Marvel Cinematic Universe

Generally, that's an annoying Vocal Minority, not worth listening. The movies are pretty good for notoriety and money. They are safe.

I'm not sure if you can dismiss comments from these people in Hollywood as a minority considering there is more coming with each week.

When I saw the first Avengers in theaters, the only other MCU film I'd seen was Iron Man 2, and I frickin' loved it. In fact, I'd probably still rank it as my favorite MCU movie.

There have been literally two comments.

Clearly this indicates a 50% increase every week.

Westerns got backlash, musicals got backlash, teen romance got backlash. Whatever movie genre is in is shit, and whatever movie genre is unappreciated is the only refuge of true auteurs. All there is to it.

Hence why the guy who produced Jeepers Creepers has a bone to pick.

Edited by Beatman1 on Oct 20th 2019 at 6:11:51 AM

Three if you count Jennifer. I'm just saying that people in the film industry have to be taken more seriously than people over the internet. I do find it funny there are now coming out after the first one made following in his footsteps.

Edited by Mizerous on Oct 20th 2019 at 6:15:45 AM

Eh, Aniston didn't say she hated Marvel movies or that they're "not cinema". She said she was finding it harder to find work that doesn't demand lots of greenscreen.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Oct 20th 2019 at 3:18:42 AM

That just begs the question of what "art" even is, and seems to suggest that "art" is "whatever any person personally finds to be good", which is not a very useful or good metric for discussion of art. So it's kind of a meaningless question.

In Japan their main superhero franchises, Kamen Rider & Super Sentai have been going on consecutively for over 20 years.

Literally, since it’s revial in 2000 Kamen Rider has had a new show every year that’s still going on now with Zero-One.

Edited by slimcoder on Oct 20th 2019 at 3:22:58 AM

I expect the MCU as a whole will be remembered, in much the same way we remember "The Indiana Jones movies", "The Friday the 13th movies", "The James Bond movies", etc.

Thirty years from now, someone's going to be announce "Iron Man: First Flight" or something like that, and it'll be this huge Broken Base where one side's excited and the other's like, "Why are they trying to bring back the MCU? Those movies were already flawless masterpieces the way they were, all six dozen of them. If you want to see Iron Man, just go watch the 00/10's era Iron Man movies with Robert Downey Jr."

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 20th 2019 at 4:28:41 AM

The James Bond movies never really stopped, though, did they?

Like, what's the longest they ever went between films?

That would be the gap between Licence to Kill and Goldeneye, which was six years.

I do agree that the MCU will be have a legacy similar to the James Bond movies: still have a dedicated following, have a lot of influence on the industry, but only a select few will be remembered as classics. And I speak as someone who likes almost all of the MCU films.

It still kind of astonished me now that the year-long gap between The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2 was the only time there hasn't been an MCU movie since it's inception. Even the James Bond films often had a year or two off between films.

Reboot Bond was a four year break.

Not really on topic (although it is tangentially evidence of MCU movies being of artistic quality), I rented the Stratford Festival production of Taming of the Shrew (which incidentally I'd highly recommend - a great staging of the play and one of the best Shakesepeare stagings I've seen).

Anyway, there's a line where Petruchio comments about Katherine and himself both being raging fires or something to that effect, and has a metaphor about fire putting out fire, which is counterintuitive, but is actually a thing and sounds poetic.

I laughed out loud though because it was so similar to that Hulk/Thor dialogue in Ragnorak.

Could be deliberate because Thor has always been very "Shakespearey", although I suppose it's more likely to be a case of Shakespeare tending to write something witty on any given subject.

Edited by Hodor2 on Oct 20th 2019 at 6:54:36 AM

So, I saw in another thread a discussion about how Thanos is supposed to be the POV character of Infinity War and it's something I've found interesting: do the Avenger films actually have a definitive POV character? Like, a character you can point to and say that the film is their story, while everyone else is just a supporting character?

I guess people might say Tony or Steve fill those roles, but I wouldn't be sure if the Avenger films are really "theirs". Like, the Guardian of the Galaxy films are about Peter Quill; he's the protagonist, the one who we follow throughout the story, and the one who has a central arc. But it's not as clear in the Avenger films.

Endgame is kind of an even split between Tony, Steve, and Thor, but what about the first two films? They're kind of divided between the team. We all make jokes about how Civil War is the real Avengers 3, but Cap is clearly the protagonist as opposed to everyone else. Or maybe it's biased because of the title.

Edited by chasemaddigan on Oct 20th 2019 at 8:55:08 AM

Well, yeah, the Avengers films are designed to be ensemble films. That's their reason for existing.

For Avengers 1, I say in the first act it's somewhat nebulously "SHIELD" while the film focuses on gathering all the supers. Then Steve in the second act because he's the audience surrogate who has to hear the most exposition and evaluate the growing conflicts between the characters. In the third act it's split between Cap and Tony when witnessing the battle on the ground and in the air.

In Age of Ultron, it's Tony in the first act, depicting his compulsion to create Ultron. Then around the second act it becomes Black Widow and Bruce, since their arcs of whether they should keep being Avengers have the heaviest personal stake in the upcoming battle. The decision to test on what becomes Vision is put through Bruce's eyes now instead of Tony. Cap isn't as important as he was in Avengers 1 because he suffers the least from his demons.

Infinity War splits the difference between four arcs centered on Thor, Gamora, Wanda, and Tony, and with Endgame as you said it's primarily Tony, Steve, and Thor.

While in Civil War Steve is the most important character, it's noticeable that the film is still very Tony-heavy and apparently there were other cuts where he was less prominent and thus less sympathetic.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Oct 20th 2019 at 6:15:49 AM

Roland Emmerich's criticism is still the funniest to me. Like the guy who wrote and directed Godzilla (1998), Independence Day, and 2012 has any room to criticize superhero movies for being popcorn flicks.

Yeah, his main characters tend to be non-powered Average Joes, so what? Emmerich's protagonists also tend to be flat, boring stereotypes who only exist to transition the story from one over-the-top action setpiece to the next. Personally, I think a lot of his movies would be MUCH better if the audience didn't have to deal with a plain boring human protagonist dealing with mundane personal issues in the middle of this insane fantasy plot.

The average MCU movie has WAY more personality and character development in its protagonist than the average Roland Emmerich movie.

Roland Emmerich has never made a truly good movie. Even the more average or mundane Marvel films usually have something that makes them more memorable than his movies.

I think Scalzi touched on the real reason some of these celebs and directors don't like the Marvel movies.

He pointed out that the Marvel movies are more a product of the studio and not that of any individual director. And to auteurs like Scorsese and Coppola, seeing movies like this get so much acclaim stings. They'd probably be more accepting of the MCU if it was all the vision of a single director or something.

Coppola directed Captain EO. He has no excuses.

Yep. Plenty of these auteurs directed utterly forgettable movies to pay the bills too. No big name director gets to be a big name director without having enough movies like this under their belt to prove to studios that they can bring in the big money.

Heck, even Guillermo del Toro has Pacific Rim: Uprising.

Edited by M84 on Oct 20th 2019 at 10:17:50 PM

The thing that gets me about people in Hollywood complaining about the MCU is that I look at movies like Star Wars that are regarded as classics and wonder what makes those any more "cinema" than Marvel movies?

I really just think it's age.

Let me just say that the whole "auteur" culture, or whatever you call it, are fucking toxic.

The difference is that the original "classic" trilogy was clearly George Lucas' vision.

The rest of the movies...eh, not so much.

Edited by M84 on Oct 20th 2019 at 10:17:21 PM