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

But overall AC is still the best of the Marvel series, and better than most of the movies too.

Tuomas otm here. Imo Agent Carter is the best thing to come out if the MCU.

There was a brief moment in the rumor mill that Hayley Atwell wanted to play the Doctor, which I am totally in support of

The Dubsmash thing of Atwell in the car with Stan Lee was v v cute.

Sad the series is over, really hope it gets renewed! I've liked some of the movies but this season was definite MCU highlight by miles.

From the trailers it looks a bit as if the Civil War all takes place in one car park.

Yeah the big faceoff in what appears to be an airport looks lame. I guess they'll justify it by saying they're minimizing civilian casualties or whatever

I haven't seen Age of Ultron yet, but all the flying people in the trailer looked... wrong

reminds me of how when marvel wanted a crossover event in the 80s, they looked at what little kids wanted, which turned out to be the word "secret" and heroes fighting each other.

and the word "wars"

And Spidey teaching all-powerful cosmic beings how to poop (although they had to save that for the sequel).

http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/square_small/4/49448/3557979-beyonder+1.jpg

I KNOW NOW WHY YOU POOP

I haven't seen Age of Ultron yet, but all the flying people in the trailer looked... wrong

Why? All the character who fly there (Iron Man, War Machine, Falcon, The Vision) are canonically capable of flying, both in the comics and in the previous movies. The only exception is the Scarlet Witch, but if you look at the trailer she's not really flying but doing a telekinesis-powered jump, as Age of Ultron established she has telekinesis. (She doesn't have that in the comics, but I'm pretty sure her sorcery powers enable her to fly anyway.)

Basically, the MCU version of Scarlet Witch is the Jean Grey they couldn't have, as her powers are telekinesis and telepathy (with a dose of some weird precog shit).

I liked the first Secret Wars ... Lotta stuff happens. Sequel was awful.

(xposts) Flying just looks weird in movies unless it's Christopher Reeve on a greenscreen

Saw Deadpool yesterday which served its purpose, which was literally wasting time. I guess it was fine. But this morning, probably unrelated, I had the coolest thought: wouldn't it have been a neat stunt if they introduced Spider-Man in the new Captain America without revealing who the nobody actor was? Like, if they had cast him in secret, and only after the mask comes off at some point in this or a later film would we learn that this guy has been hanging around in the background of several other Marvel movies? It would have been an awesome way to play into the whole secret identity thing, and give us all a nice idea of what it would be like to be in a world with secret superheroes.

Anyway, that would have been my idea.

It's kind of weird that Deadpool doesn't have its own thread, 75th biggest film of all time, biggest R-rated film ever. I get the impression that everyone who was aware of it up to a few weeks before its release had been thinking "Really? They're really going ahead with this?"

I'm amazed the film got made on a bunch of levels - gleeful rudeness, very aware script, Ryan Reynolds in a supersuit again. Does anyone know of a good "Behind the scenes" article?

I'm pretty sure he's been talking about it for years, leaking footage, spreading rumors. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some comprehensive making of that was part of its ingenious/ubiquitous marketing campaign.

It's weird that this is the movie that counts as pushing boundaries, because yeah, it's foul-mouthed, but almost all of those other Marvel movies are massively, innately violence. This is just the first with brain matter and amputations.

Am dubious of the Deadpool movie as it seems like the apotheosis of the nastier aspects of current geek culture.

(That doesn't it preclude it from being a fun movie, I suppose. It looks better than that Batman clusterfuck, for example.)

I dunno, Dark Serious superheroes are sort of the apotheosis. Deadpool is clearly a goofy lark come to life, which is partly what made it enjoyable. It's sort of like a superhero movie if it was edited together from improvised put downs and pop culture references, which more or less works better than it sounds. Really, most of the movie is one long scene on a bridge, with a bunch of out of sequence flashbacks and a final fight sequence tying it together. There's not much there, so you just sort of go along with the babbling and fourth-wall breaking and irreverence. There are some funny jokes at the expense of real Marvel titles, too, like making fun of the X Mansion being underpopulated because Fox ran out of money, or not remembering if Prof X is Patrick Stewart of McAvoy because the time lines are so confusing. That sort of thing.

Oh yeah that's the thing I forgot to mention - it is incredibly enjoyable, no eye-rolling (except if you consider the idea of a smart-mouth superhero inherently eye-rolling in which case this is not your movie), interesting structure, lots of deep and shallow gags.

Not sure which of the nastier aspects you mean - it's got three ass-kicking women if it helps?

The main boundary it's pushing (particularly for an X-Men movie) - there is no part that's po-faced.

Lots of famous people referenced by name, and Green Lantern jokes, and ... everything is a joke, basically.

And yeah, Colossus is there not as comic relief but as serious relief, because he is the only solemn, naggy, po-faced aspect.

yeah i used to watch Robot Chicken like 10 years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq0XNILIYTw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps6SBs112Io

includes gag of Professor X talking about the shortage of mutants

Well, if that is your standard, then I'd say yes, Deadpool is a lot better than that.

yeah i used to watch Robot Chicken like 10 years ago.

do you mean "yeah I used to read Deadpool comics like 20 years ago"

I won't hear a bad word about the Joe Kelly run.

Just finished the first season of Agent Carter (I know, I know) - great all the way through, but I kept getting a little distracted by the resemblance of Limpy McKnight to Ted Cruz.

Maybe if you literally melted him.

So Alfre Woodard is playing a character in Civil War...and then apparently playing a completely different character in Luke Cage. Goddamn it, Marvel, you're supposed to do better than this.

The number of people who care about that is about 1% of the people who care that Captain America was Johnny Storm (which is already quite small).

Though I did just learn that unmelted Ted Cruz played a cop in the Avengers.

Dude should really change his name. 'Unmelted Ted Cruz' has so much more pizzazz than 'Enver Gjokaj'.

A Cloak and Dagger show is being developed for ABC Family Freeform.

This is wholly speculative BUT: Marvel, who is notorious for doing a single print run of their collections and then letting them go out of print and then years later releasing that same material in a new and different configuration, has over the course of a very short period of time both reprinted the old TPB collections of Busiek's Thunderbolts and pushed out new trades that collect the previously uncollected remainder of Busiek's run. In recent years, they've mostly only done this with properties that had cinematic adaptations in the works (e.g. the recent and very quick reprinting of Priest's entire Black Panther run) sooooo I think something cinematic/televisual might be in the works with the Thunderbolts.

Hmm, that's interesting... I guess the the Infinity War might provide a similar setup to what Onslaught did in the comics for Thunderbolts: all the major heroes are thought to be dead -> new team of superheroes steps in and everyone loves them -> secretly they're a bunch of previously established villains scheming to conquer the world. But for a movie/TV series to have the same effect as Busiek's Thunderbolts did, they'd have to use villains who've already appeared in the MCU, and I'm not sure if there are too many villains left alive they could use? I guess they could have Red Skull in place of Baron Zemo, his "death" in the first Cap movie was ambiguous enough to bring him back. (And even if Weaving doesn't want to play him again, as he has stated, it wouldn't be too difficult to put some other actor under the makeup.) And the villain from Ant-Man could be brought back the same way... But are there any others?

Of course the other option would be to adapt Thunderbolts vol. 2, and make it into a team of ex-supervillains forced to do the heroes' work... But then everyone would complain they're copying Suicide Squad, which the comic did indeed do.

The latter, contingent on SS success, seems likely

I guess so, but then it's kinda weird that they're reprinting the Busiek comics based on the former premise, not the vol. 2 stuff that was copying SS. Like, when the Guardians of the Galaxy movie was coming out, they reprinted the Abnett/Lanning comics the movie was mostly based on, not the original 70s GotG comics or that weird early 90s series by Jim Valentino, because they had little to do with the movie.

Though it could be that Marvel is just genuinely interested in reprinting Busiek's comics due to him still having lots of fans around, not for any movie/TV related reasons. His entire Avengers run was recently reprinted as two giant omnibuses too.

They actually did reprint all three eras of GotG around that same time.

Though of course having the word "Avengers" on the cover made them easier to market than Thuderbolts anyway. (That's probably also the reason they added the "Hawkeye and..." bit into those Thunderbolts TPBs, even though they weren't originally called that.)

One of the best things about the movies making Avengers a household name is that a lot previously neglected Avengers comics have now been reprinted, or collected for the first time. For example, pretty much all of Roger Stern's run (except for his first handful of issues, but in those Stern was basically just tying loose ends from Jim Shooter's run that preceded it) is finally available as TPBs. Which is great, since it's still the best bunch of Avengers comics ever published, IMO.

Marvel even collected Steve Engelhart's entire West Coast Avengers run as two of those big omnibuses, though to be frank it didn't really warrant such special treatment, regular TPBs would've been fine. But at least it's now available for people like me who didn't have chance to read WCA back in the day, AFAIK this is the first time those issues have been reprinted.

(xpost)

They did? Sorry about that then, I guess I missed those other reprints.

But still, doesn't look like they're reprinting the newer Thunderbolts issues (by Ellis etc.) now, the ones that are based on the SS premise...

They did reprint the Ellis run in a single collection not too long ago. The only uncollected Thunderbolts at this point is the weird hinterland between the end of Busiek's run and when it was rebooted as New Thunderbolts.

Isn't that exactly what's collected in these new trades? Busiek's run ends in the third of those old TPBs (with Nicieza following him) and it looks like the new "Hawkeye and the Thunderbolts" books will continue straight from that.

Oh, I didn't realize those Hawkeye trades were the start of Nicieza's run. At any rate, there's a big chunk that's still uncollected prior to New Thunderbolts but I guess they may keep going with this reprint series.

That thing about Iron Man 3 not having a female villain because female action figures don't sell well enough. Has this been known for a while? I think I'm getting deja vu.

I think it just came to light. But it's worth noting that that was a decision made by the infamous Isaac Perlmutter, who has subsequently been shut out of the Marvel Studios decision making process by Disney.

I don't think Marvel in general has managed to create that many strong female villains? The only sorta well-known Iron Man female villain I can think of is Madame Masque, and even she falls into the ages-old "the love of a good man turns you from evil to good" cliche. (They had a version of her in Agent Carter, but she was so different it was practically a new character.) And many of the other famous female villains, like the Echantress or Emma Frost, have similarly turned away from villainy.

My favourite Marvel female villain is Moonstone... I just love villains who are pragmatic and opportunistic instead of fanatic and grandiose, who know when to fold 'em, and when it makes more sense to side with the good guys. Taskmaster is another villain I like for the same reasons. I'd love to see either of them in the movies, but the problem is that the movies typically only use villains who want to rule the world or destroy it, not ones who just want a bit of money and power.

I guess they could use Moonstone in the Ms. Marvel movie, because she's sorta become her dark counterpart, but she probably wouldn't be the main villain.

huh, I didn't know that Red Skull had a daughter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_(Marvel_Comics)

dc apparently doing a damage control tv show before marvel does
http://comicbook.com/dc/2016/05/16/dcs-powerless-trailer-screened-at-nbc-upfronts/