MCU/Superhero Discussion Thread

[HC Eredivisie]

Rumor has it that Captain Marvel 3, Ant-Man 4 and Eternals 2 are scrapped.

[Ameriganastan]

Rumor has it that Captain Marvel 3, Ant-Man 4 and Eternals 2 are scrapped.

Disney learning from their mistakes? What bizarro world is this?

[Forsher]

Rumor has it that Captain Marvel 3, Ant-Man 4 and Eternals 2 are scrapped.

Captain Marvel 3? They didn't even make a second one. The Marvels is basically like Shazam! and the first two Ant Man films... for whatever reason, no-one wants to watch a live action superhero family film. I mean, I don't think sticking multiple planetary extinction events into a family film is a good idea but trying to make it a family film in the first place just put a ceiling on the box office. It doesn't matter how good they are at what they're trying to do, this subcategory of film just doesn't make very much.

Quantumania is legitimately probably the worst film ever made, that had a budget of more than $50 million. If it wasn't an MCU film, no-one would ever dream that it might get a sequel, except in their worst nightmares.

Eternals is the greatest illustration of the folly of the MCU.

People sometimes say that the Guardians were nobodies before their film came out. Okay, sure, no-one had ever heard of them, but no-one had ever heard of Doctor Strange or The Avengers either. The Guardians got to appear in the big cosmic events of the noughties. They had big roles!

The Eternals are actual nobodies. They were a failed comic book property that no-one ever did anything with that stuck.

So, Feige decides to do an Eternals movie. In order to try and help the movie out, Marvel comics hires the guy who wrote The Wicked and The Divine to do a new Eternals series. Now, Kieron Gillen has previous history with Marvel but what he does is he looks at the characters and thinks two things:

• firstly, the most notable Eternal-related character is Thanos, but he'd never actually interacted with the proper Eternals, ever... so Gillen decided to fix that
• secondly, the Eternals are kinda sorta gods that are resurrected whenever they die... so Gillen decided "Oh, I can do some knock off WicDiv shit here"

The result is really, really good. I think it flew under the radar a lot because the subject was the fucking Eternals who, I must stress, are complete nobodies.

Meanwhile, Feige's hired a director who's only notable work is a movie about a woman who lives in a caravan. This is to say that she has absolutely no experience with any of superheroes, fantasy or science fiction. What does she come up with? Robots. Probably the worst possible option because it makes linking the Eternals to the super popular bad guy Thanos maximally difficult. Apparently, Terminator was one of her first introductions to American cinema. Well, with the benefit of hindsight that just reads like a red flag.

Eternals isn't a great film but it isn't bad as such (even if it probably would've worked better on television), but it's a terrible take on the Eternals as a concept and a film which now fits really awkwardly into the MCU as a consequence of that take.

Two creative teams were asked to do the same thing with the Eternals at basically the same time: make them relevant and make them work. One of those creative teams had relevant experience. The other didn't. Which one worked out? The one with relevant experience.

Look, based on Chloe Zhao's history she should've been making a movie about characters like Sabretooth, Logan, Forge, Thunderbird, Warpath (Marvel didn't have the rights until 2019 for any of these characters), Sam Alexander (the other Nova) provided the film was mostly set on Earth or maybe Ghost Rider. Characters you can stick in the wide open spaces of fly over states and meditate about misery with. That's her wheelhouse and it's kind of what she tried to do with Eternals.

If Feige wanted to see what Chloe Zhao did with fantasy-scifi gods, he should've told Waititi, Markus, McFeely and the Russos to back the fuck away from Thor and given Zhao Straczynski's Thor to adapt. As we saw with Ragnarok versus TLaT, you can take these "indie" directors and give them Marvel properties that fit with the kinds of ideas they've already working with in their own careers, but if you take them out of that comfort zone it just goes splat.

[Nyoskova]

Gwen Stacy

[GCMG]

I've heard they're really leaning into the Jean/Wolverine/Cyclops love triangle which I loathe.

So, so very hard.

Well, I guess it's not for me then.

And painting Magneto as a silver fox with dreamy hair.

I saw a picture of that. Not a fan of the long hair but doing Magneto as a silver fox kinda tracks. I'm hearing Rogue/Magneto is a thing in the show but that's been done plenty of times in the comics... including as backstory for an Exiles character (who was their son).

Tell me if he starts rocking the white suit. I might watch that episode.

Actually, I'll probably hear about the white suit even if you don't tell me. This show's proving quite difficult to escape.

[Cannot think of a name]

So, so very hard.

Well, I guess it's not for me then.

And painting Magneto as a silver fox with dreamy hair.

I saw a picture of that. Not a fan of the long hair but doing Magneto as a silver fox kinda tracks. I'm hearing Rogue/Magneto is a thing in the show but that's been done plenty of times in the comics... including as backstory for an Exiles character (who was their son).

Tell me if he starts rocking the white suit. I might watch that episode.

Actually, I'll probably hear about the white suit even if you don't tell me. This show's proving quite difficult to escape.

On my end, I legit completely forgot it was a thing until it popped up in up next and then I had to try and remember what the hell happened in the first two episodes.

I wanted to say I feel like I've already seen the white suit, but an image search didn't come up with anything so apparently i made that up.


Spider-man 4 starts filming in the fall. I honestly didn't know it had gotten the official official yet, I thought it was all still just clear intent. All I know is Zendeya is in it which hardly is a revelation.


I think we already mentioned that the Captain America Brave New World test screening went so bad they're reshooting most of the movie. From what I could parse with all the salt in the world the action sequences didn't measure up to the bar set by the Russos and the political message was so bland and broad that it felt like "Support good things, oppose bad things" or 'you know what's great? Chocolate." It's hard to tell with all the whining about 'agenda' people do to parse out if an actual execution flaw happened or someone didn't like having felt something. But the Russos also set the bar for Captain America being a political thriller but managed to make comic book-y stakes feel serious. "We're going to satellite link three flying aircraft carriers to eliminate people on an enemies list is not a serious real world issue. Sure it relates to surveillance and monitoring political thought etc, but it's so broad it only works if a dude in a patriotic suit and a shield solves it. Or its the kind of broad ridiculous thing that makes a 'roid poster child in a bright blue suit and frisbee shield seem in place.

Of course people who haven't seen it have laid the blame at whatever they're mad about, but it might just be that a Captain America movie is hard to do and we ultimately have been just...lucky. There are three Captain America movies from my childhood that demonstrate how easy it is to do badly.

[Tarsonis]

Finally saw The Marvels and I really don't understand the hate. It was the level of silly one should reasonably expect from a comic book movie.

[Eahland]

Finally saw The Marvels and I really don't understand the hate. It was the level of silly one should reasonably expect from a comic book movie.

There were women, and they did things. That's all it takes to get the incel hate brigade going.

[Lord Dominator]

Finally saw The Marvels and I really don't understand the hate. It was the level of silly one should reasonably expect from a comic book movie.

It was honestly the most I’ve laughed at any movie on first viewing for any MCU movie and a lot of movies in general.

[Ameriganastan]

Finally saw The Marvels and I really don't understand the hate. It was the level of silly one should reasonably expect from a comic book movie.

There were women, and they did things. That's all it takes to get the incel hate brigade going.

Especially if any of the women are women of color.

[Forsher]

Finally saw The Marvels and I really don't understand the hate.

Do people hate it?

I can only remember people laughing at how little it made.

On which point, like I said the other day, the problem The Marvels has is fundamentally that people don't want to watch family oriented superhero movies. Ant Man, Ant Man and the Wasp and Shazam! are all great films but none of them made anything like replacement level MCU films of the period (your Doctor Stranges, Captain Marvels, Black Panthers etc) or even replacement level DCEU movies (e.g. Josstice League, Suicide Squad). The Marvels has an even lower gross not because it's worse but because it came out in a post-Quantumania environment. It probably would've made Madame Web levels if it had had the bad fortune to come out immediately after Quantumania.

Which reminds me, I need to see the second Shazam film. Which was the next cab off the rank and got smashed as a consequence.

It was the level of silly one should reasonably expect from a comic book movie.

Upwards of 30% of Marvel superhero comics published in any given week are about one thing and one thing only: genocide.

Though I guess you could say that plot of The Marvels was also all genocide all the time. "You tried to genocide us, so I'll genocide every group you care about" is literally the bad guy's motive. That's my only problem with The Marvels.* The plot is just so incongruous with the stylings of the film. Family movies can do world ending threats but they probably need to pick one world that isn't Earth and have Disney-villain, happy to be evil kinds of villain. The Marvels' solution of ignoring that what it's putting in its movie is extinction level events does mostly work but I kinda hate that it works, right?

*Well, other than "Black Girl Magic" which is every bit as cringe as it seemed in the trailer and might be the worst Marvel line since "Let's Scooby Doo this shit" which, to be fair, is about 1,120,370 times worse and might just be my least favourite line in any movie, ever. And, yet, was also placed in the trailer like the film thinks it's a good line.

[Cannot think of a name]

There were women, and they did things. That's all it takes to get the incel hate brigade going.

Especially if any of the women are women of color.

Also Brie Larson once suggested that maybe women could also review movies, so clearly everything she does needs to be the Worst Thing in the World.

[Cannot think of a name]

Perlmutter is back with an even richer guy forcing a stock proxy battle at Disney.

Among other things he’s why we didn’t get a Black Widow movie until the character was dead.

[Ameriganastan]

Oh. X-Men 97 is a sequel. I thought it was like a reboot.

I haven't watched the original cartoon in over 20 years, so I was lost like a few minutes into episode 1.

[Cannot think of a name]

Oh. X-Men 97 is a sequel. I thought it was like a reboot.

I haven't watched the original cartoon in over 20 years, so I was lost like a few minutes into episode 1.

The only reason I wasn’t was because I looked up a summary before hand.


In other news, we’ll be getting the Shalla-bal Silver Surfer

Logo text
Fantastic Four has found its Silver Surfer. Julia Garner will play a version the classic character, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.

WandaVision director Matt Shakman is directing the feature, which stars Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman, Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/The Human Torch and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing. The film has a release date of July 25, 2025, and is rumored to take place in the 1960s, the era in which writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby first introduced the Fantastic Four, the super team that launched the Marvel Universe in comics. Eric Pearson, known for Black Widow and Thor: Ragnarok, is the current writer on the film.

That’s the wife of the ‘main’ Silver Surfer. I vaguely remember her taking his place but don’t remember the circumstances.

Let the impotent male rage begin.

[HC Eredivisie]

Finally saw The Marvels and I really don't understand the hate. It was the level of silly one should reasonably expect from a comic book movie.

It was honestly the most I’ve laughed at any movie on first viewing for any MCU movie and a lot of movies in general.

If laughing means blowig slightly more air out of my nose than usual, then yes, I've laughed a few times during the movie. I don't hate it but I don't like it either, I liked the motive for the villain but then it turned out to be revenge after all.

Finally saw The Marvels and I really don't understand the hate.

Do people hate it?

Yes, because it has not only women in the lead but a black woman and Brie Larson. That makes it peak M-she-U and some corners of the internet don't like that, not that they've bothered to watch it at all.

[HC Eredivisie]

New Deadpool & Wolverine trailer.

That's a giant Giant-man... The purple cloud dragon from Loki makes a return and going by the portals a Sorcerer Supreme might be involved as well.There are more easter eggs but these I noticed (and the destroyed Fox logo)

[Pasong Tirad]

Rumor has it that … Eternals 2 [is] scrapped.

Cowards. (Not really, I get it. I just really liked Eternals.)

[Eahland]

New Deadpool & Wolverine trailer.

That's a giant Giant-man... The purple cloud dragon from Loki makes a return and going by the portals a Sorcerer Supreme might be involved as well.There are more easter eggs but these I noticed (and the destroyed Fox logo)

"Liefeld's Just Feet".