With the exception of James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, 2023 hasn’t been the greatest year for blockbuster comic book adaptations, but lumping The Marvels in with the high-profile failures is premature even by the standards of Brie Larson’s army of detractors.

After all, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania ended up as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s worst-reviewed movie of all-time, and reportedly limped out of theaters as the franchise’s biggest money-loser ever. Meanwhile, Shazam! Fury of the Gods was designated as the heftiest bomb in DCU history, only for it to lose that title a matter of months later when The Flash came along and instantly fell off a commercial cliff.

We’re still four months away from the release of the Captain Marvel sequel – which we should point out raked in over $1.1 billion from theaters and still ranks as one of the MCU’s top-earning origin stories – but a brand new trailer has inevitably reignited the discourse that The Marvels is a disaster waiting to happen.

Obviously, nobody will be batting an eyelid that some folks are predicting the worst case scenario for the follow-up to the MCU’s lowest-rated feature on Rotten Tomatoes in terms of its user rating, or the one that was determined as its most-hated installment by way of a wide-ranging study.

It’s been a bad year for spandex-clad crimefighters in general, but if The Marvels can even come close to matching Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and avoid being trashed by critics in the face of the pre-ordained review-bombing, then it can’t be called anything other than a certifiable smash.

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