Film

We Regret To Inform You That Pissbabies On The Internet Are Mad About ‘Captain Marvel’ Again

This time it's a deleted scene stirring ire.

by Joseph Earp  27 May 2019
Captain Marvel special look

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Over the last few years, Disney, a multi-billion dollar entertainment behemoth, has politicised the act of getting people to see their movies.

Suddenly, watching or not watching say, Captain Marvel, a multi-million dollar movie about a woman who can fly through space and that’s about it, has social value. These superhero movies, big budget spectacles that are as far from revolutionary works made by outsider artists as it is possible to imagine (Captain Marvel was funded in part by the United States Airforce) have suddenly become lightning rods for a whole lotta discussions of gender parity, social equality and racism.

And sure, these are all conversations that we need to have — but Disney is not the company to lead those conversations, and movies for children are not the artform to spearhead it.

But only making the situation even more complicated are the obvious dinguses who genuinely do hate movies like Captain Marvel for regressive, sexist reasons, and whose opposition to superhero films starring literally anybody who isn’t a straight white male means that we are forced to talk about Disney properties as though they are gamechanging, status quo challengers.

Case in point: over the weekend, Disney released a deleted scene from Captain Marvel in which the titular Captain steals a dude’s bike after he asks her to smile. The scene is extraordinarily innocuous — almost childlike in the simplicity of its message and the blunt way it handles gender equality.

But, because there are a lot of people out there who can’t stand to see a woman do anything for herself, the clip has generated a degree of online ire from the internet’s most thin-skinned people, led by whinger-in-chief, Ben Shapiro.

Anyway, let’s all conserve our energy for the next time this happens, when The Lion King movie generates a weird regressive backlash in some corner of the internet and we all have to pretend it’s a nuanced work of great political art rather than another shitty Disney remake.