Captain America: Brave New World may have opened above box office expectations, but its second-week drop off of 68% was one of the worst Marvel has ever seen, and Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld has some thoughts on it.
Liefeld has always been actively engaged with at least monitoring the Marvel Cinematic Universe from afar, and when he saw that Brave New World had taken a beating in its second weekend, he called for the removal of the MCU’s head honcho Kevin Feige, saying “Get Feige off the mound. He’s spent.”
The comic writer and artist does have a point, as the 68% drop puts Brave New World into the top three Marvel films with week-to-week losses, a dubious honor at best. It’s tied with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania but still a bit behind The Marvels, which had a 78% dropoff. The factor that these films have in common is that they are all recent releases in Marvel’s post-Avengers: Endgame efforts, which has seen a slew of Marvel films crash after the opening weekend as the projects struggle to have legs. The studio has obviously been having a hard finding its footing since its successful conclusion of The Infinity Saga, despite a big win recently with Deadpool and Wolverine and a ton of hype for Fantastic Four: First Steps.
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“This is beyond a trend, it’s become the norm,” Liefeld added in another post. “If this was sports, Feige would be removed. Marvel brand is like Dodgers, Lakers, Yankees, Celtics, coaches that win championships are removed a year later when the results are disappointing.”
However, the creator isn’t the most unbiased person here. His experience with Marvel since Deadpool has come under the Disney umbrella has not been all that great, recently leading him to leave the company entirely. He’s been pretty out of the loop with the films since Disney bought Fox and claims that Marvel and Feige have routinely treated comic creators poorly and snubbed him on multiple occasions. Still, his baseball metaphor isn’t that far off base, even if it’s possibly coming from a bad space.
Feige, obviously, isn’t going anywhere unless he wants to, as being the creator of the only truly successful cinematic universe buys you all sorts of time and patience. Plus, with X-Men entering the MCU in the near future, Disney probably sees these as small stumbles until the big guns come into play.
Published: Feb 25, 2025 3:27 PM UTC