MCU - This Thread Wasn’t Made For You

[IlyaP]

4 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

The individual fight sequences had some good and creative camera work which helped hide the mediocre CGI. Every time the scenes went more grand, the CGI was bad. I didn't like the overuse of the Lovecraftian cats eating everything, either, because I just don't think it looks that good, even if it's funny.

The people in the theater where we were watching the Cats scene were, like the two of us, *howling* with laughter. It was just such a whacky choice and the inclusion of Memories from Cats made it all that much more surreal. (I did enjoy how it operated as a cute tip of the hat to Trouble with Tribbles as well, that was very charming.)

Did it always look good? Not every scene and frame. But I can forgive imperfect CGI. After all, I love The Mummy 1/2, and oh boy, the finale to Mummy 2...oof. 

[IlyaP]

7 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Like I said before, her motivations were decent for a MCU villain, but her arc didn't feature any meaningful development.

Inclined to agree here. The MCU has never been the best with its antagonists. It's a consistent weakness in their armour, so to speak. While some motivation is set up, we don't get to learn much about her. Granted, it's not a movie about her, and it's not from her perspective, but nonetheless, she's still up there alongside Ronan the Deceiver as a less than memorable foe.

[IlyaP]

29 minutes ago, Maltaran said:

I disagree - for a casual or movie-only viewer it’s clear enough that Saber is basically Shield in space, all they need to know from Wandavision is contained in Monica’s explanation to Carol of how she got her powers and the memory flashback scenes, and all they need to know about Kate Bishop is that she’s a young hero who Kamala’s trying to recruit for her new team. Sure, you’ll get more out of it if you have seen those shows (hello pizza dog) but there’s enough context given in the movie.

Totally fair. And that's the perspective I'm coming from, which you expressed perfectly - "you'll get more out of it if you have seen those shows". And I'm of course coming at this from that perspective.

I think the movie does a pretty good job of it, as you stated above. My wife hasn't seen WandaVision or Ms. Marvel (we watched and enjoyed Hawkeye together), and she didn't really struggle with it, but she did, in her defence, ask me about the backstories to Kamala and Monica prior to the start of the movie, to get up to speed, and to avoid confusion. (I think she whispered about 89,000 questions into my ear during Endgame, as she'd only seen a fraction of the MCU movies.)

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

Looks like comic book film fatigue has officially started:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/12/the-marvels-worst-opening-weekend-box-office-for-marvel-cinematic-universe.html
 

By comparison, Oppenheimer made almost 2X this with 0.5x the budget. 

[Arakasi]

I think Ilya is right. They want people to watch tv show A, B, C and movies D and E to get the full buy off for the new movie. Thing is people just want movies that are stand-alone good. WotC is going down the same road with their IP too. I think Disney has flubbed both Marvel and Star Wars here. They got greedy and thought they could get away will selling more stuff but at some point you hit diminishing returns. Corp gets greedy and poisons their golden eggs, news at 11. 

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

25 minutes ago, Arakasi said:

I think Ilya is right. They want people to watch tv show A, B, C and movies D and E to get the full buy off for the new movie. Thing is people just want movies that are stand-alone good. WotC is going down the same road with their IP too. I think Disney has flubbed both Marvel and Star Wars here. They got greedy and thought they could get away will selling more stuff but at some point you hit diminishing returns. Corp gets greedy and poisons their golden eggs, news at 11. 

Indeed, the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility, IE, Economics 101. Bob Iger needs to return to B School lol

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, Arakasi said:

I think Ilya is right. They want people to watch tv show A, B, C and movies D and E to get the full buy off for the new movie. Thing is people just want movies that are stand-alone good. WotC is going down the same road with their IP too. I think Disney has flubbed both Marvel and Star Wars here. They got greedy and thought they could get away will selling more stuff but at some point you hit diminishing returns. Corp gets greedy and poisons their golden eggs, news at 11. 

Apparently they wanted there to never be a point during the year where there wasn’t a Marvel ‘product’ streaming or in theatres. 
 

You don’t have to be a total idiot to understand why that might not be the best idea.

[IlyaP]

4 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Apparently they wanted there to never be a point during the year where there wasn’t a Marvel ‘product’ streaming or in theatres. 
 

You don’t have to be a total idiot to understand why that might not be the best idea.

There was also an idea - with which I disagree, given the tendency towards interconnectedness - of having multiple shows/movies that are different genres, and made for different audiences. Using the logic of comics here, one can have, for example, multiple series running in tandem, where each series appeals to different sensibilities. Some might enjoy Loki, while others enjoy Ghost Rider, or Hawkeye, but not She-Hulk, or Jessica Jones, but not Loki. Something for everyone, ostensibly.

Using Civil War (CW) as an example (the comic miniseries, not the movie), the miniseries featured (in no particular order): the Avengers, New Warriors, Captain American, Daredevil, the Fantastic Four, Luke Cage, Spider-Man, Doc Strange, Thor, Captain Marvel, Blade, and more. The list of characters with their own comic who appeared in Civil War is simply too massive to even list here without turning this post into a novella. 

Could readers of CW understand it even if they didn't follow every series that intersected with it? That was the general idea, as comics fans tend to get invested enough for a long enough period of time to accrue at least a working background awareness, if not knowledge, of the characters that exist in this shared playground/universe. 

Now, sure, you can easily, drop an extra $10.95 (the standard cost of a comic in Australia) on a comic from an intersecting series to see if it speaks to you, and it'll only take a small amount of time to read through it, but the same isn't necessarily true of a TV show and movies, where there are subscription costs, a minimum watch time of, what, half an hour at least, to see if you like it? From a pure attention economy perspective, that might work for the casual comic book reader, but it's not going to necessarily going to translate to viewers of live action shows and movies. 

Which brings me back to my point about interconnectedness and viewer familiarity: building out shows with the idea of appealing to different aesthetic preferences is all good and well, but if crossovers start happening with characters from shows people haven't seen, that's going to cause problems and potentially frustrate viewers who were led to believe they didn't have to do any "homework" to fully understand a live-action film. 

Which is why Endgame only featured characters from the MCU movies, rather than movies as well as Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the Netflixverse, and whatever other shows I'm forgetting at this moment. (There was also the nice analogy I saw somewhere that each MCU movie was like a big budget TV episode that was leading to a season finale - Endgame.) So either keep the shows and movies separate, or communicate clearly with viewers that things will relate and intersect. Attempting to do both is, I think, a ruinous path. 

[IlyaP]

Hilarious side note/addendum to the above: my wife has regularly asked during multiple MCU films that we've gone to see at our local cinema if the cinematic universe movie we were watching included Wonder Woman.

During Avengers: Endgame, we were seated next to a couple, where the wife kept asking the husband questions, including during the final fight sequence prior to The Portal Scene, where she asked who the arrow guy was, and I leaned over and quickly whispered: "That's Clint Barton - Hawkeye - Jeremy Renner's character - the guy from the Mission Impossible movies", as it was clear the guy was kinda over playing Twenty Questions. That prompted a smile from the husband, and the wife thanked me and indicated that she understood and was satisfied by the answer provided.

This is one of the obvious downsides to the whole Cinematic Universe concept - there's too much to track, across too many movies if you're not a hopeless nerd like yours truly, who feels a kind of warped debt to comic book movies, as comics were what helped me learn English as a child after we left the Soviet Union.

This is a problem that comics also face, which is why we get a reboot of sorts every decade or two across all the publishers, with Marvel it was the Ultimates line, with DC it was New 52, with Valiant it was (sort of?) VH-0, and with the absolute mess that is Image, one could argue the reboots took place with WildCATS 3.0, Youngblood: Maximum, and Judgement Day. Maybe. (Image is such a mess to navigate, due to all the constant delays, changes, and Behind the Scenes drama.)

It's my hope that Avengers: Secret Wars (if it doesn't get cancelled) will function as a kind of soft reset of everything, and that the shows and movies will stop overlapping after that. (Given that we're only getting one MCU movie in 2024 - Deadpool 3, there's hope that perhaps the break will be the breather we all needed, Sony's weird and mostly cringe-inducing side-verse experiment notwithstanding.)

[Denvek]

14 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Looks like comic book film fatigue has officially started:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/12/the-marvels-worst-opening-weekend-box-office-for-marvel-cinematic-universe.html
 

By comparison, Oppenheimer made almost 2X this with 0.5x the budget. 

Part of that's going to be the actor's strike meaning that the actors weren't doing any promotional work they way they'd normally do for an MCU film.

[BigFatCoward]

19 minutes ago, Denvek said:

Part of that's going to be the actor's strike meaning that the actors weren't doing any promotional work they way they'd normally do for an MCU film.

I'm sure that's what marvel is saying, I doubt it's true though. The trailer was terrible and the reviews are utter dogshit. 

[Heartofice]

It’s clearly a bunch of issues coming together at once, you could put some blame on the strike but enthusiasm for this movie was trending pretty low from the start. 
 

Add in a crappy trailer, a bunch of characters from tv shows nobody watched, a divisive ( mainly unpopular) lead character, an actress who clearly doesn’t want to be there, rumours of serious troubles with the production, unclear demographic targeting, and then some dreadful early reviews and it’s amazing the movie earned that much money at all. 
 

I didn’t even mention problems with the MCU overall either.

[IlyaP]

31 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

It’s clearly a bunch of issues coming together at once, you could put some blame on the strike but enthusiasm for this movie was trending pretty low from the start. 

It's a frustratingly incidental movie too. Obviously, I enjoyed it for what it was, and liked some of the creativity (the Ms. Marvel comic panels early in the movie are a legitimate delight and I think a first for MCU movies?), but a movie should have a reason for existing. There's a bit too much of the universe-building-at-the-expense-of-story problem here that was on display in Iron Man 2. (Not to disparage IM2, which gave us a dancing Sam Rockwell, which is never a bad thing - there just wasn't enough of it!) 

[Heartofice]

4 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

There's a bit too much of the universe-building-at-the-expense-of-story problem here that was on display in Iron Man 2. (Not to disparage IM2, which gave us a dancing Sam Rockwell, which is never a bad thing - there just wasn't enough of it!) 

Thats been an issue with the MCU for a while. The whole 'consume next product!' mentality where movies seem to exist simply to get you to go watch the next thing, whether you liked this thing is irrelevant. Almost all the Disney+ shows seem to end with some hook that leads into another movie or show, rather than giving a satisying ending. Loki being the only one recently where I've felt some level of closure for a character. 

I've seen more buzz about the mid credit scene in Marvels than anything within the actual movie itself, which is pretty damning. 

Edited November 13, 2023 by Heartofice

[IlyaP]

That is a very real problem, the whole 'consume next product' thing - and something inherited from the storytelling approached used by comics. Which - hey, it works for comics. Movies and TV shows? Not so much!

[mormont]

1 hour ago, BigFatCoward said:

I'm sure that's what marvel is saying, I doubt it's true though. The trailer was terrible and the reviews are utter dogshit. 

I keep hearing this, but any reviews I've seen were pretty positive. 

I think there's a bit of the 'computer game review' problem creeping into movie reviews, in that any major release that doesn't get universal praise and rankings over over 96% is regarded as having had 'dogshit' reviews. 

In any case, I would say that any bad reviews of this one should be ignored.

[IlyaP]

11 minutes ago, mormont said:

I keep hearing this, but any reviews I've seen were pretty positive. 

The viewer reactions on io9's Open Channel article for the movie seems mostly positive, with most people saying something to the effect of "Hey, it was a sufficiently entertaining flick. Nothing amazing, but pretty okay". I'm certain there are parts of the internet where one would find differing audience reactions, but why anyone would bother getting worked up and/or incensed about these movies is really baffling to me. They're comic book movies, about people who shoot lights from their wrists and wear spandex. High art this ain't. 

[Heartofice]

14 minutes ago, mormont said:

In any case, I would say that any bad reviews of this one should be ignored.

Yeah I'm sure all those negative reviews are just being a bit unfair, it's just the same anti-MCU bros at...'checks notes'.. The Guardian, Roger Ebert, Rolling Stone, NY times, Variety....

Guardian - The Marvels review – superheroes to zeros in tepid franchise addition - 2 Stars

Roger Ebert - It brings me absolutely no joy to report that “The Marvels” is terrible, and the worst film yet in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 1.5 Stars

Rolling Stone - ‘The Marvels’ Is Marvel Hanging Its Female Superheroes Out to Dry

NY Times - ‘The Marvels’ Review: You’ve Seen This Movie 32 Times Before

Variety - The heroines bicker and bond in a scattershot movie that diminishes the power of "Captain Marvel."

 

[mormont]

10 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

High art this ain't. 

I think they can be high art. The Marvels certainly isn't, though.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

2 hours ago, Denvek said:

Part of that's going to be the actor's strike meaning that the actors weren't doing any promotional work they way they'd normally do for an MCU film.

To be fair man, when Brie Larson is your main actor for promoting a film, your probably better off not having her promote to improve the films reception.