The new Captain America movie might feature a Brave New World, but it’s a rotten one as well.
Reviews for the latest Marvel film on the aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes have not been kind overall. As of this writing, Brave New World has earned a cumulative score of 53 from 108 different reviews from film critics.
That makes Brave New World just the third “rotten” movie in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe — which contains 35 cinematic entries and counting — following 2021’s Eternals and 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
In other words, all of the MCU’s “rotten” films have been made in the last four years — as good an indicator as any that the mega-franchise has hit a rough patch, at least creatively speaking. (From the time of the MCU’s creation in 2008 until late 2021, every single movie produced by Marvel Studios earned a “fresh” Rotten Tomatoes score.)
On Rotten Tomatoes, any movie with an average score below 60 is deemed “rotten.”
CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD
READ MORE: ScreenCrush’s Full Review of Captain America: Brave New World
The previous films in the Captain America film series — The First Avenger, The Winter Soldier, and Civil War — received Rotten Tomatoes scores of 80, 90, and 90 respectively, meaning the new film is by far the most poorly-reviewed in the long-running franchise. Brave New World stars Anthony Mackie in his first outing as the MCU’s new Captain America, following Chris Evans’ retirement from the role after 2019’s Avengers: Endgame.
Here is how Brave New World stacks up with the other lowest-rated MCU movies to date:
As Brave New World doesn’t open in theaters for a few days, and more reviews will be published through the weekend, this number could fluctuate a little moving forward. But generally blockbusters get their highest Rotten Tomatoes scores from their first wave of early reviews, with the later articles from more general film critics often harsher and less enthusiastic. Eternals, for example, initially received a Rotten Tomatoes score of 63 — already low for the MCU at the time — until more negative reviews came in and pushed that number down into the 40s.
So there is still time for Brave New World’s score to go up — and there is also the possibility that it could go down further. It could wind up becoming the lowest-scoring MCU movie ever on Rotten Tomatoes. (The lowest-scoring TV show on Rotten Tomatoes, was Inhumans, which earned an 11. I think that record is still safe for now.)
Captain America: Brave New World premieres in theaters this weekend.
