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

not a marvel head, so maybe i'm missing something extremely obvious, but

loki is not a hero! so why is he doing all this? because he likes having friends? yet he loves sophie/himself so much that he will do anything but kill her/himself. running out there and grabbing the time-strands, even if it made sense, doesn't address any of the main issues, which are him/sophie/destiny. and that was the interesting part -- are they the same? are they different? why does he care? -- not this nonsensical time chaos

(tbf the CENTURIES LATER placard was extremely funny)

hmm Loki gets his throne, completes the redemption arc he’s been on since Thor:Ragnarok, finds his Glorious Purpose (in case they didn’t make it obvious enough, that was the name of the episode for both the pilot and the finale) and becomes literally Yggdrasil, the world tree in Norse mythology holding together all of the realms - or in this case, all time and space

As an ending it’s a bit too neat, even if how he got there didn’t make a lot of sense

And agree that the show abandoned all that was interesting about the Loki/Sylvie dynamic… feels like a mistake to have kept them apart for so much of the season. I didn’t like the idea of a romantic pairing, but their scenes always had spark

This is not the same Loki as the one in Ragnarok though, right? This one diverged at the end of the first Avengers movie.

Knew someone was gonna bring that up haha. I meant in the context of the MCU as a whole, the theme of his character has always been about finding redemption through selflessness/sacrifice

which honestly is a lazy and boring trope, but I’m not expecting complex character endings from the MCU and this is a good exit for Hiddleston as any

Sounds like The Marvels had the lowest opening weekend of any MCU movie, and isn’t expected to break even.

I liked the last Loki. I thought it did a good job wrapping up the story while simultaneously putting him (and, if they want, Kang) in an in-case-of-franchise-emergency holding cell.

I thought The Marvels was fun, exceeded my admittedly pretty low expectations. Iman Vellani was great, she’s just a joy in this role. The prince subplot was weird and probably unnecessary, but the short running time overall kept it from dragging.

Was expecting a nod to that particular group in the mid-credits scene but not THAT particular version of the character.

We saw this in IMAX 3d and for the first time ever, the glasses they gave me weren’t functional. It looked like complete garbage with them on, before I finally checked my son’s glasses quick to realize I needed to go out and get replacements.

I saw it today and thought it was great, lots of fun. Now feeling like all the bad juju it had in the run up was just more dumb misogyny when it comes to superhero/fantasy/sci-fi.

Iirc, didn't the first Captain Marvel movie really benefit from coming between the two Avengers finales, with a huge post credits cliffhanger priming it further? Pretty good timing. Also, two of the main characters of this one were essentially introduced in TV shows, I wonder if that might factor in as well.

People are saying that the SAG strike, and lack of actor promotion for the movie, may have also played a factor? Idk

One thing I was a bit confused by in Loki is, when they prune someone, they'd end up in that empty world where all the other Lokis were last season.

But if that's where Renslayer ended up how come the scene then suggested that was still the TVA (with the floor logo they showed)? I wasn't sure what to infer there.

Loki getting what he wanted all along, but not quite how he wanted it. I'll take it.

I'm kind of wondering if some scenes were cut from the Loki finale. I'd heard some chatter that the finale was going to set something up with Kang for the next Avengers movie, and that...didn't really happen.

A slight sense of a hedge, yeah, with the ending reference to what happened in Quantumania and a bit of a 'we'll keep an eye on things.' I figure they could always recast, they've done it before!

xxxpost Iirc that place at the end of time, where pruned timelines go, is a hodgepodge of trimmed timeline stuff, including alternative TVA detritus and other crap. Buildings, vehicles, etc

Most of the announced future films are hovering in a pre production purgatory, so yeah, the future is unwritten.

ha ha I just saw a theory that we saw Loki becoming The Beyonder

Well, Secret Wars would be a fast way to introduce literally every unused character at once, lol.

Looking at what people have written around the web on the last Loki episode, I'm not alone in thinking
Loki is now the God of Stories. That was the culmination of a plotline where he's decided not to be the God of Lies. Kind of nice that he now has his own throne and his own version of Yggdrasil crafted from all the timelines

Yeah that's kinda what I'm figuring.

I'm always impressed when Disney lets some numbers out. Looks like a little over 11 million people watched the Loki finale.

But it was the same person in 11 million different branches

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F-jpZZkaMAAg-ih.jpg

I wrote a big long post about how I watched the Eternals for the first time and how bad it sucked, but I guess it didn't go through and I don't have the heart to rewrite it.

But man, what a slog. Definitely my least favorite Marvel movie. Well, maybe tied with the Hulk. But this one was so bad because it tried to do so much and missed the mark so badly! Pip the troll was ghastly, does anybody really want to see him in a movie? Or Starfox for that matter? Some things work in the comics and will not work in movies, or they need a very deft touch. The Mr. Fantastic problem.

Nothing landed, although some of the visuals were nice I guess. Why do Kirby and throw out everything Kirbyesque?

I tried watching both Hulk movies over the weekend. I didn’t realize/remember that the 2nd one was an MCU movie (and they just replaced the actor); I thought Ruffalo was yet another reboot. Anyway, I didn’t get very far in either of them.

Yeah, Eternals was flat-out bad and boring.

Which reminds me of a couple of other characters/actors that I just can't imagine returning to one of these movies any time soon. Like Charlize Theron as Clea. Or Brett Goldstein as Hercules. Or Jon Snow as Black Knight. First of all, they can't even keep all the mainline actors on retainer forever, can they? Eventually they have to move on, a la RDJr or Hiddleston. But these secondary people, where could they possibly fit in in the next several years, especially as Marvel/Disney incorporates the Fox properties? There are just too many characters, too little demand, and the costs are too high. One reason the Guardians movies work is they don't really have to deal with any of this stuff, they can be off in space in their own relatively self-contained stories. Probably smart that Disney is exploring the idea of making some of their other stories more self-contained as well.

I could see a Charlize movie in the chute tbh

Ang Lee Hulk was bad but interesting. Norton Hulk was just bad.

What If? returns over Christmas with a new episode daily from December 22

Why do Kirby and throw out everything Kirbyesque?

This. Especially now, when we have the technology to realize Kirby's vision, which I would describe as cinematic from the jump.

https://socyberty.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/pencil.jpg

I thought "The Marvels" felt totally perfunctory, even by the standards of these movies, where even the worst (bar one or two) have still generally been OK. Which is to say, "OK" didn't quite do the trick this time. It felt really ... small with every scene a handful of actors standing around on a small, clean soundstage, talking jibber-jabber, a la Star Trek, while (might as well be) AI readies some generic alien landscape or chaotic battle. Aside from the A+ cat sequence, it just felt so run of the mill and, for all its characters, totally free of character. These movies more or less all look the same, so maybe it really does come down to the script/story, or perhaps a director strong enough to protect the script/story. But good luck cleaning up this mess, Marvel, especially when every movie introduces another major character/universe or two.

Meanwhile, my wholly unsurprising take is that it was fun and I enjoyed it

At this point, my opinion on all the people going “wag wag I hate these movies” is “stfu and stop watching them, no one is forcing you to”

I thought it was fine if a little bizarrely edited.
Having read a couple articles, it seems that Zawe Ashton did the superhero movie workout routine, wrapped filming The Marvels, had a baby, and then was called back for reshoots that ended up being large portions of the movie

So, all things considered…. I have no idea wtf is going on over there at Disney/Marvel.

it increasingly seems like they don't either

I neglected to mention that the father of that baby? Tom Hiddleston. They met while doing a West End production.

The MCU is creeping out into reality as it slowly absorbs all actors

I think that some of Disney's worst habits/decisions have been just that, bad habits brought about by taking all those billions for granted. These reshoots, they're just the multi-million dollar equivalent of "we'll fix it in post," where "fix" means "re-write and re-shoot at great expense of time and money." There was some stink made about DaCosta leaving the shoot four months early, because it kept getting delayed/redone/changed and she had another commitment. I doubt her absence hurt the film, because this has become par for the Marvel course, doing these epic tweaks on the fly. One of those recent state-of-Marvel Variety pieces says that the "The Marvels" reshoots were "to bring coherence to a tangled storyline," which is another way of saying they didn't really have a script locked in when they started.

I read that "Loki 2" was the first at least Marvel TV show that did not require reshoots.

Ironically it could've used reshoots as the first half was pretty stodge

Tom wasn't available for reshoots because he was probably busy watching the baby his partner had to leave at home because she was doing reshoots herself

I hear Marvel provides a Watcher

I've been rewatching the earliest movies and it's become clear that one of the bigger problems with the current MCU is not having something akin to an Avengers flick every few films to help reestablish the shared universe and refocus the overarching plot. Like I just watched Age of Ultron yesterday and, while it's no great shakes, it does a pretty decent job of synthesizing the disparate threads from the previous solo films and setting the stage for the films that followed. Just having characters pop up in one another's movies and TV shows really isn't enough, and I (and Marvel/Disney, seemingly) don't have a clear idea of where they're heading with any of the stuff they've dropped since Endgame. It'd be one thing if they were just giving up on the interconnectedness altogether but that clearly isn't their intention.

I think they went for quantity of content over cohesiveness. Signing Oscar Isaac for only one season of Moon Knight means you can't set up any continuing Moon Knight stories, but you do get something to put on Disney plus.

Mainly I don't think they've found any movie leads as good as RDJ and Chris Evans

When you got movies like Tom Cruise in them, you can't lose.

Tom Cruise too busy getting the Mission Earth franchise off the ground

Hiddleston is good. And Hemsworth is pretty good. One problem is that they are running out of recognizable/A-list characters, and haven't yet risked recasting the old favorites. Then again, as the way-off-base thread I started back-when shows, for at least regular people (like me) something like Guardians of the Galaxy seemed like a terrible idea/gamble, but even with obscure characters and b-list actors it turned out to be among the most successful (in every sense) series of these films, which goes to show, again, that the writer/direction makes a big difference.

I've always thought the comics model was pretty sound. That is, every few years there's a different run of writers/inkers/artists, etc., and the comics look and read differently, but fans just go with the flow. The thing is, it's a lot cheaper to produce a run of comics than it is just to make the credits to one of these movies, probably, so there's not a lot of room for risk. The TV shows seems a bit like missed opportunities, because for all their high and low points they still largely seem to be following the look and feel of the movies, bar a couple of outliers.

I bet Disney could juice things up if they threw in a couple of things that caught people's attention. Like, what about releasing short teases on Disney+ that eventually link together for a big reveal? You can't have two hours of people talking in a room, but it'd be relatively cheap and easy to scatter a few of those out there to build up hype. Call it something like "Marvel Mystery Box" or whatever, where you don't know what you're going to get until it goes live.

So there's an Echo show about to air. Is this the one that had reportedly lots of reshoots? Is anybody excited about this? Should anybody be excited about this?

It's getting good reviews. Only 5 episodes.

also Devery Jacobs from Reservation Dogs is in it.