#ReleaseTheOnahAndDaCostaCuts

So the press tour for The Fantastic Four: First Steps is in full swing (probably ending by the time this goes up if I'm being honest), which means it's time for the normally reclusive head of Marvel Studios to talk to the press. Feige's comments are in line with a lot of both what has been on the public record about these movies and what we've kind of figured out by reading between the lines, but there is one comment he made that is part of a troubling trend, especially within Disney and their subsidiaries, to assign blame to anyone but studio executives for underperforming movies.

The comment in question was regarding the first of Marvel Studios' three theatrical releases this year. He attributed the underperformance of Captain America: Brave New World to the fact that it was the first Captain America film without Steve Rogers (as portrayed by Chris Evans) in the lead. This feels like a vast oversimplification of the situation, considering the movie was in production for two years and underwent dramatic reshoots throughout 2024. This is also not the first time a Disney subsidiary has blamed the financial losses of a major tentpole on a minority lead, as they had attempted to do the same earlier this year by blaming Rachel Zegler for the failings of Snow White.

What's particularly interesting about this is that the underperformance of Brave New World actually has some commonality with another underperforming Disney movie this year. Both Elio and Brave New World felt like they were missing something when I watched them and it appears that the thing that was missing were entire subplots that Disney was concerned would lead to right-wing backlash. Queer themes were removed from Elio which made Elio's desire to be accepted feel hollow because we never had a sense of why he didn't fit in, while Brave New World is clearly designed to indict the former/current president where the text of the movie is "the president can't answer hard questions from the press and turns into a giant rage monster."

In fact, there is another recent Marvel movie that Brave New World has some commonality with as well, because Nia DaCosta's The Marvels was similarly meddled with and left out to die. In an interview, Julius Onah used similar language to DaCosta when talking about the transition from independent filmmaking to working within a massive franchise by citing the issue of "working within the machinery" of a large corporation. At this point, it's hard not to interpret this as studio interference in a phase of Marvel Studios that has been entirely defined by studio interference. They couldn't even kick off the post-Endgame era properly because (even before COVID) their plans were up in the air with the pending 20th Century acquisition.

And let's be clear, the interference is an overcorrection from movies like The Eternals or Thor: Love and Thunder which were, for better or worse, Chloe Zhao and Taika Waititi's movies respectively and audiences did not resonate with them. The problem is the movies that were meddled with were Captain America: Brave New World and The Marvels while, to our knowledge, Thunderbolts and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 were not subject to such scrutiny. Also, Thunderbolts made back less on the same budget, yet Brave New World is the one that is facing this scrutiny, while Jake Schreier is (allegedly) signed on to work on the upcoming MCU X-Men movie.

Also, if Feige is serious about the post-Secret Wars reboot (be it a hard or soft reboot), how exactly is that going to work if audiences have a hard time connecting to this situation? Robert Downey Jr. is synonymous with Tony Stark so are we just never going to have Tony Stark? What if that happens with Doctor Doom after Doomsday? What's the point of bringing back the X-Men of the Singer-verse only to remind viewers before recasting these characters?

Realistically, these are only flimsy excuses to not pin blame on studio executives or point to the impact of the 20th Century acquisition on this period for the MCU. The byproduct is reinforcing right-wing talking points about identity politics and tacitly lending credibility to conspiracy theories.

What we as the movie-going public should do is request that Marvel Studios releases the original directors' cuts of both The Marvels and Captain America: Brave New World. I would say they don't need to do like Warner Bros. did for the Snyder Cut because dropping $70 million to finish the movies as originally shot would be absurd, but just release the production scripts as a book or post them online.

If the original scripts were so bad, why did they get greenlit in the first place to enter production? If they were concerned about right-wing hysteria, show us how "woke" the work was that it was worth blowing the budget up with reshoots and taking the creative reigns away from these directors before shouldering them with the blame.

If studio interference is such a sin, let's reserve the same level of outrage for creators of color, not just Zack Snyder.