The Marvels are coming. As Marvel Studios continues its glassy-eyed war of attrition against anyone interested in seeing another X-Men movie, focusing inexplicably instead on characters who never had one single dope-as-hell electric guitar theme song in the ‘90s, we put it to you: How’s that going?
And then we answer: Not great. On top of the industry-wide struggle to get dumpers back in theater seats, Disney has faced a series of box office disappointments following the MCU’s natural end point in Avengers: Endgame. Audiences have fallen off, dissuaded by the need to familiarize themselves with new, unfamiliar characters and keep up with hours of Disney Plus series just to follow along. Ignoring that, the studio marches toward The Marvels, a movie about unfamiliar characters from Disney Plus series.
And as unfair as that sentiment might be – Kamala Khan as played by Iman Vellani is still one of the best, most charming results of Phase Four – that’s just the way things seem to be playing out for the MCU. At present, Deadline reports that The Marvels is looking at an absolute bummer of an opening weekend, with an estimated three-day U.S. take of around $75 million when it arrives in theaters November 10. As they further point out, this would see The Marvels claiming half the box office numbers that Captain Marvel nabbed in 2019 with its three-day, $153 million opening.
To draw further terrible comparisons, Captain Marvel, which went on to earn $1.1 billion at the box office, was made on a budget of $152 million. The Marvels, as was recently reported by Forbes, cost a whopping $270 million. Time will tell if that was money well spent, but in the days leading up to another post-Endgame Marvel movie without much buzz around it, superhero fatigue seems… inevitable.
