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

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.

It does feel a little off-brand that the only MCU series they've announced for this year are this and the Agatha Harkness spinoff. And that the only movie on the 2024 slate is Deadpool 3. Feels kinda like 2020 all over again, but it also feels like they could use a year to firm up their future plans.

Probably a good thing since, y'know, the whole thing where they (rightly and justifiably) fired the main actor that they planned to build the entire next phase around.

Excited might be overselling it, but I'm looking forward to Echo. I liked Alaqua Cox in the Hawkeye series and thought D'Onofrio made a really good Fisk/Kingpin in the Daredevil series, glad he's back.

I guess someone died during the filming of "Wonder Man"? I guess they are filming a "Wonder Man" show? I guess "Wonder Man" is a Marvel character? (Sorry, Wonder Man fans.)

wonder MAN? will this woke nonsense never end???

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Simon_Williams_(Earth-616)

iirc a graft of Wonder Man's brain is what gave Vision his personality. Then when Vision was reset he refused to let the Avengers use his brain again because he'd fallen in love with Wanda.

Sounds like a movie to me!

I really really like Wonder Man. As strong as Thor, but super super insecure…his friendship with the Beast in the late 70s/early 80s was really fun…

Yeah, I remember all that nonsense - you forgot the part where Wonder Man died, then they used his brain, THEN of course he came back to life and was like "THAT'S MY BRAIN!"

It's really bad daytime soap opera shit for kids which to be fair I enjoyed in grade school, but once I got older and discovered other things in life (or rather everything else in life), that shit got really boring really fast.

I thumbed through a trade paperback that collected the old wanda/vision stories from back in the day, hoping to see some of what was in Wandavision. Eeyuck, put it right back. Later I found the recent Vision in the suburbs miniseries which was great.

I was way into wonder man as a kid. Green suit with goggles heavily preferred over leisure suit with shades

Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn are the Fantastic Four. Out 7/25/25.

Reed Richards, Susan Storm, Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm, respectively, it appears.