In 2020, Disney CEO Bob Chapek announced "a strategic reorganisation" to prioritise the media giant's "streaming services". Yes, 2019's Marvel's Captain Marvel took $1 billion dollars at the box office but cinema seats were so last year. The future was streaming spin-offs, interlinked storylines, easter eggs and fans trying to make sense of it all on social media.
From now on, if they want to have a clue what's going on in a Disney/Marvel movie, make them sign up Disney+ first and do some serious bingeing.
So here we are. Chapek has been ousted and we have The Marvels, a $260 million blockbuster that offers little to the casual cinemagoer.
A shockingly incoherent plot sees Brie Larson's Captain Marvel form a tag team with two streaming superheroines – Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), from Ms Marvel and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) from WandaVision.
Movie fans may remember Monica was a little girl in Captain Marvel, but now she appears with fuzzily defined superpowers of her own.
"I walked through The Witch's Hex," he explains. Newcomers may not find this particularly helpful.
Some sort of intergalactic war is raging (stream Secret Invasion for details), which has marooned Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) on a space station with worried technicians in slim fit tracksuits.
So he turns to the three superheroines to stop a disgruntled alien (Zawe Ashton) from doing something terrible to "space time" with a massive hammer. Luckily, the trio have a secret weapon – a magic bangle which allows them to instantly swap places and so make the cheap-looking CGI action scenes even more difficult to follow.
It seems Marvel has disappeared up its own black hole.
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