Disney will try to write it off similar to Solo or some of their live-action remakes and continue. If another bomb happens afterwards, then they will begin to change tactics. Likely starting with rewriting the MCU with the failure movies out, similar to what sounds to be happening with Star Wars and the removal of the sequel trilogy. If that does not work, I am expecting the death of not just the MCU, but Marvel in general. The comics have tanked and I doubt the tv is fairing much better as they are just MCU ads, so Marvel will have no reason to continue. The aftermath will be the rights of Spider-Man going back to Sony for them to work on new films and games. Marvel will then likely have a short lived comeback ala the Muppets years later that will result in praise for movie 1, then tank in movie 2.
If Eternals bombs while Black Widow still does gangbusters, I think you're right.
I've even seen online how even the most die-hard Marvel capeshit lovers are at least a little nervous about that movie's box office potential thanks to COVID-19 delaying Black Widow this year and throwing everyone off, although they're more convinced it will merely underperform and cause more delays or at most, end up in a Solo scenario.
I honestly think a one-two punch of Eternals and Lady Thor bombing will likely weaken the MCU and lead to a realignment, but won't kill off capeshit or the Marvel IP completely on their own if they can get the issues with X-Men and Fantastic Four fully settled and start filming by then.
But a better question is what would happen if one of the "safe" MCU titles like Black Widow or Doctor Strange 2 end up bombing? I don't think Black Widow will bomb at the box office for a variety of reasons, but I do think it could under-perform if the normies are more fed up with the capeshit fad than we think.
Black Widow under-performing paired with Eternals bombing would be a massive blow and if Eternals and Lady Thor both bomb at the box office in addition to Doctor Strange 2 bombing or under-performing, then Marvel (and possibly capeshit in general) will be deader than Ted Bundy and we'll all be richer for having lost it.
The thing I tend to hate about the Fandom Menace/anti-SJW Youtubers is their insistence of Disney eventually doing a 180 after they, hopefully, go broke. That's not how it happens with Disney. I still remember back to the early years of Iger's tenure and how the entire company sucked the collective cock of the Religious Right in a way that looks ridiculous today. From having crosses and prayers and mentions of faith in their productions to forcing their music stars to wear purity rings, yet nobody brings it up. Why? Because Disney never rolled out the carpets and announced their denouncement of these groups. They just slowly started to shift their content to a neutral ground, eventually becoming their new woke incarnation.
The way I see it, if there's a significant change in the way Disney does things, you won't hear it in a press conference. People like the Quartering, Doomcock, Nerdrotic, etc. thinking that multinational entertainment companies are going to come out and beg for forgiveness is a kind of self-aggrandizing exceptionalism I cannot fathom. The best we can hope for is a quiet realignment, if that's even possible with the Twitter Gestapo and their media allies demanding ideological submission every five minutes.
Pretty much this.
I do think we're seeing a backlash against woke culture that has been building since mid-2019 and I do think Disney and the other big corporations will follow the money and ditch all the pretentious wokeness after losing enough money but I don't think they'll try and draw attention to it.
I've been saying for a while that any cultural realignment and a wider rejection of wokeness in pop culture will be quiet and subtle, much like how the transition from the "edgy" pop culture of the 1990's and 2000's to the pretentious wokeness and SJW punk malaise of "Current Year" pop culture played out.
By the time anyone notices any real cultural shift at all, the process will be mostly complete.
about Disney/Marvel publicly unwoking themselves, what would happen if Eternals actually bombed?