Captain Marvel: Actual Facts

The current front of the culture wars is super hero movies; led off by Captain Marvel, which long before release was hawked as a feminist story by the directors, actors, and advertising, and criticized by - let's say "non-feminists" to keep things objective - for exactly that. Since the movie's release, progressive media outlets have been celebrating the movie's astounding success, while the opposition has been claiming bullshit and saying the movie is a failure. Instead of wading into the arguments and counter-arguments, let's take a moment to examine the movie's objective statistics. (I'll be using Wonder Woman as a comparison since it's... well, comparable. Both are female-led superhero origin stories by a major company with a budget of around $150 million and an extensive marketing push.)

The part that's easier to wrap our heads around is the ratings. According to Rotten Tomatoes, one movie comes in with an audience approval of 62% and an average audience rating of 2.8/5 (or 56%). The other presents with an audience approval of 88% and an average audience rating of 4.3/5 (86%). The latter numbers are from Wonder Woman. The former are for Captain Marvel. That's a 25 - 30 percent advantage for the Amazonian.

("But surely," Captain Marvel's defenders cry, "this is just misogynist trolls skewing the poll results!" Well, that's not a statistical question, but we can address it nonetheless. The proposed explanation is that woman-hating individuals or groups are sinking the ratings on purpose because the movie stars a strong woman. But remember, our comparison is with another prominent movie about a strong leading woman, which would also have been a target of such a hate mob. Clearly, the "misogynist trolls" explanation has no legs to stand on.)

We aren't done, though. Even ignoring the audience scores as potentially biased... we still have the critics scores. Back to Rotten Tomatoes: One movie gets 93% critic approval with an average score of 76.5%; "top" critics were slightly more critical, giving 90% approval with an average score of 76.1%. The other movie has a 79% approval with an average rating of 68%, and among "top" critics that drops to 62% approval and a 62.7% average rating. The differences here are less than in the audience scores (apart from top critics, who have a clear 30% preference), but there's still an obvious winner. Again, the higher scores go to Wonder Woman, and Captain Marvel glides in at scores that tend to indicate a mediocre movie. It bears mentioning, here, that the progressive media isn't just saying "Captain Marvel didn't bomb" (which is questionable, these numbers are borderline bombing for a major release like this), they're claiming that Captain Marvel was a rousing success, which is factually incorrect based on both audience and critic scoring.

There is, of course, the other way a movie can be successful: By the ticket sales, regardless of how much the people who bought tickets actually ended up liking it. For this, we're going to first take a gander at the pre-release projections. For Wonder Woman, predictions had it at anywhere from $65 to $115 million for the domestic opening weekend with an additional $100 million internationally. (I don't feel like getting a source for that number; look it up yourself if you want.) The actual opening weekend was at the high end with $103 million domestic and around that much again internationally. Wonder Woman also had what the industry calls "legs", meaning it kept walking in more sales week after week; you'll see in that last link a nice graph; the shaded area is a projection, not the personal opinion type, mind you, but rather by an algorithm with inputs consisting of the known opening weekend performance of the movie and the performance of all previous movies over the last several years. Notice how Wonder Woman's actual take skirts the top of that projection the whole way; it wasn't just a good long-term draw, it was a fantastic one.

Now we turn to the elephant in the room. Predictions for Captain Marvel placed it at $80 to $140 million for the domestic opening weekend, with a rough match internationally. How did it actually do? An opening weekend of $153 million domestic and at least $223 million internationally. That means it absolutely soared past those predictions... except that isn't the whole story. Captain Marvel's predictions actually dropped dramatically leading up to the release; they initially sat much higher, at a $140 to $180 million domestic opening. The same early predictions had Wonder Woman hovering at around $80 million domestic. Taking this into account, Captain Marvel's opening weekend actually fell to the low end of initial predictions, while Wonder Woman flew past hers.

And what of the "legs" on Captain Marvel? Well, you can see that chart for yourself, linked above. Where Wonder Woman sat on the top of the expected performance area the whole way, Captain Marvel immediately flopped to the bottom of the cone, and is still below the midpoint at its second week. So there, too, Captain Marvel is an under-performer.

In summary: Captain Marvel has nothing on Wonder Woman, by audience and critic ratings or by performance against projections. It only "wins" in the raw number of tickets sold, which, frankly, is the least informative comparison to make; by that logic, any movie released at a film festival is automatically horrible because it only had a few hundred viewers. The progressive media's desire to hype up how amazing this film is supposedly doing is just adding to the perception that they're out of touch, and lending credence to the cries of "fake news" used to smear the media as a whole. If, by some minute chance, you're one of those media people... please stop. "Sticking it to the trolls" doesn't work if you have to be dishonest to do it; it just erodes your credibility, and the credibility of journalism as a whole.