You’re not going to believe this – actually, you probably will, considering how this train wreck of a production has gone – but Captain America: Brave New World is having more reshoots. This movie was supposed to have arrived in theaters in May of this year, then in July of this year; it’s now scheduled to be released on February 14, 2025. That’s three months away, and we’ve had two trailers, including one from D23 Brazil just a few days ago, plus extensive reshoots that have lasted for months at a time and brought in a new character, the villainous Sidewinder, played by Giancarlo Esposito. It’s from Esposito that word of these new reshoots comes; he was at an event on November 3 and spoke about how much fun he had playing Sidewinder in the film, then noted he was going back for reshoots “next week,” which, because this happened on November 3, is this week. You can see the video below courtesy of X account Cosmic Marvel:
Giancarlo Esposito himself confirmed this at a recent event:
“The Captain America story, as much as it’s been great to be on set to shoot it, I’m actually going back next week to do a little more.”
(: @Veno202) pic.twitter.com/dhPQd7EvsG
— Cosmic Marvel (@cosmic_marvel) November 3, 2024
This movie has “bomb” written all over it. Aside from the trouble Marvel has had with its films in recent years and the difficulty of getting people behind someone other than Steve Rogers calling himself Captain America – particularly a character like Sam Wilson, who doesn’t feel like a lead the way Steve did – test screenings for Brave New World have yielded lousy reviews from fans, even with multiple versions of the movie being screened. Earlier this year, Brave New World filmed four or five months of reshoots, which is enough time to have remade the entire movie. (Marvel claims it was only to add or alter a few action scenes, but I don’t buy that, especially when Tim Blake Nelson, who returns from The Incredible Hulk as the Leader, says they “shot it twice.”) And as Word of Reel says in their report on the new reshoots, a big Marvel movie getting shuffled around like this before it’s finally released in February indicates that Marvel and Disney have little to no faith in it.
That almost assured lack of faith makes me wonder why they’re even bothering with more reshoots. The budget for Brave New World is supposedly close to $400 million as it is, which is already insane. Why tack on still more money, which probably means it’s over the $400 million mark, if the movie is likely to underperform (at least) anyway? You’re just adding to the losses now. Unless these reshoots are huge, I don’t see how they can make the film much better. I also expect Brave New World to feel like some of Marvel’s other recent films, like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania – a hodgepodge of several movies that can barely keep the plot coherent. Because I tend to think that, with the limited window available to them, Marvel is trying to tweak some of the aspects of Brave New World test audiences liked the least. Quantumania supposedly did the same, only it was more about catering to Bob Iger’s demands than what fans wanted. As a result, Quantumania was an awful movie that felt disjointed and constructed from separate scripts that didn’t mesh. (Think of, for example, Ant-Man/Giant-Man telling Kang “We had a deal!” when there was no deal.) Don’t expect a lot of consistency – or even coherency – from Brave New World.
But do expect a lot of laughs from the failure it ends up being for Disney and the response from mainstream entertainment media when they try to protect their precious. Brave New World will have to make over $1 billion to break even, which doesn’t look possible right now. Typically, only the Avengers movies make over $1 billion; the only solo MCU films to crack that threshold were Iron Man 3, the first one after The Avengers; Captain America: Civil War, which was essentially an Avengers movie; the second and third Spider-Man movies, which featured the ultra-popular Spider-Man; Black Panther, which became a sort of cultural event; and Captain Marvel, which rode the coattails of Infinity War and was touted as being necessary to understand Endgame (which it wasn’t). What does Brave New World have as a selling point, other than Harrison Ford and the introduction of Red Hulk? This is going to be a money pit for Disney, and it’s astonishing how they keep digging it further down.
Let us know what you make of yet another round of Captain America: Brave New World reshoots in the comments!
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