‘The Marvels’ Arrives As The Third Worst-Reviewed MCU Movie Ever

If Disney was hoping that hyper-positive reviews may avert a box office cliff for The Marvels, that does not appear like it’s going to happen. While last night’s social media embargo lifting brought many positive impressions of the film, today, now that full reviews are live, The Marvels has debuted with a disappointing, all-important Rotten Tomatoes score.

With 68 reviews in, The Marvels has a 53% on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it the third worst-reviewed MCU movie overall and only the third Rotten scoring one ever. It joins the previous MCU film, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, on that list, though that movie was even lower with a 46%, the worst overall. The third rotten film is Eternals, which I maintain after all this time, really got a bad rap.

The 53% for The Marvels is lower that the main MCU projects that it spawned from. Captain Marvel had a 79%. WandaVision, which contains Monica’s origins, has a 91%. Ms. Marvel, Kamala’s origin, is the single highest-rated MCU project at a 98%. But The Marvels appears to be worse than the sum of its parts, and that’s even with the growing data the critics are harder on MCU films than they used to be.

For reference, here’s the bottom ten scored MCU movies, and you may notice a bunch of recent entries are present, including the ones previously mentioned:

• Thor – 77%
• Avengers Age of Ultron – 76%
• Iron Man 2 – 72%
• Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness – 73%
• The Incredible Hulk – 67%
• Thor: The Dark World – 67%
• Thor Love and Thunder – 63%
• The Marvels – 53%
• Eternals – 47%
• Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania – 46%

There is likely little chance we will get a fair sense of what audience scores will even be for The Marvels, as Captain Marvel was the reason Rotten Tomatoes had to change their user score policies in the first place due to mass fanboy anger at Brie Larson, but even with safeguards in place, I doubt audience scores will prove useful here, and I wouldn’t expect them to be high either way.

The Marvels was already shaping up to be a box office miss for Disney, but low critic scores will once again feed into the narrative that the MCU has lost its sense of quality control. Again, I think a certain amount of this is critics and audiences becoming exhausted with the MCU, but when projects are still good, they shine, like with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

So, there’s no way to spin this as good news for Marvel. It’s all bad, and it’s a shame given that Carol Danvers was originally supposed to be a lynchpin of this era of Marvel, and Iman Vellani’s Kamala remains probably the best-cast character in the MCU since Tony Stark himself. But at this point the MCU needs big new entries that are more than just “passable,” which is what we seem to have here.

We’ll see more critic reviews in soon, and audiences will give their own opinions tomorrow. Then everyone holds their breath for the opening weekend numbers, which should be something to see.

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