Hopefully Disney will cut the political sermon from the next movies. I've just watched "Eternals" and couldn't believe it's a Disney movie.
Eternals has a scene with two characters having sex on a beach. Spider Man Homecoming has a gag where Ned says he's watching porn on his laptop. In She Hulk, a key plot point is she's filmed having sex and the video is then broadcast.
If they want to make Marvel for teens and older, then by all means. But they clearly market the franchise to the under-10 crowd, and the content above was not subtle. It wasn't written to go over the little ones' heads... it's in their face.
But the sexual content is unexpected and random. She Hulk is "hulk for girls"... and one episode is about revenge porn. As a parent, that's pretty awkward.
Note that my complaint isn't about movies having sexual content. It's that 95% of Marvel movies don't have overtly sexual references, and then a couple suddenly do, within the same sub-franchise. The right way to go is like Jessica Jones (on Netflix), which was a Marvel series but it was very clearly marketed for adults.
That the protagonist is a woman doesn’t mean it’s for girls btw.
If you’re looking for a more child focused Marvel series with a female protagonist, Ms.Marvel would be it.
The Marvel episodic content is (with the exception of Falcon and the Winter Soldier) is a lot more diverse in style content than the films, and unapologetically so. This is where Marvel is experimenting and providing a more varied range of content.
Yeah, I didn't really mean that the show is "for girls", but just that here was a new female-protagonist show. Ms. Marvel was fantastic, by the way (for many reasons).
I didn't notice the TV-14 on She Hulk at first, but did catch on pretty quick that the series leaned more mature. Still, the Avengers movies dropped all the overt sexual references after Iron Man 2 and became more "kiddie-friendly", so I find it odd (and frustrating) to have the maturity level vary within the same set of characters. That is my problem. In the other mega-franchise brands (Star Wars, Pixar, Disney) you know the maturity and sensibility to expect.
Streaming/episodic is much lower budget so they take more risks to try and bring in a different set of audiences that their films weren’t pulling in. My wife for example doesn’t care at all for the films, but really got into Wandavision and She-Hulk because the premise was more interesting to her.
I think the safety of the films might also disappear soon too as China and a few other countries recently rebuffed them. Marvel has tried very hard for years to be very China friendly because it’s a huge market, but recently with Shang-Chi they got blocked. So now they’ve stopped pandering to a more conservative market.
Coincidentally the big up and coming market is progressive youths and I think you’ll see a lot more topics that speak to them (or at least what a Disney exec thinks does). I don’t think Disney gives a crap about being progressive for the morality of it, but after they’ve had a pretty bad few years at the hands of conservatives (China, Florida gay rights etc), they’re now realizing this progressive market is ripe for the picking.
I think She-Hulks tone comes firmly from that pivot. So I suspect what is traditionally seen as child friendly values will see a down turn in their big projects.
That said, media is both a reflection of us and we are a reflection of it. So I think what topics will be considered child friendly will also change dramatically over the next few years.
Also there’s straight guys on there who were just fine. Wong and Matt for example were issue free. So was Bruce and a ton of extras.
A lot of the women on the show weren’t the nicest either, like Titania and the friend whose wedding she went to.
Matt, i.e. Daredevil, was reduced to carrying his shoes in his hands in a “walk of shame” (his shoes are uncomfortable heels? He feels shame after sex with a fellow lawyer?), because he’s a sorority girl now.
Bruce, who spent two decades learning to control his inner Hulk and multiple times watched friends die in service of a higher calling was upstaged in 5 seconds by a girl who told him what real anger is because she gets catcalled and asked out on dates by people she doesn’t find attractive.
Whatever boys are supposed to get from this show, they’re probably not getting it. Or perhaps boys are getting exactly what the writers want them to get.
Matt had a good time and then they made a casual joke that you’re reading far too much into.
Regarding Bruce, they had to short circuit her origin story. Nobody wants to see her go through the exact same motions.
Regardless, it seems the show was not your cup of tea. That’s fine.
There’s plenty of straight men out there who enjoyed it, and we have enough shows pandering to our male egos that having one fun show focused on a woman isn’t going to upset my balance of whatever it is you think one must get from a show.
That's disingenuous. I reject this show for the same reason women reject a show that fails the Bechdel test. It's full of caricatures of men that exist only to confirm the protagonist's (i.e. head writer's) view that men are either toxic leering creeps, oblivious privileged mansplainers or idiotic adult children.
Shockingly the men who played the villains weren’t portrayed as good people. So were the women who were the villains.
Maybe that should start an awkward conversation then? Revenge porn and sending naked pictures to other “friends” is happening in middle school
TBH I'm a little confused by this claim, why do you think any of the marvel movies or shows are targeted to kids younger than 10? I'm pretty sure basically every MCU movie has a PG-13 rating, which is definitely a deliberate choice they made. Certainly the ratings are just a suggestion, but I don't feel like they're making any attempt at targeting kids younger than 10, they have completely separate shows like Spidey that target that demographic and (AFAIK) have nothing to do with the MCU.
* Merchandise targeted at little ones. Toys, costumes, Lego…
* Avengers Campus in Disney California Adventure, next to all the kiddie IP
* Precedence: No f-bombs in the films, no blood, no sex, etc
Beyond that, many of those things are also collectables, so a lot of that stuff is not _just_ for kids. But kids who know the characters will enjoy them even if they don't specifically know the MCU versions.
> No f-bombs in the films, no blood, no sex, etc
I agree to an extent, but you basically just listed the requirements for a PG-13 movie, not whether a movie is for ages younger than 10. They definitely earn a PG-13 rating, many of them have (sometimes less than subtle) sex jokes, a few have brief sex scenes, they do have some blood and a few gruesome character deaths (for kids), and all of them have a fair amount of swearing (much more than I'd let my young daughter watch). I feel like you've just equated anything that's not R rated as "targeting kids 10 and under", ignoring the middle area that is PG-13.
You might be shocked that there are action figures for a mass murdering vigilante (The Punisher), a homicidal maniac (Joker), a guy who literally killed dozens of kids (Darth Vader), etc
He feels guilty that the chain of technological progress eventually leads to Hiroshima, but I don't think everybody would agree that it's his responsibility.
The new shows also have had decent viewership numbers too even when introducing completely new characters or scenarios.
What we all seemed to like about the show was that it was lighthearted and funny, without overly dour world ending scenarios. It was clearly written with women involved because a lot of the humour was both targeted and different, which as a guy, I enjoyed because there were a ton of really great subversions of traditional male tropes in writing.
I liked that it was basically Ally McBeal.
She-Hulk definitely appeals (or tries to) to more politically/socially progressive individuals.
“The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” is a story about talking magical animals, and is for kids. And therefore obviously has no hidden motives behind the story.
Let's go further back to any of the old Disney films, came from fables, moral tales of old. In fact what piece of media outside of the most boring and bland ever are not a tale to learn, think or expand your thoughts? Is that not a sermon?
I think it does when it's "in your face" like the latest movies. It feels like a kind of propaganda that I'm not interested in. I just want to enjoy my time and watch a f*** good and entertaining movie not a jehovah witness sermon or a diversity soup.
I'm not sure why you expect Iger to do that, he is 100% responsible for Disney movies and animations cultural shift and decided that one group of people are the audience they want to focus on and pander to, probably because it makes them more money than the alternative. Purely a profit driven decision. This is just the way it is, at the end of the day, money talks.
Chapek is no different, but "optics" were against him as he mishandled the PR aspect of the pandering.
That kind of preachiness is there to stay, at least until there is yet another cultural paradigm shift.