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

(I’m kinda looking forward to Guardians 3, too)

i signed off after Black Widow, though I'm keeping an eye on the teevee stuff and will watch loki when it's back

Yeah if anything Loki is the series to watch before this comes out.

phase 5 “surviving avengers not happy and want to change things back to how things were but instead make it worse and realize you can’t change the past” trope is getting a little tired at this point

i assume there's gonna be an "old man" universe that connects with logan before too long

Deadpool 3 is just sitting there...

Trailer breakdown for those who desire it

https://gizmodo.com/ant-man-and-wasp-quantumania-marvel-trailer-breakdown-1849969494

This thread I guess is as good as any to hope for the best for Jeremy Renner. That accident sounds terrible. Two surgeries for blunt chest trauma and orthopedic injuries so far, likely lots of physical therapy to go (and that's the best case scenario).

Doubtlessly he’s getting A+ care but damn sounds like it was potentially not survivable, so he was lucky.

Kinda related, watched Black Widow last night, first MCU I hadn’t seen, shockingly solid movie with more palpably intense action than i would have expected, which inevitably gave way to the almost-parodic inclusion of “sky fortress slowly plunging to earth” climax which seems to be the deal in every other of these flicks. It was sort of refreshing nonetheless, nice send off for SJ’s character, Pugh is fantastic and elevated the movie whenever she was in it from solid to very good, vv funny and as noted vv charismatic. Harbour was having fun, Weisz was good though I kinda felt like her character was inconsistent to a degree, Winstone was fine for what the role demanded (not much), he was kind of properly gross for the disgusting villain. I wish the film had sort of maintained the action style of the early portions, less of that bludgeoning MCU house style of the third act and more McQuarrie-era Mission: Impossible car chase close quarters fight scenes. But it went big scale and diminished at the end a bit.

Would have been interesting to see how it landed in the alternate world of non-COVID (where it would have been about six weeks after No Time to Die).

Is there a DCU thread?

Here are just a few of our plans. Up, up, and away! #DCStudios #DCU @DCComics pic.twitter.com/8XNDNLUEPq

— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) January 31, 2023

This is what guy being promoted to management and doing on-tone management voice sounds like, damn

It’s like I’m at work here! I don’t hate any of this and I’d be ok assigned to one of these teams

xpost There is indeed such a thread

James Gunn's DCU: Embracing the Morrisonverse

Watching Multiverse of Madness right now… this one ain’t no Black Widow.

it’s good when it almost goes full Raimi imo

Whoa - an uneXpected appearance in this one scene

ooh just wait

Oh man, this sure does go full Raimi, lol! Fun stuff

Yeah it's a treat for sure.

the chekov’s gun in DSitMoM is pretty funny

Kind of a Multiverse of MacGuffins aspect to the plot, but yeah very clever/satisfying once it gets beyond that.

Still in a Marvel mood, I have now put on Love & Thunder. Opening scene very sad!

That one was a swing and a whoosh. I liked the final few scenes… wish the rest of the movie had measured up to them.

Yeah the Thor movie was a dud.

I watched Multiverse of Madness not too long ago and I generally recall enjoying it, but the details have completely evaporated from my mind.

I’m a fan of the “source material,” and I see they paid Jason Aaron as a “consultant” (whatever that means)… maybe they should’ve hired him to actually write the screenplay (does that ever happen)?

The tone didn’t work, the jokes weren’t funny, the plot wasn’t engaging, you didn’t feel the gravity of Jane’s situation, it felt like nothing was at stake… (the special effects on the tiny planet were cool).

I think Ragnarok benefitted from a 'shoot the moon' exuberance, it was a reboot that made sense. Tonally Love and Thunder landed weird, like it was a good villain for a different movie.

I maintain that Love & Thunder was basically a riff on The Princess Bride where Korg=Peter Falk but that they didn't do enough to make the 'story told by unreliable goofball narrator' tone clear and that it was an unsuccessful experiment that would've worked better as a D+ series than as a tentpole film in the franchise.

I am cool with GNR, but the amount of GNR content was bizarre!

Meantime

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqcncLPi9zw

that seems pretty superfluous, even as a childhood fan of the Evolutionary Wars

Feige talks things

https://ew.com/movies/kevin-feige-marvel-phase-5-exclusive-interview/

I want to know why all of their recent films are particularly bad looking. Is it because they've really leaned in to nobody being in the same room together, relying on green screens for even mundane scenes?

Interesting interview. I didn't know he was involved in the X-Men movies.

When my kid hears GNR on the radio he says, “It’s the Thor band!”

you think YOU'RE thor

New Ant-Man getting some mixed (at best) reviews, and even the positive ones are pretty hedgy. I assume that it's probably more or less the same quality as all the most recent MCU movies, but who knows.

people have to get tired of this shit sooner or later
i think marvel u sales went down the toilet right after the x everything 90's and hit bankruptcy in the 2000s so my theory is MCU will have roughly the same expiration timeline

I really like Jonathan Majors and will be happy to see him in a bunch of these, but I just don't see his Kang as being engaging enough as a big bad to build the next 8 or whatever movies around. Happy to be proven wrong, mind.

The next two are Guardians 3 and Captain Marvel 2, and he's not in those, is he? So dunno where/when we might see him next. Loki season 2?

He's probably not going to be in/central to every film, but I imagine as the big bad they are building up to for the epic climax of these next few phases (ala Thanos), he's probably going to hang over most of them or pop up in post-credit scenes at least.

he's gonna be the deus ex capitalism to grab rebooted versions of the core players for the next Avengers movie which they will either recast or digitally de-age so that this goes on forever
xpost lol

lol probably

xp that was the exact theory people posited with the Thanos snap thing, too, though. that they'd end up twisting reality and characters would come back portrayed by different actors

Phase 5 seems like mostly soft reboot

I think they know they can only do hard reboot once every 2 generations or so without giving away the fact this is all make believe and are keeping that option on deck for when Thor is fully aged out

Per my post on the dedicated thread, I liked Quantumania and casting Jonathan Majors was a smart move.

Meantime looking ahead:

Higher. Further. Faster. Together.

Check out the brand-new teaser poster for Marvel Studios’ The Marvels, coming to theaters November 10. pic.twitter.com/zSlozSfQrz

— Marvel Studios (@MarvelStudios) February 17, 2023

Going to put a spoiler tag in just in case... haven't seen Ant-Man yet, but I saw it on the Best Show twitter:

looooool at Scharpling's character name

xpost New release date, right? That should allow them plenty of time to prepare for the epic universe-ending level backlash to a Captain Marvel movie with *three* women, two of them POC.

Yeah they moved it from mid-summer to November. Which frankly strikes me as a better plan anyway, spaces things throughout the year more.

Maybe they'll introduce a time-travel plot in which the last few movies are erased.

MCU must have hit some sort of breaking point, because I've seen multiple think pieces pointing to this latest Ant-man movie specifically as signaling signs of distress in Marvel's empire. This one, Dr. Strange 2, Thor 4, sure as hell The Eternals, even Black Panther 2 (imo, though for different reasons) probably needed a rethink. Feels like "WandaVision" and "Loki" were the only substantial successes, with She-Hulk and Ms. Marvel entertainingly colorful diversions. The sheer number of new characters introduced (or even re-introduced) in the last couple of years is daunting.

WandaVision and Loki were both fantastic. It feels like they came out a lifetime ago. Not sure either of them were big successes though? Pretty thinky!