A year and a half after its release, director Nia DaCosta (“Candyman”) is reflecting on her experience helming Marvel Studios’ “The Marvels” with Brie Larson and said the finished movie was not the one she intended to make.
“It was interesting because there was a certain point when I was like, ‘Ok, this isn’t going to be the movie that I pitched or even the first version of the movie that I shot,’” she admitted, speaking at Storyhouse,
Dublin’s second annual screenwriting festival. “So, I realized that this is now an experience, and it’s a learning curve, and it really makes you stronger as a filmmaker in terms of your ability to navigate.”
DaCosta, who had received some flack online for leaving the movie early in the editing room in order to start prep on her next film “Hedda” with Tessa Thomspon—she explained that Marvel went over schedule and she had a hard out—suggested the film was rushed by its release date.
“They had a date, and they were prepping certain things, and you just have to lean into the process hardcore,” she explained during the conversation. While the filmmaker seemed open to the process, she doesn’t sound like she was happy with the final process or final product, regardless.
“The way they make those films is very different to the way, ideally, I would make a film,” she said. “So you just have to lean into the process and hope for the best. The best didn’t happen this time but you kind of have to trust in the machine.”
“The Marvels” is still Marvel Studios’ biggest flop to date. Featuring a budget rumored to be around $300 million thanks to all the various reshoots and retooling the film underwent, the film is the lowest-grossing Marvel film of all time, barely cracking $206 million worldwide and failing to reach over $85 million domestically (read our review).
Comparatively, its predecessor, “Captain Marvel,” grossed $1.13 billion in 2019, one of the most precipitous sequel drops in movie history.
DaCosta’s next movie is the aforementioned “Hedda,” based on the play Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen that stars Tessa Thompson, Imogen Poots, Tom Bateman, and Nina Hoss and should arrive later this year.
Her next, next movie is in the can, too: the “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” sequel that’s set for January 16, 2026.
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