The latest episode of the longest-running cinematic soap opera in movie history could be the biggest financial disaster they have seen.

Chris Evans is no longer playing the iconic Marvel hero Captain America. As a result, Marvel Studios decided to follow the most recent comic book series and replace Steve Rogers with his former sidekick Sam Wilson, aka Falcon. The race-swapped comic book character is not even in the top 10 list of things wrong with this movie.

After naming the film Captain America: New World Order, Marvel decided subtlety was out of the question and renamed it Brave New World as if somehow the context would make it any better. After spending several months shooting the film, Marvel found the movie was a complete disaster.

It’s bad enough that Disney expects you to sit through several episodes of a Disney Plus series to figure out how we got here. Brave New World was reshot not once, not twice, but three times, ballooning the production budget with all reshoots to an estimated 400 million dollars.

Needless to say, the film needs to be a monster hit before Disney sees anything resembling a profit. However, every time a test audience has seen the latest version of the film, they reject it.

Rather than delaying the movie yet again, Marvel cut an hour of runtime in hopes of recouping their cost. The elephant in the room hasn’t even been addressed. Is Anthony Mackie a leading man who can pull Marvel Studios into a successful Phase 6 and out of a 400 million hole?

No.

Captain America: Brave New World begins with Sam Wilson as Captain America going down to Mexico to intercept adamantium from the Serpent Society. Returning home to the United States, Sam gets a call to work with the president of the United States, Thaddeus Ross, played by Harrison Ford.

Ross wants Sam to lead the new Avengers, who would have to answer to him as the president. As Sam mulls over this offer, he attends an event at the White House that goes awry after several soldiers are mind-controlled into an assassination attempt on the president.

As one of his close friends is caught up in the attempt, Sam pulls out all the stops to prove his innocence. Meanwhile, a massive cover-up is falling apart in real time with a mastermind who will stop at nothing to expose the truth to the entire world.

For a film that has gotten bad reviews with every test screening it’s had, Captain America: Brave New World is not among the worst MCU films of all time, but I’m pretty sure Marvel didn’t plan on spending 400 million dollars for a middle-of-the-road movie. One of the glaring issues is the casting of Shira Haas.

Haas has taken a lot of heat for being an Israeli actress, but the real problem is she is horrendously miscast in the role of a former Black Widow assassin. The actress, who is a survivor of kidney cancer that led to her physical growth being stunted in her youth, is 5 ft tall, and despite being 30 years old, looks half her age. 

Haas is not a bad actress but looks ridiculous in a role where everyone in the movie is 3x her size. Harrison Ford is the biggest star in the movie, yet most of his scenes feel like they were filmed in front of a blue screen, which makes his scene feel very despondent from the rest of the movie. 

The MCU has run out of ideas to keep audiences entertained, reaching the near 17-year mark in the Cinematic Universe. Brave New World borrows a few ideas from Winter Soldier, telling a story about how a government has been corrupted from within, and it’s up to Captain America to expose the truth to the world. 

However, this story was done far better in a movie that came out 11 years ago. Audiences are expected to accept Sam Wilson as Captain America under the guise of a couple of Disney Plus shows. There’s nothing about Brave New World that sets up a bigger conflict for audiences to get excited for down the line, which used to be the bread and butter of Marvel movies. 

When the MCU was at its brightest, not only were they paying off storylines, but they were setting up something later in the future as well. There was tons of footage of this movie that was cut out for time’s sake, so you have to wonder what key details of the film were removed that would have given this film more of a connection to build upon.

The best way to describe Brave New World is mediocre, which has become the new norm for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The hype that Infinity War and Endgame had is dead, and for those waiting for a post-credit scene, you will get nothing outside of a thin tease for Secret Wars, a movie that is supposed to present to us an Avengers team that audiences haven’t even seen yet. 

The problem with Marvel is that when they don’t use nostalgia, they have nothing to present to audiences. Marvel Studios represents a massive portion of Disney’s portfolio, so they will continue to produce content that fewer and fewer people care about.

1.5/5

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