from Chris Snelgrove
| Published
Time flies even faster than Sam Wilson. More than two years have passed Captain America 4 was announced at San Diego Comic-Con. The film is slated for a 2024 release date. had already been pushed back to February 14, 2025, allegedly due to the writers’ and actors’ strikes, although many speculated that the delay had more to do with Disney’s desire to improve the quality of the film after negative test screenings.
Now there are reports of Captain America 4 reshoots less than three months before its premiere. This makes one thing depressingly clear: Disney no longer has a true creative vision when it comes to the MCU.
The Catastrophic State of Captain America 4
Before that, there was a lot of speculation that Disney wanted to delay Captain America 4 to cut out potentially conflicting elements. These include Israeli hero Sabra, who could make waves in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.
There was also rampant speculation that previous remakes were prompted by negative test screenings, and now the latest round of remakes is reportedly due to audiences finding the film boring and irrelevant to the larger MCU. This is clear evidence that Disney have lost their creative vision for this superhero franchise and are desperately trying to adapt the content to the audience’s desires instead of just releasing a great movie and letting critics and audiences judge the movie on its own merits.
At first glance, this may sound like a paradox. after all Marvel taking repeat shots based on negative tests means that they are leaving the audience to judge, right? Well, yes and no: you see, doing a round of edits and reshoots based on feedback from supposedly bad test screenings is good business sense. Doing a reshoot again less than three months before the premiere of the film based on more negative feedback suggests that Disney is getting conflicting feedback from fans about what they do and don’t like Captain America 4 and tries to bend around that feedback instead of releasing a film based on the 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 of 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 hate the idea of ​​if they were forewarned. For example, disgraced ex-drug addict and inmate Robert Downey Jr. was crazy casting choice for Iron Man, equally chubby, lanky Parks and recreation areas star Chris Pratt was a crazy choice to lead an action movie full of superhero C-listers.
If they could, many Marvel fans would have vetoed this election (which it ended up being perfect casting decisions) as they would veto adult MCU content such as Daredevil and Jessica Jones on Netflix (shows now considered the gold standard for Marvel series). Ideas like making Thor a comedic character or disbanding SHIELD would be met with similar resistance. Fortunately for fans everywhere, the directors and creators behind these potentially controversial decisions simply focused on making a high-quality film and let everything else (including fans’ tendency to clutch their pearls at the slightest irritation they might have) fall into place. ordered by itself.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is plagued by a crippling dependence on committees
now Captain America 4Reported negative screening reshoots have revealed that Phase Five (and possibly beyond) of the MCU has been plagued by a crippling decision to rely on committees and executives to make decisions. The best example of this is A bladea film whose idiot-proof concept (a cool, sunlight-resistant vampire kills other bloodsuckers) lost multiple directors, writers, and stars as Disney tried to craft a compelling story for their most delayed Marvel film. At one point, it was claimed that the title character would be the fourth lead in a film that now focuses more on female characters, a decision even dumber than trying to skate uphill.
And, of course, the most obviously a sign of filmmaking by committee is the decision to bring Robert Downey Jr. back as 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 to happen, shoving his weird stories down our throats, the studio suddenly turned around, spending a small mountain of money to bring back Marvel’s most famous face in what will inevitably amount to another empty Variant cameo.
The reported reshoots of Captain America 4 may or may not make the film better, but ultimately they are a symptom of Marvel’s larger failure to allow creators to create a bold vision instead of trying to cope with the void status quo of the audience’s emptier expectations. Once upon a time, the studio seemed to understand that big hits only come from big swings. That’s why directors like it Jon Favreau and Taika Waititi were given so much creative freedom. With these particular directors, the sequels to their MCU debuts were obviously much weaker than the first film, but the relative stupidity of Iron Man 2 and Thor: Love and Thunder it didn’t matter that much because Iron Man and Thor: Ragnarok transformed this entire cinematic universe for the better.
Marvel needs to wean themselves off this helplessness or they are doomed
The TL;DR of my plea to Marvel is this: get rid of the helplessness that comes from bad test screenings and social media for unhappy beard reviews.
Hire talented directors and let them create the kind of killer comic book content that once made the MCU a blockbuster movie. Otherwise, this cinematic universe will continue to decline, and it won’t be long before fans who miss Marvel’s creative risk-taking will focus their passion on the upcoming DCU and the endless creativity of superstar creator James Gunn. Gunn is someone who, by the way, was previously fired by Marvel due to panicked executives, not fan demand.
Marvel has a lot to learn. They just won’t find out what it is until a committee delays finding it out by about half a decade.
