Earlier this week, Marvel dropped a teaser trailer for The Marvels, director Nia DaCosta’s upcoming film uniting Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel, Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau, and Iman Vellani’s Ms. Marvel. Like clockwork, misogynist Marvel fans, more enthusiastic for their hatred of a gender than the comic book brand they love so much, used the internet to express their distaste for the unreleased film. The Marvels’ two-minute teaser, shared on the Marvel Entertainment YouTube account, has over 300,000 dislikes. Its comment section is flooded with unfunny sexist comments as well as weird, equally unfunny references to other movies.
This is, of course, not the first time that a women-led action film has inspired men to devote their precious free time on this melting Earth to hating women. In 2019, men gathered around their screens in droves to post fake negative Captain Marvel reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Captain Marvel was the MCU’s first female-led film since the franchise’s launch in 2008 with Iron Man. Its star, Larson, became a punching bag during the film’s press tour simply for stating the importance of inclusion. The trolling for Captain Marvel was so bad that it forced Rotten Tomatoes to change its policy: The site eliminated the “want to see” percentage feature and disabled comments prior to a film’s release. The Captain Marvel audience score is currently at 45% compared to its 79% critic store. Last summer, Ms. Marvel, Disney+’s show introducing Vellani’s Kamala Khan, drew ire both due to her gender and Muslim heritage, becoming the lowest rated MCU show on IMDB. Marvel’s other female-led show from last year, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, received a similar backlash.
In 2016, of course, men with a passion for the gender integrity of the Ghostbusters franchise fought a similar battle against the Ghostbusters remake, starring Kristin Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, and Melissa McCarthy. Like Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, and The Marvels, it got review-bombed. (On Rotten Tomatoes, Ghostbusters has an audience score of 49%, and a critic score of 73%.) Ghostbusters addressed its trolls within the movie with an important message: we don’t care what you think. (In the film a male news anchor says, “what do we think of these Ghostbusters? Are they to be taken seriously?”)
Still, Captain Marvel grossed over $1 billion dollars internationally making it the fifth highest grossing film of 2019. Ms. Marvel received praise from critics and general audiences alike, much of it for charismatic newcomer Vellani. The MCU is far from its 2010s golden age, but The Marvels will most likely be one of the highest grossing films of the year after it hits theaters on November 10. Poor pre-reviews for a film that does not come out for another seven months are unlikely to convince anyone to skip it—unless they already hate women in comic book movies.