Continuing my rant started here…
‘The Flash’ and Other Mediocre Movies Won’t Stop Superhero Fatigue - Variety
I’m stunned that the moviegoing public has stomached 15 years[1] of what amounts to eternal-copyright-renewing stuntman showreels, masks and leotards gimp suits, epilepsy-inducing editing and yet more unconvincing 3-D animation…y’know?…instead of, say, interesting concepts translated to scripts and good acting. Then again, there are no less than five (so far) Transformers movies and the Star Wars juggernaut continues on so what do I know?
While we’re at it, as if the first version of Justice League wasn’t a big enough stinker, they had to release a four-hour “Director’s Cut” to address…well, I’m not quite sure…redoing the bad 3D with different bad 3D? According to my friend and yours, Wikipedia…
critics praised Snyder’s direction, visual style, action sequences, performances, improved characterizations, musical score, and balance of emotional weight and humor
Huh! Excepting action sequences, I hadn’t noticed any of those in either version. It’s a ▋▋▋▋▋▋▋ superhero movie, not Citizen Kane! In any case, Mr. Snyder, I want my four hours back.
According to Wikipedia, the Marvel Cinematic Universe started with the first Iron Man movie (2008). So I guess we’re not counting the three Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies…nor the three X-Men movies…nor the three Blade movies…nor the moneymaking turds Hulk and Daredevil. That, kids, is what’s known as cherry-picking. Ugh, why am I feeling all shaky and nauseated? ↩︎
The MCU didn’t start with the movies from Fox or Sony because Iron Man was one of the characters Marvel the company didn’t license off back when it had money problems before Disney bought it. The MCU is specifically stuff put out by Marvel Studios after the acquisition by Disney. It’s why Scarlet Witch gets her powers from the Infinity Stone and not from being Magneto’s daughter as written in the comics.
For your other comments, I agree, the studios have gotten lazy. They have gotten used to an investment of $200 MM plus another $150 MM in advertising yielding $1.25 BN in theaters for the major franchises. Even as superhero fatigue has set in from oversaturation, they still keep pushing out boring movies, with DC bring even worse than Marvel in this regard. I liked Wonder Woman, but the sequel was unwatchably bad.
There’s a problem of trying to make “safe” movies and keeping a PG-13 rating when the stakes necessary to challenge a lead character with superpowers necessitate death and destruction on a large scale. Transformers has a problem that in fights it gets really hard to track which cybernetic organism is the “good guy”, and when the fight is destroying apartment buildings, can there be a true good guy? Blade at least is killing vampires to save normies, and also steered into the R rating. There’s a lot of blood in the Blade movies, unlike pretty much everything from Marvel and DC.
Yes, I’m aware of the whole Marvel Studios/Disney MCU/non-MCU demarcation thang but thank you nevertheless.
You mean like Toho Studios’ Godzilla? Didn’t seem to be a problem for them since 1954, before there was a rating system in place, and they kept the American releases G or PG. Anyway, that “problem” isn’t mine. That problem belongs to the studios (Disney or WB Discovery) churning out these franchise movies.