Don’t Feed The Trolls, And Don’t Blame The Marvels Director Nia DaCosta For The Film’s Box Office

DaCosta is, to put it simply, going places. Her first movie, the 2018 neo-Western “Little Woods,” was a critical darling and her second film, the 2021 horror reboot/sequel “Candyman,” while less well-received, did quite well financially despite premiering at a time when the box office was still recovering from the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns. Her going on to helm an MCU film right after that is standard procedure nowadays for Hollywood, where up-and-comers are frequently hired to oversee big-budget projects after scoring a smaller hit. Yet, for some reason, unlike DaCosta, nobody accused Colin Trevorrow of being a “diversity hire” when he went from directing “Safety Not Guaranteed” to “Jurassic World.” How peculiar.

Anyway, there are plenty of reasons “The Marvels” misfired at the box office that were firmly out of DaCosta’s hands, including the cast being unable to promote the film until the actors’ strike was resolved two days before it opened and the fact that superhero tentpoles are no longer the dominant box office force they were pre-pandemic. DaCosta has also addressed the fact that she began preparing her next film, the Tessa Thompson-led “Hedda,” while “The Marvels” was still in post-production.

“For me personally, it was literally just that they moved the date of the film four different times, and so instead of it being a two-year process, which I was deeply committed to, it became a three-and-a-half-year process,” she told Jake’s Takes, adding that she continued to work on “The Marvels” remotely while prepping “Hedda” (which she couldn’t postpone any longer without risking it being canceled). By then, “everyone was so clear about what [‘The Marvels’] was, what we wanted, everyone knew what I wanted. So it really wasn’t the dramatic sort of thing that I think people are feeling.”