I predict that Avengers: Infinity War will be and become the best, most popular, biggest movie in the Marvel Cinema Universe to date…millions upon millions will see it and it will shatter every known record for movies and it will be praised more than any other in that series has been praised…
…and I predict that will be the last one that is ever seen to be that great. Oh, many that come after it may be very popular and seen as great for a long time…but none as much as that one, I bet. There has to be a ceiling somewhere right? Everyone thought it’d be with the first Avengers movie… like “OH MAN! This is it! What has been years in the making! The final, big CULMINATION of everyone and everything!”. And it was very great too…but then The Avengers: Age of Ultron came out and it was unknown if it could be just as good as the first. Some probably don’t think it was…but a lot seemed to think that yes, it was JUST AS GOOD, OMG, AMAZING, YEAH!
Well, now we’re approaching the big lead up to Infinity War…and THIS ONE…ooooh, man…
…this one is gonna be the BIGGEST ONE YET. It’s gonna have characters in it from every single Marvel movie so far (ever since they started the new cinematic universe with The Incredible Hulk). ALL OF 'EM WILL BE IN THIS ONE. Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, Thor, Spiderman, Black Panther, all of the Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange, Thanos…allllll of them finally coming together, in one place, in the same movie, for one battle of truly epic proportions.
It is going to be EXTREMELY hard to top this movie, I feel, once it’s all done and finished and out. That’s why I think that this one is gonna be the climax of it. The superhero movie genre will OFFICIALLY JUMP THE SHARK with this movie, I’m betting. Again, movies that come after will still be good, no doubt… They just won’t ever live up to how great THIS one was.
That’s a pretty safe prediction to make, but if there’s one thing Hollywood does well, it’s making the next one bigger than the last. I wouldn’t put it past Marvel to have another, even huger production in the next few years.
Yeah, once you’ve beaten a truly cosmic-level threat, where do you go from there? I mean, yeah, there will still be muggers for Spider-Man to fight, and terrorists for Captain America, and disgruntled investors for Iron Man, and so on… But after Thanos, it’s just not the same, you know?
I hate Thanos. (And his doppleganger Darkseid.) They have no personality beyond evil.
Marvel has dozens of cosmic-level villains that they can throw armies of superheroes at. The Living Tribunal. Mephisto. Eternity. The Beyonder and Secret Wars eventually died a horrible death but the concept of taking a dozen good guys and facing them off against a dozen bad guys and then forming alliances and betrayals and changes to characters would make a fantastic movie much better than anything I can imagine Infinity Wars being.
Heck, the Molecule Man alone can take down the universe without the Infinity gems.
Besides, this won’t have everybody. No X-Men, no Fantastic Four. Will Ant-man be in it? Marvel fans will never be content until a movie really has everybody, not just the subset that Disney has rights to.
I’m tempted to go the other way and say that the Infinity Wars will make a billion dollars and leave such a huge bad taste in everybody’s mouths that Marvel will have to start over to win the crowds back.
I think the big issue is whether the MCU can continue to bring new characters to the screen. There’s plenty of characters like Ant Man, Doctor Strange, and the Guardians of the Galaxy out there in the comic books. As long as they can keep tapping them and bringing them into well developed movies, the money can keep rolling in.
Which surprises me quite frankly. If you had asked me a couple of years ago, I would have predicted the MCU was on the verge of hitting a wall. They had used all the most popular characters from the comic books (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk) or sold the rights off (X-Men, Spiderman, Fantastic Four). So I figured they’d have to start hitting the B-list of characters and the popularity would start winding down.
But I’ve been proven wrong. Apparently the potential popularity of a movie character is independent of their popularity in the comic books. If you can make a successful movie about Rocket Raccoon, then there’s no theoretical limit on which characters you can use.
So will Marvel Studios be able to keep making Avengers movies? Probably not. But they won’t care when the biggest hit of 2025 is the crossover of Red Wolf, Tigra, and Wonder Man (all hot off their previous solo movies) joining up to fight Kang the Conqueror.
I think the biggest danger Marvel faces now is complacency. So far, they’ve been able to avoid it; they still work to make good movies. But if they get to the point where they assume success is automatic and they can put less effort in, that’s when they could have a box office bomb.
Few people have heard of Ant Man and Doctor Strange, fewer have heard of the Guardians of the Galaxy. Marvel movies haven’t been about the spectacle and certainly haven’t been about the villains (most popular 1) Loki 2) the rest). I can’t predict when it ends but not during the ensemble piece most likely.
Everything about Inifinity wars just sounds like a bloated mess, Hollywood couldn’t even get 13 dwarfs to work on the screen never mind jam in all these characters that apparently need to be there for this so called threat from a blue guy in a chair.
Age of Ultron wasn’t better, both it and Civil War have already been forgotten about, two bland meaningless jumbles of superhero’s fighting certainly hasn’t left me overly bothered about another three movies where every superhero in the universe gets together for a Royal Rumble.
Inifinity wars will break records, absolutely no doubt about that, just like the latest Fast and Furious smashed records and the next Transformers will do the same. And you are right that it could make the genre jump the shark. But you are very wrong that it will be because nothing could top this movie, the shark jumping will be one of the usual reasons something jumps the shark.
There’s no objective reason why DC has failed to follow the Marvel example. They have an equivalent base of comic book characters and plot lines to draw from. And presumably they had access to similar amounts of filmmaking resources (including money).
If anything this has given us a clear example of the good way and the bad way to make movies. We have two studios that had similar sources of base material and were developing movie series during the same time period. But one studio executed the process well and one did not. This demonstrates how the execution of an idea is as important as the idea itself.
Will superhero movies climax and fade because “they’ve been done” or simply fall out of fashion? How long were Westerns in vogue? Gritty cop movies? 70’s auteur movies? Each had their day, and are still made today but as one category, not the dominant genre.
The real question is what could supplant comes movies? I suspect the big special effects blockbuster will remain the focus, but will it move from comic heroes to, I don’t know, more Pixar like movies? I have no clue, but humans do things in fads and these movies seem like the latest thing.
DC’s television offerings show that their characters are perfectly viable even in today’s overcrowded superhero environment. Some episodes may be better than others, some entire seasons may be better than others (I’m looking at you Arrow), and overall I think the TV shows are far superior to DC’s cinematic productions.
Poor, poor DC. Suicide Squad took in $745,600,054 worldwide, as of Boxofficemojo today. That’s more than Doctor Strange. The much reviled Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice made $873,260,194. Is that more than the wonderfully received Guardians of the Galaxy? You bet your batarang it is. The four year old Man of Steel that killed off Superman movies? $668,045,518. The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises both broke a billion. Warner Brothers isn’t looking up to anyone except Disney with these numbers.
Marvel movies do have higher highs, true. And DC has the problem that they can’t spread the wealth around the way Marvel has: 15 of their top 16 grossing movies, adjusted for inflation, are Batman or Superman movies. But Wonder Woman will make a ton of money and that’s followed by Justice League which will do as well. I’ll bet they’ll both do better than the Spider-Man and *Thor *movies appearing later this year. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 may beat them. Or not. Who can predict this stuff?
Except to say that a half dozen superhero blockbusters a year are probably too many. That’s what will kill them off. One a year is an event. One a month isn’t.
This may be true, but also overlooks the fact that there are no Marvel characters with the global recognition or iconic status of a Batman or a Superman, not even Spider-Man. Dawn of Justice should have broken a billion, easy, and the fact that it didn’t reflects how poor the movie was. Bragging about how Dawn of Justice out-earned Guardians of the Galaxy would be like if DC made a movie based on the Challengers of the Unknown, and then Marvel fans started beating their chests because the movie didn’t earn as much as Civil War.
People are going to DC movies almost strictly on name recognition, at this point, while they’re going to Marvel movies because they think they might actually enjoy the movie.
The dwarves were among the best handled part of the Hobbit movies, I thought. All pretty distinct characters, whereas in the book Bifur and Bofur, Fill and Kili, Oin and Gloin, et al. are all pretty much the same.
I do prefer the standalone Marvel filma, though Civil War was pretty good.
Speaking for myself: I don’t care about the DC characters, their comic versions don’t excite me so why would the movies? This goes back to when I was a hyper-partisan third grade fanboy, while I don’t actively hate DC anymore I don’t pay attention to them.
But there’s a difference between selling a movie and selling a series. You can pour in hype and sell a movie. But with a series, the movies themselves have to be good enough that people want to go see the next movie in the series.
And “good enough” really isn’t good enough for this particular genre. You can keep making movies in a genre like teen slasher because the movies are relatively cheap. You can throw together another Saw or Hostel for ten million so you’re happy if it makes a hundred million.
But comic book movies are expensive, even by Hollywood standards. Suicide Squad cost $175,000,000 in production costs and probably cost at least another $100,000,000 in marketing costs. $325,000,000 in domestic box office probably barely made its investment back.
Point of note: the Marvel Cinematic Universe began with Iron Man. The post-credits stinger actually has Nick Fury confronting Tony Stark in his home to talk with him about the “Avengers Initiative” and telling him “Mr. Stark, you’ve become part of a bigger universe. You just don’t know it yet.” Stark, of course, has a cameo in the mid-credits scene in Incredible Hulk.
From the RottenTomatoes aggregator, the lowest rated MCU movie was Incredibly Hulk at 67%, and the average is above 80% out of 14 films, which is pretty damned impressive (and I have no doubt that Guardians, Vol 2 is going to boost that average). To date, the highest rated DCU film is Man of Steel at 55%, and if you think the Justice League film is going to beat that, well, you must be watching different trailers than I have. And this is despite that the main characters in the DC films (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman) inarguably started with a higher profile of general popular awareness and cinematic exposure. Marvel, on the other hand, has been able to take several little known characters and turn them out in well-regarded stories of their own, and then merge them into the “larger universe” pretty seamlessly. The sheer number of characters in Infinity War is going to be a narrative challenge that will probably require splitting the characters off into separate groups and extending the Thanos storyline across other films rather than tying it off in that film, so while it is definitely going to be a larger and more expansive film than those before it, it is hardly the end of the line. If anything, Spider-man, Guardians, Ant-Man, and Dr. Strange can continue on independent of the main Avengers storyline indefinitely (the first two have already been greenlit for sequels, and a Dr. Strange followup was threaded into its essential story). It remains to be seen if Thor, Hulk, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel can carry independent story lines or if the principal actors are even interested in that kind of commitment, but if Thor: Ragnarok ends up being even half as entertaining as the trailer promises I can see separate sequels being approved and Marvel delving further into its vault for more interesting characters.
First of all, there is no way you can’t make a successful film with Rocket Raccoon. Bradley Cooper is apparently so jazzed about voicing the character he appears willing to forego all other roles and maybe even a salary to continue to play Rocket. And if you can’t find a way to make a psychotic, machine-gun-toting, sarcastic technogenius raccoon interesting, you just need to stop breathing.
Seriously, though, the smart thing that Marvel has actually done is to make each film something more than a superhero story. The stories all fit the basic plotline of a superhero adventure film–there is a hero or a few, one or more ancillary human characters that allow the viewers to relate to the heroes, and a villain who will not stop until captured or destroyed–but Marvel has kept the films fresh by allowing each one to be set in a milieu that is more than just the adventure. The Iron Man films have been as much about the inventive Tony Stark needing to protect his technology from misuse by allies as much as ostensible villains (shades of The Man In The White Suit), Captain America: The First Avenger was a riff on golden age serials, Thor was a Shakespearean tragedy, The Avengers was as much about resolving team conflict as it was defeating Loki (“Puny god!”), Guardians of the Galaxy was classic science fantasy with a comedic bent, Ant-Man was a straight up heist movie, Dr. Strange was trippy magic and hubris, and the last two Captain America films were political and psychological thrillers respectively. The upcoming Thor: Ragnarok has been described as a “road movie” but the title graphics and visual appearance harken back to 'Eighties high fantasy like Conan: The Barbarian and the campy Flash Gordon.
Each film has also been allowed to have its own visual style and color pallet (with the Captain America films getting progressively darker) and by and large the directors have been given enough latitude to put their personal fingerprints on the movie (provided that the film still satisfies the need to advance the MCU…Edgar Wright throwing a tantrum because Marvel wouldn’t let Ant-Man be a standalone film was a battle he was always going to lose). So most of the films feel very distinct; it’s not just the same hero/villain conflict and resolution over and over again that Superhero films tend to fall into, and yet not as aimless as successive Superman, Batman, and X-Men sequels that tried to mash in a bunch of new elements but with no real plan or concern about plot coherence and character continuity. Ant-Man showed that Marvel can do separate films that are mostly self-contained (the Hydra element was kind of shoehorned in but actually worked pretty well for that), and the films that fared the poorest creatively were generally the ones that didn’t have a larger theme and were basically made to push forward the MCU timeline without having a real presence in and of themselves (Iron Man 2, Thor: The Dark World, Avengers: Age of Ultron.)
As long as Marvel continues to focus on well-constructed stories that also bring something more than just hero/villain conflict and new superpowers/weapons–and there is a whole mass of untapped genres to pick from–they should be able to keep making films post-Infinity Wars even after the original Avengers retire or age out. The fandom is practically begging for a Black Widow movie, and X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past showed that it is possible to do retro-styled movies with a cast of younger heroes without it just feeling like filler. I hold out hope for a 'Sixties era Peggy Carter/Howard Stark/Howling Commandoes film to make up for the disappointing ABC treatment, and Nick Fury certainly has some backstory as to why he things superpowered beings are the answer to humanity’s threats.
Who is the audience for these movies? Does anybody think that one group of Americans goes to Marvel movies and a completely different group goes to DC movies? I’m pretty sure that the overlap in viewership is gigantic. Marvel does better, as I said. But not gigantically better. And that’s because the audience for all these movies is the basic superhero audience, not a specific DC or Marvel audience. It’s better to look at the genre as a genre. If attendance starts going down it will go down across the board.
Domestic box office grosses haven’t been a good measure of profitability for years and gets worse all the time. All these movies have much larger worldwide grosses than American grosses and that ratio skews higher with every year. The Fast and the Furious made 30% of its gross from foreign sales; The Fate of the Furious is currently at 82%.
In addition, almost everything from here on out is profit. Cable sales, streaming, DVDs, and whatever other means of viewing is available will make back production costs all by themselves and probably much more. And that’s in addition to associated merchandise, which is where the big money is. That’s real billions.
It’s possible that DC will make a string of movies so bad it will run itself out of the business. I don’t think there’s any indication of that yet. And if that happens, my prediction is that Marvel will also get hurt because the whole genre will be affected.
