Marvel Cinematic Universe by Slider_Quinn21 (Page 14 of 14)

Ike Perlmutter has failed in his bid to regain control of Marvel and failed in his second attempt to fire Kevin Feige.
https://deadline.com/2023/02/bob-iger-s … 235254540/

However, Disney plans to lay off 7,000 employees which is pretty terrible.

What have you disliked from Feige?

I have a lot of respect for Ike Perlmutter up to a point. Perlmutter hired Joe Quesada, a terrific storyteller, to become editor in chief of Marvel Comics, and Quesada turned Marvel Comics from a bankruptcy to being a desperately sought after haven of properties for TV and movies.

Perlmutter established a solid financial foundation for Marvel Studios to produce its own movies rather than selling the rights to FOX, Sony, Universal and whatever direct to video junkyard outfit produced those Captain America TV movies. Perlmutter hired Kevin Feige to run the film division.

Perlmutter is the reason why the MCU exists. Without him, Iron Man would still be a D-list character in some comic books that only Temporal Flux and I would read.

However, Perlmutter's contempt for content and insistence that a highly successful movie studio run itself like a student film operation was ridiculous, and Perlmutter trying to fire Robert Downey Jr. for offering to do more work on CIVIL WAR was absurd. Perlmutter's INHUMANS was a national embarrassment, Perlmutter's sexism and homophobia are shameful, and Perlmutter was rightly removed after AGE OF ULTRON.

It leads to me wondering why someone so disdainful towards artists and creativity hired Quesada to run the comics, hired Feige to run the movies and signed off on Robert Downey Jr. to do IRON MAN.

I think that when hired, Quesada was a middle-of-the-road editor, Feige was a middle management producer, and Downey Jr. was a disgraced actor who would probably work for scale. Perlmutter didn't care that he was hiring comic book fans; he saw that they would work really hard for relatively low pay.

Then Feige and Downey Jr. wanted to expanded on their successes and Perlmutter's controlling nature couldn't stand it. Disney executives, while as soulless as Perlmutter, thought it ridiculous that Perlmutter was trying to fire Feige and Downey Jr. when they, not Perlmutter, were the ones bringing in the box office.

Quesada is curious: he was clearly grateful to Perlmutter and when promoted out of comics to act as a creative consultant on the films, he followed Perlmutter's orders. Quesada once remarked that he was hired by someone with whom he had little in common and that it was an example to him of how people need to build bridges to accomplish anything.

When Disney sidelined Perlmutter, Disney also isolated Quesada from the film division. Quesada continued to offer consultation to the TV division, but in 2019, Feige was appointed the head of the TV branch as well as movies.

It looks like Quesada could have stayed on as a consultant or even taken a demotion to comics, but he elected to leave Marvel last year. I'm a big fan of Quesada, but a lot of Marvel comic book readers aren't, perhaps not recalling how badly Marvel Comics was run before Quesada turned the company from a nearly bankrupt operation into a shining gem of intellectual properties.

Anyway. Perlmutter absolutely had to go and I personally haven't disliked anything Kevin Feige's done since Perlmutter's era ended. Certainly, there are films that haven't been to my taste. CAPTAIN MARVEL should have been better than it was, but not every film can be a masterpiece. THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER's political commentary was so spineless as to be meaningless, but any TV show aiming not to offend can stumble into blandness.

MOON KNIGHT felt really detached from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it was a well-intentioned stab at telling its own story. WANDAVISION was brilliant and hilarious,

DR. STRANGE II was enjoyable, all the Feige SPIDER-MAN films have been a delight. Feige fought hard to get a BLACK WIDOW movie made and that was a great ride. Feige also let Taika Waititi go nuts with THOR RAGNAROK and LOVE AND THUNDER and gave us James Gunn unleashed with the joyfully ridiculous GUARDIANS films.

I think it's likely that any other Marvel creative chief could make just as many mistakes as Feige (or Quesada), but other executives might make them while having no real respect or appreciation for the source material and the characters.

I wrote a long rambling thing about Feige, but I ended up arguing against my own point.  I think my main point was that he's oversaturated the MCU market so it doesn't feel so much like an event.  It doesn't feel special as much anymore.  I was going to say that the D+ shows needed to serve the greater MCU more, but I think that they have.  I think where oversaturation has hurt the MCU, other than a loss of "specialness" is a decrease in CGI quality because Marvel is making a dozen projects a year instead of two.

But I prefaced my whole thing with talking about how much I like Feige and how much I respect what he's done.  So let's just leave it at that.  The argument I was going to make was either going to be forced or cliche - I think Feige is doing a great job.

*******

I watched Black Panther.  I thought it was really well done for what they had to do.  I won't get into spoilers, but while I thought it felt long (because it's very long), I thought it handled T'Challa's death with the weight it deserved.  It made me realize (again) what a big hole was left when Chadwick died.

Happy to speak more to it when more people have seen it.

*******

I'm going to try and see Quantumania before it hits Disney Plus, something I failed to do the last two movies.

I know that titles, especially in the MCU, don't necessarily mean that they're borrowing from similarly-named comics....but wasn't Karen crucial to the Born Again storyline?  Or am I thinking of something else?

At the same time, maybe the storyline is that Matt gets exposed as Daredevil and has to go on the run.  Maybe it doesn't take place in New York.  I think there are some reasonable explanations for them not to be involved story-wise.

Of course, there are very easy narrative ways to include those characters.  Maybe Kingpin strikes while the three of them are on an apple-picking excursion in upstate New York, and now they're on the run together.  It is disappointing.  I thought the three of them were very good together.

DAREDEVIL's third season was largely an adaptation of "Born Again"'s plot elements, albeit repurposed to being set after DEFENDERS and rewritten to suit the Netflix version of Karen Page. As of the third season, DAREDEVIL had used pretty much every usable aspect of the "Born Again" storyline and the unused aspects of that storyline wouldn't be applicable to the post-Season 3 versions of the characters.