MCU/Superhero Discussion Thread

[HC Eredivisie]

I just hope they managed to get Captain Marvel say 'Shazam' somewhere in the movie.

Do you want Kevin Feige to get sued?

Perhaps.

[Tarsonis]

I'm not saying it's black and white, but theres definitely an objective quality gradient. Objectively, "American History X" is a better movie than "The Room." You make a fair point, but the reciprocal is also artistic cancer: that there is no objectively good or bad rating, and everything has value only to the beholder, also degrades the value of all art.

Nah.

::shrug:: i find no shame or egoism in saying that something like Reuben's "Massacre of the Innocents" is intrinsically better and more valuable than Tracy Ermin's tent.

[The Huskar Social Union]

There is nothing wrong with both of those view points imo, they both have their merit and i can understand both of them. Though i do roll my eyes half the time people spout that something is objectively bad because most of the time its really not.

[Tarsonis]

There is nothing wrong with both of those view points imo, they both have their merit and i can understand both of them. Though i do roll my eyes half the time people spout that something is objectively bad because most of the time its really not.

"The Room" is objectively bad.

[Platypus Bureaucracy]

Nah.

::shrug:: i find no shame or egoism in saying that something like Reuben's "Massacre of the Innocents" is intrinsically better and more valuable than Tracy Ermin's tent.

Come on, Emin's piece is way more interesting. Are we really saying that one among how many thousands of Bible-inspired paintings is more interesting than something like that tent. I couldn't even find Ruben's piece at first, because it's not even the only work with that title. Meanwhile, though you didn't even give the title of Emin's work (or, for that matter, spell her name correctly) I had no trouble finding it.

Oh, hey, that little objectivity experiment didn't last long. But maybe I'm just in denial about it.

I also find it incredibly amusing that a zealous Catholic can insist they're being objective while claiming that art depicting a scene from the Bible is objectively better than a piece titled "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963--1995." Methinks it might have something to do with his personal perspective. If only there were a word for that.

[The Huskar Social Union]

There is nothing wrong with both of those view points imo, they both have their merit and i can understand both of them. Though i do roll my eyes half the time people spout that something is objectively bad because most of the time its really not.

"The Room" is objectively bad.

"The Room" is the byproduct of demons and needs purged with fire.

So yes its bad.

[Liriena]

There is nothing wrong with both of those view points imo, they both have their merit and i can understand both of them. Though i do roll my eyes half the time people spout that something is objectively bad because most of the time its really not.

"The Room" is objectively bad.

Actually, I'd say that The Room is one good example of why "objectively bad" is kind of oxymoronic when talking about film. On the one hand, yes, it's incompetent on a technical level, insofar as it doesn't abide by the long-established norms of American filmmaking, and its writing and acting make suspension of disbelief difficult. But is it an "objectively bad" film? I'd say that's debatable if you consider how much people enjoy watching it, knowing that it's an incompetent film, because of how incompetent it is.

[Liriena]

"The Room" is objectively bad.

Actually, I'd say that The Room is one good example of why "objectively bad" is kind of oxymoronic when talking about film. On the one hand, yes, it's incompetent on a technical level, insofar as it doesn't abide by the long-established norms of American filmmaking, and its writing and acting make suspension of disbelief difficult. But is it an "objectively bad" film? I'd say that's debatable if you consider how much people enjoy watching it, knowing that it's an incompetent film, because of how incompetent it is.

I think it's more accurate to say that a movie usually is bad in the sense that its makers fail to tell their story in a way that reflects their intent, either due to lack of effort or simple incompetence when it comes to using the long-established techniques that cinema has to create meaning to their advantage. That doesn't mean it's "objectively" bad, but rather that it doesn't manage to use the flexible language of film in a way that connects with the audience as intended. But film language is film language. It's not a hard natural science anymore than literature is.

[Alvecia]

"The Room" is objectively bad.

"The Room" is the byproduct of demons and needs purged with fire.

So yes its bad.

Speak for yourself. I think it's hilarious

[The Huskar Social Union]

"The Room" is the byproduct of demons and needs purged with fire.

So yes its bad.

Speak for yourself. I think it's hilarious

Okay it made some good memes, and thankfully ive not had to watch the whole thing.

[Alvecia]

Speak for yourself. I think it's hilarious

Okay it made some good memes, and thankfully ive not had to watch the whole thing.

I do, admittedly, really enjoy "bad" movies.

[Liriena]

Speak for yourself. I think it's hilarious

Okay it made some good memes, and thankfully ive not had to watch the whole thing.

You absolutely should watch the whole thing. It's an almost religious experience.

[The Huskar Social Union]

Okay it made some good memes, and thankfully ive not had to watch the whole thing.

You absolutely should watch the whole thing. It's an almost religious experience.

Yeah but im a heathen god abandoner, so i dont partake of religious experiences that much any more.

[Vassenor]

There is nothing wrong with both of those view points imo, they both have their merit and i can understand both of them. Though i do roll my eyes half the time people spout that something is objectively bad because most of the time its really not.

"The Room" is objectively bad.

oh hai mark

[Forsher]

My understanding is that American History X is a propaganda film designed to make people hate neo-Nazis but instead became a fan favourite among neo-Nazis, i.e. it's a completely terrible film. Not sure, haven't seen it... this was just how it was explained in a video about The Producers.

Similarly, people love watching The Room and, therefore, it has to be a good film because it's something people enjoy and insofar as it has any underlying intention I believe people think it's a money laundering scheme.

There is only one measure of film quality and that's its enjoyment factor, i.e. do people like it (there is no such thing as watching ironically... you either like it or you don't and if you do like watching The Room ironically I have news for you... you're a fan of the Room unironically).

The only senses in which films can have an objective quality are:

• the capacity of film elements to consistently (i.e. not for all people but most of the target audience) predict enjoyment of the film.
• whether or not the film's elements should do that but don't for whatever reason (e.g. manbabies claim they want such and such in a film and Captain Marvel delivers that but the manbabies still slam the film).
• the first point again but the point here is whether or not people who are intended to dislike the film do, in fact, dislike it (i.e. the apparent problem with American History X).

[Pasong Tirad]

I'm not saying it's black and white, but theres definitely an objective quality gradient. Objectively, "American History X" is a better movie than "The Room." You make a fair point, but the reciprocal is also artistic cancer: that there is no objectively good or bad rating, and everything has value only to the beholder, also degrades the value of all art.

It's complicated. Like, really really complicated.

Just going out on a limb here now to say that my bias is towards the idea that there is no such thing as an objectively good movie.

But, like, it's definitely not black and white. While there are objective metrics by which we can judge whether or not films are (I hate using these terms) "good" or "bad," it really depends. Like, it really depends. If we're to take your example of judging between American History X and The Room, then yeah nine-hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, people are going to say American History X is great and The Room sucks ass but then, like, how? Ask people what makes one movie stand out over the other and they might say "But it really sucks, haven't you seen it?" and then if you ask them to delve deeper into it they'll be able to say a lot of things. Off the top of my head, given my one viewing of it over half a decade ago, the random shots of San Francisco alone make it terrible. And then the sound dubbing. And then there's the fact that Tommy Wiseau doesn't properly understand why a shot needs a good mise-en-scene, and simply where you place yourself in a shot is already telling a story.

BUT THEN, like, for every argument built along the lines of, for example, "this movie has poor cinematography," you're always going to have films that many people will consider great but are totally lacking in proper cinematography. Mockumentary films and TV shows, for example, have always been lacking in what film would consider "proper" cinematography because their very approach to making their films or TV shows isn't that the shot has to be "clean" or "good" or "aesthetically pleasing" or other buzzwords people throw around, but that their shot has to act like you're very very close to reality, as though you, the viewer, weren't just an idle audience member looking through a peephole into the personal lives of people, but that you are transformed from audience to spectator, someone who, by their inaction (or inability to act) is complicit in what is happening in the shot. While a lot more complicated than my crappy explanation, this is what cinema verite is. So you'd have TV shows like The Office and Parks and Rec where the cinematography arguably isn't really the most important aspect of the story they're trying to tell, while on the other hand you have movies like Birdman where the cinematography is part of the spectacle and it's just going to blow you away how great it is. AND THEN that's not even talking about how long takes can be argued to be detrimental to filmmaking because it makes a film look more like a stage play because, as Alfred Hitchcock kinda put it that one time, it overemphasizes one aspect of filmmaking original to it while almost removing altogether another: editing. Editing is so important to filmmaking that long takes are a bane to it because you literally cannot edit a long take.

Okay, I'm going to stop myself because I'm going off on a tangent. Let's get back to the two examples given.

OKAY JUST TO BE CLEAR, I'm not saying American History X is bad and The Room is actually a really great movie (although the Francos might want to have a word with you about that), but, like, what other metrics are we going to use to judge whether or not a film is actually good or bad? What about audience appeal? Cause people love American History X - but then, a lot of people also love the Room. Like, love it, love it. American History X is probably not showing in any nearby theater, but I bet you there's a theater somewhere out there right now having a jam-packed midnight screening of The Room. It's turned into a cult classic. We have people who can literally quote lines from the movie that is so so bad, while I'd love to hear someone here quote any line from American History X. Hell, I'd hazard a guess to say that a lot of us who watched it probably don't remember their names anymore. While on the other hand, we remember Johnny, we remember Mark, and we remember Lisa. And then we aren't even talking about how neo-nazis love American History X. They love it to death because even though the movie was very clear about how it was against hate and against being a Nazi, it did make them look pretty cool and pretty fucking badass. That alone should discourage a lot of people from that movie, whereas the people who like The Room are (relatively) harmless.

BUT THEN AGAIN, "audience appeal" isn't really a great metric for judging whether or not a movie is great or not. That's kinda my point. For every single metric people can bring up to argue that one movie is good and another movie is bad, there's going to be one movie out there that will break that rule, and there's going to be an argument to be made against that metric. I laid out my biases at the beginning so I'll say it again: I honestly don't believe that there is such a thing as an objectively good movie.

And that's the great thing about art. Art is not a science, it is against the very nature of art to be objective. If there was such a thing as an objectively great piece of art, then every single artist out there would just make variations of that great piece because it's objectively the best and why would you deviate away from the objectively placed standards?

HOWEVER, I could be wrong. I really could. You're free to argue that all my points are wrong and I'm degenerate trash and I'd probably just shrug and say meh because yeah you might actually have a point. And people are free to believe what they believe because that's part of what makes art and art criticism both really beautiful and really fucking infuriating: two people can give two different, well-thought out opinions and still both be right.

[Cannot think of a name]

My understanding is that American History X is a propaganda film designed to make people hate neo-Nazis but instead became a fan favourite among neo-Nazis, i.e. it's a completely terrible film. Not sure, haven't seen it... this was just how it was explained in a video about The Producers.

This is sometimes referred to as The Archie Bunker Effect. The short version is that Archie Bunker, the patriarch in All in the Family was meant to be a parody of outdated conservative views but a certain set of viewers sided with Bunker against "Meathead' regardless of how outlandish his arguments in the show really were.

In the case of American History X...well, for some reason if there are people out there who haven't seen it and still want to and don't want spoilers on this decades old movie...

while the narrative of the movie was meant to be a redemption story for Norton's neo nazi, the finale that features an act of retribution violence by black attackers against the newly redeemed brother undermined the message of the movie and could easily be viewed as reinforcing the view of the movie's nazis who, aside from Norton's brutal act of violence at the beginning, are more or less portrayed sympathetically. This is at its center good writing because the point is to show that normal people can hold outlandish positions, but can also create sympathy in the audience for the characters point of view. I was a difficult needle to thread and it's no surprise that they fell into the Archie Bunker effect.

Similarly, people love watching The Room and, therefore, it has to be a good film because it's something people enjoy and insofar as it has any underlying intention I believe people think it's a money laundering scheme.

There is only one measure of film quality and that's its enjoyment factor, i.e. do people like it (there is no such thing as watching ironically... you either like it or you don't and if you do like watching The Room ironically I have news for you... you're a fan of the Room unironically).

The show up just the same. Mitchell and Webb aside, I think you're over-simplifying in the nature of viewing pleasure and, as a member of Gen X who defined themselves by a carefully constructed sense of artificial irony, I'm obligated to fight you on this.

The only senses in which films can have an objective quality are:

• the capacity of film elements to consistently (i.e. not for all people but most of the target audience) predict enjoyment of the film.
• whether or not the film's elements should do that but don't for whatever reason (e.g. manbabies claim they want such and such in a film and Captain Marvel delivers that but the manbabies still slam the film).
• the first point again but the point here is whether or not people who are intended to dislike the film do, in fact, dislike it (i.e. the apparent problem with American History X).

And as someone who works on films, the dismissal of technical execution will also bother me. If you can't nail focus, your audio is a mishmash recorded on the camera itself or half assed in ADR, you use natural lighting and the autoexposure on your film and your actors are clearly reading the script just off camera, these are bad filmmaking techniques. You don't run into them that often because no one in their right mind seeks out bad production, that shit doesn't get wide release. By those terms, The Room fails on several levels that are technical measures of the execution of filmmaking. By that standard it is an objectively bad film. There is an entire cottage industry built around laughing at bad films (The Room) and with bad films (Sharknado), both poorly executed, one through incompetence and the other because that's the aesthetic.

I would argue that your first premise, that enjoyment is one size fits all and 'ironic' enjoyment is just like genuine fandom are indistinguishable, is flawed. In the Mitchell & Webb terms, sure. Viewing is viewing, you show up just like the 'idiots.' But I don't get the same pleasure watching Rifftrax or MST3K movies as I do, say, Marvel movies.

When you get to major studio releases, there is a baseline quality that's assumed. After all, most of these production companies have union agreements. We know how to make a film. At that point then your level of viewing pleasure is the only thing that matters. So if a manbaby wants to fold his arms and have a giant snit about a bunch of shit that happened around the movie that makes him stew and hate the movie regardless of what it does, he's still right. He hated the movie so it was terrible to him. Did he set himself up for that? Sure. Should he pull the stick out of his ass and learn to enjoy things? Probably, but his ass, his business.

People hated Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Jon Carter, both movies I loved. In this case neither of us are wrong.

Even The Last Jedi, which had internal consistancy problems and management of stakes and character motivation issues to beat the fucking band. If those didn't bother you, those elements that I think make up a bad movie and most readers would as well, then you liked TLJ and my opinion doesn't matter to you. I definitely think you're wrong, but ultimately you're the one you have to entertain.

But I still argue that there are baseline standards of story and execution that we have tacitly settled on where we can judge a movie based on how well it hit those marks.

[Forsher]

And as someone who works on films, the dismissal of technical execution will also bother me. If you can't nail focus, your audio is a mishmash recorded on the camera itself or half assed in ADR, you use natural lighting and the autoexposure on your film and your actors are clearly reading the script just off camera, these are bad filmmaking techniques. You don't run into them that often because no one in their right mind seeks out bad production, that shit doesn't get wide release. By those terms, The Room fails on several levels that are technical measures of the execution of filmmaking. By that standard it is an objectively bad film. There is an entire cottage industry built around laughing at bad films (The Room) and with bad films (Sharknado), both poorly executed, one through incompetence and the other because that's the aesthetic.

I'll reply to the rest when I get home or possibly tomorrow.

I think this might be a case of "film school" sends you wrong because I don't mean "film elements" in any technical (i.e. film school) sense... I just mean literally everything that can be construed as part of the film.

For example... The Room's being technically poor ought to make it a bad film in the sense that people don't enjoy watching it (except for the odd weirdo). The technical execution of the film is very much conceived as something which ought to be predictive of film enjoyment... this is why studio films have "a baseline quality that's assumed" (CTOAN, 2019): technically poor movies are sufficiently bad predictors of enjoyment (and hence return on investment) that they avoid them.

Similarly, the haphazard plotting, characterisation and storytelling of The Room, its poor dialogue and so forth also ought to create non-enjoyment and hence ought to make it a bad film (so we're talking more bullet point two here in my post). This ought statement is justified on the grounds that usually these qualities don't predict enjoyment. People don't, according to you anyway, like TLJ in large part because it shares characterisation problems (among other things). That's the usual relationship between film element (characterisation) and outcome.

So, why do people like The Room? Because it's so unbelievably bad at everything? Quite possibly.

There's an idea that it's very hard to manage to guess every answer wrong and therefore that people who do guess 100% of answers incorrectly are actually trolls capable of doing better. The Room is, according to everything I've ever read, the odd example of someone who isn't trolling when they make the wrong choice every single time. But as a result the film is indistiguishable from something cleverer which was trying to be bad (and Wiseau has at times claimed this is, in fact, true of The Room too). It's Poe's Law and it immediately shunts the movie from something like Alpha and Omega (which is truly the worst film ever made) in a predictive sense towards something like Sharknado. Poe's Law, in other words, makes people like The Room.

Films which are made to be ironically enjoyed ultimately work the same way as films which are made to be enjoyed. They consist of a creative team ("the director" for simplicity) who is actively choosing to combine elements in such a fashion as to create something people usually enjoy... i.e. the selection of film elements is made to predict enjoyment (allegedly ironic). Films which are bad do this too but they just get it wrong. The Book of Henry is meant to be awful so we can assume that it's combined film elements in such a way that it thought that they'd be good but in practice they predict non-enjoyment. These movies don't look like The Room or Sharknado so they usually don't prompt the same experience from people, i.e. (ironic) enjoyment. However, despite being made by an incompetent director The Room does look Sharknado which was made by competent people for a specific target audience.

It's the same problem that plagues all texts... the author's intent is completely irrelevant to the actual meaning of the text, which is instead created from the encoded text (film elements) by the audience.

Whether intent matches meaning is a great objective measure of film quality (but this does imply subjective determination of both), but mostly I'm focussing on meaning ("reception").

tl;dr -- if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck... we shouldn't be surprised if people respond to it as a duck, even if it was intended to be a swan (the Room = duck, meant to be a swan; Sharknado = duck, meant to be a duck; The Book of Henry = goose, meant to be a swan)

[Cannot think of a name]

And as someone who works on films, the dismissal of technical execution will also bother me. If you can't nail focus, your audio is a mishmash recorded on the camera itself or half assed in ADR, you use natural lighting and the autoexposure on your film and your actors are clearly reading the script just off camera, these are bad filmmaking techniques. You don't run into them that often because no one in their right mind seeks out bad production, that shit doesn't get wide release. By those terms, The Room fails on several levels that are technical measures of the execution of filmmaking. By that standard it is an objectively bad film. There is an entire cottage industry built around laughing at bad films (The Room) and with bad films (Sharknado), both poorly executed, one through incompetence and the other because that's the aesthetic.

I'll reply to the rest when I get home or possibly tomorrow.

I think this might be a case of "film school" sends you wrong because I don't mean "film elements" in any technical (i.e. film school) sense... I just mean literally everything that can be construed as part of the film.

For example... The Room's being technically poor ought to make it a bad film in the sense that people don't enjoy watching it (except for the odd weirdo). The technical execution of the film is very much conceived as something which ought to be predictive of film enjoyment... this is why studio films have "a baseline quality that's assumed" (CTOAN, 2019): technically poor movies are sufficiently bad predictors of enjoyment (and hence return on investment) that they avoid them.

Similarly, the haphazard plotting, characterisation and storytelling of The Room, its poor dialogue and so forth also ought to create non-enjoyment and hence ought to make it a bad film (so we're talking more bullet point two here in my post). This ought statement is justified on the grounds that usually these qualities don't predict enjoyment. People don't, according to you anyway, like TLJ in large part because it shares characterisation problems (among other things). That's the usual relationship between film element (characterisation) and outcome.

So, why do people like The Room? Because it's so unbelievably bad at everything? Quite possibly.

There's an idea that it's very hard to manage to guess every answer wrong and therefore that people who do guess 100% of answers incorrectly are actually trolls capable of doing better. The Room is, according to everything I've ever read, the odd example of someone who isn't trolling when they make the wrong choice every single time. But as a result the film is indistiguishable from something cleverer which was trying to be bad (and Wiseau has at times claimed this is, in fact, true of The Room too). It's Poe's Law and it immediately shunts the movie from something like Alpha and Omega (which is truly the worst film ever made) in a predictive sense towards something like Sharknado. Poe's Law, in other words, makes people like The Room.

Films which are made to be ironically enjoyed ultimately work the same way as films which are made to be enjoyed. They consist of a creative team ("the director" for simplicity) who is actively choosing to combine elements in such a fashion as to create something people usually enjoy... i.e. the selection of film elements is made to predict enjoyment (allegedly ironic). Films which are bad do this too but they just get it wrong. The Book of Henry is meant to be awful so we can assume that it's combined film elements in such a way that it thought that they'd be good but in practice they predict non-enjoyment. These movies don't look like The Room or Sharknado so they usually don't prompt the same experience from people, i.e. (ironic) enjoyment. However, despite being made by an incompetent director The Room does look Sharknado which was made by competent people for a specific target audience.

It's the same problem that plagues all texts... the author's intent is completely irrelevant to the actual meaning of the text, which is instead created from the encoded text (film elements) by the audience.

Whether intent matches meaning is a great objective measure of film quality (but this does imply subjective determination of both), but mostly I'm focussing on meaning ("reception").

tl;dr -- if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck... we shouldn't be surprised if people respond to it as a duck, even if it was intended to be a swan (the Room = duck, meant to be a swan; Sharknado = duck, meant to be a duck; The Book of Henry = goose, meant to be a swan)

I'm just going to be blunt and brief because this is a boring ass threadjack that has nothing to do with the MCU...

This is a giant wank to erase a distinction with no point. It's dumb as hell to stretch, to arbitrarily ignore that there are different forms of pleasure. And a rather solid abuse of Roland Barthes to boot.

[Forsher]

This is a giant wank to erase a distinction with no point. It's dumb as hell to stretch, to arbitrarily ignore that there are different forms of pleasure. And a rather solid abuse of Roland Barthes to boot.

If you want to see Barthes there, that's on you, not me. It is simply the case that what the author wants to do has pretty much nothing to do with what the audience experiences. What the author did, however, is connected... and that's the question we're engaged with, i.e. is it possible to speak of film quality?

It is arbitrary to distinguish between people who are pleased and who are... pleased. We're not trying to figure out if someone is stressed, anxious, depressed or whatever. There is no diagnostic purpose to the distinction of these positive experiences in the same way that healthcare professionals often have a need to differentiate various kinds of negative mental health states. We are simply bothered by whether or not they've enjoyed themselves and to claim that there's any meaningful difference is to claim that there is some purpose to distinguishing between them (if, and it is extremely doubtful, it is even possible to distinguish between them in the first place).

Incidentally... as far as aggregated critic scores are concerned... Captain Marvel seems functionally identical to The First Avenger and other films generally considered to be middle of the road (or even poorer) entries to the MCU (think: Ultron, Iron Man 3 and both Ant Mans). On the other hand, these are actually some of the best MCU films (well, maybe not Ultron and TFA).

[Cannot think of a name]

This is a giant wank to erase a distinction with no point. It's dumb as hell to stretch, to arbitrarily ignore that there are different forms of pleasure. And a rather solid abuse of Roland Barthes to boot.

If you want to see Barthes there, that's on you, not me.

Now watch as you practically quote Barthes directly...

It is simply the case that what the author wants to do has pretty much nothing to do with what the audience experiences.

What the author did, however, is connected... and that's the question we're engaged with, i.e. is it possible to speak of film quality?

Yes.

It is arbitrary to distinguish between people who are pleased and who are... pleased.

It's really not. It's part of why we come up with so many different terms to describe them.

We're not trying to figure out if someone is stressed, anxious, depressed or whatever. There is no diagnostic purpose to the distinction of these positive experiences in the same way that healthcare professionals often have a need to differentiate various kinds of negative mental health states.

So what.

We are simply bothered by whether or not they've enjoyed themselves and to claim that there's any meaningful difference is to claim that there is some purpose to distinguishing between them (if, and it is extremely doubtful, it is even possible to distinguish between them in the first place).

It is.

Incidentally... as far as aggregated critic scores are concerned... Captain Marvel seems functionally identical to The First Avenger and other films generally considered to be middle of the road (or even poorer) entries to the MCU (think: Ultron, Iron Man 3 and both Ant Mans). On the other hand, these are actually some of the best MCU films (well, maybe not Ultron and TFA).

I loved The First Avenger. Ultron suffered from the tug of war between Whedon and the studio, making it uneven. Iron Man 3 was a wuss out, they were afraid that The Mandarin's ten rings would be too hard a sell in the MCU as it was at the time but they were working their way towards the Infinity Gauntlet and Doctor Strange, they should have just gone for it. Plus we'd tangentially get Fin Fang Foom.

Of course I'm still rooting for them to try and pull off M.O.D.O.K.

[Vassenor]

Of course I'm still rooting for them to try and pull off M.O.D.O.K.

...Shut up and take my money.

[Cannot think of a name]

Of course I'm still rooting for them to try and pull off M.O.D.O.K.

...Shut up and take my money.

Right? And none of that Armin Zola half stepping either where they just suggest it, I want a giant floating head with baby limbs. The whole thing.

Also Beta Ray Bill.

[Cannot think of a name]

Sort of related by tangential. With marque stars running their contracts out meaning that Iron Man, Thor and Captain America villains not being as likely (thought Ghost is an Iron Man villain and she wound up as an Ant Man and the Wasp villain), I was thinking what they were going to do to carry the franchise going forward. Obviously Spider-man, Black Panther and Captain Marvel. We have at least one more Guardians coming. We also know that The Eternals are coming, but I feel like that's a fifty fifty proposition, like it could be the new Guardians or the new Inhumans. Like we're just quietly going to forget that there's a whole race of super beings who use to live on the moon hiding out on Earth somewhere I guess deciding, "Shit ain't our problem." Anson Mount is captaining a space ship on Star Trek these days.

My guess is since they haven't been able to explore Mutants and the Fantastic Four they might ride those out as the Avengers take a back seat. They have enough left in the tank to get them to a reboot of the Mutants and introduce the FF.

That makes Galactus the front runner for the new big bad to build towards. Here's something crazy, they name dropped Mephisto way back in the first Avengers movie on a prop. They could actually do Silver Surfer stories with Mephisto. I doubt it, though.

Gunn name dropped Wonderman. That would be a weird addition.

OOooo...West Coast Avengers. No Iron Man but Black Panther, throw in a Moon Knight (though he was considered for a Netflix show before they killed the whole deal...) Maybe War Machine. Mockingbird is also on a space ship show now. I'm too 80s to deal with Tigra without insisting she likes the cars that go boom and asking where Bunny is.

[The Huskar Social Union]

More reviews coming in:

Captain Marvel Metacritic at 66

Rotten Tomatoes at 84%


Also til that Infinity War is at 68% on Metacritic