10 Movies Doomed From The Start

The MCU has seen a brutal decline for the past year, so one cannot blame the haters for seeing The Marvels' performance and smugly deducing that it is the ultimate proof that The House of Ideas is on its way out. But while so-called Marvel Fatigue did play a part in the film's underperformance, the drop in box office numbers was so stark compared to previous films, there had to be more to it.

Given that The Marvels has found success on streaming, perhaps the quality of this movie is not the deciding factor many believe it to be. This was clearly a movie people had wanted to see, so why did its theatrical failure feel so damn inevitable?

Simply put: films don't do well during guild strikes, especially if one of those guilds is SAG-AFTRA. Because studios prioritised personal greed over paying their actors a living wage, they found themselves without a key part of film advertising for several months. The interview and commercial tie-in circuit is a major part of getting a film in front of audiences and without it, multiple films were hit financially. 

Barbenheimer succeeded because its memetic status circumvented that problem entirely - a benefit The Marvels did not share. Combine that with plain old Marvel Fatigue, and you get a disastrous opening.