When they make the Marvel vs DC movie(s), I will call it part of the MCU, and your prediction is sunk. Oh go ahead, promise me they won’t!
But domestic money is the money the studios want. Overseas money isn’t as good.
Age of Ultron made around $240,000,000 in China. That’s around ¥1,600,000,000. Great, huh? We’re billionaires!
Now ask somebody in China to mail you a check. You’ll be informed that you need the approval of the Chinese government to transfer currency out of China in excess of ¥20,000. And the Chinese government will not be co-operative with your plan to take that money that was earned in China out of China. They will strongly suggest that you should reinvest your money in China; maybe buy a nice factory or something.
There are complicated ways of getting around these difficulties (and there are businesses that specialize in negotiating other businesses through the difficulties of moving large sums of money around the world). But a rule of thumb I’ve heard of is that for every dollar a movie earns outside of America, you end up spending fifty cents of it to get it back to America. So take your overseas ticket sales and cut them in half (and expect to wait over a year for them to arrive).
Yep, this one. Battleworld.
So, are we talking Infinity War in 2018, or the sequel/“Part 2” after that? 
Either way, I think while it may well be the “high point,” at least for awhile, I don’t think it’ll be the last one ever. These things come and go in waves. After all, almost 10 years ago we had The Dark Knight, widely heralded as the greatest superhero movie ever. Avengers arguably took that crown since then. No movie is perfect, there’s always room for improvement.
My only real worry is that with DC and Fox suddenly pushing a lot of stuff, we might be hitting peak superhero saturation. 2018 currently has seven superhero movies scheduled, with Black Panther, Infinity War Part I, Ant Man and Wasp, New Mutants, Deadpool 2, Dark Phoenix, and Aquaman. If DC wasn’t having problems, we’d have Flash and Batman too.
Speak for yourself. Civil War was awesome, and if the main takeaway from that was “bland jumble of superheroes fighting”, I have to wonder if we watched the same movie, given how centrally the movie featured the conflict between Iron Man and Captain America. Sure, there was the big mid-team punch-up, but that was still focused on the main points, and also one of the coolest action scenes I’ve seen in a long time.
The key thing here is, well, Marvel Studios. They occupy a place formerly held by Pixar - everything they touch pretty much turns to solid gold. Iron Fist is the first anything made by Marvel Studios that qualifies as “bad”, and the only other things that aren’t outright “good” are like… what, Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2? If they want to bloat the hell out of their movie… Well, you know what, I believe in their ability to do it, not least of which because that “bloat” is made up primarily of characters we all already know. It’s like complaining about the end of “The Long Halloween” featuring damn near the entire contents of Arkham Asylum - we don’t have to establish these characters, because we already know them pretty darn well, so we can already figure out who they are without too much time establishing them.
And even if this is a climax… So what? We faced “the end of the world” in Ultron, and then went right back down to “interpersonal relationship problems” in Civil War, and yet the latter still seemed just as big and impressive as the former. You don’t always have to escalate. What matters is that the movies are good. And Marvel Studios has shown itself to be incredibly, absurdly good at making good movies.
Just as a point of note, the ABC and Netflix television series, while produced under the Marvel Studios aegis and within the MCU, are produced by a separate division which shares little with the cinematic films, hence the distinct differences in tone and style, as well as the smaller scale of the world and threat within it. In the Netflix series in particular, the development of not just the protagonists but the villains and ancillary characters play just as important of a focus if not more so than the action set pieces that punctuate it, and the characters are really focused on problems in their immediate neighborhood than larger threats, though there is clearly a bigger threat brewing for The Defenders. (One does wonder why Friendly Neighborhood Peter Parker can’t take a field trip and jump on the the 5 to help out a bit with The Hand since he’d probably be really good at dealing with ninjas wielding swords well out of reach of his web slingers, but I guess he’s only in if there is a cute girl in peril.)
Iron Fist, and to a certain extend Luke Cage were missteps, but both series of Daredevil and Jessica Jones were well done (even if I did get really frustrated with Jones’ reluctance to just do the right thing and eliminate Kilgrave as soon as she had the chance), and The Punisher series promises to be the first good adaptation of the character, but there is no expectation of a cinematic crossover to the larger MCU, and the kind of stories laid out in the Netflix shows don’t lend themselves to a 150 minute big screen treatment.
Stranger
I disagree with this so much. When the villain’s plan is “destroy the world/galaxy/universe” then there really isn’t any tension, especially in a continuing series. The villain can’t possibly succeed, so, who cares? But when the villain’s plan is “blow up this boat full of people”, well, shit, that might work!
Further, you know how one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic? Same thing here. Threaten a small of group of people that we care about, and it has much more emotional impact that a galaxy full of strangers.
To me, there is more suspense and tension in the Spiderman Homecoming trailer on the ferry than there was in the climax of Guardians of the Galaxy.
Small scale threats are just as good, if not better, than constant apocalypses.
Which is why, in the post-Infinity War phase of Marvel, the Avengers’ next threat needs to be the Masters of Evil, which they should have done before Ultron but, hey, too late for that, now. Also, MOE dovetails nicely into the Thunderbolts…
Would have worked even better if they had done MOE before Infinity Wars: then they could have written some (or even all) of the Avengers off as casualties, and then introduce the T-Bolts to fill the void.
Yes. Really good and extremely important point.
MCU movies have gotten themselves in a trap where the end scene must be the heroes slapping down an infinite number of faceless, personalityless minions. And that is allowed to go on forever. Age of Ultron is an example, a bad, bad example. Did the battle with the ultron bots last 45 minutes or just, you know, 40? The movie worked very well before that, deepening the heroes’ characters and strengthening the logic of the Avengers existence: they are a team of individuals who as a group would not have much in common except for the overriding threats only they can defeat and only as a team. The ending was for video gamers, not movie watchers (even though several small pieces were quite clever).
It’s going to be extremely hard for this movie not to suck if, in fact, they try to include every single Marvel character from all preceding movies.
The movies are simply not terribly interesting now. There’s so much going on that little attention can be paid to individual characters - indeed, even as superheroes they start becoming interchangeable. The only delightful parts of “Captain America: Civil War” were Ant-Man and Spider-Man, simply because they were different both as people (one a doofus, the other a kid) and they were different as superheroes - while most everyone else is just punching and kicking and eventually you start forgetting what their superpowers are, Ant-Man and Spider-Man fought in unique ways.
Superhero movies are cool, but what’s cool about them is
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The implication of a person having to become a superhero and what it means for her/him on a personal level
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The implications of the superhero’s powers, abilities, or skills, and how they can be used to advantage, or what their weaknesses are.
To use an example, the first “Spider-Man” was a cool movie because it explored what Peter Parker was all about. He was relatable, and the implications of him having a specific set of superpowers were very interesting. The same can be said of “Superman,” “Batman Begins,” “Iron Man” and most good superhero movies.
When you stuff 50 superheroes onto the screen, it just looks like a big video game. You don’t have time to get into much characterization, and it’s hard to find time to even distinguish between people in terms of what their superpowers are, which is why it devolved into EVERYONE kicking and punching, even when that makes no sense. You begin to lose sight of what people are supposedly good at, so Black Widow, who is suppose to be a super-spy-assassin, does little spying, and just kicks and punches. Iron Man has any number of standoff weapons at his disposal but look, he’s kicking and punching Captain America, a fight he should win in 3 seconds but, oh well. Look, it’s Black Panther, kicking and punching.
Add to that the “have to save the galaxy” element to every story - hell, even Doctor Strange saved the whole planet - and it’s just a big two hour noisefest. That’s fine, people liked Nickleback, too. But I maintain the superhero movie phenomenon is a bubble. As movies, they are getting worse, and people will eventually want something fresh and new.
You’re probably not wrong. The Marvel movies have felt top heavy and have had diminishing returns since Avengers 2. The bottom eventually will fall out.
And the clever bits in the ending were mostly more of that character-and-team-building that made the beginning good, like Hawkeye’s speech to Scarlet Witch about how none of it makes any sense, but he’s going back out there anyway, because it’s his job.
Sure, there was a conflict, but it didn’t match the characters in the previous films and felt ludicrously forced, like an episode of a reality show where one contestant or the other has to be voted off; when combined with a forgettable villain with a nonsensical plan and yet more of Captain America’s obsession with Bucky, it just didn’t mena a lot, emotionally speaking.
They created a civil war without really providing a convincing reason why there’d be one, and no one dies in it, so the stakes are low.
It sold, of course. So do Transformers movies. So did Dawn of Justice. Big, loud CGI fests are in, especially overseas.
What remains to be seen is whether this type of movie will keep selling. Pixar hit on a new kind of movie, but they also made a string of brilliant movies, including at least six or seven titles better than any Marvel film. And still… can they keep doing that, or will they’ll just end up making increasingly disappointing sequels? “Finding Dory” made a ton of money but it wasn’t a really terrific movie. Sooner or later the bucks will run out from just the spectacle.