fed to fuck up with marvel

[Kermit the Frog]

they're supposed to be big dumb action films and yet the action scenes are so boring and mediocrily directed. i wish their fans would understand that they're no snobbishness involved in saying they're garbage

Exactly, Sammo Hung's Wheels on Meals is significantly fresher, funnier, and better choreographed than any Marvel film, while also having substantially more authorial personality, and if anything Wheels on Meals is more intentionally 'lowbrow' than a Marvel effort. So it's never been about snobbery.

Scarlett Johansson did two great movies in the last few years, Under The Skin and Jojo Rabbit.

Under the Skin came out nearly 10 years ago now and Jojo was balls, so oof, that's a lean decade she's ended up having.

[Custard]

To be fair though, it doesn't matter what she does, I'll always think of her as Lonely Lady in that one with Bill Murray

[Dr Rock]

Marvel Exclusionary Resentful Filmfans. 'Merfs', that's your new name.

[Jerzy Bondov]

plus her entire film was just setup for the Disney plus Hawkeye series that no cunt in their right mind would want to watch

hello

[chveik]

tbh i don't think the people involved in marvel stuff would've done great things outside of it.

in terms of blockbusters, the only thing we could realistically look forward to is if we have new overlords like China and India and they end up breaking the disney hegemony.

[Kermit the Frog]

Yeah the special effects driven wuxia blockbusters that China regularly shits out now are pretty much just as artless as the Marvel films, if not more so. The immediate future of mainstream cinema is grim.

[peanutbutter]

I'd love to think people were getting seriously tired of these buy I think Disney are just focusing on trying to adjust to the mini-series format so everything can be brought under their subscription service.
All but one of the last six pre-pandemic marvel films grossed over a billion, you have to go back to the first Captain America  to find one that didn't make over $500 million. Wouldn't make any guesses of their future prospects until we see how that next Spiderman film does.


One that really baffled me a few years ago was how many people were furious at the idea of Sony keeping the Spiderman license. That'll be the same Sony that had just put out a strong contender for the best superhero film ever (Into the Spiderverse) that all these same cunts absolutely loved. Like, just totally incapable of grasping that maybe there's upsides to having more than one flavour of a thing.

To be fair though, it doesn't matter what she does, I'll always think of her as Lonely Lady in that one with Bill Murray

Lonely Girl, 17 when that was shot



Thought the film was shite but she was great in Marriage Story 2 years ago

[Sebastian Cobb]

tbh i don't think the people involved in marvel stuff would've done great things outside of it.

in terms of blockbusters, the only thing we could realistically look forward to is if we have new overlords like China and India and they end up breaking the disney hegemony.

Bad news there, China is a major consumer of all this stuff and I think in some cases they're actively taking that market in to account.

[ProvanFan]

It ain't over until good triumphs over evil once and for all.

[non capisco]

The worst of it isn't just Marvel itself - it's the effect they've had on other films.
Now every studio wants to build a franchise or "universe" to the detriment of making films that might actually be decent.

That's probably why SPECTRE ended up so shit after three decent-to-great Daniel Craig Bond films (I like Quantum Of Solace!), the pointless need to "tie everything together" by

Spoiler alert

nonsensically making Blofeld "behind it all" for the crummiest of motivations (daddy issues!)

[close]

which made a complete mockery of the storylines of the preceding films, especially Skyfall.

[El Unicornio, mang]

I got a little bit bored with the team stuff, enjoyable enough and the humour's always on point but just all blurs into lots of things flying around the place and Hulk smashing shit up. Prefer the more low key character-based stuff like Captain Marvel, Ant-Man, Black Widow, tbh.

[Small Man Big Horse]

We've had this thread a few times, so if there were no more superhero films, what do you think would take their place? Chances are it would be the same mostly shitty buddy cop/dinosaurs/dinosaur cop blockbusters before them and still around now. The danger to the genre is if something better comes along, but I can't see any other genres nipping at their heels right now.

This is how I feel, I was a little burnt out with Marvel stuff (though I liked Black Widow more than most, but possibly because of a minor crush on Florence Pugh's character) but if you look at the Hollywood stuff being made prior to Superhero cinema taking over the world it was still pretty shitty - I picked 1997 as a random example and these were the top 10 most successful films:

1   Men in Black   $250,690,539   3,180   $250,690,539   Jul 2   Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE)
2   The Lost World: Jurassic Park   $229,086,679   3,565   $229,086,679   May 23   Universal Pictures
3   Liar Liar   $181,410,615   2,909   $181,410,615   Mar 21   Universal Pictures
4   Air Force One   $171,482,545   2,981   $172,956,409   Jul 25   Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE)
5   Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope 1997 Special Edition $137,690,767   2,375   $138,257,865   Jan 31   Twentieth Century Fox
6   My Best Friend's Wedding   $127,120,029   2,376   $127,120,029   Jun 20   Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE)
7   Titanic   $112,594,173   3,265   $600,788,188   Dec 19   Paramount Pictures
8   Face/Off   $112,276,146   2,851   $112,276,146   Jun 27   Paramount Pictures
9   Batman & Robin   $107,325,195   2,942   $107,325,195   Jun 20   Warner Bros.
10   George of the Jungle $105,263,257   2,616   $105,263,257   Jul 18   Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

I know there's a Batman film in there but I think it still counts as being before Marvel came along and we got the ridiculous amount of superhero films now produced, and the rest are all pretty weak, I've fond memories of Men In Black and Face/Off but they're about the only ones I enjoyed.

[Sebastian Cobb]

But there even if the quality of the content isn't particularly great it's still covering a wider array of genres and has quite a few more production houses involved even though they're majors, that's before you get to the part that the majors will have different arms making different pictures rather than everything being a pool of superhero-film-makers.

That means if a couple of films in that list are successful it means things riding on the coat-tails will at least provide some variety and may take things in different directions.

[colacentral]

EDIT: "While you were writing, five people said the same thing you want to say." Fuck it, post.

Yeah, I think the Covid break, especially coming after the end of the Thanos saga and coupled with the loss of Downey, Johannson, Evans and Boseman, has sapped a lot of the momentum out of the Marvel juggernaut. I still generally enjoy them and I'm quite interested to see what Sam Raimi does in Dr Strange 2, but it does feel like the tide is going out on that franchise.

Still, for me the problem is less the Marvel monster and more the effect it has had on cinema, with all these fucking studios shitting out "cinematic universes" as if the very concept, rather than the quality of the films themselves, is what draws in the punters - Warners with DCEU, Sony with its Spider-Man villains (and previously with its botched Andrew Garfield Spiderverse), Universal trying to revive its Universal Monsters brand with The Mummy, only doing such a shit job they immediately gave up.[nb]Which did at least leave an opening for the fantastic Invisible Man reinvention.[/nb]

But that's a problem of Hollywood being run by soulless husks with MBAs, for whom all art is "content" ultimately reducible to digits on a spreadsheet. I know the old studio system was a toxic grind, but at least the old execs actually liked movies and cared about art. Even after that you had the likes of Dino De Laurentiis knocking out loads of old hacky shite, but still fully backing Lynch's test-crowd-alienating cut of Blue Velvet. Preferable to some dead-behind-the-eyes drone whose idea of making a good movie is to buy up an IP, flay its skin and wrap it around a generic three-act structure, and bring in some ingénue with one or two low-budget films to their name who can be relied upon to fold the moment the producers want them to change something (with no risk of an in-built fan base kicking up a fuss a la Zack Snyder).

It's just restarting. The next big crossover will be the Secret Wars film, and I think it's a safe prediction to say that the hook there will be on seeing multiple wacky versions of characters, like Into the Spiderverse times ten. I fully expect the hype by that point to be back at the level it has been for the last few years.

[willbo]

Marvel Exclusionary Resentful Filmfans. 'Merfs', that's your new name.

no we are SLOGs (stan Lee opposed grumps)

[bakabaka]

We've had this thread a few times, so if there were no more superhero films, what do you think would take their place? Chances are it would be the same mostly shitty buddy cop/dinosaurs/dinosaur cop blockbusters before them and still around now. The danger to the genre is if something better comes along, but I can't see any other genres nipping at their heels right now.

Over the next ten years as society begins to understand just how fucked we are by climate change and consumerism to the death, what possible better films could there be for escapism than ones where superheroes save the planet? I'm sure that there are Marvel/DC characters who have this as their remit or can be minorly tweaked to fit the role. Animal Man, Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, for instance. Or Steve Gerber's Swamp Thing or Guardians of the Galaxy or Howard the Duck could all be rebooted back to their roles highlighting humanity's self-destruction and hypocrisy from their previous cinematic versions if we now have a multiverse.

Stan Lee explained the Marvel method back in the '70's "The appearance of change without any real change." I don't think that has really changed.

[greenman]

The problem is there's so much of it. 25 odd films with only one or two of them being exceptional or having anything approaching originality in them and some praised way above their station like Black Panther which I thought was average but others raved about. And that's leaving out the TV shows, so many TV shows. Daredevil, Punisher, Jessica Jones, Defenders, Inhumans, Luke Cage, Agents of SHIELD and Iron Fist a few years ago and Now Scarlet Witch, Falcon, Loki and there are a couple of other more obscure ones.

It's just too much. I've watched Daredevil which was okayish, Punisher which was slightly better and only got to the first series of Luke Cage before getting bored with the Marvel TV show sausage machine. Now I might just watch one or two short reviews of Loki and think oh right, that's that then.

So yeah Marvel TV, no thanks. Still get sucked in to watching the new feature films though, that's less commitment.

Really though before these relatively short Disney+ series there wasnt any need to watch Marvel TV to follow the story, I certainly didnt.

I think that actually that was part of the appeal, compared to say Star Trek were you would be watching hundreds of episodes Marvel was a couple of hours every few months, not the same kind of commitment and also not the same potential for the setting and characters to be played out.

Stan Lee explained the Marvel method back in the '70's "The appearance of change without any real change." I don't think that has really changed.

Really though I think the films have actually shifted from that considerably, especially the Russo bros films which have a plot that does actually change the setting and character arcs that do actually have an end.

[Jerzy Bondov]

I think the TV shows are a mistake, and they should be doing direct-to-Disney+ films instead for the lower tier characters. I love Moon Knight and I'm excited for the series but honestly it's all backwards, why should characters like She-Hulk and The Falcon be expected to generate eight hours of drama when the big hitters only get two? All the TV shows have been bloated and would have been way better as movies.

[Custard]

It's just restarting. The next big crossover will be the Secret Wars film, and I think it's a safe prediction to say that the hook there will be on seeing multiple wacky versions of characters, like Into the Spiderverse times ten. I fully expect the hype by that point to be back at the level it has been for the last few years.

I dunno, a weird twisty storyline like that might turn a few people off. Whereas "we have to stop this big purple lad who wants to wipe half of us out" is much more straightforward, bollocks for a chin or not

[chveik]

a big problem is that any successfull comic book now has to be turned into a series or a film. i'm prepared  to bet the new Sandman and Sweeth Tooth adaptations will be shite. i think it made more sense when blockbusters were based on pulp scifi/crime novels rather than comics with particularily complicated storylines.

[Custard]

True. I can't bring myself to watch The Boys or Preacher or Y: The Last Man, as I think the comics have already done the perfect versions. What is point

[Thomas]

That's probably why SPECTRE ended up so shit after three decent-to-great Daniel Craig Bond films (I like Quantum Of Solace!), the pointless need to "tie everything together" by

Spoiler alert

nonsensically making Blofeld "behind it all" for the crummiest of motivations (daddy issues!)

[close]

which made a complete mockery of the storylines of the preceding films, especially Skyfall.

I agree that Bond suffered a pointless Marvelisation in Spectre, for the reasons you mention. There seemed to be this sudden pressing need to explore the 'lore' of Bond (done in part by diving further into the character's personal history than was sensible),[nb]Skyfall got it just right, in its quasi-meta nods to the series' history whilst remaining aloof with the vague details of Bond's youth. I love the slightly mystical inclusion of the Aston Martin that Craig's Bond couldn't reasonably own - no need to bring it back for Spectre! It was symbolically destroyed in the preceding film for a reason, it's not a recurring Marvel sidekick.[/nb] as if it was akin to the MCU. And we got a posthumous Iron Man hologram Judi Dench DVD giving 007 his next mission.

I don't object to canon - I enjoy that the Craig films, for example, are distinctly set in their own bubble - but retrospectively making Thanos Blofeld responsible for everything, and stupidly tying him in to Bond's childhood, was a watery imitation of superhero backstory and crossover phenomena. I'm sure men in boardrooms must have discussed spin-off M, Moneypenny, and Q films by now, with their own crossovers and Easter eggs. More Judi Dench holograms and cameo appearances by the DB5.

Bond, like Bowie, has always reflected and occasionally surpassed the trends of the day, which perhaps explains its success and longevity. But slipping into Marvel mode was a mistake.

[Brundle-Fly]

I was fed up with Marvel I think after Iron Man 2. I liked Guardian of the Galaxy though.

Ant Man was good

[mothman]

I agree that Bond suffered a pointless Marvelisation in Spectre, for the reasons you mention. There seemed to be this sudden pressing need to explore the 'lore' of Bond (done in part by diving further into the character's personal history than was sensible),[nb]Skyfall got it just right, in its quasi-meta nods to the series' history whilst remaining aloof with the vague details of Bond's youth. I love the slightly mystical inclusion of the Aston Martin that Craig's Bond couldn't reasonably own - no need to bring it back for Spectre! It was symbolically destroyed in the preceding film for a reason, it's not a recurring Marvel sidekick.[/nb] as if it was akin to the MCU. And we got a posthumous Iron Man hologram Judi Dench DVD giving 007 his next mission.

I don't object to canon - I enjoy that the Craig films, for example, are distinctly set in their own bubble - but retrospectively making Thanos Blofeld responsible for everything, and stupidly tying him in to Bond's childhood, was a watery imitation of superhero backstory and crossover phenomena. I'm sure men in boardrooms must have discussed spin-off M, Moneypenny, and Q films by now, with their own crossovers and Easter eggs. More Judi Dench holograms and cameo appearances by the DB5.

Bond, like Bowie, has always reflected and occasionally surpassed the trends of the day, which perhaps explains its success and longevity. But slipping into Marvel mode was a mistake.

Agree.

Sooner or later diminishing returns will kick in. May already have started, film historians will debate endlessly when the MCU jumped the shark.

EDIT: and that's another thing. From start to finish, Spectre takes place over the course of, what, about a week or two? And in that time Q rebuilds the DB5 - with a trip to the Alps in between, unless he left his minions doing it...

[The Mollusk]

It's "fed up to fuck".

[madhair60]

It's "fed up to fuck".

nope.

[The Mollusk]

Here's what you look like right now.

[madhair60]

if i sounded like him I would probably not be alone

[Sebastian Cobb]

Fed up to fuck = had enough
Fed to fuck = mr creosote
fed to fuck up = eaten by Colin Pitchfork

[madhair60]

who cares fucking grammar nazis jesus christ can't one aspect of my life not be picked apart GOD FUCK I WANT TO DIE