Marvel Cinematic Universe

Well, he is short...

...plus you know, the fact that he utterly failed to avenger his race, and then when he did achieve the legendary power (even being stronger than the guy he was competing against) he still got his ass beat into the ground despite that.

....that would give anyone issues....or entertain those who enjoy laughing at him.

Edit: Also....we've gotten off topic. I jokingly blame Tony Stark, and (somehow) legitimately blame Peter Quill, as always.

Edited by HandsomeRob on Aug 13th 2019 at 11:11:27 AM

You cannot hold on that gruge forever, even i kinda Made peace with Wanda Being a karma Houdini.

Anyone know who will be in charge of fight choreography for the Shang Chi movie?

Might be too early in production for them to have chosen yet.

Hell, we don't even know the director, yet.

That's pretty much the problem with Judas Bullets.

You have a superhero whose skin is invulnerable. That is his superpower. Also some super-strength, but the important thing here is the invulnerable skin. He's still susceptible to any form of harm that does not require breaking skin, but you can't break his skin.

How do you threaten him?

If your answer is "Invulnerability-piercing super bullets that can defeat invulnerable skin," you have failed at creativity. That answer is basically Andy Davis's Dinosaur Who Eats Force Field Dogs in terms of compelling narrative problem-solving.

Which is why season 2 had that plot point about Luke being more invulnerable-er than last season and the Judas Bullets no longer working. It was a quick and easy Hand Wave to write the Judas Bullets out of existence for being a dumb idea and then never speak of them again. While spending the duration of the season threatening Luke in more creative ways.

There was a lot to like about Luke's first season, but the creative team had no idea how to handle an invulnerable protagonist and it shows. The second season is a remarkable improvement over an already great series.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 14th 2019 at 8:18:32 AM

We do know the director, Destin Daniel Creton.

Yeah, there's only going to be two MCU movies released between now and then (Black Widow and The Eternals), so it's actually reasonably far along in preproduction.

Speaking of which, anyone have any idea who Awkwafina is playing? She's the only person cast without a known role.

I'm not really familiar with Shang-Chi or the Mandarin's supporting cast to make a reasonable guess.

I was under the impression that Shang-Chi was himself a supporting character (Iron Fist's, specifically), meaning that his supporting cast was gonna be either mostly original or cherry-picked from other books.

No, he was the star of his own book, Master of Kung Fu, where he fought the evil plots of Fu Manchu.

That sounds like it'll take a lot of tinkering to work. If only because of Fu Manchu.

Awkwafina could be playing Leiko Wu, a Chinese-British MI-6 agent who became Shang-Chi's love interest.

Honestly, however, I wonder if they are going to use Clive Reston, who is more akin to James Bond. Shang-Chi's early stories also featured Dennis Neyland Smith, a character from Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu books, so they probably can't use him.

Edited by alliterator on Aug 14th 2019 at 10:45:02 AM

Well, that's why they're using the Mandarin.

Because of just how much public domain and pop culture is around in Shang Chi’s forming stories, I think they’re going to be doing a lot of compositing.

I definitively think they’re going to composite elements of Neyland Smith into Reston, making Reston the Hero Antagonist who Shang Chi fights when he still works for and believes in his father, who then becomes his closest ally when Shang Chi discovers the truth about his father’s evil.

Awkwafina could be playing a Gender Lifted version of that character, or she could be playing the character of Fu Manchu / The Mandarin’s daughter, another antagonist.

Interestingly, in the comics Manchu has agents in Africa, which when updated to the Mandarin and the MCU could be a cool way of giving Mandarin antagonism to Wakanda.

I also wonder if they are going to make the Mandarin into the Yellow Claw, too, which is gives them an easy way of introducing the Agents of Atlas. Just with Shang-Chi in the Jimmy Woo role (since they already used Woo in Ant-Man and the Wasp and he was more comic relief).

The Ten Rings has explicitly been an international organization from it's introduction in Iron Man 1 (with people from centrql Asia to Eastern Europe represented just in Raza's cell), so it's not unreasonable for them to have operations in Africa.

That sounds like the simplest explanation, so it's probably the right one.

Edited by Falrinn on Aug 14th 2019 at 2:34:21 PM

It would be nice to have the main female character not be anyone’s love interest. I liked that about The Winter Soldier and Thor:Ragnarok. It’s an improvement over the earlier movies and I hope they continue it.

I'd like if they just moved away from love interests (male or female) entirely, but I'm the grouch who hates romance in all forms so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They've consistently been the weakest part of every single movie to feature them, though, so perhaps I'm on to something, at least.

Edited by Anomalocaris20 on Aug 14th 2019 at 3:53:08 PM

The romance between Tony and Pepper is still one of my favorite things from the Iron Man movies and no one's ever convincing me otherwise.

On the other hand, many have commented that Asian men very rarely get to be sexual or even in a romantic context in American movies. The situation is different than it is for the majority of white superhero movies.

Edited by comicwriter on Aug 14th 2019 at 1:06:15 AM

Depends how romance is handled in the other films. If a romance is a key plot point in Eternals, Black Widow, and Doctor Strange, while Shang Chi just goes “See, no romance! Isn’t that what you wanted?” it’s gonna seem a bit...suspicious.

I don’t mind romance as long as the romantic partner is written like a character and not as just a love interest. That’s ultimately the problem with these love arcs: the (nearly always female) love interest is really just a flat object for the (nearly always male) protagonist to emote and agonize over, rather than a contributing character who has a stake in the story and agency that matters as well as the romantic attachment. So it comes off as bland, if not outright intrusive to the rest of the story.

Nakia was a step in the right direction, imo. Hope got written a lot better on Ant Man & The Wasp, as well, after having problems the first time.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Aug 14th 2019 at 1:21:30 AM

My thought with Leiko Wu is that she gets involved in the story via the MI:6 side.

She'll represent the government repose to the Mandarin's actions, while Shang-Chi has a more personal conflict.

She could be a love interests in addition to that, but that depends on the specifics of the story they want to tell.

I'm definitely one of those who generally can't stand romance storylines in media and would hastily second the call for more movies to stop having them, especially given the MCU's dismal track record with them. I also agree that Tony's romance with Pepper is one of the highlights of the character, and that Steve's tragic love for Peggy was enjoyable to watch until it got Flanderized to the point of ridiculousness in Endgame. So it's not like they can't be done decently, it's just that even the decent ones don't always add their worth in screentime that couldn't be spent better elsewhere.

But at the same time, as an Asian prson I agree that Asian men rarely get to be depicted as having happy love lives of their own in Western media, no matter what their partner's race is. Akwafina's character being an Action Girl who doesn't conform to usual stereotypes of Asian women would be nice, but it'd be even better if she was a character with no romantic ties while Shang Chi romances someone else, as Asian women characters do not have the same issues black women characters face in terms of their implicit desirability as love interests.

Does anyone here can past me the list of object in the audition? Im curious about it.

Idris Elba wants to return as Heimdall. Which I figure they can do easily — in the comics, after Ragnarok, the Asgardians were reincarnated into human bodies and Thor had to travel the world and find them.