Thunderbolts lost millions despite rave reviews, what's next for Marvel?
Thunderbolts premiered to strong enthusiasm—a whopping 88 per cent critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 93 per cent audience rating. Disney CEO Bob Iger even heralded it as 'the first and best' result of Marvel's new film strategy. But six weeks in, its $371 million global box office haul places it among the MCU's lowest earners. With a production and marketing outlay reaching $275 million, analysts say it would need about $425 million just to break even.
Critical acclaim, financial crash
Shawn Robbins, director of analytics at Fandango, suggests Marvel has entered a 'new era' where blockbuster success cannot be assumed. Indeed, while pre‑pandemic MCU films largely topped $500 million, only 6 of 13 movies have crossed that mark since 2020. Still, Marvel's vast ecosystem—including Disney+, theme parks, and merch—helps cushion losses.
Standalone films are fading, but the big guns still fire
Michael Bock from Exhibitor Relations notes that 'lower‑tier comic book movies aren't cinematic slam dunks anymore,' pointing to Thunderbolts' rapid decline at the box office. In response, Marvel is scaling back stand‑alone origin films and doubling down on tentpole events and crossover extravaganzas, think Fantastic Four: First Steps, Avengers: Doomsday (Dec 2026), Spider‑Man 4, and Avengers: Secret Wars (Dec 2027). These are seen as safer bets with built‑in fanbases.
Quality over quantity: The creative course correction
After Marvel fatigue set in—sparked by an overload of interconnected films and TV series—Kevin Feige admitted the studio had overstuffed its release schedule . The misfires of The Marvels and Quantumania forced introspection. Now, Marvel is pulling back, emphasising fewer, bigger, and more polished projects. Thunderbolts was viewed more like a narrative bridge than a standalone hit,
What's Marvel's next move?
Marvel has signalled that it will prioritise proven franchises like Avengers and Spider‑Man. Lesser-known characters may only get spotlight time in team‑ups rather than their own blockbusters . With rising production costs and tighter budgets, the MCU's strategy appears to be about smart storytelling over sheer volume.
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Hindustan Times
2 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
AI-generated dog and cat dramas fetch huge audiences, creators earn millions
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The Hindu
3 hours ago
- The Hindu
How ‘Andor' is shaping the 21st century liberal mind
As a Star Wars fan, I've long been familiar with the strange, combustible ecosystem of its fandom. This is after all that notoriously wretched hive of scum and villainy where grown men in cosplay rail against the 'woke mind virus' they believe Disney smuggled into their decidedly unpolitical galaxy. But in the past few months, something remarkable has been happening. The conversation has veered off its usual course — past the endless gripes about Rey's lineage, past the tired Darth Jar Jar conspiracies and the incessant Filoni-worshipping — and landed somewhere far more charged. Suddenly, posts joking about subredditors ready to be 'tied to a missile and fired at Tel Aviv' started flooding my feed, and astonishingly, people weren't flinching. It's telling. For perhaps the first time, Star Wars seemed to be driven by something more urgent and tangible than nostalgia and merchandising. The idea of political awakening has rarely felt so freshly, almost violently, excavated from the franchise's marrow. And it's all because of Andor. In the month since Andor concluded its second season, the Star Wars spin-off has morphed into a radicalising force for disaffected liberals, post-left thinkers, and a whole generation of Reddit-warped digital revolutionaries. Tony Gilroy's cerebral slow-burn about fascism, imperialism, and the machinery of resistance has slipped the bounds of allegory and re-entered orbit as a cultural touchstone. The series feels so precisely timed that it makes a galaxy far, far away feel disturbingly proximate. In this moment of global exhaustion on political, ethical and ecological fronts, it was perhaps inevitable that Andor would become one of the most politically charged pieces of popular culture in years. But the series, it appears, has gone beyond, galvanising viewers who had until recently remained comfortably aloof from the language and logic of revolutionary struggle. Andor is the bitter pill in the sugarcoated saga of the franchise's space operatics. Of the many spin-offs Lucasfilm has produced in its Disney era, the series has emerged as a taut political thriller for a more mature audience. If George Lucas conceived Star Wars as an allegory for the Vietnam War and American imperialism, then Tony Gilroy strips it down to the bone to reveal the machinery beneath. Diego Luna's Cassian Andor is the titular reluctant hero conscripted by circumstance. His transformation from a disillusioned hustler to an ideologically hardened rebel charts a slow, tragic arithmetic of resistance. Gilroy's writing eschews the romanticism of lightsabers and chosen ones. Instead, it focuses on bureaucratic cruelty, resource extraction, media manipulation, and state-sanctioned terror, all rendered in disconcerting detail. The cartoonish villainy of the Empire from the Originals has now turned into an uncomfortably close reflection of the very real systems that valorise control over justice. In its sophomore season, much of the plot centres on the planet Ghorman, which the Empire has developed a particular interest in. With a visual language that evokes the Paris Commune, Tiananmen Square and the Gaza Strip, the season portrays imperial agents concocting the myth of the insurgent to justify genocidal force. The idea that a Disney series could tilt the political compass of its audience toward a kind of digital Maoism might sound absurd. And yet, scroll through Reddit, Instagram Reels, or Twitter posts from the last two months and a distinct shift in tone is undeniable. 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Yea, that was crazy huh? — mktoon (@mktoon) June 9, 2025 Andor's dour framings of colonial occupation and the fragmented, often contradictory decisions required to resist it, seem to have spoken directly to a global audience watching democracy buckle under its contradictions. Viewers across the world have taken to the internet to project onto Andor their own experiences. But two particular moments in the global discourse have refracted this phenomenon into something unmistakably real. As the Israeli bombardment and successive blockade of essential services in Gaza has escalated into what international observers, UN rapporteurs, and many across civil society openly describe as a genocide, scenes from Andor resurfaced across social platforms. Clips from the show's depiction of state-sanctioned terror and ethnic cleansing during the infamous Ghorman Massacre, as well as Senator Mon Mothma's powerful speech calling a genocide for what it is, have been juxtaposed with footage from the Palestinian people under siege. For many viewers, the parallels have been far too precise to be coincidental. what is the most sickening about this is that it's not even fiction. As soon as you open the news this is exactly what is happening in Gaza. #Andor is a brilliantly fictionalised reflection of our current reality. — Hannah (@skywalkrbxcky) May 8, 2025 To be clear, Andor is not about Gaza. It is neither a parable nor a direct allegory, at least not officially. But the manner in which Gilroy and his team of writers evoke the psychological texture of the paranoia, the fragmentation of solidarity, and the calculus of sacrifice of life under occupation, has created a cultural conduit through which people are making sense of horrors unfolding in real time. Posts reading 'Ghorman is Palestine' began circulating. One Reddit user wrote, 'Never have I felt more on the side of the Palestinian cause than after watching this. I understand resistance in a way that I never had before'. It's impossible not to see the parallels between the Imperial plan for Ghorman in Andor season 2 and what has been happening to the Palestinians in Gaza. — Matt K. (@MattJKoe) May 8, 2025 Meanwhile, as Southern California has become an unexpected epicenter of anti-immigration protests, Trump has unleashed the National Guard on protestors, branding them 'insurrectionists'. 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Remember this: the imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. — major fartagaz | Andor Forever (@fartagaz) June 9, 2025 Across the internet, Star Wars fans began overlaying scenes of Andor with footage of National Guard crackdowns and ICE raids. Even symbols of the (Star Wars) Rebellion began sprouting up in solidarity, captioned, 'Los Angeles, you have friends everywhere.' Today, as tens of thousands filled the streets in the United States as a part of the 'No Kings' uprising against Trump's jingoist military parade in the capital, the iconography of rebellion was everywhere, with banners scrawled with 'I have friends everywhere' making their way across the country. 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Many of those who began watching the series for its impeccable production value and claims of 'peak Star Wars', have found themselves grappling with the banality of evil and the mechanisms of imperial propaganda that might be hitting a little too close to home for comfort. If there is something almost surreal about this convergence of pop fiction and real-world atrocity, it may lie in the friction between what Andor shows and what it withholds. What has made Andor's political afterlife different from that of earlier cultural moments is its sincerity. None of this feels ironic or decorative. The Maoist memeification is tongue-in-cheek, but the desire behind it is very real. The jokes about 'joining Hamas' after watching Andor feel inane, but aren't entirely facetious. At the very least, Andor has made political violence or armed resistance thinkable again. People are not simply pretending to be rebels. They are looking for models of survival, action, and integrity in an apathetic world that is collapsing around them. In this way, Andor didn't ignite the moment so much as give it a grammar. It gave the disillusioned a way to articulate something beyond despair. A franchise born of mythic messiahs has turned messiah-skeptic, embracing a new insurgent modernism that's finally ready to ask the only question that counts: What must be done? And the answer feels increasingly inexorable. One way out. Of course, one shouldn't overstate the case. Watching Andor does not a cadre make. It is still a piece of fiction, nestled within a media empire whose primary function is to generate profit. But Andor proves that even in the most commodified corners of culture, something meaningful, germane and subversive can take root.
Pink Villa
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- Pink Villa
Son Suk Ku announces hiatus after consecutive hits with Nine Puzzles and Heavenly Ever After, here's what he'll do next
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