I'm not sure that you "have" to rewatch anything at all as the Marvel movies are generally pretty good at filling in the audience on the blanks of what they might need to know.
Spoilers Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread
- Thread starter bbjeg
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Most people think of the MCU as some big monolithic thing where "it's all connected", but the reality is that you can just jump in wherever you want/watch whatever you want without being lost.
A good way to illustrate what I'm talking about is the Avengers Quartet: a lot of the discourse leading up to the release of Infinity War centered around the notion of that movie being the culmination of 20 other movies' worth of storytelling, but the reality of the situation is that you don't actually have to have seen any movies other than The Avengers and Age of Ultron in order to both understand and enjoy Infinity War, and you also don't even have to have seen Infinity War to enjoy and understand Endgame.
Letting go of the notion of the MCU being monolithically intertwined actually helped me realize that I actually like more parts of it than I hate and even helped to mitigate the sense of formulaity and sameness that originally kept me away from most of Phases 2 and 3.
I saw IW without having seen either GOTG 2 or Ragnarok and I wasn't exactly lost.
I thought it would be a de-aged Nathan Fillion, since he appeared on a Wonder Man movie poster in a scene cut from Guardians of the Galaxy 2, but it doesn't look like him.
Ah, but Nathan Fillion wasn't playing Wonder Man. He was playing Simon Williams playing Arkon.
Ah, but Nathan Fillion wasn't playing Wonder Man. He was playing Simon Williams playing Arkon.
I see, and since that scene was cut, they've gone in a different direction with Simon Williams, making him the new guy auditioning for the role rather than the veteran originally in the role.
Not really. Loki season 2 contained the threat of the multiverse almost bursting at its seams.
The threat of some version of Kang destroying everything again (like He Who Remains did in the first place) wasn't addressed at all.
The charges from his ex-girlfriend were dropped. His conviction for harassment and assault still remain and those are misdemeanors.
While I think you are probably right on that, Feige wouldn't have anyone to blame but himself. People outside of comics don't know who Kang is outside of his three appearances in the MCU. Multiple movies laid the seeds for Thanos and the Infinity Stones so that even people who weren't comics knowledgeable or who didn't watch all the movies were still interested in the story.
That doesn't make sense. The whole point of Loki and Quantumania was to lay those seeds, to set up Kang for future movies and explain why he was dangerous.
Besides, it's nonsense in general to argue that a story can only succeed if audiences have prior familiarity with its characters. Nobody was familiar with Luke Skywalker before 1977 or with Buzz Lightyear before 1995. It's the job of any story to introduce whatever its audience needs to know, whether it's part of a series or not. One of the most basic rules of storytelling is never to assume your audience has prior knowledge, because every story might be someone's first. Even an installment in a series or shared universe should be capable of standing on its own, and bringing the audience up to speed on whatever's relevant to the story. That's just exposition 101.
"I got those reports on the variants of He Who Remains."
"Do any of them know that we exist yet?"
"Nope. I guess one of ’em caused a little bit of a ruckus on a 616-adjacent realm, but they handled it. So, we’re all good for now."
Well, almost nobody.
But technically speaking the novelization of the original film was first published in late 1976 and even got a review in the November 1976 issue of Cinefantastique!
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They really didn't.
Prior to Infinity War, Thanos appears in Avengers 1 for five seconds and has a minor background role in GotG 1. Plus a five second post-credits scene of him grabbing the gauntlet that was ultimately contradicted by later movies. That's it.
The infinity stones each got a movie to themselves, except the Soul Stone, but all that really established was that the stones were special and powerful. Thanos' plan for the stones is again only set up by a two minute detour in AoU and kind of by the Collector's history of the infinity stones in GotG.
A lot of people didn't like Kang or the multiverse. That is what it is. But he and the multiverse objectively had far more setup than the infinity saga, not less.
He also shows up in the mid-credits of Avengers 2 and his spaceship turns up at the end of Ragnarok.
Her civil lawsuit was dropped, that's a separate thing. No charges were dropped.
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I guess the question then is, 'If not Kang, then who?' should have been the next over arching villian/threat at the time the next phase was being mapped out.
Dr. Doom, Galactus, and anything owned by Fox at the time was off the table.
Do you go with someone like Korvac, or maybe the Beyonder or someone else?
Dr. Doom, Galactus, and anything owned by Fox at the time was off the table.
Do you go with someone like Korvac, or maybe the Beyonder or someone else?
I didn't see this reported here yet (unless it got lost in the mess arguing about Kang and plethora of other NYCC news), but io9 reports that Tommy as an adult will appear in VisionQuest, played by Ruaridh Mollica. Even though they described the show as the third part of a trilogy, this would suggest a set-up for a potential second season of Agatha All Along.
Coincidentally, I noticed while looking up Mollica's credits that he has already acted alongside Joe Locke in a London play.
Also, I don't think I noticed this before but Wonder Man comes out January 27, which is a month later from its initial announcement.
Coincidentally, I noticed while looking up Mollica's credits that he has already acted alongside Joe Locke in a London play.
Also, I don't think I noticed this before but Wonder Man comes out January 27, which is a month later from its initial announcement.
You're arguing that Quantumania was the reason the Kang storyline is dropped. I was just saying that while that makes sense, it is also stupid considering no one was going to the movie to see Kang that wasn't a comic book fan already. The seeds planted for Infinity War across various movies meant that even casual viewers of the movies would have been enticed back to see Infinity War as they'd already been teased about it in at least one movie.
On the other hand, most people only know Kang from Ant-Man 3.
Again, that makes no sense. A hit comic book sells in the tens of thousands, tops. A hit movie sells tickets in the hundreds of millions. The comics audience is literally the square root of the moviegoing audience. It's a statistically insignificant fraction of the whole. Hardly anybody who goes to a superhero movie has ever read a comic book in their life. Iron Man was largely unknown to the general public before the 2008 movie made him a household name. The Guardians of the Galaxy were obscure even to comics audiences when their movie made them a hit.
Good grief, the whole reason comic book publishers license their characters to movies and TV is because it introduces them to a far larger audience than the comics alone ever could. This is why comics so frequently change themselves to reflect their mass-media adaptations, going back to Superman comics adding Jimmy Olsen and Perry White from the radio show, and Batman comics bringing Alfred back from the dead when they learned he'd be in the TV sitcom. Movies don't depend on the comics' popularity, comics depend on the movies' popularity. The movies and TV shows create the audience for the characters, if they're good enough to make the audience want to see more. If a movie failed to create that audience, it's because the movie wasn't good enough, period. That's why the 1990 Captain America movie bombed so hard it didn't even get released in the US while the 2012 Captain America movie created an enduring franchise. There was no difference in how well-known the character was, only in how good the movie was.
Again, that shouldn't matter. It only took one movie to establish Darth Vader or Hannibal Lecter as an unforgettable villain. Advance teases are just a bonus, not an absolute requirement.
