Disney Thread!

"TJM, you've posted so much this week, but nary a word about movies? Are you okay?"

Yes, I'm fine. All is well, but I've held off long enough. The boss put out Disney threads from time to time, so I will limit myself to one Disney thread this whole week.

So, let's talk about Thunderbolts*.

It comes out this week, and tracking is...not great:

Currently, U.S. and Canada presales for Thunderbolts* stands at $12M+, which is on pace with another first installment MCU movie, 2021's Eternals ($71.2M). The presales figure is also ahead of that year's Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings ($75.3M) and behind this year's Captain America: Brave New World ($88.8M). Hence, the current opening projection on Thunderbolts* is $70M-$75M domestic at 4,300 theaters, with another $90M-$100M abroad.

How to Watch the Marvel Movies in Chronological Order
Like previous MCU titles, the expected draws are males over and under 25. Given that Thunderbolts* is largely Florence Pugh's movie, it will be interesting to see if her Little Women and Don't Worry Darling female fanbase shows up; women under 25 are currently trailing men under 25 in first choice.

Look at these star-fucking losers thinking that Florence Pugh is a box office draw.

Assuming a $70 million opening, one can expect the film to end up with somewhere between $200 and $250 million total US box office. Maybe the same worldwide for a total between $400 million and $500 million. That's a lot of money.

But then you have to do the actual calculation to figure out how much Disney needs to make to break even. The marketing budget will be at least $100 million. The purported budget is $180 million (though, that number is old and there were at least two sets of reshoots, last summer and then last November, reportedly not nearly as extensive as the last Captain America movie). So, that's, bare minimum, a $280 million investment that Disney needs to get back from box office receipts it shares with theaters.

It needs to make, at least, $466 million to break even.

Disney may get that. Maybe. And that's why major studios greenlight giant films: to maybe make their money back.

Out of the top ten movies so far of 2025, Disney has four of them. That's not bad, is it? Well, one of them is Moana 2, which came out last year (and is a genuine, big hit for the studio, lots of cash). The other three are Snow White with $200 million total worldwide so far (on a $350 million, at least, budget), Mufasa: The Lion King (also released last year and a solid, though not great, hit, for the studio, it most likely made its money back at $722 million total worldwide), and Captain America: Brave New World ($414 million at a cost of, most likely $350-380 million to produce, not even market).

Disney more and more reminds me of MGM from the 1950s, easily the biggest movie studio of the time with the biggest hits, but unable to actually turn a profit because their spectacle musicals were so expensive and their sets so badly run that the studio under Louis B. Meyer simply could not make enough money. It's why they sold their library to television that decade. They needed the money.

Disney is a deeply unhealthy film studio right now, and Thunderbolts* does not look like it's going to reverse any of the issues. Maybe Fantastic Four: The First Steps will do it?

Early tracking is not clear (I saw something about a $64 million opening, which would be horrible, but marketing has only started and the number will probably go up, assuming that number is accurate at all), but I'm sure the cast is on board with trying to expand the fanbase as much as possible. Let's see what Pedro Pascal, Mr. Fantastic himself Reed Richards, had to say recently. He couldn't possibly have done something like Rachel Zeigler in the run-up to Snow White's opening, right?

Pedro Pascal blasted #HarryPotter author J.K. Rowling for her latest trans tweets, calling the author a "heinous loser" in a comment on Instagram https://t.co/Eqoo5oceZq pic.twitter.com/osbWOLbyfx

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) April 24, 2025

Okay...maybe not.

Below, I saw Captain America: Brave New World, and I had thoughts. I felt like this was the best place for them.

Captain America: Serious Degradation

I've largely disengaged from modern blockbusters, especially comic book movies, out of sheer disinterest. However, I got a chance to see Captain America: Brave New World last week for free, and I took the chance out of curiosity.

Bleh.

However, it made me think about the degradation of the Marvel brand from an internal perspective mostly because the movie was making very explicit efforts to tie back to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, often considered one of the best Marvel films. The Winter Soldier was made in the veins of 70s political thrillers with an antagonist with no head (the Hydra organization's name says it all) and a hero on the run and against the corrupt system. Its action is more muted and grounded by Marvel standards (it still includes three flying aircraft carriers, so it's a comparative thing).

Brave New World is about political intrigue, centering on the actions of the newly elected US President, General Thaddeus Ross played by Harrison Ford, and some subplots from some previous movies like The Eternals and The Incredible Hulk. It's supposed to be filled with intrigue and has this 70s thriller feel to it, but it doesn't work nearly as well.

The reasons the film doesn't work as a movie interest me less than how the idea of making this kind of movie has changed over the last ten years or so.

Main Ideas

So, let's pull together what I'm talking about, the connective tissue, the things both movies try to do similarly.

There's the serious tone, the effort to ground the film in something approaching reality, the use of politicians as movers of the plot, and an embrace of conspiracy.

In The Winter Soldier, those are accomplished through a story about Steve Rogers having to adapt to this new time after having been frozen for 70 years and only brought back right before the big fight in the first Avengersmovie. He believes in America as it was in the 40s when he was frozen, but he's faced with an America controlled by shadowy elements. That gets centers on a cabinet secretary played by Robert Redford who is one of the most powerful members of Hydra, the shadowy, deep state organization that wants to use a program in their new helicarriers to target and potentially kill every potential threat in the world.

In Brave New World it's about a treaty effort by Ross to equitably share the adamantium (the metal that will go into making Wolverine's claws at some point) with the world as discovered in the giant alien thing partially submerged in The Indian Ocean at the end of The Eternals (I think, I haven't seen it). This gets sidelined when Sam Wilson's friend, Isaiah Bradley (I think he was introduced in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but I never watched it), suddenly stands up in the White House and tries to kill Ross. Turns out he was being mind controlled by someone from Ross's past, the gamma infused super genius Samuel Sterns whom Ross had held illegally imprisoned for decades to help craft his rise to power. Also, Ross has a small subplot about his daughter, Betty, not liking him because of the events from The Incredible Hulk.

Why does it work in one and not the other?

Focus

One thing I always have in my mind is the Classical Unities, three concepts that are considered to be ideals for telling stories. The one I care about is Unity of Action (Unity of time and place are more appropriate for Greek drama than much of anything else), saying that there should be one principle action in a story. This can be renamed as a film having a Core Idea, the one central driving force and reason the story exists.

Both The Winter Soldier and Braven New World have this, but the first works a whole lot better than the second.

In The Winter Soldier, it's about Cap rejecting the American government of the day, about how it's being manipulated by shadowy forces. Cap must fight the good fight, a constantly re-evolving and growing organization, and against all odds. This meshes well with his character, a man out of time, while, despite the nebulous nature of the threat, the path towards discovery of the conspiracy is clearly written and outlined. There's a series of steps that Cap must take to find out what's going on, going deeper into a black hole of conspiracy until he must punch things better. It works.

It's tight. It's good stuff. And it has the added interesting wrinkle of being against the executive being able to kill anyone in the world without oversight, and it was released during the Obama administration when he did just that...to two American citizens. I don't think the Russo Brothers are at all anything other than left-wing, but it's an interesting wrinkle.

Now, Brave New World does not have this strength, but I will give it some kind of credit. If you want to distill the film down to one word, you can. It's "legacy". Mostly the legacy of America, as manifested in Isaiah's story, and General Ross's ambitions for legacy as president (he says it explicitly at one point). You can also throw in Sam Wilson himself since he's taken on the mantle of Captain America from Steve Rogers and has to deal with it. But, honestly, none of it actually works because the legacy idea on any of them doesn't actually...say anything. It's thin and pushed aside for plot mechanics and never really resolved. I suspect a lot of it has to do with reshoots (so many reshoots, reportedly). It's why Sam himself never...seems very important to the movie. He's a plot device to get us from one storythread to the next, and not a whole lot else. He's caught in Ross's movie, at best.

What does Ross's need for a treaty, his need for resolution with Betty (I'm certain this entire subplot was added in reshoots to make Ross more sympathetic), or Ross's treatment of Sterns have to do with Wilson or his emotional journey...at all? If you can say that both are dealing with the idea of legacy, the two actually still don't mesh. Wilson's story is supposed to be about living up to someone else's reputation while Ross's is about facing his own. It's a real clash that doesn't work.

Plot

One wouldn't expect an MCU movie to have terrible action (questionable CGI, sure, but not terrible action), and Brave New World delivers fine on it. The problem, though, is that the story stringing these perfectly...fine action sequences is just so...uncompelling. A lot of it has to do with the last section, about how Sam Wilson doesn't feel like he's anything more than a cog in a plot machine dedicated to Ross's character journey, but more has to do with the fact that the string of clues to uncover is just...not well hidden.

The only thing that's really a secret is that Ross becomes Red Hulk in the final act, which the marketing spoiled. However, everything else about Ross hiding stuff is obvious and even explicit from the get-go. The specifics end up revolving around a hidden character, Sterns, who has no history in the franchise as far as I can tell. The mystery is around the specifics of Sterns, and they're just not that interesting or, again, tied at all to our main character.

So, Wilson goes on this journey of discovery of plot details, but none of it relates to his own journey at all. He's essentially a cop in a procedural. Except the movie isn't treated like a procedural. It's treated like a 4-quadrant action-adventure with a main character with an arc. It's just more to create this disconnect with the audience, something that The Winter Soldier does not share.

In The Winter Soldier, the entire plot revolves around a personal issue to Steve Rogers: his relationship to his childhood friend Bucky Barnes, who was discovered by Soviets during WWII and turned into a brainless, dangerous super soldier. He's become the spear tip of Hydra, the bad organization of the film, and Steve has to fight him, but also try and redeem him. It's solid storytelling mechanics to tie a plot to a character. It's clean. It's efficient. It works.

By comparison, Brave New World is just a complete mess.

Brand

Of course, that doesn't explain the box office of Brave New World. Captain Marvel was kind of crappy, and it made more than a billion dollars.

No, the problem is that the brand got broke. Years of mismanagement, bad larger directional decisions (the multi-verse was a very expensive bust), and general distaste for the most loyal members of its traditional fanbase. Outright antagonism towards your own customers ends up creating an effect, and a movie reportedly costing at least $380 million to produce (and, probably another $150-200 million to market) needs to make A LOT of money to break even at the box office when you include the theatrical distributors get a cut of every ticket (general rule people use is that theaters get 40% of ticket sales on average, the contracts are weird).

You can pull off antagonism against your audience in Captain Marvel at the height of the MCU's popularity, but you can't with Brave New World when the MCU's popularity is obviously much lower than before. There's still something to be said for a film that can make $400 million at the box office worldwide, but...Disney isn't happy about it.

posted by TheJamesMadison at 02:20 PM

| Access Comments