‘The Marvels’: the movie Stephen King didn’t watch but still defended
Thanks to the internet, everyone with a social media account can say whatever the hell they want about any movie or TV show, and it doesn’t even matter if they’ve seen it or not. Stephen King found himself among that number, but he was at least leaping to defend a film that was being attacked from all sides.
The prolific author has used the technological age to become a constant fountain of recommendations, with King frequently passing judgment on the features or series he deems worthy of publicly praising to his millions of followers. He doesn’t shit all over things too often, but neither will he stand idly by and let others do the same, especially when there is a heavy whiff of misogyny in the air.
In terms of sequels falling off a commercial cliff compared to their predecessors, few flicks in cinema history have ever fared worse than the dip between Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Captain Marvel, which earned over $1.1 billion at the box office and Nia DaCosta’s follow-up The Marvels, which barely cleared $200 million.
That’s an eye-watering shortfall, with the comic book adaptation suffering the ignominy of becoming the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first certified bomb and its lowest-grossing release ever. Caught in a perfect storm of terrible people being terrible people, there was a wave of backlash and resentment towards the movie long before it reached theatres, with Samuel L Jackson mounting a passionate defence of his friend and co-star Brie Larson.
Because there’s always a vocal minority who shout loudest on social media, there was an outpouring of joy among The Marvels‘ detractors when the superhero blockbuster, which happened to be directed by a woman and billed four women first in its ensemble, crashed and burned at the multiplex.
King, who holds absolutely no interest in Marvel Studios’ output and wasn’t rushing to his nearest screen to catch The Marvels, caught wind of what was happening and felt compelled to weigh in. “I don’t go to MCU movies, don’t care for them, but I find this barely masked gloating over the low box office for The Marvels very unpleasant,” he wrote. “Why gloat over failure?”
He also suggested that perhaps some of the joy being derived from watching the studio’s massively expensive investment wither and die on the theatrical fine was driven by nothing other than “adolescent fanboy hate.” Was he wrong? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s hard to say without a shred of doubt that it wasn’t a factor.
Of course, there were other issues in play, which included the actors’ strike restricting the movie’s stars from promoting it, the general post-pandemic downturn at the box office, and the MCU’s flagging reputation among casual cinemagoers, but King’s assessment of “Yuck! Girls!” was hardly wide of the mark.
