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But he wasn’t! Tony Stark in the comics before 2008 was a billionaire genius playboy drunk, sure, but the wisecracking — the personality — was invented for the movie. Someone had a good take that there really hadn’t been a funny live-action Spider-Man by 2008, the guy who cracks jokes at his enemies’ expense while fighting them, so Marvel Studios basically took that aspect of comics Peter Parker and gave it to MCU Tony Stark. And obviously RDJ was aces at playing that. It was a great character but it wasn’t really comic-accurate*. Really, Tony at that point was a B-list hero in the Marvel Comics stable partly because he didn’t have that much of a personality. And considering Marvel Studios and RDJ never wanted to fully adapt “Demon in a Bottle”, the alcoholism story that’s one of the biggest classics of the Iron Man lore**, they had to figure out some other thing for Tony to be, so… they made him be this guy. * ok, I suppose there was an aspect of flippant rule-breaker in the Ultimate Universe version of Tony. But 616 Tony wasn’t like that. ** I mean, it’s basically his origin, Demon in a Bottle, and Armor Wars.

Bleeding Cool liveblog from Disney's presentation at CinemaCon. The Marvel bits: Fantastic Four and Thunderbolts* will both be shot entirely in IMAX Thunderbolts* will include the asterisk as part of the official title. Marvel will not explain the asterisk until the movie has been released. Deadpool will get a special popcorn bucket

Well, there was this sort of vague haze overall, but then Endgame really made things super concrete that Avengers 1 happened in 2012, and so on. @Kel Varnsen there's already a lot of precedent for actors playing younger in the MCU. Simu Liu was 30-31 at the time of filming Shang-Chi and I'm pretty sure the character is explicitly 24 in the movie. But to go back to his earliest showbiz days as a stock photo model, he didn't really age that much from his early 20s to 31.

That was a one time fluke. AM1’s rules (per Hank, I know, unreliable source) we’re that the QR was inescapable. That’s why Scott’s move at the end was such a heroic sacrifice: he did the right thing at great cost to himself. Then he proved that Hank was wrong and the QR could be escaped but even so, Janet was still stuck there and she’s as smart as Hank and had the same tech. So then the modified rules in AM2 were that the QR is barely escapable under the right circumstances, which our heroes barely manage in order to save Janet. And then in AM3 the rules are further expanded to say that the QR drifts in and out of synch with the main universe, so sometimes it’s more possible than other times. It’s still difficult to escape — I forget what reverse-the-polarity nonsense justified it for Cassie, Hank, and Janet, tbh. Also, the whole thing from the end of AM2 to Endgame was that Scott couldn’t escape at will. That’s why he involuntarily rode out the five year gap in the QR.

Well, the whole thing was that Kang was cut off from his powers in the Quantum Realm too. It may well be that Kang’s not particularly good at martial arts since time powers (as seen with He Who Remains) is a cheat code to life. And the story needed Ant-Man to win. If Kang escaped, then (1) Ant-man doesn’t get a win and (2) story-wise, the MCU would have to go straight into Kang’s endgame, when this was just his introduction. I really think half the reason Marvel execs thought Quantumania was a “banger” is because they were so deep in its development that they remembered all the cut or altered scenes, even when watching later cuts that took out or altered vital pieces. The broad outlines of some really compelling stuff was there, but the execution just blew. Cassie doesn’t have an arc, and Scott’s arc is there but under-executed. And the final heroic sacrifice — Scott wins a sort of Pyhrric victory by trapping Kang and himself in the QR forever — is immediately undone as the movie breaks its own rules to rescue Scott seconds later. To me, these things suggest there was a better movie in there lost in editing, though maybe in the script development stage. I don’t mean to say there’s enough shot footage to cut together a better movie as much as I mean the script had unmet potential.

Yes, we already talked about this article three weeks ago. It's on this very page near the top.

The show was in Netflix’s top ten for English language shows for five weeks, per Deadline. I don’t understand how Netflix made a show that lasted on its top 10 for five weeks (esp considering its binge drop model) and then just cancelled it instead of seeing that as a success to build on.

Harmon and Marder talk about season 7 and the upcoming season 8 in Variety. They plan to do a similar mix of myth arc vs adventures-of-the-week. Evil Morty will probably return at some point.

Variety: How Marvel Is Quietly Retooling Amid Superhero Fatigue Variety didn't get into it, but it was reported elsewhere that Marvel Studios thought Quantumania was really good: So retooling here and there or cutting back on the number of projects isn't the most necessary improvement to their process. The main thing is that they need to get back in tune with their audience. (also, more broadly, a lot of would-be blockbusters fell short in 2023 even if they weren't superhero flicks. Audiences don't have superhero fatigue, they have movie fatigue.)

The Ultimate Marvel line was hit and miss. I guess 616 is too, but with a smaller lineup it was easier to notice with UM. My hot take would be that Ultimate Spider-Man is pretty good, the Ultimates (Avengers with a different team name) usually had great art and often some questionable writing that hasn't aged well, and some of the other projects (Ultimate Iron Man miniseries) were disavowed from Ultimate Comics continuity almost immediately. The early MCU took a few things directly from UM, like Nick Fury being Samuel L Jackson, the early versions of the Iron Man armor being a hell of a production to put on or take off, many superhumans being some ways related to the WW2 super-soldier project. And like UM, the MCU has gradually drifted more towards resembling the 616 continuity as time has gone on*, because so many of the creators are fans of the original stuff. Like, if Marvel Studios does their own take on Galactus, it'll probably be the 616 Galactus in all his Kirby glory and not the UM Gah Lak Tus (more sci-fi, less space god with a crazy helmet) * with exception of Nick Fury, where 616 made the new Nick Fury Black to better match the movies and thus to also match UM.

But Rhodey literally had a spinal cord implant or something that fixed his paralysis. (And Agent Ross also suffered paralysis that was fixed with Wakandan super tech, if memory serves. Also Benjamin Bratt’s character fixed himself with magic, at least until Mordo un-fixed him or whatever it was.) Anyways, ultimately you usually have to suspend disbelief about why super sci fi technology isn’t applied more widely than it is yeah, but NWH really lampshades how disappointingly little Stark and his company did with the arc reactors over the years by bringing Raimi’s Otto Octavius into the MCU to see “the power of the sun, in the palm of my hand.” That Otto, in his original movie, really was trying to change the world for the better by inventing fusion power. Stark basically has, and without any drawbacks like potentially destroying the world with a runaway reactor, and all he does with it is get into super-fights. I guess on the plus side, he also didn’t sell Iron Man tech to various militaries despite his former occupation as an arms dealer. Again, sci fi vs superhero stories. <shrug>

They’ll probably end up getting parked in the Negative Zone till the current day. (They already used deep space for Carol Danvers, the Quantum Realm for Janet van Dyne (and also how Scott Lang rode out most of the Blip era), a temporary retirement for Wenwu, and a big block of ice for Steve Rogers. Also, I figure they’re saving universe merging for the X-men.)

This is the fundamental difference between superhero stories and sci-fi. In the former, Tony Stark invents a revolutionary energy system and uses it to power suit armor. In the latter, cars all run on arc reactors, they're 80% lighter and rely on repulsor "airbags" and they fly so they don't leave tire particulates. Then you add vibranium, Pym particles, multiple humans who literally command a fraction of infinite power (Wanda and Vision and Carol, plus to a lesser extent the Sorcerer Supreme), a revived super soldier serum that at minimum reverts most of the degradations of old age, casual space travel, Spider-Man's chemical wizardry, time travel, actual magic, and pretty soon that world no longer resembles our own. It's a better world, but it's less relatable to the real world.

Even after* HWR set up his Sacred Timeline, the timeline constantly splits. It's only through the actions of the TVA that they prune out timelines that vary too far from the Sacred Timeline. So there could be timelines where Loki turns himself into an alligator, or something. And then the TVA field team shows up and prunes that variant into that end-of-time wasteland. * see below for why 'after' is kind of a difficult concept here I suppose that could be the divergence, but at that point you wonder why that person would even be Loki. I like to think that Loki variants are especially varying in appearance because Loki uses magic, but they were all originally the same baby Loki Laufeyson. Well, this is one of those time things where "when" something happens is different inside and outside of the universe you're talking about. There was a multiverse, and eventually a multiversal war of Kangs, and HWR won out and after winning, trimmed the timelines into one Sacred Timeline that prevents other Kangs from arising, mostly through a TVA he established to delegate the work to. The TVA sits outside of time. The TVA doesn't exist inside the universe/timeline, monitoring divergence points in real time. Time passing in the universe does not correspond one-to-one to time passing in the TVA. When they do field work in the universe, they time travel willy-nilly. So outside the MCU's 616 universe, aka the Sacred Timeline, the TVA was established in year XXXX of HWR's home timeline, say. But once that happened, from the viewpoint within 616, the TVA has always existed. If XXXX was, say, the year 24000 CE, it hardly matters that the Avengers got together in 2012; the TVA could open a portal to that day anyways. Yes, in a sense it's very weird and not exactly plausible that urgent timeline splits that must be attended to happen up and down the timeline but only be considered urgent at some point within the TVA's own linear timeline, but ... <shrug> I think as far as time travel / multiverse stories go, the show gave a pretty good shot at having coherent rules for how things work. OK, here's an analogy I just came up with. Think of the TVA like book copyeditors instead of autocorrect. There are typos randomly throughout the book. When they become aware of a big error, they go in and fix it, but they're not part of the book. They're not constrained by the linear flow of the words in the book; they can jump sentences or pages as any reader could. The copyeditors don't have to only correct the book as the current word is being written in real time; they can go back and forth through the whole thing.

I kind of get it. Without the evil dragon -- I forget what its name was and it literally had no lines once it manifested in its true shape -- Wenwu's fight has little to no stakes for the world. It matters to Shang Chi and Xialing, and in a better movie maybe the filmmakers would have had faith in that. (Though given Cretton's previous films, I am strongly inclined to blame studio meddling rather than the director.) Between Shang-Chi and Quantumania and Eternals, I think the biggest problem with phase 4 has been needing to hit their release dates, so the scripts end up underbaked. I've said elsewhere that Quantummania actually has a lot of good stuff in theory, but the execution is badly lacking. They should try sending the scripts through the Dan Harmon story circle; I think analyzing them through that lens might help show where the character beats the audience wants to see are being missed. The second biggest problem is that for all that this is the studio that introduced "cinematic universes" and revolutionized crossover cameos, they've been falling dreadfully short at keeping things interconnected. By phase 2, Marvel had their characters cameoing regularly. Shang Chi hasn't shown up once after his own movie. In one sense it's only been two years so far, but in another sense it's been about fifteen canonical stories between the shows and movies. They couldn't fit in one cameo? Similar complaints for America Chavez or Moon Knight/Scarab, or the Eternals. Instead, Marvel spent all of phase 4 introducing new characters and giving them no followups. Kate Bishop's second appearance in the MCU came about fourteen to sixteen stories* after her first! * it depends whether you want to count I Am Groot, Werewolf by Night, and the GOTG Holiday Special or not.