The Marvels Continues To Embarrass By Setting Another Horrible Record

The Marvels currently has 10.2 million to show for its second week, and is in a race to number four with the Eli Roth film Thanksgiving. Whether The Marvels lands in third or fourth place, it will still have the ignominious designation of being the first MCU film to drop below the number two spot in its second week. With a current domestic take of $65 million, $100 million seems like a completely unrealistic goal for the film in the United States, while $200 million may be out of reach globally.

The Marvels is a kind of sequel to Captain Marvel and features that film’s title character, also known as Carol Danvers, played by Brie Larson. It also includes Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan, the titular Ms. Marvel from the Disney+ series, and Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau, who spends the entire film with Ms. Marvel trying to come up with an appropriate superhero name for her. As for that youngest member of the cast, Iman Vellani is unfazed by the film’s historically poor box office performance.

To the youngest and arguably most outstanding star of The Marvels, the success or failure of the film at the box office is not her problem, but rather Bob Iger’s. For her part, Vellani is happy to have made a film she’s proud of that she describes as fun and not too deep and a celebration of friendship and sisterhood. She’s happy that the people she cares about have enjoyed the film and that she enjoyed making it.

Her perspective on The Marvels is a healthy one and speaks to her groundedness as an actor, a quality that continues to shine through as she gains more press. She’s not done playing Ms. Marvel, either, as the character is slated to return to the small screen in the upcoming season of Secret Invasion. What will happen with Carol Danvers, Monica Rambeau, and the rest of the Captain Marvel-adjacent characters remains to be seen, though Secret Invasion is rooted in the alien race the Skrulls, who were introduced in the original Captain Marvel film and are tied closely to that character.

Of course, The Marvels is not alone in its spectacular slump, with the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe experiencing a major slowdown in box office, critical reception, and audience engagement. To be fair, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 did quite well in all of those departments, but it is an anomaly among its contemporaries. Recent films such as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania have continued to perform poorly at the box office and seem to be heralding a deflation of what was once a solidly reliable franchise.

While The Marvels is unlikely to pull out of its current box office nosedive, it remains to be seen whether the MCU overall can right itself in the coming years.