MCU Phase 4 Trailer

[Cikomyr2]

Ah. Thank you. Knowing there may be a tie-in to the Eternals makes me less interested, rather than more.

At this point Michelle Yeoh and Awkwafina are the two main reasons I’d be interested in seeing this, but I don’t know how much of a role they’ll have.

I said may or may not. It's a wild guess if they pull it off, I am just parroting an old Moviebob theory. He usually has a good batting average for these things.

[Psyren]

The original Phoenix storyline had a LOT of buildup. There were months and years of storylines that revolved around the changes that had happened in Jean, how she was much more powerful but her powers were prone to burning out at bad moments, how she felt strange and disconnected since cheating death. And that in turn was building on years of Jean Grey being the token girl and the weakest of the original team. The big selling point of the original Dark Phoenix reveal was that it was a character nobody would expect to go mad with power doing just that. Problem was, when the defining moment of a character is built around a surprise, you can't really replicate that surprise.

And now whenever Jean shows up in any adaptation, it's just a countdown to the familiar "goes Phoenix, goes nuts, dies, gets better" arc that everyone is expecting. It's not helped by how Dark Phoenix herself, even in the original, is not a very interesting villain--generally, she just jobs out the X-Men, kills a bunch of unnamed NPC's and brags about how awesome she is.

The thing though is, you CAN do a good Dark Phoenix story without years and years of foundation and build-up. Umbrella Academy proved that with Elliot Page's Vanya/White Violin, and they pulled it off with a bunch of completely unknown (to mainstream audiences) heroes to boot. And Marvel looks poised to do something similar with Wanda. So I have no sympathy for Fox's repeated failures whatsoever, especially given that it was also done well in the 90's cartoon and they had the rights to nearly everything that was used there.

The big problem with Dark Phoenix is that all the key elements have to be there, but the Fox Movies kept leaving a bunch out. Three of the big ones they missed include:

Spoiler

Show

- The shadowy organization trying to use the Phoenix for their own ends: This provides one of the key pieces of external conflict that makes DP work, both because it gives her and the heroes someone to struggle against besides each other, and because it helps keep her sympathetic/redeemable after some of the bad things she does during the story. The comics/cartoon had the Hellfire Club in this role, while Umbrella Academy had the Temps Commission trying to manipulate her into creating an apocalypse. Neither of the Fox movies used this element, leaving us with a Jean that is just plain crazy (read: unsympathetic) and needs to be put down like a rabid dog rather than rehabilitated.

- The larger cosmic threat that the heroes need the Phoenix to help them face: This is the other big external conflict a DP story needs. A big part of what made Dark Phoenix so compelling was that it wasn't just a character study, it was also blowing off the doors that stood between the traditional X-Men comics we were used to and the cosmic side of Marvel 616. The X-Men had been to space before that, but never on this scale, which allowed Claremont to go absolutely ham on both the sweeping soap opera plotting and the quite literally stellar visuals, including iconic shots like Jean eating the D'Bari star. The Dark Phoenix comic got a LOT of major players involved - the Shi'ar empire, the Kree and Skrulls, even the Watchers all potentially coming down on the side that the entire solar system needed to be destroyed to take her out of play, and it forced the X-Men to go all out in ways they hadn't previously. The 90's cartoon pared all of that down to an extent, but it was still a major "go big or go home" moment for the 92131 continuity.

Umbrella Academy has two versions of this one - the Temps Commission again and their insistence on causing a world-ending apocalypse using Vanya's powers being one, and the more alien threat they are now beginning to explore with Reginald Hargreeves and the founding of the Academy in the first place. Like the X-Men, the Academy is not only fighting to save their sibling's life and soul, but also to deal with a threat beyond anything the world has faced before. Last Stand included none of this, which is what led to Jean standing around in the background doing nothing for most of act 3. Dark Phoenix had some of this with the introduction of the D'Bari, but their motivations and the threat they posed were all extremely vague.

- The abrupt power and tonal shift: Part of what made Dark Phoenix so shocking is that, as you rightly mentioned, Jean went from being the team's weakest and least assertive member to being it's strongest - and that change came with a big boost to her confidence but also a big shift in her outlook which eventually changed her alignment. It came out of nowhere because the build-up to it was paced so well. Fox meanwhile just can't seem to wait to get the fire bird on screen, hence us getting hints of it in X-Men Apocalypse and X2, regardless of how little sense they made, simply because everyone knows about Phoenix and that will help sell tickets.

[Azuresun]

The thing though is, you CAN do a good Dark Phoenix story without years and years of foundation and build-up. Umbrella Academy proved that with Elliot Page's Vanya/White Violin, and they pulled it off with a bunch of completely unknown (to mainstream audiences) heroes to boot. And Marvel looks poised to do something similar with Wanda. So I have no sympathy for Fox's repeated failures whatsoever, especially given that it was also done well in the 90's cartoon and they had the rights to nearly everything that was used there.

You can do it, I just don't think you can do it with Jean Grey any more, that ground is too well trodden. Having her go non-dark Phoenix and NOT go crazy (the drama instead comes from her trying to control the power and other people wanting to steal it) would be a more shocking twist.

[Rodin]

The thing though is, you CAN do a good Dark Phoenix story without years and years of foundation and build-up. Umbrella Academy proved that with Elliot Page's Vanya/White Violin, and they pulled it off with a bunch of completely unknown (to mainstream audiences) heroes to boot. And Marvel looks poised to do something similar with Wanda. So I have no sympathy for Fox's repeated failures whatsoever, especially given that it was also done well in the 90's cartoon and they had the rights to nearly everything that was used there.

The big problem with Dark Phoenix is that all the key elements have to be there, but the Fox Movies kept leaving a bunch out. Three of the big ones they missed include:

Spoiler

Show

- The shadowy organization trying to use the Phoenix for their own ends: This provides one of the key pieces of external conflict that makes DP work, both because it gives her and the heroes someone to struggle against besides each other, and because it helps keep her sympathetic/redeemable after some of the bad things she does during the story. The comics/cartoon had the Hellfire Club in this role, while Umbrella Academy had the Temps Commission trying to manipulate her into creating an apocalypse. Neither of the Fox movies used this element, leaving us with a Jean that is just plain crazy (read: unsympathetic) and needs to be put down like a rabid dog rather than rehabilitated.

- The larger cosmic threat that the heroes need the Phoenix to help them face: This is the other big external conflict a DP story needs. A big part of what made Dark Phoenix so compelling was that it wasn't just a character study, it was also blowing off the doors that stood between the traditional X-Men comics we were used to and the cosmic side of Marvel 616. The X-Men had been to space before that, but never on this scale, which allowed Claremont to go absolutely ham on both the sweeping soap opera plotting and the quite literally stellar visuals, including iconic shots like Jean eating the D'Bari star. The Dark Phoenix comic got a LOT of major players involved - the Shi'ar empire, the Kree and Skrulls, even the Watchers all potentially coming down on the side that the entire solar system needed to be destroyed to take her out of play, and it forced the X-Men to go all out in ways they hadn't previously. The 90's cartoon pared all of that down to an extent, but it was still a major "go big or go home" moment for the 92131 continuity.

Umbrella Academy has two versions of this one - the Temps Commission again and their insistence on causing a world-ending apocalypse using Vanya's powers being one, and the more alien threat they are now beginning to explore with Reginald Hargreeves and the founding of the Academy in the first place. Like the X-Men, the Academy is not only fighting to save their sibling's life and soul, but also to deal with a threat beyond anything the world has faced before. Last Stand included none of this, which is what led to Jean standing around in the background doing nothing for most of act 3. Dark Phoenix had some of this with the introduction of the D'Bari, but their motivations and the threat they posed were all extremely vague.

- The abrupt power and tonal shift: Part of what made Dark Phoenix so shocking is that, as you rightly mentioned, Jean went from being the team's weakest and least assertive member to being it's strongest - and that change came with a big boost to her confidence but also a big shift in her outlook which eventually changed her alignment. It came out of nowhere because the build-up to it was paced so well. Fox meanwhile just can't seem to wait to get the fire bird on screen, hence us getting hints of it in X-Men Apocalypse and X2, regardless of how little sense they made, simply because everyone knows about Phoenix and that will help sell tickets.

I can't speak for the second set of X-Men movies (the first set drove me off), but the comparison to Umbrella Academy is slightly unfair* to the original X-Men movies. Umbrella Academy had "Vanya goes crazy" as a primary focus of an entire TV series. Jean Grey wasn't the focus of either of the first two X-Men films, which is why we only got hints about what she's capable of. This left them with only a single movie to tell the whole thing instead of 10 hour-long episodes. A Dark Phoenix/Scarlet Witch storyline favors a long slow build-up - a large number of movies followed by a dedicated TV series in the case of Scarlet Witch.

What Umbrella Academy showed isn't that you can do a movie Dark Phoenix well. What it showed is that they should have done an X-Men TV series and either dedicated the focus to Dark Phoenix from the start or built the storyline up over a couple seasons before going all in on it. An X-Men movie is always going to struggle to focus on a singular character, because they're trying to include as many fan favorites as possible. When they don't, you get X-Men Origins: Wolverine. And nobody wants that.

*but only slightly, those movies had issues.

[Psyren]

I can't speak for the second set of X-Men movies (the first set drove me off), but the comparison to Umbrella Academy is slightly unfair* to the original X-Men movies. Umbrella Academy had "Vanya goes crazy" as a primary focus of an entire TV series. Jean Grey wasn't the focus of either of the first two X-Men films, which is why we only got hints about what she's capable of. This left them with only a single movie to tell the whole thing instead of 10 hour-long episodes. A Dark Phoenix/Scarlet Witch storyline favors a long slow build-up - a large number of movies followed by a dedicated TV series in the case of Scarlet Witch.

In both cases they had two movies - one to establish Jean's character and drop hints, the other to tell the Phoenix story. That may not be as much time as an entire season of TV, but they were also working with very well known superheroes and a conflict that didn't need a lot of explaining. UA had more time, sure, but they also used that time MUCH more effectively.

[Beleriphon]

I saw Shang-Chi yesterday. Highly recommend.

Michelle Yeoh is fun, but not a major part of the story until the climax. Awkwafina isn't Shang-Chi's girlfriend, but plays a major and that mirrors Shang-Chi journey.

The Ten Rings are yes the ten bands that the we see a major character using. They're more signed to be large bracelets or armbands rather than finger rings. The mid-credit scene confirms they are not of Earthly origin, and even the Nova Corps doesn't know what they are.

Wong is the new Coulson.

On the nature of the rings, nothing suggests this but my pet theory is that it has something to do with Galactus based on a single comment in the mid-credits scene.

[thatSeniorGuy]

Could you perhaps that please? This isn't the dedicated Shang-Chi thread.