Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread

Maybe the rumored Jen/Matt courtroom fight involving a superhero tailor is Daredevil suing the guy who gave him a yellow ****ing suit? :P

 

Matt has certainly come a long way in his characterization. But Matt did become a more serious character in the 70s--Miller did not take him from wisecracking hero to gritty and grim in one move. The groundwork was laid out beforehand. As for the Netflix series, the problem I had was the way the producers kept finding ways to keep Matt out of the suit as if they didn't really want him to be a super-hero. Iron Fist suffered a similar problem, but that issue was far from my biggest complaint about that series.

 

Sure, but that's beside the point, which is what the name "Daredevil" was chosen to represent when the character was first created in 1964. And just in general what the word "daredevil" means, which has always, always been more about reckless daring and fearlessness than anything literally devilish. (The word "devil" had been used to mean a clever rogue since the 1600s, like "You sly devil, you," so it may have been based on that, as well as simple alliteration. Although one theory is that "daredevil" was coined to mean "one who dares the Devil," like tempting fate or courting death.)

That's why the Netflix series's rationale for the name was so awkward. The comics started with the "fearless" meaning and then gradually leaned more into the "devil" stuff. But the show started with the "devil" stuff and left out the other stuff, so the "Dare" part came out of nowhere.

 

The Netflix shows were ashamed of the fact they were comic book properties, they wanted to minimize any and all comic booky stuff as possible.

 

You are correct, but some do not understand the dual meaning of the word "daredevil."

In any case, the MCU benefits by adding anything from the Netflix series, as they were often creatively superior to the movies.

 

Not superior, just more ashamed and thus appealing to those others ashamed of comics. Thankfully, those people are a dying breed.

 

I think it's pretty clear the creators of the Netflix shows did not hate the comics, they took a different approach, but they took enough stuff from the comics to make it clear they were fans.
The one example I know of a person who worked on Marvel show who openly wanted didn't like the comics is Kenneth Johnson, the creator of the Bixby/Ferigno The Incredible Hulk, and that was back in the '70s.

 

Yeah, the Bill Bixby Hulk series was a pretty serious take on a very silly comic book premise and was turned into some pretty gripping and at times scary prime time television.

 

No, I don't see that at all. I've been a huge Daredevil comics fan for well over 25 years and I didn't see anything in the Netflix series that suggested they were ashamed of comics. They very deliberately attempted to play the shows straight, less of the code names and costumes, and to ground them in a different way than the rest of the MCU. But that's a different take, not being ashamed. Different takes are perfectly valid even if you don't personally like them.

I despise every facet of Zack Snyder's takes on Superman and Batman, but that doesn't mean they are wrong or incorrect takes, just different.

 

A Bill Bixby Hulk documentary.

 

You're absolutely right on that. I think it is more likely that they, or higher ups, had certain criteria to play down the "costumed" super-hero angle -- probably because of the belief that it would play to a broader audience.

 

It's usually the way of TV comics adaptations to start out with a "grounded" approach and ease the general audience into the more comic-booky stuff. Smallville spent years trying to minimize the comic-book elements of its premise and turn the Superboy story into Dawson's Creek, and didn't really lean into the comics stuff until things like the X-Men and Spider-Man movies had made superheroes respectable. Arrow started out as a very grounded, street-level urban vigilante series, then started gradually working in sci-fi elements, then spun off The Flash, and so on, until the Arrowverse had become a full-on comic-book universe with metahumans and time travel and magic and aliens and unfettered craziness. Agents of SHIELD started out as the kind of crime procedural ABC was comfortable with, featuring a team of normal humans working for the government and investigating weird phenomena, but then started bringing in more comics characters and superpowered characters and leaning harder into the sci-fi every season.

Heck, this even happened in animation. The DC Animated Universe started off fairly grounded with Batman: The Animated Series -- which had sci-fi elements like Man-Bat and Clayface and evil robots and invisibility suits and so on, but was overall a much more grounded series than Superman or Batman Beyond or Justice League would be, avoiding elements that later became common, such as aliens and magic.

 

I think it’s 2/5s this and 3/5s budget

 

Exactly so. There was little in the shows that felt out of step with when I was watching Captain America: The First Avenger. It felt more grounded, with the larger than life elements down played and slowly explored more. Daredevil was far more about the psychology of Matt Murdock vs. Wilson Fisk than the larger than life parts and it did that quite well while feeling closer to the films, and bringing in elements of the comics.

 

It remains the best and most compelling, adult exploration of Banner and his alter-ego ever committed to film.

 

Exactly. Comic characters are not all flashy and over-the-top, and as far as being more grounded goes (within a fantasy framework), the best of the MCU continues to be Captain America: The Winter Soldier by some considerable distance--which was achieved without 50 explosions per second, aliens, or energy blasts. Its telling that all of the hand weapons used in the film were real world firearms (or based on it), and even Maria's stun baton is based on real world tech. The costumes--specifically Captain America, the Falcon and Maria Hill are all muted colors-to-dark, each designed to serve practical purposes, rather than being loud and flashy. That was just one of the visual strengths of the Marvel Netflix series, and again, that kind of character treatment is what the MCU has needed for some time.

 

This.

I like Mark Ruffalo and Edward Norton but their MCU portrayals don't even come close to what Bixby pulled off.

 

It was a good show, but it would have been nice if somewhere in the 80 episodes they could have worked in some other stuff from the comics. Even if they didn't want to go for other superpowered characters, it wouldn't have been that hard to work in characters like the Rosses and Rick Jones, who were all still unpowered at that point.
Just to be clear, it's a great show, and I don't mean this as a dig, it's just that ever since I became of fan of the comics, that's been my one disappointment with the show.
And yes, I am aware of Kingpin, Daredevil, and Thor being in the movies, but that was after the show had ended, and I haven't seen them, so I have no idea what they were like.
Even though the early Smallville seasons avoided taking a lot from the comics, they still managed to include Lana Lang, Pete Ross, Lex Luthor and the Kents.
Just with the '70s shows, Wonder Woman and Spider-Man both managed to work in some of the supporting characters from their comics.

 

Back then, it was uncommon for live-action screen adaptations of comics to use that many characters from them besides the main leads. DC adaptations tended to use only the heroes and some of their supporting cast, but generally used mostly or entirely original villains. (Batman '66 was the main exception, and only 1/3 of its villains were from the comics. But Marvel adaptations hardly even used any of the supporting characters. The '70s Spider-Man TV series only used Peter Parker and J. Jonah Jameson, plus Aunt May in the pilot alone, and otherwise created a new supporting cast. The Dr. Strange pilot movie featured Strange, Wong, Clea, and Morgan Le Fay (technically a Marvel character), but otherwise featured new characters (though the unnamed villain could be interpreted as Dormammu). The two Reb Brown Captain America pilot movies featured no comics characters besides Steve Rogers, and he was the son of the original Captain America (who went uncostumed in that reality).

The Hulk/Thor movie was cheesy but fun. I didn't like the way it broke the reality of the show's universe; the original series had been pretty grounded, with no SF/fantasy elements besides gamma mutation, the occasional psychic, a sentient AI in one episode, and some vague Asian mysticism in the two Mako episodes. So bringing in literal magic and supernatural beings was hugely incongruous. I also didn't like how much more violent it was compared to the original show. But the character work was good. It reinterpreted Donald Blake and Thor, having Blake summon Thor like a genie from the hammer rather than turn into him, but that allowed them to have a surprisingly effective mismatched-partners interplay.

As for The Trial of the Incredible Hulk, it's a pretty good Daredevil pilot for its day, albeit a mediocre Hulk movie, with the Hulk not even appearing in the climax. It doesn't use any of the DD cast besides Matt and Kingpin, creating new characters in place of Foggy and Karen, but Matt and Kingpin are handled effectively, and I like the relationship that forms between Matt and David Banner. (The movie is also notable as Stan Lee's first live-action Marvel cameo, in a dream sequence.)

Barely, as I said. Wonder Woman's first season featured Steve Trevor, Etta Candy, and Diana's mother (who went unnamed), and was one of the rare shows to use actual villains from the comics (albeit only in its first two episodes), but season 2 (set in the present) only featured Steve Trevor Jr., and marginalized him after 8 episodes when producer Bruce Lansbury took over and tried to turn the show into a Bionic Woman clone with Diana as a solo agent and Steve as her boss back in the office. And Spider-Man only used JJJ after the pilot, and it was a toned-down, more avuncular JJJ, closer to Perry White in characterization.

 

That's true, but still they at least used more characters than The Incredible Hulk.
I just remembered that they have the ICH movies on Tubi, I might have to watch them sometime.