Personally, even leaving aside Brie Larson's comments, I don't understand the projections for Captain Marvel. She is not a particularly successful character in comics or media, nor was Mar-vell, the initial character she was based on. But then again, I didn't understand the Black Panther hype either, so my personal preference on superheroes is hardly a good indicator of success. To be frank, I could take or leave much of the MCU. I liked the first Iron Man and the Guardians of the Galaxy films. Otherwise there are many decent entries but a few underwhelming ones. (I actually thought Infinity War was kind of weak, but that's another post.)
I've been thinking about who the dedicated audience is for Captain Marvel, since in a typical release you want a rabid fanbase who love the character, like Batman or Spiderman brings. These people generate hype among their friends. Captain Marvel has no such devotees. There is no one who talks about reading Captain Marvel as a teen and eagerly awaiting the next issue, or who got a tattoo of her logo before this movie started being hyped.
In its place are people who support the character for the underlying politics of a woke female superhero who considers smiling sexual assault. I think for the most part the dedicated audience is liberal white males in their 30s who are not overly familiar with comics but consider themselves conspicuous geeks. Disney may want minorities and women to watch, but quite honestly for the most part they have their own interests. Little girls want to be princesses like Elsa, not grim and dimensionless men with boobs like Captain Marvel, and that leaves you with an audience of liberal white males who hate on whites for wokeness cred. That is a sizeable chunk of people, but this group is probably an active hindrance on sales, as they run around online screaming at people, call everyone racists, and in general act like huge assholes.
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| Not sure if this is in the film |
Without a dedicated fanbase to generate positive hype, it really comes down to the group that gets called "normies" by the young people. These are casual people not paying much attention to online goings-on, and who shuffle from zeitgeist to zeitgeist as a herd. What or where they go is hard to predict, and their reasoning is superficial, bizarre, and/or contradictory. The entirety of sales and marketing could be said to boil down to trying to predict what these people want, and really the performance of almost every film depends on them. I see them breaking in one of two directions - coming out in droves, or staying away entirely.
On the one hand 'normies', who aren't paying attention to any of the online kerfuffle, are likely to go and sit down in a theater and watch Captain Marvel, because the MCU has built up a lot of goodwill with its fanbase. But, normies might not be thinking of going to the movies in March, and does this movie motivate them? Normally I'd say no, but Disney knows how to market films.
Tuesday the reviews will be out, and I expect them to be rapturous. We will hear about how awesome the character is, how much trouble Thanos is in, and how the cat is the greatest thing ever. Anything short of pure praise (Think the hundreds of Solo 'it's a blast' reviews) and I think the movie is in trouble. But I think Disney will not have to worry about reviewers, as for whatever else I think the Mouse knows how to seduce them into giving good reviews. Disney will generate hype -and lots of it- based upon critical acclaim.
The question is will normies buy in, and I think there's a good probability that they will. If normies hear there is a great new MCU film out, they might make the effort to go out in early March to see a movie. If things break for normies being interested, I'd put box office projection at about $120 million, the high end of the initial estimate.
The second question is how does it do following opening weekend if it has a strong opening. I don't see this movie as getting overly positive or overly negative word of mouth. I see it as getting 'eh, it was alright' responses. I highly doubt the Brie Larson magic of anti-white male PR permeates the movie. There may be subtle things that irritate people who know to look for it, but the average normie will probably just consume the propaganda without resistance, and in the absence of negative word of mouth I think it doesn't see a huge dropoff. Given this, I see it tracking close to Civil War and ending at about $1.1 billion.
BUT, if 'normies' are utterly uninterested in the never-successful brand of Captain Marvel - and there are some indicators of this based upon the toys already going in clearance - then we are in for a very different story. If Brie Larson has turned off fans enough that normies are aware of her comments and not just the controversy - if they start associating this film with divisiveness like they did with Ghostbusters 3 - then positive reviews won't help, and they will decide to just skip it, or forget about it, or wait for the blu-ray.
If things break this way, I see the film going into Solo territory with an $80 million opening. This movie will not generate the positive buzz needed to overcome an anemic (for a Marvel film) opening. Following low opening week turnout I see it limping to $500 million overall. It really all depends on how the normies break, but what I will say is they will break pretty much as a group one way or another: this won't be a divided film. It will either be wholly loved or wholly mocked.
I do feel like giving a positive and negative take is kind of a cop-out, but this is the inherent weirdness of living in a country of 300 million people: you have your own concept of who people are and what they want, and what society is and wants, but as with every election or open question, when it comes down to it you really don't know, and when they en masse do the opposite of what you think they SHOULD do, it can be jarring. Depending on what the stakes are, it can be downright scary.
But it also is why this is fascinating. Either way, we're about to learn something about society and culture, about what people will accept vs what limits exist. And I see Captain Marvel as an indicator of where Star Wars Episode IX will land. If it succeeds, Episode IX will probably hit TFA numbers. If not, IX could be in jeopardy, because it signals audience irritation with strident social justice theming.
You can all guess which way I'm hoping this turns out. My hope is we see this kind of 'woke' movie-making fizzle out like any other fad, and people look back on the crazed films of the 2010s the same way they view avocado colored refrigerators. But if it doesn't? Well, then I think anyone who isn't a fan of this overt woke politics needs to start building their own art and community, and understanding that you are a counter culture now. Nerds aren't strangers to this, but it is still sad to see things that once were fun get torn down purely for the sake of tearing them down.
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