T w e n t y S i d e d
The family just got back from the beach. I enjoyed my time but… you know…
So, I’m glad to be back but I’m exhausted. I had a really good time reading your conversations about the MCU. I’m glad people understand where I’m coming from. There’s a lot of MCU zealots online so it was a genuine concern.
I’m wiped out. Long car ride after fun but exhausting trip. So in leiu of an article, I have another question. What would it take for you to have genuine interest in returning to the MCU?
For me it would be a massive slowdown of product followed by a solid integration of the X-Men. I know that whole thing is still in licensing hell but I can’t see me having any real interest otherwise. For me, that comes from a fondness for X-Men over all other Marvel product and I could see a proper combo work great. Just give me Wolverine x Venom. Please.
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It’s hard to imagine getting back into the MCU. The first phase got my interest because the Avengers movie managed to weave plotlines from several of the individual movies together into a solid multi-movie conclusion. Avengers 2 failed to repeat that, and without that common endpoint there’s nothing to, you know, follow. It’s just a series of action movies, and I feel I’ve seen all of what they’ve got to show me.
Two things might get around that. The first is a superhero movie that’s primarily a philosophical battle*. Loki is the best villain the MCU has had, and I think Guardians 2 and 3 both pulled off good ones. I really enjoy a villain who’s got some mental pressure going on. Drop the bit where the villain gets punched out, and give me a movie-length superpowered therapy session.
The other is actual stakes. Not scale, but believability. There was a discussion about Thor Ragnarok a ways back, about how Thor loses both his hammer and an eye, and the audience just thinks “yeah that’s not gonna stick”. I want to watch a Captain America movie where I can believe they might actually kill Captain America at the 40-minute mark.**
*(Yes I do want every show to just be more Paranoia Agent.)
**(Invincible hit that note for a while, before it finally sank in at the end of Season 3 that despite the gratuitous gore, nobody evers actually gets taken off the board.)
I think this is the problem with this sort of big budget blockbuster, which is that it costs so much that you need to appeal to all the potential audience for it to make a profit, but the potential audience wants different things, as I am not sure I’d like the things you say here, and non-comic book fans might not like what I, as a comic book fan, want. A prime example of splitting the audience was, in fact, “The Last Jedi”, with certain fans liking the fact that it did things differently and raised questions about the Star Wars universe that some wanted explored and answered, while other fans felt that it was not only ignoring but downright mocking the elements that they liked about Star Wars. The success of the MCU was that it combined decent action and humour with elements of the stories that comic book fans liked, but when you try to appeal to a broad audience you run the risk of alienating some if not all of them if it isn’t done properly, and I really am starting to feel that the existing writing pool of these sorts of movies are not competent enough to do whatever it is they want to do properly, which then explains the loss of audience. It’s less, I think, fatigue than it is a reaction to the movies not really managing to do anything that any audience wanted in these movies well at all, in addition to them sometimes being contradictory.
I’m not sure whether you liked Guardians 3 or not, but that one managed my request for stakes: the flashbacks and general tone convinced me Rocket Raccoon no longer had plot armor.
I didn’t watch that movie because I didn’t care for the second one, and didn’t care for Ragnarok, and I think that one was the combination of both. I was out of Marvel by then.
But good movies can make us feel that anyone can die in the moment even when if we step outside the movie we know that they won’t kill off that character. And in my superhero movies I find that, as a comic book fan, I’m not all that interested in thinking that the heroes could die, and in general I think I’d rather they didn’t. Especially since so many writers want to kill them off just ’cause instead of having that death be completely meaningful (like Wash in “Serenity”).
I’d add (Ian McKellens) Magneto to the good villains, but is X-Men MCU?
No, that version of the X-Men was Fox entirely and separate from the MCU.
For me, mostly it just needs to do movies and TV shows that are quality again, that focus on faithful interpretations of the classic characters and stories with a modernized twist without loading up on gimmicks and twists. I don’t care about the purported threat creep or whatever, especially given the original mix between Avengers and non-Avengers movies where you can have a threat that can’t be dealt with by one character in the Avengers movies and smaller threats in the solo or smaller group movies, and those can indeed all tie back into an arc by having the characters that don’t seem to be much of a threat in the smaller movies still doing things that tie into the ultimate Big Bad’s main issues, like in the comics with things like “Atlantis Attacks!” where Moon Knight and the Punisher go after drug dealers who are turning people into serpent soldiers for Atlantis and their god. Maybe we don’t want to do that precisely, but stuff like that can work.
But basically, it just has to be good. I’m not at all excited for “Secret Wars” because it definitely sounds more gimmicky than I’d like, and I didn’t think they used Kang properly given the multiple aspects that he had that would have allowed them to not need to show a big Council of Kangs early on and so use different characters and different plots from the beginning and only revealing the connection later, which comic fans would have figured out once they referenced Kang and Immortus and Rama Tut, but they still could have enjoyed that revelation.
There are lots of little specific things I’d like to see changed, but in the end what it boils down to is:
I want Disney to stop trying to make interchangeable slop.
That means loosening the formula straight jacket, breaking the obligatory sequel-bait cycle, and not treating heroes as fungible CGI-blast slinging props. Also, giving the writers and directors fair pay and freedom to pursue their visions.
But that means the means risking the blockbuster crowd sales, without which the budgets would need to plummet. So…I dunno, go back to animation? But the animated What If…? show had all these problems and more, too.
I am not what you might call a qualified financial advisor…
I don’t think there’s any particular thing that the people making it could do, because it’s more due to my mercurial interests shifting after a few years. I didn’t actually really get into the MCU until (I THINK) after the first Avengers movie released, at which point I went back and watched the ones leading up to it. Then I was interested for several years until Endgame, at which point my interests mostly shifted away and so far haven’t returned. (I didn’t read any of the comics growing up, so I don’t have much in the way of attachment to any particular character[s].) But like I said on the previous post, I could see something a week from now that re-ignites my interest and gets me back into catching up on what I missed. Or in a decade. Or never. We’ll see.
Honestly, I think the biggest thing they’d need to have done to keep me watching was just keeping stuff on Netflix (which I only finally got pretty much right when stuff started splitting apart and they no longer had “everything”, but I’ve left it running for years because *one* feels about right). I refuse to pay for a giant pile of streaming services, but Disney walled up the garden. That means I have to jump through extra hoops, which adds another exponent on top of the already multiplying amount of stuff they put out times the amount of time since I stopped watching times the increasingly deep interconnectedness. Even when I hear X/Y/Z thing is good, or polarizing enough for me to wonder what’s up, no I can’t actually be bothered to go set up an account and pay Disney Specifically for the privilege, or anywhere else. Same reason I haven’t watched any of the new Star Wars stuff- by the time I had an interest it was all walled up in the Disney garden.
I mostly hear from other people that they’re tired as well, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot were like me, not so much tired of the content itself, but too tired to bother hunting it all down. Disney reduced the convenience by intentionally contributing to the fracture of the streaming market, and when you make things less convenient fewer people will watch. Maybe not few enough to impact the bottom line by their calculations, but if you could measure it I expect my types would be a significant piece of the pie. And making some of the stuff not just 2ish hour movies but whole episodic series? Bruh.
There is sooo much MCU stuff I missed out completely, that I would have to recap to get back in in the grand arc, which would include all the bad stuff too, that it is unlikely for me to ever get back into it without a complete restart. And even with a complete restart … I don’t know … meh.