It’s been an exciting few days at Marvel following Loki’s brain-busting episode 4 cliffhanger. The fandom continues to fire off compliments on all cylinders and eagerly touts the Disney Plus series as the new savior of the MCU.
However, a newly released mid-season promo for the remainder of Loki season 2 has raised doubts over the studio’s originality, especially when viewed through the lens of the MCU’s highest-grossing movie. Speaking of which money — had Hollywood entirely skipped over George Clooney’s worst (and only) outing as the Caped Crusader, one of cinema’s highest-paid actors of all time, Tom Cruise, might have actually graced the superhero studio by now.
Elsewhere, the box office is experiencing a shocking surge in ticket sales for Five Nights at Freddy’s. So much so that Brie Larson’s second outing as Captain Marvel is feeling more and more like a letdown waiting to happen (box office speaking).
Loki’s ingenuity is starting to smell a lot like Avengers: Endgame
When a movie or TV show uses time travel as a narrative device, it’s hard to veer from the genre’s most obvious trope i.e. going back in time to fix the present day. Loki hasn’t followed that structure exactly, but it has used a variation of it, what with Loki pruning himself. In the mid-season trailer, Loki appears to be the only person still in possession of his memory while Mobius, Casey, and everyone else at the TVA are living the variant versions of their lives. Should the final two episodes end with Loki wrangling his friends back to the TVA, fixing his time-slipping, and solving the Temporal Loom’s overcapacity problem in one fell swoop, it’ll essentially be a regurgitated version of Avengers: Endgame, which is to say Marvel has reached the end of its rope in terms of originality.
The MCU could’ve had Tom Cruise but Batman & Robin had to go and ruin it
Before the MCU was a thing — before even Blade, X-Men, or Spider-Man turned the world onto superhero films — Tom Cruise’s price tag to become Iron Man on the silver screen was too risky of an investment for 20th Century Fox to gamble on, especially given the dismal reception to 1997’s Batman & Robin. Cruise’s “asking fee at the time was more than even a profitable studio like Fox was willing to risk on an untested superhero property,” notes MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, an in-depth book documenting the MCU’s assent to worldwide box office domination. Now that the MCU is the most successful film franchise of all time, however, Cruise’s asking price is but a quarter between the cushions of a couch for Marvel, and what better place to make the bygone dream a reality than a multiversal playground wherein variant versions of our beloved superheroes can run amok right beside each other. Just sayin’. Your move, as always, Marvel.
The Marvels could become the next Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny if Five Nights at Freddy’s has anything to say about it
The Marvels and Five Nights at Freddy’s couldn’t be more opposite, but so were Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and that small film starring Jim Caviezel from earlier this year, Sound of Freedom. The latter two found themselves lumped into conversation due to Sound of Freedom’s modest budget ($14.5 million) and eventual box office profit ($217.3 million) compared to Dial of Destiny’s bloated budget ($300 million) and eventually box office loss ($383 million).
The Marvels has a budget of around $275 million whereas Five Nights at Freddy’s invested only $20 million. We don’t know how The Marvels will perform yet, but FNaF has already made $132 million globally within just 72 hours; The Marvels will need to climb higher, further, faster to compete against the video game adaptation given that the Brie Larson film is expected to perform 50% worse than it’s billion-dollar predecessor Captain Marvel. Still, 50% worse than a $1.1 billion movie is over half a million. If FNaF can beat that, then the MCU might really be in the endgame now.
