'Captain Marvel' Skyrockets to $1 Billion at Global Box Office

Remember how two months ago everyone was worried that toxic fanboys might derail Captain Marvel’s success because they had a stupid grudge against Brie Larson for trying to be inclusive?

Ha.

Continuing to push higher, further, faster, baby, the latest Marvel flick has now skyrocketed past the one billion dollar mark at the global box office.

Captain Marvel certainly isn’t the first Marvel movie to hit this milestone—all three current Avengers films, Black Panther, Iron Man 3, and Captain America: Civil War also made over a billion dollars in theaters.

While Captain Marvel’s final ranking among these is of course yet to be determined, you have to wonder how much more money it might have made if Avengers: Endgame wasn’t being released right on its tail. Then again, the fact that it’s made this much already, with that in mind, is pretty damn impressive.

This achievement also brings another one with it: co-director Anna Boden is now the first female director of a live-action film that’s grossed over $1 billion.

While that speaks to the longtime problem of studios not hiring female directors for their tentpole big budget films, it also speaks to the fact that audiences are ready for something different now.

Captain Marvel is a film about a woman, and largely by women. It follows a hero’s journey that is, in many ways, specific to a female experience, rather than a male experience. And audiences shelled out a shit ton of money to see it, again and again.

Choosing a female iteration of Captain Marvel, casting Brie Larson, letting her call for inclusivity and speak her mind and her politics and her beliefs, telling a story about gaslighting, and not lifting up a male character as a romantic lead—all of these things did nothing to hurt the film’s profits, or the love many people have already expressed for it. If anything, they did the opposite.

Flooding Rotten Tomatoes with negative reviews is fine if you want to throw a tantrum that one thing in the world doesn’t cater to you, but the numbers don’t lie, and Captain Marvel is definitively a freaking success.