Kevin Feige

Are you excited about seeing The Marvels, the mega-budget sequel to 2019’s billion-dollar grossing Captain Marvel? Judging by the advance box office predictions, not very many of you are. Current tracking has the film opening at around between $50 and $75 million on its first weekend. For most non-superhero franchise pictures, this would be excellent, but for a film that was budgeted at between $220 and $280 million, depending on whom you talk to, it has all the hallmarks of a colossal flop, capping off what has been a truly terrible year for Marvel Studios. It was never supposed to be this way.

The complaints about the Marvel Cinematic Universe are by now widely known. Their films follow predictable formulas and story beats. Characters become increasingly indistinguishable quip machines. The stakes are never high. The streaming content is overwhelmingly forgettable. Other than the death of Tony Stark onscreen and the sad passing of Chadwick Boseman offscreen, emotional moments are few and far between, as it's hard to care about characters when everything can be reset with a bit of multiverse mumbo jumbo. And then there's the problem of, well, as the Critical Drinker refers to it, THE MESSAGE. Expect a lot of that in the already twice-postponed production of The Marvels, girlbossing into theaters this winter.