The MCU’s Biggest Box Office Bomb Still Deserves a Sequel

The Marvels seemed like a lock. 2019’s Captain Marvel grossed $1.13 billion at the worldwide box office, outgrossing all three of 2017’s Marvel Cinematic Universe movies (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Thor: Ragnarok) and the DCEU’s Wonder Woman. It seemed as though people were really interested in Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers. However, four years later, The Marvels seems to have ended the Captain Marvel franchise before it even really became a franchise. It’s more of a cross-over film than a Captain Marvel film, and one that grossed just $206 million worldwide, a catastrophic drop of about 82%.

It’s hard to pinpoint just why audience interest plummeted in such a severe fashion. Perhaps Captain Marvel was buoyed by 2018’s Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War even more than people already thought. Maybe people just hadn’t checked out the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel and WandaVision. Maybe it was just the general audience growing tired of Marvel movies as a whole, and a title like The Marvels just seemed like a tired bridge too far.

Is The Marvels Actually Weak?

Phase Four and Phase Five were undoubtedly weaker on the whole than the eras that preceded them. Black Widow, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever were all viewed as middling by most audience members while Eternals, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania were almost universally deemed some of the entire saga’s weakest efforts. But as the films that bookended The Marvels (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Deadpool & Wolverine) proved, people will still turn out for an MCU movie that feels like an event. The Marvels just wasn’t that for most.

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And, admittedly, it’s not much of an event film. What it is, rather, is a breezy, often funny, visually vibrant Saturday afternoon movie with strong chemistry among the cast. It’s a less serious movie than Captain Marvel, which had a plot focused on lies and the attempted elimination of the Skrulls. Neither Captain Marvel nor The Marvels is a truly top-tier MCU effort, but considering The Marvels is more fun, it really only serves to show that there is life in the Carol Danvers saga yet. Or there would have been, had The Marvels not flopped hard.

Will There Be More Carol Danvers in the MCU?

This is the big question. Was The Marvels‘ financial failure enough to essentially get Larson booted from the MCU? Since this film’s 2023 release she has stuck to the small screen with Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Lessons in Chemistry, and The Bear. But without a doubt she has the stuff of a movie star, one who excels in blockbusters nearly as well as she excels in smaller fare like Room and Just Mercy.

However, while her IMDb page lists an upcoming movie, it is not an MCU adventure. This is a troubling sign as the saga has a big team-up movie on the way. Technically two of them, but it’s impossible to predict who will be in Avengers: Secret Wars. Will she end up being in Avengers: Doomsday? Likely not, but given Ryan Reynolds’ cryptic recent Avengers-related post, it’s quite possibly he’s joining Doomsday and if one character-slash-actor can join this film mid-production why can’t another?

At the end of the day, The Marvels‘ financial failure can’t be pinned on Larson, Iman Vellani, Teyonah Parris, or director Nia DaCosta. They all did their jobs and did them well. It was really just a case of the straw that broke the camel’s back when it came to franchise fatigue. Danvers, Monica Rambeau, and Kamala Khan should all be featured in an MCU project at some point in the future.

In other words, the lesson Disney and Marvel Studios specifically should learn from The Marvels isn’t that these stars aren’t likable or that woman-led superhero movies aren’t financially viable. Captain Marvel already refuted that latter point, even if it was riding the wave of two event films from the previous year. The lesson to be learned, one that was confirmed by the failure of Thunderbolts* this year, is that the Disney+ series simply stretch the IP too thin.

Having all of these small screen series makes the films feel less like events and more like just another new chapter. Worse yet, it’s a new chapter that you have to pay $15 for instead of just accessing the streaming subscription MCU die-hards already have anyway.

If you have eight months or more between movies, that makes them feel like events. If you have three movies and five Disney+ series per year, they all start to blend in together. And that’s what happened with The Marvels, it just blended in and didn’t stand out on the marquee.