MCU/Superhero Discussion Thread

[Cannot think of a name]

New Secret Invasion trailer on Sunday.

Only linking this particular tweet about it to marvel (ha!) at what it is:

That guy is watching an ad for an ad that will play during a baseball game in the hopes that you'll watch the baseball game to see the ad instead of the normal hierarchy of 'watch this baseball game and while you do we'll show you some ads." I know it makes sense given all the pieces but it's also just a kind of remarkable little bit of like an advertising singularity or something.

[Christian Confederation]

They're taking their sweet time with X-men casting

[Cannot think of a name]

They're taking their sweet time with X-men casting

They haven't cast Fantastic Four and that's on the schedule. If Endgame was a difficult thing to follow up on the ol' hype machine, imagine what Secret Wars will be? You know what would by hype as hell at that point...mutants. Phase VII-IX, the Mutant Saga. Far enough away from the Fox franchise...maybe they actually killed them in Secret Wars.

Can't really do scary being from space again (I mean, they could. Annihulus...a bunch of others. I wasn't super into space Marvel...)

They wouldn't even need a single big bad at that point...unless they wanted an enemy to bring them together after X-Men vs Avengers. Mojo? Probably not. What are those people with the fan hair or sail...actually Mister Sinister could be the big bad of a mutant saga. So could Apocalypse obviously but if they wanted to not redo a villain.

Shi-ar, that's who I was thinking of...eh.

[Forsher]

They're taking their sweet time with X-men casting

They haven't cast Fantastic Four and that's on the schedule.

Well, they've replaced the writing team for Fantastic Four. The tl;dr is that they've fired a comedy duo with no experience and brought in a guy who uses science fiction to explore societal structures in the context of some of the heaviest and/or most earnest science fiction television of the last 20 years. And also he wrote Terminator: Dark Fate.

Here's an article from when the OLD team were announced:

EXCLUSIVE: With Matt Shakman boarding as director, Marvel Studios has now found its writers to deliver the new Fantastic Four pic. Sources tell Deadline that Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer are on board to write the script for the film.

Insiders add that the writing duo actually has been involved with Fantastic Four for some time, even before Shakman was tapped as director, and have been outlining where this next series of films will fit into the Marvel Cinematic Universe alongside Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige. Kaplan, Springer and Shakman now will come together to align their visions for this project before writer dive into the script. Feige is producing the pic.

[...]

As for Kaplan and Springer, while new to the scene, the writing duo is one of the hotter screenwriter teams in town, having sold a number of specs in the past year. One of those high-profile projects is the Warner Bros. comedy Disaster Wedding, which recently landed Palm Springs helmer Max Barbakow to direct.

So, that feels like they were pretty core to not just the specific film but the entire MCU FF concept, regardless of whether they specifically write any of the films and/or their sequels and maybe even how they appear outside FF branded films. But that was September last year. Here's the recent article:

Marvel’s first family is getting a rewrite. Josh Friedman, who worked on Avatar: The Way of Water and developed Snowpiercer as a TNT television series, has been tapped to write the script for Marvel Studios’ Fantastic Four.

[...]

Friedman, on the other hand, is a veteran of the sci-fi genre. He co-wrote War of the Worlds, the Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise update on the H.G. Wells classic, and then acted as the writer-creator of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the Terminator TV series that served as his first foray into the world of James Cameron. Years later, he would return to work on 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate and was one of the writers Cameron turned to for help in world-building and crafting stories for his multi-movie Avatar franchise.

The scribe is also the show co-creator of Foundation, the ambitious Apple series adapting the Isaac Asimov stories; the second season is due to debut later this year. And he adapted for the small screen Snowpiercer, TNT’s take on the Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi movie, although he left the show over creative differences.

I have not seen most of these things. It is interesting that they're pulling what is an essentially TV guy who's dabbled in movies in after all the criticisms they've got for hiring Rick and Morty writers, though. But from what I know, these are very different properties to Rick and Morty.

Sure, I've heard nothing but bad things about all Terminator films after T2 (and there are even people who dislike T2 conceptually) and while I'm not sure about the TV side, I haven't seen anyone call those films comedies, too light or insincere.

Foundation I have seen and if you haven't it's polarising, but I like it and it honestly feels like every critique boils down to "waah! the books". It's not that I'm not sympathetic to they changed it, now it sucks (see: why I haven't seen War of the Worlds), but there's a difference between "this shouldn't be an action plot" and "it is a bad action plot". Oh, the loose plot idea is "random dude thinks he can predict the future using maths and concludes the galaxy is going to hell in a handbasket so tries to warn the empire, they half listen and it all goes half wrong, but things don't look good for the empire".

Snowpiercer I also have not seen but I'm pretty sure it's been loosely compared to High Rise (which I have seen) and Parasite (which I have not). I rather suspect that if Parasite was an absurdist disaster movie it'd be mentioned more but you never know (no-one ever talks about how downright bizarre There Will Be Blood is, for instance), nevertheless I feel confident in saying that the nature of the comparison is about subject matter. And Avatar is basically the same concept but with colonialism instead of class (though I have not seen Way of Water, so maybe it's both).

Oh, and apparently that War of the Worlds movie is a 9/11 metaphor. I watched a video about it.

So, what we've got here is a guy coming from not just serious Science Fiction but heavy and earnest science fiction which is actively engaged in social commentary. That is a massive change for the MCU because aside from Inhumans and the two Black Panther films (especially the second) there isn't anything like this in the (massive) stable. Oh, and I'm pretty sure the plot for the Inhumans film was recycled into the plot for the first Black Panther but obviously the book (the 1998 mini) is better than both adaptations. By a lot. Like I said, I don't have a problem with "they changed it, now it sucks" but my point is that if this is the critique, just let it be the critique.

Call me biased but this feels like a reaction to the problem the "too many jokes" people are really (mis)identifying... for a while now the MCU has had a "it feels like the stuff happening on screen means more to us, the fans watching a fictional movie, than to the characters living, from their perspective, real events". Which is insane. But it's also sort of goes back to why I'm kinda on the "fire the Rick and Morty people" train, because Rick and Morty can never make up its mind whether what you're watching matters or not (what was the line? "I hate that note, what does it even mean?" or something), in addition to the commonly referenced "the problem with meta humour" issue.

But this is especially interesting because Fan4stic is often condemned for being a darker and edgier movie. Or, you know, too serious and too earnest. As you may remember, I believe its real problem was trying to turn Victor into Mole Man (and Sue into Amadeus Cho), which is enormously exacerbated by the fact you can't tell how old any of the characters are meant to be (due to an egregious case of Dawson Casting). Again, the book (Ultimate Fantastic Four) is better. And very illuminating as to what went wrong with Fan4stic. Like, the first half of that movie is actually quite good, it just dives off a cliff.

But, fortunately, if anyone was in the mood for a classic MCU style Fantastic Four movie rather than what this writer change suggests we're getting, they made that movie back in 2005. People did not like it.

[Lord Dominator]

I would add that the director is currently Matt Shakman, who was the director and a producer on WandaVision.

[Ameriganastan]

I just hope the whole John Krasinski thing isn't permanent. I do not get what people like about that guy.

[Forsher]

I just hope the whole John Krasinski thing isn't permanent. I do not get what people like about that guy.

He has a beard and his wife is sorta kinda blonde. That was really it.

Having seen his performance in the cameo and given it was mostly an excuse for some really quite mean spirited deaths, I really doubt he'll be back. It feels like kids/teens (not yet born) will watch DSMoM movie in twenty years and go "what?" not just because they don't know how Krasinski is at all, but also because they won't understand the fancasting context.

And aside from the beard, Krasinski doesn't look like Reed, who's usually drawn in a quite angular fashion, at all. Unlike, say, Daniel Radcliffe aka Wolverine.

[Cannot think of a name]

I would add that the director is currently Matt Shakman, who was the director and a producer on WandaVision.

For me the best part of Phase IV and the biggest swing of all the entries. Mileage may vary.

[Forsher]

I would add that the director is currently Matt Shakman, who was the director and a producer on WandaVision.

For me the best part of Phase IV and the biggest swing of all the entries. Mileage may vary.

If you strip out the SWORD stuff and actually deliver the show that the trailers promised, sure. But they chickened out. From memory I didn't mind so much at the time, but it's become increasingly frustrating. Which probably says a lot about what followed, admittedly.

[Bayi]

What If...? Is a great series, I wish season 2 will release soon

[Lord Dominator]

For me the best part of Phase IV and the biggest swing of all the entries. Mileage may vary.

If you strip out the SWORD stuff and actually deliver the show that the trailers promised, sure. But they chickened out. From memory I didn't mind so much at the time, but it's become increasingly frustrating. Which probably says a lot about what followed, admittedly.

For the record, I noted that he was director purely to indicate that his prior Marvel work also wasn’t what you would expect of F4 things.

[Forsher]

If you strip out the SWORD stuff and actually deliver the show that the trailers promised, sure. But they chickened out. From memory I didn't mind so much at the time, but it's become increasingly frustrating. Which probably says a lot about what followed, admittedly.

For the record, I noted that he was director purely to indicate that his prior Marvel work also wasn’t what you would expect of F4 things.

Contrary to popular belief, the director has no control over this kind of story issue, especially in the context of the MCU, unless they are also the writer/head writer. It's not like, say, the non-SWORD stuff was filmed in a particularly revolutionary or unique style and that's why it counts as a "swing big" idea, but rather because the concept that Shakman was asked to direct was a swing big concept. You could have replaced him with anyone and it would be pretty much the same. Like, if you go someone with a really obvious style like Michael Bay in, you'd notice the change most in the SWORD aspect.

Like, this film used to have Jon Watts attached up until April 2022. There's a reason producers win the Best Picture Oscar... the money guys are the real shot callers... directors just get to play around in their sandbox, with the boundaries set by the script (if it's written, which is sometimes not the case, e.g. Quantum of Solace, which aside from the theme song, I think is ageing very well) and the budget. Admittedly, Shakman is also credited as a producer.

Shakman's basically a gun for hire... he's worked on essentially every genre you can think of. There's slice of life period pieces (Mad Men), grimdark fantasy (Game of Thrones), lots of sitcoms, medical dramedies (House), legal dramas (The Good Wife), weird cop shows (Fargo) and more.

[Forsher]

Sorry to double post but I don't want anyone to miss this because I feel like the, er, nuance (God I hate that word) of what I was saying was poorly explained the first time.

Suppose that WandaVision was performed by Olsen, Bettany and co. holding masks on sticks with appropriate expressions in front of their faces.

Or suppose that WandaVision's sets were represented by stage hands wearing full body suits of appropriate colours contorting their bodies into the approximate shapes of what was needed.

Or suppose that WandaVision was shot entirely in dutch angled shakey cam, except for specific moments that were those chest mounted camera things.

Or so on...

Directors have an enormous amount of control over how the script ends up looking, if they're also given the power to make those decisions. Usually, they don't have that power. They've never had that power, except in amateur films where they're generally too restricted by budget to necessarily be sure they're doing what they really want.

My examples are ridiculous and hyperbolic. This is because I can't think of how to use what directors control to produce a unique WandaVision. What was unique about WandaVision wasn't the direction and, what's more, what was frustratingly conventional, wasn't down to the director either. Yes, Shakman could easily have made the actors in the SWORD parts be melodramatic, done everything in lurid neon and so forth, but it would still have been that same sequence of events and they still would've been taking away from the concept I think we were sold in the advertising.

But if you were reading the other post and thinking "Man, Forsher really doesn't care about directors", that's the case. That's sort of what I think the problem with it is... it's not specific enough to what I'm saying about WandaVision. Hilariously the one thing which I've watched and thought "the problem with this is the directing" was also from the MCU's Phase Four... Loki.

[Cannot think of a name]

Goddamn Screen Culture is the most annoying of all the fandom channels with their fake trailers. Especially on a day where you're waiting for a new one to drop.

[Forsher]

Goddamn Screen Culture is the most annoying of all the fandom channels with their fake trailers. Especially on a day where you're waiting for a new one to drop.

Well, presumably you wanted the Secret Invasion trailer from, it seems, 21 minutes ago (at the time of writing).

If it's actually like that... I really want to watch it. If it's actually like that.

[Cannot think of a name]

Not a lot new here except the date. I wonder if it connects to issues from Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

[Christian Confederation]

Honestly wouldn't be surprised if Fantastic 4 gets pushed back given the development hell it's currently going through.

[Ameriganastan]

Honestly wouldn't be surprised if Fantastic 4 gets pushed back given the development hell it's currently going through.

Not to mention the current Disney budget cut situation.

[The Huskar Social Union]

Goddamn Screen Culture is the most annoying of all the fandom channels with their fake trailers. Especially on a day where you're waiting for a new one to drop.

Well, presumably you wanted the Secret Invasion trailer from, it seems, 21 minutes ago (at the time of writing).

If it's actually like that... I really want to watch it. If it's actually like that.

Yeah, it looks super fucking interesting and i sooo hope they keep that tone and atmosphere.

[Christian Confederation]

Honestly wouldn't be surprised if Fantastic 4 gets pushed back given the development hell it's currently going through.

Not to mention the current Disney budget cut situation.

There's probably going to be a major drawl down on the quantity of content coming out. If we're lucky quality will improve but I wouldn't keep my hopes up. It's fully possible we get 1 or 2 movies and a show if we're lucky a year by 2026.

[Cannot think of a name]

Over at the swan song, the Blue Beetle trailer is out.

I'm more familiar with the way way older Blue Beetle who had to spin a magneto on the back of his suit to power it up.

[Christian Confederation]

Spiderverse Trailer is out basically spoiled the whole movie.

[HC Eredivisie]

Over at the swan song, the Blue Beetle trailer is out.

I'm more familiar with the way way older Blue Beetle who had to spin a magneto on the back of his suit to power it up.

I think having Magneto would be copyright infringement but Blue Beetle goed on the 'eh maybe' list.

Spiderverse Trailer is out basically spoiled the whole movie.

Spot, him against all the other Spider-Men?

I laughed at the 'Dr Strange and the little nerd back at Earth-199999' line

[Cannot think of a name]

Over at the swan song, the Blue Beetle trailer is out.

I'm more familiar with the way way older Blue Beetle who had to spin a magneto on the back of his suit to power it up.

I think having Magneto would be copyright infringement but Blue Beetle goed on the 'eh maybe' list.

A magneto, not the Magneto. But now the image makes me laugh.

I deleted the spoiler because I forgot to watch the trailer before quoting and was attempting to...doesn't matter. Didn't work. Chuckled at the same part.

[Christian Confederation]

Over at the swan song, the Blue Beetle trailer is out.

I'm more familiar with the way way older Blue Beetle who had to spin a magneto on the back of his suit to power it up.

I think having Magneto would be copyright infringement but Blue Beetle goed on the 'eh maybe' list.

Spiderverse Trailer is out basically spoiled the whole movie.

Spot, him against all the other Spider-Men?

I laughed at the 'Dr Strange and the little nerd back at Earth-199999' line

I enjoyed the get Spiderman bit. Sucks they ruined the reveal of Peter and MJs kid (not that we don't see it coming but still).