This Week in Gossip #3

The Marvels flops and Nia DaCosta gets thrown under the bus, Brad Pitt continues to suck, and a legal deadline inspires a slew of lawsuits against famous men.

Welcome to issue three of This Week in Gossip. Happy Thanksgiving weekend to all who celebrated. Christmas is closing in on us and the nights are darker than ever, and there was a lot to talk about this week. Let’s get into it.

1. The Marvels Box Office Numbers Are Very Bad

(Image via Disney // Marvel Studios)

Meanie critics like me have been waiting for the inevitable Marvel fatigue to hit for what feels like years. I grew cynical with the unstoppable juggernaut known as the MCU around the time that they wasted sexy robot James Spader. Pre-COVID, Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios seemed truly unbeatable, able to overcome cynics like me through sheer popularity. Making a billion dollars per movie was the baseline for success, not the ceiling. Audiences seemed truly hungry for more, and Disney could comfortably release three films a year and expect them all to be in the top ten list of the highest-grossing titles of that period.

This past year, however, it feels as though that fatigue has well and truly set in. There’s no more evident example of that than The Marvels, the latest addition to the ever-expanding saga. It generated an estimated $47 million domestically over its debut weekend, the lowest in franchise history. Initial projections had it making between $75 - 80 million, and it didn't even come close. The only MCU films that have opened lower than $60 million have been 2015′s Ant-Man and 2008's The Incredible Hulk.

Reviews were mixed-to-tepid, and the actors weren’t able to do a full press tour thanks to the SAG-AFTRA strike. The latter’s impact can’t be overstated. Even seemingly bulletproof products need marketing behind them. The usual suspects have already tried to hijack this story as “proof” of their faux-fury culture war nonsense. Apparently, Brie Larson wanting to speak to more female journalists is tantamount to a gender genocide. Anytime you hear someone ranting that a nine-figure corporate product is “woke”, just ignore them for obvious reasons.

The Marvels will probably be a proper flop, both by MCU and Hollywood standards. It’s a shame that director Nia DaCosta couldn’t celebrate her achievement these past few weeks because, even with these underperforming numbers, she still had the highest domestic debut for a movie by a Black woman (how blatantly and cruelly the system is stacked up against women of colour, and how obvious Disney’s lack of investment in true diversity is when they waited 30 movies in to hire a Black woman.)

The problems with the MCU have never felt more evident: It’s too much product and not enough time. We’re getting several films a year plus a few TV series on Disney+, and they’re all expected to establish swaths of new characters since the first phase of familiar faces have mostly moved on. The budgets are bigger than ever but none of it is going towards talent in a real way, particularly for poor VFX workers who are fighting with endless crunch. Some of those workers are now fighting to unionize. People weren’t wild about The Marvels but they didn’t exactly jump out of their seats for Secret Invasion or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3 is the exception but even those reviews felt less eager than ones for its predecessors.

The MCU formula has been on rails for years now but it’s wearing thin. How can you get truly invested in a film when you know that there are sixteen others to follow and the supposedly high stakes are tempered because of that long-term franchise plan? And keeping up with all of this continuity feels like homework. But Disney has put all of its eggs into this heaving basket, so how can they change course? A few upcoming MCU titles have been delayed, ostensibly because of strike-related issues, but don’t be surprised if we hear of further drama. At the very least, can this give Feige more time to allow Blade to be a hard-R blood-fest?

2. Speaking of The Marvels, Is Disney Trying to Push Out Nia DaCosta?

(Gif via Giphy.)

When a film directed by a non-white dude underperforms, we’re typically subjected to screeds of bad-faith think-pieces wondering if the entire concept of women or people of colour making movies is now ruined for eternity. Mediocre white dudes in baseball caps can make as many flops as they want and be saved but everyone else risks their careers coming to a halt after one slip. It took far too long for Marvel Studios to start hiring directors who weren’t cishet white dudes in baseball caps. Nia DaCosta isn’t just the first Black woman hired under their label: she’s one of a mere handful to have been given a budget over $100 million. She’s been breaking down doors for years now, including with her previous film, Candyman. Now, she’s back to work with an adaptation of Hedda Gabbler, starring Tessa Thompson. She’s got a lot to be proud of, so it’s sad that the expected narratives are kicking in around her because of The Marvels underperforming.

It started a few weeks before the movie’s release, when Variety reported that DaCosta had caused some drama by leaving postproduction of The Marvels early to go work on another project. The phrase used about MCU executives was "eyebrows were raised again." “If you’re directing a $250 million movie, it’s kind of weird for the director to leave with a few months to go,” a source familiar with the production told Variety. That's not entirely true. Directors bounce between projects all the time. It's not uncommon to start a new one before finishing the last. Just ask Ridley Scott. As DaCosta later told the YouTube channel Jake's Takes, Marvel knew "the entire time that I had an obligation—a green-lit movie with people who were waiting for me. And I pushed that and then I pushed it again and then I pushed it again. Eventually, we all knew that if [The Marvels] pushes again, I’m not going to be in LA to do the rest of this in person.” It felt kind of shady to position DaCosta as abandoning a project when her predecessors often did the same thing. It seemed like the first sign that Marvel “sources” were getting ready to put DaCosta in the firing line.