It’s Disney. Fucking Disney.
I posted something along the same lines last week concerning Star Wars, but the long and the short is that I’m sick and fucking tired of having to do homework in order to enjoy shit.
The last Marvel thing I watched was that shit with Katherine Hahn. Something After All. Fucked if I can remember what it was called. She’s great, and I enjoyed her in Wandavision, and Wandavision was alright n’all. But halfway through… Agatha! That’s the one. Halfway through that, it became painfully clear that what we were actually tolerating was a prequel for whatever the sequel to Wandavision is going to be. They were never going to wrap up the story adequately, because then they wouldn’t be able to convince people to watch the next shit. And the next shit. And so on.
And that’s fine where it’s just one TV show with a new season every year. But this is EVERY FUCKING THING THEY MAKE. “If you don’t watch these 12 movies, then you won’t really get what’s happening”. FUCK. THAT.
Life’s too short to have to keep up with an expanding web of interconnected stories. The absolute NECK of those cunts, the arrogance of assuming that we’re happy to give up so much of our lives to their mediocre bullshit.
And to make matters worse, they’re all telling basically the same story. And that’s fine in a medium like comics, where you’re reading shit week after week, but it got boring real fuckin’ quick in movie and TV format. Lots of boomy bangs, robots/immortals smashing each other into crumbling concrete, end credits, teaser for the next bullshit.
Nah. Fuck 'em.
How many times do they think the public want to see a bad guy going after a glowing blue thing only to have someone in tights and stupid super powers thwart their plans??
General movie goers are normally pretty stupid, but 20 years is a long time to push the same formulaic script.
I gave up after watching Infinity War. Didn’t even bother with Endgame.
Oh no, Thanos is so strong. But Iron Man will make a power pose, and glitter will shoot out of him. OH NO IT DIDN’T WORK. Iron man will make a different power pose, and DIFFERENT colored glitter will shoot out of his infinitely magic suit. THE MUSICAL SCORE TELLS YOU THAT THIS IS MEANINGFUL.
Killing the faces of the franchise (Captain America & Iron Man) was a mistake.
Covid changed people’s relationship with movie theaters. I don’t think it can be explained better than that.
Now that I know I can watch it in my living room, I will wait for most movies.
Last one I saw in the theater was Superman, and before that, Dune 2.
Both were excellent choices for immersion with the big screen.
Covid changed people’s relationship with movie theaters. I don’t think it can be explained better than that.
I’d say it drastically accelerated an existing trend, but absolutely. Lots of people finally got that 50+ inch LCD and at least a sound bar, and whaddaya know, 99% of the audience was never in love with the cinema as a ritual, they just wanted to see new shit on a big screen in a dark room with nice speakers, and the last three are probably still “nice-to-haves” for many. I have many of my own little personal rituals and quirky things that evoke meaning for me, but I’m not narcissistic (enough) to presume that my pet preferences are objectively the only way to experience whatever core activity they’re tied to.
Only the movies that demand the biggest or benefit from a communal experience (Minecraft movie, K-Pop singalong) are going to be reliable performers in multiplexes. Large public screening rooms are simply settling into the use cases they actually serve best, like live theaters before them. It’s no surprise that the decline of cinema-going is dovetailing with a massive expansion of IMAX screens.
If we lose self-contained A/V storytelling in a 2-3 hour format, I think that will be a terrible shame, but I have little sympathy for the “auteurs” who want to tell quiet stories about small people with nuanced visuals but think a commercially viable number of people will go sit in a threadbare public fart-muffler with sticky floors and try to time their piss breaks just-so, simply because that small story is showing on a big screen.
Predator: Badlands was also a great theater experience if you are into that franchise.
A movie making over a half billion being considered a fall from grace is pretty absurd.
Well, considering how regularly they were pumping out billion dollar BO hits with the previous saga, how else can one describe it?
the mcu was made for early 2010 social media; it’s not surprising. social media and the internet is a lot worse off since then.
I was never a social media fan or even used something like Facebook and those movies were great and the overarching plot worked well.
Hence I don’t think it’s related to that but simply that they’re making shitty movies now.
The quantity of movies they’re pumping out is also part of the problem. Hard to get excited about a new addition to the franchise when it’s the 12th one that year.
I think it’s really the quality of the movies. They’ve taken a serious nosedive and there clearly isn’t an overarching vision for things right now (you could blame Kang getting arrested on that I guess).
Yes, in fact, the CEO admitted this back in May of this year.
Disney CEO Bob Iger seems to think that Thunderbolts* AKA The New Avengers is the start of a new era of Marvel, one that will focus on quality over quantity. Although it seems like Marvel will continue to release about three movies a year for the foreseeable future, they may be pulling back on the Disney+ experiment. While there will still be Marvel shows like Daredevil: Born Again, there seemingly won’t be as much of an emphasis on massive projects that connect back to the movies in a huge way like Loki.
“We all know that in our zeal to flood our streaming platform with more content, that we turned to all of our creative engines, including Marvel, and had them produce a lot more,” Iger said during an investors call. “We’ve also learned over over time that quantity does not necessarily beget quality. And frankly, we’ve all admitted to ourselves that we lost a little focus by making too much. By consolidating a bit and having Marvel focus much more on their films, we believe that will result in better quality. I think the first and best example is ‘Thunderbolts*.’ I feel very good about that.”
The quantity over quality was the approach under CEO Bob Chapek, who is now gone. Brave New World was the last title under his leadership. Thunderbolts is the first movie they’ve released after that and I would say, while it is certainly no Iron Man, it is definitely an improvement. I hope they do stick to the plan of just 2-3 titles a year from now on and focus on quality. Most particularly, I hope they focus on the writing. Stories and character developement are what they need to focus on.
Thunderbolts has been my favorite marvel movie in years (probably just a bit above Shang-Chi).
Interesting to see that it may be the result of some changes in their approach to the movies.
The post Endgame films being overwhelmingly mediocre wasn’t enough proof?
The threshold I have for Marvel movies post-Endgame is “Is there anything in this movie, directing, plot, performance, or effects-wise that ought to be deeply embarrassing for the movie makers?” Most don’t pass that test, and the few that do rarely rise much higher than that fairly low bar of just-barely-mediocrity.
My metroc is “is Florence Pugh playing the adorable assassin in it with all the good lines?” “Is Star Lord in it so Rocket can keep asking him for fake limbs?” “Is Alt world Tony Stark in it somehow?”
Obviously I like the witty lines and have a mild crush on Ms Pugh, but, don’t we all?
Yeah, I mean make good movies and it will work.
Did we watch the same movies?!? Because I don’t recall them being mediocre.
I have no idea which ones you watched.
Shang-Chi was good. Deadpool was fun.
Eternals, Black Widow, Multiverse of Madness, Love and Thunder, and the Spiderman movies were mediocre.
Quantumania was awful.
I plan on watching Guardians 3 at some point, but the previews and reviews for the rest look like a mix of mediocre to bad.
Absolutely agree with you (except brining all the Spiderman together was cool).
Shang-Chi sadly doesn’t seem to get a lot of love.
Thunderbolts was also really good if you haven’t seen it.
The MCU universe is so diluted now movies and shows just get watched if I stumble across them looking to fill time. The excitement is gone.
They don’t make movies I want to see anymore. They are not exciting, interesting, or cool. They are mostly just boring formulaic schlock building towards nothing interesting and not having interesting interconnections.
And a lot of people feel the same was as I do.
The movies they make now are ‘I’ll wait until it’s on streaming’.
I used to have a buddy and we’d see every marvel movie together. we stopped going after the black widow movie. we don’t even talk about them anymore. they are just non-events.
Let’s not forget all the shitty TV shows for Disney+ that further diluted the brand.
They look very boring, its all just meh
