Marvel Universe (Thar be spoilers ahead.)

[schild]

MCU is RDJ

Without him it's just the fucking runaways or something

(Though if they had the balls to do it, Holland and Wright could run the show for a solid 10-15 years).

[Khaldun]

He was just the 11 spices that sold the thing at the beginning. Now it can rise or fall without him. You either go on to make the Popeye's Chicken Sandwich or you make a "sadness pile in a failure bowl".

[schild]

Now it can rise or fall without him.

I... don't actually think it can. I think they got super lucky with a handful of kids outperforming all expectations (Holland and Wright, as mentioned - add Olsen to that list now) and they need to lean into those fast and stop dicking around with dumb losers like Mackie or Johansson.

But it will never function like it did with god damned actual iron man running the show.

[MahrinSkel]

Looks like Cumberbatch is going to be the cross-franchise glue for it now. Holland is too firewalled over in Sony, very limited in what else MCU he can appear in.

--Dave

[Khaldun]

They made a mistake with Cumberbatch, I think--especially in making him do an American accent. It's not a terrible mistake, mind you. He was fucking way better in the two Avengers films than in his solo. (Which mind you is also RDJ, who had one great solo as Iron Man and two pretty shit solos). They are gonna need a kind of emotional/narrative glue like Cap v. Iron Man (with Thor as a kind of add-on) in the next generation and I don't see it yet. Cap mentored Falcon, Winter Soldier and kinda Ant-Man; Iron Man mentored Spider-Man and War Machine and kinda Vision. Now what? Strange doesn't have any real connection any of them yet emotionally but he might to Scarlet Witch (not necessarily positively). Falcon America and Winter Soldier are obviously kinda the Black Widow-Hawkeye duo of a future team but they're pretty well cut off from anybody else and don't have the gravitas to sustain a team-level rivalry or alliance. Who knows with the new Vision. Black Panther isn't dead on screen but he's dead whenever we see Wakanda Forever, otherwise he'd be the obvious center of gravity. Thor is off in space and clearly not connected to anybody on Earth right now.

So yeah. I almost kinda wonder if this is going to be how they push the Fantastic Four into the middle--there are superhumans, there's a tradition of Avengers, but nobody's hanging together or seeing the big picture now that Tony Stark, futurist, is gone. Enter Reed Richards, also futurist. But if they're gonna play that, this Reed can't be "chilly distanced intellectual"--he's going to have to be "humane smart guy different from Tony Stark". Richard Feynman, basically--plays the bongos, sees connections no one else sees, flashes between passion and weirdness. Basically this Reed Richards needs to be the Tom Baker Doctor.

[Velorath]

Yeah I think they could have built a new Avengers around Chadwick. Without him, and without Evans or RDJ, and maybe not wanting to worry about constantly having to negotiate with Sony for Spider-man, I don’t know what team they can really build. Maybe just let the Avengers go dormant for a while as they try to nail down what they’ll do with the X-men.

They can’t try to force a build up to something like another Endgame because there’s just never going to be another one of those.

[schild]

who had one great solo as Iron Man and two pretty shit solos).

i've never seen you be so objectively wrong

watch them again

[schild]

I think there's a small understanding at Sony - at least among people who like money - that without the MCU their Spiderman is worth $0.

[Velorath]

I think there's a small understanding at Sony - at least among people who like money - that without the MCU their Spiderman is worth $0.

I might believe people at Sony were that smart if they weren't still fiddling around with their Venom and Morbius stuff. I think they've still got it in their minds that they can build up a shared universe of their own.

[Velorath]

Here's what they've got to build around at the moment:


People still around from Phase 1:

Thor
Hulk
Hawkeye
War Machine
Bucky
Jane Foster (set to become the female Thor)
Pepper (Rescue)
Nick Fury

Phase 2:

Wanda
Vision (more or less)
Guardians of the Galaxy
Ant Man
Wasp
Falcon (now Captain America)

Phase 3:

Dr. Strange
Spider-man
Valkyrie
Korg & Miek
Shuri (and Okoye, Nakia, and M'Baku)
Captain Marvel



Phase 4:

Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris). Technically introduced in Phase 3 but as a kid.
U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell)
Eli Bradley (Elijah Richardson)
Billy and Tommy (presumably would be recast if they return)

coming during phase 4:

The Eternals which includes comic book Avengers:
Sersi (Gemma Chan)
Black Knight (Kit Harington)


Shang Chi (Simu Liu)
Yelena Belova/Black Widow (Florence Pugh)
Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani)
Kate Bishop/Hawkeye (Hailee Steinfeld)
Cassie Lang (recast with Kathryn Newton)
Echo (Alaqua Cox)
Moon Knight (Oscar Isaac)
She-Hulk (Tatiana Maslany)
Ironheart (Dominique Thorne)


I don't know much about Elijah Richardson, but with Hailee Steinfeld and Kathryn Newton they're off to a pretty good start with the Young Avengers.

Not sure I need a replacement Black Widow but I can't argue with bringing Florence Pugh in, nor can I complain about Oscar Isaac as Moon Knight. Teyonah Parris was good as Monica in WandaVision. A lot of the other people coming in Phase 4 are mostly unknowns to me. I think especially after the forced pause caused by Covid the clock is winding down on most of the Phase 1 - 3 folks.  Oscar Isaac aside, they're leaning pretty heavily into a cast of people in their mid-20s, especially if they're able to keep Spider-man around a bit longer and if they keep Shuri around long-term. She-Hulk, Moon Knight, Black Knight, Sersi, Monica, and Shang Chi, and to a lesser extent U.S. Agent would theoretically all be potential fits for a non-Young Avengers. Pugh is closer in age to the potential Young Avengers but the character could fit in just as easily with the older group.

[eldaec]

I think there's a small understanding at Sony - at least among people who like money - that without the MCU their Spiderman is worth $0.

I might believe people at Sony were that smart if they weren't still fiddling around with their Venom and Morbius stuff. I think they've still got it in their minds that they can build up a shared universe of their own.

They can back both horses.

Disney have agreed to keep making movies that make them money. They can keep making their own movies that still make money despite being bad, and probably make more money than they otherwise would thanks to Disney inflating the value of spiderman.

Sony would be bonkers not to want this state of affairs to continue.

I'm just surprised Disney accepted it.

[Rendakor]

The big mystery is if Sony would be making more money by licensing the other Spiderman-adjacent characters to Disney as well, instead of making their own movies. I don't know if Disney was not interested in Venom, Carnage, and whomever else, or if the two parties simply could not agree on a price.

[Threash]

I think there's a small understanding at Sony - at least among people who like money - that without the MCU their Spiderman is worth $0.

I might believe people at Sony were that smart if they weren't still fiddling around with their Venom and Morbius stuff. I think they've still got it in their minds that they can build up a shared universe of their own.

Venom was a huge success, not sure why you think they should bail on that stuff.

[Velorath]

I think there's a small understanding at Sony - at least among people who like money - that without the MCU their Spiderman is worth $0.

I might believe people at Sony were that smart if they weren't still fiddling around with their Venom and Morbius stuff. I think they've still got it in their minds that they can build up a shared universe of their own.

Venom was a huge success, not sure why you think they should bail on that stuff.

Amazing Spider-man 1 and 2 were technically huge successes also. I'm not saying they should bail on that stuff, because clearly their end goal is to make money. I'm saying if they're fine with the notion of making movies that tank critically but still make a ton of money, they might end up deciding they don't really need Disney and the MCU after all. Morbius may very well end up making a ton of money also but I can almost guarantee a Metacritic somewhere around the 35 Venom currently sits at.

[Khaldun]

I think the calculation they all make is:

Intellectual property w/known name = gets butts in seats (in non-pandemic times) enough to get us to near profit
Intellectual property that's a superhero/comic + if we pick the release date right = we make a profit even if nobody really likes the movie
All of that plus the movie is actually ok = significant profit
MCU inclusion = big profit even if the movie is kind of shit
MCU inclusion = huge profit if the movie is actually good

So yeah, there's an upside to making the shit you have a right to make. But at some point, the suits can't resist the even bigger money they might make unless the terms are such that all the bigger money they might make gets taken by somebody else.

[Sky]

I wish Sony would just lose its mind and go full Oscarbait with their licenses.

Glen Close as an aging Sue Storms grapples with love and death in a romantic comedy set on her rural upstate NY b&b, where she retired after the death of Reed.

[Riggswolfe]

I wish Sony would just lose its mind and go full Oscarbait with their licenses.

Glen Close as an aging Sue Storms grapples with love and death in a romantic comedy set on her rural upstate NY b&b, where she retired after the death of Reed.

Fox, now Disney, owns the Fantastic Four. I think Sony only has Spiderman and his rogue's gallery.

[Khaldun]

It would be kind of great if they'd do the recent humorous Superior Foes of Spider-Man in the style of Into the Spider-Verse.

[Sky]

It would be kind of great if they'd do the recent humorous Superior Foes of Spider-Man in the style of Into the Spider-Verse.

I was only reading on the initial run of Superior Spider-Man, and it was amazing. I wouldn't mind a movie just about Otto as Spider-Man in that style.

[Khaldun]

Superior Foes is in its own way even better, but yeah, I was surprised at how much I liked Superior Spider-Man. I also liked the Spider-Man status quo after that--I kind of wish they'd had the guts to keep Peter going as a sort of lower-run techbro rather than constantly returning him to his status quo, but Marvel has gotten really reluctant to have the comics and the MCU be too widely divergent. (Which is eventually going to starve the MCU of new material to adapt.)

[HaemishM]

I haven't read the Superior Spider-Man stuff, but the status quo they set up after that with Peter as a more relatable version of Tony Stark was fantastic. My biggest problem with the Marvel Comics these days (and one of the reasons I let my Unlimited sub lapse) is that they are treating the brands more like manga these days. Each creative team gets their own run to do what they want but none of the teams are on a book longer than a few years. And with the way they've done the decompressed narratives now (every story is a 6-issue arc that can be packaged as its own graphic novel later), each team gets maybe 4-6 story arcs before they've fucked off to something else. So just when you're used to the take on it and you've started to like it, you get a 6-issue arc that is like the final season of a TV series, complete with a goodbye tour style of final issues. Then the next team comes in and upends just about everything you liked about the last one.

It makes for some interesting reads in isolation, but as a "universe of interconnected brands," it's fucking terrible. And it makes the big event crossovers even worse, because every creative team's arc is interrupted by mandatory crossover bullshit that distracts from the story you wanted to follow.

[Velorath]

Superior Spider-man was pretty fantastic. I'm also generally fine with a creative team coming on and doing what you described because these days I'm more interested in reading stuff in isolation rather than keeping up with the MU as a whole. Company-wide crossovers haven't been any good since... well Infinity Gauntlet really. There have been some good big events like Age of Apocalypse and Annihilation, but as far as the crossovers that bring in all the major books and determine the state of the MU until the next event, they've pretty much all been terrible.

And some people are still doing great longer runs. I liked Jason Aaron's run on Thor. Immortal Hulk has been pretty great. Hickman's X-men stuff started off interesting with House of X and Powers of X, but he's apparently settled in for such a long haul that a lot of plot elements introduced there seemingly came to a dead halt right after those books ended.

[Khaldun]

There have been great runs, yeah, but nothing's really cohesive any longer, and nobody's fishing up old continuity to do interesting things with it because increasingly the characters are not having a continuous series of adventures but are instead either tightly managed to promote the MCU or they're temporarily given over to a single author for stories that have nothing to do with anything else. It's maybe better than dumb fucking company-wide crossovers that constantly shit on interesting stuff a given writer is up to, but it doesn't given me any loyalty to a title, only to particular creators.

[Velorath]

I'm absolutely more interested in following good creators rather than following titles and I don't see anything wrong with that. I feel like it's hard for anything to feel cohesive because the MU collapsed under its own weight decades ago. It'll happen to the MCU eventually also and that's fine.

[Sky]

When I was a kid I had a sub to six different books. It really sucked when a book was on a great creative run and then the writer gets swapped out or you get some really horrible artist.

So I just stopped collecting comics and moved on with life 

[Khaldun]

Yeah, true enough. I used to think whenever George Tuska or Don Heck got assigned to a book "oh well, here's another comic about to get cancelled".

I suppose what bugs me is when a character who's had a really cohesive narrative and identity gets completely bungled by a new writer who is determined to wrestle that character into their take. Like Bendis trying to write Doctor Doom, which he managed to fuck up just about every time he tried. But if there isn't a particularly cohesive continuity, then no problem really, the next folks will just snap the character back and do something good with them.

[Sky]

Kinda hard to have any continuity when Tony Stark is basically middle aged for 60 years, eh? I guess MCU means they finally have to grapple with that with reboots at some point. You can only pass off Cap's role so many times before it gets weird. I imagine they'll milk the existing variants of established characters (Jane Thor etc) and then just reboot the whole thing. I just hope the mechanism isn't too obnoxious!

[Sir T]

You mean like rebooting Spiderman by selling his marriage to the devil?

[Khaldun]

The all-time worst, hands-down. I was a bit surprised with the aftermath of the Secret Wars event that they didn't just overtly de-age everybody and reset the status quo. It was odd. But they have multiple decades of DC's fumbling with their reset after Crisis as a warning about the dangers thereof, I guess.

[Velorath]

Marvel's strategy has always seemed to be to just not acknowledge it. Which becomes increasing harder when you've got characters like Magneto whose origin relies on being a holocaust survivor.

[Khaldun]

Without having been frozen in ice, etc. And of course he drags Professor X along for the ride. You can relocate Tony Stark in any number of American ah-hell-no wars, but white European survivors of famous genocides are a bit trickier to relocate without turning them black, brown or yellow. Truthfully, a Magneto who was a survivor of Pol Pot or Rwanda would be awesome; as would a Rwandan Professor X. Why not?

[Threash]

You can just as easily handwave it away as being strong mutants makes them long lived.

[Khaldun]

Yeah. Though at some point you'd expect them to have the same issues that Captain America, Black Widow, White Nick Fury (Now the Watcher FOR FUCK'S SAKE WHAT A TERRIBLE IDEA), the Red Skull, Baron Zemo II who was just a little kid in 1945 which means he's an old man now only he isn't, Wolverine, etc. ought to have about being people who have lived a long time through the 20th Century blah blah blah. It's different for the genuine no-fooling immortals like Apocalypse, etc., who have figured out ways to deal (in theory) whether that's "sleeping until the time is right for me to CONQUER EVERYTHING BAH HAH HAH" or "I have lived for eons wow I am just fucking awesome and full of gravitas". But neither Xavier nor Magneto have been played like that, so sooner or later this has got to be a kind of "Reed and Ben fought together in World War II wait no in Vietnam wait no forget the fought together thing they just went to university together wait no".

[eldaec]

The only element of continuity that really matters between the films is that the characters feel like the same person who experienced whatever the fuck happened in the last film.

The rest of it is nice to have, but doesn't really matter.

Age continuity issues are not going to make a good film into bad one.

[Khaldun]

Let's put it this way--when they get around to having the X-Men in the MCU, if they do, I don't think Magneto can be a Holocaust survivor. Honestly, it would be kind of cool if he were a survivor of a more recent genocide (Rwanda, Cambodia) as a way to switch up the character, but a lot will depend on what they decide to do with the entire idea of "mutants".