By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Time flies even faster than Sam Wilson. It’s been over two years since Captain America 4 was announced at San Diego Comic-Con. The movie’s intended 2024 release date has already been delayed to February 14, 2025, ostensibly due to the writers’ and actors’ strikes, though many speculated the delay had more to do with Disney’s desire to improve the quality of the film after negative test screenings.
Now there are reports of Captain America 4 reshoots less than three months before its release. This makes one thing depressingly clear: Disney no longer has any real creative vision when it comes to the MCU.
The Disastrous State Of Captain America 4
Previously, there was much speculation that Disney wanted to delay Captain America 4 to cut out potentially controversial elements. These included Israeli hero Sabra, who might make waves in the wake of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.
There was also rampant speculation that the previous reshoots were prompted by negative test screenings, and now, the latest round of reshoots is reportedly due to audiences finding the movie boring and inessential to the larger MCU. This is clear evidence that Disney has lost its creative vision for this superhero franchise and is desperately trying to adjust content to audience desires rather than simply putting out a great film and letting critics and audiences judge the movie on its own merits.
At first, this might sound like a paradox. After all, Marvel doing reshoots based on negative test screenings means they are letting audiences judge, right? Well, yes and no: you see, doing one round of edits and reshoots based on feedback from allegedly bad test screenings is good business sense. Doing reshoots again less than three months before the movie premieres based on more negative feedback implies that Disney is getting conflicting feedback from fans about what they do and don’t like about Captain America 4 and is trying to contort itself around this feedback rather than put out a film based on a director’s singular vision.
Why Disney’s Current Approach Is A Bad Idea
The biggest problem with this approach is something I have written about before. Marvel has an entire multiverse of fans, and most of them have vastly different ideas of what the MCU should look like.
The irony here is that most of Marvel’s best decisions for their cinematic universe are things that many audiences would have hated the idea of if given advanced warning. For example, disgraced former addict and jailbird Robert Downey Jr. was a crazy casting choice for Iron Man, just as chubby, schlubby Parks and Recreation star Chris Pratt was a crazy choice to headline an action film full of superhero C-listers.
If they could, many Marvel fans would have vetoed those choices (which ended up being perfect casting decisions) as they would have vetoed having overtly adult MCU content like Daredevil and Jessica Jones on Netflix (shows that are now considered the gold standard for Marvel series). Ideas like turning Thor into a comedic character or disbanding SHIELD would have been met with similar resistance. Fortunately for fans everywhere, the directors and creators behind these potentially controversial decisions simply focused on creating a high-quality movie and let everything else (including fans’ tendency to clutch their pearls at whatever slightest annoyance they may have) sort itself out.
Marvel’s Cinematic Universe Is Plagued With Crippling Reliance On Committees
Now, Captain America 4’s reported reshoots over negative screenings have revealed that Phase Five (and likely beyond) of the MCU is plagued by a crippling decision to rely on committees and executives to make decisions. The best example of this is Blade, a movie whose idiotproof concept (a cool, sunlight-proof vampire kills other bloodsuckers) has lost multiple directors, writers, and stars as Disney tries to create a compelling story for their most-delayed Marvel movie. At one point, the title character was reportedly going to be the fourth lead in a film that now focused more on female heroes, a decision even dumber than trying to ice skate uphill.
And, of course, the most obvious sign of making movies by committee is the decision to bring Robert Downey Jr. back as Doctor Doom. It’s Disney’s Hail Mary attempt to create a memorable Big Bad after the legal drama surrounding Jonathan Majors, but it also reveals how creatively bankrupt the House of Mouse really is. After trying to make Kang the Conqueror happen by shoving his weird stories down our throats, the studio suddenly pivoted, spending a small mountain of money to bring back Marvel’s most famous face in what will inevitably amount to another empty Variant cameo.
Captain America 4’s reported reshoots may or may not make the film better, but they ultimately represent a symptom of Marvel’s larger failure to let creators establish a bold vision rather than attempting to hew to an empty status quo of emptier audience expectations. Once upon a time, the studio seemed to understand that big hits only come from big swings. That’s why directors like Jon Favreau and Taika Waititi were granted so much creative freedom. With these particular directors, the sequel to their MCU debuts was obviously much weaker than the first film, but the relative crappiness of Iron Man 2 and Thor: Love and Thunder didn’t matter as much because Iron Man and Thor: Ragnarok transformed this entire cinematic universe for the better.
Marvel Must Unlearn This Helplessness Or It Is Doomed
The TL;DR of my plea to Marvel is this: unlearn the helplessness that comes from bad test screenings and doomscrolling social media for disgruntled neckbeard feedback.
Hire talented directors and let them create the kind of killer comic content that once made the MCU a blockbuster film franchise. Otherwise, this cinematic universe will continue to decline, and it won’t be long before the fans who miss Marvel’s creative risk-taking focus their passion on the upcoming DCU and the endless creativity of superstar creator James Gunn. Gunn is someone who was, incidentally, previously fired from Marvel due to panicked executives rather than fan demand.
Marvel has a lesson to learn. They just won’t know what it is until a committee delays figuring it out for about half a decade or so.