Why The Marvels Flopped

2023 has most certainly been the year of the grossly over-budgeted blockbuster, and even accepting that the pandemic caused budgets to skyrocket across the industry, The Marvels' estimated $250 million price tag is just too damn high.

Sure, there's no reality where the sequel to a $175 million hit superhero movie was going to be reining things in, but its undeniably bloated budget ensured it started on the commercial back-foot.

Using the 2.5x rule, a $250 million cost means that The Marvels needs to gross $625 million in order to be truly considered a success, which it hasn't got a hope in hell of doing.

In fact, current projections have it potentially failing to hit even half that figure - a disaster by even the most generous assessment.

Yet looking at The Marvels, does it look like it cost a quarter of a billion dollars? Sure, it's swimming in CGI and has Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson's inevitably large paychecks to settle, but it's hard to look at the movie and consider it premium quality from a technical standpoint.

The MCU, and Hollywood as a whole, desperately needs to get their spending under control, because with the franchise's current downturn, it simply isn't sustainable to be pumping out so many movies costing this much money - especially with returns potentially this meagre.