Why I'm Apathetic About Seeing Captain Marvel

I'll probably see Captain Marvel, mainly because she'll be in Avengers: End Game but I'm just not feeling the love for it. Here's why:

Brie Larson. The star is outspoken and Woke. She's said that the movie isn't for 40-year-old white guys and she probably doesn't think it's for 64-year-old white guys, either. But that's only a minor complaint. I ignore a lot of dumb things that actors say ad watch their movies anyway.

The Character. I grew up on Marvel Comics during the Lee/Kirby age. I've got the issue where they introduced Captain Marr-Vell of the Kree Space Force. When I think of the character, I think of him in his red and blue costume fighting Thanos. When I think of Carol Danvers I think of her in her black costume with the lightening bolt and her long blond hair. I've only read a few comics with Carol as Captain Marvel and I didn't care for them.

They Changed the Character. From what's come out so far, they writers threw everything in the comics out the window and started from scratch. That's very risky. All of the other characters have had a relationship to their comic origin. By eliminating that they are trying to substitute an all new character with a familiar name. They did at least use the Kree. They added in the Skrulls who have a long history of enmity with the Kree but have nothing to do with Marvel's origin.

Social Justice. A few years ago the Powers That Be at Marvel Comics decided to eliminate all of their major white male characters and replace them with a new set of minorities and women. Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel suddenly became the flagship of this movement. Fans hated it. Sales plummeted leading to DC beating Marvel in sales for the first time in decades. My fear is that the whole social justice movement at Marvel Comics came from the Disney take-over and that the Captain Marvel movie is the MCU version of this. Movies haev a much longer lead time than comic books so it could have taken until now for Disney's influence to show up in the MCU. Promos that say Captain Marvel will take her place as the most powerful hero in the MCU seem to back that up.

The Trailers. I've been having misgivings since they announced the movie but I had misgivings when they announced Iron Man, The Guardians and Ant Man. The trailers for all three made me want to see the movies. The Captain Marvel trailers haven't done that. I've seen her flying around, in a place and on her own, I've seen her with some Kree and with a young Nick Fury, I've seen her punching out Skrulls but I haven't seen anything that makes me want to see more. I'm afraid that the movie will just be a long bore with Carol as a Mary Sue.

The worst thing about this is that I'm beginning to lose faith in Avengers: End Game because Captain Marvel might fly in and ruin it.

So the big question, after messing up the Star Wars universe, will Disney mess up the MCU?

Captain Marvel

The premiere of Captain Marvel is still two weeks away but people are already panning it. There are good reasons to be wary of this movie.

This is the least-established character that Marvel has featured to date. There have been seven characters named Captain Marvel in the Marvel Universe although three came and went pretty fast. It appears that the movie will have two of them, Mar-Vell, a captain in the Kree space force and Carol Danvers, a pilot in the US Air Force.

Carol Danvers has her own complicated history. She started out as the head of security at an Air Force base that Mar-Vell infiltrated. After being discharged for gross incompetence (seriously, she was the Sergent Shultz of the Air Force) she became editor of Marvel's version of Ms Magazine and, on the side, she was Ms Marvel. As Ms Marvel, she had the powers of Captain Marvel but only half the uniform. Her legs and stomach were exposed (the artists had a lot of trouble remembering the stomach cut-outs so they eliminated them fairly quickly). She also had multiple personalities. Once that was resolved, she got a spiffy black costume with a lightening bolt across her chest. He comic didn't last long and she moved on to the Avengers. Later she gave birth to an alien from a different dimension then married him and moved to his dimension (this was even creepier than it sounds here). She returned only to have her powers and memory stolen by Rogue who eventually joined the X-Men. Some aliens experimented on her, giving her cosmic powers. She called herself Binary and went off with a crew of aliens. When she returned she lost most of her cosmic powers but had her old Ms Marvel powers back. Calling herself Warbird, she rejoined the Avengers and developed a drinking habit.

Years later she surfaced again as Ms Marvel and got her own comic. A few years later she changed her name to Captain Marvel and adopted a version of his costume.

As Marvel changed its focus to Diversity all the time, she became the flagship character. She also cut her hair short and became sexually ambiguous. What she did not become was popular but regardless of that, she was pushed as Marvel's flagship character.

So we have the role of Captain Marvel and the character of Carol Danvers, both of which are very complicated that the movie has to deal with. There's strike one.

And the character is not very popular with fans nor have any of the trailers created much excitement. Advanced publicity indicating that Captain Marvel will be the most powerful hero in the MCU (and possibly a Mary Sue) is part of this. That's strike two.

Strike three comes from the star, Brie Larson who went on a publicity tour for the movie with a chip on her shoulder. She will not allow herself to be interviewed by a straight, white reporter. She's also critical of reviewers (and anyone else) who didn't like A Wrinkle in Time or the Ghostbusters reboot. It's hard to be excited about a movie when the star has told you that you don't deserve to have an opinion.

Marvel's projections for the opening weekend have dropped accordingly. At one point, based mainly on it being Marvel's first movie with a female lead, they were projecting $180-$200 million for the opening weekend. Then they dropped the projections to $160 million and now to $100 million. That's added a lot of fuel to suspicions that it's going to be a bad movie.

So, will this be the MCU version of Solo? No.

For one thing, it's not suffering from bloated expectations as Solo was. That's reflected in its budget. Disney does not release its budgets but the rumor is that it was budgeted somewhere in the $135-$150 million range. That's similar to Ant Man and less than Ant Man and the Wasp. It's still a lot of money but it lowers the bar a lot. I believe that the Incredible Hulk was Marvel's lowest-grossing movie to date and it still brought in $263 million worldwide. The Incredible Hulk is also one of the weakest movies in the MCU and it came out before the MCU was really a thing. So that establishes a low bar that Captain Marvel has to clear to be a success.

That doesn't mean it will be a good movie, though.

What Happened to Star Wars

I'm late to this party but I'm going to weigh in anyhow. Last Spring Solo, the 4th Star Wars movie managed to lose money. How did that happen?

I've seen a lot of arguing back and forth about over-saturation. This was the 4th Star Wars move released in 3 1/2 years and it came out just a few months after The Last Jedi. Yes, Marvel manages to release 2-3 movies a year and they are all hits. But Marvel does it by managing their expectations and by differentiating their movies. 2018 saw The Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Ant Man and the Wasp. They also Released Thor: Ragnarok in late 2017. And they were all huge successes. So what did Marvel do differently?

Marvel manages to release so many movies because they are all different in both tone and content. Thor was mainly improvisation directed by someone who specializes in comedy. Ant Man and the Wasp was sort of a heist movie with its own comedic elements. Black Panther was unique. Yes, the title character wears a costume but the story was closer to the Lion King than a comic book and no one has ever done a movie featuring Africans in such a positive light. Avengers: Infinity War was the culmination of a decade of story-telling. It should have gotten a Best Picture nomination but the Academy was doing well to nominate Black Panther. Nominating two comic book movies is beyond them.

Back in Star Wars, Disney released two sequels that killed off all the survivors of he original trilogy and they released two prequels that took place between the first trilogy and the first set of prequels. Disney can't let go of the original movie. The fact that they are making the stand-alone movies around the original says everything about their new trilogy. It's not strong enough to spawn it's own spin-off stories. So they are doing spin-offs and prequels to a movie that came out over 40 years ago. Given that and that Han Solo was more of a supporting character than the star, Disney should have tempered their expectations. Ant Man and the Wasp had a budget of around $175 million and grossed $622 million world-wide. So if was a big hit. In contrast, Solo had a budget of over $400 million (more like a half billion after publicity) and only grossed $392 million. If Disney had kept Solo to a budget similar to Ant Man and the Wasp's then it would have made a profit.

The Disney Star Wars movies all have a sameness to them that the Marvel movies don't. There's going to be fights on exotic planets with blasters and there's going to be a fight between space ships. There will be droids who act human. And there will be a helping of diversity that distracts from good story telling. That's how Marvel avoids saturation.

Even more important, the Marvel movies are better. Yes, there are ones like the first two Thor movies that don't hold up very well but they are still more enjoyable to watch for the 6th time than The Force Awakens is for the second time. Let's be honest, The Force Awakens was nothing but a bunch of scenes from the original trilogy recycled with a Mary Sue and a black character thrown in for diversity and topped off with a heaping helping of coincidences. There were all sorts of signs and portents but none of them meant a thing. Director J. J. Abrams just threw them in and left it to his successor to make sense of them. Rather than doing that, The Last Jedi threw them away while congratulating itself on subverting expectations. After that sunk in, people were in no mood for more Star Wars.

Solo might have done better if it had been released later but it came out while the after taste of The Last Jedi was still lingering in people's mouths.

Then there's Solo itself. It's just not engaging and it's way too long. Most movies are have three acts. Solo has four. First he escapes from the planet he was raised on but he leaves his girlfriend behind. Then we see him as a storm trooper who realizes a heist is about to happen and wants in (picking up Chewie along the way). The heist goes bad and most of the colorful characters we've just met die. So then we have another heist. Then we finally have a lengthy shoot-out where everyone betrays everyone else. And I hope you didn't care about anyone who wasn't in the original trilogy because they're all going to die. Plus they spent a lot of effort answering questions that no one even thought to ask (how did Han get the name "Solo"? How did he learn to fly?, etc)

This was not a movie that was going to gross a billion dollars. It only did as well as it did because of the Star Wars name attached. If the names had been changed to make it generic it would probably have grossed half what it did.

The final difference between Marvel and Star Wars is that Marvel respects their fans and makes movies for them. Disney seems to be embarrassed by Star Wars fans. They have made it clear that they are making movies for a different fan base in mind, one that's move diverse. Their problem is that the fans they want don't exist in the numbers they need.