Hacker Cinema
The Marvels
2023 · Film · 105 min
Part of Captain Marvel Collection
Directed by Nia DaCosta
Science FictionAdventureAction
When her duties send her to an anomalous wormhole linked to a Kree revolutionary, Carol's powers become entangled with that of Jersey City super-fan Kamala Khan, aka Ms. Marvel, and Carol's estranged niece, now S.A.B.E.R. astronaut Captain Monica Rambeau. Together, this unlikely trio must team up and learn to work in concert to save the universe.
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20 comments on Hacker News
The same works the other way, and actually a lot better IMO.
Let's imagine a scenario with two identical restaurants with the exact same quality of food.
One sells their dish as a fully vegan option, but doesn't tell the customers.
Hardline "oorah, meat only for me" dude walks in and eats the dish, loves it.
If he goes to the other restaurant and is told beforehand that "sir, this dish is fully vegan" - do you think they'd enjoy it as much?
Prejudices steer people's opinions, a lot. Just like people stop enjoying movies and games due to some weird online witch-hunt that might later on turn out to be either a complete willful misunderstanding of the whole premise (Ghost in the Shell) or a targeted hate campaign (Marvels and many many other movies starring a prominent feminist woman).
Not really (except hardcore fans, who already followed the 'after-trilogy' lore, and would have been happy with a continuation in a much cheaper format)
But Warner Brothers itself wanted a big tentpole release, and insisted Matrix be it. (Even though it wouldn't really fit that mold)
The Matrix 4 itself, even mentions how the demands on the release were ridiculous and wouldn't work (it's not 1999 anymore, you can't just re-do 1999 and expect it to work).
The Matrix 4 film itself is really good (IMHO), as a huge fan of the original stories and lore, it moves the universe forward in a way that feels authentic to the original trilogy, it reunites old characters, makes charming and thoughtful new ones, and it remains authentic and true to the original romance underpinning the whole thing. The lack of Hugo Weaving/Laurence Fishburne, and a little bit of dated action fights is the only real bummer I can think of.
The problem is that the film is only good, and not mind-crushingly great. And what everyone seemed to want out of this, was a guaranteed 300+ mil smash hit at box.
If they had released it to theaters, I don't think it would have made that. But it 'only' cost $190 million to make (Matrix 2 was 265m in 2024 dollars), and I think Matrix 4 would have done at least $200 mil total at box, if it had a theatrical release (for comparison, The Marvels is another 'good-but-not-great' SciFi action film, and grossed $206 million at box).
If there is a disagreement between the director and the studio, they will negotiate with each other about which changes to make. But the director is never cut completely out of the process.
There are a lot of directors who would disagree with you on that...
Disney is notorious for this; off the top of my head, Ant Man, Rogue One, Solo, and Brave changed directors because of disagreements with the studio in post-production. With the Marvels, it is widely known that the director did not have final cut of the film. Bryan Singer and Steven Soderbergh have been replaced on movies due to disagreements with studios after filming had started (and in both cases, the films at issue went on to be multiple-Oscar nominees). Cary Joji Fukunaga was replaced on It due to disagreements with the studio (but retained writing credit) right before filming started; and he replaced Danny Boyle on No Time to Die after Boyle was let go due to disagreements with the studio.
If the studio tries to take creative control completely away from the director, the director can petition the DGA to have his or her name removed from the film.
The director always is consulted during the edit, and in most cases works very closely with the editor. The studio may or may not insist on changes later, but there is just no universe where the editor makes changes alone with no input from the director at all. The DGA would have a fit if that happened.
This is just incorrect. Indeed, what you suggest is at odds with over a 100 years of film history...
The DGA does not have a fit over stuff like this because a director is not entitled to "complete creative control" or to "final cut" unless they negotiate for it, get themselves hired as editor on the film they direct (which would also involve them being a producer), or work with a studio that embraces the auteur school of filmmaking (in which the released film represents the director's vision of the film).
It's one thing to support the auteur school since it usually results in better films (counterpoint: most Netflix films), but it is objectively not the way most films are made.
There’s a joke about transparent displays in the recent MCU film “The Marvels”: “if this is all so secret then why do you use transparent screens”?
This is a funny one - the editors have blocked the Mavels movie from being called a “bomb” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marvels
Reading Characters and Viewpoint by Orson S. Card and one of the main thing is that characters should answer these three points:
* Why should I care?
* Why is he doing that?
* What is happening?
IMO, most movies focus on the last one and not on the two first. They expect us to believe the answer for the first is our love for the universe and the second is "heroes good, villains bad". Which makes for a very bland story. I watched The Marvels and the most interesting thing was the sound in the theater (Dolby Audio). But I've done an all-nighter for Andor and watched it again the day after because:
1. Everyone had serious motivations which you discover during the show.
2. It was not a fairy tale
3. The story was clear and beautifylly put together.
These days, I prefer having my own curated collection that I can rewatch every now and then and add the few good things that come each year.
The marvel movies lately have just been bad. Multiverse of madness, the marvels, black panther 2. Just not good. Pretty dissapointing.
Are you serious? TLDR: They feel pretty different to me. SW has nowhere to go and is trying to go nowhere. Marvel continues doing its thing, within the level of competence they've always demonstrated.
I find that SW has declined to a level previously unimaginable, they are effectively stuck doing live action versions of children's animated TV shows. The mild incompetence of Clone Wars is now a distant memory, the lowest level of quality in a SW fiction project ever has been breached multiple times now by shows such as Boba Fett. The whole universe has no guiding function, expect to retcon as much as possible on top of previously very popular characters.
Marvel has ALWAYS been a milquetoast production company, with some big hits like Iron Man, Avengers films, etc. But most of their production has always been "ok", and having watched The Marvels recently, I felt like they're just going back to their Phase 1 days, where some films were good, many not really (Thor 2, Avengers 2, Iron Man 2).
BUT Marvel has a guideline for where they want to take their content, even if they just recently lost a major actor (only his own fault).
So yeah I do think there's a difference. Marvel is ok, has always been ok, with some moments of brilliance.
Star Wars was a bit all over the place but it definitely had new ideas, every single movie introduced something interesting, be it a location/planet, a character or spaceship. It didn't constantly flirt with the same recycled material ad nauseam, because its creative direction was set, even if sometimes the audience did not like the result.
Current Star Wars creative direction is nil outside of "let's find some other popular side character to wrap a show around, maybe?". There is no story line that makes any sense for the SW being produced, it's just a grab bag of "this worked I guess".
The word "meaningfully" was there for a reason.
Yes, obviously, there's someone buying it when they release it. But even in Marvel's current anemic state I doubt sales of Snow White reaches even .1% of the revenue from The Marvels, a single movie. Their revenue on direct sales of stuff about to go public domain is a rounding error, and nowhere near enough to justify locking up the entire rest of the nation's culture just for that.
Further evidence that it must not be that big a deal is that the Mouse seems to have finally relented and doesn't seem to be lobbying for more extensions anymore.
They lost at the box office, but reviews for The Marvels suggest it's the better movie (although not by much). That's even taking into account the fact that horror tends to get worse reviews as a genre. There are a lot of reasons why The Marvels might have performed so much worse in ticket sales (I'm guessing superhero fatigue, and the character(s) not being very popular to begin with had a lot to do with it), but Disney's MCU can recover as long as they're willing to put more effort into giving people a story worth watching.
Five Nights at Freddy's: $286,595,570
The Marvels: $197,035,186
That's how badly Marvel movies are bombing now. FNaF actually straight-up beat Marvel, and by a very comfortable margin.
There is no minimizing this. This is disastrous for Disney.
> 2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".
And rightly so. The so-called special effects in those superhero movies are really getting exhausting. What's the point of having superpower yet battling like a peasant in medieval times? What's the point of having super intelligence yet making so many illogical decisions? What's the point of having the best technologies on earth yet having your tribe living in dirt and fighting with rhinos and using duet to elect your leaders? I can even tolerate such plot holes if the movies have good stories or interesting characters, but do they?
To be more precise, those mid-budget films all did well relative to their budgets. Marvels still made far more money, but the budget was so bloated that Marvel took a loss.
2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".
On the other hand, aside from the massive big-budget hits of Barbie and Mario, there were also a number of mid-budget films that did very well: John Wick 4, Sound of Freedom, Five Nights at Freddy's, Cocaine Bear and M3GAN all exceeded expectations.
So it's hard to interpret this as the "middle class" of movies disappearing. I'd say it's the opposite, in fact. People have gotten sick of the big-budget crap that follows the same formula (note how most of those bombs are superhero movies). It's really the big-budget films that are falling apart.
Judging by Disneys upcoming roster of films and TV shows I don't think they have learnt. Even after every film they released this year flopped, they're still persuing this failed philosophy. Their last two releases this year, the Marvels and Wish are going to lose them around $400 - $500million.
It doesn't matter though, they're rapidly turning into a very attractive takeover target with their stock price so depressed. The decision will so be taken out of their hands.
Its not 10 outright failures in a row, but they've been doing poorly for most of 2023.
Keep in mind that ~2X the official production budget is roughly the minimum threshold for a movie to break even, after factoring in marketing and the theater take:
Elemental was a modest success earning $495.9M against a $200M budget.
The Little Mermaid maybe barely broke even at $569.6M against a $297M budget.
Indiana Jones bombed hard, earning $384M against a $300M budget.
The Marvels is trending towards about $200M against a $274.8M budget.
Wish opened terribly this weekend, pulling in $49M in its first weekend against a $200M budget (will likely finish between $120-150M)
Edit: Forgot about Haunted Mansion, earning $117.5M against $150M.
I think any person who saw The Marvels trailer could have told you that movie was going to bomb.
I really like the Marvel stuff but they have two problems that are well known at this point:
Quality and volume.
Some of their recent efforts, like Loki season two and (apparently) The Marvels are quite good.
The problem is we already got burned by a number of poor entries like Thor: Love and Thunder and The Eternals (I mean, wow). It seems rare I hear about a good movie these days, even when they make one, but the bad ones get mentioned a lot. Or the ones that people just dislike for whatever ideological reason like She-hulk: Attorney at Law.
Much like with Star Wars they put things out so fast that it feels like you’re always trying to keep up. Even if DC and others didn’t keep trying to make superhero movies they would have oversaturated the market alone.
Combine those and it can feel like you’re always trying to keep up with a bunch of bad stuff in hopes of finding the rare good one. It’s exhausting.
And all of that is just Marvel stuff. But they’re also up against great TV, great video games, and everything else going on in the world. Trends away from wanting to go to movie theaters.
They drove the audience away with too much cash grabbing. Pure and simple.
I 100% reject the nonsense “go woke go broke” arguments, everything that’s going on can be explained without that perfectly, and there is no actual evidence to back it up.
With generic "capeshit" superhero movies no longer being a sure thing (The Marvels is tracking to a $45-55m opening this weekend, guaranteeing it's a huge bomb) and the massive success of Mario, Sonic 1/2, and even the extremely mediocre Five Nights at Freddy's movie, it seems inevitable that video games are the next trendy frontier for movie studios to harvest from.
I do wonder how long it can last as, while I thought the Mario movie wasn't bad as a generic kid's movie, it also relied heavily on nostalgia and references to keep parents entertained. And comic books seem to have a much deeper pool of nostalgic characters to draw from before they start scraping the bottom of the barrel for you-don't-know-who-this-is-unless-you're-a-hardcore-fan characters like Shang-Chi or Ms. Marvel.
For games, after Mario, Link and Sonic, you've got Pikachu/Pokemon, Master Chief, Lara Croft... and then a pretty sharp fall-off after that. Like yeah, I love Metal Gear, but is Solid Snake really a cultural icon the same way Magneto or Mario is?
It would be horrible and too easy to manipulate, think a fighter taking a dive.
Say the Marvels is coming out, Brie Larson knows everyone hates her and she's a bad actor so it will probably flop. Brie takes out a $10 million short on her own movie.
Now she has an incentive to be horrible so she acts EXTRA bad and treats people even worse than usual to be sure it flops.