Marvel’s new Captain America movie earns $134m in first weekend, despite poor reviews
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American actors (from left) Harrison Ford, Anthony Mackie and Danny Ramirez at the premiere of Captain America: Brave New World on Feb 11.
PHOTO: EPA-EFE
Brooks Barnes
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NEW YORK – At the height of the superhero boom a few years ago, Disney pushed its Marvel assembly lines to run faster and faster. After awhile, quality suffered and ticket sales declined.
So, Disney slowed the pace. In 2024, Marvel released one movie – the mega-successful Deadpool & Wolverine and two Disney+ series. To compare, in 2021, Marvel churned out four movies – with mixed results – and five Disney+ series.
Factory problem fixed?
Maybe: Marvel’s Captain America: Brave New World, starring Anthony Mackie as the superhero soldier, was a runaway No. 1 at the global box office over its opening weekend.
The movie, which cost at least US$300 million (S$403 million) to make and market worldwide, was on pace to sell roughly US$100 million in tickets in the United States and Canada from Feb 13 to 16, according to Comscore, which compiles box-office data. Moviegoers overseas were poised to chip in another US$92 million or so.
Maybe not: Brave New World received the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s lowest grade – B-minus – from ticket buyers in CinemaScore exit polls. Reviews were only 50 per cent positive, according to Rotten Tomatoes, which resulted in a “rotten” rating from the site.
Brave New World outperformed analyst expectations amid a racist backlash from some internet users and right-wing pundits, who criticised Marvel’s decision to refresh the “Captain America” franchise by giving the title role to a black actor. (A “DEI hire”, they maintained in numerous X posts, a reference to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.)
Mackie, who took over the character from Chris Evans, also came under attack as “anti-American” for a comment he made while promoting the film overseas.
Some people appeared to buy tickets as a counterprotest. “We went to support the DEI hire for Captain America,” Ms Deborah Olivia Farmer, a Chicago communications executive, wrote on social media platform Threads on Feb 15, using the term ironically.
Veteran movie star Harrison Ford features in Brave New World as a power-crazed American president who turns into Red Hulk, wreaking havoc in the government and society.
Disney had initially scheduled the film for release in May 2024 – long before President Donald Trump returned to the White House and declared war on DEI, and companies, including Disney, responded with rollbacks of their diversity policies. Brave New World was delayed partly by labour strikes in Hollywood. Marvel had also decided that some of the film’s action sequences were not good enough. NYTIMES
