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Spoilers Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread

What grade would you give the Marvel Cinematic Universe? (Ever-Changing Question)


  • Total voters
    185
I'm really tired of the doom and gloom attitude towards thr mcu now. Phase 4 & 5 aren't that bad and the other phases weren't that good

Well, the box office doesn't lie. The current storyline isn't working as intended, i.e. people are not excited about it anymore and the biggest movie successes post Endgame ( Spiderman: No Way Home and Guardians 3) have little to do with that storyline, i.e. Kang and the Multiverse. The TV shows were a broad hit and severely miss and it just seems Marvel has lost that instinct for finding the right characters, actors, stories and producers/writers/directors to make them good while advancing the main storyline bit by bit.

The article mentioned some postings earlier goes into depth what the causes are and Marvel is rightfully in crisis mode and is working on major course corrections. Superhero fatigue is not a thing because good stories with lovable characters and "hateable" villains still drawn people in so there goes that excuse.
 
Well, the box office doesn't lie. The current storyline isn't working as intended, i.e. people are not excited about it anymore and the biggest movie successes post Endgame ( Spiderman: No Way Home and Guardians 3) have little to do with that storyline, i.e. Kang and the Multiverse. The TV shows were a broad hit and severely miss and it just seems Marvel has lost that instinct for finding the right characters, actors, stories and producers/writers/directors to make them good while advancing the main storyline bit by bit.

The article mentioned some postings earlier goes into depth what the causes are and Marvel is rightfully in crisis mode and is working on major course corrections. Superhero fatigue is not a thing because good stories with lovable characters and "hateable" villains still drawn people in so there goes that excuse.

Tbh I don't think box office entirely correlates to quality

I also don't know what you mean by "lost the instinct". Phase 1 and 2 were full of Mediocre plots, underwritten villains and weak romances. Even the action scenes repeated themselve too much a la AoU

Personally, I find the phase 4 projects to be more imaginative. I know people like TFA and Thor 1 and I do too but their plots aren't as interesting as something like WandaVision's. And anyone who wasn't a main hero wasn't particularly well developed pre-Endgame.
 
Uh... what? At most two out of the five (40%) could be described that way.

Obi-Wan, Ashoka, and a portion of The Mandalorian (including almost all of Season 3) definitely fit, and I'd argue Book of Boba Fett does to, especially with its overall tone and Fennec being a Filoni character who also eventually appears in The Bad Batch.

Again I'm not saying Filoni is bad, the only live action Star Wars show not touched by his stuff is Andor, and I think that Andor is absolute garbage. I'm just saying that I'm tired of one guys "vision" ruling TV Star Wars, especially since it all just ties into the same period of time. Plus, like I said, I think he's definitely slipping when it comes to writing quality, possibly because almost every Star Wars project that is streaming/TV based is ran by him. It happens, Doctor Who has dealt with producers burning out,or at least being stretched too thin for too long, several times.

I was also saying that I don't think Feige and the MCU work the same way, since feige is not literally writing/directly showrunning/etc almost all the MCU projects like Filoni is doing with Star Wars.
 
Andor is garbage? I think Thy'lek Shran would disagree

I did say that I think its garbage, which is just my opinion. I thought that the show absolutely hated that it was a Star Wars show, and that it felt like every other generic "Adult Drama" TV show thats been coming out for the past 10+ years, except that it very occasionally had a robot walk around on screen. I know I'm in the minority with that opinion, but that doesn't bother me :shrug:
 
I did say that I think its garbage, which is just my opinion. I thought that the show absolutely hated that it was a Star Wars show, and that it felt like every other generic "Adult Drama" TV show thats been coming out for the past 10+ years, except that it very occasionally had a robot walk around on screen. I know I'm in the minority with that opinion, but that doesn't bother me :shrug:

Idk, I felt it was very Star Wars-y but not necessarily in the typical way we expect
 
kirk55555 said:
I'd argue Book of Boba Fett does to, especially with its overall tone and Fennec being a Filoni character who also eventually appears in The Bad Batch.

It comes down to what makes something built upon the prequels, TCW, and/or Rebels. Tone doesn't cut it. Where the PT is concerned, we get a brief flashback to child Boba on Kamino, that's it. The show hardly depends on it. And Fennec is a character inherited from The Mandalorian who only appeared in the cartoons after the fact, it doesn't work in reverse. I suppose a case could be made that the inclusion of the Pykes means that the show is built on TCW?
 
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My main takeaway from this; I can't believe anyone thought making a 'Daredevil' show a procedural was in anyway a good idea. I'm glad they've taken the opportunity to course-correct, though it remains to be see if they've steered the show away from one cliff, or right off of another.

A lot of this does seem to line-up with the kinds of shows we've been getting that seem to pinwheel in quality and focus. 'Secret Invasion' felt like a show that was written by ChatGPT it was such a bizarre mess of a show. Totally devoid of any coherent idea of what it was beyond something (anything) to fill a given release window and title.
'Ms Marvel' started strong but then veered off into an entirely unnecessary side-story that would have been better saved for a season 2 through-line. 'Moon Knight' again had an intriguing start but never really did much with it in terms of story.
Indeed if there's one thing I've noticed is an overdependence on strong actors to carry weak material, because the likes of Oscar Issacs & Ethan Hawke, the sheer gravitas Sam Jackson & Don Cheadle, the chemistry between Sebastian Stan & Anthony Mackie, and basically all of the New Jersey side cast of Ms. Marvel are the only reason most of their respective shows are even watchable (and SI reeeeally stretched the definition of the term "watchable" IMO.)
 
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You know there's a whole Star Wars sub-forum y'all can take this conversation to?
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Interesting and encouraging news. It does sound like Marvel's TV process was inefficient at best. They were trying to reinvent something that TV writers and producers had already figured out long ago.

I mean, isn't how this how "Twin Peaks the Return" was done too? Written and shot like it was a 18 Hour long movie and then cut up into episodes, instead of being done the "Traditional" Way? It worked out well enough there
 
I mean, isn't how this how "Twin Peaks the Return" was done too? Written and shot like it was a 18 Hour long movie and then cut up into episodes, instead of being done the "Traditional" Way? It worked out well enough there

You're comparing a work by of one of the greatest filmmakers of all time to crap like "Secret Invasion"?
 
I mean, isn't how this how "Twin Peaks the Return" was done too? Written and shot like it was a 18 Hour long movie and then cut up into episodes, instead of being done the "Traditional" Way? It worked out well enough there

One example obviously does not prove a pattern. If you're relying on the luck of the draw, then naturally it's going to work sometimes and go wrong sometimes. But that inconsistency is the problem. It's obviously better to use a system that was designed on the basis of decades of experience to optimize the chances of a good outcome.

Besides, this isn't just about the quality of the work, it's about the writers' careers. Remember that part of the issue behind the strike was that streaming's abandonment of writers' rooms and its adoption of shorter seasons/series meant that writers were no longer getting the kind of steady work that let them a) make a decent living and b) gain the production experience they needed to rise through the ranks. Streamers were just having writers spend a month or two writing a series, then letting them go and producing the shows without them. Even if the resultant shows turn out okay (which is less likely without writer/showrunner oversight of production), it hurts the writers when they're just cast aside like that.
 
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