With the disappointing box office of The Marvels, the studio is doing some soul searching, but the answer is obvious to anyone who has ever written a story.
The writing is just bad now. It's become campy and jokey. Then you have the links to D+ shows that I have no interest in watching. CGI overload too. It's Live Action CGI. The characters don't even look real when fighting now. The Black Panther CGI fight was some of the worst CGI ever. Dumb CGI physics. There's definitely soapbox activism taking place since Phase 4 started and I want nothing to do with that. And then... We've had 20 years of superhero flicks and I'm tired of them. It's not just the MCU I've stopped watching. It's all of them. Super hero fatigue is a real thing. The genre needs to be put on ice for a decade (same for Star Wars). I'd like to see real cinema come back to the theaters.
I think the biggest problem with Marvel these days is that most of the new films have Required Readings before you plant your butt in the theater. You better have watched Ms. Marvel and Wandavision before going to see The Marvels, because we can't be bothered to do a recap and there WILL be a quiz! Imagine what a travesty Infinity War would've been if they sucked out all the scenes explaining Thanos' motivation and put them in Agents of SHIELD, that tepid dumpster fire, instead. You'd end up with a Matrix Reloaded situation, where playing the video game and watching the Animatrix were largely essential to unwrapping the plot. Sure worked out well for them!
I'm sorry, Disney, but I don't want to watch Loki, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, She-Hulk, Wandavision, and Secret Wars before I see your movie. I don't want homework. I just want to enjoy a film. I understand that you are doing a serialized narrative, but each part needs to stand on its own or the entire edifice will crumble.
Early in the saga, when Thanos first appeared, a devoted comic book friend told me, "Marvel is going to regret using him so early. The stakes are so high, whatever they follow him with will be a let down."
I can see his point, but for me the growing problem with the MCU is the characters are always exactly as weak or powerful as is necessary for the set pieces designed. Thor can both be stabbed with a little knife, or withstand a gamma ray beam from a neutron star. Tony Stark always has another Mark Whatever magic suit that is either perfect for the immediate crisis, or not quite there so they can lay the foundation for the NEXT set piece.
As a result, I was more interested in the humor and the smaller character stories—which were often quite good. But as the set piece battles became increasingly huge and "important" to the overall story arc, the movies became less interesting. Infinity War pulled off thatgut punch ending despite the set piece spectacle, but the commitment to visual cacophony left Endgame feeling both rushed and way too long. The interesting parts weren't long or developed enough (with a couple of exceptions), and the set pieces mostly felt like boxes being checked off.
I didn't dislike Endgame, but more than anything else I came out of it feeling more relieved a long slog was over than satisfied by a story well-told. Since then, the only Marvel movie I've seen is the Spider-man with the previous Spider-mans, and I found it … fine, I guess. That's when I realized I just don't care anymore.
You're absolutely right - my favorite bit is Captain Marvel, who is essentially a god, tearing through a warship like it's paper but then needing an honor guard to get the Infinity Gauntlet to the, er, time machine instead of either tearing through Thanos' army like paper OR JUST PUTTING THE DAMN THING ON SINCE SHE CLEARLY IS POWERFUL ENOUGH TO DO JUST THAT. I regard that kind of wonky power calibration as kind of necessary to the story -- we want these characters to be both superheroes but also normal people we can relate to, so their god-like power has to fluctuate -- but it IS super annoying.
This is basically what I tell people when I talk about Marvel now. It's hard to start over again emotionally after Endgame. The new stuff is like...okay. I'm just not as invested as I used to be.
They really needed to take a pause and start slow again. But then again, no one is offering me billions of dollars to keep pumping out material, so what do I know?
The writing is just bad now. It's become campy and jokey. Then you have the links to D+ shows that I have no interest in watching. CGI overload too. It's Live Action CGI. The characters don't even look real when fighting now. The Black Panther CGI fight was some of the worst CGI ever. Dumb CGI physics. There's definitely soapbox activism taking place since Phase 4 started and I want nothing to do with that. And then... We've had 20 years of superhero flicks and I'm tired of them. It's not just the MCU I've stopped watching. It's all of them. Super hero fatigue is a real thing. The genre needs to be put on ice for a decade (same for Star Wars). I'd like to see real cinema come back to the theaters.
I think the biggest problem with Marvel these days is that most of the new films have Required Readings before you plant your butt in the theater. You better have watched Ms. Marvel and Wandavision before going to see The Marvels, because we can't be bothered to do a recap and there WILL be a quiz! Imagine what a travesty Infinity War would've been if they sucked out all the scenes explaining Thanos' motivation and put them in Agents of SHIELD, that tepid dumpster fire, instead. You'd end up with a Matrix Reloaded situation, where playing the video game and watching the Animatrix were largely essential to unwrapping the plot. Sure worked out well for them!
I'm sorry, Disney, but I don't want to watch Loki, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, She-Hulk, Wandavision, and Secret Wars before I see your movie. I don't want homework. I just want to enjoy a film. I understand that you are doing a serialized narrative, but each part needs to stand on its own or the entire edifice will crumble.
Early in the saga, when Thanos first appeared, a devoted comic book friend told me, "Marvel is going to regret using him so early. The stakes are so high, whatever they follow him with will be a let down."
I can see his point, but for me the growing problem with the MCU is the characters are always exactly as weak or powerful as is necessary for the set pieces designed. Thor can both be stabbed with a little knife, or withstand a gamma ray beam from a neutron star. Tony Stark always has another Mark Whatever magic suit that is either perfect for the immediate crisis, or not quite there so they can lay the foundation for the NEXT set piece.
As a result, I was more interested in the humor and the smaller character stories—which were often quite good. But as the set piece battles became increasingly huge and "important" to the overall story arc, the movies became less interesting. Infinity War pulled off thatgut punch ending despite the set piece spectacle, but the commitment to visual cacophony left Endgame feeling both rushed and way too long. The interesting parts weren't long or developed enough (with a couple of exceptions), and the set pieces mostly felt like boxes being checked off.
I didn't dislike Endgame, but more than anything else I came out of it feeling more relieved a long slog was over than satisfied by a story well-told. Since then, the only Marvel movie I've seen is the Spider-man with the previous Spider-mans, and I found it … fine, I guess. That's when I realized I just don't care anymore.
You're absolutely right - my favorite bit is Captain Marvel, who is essentially a god, tearing through a warship like it's paper but then needing an honor guard to get the Infinity Gauntlet to the, er, time machine instead of either tearing through Thanos' army like paper OR JUST PUTTING THE DAMN THING ON SINCE SHE CLEARLY IS POWERFUL ENOUGH TO DO JUST THAT. I regard that kind of wonky power calibration as kind of necessary to the story -- we want these characters to be both superheroes but also normal people we can relate to, so their god-like power has to fluctuate -- but it IS super annoying.
This is basically what I tell people when I talk about Marvel now. It's hard to start over again emotionally after Endgame. The new stuff is like...okay. I'm just not as invested as I used to be.
They really needed to take a pause and start slow again. But then again, no one is offering me billions of dollars to keep pumping out material, so what do I know?
2.7M for a bottle of whiskey? Unreal.