The End of M-She-U? Probably Not

I was a real fan of the Marvel movies at least since the Wesley Snipes movies, Blade and Blade II. They had problems, but Snipes portrayed Blade the way he was meant to be portrayed. And the movie took itself seriously. Then there was the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie. It was the first time that a Marvel movie was done in a way that was as faithful to the original material as possible. But that isn't a surprise, because Sam Raimi is a FAN of the Spider-Man comics.

Well, you can see my take on the evolution of Disney Marvel below the video. The last offering of 2023 was The Marvels. It is the quintessential M-She-U movie. 3 girl bosses, two of whom most people hadn't heard of, who mostly have no character flaws - I won't say they have no character, but some might. Look up the trope of Mary Sue to see how I feel about Captain Marvel, the 3rd girl boss.

The Marvels had a production budget (that Disney will admit to) of $274.8 million dollars, plus marketing. Worldwide box office, of which they get roughly half, was $199.7 million dollars. This movie lost HUNDREDS of millions of dollars for Disney, because they spent much more than $100 million on marketing.

This the Nerdrotic video Marvel Admits FAILURE - The Marvels Killed the M-She-U, and That's a Good Thing

After the original Spider-Man movies, Spider-Man 3 had a lot of studio interference. Never a good thing, and it was horrible. Then Iron Man was faithful to source material. As was Captain America, even if that movie was too long.

Then the original The Avengers came out in 2012. It made $1.5 billion at the box office, and another $252 million in DVD and Blu-ray sales. All that was on a production budget of $225 million plus marketing. Note that while they only get about half the money from the box office (the theaters DO get paid), I'm sure they get more than half of the DVD/Blu-ray gross.

Somewhere along the way after a string of financially successful movies, and after Disney purchased the bulk of the franchise, and despite the fact that all of those really successful movies were based on interpretations of the characters that were faithful to the source material, it was decided that the source material would be ignored. Not just in Marvel, but in Star Wars and Indiana Jones as well, but let's stick to Marvel. Thor was turned into a buffoon by Taika Waititi, for cheap laughs. It worked, for some, in Thor: Ragnarok, but not in Thor: Love and Thunder, which made $760 million at the box office, so it probably made some money, but not as much as The Avengers from 10 years earlier.

So by ignoring the source material, and pissing off the fans - who spent BILLIONS of dollars on movies we liked - Disney entered the realm of diminishing returns. The Marvels was the age of negative returns.