It's ok to be wrong. The last marvel movie to hit 1 billion since endgame was spiderman with 3 white male leads. Let that sink in. The audience sees the pandering and knows its pandering. The only phase 5 movie to do well this year old school guardians. Hmmmmm.....maybe just maybe they tried to put a chick in it and make her gay 1 too many times.
Let's take a look at the top 10 grossing films this year. We'll go worldwide, and not just limit ourselves to domestic, since that tends to be the yardstick by which films are judged.
In 2023, the top grossing film was...
Wait for iiiiiiit.....
Barbie. At about $1.4B. Followed shortly thereafter by The Super Mario Bros. Movie at $1.3B, and then Oppenheimer at almost $949M.
Guardians came in at $845M, then Fast X at $704M, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse at $690M, The Little Mermaid at $569M, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One at $567M, Elemental at $495M, and finally Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania at $476M. Granted, there's still about a month left in the year, so I suppose
If your theory, that audiences are rejecting diversity of casting, and that Marvel is suffering because of "pandering" is true, you would expect Barbie to be somewhere down around, oh, I don't know Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at around $383M (or lower, even!).
But instead, a movie about a female character that
explicitly takes on themes about patriarchy is the leading film world-wide, followed by...er...a video game plumber. You'd also figure that the kind of "pandering" of a character like, say, Miles Morales (you know, black-hispanic Spider-Man?) would suffer as well, right? And for sure you'd figure audiences would roundly reject The Little Mermaid due to all that pandering by changing the character from white to black, right? So...why don't the numbers bear that out?
2022 doesn't really support your theory, either, actually. Top grossing worldwide was Avatar: The Way of Water at $2.3B (which still boggles my mind, and which I still haven't seen). At a distant 2nd place we have Top Gun: Maverick at just about $1.5B, then Jurassic World Dominion at $1B, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness at $955M, Minions: The Rise of Gru at $939M (seriously?!), and...hmm...that's strange...Black Panther: Wakanda Forever at $859M? What's a movie about not even a male superhero, but a black female superhero, featuring another black female superhero squaring off against quasi-meso-American-pre-Colombian supervillains doing mixed in here? Surely, one would expect a film about a black, female superhero to perform rather poorly, no?
But, ok, let's just look at Marvel films alone. I mean, after all, Avengers: Endgame did so amazingly well, right? Surely, that must demonstrate that only films with white male leads can do well, right? And surely, your view that audiences are rejecting pandering would be borne out in the numbers within those films, right?
So, why did Captain Marvel's first film do $1.1B worldwide?
Put simply, I think your theory is...poorly grounded when you look at the evidence. It's not inclusiveness or pandering or wokeness or whatever you want to call it.
The reason you're seeing this stuff in the trades about superhero movies dying out and Marvel being on its last legs and such is not because of the money the films take in, by itself. It's because of the amount of money that Disney
spends on the movies, and what that does to their
profit margin. The other aspect is that these films aren't hitting
projected numbers within certain release windows, because what everyone wants is consistent $1B hits.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny did $383M worldwide, almost $384M. But it had an estimated budget of around $300M, so it ended up being, technically, a box office bomb. Ant-Man Quantumania "only" did around $476M, on a budget of around $200M, and we point to that as a failure? Really? This is about shareholders not getting
as much money as they used to, and them being pissy about it. Turns out you can't just create a factory that pumps out consistent $1B hits. Nobody bats 1000, I guess. But it ain't about the "pandering." If it were, you'd never have seen the first film crack $500M, you'd see Little Mermaid below that amount, too, Wakanda Forever never would've made it across the $500M mark, etc., etc., etc.
I would submit that the
rhetoric surrounding these films, especially within a
segment of the fan population, has turned it into an article of faith that these films "did terribly" because of "pandering." But like I said, the numbers don't bear that theory out. The films may "disappoint" according to the trades, but a lot of that is built around pre-release expectations of box office earnings and profit margins, which is all just another fancy way of saying that the suits imagined how they thought the film would do, and then it didn't do as well as they imagined based on "projections" and "expectations."
But these movies are popular. Hell, the "disappointing" Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
was popular! It did $383M!!! By any measure, that is
not an "unpopular" movie; it's just not
as popular as what Disney
hoped it would be. It's not the mega-hit they banked on, and it's not showing the brand name strength they'd assumed it'd have. But come on, $383M is not unpopular!
You know what was an unpopular film? The Expend4bles. Filmed on a budget of $100M, it only did $51M. Now
that is a
real box office bomb.
(i.e. they get a hit 30% of the time).
