Yeah, they just added her to this game I play “Marvel Rivals” and she needs to come with a seizure warning because it’s basically 4th of July as a superpower.
Not sure Jubilee needs to be a really be a powerful fighter as she’s more of the banter/annoy the villain character role. While Deadpool fills that role for mutants, he’s not really a team player. You plug Jubilee on the X-Men and you get instant quips ala Spider-Man. The quality of her shifting from super annoying to lovable scamp is firmly in the skill of the writers.
That said, her powers are technically creating energy and making detonations at the sub-atomic level. She can basically create explosions as powerful as an atomic bomb. She nerfs herself and never goes to that level.
Been thinking about this thread, and I’m gonna have to disagree with this. I grew up in the 70s (before X-Men really took off), and, yes, Spider-Man was the biggest draw, but Thor, Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man, and Fantastic Four were all big draws. 80s saw the ascendance of X-Men and less interest in the other titles, but I certainly wouldn’t call them “third-stringers”
I think the brilliance of the MCU came from Marvel understanding that the comic book stories could translate into popular eye-candy action movies. Yes, they sold the rights to Spider-Man and Hulk (popular enough to have their own cartoons in the 70s; Hulk also had the live-action series). The Hulk movies bombed; the first Spider-Man movies did OK enough for sequels, but didn’t really soar, so I can see where Hollywood was leery on other super-hero movies. Stan Lee knew that these would be entertaining stories with the right production.
Guardians worked because it was an ensemble cast of VERY DIFFERENT personalities, and one character didn’t have to carry the entire movie. Could you imagine an entire movie for Drax? Eternals… were any of them different or even interesting? Thunderbolts… yeah, I think the public is getting tired of it all.
I don’t think Doomsday will do as well as Endgame, and I worry about backlash. I’m not going to say that the MCU is dead, but it will not have the success in the future that it has enjoyed, and Marvel Studios has to accept that and accept that its movies should make money, but aren’t going to make career-making money ever again. I’m worried that they won’t find financial backers, because special-effects movies are expensive!
Please note that I specifically said “among the general audience.” Yes, absolutely, comic book fans (like you and me) knew Cap, Iron Man, etc., but 20-25 years ago (which is the time frame we’re talking about, because that’s when Marvel sold the movie rights for some characters), there was only a handful of comic book characters whose visibility and popularity had broken through into the broader pop culture, and weren’t just popular among comic fans: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Hulk, the X-Men, and maybe Wonder Woman and the Fantastic Four.
And that was my point. To a comic book fan, Iron Man, Thor, etc., were still big, important, popular characters prior to 2008 and the birth of the MCU; to a broader audience, I don’t believe that they were. And that’s why the movie rights to Spider-Man, Hulk, the X-Men, and Hulk were valuable enough to movie studios that Marvel (before being owned by Disney) was able to get money from Sony and Fox for those rights; I suspect that, if Iron Man or Thor would have been seen as being as broadly popular as those other heroes, 20+ years ago, some studio would have bought those rights from Marvel, too.
Put it this way: If not for comic books, where would anyone have heard of those characters? Spider-Man had a newspaper comic, plus cartoons (I remember Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends), plus the live-action Electric Company version. The X-Men had a cartoon. Superman and Batman have had too many movies and TV shows to count, and are also iconic as templates for other characters. Wonder Woman had the Linda Carter TV series, and also was “the female equivalent of Superman”. The Justice League and the Superfriends had cartoons, which would give at least some exposure to the second-string DC heroes. But where would anyone know Iron Man from?
Iron Man had a cartoon in the mid 90s that ran for two seasons. Avengers had one season in 1999. They weren’t super popular shows but they had enough brand/name recognition to get something a decade before the first Iron Man movie.
Speaking personally as someone who read, and still has boxes of comic books at home. I never bought any iron man comics. The character was tangentially interesting. I mostly bought Amazing spider-man, and occasional forays into other ones when there was a cross-over event. I bought Black Panther and some x-men, but even though I saw iron man in the comic book store when I went, Iron Man (and Tony Stark) were only interesting to me if they appeared in the context of some other story. So even though I was comic book fan (I also bought a lot of DC), I did not get really introduced to Iron man until I watched the film. Yes, I did know the rough details (the grey armor, the shrapnel heart thing, and few other details), but not much else. And that is me, as someone who would frequent the comic book shop at least once a week.
I had never conceived about someone making a movie with him as the star but was excited for a new comic book film. Interestingly enough I did know who Rhodey was because of the original Secret Wars comic.
Iron Man was probably slow out of the gate as a live action character because what he mostly did was fly. Even live action Superman looked stupid flying unless they threw a zillion dollars at the effect.
Iron Man’s flight is a much easier special effect than Superman’s, though. Since he’s fully suited up, you can replace the actor with a model if you want (including a digital model if that’s the way you’re going, since armor is a lot easier to avoid the uncanny valley than a person), and you can justify him being perfectly rigid while flying, and you can animate in something like a flame to make it look rocket-like.
But flight isn’t all he does: He also projects blasts from (mostly) his hands, and can pop up pretty much any other sort of weapon you want.