I wonder how different this movie would’ve been if Green Lantern had succeeded.
Except that The Avengers was seen by a lot more people than had seen any of the previous Marvel films, as reflected in the box office numbers. Yes, Marvel did put out 5 movies worth of backstory first, but that wasn’t the sole reason the first Avengers became the 3rd highest grossing movie ever (for a few years at least).
RickJay:
They liked the Avengers because the characters are engaging, and the dialogue was snappy, but plays to each individual character’s strong points. DC is trying to sell their movies as classical epics, Marvel is selling their movies as human adventures (even Thor).
Does this statistic take into account home video viewing? I know quite a few movies I have seen, I never saw in the movie theater. Casablanca, for example, 300: Rise of an Empire for another example (and mostly for the sake of making a surreal comparison with Casablanca)
Right. The snappy dialogue is missing.
DC doesnt get that you can have snappy, hilarious one liners without going for broad comedy. (“Puny God”. “We have a Hulk”. “Hulk… Smash!”). Superman the movie 1978 had such lines too. So did the Keaton/Nicholson Batman.
I suppose that’s true, though I don’t think snappy dialogue is necessarily the most important thing in a movie. Yes, the bit where Iron Man caught the guy playing Galaga was funny, but jokes are a small part of a movie or else you’d make a billion dollars just filming a Friday night show at Absolute Comedy and putting it on the big screen. I mean, if that’s the only difference, it’s a pretty small difference. Are Joss Whedon one-liners what make a movie great? Gosh, I hope not. Didn’t Perry White have some pretty good lines?
(Incidentally, I found the Keaton/Nicholson Batman quite boring, but love the original Superman. All of this is just IMHO.)
Some other good examples from Avengers, IMHO:
“There’s only one G-d, and he doesn’t dress like that.” - it’s exactly what you’d expect a white-bread American from the 40’s to think about a being described to him as a god.
“He’s adopted.” - Thor’s sheepish response to a list of Loki’s crimes…a perfect echo of the family drama that was at the heart of Thor’s stand-alone movie.
Whedon didn’t just write an action film with a bunch of super heroes in it. He wrote the characters as they were established in their standalone (or, in the case of Black Widow, introductory) films, and made each of those personalities shine in their own way in interaction with the others. That’s what made Avengers such a beloved movie. A failure could have doomed the MCU franchise, but Whedon totally knocked the ball out of the park.
Despite having grown up on DC comics, I don’t think they’ve put out one worth $.05 since The Dark Knight. In fact, since then they’ve gotten worse and worse. BvS just continues the trend. I won’t bother seeing anything else they do. They’ve shown they are incompetent and boring.
Joss Whedon’s famous one-liners tend to piss me off more than they amuse me. They have a smugness about them that would tempt me to taint punch anybody who talked like that in real life.
So, still haven’t seen the movie, but I thought I’d like to the How It Should Have Ended guys take (this one DOES have spoilers, so you’ve been warned) from his YouTube channel. I’ll be honest here…it seems a lot of the hate on this movie is unjustified. I’m going to see the movie on Thursday so will have to see for myself, but I have a number of friends who have seen it already and they concur both with the HISHE guy and the earlier Angry Joe review I linked too…it’s not that bad a movie and doesn’t deserve the hate it’s getting. It’s just a different style of movie than the more upbeat Marvel movies have been, darker…and, I think, they tried to do to much with this one instead of focusing on key parts of the story and leaving jamming in more fan wankage for later follow on films.
Most of these ‘snappy one-liners,’ are exactly why I’m not enamored with the MCU. And WB may be taking the pendulum too far the other way, but I’d rather sit through a ‘too serious’ comic movie than most of these Marvel action comedies. Winter Soldier was a welcome relief.
You know what would have been a really shocking ending?
Superman doesn’t die. Geez, really, they’re doing the dead Superman thing again?
Does it make you want to sometimes punch him in his perfect teeth?
Stranger
But the great bit is how he works the point-and-quip about Galaga in with what he says while exaggeratedly pantomiming an eyepatch and snapping his fingers and patting Thor on the arm: the silly patter about trivialities is just there to sell his gestures-a-lot-while-thinking-about-trifles persona, so nobody thinks he’s on about stuff worth paying attention to as he puts his little electronic device into place.
Which means Whedon’s dialogue is part of the plot; a magician’s assistant, even!
Hey, I can do that all day.
The Avengers was a lot more successful than any of the previous Marvel movies, yes. But how many people saw it who didn’t see any of the others? I can see one fan who’s watched only the Iron Man movies and who watched Avengers because it had Iron Man in it, and another who was a fan of the Captain America movies, and so on. Plus of course the nerds like me who see all of them.