“Wacky and silly.” That’s how The Marvels director Nia DaCosta described Captain Marvel sequel The Marvels in a pre-release interview in August 2023, months before the Marvel Studios movie — bringing together Avenger Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), teenage super-fan Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani), and astronaut Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) — bombed at the global box office that November. The Marvels made just over $200 million (against a reported budget of $307 million) and bypassed 2008’s The Incredible Hulk to become the lowest-grossing installment in the now 35-movie Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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It’s also the movie that DaCosta, best known for the indie crime drama Little Woods and the 2021 Candyman sequel, says she didn’t set out to make.
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“It was interesting because there was a certain point when I was like, ‘Okay, this isn’t going to be the movie that I pitched or even the first version of the movie that I shot,’” DaCosta said of The Marvels at the Storyhouse Screenwriting Film Festival in Ireland, according to The Playlist. “So, I realized that this is now an experience, and it’s a learning curve, and it really makes you stronger as a filmmaker in terms of your ability to navigate.”
In April 2020, Disney dated the then-untitled Captain Marvel 2 for July 8, 2022, and hired DaCosta to direct that August. The Marvels was later pushed back to Nov. 11, 2022, and then July 28, 2023, eventually switching places with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and moving to the Nov. 10, 2023 release date.
“They had a date, and they were prepping certain things, and you just have to lean into the process hardcore,” DaCosta said. “The way they make those films is very different to the way, ideally, I would make a film. So you just have to lean into the process and hope for the best.”
She added, “The best didn’t happen this time, but you kind of have to trust in the machine.”
DaCosta previously revealed in a 2023 interview that “one of the first things” she pitched “way back when” was the involvement of Adam Warlock, a cosmic character who would go on to debut in the James Gunn-directed Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and time travel. “I think they have enough time travel in Loki, so we didn’t do that,” she said at the time.
The Marvels, which cost about 12 times more than the $25 million-budgeted Candyman, reportedly ballooned to $374 million before a $66.7 million rebate brought the price tag down to an estimated $307 million.
Before The Marvels grossed a franchise-low $46 million in its opening weekend, Disney CEO Bob Iger noted during a November earnings call that “the [COVID] pandemic created a lot of challenges creatively for everybody, including for us. In addition, at the time that the pandemic hit, we were leaning into a huge increase in how much [content] we were making and I’ve always felt that quantity can be actually a negative when it comes to quality. And I think that’s exactly what happened. We lost some focus.”
Iger gave a more blunt explanation for The Marvels bombing at the box office when he gave a talk at the New York Times DealBook Summit weeks later, saying that “The Marvels was shot during COVID, and there wasn’t enough supervision on set [from executives].”
