It’s been six years since Steve Rodgers handed over Captain America reigns to Sam Wilson, Aka The Falcon, in “Avengers: Endgame.” Wilson (Anthony Mackie) will be the lead of Julius Onah’s “Captain America: Brave New World.” A trailer was released in the summer.
Two different cuts of the film test screened last week, and plot details for one of the cuts have leaked online. The person who attended didn’t seem to like the movie all that much.
Based on the folks I’ve spoken to, those who attended were either given a red or green bracelet and were split up into two different theaters. The reactions I’ve heard have not been very kind to this movie, which is being described as “inessential” and “flat.”
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Reshoots on ‘Brave New World’ happened in August. This could explain why two different cuts were shown. Last year, after receiving negative test scores in another screening, and Marvel themselves underwhelmed by an early cut they saw of the film, ‘Brave New World’ was delayed to February 2025. Extensive reshoots were called, with “three major action sequences” having been filmed, between May and August 2024 in Atlanta.
‘Brave New World’ had originally wrapped filming in June 2023, and was set for a July 2024 release date, but it’s now turned into this monstrous mess for Marvel. You just don’t push a movie this big out of your calendar, and then decide to dump it in February, unless major trouble is brewing.
Last December, Matthew Orton was hired by Marvel to pen “additional scenes and material”. Orton’s work was shot during this summer’s reshoots. They’ve also added new characters to the story. Will audiences even show up to a Captain America movie that doesn’t star Chris Evans?
“why can’t they just make it good”
well, as it turns out, good, truly good and griping, is hard.
when you have the stars who can carry just about anything, quality can slip a bit, but when you don’t, and it’s been proven the stars you’re using, aren’t compelling personalities, for whatever reason, and don’t have the draw themselves, good becomes paramount. and because the mcu is built around intertwined narratives which are almost completely dependent on characters, when the characters themselves aren’t working (mackie, larson, et all) and the narrative itself is far past being played out, you’re sorta up a creek.
Yeah, I think it’s telling that even the Disney+ series that setup Mackie taking over as Capt. America didn’t even really “star” his character, it was Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Falcon has never been that big of a character on his own in the Marvel universe, he’s just some guy that flies, even Baron Zermo and John Walker were more interesting than anything else in that series. Mackie seems like a nice, funny guy, but I don’t know that he has a big enough personality to play a leading role. I could see a “buddy film” with Winter Soldier, since they seem to have good screen chemistry with Sebastian Stan, but that would just be a repeat of the D+ series.
Still, you have to blame the writing for all of that, not the actors or the source material. Because what’s on screen can vary wildly from the comics if you want it to.
Yeah, I think the actors try to do as good a job as they can do with the material they’re given, unfortunately, Disney has just been churning out mediocre production after mediocre production. Either they’re just hiring sub-par writers/directors, not giving them enough time to develop the material, or a combination of both. I think if given a good enough script, Mackie could probably handle it on his own, but unfortunately the people running the company are probably not up to snuff and just end up giving us sub-par drivel like they’re trying to deal with with Brave New World. Star Wars has basically gone to shit now, but in the hands of somebody competent, like what we got with Andor, they could still deliver some awesome material. Unfortunately, we just can’t really depend on them to do that.
One thing I was trying to keep in mind with this movie is I’m pretty sure that it’s the last MCU production to start filming before Kevin Fiege’s shift to “making good stories” or whatever. I think the turnover shows too, as this movie started filming in March of 2023 and is getting released a mere month or two before Thunderbolts*, which started filming in February of 2024. But it seems like the reshoots couldn’t fix this movie’s problems.