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In many respects Marvel Studios just had a good weekend. The final episode of Loki Season 2 dropped on Friday last week and was a wonderful hour of TV that riffed delightfully on Groundhog Day before coming to a satisfying, metaphysical close that wrapped up the title character’s twelve year story in a way that brought his two desires, to sit on a throne and to be a god, together with bittersweet poeticism. Then The Marvels was released in cinemas marking a joyous return to the neat and contained nature of those early MCU adventures, only this time with an all female lead cast that brought its characters together in a way that felt neatly driven by narrative rather than the clumsy contrivance of that moment on the battlefield in Endgame.

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The big shame is that no one was really there to see it.

The Disney+ viewing figures for Loki were almost half of what the first season did back in Summer 2021, and The Marvels has seen the worst box office receipts of any MCU film ever.

Audiences have clearly got a little tired of these stories. 2019’s Endgame, as the 22nd film in the series, was the glorious pinnacle of everything that had come before (that one laboured moment with the women teaming up notwithstanding, although even with that I can see what they were going for and applaud the intention). Now, after ten more movies and no less than seventy one episodes of their streaming shows, all of mixed quality, some of the viewers have simply walked away. (Having collated those numbers, I’m amazed anyone has stuck with it and as one of those who has I’m wondering what else I could have been doing with my time.)

As suggested though, despite spinning off from a previous movie and two, arguably three, TV shows, The Marvels does feel like it stands apart more that what the studio have given us recently. It comes from but isn’t slave to the wider bloated narrative. I guess both the success and failure of this movie are down to the fact that it doesn’t feel like essential viewing. It just tells a fun little side story built around strong characterisation which is exactly what this studio excelled at in the beginning. The tag line of Captain Marvel was ‘Higher, Further, Faster’ and for this one they have added the word ‘Together’, but they could have just as well have put ‘Shorter, Smaller, Simpler’ on the poster as that sums it up pretty well.

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece examining the way Marvel Studios was depicting woman superheroes and raised a worry that after recently releasing their first movie with a sole woman in the lead (the aforementioned Captain Marvel) they then seemed to lose confidence in this idea, following it up with films where the ostensible female lead or co-lead was part of a group. This was certainly the case with Black Widow, Ant-man and The Wasp: Quantumania and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and it seemed that this film was going to follow suit. In this case at least though I needn’t have worried. It is something actually addressed in the script with the line ‘to stand tall, you don’t need to stand alone’ and the whole thing lives up to this. The dynamic between Captain Marvel and Kamala Khan and Monica Rambeau, from Ms. Marvel and WandaVision respectively, is in practice great and it does enhance rather than diminish the main hero’s story. Here she is not just a woman with unimaginable powers, she is a mentor, a leader and an ally. Her first film was a demonstrably feminist piece that showed her to be stronger than the men around her but here, in this company she has nothing to prove. Significantly the antagonist is also a woman. The film even has the confidence to give her some of the traits of the more stereotypical female characters of the past, having her show at various points self-doubt, conjugal objectives and a pretty dress. Still though her power and standing is not compromised.

In fact looking at the three women in this film together, each presents and redefines different culturally set facets of femininity. Carol, our original Marvel, is the socialite – taking risks and reacting with confidence and impetuousness to any situation. Monica is the career woman and Kamala is all about family. In this context they are shown to able to manage these things and still be strong, effective and absolutely no threat to one another. We also see them become a team which nicely brings in the element of companionship familiar from female-centric films as well.

Crucially The Marvels is also a huge amount of fun. Director Nia DeCosta is showing showing a different sense of humour here. There was some black comedy alongside the horror in her Candyman film but here she gives just the lightness of touch it needs. While the cinema takings have been disappointing here, with the $118 million taken over the first weekend being what a Marvel Studios movie would normally take on its first Friday alone, and not even half of what it cost to make, this is still the highest grossing film by a black female director. There is so much to be read into this in terms of the opportunities that exist in Hollywood and how even a blockbuster that is being classed as a commercial failure can represent a big win in this context. I just hope that no one associates the comparatively low numbers for this film with the women behind it, because creatively this a success. One way another I am sure the Nov 17th weekend will be a turning point for the studio but I hope it is allowed to present the new beginnings that it can.