Disney Exec Blames Fans for The Marvels Disastrous Flop, Because Of Course
Devastating news: another gem of a movie destroyed by the terrible people at home.
Summary:
- The Marvels became one of the main superhero flops of 2023, losing Disney hundreds of millions of dollars.
- An unnamed Disney executive blamed toxic fans for sinking The Marvels out of their hate for female leads.
- As a side note, Greta Gerwig’s female-led movie Barbie was released in the same year and became a worldwide phenomenon.
There’s one thing the audience just fails to grasp: if a big-budget movie bombs, it’s their fault. Not the studio’s, not the director’s, not the writer’s; it’s entirely on the viewers.
Take The Marvels, for instance. The movie’s clearly brilliant on every level, but it still made only $206M against its $270M production budget, flopping disastrously.
The Marvels bombed for one reason and one reason only: the terrible people at home. At least, that’s what a Disney executive recently revealed.
Disney Exec Blames Fans for The Marvels’ Flop
Generally, when speaking about The Marvels’ fate, we point out several possible reasons and try to go over the objective facts: the COVID pandemic, the blatant overspending, the superhero fatigue, the lack of creative oversight, the movie’s plot irrelevance to the larger MCU picture… But that’s just because we are bad, bad people.
“[Fans] won’t say they find female empowerment distasteful in The Marvels or Star Wars, but they will say they don’t like those movies because they are ‘bad.’ So ‘make better movies’ becomes code for ‘make movies that conform to regressive gender stereotypes or put men front and center in the narrative,’” an unnamed Disney executive told Puck.
Dear everyone who didn’t rush to the theaters as soon as The Marvels was released, forget your personal reasons. Disney says, if you didn’t watch it or disliked it, you’re toxic and immoral, and that’s all your fault that this brilliant movie bombed where even the likes of Morbius managed to break even and make some profit on top.
Most Fans Are Cool with Female Leads
It’s a shame we didn’t realize just how much having a female protagonist doomed movies earlier. Otherwise, we would have had to talk about the phenomenal box office success of Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, Frozen, the new Star Wars trilogy, and the original Captain Marvel as of true financial miracles, no less.
The truth is, there are quite some trolls who resent female leads and make gross statements about them; but while they’re loud and obnoxious, there are not enough of them to tip the scales significantly.
The vast majority of fans are either cool with female protagonists or genuinely welcome them, and there are countless movies that prove that with their box office numbers and general popularity with the audience.
Even apart from that, blaming fans for a movie’s flop is… Quite a choice. Especially so soon after Barbie became the main movie of 2023 and broke all possible records.
Source: Puck