Marvel Cinematic Universe, Phase 4 & Beyond (and a chance to change your vote)

Hard to believe this isn’t a critical darling.

Who cares about the Rotten Tomatoes score I came here for Angelina Jolie being badass
#Eternals pic.twitter.com/6zfJVveN3Q

— Marvel HD+ (@MarvelHDgifs) October 28, 2021

Pains me to say as a booster for the director but it just looks bad? Self important, snarky, uninteresting casting, hokey design, not much interest or connection with Kirby at all.

For all the mucking about Snyder’s already done, I still think there’s a fun fourth world pic to be made but the eternals, sans FF connection, is a concept in search of a purpose

And I suddenly realize I have been confusing the eternals and the inhumans. Why do the eternals? They are a retread of a retread of a retread!

Yeah me too. I’ve been reading Marvel all my life, and I’m not entirely sure who the Eternals are.

Inhumans TV show was a flop IIRC, might as well try some different IP.

Inhumans show was scandalously bad

never saw it. but those characters have preordained space and relationships within the marvel universe as ordained by saint kirby

Our relatively brief thread vivisection

MARVEL TV HAIRVERSE ASSEMBLE: Inhumans

The key piece linked was this

https://gizmodo.com/everything-that-happened-in-inhumans-for-those-of-you-1820404960

Thanking U, Ned, that is some time saved.

uh

Karnak happens upon a weed farm and gets into a quick and extremely clunky romance with one of the weed farmers, after which said weed farmer’s partner betrays her, siccing some of their buyers on her for reasons that are barely even contemplated, let alone explained to the audience. Gorgon reunites with Karnak after leaving his bros behind, they beat up the drug dealers, and Karnak’s new lover also leaves so the two can go join the rest of their family.

Such art

Just read a mostly positive but still, in the end, negative review of "Eternals" that basically boiled down to "it would have made a great TV show."

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZFQFf_Vb0Hw/hqdefault.jpg

So cool they got Carson into the MCU.

Black Bolt killing his parents was amazingly funny

I went into that clip thinking "they're hyping this, it can't actually be that funny" but readers, I was wrong

I love the 60s-70s comics Black Bolt so much and my god the Black Bolt on the show was just nothing, the deadest of fish

so did anyone see the Eternals yet or not?

I did. it's...aight. v much an exposition flick, not much more

do the effects look better on the big screen than they did in the released clips or should I just wait for this to hit streaming

I did. it's...aight. v much an exposition flick, not much more

Marvel: Expositions 'n' Explosions!

xpost just watcch it streaming

thanks! that saves me probably $100 since going a movie here means taking the whole family, nothing worse than shelling out that much cash and having it be mediocre

It's also like 2 hrs 40 mins.

We got there at 940, left at 12:30 am

How many stingers were there?

2. One mid one post

please spoil them

I heard there were ... three?

There are two

I really enjoyed this but I also like all of the Marvel movies so grain of salt

There are two

I really enjoyed this but I also like all of the Marvel movies so grain of salt

Starfox (Eros) shows up in the first. Sersei's boyfriend inherits the Ebony Blade from his ancestors. The voice of Blade (Mashershala Ali) asks him if he's ready for that

Angelina Jolie is extremely bad-ass in a relatively minor supporting role and Brian Tyree Henry ruled

I told the friend next to me that Tyree Henry was outacting everyone on screen. Which isn't to say everyone else is bad but he's always my favorite in every movie or tv show ep he appears in (esp ATL)

lol did you see Godzilla vs Kong? Then again, it's quite possible he was the best thing about that movie, too, I can't remember.

they're linking blade to the eternals? uhhhhh that sounds like a marriage of convenience rather than considered continuity

blade and black knight have continuity by both being british (and thus part of MI-13 in the comics)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXhKzY0BKwY

The reports I've heard back from friends and their kids have been remarkably consistent. "Fine" and "boring" are the two most common takeaways. Most say it'll be ok on TV, one claims it wouldn't have even made a good TV series. All suggest it's pretty inconsequential, and one suspects it was Disney hedging their bets with another superpower team before they acquired Fox/X-Men, which made it moot. Given how over-stuffed the upcoming films seem, The Eternals (and Black Widow) seem even more like like Covid-era stopgaps, which I suspect Disney has leaned into. Those other upcoming movies keep getting delayed and moved around, not just because of Covid and injury but I suspect because of re-writes and re-shoots to shoehorn in a bunch of stuff to make up for lost time.

See the movie fans are calling "Fine", "boring", and "better than spending time with my kids but only slightly"

I'm assuming Mahersalah is not voicing Blade as British.

My friend said he says so little, off-screen, it's hard to discern an accent, if one is there. His theory is that he's offscreen because they're going to introduce his OG outfit:

https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/blade_evolution_debut.jpg

There's going to be a big twist at the end of this MCU cycle where they reveal there actually are no humans on earth, just superheroes, supervillains, gods and monsters. And then they'll shift to an entirely new Earth and introduce the Fantastic Four and start over.

Well, that happened.

I have mixed feelings.

Anyone else see the news story that Letitia Wright, whose current injury has delayed Black Panther 2, may have some trouble getting back to the States under current guidelines if she continues to refuse the vaccine?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/hollywood-studio-projects-get-stricter-about-covid-19-vaccine-mandates-1235045153/

Logistical challenges await for studios that are working with stars who haven’t gotten the shot. Disney’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever star Letitia Wright — who portrays the lead Shuri, the sister of Black Panther T’Challa (the late Chadwick Boseman) — is not vaccinated, sources say. After sustaining an on-set injury in August, the Guyanese-born British actress went home to London.

Now, a return to the U.S. for a possible shoot in Atlanta, where Wakanda Forever is based, could be an issue. On Nov. 8, the CDC implemented rules that require all non-immigrant, non-citizen air travelers to the U.S. be fully vaccinated and provide proof of vaccination status before boarding a plane. Wright is not a U.S. citizen. Disney declined to comment.

They should honestly just consider replacing her (and likely are considering it, should it come to that). If they can film a sequel to Black Panther after the death of the titular character's iconic portrayer, if Disney can fire Gina Carano for being an asshat, if filming has been delayed several months already, they can probably pretty easily go forward with someone else. As someone else pointed out, people love the character.

Will add to the chorus of voices saying Eternals was... fine. I thought it has some great visuals and production (esp the costumes!) and the cast was good. Watchable, but it really felt kinda like unnecessary filler in the end, like Captain Marvel. (I found Shang-Chi and Black Widow to be much better standalone stories.) Even if the Celestials become a Big Thing in Marvel Phase 5, this is one you can safely wait until it's on streaming in three months.

(Iron Man 2 still safely the worst film in the MCU.)

so now Kit Harrington has been on a tv show with a Cersei, and in a movie with a Sersi

really feel like Bryan Tyree Henry is the only person who had a fleshed out character. Sersi should have, being the focus of the movie, but they didn't give her much to do

if anybody reads the following and wishes to suggest that I'm an inflexible prick, fair enough…

Jack Kirby's conception of this what-we-now-call IP is of two species, differentiated from the conventional human race, both hidden races but both just as much earthling as the human race, both initiated via experimentation upon cro mags or neanderthals by vastly powerful, inscrutable extraterrestrial beings called the Celestials. One is genetically unstable and ostensibly grotesque, the other functionally immortal, ostensibly gloriously beautiful and can shoot lasers out their eyes…and furthermore, since Kirby had no intention to have this 1976 series lock in with Marvel continuity, the idea is that encounters with Eternals and Deviants were what accounted for human myths, legends, folklore (as opposed to mainstream marvel continuity, in which Greek and Norse myths, King arthur and the Round table and Dracula and Frankenstein existed, walking the earth as surely as the Invaders or Rama Tut or the Rawhide Kid)…

There is no question in my mind that you could make a movie, much less an MCU movie, about hidden races on Earth as such. But that is not what Chloe Zhao and Kevin Feige have done in the film I saw yesterday… I don't think it's spoiling to say that this movie changes the nature of this IP, but I'll leave it at that. So if Marvel wanted to make the film as it is, I don't particularly understand why they can't make an entirely new cosmology, new characters to tell the story they desire… the Eternals is not like Spider Man or the X-men, in that Marvel couldn't root and branch change what those characters are at their core as they have done in this film, so they can get away with it… but by the same token, the global audience that are obsessed with the MCU but have no investment in what Jack Kirby or Peter Sanderson did in 1976 and 1985 would absolutely accept a completely new set of characters… why do they feel as if they can't create something that has no connection to 40/50/60 year old comic books? and is there a particular reason the eternals and deviants as they had been done for 45 years wasn't going to work as an MCU film?

similarly: in the comics, Deviants have a civilization and all that entails…in this film, they are snarling, massive CGI beasts with the cognition of wolves…and more crucially, Sersi in the comics is a terrific character, a woman who has lived for many thousands of years and has ended up as a hedonist/ 5th avenue/UES party hostess nonpareil who while seeming to be louche and easily bored has hidden depths (kinda like Janet Van Dyne). again, this is a firm-as-fuck foundation for a character in a film, and how Kirby and every single Marvel writer has played her for 44 years! But that is not how Gemma Chan plays it…

2 more things: first time I was in a theatre since 2/20: since the last movie I saw, I have a 1 year old and a father dead from COVID…so when Floyd's "Time" kicked in, while a movie concerned with Kirby koncepts I care about was about to begin in earnest, I cried for a couple of minutes…is this the first time Floyd's music has been used in a massive four quadrant film? and is this the first time onscreen fucking as occurred in the MCU?