The Four Color Media Monitor

Well, it looks like the Marvel movieverse is catching up with the financial results of at least a few DC movieverse entries, which started strong upon their debuts, then took a considerable dive at the box office soon after. Forbes acknowledged the plummet in grosses, even as they took the side of wokeness by not honestly discussing the causes for the financial declines:

Walt Disney’s Thor: Love and Thunder is the top movie at the domestic box office yet again, earning $13.8 million on Friday. However, that’s a brutal 80% drop for the Chris Hemsworth/Natalie Portman sequel from its $69.5 million. In terms of MCU movies, that’s behind only the 82% drop for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness after a $91 million Friday. It’s on par with Black Widow (-79%) last July and Eternals (-75%) this past November. Alas, we’re likely looking at a $45 million weekend and a $233 million ten-day total, still solid by most rational standards but a record (for Marvel) 68% second-weekend plunge. With any luck, it’ll barely avoid the $100 million losers club (after a $144 million opening weekend). It should be over/under $500 million worldwide by tomorrow.

Yup, that's pretty steep for a drop, but too bad they won't even so much as question whether the woke LGBT pandering had anything to do with this, and apparently, they're using the foreign gross as an attempt to deflect from the domestic failure. All without making clear China banned the movie over the very issues Disney doesn't seem to have qualms about employing in western releases.

And on that note, it's fascinating how, among those who panned the movie, Polygon's doing so because the woke website's writer feels it didn't go far enough on the homosexuality themes:

More than any other Marvel Cinematic Universe film, Thor: Love and Thunder arrived with a certain level of queer expectation. Some fans hoped the second film from Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi would bring considerably more of what the previous film did well — not just in terms of wit and color, but also an expansion of Ragnarok’s rich subtext, a surprising amount of which can be read as queer. In Hollywood, blockbuster success is typically rewarded with creative freedom. Queer audiences could understandably infer that Ragnarok awarded Waititi and his collaborators a stack of chips that could be cashed in, at least partially, on the queerer story he says he wants.

Waititi and the film’s cast leaned into that reading on the Love and Thunder press tour, eagerly replying to fans who ask “How gay is it?” with quotes like “So gay.” But in the finished movie, it’s hard to see this queerness taken seriously. The most explicitly gay relationship is between fictional rock aliens that are all male and reproduce by holding hands over a lava pit. While that isn’t nothing — especially in the current political environment, where the very suggestion of something other than heteronormativity sends a reactionary media apparatus into a tizzy — it’s also cowardice. It’s a way to queer up a story without including actual queer people. (Valkyrie, an established bisexual character, does some flirting, but doesn’t really get a story of her own.)

[...] This is a disservice to queer people on both sides of Disney’s pop culture empire — its audience and its creators alike. The former group is left adrift when the company line rejects entirely understandable queer readings of its films, like Pixar’s Luca. The latter group can also feel trapped in a Sisyphean struggle. As Owl House creator Dana Terrace said last spring, creators working to widen the inclusivity of Disney’s offerings are naturally frustrated, knowing their efforts are effectively burnishing Disney’s reputation but that the company can still burn them at any time.

So for Polygon's panderers, the issue is not whether the action was poor and the comedy heavy-handed, it's just dissatisfaction over what they believe is insufficient emphasis on homosexuality. Even though what's described is already troubling enough. Of course, as any realist familiar with how these propagandists work knows, they'll never be satisfied until Thor himself is changed entirely to homosexual, and any and all of his lovers like Sif are kicked out of the picture. Needless to say, "some fans hoped" is also insulting as it implies all, rather than some vocal minority that only cares about their ideological standings and forcing it upon the creation in focus. And "creative freedom" in today's mainstream Hollywood? Don't make me laugh. They certainly don't respect conservative-leaning values as ingredients for storytelling.

Interestingly enough, Collider opined this latest Thor movie entry should be the last, in addition noting something about how the thunder deity's experienced certain loss of family/friends in these past movie entries:

But for as much as the fourth chapter shows that Thor and his exploits still have a withstanding likability and endless story potential for the future, I argue that Love and Thunder should be the final word in Hemsworth’s tenure as the space Viking for how it fulfills his most interpersonal needs for family.

Over the past 11 years, Thor has faced ancient evils, megalomaniacal titans and otherworldly terrors of every description on his travels, but what has persisted throughout each of his films is how much he values family and the tremendous grief he endured upon losing all of his loved ones. From even the first film Thor (2011), the Asgardian prince is surrounded by loved ones and is portrayed as an eager youth with an arrogant invincibility unafraid of death, taking the lives of those around him immortally for granted.

With each passing film, after losing his mother, father, countless friends, girlfriend, fellow Avengers, kingdom and his adopted brother, Thor’s character development came to be defined by how much he loved and lost practically everyone he has ever cared about and how he chooses to remedy it. Grief has shaped how Thor occupies his own stories and has coped with loss in his own ways through rage, depression and vengeance. In Love and Thunder, Thor denies acknowledging his pain and closed himself off from love of any kind out of fear of further loss and heartbreak.

The ending of each of Thor’s stories take something he loves away from him and present him greater pain to add to his grief, but while Love and Thunder still ends with the loss of Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), it is the first time that tragedy gifts Thor with an opportunity for new love.

Judging from what the 4th movie emphasizes, that's surely a perfect reason for bringing the Thor film series to an end, before they really pull something atrocious and insulting to the intellect in another installment, which is certainly possible, judging from where they've been going lately. I'd be a lot happier if the audiences who've been attending these films would read the 1962-2002 Thor comics instead. Walt Simonson's mid-80s run is a lot more engaging, and no live action movie should substitute for the source material in every way.

So, here's a sign the Marvel movie franchise is declining, and deservedly so, seeing how they've become far more obsessed with foisting political agendas upon the audience than actually entertaining them. If the Thor films end after this, that'll be a blessing and a great mercy.

Labels: golden calf of death, golden calf of LGBT, marvel comics, msm propaganda, sales, Thor, women of marvel