I was trying to decide whether to see The Marvels or The Holdovers this weekend. I think I will see The Holdovers.
One user’s POV:
While I may want to, I don’t have the time to follow every TV series and movie, and I’ve definitely never read the comics. So if they can write a story than I can figure it out in context, I’ll be fine. I haven’t even see all the original movies, and I could follow along mostly fine up to Endgame.
Given that, Quantumania was a visually exciting hot mess of pointlessness. Why should I care about any action that takes place in the “quantum realm”?
I don’t like multiverse movies* because - when you have an infinite number of universes, caring about any one is pointless. Who cares if Earth-219084 Spiderman dies? There’s literally an infinite number of others!
And, in a minority opinion, I hated Endgame. Basically, because it isn’t internally consistent.
Given that, I’ll probably see The Marvels, but I’m in no hurry.
*except, oddly, the animated Spiderverse. Somehow it works for me animated.
I liked Black Widow, a lot. But I’m atypical - I’ll see a movie because I like an actor. BW was good because of Florence Pugh and David Harbour (just as Pugh and Hailee Steinfeld made Hawkeye fun). I loved Iman Vellani in Ms. Marvel, and liked Brie Larson in Captain Marvel, so I’ll probably see their film, just for that.
This sums it up.
Hollywood always draws the wrong conclusions. It’s like they are incapable of intelligent analysis.
That, and they are always reacting to the last thing that happened. Space movies were nothing, dead, money losers - until Star Wars. Then SW knockoffs were EVERYWHERE!
Action heroes had to be large tough guys. Until Die Hard. Then smart ass wise guy heroes were EVERYWHERE.
Movie moguling is all about making money first, sure, but securing your position in the hierarchy is more important.
To my point, that’s because those were fantastic movies that broke new ground in animation and story telling.
To me it often comes down to a genre thing. If I like superhero movies, I might be more likely to enjoy a bad one, just because I like the genre. If it’s a genre I’m not into, I won’t tolerate a mediocre movie, but I still will probably enjoy a good movie in that genre.
Standard disclaimer: people like what they like, etc., and you’re not a bad person for enjoying something somebody else doesn’t, or vice versa. Even if you’re wrong.
The other problem I have, and it just might be my age and fading memory, is even when I watch past series and movies I completely forget what they were about and where they left off. I saw all of Wandavision and S.1 of Loki, but damned if I could give you a basic plot summary or tell you who is alive or dead at the end of them much less who the main characters were.
I seem to have the same problem with all the Star Wars spin off stuff.
You do realize that this means there will be a flood of bad movies employing variations on this success?
Yes, I trust Hollywood will release lots of movies that will try and break new ground in animation by repeating exactly what has gone before.
I won’t even make the tired joke of Hollywood being stupid. I’m sure the people making follow-on movies have completely reasonable ideas of what made the original successful, they just aren’t able to capture the same magic. Often, I think, that is because they are releasing their movie into a post-Spiderverse society, or whatever.
There are a bunch of animated superhero movies that I’ve never watched. I’m not too into animation, so I don’t know which, if any, are follow-ons of Spiderverse compared to which are just a continuation of the 70 year (or whatever) history of animated super hero stories.
I liked Black Widow also, it was a decent enough movie that would have done fine if it wasn’t released at the height of COVID. Also the first Captain Marvel movie was female lead and there was a lot of vitriol online for it and it still did 1.1 Billion at the box office. Marvel movies are bombing because they are just throwing things at the wall instead of being on a clear path like before, DC movies are bombing because they cancelled the damn universe and still keep releasing movies in it.
I hope the lesson they took from that is “don’t pay attention to the incels”, as they don’t control the market. They may talk loud, but they are hollow.
I liked it. Black Widow, too. Still mad they killed her off in Endgame, though, even if it fit the story.
“The Holdovers” is excellent! One of my top films of the year so far.
“The Marvels” is the first MCU movie in several years that I didn’t get tickets for opening night. The trailer just does not interest me at all.
Rich Sanchez has entered the chat! Michael Shannon, the actor who played Zod in Man of Steel and again in The Flash shares your opinion and thought his second time around as the general was meaningless. I think you have a valid point, which is why I think anything with the multiverse needs to be used sparingly. In one Batman comic, he runs into other versions of Batman including Adam West and the Arkham Asylum video game Batman which is fun for the fans. I enjoyed seeing Toby return as Spider-Man in the last movie.
Good point, I won’t have to dehydrate beforehand.
I saw Endgame at a theater that’s also a brewpub (so they assume people will have liquid intake). The ticket woman said “If you need to run to the restroom, do it when you see the Hulk with a taco. That’s the halfway point, and not much happens for the next five minutes.” We thanked her, walked down a long hallway to the theater. She waved and called after us: “Hullllk…with a taaaaaco…”
Ha, I assumed the D+ was a grade. But can anyone tell me (spoilers ok) what in Secret Invasion “sets up a chunk of the plot of the movie”?
I gave up on SI, but don’t want to be watching The Marvels and yelling "Whaaaaa…? The Stan Lee that died was a Skrull?" Or whatever.
Or is it something that would wreck the Marvels, or that I can look up after the movie?
I found an article that spells it out and basically says "You don’t need to see SI.": Everything you need to know from Secret Invasion before The Marvels
My daughter is super looking forward to it. She loved the Ms. Marvel show.
I’ll take her not this weekend, but next.
Okay, they had the Captain America franchise, and they killed him off- sorta.
They had the very best franchise- the Avengers- and they killed them off. No reason to do that.
Now they have the Guardians, and Spiderman (sorta).
Well, my guess is they killed off the Captain America and Avengers franchises because the stars got too expensive. I believe Robert Downey Jr was paid very little for the first Iron Man movie, but then more and more later. Better to start with cheap unknown actors.
Okay, there is low quality pirate copy floating around and I couldn’t help but go ahead and watch it. There are a very few fun moments in it, but it is mostly really, really, really bad.
Mid credits scene? Involves a furry blue guy who sounds sort of like Frasier.
Stars are replaceable. Major well known characters are not.
Just find a study guy to play Cap, and a smart assed sophisticated actor to play Iron Man, Tony Stark,
I dont need to see Stark as iron man or Evans as Cap.
Well, yeah, that too.
Indeed. They were fresh, they were different. And yes, as stated in following posts, we’ll see others try to capture the same lightning “but my way” and fail.
(And I recall a recent year where there were two films explicitly about a multiverse and a cosmic champion in it… and the one everyone talked about was not the Marvel one with the white guy lead.)
As others have mentioned part of the issue is that the “comic book” mentality is drifting up into the productions. Part of the fun with things like the early Avengers arc was that you did not need to arrive already knowing that much, heck, it helped if you didn’t or if you just knew broad strokes, because you then would not get hung up on “canon”. But let’s be fair: Captain/Miss Marvel… are not that iconic with the mass market to start with. So they do have a greater challenge with establishing the character and then having people interested in seeing what’s next. We’ll see how well they did that.
Sometimes lightning just strikes. But then what follows may look lesser unfairly because now that you’re going into that theater expecting to get knocked out of your shoes.
Or, it can look lesser because…
…the studio gets up its own fundament with the “but we must release more and bigger every year” business model.