With Deadpool & Wolverine well over the box office hump by now, we’ve long since seen the end of Marvel Studios’ 2024 theatrical campaign. Looking ahead to next year, it’s busy business as usual, with a slate consisting of Thunderbolts*, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and Blade (supposedly). Leading the charge is Captain America: Brave New World, which hits theaters in February.
The film’s militaristic set dressing will play host to a number of debutants, including Harrison Ford as President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, but it’s the returnees that are well and truly stealing the spotlight here. One of them is Tim Blake Nelson reprising his role as the Leader, a villain who we haven’t seen since 2008’s The Incredible Hulk.
Speaking of which, it’s through Nelson that we’ve come to learn of a very peculiar record that Brave New World has set within the MCU — namely, the number of times that the movie has been made. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Nelson remarked that, technically speaking, he shot this movie twice.
Well, we’re done. I’ve shot it. I’ve actually shot it twice because I did it originally a year ago, and then we came back and redid a lot of it at the beginning of it this summer.
Nelson is, of course, referring to the heavy reshoots that took place from May to August earlier this year. It’s important to note that, despite reshoots being a common occurrence for MCU films, the reshoots done on Brave New World accounted for more changes than any MCU film has faced mid-production before. The average reshoot timeframe is six weeks, whereas Brave New World‘s took four months (which is the more accurate, less-cheeky record that Brave New World has set here).
It’s easy to look at that little statistic and grimace a bit, and it’s hard to blame anyone who does so. As Marvel sinks further and further into the Disney machine and continues to stylize itself as more of a brand than a franchise, all these reshoots point towards a form of storytelling driven by business, fan service, and product marketability rather than character, theme, or any honest narrative tools whatsoever.
In doing so, Marvel seems to be sorely forgetting about why so many people fell in love with this universe in the first place; Black Panther, Iron Man, Captain America: The First Avenger, The Winter Soldier, the Spider-Man trilogy, and so on. All of these adventures, flaws and all, were quite resolutely rooted in emotion rather than setups and references. There was some of that sugar, for sure, but the carbs were never forsaken.
The same simply can’t be said for the current influx of films and shows that populate Marvel’s slates these days. Maybe that will change, and we’ll cheer them when and if it does, but when it comes to art, the love something earns can only equal the love that gets put into it, and love doesn’t come from the suits. Captain America: Brave New World flies into theaters on Feb. 14.