Captain America: The Winter Soldier

[Maven]

These are all great comments. I've come away with a better understanding of the character and film. I hope they maintain the quality for whatever the third (Final?) film will be.

[eldaec]

Final on his contract afaik.

If they have any sense I imagine they'll rest these characters and rotate in new ones after 3ish films.

[jgsugden]

They do not need to rest any characters.... if it made financial sense, they'd be great with weekly TV shows as there is so much source material to draw upon. What they need, financially, is to draw as many characters as possible into the public view. IM, Cap and Thor will stop getting their own movies because Doctor Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, and the Vision need their own movies and they can't risk having too many on the screen.

[HaemishM]

I think their best bet with all of these movies is give the main actors 3 films, then recast the main role unless the actor wants to continue. Don't do fucking reboots, just recast the goddamn things and move on. I think people are willing to accept recastings as long as the new cast choices are good. Reboots get really messy especially when you are talking about 5 or 6 interwined properties. Soap operas do recasts all the time and few people bat an eyelash.

[Ironwood]

Yup.  Otherwise you'll end up with another fucking origin story.

[Maven]

Tony: I didn't expect to see you here.
Rhodes: It's me, I'm here, deal with it, let's move on. Drop it.

[Soulflame]

Yes, that's exactly right.

Whereas Superman killed Zod.

 

I can see why you would find that annoying.

[Margalis]

One of the good things about how these movies tie together is it makes reboots pretty unlikely. You could have a new person take over for the character and have it be considered new person in the story, but you can't just press reset and start over like Sony is doing with Spider-Man.

[jgsugden]

I think they'll reboot sometime down the road when they get the rights back to some of the other characters.... but it may be a couple decades.  Until then, I think they'll stick with the actors as long as they can and then will replace them when they have to for cost reasons - or when an actor starts to age and the role (Thor, Vision, etc...) should not.

[Furiously]

Took my son. He cried at one point. So emotional investment in the character was there.

He wants to watch it again. Falcon was much cooler than I anticipated. Roger Ebert from the grave says see it in a theater.

[tazelbain]

Count me in the no more reboot crowd. Reboots are a crutch for people who can't tell interesting stories so they rehash old ones. Marvel doesn't need it.

[jgsugden]

If they get the X rights back, I'd think a reboot would be good.  You could add mutants to the existing MCU,  but you'd be denying a lot of legacy stories.

[tazelbain]

Yes, I agree, I meant in the status quo.

[SurfD]

Count me in the no more reboot crowd. Reboots are a crutch for people who can't tell interesting stories so they rehash old ones. Marvel doesn't need it.

The only reason that marvel doesn't need it is because as long as they keep expanding their character library, they should easily have 10-15 odd years of 3-5 movies a year before they exhaust the existing potential of their stuff.  Around that point, you would start considering reboots because you will want to refresh things for a new generation of marvel movie fans.

DC sort of shot themselves in the foot with the pre-nolan Batman movies since they had a pretty bad habit of killing off the villian of each one (hard to continue the franchise when every Bats villian anyone cared about was dead).   I think the original Spiderman set also suffered a bit of the same problem.    I am a bit of on the fence with the X-Men franchise, since they seem to be doing a pretty good job of expanding stuff, and Futures Past gives them potential Timey Wimey licence to "undo" the whole "everybody dies" ending of the last official "main" X-men movie.  However, they really need to get back to makeing "X-Men" movies, instead of the "Wolverine and some other mutants" movies they have been doing (at least First Class was a step in the right direction as far as that goes.)

[Margalis]

Most of the mainstream Marvel characters could survive for decades just by taking storylines out of the comics without ever having to come up with original plots.

The Batman films were rebooted in part because the Schumacher films fucked the franchise. They were so panned by critics and audiences that more films considered part of the same series would have been pointless.

[eldaec]

The issue isn't coming up with new plots. That would be easy with or without the comic book back catalog.

The issue is that the character becomes stale on the big screen once they've completed their own personal arc. Iron Man and Thor are pretty much there already.

Given there are so many characters to make films with I don't really see why they'd want risk the series goodwill by running characters into the ground. If people who think this will run for 20 years are right, it surely has to be based on continual introduction of new characters. If they try to make an iron man film every 18 months forever, they are going to come unstuck sooner or later.

[Maven]

Based on what I read from an interview with Kevin Feige, head of Marvel Studios, I foresee their strategy as exploiting different narrative genres with the character arcs being placed on the back burner or self-contained within the actors lifetime as the character. I don't foresee reboots, but I do see start and end points for multi-movie arcs, and I expect them to happen between phases (that is, all at once with all characters).

If you look at Garth Ennis's run on the Punisher: MAX, he took the Punisher as this absolute force used to explore different real world situations such as human trafficking. The interesting bits were in the character dealing with the situation in his way (and the Punisher had an extreme way of dealing with things). Frank didn't go through any major changes -- he did ask questions of himself that challenged his trauma-born ideology, but at the end he ended up being the hard-line stance to preserve his status quo. I loved that series.

The characters and what they represent won't get stale if Marvel's smart to mix up how they are presented and what they are presented in regards to. Their embodiment of ideals contained within them, such as Cap's Boy Scout attitude, will be used to explore the issues people care about and keep them relevant.

That's how it has always been, hasn't it?

[MahrinSkel]

The issue is that the character becomes stale on the big screen once they've completed their own personal arc. Iron Man and Thor are pretty much there already.

Thor still needs to resolve the fact that Loki is on the throne, pretending to be Odin.

--Dave

[Margalis]

A lot of these movies have avoided real personal arcs.

For example a good arc for Captain America would be when he became just "The Captain" and was replaced by US Agent. That's probably the most interesting thing that's ever happened to the character, because it speaks directly to what it really means to be Captain America. (Turns out the America part isn't the most important part)

For Iron Man there are a couple different arcs, mostly regarding recklessness in some form, be it drugs or technology. The movies have sorted skirted around these, without ever being about them. There still hasn't been a good Hulk movie.

Thor is the only one that I can't come up with an interesting arc off the top of my head, but I never read Thor comics so I don't have much to go on there.

[SurfD]

Well, one of the biggest ones with Thor would have been the whole "I strip you of pretty much all of your powers (and memories) and banish you to Midguard where you will live the next 5 or 10 or whatever years as a human to learn some Humility" arc, which the movie promptly summed up in a week long vacation to earth that supposedly changed Thor's life.

[Raguel]

For example a good arc for Captain America would be when he became just "The Captain" and was replaced by US Agent. That's probably the most interesting thing that's ever happened to the character, because it speaks directly to what it really means to be Captain America. (Turns out the America part isn't the most important part)

Minor quibble but I think him giving up being CA and becoming Nomad was far more important, and IMO The Captain bit was sort of a rehash.

[eldaec]

The issue is that the character becomes stale on the big screen once they've completed their own personal arc. Iron Man and Thor are pretty much there already.

Thor still needs to resolve the fact that Loki is on the throne, pretending to be Odin.

--Dave

Which I'm fairly sure will be done after the next movie. Are you really all that excited to see more than another couple of hours of thor/loki hijinks? (and at this point this is simply a story plot, not a character arc)

On Margalis's point about the movies not really committing to character arcs, I really associate that with the way the third act if each movie just seems to disconnect from the characters and substitute in arbitrary explosions. There are plenty if hooks in the first half each film for character development, but at the end they just work out their issues through cathartic punching therapy.

[Margalis]

Minor quibble but I think him giving up being CA and becoming Nomad was far more important, and IMO The Captain bit was sort of a rehash.

The Nomad costume is so hideous that I block it from memory.

[UnSub]

This was the first Marvel film to impress me. Possibly because I went in with low expectations, but it made CapAm and Falcon interesting characters.

I did dislike turning Shandling into a Hydra agent. Couldn't someone just disagree with Tony Stark on perfectly valid grounds rather than being an evil pawn?

It would if he didn't have the key.  Think of the file having two properties ;  the unlock code and the 'last used'.  It says it was encrypted by Fury, but it doesn't have the key on record, so it has fuck all clue how to decrypt it.

Plus Fury didn't have a Macbook Pro - that was also important.

[Ironwood]

Lol.  Apple would like you to think so.

[Johny Cee]

Just saw this.  Much better than a comic book movie had any right to be, and the action was great.  Tops Avengers in my books, as no Whedon dialogue making all the characters sound the same, and probably right around Iron Man.  Iron Man had a much better first half, but it's second half was kinda a let down.