If you keep track of Marvel movie news, you might have heard that Captain Marvel, set to premiere in March of 2019, has finally released official photos. The photos are pretty great, finally showing fans Carol Danvers (played by Brie Larson) in her official costume. But what’s so surprising is how long these photos took to be released.
The first look at anything Captain Marvel related was this tweet showing the official title font and announcing Brie Larson as the main star.
That was quickly followed by this tweet (link) from Larson herself after her first panel at SDCC 2016.
The account was pretty sparse for a while, mostly retweeting comic book news and trailers for other Marvel movies until March of this year, when filming began. The account tweeted about one photo announcing the start of filming and continued the pattern of unrelated retweets until these photos were released.
It seems odd how little marketing is being done for this film, considering how close it is. The past three Marvel movies (Infinity War, Thor: Ragnarok, Ant-Man and the Wasp) all had 5 months between the first trailer and release of the film. If that pattern is to be continued, we should be getting a trailer next month, and these photos are doing a good job of getting fans excited before hand, but their social media presence is not helping at all. The account didn’t even make an original tweet to announce the photos’ release, they retweeted EW.
But, I suppose it does stand to ask if Marvel movies even need a heavy social media presence. These are some of the highest grossing films of the past decade and it’s hard to not know every little bit of news about them when a thousand blogs and news sites write about it. Does @captainmarvel need to make original content promoting their film when everyone is already planning on seeing the film anyways?
Marvel movie twitter accounts are almost universally boring. Mostly tweeting about app game news, DVD releases, and the birthdays of their stars. But, in a world where these movies barely need to be promoted to make millions of dollars, does it even matter?