The slow decline isn't slow anymore
The slow decline isn't slow anymore
The slow decline isn't slow anymore
Endgame was a 3 hour fan service and wasn't all that good and I'll die on that hill.
No, you're right. Infinity war is the better movie but endgame was the better event. Endgame is almost a perfect fanservice movie and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Infinity war is not that good either. Everything is preventable but the heroes forgot how to heroe and make very bad decisions
Infinity War has its faults. It's paced a little nonstop and the Wakanda bits are a bit weak. That being said, I saw it ten times in the cinema and it's the perfect movie for me. I swear -- the tail end of Thanos being on Titan to the end of the movie, you can feel how somber it was and I feel that's because of the connection to the characters. We can always say "oh they're coming back" but I like to watch the movie on its own and remember just how it felt watching the movie for the first time.
Yeah infinity war was better, I knew this the moment Thanos ripped that planet down with the power and space stones
Exactly. Endgame is great in terms of fanservice, but IW is just a far more solid film
Less of a hill and more of a well constructed 15th century fortress with about 100 loyal defenders at your service.
I'm still pissed that the McGuffin in that movie was basic-ass time travel, when they had the way cooler McGuffin of the Quantum Realm they could have explored.
To make matters even worse, it's seeming like the real reason they did the time travel BS was so they could start the multiverse BS, so they had a justification to continue pumping out garbage content.
Completely agree! Though time travel wasn't a MacGuffin, it was just a plot contrivance. A Macguffin is an interchangeable irrelavent object used to drive the motivation for the plot. The "tesseract" in Avengers, or the "Philosopher/Sorcerer's Stone" in Harry Potter for example.
Sorry to be pedantic, I fully agree with your actual point, and just thought you might want to know.
It's also just a bad time travel movie because the purpose of it was to be appeal to self-contained nostalgia. Like, "hey, remember all these OTHER movies you saw that built up to this one? Well, they're going to revisit these in minor, superficial ways at the very end of our huge event." Yeah, dog, I don't care about those movies anymore and they weren't very entertaining to begin with. Just get to the ball numbing action violence.
I'm so sick of time travel
Agreed. My main takeaway from it was that my butt hurt after sitting in the theater for that long.
I fell asleep during it in the theater. It was so insanely boring.
You’ll have my bow.
Ma...ma.... Marvel movies are mostly redundant bullshit without even a single relevant thought in them. Just like these mass-produced romcoms, same level. They will probably be the first movies written and produced by inferior AI soon and it won't even make a big difference.
The worst part of Marvel movies is how they expect you to remember everything from every other Marvel movie and TV show going back to Iron Man in 2008. I gave up after a while. I can't keep all of that in my memory and I should be able to skip the ones that are less interesting to me and not get confused in a movie that isn't a sequel to those.
I'm a big One Piece fan. One piece has thousands of characters many with fleshed out back stories. They all feel fresh and unique and the universe is coherent. But marvel? Most if not all super heroes are interchangeable and the universe makes no sense.
Ya know, I'm actually okay with that. Up to endgame it wasn't really all that much. You had Ironman x3, GoG x2, Strange x1, Thor x3, Spiderman x1 (x2 if you want to watch the one right after endgame), Captain America x3, Avengers x3, Ant-Man x2, and Black Panther, all of which set you up for endgame. Thats... a grand total of 20 movies, plus the spiderman right after endgame.
Is that a lot? Sure, 40-50 hours. But let one company have a cool, big, tied together place in movies. I liked my invincible comic read. One book, straight through from beginning to end. I also liked when I read through the Marvel Ultimate comics, with about four or five of the serials that I was reading interweaving. I can't think of any other setting that was tied together like that in movies. The closest you'd get would be the television types, with a few hundred episodes.
I'll agree that the tv show styles were too much. I personally couldn't even watch the first trial of those, the agents of shield, right? That first episode was just such terrible writing. I definitely don't want to take that 40-50 hours (over 11 years, too, so that helps) and multiply by exponential scales.
When you strip away the trappings and just look at the scripts, it's incredible how generic all of the dialogue is.
It would be trivial to re-purpose any script to be for any other character because of how little they truly differ.
I'm entirely unconvinced that they haven't already been algorithm -assisted
at least then marvel will have a future, for whenever the inferior ai eventually gets replaced with superior ai
They will probably be the first movies written and produced by inferior AI soon and it won't even make a big difference.
While watching Quantummania I already had a feeling that the entire script was written by ChatGPT.
MCU are just superhero Hallmark movies
I just want things to end. It's okay for things to be over. Star wars wasn't served by it's sequels, but here we are with a new WHATEVER every year. And marvel is worse, with a new show every month or two. Realistically, how long is anyone supposed to care?
It’s okay for things to be over.
False. Mediocre content still sells, and it is literally illegal for the company to not produce profit for the shareholders.
I'm just bemoaning how art suffers at the hands of capitalism.
Mediocre content still sells
Been living under a rock for all of 2023?
Endgame was stupid. The solution to Thanos was have Tony conveniently invent time traveling and then save the day. Infinity Wars was the peak.
Infinity Wars was stupid. Have some super heroes run around fighting bad guys trying to destroy the world for some stupid reason. There was no pick. It's all stupid.
All stupid is correct.
I don't know, I thought it was kind of fun that they mixed things up for a change and had the protagonist be the villain and the central plot be about his triumph over the antagonists who are the heroes; the movie ending with him relaxing and enjoying the sunset now that his great work was over and so he could retire and put down his burdens was a really nice touch.
You ignorant. Thanos was the hero. Ironman is just another billionaire denying the obvious responsiblity for the death of all life on earth Thanos was preventing.
Maybe so, but it was still a janky story. A gigantuan struggle, with epic consequences... resolved by deus ex machina.
But that plot point was completely nonsense.
Maybe you’re just older because they weren’t good to begin with
Nobody says they were masterpieces. But they were entertaining - and excellent at it as far as cheap entertainment goes -, now they're just sad to watch. I followed it closely until No Way Home, that was my closing point. From now on, I'll only watch Spider-Man movies because I'm a huge fan of the character. Couldn't care less about the multiverse they're selling
Would also recommend GOTG3 if you enjoyed the first two films, I'd personally say it's my favourite of the trilogy
the multiverse they’re selling
Oh they do be selling it that's for sure. I haven't checked in to Spider Man since Enter the Spiderverse, which I thought was really cool. Marvel I didn't even like the style of the first movies, but I felt obligated to see them since I was technically part of what is now "nerd culture," and I think a lot of us felt the same obligation to see them for nerd cred. Now they've just commodified it to shit and milking every drop they can out of it.
Marvel films are the popcorn flicks of the 2010s. None of them are masterpieces, but most are just a fun watch.
But now they're often not even that. Besides a few outliers (No Way Home, GOTG3), they fail to even be entertaining popcorn flicks. I'd say the line is National Treasure. If it's better than National Treasure, that's a solid popcorn flick. If it's worse, then it's not worth watching.
Not a movie, but both seasons of Loki were also good.
Guardians had the things I hate about MCU but was entertaining enough to be enjoyable, because they leaned in to how wacky it was I think. Rest of MCU was just done to a crisp even then.
National Treasure is fucking awful though.
It's certainly no The Mummy (Brendan and Rachel obviously, not Tom's shitty effort that killed the whole "Dark Universe" franchise two movies in), which is about where I draw the line on popcorn guff.
There was something to look forward to as all the characters got their movie and then the big team up to fight the big bad guy.
It was never Oscar worthy material, just some nice entertainment.
Nah, the first Iron Man still holds up well.
Does it? Does everyone just ignore big ironman as a villain?
Yeah I'd say they were pretty bad and then got worse. They were agreeable movies for a diverse group at one point, even if they weren't all Marvel-heads. The Joss Whedon style of quippy self-referencing dialogue and unlikable protagonists is their major weak point, it got old between Firefly getting cancelled and the first Marvel movie but hadn't been overdone in pop culture yet apparently.
An MCU sex scene:
"That was so hot how you did that thing 3 scenes ago ...I guess we're alone now"
"Yeah... this is the part in a movie where sex happens..."
"I suppose if sex were going to happen, we would start like this..."
"Yes, and then I would do this"
(cheesy montage to an old classic)
"Woah... so that happened."
They were never good you just had dogshit standards.
Yup, I would have worded it differently but I second this
I get that alot 😄
They hated him because he spoke the truth.
This is another occasion where I really hope the lesson isn’t “Female leads don’t sell”. Probably an obvious observation, but Captain Marvel always struck me as a boring, flawless, invincible hero without much personality.
The Superman problem. Main sources of conflict tend to involve depowering, fighting another godlike, or threatening people they care about. Over and over again.
Actually makes me appreciate so much more that one set of writers managed to make a semi-compelling show that focuses on Lois, including her personal growth, all while discovering that her plucky goodboy intern is in fact the man of steel. (Referring to My Adventures with Superman in case it’s not obvious)
One of the things a reviewer highlighted as very important to that show was that it didn’t praise Lois’ rebelliousness and spunk as having no consequences. I basically just didn’t see any of that journey in the first Captain Marvel movie.
The problem is that even Superman deconstructions get shat on. Snyder tried to do something different but everyone wanted a hokey silver age comic supes
this is so interesting, we were just talking marvel today with my best friend and she pointed out captain marvel as one of her favorite mcu characters. and it's specifically because she's a strong female character who's allowed to be strong without being hyper-competent or incredibly cerebral or anything like that. she's just a woman who stands up for things and punches shit occasionally and is allowed to win through sheer brute force.
and yes, she's way too powerful in many of the same way as superman, which is a narrative defect, but i find it extremely hypocritical how much more scrutiny people point toward captain marvel on that, while superman continues to be one of dc's most popular heroes, despite marvel using her better than dc uses superman.
It's new to me that Superman evades that criticism. There's a reason Batman gets so much more media than him lately, in large part because of the "What if Batman is actually bad for Gotham" philosophical junk.
Even the Zack Snyder films, for all their flaws, examine the two-toned mistakes of the hero more than the power, eg "Maybe a god X-raying us at every occasion and destroying buildings to fight his rival is perhaps too oppressive" versus "Maybe he should've used his X-ray vision to see the bomb in that guy's wheelchair before he set it off."
Superman is a morality play. His powers have been secondary since the 80s.
He's Clark before he's Superman. And Clark is one hell of a good dude who's been fleshed out incredibly well.
Most people who don't like Superman don't know who Clark Kent is, and by that I mean they don't really read much Superman comics.
Not saying this is you, just commenting on the general stigma Clark seems to catch. Dude isn't even the most powerful being on Earth by a long shot.
If anything the peak was infinity wars. But tbh just finished watching s02 of loki and it's absolutely excellent. I have tons of critique but still it's very good.
Wait you thought s02 of Loki is good? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Endgame was shit, infinity war was the actual peak
I don’t think it was total hot garbage like most. I dislike most of everything to do with the final battle, but the time travel shenanigans are fun as fuck
Meanwhile, Loki is the best MCU content to date.
But female Loki blabla /s
I mean, in spiderverse they have a pig version of peter parker, i would say anyone really complaining about female loki is really just being sexist
Series one maybe, two was a bit of a mess imo. I didn't even understand what the stakes were until everything started turning into noodles.
Look, I love spaghettification porn as much as the next guy, but Loki was a mess. The story was gobbldyremoved. I could not see any good interpretation of all the stuff about purifying non-übermensch timelines. The Wilson / Hiddleston chemistry was great, really that's the only reason to keep watching.
Everyone argues with me over it, but The Incredible Hulk (Edward norton) and Iron Man/Iron Man 2 were pretty much it for me.
I did enjoy No Way Home, and Thor Love and Thunder, but the rest were so watered down. Captain America & Bucky VS iron man was the death warrant. He can take a tank round, but not a punch from Cap?
Hulk pissing himself in Infinity War against Thanos with just the power stone? No. Hulk should have smashed him to a pulp.
This. Civil War's final fight scene is hugely overrated. Iron man by that point had tangled with multiple fighter aircraft, dozens of missile armed drones, Thor and more. Goes down to two strong guys punching him.
Even before Endgame, there were some stinkers.
It's one of the reasons why Guardians of the Galaxy was so popular, it changed the formula.
It was also just a straight up James Gunn movie with an ensemble cast of misfits. It's like...his thing. That's what's so weird about so many Marvel movies. They gave them to competent directors and basically said "make one of your movies, but with our characters and setting." Iron Man 2 was a Shane Black joint: took place at Christmas, lots of witty banter, there were some buddy cop elements. But the shell of it is an Iron Man movie.
The two Hellboy movies did the Marval style film before Marvel and it was only second to Iron Man.
I'd say this is just nostalgia. The iron man movies where utter trash. I guess you judt were young and impressionable then.
Marvel peaked with the first Blade movie and it's all been varying flavors of downhill since then. This is the truth.
Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill!
Watched Blade for the first time Saturday and that line gave me whiplash.
furious katana spinning gif
But Infinity War was the better movie. Is this still up for discussion?
They were never good.
Guardians of the Galaxy were the only fun ones anyway. The rest was rehashed trash.
as an instance admin, regarding your profile picture: fuck you very much lmao
Haha as a QA engineer... I wish I'd not gone and looked.
Third one might be my favorite marvel movie ever, and that’s post endgame
For me, the Deadpool movies are the only ones I’ve watched more than once
I forgot that those were from Marvel since they were actually funny.
I thought comic book movies were in decline until the Batman came out. The question is if Marvel is willing to part from their generic formula so their movies feel fresh.
Marvel needs some good direction from a management level, they need to build an Avengers team of writers who can really think of an overarching plot and have an end goal. They keep introducing new characters and then just don't use them at all (where is Shang Chi?), their IP is spread out too much across unnecessary TV shows, they need to get their budget under control because somehow everything costs a billion, and their end product is worsened by the fact that their VFX teams are being overrun. This is Kevin Feige's time to shine more than ever and he needs to show Disney that he can earn that pay.
Exactly. I was a big fan of the Batman, adapting the neo noir feel really helped it stand out.
Disney is kind of starting to figure this out on the star wars side with Andor and the Mandalorian. Creating unique stories with varying, structure, genre and tone. Every marvel movie just feels so generic and blends into every other, gets boring. Wanda vision had a glimmer of genius before devolving back to generic marvel meh stuff.
I mean, I still enjoy ‘em. They ain’t perfect, but nothing is.
I feel like comic book movies in general, peaked. Marvel nor DC have made anything that gets close.
I think the big reason is that marvel had to make due with it's B and C suite of characters, after they sold the rights of to their most popular franchises, like X-Men and Spiderman. They had to step their writing game up to overcome the limited popularity of the characters.
Is this a staged joke? Is everyone here in some conspiracy to make me believe that either the world went mad or I did? Why is everyone calling every Marvel movie "peak" but the first Iron Man? Obviously, this was the best one.
It was all downhill from there for me too
I thought it was the opening of Lady Gaga's Poker Face.
That would have been funny too
The Marvels was a fun movie tho
Marvel movies have never peaked because it was a downwards slide from the start
It’s hard to argue that the first Ironman didn’t completely reboot and reframe the entirety of the marvel franchise and superhero movie genre.
Is it a critically acclaimed movie? No.
But it should still be recognised as the starting point for a massive popular culture shift.
Either they all are the same quality or one was better than others, therefore creating a peak.
Look at f(x) = e^-x and tell me where the peak is.
A peak is only when it first gets better, then worse.
My god End Game was trash. It qas terribly rushed. They should've just ended it in Infinity war with a cliff hanger.
Rushed, and yet still somehow way too long.
Shoulda been a trilogy with a proofreader
I wonder what the impact of that would be on the population psychologically.
There are too many. The other day I saw the latest flash movie. It's the second? Third? Fourth? I don't know because they don't put a number and I don't care enough. Too many stuff referenced other movies or series making watching a bit of a hassle. Is this just unknown and will be told later for making the movie interesting, or it's because the audience is supposed to having watched 40 hours of previous works?
If they really need to push a new superhero movie or series every 2 months, their stories should be self contained, at most separated in a trilogy. Not an infinite parallel universe constantly self referenced that needs a guide that tells you which content you need to watch and in which order.
The Flash is not MCU. The rest is true.
This is why the whole "marvel vs DC" thing is fucking stupid. Most people don't know or care about that difference, they just know they saw a shitty superhero movie. Better movies overall help both companies.
Lol I'm so out of touch that only now I noticed it's DC
LOL that's why there was batman at the beginning
I was genuinely thinking it was Marvel ignoring all the references to the justice league. Like, my mind shutted off at the beginning of the movie, just watching the action but ignoring the story
LOL i can't believe I did such a mistake
I felt that way after Spiderman 3.
Jazz hands!
Marvels was good, trolls getting mad about it are also good, really just a good time to be alive entertainment-wise
The Marvels was poorly paced and I don't know if that's more the fault of the editing or the directing. But holy shit the individual pieces were so. good.
The interactions between the leads, the evolution of the fight scenes to integrate the problem and turn it into an advantage. Princesses and kittens are not my kind of deal, but they were absolutely perfect in this movie and I was thrilled to see them. Kamala Khan being a superhero with a normal, well-adjusted, loving family is one of my favorite things about her character.
My frustration and disappointment with this and with The Eternals is this had all the pieces to be a great Marvel movie, but the pieces didn't get assembled properly somehow. I don't know what changed about their production process, but if they can fix it, they still have good content to build great movies on. Haters bedamned.
Honestly, as far as the ensemble movies go, I personally think Marvel peaked with the first Avengers movie...
Hard agree. The others just don't give any characters enough to time to do anything other than show, do a bit of fan service, and fuck off again. Endgame is a complete clusterfuck.
The only things that have been anywhere near that good since are the Spiderman (maybe not the middle one) and Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn is just at home doing this stuff) movies.
I wanted the Taika Waititi and Sam Raimi films to be a lot better than they were, and they just feel too constrained by the House of Mouse for the kind of directors they are.
Winter Soldier is the peak for me, with Civil War just barely below it.
I didn't really care for the movies until Thanos made an appearance. Right now is like the prelims. Once we get to the main card when the next main boss comes, I'm going to be hyped again.
Watch Loki. I think we have our big bad.
We've known the big bad since the first season of Loki and from Ant-man at least.
Could you spare a spoiler for somebody who has no plans to watch any of the marvel TV shows?
Oh that guy. I've only seen season 1 and haven't grasped how much of a threat he really is.
Tbh I think the top of the mountain was infinity war. I never heard such silence as I did in the scene when gamora asks, what did it cost
Yes endgame was good, but fuck if people aren't now comparing the "weekly episodes" to what was essentially the epic 2 part seaon finale.
In that last pane, what's up with the scattered grains of rice next to a pink cloth?
I stopped watching the live action movies after Iron Man 2. I find the Marvel animation much more enjoyable.
I haven't really seen any of their animated films, any you can recommend?
Phase 1 was peak.
iron man 1 and 2 were the peak and they carried the rest of phase 1. avengers introduced the (not so) novel concept of building culture on prior culture that was possible despite all of copyright's bs because disney bought so much shit, and as such it was innovative at the time, but the only movies actually worth going back to from phase 1 are good for entirely different reasons
Agreed.
Iron man 3 was just... Weird.
If anything the peak was infinity wars. But tbh just finished watching s02 of loki and it's absolutely excellent. I have tons of critique but still it's very good.
Yeah, Loki Season 2 was awesome.
Loki season 2 was peak of all marvel and it’s not even close for me.
People sure love yucking other people's yums.
People are allowed to dislike things
Yup quietly without diminishing others enjoyment...
If anything the peak was infinity wars. But tbh just finished watching s02 of loki and it's absolutely excellent. I have tons of critique but still it's very good.