With a so-so 62% on Rotten Tomatoes and a mere $206.1 million at the worldwide box office, The Marvels failed to live up to expectations last November and is now Marvel Studios' lowest-grossing movie.
It's still hard to say where it all went wrong; Captain Marvel grossed over $1 billion in 2019 and both Ms. Marvel and Photon had taken centre stage in two critically acclaimed Disney+ TV shows.
We can take some guesses, of course. "Captain Marvel" probably should have been somewhere in the title, while the marketing campaign definitely underwhelmed. As for the movie itself, the story felt too small in scale and ultimately wasn't the sort of massive event which gets people into theaters these days.
Carol Danvers actress Brie Larson has spent years fending off sexist trolls online and seems to have grown disillusioned with her place in the MCU (last year, comments of the Oscar-winner wondering whether anyone wanted her back as Captain Marvel quickly went viral).
Appearing at the SAG Awards over the weekend, Larson was asked what she can say about her Marvel future and her response was quick and to the point.
"I don't have anything to say about that," she states at the end of the video below.
Doing the rounds to promote The Marvels, Larson was asked a similar question and said, "I don't want Marvel to come for me. But there is something. There is definitely something, to answer your question, that I would want to say, but I am not going to."
Has something changed since then? It's hard not to speculate, particularly after The Marvels underperformed drastically (it's also no secret that the movie was a victim of extensive changes made during reshoots/post-production).
We'd expected Captain Marvel to be a huge part of the next Avengers movies, especially with Monica Rambeau trapped in the X-Men Universe. With Destin Daniel Cretton no longer helming Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Michael Waldron rewriting the script, a lot might have changed.
In The Marvels, Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel has reclaimed her identity from the tyrannical Kree and taken revenge on the Supreme Intelligence. But unintended consequences see Carol shouldering the burden of a destabilized universe.
When her duties send her to an anomalous wormhole linked to a Kree revolutionary, her 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 as "The Marvels."
The movie stars Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Samuel L. Jackson, Zawe Ashton and Park Seo-joon.
The Marvels is now playing in theaters worldwide.