From what I heard recently, before the reshoots and rewrites this was going to be "Captain America: Black Lives Matter". For example, apparently there was a major subplot about how the first Captain America was actually a black man, but the government of course betrayed him and he ended up in prison. And the Super Soldier program itself started as a variant Tuskegee experiment. So all that, even moreso than the presence of Captain Zionist, was sanded down to a nub.
As to the budget, entertainment industry shill sites like Deadline are running with the story:
‘Captain America: Brave New World’ Barreling Toward $90M+ 4-Day
"We're hyping up this new, lower number even though we were just going on, hours before, about how CA4 was headed towards 95 million! We used the word
barreling to make it sound like this is progressing forward in a positive way!"
To quote from Deadline
UPDATED, Friday midday: It’s Valentine’s Day and even though there aren’t any female skewing movies on the marquee such as Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, it’s still bound to be a big moviegoing day even though we have the dude-skewing Captain America: Brave New World. The Anthony Mackie movie is expected to do around $39M today, which includes last night’s $12M, on its way to a 4-day of $90M+. Three-day is around $82M-$84M at 4,105. Day one for Captain America: Brave New World is higher than the first day/previews of Captain America: Winter Soldier which came in at $36.9M.
Eleven years after Winter Soldier, this new CA movie with double the budget might--mind you,
might--barely eke out enough box office to barely squeak by! Friday box office numbers always include Thursday receipts as well--no reason why it should, other than Hollywood execs and others need something to help with their lies about how every movie is a smash hit. Plus, there's no real competition at the megaplexes for this latest Marvel film, so there will be no one else to blame when the Monday box office numbers come up shorter than they hoped. Below $90 million is now almost a cinch at this point, how low can it go? What excuses will the running dogs of the entertainment media be fed to report?
Superhero movies like this are heavily pushed and promoted to the early access, Thursday numbers and first week. That is where the studios get the biggest cut from theaters and when the real fanatical fans show up, the first week. After that, well, the box office receipts are going to fall off a cliff 60+ percent. The superhero subgenre of action flick has due to a variety of factors, including cape fatigue, probably, has had no legs for a while. A first weekend box office take of $85 million might be $30 million the next week and not even $20 million the next and after that a movie like Marvels or CA4 ought to be out of the theaters, because it is just Disney throwing its weight around forcing theaters to run duds on primo screens and too many of them. The only word of mouth CA4 will get is what it's already been getting, that it's a stinker.
Marvel Phase 5 and Phase 6 look like they are racking up quite the list of certain box office flops. Thunderbolts will bomb harder than any Suicide Squad movie did, Feige should probably be banished to the wastelands after Thunderbolts and Fantastic 4: First Steps flop or bomb in theaters theatrically but Kathleen Kennedy has been "two more weeks and she's OUTTA HERE!" for years now after all of the Disney Star Wars flops and she is not outta here.
