The Illuminerdi, which gets its material from Daniel (cf), is reporting that John Krasinski will appear in Doctor Strange 2 as Reed Richards. If accurate it confirms one of the longest running casting rumours there is in Marvel, as he's been fancasted since before I started writing about the MCU. The word is he'll be a multiverse appearance, but Sutton believes public pressure will force Feige to keep him in the role (rather than getting whatever 'brave' bizarre choice MCU's casting directors would thrust upon us). Normally I'd dismiss Sutton's idea, but the MCU brand has suffered enough that Feige might actually yield to that pressure.
Reshoots for films, particularly MCU films and shows, are normal--planned long before principal photography has finished. However, we're seeing a couple of cases of massive reshoots that are worth going over:
- Doctor Strange 2 is getting over thirty days of reshoots (that's roughly a third of the time it takes to shoot a film). According to Daniel, they reshot most or all of the America Chavez scenes while adding more cameos (the latter undoubtedly in response to Spider-Man 3's success). Are the Chavez changes a response to the tepid reaction fans have had to the various introduced characters in Phase Four? It's certainly suggestive, particularly given what's happened to Ms. Marvel (below), but what's less clear is how things are being changed. I have to wonder if, ala Witcher season two, the original film had everyone falling all over themselves to tell Chavez how amazing and brave she was.
- Ms. Marvel wrapped filming almost a year ago (official organs say it wrapped in May, while Kamran Pasha claims it wrapped earlier--the point is it has been awhile); originally the show was intended to have the release date used for Hawkeye, but was given a massive delay in October. Rumours are that the show either tested poorly or that Marvel isn't happy with it, so they are desperately trying to fix it. I'm not sure what you can do to rescue an IP that isn't inherently popular, but particularly when its limited fanbase were already not happy with some of the casting. What the MCU intends isn't clear, but they are trying to do something to fix it as these are not typical reshoots.
What I don't expect is that either IP will magically bring back the quality we expected prior to Phase Four. Instead, what it may do is drag these productions somewhere towards average and, in the case of Doctor Strange 2, that might be enough to drag up the box office (especially if the cameos are particularly notable). Normally Marvel tries to keep cameos under wraps, but given how much letting everyone know about them in Spider-Man 3 helped, I can imagine Feige letting early reviewers 'spoil' those appearances to try and drum up more interest (as he did with Eternals, even though that attempt failed). We also have to keep in mind Blade's filming was pushed back significantly, presumably because its star wasn't happy with whatever low caliber script Stacy Osei-Kuffour had provided [cf].
More Nielsen Ratings:
- Witcher 2,191 (December 20; 1st overall)
- Hawkeye 580 (finale December 22; +10%, 4th overall)
- Lost in Space 569 (-56%, 5th overall)
- Wheel of Time 467 (finale December 24; -8%; 10th overall)
- The Great British Baking Show 292
- Selling Tampa 243
- Money Heist 231
- The Queen of Flow 218
- Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous 215
- Twentysomethings: Austin 185
As expected, given how big it hit last year, Witcher debuted very strongly (almost double The Wheel of Time's opening), but I'm curious to see what the drop off will be--there's no doubt this season has not been received as well as the first (the impact of that will be felt first by the unwanted prequel Netflix is giving us, Witcher: Blood Origin, which viscerally reminds me both of Wheel of Time and the cancelled Game of Thrones prequel series). Hawkeye received a marginal bump for the finale (the power of Kingpin), but a finale couldn't help Wheel of Time's slide down to oblivion (a fan of the show actually thought it was worse than the Game of Thrones finale--ouch). We can summate viewer retention for both of the latter shows:
- Hawkeye 853->580 (68%)
- The Wheel of Time 1,163->467 (40%)
There was much greater interest in Amazon's fantasy epic initially (albeit far less than generated by The Witcher, which makes sense both because the latter is a more popular IP and it had Henry Cavill as an excellent Geralt), but it had a much harder time retaining that interest (granting that Hawkeye still dropped a third of its audience for what was already the lowest viewed MCU show to date). The general praise I've seen for Hawkeye is "it's not as bad as the other MCU shows" and that people like Steinfeld (not for her performance as Kate Bishop, but just the actress). Damning with faint praise isn't much of an endorsement. On the other side, it's much too early for the media to properly dissect how badly Amazon's fantasy effort failed, but someone at the company must be worrying about their much more expensive Lord of the Rings adaptation--while the latter will have much better production values, if the writing quality is just as bad, it's going to suffer much more than Robert Jordan's mostly forgotten epic.
This article was written by Peter Levi
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