A new Marvel movie opens this weekend: Captain America: Brave New World, about what Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) does with the title of Captain America after it was bequeathed to him by Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) at the end of Avengers: Endgame. The reviews are in, and they are tepid. "The movie’s more interested in fan service and protecting corporate IP then in telling that story, or any story," raves The Washington Post. "The fight sequences are meditative, the grave-whisper acting belongs in a coming-attraction trailer from 1996 and, yet again, the viewer needs to have watched a TV series and at least two movies to fully grasp what’s happening," enthuses The New York Post.
All told, the movie currently has a rating of 51% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. It's not the worst rating that a Marvel movie has ever gotten — Eternals and Ant-Man 3 fared worse — but it's not great.
And a lot of people probably predicted this. It's no secret that the movie has had a troubled production. There was a title change at one point, extensive reshoots were done, and a wholly new supervillain character played by Giancarlo Esposito was inserted after the fact. Maybe it's not a shock that a messy production resulted in a messy movie.
Now, an anonymous crew member who worked on the reshoots is giving us a better idea of how it got here. "I think everyone on the crew knew this is probably not going to be a good film," they told Vulture. "Some of the action sequences were not believable. We had a lot of frustrations on set...My co-workers who spent more time on Brave New World than I did said, 'Yeah, this has been a really rough production.'"
"Entire sequences we shot won’t make it into the film, and that’s VERY expensive...At the end of the day, it was the most tense Marvel shoot I’ve ever worked on. Everyone kind of felt their buttholes tightening a little bit. It’s like, Ugh."
Apparently, one of the trickiest things to deal with on set was the bahvior of Harrison Ford, who plays the villain, General Thaddeus Ross. "Harrison Ford was one of the crankiest performers I ever dealt with. Which was sad. I’m a fan. But he was very much a diva," the source said. "Everyone was trying to scramble to make him happy. That made for a very awkward work environment."
The source also hints that director Julius Onah, an acclaimed independent filmmaker, may not have been ready to handle the pressures of a movie that cost nearly $200 million to make. That's a problem Marvel has had before. For example, Chloé Zhao may have won an Oscar for directing the tiny slice-of-life drama Nomadland, but asking her to go from that to a massive movie like Eternals is a huge risk. Big-budget filmmaking requires different skills that have to be built up.
Finally, there's the matter of Brave New World touching on politics in a very touchy political climate. Mind the SPOILERS, but General Thaddeus Ross is a demagogic, proto-fascist leader who turns into a giant orange monster. With Donald Trump back in the White House, Disney may have feared setting off a firestorm and scrambled things behind the scenes, leading to more disorganization.
None of this will matter if Captain America: Brave New World makes a mint at the box office; it's up to the fans now. Personally, I think the writing has been on the wall for this movie for a while. If Marvel is hoping for a big success this year, it's probably going to come from The Fantastic Four: First Steps in July:
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