Bonfire Of The Hollywood Vanities
The nature of the tide sweeping the Los Angeles movie industry out to sea
Pedro Pascal is the perfect avatar of the postmodern, post-Harvey Weinstein Hollywood fetish for non-toxic masculinity and girlboss ‘empowerment’ narratives. He confirms it with every interview. He will not be quiet about his fringe political views or his hatred of J.K. Rowling. He consciously embraces and emulates loudmouth Rachel Zeigler of the late, ill-fated Snow White.
Pascal’s new film coming out this weekend, Fantastic Four: First Steps, is expected to make back about half of its reported production budget, not including the cost of the hurried re-shoots or the promotion spend. Last-minute box office projections ($110-125 million, down from $125-136 million early projections) are that it will not be a billion-dollar film, indeed it will underperform versus Superman, nor will it establish Pascal as the new leading man for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It might not even break even.
If Fantastic Four is not fantastic, it could be the end of the MCU, and will very likely end the era of emasculated male heroes onscreen. The moviegoing audience has rejected the creative vision of Kevin Feige, the man who has single-handedly ruined the MCU ever since 2023, when he succeeded in having Isaac Perlmutter’s creative oversight committee purged over politics. Feige’s management has left billions on the table in the name of “inclusion” and “diversity.” Investors ought to be howling for someone else to be included in his job, someone with more diverse ideas about making stories that people actually want to watch.
A disappointing box office performance by Pascal’s Fantastic Four will likely doom the big Marvel Avengers: Doomsday project, two or three films that probably need to gross more than $1.5 billion each just to pay for the ensemble casts being touted in advance publicity. Disney simply cannot afford to keep throwing money away on bad films made through Feige’s scrapbooking method just to push messages that please Kevin Feige.
Likewise, the days of pandering to an imaginary ‘modern audience’ that supposedly hates strong, stoic men, that allegedly wants to see women rewarded for simply being awesome and amazing without any sort of character arc, are ending. The late re-shoots for Fantastic Four reportedly followed poor test audience reactions to just such a narrative arc.
Early reviews describe a middling film with predictable structural problems and plot holes amid solid performances. Pascal has talent, but his moment as a leading man appears to be ending along with the archetype of emasculated manhood in which he has been typecast. Investors will now demand profitable crowd-pleasers instead of mediocre message films. They will want to see completed scripts before filming begins, AI making CGI cheaper, and production moved out of Los Angeles, away from the inflated egos, budgets, and risks of the Hollywood culture. They will want leading men who are actually masculine.
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