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The past week presented a remarkable challenge to some of America’s longest-standing norms (and constitutional amendments). A green card-holder who’s married to an American citizen was disappeared in plain sight, the President of the United States turned the White House lawn into a car dealership as part of a naked bid to spare the world’s richest man from the consequences of the economy they’re both determined to crash at our expense, and — most unexpected of all, if also most welcome — Marvel actually released something bold and creatively provocative for the first time since Chloé Zhao was allowed to shoot with natural light.
Sure, that “something” was the third trailer for a movie that still feels like it could’ve been an email, but at a time when even the most shocking events immediately seem like well-seeded inevitabilities, I’ll take my good surprises where I can get them.
And I’m of the mind that this was a good surprise. Titled “Absolute Cinema,” the first “Thunderbolts*” promo since the sub-ideal release of “Captain America: Brave New World” went to extraordinary — and extraordinarily specific — lengths to push back against the idea that Hollywood’s most profitable blockbuster machine has been permanently enshittified into a massive slop factory.
Released in tandem with a Florence Pugh interview in which she insisted that “Thunderbolts*” “ended up becoming this quite badass indie, A24-feeling assassin movie with Marvel superheroes,” the trailer starts with the actress saying “there’s something wrong.” It’s unclear if she’s talking about our world, her own, or the production company that bridges them together, but her point is hard to argue regardless. Then: A Marvel Studio logo we’ve never seen before, the colors and flash of which do more to evoke the false humility of A24 or Plan B’s company idents than the fascistic “we own you” energy we tend to get from those of a major studio.
Cue a fat electro beat courtesy of French DJ Gesaffelstein, miles removed from the hushed silence that most superhero movie trailers use to suggest gravitas, and — what’s this? — a shot of Pugh yawning!? Superheroes aren’t supposed to yawn! Superheroes are supposed to wink and fly and say things like “we have to stop CGI Harrison Ford before he eats the Washington Monument!” But “Thunderbolts*” isn’t your daddy’s superhero movie. It isn’t even my daddy’s superhero movie (which was “The Dark Knight,” at least until he walked out of it halfway through in favor of watching “Mamma Mia!” for the second time). No, “Thunderbolts*” has an asterisk in its title.
And what does that asterisk mean? It means this isn’t a regular Marvel (as Tim Robinson might describe it in A24’s upcoming “Friendship”), it’s a cool Marvel. Where “Captain America: Brave New World” was sold on the premise of watching Sam Wilson rebuild the Avengers, this trailer for “Thunderbolts*” downplays the movie’s role in a corporate mega-strategy in favor of foregrounding its indie cred. It highlights its cast by boasting that it’s “From the stars of ‘Midsommar,’ ‘A Different Man,’ and ‘You Hurt My Feelings” (the last of which briefly electrified me with the hope that Jeannie Berlin might be playing The Void, until I remembered that Julia Louis-Dreyfus has been in several of these things), three A24 movies that combined to gross $150 million less than “The Marvels” did alone.
“The writers & director of ‘Beef.’” Louis-Dreyfus sips a glass of water. “The cinematographer of ‘The Green Knight.’” Someone hurts themselves. “The production designer of ‘Hereditary.’” Stan screams. “The editor of ‘Minari.’” “The composers of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’” (a compelling argument, if we’re being honest). What is coming from all of these talented people from the A24CU? It’s not an Avengers movie, that’s for sure. “The Avengers are not coming,” a voice tells us. “Who will keep people safe?”
Then, and only then, does the trailer begin to highlight its famous Marvel characters, as it plasters their names on the screen with an EDM punch and a film strip wiggle that seems lifted straight from the marketing for “Spring Breakers” and “The Bling Ring.” Stan spills something on his shirt, a person in a chicken suit gets punched in the face, and David Harbour screams “Yessssssss!” It’s all vibes and no plot, but those vibes tell a story of their own: This isn’t going to be another cookie-cutter spectacle about people in spandex fighting to stop a beam of light from the sky. This is going to be a real movie. A dangerous one, even.
I’m not sure how far I trust those implied promises (or maybe I am sure, and it’s not very), but I have no trouble believing the broader message that’s being conveyed here: After dictating the culture for the 17 years or so, Marvel has finally been reduced to the point of reacting to it. After 17 years of watching Disney’s competitors wish they were Marvel, we’re seeing Marvel desperately try to be someone else.
But the MCU of it all is just the tip of the iceberg here, as this brief web trailer provides a wildly prismatic biopsy of the movie business as it stands today. There’s a lot going on here. For one thing, the Disney marketing department’s attempt to frame “Thunderbolts*” as an indie film is a fascinating conflation between aesthetics and the means of production.
MCU installments are glossy plastic eyesores because they cost several hundred million dollars and have to make several times that much in order to break even, an economic condition that requires them to be generic enough to appeal to a four-quadrant audience of casual moviegoers from all around the world. A24 movies can be shot in a way that dynamically serves the story at hand because the veneer of artistic license is a big part of what the studio is selling, and also because the financial success of “I Saw the TV Glow” or whatever depends more on Letterboxd than it does on China.
For another thing, the Disney marketing department’s attempt to distill “the A24 style” with the “Thunderbolts*” footage at its disposal should be enough to prove once and for all that there is no “A24 style.” While it’s true that a large portion of today’s viewing public regards the more successful American studios as the primary artistic force behind the films they produce (a depression indicator that points back to the Golden Age of Hollywood, and a trend that I suspect will continue as our economy grows even more stratified), the fact of the matter is that A24 is a brand whose success and ubiquity have been confused for a visual identity.
There are certainly a number of overlapping signifiers in their collective output (e.g. fluorescent lighting, the state of Florida, wall-to-wall coverage on IndieWire.com), but no one would ever suggest that it’s as hard to distinguish between “Lady Bird” and “The Iron Claw” as it is between any two Hong Sang-soo movies, or that “Minari” and “A Different Man” — to use two of the titles cited in “Absolute Cinema” — were as interchangeable as “Black Widow” and “Captain America: Winter Soldier.”
So why is it so obvious that Marvel is specifically cribbing from A24 with its the “Thunderbolts*” trailer? Because the promo successfully captures the same brash confidence that A24’s marketing campaigns is able to reverse engineer from its films, while simultaneously being incapable of conveying the “you haven’t seen this before” novelty that backstopped “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” or the “you don’t even know what this is” eventization that allowed the first promo for “The Brutalist” to feel as “monumental” as the film itself. As a result, the latest “Thunderbolts*” trailer doesn’t feel like an A24 movie so much as it feels like someone trying to imitate an A24 movie; by using a similar approach to sell something that we have definitely all seen before to one degree or another, Marvel has only helped to reaffirm that A24 is more attitude than aesthetic.
But the fact that Marvel is trying to look a bit more like A24 at the same time as A24 is trying to look a bit more like a traditional film studio (complete with $70 million period epics slated for awards season) is only so interesting to me because of how those trends reflect a larger shift in the way that mainstream entertainment is consumed: the inevitable sea change from a casual monoculture to a network of siloed devotees. Fanboys are out, enthusiasts are in.
I’ve long feared that film — or at least the practice of watching it as it was meant to be seen — would go the way of opera, as movie theaters became exclusive to big cities and the cost of seeing them priced out all but a certain class of cinephiles (which would of course have a devastating effect on the number and variety of movies that got made in the first place). I’ve feared that would happen because it’s obviously happening already; even London’s most famous independent cinema is struggling to survive, while it was reported this week that Hollywood studios have been inexplicably resistant to AMC’s pleas for longer theatrical windows.
But the best time to make things better is when you can see them going from bad to worse, and I can’t help but feel like the “Thunderbolts*” trailer indicates that you — by which I mean anyone who cares about this shit enough to have read this far — will have an outsized say in whatever happens next. As the mass audience fragments and the cultural ecosystem fractures apart further than it has already (a self-own on Disney’s part, as the company’s streaming greed made it impossible for a new MCU movie to feel like the mega-event that it once did), even the biggest corporations on Earth will have to compensate with genuine excitement what they’ve lost in blind obligation. If the Nazification of Tesla has taught me anything, it’s that a brand is only as strong as the people who love it.
I’m sure a few unfortunate souls are happy to flaunt their awfulness on four wheels (as with all aspects of the right, the Cybertruck’s ugliness is more of a feature than a bug), but MAGA chuds alone aren’t enough to sustain a gazillion dollar car brand when the average person thinks it’s a sign of the Fourth Reich. If they were, then Elon Musk wouldn’t be on the brink of tears as Fox News questioned him about the strain that being a historically terrible human being has put on his signature business.
Or, on a more relevant note, consider “The Electric State,” an unwatchable $320 million streaming movie that virtually no one is excited to see, even though Netflix will inevitably send out a press release proclaiming that it’s the most-watched spectacle since the moon landing or whatever. I wrote in my review that “The Electric State” doesn’t just feel like it was made by AI, it also feels like it was made for AI, and that’s the very feeling that “Absolute Cinema” is trying to push so hard against. Perhaps there was a time when simply making “big-screen entertainment” available to the masses was enough for a quasi-monopolistic outfit like Netflix to survive, but there’s a reason why the executive who greenlit the Russo brothers’ latest boondoggle — and so many other of the streamer’s riskiest movies, mega-budget movies, a few of them excellent! — has been replaced by someone with a mandate to make things that might do more to justify their expense.
On the same tip, there’s a reason why “Joker: Folie à Deux” cratered at the box office even though its predecessor cleared a billion dollars, just as there’s a reason why a three-and-a-half-hour Brady Corbet epic about a traumatized Hungarian architect has had the zeitgeist in a chokehold for much of the last few months. What used to be a battle for our wallets has become a war for our attention, and it’s being fought in Twitter replies, impassioned Subreddits, and — most crucially of all — on Letterboxd, where movie opinions are the only currency that matters to legions of young people who don’t have any other kind to spend.
Content isn’t king anymore, especially now that Gen-AI has devalued it worse than a memestock. Love it or hate it, people want to experience something real and worth talking about. Discourse is toxic, but it’s the best press money can buy. At the same time A24 has proven that hardcore enthusiasm can be converted into general interest, Marvel has proven that it’s getting much harder to drive things in the opposite direction. The future belongs to movies that people actually want to see; for Marvel’s sake, I can only hope that trying to sell a blockbuster along those lines will eventually inspire them to make a blockbuster along those lines. Fingers crossed that “Thunderbolts*” turns out to fit the bill, because time is ticking, and the next pair of “Avengers” movies already have all too much in common with “The Electric State.”
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