Of Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Time goes even faster than Sam Wilson. It has been over two years Captain America 4 was announced at San Diego Comic-Con. The film’s intended 2024 release date has already been delayed to February 14, 2025, ostensibly due to writer and actor strikes, although many speculated that the delay had more to do with Disney’s desire to improve the film’s quality after negative test screenings.
Now there are reports of Captain America 4 taken in less than three months before its release. This makes one thing depressingly clear: Disney no longer has any real creative vision when it comes to the MCU.
The catastrophic state of Captain America 4
Earlier there was a lot of speculation that Disney wanted to postpone Captain America 4 to cut out potentially controversial elements. These included Israeli hero Sabra, who could make waves in the wake of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.
There was also rampant speculation that the previous reshoots were prompted by negative test screenings, and now the latest round of reshoots is reportedly due to audiences finding the film boring and irrelevant to the larger MCU. This is clear evidence that Disney has lost its creative vision for this superhero series and is desperately trying to adapt the content to the audience’s desires rather than just putting out a great movie and letting critics and audiences judge the movie on its own merits.
At first this may sound like a paradox. After all, Marvel doing retakes based on negative test screenings means that they is let the audience be the judge, right? Well, yes and no: you see, doing a round of edits and reshoots based on feedback from allegedly bad test screenings is good business sense. Do retakes again less than three months before the film premieres based on more negative feedback suggests that Disney receives conflicting feedback from fans about what they do and don’t like Captain America 4 and tries to wrap itself around this feedback rather than putting out 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 very different ideas about 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 if given advanced warning. For example, disgraced ex-addict and jailbird Robert Downey Jr crazy casting choice for Iron Man, equally chubby, sloppy Parks and Recreation star Chris Pratt was a crazy choice to headline an action movie full of superhero C-listers.
If they could, many Marvel fans would have vetoed those choices (which ended up being perfect casting decisions) as they would have vetoed overtly adult MCU content like Daredevil and Jessica Jones on Netflix (shows now considered the gold standard for Marvel series). Ideas like making Thor a comic character or disbanding SHIELD would have been met with similar resistance. Fortunately for fans everywhere, the directors and creators behind these potentially controversial decisions simply focused on creating a high-quality film and let everything else (including fans’ tendency to clutch their pearls at the slightest irritation) sort itself out.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is plagued by a crippling reliance on committees
Now, Captain America 4s reported retakes over negative showings have revealed that Phase Five (and likely beyond) of the MCU is plagued by a devastating decision to rely on committees and executives to make decisions. The best example of this is Leafa film whose foolproof concept (a cool, sunlight-proof vampire kills other bloodsuckers) has lost several directors, writers and stars as Disney tries to craft a compelling story for their most overdue Marvel film. At one point, the title character was reportedly going to be the fourth lead in a film that now focused more on female heroes, a decision even dumber than trying to skate uphill.
And, of course, most of it obvious sign of making films by committee is the decision to bring back Robert Downey Jr 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 really is. After trying to do Kang the Conqueror happen by shoving his weird stories down our throats, the studio suddenly pivoted and spent a small mountain of cash to recast Marvel’s most famous face in what will inevitably amount to yet another empty variant cameo.
Captain America 4’s reported reshoots may or may not make the film better, but they ultimately represent a symptom of Marvel’s larger failure to let creators create a bold vision rather than trying to settle 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. That’s why directors like Jon Favreau and Taika Waititi was given so much creative freedom. With these particular directors, the sequel to their MCU debuts was obviously much weaker than the first film, but the relative crap of Iron Man 2 and Thor: Love and Thunder didn’t matter so much because Iron Man and Thor: Ragnarök transformed this entire cinematic universe for the better.
Marvel needs to read this helplessness or it’s doomed
The TL;DR for my appeal to Marvel is this: get over the helplessness that comes from bad test screenings and doomscrolling social media for disgruntled neckbeard feedback.
Hire talented directors and let them create the kind of killer comedic content that once made the MCU a blockbuster franchise. Otherwise, this cinematic universe will continue to shrink, 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 superstar creator James Gunn. Incidentally, Gunn is someone who was previously fired from Marvel 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 delays finding out for about half a decade or so.
