just going to go ahead and have a Captain America: The Movie thread

the level of terrible, sucky comic book movies has gotten much better! c.f. the last punisher movie versus the lundgren version.

Omg the Captain America with the guy from Space Mutiny is on Syfy now.

Bridge Largemeat! Splint Chesthair! Smash Lampjaw! Rip Slabcheek!

the first movie is a total mess - veers wildly in tone, character motivations make no sense, plot has literally no regard for a coherent sequence of events, majority of the acting is terrible etc

Batman Begins, you mean.

nrq, are u such a relentless horndog in your published crizizism?

― you call it trollin' i call it steamrollin' (Dr Morbius), Friday, July 22, 2011 2:43 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

lol no. i could ask you the same qn tbqh!

so how did those early-mid 90s marvel adaptations happen? my theory is that corman et al were sitting on 5- or 10-year marvel licenses that had been drawn up in the mid-'80s when comic-book movies were not in vogue. then with the crazy success of batman they rushed them into production (captain america maybe was even in production during batman pre-release hype?). my question is did marvel have to sue to keep the corman fantastic 4 from seeing proper release? or did corman himself deem it unreleasable?

seems like another world. now even 2nd-rate marvel characters get $300 million movies.

xpost

it's weird to think how early in burton's career the two batman movies were. i mean w/ the first one he was fresh off of beetlejuice.

I enjoyed this - not for the action really, but for the amusing metafictional aspects I didn't realize were a part of the character's development (or is in the movie, anyway). Also, weirdly poignant last scene!

but the elaborate, bloodless 'war' scenes were pretty zzzzzz

bizarre abt the fantastic 4 corman movie
The Fantastic Four is an unreleased low-budget feature film completed in 1994. Created to secure copyright to the property, the producers never intended it for release although the director, actors, and other participants were not informed of this fact.

more:
In 1992, Constantin Film was about to lose its option on the film rights for Fantastic Four, unless production began by December. Without the $40 million in necessary funding for a full-budget film, producer Bernd Eichinger turned to Roger Corman for help.
Constantin Film permitted the director, actors and others involved in the film to believe that the studio intended to release it in theaters, rather than the film being a cinematic equivalent of an ashcan copy.[1][2] The cast and crew did the film for low salaries after being told that if it did not get released to theaters, it would be used as the pilot for a potential television series.
Filming lasted a month and finished in January 1993, after which post-production began. The cast gave press interviews and attended comic book conventions in good faith. The studio announced a premiere date of 1994, at the Mall of America in Minnesota. In late 1993, the studio announced that the film would not be released because of the budget.
Over a decade later, Constantin Film made a $100 million Fantastic Four film and its sequel, the $130 million Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

was there a precedent for this kind of maneuver? seems nutty.

The line "Jam Captain America down their throats!" was just uttered. I had a coughing fit.

p.s. continuity nerds are going to have a hell of a time explaining how chris evans is both johnny storm and captain america.

in fairness, the CGI done on Steve Rogers make him VERY un-Johnny Storm-like

the effects on skinny steve rogers are good, but its weird because they didnt do anything to change chris evans' voice, so he comes off like tay zonday

Skinny Steve looks like Pete Campbell.

the problem with cap - i liked this movie btw! - is that he spends the whole movie effortlessly plowing through every obstacle. i dont think chris evans gets a single scratch or nick on him. so you can basically lean back and go 'eh, he's got this' the whole time.

― ＤＥＨＵＭＡＮＩＺＥ ＹＯＵＲＳＥＬＦ ＡＮＤ ＦＡＣＥ ＴＯ ＢＬＯＯＤＳＨＥＤ (Princess TamTam), Friday, 22 July 2011 14:31 (5 hours ago)

^OTM.

This movie just hammers home what i've always thought: watching superheroes in action is generally pretty boring. The stuff that's fun for me about comic-based movies (when they're at least halfway decent) is usually not the hero-fighting-baddie stuff.

Anyway I liked this overall, largely because of the retro pulp sci-fi WWII setting and the metafictional aspects Simon H. mentioned above. And Evans was good.

what metafictional aspects idgi

They have a Princess Bride-type framing device where a grandpa reads a Captain America comic to his ailing child, who then becomes Captain America IRL at the end of the movie.

p.s. continuity nerds are going to have a hell of a time explaining how chris evans is both johnny storm and captain america.

― by another name (amateurist), Friday, July 22, 2011 7:31 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark

The FF movies and the Avengers-related Marvel movies are separate.

"We sure did cram ourselves down a few throats, didn't we?"
"We sure did, Steve."

I can't believe this movie.

?? are they planning to have metafictional grampa steve rogers lead the avengers??

no, i was kidding

that's too bad! i was looking forward to charlie kaufman's avengers.

yeah, evans was good. its tough to play a character this square and still be charismatic, but he pulls it off. and simon otm about weirdly poignant closing scene, which actually made me want to see a sequel just to see how they handle its implications

i liked this a lot

yeah you never feel like Cap/Evans is in danger at any time.

for the curious - metafictional qualities in this movie = Evans earning the Cap title not through valor / some personal vested interest in AMERICA iconography but through a war bonds promotional tour that winds up extending to films...and comics! I kind of loved that he had to prove himself as a commerically viable capital-I Icon before he could do any actual adventuring.

*commercially

lol that is pretty cool

I do like the mobius strip like vibe of all these comic book franchise reboots and relaunches. I'm not imagining things when I say I thought I heard news that after The Dark Knight Rises they're restarting the Batman franchise all over again, right? It's really in keeping with the comics, where the quality of the product ebbs and flows radically based on what writers and artists are tackling in essence the same story over and over again. Like, in the comics, many of these characters go fallow for years until someone finds a way to make them fresh again. Funny that the movies are following the same model, however inadvertently.

well I mean at some point someone is going to do Batman again in any case, it's just a matter of when.

doing the origin story over and over is pretty fucking stupid tho, there is a lot more to the comics than that

Yeah, sometimes they also kill him, too.

never forget: batman's parents were murdered etc.

Every generation gets the origin story it deserves.

Producers not trusting the public to follow a superhero series more than two films past the origin story, non-shocker. (Producers are likely otm.) Reminds me a little of writers who take over a title and want to retcon away the previous writer's work. (Daredevil as the leader of a ninja assassin gang?! Sure, why the fuck not...)

where's our generation's paul giamatti penguin?

Producers not trusting the public to follow a superhero series more than two films past the origin story, non-shocker. (Producers are likely otm.)

probably not really a bad idea if your target audience is 10 years old

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSdX9-_3vEA

I totally thought that kid in the tie dye was going to say "green lantern.... which they FUCKED UP" haha

trailer looks interesting but uh haven't there been enough marvel comics-based movies this summer?

thor
x-men 1st class
crappy transformers, sorta
this one

slow down ffs. spread those IPs out.

well they had to rush out thor and cap so they can do avengers next summer. and transformers has nothing to do with marvel

and xmen doesn't really have anything to do with marvel either. Fox has to release an xmen movie every 3 years or they lose the rights back to marvel.

tbh the kids in that last video could replace most film critics and noone would notice

tbh the kids in that last video could replace most film critics all of ILX and noone would notice

that rang most true for response to "what do you most want to see?"
"horrible bosses... and... harry potter."

Hasbro had previously worked with Marvel Comics to develop G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero for a three-pronged marketing scheme - the toyline, a tie-in comic book by Marvel, and an animated mini-series co-produced by Marvel's media arm, Marvel Productions, and the Griffin-Bacal Advertising Agency's Sunbow Productions animation studio. Given the success of that strategy, the process was repeated in 1984 when Hasbro marketing vice president Bob Prupis approached Marvel to develop their new robot series, which Jay Bacal dubbed "Transformers."[3]

i don't like that i knew that already, but at least i had to confirm with wiki.

yes, there was a transformers comic, but marvel have nothing to do with the transformers movie. and marvel studios has nothing to do with the x-men, spiderman, fantastic four, daredevil, or ghost rider movies.

so I'm just saying it doesn't make sense to say "why did marvel put out 4 movies this summer?" when they only put out 2. that still may be one or two too many, but you can't blame them for transformers.

i think people are just reacting to the glut of comics-themed movies this summer, whoever is behind them

and while one studio isn't responsible for all of them, surely all studios knew what the others' summer schedules were. so they must have figured there was an inexhaustible market for this stuff.