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.