Marvel's Multiverse of Maddening Returns

[Jaxom 1974]

34 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I dunno, you seem to continually try and misrepresent what I’m saying, like how you seem to think I hate everything, when I’m constantly posting about movies and shows I like.
 

If your only take from everything I said was ‘Eww girls’ then that’s up to you.

Glad you seem to like things. Certainly hard to tell. But if you can't see that your fallback once you criticize something is to complain loudly that is the fault is adding women, or POC, or flipping a gender role...well, that's on you. Because anytime you dislike, outright hate on, something it's a pretty good indication for the rest of us to take a better look at the property and make our own decisions about it.

 

[sifth]

Getting back to the Marvels, the film is predicted to suffer a 78% to 80% drop this weekend, which would make it the highest second weekend drop in the history of the MCU. Ant Man 3 held this title previously with a 69% drop in it's second weekend.

Edited November 18, 2023 by sifth

[DaveSumm]

Remember when Feige said they were going to drop Phases all together? I imagined he was thinking that, kinda like comics, we didn’t need to immediately launch into the next Big Event. I think the idea was that we’d all take a breath and have some more isolated stories that introduced some new characters.

But sadly this coincided with Chapek taking over with other plans; to ramp things up and have constant D+ shows. I think that’s the heart of the issue for me, this fundamental clash between taking a beat and milking it simultaneously. Suddenly Feige had to adopt phases once again, and then hurriedly announce the Next Big Thing after a few duds. Throw in Boseman’s death and Covid to really make things difficult.

The good thing is, I don’t think they’ve made any decisions that ruin anything. The MCU could start churning out gold tomorrow and we’d all be back on board I suppose, it’s not like the SW prequels where they’re just so shit that there’s no course correcting. On paper, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having the return of Daredevil / Kingpin, X-Men, F4, Blade, a just-starting-out-in-NYC Spider-Man. There’s a truck load of potential there, if they can just make it all good.

[sifth]

1 hour ago, DaveSumm said:

 

But sadly this coincided with Chapek taking over with other plans; to ramp things up and have constant D+ shows.

 

That was on Bob Iger, not Chapek. Bob Iger had Marvel make the shows for Disney Plus, but considering it takes about a year to get one of these mini series completed, plus Covid delays, they didn't start coming out until Chapek was the CEO.

[Ran]

4 hours ago, sifth said:

Getting back to the Marvels, the film is predicted to suffer a 78% to 80% drop this weekend, which would make it the highest second weekend drop in the history of the MCU. Ant Man 3 held this title previously with a 69% drop in it's second weekend.

At the Boxoffice subreddit, it's noted that it's now performing about on par where Morbius was at the same timeframe since release (actually slightly worse on Saturday vs. Morbius's similar Saturday). People are saying it'll struggle to make $90 million domestic.

To put it in perspective, at 9 days since release, it's still not made as much domestically as Captain Marvel in its first day of release. Feels like a box office disaster of epic proportions.

Also feels like a real wake-up call for Marvel Studios. 

Edited November 18, 2023 by Ran

[BigFatCoward]

14 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

The good thing is, I don’t think they’ve made any decisions that ruin anything. The MCU could start churning out gold tomorrow and we’d all be back on board I suppose, it’s not like the SW prequels where they’re just so shit that there’s no course correcting. On paper, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having the return of Daredevil / Kingpin, X-Men, F4, Blade, a just-starting-out-in-NYC Spider-Man. There’s a truck load of potential there, if they can just make it all good.

The board might be, I don't think the man on the street would. 

[The Anti-Targ]

The movie is getting a worse boxoffice than it deserves. I liked it and was happy to have seen it at the movies. It was certainly better than the last Ant Man. They need to think about how they're going to get the wheels back on this machine. In a different context this exact same movie would have been easily on track for $500M globally, which is not brilliant by MCU standards but it would have done what it needed to do.

Edited November 19, 2023 by The Anti-Targ

[Heartofice]

Maybe if they had, from the very start, planned it as a Ms Marvel movie and stuck to that, made sure it was definitely just a kids movie, and kept that focus. Then the movie probably would have been better, less of a choppy mess, but more importantly it would have been easier to market.
It might have been cheaper too. 
 

As it is, it just feels like a movie that had been through numerous rewrites and was a mutant mix of multiple movies thrown together. 
 

Either way, if they had just said ‘hey we are making a fun kids movie for the summer, bring the family’ and ditched the Captain Marvel burden, maybe this movie would have done better. 

 

[Heartofice]

I was going to say in response to Davesumms post that one of the issues Marvel has which makes it hard to turn the ship around is that have already planned these movies and tried to build up to them, very hard to just cancel the tentpole events they have been leading up to.

Except that might well be happening. Reports that they are preparing to ditch the entire Kang storyline, with the Majors stuff going on.

https://www.cbr.com/report-marvel-studios-possibly-backing-away-from-kang/
 

Quote

"I heard from someone recently...the screenwriter Jeff Loveness, who wrote Quantumania, was supposed to write The Kang Dynasty...anyway, it's confirmed. I had it confirmed to me he's no longer working for Marvel," Robinson said. "I asked the person why, and they said the reason why is he was all wrapped up in this Kang storyline and they are likely going to be moving away from that."

Not exactly solid confirmation of anything but if they did just cancel the whole idea, it would be a big deal. The ending of Loki actually makes it a lot easier to do, and right now Kang just seems the least threatening villain of ‘all time’ anyway!

A hint they could ditch Secret Wars too, which I doubt as it’s probably a good way to bring in F4 and X-Men.

Edited November 19, 2023 by Heartofice

[sifth]

Disney really learned nothing from Johnny Depp, did they. A person is suppose to be innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around.

[mormont]

Whether you're a bad PR risk isn't the same as whether you're criminally liable for an offence.

(Also, the evidence suggests that dropping Depp was the right move. Go read the UK judgement: it's a pretty convincing finding of fact.)

 

[Heartofice]

24 minutes ago, mormont said:

Whether you're a bad PR risk isn't the same as whether you're criminally liable for an offence.

(Also, the evidence suggests that dropping Depp was the right move. Go read the UK judgement: it's a pretty convincing finding of fact.)

 

The two cases are also different given that Depp was suing the Sun, not Heard. It was about whether the Sun should be able to use the term ‘wifebeater’.
 

However that judge also wasn’t interested in whether Heard was abusing Depp or questioned her honesty (which appears to not exist) 
 

Either way, Depp revealed enough in those trials to prevent him working again. 

[sifth]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

Whether you're a bad PR risk isn't the same as whether you're criminally liable for an offence.

(Also, the evidence suggests that dropping Depp was the right move. Go read the UK judgement: it's a pretty convincing finding of fact.)

 

Sorry, this is info I'm not familiar with. James Gunn losing his job is another example of Disney jumping the gun. No doubt another wise move by them according to you, lol

Edited November 19, 2023 by sifth

[mormont]

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

The two cases are also different given that Depp was suing the Sun, not Heard. It was about whether the Sun should be able to use the term ‘wifebeater’.

However that judge also wasn’t interested in whether Heard was abusing Depp or questioned her honesty (which appears to not exist)

You haven't read the judgement.

1 hour ago, sifth said:

Sorry, this is info I'm not familiar with. James Gunn losing his job is another example of Disney jumping the gun. No doubt another wise move by them according to you, lol

Gunn is quite a different situation, to be fair. In fact, other than that he was fired for PR reasons, the situation is different in almost every way (including the fact that Gunn fully admitted to doing what he was accused of, so the original point you were making doesn't apply).

But anyway, getting back to the topic more directly, one of the strong arguments for Marvel reconsidering Majors' role is that he will likely be wrapped up in defending the charges during a key period... and it does let them reset things somewhat. The argument against is that the best thing Marvel could do to stimulate interest is release an Avengers movie, and ditching Majors is bound to lead to delays in doing that.

[Werthead]

I think the main problem is that a lot of casual viewers were charmed by Robert Downey Jr's performance in Iron Man (the character himself being obscure as all fuck to a non-comics audience), and then the extremely enjoyable eye candy of The Avengers. I think there was a snowball effect that permeated through that entire arc leading up to the Infinity War, helped by great casting decisions (imagine if they'd fucked up casting Loki, and their casting choices for Thor and Captain America were not initially well-received).

A very large problem is the loss of their charismatic leading characters (RDJ and Chris Evans mainly), the downplaying of the other surviving Avengers, the loss of Gunn effectively terminating the Guardians sub-group (Star Lord is apparently combing back solo, but Bautista is indicating he's done for good), the sad loss of Boseman who was being set up to lead the next era, and not-very-strong results in bringing in new actors of the calibre of the ones they've lost. I think they could have gone all-in on Spidey, but the kerfuffle with Sony made them paranoid they're only ever one conversation away from losing the character, so they can't anchor the franchise around him.

Bringing in Deadpool, Fantastic Four, Doom and the X-Men and Brotherhood are all big, low-hanging fruit they can go all-in on, but I suspect they were aiming to be careful in the writing and casting and do that whilst the Kang Saga unfolded. With that on the rocks, the temptation must be to say "it's mutant time," and hope like hell they nail those movies.

Also, whilst I don't think superhero fatigue is a major problem in itself (we've had, I think, at least one superhero movie per year of some type or another since Batman in 1989, and sometimes many more than that), I think fatigue with Marvel and keeping track of WTF is going on in each film and TV show has really become an issue. They might have been better-served taking five years off after Endgame and rebuilding excitement for the franchise.

[The Anti-Targ]

Their plans for who would anchor the MCU post RDJ and Evans being thrown for a loop the two obvious candidates to me would be Mr Fantastic and Professor X as the intellectual leads. I doubt they will try to run back a different wolverine as the eye candy anchor, I feel like they should completely change tack with Wolverine, go deeper on him being a short angry guy. Cyclops is no good as the Evans/Hemsworth eye candy, because you need a character who you can look longingly in the eyes. Dare I say it but a possibly good candidate for that is Angel, just power him up to be more than just someone who can fly. On the non-mutant side Jessica Drew could be the female sex symbol but the problem there is 1) she's not been introduced to movie goers yet, 2) she's a spider person, which a) means Disney doesn't want Sony controlling an anchor character, b) there are already 3 spider characters in the spotlight (if you include the Spiderverse animated characters). Spider Gwen doesn't suffer from problem 1, but she does suffer from problem 2 and at present she's a teen character in the animated movies, and dead in the Spider-Garfield-verse. Storm would be a great female lead, but 2 X-persons as the hotties is possibly not ideal. 

Any female character not yet seen in the MCU could do the job if introduced right. But they banked on Carol Danvers being it and it didn't work. She Hulk could have also been a great female anchor, but that didn't work either. Also if any female character is going to anchor the MCU they need to not be introduced via a Disney+ TV show.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

As a casual fan, I always viewed Spider-Man as the new anchor for the MCU, with him even being groomed by Iron Man directly in the films. Always those films are the best and most fun of the post endgame stuff for sure.

Edited November 20, 2023 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[BigFatCoward]

How could spiderman be the leader? He's a fucking idiot. 

[Heartofice]

Spider-man is great, but he's never going to be the leader of anything. He works better when he is bouncing off more serious, authoritative figures. You can imagine him just irritating Black Panther. 

I think if they went down the Secret Wars route, and then had Mr Fantastic and Xavier pretty much lead that storyline, that could be a way to centre the franchise around those teams. You could also do that thing the comics used to do of having members of those teams join the Avengers for... reasons. 

[polishgenius]

Issues of character aside Spidey was never gonna lead the Avengers because he's still on loan from Sony and if that deal collapses they'd be screwed.

 

Seems clear to me that Black Panther, Carol and Strange were supposed to be the new lead trio but obviously Boseman dying stopped that and then the other two haven't landed the way they needed, even though Captain Marvel did do well.