★★
“Bombs away!”
Like it or not, the history of action heroines is littered with commercial failures. Cutthroat Island set the gold standard for a long time, but there have been many others, from Barb Wire through to Mulan (no – the other one…). The reasons for their failure varied: sometimes the film was at least partly to blame; sometimes, it was external factors. But last year, The Marvels took things to a new height. Not just the biggest bomb of the year. Or even the biggest bomb in girls with guns movies. While Hollywood accounting will always leave such things uncertain, The Marvels may well be the biggest loss-maker in film history. It had a production budget of $270 million, which doesn’t take into account marketing or other post-production costs, and took in only about $206 million worldwide. Take off things like the cinemas’ cut, and the loss for Disney and Co. is estimated at a staggering $237 million.
Why did The Marvels fall so hard? To be honest, discussing that is perhaps more interesting than talking about the film itself. Not that it’s terrible. There are movies where, you see three minutes and are left wondering, “What the hell were they thinking?” and whose failure was inevitable. Cats, for example: even as something of a connoisseur of bad movies, I’ve not been able to bring myself to watch more than clips. The Marvels is not on that level. Sure, it’s not very good, and we will get to that. But it’s no worse than other movies from the Marvel and DC Cinematic Universes. Line this up with Morbius, Suicide Squad and Madame Web – I’d defy someone without prior knowledge to point the finger at The Marvels as being the worst-ever bomb.
I think a whole slew of factors went into its failure, beyond the quality of the movie. As we saw recently with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, even good films can tank abysmally. Here, in no particular order, are the elements I think were involved:
- Superhero fatigue. After Avengers: Endgame, interest and ticket sales could only go down.
- A sequel to a film no-one wanted. Sure, Captain Marvel did well. But it was certainly helped because it came between Infinity War and Endgame. She is not anything like an iconic character.
- A run of underwhelming Marvel entries. Thor, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy. All made less than the preceding films in those franchises, and were less well received critically. At some point people will just stop watching.
- General downtown in cinema going. The pandemic whacked the legs out from box-office returns, and people haven’t come back. In this case, perhaps related to:
- Quick release on streaming. It was available on Disney+ less than three months after hitting cinemas. Anyone on the fence would be forgiven for thinking, “I’ll just catch it at home.”
It’s worth mentioning a couple of reasons I don’t think had much impact. Some suggest the actors’ strike handcuffed the film, preventing the stars from doing publicity for it. Others blame a backlash against women-led movies. But neither of these seem to have affected other entries. For instance, you might have heard of this little woman-led film called Barbie? It did okay, or so I’ve heard. You don’t need to invoke conspiracy theories to explain The Marvels‘ failure. The fact it’s taken me, a devoted fan of action heroine movies, more than seven months to get round to watching it, probably tells you all you need to know.
So, let’s get to the film, which sees three action heroines for the prices of one! How can you go wrong? Well… As well as Carol Danvers, a.k.a. Captain Marvel (Larson), there’s Monica Rambeau (Parris), whom I last saw as a little girl in Captain Marvel, so I guess several decades have passed since then? Like so much here, don’t expect an explanation. She apparently got superpowers after some “Hex” thing, and can manipulate electromagnetic radiation. There’s also Kamala Khan (Vellani), Ms. Marvel, who is a dedicated Captain Marvel fan-girl, but has powers courtesy of a magical bangle. However, the other bangle is in the possession of Dar-Benn (Ashton), leader of the Kree who intends to use it for malicious purposes. Because reasons, Danvers, Rambeau and Khan swap places with each other whenever they use their powers, which complicates trying to stop Dar-Benn.
I’m not prepared to swear to all of the above, since the film makes the assumption I have seen the related TV shows WandaVision and Ms. Marvel, which fill in the background of both Monica and Kamala. I have, in fact, not. This, combined with my general apathy about the MCU, left me frequently confused and/or uninterested in the finer points of whatever was going on. The lack of internal characterization present here which resulted from it, left me not caring very much about anyone – especially Khan, who seems like an annoying teenager, shoehorned in purely to appeal to other annoying teenagers. [Memo to Marvel: make movies to appeal to a minority, and only a minority will find them appealing] Rambeau isn’t much better, and Danvers just seemed like your basic, overpowered superhero.
Most of the running-time – and, at least, it’s relatively short, not much more than 90 minutes before the closing credits start – is spent bipping around the galaxy, going to places the film presumes we know, and meeting people we are supposed to recognize. I would say, the budget shows up on screen, and the action is decent, especially when the three heroines figure out how to team-up properly. But it tends to have the same problem as in Captain Marvel, where the fights frequently feel so artificial as to be lacking in impact. The only sequence which genuinely entertained me had the crew of a space-station pursued and eaten by feline-shaped extra-terrestrials, while Midnight from the musical Cats plays. It’s utterly glorious. Shame it is also so totally at odds with the po-faced approach generally taken elsewhere, which leaves little or no impression at all.
To be honest, I’d rather have five $50 million movies than one costing $270 million, and if this brings an end to the fondness for ridiculously over-priced Hollywood movies, it’s a price I’m willing to pay. It’s a shame it will, almost certainly, have a negative impact on our genre, because we’ll be forced to hear again that nobody wants to see action heroines. That’s not the case, of course. But if you spend more than a quarter-billion dollars and this underwhelming result – complete with, inexplicably, musical numbers – is all you can manage, it’s not hard to conclude something needs to change.
Dir: Nia DaCosta
Star: Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Zawe Ashton