The Marvels Limps Towards Embarrassing Box Office Milestone That’d Make Even Black Adam Hurl
Marvel Cinematic Universe’s highly awaited The Marvels starring Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Zawe Ashton, Park Seo-joon, etc., released on November 10th, 2023 as a part of Phase Five. The movie directed by Nia DaCosta is the sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel and a continuation of 2022’s Ms. Marvel series.
Upon its release, the movie received mixed reviews from the critics as well as the audience except appreciation for the chemistry between leading ladies. The Marvels was one of the highly awaited movies from the MCU but its box office collection has been a huge disappointment for the studios. Let’s find out more about the same.
The Marvels become the lowest-grossing movie in the MCU
The Marvels starring actors Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Zawe Ashton, Park Seo-joon, Gary Lewis, Zenobia Shroff, Samuel L. Jackson, and more was one of the highly awaited movies of 2023 as the ardent fans of the franchise were excited to know how the story after 2019’s Captain Marvel along with 2022’s Ms. Marvel series would turn out to be.
The star cast of the movie looks solid on paper but unfortunately, it failed to garner the attention of the audience as it has been dubbed as the lowest-grossing movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe crossing over $190 million worldwide according to reports.
According to Forbes, The Marvels upon its opening weekend collected about $47 million and became the lowest-earning movie in the franchise’s history despite a post-credit scene that was expected to set an exciting character to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Some critics noted that the failure of The Marvels makes the failure of DC Studios’ Black Adam look better on paper.
Just like The Marvels, Black Adam starring Dwayne Johnson had also received mixed reviews and only managed to gross $393 million and was soon dubbed as a box-office bomb for failing to break even. A fan pointed out that The Marvels needed over $600 million to break even, which it eventually failed.
Disney CEO Bob Iger explains the failure of The Marvels
Disney CEO Bob Iger at a recent panel discussion at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit addressed why The Marvels failed to reach their expectations. He said via EW,
“The Marvels was shot during COVID. There wasn’t as much supervision on the set, so to speak, where we have executives that are really looking over what’s being done day after day after day.”
The CEO further said,
“I’m not sure another studio will ever achieve some of the numbers that we achieved. I mean, we got to the point where if a film didn’t do a billion dollars at the box office, we were disappointed. That’s unbelievably high standard, and I think we have to get more realistic. I don’t want to apologize for making sequels, some of them have done extraordinarily well and they’ve been good films too.”
Somewhere else during the conversation, Iger noted that the company has to now find a reason beyond commerce to green-light the sequels. He added that they will only consider sequels if the story is worth telling.
Nia DaCosta had mentioned in an interview that the project that was supposed to be a two-year-process became three and a half year process and the company knew the entire time that she had an obligation, a movie with people who were waiting for her noting that they figured out a best process or way to do it remotely. It’s disappointing that the movie failed to impress the audience and the critics; the lack of promotion from the actors due to strikes at the time can also be one of the reasons why the movie failed to grab the attention of the audience.
Also read: Spider-Verse Director Phil Lord’s Hot Take on ‘The Marvels’ Has Fans Dubbing It as a Sleeper Hit
