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by Chris Snelgrove
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Time flies even faster than Sam Wilson. More than two years have passed since then Captain America 4 Announced at San Diego Comic-Con. The film’s intended 2024 release date has already been pushed back to February 14, 2025, ostensibly due to the writers’ and actors’ strikes, although many have speculated that the delay has more to do with Disney’s desire to improve the quality of the film after negative test screenings.
Now there are reports of Captain America 4 Reshot less than three months before its release. This makes one thing depressingly clear: Disney no longer has a true creative vision when it comes to the MCU.
The plight of Captain America 4
In the past, there was a lot of speculation that Disney wanted to hold back Captain America 4 Cut out potentially controversial elements. These included the Israeli hero Zabar, who may make waves following the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.
There was also rampant speculation that the previous reshoots were due to negative test screenings, and now, according to reports, the latest round of reshoots is due to audiences finding the film boring and unnecessary for the bigger ones. MCU. This is clear evidence that Disney has lost its creative vision for this superhero franchise and is desperately trying to tailor the content to the audience’s desires instead of just putting out a great movie and letting critics and audiences judge the movie on its own merits.
At first it may sound like a paradox. after all, wonder Doing reshoots based on negative tests means they are they Let the audience be the judge, right? Well, yes and no: you see, doing one round of edits and reshoots based on feedback from seemingly bad test screenings is good business sense. Reshoots again Less than three months before the premiere of the film based on more Negative feedback implies that Disney is getting conflicting feedback from fans about what they do and don’t like Captain America 4 and tries to twist itself around that feedback instead of releasing a film based on a director’s unique vision.
Why Disney’s Current Approach Is a Bad Idea
The biggest problem with this approach is something I’ve written about before. Marvel has a whole Multiverse of fans, and most of them have wildly different ideas of what the MCU should look like.
The irony here is that most of Marvel’s best decisions for their cinematic universe are things that many audiences would have hated the idea of ​​had they been forewarned. For example, ex-addict and disgraced prison dirt Robert Downey Jr. was a crazy Casting choice for Iron Man, chubby, equally evil Parks and Recreation Star Chris Pratt was a crazy choice to head up an action movie full of superheroes.
If they could, many Marvel fans would have vetoed these choices (which they ended up being perfect casting decisions) as they would veto overtly adult MCU content like daring and Jessica Jones On Netflix (programs that are currently considered the gold standard for Marvel series). Ideas like turning Thor into a comic character or disbanding SHIELD would have met with similar resistance. Fortunately for fans everywhere, the directors and creators behind the potentially controversial decisions simply focused on making a high-quality film and let everything else (including fans’ tendency to clutch their pearls at the slightest annoyance) sort itself out.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is plagued by a crippling reliance on committees
now, Captain America 4The reported footage of negative filters revealed that Phase Five (and likely beyond) of the MCU is plagued by a crippling decision to rely on committees and executives to make decisions. The best example of this is bladeA movie whose idiotic concept (a cool, sunlight-resistant vampire kills other bloodsuckers) has lost multiple directors, writers, and stars as Disney tries to create a compelling story for their most delayed Marvel movie. At one point, the main character was reportedly going to be the fourth lead in a film that now focused more on female protagonists, a decision even dumber than trying to ice skate up the hill.
And of course, the most clear A sign of committee filmmaking is the decision to bring Robert Downey Jr. back in line Doctor Doom. It’s Disney’s Hail Mary attempt to create a memorable Big Bad after the legal drama surrounding Jonathan Majors, but it also reveals just how creatively bankrupt the House of Mouse is. After I tried to prepare Kang the Conqueror Happened by shoving his weird stories down our throats, the studio suddenly turned around, shelling out a small mountain of money to bring back Marvel’s most famous face in what would inevitably amount to another cameo and an empty lung.
The reshoots for Captain America 4 may or may not make the film better, but ultimately they represent a symptom of Marvel’s larger failure to let creators establish a bold vision instead of trying to carve into an empty status quo of emptier audience expectations. Once upon a time, the studio seemed to understand that big hits only come from big swings. This is why directors love John Favreau And Taika Waititi was given so much creative freedom. With these particular directors, the sequel to their MCU debut was arguably much weaker than the first film, but the relative crap of Iron Man 2 and Thor: Love and Thunder Not so important because iron man and Thor: Ragnarok changed this entire cinematic universe for the better.
Marvel has to allow this powerlessness or it’s doomed
The TL;DR of my plea to Marvel is this: remove the helplessness of bad screenings of tests and scrolling social media for disgruntled neckbeard feedback.
Hire talented directors and let them create the kind of killer comic book content that once made the MCU a blockbuster franchise. Otherwise, this cinematic universe will continue to decline, and it won’t be long before fans who miss Marvel’s creative risk-taking focus their passion on the upcoming DCU and the endless creativity of creator James Gunn. Gunn is someone who has been fired from Marvel in the past due to panicked executives rather than fan demand.
Marvel has a lesson to learn. They just won’t know what it is until a committee postpones this inquiry for about half a decade or so.