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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
... come to think of it, Nefaria could work as an Ant-Man villain too. The supervillain mafia, trafficking into supertech and such. They steal a MacGuffin, Ant-Man tries to steal it back, shenanigans happen as other thieves, hitmen, mercenaries and eventually Nefaria himself play hot potato with it.
But yeah, Nefaria's benefit is that he can work with pretty much everybody.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Jun 30th 2020 at 11:26:08 AM
Living Laser was one of the most memorable parts of Iron Man: Armored Adventures for me, so I'll be happy to see him on the big screen.
The legend has returned.Well, you asked for Living Laser and here he is:
Apparently one of the chief antagonists of the Iron Man VR game alongside Ghost.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."That's because they seem to have straight up turned Ghost into a different character in the VR game. Flight? Duplication? Telekinesis? Holy shit.
I love the Living Laser, but god does every character design he's ever had suck (though the VR one is especially bad: it's an MCU-style mix on the comics design, which is already not that great). Except EMH's one. That one was okay. The Armored Adventures design is decent too.
The game looks a lot like that superhero VR game that came out a few years ago, where you were trying to stop waves of aliens ships from destroying a city.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 1st 2020 at 2:24:44 AM
I don't know, it worked well in MODOK's 11.
And does MODOK count as an Iron Man rogue? He also antagonizes Captain America and Hulk a lot. And in general he's not tied to one hero.
Edited by Cortez on Jul 1st 2020 at 12:02:31 PM
Heck he was even the Big Bad of Gwenpool of all characters for a while. He's a general Marvel villain in that yes he is an Iron Man rogue but not exclusively so.
"These 'no-nonsense' solutions of yours just don't hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time travel."People always say Galactus has a stupid design.
I on the other hand think MODOK would be pretty much impossible to take to the big screen with a serious, comicbook accurate design.
It's just so.....silly.
Certified: 48.0% West Asian, 6.5% South Asian, 15.8% North/West European, 15.7% English, 7.4% Balkan, 6.6% ScandinavianMy usual addendum to MODOK's design would be to have his main body be a TV set, and his gigantic head is just the image of his head stretched over a MODOK-body-sized-screen. In tropespeak, a TV Head Robot. His design as portrayed lends itself well to that image (the yellow bits of his chair forming the presumable edges of the screen
).
Being a TV-Head Robot is usually Zola's thing, but since Winter Soldier made Zola a stationary A.I. who's probably dead anyway, I guess MODOK can make it work.
Besides, how do you explain MODOK having a giant head and tiny limbs?
Oh, and apparently the Baxter Building technically already appeared in the Winter Soldier, so I guess the former Avengers HQ that used to be Stark Tower will probably be Oscorp after all. In retrospect, it makes sense since the HQ getting bought and renovated was only ever brought up in the Spidey movies.
They did come up with a pretty awesome design for "robot with a tv screen" Zola for Ant-Man
- he was supposed to cameo as Cross' HYDRA contact - that ended up not being used.
I tend to think that if we cut ourselves off from using weird, oddball or silly concepts in comic book movies, we're cutting ourselves off from a lot of otherwise great content that would work well for the films regardless. A lot of comic book characters, especially those created by Stan Lee, are inherently and intentionally silly, but have strong, well developed roles within The 'Verse because the franchise never treats them as any less for being that way. And because they have those roles, refusing to use them for aesthetic reasons is basically cutting off your nose to spite your face.
One of the fun things about comic books is that mix between the strange and incredibly creative with the relatable and occasionally grounded. Being excessively rigid and grounded typically results in creatively stifling ones-self, and I tend to percieve that audiences are more accepting of "silly" ideas than people think they are as long as they're in movies that are epic and well done. The belief that a concept can't work in adaptation is usually wrong.
Hell, Aquaman featured our hero riding into a battle between merpeople and Scottish crab-men on the back of a sea monster voiced by Mary freaking Poppins. Dare to be different. It pays off.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 2nd 2020 at 10:25:58 AM
I'd say Guardians of the Galaxy proved that silliness can still be awesome onscreen.
Whatever your favourite work is, there is a Vocal Minority that considers it the Worst. Whatever. Ever!.Well... sorta. Guardians was a good step forward, but it also helped codify the idea that the crazy stuff should only come out in gaggy movies. Which I've always figured is a main reason people primarily pitch guys like MODOK for movies like Ant-Man and Deadpool - sort of an odd acceptable of "this character is silly looking, so they should be in a movie that will treat them like a joke" - which is not something I think superhero movies need right now.
(I know that's kind of a reduction of Guardians and Ant-Man - hell, both of their sequels imo fall into "seems gaggy, but is actually very heartfelt" and feature more earnest adaptations of even stranger concept than their first movies did - but I'm speaking more on what people think of them)
And it's something they're definitely going to need to figure out before the Fantastic Four comes back. "Dare to be strange" is basically a perfect description of their Rogues Gallery. It's telling that the tamest dude there is DOOM, a character whose hamminess and over-the-top grandiose nature is seen as central to him but which has been constantly toned down in movies in order to fit a more "grounded" tone, in a way that is often pointed to as emblematic of those movies' problems.
That said, I do feel like the MCU is trying to move away from that after falling into it hard in the first couple phases, and has been in baby steps since Phase 3 - with more creative bad guys popping in, stranger and more visually pleasing aesthetics, and some of the characters' more out-there and comic booky characteristics coming in. It's slow, but I don't think it'll be a problem as much a few years from now.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Jul 2nd 2020 at 10:53:10 AM
I blame the sluggishness of Phase 1 and 2 (ESPECIALLY 2) as the Creative Committee wanting to be 'Safe' and sticking to the 'Classic Superhero Formula' and the various creatives actually reading the room and going "Dude we have them on the hook, we can sell them anything we want now!"
Both Winter Soldier and Got G were critical in getting said Creative Committee on board with breaking the 'classic superhero formula' Note its believed that one of the first pitches for the MCU was BLACK WIDOW along with Iron Man, and it wasn't until 11 year later they finally got enough control (and people in control willing to give it a shot) to actually pull it off.
Feige always regretted the fact DC got Wonder Woman made before MCU did Black Widow and/or Captain Marvel
I feel like MODOK works best when you have a Beware the Silly Ones thing going with him where the story does acknowledge and wink at the fact he's absurd, but this doesn't make him any less of a threat or any less of a character. That's almost exactly what Earth's Mightiest Heroes did where his introduction (its initial exchange being even the page quote for MODOK's tvtropes page) had both Wasp and Thor being befuddled by his surreal appearance before getting their asses handed to them for a while.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."

Well, it all depends on the heist. MODOK's genius-level intellect and psionic abilities make him a pretty scary guy to steal from and his For Science! shenanigans also make him a very stealable guy. Just say that MODOK invented some doomsday device in whatever base he has, but to infiltrate and steal said device from a base full of AIM goons and also a psionic madman who can both beat them all in single-combat and outsmart them they're gonna need the whole crew to bring their a-game.
Although if we're pilfering IM's rogues, Spymaster is actually probably the most fitting for Ant-Man, if they manage to give Spymaster any goddamn personality aside from "he's a spy".
"All you Fascists bound to lose."