I've been sick of superheros in general since 2012. I'm really hoping they burn themselves completely out like the Westerns did. I think it would be great if, in a decade or two, bringing up...
I've been sick of superheros in general since 2012.
I'm really hoping they burn themselves completely out like the Westerns did. I think it would be great if, in a decade or two, bringing up superhero movies dated you, and brought people nostalgia for the 2010's, and nothing more.
As an outsider to the MCU, I see so many advertised and I can never tell the difference between them and I have no idea what the plot is. All I can see are cross-overs over cross-overs over...
As an outsider to the MCU, I see so many advertised and I can never tell the difference between them and I have no idea what the plot is.
All I can see are cross-overs over cross-overs over cross-overs.
Avengers: The Final End End Game — featuring Spider-Man and His Dark Alter Self!? and Iron Man is there too? and some talking raccoon? and some lady wearing a skin suit?? and a shirtless Chris Evans???
And there I am thinking, what... is even going on.
It's the same for me. If I watch an MCU film I'll enjoy it for what it is, and look at the plot on its own rather than as part of a wider story, because it's just too complicated and sprawling for...
It's the same for me. If I watch an MCU film I'll enjoy it for what it is, and look at the plot on its own rather than as part of a wider story, because it's just too complicated and sprawling for me.
Admittedly I find the films themselves very enjoyable to watch, but that might just be because ambitious, high-budget films like these are what I've become used to watching.
I only like the deconstructions these days. I was always a fan of Watchmen (own the OG comic). Now I enjoy The Boys, Invincible, Umbrella Academy and such.
I only like the deconstructions these days. I was always a fan of Watchmen (own the OG comic). Now I enjoy The Boys, Invincible, Umbrella Academy and such.
I don’t think it’s genre fatigue nearly so much as the latest releases becoming super safe and unchallenging. So many of them feature the same characters, which is fine to a certain extent, but it...
I don’t think it’s genre fatigue nearly so much as the latest releases becoming super safe and unchallenging. So many of them feature the same characters, which is fine to a certain extent, but it doesn’t seem like they are too interested in them growing as people so they seem flat and uninteresting.
The last Thor movie is a pretty good example. It brought back fan favorite Valkyrie and everyone was pretty excited about Mighty Thor being along for the ride as well. While there is a lot I liked about the film, the one glaring problem with it was OG Thor. This story had real external stakes that would have made a fundamental change to the universe, but OG Thor is just goofily laughing around like he’s going through the same somewhat lighthearted personal adventure as his previous one. It’s really inappropriate, it makes the stakes seem less real, and honestly I would have preferred if there were a way to turn him into a background character because Jane Foster Thor is so much more interesting if a character and Valkyrie gets a lot of synergy from interacting with her.
I’m not sure I agree, but let’s just for the sake of argument accept the premise and say audiences are starting to grow bored of Marvel movies. There’s been 29 movies so far and a dozen TV shows....
I’m not sure I agree, but let’s just for the sake of argument accept the premise and say audiences are starting to grow bored of Marvel movies. There’s been 29 movies so far and a dozen TV shows. Is it that surprising? I mean, the only other franchise with a comparable amount of entries in western culture that I can think of is the James Bond franchise, which has 25 entries.
And the same thing has happened with that franchise multiple times. But it’s still going. When they hit a point of diminishing returns, they take a step back and reset. It happened at the end of the Moore era and the Brosnan era. The same thing could happen with the Marvel franchise. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, most of the best James Bond films came as a result of just such a change.
Anyway, I think that it’s hard to pin anything on audiences right now. Saying they are tired of Marvel films just because the films released this year underperformed compared to pre-pandemic films in the series ignored a whole lot of external factors.
People just aren’t going to the movies like they used to. I used to have a Regal Unlimited card and go 2 or 3 times a week. I’ve been maybe 5 times in 2022.
We also have no clue how many people are watching these movies when they hit Disney+ (or specifically skipping them in theaters because they know they’ll be free on Disney+ in 45 days). Disney has shown they are willing to use their franchises to prop up/boost Disney+’s numbers, which is probably the smarter bet in the long run.
Four quick points about why the luster of the MCU seems a bit tarnished right now. From someone who enjoys them for what they are. We have run the cycle of many of the big Marvel heroes that...
Four quick points about why the luster of the MCU seems a bit tarnished right now. From someone who enjoys them for what they are.
We have run the cycle of many of the big Marvel heroes that everyone has heard of. Many of the stories now are of second tier characters and even though they are strong characters they need to be introduced and are not automatically accepted so people have a wider variety of opinions about them.
The MCU does not have a central focus to hold it all together like it did with Thanos. We knew he was coming at some point and that gave energy and momentum to the whole MCU. Right now there are at least four major villains that could be the next big one but there is no focus.
Way too many minor characters are being introduced or hinted at. Every movie's post credit scene adds another potential super to remember and potentially care about. Plus there are still some major players like X-men and Fantastic 4 that keep getting teased. Unless you are a super fan who understands all of the back stories you start to get tied of being teased. The over-all story is not moving forward so people are losing interest.
Thor Love and Thunder was genuinely a bad movie. There was so much potential in the story line for another amazing MCU movie but the tone, pacing and character development were just not there. Disney's fingerprints were all over the movie to a degree that it took me out of the story. I remember thinking at least a couple of times. "Oh, this was put in so they could make a ride out of it." For a movie with a character called "The God Butcher" there was, at best, a god stabbing. Christian Bale was so good but instead of being covered in dripping gold as he made his way ever closer to Thor we got him sitting in corner trying to scare children with stories. I wanted to like this movie. I would like to see a more serious remake of this movie targeted to a more adult audience.
This is exactly my issue right now. I love the MCU, and as someone who loves the messy stories in comic books I can't overstate how genuinely thrilling it was to see a grand multi-movie arc take...
The MCU does not have a central focus to hold it all together like it did with Thanos.
This is exactly my issue right now. I love the MCU, and as someone who loves the messy stories in comic books I can't overstate how genuinely thrilling it was to see a grand multi-movie arc take place and be resolved so satisfyingly. The latest wave just isn't grabbing me the same way.
For example, we had the What If... series showing us a "multiverse", then Loki exploring (teasing really) what happens when the controls put in place to keep that from unraveling are taken away, then the promise of a Multiverse of Madness that in practice was not much more multiversal than what we've seen in Star Trek recently.
All in all it's left me feeling like the properties are meandering, waiting for something big to happen. I'm sure some of that is due to higher expectations, and if you looked at the first string of movies objectively you'd probably say the same thing prior to Infinity War, but it's got me a bit worried. I haven't "cooled" so much as gotten to the point I'm less confident that they won't f*ck it up, like they have with Star Wars, if that makes sense.
In the lead up to Infinity War I was cautiously optimistic that they could pull it off a massive multi-movie spectacular, but I was tempering that with lower expectations. Now they've done it once, I paradoxically have more riding on them not messing it up the second time, but think they inevitably will.
I feel like the MCU is an artifact of a different time. Just in the last six years or so the world has gone in darker directions, and we want different things from our stories than we did before....
I feel like the MCU is an artifact of a different time. Just in the last six years or so the world has gone in darker directions, and we want different things from our stories than we did before. A behemoth as large as Disney doesn't turn on a dime, and so the stories coming out now aren't necessarily in line with what people want to watch. If you have a huge 30 movie structure planned, how do you shift that to stay in alignment with the world?
I don't think there's ever a bad time for escapism, it consistently thrived in our darkest times. I understand the impulse to make comprehensive explanations, but our times are not particularly...
I don't think there's ever a bad time for escapism, it consistently thrived in our darkest times. I understand the impulse to make comprehensive explanations, but our times are not particularly less inclined towards escapism than any other period in movie history.
For me it’s the tone of the movies that break the interest. The trailers all seem to have super serious moments followed by some licensed music from the 70’s and 80’s with a little 90’s sprinkled...
For me it’s the tone of the movies that break the interest. The trailers all seem to have super serious moments followed by some licensed music from the 70’s and 80’s with a little 90’s sprinkled around. A couple of laughs and a catchphrase and then that’s it. It’s like every trailer and in a sense the movies themselves were put together with machine learning and barely any effort. All for the sake of making them faster and more flashy. I think it was around when guardians of the galaxy vol1 came out, that movie really shifted the tone, like all of a sudden Disney had to use all of this licensed music for the next X number of years in their movies or pay a fine. Absolutely stupid and uninteresting.
Well, Blazing Saddles did not kill the western ;) Super-hero deconstruction is not a new thing, and it didn't kill superhero comics either! Also, superhero fiction is way more flexible than...
Well, Blazing Saddles did not kill the western ;)
Super-hero deconstruction is not a new thing, and it didn't kill superhero comics either!
Also, superhero fiction is way more flexible than western as a genre. It won't disappear, but it'll most certainly change. Like it always does.
Superhero fiction is more or less our contemporary mythology with a sci-fi spin anyway. Our need for mythology will just transcend.
Edit: incidentally, I'm watching The Umbrella Academy right now. A refreshing, contemporary take on many super hero tropes. It reminds of me of the British show Misfits, which was also fresh take on the genre. For a movie, see the excellent Chronicle.
The Marvel "phases" are kind of just a marketing tactic in a sense, but they do exemplify breaks in the style of storytelling I think. The early movies in phase 1 were very simple origin stories...
The Marvel "phases" are kind of just a marketing tactic in a sense, but they do exemplify breaks in the style of storytelling I think. The early movies in phase 1 were very simple origin stories that were mostly self contained, and it's really phase 3 when the build up and interconnection really started settling in, in my opinion at steep cost of making the films unsatisfying as self contained stories. Now with the whole thing being more scattershot and individual again as they seem to want to set up the pieces for something, I think their formula has just lost the simple archetypal storytelling that the studio originally found success in, and doesn't have the sheer momentum of the interconnected epic upcoming confrontation either. Sort of a worst of both worlds.
I'd say that the linked TV shows were a bit much for me. Suddenly being up to date with the MCU became kind of a chore. A similar thing happened to Star Wars.
I'd say that the linked TV shows were a bit much for me. Suddenly being up to date with the MCU became kind of a chore. A similar thing happened to Star Wars.
The TV shows are a little bit long-winded, aren't they? Some of them are well paced - What If, Loki, and Falcon/Winter Soldier were pretty great. But then Wandavision and Hawkeye was kind of all...
The TV shows are a little bit long-winded, aren't they? Some of them are well paced - What If, Loki, and Falcon/Winter Soldier were pretty great. But then Wandavision and Hawkeye was kind of all over the place, and Ms. Marvel and Moon Knight seemed like it was started from a movie concept that they were trying to flesh out at first but then towards the middle they just gave up on fleshing out the plot.
I'm really okay with the concept of having TV shows within the same universe, what bothers me is feeling that now they're required reading to fully enjoy the movies. It doesn't feel fair to me....
I'm really okay with the concept of having TV shows within the same universe, what bothers me is feeling that now they're required reading to fully enjoy the movies. It doesn't feel fair to me. They're a huge time commitment. I wouldn't say they're necessarily long-winded, but there's an accumulated universe fatigue that probably plays a role here.
Loki was okay, not extraordinary, but Marvel Doctor Who is fine by me. Falcon/Soldier was competent and had gravitas, some characters require a certain seriousness and it felt very appropriate.
Haven't seen Wandavision, I reckon it's quite good and a bit avant-garde but that's not what I look for in the MCU, and according to my friends you kinda have to watch it to get the new Dr. Strange.
And Moon Knight was a complete mess, couldn't watch more than two episodes, awful writing, with all the elementary mistakes that I would expect from someone who just learned to plot a story, or from a trashy superhero movie like Tom Brady's Venom.
I honestly don't have any energy to even acknowledge the existence of the other shows you mentioned. But DC's Peacemaker series was awesome.
IMHO you could have watched the new Dr. Strange without having seen Wandavision; sure, you'll get the experience of having missed a chapter of a book, but it's a particularly poorly executed...
IMHO you could have watched the new Dr. Strange without having seen Wandavision; sure, you'll get the experience of having missed a chapter of a book, but it's a particularly poorly executed chapter that doesn't really give you much more of an understanding than you get from context clues. Even having watched it, I still wasn't entirely clear on her motivations during the film and why she was so unshakable in her conviction.
I totally get what you're saying but I'm the kind of guy that will obsess on completion, so I'll eventually have to force myself into watching Wandavision in order to watch the latest movie from...
I totally get what you're saying but I'm the kind of guy that will obsess on completion, so I'll eventually have to force myself into watching Wandavision in order to watch the latest movie from my favorite MCU character :P
I've been sick of superheros in general since 2012.
I'm really hoping they burn themselves completely out like the Westerns did. I think it would be great if, in a decade or two, bringing up superhero movies dated you, and brought people nostalgia for the 2010's, and nothing more.
As an outsider to the MCU, I see so many advertised and I can never tell the difference between them and I have no idea what the plot is.
All I can see are cross-overs over cross-overs over cross-overs.
Avengers: The Final End End Game — featuring Spider-Man and His Dark Alter Self!? and Iron Man is there too? and some talking raccoon? and some lady wearing a skin suit?? and a shirtless Chris Evans???
And there I am thinking, what... is even going on.
It's the same for me. If I watch an MCU film I'll enjoy it for what it is, and look at the plot on its own rather than as part of a wider story, because it's just too complicated and sprawling for me.
Admittedly I find the films themselves very enjoyable to watch, but that might just be because ambitious, high-budget films like these are what I've become used to watching.
I only like the deconstructions these days. I was always a fan of Watchmen (own the OG comic). Now I enjoy The Boys, Invincible, Umbrella Academy and such.
I don’t think it’s genre fatigue nearly so much as the latest releases becoming super safe and unchallenging. So many of them feature the same characters, which is fine to a certain extent, but it doesn’t seem like they are too interested in them growing as people so they seem flat and uninteresting.
The last Thor movie is a pretty good example. It brought back fan favorite Valkyrie and everyone was pretty excited about Mighty Thor being along for the ride as well. While there is a lot I liked about the film, the one glaring problem with it was OG Thor. This story had real external stakes that would have made a fundamental change to the universe, but OG Thor is just goofily laughing around like he’s going through the same somewhat lighthearted personal adventure as his previous one. It’s really inappropriate, it makes the stakes seem less real, and honestly I would have preferred if there were a way to turn him into a background character because Jane Foster Thor is so much more interesting if a character and Valkyrie gets a lot of synergy from interacting with her.
I’m not sure I agree, but let’s just for the sake of argument accept the premise and say audiences are starting to grow bored of Marvel movies. There’s been 29 movies so far and a dozen TV shows. Is it that surprising? I mean, the only other franchise with a comparable amount of entries in western culture that I can think of is the James Bond franchise, which has 25 entries.
And the same thing has happened with that franchise multiple times. But it’s still going. When they hit a point of diminishing returns, they take a step back and reset. It happened at the end of the Moore era and the Brosnan era. The same thing could happen with the Marvel franchise. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, most of the best James Bond films came as a result of just such a change.
Anyway, I think that it’s hard to pin anything on audiences right now. Saying they are tired of Marvel films just because the films released this year underperformed compared to pre-pandemic films in the series ignored a whole lot of external factors.
People just aren’t going to the movies like they used to. I used to have a Regal Unlimited card and go 2 or 3 times a week. I’ve been maybe 5 times in 2022.
We also have no clue how many people are watching these movies when they hit Disney+ (or specifically skipping them in theaters because they know they’ll be free on Disney+ in 45 days). Disney has shown they are willing to use their franchises to prop up/boost Disney+’s numbers, which is probably the smarter bet in the long run.
Four quick points about why the luster of the MCU seems a bit tarnished right now. From someone who enjoys them for what they are.
We have run the cycle of many of the big Marvel heroes that everyone has heard of. Many of the stories now are of second tier characters and even though they are strong characters they need to be introduced and are not automatically accepted so people have a wider variety of opinions about them.
The MCU does not have a central focus to hold it all together like it did with Thanos. We knew he was coming at some point and that gave energy and momentum to the whole MCU. Right now there are at least four major villains that could be the next big one but there is no focus.
Way too many minor characters are being introduced or hinted at. Every movie's post credit scene adds another potential super to remember and potentially care about. Plus there are still some major players like X-men and Fantastic 4 that keep getting teased. Unless you are a super fan who understands all of the back stories you start to get tied of being teased. The over-all story is not moving forward so people are losing interest.
Thor Love and Thunder was genuinely a bad movie. There was so much potential in the story line for another amazing MCU movie but the tone, pacing and character development were just not there. Disney's fingerprints were all over the movie to a degree that it took me out of the story. I remember thinking at least a couple of times. "Oh, this was put in so they could make a ride out of it." For a movie with a character called "The God Butcher" there was, at best, a god stabbing. Christian Bale was so good but instead of being covered in dripping gold as he made his way ever closer to Thor we got him sitting in corner trying to scare children with stories. I wanted to like this movie. I would like to see a more serious remake of this movie targeted to a more adult audience.
This is exactly my issue right now. I love the MCU, and as someone who loves the messy stories in comic books I can't overstate how genuinely thrilling it was to see a grand multi-movie arc take place and be resolved so satisfyingly. The latest wave just isn't grabbing me the same way.
For example, we had the What If... series showing us a "multiverse", then Loki exploring (teasing really) what happens when the controls put in place to keep that from unraveling are taken away, then the promise of a Multiverse of Madness that in practice was not much more multiversal than what we've seen in Star Trek recently.
All in all it's left me feeling like the properties are meandering, waiting for something big to happen. I'm sure some of that is due to higher expectations, and if you looked at the first string of movies objectively you'd probably say the same thing prior to Infinity War, but it's got me a bit worried. I haven't "cooled" so much as gotten to the point I'm less confident that they won't f*ck it up, like they have with Star Wars, if that makes sense.
In the lead up to Infinity War I was cautiously optimistic that they could pull it off a massive multi-movie spectacular, but I was tempering that with lower expectations. Now they've done it once, I paradoxically have more riding on them not messing it up the second time, but think they inevitably will.
I feel like the MCU is an artifact of a different time. Just in the last six years or so the world has gone in darker directions, and we want different things from our stories than we did before. A behemoth as large as Disney doesn't turn on a dime, and so the stories coming out now aren't necessarily in line with what people want to watch. If you have a huge 30 movie structure planned, how do you shift that to stay in alignment with the world?
I don't think there's ever a bad time for escapism, it consistently thrived in our darkest times. I understand the impulse to make comprehensive explanations, but our times are not particularly less inclined towards escapism than any other period in movie history.
Maybe those movies are simply not that good.
For me it’s the tone of the movies that break the interest. The trailers all seem to have super serious moments followed by some licensed music from the 70’s and 80’s with a little 90’s sprinkled around. A couple of laughs and a catchphrase and then that’s it. It’s like every trailer and in a sense the movies themselves were put together with machine learning and barely any effort. All for the sake of making them faster and more flashy. I think it was around when guardians of the galaxy vol1 came out, that movie really shifted the tone, like all of a sudden Disney had to use all of this licensed music for the next X number of years in their movies or pay a fine. Absolutely stupid and uninteresting.
Blazing Saddles killed the western.
Did The Boys kill the Marvel universe? You heard it here first.
Well, Blazing Saddles did not kill the western ;)
Super-hero deconstruction is not a new thing, and it didn't kill superhero comics either!
Also, superhero fiction is way more flexible than western as a genre. It won't disappear, but it'll most certainly change. Like it always does.
Superhero fiction is more or less our contemporary mythology with a sci-fi spin anyway. Our need for mythology will just transcend.
Edit: incidentally, I'm watching The Umbrella Academy right now. A refreshing, contemporary take on many super hero tropes. It reminds of me of the British show Misfits, which was also fresh take on the genre. For a movie, see the excellent Chronicle.
The Marvel "phases" are kind of just a marketing tactic in a sense, but they do exemplify breaks in the style of storytelling I think. The early movies in phase 1 were very simple origin stories that were mostly self contained, and it's really phase 3 when the build up and interconnection really started settling in, in my opinion at steep cost of making the films unsatisfying as self contained stories. Now with the whole thing being more scattershot and individual again as they seem to want to set up the pieces for something, I think their formula has just lost the simple archetypal storytelling that the studio originally found success in, and doesn't have the sheer momentum of the interconnected epic upcoming confrontation either. Sort of a worst of both worlds.
I'd say that the linked TV shows were a bit much for me. Suddenly being up to date with the MCU became kind of a chore. A similar thing happened to Star Wars.
The TV shows are a little bit long-winded, aren't they? Some of them are well paced - What If, Loki, and Falcon/Winter Soldier were pretty great. But then Wandavision and Hawkeye was kind of all over the place, and Ms. Marvel and Moon Knight seemed like it was started from a movie concept that they were trying to flesh out at first but then towards the middle they just gave up on fleshing out the plot.
I'm really okay with the concept of having TV shows within the same universe, what bothers me is feeling that now they're required reading to fully enjoy the movies. It doesn't feel fair to me. They're a huge time commitment. I wouldn't say they're necessarily long-winded, but there's an accumulated universe fatigue that probably plays a role here.
Loki was okay, not extraordinary, but Marvel Doctor Who is fine by me. Falcon/Soldier was competent and had gravitas, some characters require a certain seriousness and it felt very appropriate.
Haven't seen Wandavision, I reckon it's quite good and a bit avant-garde but that's not what I look for in the MCU, and according to my friends you kinda have to watch it to get the new Dr. Strange.
And Moon Knight was a complete mess, couldn't watch more than two episodes, awful writing, with all the elementary mistakes that I would expect from someone who just learned to plot a story, or from a trashy superhero movie like Tom Brady's Venom.
I honestly don't have any energy to even acknowledge the existence of the other shows you mentioned. But DC's Peacemaker series was awesome.
IMHO you could have watched the new Dr. Strange without having seen Wandavision; sure, you'll get the experience of having missed a chapter of a book, but it's a particularly poorly executed chapter that doesn't really give you much more of an understanding than you get from context clues. Even having watched it, I still wasn't entirely clear on her motivations during the film and why she was so unshakable in her conviction.
I totally get what you're saying but I'm the kind of guy that will obsess on completion, so I'll eventually have to force myself into watching Wandavision in order to watch the latest movie from my favorite MCU character :P