Oh, one "L", carry on.
I don't see it. Love and Thunder was nothing like Moon Knight, which was nothing like Ms. Marvel, which was nothing like Doctor Strange. Can you point out what you think was generic, or how Thor looks aesthetically the same as Doctor Strange?
I do think it's strange that phase 4 has more hours of content than phases 1-3 combined.
Eventually there was a huge comics industry-wide bust. But that was also tied to the speculator/collector aspect which doesn't directly apply to film.
Remove the Marvel bits from Love and Thunder or Doctor Strange, and they still stand on their own with entirely different art direction, thematic elements, conflict, and stories.
> they all look the same
See my previous comment. I don't see it. I can easily spot differences between each property, the same way I can spot similarities between any other two random non-Marvel movies. I suppose you're going to see what you want to see.
Of course the storyline was riddled with plotholes and was logically a bit messy and the movies ranged from great to not-so-great, but it delivered that incredible build-up-and-release that everyone was waiting for (I literally screamt, laughed, clapped and cried in that one movie alongside a packed theater)
But since that high, since that chapter closed beautifully, the new "phase" of Marvel needs a lot of the same world building from zero, but now, everything feels much more formulaic. Add to it, directors getting more freedom to be stylistically seperate (eg. the new Thor is more comedy, the new Strange had elements of horror) means that the fanbase has no coherent thread to hold onto.
Finally, just a reminder that most of us are now a decade older (and hopefully wiser ;)) and don't really want to follow movies + TV series which are now critical to even understand canon (eg. I had never watched any of the earlier MCU TV series, but never missed them, but I know if someone skipped Wandaverse, then the new Strange movie will be missing a lot of context)
Personally I still watch all of them and I even enjoy Ms Marvel, which got very badly reviewed online to be decent, but you have to consider it as its own stand alone story and the fact that it's targeted to a younger audience.
This was hard to me ESPECIALLY in comparison to Infinity War which was one of the best action movie I've ever seen in all this aspects, and all the build up they did for endgame.
Every time i see a comment like yours I'm like "wtf are people that blind"
At this point they're on such a conveyor belt that they do a bunch of the CG before shooting starts or they have a final script. But, again, that's not new, they've been operating that way for a while.
[EDIT] I write this as someone who's seen just about everything except a couple of the most recent films. To be clear, the overall project is pretty impressive, but part of why it's impressive is that they've managed to consistently be almost bad enough to be actually-bad, while still holding it together enough that they're not quite bad-bad, just... economical, profitable, and low-risk. And they do consistently manage to make entire films that hold together OK in terms of plotting, pacing, et c., which one might think wouldn't be impressive except... well, I'll refrain from mentioning my #1-with-a-bullet example of a high-budget recent-ish film (from Disney, even!) that completely fails at those basics to such a degree that it deserves to be studied in film class for its failures, for fear of veering into an offtopic flame war, but let's just say that's not a given so it's a bit impressive they've had essentially no complete face-plants over so many films.
Really? You needed this community to weigh in on pop-culture and movies? This needs to be flagged off asap.
Like what is this? Is this a karma ploy?
Loki was also very different and had a unique look.
Each one of these little series has been pretty enjoyable and different, and I found myself pleasantly surprised. The movies however are not my cup of tea and do seem repetitive and generic with some notable exceptions like Thor Ragnarok.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that some people here are simply feeling the vibe less right now -- it's likely because of the woman-centered vibe, and HN leans dudeward.
As a woman, I think this is great! :D But it also means that if that's not your thing (and it can be, blamelessly, not your thing!) the content is going to appear more "generic" (in the words of OP,) more self-similar, as we humans tend to notice variations and differences in things that appeal to us. Wines, clothes, cars, guns, teas, pens, whatever. If it fascinates you, it's gonna have depth.
But if it doesn't? You're gonna see an undifferentiated wash.
This is the mechanism behind why I can get hyper-technical in my kitchen -- I like food -- but cars, which one of my old boyfriends was obssessed with, all seem more or less interchangeable. Same-y. Cut-and-paste.
Because I wasn't into cars, I couldn't really tell them apart.
But since I'm into food, I see tiny details! I can ~go on~ about the specific differences in, say, grades of USA steak, they are so different lol
I watched Top Gun Maverick last week and it was so much better as an action/adventure film than the multitude of Superhero films released over the last 15 years. The ariel dogfights were a hundred times more exhilirating than anything in a Marvel film.
I’m getting bored, and this is coming from a former avid comic book fan (as a kid) who went f’ing ape shit went it became “real” via movies. First time I saw Iron Man I completely geeked out.
And that’s the problem. 15 years later, I’m bored. Other movies outside of the marvel universe continue to excite me. This very much feels like a stale relationship… it’s me, not Marvel? But then I saw this post and realized others may feel the same way.
I couldn’t even begin to suggest what they should try next.
So as long as the MCU can bring in 1.3 billion a shot (like the latest Spiderman) they would appear to have little incentive change what appears to be working.
(You probably noticed the 5D/Web5 discussions starting to tip finally ...)
What Marvel is releasing won't be what you're focused on as the adventure of life will be far more fantastic than anything we could ever put into a book.
And add a healthy dose of screaming in between each step.
One big external factor has been China as a market. That one is definitely on the outs
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_(2008_film)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Studios#Disney_conglome...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_the_Marvel_Cinemati...
At the end it's economics that dictate what goes out hand or not.
I’m going to watch the new Thor, but I’m not sure I have the time or energy to invest in catching up on all the stuff I need to watch to get the most from the Spider-Man/Strange/Wanda thread.
However I’m probably in a small enough group that Marvel see that as an ok trade off to make something rich and complex for the fans, which is fine.
The Temporal Consistency Agency find it convenient that the concept be regarded risible.
Time travel and multi-verses, at least for me, end up reducing the stakes of the movies and for me make them more cartoonish like Tom and Jerry. No matter what happens, you know Tom and Jerry will be back, good as new.
[EDIT] On reflection, I think the easiest paths to a fix would have been to either go campier with it, until near the end (as TNG or TOS probably would have done) or to go with a distinct, somewhat artsier film-sci-fi-drama tone in the storytelling and cinematography. Its tone is too similar to the rest of the season to work for that particular episode. Fine for the rest, but not quite a fit for that story.
As a viewer I'm getting sick of CG action. It's striking how we've gone from action scenes that are improbable, to action scenes that are completely impossible, in terms of the perfection with which humans execute their parts in them, not in terms of stuff like Sci-fi elements. You watch older car chase scenes in something like Bullitt and they're over the top, but not impossible, because despite using movie magic to string together separate shots into one long sequence a real human did actually have to do most of the driving, in a real car and using a finite amount of film—but are at like 1% the insanity and intensity of a car chase scene in a Marvel movie or Fast & the Furious or something.
There are little grounding imperfections and limitations in older action movies that CG and super-cheap digital shooting & editing have destroyed. I often check out for the interminable action scenes in Marvel films because they're just boring, for reasons both narrative and technical, which is the exact opposite of what an action scene ought to be.
I am confused why this is on HN though. Pretty sure it doesn't meet the 'What to Submit' guidelines.