‘Captain America’ Becomes One Of Marvel’s Worst-Reviewed Films Amid Protests From Progressives And Conservatives
The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s latest installment, “Captain America: Brave New World,” opens Friday fresh off the heels of some of the superhero franchise’s worst-ever reviews as well as several controversies, including protests over an Israeli superhero character and anti-“woke” conservative backlash.
Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford star in “Captain America: Brave New World,” which is receiving a … [+]
“Captain America: Brave New World” has just a 53% score on Rotten Tomatoes, one of only three movies in MCU’s catalog—which now spans 35 films—to receive a “rotten” score, a designation given to movies that have a score under 60%.
The newest installment only ranks above “Eternals” (2021) and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” (2023), two recent MCU films that failed to impress critics.
The movie’s poor reviews come on the heels of Disney CEO Bob Iger stating on an earnings call last year that Disney, particularly the MCU, would “reduce output and focus more on quality” after several films, including “The Marvels,” failed to make a dent at the box office and received middling reviews.
Marvel previously released about three to four films per year, but only one MCU installment hit theaters in 2024: “Deadpool & Wolverine,” which fared much better with a 78% critics score and more than $1.3 billion in box office gross.
In “Captain America: Brave New World,” actor Anthony Mackie makes his film debut as the titular superhero, taking over the role from Chris Evans, who starred in multiple MCU films.
Many critics considered the film one of Marvel’s worst outputs. Rotten Tomatoes top critic A. A. Dowd wrote for Digital Trends the film is a new “rock bottom” for the franchise with a “mess” of a plot, stating “no blockbuster that cost this much money should look this shoddy.” Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri slammed Marvel as becoming a “giant slop machine,” accusing the franchise of spinning “out of control into the confused and shallow mess that we have before us.” In a 1.5-star review, Washington Post critic Ty Burr called the film “humorless” and a “pixel-pounding mishmash” that is “more interested in fan service and protecting corporate IP” than in telling a coherent story. The Hollywood Reporter critic Frank Scheck blamed the film’s writers for letting Mackie and his co-stars down with poor material.
The film stirred some controversy by including what seemed to be an Israeli superhero when it was announced in September 2022 Israeli actress Shira Haas would play Ruth Bat-Seraph, also known by her alter-ego Sabra, a character who appears in the Marvel comics. The character is a member of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, in the Marvel comics, but Marvel clarified in 2022 that the character would be reimagined for the film. After the trailer was released last summer, an updated description for the film described Haas’ character as a U.S. government official, not a member of the Mossad, and The Hollywood Reporter reported the film would not use her alter-ego name Sabra, which some critics pointed out is the same name as a refugee camp in Lebanon where Palestinians were massacred in 1982. But the decision to change Bat-Seraph’s backstory angered Israeli critics, and the Israeli news outlet Haaretz published a story claiming she was “stripped” of her “Israeliness.” Pro-Palestinian activists, meanwhile, have protested the character’s inclusion. Organizations supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement called for boycotts of the film, while dozens of protesters gathered at the film’s Hollywood premiere Tuesday.
“Captain America” has been caught in the crosshairs of the anti-“woke” and anti-diversity, equity and inclusion culture wars over the past several weeks, particularly since Mackie made controversial comments about his character at a question-and-answer session. “For me, Captain America represents a lot of different things and I don’t think the term ‘America’ should be one of those representations,” Mackie said, stating he believes the character is a “man who keeps his word, who has honor, dignity and integrity.” The comments received immediate blowback from conservatives online, who considered his statement anti-American, and some slammed Mackie as “woke” or a “DEI” Captain America. Mackie clarified his comments on Instagram, stating he is a “proud American and taking on the shield of a hero like [Captain America]
is the honor of a lifetime,” adding he has “utmost respect for those who serve and have served our country.” Director Julius Onah defended Mackie in an interview with Vanity Fair, stating “things at times get misinterpreted.” Disney has long been a target by anti-“woke” activists, who have slammed several of its films, including “The Marvels” and “The Little Mermaid,” for centering LGBTQ themes, women and people of color.
The film’s box office outlook is promising, according to projections from multiple outlets, including Variety and Deadline, both of whom predict the film will gross about $80 million over the weekend and $90 million to $95 million over the extended President’s Day weekend. That would mark the biggest opening weekend of the year by far, and the biggest since “Moana 2” debuted over the Thanksgiving holiday.
Some of the most recent notorious superhero flops—“Kraven the Hunter” and “Madame Web,” which earned scores of 16% and 11% on Rotten Tomatoes, respectively—were also box office bombs, but they’re not considered part of Disney’s MCU. These movies were produced and distributed by Sony as part of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, based on characters from Marvel’s Spider-Man comics, though Spider-Man himself is not a main character in these films. The Sony Spider-Man Universe, which also includes “Morbius” and the “Venom” series, consistently struggled with critics while most of the series flopped at the box office, and The Wrap reported in December the franchise appears to be on hold.
Whether Marvel’s focus on “quality” over “quantity” will pay off later in the year. Two more MCU films are planned to release in 2025: “Thunderbolts*,” which hits theaters in May, and “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” which opens in July and is intended to reboot the “Fantastic Four” franchise.
How Marvel managed to upset Palestinian — and Israeli — fans (Vox)
Anthony Mackie Clarifies He Is a ‘Proud American’ After Viral Captain America Comment: ‘I Have the Utmost Respect for Those Who Serve and Have Served Our Country’ (Variety)
Conor Murray is a reporter covering trends in entertainment and culture. He is based in Jersey City and joined Forbes in 2022…. Read More
Conor Murray is a reporter covering trends in entertainment and culture. He is based in Jersey City and joined Forbes in 2022.
One Community. Many Voices. Create a free account to share your thoughts.
TOPLINE
KEY FACTS
CHIEF CRITICS
WHY IS “CAPTAIN AMERICA” SPARKING CONTROVERSY FOR AN ISRAELI SUPERHERO?
WHY DID “CAPTAIN AMERICA” SPARK ANTI-”WOKE” BACKLASH?
CONTRA
TANGENT
WHAT TO WATCH FOR
FURTHER READING
Join The Conversation
10 Years After ‘Stucky,’ Captain America: Brave New World Signals a Big Shift in Marvel Fandom
THERE’S A NEW Captain America movie out this Valentine’s Day. This probably isn’t news to anyone—after all, the new trailer for Captain America: Brave New World, in which Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson officially steps into the Cap role, aired during the Super Bowl. And millions will head to theaters this weekend to see the film, whose cast also includes Harrison Ford as Red Hulk (imagine the regular green one, but red).
A decade ago, “a new Captain America movie on Valentine’s Day” would have held a different cultural weight. At the time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was arguably at its pop-cultural apex. And in a rare alignment between the fan-fiction world and the mass media one, Captain America was at the root of one of fandom’s “juggernaut ships”: Stucky.
Using a portmanteau of Steve (Rogers, the old Cap) and Bucky (Barnes, his childhood best friend turned brainwashed super-assassin), the Stucky fandom’s romantic fics took off in the wake of 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier. In the years that followed, they produced some of the most influential fan works ever created, and their stories remain popular.
When Captain America: Civil War hit theaters in 2016, it made nearly $180 million domestically; Brave New World is on track to make a little more than $90 million this weekend. Critical reception of the film, as of this writing, has been lackluster. The contrast between the frenzy of the first Captain America trilogy and the far more muted reception of its new iteration offers a complicated snapshot of the current moment in fandom and pop culture.
Broadly, it signals bigger trends: audiences weary of both superheroes and never-ending franchises, increasingly dispersed communities of fan creators, and the arguable end of “juggernaut ships.” More specifically, Brave New World enters the zeitgeist with a Black superhero long cast aside in favor of white characters by both fans and the franchise itself, while also facing a boycott from some fans due to the inclusion of an Israeli character who was originally a Mossad agent in the comics.
If there’s one thing that’s true about the MCU in 2025, it’s that there’s a lot of it. Brave New World is the 35th big-screen installment to be released in a mere 17 years—and that’s not including all the television shows. Introduced in the comics in 1969, Sam Wilson made his onscreen debut in Winter Soldier as Steve Rogers’ modern-day best friend. After supporting roles in subsequent films, his first star turn was as the titular Falcon in the 2021 Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier; now, he headlines the first Captain America movie in nine years.
As the titles in the MCU and other big franchises have piled up, the quality of the films has fallen off—and audience enthusiasm has fallen off with it. In the 2020s, franchises have been contending with increasingly fractured media consumption patterns caused by everything from Covid-19 to TikTok to political chaos. Still, studios seem to churn out constant “content”—movies and shows mired in a vast array of characters presented in connected, multiverse-heavy storylines. Viewers, forced into an all-or-nothing situation, have to follow along with every single installment or feel lost. Last year, Disney CEO Bob Iger vowed to slow the company’s output of Marvel films, but it seemed as though burnout had already set in.
“It’s hard to hold eight films in your head at once with 50 interlocking characters,” says JSA Lowe, an adjunct professor of film and literature at the University of Houston–Clear Lake. She offers the linguistic term “semantic depletion” for thinking about the MCU and other big franchises that have pushed out nonstop installments in recent years. “With each iteration, something can get more watered down,” she says. “You can retcon your retcons, but at a certain point, you lose the audience’s engagement—you lose their willingness to keep entertaining these iterations.”
At the height of the franchise, Lowe was a Captain America fan (and especially a Sam Wilson fan). She cites Winter Soldier as one of the few MCU titles that stands alone well enough to teach in the classroom now—and that she thinks will be teachable in a decade, too. (Another is 2018’s Black Panther, which she taught in a mythology class last semester.)
That self-contained-ness—and the bigger world the film gestures to but doesn’t fully spell out—was also a key reason why Winter Soldier was such fertile ground for fans making transformative works a decade ago. “We would pour over screen caps from the film,” says a writer with the pen name tigrrmilk who is behind a number of Stucky fics and collaborated on “Steve Rogers at 100: Celebrating Captain America on Film,” one of the most popular fan works of the era. “We called it the Citizen Kane of Tumblr,” she jokes. “There was always more to discover, and there was a lot of really nerdy, fandomy close reading.”
Setting aside the perpetual exception that is Harry Potter, many big fic fandoms of earlier eras came out of cult-favorite shows like Stargate Atlantis or Due South. Captain America fandom’s contemporaries were more in tune with mainstream audiences—Sherlock, Teen Wolf, and Supernatural chief among them—but none were at the scale of the MCU. Like other big fandoms of the era, its sheer size meant there were many corners to explore and various thematic niches. “There was so much happening,” says tigrrmilk. “It really was a behemoth, in a way that I’ve really not experienced with other things.”
Even with all those various niches, the dominant force in the fandom was Stucky. Consistently one of the most popular ships across fandoms in the 2010s, Stucky fans wrote epic fics that swept through the history of the 20th century and played with ideas of politics and identity. Around the release of 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, fans tweeted the hashtag #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend, pushing the idea of the ship beyond the pages of Archive of Our Own (AO3) and onto the radar of the broader pop-culture world. By the time Steve Rogers bowed out of the franchise in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, many fans felt the relationship—even the friendship—of Steve and Bucky had been deliberately downplayed in response to the ship. His trip back in time to live out the latter half of the 20th century with Peggy Carter left some fans feeling downright betrayed.
Regardless of how the franchise handled the characters onscreen, the Stucky ship continued to flourish in fan works. Writers still pen stories about them to this day. Lowe was initially drawn into the world by the onscreen relationship between Steve and Sam, but she often found herself reading Stucky due to the large volume of high-quality work. (She had a particular weakness, she notes, for the fandom’s tendency to write Bucky Barnes as Jewish.)
Sam Wilson, she explains, was often sidelined in Captain America and Avengers fan works, regularly cast in the role of providing free therapy for traumatized white characters. The fandom’s treatment of Wilson and other Black characters has been long discussed by fans—and that’s a discussion that continues as Wilson takes on the Cap mantle in the films. Last month, AO3 announced it would be splitting the Captain America tag into “Chris Evans” and “Anthony Mackie” versions (with the more than 100,000 existing Captain America works sorted by default into the former category). The decision immediately sparked condemnation—questions of “who asked for this?” and commentary of “separate but equal.”
That fandom sidelining is an echo of the franchise’s treatment of the character, too. Kelsey White, a longtime Sam Wilson fan—or as she puts it, “fanatic”—says Mackie’s introduction into the cinematic universe got her back into comics. “I was living for the Black representation and couldn’t wait to see Winter Soldier,” she says. “Saying I was in love is an understatement. They made a Black man be emotionally intelligent and made that how he bonded with Steve.”
But she notes that even as Sam ostensibly had a more central role in the franchise in recent years, it was hard to see evidence of that onscreen—or in the franchise’s promotion and marketing. “As a POC, you tend to hope and pray that you can get merch of the characters that look like you,” White says, but she has found little for Wilson or Brave New World from the usual distributors. “Come on. It’s Black History Month and you can’t get your teams together to celebrate Sam Cap?”
It’s been widely observed that for Marvel, franchise fatigue—and the flagging quality of the studio’s projects—set in just as they finally diversified their leading roster after hanging up the jerseys of its beloved white male heroes in Endgame. “For Anthony Mackie, that’s unfortunate,” says Lowe. “The time is just not right—and that’s not on him. That’s not even on the production. It’s just that history has marched on.”
Brave New World in particular is also facing a boycott from fans. First called for by the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, which leads a range of economic-focused actions against Israel, the boycott is a response to the film’s inclusion of the Israeli comic character Sabra, an agent in Israel’s intelligence organization Mossad. While the character’s name and backstory have been changed for the film, the movie’s Hollywood premiere on Tuesday was met with in-person protests. Many fans, it seems, are looking to sit this one—and even the broader franchise—out. These geopolitical discussions also connect to critiques of the MCU’s relationship with the US Department of Defense, long a point of discussion within the fandom but thrust into mainstream focus when 2018’s Captain Marvel was used for Air Force recruitment.
Bad critical reviews or ambivalence around the source material aren’t necessarily impediments to fan creators—just look at the continued dominance of Harry Potter in the fan-fiction space. But the relatively muted cultural response to newer Marvel titles also reflects just how much fan culture has changed in the past decade. Transformative fandom is far, far larger than it was at the start of the MCU, but compared to the early Captain America era, fans are more disparate, spreading their interests across a much wider range of source material.
Many fans also spend less time in one place, cycling through a fandom for a few months, even weeks, before moving on. The deep, sustained interest in a world that fueled so much Captain America fic in its heyday is harder to find now, especially at scale. With so much content across film and television, fans barely have time to latch on to anything—or to spin up their own versions of the characters and their worlds in the gaps.
Early box-office projections suggest Brave New World will do well for Marvel, potentially putting it on track with the opening performance of Winter Soldier. Like all entertainment corporations, money is the key metric for Marvel and its parent company, Disney. Whether they’re creating space for fan creativity doesn’t particularly matter if the numbers are still there. But for fans, the return of Captain America to the big screen is a moment to reflect on past eras and see just how much has changed. They’ll have to do it quickly—there are only 10 weeks until the next MCU title, Thunderbolts*, hits theaters in May.
Join the WIRED community to add comments.
In your inbox: Upgrade your life with WIRED-tested gear
Musk takeover: Tech workers forced to defend projects
Big Story: Are you lonely? Adopt a new family on Facebook today
I dated multiple AI partners at once. It got real weird
Event: Join us for WIRED Health on March 18 in London
MORE FROM WIRED
REVIEWS AND GUIDES
© 2025 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices
Comments
You Might Also Like …
‘Captain America’ is a brave new world of Marvel cinematic gobbledygook
Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford star in an underwhelming addition to the MCU canon.
“Captain America: Brave New World” is, by official count, the 35th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that began in 2008 with “Iron Man.” It’s also the fifth in the series of interconnected storylines known as MCU’s Phase 5, which itself is the middle installment of the three-phase, 17-film “Multiverse Saga,” which also includes 20 dedicated TV series that have aired or will air on the Disney Plus streaming platform, of which the most relevant to the new film is 2021’s “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.”
