'The Marvels' has the worst opening weekend ever for any MCU film at $47M
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
But I think a larger cohort of people have realised that, no, actually people were not slamming these movies because everyone is anti-progressive.
The only issue now is that Disney owns half of all media, so if you like movies or want to go on a date or take the kids to the cinema, you don’t get a seriously large variety.
Loki was truly excellent though, so they can do this; they just choose not to make complex and interesting stories and characters.
Where do you go after Thanos wiping out half the universe with the flick of a finger? Thanos 2.0 wiping out 2/3rds of the universe? Who gives a shit. Deadpool is invincible. Scarlet Witch is basically a god. So is Vision. Loki is literally capable of time jumping at will while the universe disintegrates around him. There’s only so much you can lean on zany characters like the Guardians of the Galaxy before they jump the shark too.
All the good TV shows either ran their course (Agents of SHIELD), or were prematurely canceled like Punisher and Luke Cage during the Disney handover. Seriously, what now?
They just keep escalating with Loki. He Who Remains is another one of those deus ex villains that they’ll have to one up even further. Based on the season 2 finale I can’t even tell if they want a season 3 or if thats over too.
/rant
Some terrible shows aren't progressive at all.
There are definitely cases that people morally blame audiences as a false cover for a bad movie, but there are also people who can't enjoy great movies if they can find any progressive meaning in them and make a career about ranting about it.
>but there are also people who can't enjoy great movies if they can find any progressive meaning in them and make a career about ranting about it.
the problem is that being 'progressive', whatever that means today, shouldn't come before making a good movie when the goal is.. to make a movie.
No one would have cared about any of Kubrick's social messages if they hadn't been wrapped in spectacular cinema.
the 'life and times' are inexorably twisted into the cinema, but some people want to just sit back and watch robots shooting lasers at each other without being reminded constantly that the world is an unjust and uncivilized place outside of the silver-screen.
I think that there is a general fatigue among spectators in the cinemasphere for the burden -- which isn't to say that 'crusading in popular media' isn't an important concept, but rather to say that a fatigued audience will be less likely to lend an ear.
Its that they make something as generic and “safe” as possible, then put women, minorities or homosexual representation in the movie very late (after writing maybe) and it becomes forced.
Then when the movie bombs for being uncreative and forced they claim that it’s because of racists or misogynists. Because a few people genuinely are racists and misogynists it masks all the criticism and they can blanket deny that theres any issue.
Someone on Twitter likened Loki to a really expensive version of Doctor Who, and based on what little I know of that show, I can see that. The cosmic time-jumping sci-fi plot is all nonsense and ancillary to the characters, who are elevated (more than the show deserves) by the talent.
It also reminded me of Terry Pratchett novels, which usually devolve for me into arbitrary magical/fantasy illogic three quarters of the way through deus ex machina style, but the strong characterization, the concepts, and the comedy salvages it.
It has nothing to do with 'progressiveness'. Wall St. ate Hollywood. All the major studios are run by investors who reduced everything to a game of metrics. Major studios don't 'create' movies anymore. They manufacture them. The executives running these companies have simply lost sight of the forest for the trees and are now at the throwing poop at a wall and seeing what sticks phase.
great acting by Tom Hiddleston & Sophia Di Martino and excellent chemistry
Superb writing
Wonderful action and better than movie quality special effects.
Many of the other MCU shows & movies are similar in that they have a strong lead, talented villians, excellent writing, easy to understand plot and devices, and great special effects. If we go over the historical heroes and villians across MCU, the vast majority have great presence and we see some phenoms showing up even in bit roles. The MCU has really been a Cornucopia of Who's Who in Hollywood that has acting talent.
Unfortunately, Brie Larson and Teyonnah Parris are not comparable talents to Scarlett Johansson or Elizabeth Olsen, and though I think Iman Vellani is quite talented she is not as experienced as an actress yet. I view the casting of Brie Larson in the role as an epic failure that has led to the rejection of the movie, and her role. She is not comparable to the highly talented folks in the MCU, and I think the only fix is recasting the role.
Even in captain marvel she is consistent- the issue is the writing makes her a smug self-centered person with no growth other than gaining even more confidence.
Its exclusively a writing/directing problem.
The hate got directed at her because she was the lightning rod for the movie, and she had a couple of awkward interviews and made a few really alienating comments about the franchises core audience and their relation to the movie.
But she is a good actress.
Not true, you just need to watch movies at home. I brought my girlfriend over to my place and showed her "Alien" and "Aliens" (she had never seen them) and she loved them. Why bother watching new junk when there's SO many wonderful classic movies you can watch instead? And you can get an absolutely huge flat-screen TV these days for not that much money. Who needs a cinema?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1iiFYDAxv4
Get ready to drown in video game content in quantities that will dwarf superhero comics, which are adapted by only a mere three studios.
I mean, they're already greenlighting nearly twenty Mattel based projects just because of Barbie (https://www.insider.com/all-upcoming-movies-mattel-toys-barb...), it seems like Hollywood hasn't come a long way from the video's intro anecdote about how the original Batman movie ushered in a wave of adaptations of retro pulp heroes, rather than the more naturally lucrative choice of comic book adaptations. So who's to say they won't look at the similar success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and mine video game IP for adaptations?
At the same time, I think that other than for Daniel Kaluuya's 'A24-Type' Barney movie, most of the Mattel projects are not even going to see the light of day. It's a much more limited IP vein and once there's a box office bomb or two, the studios will quickly put the kibosh on the outlandish idea. Battleship, for instance, didn't exactly unleash a huge trend of board game movies.
Outside of the theaters, The Last of Us being a huge hit and a critical darling would seem to indicate that after decades, we might finally be seeing the end of the video game adaptation curse. The fact that there are any quality video game adaptations now, let alone successful ones, is itself a sea change. And as the video theorizes, maybe this isn't 2008 so much as it's the early '00s when the original X-Men and Spider-Man adaptations came out. A sign of the shift that is to come. But I firmly do believe it so to come. There are far more video games than there are Marvel/DC superhero properties. More genres, even.
I did recently beat the new Spider-Man PS5 game, and it was a great time. There were interesting twists on the story, characters I cared about, and the interactivity of it sets it apart from yet another film.
I did this for Star Wars... I had basically zero interest in the new movies or really anything but the Old Republic setting, but the SW TV shows are pretty engaging. They're so much more grounded than... Whatever was going on in the new movies.
I’ve heard a lot of positive comments about The Marvels though. I’ll probably see it in a week or two.
i’m also confused about the batman movies. how many reboots at this point? i’ve similarly given up here too.
Disney+ probably isn't helping. not being able to do promo work due to the strike didn't help, either.
Chris Hemsworth
Christian Bale
Tessa Thompson
Jaimie Alexander
Taika Waititi
Russell Crowe
Natalie Portman
Shoot... they even cut scenes with talents like Jeff Goldblum (Grandmaster), Peter Dinklage (Eitri) and Lena Headey.
Not remotely comparable.
Quality and volume.
Some of their recent efforts, like Loki season two and (apparently) The Marvels are quite good.
The problem is we already got burned by a number of poor entries like Thor: Love and Thunder and The Eternals (I mean, wow). It seems rare I hear about a good movie these days, even when they make one, but the bad ones get mentioned a lot. Or the ones that people just dislike for whatever ideological reason like She-hulk: Attorney at Law.
Much like with Star Wars they put things out so fast that it feels like you’re always trying to keep up. Even if DC and others didn’t keep trying to make superhero movies they would have oversaturated the market alone.
Combine those and it can feel like you’re always trying to keep up with a bunch of bad stuff in hopes of finding the rare good one. It’s exhausting.
And all of that is just Marvel stuff. But they’re also up against great TV, great video games, and everything else going on in the world. Trends away from wanting to go to movie theaters.
They drove the audience away with too much cash grabbing. Pure and simple.
I 100% reject the nonsense “go woke go broke” arguments, everything that’s going on can be explained without that perfectly, and there is no actual evidence to back it up.