Preceding the release of Captain Marvel, I'm sure no shortage of you were familiar with the outrage shown by various groups (and certainly no shortage of them here on MMO champion) at the "female empowerment" tone of the film, outrage at comments purportedly made by the star Brie Larson, and so on and so forth. People took to sites like IMDB and rotten tomatoes before the film opened and tanked the audience ratings for a film they had never seen. Following its release, people cited empty theaters and conspiracies of Disney having bought out tickets to fudge the data to try and detract from the films ostensible success.
Other films featuring protagonists depicting minorities or women have faced similar amounts of vitriol. Black Panther, Wonder Woman, and The Last Jedi all faced lambasting from certain groups (I'll style them "anti-SJW," because why not) because of their choices to prominently feature the aforementioned women, minorities, and so forth.
Nevertheless, these films have all been colossal box office successes.
I'll draw attention back to Captain Marvel, which had perhaps the greatest amount of disdain towards it going in: This past week it passed the one billion dollar global gross. It is, demonstrably and unequivocally, a box office success. Very obviously, the "anti-SJW" crowd's vehement attempts to dissuade people from seeing the film by tanking its audience ratings, misrepresenting various comments and spreading rumors about malfeasance by Disney amounted to absolutely nothing. Disney is not doing some soul-searching while kicking back on their billion dollar pile of money.
Now, let me make something clear: I'm not saying that these films are perfect or without due criticism. Far from it in fact. I think ALL of them have legitimate criticisms that can be levied at them when it comes to things like story structure and other film trappings that seek to analyze them as pieces of cinema, like any other film does. Because I dislike mincing words, my thoughts specifically are: I thought Black Panther was pretty good overall, its primary weakness being the 3rd act textbook Marvel giant CGI army battle. Similar thoughts on Wonderwoman and Ares shouting video game boss fight lines at the end. I liked the Last Jedi and its stuff with Luke, Rey and Kylo but I felt the side plot was particularly weak and largely pointless. Captain Marvel was a serviceable Marvel movie but I wish that the scope of her powers had been more defined within the film and I wish the character had more of an arc; it simply felt like an overall fine but largely forgettable entry in a TV show requisite to introduce a character for End Game.
But that kind of film criticism is not what I'm talking about these movies facing. I'm talking about the intense vitriol coming up against these kinds of films BECAUSE of their casting choices; criticism these films were facing before anyone had seen a SINGLE frame of them, and the crusade various groups went on to lambast the films before and after their release. And, to the point, that these "crusades;" the effort from these groups or people in trolling review sights, attempting to tank ratings, lying about empty theaters or seeding the conspiracy of the studio buying out tickets to falsify the box office data all... well...
(and here's the TLDR;)
The "anti-SJW" opposition all amounted to nothing.
The films were financially successful; incredibly successful. In many cases, critically successful as well. The three of the four films I cited, in fact, all made over a billion dollars. The effort these people put in to attempting to troll these films they disagreed with, not as pieces of cinema, but from some stinted ideological or political standpoint, was all wasted hot air on their part. They wasted nobody's time and effort but their own.
So the question I suppose this thread poses is: Will this sort of bad faith film trolling continue in force? I proffer that people don't really care about their political views on films and the only time and effort they're wasting is their own. I know some people on this very website were eager for Captain Marvel to fail spectacularly for the reasons I outlined above. Very obviously, it did not fail. So what, then, is their redress to this film's success and the success of many other films like it? What good is their constant gnashing when nobody seems to care but them? Someone can, of course, not like a film for whatever reason, no matter how asinine, he or she pleases; but it seems that their own asinine reasoning is not shared by the majority of the public, nor does the public care particularly about said reasoning or want to even hear about it. Why continue to shout into the wind? You can rue a movie privately to yourself, or spend a tremendous amount of effort shouting and screaming and falsifying online and still apparently, come up with the same result of... nothing at all changing. Will these people recognize that?
Also, as for the various "conspiracies" about how Disney "futzed the numbers" on Captain Marvel in particular, This Video does a spectacular job explaining why almost ALL of them are either presented horribly out of context or are likely complete bullshit. And the guy doing the video didn't even like the film.
Some hits:
-The box office dropoff seen by Captain Marvel is well in line with the dropoff seen by many other Marvel films, finding its dropoff practically equal to that seen by Age of Ultron, Winter Soldier, Dr. Strange, and the first Iron Man.
-On the subject of Disney "buying out tickets," If Disney had bought out 25 seats for five showings for every theater in the United States, on its first weekend, they wouldn't have fudged Captain Marvel's gross by more than 10% and would still have been the 9th highest opening MCU film even if they had.