There’s a couple of things you don’t want when you’re going to a movie theater: the first is for the film you’re paying for to be terrible; the second is for the building’s infrastructure to collapse with you in it.
Unfortunately, for moviegoers seeing “Captain America: Brave New World” on Feb. 26 at Liberty Cinema in Wenatchee, Washington, both of those things happened.
During the showing, the ceiling of the historic theater caved in. Thankfully, however, there were only two attendees in the auditorium, and neither were injured.
This paltry crowd isn’t an outlier scenario either: “Captain America: Brave New World” dropped 68% in its second weekend and has only just passed the box office revenue of “The First Avenger.” It’s still made a lot of money, about $265 million against a $180 million budget, but this is from the studio that produced three of the 10 highest grossing films of all time.
Let me be as clear as possible from the start: I think “Captain America: Brave New World” is a horrendous film — that is, insofar as it even qualifies as a true film in the first place. Maybe it’s more accurate to call it a product, a corporate projection that prides itself as a work of art but fails to be so because it’s utterly devoid of a soul. I abhor this product so much and am so harsh in my appraisal of it, because I resent everything it represents and everything it stands for: a total commodification of the art of film, a factory line churning out merchandise that is totally antipathetic to creativity.
I never purposely seek out news related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it’s often unavoidable. I’ve recently seen that the next project in the franchise, “Thunderbolts*,” is flaunting its indie cred by name-dropping all the cast and crew who’ve previously worked on films distributed by A24. The film’s director, Jake Schreier, directed six episodes of the Netflix show “Beef”; Harry Yoon, the film’s co-editor, edited “Minari”; cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo has worked with director David Lowery on “The Green Knight” and “A Ghost Story”; and so on, and so forth.
All of this sounds well enough — I won’t deny that any of these people are insanely talented individuals. But Marvel Studios is the place where talent goes to die. Let’s not pretend like the Marvel Cinematic Universe hasn’t seen talented creatives before: Taika Waititi, Sam Raimi, Ryan Coogler, Chloé Zhao, just to name a few. Alan Taylor, director of “Thor: The Dark World,” quite possibly one of the worst of the franchise, directed nine episodes of “The Sopranos,” for God’s sake!
Clearly, bringing in diverse talent from across the industry is not the key to Marvel finally crafting actual cinema.
A couple of years ago, in 2022, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times asked Quentin Tarantino why he’d never directed, or expressed interest in directing, a Marvel film.
“You have to be a hired hand to do those things,” he said. “I’m not a hired hand. I’m not looking for a job.”
This was only a few years after Martin Scorsese, one of the industry’s great directors, claimed that Marvel films were “not cinema.” As indelicate as their analyses were, Tarantino and Scorsese were both entirely correct. The Marvel formula does not factor artistic freedom. Everything about the Marvel film is just so unequivocally, and decidedly, uninteresting: the cinematography is unremarkable, each line of dialogue only exists to advance the story and nothing more, the acting is only as convincing as it needs to be, everything that isn’t a living being is just rendered with a computer because it’s quicker and cheaper that way.
And it’s for this reason that I question their status as films in the first place: if you strip a work of art of every bit of its artistic merit, at what point does it entirely cease being a work of art? A film like “Captain America: Brave New World” lives on the same plane as a Thomas Kinkade painting reproduced and reissued again and again as puzzle sets, greeting cards and posters in a much too expensive frame. Simply put, it’s “art” in quotation marks, a “film” that, like “Thunderbolts*,” exists with a massive clarifying asterisk.
I don’t hate superhero films indiscriminately. I think, like any genre of film, they have the potential to be good or even great. “The Dark Knight” is so highly praised for a reason, for example. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’d argue that Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy doesn’t fit into the rest of his filmography — as different in concept as it is, they manage to feel natural alongside “Memento” or “The Prestige.” That is, they’re projects created at the behest of a director who is given the opportunity to direct. Nolan, it seems, was the artist with the brush, not the faceless entity that is DC Comics.
It’s entirely possible that “Thunderbolts*” might be an enjoyable movie. I can’t say for certain, one way or the other, until it premieres in May. But I refuse to engage with it critically, just as I refuse to engage with any Marvel Studios product critically. There are so many better movies out there to spend time and money on, so many directors who bring genuine passion and resolve to the artform.
