No Avengers spoilers in this thread, please. Or, if you can help it, un-hidden Cap plot points/easter egg spoilers. 
So I was tooling around on the computer, and made this for fun:
... Which got me thinking. There's been some talk recently, notably in an AV Club video bit titled "the future of mega-franchises", about whether there'll ever be another franchise project as large as HP.
You see where this is going.
Is it just me, or has the ambition of the MCU so far been rather under-appreciated? So far as I know, only one "cinematic universe" has really preceded it - that being the View Askewniverse - but those stories were haphazardly and tangentially connected at best. (There was a hint of something similar with X 1-3 followed by XMO:W, but the whole Origins thing is looking more and more like a one-off followed by an even farther one-off rather than as part of a cohesive whole, and I doubt even The Deadpool, if it gets made, would change that.)
Whereas, counting the in-production Avengers, the MCU is so far very much internally consistent (the recasting of Howard and Norton aside), and will probably beat HP's 8-movie numeric stretch with Captain America 2 in 2014 or '15.
Granted, the MCU films don't follow as narrow a band of characters as HP's, nor is there the same larger-than-movies effect of seeing child actors grow from pre-adolescent kids to young adults. Still, in one sense - that of putting huge and serious/well-respected actors main, supporting and side roles - it's doing just fine. So far, we have:
- Downey Jr.
- Bridges
- Norton
- William Hurt
- Rourke
- Hopkins
(Oh, how I wish I could add Branagh here...
)
- Lee Jones
- Tucci
- Renner
- Ruffalo
... That's a hell of a list.
And, of course, the MCU is also totally unlike Potter in that it has no pre-determined length or endpoint. But still... anyone else just kinda in awe at the movie history being made here? And anyone care to guess at how long the MCU'll hang together before going totally haywire-continuity-wise, sinking into hopeless mediocrity, totally nuking the shark, being rebooted, or some combination of the above?
I suppose the biggest test will come whenever the original leads start to check out, as Downey may do post-IM3. Of course, they've already recast el Hulko, so that wouldn't necessarily stop things, but it could provide motivation for rebooting/continuity-splitting a character... which in turn might strain the internal coherence of the MCU as we know it.
Thoughts?
So I was tooling around on the computer, and made this for fun:
... Which got me thinking. There's been some talk recently, notably in an AV Club video bit titled "the future of mega-franchises", about whether there'll ever be another franchise project as large as HP.
You see where this is going.
Is it just me, or has the ambition of the MCU so far been rather under-appreciated? So far as I know, only one "cinematic universe" has really preceded it - that being the View Askewniverse - but those stories were haphazardly and tangentially connected at best. (There was a hint of something similar with X 1-3 followed by XMO:W, but the whole Origins thing is looking more and more like a one-off followed by an even farther one-off rather than as part of a cohesive whole, and I doubt even The Deadpool, if it gets made, would change that.)
Whereas, counting the in-production Avengers, the MCU is so far very much internally consistent (the recasting of Howard and Norton aside), and will probably beat HP's 8-movie numeric stretch with Captain America 2 in 2014 or '15.
Granted, the MCU films don't follow as narrow a band of characters as HP's, nor is there the same larger-than-movies effect of seeing child actors grow from pre-adolescent kids to young adults. Still, in one sense - that of putting huge and serious/well-respected actors main, supporting and side roles - it's doing just fine. So far, we have:
- Downey Jr.
- Bridges
- Norton
- William Hurt
- Rourke
- Hopkins
(Oh, how I wish I could add Branagh here...
)- Lee Jones
- Tucci
- Renner
- Ruffalo
... That's a hell of a list.
And, of course, the MCU is also totally unlike Potter in that it has no pre-determined length or endpoint. But still... anyone else just kinda in awe at the movie history being made here? And anyone care to guess at how long the MCU'll hang together before going totally haywire-continuity-wise, sinking into hopeless mediocrity, totally nuking the shark, being rebooted, or some combination of the above?
I suppose the biggest test will come whenever the original leads start to check out, as Downey may do post-IM3. Of course, they've already recast el Hulko, so that wouldn't necessarily stop things, but it could provide motivation for rebooting/continuity-splitting a character... which in turn might strain the internal coherence of the MCU as we know it.
Thoughts?
