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

I thought I read it on this thread but I can't find it - the workhorse doing the most to move Netflix over to the next, respectable, phase of its plan is one Martin J Scorsese, who's going to get it some Oscars.

In the wake of Paramount's dark fate with the Terminator movie, both Sony and Warner Bros. have now suffered "franchise" flops. WB's doing ok, though, in part b/c the Joker movie (which Scorcese considered directing!) was a huge smash.

The article on WB is also interesting, b/c it talks about how how "mid-level" films just aren't making it these days:

“It has to be so frustrating as a studio,” said Jeff Bock, a box office analyst with Exhibitor Relations. “If you look at these misfires, they’re all unique films. ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ would have been a big hit in the 1990s, but that genre is being phased out.”

...“When we think about the best adult dramas these days, we think of streaming and TV shows,” Bock said. “There’s so much genre specific [material on TV] that it’s really hard for these dramas in theaters to compete with that in terms of poignancy.”

Meanwhile, it sounds like the forthcoming Black Widow movie may have things going for it that even Scorsese will appreciate...

But instead of helping propel ticket sales to new records, everything from Sundance darling “Blinded by the Light,” to the gritty action flicks “The Kitchen” and “Shaft” sputtered in spectacular fashion. Moviegoers all but ignored these films, even when the reviews, as in the case of “Blinded by the Light,” were sterling. It’s led to a wildly unpredictable year for Warner Bros.

I can't believe that a Bruce Springsteen musical wasn't an enormous hit in 2019!

Tbf He did sell out 236 nights on Broadway in the preceding months.

Major diff between a romcom set in Luton that merely features the music of Springsteen vs actually seeing the man perform live

xp Billie Joel did something similar at MSG, but I don't think the gritty coming of age musical Piano Man is getting greenlit soon.

(the former is actually really good but it didn't get a lot of fanfare when it came out)

Its not really a musical tbf, it’s Brit feelgood mulch of a kind that has historically been quite successful

Also it’s bad

Xxpost He already has a Broadway jukebox musical, Movin' Out.

It's pretty dumb

Also tbf Springsteen had his *own* Warner Bros. theatrical release that massively flopped. Could be Bruce fatigue, could be "Blinded" came out after "Yesterday" ...

Could be it’s bad

Could be the audiences who attend expensive shows on Broadway and audiences who see movies aren't the same

an unloved Shaft remake gets a horribly reviewed watered-down reboot(?)/sequel(?) that people forgot was coming out and it didn't do well, it's a sign of the times.

Shaft was mentioned in the part of the article specifically talking about WB’s recent releases; it’s not being presented as a sign of the times.

The ad campaign for that Blinded By The Light movie was horrific. "Indian dork is super into Bruce Springsteen" is not gonna get people flooding into theaters.

Where focus testing meets a coked-out film exec's humvee jams.

Xpost he was Pakistani

i saw Endgame, finally. Cool spectacle, everyone seemed to handle the 50% of life in the universe is gone thing pretty well, they were a bit angsty about it but still cracked a lot of good jokes. the vv quick glimpses of ordinary ppl seemed to indicate they were either completely recovered from it or just going through a bit of mild PTSD.

never seen a film where the three-act structure was this obvious, which is less a criticism and more of a neutral comment. i enjoyed the very beginning in terms of the setup, dispatching Thanos early on and all that business.

Everyone got their big telegraphed moments in the end, so the final battle felt very by-the-numbers, until the absolute last moment w/Iron Man. I thought the part where all the ladies banded together in the big battle at the end was cringe-worthy, like a moment of intended positivity and strength that came off as pandering instead.

Tony Stark's last scene was a good one, i liked it for it's low-key brutality and finality. I liked the Cap'n getting his second chance w/Peggy.

i was kind of joking around when i said these films always end with a giant smoldering enemy spacecraft slowly crashing to the ground but i guess maybe it's not a joke after all.

it was a good funhouse ride. i assume that there will be another 20-30 of these things coming out in the next decade.

Xpost he was Pakistani

I apologize. That changes everything.

Yesterday and Blinded By the Light looked equally MOR, and both got good reviews, but the former did well and the latter didn't. Who knows.

Yesterday had a much bigger marketing push, from my POV. Also Beatles are way more popular than Springsteen, ofc

I thought Blinded by the Light looked potentially good (for that kind of movie), but I didn’t go see it. I’m sure I’ll see it on TV at some point.

Is Pugh Yelena Belova in the Black Widow movie?

Just saw this Alan Moore interview making the rounds:

I think the impact of superheroes on popular culture is both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying. While these characters were originally perfectly suited to stimulating the imaginations of their twelve or thirteen year-old audience, today’s franchised übermenschen, aimed at a supposedly adult audience, seem to be serving some kind of different function, and fulfilling different needs. Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods, or (b) the relatively reassuring 20th century. The continuing popularity of these movies to me suggests some kind of deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest, combined with an numbing condition of cultural stasis that can be witnessed in comics, movies, popular music and, indeed, right across the cultural spectrum. The superheroes themselves – largely written and drawn by creators who have never stood up for their own rights against the companies that employ them, much less the rights of a Jack Kirby or Jerry Siegel or Joe Schuster – would seem to be largely employed as cowardice compensators, perhaps a bit like the handgun on the nightstand. I would also remark that save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.

Okay, THAT takes the cake as the most profoundly fucking stupid and blinkered take I've encountered in this non-debate. Bravo, Alan!

I love the smell of Godwin's Law in the morning

Like I get that you have plenty of justified ire towards the industry and maybe no small amount of shame/self-loathing for your prior participation but it's maybe a better look to voice that ire directly rather than burying it in an otherwise disingenuous and kinda shockingly uninformed argument about another thing entirely.

Moore's comments are in fact extremely mild, merely prolix, with a fine rhetorical joke at the end (and were made over three years ago).

sic otm

Responses falling in nicely among party lines I see

if you catch the vapors over Alan Moore making a mordant joke that batheticises a fundamentally horrific intersection of real history & its mediation through pop culture, I have some bad news about the previous work & interviews of a man who was drawing a children's newspaper strip under the name "Jill de Ray" [checks watch] forty years ago

I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.

seems highly likely that Lindelof read this interview/quote three years ago and a lightbulb went off in his head about his stupid fucking TV show

Sounds like this is the first time it was published in English?

if alan moore thinks that comic books are fascist ubermenchen parables that indicate moral and/or emotional failings in its consumers i wonder what he'd think about this other guy alan moore who basically inscribed that particular narrative stylistically and is maybe more responsible than any other comic book writer for its aesthetic promulgation in the medium

maybe more responsible than any other comic book writer for its aesthetic promulgation in the medium

this seems like a stretch

Moore + Miller?

Frank Miller, for one, demonstrably worse for embedding actual cryptofascist politics in his comics

lol xps

i'll accept that he didn't act alone

lol u make it sound like he committed a murder. I think he just openly acknowledged - highlighted, you might say - some tendencies that were already deeply embedded in the medium. He didn't come up with the idea out of whole cloth, and other writers either trafficked in it or pointed it out way before Moore did (O'Neill + Adams' 1970s Green Lantern/Green Arrow springs to mind)

It all feels like a take that would have been smoking hot in 1986, and has cooled considerably in the decades since... but sounds like he didn't really have much to say about it anyway ("Frankly, I don’t think about comics that much, I don’t think of Watchmen at all, and the lasting impact of one upon the other is really no longer my concern.")

and *after* Moore other, much less scrupulous and creative people, really ran with it (Squadron Supreme etc.)

xp

i wonder what he'd think about this other guy alan moore who basically inscribed that particular narrative stylistically

luckily for you, he has expounded his criticisms of that guy at length since at least... 1988? when he had long finished his three-year career run of writing superhero IP, and was saying how bad The Killing Joke was before it even came out.

and is maybe more responsible than any other comic book writer for its aesthetic promulgation in the medium

a fine trick to achieve before his own birth

xp Squadron Supreme predated Watchmen. Moore mentions it in this 1987 interview: http://www.tcj.com/a-portal-to-another-dimension-alan-moore-dave-gibbons-and-neil-gaiman/

haha! well that's even better

i don't think the idea of superheroes is inherently fascist is my feeling even if it has increasingly become that. superman's origins at least seem to be anti-fascist (themes of immigration, protection of democratic liberalism, responsibility in power, obligation to the community + society) - just having a superpowered individual doesn't inherently make a fascist story. nb i was only 2yo when Watchmen came out so i'm looking back on this history having read many comics from over the century of the medium and to me there definitely seems to be a cruel fascist emergence circa Moore's (and Miller's) contributions to the medium. were they always there? maybe but clearly the opposite possibility has also been present.

fwiw i know this is an extension of the MCU conversation which i haven't really participated in but i'd like to say i've seen them all except some of the Captain America's, the new Cpt Marvel and like a half of a few of the ones i actually could not make it through (the new ant-man + wasp, one or two of the iron mans). my feeling is that they're too tepid to be fascist or anything really.

I don't think they're inherently fascist either, and I also don't think that (adults) who see superhero movies are necessarily clinging to their "relatively reassuring childhoods (or "the 20th Century"); or that there's a "numbing condition of cultural stasis" in modern popular culture... guess I don't agree w/Moore on anything here, lol

At least Scorsese didn't attempt to psychoanalyze the movies' audience (beyond noting that "people like theme parks," or whatever)

just having a superpowered individual doesn't inherently make a fascist story

I suspect Moore's contention is that it is, actually.

I'm not sure I entirely agree tbh, but I can see the argument - just in how the superpowered individual is inherently set apart from non-superpowered masses, making them uniquely responsible and capable, their existence automatically sets up a hierarchy with a power imbalance (similar to the basic cop POV: everyone who is not a cop is either a criminal or a victim, etc.)