Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 4: Tripping Balls (Spoilers)

[mr. sunshine 2819]

On 8/11/2024 at 8:12 AM, bernorange said:

I have no hope for a decent FF film treatment.  I just don't think those characters (especially stretchy man) translate well to film.  

I don't know. Seemed to work very well when they called it The Incredibles

[mdmost 42137]

Not surprising. I didn't think there was a big audience for this. As an animated What If? type film it would've been fun. 

 

[atomheartbevo 88724]

Fight scenes are going to be incredible.

[Buzzrock 14774]

Time travel and multiverses destroy everything. 
 
Everything.

The Final Countdown, bro

[atomheartbevo 88724]

 

[mdmost 42137]

17 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Fight scenes are going to be incredible.

Just try to keep it grounded. The first half of Shang Chi was really good. When it went into CGI land, it wasn't as good. Yes, fight scenes should be great. 

[LCHorn 2524]

20 minutes ago, mdmost said:

Just try to keep it grounded. The first half of Shang Chi was really good. When it went into CGI land, it wasn't as good. Yes, fight scenes should be great. 

Hot take-the best part of Shang Chi was Simu and Awkwafina being stupid at the beginning.  
 

Everything after grew more and more untethered from the real world, which deprived the climax from there being any real stakes.  

[mdmost 42137]

2 minutes ago, LCHorn said:

Hot take-the best part of Shang Chi was Simu and Awkwafina being stupid at the beginning.  
 

Everything after grew more and more untethered from the real world, which deprived the climax from there being any real stakes.  

It suffers from what many MCU movies do which is everyone becomes an instant expert at everything and has a CGI shitfest final battle. The bus fight and the attempted escape from the fight club were both really well done. 

[LCHorn 2524]

3 minutes ago, mdmost said:

It suffers from what many MCU movies do which is everyone becomes an instant expert at everything and has a CGI shitfest final battle. The bus fight and the attempted escape from the fight club were both really well done. 

I actually was thinking about both of those scenes when I trying to articulate what didn’t work.  I see what they were trying to do-those are the bridge to the fantastical elements in the third act. I think there’s something about the way they were shot, particularly the fight club, that was too just too much.  
 

Maybe it’s over saturation of colors, maybe it’s CGI, I just know it didn’t work for me.  It’s like two different movies between the first half and the second.  If I was script doctoring I’d say “start with a scene that shows off the fantastical elements so that the audience is prepared for it later.”, which obviously they did and it still doesn’t work for me.  
 

[mdmost 42137]

Yes, the CGI was really off. The scene where Tony Leung finds the bamboo forest was terrible. A lot of the CGI creatures were bad. The CGI for the rings was really good. It was just really inconsistent. The bus fight was so damn good though. It's funny, my oldest and I have been rewatching all the MCU movies. It's our Friday night routine. We're now onto post-Endgame and we watched Shang Chi 2 weeks ago. She was tired from a long day of school and so we stopped it at the point where they had escaped the bad guy's lair and made it to the start of the forest. When we picked it up, I was kinda feeling like it would be a slog since I knew what awaited us. It was okay but just not as good as the first half. 

[mdmost 42137]

Supposedly, Spidey 4 will be an Earth grounded story with multiverse elements. Basically what No Way Home was. The problem is Spiderman is running out of villains since Sony keeps wasting them on stupid Sony movies. Now let's announce Sydney Sweeney as Black Cat. 

Edited September 10 by mdmost

[mdmost 42137]

I'll take more Bucky and Yelena. The rest, eh. 

Bob appears to be 

Spoiler

Sentry

 

 

Edited September 23 by mdmost

[Bookman 4548]

I hope that's good. That Marvels movie sucked ass, and I gave up on the TV shows after She-Hulk and Secret Invasion. Is Agatha Harkness worth watching? 

[Viper 11916]

On 9/10/2024 at 2:00 PM, mdmost said:

Supposedly, Spidey 4 will be an Earth grounded story with multiverse elements. Basically what No Way Home was. The problem is Spiderman is running out of villains since Sony keeps wasting them on stupid Sony movies. Now let's announce Sydney Sweeney as Black Cat. 

Yeah they need to move Spidey to the more street level heroes like the Daredevil show. Shang Chi should be the same. Giving him the 10 rings was cool, but maybe a mistake for future stories. Also Sydney Sweeney is already Spider-Woman, and I'm not convinced she'd be the best to play Black Cat acting-wise. I think Samara Weaving would be a better fit.

 

 

8 hours ago, Bookman said:

I hope that's good. That Marvels movie sucked ass, and I gave up on the TV shows after She-Hulk and Secret Invasion. Is Agatha Harkness worth watching? 

I thought the Marvels was underrated, though the villain was undercooked. Agatha is really good so far, we'll see if they stick the landing.

Edited October 18 by Viper

[ChickenSandwich 9740]

[Viper 11916]

1 hour ago, ChickenSandwich said:

[Js1 82103]

8 hours ago, Viper said:

I thought the Marvels was underrated, though the villain was undercooked. Agatha is really good so far, we'll see if they stick the landing.

Marvels, Agatha, Wanda Vision. They need to lean into the weird and kooky over the serious or trying to be extra funny for their TV shows. (Even though I liked She-Hulk but I am in the minority)

[mdmost 42137]

 

[Parliament 13978]

Wesley Snipes was right.

[atomheartbevo 88724]

Spider-Man 4 next July director by the Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton.

[mdmost 42137]

 

[atomheartbevo 88724]

Damn, that Daredevil is going to be amazing.

[Parliament 13978]

“Wonder Man?”  Seems kinda derivative.

[Buzzrock 14774]

Maybe it’s because my kids were the right ages, but I loved all the Marvel stuff and saw them all in the theater up until Endgame basically, maybe a little beyond, and now I’m just very uninterested. I’ll be curious if that list of titles above performs well.

[freyguy 4237]

11 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Damn, that Daredevil is going to be amazing.

It gives me a chubby

[PilotsError 2232]

After Endgame and seeing everything they've done to Marvel, intentionally I might add, that you people still have faith in them is astounding.

There truly is a sucker born every minute.

[Scary Stranger 1708]

Who was demanding that Ironheart show? She was the worst part of the last Black Panther movie.

[mdmost 42137]

There's been good stuff and bad stuff. Loki, WandaVision, Agatha All Along (so far), Hawkeye, the 3 Spiderman movies, GOTG 3. The beauty is if it doesn't interest you any longer, you don't actually have to watch it. 

[Herpa Derpa 6084]

3 hours ago, Buzzrock said:

Maybe it’s because my kids were the right ages, but I loved all the Marvel stuff and saw them all in the theater up until Endgame basically, maybe a little beyond, and now I’m just very uninterested. I’ll be curious if that list of titles above performs well.

The Infinity Saga was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that won't be repeated (and it still had a few duds). Adjust expectations accordingly and you'll still find some good stuff as @mdmost noted.

[Buzzrock 14774]

Yeah I get it. “Well then just don’t watch it.” As a fan of movies, blockbuster action movies, comic book material, sci fi etc it is interesting to look back on and talk about it. How did it go from being so epic and worth anticipating to mostly duds? Was it fatigue with the material? Hubris? “Woke stuff”? Or did they just catch lightning in a bottle with that cast, a pre-covid world, those writers and directors, etc. 

Not too many franchises have staying power. Bond has managed to be reinvented over the decades, and the Mission Impossible movies have had an impressive run. Star Wars fell apart. Alien is all over the place. I don’t know if Marvel can be “fixed” per se, but if they can find some good stories / writers /directors / cast I’ll check it out. 

[kevwun 15131]

They made some missteps and had some bad luck.  The multiverse is just too complicated to be the main storyline.  Chadwick Boseman died and he was going to be a big part of this phase.  Then the actor playing Kang turned out to be rapey.  I think the multiverse storyline is the biggest problem though.  It's a mess that was probably always going to be a mess because of it's very nature.

Edited 14 hours ago by kevwun

[CooterBrown 17686]

2 hours ago, Scary Stranger said:

Who was demanding that Ironheart show? She was the worst part of the last Black Panther movie.

Stark spent $1B+ on R&D.  This chick did it all from a dorm room in her free time and funded it by skipping avocado toast.  Way to belittle the achievements of Tony Stark. 

[LCHorn 2524]

3 hours ago, Scary Stranger said:

Who was demanding that Ironheart show? She was the worst part of the last Black Panther movie.

I appreciate that they are trying to expand their audience but you’re right, she really was.  I would hope they know that and decided to proceed anyway because they had a show runner lined up with a really good take (that said, checking out IMDb right now and her resume is light).  

[freyguy 4237]

1 hour ago, CooterBrown said:

Stark spent $1B+ on R&D.  This chick did it all from a dorm room in her free time and funded it by skipping avocado toast.  Way to belittle the achievements of Tony Stark. 

 

[atomheartbevo 88724]

2 hours ago, Buzzrock said:

 Was it fatigue with the material?

100% this.

Combine it with the fact that there's no urgency to watch everything because it's all on Disney+ just sitting there and there are no "event" movies coming out soon. 

Up through the Avengers movie, it was extremely easy for non-comic fans to keep track of it all.  Even up through Endgame/Infinity War, it was still fairly easy for the casuals, and you could skip movies centered on individuals and still be okay when you watched the main Avengers "event" movies, because you still knew the main characters.

And I would toss in that Deadpool/Wolverine was the last "event" movie, and it brought in the casuals because they didn't have to know much - they knew who Hugh Jackman's Wolverine was and Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool, and there was comedy, and that was enough.

The Multiverse stuff, combined with a lot of spinoff shows and dozens of side-characters was way too much for the casuals though.  Shit, even I got burned out on it and I grew up reading this stuff and liked the movies.

I will say that I'm rewatching the MCU with my middle-schooler, and he hasn't really had a problem with anything, and even the "filler" movies/shows weren't as bad as I remembered.  But we are not racing through the movies either, because again, they are all just sitting there on Disney+, and there's nothing coming out in theaters in the near-term that makes us think we have to race through it and/or be ready.