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Spoilers Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread

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


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And I'm sure they attacked Black Panther too, and it was a huge smash.

I wouldn't make that assumption lightly. Most pushback seems to start when deviations from comics appear to be driven by politics/money rather than organic story reasons. Black Panther didn't deviate significantly from the basic set up of the comics. The only rumblings I remember is minor complaints about the film being promoted as "diverse", when when what it actually did was make the MCU more diverse.
 
I wouldn't make that assumption lightly. Most pushback seems to start when deviations from comics appear to be driven by politics/money rather than organic story reasons. Black Panther didn't deviate significantly from the basic set up of the comics. The only rumblings I remember is minor complaints about the film being promoted as "diverse", when when what it actually did was make the MCU more diverse.
Well, this came up as recently as March of this year, during the failed and pitiful hostile takeover attempt.

 
I wouldn't make that assumption lightly. Most pushback seems to start when deviations from comics appear to be driven by politics/money rather than organic story reasons.

No. The audience for a successful comic book issue is typically in the tens of thousands, the audience for a successful movie in the hundreds of millions. The comics-reading audience is the square root of the movie audience. Most moviegoers know nothing about the comics. The pushback comes from racists, sexists, and people who get YouTube hits from performative negativity. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous at best.

It's also disingenuous to label efforts at inclusive storytelling and hiring as "politics" while pretending that the systematic exclusion of women and minority groups from representation and employment is not also political. It's deeply inorganic to depict the human population as overwhelmingly white or heterosexual; that is an aggressively political imposition of an artificial reality. A truly apolitical story would have a realistically diverse cast of characters and team of creators, because that's what humanity actually looks like when you remove the politically motivated filters that perpetuate discrimination.
 
No. The audience for a successful comic book issue is typically in the tens of thousands, the audience for a successful movie in the hundreds of millions. The comics-reading audience is the square root of the movie audience. Most moviegoers know nothing about the comics. The pushback comes from racists, sexists, and people who get YouTube hits from performative negativity. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous at best.

You shouldn't compare the number of physical comics sold with movie tickets sold, that's not the right comparison. It's people who consider themselves fans of the character, before the movie, vs movie tickets. I'm a fan of Superman, I've never bought a Superman comic book in my life (for the record, the only comic I collect is The Rocketeer). Lots of people have prior experience with characters, enough to know when a production feels "off". This is of course more true with Superman than say, Captain Marvel.

The way I see it, toxic negativity can't a get a foothold if the show is actually good. There's no clicks in trashing a show people actually like. I noticed no push-back to Fallout despite the makeup of 2/3 of the leads, because the show is actually good.

As an aside about good and bad adaptations, lets look at the difference between early video game movie adaptations (Mario, Mortal Combat, Tomb Raider ect) and new ones (Sonic, Mario, Fallout, Last of Us). Quite a few of the new ones are actually good, I think because enough of the people making them are the correct age to have been fans of the original property, so they "get" why people liked the property in the first place, sometimes going so far as to heavily involve the original creator of the property. Sonic would have crashed and burned if they hadn't redesigned the character, because even people who had never played the games realized he was just "off".

It's deeply inorganic to depict the human population as overwhelmingly white or heterosexual;

True, clearly there should have been a lot more black and Mexican cowboys in all those westerns, for example.

A truly apolitical story would have a realistically diverse cast of characters and team of creators, because that's what humanity actually looks like when you remove the politically motivated filters that perpetuate discrimination.

But how are you defining "realistically"? Are we making allowances for setting, or does the cast need to match the 21st Century SAG?
 
You shouldn't compare the number of physical comics sold with movie tickets sold, that's not the right comparison. It's people who consider themselves fans of the character, before the movie, vs movie tickets. I'm a fan of Superman, I've never bought a Superman comic book in my life (for the record, the only comic I collect is The Rocketeer). Lots of people have prior experience with characters, enough to know when a production feels "off". This is of course more true with Superman than say, Captain Marvel.
Except most of those people's familiarity will come from TV and movies, so they won't necessarily know what's true to the comics.

More to the point, racists and sexists are always using "fidelity to the comics" as a cover for their hate, so it's dangerous to assume that's genuinely the primary driver. I mean, it's obviously BS; they never object when Jimmy Olsen is portrayed as blond or brown-haired instead of red-haired, but they always trot out the "fidelity" argument when he's depicted as black.


The way I see it, toxic negativity can't a get a foothold if the show is actually good.

Nonsense. The Marvels was fantastic, but the negativity absolutely got a foothold there.


There's no clicks in trashing a show people actually like.

That's completely backward. The whole reason YouTube haters focus their hate on popular, successful shows is because that gets them more attention. There's plenty of hate directed at Star Trek shows and movies that are actually pretty good. Star Wars and others as well. If people don't like a show or film, it gets little attention, so there wouldn't be that much interest in criticisms of it.

Besides, in my experience, anything that is strongly loved by some people is going to be strongly hated by others. They're two sides of the same coin. The only way to offend no one is to delight no one, to be too mediocre to generate much reaction either way.


But how are you defining "realistically"? Are we making allowances for setting, or does the cast need to match the 21st Century SAG?

People always cast this issue in terms of the characters, but that's missing the point. A TV series or film is an employer. What matters is whether it's open to hiring actors, creators, and production staff without bias, in which case the cast and crew will naturally be diverse. How the characters are written and depicted is a response to how the cast and crew are chosen. If the cast is diverse, then the characters will be. (Of course, that doesn't have to be the case in animation, but these days it's generally preferred for actors to play characters of their own ethnicity.)
 
I wouldn't make that assumption lightly. Most pushback seems to start when deviations from comics appear to be driven by politics/money rather than organic story reasons. Black Panther didn't deviate significantly from the basic set up of the comics. The only rumblings I remember is minor complaints about the film being promoted as "diverse", when when what it actually did was make the MCU more diverse.
I think the largest diversity complaint was because the featured white characters they had were Tolkien white characters
 
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And Michael Giacchino! I remember him being announced at Comic-Con, but with all the other announcements, that one fell under the radar afterwards. Just another reason for my high anticipation for the project.
And my brain just went DUH!

He scored The Incredibles which is why my brain went to that film without realizing why. Perfect!
 
I wouldn't make that assumption lightly. Most pushback seems to start when deviations from comics appear to be driven by politics/money rather than organic story reasons. Black Panther didn't deviate significantly from the basic set up of the comics. The only rumblings I remember is minor complaints about the film being promoted as "diverse", when when what it actually did was make the MCU more diverse.

Funny, "The Boys" genderswapped and raceswapped characters and utterly changed others so they barely resembled their comic selves...and no one complained
 
Funny, "The Boys" genderswapped and raceswapped characters and utterly changed others so they barely resembled their comic selves...and no one complained

Right, because the resulting show is good, especially at the beginning, where it matters, so the changes can be assumed to have happened for organic story reasons. It's only if a show is bad or meh that you get issues.
 
Right, because the resulting show is good, especially at the beginning, where it matters, so the changes can be assumed to have happened for organic story reasons. It's only if a show is bad or meh that you get issues.

Please, these days before a show debuts it's ripped into for that stuff.
 
Right, because the resulting show is good, especially at the beginning, where it matters, so the changes can be assumed to have happened for organic story reasons. It's only if a show is bad or meh that you get issues.
It really has nothing to do with the quality, I think a lot of it just comes down to the target audience. Most of the people who complain about things like the racial or gender makeup of movie are going to be more conservative and movies target towards more liberal people, are probably not going to appeal enough to them for them to care enough to complain.
I have a feeling once they realized what things like Black Panther or The Marvels were, they just didn't care enough about them to even complain.
Marvel has posted a full walkthrough of the TVA experience from D23, and it thought it was pretty impressive.
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I liked the time doors with costume and prop displays inside them, but I wasn't sure which movie or show the one with the guy in the leather duster and the woman in red were from. I think the blue room might have been costumes and music from Agatha All Along.
 
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