These movies all seem like such a massive waste of time. Rehash after rehash. Endless trash indeed. Glad I checked out after the Raimi Spider-Man films.
I went back and watched them not that long ago and the difference in quality between them and even the "classics" of the MCU is staggering. They aren't perfect films but they have a sense of genuine passion and fun to them that not even the best Marvel movies had, and especially compared to the slicker and cleaner contemporary X-Men films. I really don't think Superhero movies ever got better than the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy (and yes, Spider-Man 3 is... fine, and I'm tired of everyone pretending it's not).
Spider-Man 3 is much, much better than advertised. You have to take it as a COMIC BOOK movie and not serious art, because it plays out exactly like those classic six-part stories from back in the 80s and 90s. Fun stuff.
Affleck Daredevil is also unironically far superior to most marvel slop of the last decade. Written and directed by a passionate fan, in consultation with legendary authors, and packed so full of all the ‘00s “holy shit that’s badass” a 14 year old could want… chef’s kiss
As a 1980s Marvel Zombie with disposable cash -- an aging Comic Book Guy -- I should be the target audience for these films. Instead I have absolutely no interest in them. I would rather dig into my musty longboxes and re-read the old comics.
I am probably not the average American moviegoer, but I still think my attitude indicates that Marvel Studios may have an audience problem.
They've had a pretty persistent audience problem for a while. Most mainstream audiences dipped after Avengers: Endgame, and the studio seems to be everything it can possibly do to antagonize and drive away the hardcore fans that have hung on by constantly pissing in their wheaties. That's to say nothing of the absolute dearth of writing talent that can't write a good script to save their life. Half the writing leads for their newest projects are literal second-stringers from the Rick and Morty writing stable (which if I remember correctly had a writing room of sixty people at one point) and it shows.
Dec 8, 2023·edited Dec 8, 2023Liked by Yakubian Ape
I have no insight into the industry whatsoever, but it's my assumption that Hollywood writers' rooms are plagued by the same Moloch who afllicts all American institutions, namely nepotism. People get these jobs based on whom they know or are related to, not by proven merit.
You only have to throw a metaphorical rock to hit a talented fiction writer on Substack who would be capable of writing an engaging and internally coherent script for a superhero movie. But that's not who gets hired.
Funny you should say that, because I know for a fact that's exactly how they got their positions. Kevin Feige is/was such a big Rick and Morty fan he wanted to crib some of their "talent". Of course, anyone who was having any success in their absurdly overstuffed writer's room wouldn't have any desire or impetus to leave, so he only ended up taking the people who were already middling among a crowd of "talent" that was questionable to begin with.
It's like trying to poach talent from a competing business and only walking away with their dregs.
"but only grossed a meager $476 million on a budget half as big. Since public budgets for films often do not include the cost of marketing, and marketing can often double the cost of a film, especially when it’s a Disney production… well, you do the math."
Of course, you'd also have to factor in the theater-owners take, which is roughly 40% even in this benighted age. The merch and other licensing side deals don't even come close to making up the difference these days: no kid is clamoring for a Carol Danvers doll.
The math is bad and wrong and probably racist, but it spells doom for these franchises even in the short term. If reality still punished with the swift hand it did five years/minutes ago, the studios could course correct. But they are doomed.
I always forget about the pound of flesh owed to the theaters, but yes, that also has to take a significant chunk out of the box office returns for these movies. Disney used to be able to negotiate pretty low percentages because of their box office dominance, but, obviously, those days are behind them since every empty showing of Ant-Man: Quantumania or The Marvels is a screen that could have gone to a showing of a movie people would have actually paid to watch. And if you want to talk merch, there are many, many videos on YouTube documenting the vast amounts of MCU merchandise quite literally flooding various discount/last chance stores across the country, but all that licensing has to cost a significant amount, too.
If you manage to shed a tear, let me know because I don't think I can even do that much.
That would be a problem if Disney cared about profit. But they're presently cashing in their brand to do good in the world and embracing the future of stakeholder capitalism.
Personally, I have thoroughly enjoyed leftist media critics such as Paul Tassi valiantly and painstakingly twist themselves into pretzels to explain the totally unknowable mystery of why the fandom isn't fond of Brie Larson.
Well, it's because, uh... something about incels, sexist, mysoginists, so on and so forth. Totally has nothing to do with the fact she's practically a black hole of charisma that constantly expresses her disdain for the fans. It has nothing to do with that at all.
I liked her in Ben Wheatley's FREE FIRE (2016), an hilarious Brit send-up of the American action movie. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4158096/ But it also has Armie Hammer in it, so...
Talk about a movie that was made only 7 years ago that could not get made today under any circumstances.
Something like that; I can't even be bothered to hunt down the gory details, so little do I care about celebritykulturkampf. Anyway, I'm given to understand he's unemployable now.
"A lot of what made it work in One Piece was careful cinematography and shot blocking, all of which is far above what the current crop of Marvel-ites are capable of."
Directing an action sequence that is believeable and coherent -- where one as the viewer has a logical sense of bodies, weapons, and projectiles operating and colliding in space -- seems to be an art by and large lost to Hollywood today.
I cannot stand, for instance, Christopher Nolan's Batman movies or every Daniel Craig Bond. Paul Greengrass-inspired jump cuts and shaky mess now pass for action sequences. The good guy wins when his fist comes out of nowhere; you, the viewer, will accept this and like it.
Compare the 1970s work of a yeoman-master like Don Siegel. DIRTY HARRY and CHARLEY VARRICK are utterly engrossing ballets of violence which have the additional charm of credibility; Clint Eastwood and Walter Matthau are real men who fuck up, get hurt, and bleed, not invulnerable superheroes.
I understand what you mean. Personally, I can get hype during a Greengrass-esque action scene the first time I watch it, and I'm like, "Oh, man, this is so cool", and then when I go back and rewatch it and really try to analyze it, it's a total mess and I remember, "This is why these movies always disappoint." I remember when someone slowed down the action scenes from the latest Star Wars movies and picked apart the fight choreography, and it's laughably bad. People say, "Well, it looks fine when you watch it at full speed", but the thing is once you know what to look for, even in real time, you can never unsee it. Even a keen eye could spot it during their first viewing, too, I'm sure.
You mention the frequent hunt for a magical macguffin . . . one of the things I've noticed about little kids' media is the constant theme of petty theft; it's in PJ Masks, Despicable Me, and I'm sure a lot of other things I can't think of right now. It's almost as if, for a certain children's demographic cohort, the epitome of evil is to take something. Now I'm wondering if, for whoever the marvel films are considering as their core audience, the key existential problem is the lack of, and search for, some object . . . I don't know what that object might be, though . . .
I'd say the search for the mystical meaning of why anyone is supposed to care about these movies anymore, but even that sounds like a stretch. I think at this point they're so bereft of ideas that a simple "We need something, the bad guy needs something, and we have to get it at the same time" plot is all they can muster up. It's pretty sad, especially when the Marvel television shows always start off with a unique premise and devolve into who can grab the magical tat first.
These movies all seem like such a massive waste of time. Rehash after rehash. Endless trash indeed. Glad I checked out after the Raimi Spider-Man films.
I went back and watched them not that long ago and the difference in quality between them and even the "classics" of the MCU is staggering. They aren't perfect films but they have a sense of genuine passion and fun to them that not even the best Marvel movies had, and especially compared to the slicker and cleaner contemporary X-Men films. I really don't think Superhero movies ever got better than the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy (and yes, Spider-Man 3 is... fine, and I'm tired of everyone pretending it's not).
Spider-Man 3 is much, much better than advertised. You have to take it as a COMIC BOOK movie and not serious art, because it plays out exactly like those classic six-part stories from back in the 80s and 90s. Fun stuff.
Affleck Daredevil is also unironically far superior to most marvel slop of the last decade. Written and directed by a passionate fan, in consultation with legendary authors, and packed so full of all the ‘00s “holy shit that’s badass” a 14 year old could want… chef’s kiss
As a 1980s Marvel Zombie with disposable cash -- an aging Comic Book Guy -- I should be the target audience for these films. Instead I have absolutely no interest in them. I would rather dig into my musty longboxes and re-read the old comics.
I am probably not the average American moviegoer, but I still think my attitude indicates that Marvel Studios may have an audience problem.
They've had a pretty persistent audience problem for a while. Most mainstream audiences dipped after Avengers: Endgame, and the studio seems to be everything it can possibly do to antagonize and drive away the hardcore fans that have hung on by constantly pissing in their wheaties. That's to say nothing of the absolute dearth of writing talent that can't write a good script to save their life. Half the writing leads for their newest projects are literal second-stringers from the Rick and Morty writing stable (which if I remember correctly had a writing room of sixty people at one point) and it shows.
I have no insight into the industry whatsoever, but it's my assumption that Hollywood writers' rooms are plagued by the same Moloch who afllicts all American institutions, namely nepotism. People get these jobs based on whom they know or are related to, not by proven merit.
You only have to throw a metaphorical rock to hit a talented fiction writer on Substack who would be capable of writing an engaging and internally coherent script for a superhero movie. But that's not who gets hired.
Funny you should say that, because I know for a fact that's exactly how they got their positions. Kevin Feige is/was such a big Rick and Morty fan he wanted to crib some of their "talent". Of course, anyone who was having any success in their absurdly overstuffed writer's room wouldn't have any desire or impetus to leave, so he only ended up taking the people who were already middling among a crowd of "talent" that was questionable to begin with.
It's like trying to poach talent from a competing business and only walking away with their dregs.
"but only grossed a meager $476 million on a budget half as big. Since public budgets for films often do not include the cost of marketing, and marketing can often double the cost of a film, especially when it’s a Disney production… well, you do the math."
Of course, you'd also have to factor in the theater-owners take, which is roughly 40% even in this benighted age. The merch and other licensing side deals don't even come close to making up the difference these days: no kid is clamoring for a Carol Danvers doll.
The math is bad and wrong and probably racist, but it spells doom for these franchises even in the short term. If reality still punished with the swift hand it did five years/minutes ago, the studios could course correct. But they are doomed.
I'll try to shed a manly tear.
I always forget about the pound of flesh owed to the theaters, but yes, that also has to take a significant chunk out of the box office returns for these movies. Disney used to be able to negotiate pretty low percentages because of their box office dominance, but, obviously, those days are behind them since every empty showing of Ant-Man: Quantumania or The Marvels is a screen that could have gone to a showing of a movie people would have actually paid to watch. And if you want to talk merch, there are many, many videos on YouTube documenting the vast amounts of MCU merchandise quite literally flooding various discount/last chance stores across the country, but all that licensing has to cost a significant amount, too.
If you manage to shed a tear, let me know because I don't think I can even do that much.
That would be a problem if Disney cared about profit. But they're presently cashing in their brand to do good in the world and embracing the future of stakeholder capitalism.
Personally, I have thoroughly enjoyed leftist media critics such as Paul Tassi valiantly and painstakingly twist themselves into pretzels to explain the totally unknowable mystery of why the fandom isn't fond of Brie Larson.
Well, it's because, uh... something about incels, sexist, mysoginists, so on and so forth. Totally has nothing to do with the fact she's practically a black hole of charisma that constantly expresses her disdain for the fans. It has nothing to do with that at all.
I liked her in Ben Wheatley's FREE FIRE (2016), an hilarious Brit send-up of the American action movie. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4158096/ But it also has Armie Hammer in it, so...
Talk about a movie that was made only 7 years ago that could not get made today under any circumstances.
Didn't he get in trouble for telling women he wanted to eat them or something and that he had, like, a cannibalism fetish?
Something like that; I can't even be bothered to hunt down the gory details, so little do I care about celebritykulturkampf. Anyway, I'm given to understand he's unemployable now.
"A lot of what made it work in One Piece was careful cinematography and shot blocking, all of which is far above what the current crop of Marvel-ites are capable of."
Directing an action sequence that is believeable and coherent -- where one as the viewer has a logical sense of bodies, weapons, and projectiles operating and colliding in space -- seems to be an art by and large lost to Hollywood today.
I cannot stand, for instance, Christopher Nolan's Batman movies or every Daniel Craig Bond. Paul Greengrass-inspired jump cuts and shaky mess now pass for action sequences. The good guy wins when his fist comes out of nowhere; you, the viewer, will accept this and like it.
Compare the 1970s work of a yeoman-master like Don Siegel. DIRTY HARRY and CHARLEY VARRICK are utterly engrossing ballets of violence which have the additional charm of credibility; Clint Eastwood and Walter Matthau are real men who fuck up, get hurt, and bleed, not invulnerable superheroes.
I understand what you mean. Personally, I can get hype during a Greengrass-esque action scene the first time I watch it, and I'm like, "Oh, man, this is so cool", and then when I go back and rewatch it and really try to analyze it, it's a total mess and I remember, "This is why these movies always disappoint." I remember when someone slowed down the action scenes from the latest Star Wars movies and picked apart the fight choreography, and it's laughably bad. People say, "Well, it looks fine when you watch it at full speed", but the thing is once you know what to look for, even in real time, you can never unsee it. Even a keen eye could spot it during their first viewing, too, I'm sure.
You mention the frequent hunt for a magical macguffin . . . one of the things I've noticed about little kids' media is the constant theme of petty theft; it's in PJ Masks, Despicable Me, and I'm sure a lot of other things I can't think of right now. It's almost as if, for a certain children's demographic cohort, the epitome of evil is to take something. Now I'm wondering if, for whoever the marvel films are considering as their core audience, the key existential problem is the lack of, and search for, some object . . . I don't know what that object might be, though . . .
I'd say the search for the mystical meaning of why anyone is supposed to care about these movies anymore, but even that sounds like a stretch. I think at this point they're so bereft of ideas that a simple "We need something, the bad guy needs something, and we have to get it at the same time" plot is all they can muster up. It's pretty sad, especially when the Marvel television shows always start off with a unique premise and devolve into who can grab the magical tat first.
Seems everyone likes this new Kid Marvel, girl or her actress. I guess I'm just suspicious of how much positive press she's gotten.
As to the other two, they seem boring (Larson in particular) but you did a good job summarising everything thus far.