This year’s San Diego Comic-Con teased a lot of exciting news for Marvel fans, including the first appearance of Tenoch Huerta’s
Namor in
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a new trailer for
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and a
whole slewof confirmed names and release dates. However, there were conspicuously no updates on the upcoming film
The Marvels, which will unite Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers, Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan, and Teyonah Parris’s Monica Rambeau. According to our trusted and proven sources, there may be a reason for that: Marvel Studios getting nervous after poor test screenings of
The Marvels.
The Marvels is set to be the 33rd MCU film, and a direct sequel to 2019’s
Captain Marvel, 2021’s Disney+ series
WandaVision, and the more recent show
Ms. Marvel. That is a whole lot of plotting for a single movie to start off with, which might contribute to some poor test screenings. It is also notable that
Captain Marvel, which introduced Brie Larson as the titular character and which was initially intended to position her as a centerpiece of the MCU, was review bombed with negative scores upon its first release. It does not bode well for the film that the first movie in its sequence of cosmically powered female superheroes was sandbagged with negative Rotten Tomatoes audience scores within hours of its premiere.
It also seems that MCU movies are sliding down the ranks of audience appreciation in general. Three of the most recent Marvel releases have scored in the
bottom percentileof the entire film franchise.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness ranks at #25 with 74% at Rotten Tomatoes,
Thor: Love and Thunder at #26 with 66%, and
Eternals at dead last with 47%. This is not a good trend for upcoming films, at least when it comes to audience reviews and poor test screenings.
In general, poorly reviewed test screenings are considered an opportunity for film studios to re-edit films and commit to reshoots before a wide release. Marvel Studios is nothing if not very cognizant of the expectations of its fan base, which means that a negative score before release will likely mean some pretty big changes for
The Marvels. A recent report by an anonymous VFX worker alleged that Marvel is extremely demanding of last-minute changes and reliant on hastily-designed CGI scenes to try to fix poorly performing movies. It was specifically claimed that the notoriously shoddy-looking final fight between Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa and Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger in
Black Panther was the result of hasty VFX, which is a chilling fate that might be in store for the movie.