Having been a Marvel fan for over three-fourths of my existence on this Earth, I can admit to sometimes being as loud and obnoxious as some of the worst of them. After all, I've lived long enough to have actually seen on Betmax, some of the earliest Marvel movies, like disastrous Howard the Duck, as well as the direct-to-video debacles that were 1989's Punisher and 1990's Captain America. I'm old enough to have felt agony seeing Batman movie after Batman movie getting made, while Spider-Man languished in development hell. In short, these days, in which we are virtually guaranteed that every year at least two quality movies based on Marvel Comics characters are released, are the days for which I, and many, many others like me have yearned for decades, and I'll be damned if I don't enjoy them while they're here.
In this context, when I learned that movies based on Marvel's Captain Marvel and DC's Shazam (who used to be called Captain Marvel) would be released within a month of each other, as a die-hard Marvel fan, I knew which movie I would be rooting for when they came out. At least, that's what I thought at the time. Personally, I'd wanted to see a movie featuring Carol Danvers some time ago.
Flash forward to a few years later and I find myself scratching my head, having seen both Captain Marvel and Shazam and having enjoyed the latter much more than the former. I suppose it was bound to happen; having been consistently enamored of Marvel movies for the last few years, it was inevitable that one of their films would fail to click with me. Conversely, given that Warner Brothers and DC have been aggressively retooling their approach to adapting their properties in the wake of the failure of Zack Snyder's ultra-dark approach to set the box office on fire, there was a fair chance that I would like the light-hearted Shazam.
Looking past what I thought of the two movies, though, there was something I observed about their respective performances at the box office that got me thinking: How did Captain Marvel, with its lukewarm reviews (78% on rottentomatoes.com, with an average score of 6.77/10), and its alleged army of haters, manage to gross over a billion dollars at the global box office, while Shazam, with its glowing reviews (90% on RT, average score of 7.3/10) and the love of "everyone" will be lucky to finish with even half of that? The answer I came up with is hardly scientific, but I wouldn't be surprised if data bore it out, and it's that Captain Marvel has tapped into an audience that has been starved for movies in the last ten years of the current cinematic superhero hegemony.
Since 2011, there have been an average of three or four comic-book based movies in a year, most of them based on characters from Marvel Comics. Spider-man has gone from being stuck in development hell to having eight movies in the last eighteen years. My cup ran over quite some time ago, if I'm honest, and the Marvel geek from the 80s who wept in frustration has been satisfied many times over. With all these movies, however, it was inevitable that a pattern emerged; their lead characters were almost exclusively white and male.
This wasn't an issue when these movies first started breaking out and we fans were just overjoyed to see them, but with each box office hit that came and went there was a part of me that wondered when we'd start to see prominent Avengers characters like Black Panther, the Wasp and Captain Marvel, to name a few. That was just me as a casual fan; I wasn't one of the black Marvel fans who wondered where Black Panther was, or the female fans who wondered where Captain Marvel was.
As it turns out, there were quite a few people who wanted to see the beloved Marvel brand do a black superhero, as Black Panther proved to the tune of 1.3 billion dollars at the global box office last year. One might argue that it was the quality of that film, that garnered critical acclaim and three Oscars, which put fannies in the seats, but then one now has to add Captain Marvel to that conversation, a movie that nobody is tipping for Oscar glory and which has conclusively debunked the years-old myth pushed by bitter DC fans that film critics are on Disney's payroll, given that the reviews have been lukewarm at best. Whatever I may have thought of Black Panther and Captain Marvel (loved the former, didn't much care for the latter), what mattered was that they served audiences that had been neglected for years, in the same way that the first Spider-man movie did for Spidey fans back in 2002. I reckon that the people who have propelled Captain Marvel to over a billion dollars in global grosses are audiences starved for content, the ones who made Jennifer Lawrence's (mostly mediocre) Hunger Games movies a nearly Three Billion Dollar global box office phenomenon, and who powered Wonder Woman to $821 million in 2017. My pet theory is that Captain Marvel's success is only vaguely related to its quality, as subjective as that may be. I can think of at least three, possibly five movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe that are quite arguably better than Captain Marvel when measured up by objective criteria like story cohesiveness, but which grossed far less than its 1 billion global take. None of these movies, however, were any sort of significant departure from MCU's usual fare.
Viewed from that lens, Shazam doesn't have much to set it apart from the plethora of superhero movies we've had in the last decade or so, with its Caucasian protagonist, cookie-cutter villain and fairly standard storytelling, right down to the generic CGI. Sure, it's entertaining, but the stakes aren't particularly high, and it isn't anything that hasn't already been done before; the die-hards and a few casuals have come out in force (it'll probably manage half a billion when all is said and done) but that's about it.
Superhero fatigue isn't quite a thing yet, but given enough repetition, people are more likely to see something they haven't seen yet than something that they have. Consider that, as good as last year's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was, audiences almost gave it a pass until they realized that it wasn't just another Spider-Man movie.
Whatever I or anyone else may think, therefore, about the quality of Captain Marvel, it remains an important movie because it underscores just how potent underserved audiences can be. In fact, if it can actually be argued that the movie is objectively mediocre, it becomes even more important as a cultural touchstone of sorts because it shows that this particular audience segment is so starved for strong female lead characters that they'll embrace any movie that features them, even mediocre ones, or for that matter, terrible ones (coughcoughAlitaBattleAngelcoughcough). They deserve characters like Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs or Ellen Ripley from Aliens or even Mattie Ross from the 2010 remake of True Grit, and given that superhero movies are basically the most commonly-consumed cinematic staple today, audiences should be able to find their capable female/person of color hero in these movies. Notably, though, the Hunger Games movies demonstrated diminishing returns as did the new Star Wars films, and it's not too much to speculate that future Marvel movies that just coast on their brand name will be similarly afflicted.
While it is just about set in stone that we'll get sequels to Black Panther and Captain Marvel, I sincerely hope Marvel took notes from the legitimate complaints that were raised about both movies (e.g. bad CGI in Black Panther, bad writing in Captain Marvel) and come up with sequels that can stand among their best work like Captain America: The Winter Soldier or the first Avengers movie. Also, given that Marvel's next avowed goal is to bring LGBTQ+ characters into the spotlight with The Eternals, they might want to consider focusing on crafting a strong story before highlighting the sexual orientation/gender/race of any given character. That way, they won't have to ride off the massive reservoir of audience goodwill they've accumulated over the last decade, and will be able to keep the hits coming for decades to come.
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