The Four Color Media Monitor

Seth Mandel at Commentary spoke about Marvel/Disney's cowardice in how, in a way, they erased Sabra from the 4th Captain America film, which is easily one of the worst recent entries in the whole live action franchise:

For the duration of the recent explosion in anti-Semitism in the West, the Jewish community has been warning of the erasure of Jewish and Israeli people and symbols from the public square. And now that has been done by Disney and Marvel studios in its major film franchise—and the response has been muted.

To say that this is a bleak portent for the future of American Jewish belonging would be an understatement.

The background, in brief, is as follows. Marvel, which is owned by Disney, announced a couple of years ago that it was finally bringing its Israeli superhero, Sabra, into the film franchise, though it soon became clear she would be a minor character in someone else’s story. There was an immediate uproar—Sabra is proudly Israeli (in the comic books, she works for the Mossad) and identifiably Jewish, her uniform consisting of a blue and white pattern with a Jewish star in the center. The entertainment world was up in arms that such a person would share the screen with their childhood heroes.

Marvel relented and assured everyone that the character, Ruth Bat-Seraph, would be reinterpreted, without explaining what the changes would be. In the end, Captain America: Brave New World remade the character into an Israeli-born, Russian-trained American superagent. She wears a business suit. She blends nicely into the background. “No one will even remember her,” writes Vulture’s Darrin Franich.

In a way, Disney and Marvel’s cowardice did us one favor: The fact that the character, played by Israeli actress Shira Haas, drew protests at movie theaters can put an end to claims that critics are motivated by anything other than the existence of Israeli people anywhere on earth.

A problem with Sabra's original portrayal by Bill Mantlo, is that the Hulk story he wrote in 1981 was biased against her, in a whole insult to the intellect implying Israelis "wouldn't share" the land with Arabs. Ahem. Anybody who upholds Islamofascism can't be considered worth residing here, as October 7, 2023 made clear, and Donald Trump seems to understand. One can only wonder what Mantlo himself might say about the changes to his character, if he were still in good enough health to understand and comment on the issue. Mandel also reminds that:

A couple points here. First, the comics industry was built by Jews. Everyone making movies about comic-book heroes, and raking in the dough from ticket prices and licensing agreements, is doing so on the backs of the Jews who made it possible. As has been noted, “Jews created the first comic book, the first graphic novel, the first comic book convention, the first comic book specialty store, and they helped create the underground comics (or ‘Comix’) movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Many of the creators of the most famous comic books, such as Superman, Spiderman, X-Men, and Batman, as well as the founders of MAD magazine, were Jewish.”

Is this the “cultural genocide” I’ve heard so much about from smug college kids? It must be.

What's bizarre is if these same smug college students even read comics originally created by Jews to start with, though even that could surely be doubtful today. If Stan Lee were still around, without a doubt, he'd be soundly rejected by one of the very crowds he once marketed his comics to. Even Mantlo would likely be reviled, no matter his approach, and he was quite a leftist for his time.

Of course, if columnist Seth Mandel thinks it's appalling Sabra couldn't be elevated into a more respectable icon, maybe he should consider it's sadder still if nobody who's specialized in comicdom makes an effort to develop one of their own in a different comic. Why, he might even want to consider how troubling the developed background of a certain Harley Quinn was when she was first introduced in Batman: The Animated Series in 1993, before being introduced into the DCU at least 6 years later. That's definitely not what I'd consider a Jewish icon. Of course, if Colossal Boy from the Legion of Super-Heroes, who may have been given a Jewish background in the Bronze Age, were considered for a movie cast, chances are even that would be dumbed down by the upper echelons at Warner Brothers studios, much like they had a hand in dumbing down anything else in relation to their comics and other products over the years. Exactly why neither DC nor Marvel belong in a corporate structure.

Back to Captain America: Brave New World, the film's sunk in its 2nd week, having dropped nearly 70 percent, and John Nolte at Breitbart says:

This puts the troubled production – that reportedly cost as much as $350 million – in the same territory as previous Marvel flops like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels, which dropped off by 70 percent and 78 percent respectively during their second weekend in theaters.

The problem here is obvious: the repeat business is not there. What propels a movie into box office glory, especially a superhero movie, is repeat business. Brave New World earned a dreadful (for a superhero movie) B- CinemaScore. Even Marvel failures like The Marvels, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and The Eternals earned a B CinemaScore.

Brave New World’s B- is the lowest CinemaScore in Marvel’s two-decade history.

What that means is that the people who were most eager to see Brave New World, those who saw it opening weekend, didn’t much care for it. So why would they go back to experience it again?

I found the movie bad to mediocre without a single inspiring moment.

Counting this weekend, by Monday Brave New World’s total domestic gross will sit somewhere around a pathetic $140 million. This is especially pathetic when you consider there has been no real competition in theaters since Brave New World’s release ten days ago. Right now, the fourth chapter in the Captain America franchise could fail to hit $200 million domestic and $500 million worldwide, which means Disney will lose a fortune when it needs at least $650 to $750 million to break even.

Anybody who's going to be as cowardly as they turned out to be is asking for the financial failure this film could turn out to be. But, let's also consider that anybody with the writing and art talent who won't develop their own comics with Israeli/Jewish characters that could serve as inspirational is also failing the needed messages. So maybe artists both local and overseas who're realists might want to begin proving they can think of stuff that can be unabashed and bold, and relay a positive message along with focusing on serious issues, even metaphorically. That's something we really need now, and artists and writers who recognize the need for standing firm against Islamic terrorism in pop culture would do well to start working on something courageous.

Labels: dreadful writers, history, islam and jihad, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics, terrorism, women of marvel