There is a notion that 2019’s Captain Marvel was not the success story we thought it was. Cosmic Book News, a small, independent media ‘outlet’ that focuses on (unsurprisingly) comic book media, including the Marvel Cinematic Universe (among other things), is claiming the first Captain Marvel film failed, despite the film’s takings of $1.128 billion at the box office. The argument put forward is a claim, on the site itself, that others have claimed many movie theatres were virtually empty.

If the theatres were virtually empty (and as we all know, claims on social media is always the best source of information… /endsarcasm), how could the film have made over a billion dollars? The answer? Disney spent hundreds of millions of dollars to boost the film’s performance. The lack of evidence for this doesn’t matter – there’s a few social media claims, repeated as being reliable, as per a small comic book site (which couldn’t possibly have an agenda), so it must be true!

A lot of the terms used on Cosmic Book News speak volumes about the conformation bias of the site’s authors. I quote:

Why fans getting rid of Captain Marvel 2 doesn’t come as a surprise is because the first movie was so bad (read my review here), as a lot of fans don’t like star Brie Larson and the movie introduced the woke MCU with its anti-male agenda and replacement of male characters at the expense of quality storytelling, which is what the MCU is all about going forward.

The authors don’t like the ‘woke’ agenda and the apparent ‘anti-male’ agenda of the MCU. In other words, they hate a pro-equality policy and they loathe strong female characters. The notion that a woman could be more than a housewife or sex object is utterly abhorrent. It enrages them to the point where they need to invent elaborate, unprovable notions about a major film studio spending huge sums of money to make it appear a film is success (never mind that said film is part of a series of hugely successful films).

I shouldn’t be surprised. The snowflakes who whine about the ‘woke’ brigade are often pro-Trump, and we know Donald Trump’s views on women. ‘Grab ’em by the pussy’. The character of Captain Marvel must leave them so trembling with fury that they can’t think straight.