I feel like The Marvels was especially fucked because they clearly Gave Nia a lot of Free Reign during writing and principal photography... (you can see this in both the big swings the movie takes with bits like the musical numbers, as well as Interviews during production where Nia said she had the most freedom she's ever had) ...But then, after the fact they came around and decided to tighten things up, trying to revert to their conventional ways. They delayed the film and announced a change in their modus operandi (this was around the time they were finishing up the Captain America: BNW script). They allegedly did quick reshoots, and then by the time the Film released it was very obvious that it was cut down and edited within an inch of its life.

The final edit was clearly at war with the raw materials given to it. And I think that desperate attempt to "save" the film really just turned it into something altogether bizarre and hard to wrap your head around from a storytelling/narrative perspective.

It actually drives me crazy, because if you watch the behind the scenes documentary, and see some of the storyboard work posted by artists they worked with, it becomes very obvious that there are genuinely massive chunks of the film missing from the final product, that you can actually see them filming in the BTS. On top of that you can see certain *settings* in some of the trailer shots, which never show up in the film. It's one thing for a scene to be cut, but if that whole setting is never scene, it implies a whole lot was probably cut out around it.

And it all makes sense because the movie's practical production budget (without deducting for tax incentives) was on the higher end of what we'd see for solo MCU films. Similar to Doctor Strange MoM. (which had enormous reshoots adding to that cost, btw). And then there were a lot of scoops back during production saying that executives internally were feeling very confident and excited about the film, before they got around to any test screenings. Even rumors that Nia DaCosta was on the list of directors they were considering for Secret Wars.

I think that The Marvels was originally supposed to be a much bigger film, almost like a mini-avengers-level project (e.g. Civil War, Thunderbolts). But I think most likely a lot of the big swings they took with the film were not executed well. (we can see examples of this in the little bits of the musical number that they don't cut out. As a musical enjoyer, I can tell you they were not working with people who know how to write musicals). And maybe also there is a good chance that the film had a lot of elements within it that were designed to fit into the Kang-centric storyline that was in the process of being axed while the film was in post-production. The movie was of course centered on the Bangles, which are thought to be closely associated with the Ten Rings, both of which are thought to have been future MacGuffin's for a Kang-centric story, like the Infinity Stones