After Disney has suffered an embarrassing run of box office disappointments in recent times, from Pixar’s Elemental to Lucasfilm’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, it’s looking more and more likely that Marvel Studios’ final movie of 2023 is likewise set to underperform in theaters. On paper, The Marvels has the opportunity to pull the Mouse House out of the doldrums single-handed, what with its predecessor Captain Marvel earning over $1 billion back in 2019.
And yet a seemingly universal ambivalence about the film from within the MCU fandom is not exactly inspiring huge confidence that the sequel will manage to match what Carol Danvers’ origins story made. In a Reddit thread which asked the all-important question of whether The Marvels will be a hit or a miss, most fans appeared to agree that, actually, it’ll be neither.
Going by the discussion’s most upvoted comment, it seems the majority don’t anticipate it being as bad as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania or as good as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and are foreseeing a rather middle-of-the-road Marvel outing.
A respectable, for Marvel, $700 million seems to be the peak of people’s estimations.
This has got to be the most accurate prediction of the movie’s performance of the lot, though. You don’t need a crystal ball to know it’s inevitably going to inspire new talk about “superhero fatigue.”
Despite Brie Larson continuing to be an inexplicably controversial figure with a certain subset of the fandom, who have most recently taken to calling her “Captain Useless,” it should be pointed out that the two MCU productions to feature her in a major role —that’s Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame — earned almost $4 billion between them. But if all The Marvels only raises some shrugs instead of raising the roof when it arrives on Nov. 10 then it may well end the Oscar-winner’s Marvel-winning streak.