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Captain America: Brave New World

OK. To be fair, I may be behind the times, but I remember reviews coming out for movies at least a week before the premiere to generate buzz. If the studio didn't let critics post reviews, that was a warning sign that a movie was bad. From what I've read, the reviews for this movie are embargoed until 48 hours before the premiere. That, combined with the release date being pushed back and then having a superhero movie drop on Valentine's Day, make me bet this is going to be the highest grossing Captain America movie featuring a black actor playing Cap. :bergman:
 
It looks, from RottenTomatoes, like they opened up Deadpool & Wolverine for reviews 3 days before premiere. Nonetheless, your point is taken. These aren't the days when Siskel & Ebert had a TV show to review upcoming movies or you picked up your daily newspaper to read a review. Hell even "Entertainment Weekly" and "Entertainment Tonight" are pretty irrelevant. So I guess we gotta wait until Friday to really see.
 
I imagine movies used to be reviewed in magazines that were printed a month before release so they probably needed much earlier press screenings before print died. (The moive will be "okay, I guess?" probably.)
 
OK. I should just shut up, wait a few days and see, but I can't resist making a guess. The Hollywood Reporter says the movies budget was $180 million--relatively small for a recent MCU movie. I don't know if I believe that or not, but I guess they're a credible source so barring actual evidence to the contrary we'll go with it. Somehow "they" (I don't know who "they" are or their methodology) are predicting a $90 million 4 day opening weekend (Valentine's & President's Days). $22-23 million a day. Looking at recent Marvel outings, that isn't implausible, but I'll believe it when I see it. IMO, they're just committing all the textbook Disney gaffes with this film. The biggest is creating an unnecessarily confusing story. Captain America is black. And has wings. I mean, you don't have to have Disney+ to know Cap told Falcon to become the new Cap at the end of Avengers. But still, for the casual viewer it's a stumbling block. And he's fighting The Hulk. But The Hulk is red. You gotta be some kind of comic book nerd to not be confused by that. It's "Lightyear" "Little Mermaid" and "Marvels" all over again--creating things that confuse or alienate the viewer just for the sake of creating things to confuse and alienate the viewer. It may do OK, but I won't be surprised if it bombs.
 
First reviews are hitting at RottenTomatoes. Not enough for the aggregator, but counting them myself it's a little over 50%. And about half of the "good" reviews are "it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be."
 
It was as low as 47% before bumping up to around the 52% I guesstimated originally. And I'm going to make a few more observations: first off, I don't believe the "Hollywood Reporter" budget of $180M story. I suspect we're much closer to the $350M people have been bandying about. The last time Disney spent $180M on a movie was in 2021 for "Shang Chi..." Are you seriously telling me they spent the same amount to relaunch a tentpole character in the next phase of the MCU, brought in Harrison Ford for the antagonist, have shit-tons of CGI, put it on the shelf for a year, did extensive rewrites and 2 reshoots and God knows how much post and still did it for less than it took to make a movie about a nobody character for a throwaway movie in the depths of the Pandemic when inflation was 20% lower? Clap your hands and say "I BELIEVE IN FAIRIES!"

Second, the fact that they're going with the story that it only cost $180M means they're trying to manage expectations. If you release a $350M movie that only grosses $300M, it's an unmitigated bomb. But if you release a $180M movie that grosses $300M it's disappointing, but not the an embarrassment. That said, I dunno that this grosses $300M. It's looking "Elementals"/"Quantumania".

Next we get to the predictions of a $90M opening weekend. Impressive, right? That's more than "The Marvels" made in its whole run. BUT...it's a 4 day weekend (Valentine's Day on Friday and President's Day on Monday) AND they're actually releasing it on Thursday. They stuck to their timeline on the review embargo but they're giving themselves an extra 24 hours at the box office. So it only needs to make something like $18M a day to hit $90M. It still might not get there, but it's a lot lower bar than trying to hit $90M in 3 days. Most recent MCU films can manage that. Even "The Marvels" managed to pull $15M a day, average, on its first 3 days. It fell off like a stone but it made some money at first--more than 1/2 of its box office gross for the entire run on the first 3 days. I dunno. Maybe I'll be wrong. I haven't been so far, but isn't it nice that I went on record so y'all could laugh and throw rotten fruit at me if I am?
 
I saw "Captain America : Brave New World" last night & found it to be a fun exciting enjoyable adventurous romp.

Captain America is one of those comic book characters I have very little familiarity with aside from seeing his image & his comics on comic book store shelves.

I've never seen the previous MCU Captain America flick(s) either.

But Brave New World was great fun to see in the movie theater up on a huge screen.

Do I recommend others go see it in the movie theaters while it's still out?

Definitely!
 
Im kinda sad on it, like Anthony Mackie DESERVES to get a decent shot here as Cap, hes funny as hell, and I actually like the runs of Falc as CA in the comics.

But man Marvels writing has been atrocious of late.

Feel the same way about Iman Vellani too. Like she fucking IS Ms Marvel... like comic accurate IRL to how Ms Marvel is in all her runs, and shes fucking hilarious, yet The Marvels was all over the place. I did like her show but I totally got why others didn't.
 
Box Office Mojo reports a $40 million opening--which sounds pretty good--except that puts it between "...Quantumania" and "Eternals." Too early to be definitive, but I'd say $200 million domestic is a realistic final amount.
 
The movie is...fine. Just about fine. The general "it's not terrible, at least!" response is true, yes, but only because it plays everything so incredily safe that it coulnd't possibly have been terrible. There are no risks taken at all, no attempt to really say anything. Everything is explcitily spelled out for the audience. Exposition is given then sometimes reiterated by other characters just to make completely sure the audience can follow the (not that complex) plot. "Giancarlo Esposito, more like Giancarlo EXPOSITION!" is a hilarious joke I thought of at one point, but I resisted the urge to shout it out in the cinema like I was George Costanza.

What I found most shockingly weak is how they gave Sam's character so little of a character arc: up until the scene with Bucky I was thinking they'd forgotten to give him really any character work at all. Anthony Mackie does fine with what he's given, but how could he do any better when there's nothing for him to sink his teeth into? For all the "WOKE DISASTER!" shit videos from assholes that are no doubt popping up, it's shocking how little his race is even a factor. There's maybe a few lines where if you squint you can kind of see him alluding to being a black Captian America? But Falcon And Winter Solider was actually much braver in that regard and I didn't think that was a very good tv show at all! I'm not saying him being black had to be constantly referenced or anything but they could have at least done something with it and him being a role model for people like him (which is the part that's briefly touched on.) Harrison Ford does good grumpy and angry acting, I guess, but again he has nothing to play but those two emotions and perfunctory "I miss my daughter" stuff. I did like his Hulking-out acting and the one bit of news footage where he had a moustache. Danny Ramirez is pretty good as the most generic, predictable sidekick character you could imagine. I liked Tim Blake Nelson as Sterns (and his broccoli head) but he's not in the movie enough and again doesn't get anything really meaty. Carl Lumby actually impressed me the most in acting terms.

There's some decent, or at least watchable action bits, and some weak stuff like Ruth's big fight scene. There's stuff that should have been better and made a lot more of an impact: there's a bit where Sam is riding on a missile trying to stop it which struck me as something that should have been a much bigger deal, but it goes by so fast you forget it right away. Red Hulk did look really good though, so I give the VFX artists credit there. The fight he has with Sam is the most fun part of the movie so at least it finishes with a bit more excitement than most of its runtime.

I wonder how much Liv Tyler got paid for six lines of dialogue (half of which she's off-screen.)

Winter Soldier, the movie this is obviously trying most to be like, was a very good comic book movie, still easily in the top five of the MCU for me. But it was also eleven years ago. They should be regularly makig better movies than it by now. There's really no excuse for making something like this which is inferior in pretty much all aspects of production.
 
I don't know if I've said this here before, but I've said it elsewhere. Here's fascinating thing about this, for me: In the...19th century? I forget the specifics. Around that time someone wrote a book called "The Well-Made Play"(?). It was basically a paint-by-numbers formula for churning out a play that would make a lot of money at the box office. I absolutely guarantee you that, after over a century, Disney has something like this--a book in a secret vault that tells you how to make entertainment product that will make you wheelbarrows and wheelbarrows full of money. I'm positive they literally have it down to a science. So it amuses me immensely that, around 2012 or so, someone high up at Disney said "you know what? Forget The Book. We're going to do things *this* way." And they ran Star Wars into the ground. They ran Marvel into the ground. They ran Toy Story into the ground. They ran Indiana Jones into the ground. They ran their live-action/CGI remakes that were basically a license to print money, into the ground. They're in the process of killing their theme parks and they're killing Disney+ and they don't have to at all because they could just go back to the formula that they refined for the better part of a century. But they refuse to for...reasons. So I laugh every time something new from Disney fails. I can't wait for "Snow White" to come out in a few weeks so we can watch that power-auger into the ground too.
 
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