Brie Larson Facing A Terrible Change For The Marvels
Well, that's disappointing.
If you thought you’d finally heard the end of all the big studio movie schedule shake-ups, sober up — you’re wrong. Disney/Marvel just announced another big change. The next film confirmed to star Brie Larson as Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel — The Marvels — is not arriving as planned on February 17, 2023. The film has been pushed back five months to July 28, 2023.
As reported by Deadline and others, The Marvels is switching places with Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania, which was originally scheduled to bow next July. Now the third Ant-Man entry will release next February and Brie Larson will wait to the end of July for The Marvels. Meanwhile, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 remains solid on May 5, 2023, watching the other two films play musical chairs around it.
Why the change? Does Marvel want to premiere Jonathan Majors as Kang sooner than planned? Does the fact that Kang is all about time travel just make them want to mess with scheduling as an indirect promotional tool? Do they think if they move Ant-Man 3 to an earlier month that, essentially, that’s 5 fewer months Evangeline Lily has to embarrass them by endorsing morons who compare vaccines to the Holocaust? Or does Brie Larson just really hate February?
No, it’s none of those reasons apparently. Deadline reports no drama in the decision. They say they’ve heard that the Paul Rudd flick is further along in the production process than the Brie Larson one, so Marvel figured “Hey, it isn’t like the entire cinematic world has been nothing but one schedule change after another for the past two years! Why not switch?”
Feel free to call us overly suspicious, but we can’t help but speculate especially when this change comes the day after the news that — the weekend before The Marvels‘ new release date — Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and the Margot Robbie led Barbie will go head-to-head. Could it be that Disney and Marvel have more confidence in Brie Larson competing with those two powerhouses than they might have in Paul Rudd? After all, 2019’s Captain Marvel made $1.1 billion, compared to Ant-Man & The Wasp‘s — the better performing of the Ant-Man films — $622.7 million. In fact, Captain Marvel‘s domestic take-home ($701.6 million) beat Ant-Man 2‘s worldwide. Seems like between the two, The Marvels might be the one to face Nolan’s famously monochromatic Oppenheimer and Barbie Quinn.
This makes the third date change for the Brie Larson superhero flick. Before even the title was unveiled, The Marvels was scheduled to release this summer, on July 8. A year later, the title was revealed along with a schedule shift back to November 11. Then, last October, when almost the entire post-2021 Marvel schedule got knocked back — save, of course, for the seemingly immovable Guardians Vol. 3 — The Marvels fell back to February 17, 2023, with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever taking over its November slot.
The good news is that, of course, eventually Marvel just has to release the movie. They could always make us wait even longer. Brie Larson could wind up like Orson Welles, whose final film The Other Side of the Wind took close to fifty years to hit theaters. We don’t think The Marvels will take quite that long, but even if it does, by that point movies will be directly uploaded to our brains and we can watch them while meditating in our isolation pods.
