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Welcome to the main discussion thread for the Marvel Cinematic Universe! This pinned post is here to establish some basic guidelines. All of the Media Forum rules still apply.

  • This thread is for talking about the live-action films, TV shows, animated works, and related content that use the Marvel brand, currently owned by Disney.
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    Original post 
Since Thor and now Captain America came out this year, I wanted to get what Tropers thought of the concept and execution of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general. Personally I love the idea and wonder why this idea hasn't been seriously tried before. It sorta seems to me like the DCAU in movie form (And well, ummm, with Marvel), and really 'gets' the comic book feel of a shared universe while not being completely alienating.

Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM

Swanpride Since: Jun, 2013
#97251: Feb 28th 2019 at 4:33:39 AM

[up] Nobody claimed that those people are reasonable.

slimcoder The Head of the Hydra Since: May, 2013
The Head of the Hydra
#97252: Feb 28th 2019 at 4:35:25 AM

To call it Collective Insanity would be an understatement.

Edited by slimcoder on Feb 28th 2019 at 4:35:38 AM

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."
Beatman1 Since: Feb, 2014 Relationship Status: Gone fishin'
#97253: Feb 28th 2019 at 4:39:35 AM

To be fair, the no female cut of TLJ was inherently satirical.

slimcoder The Head of the Hydra Since: May, 2013
The Head of the Hydra
#97254: Feb 28th 2019 at 4:45:10 AM

Wait that was an attempt at satire?

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."
Beatman1 Since: Feb, 2014 Relationship Status: Gone fishin'
#97255: Feb 28th 2019 at 4:59:43 AM

[up]Yeah, it was a pushback at the idea that women were the problem with the film and not you know, the writing.

Galadriel Since: Feb, 2015
#97257: Feb 28th 2019 at 5:23:59 AM

Wow, with a few exceptions I’d have said (with less venom) that was what Marvel had done. “Middling popcorn flicks” describes most of their movies (all the Thor movies, all the Iron Man movies, both the GOTG movies, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, etc). Entertaining, but minimal depth.

Of the about 20 movies they’re made, there are only a handful of exceptions to this (the exceptions include Winter Soldier, Civil War, and Black Panther.)

Edited by Galadriel on Feb 28th 2019 at 8:28:19 AM

HailMuffins Since: May, 2016 Relationship Status: Shipping fictional characters
Swanpride Since: Jun, 2013
#97259: Feb 28th 2019 at 5:38:25 AM

[up][up]So you are basically saying: The movies are middling with the exception of those.

If you have such a long list of exceptions, it kind of makes the original statement absurd.

Edited by Swanpride on Feb 28th 2019 at 5:38:34 AM

AyyItsMidnight Look, just be decent to one another ok? Since: Oct, 2018
Look, just be decent to one another ok?
#97260: Feb 28th 2019 at 5:43:34 AM

[up][up][up]Running the numbers I've estimated that I enjoy a majority of MCU movies, but yeah, only a minority I can consider truly, truly great.

How much I'm willing to put up with a movie's lack of true depth depends on my mood and the movie itself, I guess.

Edited by AyyItsMidnight on Feb 28th 2019 at 6:00:32 AM

Self-serious autistic trans gal who loves rock/metal and animation with all her heart. (she/her)
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#97261: Feb 28th 2019 at 5:52:02 AM

The ironic thing about The Last Jedi is that Rian Johnson made an attempt to shake up the formula by subverting a lot of the tropes we've come to expect from the Star Wars universe, only to be met by massive backlash from fans who wanted their formulaic entertainment, thank you very much. This, naturally, intersected with the people who don't want girl cooties in their masculine power fantasies and gave us a double dose of people complaining on the Internet. note 

It's like trying to publish a Call of Duty game in which Middle-Eastern people aren't all terrorists. The target audience for that franchise just doesn't know how to handle entertainment that doesn't confirm its biases.

Marvel's genius is that it's been slowly playing with its tropes for quite a few films, building up the expectation that the audience will have its biases shaken up a bit each time. This is good because it allows people to establish a certain comfort level with the idea that they aren't getting formulaic movies, so they don't get all shocked and outraged about it.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 28th 2019 at 9:10:35 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
slimcoder The Head of the Hydra Since: May, 2013
The Head of the Hydra
#97262: Feb 28th 2019 at 6:14:05 AM

The funny thing is TLJ really isn’t that subversive.

A lot of the elements used in the movie has been seen many, many times in the EU, they just have never been used in the movies.

It’s quite amusing really cause it’s honestly not that big of a deal.

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#97263: Feb 28th 2019 at 6:17:46 AM

The SWEU has done every possible trope with every possible character, basically. It's unfair to hold that up as a standard, since only a small fraction of the audience has managed to read all of that material. Truly there are no one hundred percent original ideas, but there are gradations between "strictly formula" and "completely novel", and even these vary depending on the context.

If anything irritates me more than fans complaining that TLJ didn't give them their comfortable formulaic entertainment, it's people who've read every EU book and have somehow arrived at the belief that the films are obligated to conform to them (or that the films borrowing from the EU, deliberately or otherwise, is either a validation of their beliefs or proof that they are unoriginal).

If I hear one more person talking about Mara Jade or the Yuuzhan Vong (or however that's spelled) in the context of the film continuity, I'm going to start frothing at the mouth.

Anyway, the point of that digression was to say that originality in mainstream media is not uniformly good or bad, and that defying audience expectations by introducing original ideas is not always universally acclaimed — far from it, in fact.

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 28th 2019 at 9:26:55 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Beatman1 Since: Feb, 2014 Relationship Status: Gone fishin'
#97264: Feb 28th 2019 at 6:44:25 AM

[up]Home Movies had one of my favorite quotes on that idea.

“It’s an alternative!”

“Yeah, an alternative to good!”

HailMuffins Since: May, 2016 Relationship Status: Shipping fictional characters
#97265: Feb 28th 2019 at 7:07:11 AM

People need to remember that subvertion of expectations is not, in and of itself, a good thing.

Tropes Are Tools, and people, both here and elsewhere, keep forgetting this.

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#97266: Feb 28th 2019 at 7:11:22 AM

Yeah, but calling the Star Wars franchise "creatively bankrupt" is patently wrong given what happened with TLJ. Objectively, Disney tried changing the formula in that film. It didn't work (for a variety of reasons), but that's not the same thing as not trying.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
KnownUnknown Since: Jan, 2001
#97267: Feb 28th 2019 at 7:33:14 AM

There’s also the bit where Disney unveiled plans to do a wide range of movies with a variety of genres, and Star Wars fans revolted because “every film has to be an event” or some such nonsense.

The fandom has always had a nasty habit of wanting new things insofar as they’re identical to the things they already know, and balking at creativity in general. But once that avenue of complaint stopped being viable they switched to others, some quite unsavory, that still match the actual overall reason: they’re a very traditionally minded bunch, and they don’t like change. People have been saying that about the Star Wars fan base for decades, it’s just that only now is the national spotlight shone on it.

This is the same problem Marvel currently faces. It’s traditionalism: people look for any legitimate-sounding argument they can find to deflect from the fact, but that’s ultimately what it is. A dislike of change. A dislike of hearing about how the way things used to be wasn’t great. A dislike of people actively trying to change those things into something new.

Tuckerscreator (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Drift compatible
#97268: Feb 28th 2019 at 8:22:20 AM

I saw no one bat a eyelid when Wonder Woman come out.( except for those against Gal Gadot because of her nationality)

Hoo boy, the pre-release hatedom for Wonder Woman was all over the place. There were fanboys blowing their tops over the Alamo Drafthouse offering women-only screenings, backlash from the setting being moved to World War I, complaints about Gadot and Jenkins as “inexperienced”, anti-semitism (never mind that Superman himself is a Jewish creation), and so on. And Gadot did push back:

Take the way [Gadot] brushes off the naysayers who took issue with Wonder Woman, a national treasure (lauded by the Smithsonian as one of the “101 Objects That Made America”), being portrayed by an Israeli: “Oh, my God, seriously, you guys?” (The movie was banned in several Arab countries for the same reason.) Or how she dispelled interweb gripes about the size of her bust with the pointed knowledge that, rather than having pinup proportions, Wonder Woman would historically have lopped off one of her breasts anyway: “I told them, ‘Listen, if you want to be for real, then the Amazons, they had only one boob. Exactly one boob. So what are you talking about here?

And then when the movie was successful, there was a movement to claim Zach Snyder was responsible for its quality, not Jenkins. This all was not that long ago.

And the biggest irony is, for all the assertions that it was “promoting the rise of feminism”, “Wonder Woman” ended up making a fortune for the Koch Brothers, who primarily fund conservative and anti-feminist causes.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 28th 2019 at 8:26:51 AM

alliterator Since: Jan, 2001
#97269: Feb 28th 2019 at 8:53:57 AM

“I told them, ‘Listen, if you want to be for real, then the Amazons, they had only one boob. Exactly one boob. So what are you talking about here?
Ironically, the whole "Amazons only have one boob" thing was a myth propagated by men who wanted the Amazons to seem like monsters.

Forenperser Foreign Troper from Germany Since: Mar, 2012
Foreign Troper
#97270: Feb 28th 2019 at 8:58:24 AM

To be fair, I CAN see why Gadot's includement was received controversially in certain parts of the Middle East (specifically, Lebanon and Palestine), as she was a part of the Israeli military. Doesn't justify the blatant anti-semitism off course.

Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% Scandinavian
windleopard from Nigeria Since: Nov, 2014 Relationship Status: Non-Canon
#97271: Feb 28th 2019 at 9:11:53 AM

The complaint about Gadot not being big enough to play Wonder Woman was always nonsensical given that a) WW is rarely ever depicted as being muscular and b) this complaint never comes up when it comes to other actresses playing super heroines. Especially ones playing characters with super strength or who employ close quarters combat. Where were the complaints about Melissa Benoist or Scarlett Johansson being too skinny to play Supergirl and Black Widow?

Edited by windleopard on Feb 28th 2019 at 9:12:22 AM

Beatman1 Since: Feb, 2014 Relationship Status: Gone fishin'
#97272: Feb 28th 2019 at 9:30:35 AM

[up]Everyone’s gonna find something to be mad about. “Captain Marvel does featurette with US Airforce” = “Brie Larson is paid shill of military industrial complex.”

Let’s be honest, some people won’t be happy unless the film is cancelled.

Swanpride Since: Jun, 2013
#97273: Feb 28th 2019 at 10:09:13 AM

Every young person in Israel serves in the military at one point (unless they are hyper religious). It's the law. They always made too much out of her military service, in both directions, since she never was at the front or anything like this, she basically did her basic training and I think she wasn't even trained for battle. In fact, her military service shows that she is not overly religious, so that should have been a point for her, not against her, except that the states in the middle east just hate Israel.

and yes, the attacks on her was ridiculous. I was and am critical of her ability as an actress, but the way she was build should have NEVER been an issue. I mean, have you seen Lynda Carter? Hardly a muscle package, is she?

[up][up] Actually, there are people who are still complaining about Scarlett Johannson being Black Widow, because she is "too small" and doesn't do her own stunts.

Edited by Swanpride on Feb 28th 2019 at 10:10:20 AM

NoName999 Since: May, 2011
#97274: Feb 28th 2019 at 10:14:40 AM

"But guys, I don't want politics in my movie clearly about anti-imperialism"

Tuckerscreator (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Drift compatible
#97275: Feb 28th 2019 at 10:17:37 AM

Sometimes it’s amusing for me to spot when Black Widow is suddenly being played by more muscular Linda Moneymaker.

It’s every time there’s a fight scene where she’s shot only from the back. [lol]


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