“The love that you feel for your family makes you weak!” the villain tells Jaime. And later on, he repeats, “I told you, the love that you feel for your family makes you weak!”
So I guess that’s what the love that Jaime feels for his family makes him, unless there’s any late-breaking reports.
Continue reading Blue Beetle 104.1: What Your Family Makes You
The wonderful thing about The Flash underperforming at the box office is that it seems like it’s making everybody happy.
People who hated the Zack Snyder era say that The Flash is bombing because it’s the last gasp of a failed cinematic universe. In the other corner, Snyder supporters say it’s because the new heads of DC Films made the movie irrelevant, by firing Henry Cavill and Gal Gadot, and shutting down that storyline.
So that’s why everybody’s so cheerful on Twitter today; we finally have something that everyone can agree on.
So here we are, at the end of an actual era. The big current-events story that I’ve been tracking for a while now is the transition of James Gunn from the writer and director of some of the best Marvel movies, to a role that’s probably going to end up as the writer and producer of all the best DC movies.
James Gunn wasn’t the first writer to make a really good Marvel movie — in my opinion, that was Joss Whedon, in 2012’s The Avengers — but he was the first one who showed that you could do it as a stand-alone film.
If you look at the movies that came after The Avengers — Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The Winter Soldier — you can see that Joss Whedon’s work on the first Avengers film didn’t have much of an impact on the rest of the line.
It took Gunn writing and directing Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014 for everybody at Marvel Studios to say, “oh, that’s how you do it!” and start making better films. Basically, the formula is: turn the lights up, create funny characters with interesting backstories, give the lead characters an emotional story arc that drives the action, be visually inventive, and above all, make it fun. In other words: make a Pixar movie.
Continue reading Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3: Violence, Feelings and Pop Music
Finally! They’ve made a movie with a positive message that we just don’t see often enough: believe in yourself and be true to your friends, and you can accomplish anything.
They call it “Marvel Fatigue”, which is apparently a thing that happens to people who like something so much that they watch a lot of it.
“Is the world starting to get Marvel fatigue?” Gamerant asked in December 2021, one week before the debut of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which made $805 million domestic.
“Marvel Fatigue Is More Obvious Than Ever After San Diego Comic Con,” Thegamer.com asserted in July 2022, halfway between Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness ($411 million) and Thor: Love and Thunder ($343 million).
“Marvel Fatigue Is Setting in with MCU Fans,” Screenrant declared in November 2022, a week after the premiere of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever ($453 million).
“Marvel’s Kevin Feige has a plan to combat superhero fatigue. Will it work?” AV Club gasped in February 2023, two days before Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had a $118 million opening weekend.
I swear, my greatest dream in life is that someday people will be as tired of me as they are of Marvel movies. Just imagine how much money I would make.
Continue reading Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania: The Problem is Not the Problem
These are uncharted waters. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has become a mega-franchise that produces hits so dependably that it’s acquired a logic of its own, which does not resemble normal human artistic endeavor.
In 2018, Marvel Studios produced Black Panther, a profoundly successful movie about a character who was not particularly well-known before he started showing up in Marvel movies. The film made a staggering amount of money, with a $700 million domestic box office take. It was the #1 movie of the year in the United States, even beating that year’s Avengers crossover.
They planned to make a sequel, of course, with Chadwick Boseman returning as King T’Challa. Writer-director Ryan Coogler started working on a script, and most of the original cast signed on for the second movie. They were about seven months away from the start of filming on Black Panther 2 when the news broke that Boseman had died of colon cancer, a condition that he’d been struggling with privately since 2016.
At that point, the normal thing for the studio to do would be to announce that the film was cancelled, and that the MCU would regretfully move on without Black Panther. Instead, they decided to make the movie anyway, rewriting the script to have the lead character die offscreen on page 2.
This is a bizarre way for a movie studio to behave. They made a two hour and forty-minute film about how bummed they are that they couldn’t make a sequel to Black Panther, and released it to theaters, and then everybody showed up and loved it anyway.
Continue reading Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: Make the Movie Anyway
It’s tough being DC Films these days, for almost every possible reason. They’re standing in the shadow of the pop culture juggernaut that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is still expanding like crazy, in both movies and TV. There’s a clear vision behind Marvel’s plans, extending further into the future with movies lined up for 2026 and beyond.
In comparison, DC has been falling backwards downstairs for the last ten years, insecure about what they’re making and who should be in charge. Warner Bros started DC Films in 2016 after everyone didn’t like Batman v Superman, putting Geoff Johns and Jon Berg in charge. Then everyone didn’t like Justice League in 2017, so Johns and Berg were ousted, and replaced by Walter Hamada.
After Aquaman was successful in 2018, Hamada announced that DC was going to focus on individual character stories instead of worrying about how they all connect. After a few more movies, they backtracked in 2021 and announced that the films were all interconnected again… and then they released The Batman, a very successful standalone film, so they have no idea what they’re trying to do.
By this point, DC’s fans are polarized into warring tribes, who are trying to push the company into making decisions based on how a particular hashtag is trending on Twitter on any given day. And now the company’s been bought by Discovery Inc., and their terrible new CEO has ousted Hamada, and is reportedly looking for “a Kevin Feige type” to give the films “a coherent creative and brand strategy”, which is probably not going to work, because how many Kevin Feiges can there be in the world?
Amid this turmoil and uncertainty, it’s only fitting that this weekend they put out a new film that isn’t very good, but is doing very well at the box office, just to complicate things even more.
And hardly anybody even noticed, was the really annoying thing for all the people who made the Swamp Thing movie. They worked as hard as they could, in the middle of a swamp, and some of them were good at their jobs and some of them decidedly were not, and eventually it turned into a movie that hardly anybody watched. It made so little that Box Office Mojo has a blank space where the domestic and international gross is supposed to be.
Meanwhile, all the way over here at the other end of history, the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe effort — Thor: Love and Thunder — made 143 million dollars this weekend, and people are talking about how disappointed they are.
Continue reading Thor: Love and Thunder: Things That Happened to Thor
It was silly of me, I suppose, to hope that a follow-up to WandaVision, Loki and Spider-Man: No Way Home would be anything but disappointing; I just didn’t expect it to be as disappointing as this. I guess sometimes green means stop.
Continue reading Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: Everything Somewhere
And as General Zod sinks slowly in the west, we bid farewell to successful superhero movies for a while. If I’m going to cover the entire history of superhero movies, then that means taking the bad with the good, so I’m about to enter the string of disappointing comic book movies of the 80s, including Swamp Thing, Supergirl and Howard the Duck, which convinced everyone at the time that making movies based on comic books was a dumb idea.
Meanwhile, way over here on the other side of history, we live in a world where making as many movies based on comic books as possible is the only logical course for every single movie studio to pursue. You can tell that the nerds have won because a movie about a minor Spider-Man character comes out, and the entire pop culture discussion around the movie is about which Marvel movie “universe” it belongs in. This is not normal pop culture behavior.
Superheroes Every Day 