When a selling point for upcoming productions from the MCU and Lucasfilm have explicit reference to "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" and when you believe that character development with writing quality have gone downhill but are also dismissed as being a "bigot, racist or h***mophobe" online just for saying so (even if you didn't bring up gender, race or sexual identity) I wouldn't fault you for suspecting some pandering to a populist ideology might be at play. Of course nothing can be proven, but you can make a substantial case for it.
You can claim that "pandering" exists by trying to connect "Look, they talked up diversity" with "Look, the suits filed down all the edges of the story and now the characters are bland."
The thing that people have been trying to do, though, is then connect that "pandering" to box office performance, and that's where the theory just runs into a brick wall.
Again, these movies
are popular. They are not universally disliked at a baseline, much less for something specific like "pandering." No movie does +$300M at the box office because people are indifferent to it or can't stand it.
The problem seems to be that the movies aren't
profitable, or rather aren't
profitable enough. And that has sod all to do with diversity/pandering and everything to do with film studios' goals, expectations, and business practices.
In essence, the film studios are betting on every entry in these franchises as being potential billion-dollar films. That's how they treat each of them in the development process, and it's how they support them in the pre- and post-release marketing process. But the problem is that the films aren't actually performing like billion-dollar films. They're performing like hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars films....and that's
not enough for the studios. Or at least, it's not enough to justify the expenditures they made or support the development process they've adopted.
Let's step aside from Marvel for a second, and focus instead on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. LFL's budget for the film is estimated to have been about $300M. I don't know how much was spent on marketing. It used to be that you assumed the film's budget was simply replicated in marketing costs, but I question whether Dial of Destiny saw $300M worth of marketing. Although admittedly, I don't watch TV with commercials anymore, so what do I know. Regardless, they spent $300M just making the film, a bunch more money marketing it...and it brought in $384M worldwide in box office.
By any reasonable, objective standard, $384M box off is is
a crapload of money.
The problem is that they blew probably more than that amount in earning it.
Now, was that because the film dared to have a female character who was remotely competent? Was it because the film made Indy a broken shell of his former self?
Or was it maybe because the last Indy film left audiences feeling kinda blah? Or perhaps that people just don't buy the notion of a nearly-octogenarian action hero? Or maybe it's just that...
the brand isn't that strong anymore and kids have no idea who Indiana Jones actually is. Orrrrr maybe it's all manner of other stuff? Economic pressures, post-COVID theater-going tendencies (or rather, stay-at-home tendencies), etc., etc.
Answer: It actually doesn't really matter a ton. Because $384M worth of box office means your movie was
actually quite popular. It just wasn't $1B popular. And the reason this film is a "disappointment" is because they
spent money on it as if it was going to be a $1B film...and it just wasn't. If I spent that kind of money on a project and didn't even necessarily cover my costs, hell yeah I'd be disappointed, to put it mildly. On the other hand, if I'd spent, say, $100M on making it, and made 3x that much, I'd be pretty damn happy.
Again, the numbers don't bear out the "pandering" theory in terms of box office performance. What they show is that these studios' business practices in actually making the films are idiotic and they're making billion-dollar bets waaaaay too often.
