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‘The Marvels’ meltdown: Disney MCU posts lowest box office opening ever at $47m — what went wrong
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- Authors
- Anthony D'Alessandro
- Published
- Nov 11 2023
- Word count
- 2761 words
This is actually the lowest opening for an MCU ever. Beating The Incredible Hulk's 55M opening, back when nobody knew it took place in the same universe as Iron Man. It might be the first MCU movie not to hit 100M DOM.
I already gave my opinion on the film here. It's pretty bad. And it tied with Eternals and Quantumania for the lowest Cinemascore.
After Guardians Vol. 3 (which I loved) I just felt done with the MCU. I have not been interested in anything they've been bringing up, I think they've promised a lot of stuff and there is currently no plan to follow through with any of it. And I'm sure most people feel the same way. The Disney+ shows were a mistake. You cannot watch Marvels without having watched WandaVision and Ms. Marvel (Ms. Marvel being the MCU show with the lowest viewership ever).
I think Disney felt security greenlighting a sequel to Captain Marvel because it made a billion dollars, but for some reason did not think that the only reason it made a billion was because it was right before Endgame. Nobody really cared about the movie or the character, and she ended up not being important to Endgame (ironically Ant-Man and the Wasp was far more important yet didn't get the end credits tease Captain Marvel got in Infinity War).
It's Disney's bad decisions finally catching up with them. Along with them not knowing who their primary audience is. Women did not go see this, and the audience was mostly over 25. So it's older white dudes going to see this.
Yeah I just don't know what they're gonna do. Captain America 4 had terrible test screenings and will surely be a bomb. I'm not sure Thunderbolts will even get made. And I have a feeling Deadpool 3 is gonna be a mess and end up making less than it's predecessors. On the other hand DC has a pretty exciting slate for the next two years. Joker 2, The Batman 2, and Superman Legacy. All of which I think will make more money than Marvel's slate for the same years.
Personally speaking the problem is that the D+ content is generally mediocre compounded with the fact that there is too much of it. There was definitely continued demand during the Pandemic but I noticed significant cooling of interest overtime, because most of the shows are just... not good.
Is it true that the D+ are mandatory viewings now to be able to follow the films? If so I think that's the nail in the coffin - no way I'm going to spend hours or even minutes catching up on mediocre content when there are so many better shows out there.
For whatever it’s worth, my partner and I have never had Disney+ and never seen any of the TV series, and both walked out of the movie yesterday having had a good time. I’m sure there were references and Easter eggs that we would have missed, but I don’t feel like I was left behind.
I’m not a movie critic by any means, so I certainly don’t sit down to watch a movie and look to pick it apart, but I had more fun with this one and walked away less frustrated than I did with Quantumania, Multiverse of Madness, Dark World or Love and Thunder.
If you dislike the same movies that I’ve listed here, you might have a good time, maybe not, but I did. And regardless of what has critical acclaim or does well in the box office, if I have fun, that’s all I’m really looking for in a movie.
Yeah, It's tough. First of all, the D+ strategy was absolutely key in the entire streaming war for Disney to come out on top. Even if Marvel dies down that may be worth it in and of itself. Similar to how the PS3 may have been the worst performing Sony console but basically decided the format war post-DVD.
But yeah, on the other hand a TV show is a very different medium to watch and simply has less budget and care put in, because it's harder to make money on TV. People pay $10-20 for a ticket (and yes they don't get the full ticket value but a decent amount), D+ is 10 dollars to get everything for a month. Even if the shows were best in the industry franchise fatigue may be inevitable for some. People not hyper invested don't want to do days of homework to properly watch one movie.
I think it sadly says more about streaming than marvel. Like many things, streams were in growth mode and that's shifting across all industries. At some point it's gonna either skyrocket it's prices or (more likely) start to add additional costs individually (or by group). We saw one idea of this with Rava where (outside of being a mid movie) needed a subscription and to pay $30. That might be more relaxed to a sub + 3-5$ per "big novie/TV show season", sort of like the Pay-Per-View model in cable.
Isn't D+ folding into Hulu in a few months?
It's possible that's still a win for them, but their overall strategy seems like it didn't pan out the way they wanted
Disney+ lost 1.5 billion dollars in 2022. How are you judging that they won anything?
https://flixpatrol.com/streaming-services/subscribers/
in 4 years they broke into the top 3 services in a very competitive landscape. And I'm sure leveraging their success from Endgame/Infinity War is part of how they gained those numbers. Even if it may have arguably degraded the quality of the MCU in the process.
It's a classic strategy to be a loss leader to break in and then drive up prices once their brand and userbase is established. And Disney is more than good to lose billions for long term success.
Not sure about "required viewing", but both Quantumania and The Marvels star characters introduced in Disney+ shows.
I don’t know if you’re right about Deadpool, I feel like it sort of exists separately in some way from the rest of the MCU, even if it does technically exist within it. Otherwise, I think you’re spot on.
Yeah I'd still be pretty confident that Deadpool 3 will do well (despite personally being over it) because it has Ryan Reynolds/Deadpool and Wolverine. As brands, they're pretty separated from Disney. I'm not sure what kind of box-office pull Jackman has right now but Wolverine surely will get some butts on seats.
From the plot leaks Deadpool 3 seems to be very connected to the MCU and Loki Season 2 specifically and will serve as the main lead up to Secret Wars.
I also think there's cause for concern about the quality because Shawn Levy is perhaps the weakest director to helm the franchise.
That might be a mistake on Marvel’s part, and it possibly spells bad news for Deadpool 4, but I suspect most casual Deadpool viewers are not super aware of leaked scripts and will be going to see Deadpool 3 because of Ryan Reynolds and his brand of humour or for Wolverine.
I always thought it was bizarre how little attention or importance was given to Captain Marvel despite the buildup, and almost entire lack of presence in Endgame. It's like they were hyping up the Avengers' own Thanos-level hero who would show up and turn the tide, especially after all the promise of her insane powers and abilities. And then there was a whole movie exploring her origin and strength, timed to hype her introduction into the mainline movies with Endgame.
....And then they did nothing with it. She shows up for a few minutes total and doesn't even square up against Thanos in a straight fight even though, by all indications, that's exactly what she was supposed to do.
What is this character supposed to be for? The original Avengers built up a following because they cast A-level stars (or made people into them) while also making endearing, appealing movies introducing the main heroes. I suppose at some point after making Infinity War but before making Endgame they realized they shouldn't have a new face (or, controversially, a controversial face) show up to bail them all out, and then wrote Endgame to minimize Captain Marvel and instead maximize fanservice while sending off Iron Man in an extra-heroic way.
Or maybe they thought her movie would be a much bigger hit than it was? But then again, a lot of the big Avengers had subpar first movies (Thor, Hulk) or didn't have any at all (Hawkeye, Black Widow), so either this wasn't the case or they overreacted.
I think in retrospect this was the writing on the wall for the MCU. It was clearly being done by the seat-of-their-pants and things were beginning to unravel. It wasn't clear at the time because the setup and plan so far had been paying off and coming together but this inconsistency with setting up Captain Marvel properly spelled doom for any upcoming new heroes. They couldn't even cleanly introduce a major character, played by an Oscar-winning actress, into the MCU without a truckload of issues, and yet their plan was to effectively replace all the original heroes and continue with a new assortment within a few years?
I don't want to come off like some kind of MCU hater or anything but I think it's becoming clearer that the whole "Phase 1, 2, 3" concept was their only really planned content, and there was either no or no good succession planning implemented. It really feel like outside the whole Thanos saga, there wasn't really a plan with the MCU and everything was being decided on the fly to see what would stick and what wouldn't. And Captain Marvel seems like really solid evidence that this planless approach started with Phase 3 when they either adjusted (at best) or forgot about (at worst) Captain Marvel.
As someone who is very meh about MCU, Captain Marvel was much better than well over half of them.
It had fairly positive female presence on the screen, which was much more than can be said for most of the others. I wager that's half the outrage. Male audiences tend to react poorly to strong female leads.
I mean male audiences were the ones that went to go see Captain Marvel, and they're the main ones that went to go see The Marvels. To put it into perspective, Aquaman had a higher female audience percentage than Captain Marvel.
It's not about rage, it's not about incels, or guys being sexist. It's just that nobody actually cares about Captain Marvel all these years later. It was just a movie with middling reception.
Not many people really cared about Iron Man or Captain America before those movies created compelling stories for them.
Captain Marvel was compelling enough, but just didn’t do anything interesting or different beyond being a fun period piece TBH. Even my celebrity crush on Brie Larson wasn’t enough to really motivate me into going to see it.
In all fairness, that's not an important factor for many people when enjoying a movie
Marvel has the superman problem; she has a relatively flat character and by the end she's literally untouchable. But superman's whole Schick is simply being he bastion of good and a model hero; selfless, caring, empathetic, loyal, and unwavering. And he has an origin story with themes of biological vs. Chosen family and the black sheep adjusting to a society different from him. Is Ms. Marvel that way for modern audiences? I can't truly say becsuse I know on some subconscious level she's designed to be a role model for women to rise up. Not necessarily a universal one like Supes.
Also, I jokingly call Ms. Marvel the Nick Fury movie becsuse he got more fleshed out with a character arc that would lead to more interesting payoffs with the Avenger initiative, and his struggles with the politics surrounding such an organization. Marvel just goes on to be distracted offscreen because she would have put an end to any of earth's issues in Infinity/Endgame by existing.
That was why I was interested in seeing what they do with her here (especially since I love when they explore non-earth environment and conflict in a larger-than-planet scale). But reviews don't seem promising. Then Again I liked Thor Love and Thunder so it doesn't necessarily mean I'll hate this.
In the comic books Captain Marvel has the “flying brick” suite of Superman powers, but she’s not Superman levels of overpowered on them. She’s sort of a heavy hitter, but not on the level of Thor or some of the others.
In the MCU they tried to make her that, but the whole MCU universe has a problem with consistently representing power. Nothing looks like it hurts. All fights are sort of weightless CGI fests until someone falls down and it’s not really clear what it means to get hit. This makes it hard to have battles where it feels like there are real stakes. If someone's power is that they're strong and fast, there's no way to represent that because everyone is always exactly as strong/weak or fast/slow as they need to be to hit the next plot beat. It doesn't follow any internal logic, so Carol can punch hard but sometimes a hard punch can knock an Asgardian out--like Thanos punching Loki--and other times it just sort of dazes them--like Hulk bashing Loki into the pavement multiple times.
Yeah, I used to do 3D modeling years ago, and I think it’s kind of odd that after all these years animation studios still have so much difficulty depicting elements so that they appear to have weight.
I’ve been out of the industry for a long time now, but I would have expected that at this point there would just be a setting in the animation software to say that an object weighs 250 pounds or whatever.
It’s definitely not a limitation of software or understanding how to make the art work. The God of War games have near cinematic fights that are less photorealistic but still do a great job of looking and feeling visceral. Pacific Rim also had an excellent sense of power and weight in its fight scenes and that movie is over a decade old now.
I think the Marvel movies in particular just don’t plan or choreograph the fights very well and don’t give the VFX people the creative room or the time to really refine it.
That's exactly it and it's been well documented how flawed their process is. They don't have set scripts in pre-production, which leads to almost everything getting fixed in post. There are movies from 10+ years ago that look better than many of Marvel's current output.
It could also be intentional. Make something too visceral with those graphics and you risk an R rating. In addition, while they want realism, they still clearly want to cash in on the campy snarky hero trope they created.
I just watched The Killer, so my comment is not really appropriate for your "visceral graphics" remark, as it has a pretty visceral fight.
But even ignoring the gory violence, the fight scene in this movie had an amazing heft to it. It was a combination of camerawork, choreography and sound design, that made some of the punches really feel very, terribly impactful.
I think this is what's missing from the Marvel movies. There's so many tools to use in order to make fights feel visceral and hefty, but they're just not using them.
Edit: I think that Civil War's fight between Tony, Captain America and Buck was the closest they got to portraying a believable fight.
It's more about the POV of the film raters, not what would casually be considered "visceral". I don't know the line between PG-13 and R rated but I don't think Disney is interested in blurring the line (except with Deadpool, which did so before Disney assumedly acquired movie rights).
I doubt it's a talent issue, there's just a certain feel they want to the movies and it's not having jaws broken or bones obliterated, even though these impacts very much should do so. I think of the (in)famous Hulk scene with Loki in the original Avengers as an example. That was hilarious, and intentionally so. The point wasn't to show a battered up Tom Hiddleson but quell Loki's haughtiness before a true brute.
Visceral doesn't mean gory. It just means you can feel it in your body, like instinctively. It feels natural and intuitive to how things should move.
The Marvel fight scenes fail at that. Shang Chi somewhat came close, and the Moon Knight series had some good fights. But those are stand-outs in the franchise and those are a sadly low watermark for standouts.
I truly do not get your hate for this movie. Like what were you expecting from this, man? It's whimsical and supposed to be whimsical. It's dry as hell and so the humor isn't the most obvious. Or maybe it's just not your type of humor. I'm also literally not sure how you think the acting was bad or any the scenes poorly edited to be "choppy". There's such dramatic exaggerations in your review that I feel like you went in wanting to find every single flaw you could find. It's a movie. It's supposed to be fun and that's what it was. The three leads had amazing chemistry. The Memory scene is legendary. I really don't know how you found it to be garbage.
At the very least a functional story, with maybe interesting characters.
I don't really know what this supposed to mean. I've been a fan of many Marvel films and their sense of humor. I also don't understand why something that's supposed to be "whimsy" can't also be a well-made movie or that that somehow excuses short falls in filmmaking and storytelling.
A lot of the line deliveries are awkward as hell, it's like the actors are cold reading a lot of the time. From the performance you can just tell Larson is over it, and not really trying (I mean she's an Oscar winner for gods sake she's obviously phoning it in here).
The momentary editing, that being cuts from shot to shot, are overall pretty jarring. It feels amateurish, and sloppy. The structural editing also feels like a mess, the movie feels like it's been re-shot and re-cut, much like Suicide Squad (2016) it feels rushed and like they were trying to salvage it. Which is exactly what happened.
No, I'm just kind of an active viewer of movies. I've been a movie fan a while, and I notice everything. Camera movements, cuts, I notice all of it.
Yeah. This wasn't. There's well made fun movies that come out every year. It's not like you can have one or the other, you can have both a well made movie that is fun. This was pretty boring if anything. Part of the fun, at least for me, is seeing an interesting story with interesting characters. Not just a bunch of CGI fights loosely strung together.
I don't really know what that even means honestly.
If you don't care about movies, and all you care about is Marvel that's fine. But the idea that you can't even comprehend why someone wouldn't like this movie is kind of wild. That's almost blind fanaticism. It's like when a DC fan talks about Batman v Superman in high regard.
Yeah, I'll admit it I'm definitely not as active of a viewer as you. I'll just have to rewatch when it comes to D . I truly didn't notice any of those things and I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I dunno. Like I liked it, I had fun watching the cgi, and I liked the acting, I dunno. Maybe I should be more aware of these things
Nah just live your life in peace and serenity.
What is the difference between peace and serenity?
I would just say that peace is external and serenity is internal. You can be at peace while suffering strife internally or you can be at war while completely calm mentally.
This is definitely a bit off topic and I promise I'm not trying to trap you into some sort of "you're an incel!" trick, but what did you think of Barbie?
Because I also consider myself someone who is quite critical of movies and I thought Barbie was pretty bad. Bad because it felt like a 2hour long SNL skit, not because of the message or anything political. To clarify, in my opinion the message wasn't even very radical and it's extremely hard to disagree with unless you really just have no empathy for womens issues, (but that doesn't make the movie good).
But when Barbie came out I saw it receive almost unanimous praise, here on Tildes too.
The biggest problem with the Barbie movie was they were maintaining too many story threads at one time to do all of them properly start to finish.
Tons of movies are little more than 2 hour SNL skits. Quality is hit or miss, as is true for SNL itself.
I personally thought Barbie was quite well done, all things considered.
I'm not sure I agree with that assessment -- there's really only ever three significant plot threads (Barbie, Ken, and the Mother/Daughter relationship) and they all tie directly in together. That's pretty much standard for a movie of that length.
My biggest issue with the movie was that its commentary was really pretty surface level and obvious. I thought it was a funny movie and it was nice to see a blockbuster movie that actually made some social commentary but I didn't think it was like an award winning movie by any stretch.
Good, definitely. Best movie of 2023? Nah.
Don't forget the whole "shoehorn in the creator as the ghost-in-the-machine".
My wife put it well, as a massive movie buff herself: Oppenheimer was a better film in most ways. However, months later, she still periodically thinks about some various aspect of the Barbie movie in an introspective manner, while Oppenheimer was more of a once-and-done. And that's somewhat of a rarity.
A lot of the social commentary was punch-in-the-face obvious. But there was also a lot of subtle stuff that built upon it in different ways. Namely since a lot of the themes explored are almost never discussed so openly in large media productions. Having male privilege so far at the forefront is no less of a forward push in cinema than having black characters on TV in the 1950's.
I disagree about your bit about D+ shows because Loki has been fuckin fantastic. That is the peak Marvel has put out
And again as with all these topics, it’s very simple. The quality of the writing has gone off a cliff.
They got all the transformers crowd but also pulled in people like me by having moderately better writing and pacing in their films than your average summer blockbusters.
Sometimes they still do. But lately, more and more, their stuff Is just objectively bad tropes being overused with one or two good moments.
Plenty of people will see more marvel movies but not if they’re pulling Quantumania bullshit
It's a strange distinction right? Isn't it basically the same thing? Considering that to most people superheroes are the MCU.
Anecdotally I personally never realized how important the actors are to promoting a movie, even though I don't actively go out of my way to watch interviews. I didn't even know this movie was out until yesterday, and didn't even realize that Echo was out either. Loki I've been getting ads for though.
I'll probably go watch Marvels though eventually, havent been able to use my AMC membership since I've been kinda busy but I like Brie Larson and Iman Vellani a lot, I've been reading much mixed reviews on Marvels.
There's plenty of non-MCU superhero stuff like Invincible, The Boys, Gen V, Spider-Men still going strong, and people genuinely want to see more Deadpool, Joaquin Phoenix's Joker, Peacemaker...
I'd say this distinction is very on point. MCU became extremely unreliable.
Yeah, Anthony is just being weird about this (he's kind of a controversial figure in the box office community). But we saw it with DC this year too. Stuff like Shazam 2, Blue Beetle, and The Flash would have made a lot more money five/six years ago but now they're huge money losers.
The only two superhero successes this year have been Guardians 3 and Spider-Verse, both of which were not cliche superhero slop. So I think audiences are tired of generic superhero stories.
I kinda figured The Flash would do worse than expected, especially with the controversy that is Ezra Miller right? (I almost typed Jared Leto instintively lol)
I don't remember the timelines but was Blue Beetle also released during the actor's strike?
Eh, I mean it was a superhero movie that had two Batman in it, like a No Way Home type of thing. That 80s nostalgia bait was a lot more popular in the 2010s.
Yeah but it's debatable how much lack of Actor promo has actually affected releases. Equalizer 3 still did pretty good without Washington on the promo trail, and that's a type of movie that would really benefit from that type of ad campaign. Five Night's at Freddy's had a similar handicap and still managed to create hype without Josh Hutcherson posting it on social media or going on Jimmy Fallon.
To be fair, Five Nights I feel like would do relatively well either way considering the age group it goes for, regardless on how good or bad it was.
I feel that though. I think Blue Beetle might have done a bit better but not by much with actor promo considering that they were playing up the Latin audience. I feel like it's hard to quantify, at least for me personally sometimes I see funny clips from interviews more than actual ads, and that's how I get my news for releases but I've just kinda fallen off the movie train recently.
It's debatable like I said. I don't think actor promo would have an effect on such IP heavy films because the reason to go watch it is the superhero not the actors. The hype FNAF built up is the hype superhero movies used to have.
But I don't think the Latino audience would have turned out for Blue Beetle regardless. Nobody really cares about the DCEU, and I don't think Latinos specifically care about representation all that much. Mario had a higher percentage of Latino audiences in the U.S than Blue Beetle forget about raw numbers.
I am Latino in the U.S, I'm not some sort of Latin whisperer, but it's been my experience that people don't go "oh this is a story about us let's go see it" or "oh I love George Lopez." I also think WB wanted to bury it after how much money The Flash lost so the marketing campaign would have been muted regardless.
And in fairness there hasn't been a big movie coming out since Barbenheimer. It's mostly been small releases. Though I do think Actor promo would have benefited movies that are less IP dependent like A Haunting in Venice and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Makes sense! I'm not super familiar with box office stuff but it's good to know.
I thought Echo didn't come out until Jan?
you're right lol i was under the impression it was out but I guess it was just the trailer!
Isn't just the quality, the average person might feel there is a point of over saturation with these types of movies . I'm not the biggest fan but the last Guardians movie was the last one I really enjoyed..
It's an over saturation of Marvel in general. There's always a small gap between movie releases that is then filled by a Disney+ show to watch. It's exhausting. I have some friends who are hardcore long-term Marvel fans and even they are struggling to keep up with all the content that they are pumping out.
With all these shows and movies coming out, I'm just completely lost. The last Marvel movie I really remember watching was Shang-Chi in 2021. I've certainly watched other Marvel movies that have come out since then but they're not memorable at all to me. Another thing that has turned me away from going to the theaters is the cost and length of these movies. Ticket prices in my area (SF Bay) are easily 15-20 bucks per movie. Movies are also easily 2-3+ hours long now. While I've enjoyed many super hero movies, I feel like 2-3 hours is way too long for those stories.
I suppose the incoming issue which may happen is Disney overextending the Star Wars universe at some point, which makes me a bit sad to be honest. I mean businesses are all about making money, but oversaturation of loved/popular franchises really isnt a health thing is it?.
Definitely not, at a certain point you start competing with yourself on the market because you've given consumers a million different options.
Speaking of Star Wars, I thought I'd check to see how many shows they've got now and its just insane. There's been about 6 animated shows over the last 6 years or so, all being 1-2 seasons each. Things get really insane with the live action shows as there have been 5 different shows aired so far with 2 more coming by the end of this year and beginning of next. From December 2021 until October 2023, you didn't have to go more than 4 months between TV shows and seasons. That's a TON of Star Wars content. There's also a ton of potential movies that are apparently being worked on that I forgot about before looking at the Star Wars Wikipedia page. There's a lot to explore in the Star Wars universe but man, it's tiring having this much content.
In the case of Star Wars, it certainly feels like you can skip all of it except Andor. Though a lot of people also dig the Mandalorian (though I'm not one of them).
Andor, though...! That show was incredible. That is what I want from Star Wars as an elder Millennial — I want the franchise to have grown up with me. Not everything needs to be as dour as Andor, but it was smart in a way that Star Wars stuff hasn't been.
Everything else feels like it's juvenile schlock in one way or another. Since RoTJ, I feel like the only three movies/shows that were any good were the Force Awakens (derivative though it was), Solo (a movie nobody asked for but that I thought actually turned out good), and Andor. Rogue One got close but fumbled a few things, story-wise. In my opinion, that's it. Which is pretty sad considering the volume of stuff LucasFilm has put out for the franchise since Disney's acquisition.
Women and men go for different things in their entertainment, as anyone who has ever been on a date to a movie knows all too well. Disney executives were smoking bleu cheese if they they expected to change that. Refusal to live in reality is never a viable business strategy.
Male audiences tended to react very well to strong female leads, and anyone who says otherwise is ignorant of scifi's legacy of being at the forefront of strong female leads since the 70s. Perhaps if any of the modern female leads had scripts and characters that could keep up with those in the original Star Wars, Fifth Element, Matrix, or Alien this would be less of an issue. The studios likes to pretend those strong female leads never happened, because then they'd have to admit they can't write a single good scene anymore, rather than hiding behind their misogynistic straw boogeymen.
No one reacts well to bad writing and endlessly recycled garbage stories. That's the real problem here. Captain Marvel was a colossal flop in the comics, and now it's legacy is a colossal flop in the cinemas, and that's because the characters are just trashy mary sues with no depth at all. How stupid do you have to be to watch that play out in the printed comics, and then think the same thing won't happen in the cinema? Disney stupid, that's the answer. That level of depth works for ten year old kids, and that's about where it stops.
We are two years away at most from having an AI that can generate, in a weekend, on a home computer, using nothing more than text to speech, animations that look as good and run as long as anything out there right now. Not long after that those animations will become impeccably photo-realistic. This is fatal to the entire concept of a movie studio, making all artists, all actors, all animators, and all producers as obsolete as the horse-drawn carriage. Anyone can do those jobs with the AI's help, now.
Want to make a music album? Well, thanks to the AI, you no longer need to learn to play any instruments in order to do that. You just need to tell it what you want, and iterate the output it gives you until it's just as you like it. Did you want to make a movie? Well, you won't need to use any existing post-production software to do it, or even learn how to pick up a camera and develop film, scout a location, or handle a casting call... because the AI can do that for you now. You just need to tell it what you want.
Art will fall... or be set free, depending on your perspective.
As the difficulty of producing something as good as Game of Thrones drops to a couple of months of hard work for a five person team armed with AI tools and a total cost of a hundred thousand bucks per season, the amount of content, and the number of voices making that content, is going to rise to levels we can't even begin to keep up with without another fleet of AI tools just to keep it all organized. Once the AI baked into our video games takes them to the next level of interactivity, it's hard to imagine what value a 'motion picture' has in the first place. It has already become an obsolete second-class form of entertainment. The gaming industry posts numbers Hollywood has never reached already, and has for many years.
Hollywood had a good run, but it's over now. Movies no longer require that massive support infrastructure to make or the movie theater for distribution. Actors who were once prevented by contract from interacting with the public outside of studio control destroy themselves with their inane opinions every day on social media. The mystique is long gone. What replaces it will be a gold rush of independent media with no contracts, no guilds, and no strings or limits attached to their voices. It will no longer be possible for any agenda to be enforced or opinion to be censored. Anyone can make anything they want, from the most epic hero's journey to the most unbelievably vile pornography, and it only gets easier and cheaper.
Why bother going to the movies, when you can make a personal movie for your date in an afternoon just to surprise them? People really can't seem to wrap their heads around where this is going. Wherever that happens to be, it's not going to the local movie theater, or going to a streaming service. Those days are already ending. If you're invested in the film sector, cash out now, it's all downhill from here. Broadway will be the only survivor.
Disney is over. It does not matter what they do, even if they get everything exactly right they are still a dead company walking. If they had a time machine, and could go back in time to prevent the desolation of every IP they own, it still wouldn't matter. The world is changing. When you sell water in the desert, and suddenly it rains every day, you get to live with that. Sell buckets and umbrellas instead of wasting $25 million per episode of She-Hulk.
I feel kinda bad for the actors and writers. They got their strikes resolved at just about the time the business models they rely on are going to go extinct. Put all the anti-AI protections you like in those contracts... I didn't sign them, and neither did the people who are going to use this tech to destroy those old ways of doing things. The anti-AI protections are more likely to place the studios at a disadvantage, since independent media doesn't have to jump through those hoops and thus will not be limited by them.
The 'rumor' is that George Lucas and a number of other major stockholders are about to sell it all to Apple, making Disney into Apple's personal pet company, followed by the firing of the entire board of directors and everyone involved in the last ten years of Disney's crap content creation. If Apple is ready to charge in and try to save the day, good for them, but I'm not optimistic about their chances. Perhaps they can license the properties to more competent creatives and turn it into a win that way. It's certainly an opportunity to pick up dozens of once-loved, now-reviled franchises at fire sale prices.
oh I wish. Tech has come far, but the little I've seen of AI animation is barely tutorial level 3d modeler. Do anything fancier than transform basic shapes (let alone characters) and the scene just explodes.
Now, there is some very impressive Machine learning in acedemia circles, but that training data isn't something a home computer can process in a weekend to get believable results.
collective social conscious. Same reason why Fantasy Football leagues compliment the NFL instead of replacing them. These are ultimately experiences had not just as a hobby but as a hobby to share and feel with others.
There will be a day (which I estimate in decades, not years) where you can make some bespoke stuff for an intimate audience, but it won't replace watching whatever the next big show is.
Your wish is granted. I'd suggest subscribing to Matt Wolfe as he does a single video each week covering the AI news which is moving so fast no one can keep up with it all. Just this week OpenAI bumped the context window up from 8K to 128K and also managed to reduce the hardware load for their GPT to one third the resources required of the previous version at the same time. They are making their competitors more jealous every day. That represents multiple-orders-of-magnitude improvement to the context and performance in a single release. The bigger the context window gets, the smarter and better these tools perform and the faster they learn.
Last time I saw a tech move this fast was when 3D video cards were completely new on the scene, and AI is moving much faster than they did. Already, companies are selling dedicated AI-based hardware for video production and I'd remind you that this tech only came into existence last November. This shit is moving scary fast. I'd bet we'll get the animation generation nailed down by the end of next year and better video creation tech than anything Hollywood has ever dared dream of on a home computer within five years at the latest.
I saw it and thoroughly enjoyed it. Our showing was full of middle-school age boys and they seemed to be having fun too. It had the typical issues I associate with every post-Endgame Marvel show, which is: the plot logic falls apart when you poke it with a stick, but I also found it to be fun, silly, and unusually well paced for Marvel. I'm a long time Ms. Marvel comic book fan, and the young actress playing her did a bang up job. The character was a good foil for Captain Marvel, who I've always found a bit... stiff.
All that being said, the only reason I saw this movie is that I really like Ms. Marvel. It was fun to see my favorite superhero on the big screen
Ms Marvel was a decent show, not excellent, some weak points, but the lead is just one of those actors that is fun to watch act. It's like Tom Cruise, or Tom Hardy, or Meryl Streep, they can command your attention just doing their thing. If only she had been given a better script to follow, I think she could carry it. And she had a different backstory to most. I think the India/Pakistan partition lost a few people, but that is such an excellent event to choose in terms of generational trauma. Anyway, the only reason I'll catch The Marvels at some point is Vellani, not Larson or Parris (I mean, I really don't think Parris' character was nearly ready to be a joint-lead yet).
Random Thoughts:
Spoiler Thoughts
Closing thoughts:
Let me propose that the MCU has always kinda been mid, but with key points where the movies are good and hype doing the rest. Iron Man, The Avengers, Winter Soldier, Civil War, Guardians and a string of hits in phase three made the MCU a must see cultural phenomenon , but a lot of the characters people have gotten to know have cycled out, the arc narrative is taking it's time getting to where it's going, the individual projects are putting less and less care in hiding the seams of serving a bigger story, and the big cultural events the world has to offer aren't Marvel Movies anymore, for better or worse. There is other stuff going on, in this reality even, and Marvel Movies aren't the escape they used to be.
I think another factor at play here is that those with Disney+ subscriptions have already sussed out that there is a relatively short gap between theatre and streaming. Hence, for those unsure about a particular movie they can always opt for the safer option of waiting a few weeks and watching at home. It takes a very quality movie to drag people out of their homes and drop the money on a theatre experience, and this further compounds the general quality issue Disney is experiencing.
Haven't seen it yet but I'm looking forward to it. Say want you want about the MCU, I still love it
I still havnt seen a trailer or an ad or anything for this. I didn't even hear of it till it was already in theaters.
Marketing was way down due to the strike.