Week-to-Week: Saying The Marvels bombed isn't a value judgment—it's a fact
Kristen Warner joins me to break down the industry and trade press logic that has angered advocates for diversity in the film industry
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The Marvels opened in theaters over six weeks ago, and it’s been three weeks since Disney announced they would no longer be reporting global box office results for the film. This affirmed that it will go down as the lowest box office gross in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, earning less than $85m domestically and just over $200m worldwide on a budget of at least $220m (some reports have it at $270m, but there’s some tax incentives involved). It also holds the record for the lowest opening weekend of any MCU release, at only $46m.
These facts are indisputable, rightfully enshrined on the film’s Wikipedia page. They are also not inherently a judgment of the film, its female leads, or its director Nia DaCosta. That said, there’s no question that in online spaces inherently shaped by white supremacist and patriarchal forces, these facts were weaponized by bad actors who sought to use the film’s failure as evidence against inclusiveness both on-camera and behind-the-scenes. Combine that with a clear effort in the trade press by Disney to scapegoat the film amidst an effort to signal a shift in Marvel’s production practices after a turbulent year, and I can understand why we might be instinctively defensive about a film that I quite enjoyed at the end of the day.
But it has to be said that over the past few weeks the internet has lost the plot on The Marvels. Upon the release of two new films—Wonka and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom—and in responses to a viral tweet about Killers of the Flower Moon’s budget and box office results, social media accounts have gotten huge engagement on posts accusing the trade press of double standards for how they treated The Marvels and DaCosta. In every case, the argument amounts to “Why isn’t the trade press being as breathless in their attacks on these films after they had a lower opening weekend/grossed less money/etc.?” And as their comments fill up with technicalities (aka facts) about the films’ budgets, the different multiples attached to films released near Christmas, or the different logics governing film financing for tech companies like Apple, the initial posters largely stick to their guns to make a point about the white supremacy and misogyny that allegedly led to The Marvels being reported as a bomb as opposed to the “highest grossing opening weekend for a black female director” (surpassing Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time, another Disney film with objectively disappointing box office results, but let’s not get into that).
It’s a hard thing to write about, because there’s this presumption that you’re defending the veracity of the trade press (I am literally in a perpetual feud with Deadline and Vulture, they know what they did) or aligning with those who dismissed the film itself (as noted, I’m on the record as liking it). But after weeks of knee jerk responses to basic facts and seemingly no progress made by fairly presented corrections, it’s necessary that we talk through what’s going on here. And in the interest of working through it as productively as possible, I accepted a kind offer from friend of the newsletter Dr. Kristen Warner, who studies the media industries and racial representation at Cornell University, to allow both of us a chance to vent a bit at what we’ve been witnessing over the past few weeks. I’ll let her get us started, and interlude—rather than interject—where appropriate.
KW: In the words of Tyler the Creator, “okay okay okay okay okay.” I know everyone wants to make a point about inequality of women centered films and how anything viewed as failure creates the perception of a “chill” that stymies future production. Let me put y’alls mind at ease: The stymie never leaves.
It’s always there. Success of anything with women at the center, at the top of the billing or under Jamie Dornan—HAA you will get these Fifty Shades of Grey jokes people, I’ll explain why later—is always noted with an asterisk. To paraphrase the dude from the “basket full of kisses” episode of Mad Men who remarked on Peggy Olson’s talent for taglines as “watching a dog play the piano,” the industry mostly thinks of [white] women centered things or [Black and Brown] women centered things as these little exceptions to the rule. A slice of cantaloupe with one’s brunch, if you will.
So, let’s just set aside the fear argument when trying to throw the petty bones at an industry that could frankly care less about your feelings. The people affected aren’t them but your followers and friends and folks who don’t think about box office or box office accounting or the way that money moves in mysterious ways vis a vis shell corporations in Hollywood. And, frankly, that makes everyone who DOES think about that quite frustrated because the job is now doubly difficult.
MM: Okay, interlude one—this is where we need to discuss how this whole situation frames the trade press. There’s an argument here that because Variety is a Twitter account, and because its journalists are on social media, that they are human beings who should be highly attuned to the feelings of the moment. And yet of all the jobs in film journalism, trade reporters are especially driven to embody and enforce industry logic, both because that’s their actual audience and because they depend on advertising by the industry in question. And let’s not forget that the three primary industry trade publications—The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline—are all owned by the same company, and thus have no incentive to deviate from an established norm of reifying said industry logic.
But in truth, at least in the post-2020 moment, the trade press has actually largely been an ally to causes surrounding diversity and inclusion right up to the point where other, dominant industry logics are unavoidable. Because at the end of the day, their job is to tell stories based on which narratives matter most in Hollywood, and it is not within the power of a single Penske Media employee to change the math on how a movie makes money. When the facts of a film make it a financial failure, that is going to be the story. But because the trades are primarily speaking to an audience who is already painfully—or gleefully—aware of this, they often don’t do the work of explaining this, which combined with some colorful headline writing and social media copy leads to our current situation. Moral of the story: we have some teaching to do. Back to you, KW.
KW: :claps hands: Let’s do a micro lecture. When I teach my industries class, the first couple of weeks we talk about the business of the industry and I introduce all these terms to my students like minimum guarantees and P&A…er…prints and advertising.
I also show them this: Steven Soderbergh's State of Cinema Address at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
Ten years ago, Steven Soderbergh, a filmmaker we in my business refer to as an indie-auteur, gave the keynote address at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Called the “State of Cinema,” Soderbergh launched off in the wonderfully curmudgeon fashion we love him for and argued that cinematic filmmaking was atrophying because of the industry’s dependence on over simplification for the sake of international markets as well as its general aversion to risk. I encourage y’all to watch the whole damn thing but for the sake of Myles’ editing fingers, I’ll get to the point. The section that I spend the most time in class discussion happens around the 17 minute mark. Soderbergh, in 2013 numbers, lays out the money that a film must make to “clear” and be considered profitable at the studio level. Soderbergh’s approach is helpful in its simplicity to a lay audience of film lovers but because it’s simple math*, we don’t have all the variables needed to illustrate a more complete picture.
What variables you ask? Here’s a few: Which studio? Who’s the boss? What cycle of “money is a means to an end” versus “minimum money for production” are they in?
MM: Are they new on the job? Is their contract up soon? How did their last big film do? How many big films do they have coming up? We could do this forever, so do go on.
KW: If you’re talking about, for example, The Marvels, which is a Marvel studio film that operates as a subsidiary of a transnational media conglomerate called Disney, currently run (again) by Bob “where’s my money and why didn’t you bring my change?” Iger? A $220m reported net budget [MM: after aforementioned tax incentives] means that the actual spend is more likely:
*Editor’s note: This “simple math” led to the two of us going back and forth trying to parse Soderbergh’s intentions, and we honestly never fully came to an agreement. It’s a reminder that while Soderbergh can frame it as simple math, nothing about Hollywood accounting is simple, which is a huge part of why we often just interpret it as “big numbers good, low numbers bad.” So these are fundamentally estimates, and I’ve tried to thread the needle in editorial between our two interpretations while acknowledging that no matter what math we use, the facts of these cases don’t change.
$220M net budget + the cost of releasing the film (testing/tracking/distribution) which Soderbergh puts at roughly $60m worldwide + the P&A spend which Soderbergh sort of collapses into the costs of release but let’s say adds an additional $100m for a blockbuster film like this. To break even by this simple math, the film would have to gross double the upfront costs of making and releasing the film ($380m), which would be $760m.1 Right now it’s at about $206M worldwide box office.
MM: I’ll interlude here to say that there’s probably some additional fuzzy math with Marvel projects, since you’re also factoring in merchandising and licensing in a way that Soderbergh isn’t probably considering, plus I suppose there’s the murky numbers of how films drive interest in theme park lands (Captain Marvel is a centerpiece of an underwhelming makeover of a roller coaster at Disneyland Paris’ Avengers Campus) and how they add value to Disney’s ongoing effort to make streaming a profitable part of their business (which is going super great no I’m not awkwardly gritting my teeth for any reason while typing this why do you ask?). And then there’s the streaming rights, the VOD, the FX window, etc. But at the end of the day, you can’t try to make any of that fuzzy math work with $206M gross against this kind of production and marketing spend.
KW: Yeah…I’m sure every day Bob Iger is mad he handed the job to (other Bob) Chapek. Every single day. But for The Marvels specifically? Yeah…Bob is pissed. Because the expectation is that if you spend a ton of money and then carpetbomb the culture to hell and back with advertising and marketing and if the algorithm gave you some sort of predictive assessment of the overall success of the movie and it doesn't succeed?
Chile, all the diverse looking bodies in front and behind the camera in the world ain’t gon stop Bob from shaking [Kevin] Feige and all the rest of the team. If the milkshake don’t bring the folks to the yard…what’s the point?
MM: I was watching some Disney propaganda—a 20/20 special about the 100th anniversary—this week, and they were quick to herald the Ms. Marvel TV series that introduced Kamala Khan, one of those diverse characters at the center of The Marvels. But the vagaries of streaming data mean that there’s no clear evidence whether or not that show was a success, and its place as part of a larger content push to draw subscribers meant it was there as part of an experiment to extend the box office success of the MCU into the streaming space.
But once Kamala entered the world of box office, the data is no longer fungible: box office is hard facts in a way streaming ratings aren’t.2 And so while Ms. Marvel introduced the “first Muslim superhero,” and Disney gets to pat itself on the back, it’s harder to present that narrative in this context when there’s so much evidence that any ground being broken in The Marvels has failed to match up to the established metrics that apply to Marvel theatrical releases. It doesn’t change the facts related to questions of diversity—female leads, diverse leads, black female director—or its value to Disney as a company, but it forces these two narratives to compete with one another in a way Disney can’t “silver lining” without making shareholders mighty antsy.
KW: Myles, why did I get confused and think you were injecting Kamala Harris into Disney discourse?! The way my brain quaked. Next it’s going to be Taylor…and then I will have to depart. I kid.
MM: I am already on a strict warning for turning this into a Taylor Swift newsletter so rapidly everyone noticed, so you’d have support on that one. But please, continue.
KW: Anyway to your point about evaluative metrics, I agree but I think that’s a hard data point to examine anyway. Remember back to the arguments folks made about the success of Star Wars: The Force Awakens being owed at least in part to the racial and gendered diversity of its leads? I to this day don’t believe that was the case because the movie was on track to earn bajillions of dollars even it featured sock puppets and stick figures, but I think the case study you’re bringing up involves the studio actually investing in showcasing their diversity as part of the film’s promotion. Which, yeah, there might be some testable data there…maybe? Maybe? Maybe.
MM: Honestly, though, I don’t think I read a single trade story that actually presented the idea that Marvel’s “wokeness” or focus on diversity was somehow responsible for the film’s failure. Heck, even Deadline—whose breathless box office reporting is the standard bearer for reinforcing industry logic—sticks exclusively to Marvel’s oversaturation on Disney+ and some stock marketing gibberish without once suggesting that issues of gender or race were part of the story. And honestly, I even went through some of the 250 comments on that article, and I didn’t even see much of it there (and Deadline comments really are a cesspool).
But because that’s a discourse that did emerge in response to the film’s failure (because, internet), the consensus seemed to be that continuing to report on its box office was directly fueling the backlash against diversity, and thus somehow in opposition to its message of diversity. But Marvel’s fall from grace is a huge story, and The Marvels’ failure at the box office is a huge part of it, and loath as I am to defend the trade press writ large, I don’t think they overplayed their hand on its significance to the industry as a whole.
But the suggestion they had some type of vendetta has led to this knee jerk reaction to less “negative” box office reporting for films like Wonka and Aquaman that had opening weekends below The Marvels, but which were releasing during a holiday season where they’ll make more of their money after their opening weekend. Their stories are not comparable to The Marvels—Wonka has already surpassed The Marvels’ domestic and international totals on roughly half the budget, and while Aquaman will be more of a flop it will still probably outgross Marvel’s low point when all is said and done (which won’t be until the dust settles on the holiday window).
And honestly, I feel like this level of box office literacy should be closer to common sense at this point: movies with bigger budgets need to make more money, and movies that debut at Christmas earn higher multiples of their opening weekend. This isn’t exactly calculus. But I’ll admit I’m more sympathetic to the confusion about the math behind streaming titles, even if it seems like a lesson that we should all be listening to more in our current climate.
KW: Oh good point. And also, back to something Soderbergh says in his talk, these logics are why for these studios it makes a lot more sense to them (I just interpret the data) to produce $200M+ films that cost so much to clear, or films with IP that the studio already owns as part of its library so it can remake the same movie every 20 years because every generation needs their Wonka (although God…why…a musical…) than a handful of smaller to mid-budget movies for theatrical/streaming that may pay off big but not in the massive ways their counterparts do.
Okay back to the lesson: let’s contrast The Marvels with Apple and Flowers for Algernon...I mean Killers of the Flower Moon. First, let’s start with the fact that Tim Cook at this point doesn't really care about box office in the ways that a movie studio chief who spent years crawling up that precarious ladder—or not but that’s a different point—might care. His relationship with the Apple TV+ original content is still somewhat in that honeymoon stage where he wants to celebrate “cinemahhh” and give freedom to makers and, also, make a movie with everyone in Generation X and geriatric millennials’ favorite film head, Martin Scorsese. Killers is good IP and Martin still has Leo Dicaprio’s phone number and it’s a relevant story and, most importantly? It’s good for the Apple Originalⓒ brand: beautiful, compelling, stories that attract the upper echelon of Hollywood—what we used to call movie stars but now…I dunno…it’s depressing, I can’t talk about it—and earn critical acclaim.
Also, and this is no small thing: they want to prove they’re better than Netflix and actually appreciate the movie theater as an exhibition site so there’s less chance that, for example, Thierry Fremaux will disallow an Apple Original from premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in competition….ahem. LOL also the movie is still faring better than The Irishman so…yeah.
So, with that in mind, let’s return to the rough math if we just treat this as a theatrical release:
$200M budget + $60M to release the film + an additional $30M P&A (lowballing slightly, perhaps, if we’re not factoring in the awards campaign) means that the “break even” point is at $580m. Right now it’s grossed around $156M worldwide. Apple is in partnership with Paramount for domestic distribution so it’s likely that Paramount will get first monies of that $156M to recoup their distribution costs, and then Apple will sell the film for $20 online and then license it in other places it wishes to distribute for ancillary revenue.
MM: There’s an additional vagary with streaming budgets, which is how much of the participants’ profit is built into the production costs—with limited opportunities for backend gross or profits, big directors and big stars get bigger upfront paychecks. They get their money upfront, and Apple (and Netflix, who works under the same model) get their prestige and Oscar nominations on the back end. So a $200m streaming movie and a $200m theatrical exclusive are not the same beast, even if both companies are equally concerned about the bottom line, which…is decidedly not the case here.
KW: Yes, the TL;DR version–Apple sells phones and hardware and wants to build goodwill with industries it sees as connectors to continue to evolve their love brand. I don’t think Tim Cook is going to sweat this nearly as much as Iger is sweating everyone at Marvel and THAT is why this isn’t the same thing. That is why as much as it may appear that these films are oranges to oranges correlations, it’s not. The variables, the histories, the personalities of these studios and their top brass are just as important to the story as the box office numbers alone.
Also, and I mean this genuinely: Apple will write off the loss and move along post-Oscar season campaign. Disney will too (minus the Oscar campaign) but it still burns Iger’s ass.
MM: Alright, let’s boil this down. What are these stories of box office “failure” and people’s reactions to them telling us?
KW: The failure of The Marvels isn’t about the temporality of diversity and inclusion or about this terrible pattern of Nia DaCosta signing on for projects that render her utterly invisible (she and her team should really examine this closer). In the same way that the failure narrative for Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t about a pretty dark true story with a 3:30 goddamn running time in an era where most of the conversation around the film is “why is the white man getting all the lines” and not “would the movie be made if the white men didn’t attach”? :shrug:
I DIGRESS.
It’s more that the failure of and attention that The Marvels is receiving allows for a synecdochal reading of Marvel Studios reaching the end of its own meta Phase One. It’s been a good ride—fifteen damn years going hard in the paint—and now they will have to reboot. As will all of Disney’s interests.
MM: And similarly, the “soft” box office performance of Killers of the Flower Moon is a story about Apple’s success at laundering a streaming release through the theatrical marketplace—Paramount’s probably in the black on whatever deal they cut to distribute it, and whatever money Apple gets from windowing it onto VOD before it hits Apple TV+ is bonus cash to put toward the billboards in L.A. when they get their Best Picture nomination. Everything in streaming is still an experiment, and no amount of facts can derail an experiment being run by tech giants with bottomless pockets and an industry to disrupt.
That said, I do feel like the trade press struggles at times to realize how these stories intersect with the other online discourses—the stories themselves are sometimes nuanced, but headlines and tweets never are, and there’s at least a question of responsibility that I hope is being asked.
KW: Valid. To be fair though, this moment of audience’s interested in industry discourse is new and, I imagine, the realizations are still happening that these reporters are having to explain concepts that, for several generations, were touted as true inside baseball ideas. I mean, Myles, let’s see how serious a face you put on explaining to lay folks what a “mouse house” is or, Lordy, “boffo.” Transparency is key here I suppose and laying out that the blindspots are not malicious but are still ever present because the only folks who cared about what they talked about were folks already enmeshed in those worlds and that’s a hard socialization to unlearn. (META KW: I never thought there’d be a day when I made an argument extending grace for the trade reporters even though I am fond of many. And Bob’s your uncle. Sighs.)
MM: This isn’t to say that people’s fear is invalid, or that we shouldn’t be questioning the trade press’ investment in upholding industry practices as a whole. But the coverage of The Marvels is pretty comfortably tied to broader industry storylines, and tying it to that fear doesn’t help us better understand that industry or the challenges facing efforts to diversify it at the end of the day.
Speaking of which, we never did get back to Jamie Dornan did we?
KW: Yes thank you for the reminder, sir. Listen, if you don’t recognize a woman centered three-film franchise with what may have been a combined budget of $125M grossing $1B worldwide never being reproduced by any studio as the stymie of all stymies? Y’all LATE. Fifty Shades of Grey revealed the jig between the years 2015 and 2018 friends.
Myles, thank you for letting me get this all off my chest.
MM: And thank you for inspiring me to stay up much too late to get this off mine.
KW: HOLIDAY BREAK!
Episodic Observations
I haven’t made it to any of the big Christmas releases, as a cold worked its way through the family holiday, but I did make it to Godzilla Minus One last week and had a lot of fun. Definitely an interesting counterpoint to the “Godzilla as friend” narrative we’re seeing in the Monsterverse films, and in Monarch (on which I’m a week behind, but I’ll catch up before the finale).
I had a moment last week to check out the first of Marvel’s daily What If? drops, but the schedule just wasn’t sustainable with family commitments, so I’m not sure when I’ll get to them. I ultimately didn’t watch all of the first season, and while I like the concept the anthology dynamics make it less of a must watch.
I’ll be in touch about the January/February schedule sometime early in the new year—we’ve got a few shows finishing up before we’ll be adding any new coverage as things are slow to reboot following the break.
And because Kristen felt you should know how in the weeds we got, here’s a screenshot of our entire back and forth trying to decide what Soderbergh’s math was. My thanks again to Kristen for joining me—if she decides to start newslettering again, here’s her Substack.
For the record, even the “simplest” math presented online of 2x the film’s budget without accounting for P&A would still be $440m.
I think of this often with The Happiest Season, which was supposed to be a theatrical release before COVID, as compared with Bros, which went theatrical and bombed in a way that dredged up every presumption about straight audiences’ interest in queer stories in a way that Happiest Season’s streaming debut didn’t.
Me have one more intangible in Marvels' favor: a way forward for MCU.
Me have written about this before in these comments (and would happy to flesh these thoughts into essay, pro bono, if Myles ever want more Monster-American representation on writing staff!). But me think biggest reason for MCU's decline is one that is least talked about: it too disconnected.
From 2011-2019, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America each appear in 7 movies (not counting post-credits stingers). These were characters who interacted, had history, had strong opinions about each other. In fact, they fit in to classic matriarch-patriach-craftsman-clown structure (Cap/Tony/Bruce/Thor). They were main characters, and entire 24-film arc that wrap up with Endgame was their story.
Whose story is current phase of MCU? We have more movies, and TV shows, and Doctor Strange is only character we have seen twice on big screen, and only character who has interacted with other lead character (Spidey). So who are main characters? Where are connections? It just bunch of disconnected stories about people throwing CGI blobs at each other, with no real emotional throughline.
So of course everyone lost interest. And first time that spark of interested started to rekindle — for this monster, anyway — was in Marvels' post-credit scene. Me also enjoyed movie on own merits. But Young Avengers team, led by winsome Iman Vellani, would get me invested again. Young characters are currently MCU's biggest asset, and me would be perfectly happy if Kang Dynasty, or whatever it get renamed post-Jonathan Majors, finds way to retire Dr Strange and Ant Man and we get clean slate with Kamala/Kate/Ironheart/Shuri/Spidey. Make them all hang out. Make them get on each other's nerves. Give them *some* interpersonal dynamic people will pay money to see. Because Shang-Chi doing one entertaining film and then disappearing forever not really doing it for me.
So going back to original premise, me love Brie Larson as much as next monster, but Iman Vellani was clearly star of Marvels. She have *it*, as they say in Hollywood, and that worth more than better headlines in Variety, as far as keeping this unwieldy enterprise going. (And whether that good thing in itself whole separate conversation for other day. Me have overstayed welcome and have some Christmas cookies to eat!)
This was an excellent discourse, many thanks to you both. Others have already covered my initial thoughts, and Cookie Monster got at the heart of what my biggest issue is with the current state of Marvel in that each movie used to be a solid stand alone story that was objectively good and could stand on its own, with maybe an errant line here or breadcrumb there hinting at bigger things coming. Nowadays, it's like a version of the comics where it's just *editors notes* plastered across every panel telling you what other issues to read. I enjoyed the Marvels but it is a flawed film for many reasons, and everything that lead up to it was more of the same. Between the Multiverse as a whole being too large and vague of a storytelling structure, and the Majors/Kang fiasco, there was simply too much money being spent and not a clear enough vision. I'm not nearly as excited for a Young Avengers simply because half the people they have introduced so far are barely characters, and the real stand-outs (Kate Bishop, Kamala) never even debuted on the big screen until a month ago. Now we've got the Marvel Spotlight banner which just feels like a fresh coat of paint on the Netfix Marvel show model which...not progress. I don't know if there's an easy answer here other than for them to slow down, plot out what the hell the overarching story actually is supposed to be (vague things like Multiversal War and Secret Wars are not compelling or enough of a draw to the average person), and focus on making good, standalone films again, hopefully on smaller budgets. The cost per episode of Secret Invasion still blows my mind because that show was absolutely terrible. The gulf between that and how good season 2 of Loki was surely is a good starting point for tearing this thing apart and rebuilding it from scratch. I did laugh out loud at Myles' shoutout to the Taylor Swift flack he caught; as we are all consummate consumers of pop culture, I am fine with TS making her way into some of these discussions, but it's fun to give you shit from time to time. Happy New Year to everyone, looking forward to another year of comments and reviews.🍾