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Marvel and DC should look to ‘The Creator’ for a cure to their biggest problem

Could 'The Creator' change the Hollywood paradigm?

Image via 20th Century Studios.

With 2023 seemingly being full of unprecedented flops ranging from Marvel to DC and everything in between, perhaps studios such as Disney and Warner Bros. should look to the new film The Creator for a solution to one of their biggest issues.

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You see, when a movie flops, it is usually made that much worse when a film’s budget is out of control and doesn’t even seem to hit the mark of quality you would think a higher rate of spending would generate. Over-inflated budgets have been a common problem with many of this year’s biggest bombs since their break-even points at the box office become that much higher. However, when it comes to The Creator, the film was made on an astonishingly low budget of $80 million, according to The Numbers.

How could $80 million be considered low? Well, when you compare it to other movies from this year that failed to meet financial expectations such as Lucasfilm’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Warner Bros.’ The Flash, The Creator starts to look like an indie film by comparison, even though it is produced by the Disney-owned 20th Century Fox.

The Creator, starring John David Washington and directed by Gareth Edwards, is a sci-fi epic about a future earth in which parts of the world are at war with artificial intelligence. Despite what the earliest reactions might have had you believe, The Creator isn’t quite universally acclaimed as a masterpiece or anything, with it currently sitting at a 69 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 165 reviews. And to be fair, there’s a solid chance The Creator will bomb at the box office as well. So what exactly makes me say it has the antidote that big studio franchise films should be seeking out?

Well, despite some reviews being not-so-rosy, The Creator‘s amazing visuals, computer-generated effects, and impressive set pieces were pretty much universally acclaimed, even in the negative reviews. The main criticisms leveled at the movie focus on not landing the emotional moments, rather than the visuals being subpar. Take NPR’s Justin Chang, for example, who writes in his excerpt, “Even the most strikingly beautiful images — like the one of high-tech laser beams shimmering over a beach at sunset — are tethered to a story and characters that never take on a life of their own.”

Another reviewer, Paul Whitington with the Irish Independent, acknowledged The Creator‘s weak story while still calling it “absolutely marvellous to look at.” Meanwhile, Leo Brady’s mixed review for AMovieGuy.com called out a “frustrated” experience in terms of trying to be revelatory but still hailed it as having “gorgeous visuals.” Other reviewers have proclaimed The Creator as one of the year’s best.

The point I’m trying to make here is to highlight how impressive the universal praise is for The Creator‘s visual effects and action set pieces are, considering it only had $80 million to work with. That is a feat in and of itself when you consider other films from this year with much higher budgets had their visual effects taken to the cleaners by critics.

For comparison, consider the melting wax-like renders of characters featured in The Flash, with its mannequin-like CGI resurrection of Christopher Reeves’ Superman, and the wildly inconsistent digital de-ageing of Harrison Ford in Dial of Destiny that made it look like a PlayStation 4 video game cutscene at times. What’s baffling is The Flash‘s budget was more than double The Creator‘s, at $200 million, and the latest Indiana Jones adventure came in at more than triple, at $300 million — that’s more than a quarter of a billion dollars just to make a movie that ended looking terrible at parts. They are among the movies that bombed the hardest this year, with Dial of Destiny only raking in $381 million and The Flash hauling a global gross of $267 million.

Now, a quick thought experiment: if either of those films had an $80 million budget but made the same amount at the box office, would we still be calling them financial flops? The answer is unequivocally no. By the rule of thumb that a movie must double its production budget just to break even as a ballpark estimate, The Flash would have profited over $100 million and Dial of Destiny would have profited over $200 million.

Projects in the Marvel wheelhouse are suffering from similar budgetary issues. For instance, the Disney Plus series Secret Invasion was slammed not only for bad overall storytelling, but for terrible-looking CGI. However, Secret Invasion‘s budget was much higher than The Creator, at $211.6 million. Another Marvel project lambasted for its stomach-churning visuals was Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which had a production budget close to $200 million.

We don’t necessarily have hard evidence to show either Secret Invasion or Quantumania flopped in the traditional sense of low viewership, with the Ant-Man threequel reportedly barely eking out a profit, for instance. However, they were certainly both considered failures from a critical standpoint. Plus, once we know more information about each project’s financials, such as Quantumania‘s post-production cost, it could change to include more red in the ledger, after all. But the question still stands: how can these projects with more than double the production budget of The Creator have worse visuals when all the dust has settled?

We don’t necessarily have an answer to this query, but we have the feeling it’s the right question to ask. One that could hold the key to studios hauling in more sustainable box office returns in the future. For now, we will have to check out The Creator, in theaters on Sept. 29, just to see for ourselves how mind-blowing the visuals truly are.