Rolling Marvel Cinematic Universe thread (+ a poll: Classic or Dud?)

i would be cool with them doing short origin story bumpers at the start of each marvel movie for the NEXT marvel movie, a'la pixar's preshow shorts.

but yeah, fuck wasting the first half of your movie with an origin story that was kinda lame when it was penned sixty years ago and that 75% your audience already knows anyway

OTM. The first few movies can be seen as an origin story for the whole milieu and let's get on with it from there.

skipping the origin story allows writers to backfill as necessary, which I would think is liberating.

fuck wasting the first half of your movie with an origin story that was kinda lame when it was penned sixty years ago and that 75% your audience already knows anyway

thing is, any character they launch now will NOT be familiar to 75% of your audience if your audience is a blockbuster one. I can see wanting to get away from movies where the climax of the film is "and that's how...he became...THE SUB-MARINER!" but I hope they find a middle-ground between that and assuming we don't need a little time to acclimate to a dude in a speedo with wings on his feet.

we still need to know why we should care about the character beyond the fact that they've been in the presence of nerds for decades, and origin stories are usually the easiest way to express that

i'm seeing guardians tonight so will be able to answer this question myself soon but didn't they just throw the characters in with like five minutes of exposition? And that's one where you can assume 95% of the audience DOESN'T know who these guys are.

no guardians is an origin story fo sho

each individual character gets a little exposition at the beginning, but the story is about their gradual transformation into a team

yeah, that's what I mean by "origin story": how they became who they are. Team dynamics tend to make good movies. But origin stories that stick to canon usually suck because this stuff was written by madmen on a deadline in 1953; nobody wants to hear about spiderman's daddy issues. if the origin story is a freshly rewritten take on the character (Thor did this pretty well i thought) then fine. Otherwise, I'd prefer we start with issue #75 and up plz

people loved spider-man's origin story the first time. it was huge. they just didn't need it again in the fourth spidey movie in a decade.

if dr. strange will already be sorcerer supreme at the beginning of the movie, they'll probably have an audience surrogate (maybe a laaady) going "wtf magic?" instead of strange himself

so it will really be the "origin story" of his assistant or girlfriend.

the smart thing about taking that road would be it allows for them to do a flashback "strange rising" prequel...and you knoooow they love prequels

STRANGE BINDS SLIMER IN THE CRIMSON BANDS OF CYTTORAK.
Bystander: "How the hell did you do that?"
Dr. Strange: "It's a long story."
Bystander: "Hell with that, I'll miss my train."
Dr. Strange: "That's cool, I wasn't offering to tell it...UNLESS MY OPENING WEEKEND BLOWS THE FUCK UP."

xps

Hellboy did a pretty great job with this. 5 minutes - oh, he's a demon from hell and we'll figure out the rest later - Cut to 80 years into the future!

That said I agree that origin stories can be great if done right, the ones that are annoying are where we have to keep seeing them (new Spider-Man, new Fantastic Four again soon) or the ones that are just terrible generic-feeling retreads (Green Lantern, which should have easily avoided this problem).

x-men did the "non-origin origin story" structure well, with rogue as the audience surrogate needing to be caught up while cyclops and storm were already cyclops and storm

xpost hellboy had that geeky fbi agent (and actually didn't do so great)

the most non-origin story, audience-surrogate-free superhero movie i can think of is watchmen, which tanked

The new Spidey films totally should've just been sequels with a different actor.

I dunno if the same is true for the new FF, not sure enough people saw the first one to not have a retread, and they didn't do it particularly well. They could have the whole thing over with in the first 15 mins though.

I dug how they handled it in The Incredible Hulk. All of the origin rehash was handled in brief snippets during the opening credits.

well that was a sorta-sequel anyway

The Hulk's origin is extremely straightforward.

No more so than most of the other superheroes who don't really require a cinematic origin story. Unless WB is doing a Hawkman movie, I think we can generally leave it out.

Burton's Batman only spent about two minutes on the origin iirc.

and still managed to totally fuck it up

still nerdgaging over the Joker killed the Waynes thing

The upcoming Venom Carnage film has the unenviable task of presenting the origin stories of both Venom and Carnage in addition to presumably explaining how they became a single entity with an unwieldy name.

that will be covered in the Sinister Six film, which will consist entirely of origin stories for the titular villains

xpost hellboy had that geeky fbi agent (and actually didn't do so great)

Burton's Batman did have very little origin story but that is a case where between the tv shows animated and not etc etc you can honestly say the global audience is familiar with his basic steez. but you can't say that about any marvel property they might kick up AFTER ant-man.

Batman Begins on the other hand is almost all origin story and is probably my favourite Batman movie.

Though I guess it covers a portion of his life that isn't very culturally ubiquitous.

The upcoming Venom Carnage film has the unenviable task of presenting the origin stories of both Venom and Carnage in addition to presumably explaining how they became a single entity with an unwieldy name.

i kind of can't believe venom carnage is actually going to happen, at least in its current form. of the three spideyless spiderverse movies planned, only sinister six even has a set release date. unless the buzz on that improves, i can't believe sony would just blaze into "two gooey psychos dressed like spider-man go to white castle." they've already amended their spideyverse fantasies once, can see it happening again

but then again sinister six seems like such a wtf they already look like wile e coyote standing over a ravine confused to me

i still don't get how they're doing a Sinister Six movie without Spider-Man in it

like, they realized from the asm2 numbers that spidey's suffering some audience burn-out, but they still think movies about his supporting cast are going to get people MORE into regular spidey movies?

maybe they think sinister six sounds like fast five which sounds like a franchise re-energizer?

But the Fast series never needed a re-energizer, even the third one that didn't have the original stars made a crapton of money

I'm gonna start presuming that all comic book movies will be titled Venom Carnage from now on unless i'm explicitly told otherwise

In related news, did you hear about the John Carter spin-off Disney is working on called Martians?

But the Fast series never needed a re-energizer, even the third one that didn't have the original stars made a crapton of money

fast five did twice as well as fast 4, you can play semantics but fast five did take things up a big notch

and asm2 still made a ton of money, it just didn't expand upon the market of the reboot like they hoped

some marvel origin stories are good! and i like that the screenwriters have an opportunity to take the bizarre/corny ones and present/form them better. with liberties.

but i can definitely see how the strange origin would be done with as little origin as possible.

er *strange movie

my.. hands.. my.. HANDS *falls to his knees, gazes up into the starlit sky*

Yeah, Strange's is definitely one of the least necessary origin stories. In a way, our encroaching era of private space flights is a perfect time to zip right through an updated version of the FF's origin with a minimum of logistical finagling.

word is they're doing something different with the FF's origin anyway

So they're going to be alien ninja turtles, then.

Did they actually go ahead with that?

Nah, they eventually realized that Bay's involvement was enough of a slap in the face for anyone who cared.

I would watch a Strange Hamm:
http://blog.sfgate.com/dailydish/2014/08/25/jon-hamm-dismisses-doctor-strange-rumors/