It’s not exactly a controversial statement to say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe, while still being successful overall, has struggled to reach the same heights of success recently that it once achieved. Post-Avengers: Endgame, few movies have seen the box office success of earlier entries, and while there's reason to be hopeful for some upcoming Marvel movies, recent entries, like Ant-Man: Quantumania and The Marvels, have really struggled.
The Marvels now has the dubious distinction of being the lowest-grossing MCU movie at the global box office. There are any number of reasons why that may have happened. However, director Nia DaCosta recently spoke openly at the Storyhouse screenwriting festival (via Deadline) about her experience and may have given us some answers. She admits that the Marvel way of making movies and her own style didn’t necessarily mesh. DaCosta explained…
They had a date, and they were prepping certain things, and you just have to lean into the process hardcore. The way they make those films is very different to the way, ideally, I would make a film, so you just have to lean into the process and hope for the best. The best didn’t happen this time but you kind of have to trust in the machine.
DaCosta is far from the first person to describe the Marvel Studios process as “a machine,” and like all machines, it’s designed to work in a particular way. Trying to get a machine to do something it wasn’t designed to do usually breaks it.
Some directors have clearly thrived inside the Marvel Studios system. The Russo Brothers have recently returned to Marvel. James Gunn went from making movies in the Marvel machine to running his own machine at DC Films. But others have had a tougher time. Some directors have declined to work with Marvel specifically because they didn’t want to become a cog in the machine. DaCosta says that, being a huge comic book fan, she really wanted to make a Marvel movie.
In the end, however, due to what sounds like a production that was pushing to hit a release date, DaCosta realized that The Marvels simply wasn’t going to be the movie that she wanted it to be. She’s clearly disappointed in that but has taken it all as a learning experience. The director continued…
It was interesting because there was a certain point when I was like, ‘Ok, this isn’t going to be the movie that I pitched or even the first version of the movie that I shot’ so I realised that this is now an experience and it’s learning curve and it really makes you stronger as a filmmaker in terms of your ability to navigate.
The most disappointing thing about all this is that, one assumes, whatever version of The Marvels Nia DaCosta pitched to Marvel was the reason she was hired to do the job in the first place. It’s incredibly frustrating if the Marvel “machine” then prevented that movie from happening.
One has to wonder just what sort of movie we would have seen if Nia DaCosta had made the film she had wanted to make. Maybe it wouldn’t have been more successful, but it also could have been brilliant.
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