3 / 10
Official trailer
The Marvels is the Captain Marvel sequel that teams up Brie Larson with two female MCU successors. Nia DaCosta directed. Megan McDonnell, Elissa Karasik, and DaCosta wrote. Larson returns as Carol Danvers. Iman Vellani plays Kamala Khan, the Pakistani-American teenage Ms. Marvel introduced in her Disney+ series. Teyonah Parris plays Monica Rambeau, the adult version of the character introduced in WandaVision and now light-powered after her S.W.O.R.D. exposure. Zawe Ashton plays Dar-Benn, a Kree revolutionary whose stolen Quantum Band entangles the three heroes so they switch positions whenever they use their powers. Samuel L. Jackson returns as Nick Fury. The plot follows the three heroes learning to coordinate while pursuing Dar-Benn.
The film made approximately two hundred and six million dollars worldwide on a two hundred and twenty million dollar budget.
The commercial performance was the worst opening in MCU history. The film lost money for Disney after marketing costs. The Marvels’s failure is widely cited as the moment Marvel Studios acknowledged its post-Endgame strategy had broken. The 2024 layoffs at Marvel Studios and the strategic pivot announced at San Diego Comic-Con followed this film’s reception.
The Marvels left me cold and a little annoyed, which is a strange reaction to a movie with a planet full of singing aliens in it. There’s a fun film buried in here somewhere. Iman Vellani is working her heart out to find it, and the studio kept piling brand decisions on top of her until the film sagged.
What Made It a Woke Disaster
The film exists because Marvel Studios committed to female-led ensemble work as a strategic priority regardless of audience demand for the individual characters involved. Captain Marvel (2019) had performed well commercially but generated significant audience hostility toward Brie Larson’s public statements about diversity and her performance. Monica Rambeau was a supporting character in WandaVision. Kamala Khan was the lead of a Disney+ series that hadn’t built mass audience awareness. Character demand didn’t drive the decision to team these three. The studio’s commitment to a particular kind of representation drove the decision.
The Dar-Benn antagonist is the film’s clearest ideological tell.
Dar-Benn is a Kree revolutionary whose grievance is that Carol Danvers destroyed the Supreme Intelligence and damaged Kree civilization. The film positions the character as a colonized people striking back at her colonizer and treats this framing as legitimate moral footing. It asks Carol to acknowledge that her actions in Captain Marvel had consequences for the Kree, that she’s been treating them as obstacles instead of as a people, and that her superhero status implicates her in their suffering. The framing is anti-colonial critique applied to a superhero film about flying lightspeed-punching alien fighter pilots.
The Kamala Khan family humor undercuts every dramatic beat. The film cuts repeatedly to Kamala’s parents and brother for comic relief. The family is charming, and it’s also in every scene that could otherwise build tension. The script won’t let the audience feel the threat of Dar-Benn because every other sequence cuts back to the Khans being cute. The structural commitment to keeping the tone light enough for the Kamala Khan demographic limits the threat the film can credibly stage. The Marvels is a superhero film that can’t risk being a superhero film.
The Khan family is the film’s most damaging choice. I like them fine as people, and I’d watch their own sitcom, but whenever Dar-Benn starts to feel like a threat, the film cuts to Kamala’s dad being adorable and the air goes right out of the room.
For Writers
A team-up film built from characters the audience hasn’t embraced individually won’t generate audience embrace through assembly. The Marvels stacked three protagonists with different demographic profiles and assumed the diversity would compensate for the limited individual character demand. The lesson is that audience investment in characters is built one character at a time. Assembly can’t manufacture investment. If the audience doesn’t want any of the three characters carrying their own film, the team-up film won’t solve the problem. Build the individual characters first.
The Quantum Band Mechanic
The film’s central plot device is that the three heroes’ powers are entangled.
When any of them uses powers, they swap positions. The mechanic is the kind of high-concept structural device that could drive a strong action film. The choreography of the swap sequences is the film’s most accomplished individual work. The team learning to use the entanglement deliberately produces the third act’s strongest action beats.
The swap fights are the stretch of this movie I enjoy. Watching three heroes blink in and out of each other’s places has a real snap to it, and for a few minutes I forget how little these three belong together. Then the fight ends and I remember.
The mechanic also exposes the film’s larger structural problem.
The three protagonists have to be physically swapping to make the action sequences read. Without the swap, the three heroes have no reason to be in the same movie. Carol can fly through space and punch at lightspeed. Monica can phase through dimensions. Kamala can stretch. The three power sets don’t naturally combine. The film invented the swap mechanic to give them a reason to fight as a team. The invention works in individual sequences and exposes the larger problem in retrospect. These three characters didn’t belong in the same film.
For Writers
A clever mechanic invented to force together characters who wouldn’t naturally combine signals a script that started from casting instead of from story. The Marvels’s Quantum Band entanglement is a writing solution to a casting decision. The lesson is that structural inventions to justify pre-decided teams tend to read as inventions. The audience can feel the seams. Build teams whose members have organic reasons to be together. If the casting is fixed first, build the story around relationships the characters could plausibly have.
The Iman Vellani Problem
Iman Vellani is the film’s most successful element.
The young actress plays Kamala Khan as a distinct person with her own enthusiasms. Her Carol Danvers fan-girling sequences are the film’s most committed character work. Vellani is performing at a different energy level than the rest of the cast. The result is a Kamala Khan character who feels like a real person in a film where the other two leads feel like brand-management exercises.
The Vellani performance also exposes the Larson performance by contrast.
Brie Larson is a capable dramatic actress who hasn’t yet found Carol Danvers as a character. Across three appearances (Captain Marvel, Endgame, The Marvels), Larson’s Carol has remained inscrutable. The performance is muted, cool, and emotionally distant. Vellani standing next to Larson is the moment the audience can see what character work looks like in the same scene as what brand work looks like. The contrast is unflattering to the film’s nominal lead.
Vellani is the reason I’d give this film anything at all. She plays Kamala like a kid who can’t believe she’s in the same room as her hero, and I believe her completely. Standing her next to Larson’s blank Carol is cruel, and I blame the filmmakers who never gave Carol a pulse at least as much as I blame Larson.
For Writers
A supporting performance that outshines the lead exposes a casting problem the script can’t fix. The Marvels has Iman Vellani doing more committed character work than Brie Larson in their shared scenes. The audience reads the comparison. The lesson is that strong supporting performances reveal weaknesses in the leads they support. If the lead can’t match the supporting work, either the lead needs to raise or the supporting work needs to be moderated. Audiences see contrasts even when scripts don’t.
Craft Note
The Aladna musical sequence is the film’s most distinctive individual passage and the closest the production comes to having a singular creative voice. Carol arrives on a planet where the population communicates through song. The sequence runs about eight minutes and is strange. It’s also walled off from the rest of the film. The Aladna passage suggests what The Marvels could have been if Nia DaCosta had been given license to make a stranger, weirder Carol Danvers film instead of a brand-management ensemble. The sequence is the production’s vestigial evidence that a more interesting film almost existed.
Where does The Marvels (2023) go wrong?
3/10. The lowest-grossing MCU film and the moment Marvel Studios admitted its post-Endgame strategy had broken. Iman Vellani is excellent, and the Aladna sequence is the strangest and best thing in the movie, a glimpse of a weirder film I’d have loved to see. The rest is weak. Carol still has no pulse, the Dar-Benn framing asks me to feel guilty on behalf of a lightspeed-punching fighter pilot, and the family comedy keeps stepping on the tension. Watch it only if you’re completing the MCU.
Frequently Asked Questions
- The Marvels, Box Office Mojo
- The Marvels review, The Hollywood Reporter
- The Marvels (2023), IMDb
