This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
It certainly isn't to me. It's pretty clear that Marvel has gone too far towards pandering to what it believes are "modern audiences." Anytime you see predominantly female led movies, you are almost guaranteed to get a **** show. This isn't because female led movies can't work because we saw it work prior to 2016 before that ****ty Ghostbusters 2016 movie was released.
The Critical Drinker's review did say that it was oddly devoid of propping the female characters up at the expense of the males so that's nice to hear. However, as I understand it there were a lot of reshoots and delays on this thing and that was likely to make it less likely to offend Marvel's actual customers which they've largely been driving away from theaters in phases four and five.
The thing is, while that's well and good the core customer base doesn't care anymore. They can blame franchise fatigue all they want but the real problem is that these movies have bad scripts that rely on MacGuffins and other plot contrivances or coincidences to move what passes for a story along. Marvel has also had a villain problem for some time now. Even Thanos who had good screen presence suffers from weak motivations that don't often make sense because they were all originally conceived back when entertainment broke things down as simple good and evil. The villains in most comic book properties aren't much different than the black hat wearing moustache twirling villains of Spaghetti Westerns.
Sure, you have the occasionally brilliant updates to them in specific shows or films that add depth to villains like Mr. Freeze in the 1990's Batman the Animated Series and subsequent DCAU shows. But Marvel isn't doing that. Instead, characters like Ronin the Accuser and Thanos have motivations that amount too: "The villain is evil". They seek power for its own sake rather than having any motivation beyond that.
This isn't universally the case with all comic book villains, but its pretty standard fare for Marvel and the MCU. Especially as of late.
So, if your villains aren't entertaining and your heroes aren't likable, what else is there? Well, the story could have been written by ChatGPT and the visual effects have been getting worse and worse for some time now. It used to be that a Marvel movie was guaranteed to have top notch special effects but that's far from the case now. Usually its dodgy CG and nothing else. I can go back and play old *** video games or watch anything on the CW if I want to see that.
Of course, I think there is a case to be made for super hero fatigue and I think Marvel is guaranteed to lose some business because of that but the real problem is that Marvel no longer has the same track record it did pre-Avenger's Endgame where every movie was guaranteed to make a billion dollars and people were going to come away from it satisfied with their time and money. If anything, Marvel has missed the mark more and more consistently to a point where its almost at rock bottom. Between market saturation in the super hero genre to Marvel movies being almost guaranteed to suck now, only the most die hard fans are going to see these films.
I think a lot of die hard fans have had their interest die off and no one cares about this **** anymore. So even though this one might not be some "stunning and brave' girl power flick that elevates its female leads by tearing down men, it's got nothing else to offer audiences either. I'm actually surprised its doing as well as it is to be perfectly honest.
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