I don't know that we need a thread for every single movie and show so I'm just doing a general thread. I know we just got a new shake-up with release dates recently, but I'm waiting for the other shoe due to the strikes. It also feels like these strikes could lead to massive changes to the industry, one way or another, since the studios appear so determined to change how Hollywood operates.
I'm hoping the strikes help improve the quality of the MCU in the long run. They've branched out too far at this point and they're struggling under the weight of it all. Kevin Feige is good but he can't oversee everything. Needs to be tighter and more focused.
My impulse is to argue against that, but maybe with the way Marvel Studios is structured you're right. In my mind, it's like saying Paramount Pictures shouldn't have done 22 movies in 1981 because Raiders of the Lost Ark took away from the quality of Going Ape. (I am definitely not in the camp that believes this. Those people can burn in hell.) I think I'm still stuck in 2008 when I expected Marvel to become an actual studio releasing a dozen movies or so a year in diverse genres. I guess it's meant to be closer to Pixar at their biggest, which is 2-3 a year.
Either way, I feel like the strikes are gonna result in massive industry changes. I really hope for the better across the board but we'll see.
I'd be fine with less content with higher quality control. I hated the Secret Invasion finale.
I definitely hope for higher quality. Secret Invasion was the first Marvel show I just couldn't get into and gave up on. But I'm still down with a few shows and movies every year. Some have been better than others for me, though I haven't really hated any of the movies. I doubt I'll ever rewatch Quantumania but I don't regret watching it at all.
The one win I can salvage from Secret Invasion's quality ranging from boring to terrible, is that it really shut up the fanboys who hailed this as a return to MCU badassery with it's surplus of guns, explosions and moving away from them pesky wokeisms and womens ruining the MCU.
I'd pay to see their reactions when G'iah instantly pushed her way into the Top 10 Most Powerful MCU Character charts.
That's true, good point. That IS a solid win.
Since I'm constantly reconfiguring the route to an MCU version of Dark Avengers, my first thought was "could G'iah be the Dark Captain Marvel?"
My impulse is to argue against that, but maybe with the way Marvel Studios is structured you're right. In my mind, it's like saying Paramount Pictures shouldn't have done 22 movies in 1981 because Raiders of the Lost Ark took away from the quality of Going Ape. (I am definitely not in the camp that believes this. Those people can burn in hell.) I think I'm still stuck in 2008 when I expected Marvel to become an actual studio releasing a dozen movies or so a year in diverse genres. I guess it's meant to be closer to Pixar at their biggest, which is 2-3 a year.
Either way, I feel like the strikes are gonna result in massive industry changes. I really hope for the better across the board but we'll see.
My point is that these movies are all interconnected, so they need to be overseen by a central authority. Which in this case has generally been Kevin Feige. Movie studios can makes tons of unrelated movies because they don't have continuity or various interconnected threads to worry about in that case. For the MCU, there is a central vision and a level of quality that just can't be upheld if the story takes too many branches.
I'd argue that somewhere around 3 movies and 3 Disney+ shows a year would be the ideal route for them to go if they want to maintain quality and viewer interest.
And I think making more unrelated movies is how they continue in the future. Team-up stuff will always happen, and should. But, for me, things like Eternals, Moon Knight, and Werewolf By Night were cool because they were their own thing while also definitely set in that world. Diversifying more would be smart, especially since Marvel's interconnectedness was always a little tenuous. Also, with more standalone projects, the Avenger movies but also teamup stuff, like Ragnarok or what have you, will also be more special again.
But you do still get things like Hawkeye, for instance, which coincided well with Avengers, Endgame, and Black Widow. The continuity wasn't the issue. (And I don't hate Hawkeye, it was fine and fun.) Meanwhile, the creative people behind Multiverse of Madness was pretty open about not paying attention to WandaVision, and that explains how it seemed (to me anyway) like Wanda's arc was learning something she'd already learned. So I would really put the onus on the writers and directors. Things like the more standalone projects can obviously go as they will, but some of these crossover projects really need to put more effort into insuring they connect well and don't contradict each other.
But I really don't think the continuity is the real issue. I think it's just quality. I wasn't a huge fan of MOM, and a big part of that WAS how they handled Wanda. I'm not even upset about her going villainous but it didn't work that well with WandaVision for me. But the other part of my issue with MOM was just... I didn't really like it. The first Strange surprised me because I wasn't expecting much, but it was mostly fun while also having one of my favorite ultimate-opponent defeats in the entire MCU. MOM surprised me in the opposite way. I'll take continuity issues if the movie/show is great. They've always had little ones anyway, especially with the credit scenes. Of course I don't really know for sure, but my guess at Marvel's problem anymore would be half-baked projects that just need more development. A few more drafts. It would be easy to lay that on Disney since they did the same thing with Star Wars, rushing the creatives through the sequel trilogy.
On another, but related, note, I saw IO9 did an article contrasting Agent Carter with Secret Invasion. The crux was this little show with a fraction of the budget, a less recognizable main character, and no big name stars, managed to pull off compelling spy stuff far better than SI. And be fun. Just thought that was a good point, since SI didn't really seem to know how to do spy stuff at all.
Another thing with the shows is Marvel apparently isn't doing the traditional writers room, having a group break the story of the season together then assigning episodes amongst the group. This is something that ensures continuity just within the show itself, along with a showrunner. Supposedly, marvel has been treating the directors of these shows like the showrunners while writers aren't even on set. Marvel is not the only studio doing this but apparently it's how they're running things.
And I know directors are a big deal and all that but I always make gotta point out how important writers are. And I get breaking with tradition can be beneficial but this way doesn't seem to be an improvement.
RU, had to rejoin just to keep you in line... 😜
I think Marvel likely has overdone the "Phase" marketing, which makes us think everything is related, even though some things are really closing the books on the first few Phases, and others may be setting things up or could be standalone. So things are judged too much on how they fit into the bigger story - which at this point I think is hurting how people react to it.
As for the D+ shows, not sure they need a writers room for what are meant to be mini-series. Seems like that is more significant for ongoing shows that need to come up with 22 episodes each year. I think what they really need is to get away from the mandate of a big final CGI battle.
I feel like I was one of the few that liked Secret Invasion* - I agree it never fully clicked, but I didn't think it was bad, and liked much of it. However I had not read the original Secret Invasion so wasn't comparing to that, and never really felt of Fury as a "spy" in the MCU anyway. So it worked for me as a way to get to know Fury, who was never a real character but a plot device. I am not sure it earned killing off Maria and Talos and having Rhodey be a duplicate since pre-blip I guess, so it has that against it.
*I also am among the few who liked X-Men 3, which although it was a terrible adaptation of Dark Phoenix if you loved the comics, but actually was a good story with Jean going off the rails, Magneto biting off more than he could chew, and the whole "cure" debate was interesting.
What? What I do?!
Well, I did read the SI comics but I never expected anything like that even if they'd done a mega budget feature; just not how marvel studios operates. I did expect a spy thriller with intrigue and twists because of how the studio hyped it beforehand. I think the biggest twist was revealing the one character everyone predicted would be a Skrull from the first trailer... Was a Skrull.
I agree about moving on from the formulaic cg battle finale. Again I mention Dr. strange where he simply outwitted a seemingly unbeatable foe. A smaller writers room may work for these miniseries but I still feel it's necessary. A lot of the streaming services aren't paying writers to be on set or do rewrites so I honestly feel that has an impact you can feel. But even if you have six episodes, you still have six writers or pairs of writers, in a room with the showrunner breaking the plot of the season, then episode by episode. Then they write them. But that's how you get away from the aimless wandering (what I saw of) Secret Invasion suffered from. Book of Boba Fett was far more guilty of that and if you couldn't have a writers room on that show, at least have ONE more person to tighten it up. Both shows came across to me as written by inexperienced writers who were copying a genre they didn't fully grasp.
I'm definitely with you on the phase issue. I enjoyed Antman at the time partly because it wasn't connected. Yeah you had Falcon and references and that's fine but it was sorta a breath of fresh air after the mega crossover of Age of Ultron (which I also did enjoy a lot, apparently more than most). I thought that was a nice balance between those movies. I don't think expect all roads to lead to Secret Wars, except possibly that characters from most of that phase are likely to show up in it.
Anyway, genuinely glad you're back too, fac.
I feel like they need a writers room for the whole MCU more than individual shows, if that makes sense.
I also think Phase 4 would have been just fine as being marketed as post-Endgame stories but not announce Kang until the very end of Loki, and even then have it be unclear if Kang was going to be the big bad, kind of how the Multiverse stuff was overly talked about - they have telegraphed more than they did with the Infinity Stones at first. I know people disliked some of the tone of Thor 4, but I liked that it wrapped up Thor and the Asgardians if they wanted to end it; same with Guardians 3, and same with WandaVision/Dr Strange MoM, Black Panther 2 and the Hawkeye series, and to some extent Falcon and Winter Soldier. In retrospect they should not have announced what was Phase 5 until it was about to start and surprised us with the Council of Kangs.
I'm not saying Secret Invasion was great, but I liked the lack of "superheroes" and even felt the desire to become one on Graviks part made sense - although they needed to be more explicit that he feared the hammer being dropped by the Avengers without those powers. I also wish Giah was a bit more torn so that we aren't sure, now that she has that power level she has, if she is going to keep pushing for the Skrulls to be recognized as an antgonist, keep the pressure on Fury. This was probably the show that needed to wrap that storyline up - say they got rid of Gravik in episode 4, then Giah still reacts to the President declaring the Skrulls as bad guys. For a show that killed off a couple of key players, that it sort of ended back to status quo was disappointing. (Note, they could redeem that if The Marvels ties into this more, like Kamala starts to compare the Skrulls to the Pakistan/India split storyline from her show...)
I'll also say that Disney+ isn't be used effectively to in terms of the shows - I'm not sure the number of episodes is being driven by the story beats, which is a problem, so some of the shows seem episodic and sometimes not really - only WandaVision and She Hulk to me really took advantage of the episodic nature. Everything else has seemed like act breaks more than episodes. (I also think that Boba Fett was killed by the editing, which I still think was meant to be linear and less flashbackish...and it seems like a minor thing, but we needed the scene with Fury recruiting the Skrulls to be the start of the series, not the Ross imposter sequence, like I bet was intended - for each episode to open with a flashback. )
I feel like they need a writers room for the whole MCU more than individual shows, if that makes sense.
It does, and I definitely agree on that. For instance, Phase 2's writers room would have been Whedon, Gunn, Black, McKay, Markus, & McFeely with Feige as 'showrunner'. REALLY how they should handle it these days. And I get the idea of abandoning the phase system, or at least making it less pervasive, but as far as breaking the plots, the phase system needs to be paid attention to.
I also think Phase 4 would have been just fine as being marketed as post-Endgame stories but not announce Kang until the very end of Loki, and even then have it be unclear if Kang was going to be the big bad, kind of how the Multiverse stuff was overly talked about - they have telegraphed more than they did with the Infinity Stones at first. I know people disliked some of the tone of Thor 4, but I liked that it wrapped up Thor and the Asgardians if they wanted to end it; same with Guardians 3, and same with WandaVision/Dr Strange MoM, Black Panther 2 and the Hawkeye series, and to some extent Falcon and Winter Soldier. In retrospect they should not have announced what was Phase 5 until it was about to start and surprised us with the Council of Kangs.
I honestly can't remember when I learned about Kang but yeah I agree. The stones kinda happened by accident. We need six, well... I guess that one was the mind stone! And so on.
F&WS to me is their Book of Boba Fett, where the main characters are pretty much where you expected them to be after the last time you saw them (Endgame, and Mandalorian season 2 respectively.)
And I've felt like knowing what's coming out so far ahead has always been a double edged sword. I loved Winter Soldier but I remember sitting in the theater to watch it and being hyped for Age of Ultron already. So, while I have a compulsion to know this stuff, yeah it also has an affect on enjoyment for what is coming now.
I'm not saying Secret Invasion was great, but I liked the lack of "superheroes" and even felt the desire to become one on Graviks part made sense - although they needed to be more explicit that he feared the hammer being dropped by the Avengers without those powers. I also wish Giah was a bit more torn so that we aren't sure, now that she has that power level she has, if she is going to keep pushing for the Skrulls to be recognized as an antgonist, keep the pressure on Fury. This was probably the show that needed to wrap that storyline up - say they got rid of Gravik in episode 4, then Giah still reacts to the President declaring the Skrulls as bad guys. For a show that killed off a couple of key players, that it sort of ended back to status quo was disappointing. (Note, they could redeem that if The Marvels ties into this more, like Kamala starts to compare the Skrulls to the Pakistan/India split storyline from her show...)
Yeah I was fine with no superheroes. I didn't need any Avengers, and wanted a Fury story. Just the ones I saw weren't that interesting. Falsworth was certainly a good addition but to me, Fury didn't get a lot of moments. I mentioned before but I loved the scene with him and Talos on the train. But the show really seemed to fall under the same "man, how about another draft or two, probably written by a new set of eyes" issue other D+ shows suffer.
I'll also say that Disney+ isn't be used effectively to in terms of the shows - I'm not sure the number of episodes is being driven by the story beats, which is a problem, so some of the shows seem episodic and sometimes not really - only WandaVision and She Hulk to me really took advantage of the episodic nature. Everything else has seemed like act breaks more than episodes. (I also think that Boba Fett was killed by the editing, which I still think was meant to be linear and less flashbackish...and it seems like a minor thing, but we needed the scene with Fury recruiting the Skrulls to be the start of the series, not the Ross imposter sequence, like I bet was intended - for each episode to open with a flashback. )
And I agree with that too. Those two shows really worked well with the format. i enjoyed Loki and think it handled the other style the best, but most of the shows feel like they're written by people who have watched shows but never written for one.
Echo got pushed back to January and Agatha (now Darkhold Diaries, I wish I was joking) was moved to October 2024.
I assume they're spreading the content out more since they aren't producing anything now.
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