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Marvel Cinematic Universe General Discussion 6: Just Send Me a Raven T-Bone


The Anti-Targ

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Because the last thread is now closed.

In other news, Rebecca Thomas is another name rumoured to be in consideration for directing Captain Marvel. Her credits include: Electrick Children, upcoming projects the short film Las Vegas, West and the live action Little Mermaid movie.

Never heard of any of these movies. So I have no idea whether she's a good option or not. But it seems like she's a bit light on director experience right now to get the nod for Captain Marvel.

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So in the interests of keeping this on the front page :-D  a couple of questions.

Do you think the MCU should, or will, introduce the Olympians as some stage? And if so, who should be Hercules/Heracles? Maybe, instead of bringing in a new Thor, if/when they kill off Thor, he is replaced with Hercules and the Olympians become the main alien-deities in the MCU. My preference would be for the MCU to make Jane Foster Thor as per the comics. The question is whether Natalie Portman would be interested in  waiting until some time in the 2020's for that to happen (I don't see Thor being killed off until at least Infinity War 2, which is 2019, and probably no subsequent movie with Thor in it until at least 2021 or 2022.

The other question: What's the MCU going to do with Zemo? They clearly kept him alive so that he's in the back pocket to pull him out for more villain duty later on. But the huge change they made to his character, being that he's not part of Hydra or a Nazi, indeed he's anti-Hydra, means all his motivations for villainy are different. He can end up being dumped in a vat of goo and become disfigured. But the problem with these personal vendettas is that they lack an epic scale. Hydra was great because it had its own vision of how the world should be and did all manner of things to try to achieve that vision. Maybe Zemo could be recruited into a reformed Hydra with a different set of founding ideals (not based in Nazism / master race stuff) but still with a vision for the world that excludes the Avengers and looks to overthrow national governments and implement world totalitarianism.

I think the MCU needs local, global and galactic stories. Hydra (or an organisation with similar vision and goals) is a key antagonist in the global stories.

 

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Seems I'm the only one keeping this thread afloat, for now. And I can't let it disappear into the oblivion of page 3!

Did I only just notice that Civil War has surpassed the $1 billion mark? It seems that among the MCU movies that get over $1 billion there is a common thread: Ironman. I think Iron man is the only superhero that has appeared in all the $1 billion movies. Of course not all movies with Iron man make $1 billion, but he seems to be a necessary ingredient.

Also, I didn't realise this until now, but Guardians of the Galaxy is the highest grossing non-billion dollar movie in the MCU. Only Iron man 3 and the "ensemble" movies are ahead of it. For a movie that I was very sceptical about it's likely success, with characters that only the core fanbase know or care about, before it came out it has done amazingly well. Ensemble movies seem to be the biggest draw cards for the MCU.

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29 minutes ago, Leap said:

I meant to reply to this thread a while ago actually:

1. I do not think they will introduce the Olympians any time in the next decade. I feel like Ben Foster could do a good Hercules though, why not?

2. I would be down with lady-Thor, but I'm not at all convinced Natalie Portman/Jane Foster is the right choice unless they really revamp the character - and get the actress interested.

3. No idea what they're going to do with Zemo, but I do hope they give him a new motivation. It felt like even though he failed to exact full vengeance on the Avengers, he did find some closure at the end. I kinda hope they turn him into an anti-hero rather than a traditional villain (not an anti-hero, an anti hero villain), as in, his motivation is purely to stop heroes from being heroes, because he believes they cause more chaos than good or whatever. That would fit with this character without prolonging the revenge story arc. Can't see him appearing any time soon, but maybe for Captain Marvel or Black Panther?

4. Iron Man, or perhaps more accurately Robert Downey Jr, is certainly one of the biggest reasons the films he's in make so much money. Of course, Civil War had some great marketing (second only to Deadpool and Rogue One this year), and that was largely possible because of the way the story was set up. Basically, like Batman vs Superman except we didn't already know the outcome, and we already knew and cared about the characters. It also helped that Winter Soldier was pretty damn good, and Iron Man 3 + Age of Ultron both rode the coattails of The Avengers.

5. I am surprised to hear that GotG is the best selling MCU film that isn't Iron Man 3/The Avengers, I'd have guessed that Winter Soldier might have done better at least. I don't know if I would attribute that entirely to it being an ensemble cast though. It's style and humour came about at just the right time, along with excellent word of mouth. 

I'd be surprised if Doctor Strange made more than $600m-700m, even with Benedict Cumberbatch. Homecoming will likely make a tonne due to Spiderman's popularity and Robert Downey Jr. I really hope Ragnarok does well though, Hemsworth has got to have a lot of pull with the general audience at this point. I think the Thor films stand out as being better loved by the general audience than they are by the fanbase.

I'm worried for Thor Ragnarok cause it will be coming out around the same as Justice League. But I also want the DCEU to do good(although I have zero interest in it)

Doctor Strange is surprisingly my most 2016 anticipated movie, I will definitely be at the theaters on Nov 2 and I hope it does well. 

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On 8/31/2016 at 5:39 PM, The Anti-Targ said:

So in the interests of keeping this on the front page :-D  a couple of questions.

Do you think the MCU should, or will, introduce the Olympians as some stage? And if so, who should be Hercules/Heracles? Maybe, instead of bringing in a new Thor, if/when they kill off Thor, he is replaced with Hercules and the Olympians become the main alien-deities in the MCU. My preference would be for the MCU to make Jane Foster Thor as per the comics. The question is whether Natalie Portman would be interested in  waiting until some time in the 2020's for that to happen (I don't see Thor being killed off until at least Infinity War 2, which is 2019, and probably no subsequent movie with Thor in it until at least 2021 or 2022.

The other question: What's the MCU going to do with Zemo? They clearly kept him alive so that he's in the back pocket to pull him out for more villain duty later on. But the huge change they made to his character, being that he's not part of Hydra or a Nazi, indeed he's anti-Hydra, means all his motivations for villainy are different. He can end up being dumped in a vat of goo and become disfigured. But the problem with these personal vendettas is that they lack an epic scale. Hydra was great because it had its own vision of how the world should be and did all manner of things to try to achieve that vision. Maybe Zemo could be recruited into a reformed Hydra with a different set of founding ideals (not based in Nazism / master race stuff) but still with a vision for the world that excludes the Avengers and looks to overthrow national governments and implement world totalitarianism.

I think the MCU needs local, global and galactic stories. Hydra (or an organisation with similar vision and goals) is a key antagonist in the global stories.

 

Ares > Hercules, IMO. But I'd be down for a Hercules/Amadeus Cho team up movie, or a Champions one. 

But I love Jane Foster's Thor. I think she'd be the most suitable replacement for Hemsworth's Thor, as long as they keep Natalie Portman away from it. She clearly wants nothing to do with Marvel and it shows and I don't wanna see her being miserable a la Daniel Craig/Jennifer Lawrence and dragging down the movie. It kills me that Marvel went with the overrated Portman while I'm sure someone like Elizabeth Henstridge (Simmons in AoS) would slay as Jane. 

As for Zemo, I hope they're at least considering doing the Thunderbolts in the near future, since James Gunn is a big fan and has reportedly talked to Feige about them. But yeah, I think being Hydra is a big part of Zemo's character and I missed that in Civil War. 

On the topic of Iron Man (and Civil War) being a huge hit for Marvel, the cynical part of me wonders if they could be considering adapting Civil War II in the future. 

 

 

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I think Thor and Hulk's absence from Civil War will make people want to catch up with those characters again, which means so long as the movie is actually good it should do well at the box office.

Re Portman reprising Jane Foster, potentially as the new Thor. From Portman's comments in interviews it seems like she is somewhat neutral on the thing, and that she was written out of Avengers 2, Civil War and Thor 3 mostly as a studio decision and not because she's been negging on them. But maybe that's just Portman's spin. I thought the person who was actually really negative and never wanted to come back was Paltrow.

Lizzy Henstridge is never going to make the transition to the MCU, IMO. It seems that AoS has been completely sequestered from the MCU, almost like if the MCU is Earth 616, then AoS became Earth 617 as a multiverse divergence during the events of Winter Soldier. Everything that happens in Earth 617 is similar to and sometimes identical to what happens in Earth 616, but they are their own separate realities. 

The question is, are the Netflix shows Earth 616, 617 or 618?

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I never really jumped on the anti-Portman bandwagon. She's a capable actress, who hasn't really been serviced well. If they gave her character a worthwhile arc, I'm sure she'd be interested. A Cancer-stricken Jane, who takes on the Thor mantle -- which ultimately makes her Cancer worse -- is just the type of arc, I imagine, that would get Portman interested and invested. In Thor 1 and 2, she was just a love interest -- the worst possible thing to saddle an actress like Portman with.

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I wonder if Portman is interested in becoming an action hero. Sure she started out in Star Wars, and got to shoot a blaster a time or two, but her's wasn't all that much of an action role. And she ended up mostly mooning over an increasingly insane Anakin and being a political pawn to Palpatine.

Female Thor is definitely a phase 4 thing, so that's some time away. And unless female Thor is going to be a temporary thing to transition Thor back to another male actor (assumiung Hemsworth no longer wants it / is no longer wanted) then it's going to be quite a significant commitment of time for someone who will be 40 (or possibly older) by the time Jane-Thor gets started.

Scarlett Johanssen is 3 years younger than Portman and got started oin her Black Widow action hero role when she was 26. She's 32 now, and I can imagine her wanting to exit the MCU before she hits 40.

I don't think it's a problem having a 40-year old female actor play an action hero role. I just wonder if many 40+ female actors, including Portman when the Jane-Thor opportunity is likely to come around, would want to do it as a potentially decade-long commitment. As a one off, I think almost any female actor would be up for it if asked. But if they are a reasonably in demand actor then a 3/4 movie 10 year commitment might not be what they are looking for.

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Portman got her start in action, but it was long before Star Wars.

As a preteen she was an assassin in training in The Professional.  If she is to return to action, I'd much prefer to see her return to a follow up to that movie.  Think it could be really fun.

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14 hours ago, Rhom said:

As a preteen she was an assassin in training in The Professional.  If she is to return to action, I'd much prefer to see her return to a follow up to that movie.  Think it could be really fun.

 Love that movie. Would be onboard for a sequel if Besson directed for sure.

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22 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

The question is, are the Netflix shows Earth 616, 617 or 618?

616 is the comics, isn't it? I think the MCU has a different number. I guess technically the double casting of Alfre Woodard suggests the Netflix shows are in their own pocket universe. Still I think the Netflix shows are a lot less problematic than Agents of SHIELD, where you have worldwide crises that just don't register in the films at all. The whole "Inhuman fish-oil outbreak" thing is the most egregious example. A line or two in Civil War could have done so much to legitimize Agents of Shield. Oh well. 

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3 hours ago, The BlackBear said:

Civil War gets it's Honest Trailer

I think it's a bit hard to claim Zemo's plan was worse than Lex's.

And it was nice to see 'A Real Hero' return from the Matrix video.

Hopefully we can start to talk about Civil War honestly now in the wake of a bunch of nerds overpraising it compared to batman v superman. It's not a top tier Marvel film.

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47 minutes ago, Kindly Old Man said:

Hopefully we can start to talk about Civil War honestly now in the wake of a bunch of nerds overpraising it compared to batman v superman. It's not a top tier Marvel film.

It may not be top tier Marvel, but I find it's better than most of the films in their cinematic universe.

I'll have to watch it again to see how it holds up but now, it sits pretty comfortably in the middle of the pack.

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4 minutes ago, Durckad said:

It may not be top tier Marvel, but I find it's better than most of the films in their cinematic universe.

I'll have to watch it again to see how it holds up but now, it sits pretty comfortably in the middle of the pack.

I agree with this.  Just the gushing praise that happened after it came out was embarrassing. Iron Man 1, Winter Soldier, GOTG and The Avengers are clearly above it. It's in there with Ant-Man et al.

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I'm beyond gushing praise for any MCU movie (same goes for DCEU movies too). I think the wow factor for DC and MC movies happened with the Dark Knight trilogy for DC and Iron Man and Avengers 1 for MC. After that all I want is solid stuff that will entertain and keep things moving forward reasonably coherently. GoTG was almost wow, but it was more along the lines of a pleasant surprise, because conceptually I worried about how it would work, and play with audiences, but it ended up being just fine.

The only way MCU and DCEU could wow me again is if they went R-rated like the Netflix stuff. But that ain't never happening, 'cause the tween audience is essential for the revenue. At least not with the main sequence movies. Would be cool for MCU to go off book with something spin-offy in movie form, a bit like Fox did (reluctantly) with Deadpool (in the XMU).

Dr Strange looks like it's going to have an Inception vibe about it visually. So while it's going to venture into territory not seen before in the MCU, I expect it to be a pretty safe journey. Most interesting will be how (or if) they create a direct connection with the Avengers characters. I can imagine Stark and Rogers both seeing that whole magicky stuff as being flaky, hippie shit.

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13 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Dr Strange looks like it's going to have an Inception vibe about it visually. So while it's going to venture into territory not seen before in the MCU, I expect it to be a pretty safe journey. Most interesting will be how (or if) they create a direct connection with the Avengers characters. I can imagine Stark and Rogers both seeing that whole magicky stuff as being flaky, hippie shit.

Given that they teamed up with an actual Norse God (not to mention Wanda) on multiple occasions they shouldn't really have a good reason to dismiss Strange, although I wouldn't be surprised if Stark at least would try to claim their powers were due to aliens/science rather than magic.

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3 hours ago, williamjm said:

Given that they teamed up with an actual Norse God (not to mention Wanda) on multiple occasions they shouldn't really have a good reason to dismiss Strange, although I wouldn't be surprised if Stark at least would try to claim their powers were due to aliens/science rather than magic.

But it turns out the Norse god is merely an alien, not an actual god. And you could call Wanda's powers an ability to manipulate the laws of physics that operates still on a physical level and is kind of sciency and not magicky. Dr Strange's shit is mystical/metaphysical, possibly even, dare I say it, spiritual.

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