Marvel Cinematic Universe

They could work Peggy in, though.

And Coulson and Fury, older than in Captain Marvel but still a few years younger than in Iron Man. Another thing that might be interesting would be to see what the effective status quo was before Iron Man rocked it.

One thing I'd want would be for Peter to already know his parents were SHIELD agents, and for that to be set up before the movie even happens, so that it doesn't feel forced to give him a connection there.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Jul 15th 2018 at 8:03:24 AM

The early naughties in the MCU are not exactly a period of time I'm dying to have explored. I'm not sure any prequel set around SHIELD at that time could tell us anything we couldn't guess.

Let Spider-man as a franchise look forward. There's so much going on in the MCU and Peter gives us a grounds eye view of it.

I agree...going backwards might make sense occasionally (after all, it is kind of nice to know who Fury might also have considered for the Avengers initiative before he settled on the six guys we got...and I am not even sure that Hawkeye and Black Widow were planned members), but as a general rule, I prefer to move forward with the characters.

I just realized something.

In Avengers 4, they have a chance to use all of the original, 1963 members, if only in code name (I have not watched Ant-Man and the Wasp). Thor, Hulk, Iron Man, Ant-Man, and Wasp

Yeah... about that...

Yup. I really hope they somehow time travel finagle or reality warp or whatever shenanigans those set photos are implying both Ant-Man and Wasp into the events of Avengers 1 for a Mythology Gag.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 16th 2018 at 10:03:05 AM

A bit unrelated to Marvel but James Gunn is apparently said to have shown something that relates to his next project...and it's an adaptation we least expected coming from him....

http://comicbook.com/anime/2018/07/17/james-gunn-berserk-new-film-rumor-anime-sdcc/

• Death Note
• Ghost In The Shell
• Dragonball Evolution

We're three for three. I'm starting to think we just suck at this. Well, ok, I'm told GITS wasn't bad, people just had problems with the casting.

Edited by Soble on Jul 17th 2018 at 7:19:52 AM

Amusingly Edge of Tommorow adapted from the light novel All You Need is Kill is pretty good from what I heard.

Shame no one ever brings it up.

You just did. And I agree it's pretty good.

It mostly does its own thing though. Goes its own way with the material

There's a huge tonal difference

Edited by Bocaj on Jul 17th 2018 at 10:34:08 AM

Edge of Tomorrow is very good. Kind of a sci-fi, war, action movie take on Groundhog Day (in more ways than you'd expect). The only criticism I have is that throughout the film the main character is almost Made of Plasticine and dies or is crippled incredibly easily, but the second he's out of the loop, he's suddenly Made of Iron and survives some seriously wacky action movie shit.

That's standard Good Thing You Can Heal. If you can survive something, you get hit with it more. If you resurrect on death, you get hit a LOT.

So what I’m getting at is Edge of Tommorow is the antithesis of Netflix’s Death Note adaptation.

In that both put their own spin on the original source material but there’s one vital distinct difference......... one’s a good movie & the others not.

Anime is really hard to adapt to a live-action film. In part because it's asking someone to condense a television arc, designed to be upwards of 12-50 hours long, into a quick 2-3 hour jaunt.

Dragon Ball Evolution set out to tell the story of both the Pilaf and Piccolo Daimao arcs in 83 minutes. It had to cut some pretty drastic corners to even try to make that work.

Another problem is that anime adaptations have a bad habit of being made by people who want to make it...well, anime-ish. And that doesn't work. Live-action is a fundamentally different animal than animation. You can still be silly, as Gunn demonstrated with Guardians of the Galaxy, but it's a different kind of silliness. You can't just do a 1-for-1 transition. "Give me THAT face from panel #6." It doesn't work. It's too clearly visible as someone trying and failing to look like an anime character, and it takes the audience out of the story.

A live-action film needs to understand the medium it's using and be willing to tell the story using its own version of the characters.

But it also needs to respect the source material and not do shit like "Goku's in high school because why not?" or "The Kamehameha is AIRBENDING, YO. We're hip to what the kids are into!"

Dragon Ball: Evolution is the perfect storm of how not to do an adaptation. They changed what they shouldn't have - basic character, concept, and story dynamics - and refused to change what they should have - shallow visual aesthetics and storytelling model. The result is a bunch of assholes who have nothing to do with Dragon Ball characters running around trying to look like Dragon Ball characters for an hour and a half.

Gunn, on the other hand, has already written and directed a profound example of how to do an adaptation right. Guardians of the Galaxy shows great respect to the characters and source material while updating the aesthetics, storytelling model, and joke construction to better suit its medium. So he might actually be able to pull it off.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jul 18th 2018 at 8:58:24 AM

I friggin loved Edge of Tomorrow, but let’s be frank. How much of that movie works without Tom Cruise? For all the bad you can say about him, he was radiating charisma from every pore and made every scene work.

Don't think this was posted already, but some possibly interesting casting news for Spider-Man: Far From Home- had seen it the other day on Reddit, but was waiting for the story to be picked up by a reputable source, just in case.

So, Numan Acar, a Turkish-German actor has been cast as "Dimitri". What's interesting is that while the guy looks like he'd make for a great Kraven, Dimitri is the first name of Kraven's half-brother, the Chameleon. It's possible that he's just playing a minor role in the movie, but Chameleon (or Chameleon pretending to be Kraven?) would make sense given the confirmed presence of Mysterio. The two have sometimes worked together in the comics, or at part of the Sinister Six, and in Spectacular, Mysterio started out with the Tinker in a Terrible Trio lead by Chameleon.

Also, regarding the anime-adaptation-discussion, I was thinking recently of how/why it seems like the most successful adaptations of Japanese works have been the various Yojimbo and Seven Samurai Seven Samurai inspired movies. And there's some interesting Recursive Adaptation with the former, especially because it started as the noir novel Red Harvest, was then adapted as the samurai movie Yojimbo, and then became the Western A Fistful of Dollars. Not to mention that the Korean film The Good, The Bad, The Weird sort of squares the circle by taking elements of several Leone movies but transporting the setting to Asia. And similarly, there's a Japanese samurai movie adaptation of Unforgiven.

Basically, I think what makes these adaptations work is that the element of "lone hero/underdog heroes cleaning up a town" works equally well in the Noir, Jidai Geki, and Western genres. I think both because of things like Philip Marlowe thinking of himself as a Knight Errant, and because what with America being a new and expanding country, there's a lot more overlap between noir and Western than one might initially think. Besides Red Harvest itself, I'm thinking of the movie Bad Day at Black Rock, which is set in the New Old West, but has a lot of noirish touches. And it's one-armed, mysterious protagonist suggests a Jidai Geki setting would work equally well.

But tl; dr, what makes these movies work is that there's an overlap of tropes and cultural exchange going on. The problem with a lot of other anime adaptations is that there's no interest in the source material, even in cases like GITS, where the source material itself has a heavy Western (in the sense of European/American not in the sense of cowboys) influence. Seriously, it's a police procedural. How can you screw that up?

Edited by Hodor2 on Jul 18th 2018 at 10:21:25 AM

It’s not Berserk Gunn is doing. It’s Nameless. That’s where the symbol is from. And that’s a pretty boring Event Horizon rip-off so trepidation has been replaced with complete, burning apathy.

Edited by Beatman1 on Jul 18th 2018 at 11:23:13 AM

Okay, now I’m sure they’re doing the fake Spider-Man story.

As for anime adaptations, another thing that hits them is the same thing that hits live action video game or cartoon adaptations: writers and directors having no faith in the source material and instead trying to conform it to something cheesy and market safe that uses names and ideas from said source but little else. This is precisely what hits adaptations like Dragon Ball Evolution.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 18th 2018 at 12:37:14 PM

Begun the clone saga has

I didn’t mean the Clone Saga, I meant the “Mysterio takes advantage of Spider-Man’s growing reputation by concocting a fake Spidey, going on a crime spree pretending to be Spider-Man while making himself out to be a hero” story.

It’s the story he was introduced doing, and while Chameleon wasn’t involved in it at first, he’s put into it in the Spectacular version of the story.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 18th 2018 at 12:42:38 PM

Evolution has a lot of problems, there's a whole laundry list. From trying to combine the Pilaf and King Piccolo arcs, to trying to make Goku into Spider-Man or teen Gohan, to remaking the plot structure of the other Dragon Ball live-action movie, The Magic Begins. It's just a mess.

I just imagine Gunn now keeping it a surprise until Friday, everyone goes in thinking Gunn did GOTG, he can do Berserk. Then he announces Nameless and gets booed off the stage as the crowd throws leftover food at him.

That sounds like a really fun thing to do with Mysterio, and it would probably let the pair stage fights to further the illusion. My only slight complaint is I just know I’m gonna be asking where Daredevil or Luke Cage are (I know about the Netflix rules but seriously).

Edited by Beatman1 on Jul 18th 2018 at 3:47:08 PM

The Defenders tend to keep to their respective neighborhoods