Marvel Cinematic Universe

[Chindie]

 

[Chindie]

I actually don't think a great deal of that trailer. It really feels forced. I'm yet to be convinced Captain Marvel is a good character to develop.

In other news Marvel are supposedly developing a Shang-chi movie. Shang-chi is a fairly minor character, basically Marvel's Bruce Lee. He is a master of a huge variety of martial arts, his skills being such that he's able to defeat characters that are far greater in power or ability. He doesn't have any super powers per se, but his martial arts ability is so advanced that he might as well have.

The idea of going for this character seems to be in aid of 'doing a Black Panther' for East Asian markets. I can see the idea, and it's true that East Asian characters are thin on the ground, but I'm not sure pushing a character of Chinese descent as an incredible martial artist is the most progressive idea going. Supposedly they are aware of the slightly iffy background of the character for a modern audience and will be changing things, but fundamentally at the end of the day its still a Chinese guy being an awesome martial artist, with all the stereotyping that comes with it.

[mikeyp102]

Avengers trailer and title to finally be launched tonight 

[Chindie]

That stealth suit really is a modern take on the Noir suit. Not sure the Homecoming suit benefits from switching the blue for black. I know that's fairly normal for Parker's suit to switch blue for black but it doesn't translate to reality very well.

Edit - the first Far from Home trailer is coming on Saturday as well, which seems daft.

Edited December 6, 2018 by Chindie

[villa4europe]

3 hours ago, Chindie said:

Edit - the first Far from Home trailer is coming on Saturday as well, which seems daft.

for the cinemas it will be attached to in to the spiderverse and mary poppins at a guess

im assuming thats how trailers still work, im not sure where they consider the biggest exposure to be, they release them online, youtube, social media etc but then they also still attach them to the reels of their big releases (i doubt very much it will be shown before aquaman but maybe if they pay the $)

 

[Chindie]

 

[villa4europe]

i would say the prominence of ant man in that tells you hows its going to go

[Chindie]

There's been a lot of evidence of what's going to happen in fairness... Avengers Endgame spoilers follow

Spoiler

They were seen filming what appeared to be a rerun of the end of the first Avengers, with Cap in his horrible suit from that film and so on, but with a few characters wearing some device on their wrists.

There is also the absolute clunker of a line in the Ant-Man and the Wasp mid credit scene where Janet van Dyne (quantum Jesus) drops 'beware time vortexes, we went be able to help you!' as he enters the quantum tunnel. We've never had mentions of a time vortex before. I wonder why she suddenly had to say that? 

A rumour of the plot has the Avengers using the quantum realm to time travel and secure their own Infinity Gauntlet to do a huge reset, which isn't exactly the most inventive decision. I'm wondering if their doing that will effectively 'delete' the original Avengers... They go back and prevent their own origins in their efforts to prevent Thanos getting the gauntlet.

 

[Chindie]

Also good to see the trailer confirm Ronin. We've known it was coming for ages but at least they just got the confirmation out the way quickly.

[mikeyp102]

Good trailer, surprised the title is End Game as fans had guessed that. A lot of questions there to be asked from it. 

Spoiler

There has been talk of Pepper donning the Iron Man and becoming a character called “Rescue” wouldn’t be surprised to see her be the one to get Tony from space

 

[sne]

Film  studios being cynical shocker.

Quote

One Of The Directors Approached For BLACK WIDOW Slams Marvel Studios And Its Approach To Filmmaking

Cate Shortland has been hired by Marvel Studios to direct Black Widow and production is expected to begin next year in anticipation of a 2020 release. Over the years, however, the company has fallen out with quite a few directors, including Alan Taylor (Thor: The Dark World) and Edgar Wright (Ant-Man).

Now, one of the candidates to helm Black Widow, Lucrecia Martel, has said that after talking to Marvel Studios, she doesn't believe that they want female filmmakers taking charge of action scenes. 

"Marvel and other such production houses are trying to involve more female filmmakers," she said. "They also told me, 'Don't worry about the action scenes, we will take care of that.' I was thinking, 'Well I would love to meet Scarlett Johansson but also I would love to make the action sequences.'"
 

"Companies are interested in female filmmakers but they still think action scenes are for male directors," the filmmaker continued. "The first thing I asked them was maybe if they could change the special effects because there's so many laser lights... I find them horrible. Also the soundtrack of Marvel films is quite horrendous. Maybe we disagree on this but it's really hard to watch a Marvel film. It's painful to the ears to watch Marvel films."

Something tells us that feedback probably wasn't appreciated by Marvel Studios and if they want a grounded Black Widow movie (which makes sense given the nature of the character), then huge action scenes with "laser lights" probably won't be part of that, anyway. However, Marvel telling Martel not to worry about sequences of that nature is definitely concerning.

Bizarrely, Martel says she would still be open to helming Black Widow but we don't think she'll be getting the call somehow.

https://www.comicbookmovie.com/black_widow/one-of-the-directors-approached-for-black-widow-slams-marvel-studios-and-its-approach-to-filmmaking-a165292

[mikeyp102]

Katherine Langford has been confirmed as being in Endgame, no character name given.. rumours saying she could be death 

 

[mikeyp102]

Captain Marvel trailer 3 is out. Shows a bit more of Jude Laws character (sorry can’t post link)

[Chindie]

Still not feeling it. Larson's playing Danvers like someone with Asperger's, I don't think there's been a shot yet with her having much more than a blank face.

I still don't much like Captain Marvel to begin with so this might be the Marvel film that needs to work the most to win me over.

[sne]

As I had never heard of this Captain Marvel or most of the other guys and gals that are taking over I'm gracefully going to back out of the Marvel movie universe after the Avengers End Game finale arc is over.

They don't interest me and I have no history with them so it's a perfect end for me.

Guess it will be the same for quite a few people and they'll have to take care not to fall into the same hole as Disney did with Star Wars and pump out movies no one wants.

I know some of these actors have contracts for more films but since I didn't enjoy Black Panther and certainly wont watch a Black Widow flick 

Am kinda looking forward to the last Avengers movie thou.

And I might catch a 3rd Guardian movie if Gunn is allowed back.

[Zatman]

Rewatched Age of Ultron, for me its extremely weak and even boring on 2nd viewing.

[Chindie]

It'll certainly be interesting to see where they go after Endgame. There's some blatant replacements filtering through (they want Dr Strange to take the Iron Man position for instance, and it's painfully obviously so) but they do need to introduce more characters doing something a bit different.

I'm ok with that, there's not many characters they can bring in that I won't know, however there is some real dross in the Marvel roster they might be tempted to go with. The apparent move to develop a Shang-chi movie is just... Ugh. It's really clear what they're doing with that one, they want to do a Black Panther for East Asian demographics, which is fine (laudable in some respects), but Shang-chi is a complete non entity of a character. He's a born and bred supporting character. He's just an incredible martial artist, whose main thing for most of the time since they introduced him has been as a trainer for other better heroes, with the odd smattering of embarrassingly bad kung fu movie tropes thrown in. They'd have been better off effectively rebooting Iron Fist, take the heat for changing his ethnicity, make the choice to ultimately completely remove the TV/Netflix stuff from the canon, and end up with a better version of exactly what they're trying to do anyway, bit with much greater scope for spectacle and so on.

Doing stuff like Shang-Chi, the Eternals and that end of the barrel isn't good. I'm sure Marvel can make competent movies out of them, their method works across the board, but there's a reason these characters are lower tier.

[Chindie]

Also there's no chance of Gunn returning unfortunately. That is a mistake on Disney's part and one they can't row back.

[sne]

4 minutes ago, Zatman said:

Rewatched Age of Ultron, for me its extremely weak and even boring on 2nd viewing.

That one and the first Captain America film are both DCU-level of poor.

Both gash.

[Chindie]

Age of Ultron is just messy. Whedon was trying to balance too much in one film. He wanted to do the Ultron story, which is completely understandable as he's a long time Avengers level villain, and indelibly involved with the creation of Vision, who is also an Avengers staple they wanted to bring in. He also wanted to make a film where the secondary characters had a bigger stage, the characters that didn't have their own films to live in, so pushed a greater focus on Hawkeye, Black Widow and Banner. He also was tasked with introducing Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, again Avengers long term figures. And Marvel wanted to set the stage for Phase 3. And he was coming into this with increased expectations after the first film was so successful in nearly every regard.

So he ends up making a film about one of the most classic Avengers stories, whilst also trying to increase focus on side characters, and introduce 2 new characters who have their own stories (which he can't take from the comics because of the X-Men rights), and do set up for the direction of the next films, and do so with heavy expectations from every quarter.

Unsurprisingly it collapses under it all. It's not a bad film, it just doesn't hold a candle to the first. The choice to focus more on the sidelined characters leaves loads of time feeling like filler (nobody cares about Hawkeye, let alone his family, or buys into a Banner/Widow romance with dodgy undercurrents). Ultron isn't fleshed out enough and the decision to try to hide his goals and plan until the last minute leaves it feeling rushed. Vision isn't developed. The Scarlett Witch/Quicksilver stuff is reasonably successful and let's Joss do one of his favourite narrative moves at the end. The Phase 3 stuff is completely hamfisted and obviously parachuted into the script at the end, even more clearly so when it uses the character Joss just doesn't know how to use and is done with what feels like the last fiver in the budget. And it's obvious Joss didn't have many ideas on how to outdo what he'd done in the first film. The set pieces are weaker or feel like they're trying too hard - the finale is someone looking for a way to escalate stakes and spectacle at all costs but missing all the little iconic moments that made the first. The best set piece in the film comes midway through as a rerun of the Hulk incident of the previous film, with a twist straight from the page, but doesn't really change anything, to the extent you could remove it and not fundamentally alert anything.

It's the weakest Avengers movie by miles and one of the worst films in the series. It's not bad, but compared to most of the rest of it all, it's just lacking.

The first Captain America is really good though. Main flaw is it's not got enough action in it, to the extent they use a montage in the middle to skip a bunch of action moments, but otherwise it's easily top half MCU for me.