The fact Samuel L. Jackson recently spoke out on the “incel dudes who hate strong women” in defense of friend and co-star Brie Larson makes it abundantly clear that the ongoing hate campaign against the actress shows no signs of abating, a full seven years after she was first announced to be taking top billing in Captain Marvel.
Between then and now, we’ve seen Rotten Tomatoes alter its algorithm to try and combat review-bombing, the Academy Award winner repeatedly bite back against her trolls, all while the trailer for sequel The Marvels has comfortably outstripped everything – including Morbius – to become the single most-disliked trailer for a Marvel Comics adaptation there’s ever been.
Even attempts by the aggregation site to quell the discontent backfired spectacularly, with Captain Marvel‘s audience approval rating of 45 percent making it the lowest-rated of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s 32 feature-length installments to date by a vast distance, with The Incredible Hulk second-from-bottom and still miles ahead on a 69 percent score.
The initial bout of bad buzz all proved to be for nothing, though, seeing as the cosmic origin story netted over $1.1 billion at the box office, and it still ranks as one of the MCU’s top-grossing debuts ever. Even now, streaming subscribers are clearly still checking it out, given that Captain Marvel is a Top 10 hit on Disney Plus in 19 countries around the world, per FlixPatrol.
Everybody knows the exact same thing is going to happen all over again come November, but we’ll see if the results are any different second time around.