I've jokingly noted they could just send human waves of Kangs against the Avengers that die easily.
Spoilers Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread
- Thread starter bbjeg
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I've jokingly noted they could just send human waves of Kangs against the Avengers that die easily.
Why is that important? It's important in-universe, sure, but it's not important for the enjoyment of an individual movie or TV show that isn't about the Avengers.
I wouldn't mind knowing that, but it's not a dealbreaker for my enjoyment of something like Hawkeye or Ms. Marvel. It's just part of the general background of the universe. It's setting, not core narrative, except in those specific stories where it becomes the core narrative.
Which is exactly the problem. They took the wrong lesson from Infinity War/Endgame. They started to think of that level of connection as the rule instead of the exception it was meant to be.
It was the remarkable climax of a whole remarkable buildup. You can't easily replicate something like that. It's probably best not to try. Just let it be the amazing accomplishment it was, and move on to something different.
I can state from repeated theatergoing experience that this is emphatically not true. Even after dozens of movies with post-credit scenes, plenty of people still walk out of the theater before they show.
And really, that's how it should be. That's the whole reason they put them after the credits -- because they're supposed to be a bonus for that segment of the audience interested in the connections, but optional and expendable for people who are just there for that specific story.
As I said: It's sad that people have come to see continuity as a chore or an obligation rather than just a fun, optional extra level of the experience. Organizing the movies and shows that way on the menu is a convenience, not an imperative. I mean, the Dewey Decimal System doesn't mean you have to read every archaeology book in the library to understand a specific archaeology book. It's just a guideline to help you find related books if you so desire.
Ideally, if the filmmakers did it right, you could. Continuity is not supposed to be a barrier to entry. If it is, then they're doing it wrong.
The Ten Rings? Kamala's bangle? It seems clear to me that they're laying the groundwork for a cosmic origin for a number of the characters' new powers.
Why does it have to be one or the other? I mean, yeah, it's a fresh start, but it's also a continuation. So why shouldn't it be both? Again, it's not supposed to be one series that everyone has to experience as a whole. It's supposed to be multiple distinct series and films that viewers are free to experience as many or as few of as they wish. So it doesn't matter if they aren't all doing the same monolithic thing.
What's wrong with that? That's what most movie studios do. The only difference is that Marvel sets all its movies and shows in the same reality. But it's a whole big universe, with plenty of room for stories to go in different directions. A shared universe should offer a range of different options for different tastes. Bringing the disparate characters together into a team-up like the Avengers is supposed to be the exception to the rule. It's sort of the point of that kind of superhero team that they don't naturally go together because they come from different worlds and different genres.
I agree that's an issue, but it's not like it's ruining the whole franchise. It just means it's less than perfect.
So maybe they did it because they wanted to try to raise Ant-Man's profile by giving him such a big story? Numbers aside, the movies were critically well-regarded.
Isn't that kind of like saying "If they wanted us to fear the Joker, Batman should have died?" That's not the only way to make a villain effective. Anyway, it's a separate question from whether it worked to introduce him in an Ant-Man movie.
New Rockstars just announced the post-strike schedule for Phase 5:
DEADPOOL 3: July 26, 2024
CAPTAIN AMERICA 4 - BRAVE NEW WORLD: February 14, 2025 (Valentine's Day?!?)
THUNDERBOLTS: July 25, 2025
BLADE: November 7, 2025
So only one Marvel movie next year.
DEADPOOL 3: July 26, 2024
CAPTAIN AMERICA 4 - BRAVE NEW WORLD: February 14, 2025 (Valentine's Day?!?)
THUNDERBOLTS: July 25, 2025
BLADE: November 7, 2025
So only one Marvel movie next year.
For me, "Infinity War"/"Endgame" seemed . . . vastly overrated, like most of the MCU for seven years. Mind you, I thought "Infinity War" was pretty decent, but not as great as I thought it could have been. But I felt differently about "Endgame", which I grew to heartily dislike.
Maybe. I remember when the trailers for Quantumania came out, people noted the similarities between the design of Kang's tech and the ten rings, but little seemed to have come from it.
I have big worries that the areas of the Multiverse saga which are seen as failures will be abandoned without any followup. Like, I think Eternals had issues, but it was unfairly maligned. I feel pretty certain though that there's no intent to follow up on the threads left dangling at the end of this movie (which pointedly did not end with a proper resolution) any time before Secret Wars.
The question then is, why make it within a shared universe if you don't intend to use that shared universe? I mean, I know the real-world reason - established franchises are less risky than original IP, so from a business perspective, slapping MCU on something makes sense, even if they don't intend to use someone like Werewolf by Night again.
But I think any writer needs to ask "Why is this story in the MCU?" Just like some stories can't work within Trek due to the type of universe it is (nihilistic posthumanism, for example), some stories just can't work any longer within the MCU. For example, given aliens have been known to exist since the Battle of New York, stories centered around a conspiracy to keep the existence of aliens (in general) secret don't work. Or, more saliently, since there's a broad stable of superheroes who already are known to exist, any story that relies on one (and only one) of them to save the entire Earth will be really hard to pull off.
I understand why they might have wanted to do it, but the execution left a lot to be desired.
I saw a fan video on Youtube last year that argued if we want the audience to take Kang seriously, he has to kill Thor, since he's the most powerful Avenger left standing. And then Loki will have to arrive only moments after his brother dies, denying any sort of reunion from happening.
It's not the same, because Batman is not only the star of the Batman movies, but has generally existed within self-contained Batman universes. Not only that, but Kang wasn't being set up as Ant-Man's nemesis, but explicitly as a threat to the entirety of the Avengers (whatever the hell they are now).
I've also just grown to hate narratives that allow for victories without any real sacrifice/ramifications for the character going on. Paul Rudd might be aging amazingly well, but he's still a guy in his mid 50s who won't be able to play active roles forever (and I doubt he'll have a chance for another Ant-Man movie before he turns 60). There should be some sort of planned obsolescence for all the OG Avengers, rather than just letting their stories just sort of peter out off-camera.
New Rockstars just announced the post-strike schedule for Phase 5:
DEADPOOL 3: July 26, 2024
CAPTAIN AMERICA 4 - BRAVE NEW WORLD: February 14, 2025 (Valentine's Day?!?)
THUNDERBOLTS: July 25, 2025
BLADE: November 7, 2025
So only one Marvel movie next year.
So this means that "Phase 5" will officially run from 2023-2025, instead of 2023-2024 as was planned?
I also note that the Fantastic 4 movie isn't on there. I presume this means it's being pushed into 2026.
I like Endgame a lot more than Infinity War, TBH, because of how much time it allows us to just spend with the characters. It was the payoff for all of the setup which took place across seven years of movies, and just about everyone got their chance at genuine pathos here.
The end combat scene was overblown/stupid though.
I can't decide what the worse position is: completely denying that the MCU has become overly interconnected, or wanting it to be even more overly interconnected.
I think part of the problem some people, myself included, have been having with Multiverse Saga so far, is that there doesn't seem to be the kind of obvious arc going through the movies and shows like there was throughout pretty much every entry in Infinity Saga. Pretty much everything connected to the build up of the Avengers, or the set up of the Infinity Stones and the conflict with Thanos in the Infinity Saga, But with the Multiverse Saga there doesn't really seem to be the same kind of arc, we've seen different timelines and we've met three variants of Kang, but there's no obvious connections to any of this. All of the visits to alternate universes have been completely unrelated to each other, and all of the encounters with Kangs have been unconnected, with the characters not aware of his other variants. They keep telling us that all of it building up to something in The Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars, but it's not as clear how that's happening as it was in the Infinity Saga.
It's only been two years since Shang-Chi. After The Avengers introduced the Tesseract and Loki's scepter, it was three years before we learned about the Infinity Stones and three more years before they were brought together. True, we're getting more new stories per year these days, which is probably why people are expecting faster payoff, but there's no need to rush it.
Yeah, it would be a shame if they didn't follow through. But that's exactly why I'm troubled by this narrative that the MCU is somehow failing and needs to be modified. I just don't see how it's materially worse than before. It's not like it hasn't had its ups and downs before, but they stuck with the plan in spite of it. They didn't abandon Thor after The Dark World. They brought back the Hulk and even the Abomination, eventually, despite The Incredible Hulk being less than a (heh) smash.
The question is, how do you define "use?" Again, story is not exclusively about plot. The elements of drama are plot, character, setting, and theme. Distinct stories can make use of shared characters, like Nick Fury or John Diggle or Q, and they can make use of a common background to inform their stories. The DCEU movies over the past few years have, I feel, done a nice job of using the setting of a shared superhero universe to inform their own individual plots and characters. The universe is there to serve the stories, not the other way around. Having a large, complex universe lets you enrich the individual stories by making them feel like part of something bigger, something that has a deeper texture and history.
Also, as I said, the point of a shared universe is to work on both the holistic level and the individual level, to appeal to both those audiences invested in the whole and those who are only interested in one or two parts. If it's strong on both the individual level and the combined level, then it's not a fatal thing if the interconnections take a back seat, because the individual parts are still satisfying in and of themselves.
Good, because I hate stories like that. The point of speculative fiction should be to explore how the world is changed by its fictional premise. Hiding it to maintain a "real-world" status quo is wasting the potential of the concept. Plus, given how much damage has been done to the world in recent years by political and business leaders perpetrating lies and coverups for their own ends, I've developed a distaste for stories about people trying to hide the truth from the public.
But I don't see what point you're trying to make here. Of course there are certain stories that work in one setting but not in others. How is that unusual or bad?
Depends on the context. Maybe they're the only one in a position to address it, e.g. the Ant-Wasp Family were the only ones in the Quantum Realm and in a position to stop Kang. Maybe it develops fast enough that they don't have time to call for backup. Anyway, this is an issue that shared-hero universes have always had to deal with. It's a credibility issue, yes, but it's hardly unique to the MCU, and it's hardly a deal-breaker.
I don't see how either of those differences is relevant to this specific point. No analogy is intended to draw an exact parallel between two different things, merely to focus on the one thing they have in common. The differences unrelated to the analogy don't matter.
I simply object to the facile and absurd notion that the only way to make a villain threatening is to have them kill the hero. Since when? Hell, the Joker appeared to die in most of his early stories. He lost over and over again, but he was still an effective villain. So why should it be any different for Kang?
That seems needlessly negative. Life doesn't have to be a zero-sum game, especially in heroic narratives. I mean, doesn't it cheapen the idea of a noble sacrifice if it has to happen in every single case? Doesn't it just become routine and ordinary then?
I just don't see why everything should need to be building to a single climax just because that's how it was done before. Why can't the MCU be allowed to change and do things differently?
And yeah, I'll agree the continuity threads they've been laying haven't been as efficiently woven together as they were before, but my point is that that's not the only thing that matters here. It doesn't have to take away from the merits of the individual movies and series as distinct works. I mean, yeah, it annoys me that Eternals ended with that ridiculous business of the stone giant sticking out of the Earth and then being ignored, but that doesn't make the rest of the movie worthless. Because continuity ties and setups are just one part of storytelling, not the only part that matters. Audiences today have become overly preoccupied with continuity to the degree that they can't see the trees for the forest.
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I've really enjoyed most of the individual movies and shows in the Multiverse Saga so far, more than most people seem to have, I was just talking about the MCU as a whole.
A: Blame the movie-goers for "not giving a chance" to new characters.
B: Blame the movie-goers for comparing uninspiring new characters to the 1st generation heroes, because it is somehow "unfair".
C: If all else fails, trash the arcs of long-dead characters by digging them up from their graves for "Awweeesssooome!!! / whatdafucck!!" baiting to make movie-goers pay attention to the new characters because of their association with the 1st generation heroes.
We've met at least six, not counting the ones in the arena.JD said:
We first heard the term infinity stones in 2013 only a year and a half after that point, and they were formally introduced in GOTG in 2014. The Tesseract was introduced in Thor 1 and also appeared in The First Avenger, both in 2011.
I find this comment perplexing.eschaton said:
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I would have thought Captain America would come out in 2024 too since they'd finished filming and some thought it would take Deadpool's May slot. Are we forgetting about any other movies?New Rockstars just announced the post-strike schedule for Phase 5:
DEADPOOL 3: July 26, 2024
CAPTAIN AMERICA 4 - BRAVE NEW WORLD: February 14, 2025 (Valentine's Day?!?)
THUNDERBOLTS: July 25, 2025
BLADE: November 7, 2025
So only one Marvel movie next year.
Anyway, at least we are getting Deadpool 3. That's the one i'm crazy fired up to see.
It has a paywall.
I quoted the relevant film bit so you aren't missing anything.
So it's going to make more money that The Flash? How much?
I would like to comment on the Italian box office for a moment. Marvels isn't doing badly. Simply C'è ancora domani , the first place film, is doing much better. It is a film that is breaking many records in Italy and is bringing people to the cinema who have never been there. They are also organizing special viewings for schools. Let's say it is an exceptional event.
Now, can you explain to me why if a Marvel film doesn't immediately hit first place it's automatically a failure?
It doesn't need to hit first place, but we can model where it should be in sales - and it's way off everywhere. For this type of film, presales are dismal everywhere, and we'll find out this week, but all of the signs are that the walk-up audience will also ignore the film.
Whatever it is this film is selling, people don't want it.
Now, I know various people think this will not change the future slate - my position is that they are high. There is no chance that Disney will ignore such a bomb, none (which, by the way, has nothing to do with the quality of a film I have not commented on and don't comment on as I've not seen it).
Disney itself will come under pressure from exhibitors who have been forced to commit to large empty screens.
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