Marvel Cinematic Universe by Slider_Quinn21 (Page 14 of 15)

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.

I watched both Ant-Man and Guardians Vol. 3.  I'll get into some quick spoilers so I'll set up spoiler tags:

S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

I thought this movie was...fine?  I thought the Quantum Realm was a bit confusing.  When we first see it, Janet is living by herself in some kind of cave?  Then Kang comes and they work together for a long time.  Then Kang gets his powers back and she gets rid of his power core...then we flash forward to the present.  I know she worked with Bill Murray in some sort of resistance before she was rescued.

But....were there people before Kang got there?  Did Janet not know there were other people and lived by herself because she didn't know any other way?  If so, did she bring the weapons she had (were they Wasp weapons?)

Or was Janet some kind of exile/recluse?

I know this type of story happens all the time where we get dropped into this fantasy universe and we meet all these societies and learn about their conflicts.  But this felt really confusing because I don't understand either side.  Some of the resistance people are basically humans and some are jelly monsters.  Are they both native to the Quantum Realm?  Are some of the humans other people who developed their own Pym particles?  Are Kang's people different?  Or were they created/cloned?

Also what a waste of William Jackson Harper!

I also am struggling to get Kang.  We have spent way more time with Kang than we did with Thanos, but I'm struggling to understand what makes Kang scary.  He's got powerful tech, but I would think the scariest thing about Kang is how much future information he knows.  But is his future info limited?  Because he was surprised a number of times.

But I thought he was good, and the movie wasn't boring.  I just thought it was fine.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3

I recently found out that James Gunn didn't like some of the character beats in the Avengers movies.  He thought Quill wasn't dumb enough to punch Thanos and risk half the universe (I think that's the weakest moment of Infinity War).  I know that he didn't love Thor being with the Guardians.  I don't know if he was a fan of the alternate Gamora.

So I feel like the story felt hamstrung by some of those ideas.

But I thought it had a lot of heart.  I felt like they probably could've left out Adam Warlock, who I felt wasn't developed much.  I thought the breakup at the end of the movie felt unnatural, but I'm interested to see what (if anything) they do with these characters going forward.  But the Rocket stuff was great, and I found myself to be emotionally invested quite a bit.  Every one of the characters had a nice moment.  I think James Gunn is great, and I'm very excited to see what he does with DC.

I'm shocked none of the Guardians died.

Secret Invasion...

S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S

I'm not one to buy into the idea that Marvel has jumped the shark, but something is wrong.  I don't know if they spread themselves too thin or they lost the ball or what, but their storytelling has gotten so much weaker. 

And I think Secret Invasion is a good microcosm of this.  I think Secret Invasion could've been a huge movie - essentially the spiritual sequel to Civil War.  The Avengers reunite to take on some big bad (not Kang).  With no Cap or Iron Man, the team is powerful but struggles, and one member of the team (Rhodey?) is killed.  They finish the job and rush to Rhodey and...he's a Skrull. 

So now you have Carol Danvers and Dr. Strange and Peter Parker and whoever else trying to figure out who else is a Skrull and what the heck is happening.  You have Sam Wilson trying to argue that he's the leader....is he doing that because he's a Skrull or because he thinks Captain America should have more respect?  You have all these new heroes - Shang-Chi and Shuri and maybe Kamala or Kate Bishop or the Eternals - who are they and where did they come from and are they Skrulls?  No one knows who to trust and everyone starts fighting and maybe by the end there are no more Avengers in any form.

Instead of being a huge $300 million+ budget movie, they made it a show.  Which I think is fine.  With the Super Skrull, there's an argument in-universe for why the Avengers cannot show up.  So you make it mostly unpowered humans Skrulls.  That's fine.  You save a ton of money on cast and effects and make it a modern spy thriller.

Here's the problem: they did nothing.  The show goes nowhere and does nothing.  People accuse Marvel of moving pieces around to get to the next movie, but I don't think this even does that.  It's just nothing.

- The whole premise is that Fury promised the Skrulls that they'd find him a home if they helped him.  The Skrulls held up their end of the bargain and Fury didn't.  And that thread goes....nowhere.  Fury never talks about why he didn't find them a planet or what he tried or where he failed.  And, again, this is something the show worked really hard to set up.  Episode 2 is called "The Promise." So this isn't something that they set up in the background and never followed through on (like how everyone assumed the scientist friend in Wandavision was going to be Reed Richards and the writers never meant for it to be an Easter Egg).  Fury never has to struggle with why he failed or even explain himself (the only time "he" even talks about it, he's being impersonated).  It's bizarre.  It's Chekov's gun except the gun is shown picture-in-picture consistently for the entire movie but is never used.

- Rhodey is a Skrull.  So what?  When?  No one ever asks him or confronts him.  Has he been a Skrull since Civil War (human Rhodey seemed to be paralyzed so that's as far back as it can go).  Did a Skrull fight Thanos?  If not, was he a Skrull during Falcon and the Winter Soldier?  If not, when was he a Skrull?  If he was only a Skrull in this appearance, who cares?  Same with Ross.  Was he a Skrull in Black Panther 2?  If not, who cares?  Rhodey being a Skrull only matters if he was a Skrull when we didn't know he was a Skrull.  If they showed Rhodey during the time period of Infinity War being a Skrull, that's interesting.  If he was only a Skrull now, the reveal is narratively pointless.

- What was Fury doing out in deep space?  It's been referenced a couple different times.  What was he doing?  Was it unrelated to finding the Skrulls a home?  There was plenty of time for him to talk about it, and he never does.  Is that going to be saved for a line in the Marvels?  If so, why wait for that?

- The Super Skrull.  It's a cool idea, but it shatters the whole point of not bringing in the Avengers.  If we were going to end up here, Fury should've called in the Avengers immediately.  And at the very least, Maria Hill was alive.  Now there's a huge threat out there.  That and the human-Skrull war that the president launched.  This feels like the Celestial from the end of Eternals - is this going to be a fairly big deal that no one ever talks about again?  How can Ga'ia exist in her current form.  She's a one-woman Avengers who should be a part of every team going forward.  Or she's a threat.  I dont' know how she can be in the background when she's literally the most powerful character in the universe now.

- Thematically, it's all over the place.  The main theme is supposed to be how immigrants/refugees should respond to a system that doesn't love them.  Do you work as hard as you can to make people love you (Talos' method) or do you fight for a place of your own (Gravik's)?  The answer is....nothing?  Talos died saving the president's life, and the president turned around and declared war on his people.  Ga'ia is forced to face this question and never comes to any sort of real conclusion.  It's another Chekov's gun that never leaves a drawer.

I wanted to like this show.  I loved the idea of telling smaller stories on Disney Plus to fill in gaps or introduce new characters.  But most of these shows are mediocre or don't go anywhere.  And it seemed like, at least at some point, these shows had a point.  Wandavision was great and led right into Multiverse of Madness.  You could get the backstory if you wanted, but the movie fills in enough gaps if you missed the show.  Falcon and the Winter Soldier leads directly into Captain America 4.  Loki into the Kang stuff.  Ms Marvel into the Marvels.  We get some character stuff so that we can get into the good stuff for the movies.

But if we're going to get stuff like this, I'm less interested.  And if stuff like this is also going to make the movies worse (Thor 4, Quantumania, etc) then what are we even doing?

What really bakes your noodle is when you realize that the 6 episode Secret Invasion had a 212 million dollar budget.

To compare, Captain America: The Winter Soldier had a budget of 170 million.  I know there are more hours of content and inflation over ten years, but do the two even remotely compare in effects, locations and star power?

These Hollywood studios are making crazy decisions, and I think it’s all part of some grift and con game.  Given how frequently it’s happening now, there has to be some significant profit in failing so obviously and publically.  If it’s tax write offs, Congress needs to close the gaping loop holes.

I am only three episodes into SECRET INVASION, a show so boring and uneventful and devoid of interest that I'm vacuuming while it plays (with headphones). But I can tell you exactly what's wrong with SECRET INVASION and it's totally obvious what's wrong with it: the SECRET INVASION storyline is a first season of a TV show that has no business being the first season of a TV show.

SECRET INVASION is about shapeshifters impersonating humans. This means that SECRET INVASION requires that the audience be highly familiar with the characters so that the potential that some or any or all of them are impersonators is compelling and disturbing; we need to know their behaviours and speech patterns and mannerisms and screen presences to look for discrepancies in the actors' performances.

On AGENTS OF SHIELD, we had spent over three seasons with the characters before we entered the LMD arc where we didn't know which team members had been captured and replaced with killer robots, so it was unnerving and frightening. On SECRET INVASION, our characters are people we barely know, so the potential that they are impersonators is hardly concerning.

Who is Nick Fury? Who knows? Fury was a limited presence at his height, more an informant making guest appearances and cameos than a main character. We don't know him well enough to tell if he might be an impostor or not. Who is Talos? Who can say? We've known him for one full appearance in CAPTAIN MARVEL and a cameo in FAR FROM HOME and since he was a shapeshifter from the start, we have no baseline for the character. SECRET INVASION is not the right story to tell without a well-established cast that has made regular, consistent appearances. SECRET INVASION would have been a great eighth season of AGENTS OF SHIELD. Instead, it's Season 1 (and probably the only season) of a Nick Fury show.

If a show about shapeshifting aliens can't use impersonation as a plot device for suspense and terror, then there's no point doing it. There is no point to doing SECRET INVASION. I would say the same about the original comic, too, where nobody that important ever turned out to be a Skrull.

The show has plenty of other problems too. It's very obvious that multiple showrunners have passed through this project because the series is clearly a clumsy mismash of different writers' mismatched drafts. The most obvious problem is the lack of exposition: where has Fury been since AGE OF ULTRON? Why didn't he find the Skrulls a home as promised? I can tell from the fumbled plots that don't explain these raised questions: the showrunner was fired in mid-scripting and didn't complete his work; the incoming writer had to whip up more pages slapdash based on actor availability and location bookings and wasn't able to work out the story.

It's interesting: when AGENTS OF SHIELD first aired, there was a certain air of impostor syndrome to it. It claimed to be a SHIELD show set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it only had a brief cameo from a supporting SHIELD character from AVENGERS (Maria Hill) and none of the superheroes appeared on camera. Later, it claimed to be set after THOR: DARK WORLD, but the TV budget sets and effects, when compared to the lavish production of a feature, made AGENTS feel like a fan film phony. Eventually, the tie-in to WINTER SOLDIER and a guest-appearance from Samuel L. Jackson closed the credibility gap.

In contrast, SECRET INVASION has Samuel L. Jackson in a lead role and SECRET INVASION feels like even more of a fan film phony than AGENTS OF SHIELD ever did, and it's not closing the credibility gap at all. Nick Fury in SECRET INVASION feels like a fake. The Fury we met in AVENGERS and got to know more in WINTER SOLDIER was a master spy. The Nick Fury in this show is an inept, incompetent spy. He runs about aimlessly in a public space and haplessly allows a terrorist to detonate explosives; he's facing shapeshifters but makes no plans for his comrades to easily identify him and gets his friend killed; his intelligence skills consist of demanding information from villains who have no reason to give it; he issues death threats to people who are perfectly willing to die.

Nick Fury should be written like Ethan Hunt in the latter-era MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies: a trickster, simultaneously an improvisor and a master-planner. Ethan Hunt is a well-written spy in the last three M:I movies because the actor and writer/director on those films were able to lavish time and creativity. Nick Fury demands the same level of attention, but SECRET INVASION is rushed hackwork due to some strange personnel changeovers behind the scenes.

SECRET INVASION does not seem to have had a consistent creative hand, so a lot of its choices are not fully mined or developed.

But even if SECRET INVASION had boasted a consistent creative team, SECRET INVASION as a series is just an exercise in self-sabotage. The concept demands a level of familiarity with the characters that would require at least one season to get to know them first. SECRET INVASION is unable to create any vivid sequences of impostorship because these characters are strangers or near-strangers. SECRET INVASION should have been a season of AGENTS OF SHIELD or a second season of FALCON & THE WINTER SOLDIER or a second season of MS. MARVEL or even a second season of WANDAVISION or LOKI. It should not have been the first season of anything.

Secret Invasion was so bad, Bob Iger has to be dumbfounded.  The Marvels is going to follow right up along that path of trash.

So a ton has come out post writers strike about how Marvel does their productions (specifically TV).  It seems that they treated their TV shows like expanded movies.  No show bibles.  No showrunners.  Just (mostly movie) executives that were in charge of making sure the shows were good.  No pilots.  They'd greenlight an entire project, let it shoot, and work on fixing it with reshoots and post.

Now for a 2-hour movie, that works.  Let a creative make a movie and reshoot stuff that doesn't work.  You can cut out scenes that don't work, characters that don't work, plotlines that don't work.

For a 6-hour TV show, it's much harder.  Secret Invasion and Falcon and the Winter Soldier have obvious reshoots to remove/reshuffle plot lines, and it doesn't work.  There's too much to unwind and even with shifting episode lengths, it's way easier for it all to turn into a mess.

Example - the Daredevil show.  They greenlit it and the production shot at least 4-6 episodes.  When executives took a look at it, they were horrified that it wasn't the gritty, action-oriented show that they were expecting.  Matt doesn't even wear the Daredevil suit until episode 4.  It was more of a courtroom procedural than season 4 of Netflix show.  They're apparently throwing it all away and reshooting a ton (all?) of it.

But how does all that get done without the executives knowing?  Did no one read any scripts?  Is there no one monitoring what's being written or shot?  There's allowing creatives to make something they want to make, and there's sheer irresponsibility.

They're fixing this, but I'm worried they're going to overdo it.  They're going to start doing pilots, force writers to write show bibles, and focus on multi-season stories.  Which is fine in some cases.  That's basically TV 101.  But I think some of the allure of the Disney+ is that they can introduce characters like Kamala Khan and catch us up on 2-3 movies worth of character development and then let them show up.  Or to explain how Scarlet Witch is the villain of Dr. Strange 2.  Or to explain why Sam is Captain America without having to spend an entire movie on that.

Loki works as a multi-season show.  Wandavision worked as a one-off.  Werewolf by Night worked as a special movie event.  We don't need four seasons of Secret Invasion or Hawkeye.  We can do both.  I hope they realize that before they go too far the other way.

This is hilarious as Loki takes another big step into sanity and being a viable long-term protagonist as opposed to a villain... but it's also a bit of a retcon (to me). My impression was that, in AVENGERS, Loki was under the influence of the Mind Stone and that it was taking all of his insecurities and frustrations and pushing him into a deranged state. At least that's what I remember. LOKI, not unreasonably, takes the view that Loki has to be responsible for his own actions to be responsible for his own growth.

Or maybe I remember wrong. I wasn't a very big fan of the AVENGERS movie despite everyone else loving it.

My understanding is that in THOR, Loki is lost in space and presumably encounters Thanos who suggests an alliance and gives Loki the scepter with the Mind Stone. In AVENGERS, there seem to be a few scenes where Loki isn't entirely on board with the Mind Stone's influence, particularly where Thor points out the chaos that Loki has unleashed.

But I'm actually not sure LOKI the TV show forgets that. Noticeably, Loki is only a few days removed from AVENGERS in the LOKI series, but his characterization has shifted from 'cackling supervillain madman' to 'amoral scoundrel' very suddenly while flat-out admitting that he hurts people because he feels weak and putting a scare into someone makes him look stronger than he feels.

The second season of LOKI is, what, a week since AVENGERS? And Loki has gone from being a nutjob ranting about how everyone's a peasant to be ruled to consoling a police officer who lost his temper and suggesting some pie to calm down, and Loki is also no longer easily bated into violent tantrums.

That said, thinking about it, maybe Loki has never really been aware of how the Mind Stone affected him.

I've been reading MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, an unauthorized history of Kevin Feige's Marvel Cinematic Universe by journalists Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards. It starts with Marvel in bankruptcy and Feige being an assistant on the X-Men movie series. It provides an in-depth journey for Feige and Marvel from Iron Man to The Falcon & The Winter Solder and Wandavision at which point, the journalists have had fewer years to interview the participants and it gets quite vague. But some takeaways for the moment:

The ABC, Hulu and Netflix shows are addressed one chapter of this 30 chapter volume. The dismissiveness is telling. Basically, the Marvel CEO at the time, Isaac Perlmutter, set up a Marvel TV division within Marvel Entertainment that was separate from the Marvel Studios film division. Feige protested the MCU becoming weekly episodic TV instead of massive feature film events.

But Perlmutter wanted TV ad revenue profits and went ahead with the TV division despite Feige's concerns. Perlmutter had Marvel Studios' hire, Joss Whedon, commissioned to produce Agents of SHIELD. Feige protested his Avengers II director being distracted by TV and Perlmutter blocked from Feige from any TV involvement.

Perlmutter situated the Marvel TV offices far from Marvel Studios, and forced Marvel Studios to grant access to Jaimie Alexander (Sif), footage from The Winter Soldier, Samuel L. Jackson, and the Age of Ultron tie-in. But after Perlmutter was removed from authority over Feige, Perlmutter couldn't force anymore crossovers and Marvel Studios refused to tie in with the Netflix shows.

There also seems to be some sort of conflict between Joss Whedon and Kevin Feige that has made Feige unwilling to use Whedon's characters on Agents of SHIELD. It may be that Whedon agreeing to do a TV show was viewed as a betrayal of Marvel Studios or some other conflict tied into Whedon being revealed as an abusive boss, but Feige is noticeably steering clear of any of Whedon's original creations.

Perlmutter was cited as having a strong hand in the Marvel Creative Committee that oversaw and controlled the MCU films from Iron Man to Iron Man III. The Creative Committee was infamous for blocking female-led films and prominent female superheroes or supervillains, and it was peculiar, because that committee included comic book talents like Brian Michael Bendis and Joe Quesada who are not, to my knowledge, misogynists.

The book uncovers how Perlmutter was using the Committee to block any characters and films that Perlmutter didn't believe would lead to toy sales, and Perlmutter did not believe that female action figures sold well enough to justify female superhuman characters or female leads, which is why the Committee was thrown out of Marvel Studios along with Perlmutter. This seems to have indirectly led to Joe Quesada and Brian Michael Bendis both leaving Marvel, having been dismissed from any involvement (and pay) in the feature films.

The film notes that Feige as a producer tends to have an attitude: "We'll fix it in post." Iron Man was filmed without a completed script, with special effects designers and directors and actors feeling out the story during filming and writers drafting scenes on the day they were shot, and then Feige would assemble the film in the edit bay and rework things with dialogue recording and digital alterations and limited reshoots.

Feige's improvisational inventiveness and flair for creativity crashed hard on Iron Man II, a film made in less time than Iron Man and therefore with less time to refine and rework. This approach yielded, on the whole, good and often great results from Thor straight through to Endgame. However, a shift in leadership at Disney when Bob Chapek took over, has seen Feige severely overstretched. Chapek wanted more movies more often and more shows more constantly. This saw Feige working not only on movies but also Disney+ shows; Feige was now expected to weigh in on comic books and merchandising and theme parks and whatnot.

The history also points out: at numerous points, Feige had some vital creative partners, but due to circumstances outside Feige's control, many have slipped away. Joss Whedon was to be a key collaborator in the MCU, but he left and seems to have been encouraged to stay away. James Gunn was expected to become a vital part of the MCU films, but then Gunn was fired off of Guardians of the Galaxy III. Despite being re-hired to the film, Gunn was not available to be re-hired in his Marvel producership. Victoria Alonso, a vital producer overseeing effects production, was abruptly terminated for reasons unclear. The excellent comic book writers on the Creative Committee were thrown out with Perlmutter.

Anthony and Joe Russo were alienated from Marvel and Disney due to Disney trying to scam Scarlett Johansson out of her pay. Feige is having to shoulder all these burdens from all these departures, and it's not easy to find successors compatible with Feige's approach. The book notes that the third Ant Man and the fourth Thor features were regarded as middling-to-poor, and it all stems from Feige's improvisational assembly tactics becoming a liability when Feige's team is depleted.

The book says that Kevin Feige is wonderful, but there are only 24 hours in a day, and there are simply too many movies, shows, comics and rides for one person to handle. The book declares that while Kevin can raise the quality of any project he touches, there are now too many movies and shows and that there is only so much Kevin to go around. The book ends on a somewhat pessimistic note, unsure if Feige is coming to the end of his path with Marvel... unless Feige is able to find new collaborators or if Feige willing to reinvent the way he works or if Feige manages to once again achieve the run of success he had from Iron Man to Endgame.

I'm not sure how much of that I agree or disagree with, but it's an interesting and informed perspective.

One thing that jumped out at me: the book reports that Samuel L. Jackson was angry during the filming of Avengers that Whedon had written scenes that called for Jackson to run. He was similarly displeased on Captain Marvel for having to run. He was relieved that his action sequence in The Winter Soldier involved sitting in a car. The book points out: Jackson was 60 in Iron Man, 65 in Avengers, and 74 years old in Secret Invasion.

It occurs to me that this could have been a huge problem in trying to present Nick Fury as an action hero lead in Secret Invasion or in most Marvel movies, which may be why Jackson's roles were always brief and aloof, and why making him an action lead in Secret Invasion was less than successful.

I guess... I never realized that Samuel L. Jackson was anything but ageless, probably due to movie magic.

Why isn't THE MARVELS financially successful? I think there are unfortunately a number of creative and marketing factors at play.

Well, there may have been too long a time gap between the film and its Disney+ tie-ins. The characters of Monica Rambeau and Kamala Khan made their full debuts in Disney+ TV shows. Monica was in CAPTAIN MARVEL as a child, but the adult incarnation only appeared in WANDAVISION. Kamala Khan was first onscreen in MS. MARVEL. WANDAVISION was two years ago and didn't lead into THE MARVELS. MS. MARVEL ran from June 6 - July 13 in 2022 and while it ended with a lead-in to THE MARVELS, it was over a year in the past when THE MARVELS premiered.

THE MARVELS may have been poisoned by forced synergy. Disney+ shows have a smaller audience than the mainstream moviegoing public. ENDGAME sold over 35 million individual tickets, LOKI reportedly streamed to 2.5 million households in its first five days, and MS. MARVEL reportedly streamed to 780,000 viewers in its first five days. THE MARVELS, in presenting itself as a movie with Monica, Kamala and Carol, may have given the impression that viewers who hadn't watched WANDAVISION and MS. MARVEL would have no interest in THE MARVELS.

Some have claimed that Disney has diluted the Marvel brand with Disney+ Marvel shows. They point out: ENDGAME was a huge release at a time when Marvel movies were all cinematic events of cultural significance. ENDGAME was one of three Marvel Studios releases in 2019. Marvel Studios 'only' released four movies in 2021, three in 2022 and another three in 2023. But from 2021 - 2023, Marvel released nine TV shows on Disney+. The argument is that WANDAVISION, LOKI, HAWKEYE and SECRET INVASION, by featuring lead Avengers characters from the films, made the films less special; films no longer seem like an event if their characters appear in view-on-demand shows.

I'm not entirely sure I'm convinced of this as these shows were fairly short, ranging from 6 - 9 episodes. But Kevin Feige might feel that the shows dilute the brand. Judging from the MCU: THE REIGN OF MARVEL STUDIOS book, Feige did not want the MCU on TV back in the days of AGENTS OF SHIELD and was very much pressured by Disney CEO Bob Chapek to produce TV for Disney+.

Speaking on a marketing level, THE MARVELS was definitely damaged by actor's strike. Brie Larson, Iman Vellani and Teyonah Parris couldn't make public appearances to promote Carol, Kamala and Monica. They couldn't appear in public showing off their sisterly bond on talk shows and at conventions; they couldn't post social media videos of the three of them hanging out as friends who adore each other; they couldn't show off the 50 megawatt chemistry of their onscreen connection.

But also on a marketing level, I think THE MARVELS was hurt by how Marvel never really gave Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers, a distinct and vivid personality that defined her in the cultural consciousness, and this is despite CAPTAIN MARVEL earning 1.131 billion at box office.

Carol Danvers suffers from an undefined personality. Slider_Quinn21 once said of Supergirl on the CW SUPERGIRL TV show: Kara Danvers (no relation) was defined by being 'nice'; there was nothing else to her character. I would argue that Kara was defined by being 'superhumanly nice' to the point where it was a legitimate superpower. Slider_Quinn21 was sort of right in that compared to the tormented warrior Oliver Queen and the neurotically hurried Barry Allen, the Kara character was far less distinct.

However, not every character needs to be written as a hypercomplex contradiction. Kara was a very simple, straightforward character who was defined by actress Melissa Benoist bringing charm, liveliness, humour and appeal to the role, much like Marty McFly having no characterization in BACK TO THE FUTURE but made dynamic through Michael J. Fox's comic timing and hilarious reactions to absurdity.

Marvel attempted something very much like the Supergirl template with Carol Danvers. Carol has amnesia and is defined by actress Brie Larson having an subtly militaristic bearing, an affable and lightweight charm that gives way to severity and forcefulness if pushed. The problem: SUPERGIRL, a weekly TV show, had plenty of screentime to let Melissa Benoist show Kara in everyday life and render her character with physical comedy and emotionality.

CAPTAIN MARVEL was a two hour movie, THE MARVELS is a 105 minute movie, and these feature films are not designed to let the audience spend an extended and regular amount of time with Brie Larson's body language, mannerisms, expressions and reactions. Where SUPERGIRL could let Melissa Benoist spend 30 minutes of the premiere being Kara Danvers and about 12 being Supergirl and still get the audience back next week, CAPTAIN MARVEL was juggling the Kree, the Skrulls, Carol's amnesia, Carol's lost identity -- so that by the time Carol gets something of her identity back, the movie was nearly over. Unlike, say, WONDER WOMAN, the CAPTAIN MARVEL movie did not present Carol Danvers with a strong identity or a distinct sense of what she respresents and what she stands for.

When WONDER WOMAN ended, everyone had a very clear sense of who Diana was: Diana is a warrior peacekeeper who loves the world and everything in it except for war. Diana lives for bringing peace into crisis. But who is Carol? What does she stand for?

CAPTAIN MARVEL fashioned her as a nearly empty vessel for Brie Larson's screen presence, and while Brie Larson is a magnetic, warmly endearing person, the amnesiac character she played meant she was limited in what she could do. WONDER WOMAN ended with Diana having endeared herself to the audience: she was the superhero who would not only save you but see the best in you and hug you. CAPTAIN MARVEL left Carol still rather blank, appreciated not for her vague personality but for how she would play a critical role in ENDGAME.

CAPTAIN MARVEL has been heralded as a smash hit because of its feminism and inspiring roles for women. It was wonderfully feminist and inspiring... but it also had a poor sense of geography in its action sequences, an overstuffed plot that limited Brie Larson's performance, a certain blandness in its overall direction.

I suspect that while the women-forward approach was good marketing for CAPTAIN MARVEL, it was successful at box office because CAPTAIN MARVEL was viewed as a key prequel to how ENDGAME would wrap up, so viewers enthralled by INFINITY WAR stirred viewers to watch CAPTAIN MARVEL, eager to see what seeds it would plant for resolving ENDGAME.

THE MARVELS doesn't have that advantage as critical viewing before an ENDGAME-level release (not that many movies do).

Ultimately, the success of CAPTAIN MARVEL may have been a bit of a mirage when it comes to Carol Danvers. Neither CAPTAIN MARVEL nor ENDGAME made Carol as personable and vivid as, say, Robert Downey Jr. in IRON MAN. Neither CAPTAIN MARVEL nor ENDGAME made Carol as dynamic and fun as Paul Rudd in ANT MAN or Chris Pratt in GUARDIANS.
Brie Larson is perfectly capable of being as endearing as Downey Jr. and Rudd and Pratt -- but the amnesiac character she was saddled with didn't allow her to make full use of her talents. And the marketing department had no ability to market Carol, Kamala and Monica because Larson, Vellani and Parris were on strike, no way to show the moviegoing public the fun, women-friendly, sisterly bond of these three characters with these three performers.

In addition, the film seems to have been edited to be as fast paced as possible. While Carol, Kamala and Monica have excellent chemistry throughout, there is a certain minimalism to the amount of screentime they get to just hang out and be; at one point, their interactions are compressed into a training montage. The movie survives it, but this lack of decompressed time with the characters also deprived the film and its marketing of more personal time with the characters.

As a result, there was not a huge audience hammering on the cineplex doors. There was only a very limited number of people eager to see THE MARVELS, eager to spend more time with Carol. There was only a very small audience who'd watched WANDAVISION and MS. MARVEL, who'd enjoyed Monica and Kamala, who wanted to see them on the big screen. There were only a few who were eager to join Carol Danvers on her cosmic sleepover adventure with Kamala and Monica.

Marvel movies have reached success with broad, mainstream audiences, but Carol's blandness and THE MARVELS being the culmination of two small screen shows meant it was making its audience narrower instead of wider.

As someone who loved Monica in WANDAVISION and adored Kamala in MS. MARVEL, I was so happy to see them with Carol in THE MARVELS. As someone for whom Brie Larson's acting strengths excuses any scripting weaknesses, I was delighted to see Carol back and with Monica and Kamala. But... I'm just one viewer. And right now, I can't imagine what someone who hadn't seen WANDAVISION and MS. MARVEL made of THE MARVELS. I have to think they would have been confused by who Monica and Kamala were, and would have been sufficiently confused that they would have stayed away.

It may have been better to just do CAPTAIN MARVEL II as Carol's story instead of tying it into two TV shows with a smaller audience than a mainstream superhero action film.

THE MARVELS ensures that audiences who haven't seen WANDAVISION and MS. MARVEL won't be confused by who Monica and Kamala are. But THE MARVELS is very much dependent on the affection and familiarity that was established with Monica and Kamala in the Disney+ shows. I do not think the movie re-establishes Monica and Kamala to the point where audiences who don't know Monica and Kamala will appreciate how they're finally having a slumber party in space with Carol. I think THE MARVELS is too short and lacks that decompressed time needed to really feel close to Monica and Kamala unless you already felt close to them from watching their multi-episode TV show.

I didn't give anyway any big spoilers in my review, just plot mechanics and SECRET INVASION issues.

S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S

Marvels wasn’t bad.  The first few minutes made me wince, but stick with it.  What impressed me was how much comic lore they stuffed in.

The body swapping Nega Bands idea of the Rick Jones era.  The adaptation of the comics crossover Operation: Galactic Storm.  The revelation of the Quantum Bands (which was handled in the surprising way the infinity stones were).  I was impressed too that the bands’ “curse” of consuming everyone who wears them was there.  The only people who survive are those who accept them instead of trying to harness them.

Even the quantum bands’ power of creating jump points is straight from the comics.  Quasar would use them to jump to different points in space by entering and exiting the quantum zone; and during one of those “quantum jumps”, a massive surge of power sent him instead to a parallel reality (Quasar#30).

https://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronoc … 0-31.shtml

The Marvels wasn’t perfect, but this was the most MCU flavor movie I’ve seen since Endgame.  No Way Home was great,  but it was really just a nostalgia gimmick and not a deep dive into comics lore.  The Marvels is worth the watch - just suffer through those first few minutes

The only thing that really bothered me about The Marvels was that we may not get Quasar now (one of my favorite characters); but even in the comics, there were two pair of quantum bands in the universe

Actual Spoilers This Time

Kamala trying to do a Nick Fury impression with Kate Bishop was pretty funny. HAWKEYE was a joyfully hilarious TV show, and I hope THE MARVELS bombing at box office doesn't mean we won't get YOUNG AVENGERS with Kate and Kamala and Cassie Lang from ANT MAN and Harley from IRON MAN III and Billy and Tommy (Wanda's kids from WANDAVISION).

**

Monica ends up in the FOX X-MEN universe with Kelsey Grammer on a break from FRASIER reprising his role as Beast. DEADPOOL will feature Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.

What is Kevin Feige planning?

I am sick at home and watched the VENOM movie, which I didn't see when it first released in 2018. It made no sense to me: Venom is an evil version of Spider-Man. How are you supposed to do Venom without Spider-Man?

But I liked this movie. I was grudgingly impressed by how actor Tom Hardy's idiosyncratic twitchiness turns Eddie Brock into a struggling, frantic, moral, reckless journalist. I was grudgingly appreciative of how Venom is presented as an alien parasite from a horror movie whose bodily possession and eventual symbiosis with Eddie is played for terror and amusement. I was grudgingly admiring of how the Venom concept was reconfigured from dark mirror image of Spider-Man to a horror monster who falls in love with humanity and becomes a superhero. I was grudgingly entertained by the insane action sequences where Venom engages in chases and battles and drags Eddie along like a puppet.

Tom Hardy is a brilliant actor and director Ruben Fleischer did an impressive job at reimagining Venom as a copyright that had to function without Spider-Man. I still don't understand what Sony is playing, creating a Spider-Man cinematic universe with his villains and supporting cast (VENOM, MORBIUS, KRAVEN, MADAME WEB), but... VENOM is a fun movie. Maybe it doesn't matter how tired or fragmented a copyright is so long as it's given to talents who really embrace the material?

Sony are making Spidey-Verse movies because they have little choice.  Their agreement with Marvel from over two decades ago now is not expansive, but you also have the issue that Tom Holland is not going to do Venom movies.  Why would he?  He's done far better for himself as part of the MCU at Disney.  The first Venom was well-received, but the sequel was not, and I shudder to imagine how bad the third one will be. 

Majors' issues are part of it, but his character/portrayal is just not very good.  Frankly, he was somewhat charming as the whimsical "He Who Shall..." guy in Loki S1, but stunk up the joint in S2 and his Ant-Man 3 role was poorly received.  Makes sense to cut and run, but MCU seems entirely listless and dead inside.

Holland will appear in a Venom movie because Sony desperately needs him to.  Sony is making a valiant effort to generate a shared universe with the scraps they have left from their Spider-Man deal, but they almost backed out of the deal with Marvel already.  And I assume if Madame Web, Venom 3, and Kraven the Hunter (ALL REAL MOVIES) all bomb, Sony will just cut an enormous check to Holland to have him essentially do for Venom what Downey Jr. did for Spider-Man Homecoming.  He'll do a couple scenes out of costume and the rest will just be the Spider-Man CGI model.

I can pretty much tell you how I think they'd do it too.  It will be "Sinister Six" or something, and the plot will be Venom, Madame Web, Morbius, Kraven the Hunter and I don't know who else (Spider-Woman? Scorpion from Homecoming?  The Vulture?) teaming up to fight whoever the biggest villain that Sony has the rights to.  Let's say Hobgoblin.  And that will be the movie.  But there will be a couple of scenes where Tom Holland (out of costume) will interact with Tom Hardy and let's say Dakota Johnson.  Not as Spider-Man and he doesn't know who they are (Madame Web knows).  And in the finale of the movie, Spider-Man (in costume with voice over from Holland) shows up (with a big shot of him web-swinging and landing directly in front of the main characters) and has a misunderstanding with the main characters.  He has a quick fight with Venom, he throws a punch or two at Morbius, he says something to Vulture maybe.

Then Spider-Man realizes the Hobgoblin is the problem and leaves to go help civilians or something.

"You go save them," Eddie Brock says before the Venom mask reappears.

"This guy is ours" Venom says.

Spider-Man leaves and doesn't reappear.  But Sony will absolutely market this as "Spider-Man vs the Sinister Six" and call the movie that.  They'll put every second of Spider-Man / Tom Holland footage in the trailer, and people will be really disappointed.  "Sinister Six" will be an in-joke inside the group "What are you trying to do, make a super group?
Like the Sinister Six?" that won't make any sense outside of that one scene.

Yeah, I'm assuming that Sony just throws some crazy amount of money at Holland for a few days work, and I assume there will be some sort of indication that Holland isn't the MCU version.

They could also do the same thing with Maguire or Garfield, I suppose.  There's indications that the Sony universe is actually the Amazing Spider-Man universe.

It's hard to say. In terms of Robert Downey Jr., all accounts indicate that Downey Jr. has a highly improvisational approach to performance where he will actively ignore/replace the script on set and often want to rework it before he films.

This isn't going to work for animation where the dialogue recording and animation aren't done at the same time. I imagine he would just decline to be involved. And Downey's fee might be any number of times the budget of an episode.

Personally, I like Mick Wingert's voice as Tony. It isn't Downey Jr., but he captures Stark's arrogance and comedy.

I'm surprised that Chris Evans declined to voice Steve Rogers; there may have been scheduling issues or, as with Downey Jr., he or his representation didn't want him to set a low price on his voice acting that subsequent productions would consider his going rate. Josh Keaton did a nice job.

Scarlett Johanasson was at odds with Marvel at the time WHAT IF was in production. I found Lake Bell's performance pleasant but with some uncanny valley effect in her first episode, but then I stopped noticing it, and her emotionality in the closing Season 1 episodes really moved me.

My guess would be that Tom Holland's contract, being with Sony, didn't account for voice work on a Marvel TV production. But I'm very happy with Hudson Thames's performance.

The comment about Lake Bell not differentiating her voice enough is very funny. Bell was a modestly successful actress from 2004 onward: guest appearances, supporting roles. Then Bell wrote, produced, directed and performed in the 2013 film IN A WORLD where Bell plays a struggling voice actress who is forever living in the shadow of her father, a renowned voice performer while Bell is scrambling to make rent via accent coaching for more successful actresses.

Bell wrote IN A WORLD with a central joke being all the bizarre and random voices that Bell and Bell's character have inside her. It's very funny to read someone (probably not unreasonably) take issue with how Poison Ivy is an angry eco-terrorist and Black Widow is a master spy and Bell's voices for them are too similar.

My guess is that Bell gave the similarities between Ivy and Natasha no thought whatsoever: she played Poison Ivy in one project as a character and played Natasha as mimicry of Scarlett Johansson's voice but with Bell's own performance choices, and they ended up being pitched rather closely.

I liked Bell's performance in the Season 1 WHAT IF finale where she tells the Watcher that she is hurt by how he doesn't see her as a person, just as a story.

Here's her real voice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkdu-1mDWa8

There's a Tony Stark centric episode in WHAT IF's second season and Mick Wingert's Stark gets a very thorough showing. Wingert's performance is very close to Downey Jr. The main dis-similarity to Downey Jr.: Downey Jr. has a very improvisational rhythm to his performance because a lot of his lines are conceived on the spot as he performs. That wouldn't be present even if Downey Jr. were doing the voice in WHAT IF because animation's not a place where actors can improvise as what they say has to match the animation in progress elsewhere.

As of the second season, I honestly don't hear the difference between Lake Bell and Scarlett Johansson. I'm not saying that I wouldn't be able to tell if they were played side by side, but I can't tell from watching the episodes.

I think the voice acting is great.  Downey and Johansson have very distinct voices, and I'm sure a talented voice actor would have no issue doing a seamless impression.  I feel like the actor that replaced Chris Evans didn't nail it as much, but Evans doesn't have as distinct a voice.  I'm not sure you can do an "impression" of Evans, and it might sound silly if someone tried.  I assume the creative team picked the best voice for Steve and just had him use his normal voice.

Again, I don't mean to insult Wingert or Bell.  Nothing about the voice work was distracting or bad.  It's almost more distracting when it's a fake Chris Evans talking to a real Chris Hemsworth.  Then I spend time wondering if that's really Jon Favreau (and it is...he just sounds off even when he's playing normal Happy Hogan).

I think the production did the best possible job.  They got as many of the real actors as possible and filled in the rest the best they could.  I still just think it's a little weird that they get some people and don't get others.  I get Chris Evans not wanting to ruin the legacy of his Captain America with a cheap return or Downey not wanting to get paid minimum wage after he's made a fortune off his Iron Man.  But I have to assume a lot of these guys did recordings at home, and they're all playing alternate versions of their characters.  Maybe it's just the principle of not coming back.

*******

I watched all of What If...? Season 2, and overall it was really good.  I feel like maybe they played way too hard into the Captain Carter thing?  She's a fun character, and I'm glad she's getting some spotlight after she sorta got shortchanged in live action.  But she's the star of 1/3 of the episodes, and almost every line of dialogue from Uatu is about how great she is.  It's just a little odd that it's a show about endless possibilities and we keep returning to the same character over and over again.

Regarding DAREDEVIL on Disney+: Disney has remounted the series with two new showrunners with whom I have no familiarity. However, they have already made a drastic change: Deborah Ann Woll and Eldon Henson will be reprising their roles as Karen Page and Foggy Nelson. The two actors, who were not hired for the original and now shuttered Disney+ DAREDEVIL, have now been seen on set filming scenes with Charlie Cox (Matt Murdock).

https://thedirect.com/article/deborah-a … set-photos

There are rumours, however, that Karen and Foggy are only going to be in three of the 18 episodes. While that's disappointing, that's still three more episodes than they were in before.

Also, Marvel previously omitted the Netflix DAREDEVIL and all the other Marvel Netflix shows from their official timeline in their Marvel chronology book and on Disney+. This has changed: the Netflix shows are now part of the official timeline.

https://nerdist.com/article/daredevil-e … sney-plus/

I am 90 percent sure that Wilson Bethel (Bullseye) is going to be in the Disney+ show. Deadline reported it, but Marvel has declined to comment. However... given how this series has been in such a state of flux, I'm trying not to get my hopes up just in case.

I am not entirely sure, even now, if the Disney+ DAREDEVIL will spend much time following up on Karen, Foggy or Bullseye. The rumour is that it'll just be 1 - 3 episodes that focus on those characters and that Karen is only in three. That would be disappointing. But again, in the previous incarnation of the Disney+ DAREDEVIL show, these characters were absent.

There were even rumours that Karen and Foggy were killed off camera in the opening of the original first episode, resulting in Matt abandoning his Daredevil identity and focusing on his career as a lawyer. I'd be curious to get some hard facts on whether or not that were true and how something so offensive to Daredevil's fans could have been permitted to be filmed, or if the intention was that Karen and Foggy were in hiding, to return at a later date.

Certainly, in the 2006 comics, Foggy was brutally murdered while Matt Murdock, in prison after his secret identity was exposed as Daredevil, was trapped in his cell, listening to Foggy's helpless screams as Foggy bled out and Matt sobbed in his cell, knowing that he had failed everyone in his life. I think Foggy came back to life like four months later, revealed to have survived the stabbing and gone into witness protection. (A later storyline had a lot of doubt sown regarding Daredevil's true identity via Iron Fist putting on the costume while Daredevil was in jail, enabling Matt to resume civilian life; even later, another writer had a memory machine erase the world's memory of Daredevil's true identity.)

However, Karen Page died in "Guardian Devil" by Kevin Smith in 1999, and to my astonishment, the comic book Karen has never been resurrected. I'm always 4 - 5 years behind on my comic book reading because I wait for writers' eras to conclude. But I still check Karen's Wikipedia page every few months and Karen persists in being dead, still unresurrected by reality-warping gimcrackery or time travel hokum or ninja voodoo or whatnot. It's been 24 years... but I still think Karen will be back any day now.

Anyway. I'm relieved that Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson will reprise their roles, even if it's briefer than I'd like. And I certainly hope and think Wilson Bethel is coming back, but until there is an official announcement or set photos, I would be cautious.