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Comment by danielweber | Hacker News Reader

Am I a dork for noticing the mistake that the second Thor movie wasn't a prequel for The Avengers?

Unless I'm misreading the article, I don't think it says that Thor: The Dark World was a prequel to The Avengers. Rather, it says that the Thor movies were planned as part of the "Avengers initiative." The confusion arises from the phrase "set the stage for The Avengers." I think what the writer means is that all of these movies, including their sequels, were set into development as part of a single initiative, meant to culminate in the Avengers franchise.

Yes, the events of the second Thor movie take place after the events of The Avengers. But that may have been planned well in advance.

I am particularly amazed at the co-ordination of the movies and the TV series Agents of Shield. Way back when I was at USC professor Arthur Knight used to joke about movies "You can know when it will be done, or you can know it will be good, but not both." because of the challenges of managing a movie production schedule. That Marvel could pull off Thor: The Dark World, have it hit theaters when events in the TV series matched up, that floored me.

Yes, they are an incredibly well-oiled machine. An old friend and former colleague of mine is one of their producers and development executives, and I can say without hesitation that he works harder than anyone else I know in that business. Marvel is in a state of continuous production on all of its properties, all of which are centrally coordinated.

This wasn't always the case. Historically, Marvel has had different licensing deals set up at different studios: X-Men and Fantastic Four with Fox; Spiderman with Sony; etc. When it set about creating the Avengers initiative, it realized the logistical benefits of keeping everything under one roof. The Disney acquisition helped with that. The company still does projects under the terms of its legacy deals (see: the Spiderman reboots still being made at Sony, presumably at Sony's request, to exercise and thus keep its deal active). But the magic seems to be happening with the more centrally coordinated projects, like Thor/Iron Man/Cpt America/SHIELD/Avengers.

Not only that, but they did it a second time with Captain America: Winter Soldier.

Your right, not once but twice in a single TV season. That is seriously amazing planning.

I think lots of people would balk at those constraints, but Joss Whedon sees them and thinks "this is awesome!"

Which was the bigger tie-in, as the episode the week before ended with the already-released scene of Nick Fury's car chase, and the episode the week after dealt with the (very significant) aftermath.

For many reasons, it was one of the best moments in the series.

It is amazing but Agents of SHIELD did suffer due to that. Most of the episodes until the Captain America 2 tie over episode was very lackluster. Let's see how they will handle the new season.

How about noticing that the article tossed the tepid Ed Norton HULK film (Marvel film #2) down the memory hole altogether?

It does reference The Hulk in the context of the license to Universal. But Marvel regained the film rights in 2006 and Universal was just a distribution partner on Norton-Hulk. It was much more a Marvel Studios film than any sort of Universal-driven successor to Bana-Hulk.

Nor does it ever mention Agents of SHIELD by name. To omit the name after specifically discussing the TV appearance clauses is pretty poor form for a journalist, particularly one who dedicated so much ink to the "Universe" strategy.

But I guess facing Marvel's mis-steps just didn't fit a "Marvel is unstoppable" storyline.

Perhaps you should not assume shoddy work on the journalist's part. The nits you pick could have been created by editors prior to publication.

You're absolutely right. I was wrong to carelessly specify fault in the journalist, rather than simply faulting the piece.

However: If I had correctly identified that the piece was shoddy, rather than the journalist, wouldn't materially impact the points in my post. That's a nit.

Including Marvel's existing mis-steps would materially impact the points of an article recounting Marvel's lack of mis-steps. That is not a nit.

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