Comic Book Movies

[Dr. Insomniac]

Yeah, though I did really like NWH and Doctor Strange 2, the rest of the movies were just "Okay, fine, whatever". As for the shows, they've got the opposite problems the Netflix ones had where they all forget they only have 6 episodes instead of 13, so they end up shoving too much in the finale without giving anything room to breathe. There's that pattern where they have a really good penultimate episode, and then a finale that does too much without thinking how all the pieces work. Though honestly, I kinda prefer it over Phase One and Two. Aside from Iron Man, Winter Soldier, and Guardians, most of those movies then didn't go above "Fine" or "I guess I liked that?" for me.

I think the problem with Phase Four is there's too much of an interim period to it all. Half the Avengers are gone, but they don't want to immediately have the Fantastic Four and the X-Men show up, so it feels like they're twiddling their fingers and waiting. And shit like Chadwick Boseman dying, not fully owning the Spider-Man rights and having to talk with Sony, and letting Gunn go for long enough that he's doing a dozen DC projects instead of a dozen Marvel ones screwed up a lot of their plans.

And for what it's worth, Phase 4 hasn't produced anything as bad as Morbius yet. So they're doing better than the Sony front. Also, and I hope I'm not jinxing it, at least they're not dealing with one of their actors kidnapping a girl and going on the run like WB.

[Avaitor]

I think the TV shows have really put the MCU into overkill territory. There's just way too much content now, and little of what we're getting has been the franchise at its best. My opinions on each Phase 4 project largely overlaps you guys and it feels like I'm watching a lot of this, the shows in particular, out of obligation than personal interest at this point.

Granted, no we haven't had a Morbius or Inhumans-level disaster, but I also don't think that we've had a singularly great work like Black Panther, Guardians or (most of) Daredevil. NWH is probably the closest, but I don't feel comfortable putting it at that level, probably since it relies too hard on nostalgia to the Raimi and Webb films more than being its own movie.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Or maybe it's because the shows were always in excess years before the Disney+ era, it's just it was easy to think of them as their own thing separate from the movies. If anything, we've had less MCU content now than when Hulu, ABC Family, Netflix, and ABC were pumping out Runaways, Cloak and Dagger, the Defenders shows, and Agents of SHIELD all in tandem with each other.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Another issue the MCU has now that they didn't have previously is the lack of competition. For most of the first three phases, they had to compete with the X-Men and DC films. But now that Disney bought Fox, and DC's still going through growing pains with the Discovery buyout being one of them, they don't have any serious rival at the moment when it comes to making superhero films, and no serious rival means less reason to push harder. Like look at Sony's description of their Kraven film and tell me Feige and the rest of Marvel execs are genuinely worried.



Closest they have to a rival is all The Boys spinoffs Amazon is making.

[Avaitor]

The new Thor is not sounding very good, and this seems to be coming from all different sides. I'll admit that I'm not expecting much at this point, since Waititi's shtick doesn't do a lot for me, even if Ragnarok did grow on me, but I'm curious to see what the big deal is all about.

I probably won't get to see it until next week, though. I'm supposed to get a free ticket from D23, but it hasn't come in yet, and I really can't afford to pay currently.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Yeah, hearing from people who loved Ragnarok that Love and Thunder is a bust is concerning.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I'm probably in the minority in enjoying Love and Thunder on the whole. It's not as good as Ragnarok, IMO, but I feel like some of the criticisms levied against this movie are people being more irritated with the tonal dissonance whereas for me that part felt intentional and mostly worked in the movie's favor. That said, the movie makes some pretty big missteps in it's story-telling and it's biggest issue by far feels like it kind of ignored Thor's development from Ragnarok. I could accept the character inconsistencies between the first two movies and Ragnarok more since it was meant to be a soft reboot for the character, but it's rather irksome when it feels like this is another reset for Thor after Endgame already regressed his character.

That said, I'd say that the movie was still pretty enjoyable for me. I may be going too easy on it but I can't help but have fun with Waititi's style of humor. It just works for me.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

After stewing on it some more, while I still personally "enjoy" tgis movie, it's definitely another Doctor Strange scenario where it has a ton of major story issues when you actually stop to think about it.

Most notably:

Spoiler

The whole thing with Eternity being able to grant a wish and Thor knowing about it is now a major retroactive plot-hole for Avengers Infinity War and Endgame, since it makes no sense for him to not even bring it up after the snap. Also, this movie feels like it rushed through both Jane Foster and Gorr's character arcs. This is oddly enough a case where the movie could have stood to be a bit longer and fleshed out these characters and story beats more.

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It's odd, because even putting Ragnarok aside, Waititi has made movies where he's able to balance humor and serious character drama before (Boy, Jojo Rabbit, etc.), but this movie feels so much more clumsy in it's execution. Apparently, though, Waititi was given a lot of creative freedom on this movie, if behind-the-scenes reports are to be believed, so this doesn't seem to be the usual case where you can just blame all of it's shortcomings on studio interference. This may be a case like It: Chapter Two, where the director maybe should have been reigned in just a bit more to keep things more on-track and focused.

[Dr. Insomniac]

I was noticing on Twitter how many random bad superhero movies from at least 5 years ago keep getting tweets going "Why did we as a society sleep on this?", "This was an underrated classic and I'll never forgive the haters!" or some other way to say "bad movie was actually good movie". Thor 2. TASM 2. The 2017 Power Rangers movie. The fucking Halle Berry Catwoman movie. Reminds me how the SW prequels and Spider-Man 3 got reappraised, or why there's a bunch of adults celebrating Dan Schneider shows. Yeah, a lot of it's nostalgia, but it's still weird. I suppose it's a sign that superhero fatigue's hardly a thing if there are audiences wowed by TASM 2 of all movies. Fully expecting movies like Elektra or League of Gentlemen to get rediscovered by Twitter stans, or guys with bluecheck accounts begging Disney to make Sky High 2. And I know in the future, movies like Eternals or Wonder Woman 1984 will probably get some form of "Why did we hate this? These movies are great!" discourse that'll be just as confusing.

[Avaitor]

I actually did watch Elektra again a couple of years ago, and it's not THAT bad. It deserves some praise for focusing on the bond of two female characters well before this was something super hero movies were more apt at, even if that's mostly a discount Ripley and Newt. But it's still pretty dumb, and out classed by both WW movies and even Captain Marvel.

But you never know what movies matter to some people. I know someone who's a serious film buff, can write essays of well-researched and honest critiques of classic Hollywood and contemporary stuff, whose favorite super hero movie has been Supergirl ever since he was a kid. I still have a soft spot for Affleck's Daredevil, myself, even though I'd never pick that or most comic book movies from that era over more recent stuff.

Still, it really is telling that the MCU movies that arguably have the most creative control are the ones that are catching on the least successfully. Although I'd say with MoM, Raimi is not the problem at all, and if anything, it would have been a lot better if he wasn't forced to spilt the Doctor Strange movie he wanted with a WandaVision sequel he clearly had no interest in. And with Eternals, Chloe Zhao is talented, but she's still a weird choice for the MCU. She's honestly pretty humorless and really struggled to fit the studio's trademark banter into the heavier story she wanted, but even that suffered from a lack of balance between its cast and some clumsy ideas.

Can't speak for Love and Thunder yet, and who knows, I may even end up loving it. For every four or five people who came out annoyed, I do see someone who genuinely enjoyed it, although only a handful of those seemed to have truly loved it. But it's sounding like Waititi may just not be the best fit for super hero storytelling, and Ragnarok was possibly a fluke.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Eh, I bet MoM will be one of those superhero movies that catches on over time. While the attempts to shoehorn Wandavision are awkward, the movie still has a lot of fun with having Wanda as the villain. Kinda like how even though Raimi had no interest in Venom, the symbiote scenes in 3 are the ones everybody talks about.

The Marvel movies feel like they're going through the same uncertainty period they had in 2005-2007 (yeah, I know it was multiple studios in that case, but it's more jarring how more than one studio screwed up than just the one), with Rise of the Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider, X3, and even a couple before that like Blade Trinity and that one Punisher film I never hear anybody talk about without confusing it with War Zone. Admittedly, Phase 4 hasn't delivered anything as bad as those films yet, but it still reminds me of how the superhero movie craze doesn't really crash so much as it ebbs and flows. There's always that period every 7 or so years where it looks like it's about to peter out (see 1997, the period I just mentioned, 2013), but then a big rebound happens. And I wonder if we're in that period again.

[Avaitor]

That may be it, although The Batman and No Way Home are big enough successes to say that we're not quite at that level.

That said, I do think super hero fatigue, particularly MCU fatigue, is real. Again, NWH is a fluke, but from what I see with a lot of my friends, it does feel like each release seems to matter a little less, and a lot of the people who are still catching up seem to be doing so out of obligation more than interest. I do think that the shows are especially making it feel like there's just too much content, and not enough of it is worth sticking around for.

Obviously they've been doing shows alongside the movies for a long time, but you could skip most of those and not miss anything. The Netflix shows were largely doing their own thing, the people behind the movies almost purposefully ignored Agents of SHIELD, and stuff like Cloak and Dagger and Runaways basically didn't count. But now you need to see WandaVision and possibly What If? to understand MoM, Ms. Marvel is supposed to lead into the next Captain Marvel, and who knows what else. And almost all of these shows peak early.

[Dr. Insomniac]

I don't know. The thing about most of the movies is the characters usually go through a couple rounds of exposition to explain prior events so the audience won't feel like they needed to do homework. Like how Infinity War had a bunch of scenes where they reminded the audience what happened in Doctor Strange, Black Panther, GOTG Vol. 2, Civil War, etc. And MoM had a couple scenes that were clearly there for the audience that didn't watch Wandavision.

And I don't think superhero fatigue's a thing, or at least not in the form most people think. Yeah, there's a lot of capeshit being made, but at least there's a little more variety compared to the endless cycle of DC/Marvel cartoons and random Saban shows I went through as a kid. If the fatigue were a thing, I think it would've happened a long time ago, like in that mid-2000s period I mentioned. But like I said, it comes and goes in waves. There's always that one year where it feels like every superhero movie out in theaters is either mid or kind of sucks, but then a TDK or a Winter Soldier shows up and surprises you.

I guess what I'm getting at is how superhero movies can be slotted into eras. How the 90s was defined by the Batman movies and its copycats, the X-Men films dominating the early-to-mid 00s, the Nolan Batman films defining the late 00s-early 10s, then the MCU reigning from the early 10s up 'til now. We're probably due for a transition to another era, though I'm not sure what. Maybe Black Adam becomes a surprise hit and colors the next 7 years of superhero movies. Or maybe Kraven is somehow a 10/10 and Sony gets another chance at the seat.

[Avaitor]

I finally got around to seeing Love and Thunder, and it's definitely a step down from Ragnarok, but I don't think it's quite the trainwreck others have written it off to be. The humor does largely fall flat- even besides the constant tone shifts, it does seem like Waititi used most of his best gags in Ragnarok- but it also tries to write some big checks in terms of dramatic stakes that I don't think it can cash.

Still, I think his direction is solid, and the cast does their best. Hemsworth in particular seems to be having the time of his life, and clearly likes Waititi's style.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Just as expected, they are totally doing Namor and Atlantis in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The thing is, I always liked the rivalry between T'Challa and Namor in Hickman's run, having a mutual respect for each other as intelligent leaders, but at odds with each other in their ideological differences. The problem is, T'Challa isn't in this movie due to Chadwick Boseman's tragic passing, so I don't really know what to make of this yet.