Definitely, with a little Firefly.
Spoilers Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread
- Thread starter bbjeg
- Start date
Got back to my rewatch of the post-Endgame MCU movies with Wakanda Forever yesterday. I really enjoyed it again, not sure I'd rate it as highly as the first, but it's still a good movie.
Has any more been come out about the accusations against Tenoch Huerta? I had forgotten about that until I was looking at his Wikipedia page after the movie, and all I could find was stories about the original accusations.
Has any more been come out about the accusations against Tenoch Huerta? I had forgotten about that until I was looking at his Wikipedia page after the movie, and all I could find was stories about the original accusations.
Marvel will probably increase vetting of its stars to beyond US presidential levels after the fiasco's of Huerta and Majors. They took a risk with Downey Jr. and Favreau had to fight hard for him but these days are long gone.
In other news i couldn't care less about the upcoming Echo show but seeing the trailer i was actually impressed. If that's the style and the story holds up we could be in for a great street level hardcore Marvel show that may be the template for the coming Daredevil show. I always wanted MCU Daredevil to keep certain aspects of the Netflix show, it's blood and violence level amongst others, and was horrified at the version on She Hulk.
I'm ok if they tone it down a little bit, the blood and gore level on Netflix' Punisher was a bit too much, but with Echo it seems to have found a level that works.
Marvel thinking about returning old characters to right the ship is a declaration of creative bankrupcy, if they do that they might as well bury the MCU because it'll be the end of it. Not all movies worked the same in the Infinity Saga ( i really don't like the Thor movies for example) but they failed to evolve in their movies and kept to the same basic formula of one liners, huge CGI battles and some drama. If they went out of the mold a little bit like with Shang Chi it worked well enough but then we get things like Ant Man 3 and Strange 2 which pulls the overall quality down again. I hope the hard measures Marvel is currently working on will put them on track.
In other news i couldn't care less about the upcoming Echo show but seeing the trailer i was actually impressed. If that's the style and the story holds up we could be in for a great street level hardcore Marvel show that may be the template for the coming Daredevil show. I always wanted MCU Daredevil to keep certain aspects of the Netflix show, it's blood and violence level amongst others, and was horrified at the version on She Hulk.
I'm ok if they tone it down a little bit, the blood and gore level on Netflix' Punisher was a bit too much, but with Echo it seems to have found a level that works.
Marvel thinking about returning old characters to right the ship is a declaration of creative bankrupcy, if they do that they might as well bury the MCU because it'll be the end of it. Not all movies worked the same in the Infinity Saga ( i really don't like the Thor movies for example) but they failed to evolve in their movies and kept to the same basic formula of one liners, huge CGI battles and some drama. If they went out of the mold a little bit like with Shang Chi it worked well enough but then we get things like Ant Man 3 and Strange 2 which pulls the overall quality down again. I hope the hard measures Marvel is currently working on will put them on track.
In doing the marathon (all 3 GotG movies) that I did today, I've realized that my original issues with the first GotG movie are the same issues I initially had with The Force Awakens, and, in both cases, I've since had my opinions changed.
And while we're talking about opinions, I've got to say that, just as was the case with the IM Trilogy, the third GotG movie has ended up being my favorite, even though I do wish that there weren't parts of the story that required audiences to be familiar with stuff that exists outside of the movie itself.
And while we're talking about opinions, I've got to say that, just as was the case with the IM Trilogy, the third GotG movie has ended up being my favorite, even though I do wish that there weren't parts of the story that required audiences to be familiar with stuff that exists outside of the movie itself.
It shouldn't be.
For a good long while, it was possible to jump into the MCU anywhere and not have to be familiar with anything else in order to fully enjoy whatever movie you were watching, and the overall IP was by and large better for it.
Speaking specifically about GotG Vol. 3, viewers shouldn't have been required to watch the GotG Holiday Special in order to understand why the team is where they are at the start of the story, why there's a talking dog with them, and why Quill and Mantis are referring to each other as siblings.
I agree, to paraphrase Stan "every Marvel movie is somebody's 1st Marvel movie". A few quick throwaway lines to bring viewers up to speed would suffice.
Wait… your argument is that a viewer shouldn’t be required to watch a previous installment out of the same series to be familiar with every element?
I expected an argument against Infinity War/Endgame, not against A Guardians of the Galaxy short film.
Exactly.
I've never seen Infinity War and Endgame, so, yes, the GotG Holiday Special and GotG Vol. 3 are my current reference points for the issue of MCU over-connectivity.
Infinity War and Endgame (and possibly the upcoming Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars) are a slightly different beast though. It was pretty clear from all the hype leading up to them that a new viewer should expect to be thrown into the middle of an ongoing story. That shouldn't be true for all Marvel movies, and with the overwhelming number of them viewers should not have to expect to have to watch everything before going to see them.
I can't decide where in the MCU I want to head next. I could watch Captain Marvel (which is one of the last individual movies I've yet to see), marathon the existing Avengers movies (since, as mentioned, I've never seen Infinity War and Endgame), or start revisiting full subseries that I've seen in their entirety.
Thoughts/suggestions?
Thoughts/suggestions?
I'd do the Avengers films because there is a lot of stuff in there. Captain Marvel is still worth watching however.
I'll give you the sibling aspect, but Knowhere and Cosmo aren't good examples of this at all. They're just elements of time passing and the heroes having a life offscreen. Being introduced to them in vol. 3 instead of the special makes absolutely no difference because both productions introduce them to the audience the same way: as unfamiliar elements which have already been around for a significant but unknown amount of time in between films.
I dunno, that's within the same franchise, familiarity with a previous installment is fair game.
Do people complain that they need to watch Back to the Future part 1 to understand part 2 or The Dark Knight before The Dark Knight Rises? Maybe they do. And that would be weird.
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Ideally, the rule is to assume that every story may be someone's first -- or at least that returning viewers/readers might need to be reminded of things they've forgotten. So every installment of a series should remind people of whatever they need to know to follow the story. The goal is not to create obstacles to entry or punish people for not knowing the "right" things. You want your work to be accessible to everyone, not just the experts.
After all, there's no reason audiences can't follow a story that references events they didn't experience. People in 1977 could follow Star Wars just fine without prior knowledge of the Jedi or the Clone Wars. People could follow "The Cage" without having seen the battle on Rigel VII beforehand or having known the dead yeoman Captain Pike was mourning. It's not that hard to fill audiences in on unseen past events with just a few brief references. So by the same token, it's not hard to make similarly brief references to the events of previous installments, either to remind returning audiences without photographic memories or to bring new audience members up to speed. Certainly prior familiarity can make details and nuances clearer, add deeper context, etc., the way the prequel trilogy added context to Star Wars or the way "Among the Lotus Eaters" revealed more about Rigel VII and Pike's yeoman. But it should never be required for basic understanding of who the characters are and what's happening in the story. It's the storyteller's job to include any essential information in the current story itself.
So there's simply no validity to the notion that an audience ever "has to" be familiar with previous installments to follow the current one. Or rather, if an installment isn't comprehensible without that prior knowledge, that's a failure of basic story construction.
And this is where I feel that parts of the MCU have unfortunately landed.
Mind you, GotG Vol. 3 isn't incomprehensible without knowledge of the GotG Holiday Special, but I do think that the former should've included expository dialogue explaining the significant things that happened in the latter.