arc
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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
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On 3/30/2024 at 5:09 PM, Makai said:
I really doubt that the character will be close to 30 when Young Avengers is finally made. MCU time has never been in line with real time and projects aren’t released linearly.
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. -
3 minutes ago, Kel Varnsen said:
To me it just wasn't clear why Scott couldn't just leave the quantum realm at any time by turning the controls on his belt. He did that without any problems in the first movie.
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.
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14 hours ago, Raja said:
I wasn't thinking of Majors but of Kang, the big bad, being defeated by Scott Lang who wasn't even using his quick change of size powers to defeat the big bad in a fight. And by framing the fight like that it seemed like Paul Rudd who before could have his Ant-Man lose to the Wasp in a head to head match had now gained the Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel clause that their characters can't lose a fight on screen
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.
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On 3/15/2024 at 7:19 AM, tv echo said:
Related article:
How Marvel Is Quietly Retooling Amid Superhero Fatigue
BY BORYS KIT, AARON COUCH FEBRUARY 21, 2024
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/marvel-fantastic-four-avengers-movies-1235830951/Yes, we already talked about this article three weeks ago. It's on this very page near the top.
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The show was in Netflix’s top ten for English language shows for five weeks, per Deadline.
QuoteThe Brothers Sun launched to critical praise, with reviewers hailing Oscar winner Yeoh’s standout performance. The show spent five weeks in the Netflix Top 10 for English-language series, peaking at No. 2, but it couldn’t find a large audience. Its performance was modest by Netflix standards, with its number of weekly views staying below 7 million and slipping under 2 million for its last two weeks in the Top 10.
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.
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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.
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Variety: How Marvel Is Quietly Retooling Amid Superhero Fatigue
QuoteMarvel dropped Majors hours after the conviction and is rewriting those movies, which will now either minimize the character or excise him entirely. The first of the new Avengers movies, due out in 2026, was initially titled Avengers: The Kang Dynasty but will be getting a new title to remove the character’s name, though sources say that even before Majors’ conviction, the studio was making moves to minimize the character after Quantumania underperformed, grossing $476 million.
QuoteExecs are not calling it a reboot, not even a soft one, but more of a creative retooling.
Variety didn't get into it, but it was reported elsewhere that Marvel Studios thought Quantumania was really good:
Quote"[Marvel Studios] is aware of what's happening to their brand. My understanding, having talked to some people, is that ‘Quantumania’ really shook them, and I'm sure ‘Secret Invasion’ shook them further, but ‘Quantumania’ really shook them because they felt like they had something good. Because they all internally thought, 'Everyone's gonna love this.'”
[…]
“And then they put it out and people didn't. And then they were like, 'Oh no, our internal barometer is not attuned to what people want anymore.' With ‘Quantumania,’ they were like, 'We put out a banger.' And then that's not how a lot of people felt."
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.)
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On 2/16/2024 at 1:02 PM, Morrigan2575 said:
Personally, I never read the Ultimate line only 616 but, some of the stuff I've heard about the Ultimate line makes me side eye the stories.
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.
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2 hours ago, Cobalt Stargazer said:
but his hearing issues persist because it would probably require the equivalent of a cochlear implant, and given the odds there's every chance something like that could be fiddled with by those with unsavory intentions.
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
2 hours ago, Cobalt Stargazer said:Tony's arc reactor started out as a way to keep him alive, prevent those pieces of shrapnel from stopping his heart, and he nearly died when Obadiah Stane removed it from his chest.
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>
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19 minutes ago, Kel Varnsen said:
And if it is set in the 60's they will either have to come up with an explanation why no one ever mentions them in current day
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.)
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4 minutes ago, Kel Varnsen said:
As for the movie Love and Thunder I still hate it that cancer is a thing in a world with Pym particles.
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.
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On 1/2/2024 at 12:53 PM, iMonrey said:
For example, at the outset of Season 1 we were told there used to be a multiverse but it had been merged into a single "sacred" timeline. If that is the case how were there multiple Lokis?
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
On 1/2/2024 at 12:53 PM, iMonrey said:but the existence of a female Loki or an alligator Loki or a Black Loki suggests other universes where he'd been born those things.
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.
On 1/2/2024 at 12:53 PM, iMonrey said:presumably the TVA did not exist prior to the multiverses being merged into the sacred timeline.
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.
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4 hours ago, Kel Varnsen said:
But instead here is a crazy looking CG dragon.
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.
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3 hours ago, Raja said:
I hope that I don't need to finish Loki to make sense of the movie.
Loki is really good! S1 less so with the Jonathan Majors stuff tainting his appearance. S2 is a drag in the middle but ends really strong.
I strongly suspect you won't need to watch Loki to understand Deadpool 3. He breaks the fourth wall and also Marvel has been pretty good about slipping in enough exposition in the movies to cover the basics of what went on in the previouslies, without doing actual previouslies. Or rather, lately Marvel has outsourced the previouslies to the "Marvel Legends" clips they put on Disney Plus and Youtube. Five minute clips that run down all the things that will probably be touched on in the upcoming show or movie. So worst case, watch the Marvel Legends they put out just before this movie premieres.
That said, I'm kind of in the same boat as I haven't watched Deadpool 1 or 2, so maybe I'll need to watch some Marvel Legends to catch up.
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On 12/24/2023 at 11:44 AM, Harvey said:
It's weird that the show went on for 7 whole seasons and this is completely unexplored.
I guess in this show parental issues are mostly dealt with via Morty and Beth and Summer, and much less so Rick's own parents and upbringing?
Which Rick set up the Central Finite Curve? Our Rick? Excluding anyone smarter than him either means he cut his parents out of the CFC, or they're not smarter (or even as smart?) as him.
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On 1/16/2024 at 7:03 PM, Cobalt Stargazer said:
despite the new insistence that the earlier phases were perfection. (They weren't.)
These days, I like Avengers 1 except for all the distinctly Whedon-ish touches esp in the dialogue, and there's more than a few of those. But it's at least pretty good. I found Avengers 2 very disappointing. I get the sense most fans thought the Russo brothers did a better job overall with Civil War aka Avengers 2.5, then 3 (Infinity War) and 4 (Endgame) than Whedon's 1 & 2 taken together.
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On 1/20/2024 at 7:37 PM, Kel Varnsen said:
And I was kind of annoyed that the whole use your powers and you switch places wasn't at all consistent and only happened (good or bad) when the plot required it.
It's not when their powers are used, but when they're used at the same time that a switch would occur.
(Which again, brings me back to the quibble I raised months ago in this thread: when people are light years apart, it's really hard to even say when two things occurring are "simultaneous".)
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With show forums like Community that got vaulted and converted into a single thread, could those vaulted forums please be un-vaulted and merged with the new forums for the show?
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6 hours ago, Raja said:
As I never saw Raid
The first is a classic. The second one is actually the story the filmmakers wanted to tell, but with budget constraints they decided to scale back and do the first Raid movie in a smaller setting. It's brutal but a martial arts masterpiece. The second one is still good but suffers a bit from losing a bit of focus.
6 hours ago, Raja said:I was left in wonder how Grace, and all the other Boxers was able to hold out as long as she did against June.
Well, this is a world where nearly everyone is a very skilled martial artist, besides Bruce and maybe Mama Sun. The Boxers overall have been some vicious killers, from the giant in ep 1 to the squad that attacked at Ka Spa. June is indeed apparently a major league assassin in her own right for someone who probably doesn't have expensive training -- given how poor she was growing up -- cause she murked that LA drug runner who was Sleepy Chan's LA guy. Maybe Grace made up for any combat deficiencies with sheer righteousness?
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On 6/19/2019 at 8:26 PM, paulvdb said:
‘Mixed-Ish’: Mark-Paul Gosselaar Joins ‘Black-Ish’ Spinoff On ABC In Recasting
He will play Bow's father
So catching up on this, just curious, given that Gosselaar is mixed, was Gosselaar's character white or mixed himself?
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17 hours ago, cdnalor said:
So was he the one behind the Boxers or were we never told who Grace was reporting to?
Yeah, it never made sense to me that Grace was head of the Boxers or even high enough to be able to promise not to hunt Charles or Eileen. But I never thought the Jade Dragons consigliere was behind them either, and we never even saw her reporting to anyone.
Who was the guy on screen left in the mid credits scene?
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On 1/4/2024 at 10:43 AM, aghst said:
The show runners are a couple so maybe they were able to do some work on scripts during the WGA strike.
My understanding was that the guild asked members not to write for struck productions during the strike, even if it wasn't going to be shared with the studios until after the strike resolved. Obviously this is next to impossible to police, but this mostly went on the honor system.
But in any case, if production had already started on s3 before the strikes, then writing would have been almost entirely done before filming began. (Yes, with network shows they'll start filming one episode while episodes due a few weeks later aren't even written yet, but for cable and streaming shows, esp with shorter orders, the tendency is for the entire season to have full teleplays written before filming begins.)
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4 hours ago, Chaos Theory said:
he is still way too much a moralistic coward for this kind of show.
That may stem from the producers wanting to keep things light. I've been reading a bunch of pieces since finishing the show, so I can't find it now, but I remember reading that they wanted some kind of balance leaning towards lightness*. So that may be why Bruce is conflicted about it all. Plus, this is a pretty short amount of time for a newbie to just dive in and fully commit to the gangster life.
(edit: found it:
QuoteThat emotional core and levity are what underscored the production, said co-creator Brad Falchuk. “We didn’t want any darkness in the show,” he said. “You’d watch this show and you’d feel good afterwards. You wouldn’t feel like you had been sort of beaten down in any way.”
)
But yeah, one thing they definitely could have done more with was earlier in the season when Charles said Bruce wasn't being a rebel, but just a coward because he was pursuing improv secretly, not in open defiance of his mom. That hit hard because it was valid.
Even so, he did change a little over the course of the season. He started off like a typical Asian American son, outwardly obedient but secretly slightly rebellious, but he ends up with no hesitation in aiming Xing at the Boxer who killed Blood Boots, he fully lies to the cops, and he doesn't oppose his mother when she firmly states her intention to take over the gang.
4 hours ago, Chaos Theory said:I was hoping Charles or mom would knock some sense or big truths into him but for some reason the show is making him out to be the moral center…..and it falls flat.
I love Charles and Eileen, but they're pretty bad people who are definitely not committing only victimless crimes. The Boxers may not have been good people themselves, but they had legitimate reasons to want to destroy the triads. I do agree that Bruce was too naive, even at the end, but I'm just not sure anyone had much of a moral high ground to talk to him about it.
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The Marvel Cinematic Universe: The Avengers, etc.
in Movies
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.