The Marvels , you know that new superhero movie

[Infernally Clay]

I think that's actually the problem with lacking a Captain Marvel 2.

At the end of Captain Marvel 1, we've established what Carol Denvers no longer is. She's no longer Mar-vell, Kree soldier. She's liberated herself and freed the Kree. But it doesn't actually develop what she will do next.

That should have immediately be followed up by a Captain Marvel 2, where Carol Denvers is trying to find out what to do next. We know what she isn't, but we haven't really established what she is now. What her intention and motivation is other than "fight Kree" (done), protect Earth (ongoing, but not very interesting) and help the Skrull (seems to be mostly failing).

The Marvels could have been that movie, if it had just allowed a bit more time in the beginning and end to establish a character arc for Carol. Like, if she actually decide to help the Kree rebuild more in the end rather than just punch their sun. Could have worked: she doens't want to work for their military regime and destroyed that, but she still feels connected to the Kree and wants to help them rebuild into something peaceful. Or she still feels guilty over hastily destroying the supreme intelligence and plunging them into civil war, so now needs to find some new purpose elsewhere. Also hinted at in this movie, but not developed enough.

That's really why I think we needed a Captain Marvel 2 a couple of years ago.

The first movie literally ended with Carol Danvers saying she was going to confront the Supreme Intelligence and end "the war, the lies, all of it" before heading off to help the Skrulls find a new homeworld while Ronan the Accuser is all "we'll be back for the weapon". Then, for whatever reason, they decide to skip ahead thirty years to after the events of Endgame and then act like either the first Captain Marvel movie happened last week or it actually took Carol thirty years to take out the Supreme Intelligence.

Why wasn't there a Captain Marvel 2 set immediately after the first one with Ronan as the physical threat while Carol Danvers dismantles the Kree propaganda network and allows the Skrull to live in peace? We saw from the first Guardians movie that Ronan always thought he could punch above his weight so him trying to take Carol on isn't that different to him wanting to tango with Thanos even before acquiring an Infinity Gem and it was really the Kree that alienated the Skrull by painting them as infiltrators and spies trying to take over worlds by impersonating powerful people.

[Saph]

I think that's actually the problem with lacking a Captain Marvel 2.

At the end of Captain Marvel 1, we've established what Carol Denvers no longer is. She's no longer Mar-vell, Kree soldier. She's liberated herself and freed the Kree.

That should have immediately be followed up by a Captain Marvel 2, where Carol Denvers is trying to find out what to do next. We know what she isn't, but we haven't really established what she is now. What her intention and motivation is other than "fight Kree" (done), protect Earth (ongoing, but not very interesting) and help the Skrull (seems to be mostly failing).

The Marvels could have been that movie, if it had just allowed a bit more time in the beginning and end to establish a character arc for Carol. Like, if she actually decide to help the Kree rebuild more in the end rather than just punch their sun. Could have worked: she doens't want to work for their military regime and destroyed that, but she still feels connected to the Kree and wants to help them rebuild into something peaceful. Or she still feels guilty over hastily destroying the supreme intelligence and plunging them into civil war, so now needs to find some new purpose elsewhere. Also hinted at in this movie, but not developed enough.

See, this is the thing. At this point, lots of people in this thread have chipped in with suggestions about how to tweak the movie, or the story, or the production, or the marketing, or something or other. And it's not that any of them are terribly bad ideas, but I'm not convinced that any of them would have made the movie into a success.

I think the core problem is that Captain Marvel just isn't particularly interesting. She isn't a particularly interesting character, she doesn't have a particularly exciting backstory, and she doesn't have a rogue's gallery of cool villains to fight against. There isn't really any 'hook' or key to get people interested. I remember back when Captain Marvel came out, the publicity campaign felt something like this:

Them: "We're releasing our first female-led superhero film!"
Me: "Okay, what's it about?"
Them: "Captain Marvel!"
Me: "Who?"
Them: "She's our first female superhero lead and the new face of the MCU!"
Me: "Okay, so tell me about her."
Them: "She's really awesome and powerful!"
Me: "Okay?"
Them: "So what do you think? You're excited, right?"
Me: "Um . . . about what?"
Them: "About the movie!"
Me: "But you haven't actually told me anything much about this character I'm supposed to be excited about."
Them: "Sure we have! She's really powerful and awesome!"
Me: ". . . that's it?"
Them: "Did we mention that she was female?"

And that was about it. The movie made money, but it was pretty obvious that that was due to being released right at the peak of the wave of MCU hype, rather than due to its quality. It got by on goodwill . . . so what happens when that goodwill runs out? Well, you get the situation we've got now.

[Murk]

Whilst the MCU is a large and therefore easy target in this regard, when was the last time you heard a movie score that wasn't licensed music, or by John Williams, and it really really stuck with you?

Well, the Avengers theme.
It's catchy and it's effective and that's why I remember it -- but I also remember it because it was used in Avengers 2 (though sparingly) and in Avengers 3 and in Avengers 4. If all four of those movies had had a different "main theme", no way I would have remembered any of them.
But because there was one catchy piece used in all four movies, it stuck with me.

I mentioned three others that I remember: Doctor Strange, Spider-Man and Ant-Man.
Neither is amazing, but they were all repeated in the sequel movies, so I remember them. It would have been even better if these personal themes were used in the team-up movies, but that sadly rarely happens.
And I mentioned one that I did remember after the first movie, but then wasn't used in the sequel so now I will inevitably start forgetting it: Captain Marvel.

For non-MCU movie scores, after 2010, not by John Williams:
- Wonder Woman, which someone else already mentioned. A
- Avatar 1. Not sure if that was re-used in Avatar 2 because I didn't pay attention to Avatar 2.
- The Star Treks from 2009 onwards.
- And franchises with an older theme that are still making new movies using that older theme effectively. There's so many of those: Pirates of the Caribbean; Mission Impossible; several of the James Bonds; the Hobbitses; etc.
- Musical movies (like the newer Disney classics or Song of the Sea) which might be cheating.

To me, the question is rather: except for the MCU, which long-running movie franchise does not have an instantly recognisable piece of music?

[Eldan]

See, this is the thing. At this point, lots of people in this thread have chipped in with suggestions about how to tweak the movie, or the story, or the production, or the marketing, or something or other. And it's not that any of them are terribly bad ideas, but I'm not convinced that any of them would have made the movie into a success.

I think the core problem is that Captain Marvel just isn't particularly interesting. She isn't a particularly interesting character, she doesn't have a particularly exciting backstory, and she doesn't have a rogue's gallery of cool villains to fight against. There isn't really any 'hook' or key to get people interested. I remember back when Captain Marvel came out, the publicity campaign felt something like this:

Oh, totally agreed. I watched this for Kamala Khan and to see her bounce off Carol as a straight man. That's what I wanted to see, that's what I got, I don't feel like I wasted my time.

[Psyren]

Aligned? You seem to want to apologize on their behalf for mealy mouthed, fair weather, preachy, ineffectual, half-assed "support" in the name of cynical profit while I want to hold them accountable for it. Where is the alignment?

We're aligned in that both of our stances are based on their actions. You think their movies are not doing nearly enough, I think they're doing far more than most. Two pairs of eyes regarding the same actions and coming to different conclusions based on our individual perspectives. That's life.

I think that's actually the problem with lacking a Captain Marvel 2.

At the end of Captain Marvel 1, we've established what Carol Denvers no longer is. She's no longer Mar-vell, Kree soldier. She's liberated herself and freed the Kree. But it doesn't actually develop what she will do next.

That should have immediately be followed up by a Captain Marvel 2, where Carol Denvers is trying to find out what to do next. We know what she isn't, but we haven't really established what she is now. What her intention and motivation is other than "fight Kree" (done), protect Earth (ongoing, but not very interesting) and help the Skrull (seems to be mostly failing).

The Marvels could have been that movie, if it had just allowed a bit more time in the beginning and end to establish a character arc for Carol. Like, if she actually decide to help the Kree rebuild more in the end rather than just punch their sun. Could have worked: she doens't want to work for their military regime and destroyed that, but she still feels connected to the Kree and wants to help them rebuild into something peaceful. Or she still feels guilty over hastily destroying the supreme intelligence and plunging them into civil war, so now needs to find some new purpose elsewhere. Also hinted at in this movie, but not developed enough.

One problem I see with fleshing her out is that it means fleshing out the cosmos that she's running around in. Certainly there's nothing for her to be doing on Earth post-Thanos (yet.) I can see them not wanting to lock that in just yet. Sure we got an update on what was going on with the Kree, but I think "Carol fights the Kree again" would have been an even thinner plot/villain than what we got here.

Routinely, the strongest things I hear about this movie are Kamala and Monica bouncing off Carol as the fussy mom/aunt. Could they have come up with a better solo CM script than this one? Maybe, but in the absence of an established cosmic threat, I'd be doubtful. It's not like she has a go-to credible nemesis like a Lex Luthor or Braniac that we can pull out whenever the idea bucket is low.

[Silverblade1234]

We're aligned in that both of our stances are based on their actions. You think their movies are not doing nearly enough, I think they're doing far more than most. Two pairs of eyes regarding the same actions and coming to different conclusions based on our individual perspectives. That's life.

And we shouldn't discount what the movie DOES do because of what it doesn't. In any market, in any country, it's a movie all about diverse, strong women (heroes and villains) doing awesome superhero stuff. Even if Marvel has to censor some content in some countries, and that DOES suck (no argument), those are the places I want to see the stories of these awesome, diverse, super women, to be role models and inspirations for a new generation of RL heroes that might be able to change things for the better. This movie is absolutely a net force for good in the world in terms of message, diversity, etc.

Moreover, the people not supporting it out of spite run the risk of contributing to Marvel learning the wrong lesson from this movie: "movies about new/different/diverse characters don't sell, we should go back to the old characters that made us money and spend a fortune to get RDJ, Chris Evans, etc. back." If you want Marvel to be pushing more stories focused on different people than their normal fare, you don't sit out the movie with three strong, diverse female leads and a female villain.

[Tyndmyr]

Sure, we wouldn't - we're regular posters on a geek-oriented message board. I don't regularly watch Jimmy Fallon or Good Morning America or Hot Ones et al either. Those cast promotions are aimed at mainstream audiences, and the studios wouldn't allocate millions to doing it if it never worked.

Well, it isn't just marketing. Word of mouth, not marketing, drives post-opening weekend falloff. This movie had a worse falloff than Morbius.

I mean, I don't need you to tell me anything you're bringing up the scene 4 years later, so it did its job as far as I'm concerned.

If being used as a commonplace example of cringe is its job, that's a strange job for any scene to have.

A good scene does one of the following: Explores a character, advances the plot or develops the world. A great scene does more than one of those at once.

A scene that does none of those shouldn't be in the movie.

This is what I mean when I say Marvel lacks direction and consistency. There were rumours that the Celestial would become Krakoa or that it would be made of adamantium or something like that to tie it into the X-Men, but Marvel is evidently in absolutely no rush to make an X-Men movie. They're only just now casting the Fantastic Four after announcing that movie four years ago. We probably wont even see any X-Men until 2030 at this rate and by then the Celestial will have been an unresolved plot point for almost a decade. That's ridiculous.

I know rights were an issue for X-men, but I dunno how exactly that will be tied in. It is odd that FF has been stalled on so long...but yeah, I agree that at this point we have unresolved threads leading every which way.

Hell, we have several different origins to the multiverse, all of them at least somewhat contradictory. Did the Spiderman/Dr Strange meddling create the multiverse? Did the end of Loki Season 1? Or was Antman 3 responsible? The goal is consistent, but the logic is all over the place.

I care about the Thunderbolts... or at least I would if y'know the film called Thunderbolts had any actual Thunderbolts in it.

That's a problem for sure. Blade apparently was aimed to have very little Blade in it, and that's just a disappointment for anyone that cares about that property.

I wasn't really speaking in a literal sense, but a spiritual sense. Had Chadwick Boseman not passed away, Carol Danvers and T'Challa would have replaced Steve Rogers and Tony Stark as the emotional and intellectual leaders of the Avengers respectively. It would have been a big upgrade in terms of power, as you point out, but the Avengers would have faced much greater threats so it'd even out.

The current Carol Danvers, as portrayed, isn't much of a leader in either sense. She's powerful, but in a flying brick sort of way. She's not been portrayed as especially big on heart, nor as a brilliant strategist. Cap had heart. T'Challa had heart. That works, or would have. If the leader doesn't care about their people, the audience doesn't tend to care about them as a leader. Carol probably needs to be part of a team to work at all, but that does constrain your plot a bit. As with Thor, you need something big enough to credibly challenge her, without immediately invalidating the rest of the team. Now, yeah, you could maybe develop her with some character growth to eventually fit some role like that, but it hasn't actually happened yet.

Me, I don't find the flying brick concept all that interesting. Even Superman can often be poorly used, and he generally has at least somewhat more portrayed character in his movies to fall back on, so people can find interest in moral tests or what not, but the powerset itself being interesting? Eh, nah. Superstrong people punching each other on screen happens in basically every superhero film, one who punches particularly hard isn't even novel. Do I want, say, a Sentry movie next? No. God no. Give me someone with charisma and drive. Give me Doom.

[warty goblin]

And we shouldn't discount what the movie DOES do because of what it doesn't. In any market, in any country, it's a movie all about diverse, strong women (heroes and villains) doing awesome superhero stuff. Even if Marvel has to censor some content in some countries, and that DOES suck (no argument), those are the places I want to see the stories of these awesome, diverse, super women, to be role models and inspirations for a new generation of RL heroes that might be able to change things for the better. This movie is absolutely a net force for good in the world in terms of message, diversity, etc.

I think if you want to inspire people to change the world for the better, Marvel is a terrible choice to pin your hopes on. Superheroes don't change the world, they punch the inevitably villainous people who try to change things through walls, then go back to being useless.

Moreover, the people not supporting it out of spite run the risk of contributing to Marvel learning the wrong lesson from this movie: "movies about new/different/diverse characters don't sell, we should go back to the old characters that made us money and spend a fortune to get RDJ, Chris Evans, etc. back." If you want Marvel to be pushing more stories focused on different people than their normal fare, you don't sit out the movie with three strong, diverse female leads and a female villain.

Isn't that exactly the lesson the people not watching the movie out of spite want Marvel to learn?

Which isn't why I'm not watching the movie, I'm not watching it because it looks like an aggressively mid entry in a franchise that ranges between C- and B for me. And it's been a long time since it hit B; either the first 2/3 of Black Panther or Infinity War while ignoring Endgame as hard as possible. I don't really care about the race or gender of whomever they're jamming into their shtick because they all turn into pretty much the same character anyway, and I'm bored of their shtick.

[Psyren]

If being used as a commonplace example of cringe is its job, that's a strange job for any scene to have.

The folks scattered around the internet who found that rather harmless scene annoying deserved to be annoyed in my view, though that's ultimately only a secondary reason why I liked it. I'm glad Feige included it and I'll take three more.

I think if you want to inspire people to change the world for the better, Marvel is a terrible choice to pin your hopes on. Superheroes don't change the world, they punch the inevitably villainous people who try to change things through walls, then go back to being useless.

Why are superhero movies any worse at that, or held to a higher standard for that, than any other fantasy movie? I didn't walk into Lord of the Rings or Moana expecting some kind of seismic call to action. Superhero movies are primarily character pieces that deal with themes like found family, balancing personal obligations with career, breaking rules to do what's right, maintaining hope in the face of long odds... and yes, the power of a diverse team with varied backgrounds and skillsets, in the case of an ensemble film, which this one is. All of those things can be inspiring.

[VampiricLongbow]

That's really why I think we needed a Captain Marvel 2 a couple of years ago.

The first movie literally ended with Carol Danvers saying she was going to confront the Supreme Intelligence and end "the war, the lies, all of it" before heading off to help the Skrulls find a new homeworld while Ronan the Accuser is all "we'll be back for the weapon". Then, for whatever reason, they decide to skip ahead thirty years to after the events of Endgame and then act like either the first Captain Marvel movie happened last week or it actually took Carol thirty years to take out the Supreme Intelligence.

Why wasn't there a Captain Marvel 2 set immediately after the first one with Ronan as the physical threat while Carol Danvers dismantles the Kree propaganda network and allows the Skrull to live in peace? We saw from the first Guardians movie that Ronan always thought he could punch above his weight so him trying to take Carol on isn't that different to him wanting to tango with Thanos even before acquiring an Infinity Gem and it was really the Kree that alienated the Skrull by painting them as infiltrators and spies trying to take over worlds by impersonating powerful people.

I totally agree with you. Captain Marvel 2 should have been in the 90s. Even if she failed to defeat the Supreme Intelligence, it still should have been shown why she has not accomplished her goal, why Ronan is still alive in Guardians and why the Skrull are not doing great in the modern era. In fact, a movie where Captain Marvel tries her best but makes things worse would have been super fascinating to watch and added a lot of depth to the MCU version of the character.

See, this is the thing. At this point, lots of people in this thread have chipped in with suggestions about how to tweak the movie, or the story, or the production, or the marketing, or something or other. And it's not that any of them are terribly bad ideas, but I'm not convinced that any of them would have made the movie into a success.

I think the core problem is that Captain Marvel just isn't particularly interesting. She isn't a particularly interesting character, she doesn't have a particularly exciting backstory, and she doesn't have a rogue's gallery of cool villains to fight against. There isn't really any 'hook' or key to get people interested. I remember back when Captain Marvel came out, the publicity campaign felt something like this:

Them: "We're releasing our first female-led superhero film!"
Me: "Okay, what's it about?"
Them: "Captain Marvel!"
Me: "Who?"
Them: "She's our first female superhero lead and the new face of the MCU!"
Me: "Okay, so tell me about her."
Them: "She's really awesome and powerful!"
Me: "Okay?"
Them: "So what do you think? You're excited, right?"
Me: "Um . . . about what?"
Them: "About the movie!"
Me: "But you haven't actually told me anything much about this character I'm supposed to be excited about."
Them: "Sure we have! She's really powerful and awesome!"
Me: ". . . that's it?"
Them: "Did we mention that she was female?"

And that was about it. The movie made money, but it was pretty obvious that that was due to being released right at the peak of the wave of MCU hype, rather than due to its quality. It got by on goodwill . . . so what happens when that goodwill runs out? Well, you get the situation we've got now.

Part of the problem with Carol's Captain Marvel is that Marvel does not really want to engage with Carol's past in the comics, as the high heel wearing, bathing suit clad Ms. Marvel.



When you remove that version of Carol, you strip out tons of the interesting and fun things from her past. By pretending that Carol's story started in 2012 rather than 1968, they rob the character of what makes her truly interesting, IMO. This is doubly hampered by having her begin her journey in the 90's and not really being integrated into the Avengers until Endgame, which means she has few connections to the other heroes. Since she is so powerful, she immediately warps any story she is involved in on Earth (even more than Thor did), so the writers feel like they have to send Carol out into space, which means she has even fewer chances to integrate with the other heroes of Earth and build up those connections that make for good future story telling.

[Tyndmyr]

Moreover, the people not supporting it out of spite run the risk of contributing to Marvel learning the wrong lesson from this movie: "movies about new/different/diverse characters don't sell, we should go back to the old characters that made us money and spend a fortune to get RDJ, Chris Evans, etc. back." If you want Marvel to be pushing more stories focused on different people than their normal fare, you don't sit out the movie with three strong, diverse female leads and a female villain.

If the movie's bad, I don't care who's starring. A bad film's a bad film. Watch or don't watch for any reason you wish.

You can't force the movie studio to have good methodology for figuring out why things are broken. Some films featuring new/different/diverse characters have obviously done great. If they look at that data and blame that anyways, that's...not something you can change by buying an extra ticket.

The folks scattered around the internet who found that rather harmless scene annoying deserved to be annoyed in my view, though that's ultimately only a secondary reason why I liked it. I'm glad Feige included it and I'll take three more.

If you want these movies to be successful, why would you want them to annoy their fanbase? Surely these goals are inherently in conflict.

[VampiricLongbow]

This is what I mean when I say Marvel lacks direction and consistency. There were rumours that the Celestial would become Krakoa or that it would be made of adamantium or something like that to tie it into the X-Men, but Marvel is evidently in absolutely no rush to make an X-Men movie. They're only just now casting the Fantastic Four after announcing that movie four years ago. We probably wont even see any X-Men until 2030 at this rate and by then the Celestial will have been an unresolved plot point for almost a decade. That's ridiculous.

I feel like the MCU X-Men will not be added to the canon until after there is a soft reboot following Avengers Secret Wars. Why else would they busy themselves integrating the Fox X-Men into the MCU, when they could instead make an amazing version of the X-Men that is all their own?

What's taking them so long? Why did we have to wait six years for Doctor Strange 2? Even Sony managed to do something with the character before we got that sequel. Why did it take them four years to bring Captain Marvel back and how long will we have to wait to see her again? What about Shang-Chi? It's been two years since that movie came out, so where's the second one?

To be fair, Dr. Strange's first movie came out in November of 2016, then he had an important role in Thor Ragnarok (2017), he was a big part of Infinity war (2018) and Endgame (2019) and was a big part of Spider-Man No Way Home (2021). If not for COVID and some Director issues Dr. Strange 2 would have come out on May 7, 2021. Four and a half years between movies while still being a major part of several other films is completely fine. It would have only been a year and a half longer than the time between most other headline heroes' sequels. But with the delay, yeah, felt bad for sure. :(

Marvel is spending so much money on movies and TV shows that nobody really needs to see, like Ant-Man 3, Thor 4, Echo, Black Widow, Secret Invasion that if they instead cut all the fat, focused on a small number of characters and got their movies out quickly and to a high standard of quality, the MCU wouldn't be in the state it's in now.

Very much agree. Marvel failed to pick a group of heroes to build Phases 4 and 5 (and maybe even 6) around, which has really hurt them narratively. Secret Invasion was a dumb, dumb, dumb project too. That could have been an entire phase of Marvel movies after Secret Wars. To waste the idea on a bad TV show no one will watch is astounding.

[Saph]

Part of the problem with Carol's Captain Marvel is that Marvel does not really want to engage with Carol's past in the comics, as the high heel wearing, bathing suit clad Ms. Marvel.

Okay, that actually explains a lot. I'd been wondering why Marvel was trying so hard to push this incredibly bland, generic superheroine. If she's got a whole backstory that they got nervous about and decided to censor out, then that would explain why the character feels so weirdly disconnected from everyone and everything.

[warty goblin]

Why are superhero movies any worse at that, or held to a higher standard for that, than any other fantasy movie? I didn't walk into Lord of the Rings or Moana expecting some kind of seismic call to action. Superhero movies are primarily character pieces that deal with themes like found family, balancing personal obligations with career, breaking rules to do what's right, maintaining hope in the face of long odds... and yes, the power of a diverse team with varied backgrounds and skillsets, in the case of an ensemble film, which this one is. All of those things can be inspiring.

I'm not holding them to a higher standard, or expecting a call to action. But superhero movies are an extremely conservative genre, even more so than either of the comparisons you listed. Moana substantially changes her society for the better, they start out slowly failing on a single island, she brings them to the sea. For all of the bittersweet elements at the end of Return of the King, it fundamentally leaves the world a place that has been transformed for the better. The Avengers do precisely squat until some supervillain shows up, then they transform the immediate vicinity into a smoking crater and return to being useless. Oh, and I guess Black Panther opens a community center.

[Bohandas]

I'll be seeing it opening night this week, but I don't expect it to do super well - even putting aside the looming specter of superhero / shared-universe movie fatigue, the timing of the SAG-AFTRA strike stuff meant the cast couldn't do any promotional tours. No Hot Ones, no late shows, no Wired, nothing.

If it does badly, the one silver lining is that hopefully it'll wake up the production studios to the importance of avoiding strikes in the future.

Yeah. They need to get that Calculon tech fully up and running before the current contract ends.

[Psyren]

If you want these movies to be successful, why would you want them to annoy their fanbase? Surely these goals are inherently in conflict.

"Fanbase" isn't a monolith, not all of us have the same desires or goals.

I'm not holding them to a higher standard, or expecting a call to action. But superhero movies are an extremely conservative genre, even more so than either of the comparisons you listed. Moana substantially changes her society for the better, they start out slowly failing on a single island, she brings them to the sea. For all of the bittersweet elements at the end of Return of the King, it fundamentally leaves the world a place that has been transformed for the better. The Avengers do precisely squat until some supervillain shows up, then they transform the immediate vicinity into a smoking crater and return to being useless. Oh, and I guess Black Panther opens a community center.

Both of those examples result in a big change because they're effectively about resolving force of nature villains, i.e. slow-moving natural disasters that have persisted in and slowly warped the setting for years if not generations. Supervillains generally don't work that way, they are sudden onset followed by sudden defeat. Again, these movies are character pieces. To say they're not inspiring is to say you don't find character pieces inspiring, which is entirely fair for you, but I don't think that can be universally extrapolated. Miles Morales is inspiring on multiple levels, even if his movies end with New York just going back to being New York.

[Saph]

I'm not holding them to a higher standard, or expecting a call to action. But superhero movies are an extremely conservative genre, even more so than either of the comparisons you listed. Moana substantially changes her society for the better, they start out slowly failing on a single island, she brings them to the sea. For all of the bittersweet elements at the end of Return of the King, it fundamentally leaves the world a place that has been transformed for the better. The Avengers do precisely squat until some supervillain shows up, then they transform the immediate vicinity into a smoking crater and return to being useless. Oh, and I guess Black Panther opens a community center.

I wouldn't really call modern superhero movies a conservative genre – there's no particular love of tradition or anything like that. They do frequently change the world in huge ways – it's just that they don't really have any very coherent vision for what that changed world's supposed to look like, so they end up kind of flailing around in an increasingly incoherent setting and then basically giving up and saying "welp, we're going to make all this the next director's problem" and rolling the credits.

When it comes to MCU movies, it's more accurate to say that they want to be revolutionary and anti-traditional, but they aren't willing to do the hard work of figuring out what society would look like if it was changed in such a fundamental way, so the world ends up feeling weirdly static because everything in the setting defaults to "normal" even when it shouldn't.

[VampiricLongbow]

I wouldn't really call modern superhero movies a conservative genre – there's no particular love of tradition or anything like that. They do frequently change the world in huge ways – it's just that they don't really have any very coherent vision for what that changed world's supposed to look like, so they end up kind of flailing around in an increasingly incoherent setting and then basically giving up and saying "welp, we're going to make all this the next director's problem" and rolling the credits.

When it comes to MCU movies, it's more accurate to say that they want to be revolutionary and anti-traditional, but they aren't willing to do the hard work of figuring out what society would look like if it was changed in such a fundamental way, so the world ends up feeling weirdly static because everything in the setting defaults to "normal" even when it shouldn't.

The fact that they never really engaged with the Blip as a world building concept kills me. They shuffled on right past it as fast as possible. The concepts presented in Falcon and the Winter Soldier were fascinating and interesting. The world moved on for five whole years and then everyone came back. How do you handle property rights? How do you handle jobs and careers for those who returned vs those that remained? How do you handle food production for an added FOUR BILLION people? The Blip is a seismic shift in story telling that Marvel could have mined for stories for a decade or more but instead they swept it under the rug

[Tyndmyr]

I'm not holding them to a higher standard, or expecting a call to action. But superhero movies are an extremely conservative genre, even more so than either of the comparisons you listed. Moana substantially changes her society for the better, they start out slowly failing on a single island, she brings them to the sea. For all of the bittersweet elements at the end of Return of the King, it fundamentally leaves the world a place that has been transformed for the better. The Avengers do precisely squat until some supervillain shows up, then they transform the immediate vicinity into a smoking crater and return to being useless. Oh, and I guess Black Panther opens a community center.

There's an inherently conservative element in that they attempt to preserve the status quo most of the time. They stop crime, they don't stop city hall...unless city hall is run by a gang of criminals. The idea of city hall is rarely challenged.

So, sort of. But if you adopt the perspective of the villains, or non-traditional interpretations, we get a wider range of options. Doom feels no compulsion to preserve the failing leadership of inferior humans. Watchmen has no issue showing the dark side of upholding the status quo.

So, yeah, the genre does permit a nice flexibility in terms of addressing change...and to some extent, the MCU has that, at least with the blip, but that blip doesn't translate well to real life, and also hasn't been addressed very well. Sure, it's an interesting theoretical problem. Who owns this house, the guy who did five years ago, or the guy who is taking care of it now? The shows kind of handwave that for a vague "bad time" though, and don't really engage with it. They can't decide if they want to embrace the big change, or if they want to have the status quo, and we get this awkward middle thing that is kind of neither.

"Fanbase" isn't a monolith, not all of us have the same desires or goals.

Well, if the current outcome of The Marvels trying to underperform Morbius is not your goal, then one should take issue with Disney's strategy.

[Trixie_One]

but instead they swept it under the rug

I can see why, it's because they had nothing to say. Nothing what so ever, and they certainly had no concrete answers.

Just listen to Falcon's speech at the end to the political types. This is where they had the chance to really make a statement.

All he says pretty much is "do better!".

No wonder they tried to get past it as quickly as they feasibly could.

[Eldan]

Huh. You know, I think you just reminded me of another mian reason why I'm not that into Marvel anymore. Sweeping the blip under the carpet showed very definitely that they have no interest whatsoever in worldbuilding or serious themes. It showed very clearly that there are no real stakes (or rather, stakes happen, but everyone ignores them, cough planet which just had their water stolen cough), and the multiverse where there's always a world where Bad Thing (tm) didn't happen only reinforces that.

[Infernally Clay]

The fact that they never really engaged with the Blip as a world building concept kills me. They shuffled on right past it as fast as possible. The concepts presented in Falcon and the Winter Soldier were fascinating and interesting. The world moved on for five whole years and then everyone came back. How do you handle property rights? How do you handle jobs and careers for those who returned vs those that remained? How do you handle food production for an added FOUR BILLION people? The Blip is a seismic shift in story telling that Marvel could have mined for stories for a decade or more but instead they swept it under the rug

To be fair a lot of the logistics of the Snap are remarkably mundane and ultimately unimportant. It's the psychological impact that we need to see more of. We got a little of it in WandaVision with Maria Rambeau sitting there next to her terminally ill mother one minute and returning five years later to find she passed away, but outside of amusing gags in the Spider-Man movies there hasn't really been as much emphasis as you'd expect.

The biggest problem, of course, is the scale. Thanos killed half of all life in the entire universe, yet all too often characters act as though it only really happened on Earth. I am legitimately amazed that no alien race showed up during those five years to ask what the bloody hell happened. Like... what are the Infinity Gems? How did Thanos get all six? Why did Earth have half of them at one point? Why didn't Earth stop Thanos or destroy the Infinity Gems they had? Why didn't anyone involved tell anyone else what was going on? Every army in the universe would have descended upon Thanos to stop him killing half of all life in it and it's not just armies either. Superheroes from across the universe would have gotten involved. Even if the Eternals couldn't directly intervene in mortal affairs and stop Thanos themselves, surely if they had known he intended to use the Infinity Gems - which were created by the Celestials themselves - they could have dropped Arishem a note telling him? At least then he could've been like "sorry purple guy those aren't for you to use". So why was no one warned of what Thanos was doing? Surely "purple maniac is trying to gather the Infinity Gems to kill half of all life in the universe" should at least be on the evening news?

Of course we as the audience know that these things had to play out that way because that's just how they were in the movie and other movies like the Eternals didn't come out until later, but in-universe they would be very relevant questions.

I would have expected some sort of tribunal held before representatives of the most powerful civilisations in the universe to decide whether or not Earth's Mightiest Heroes are complicit in or responsible for the deaths of over half of all life in the universe and what, if any, punishment they deserve.

[Psyren]

Well, if the current outcome of The Marvels trying to underperform Morbius is not your goal, then one should take issue with Disney's strategy.

My (continued) enjoyment of the A-Force scene in Endgame 4 years ago had nothing to do with The Marvel's box office today, but sure thing.

All he says pretty much is "do better!".

Well, before that he mentioned the importance of having the actual disenfranchised people in the room where decisions about the fates of the disenfranchised are being determined. It sounds like a basic message, but (un)surprisingly it's not something we do well in the world of nonfiction.

The fact that they never really engaged with the Blip as a world building concept kills me. They shuffled on right past it as fast as possible. The concepts presented in Falcon and the Winter Soldier were fascinating and interesting. The world moved on for five whole years and then everyone came back. How do you handle property rights? How do you handle jobs and careers for those who returned vs those that remained? How do you handle food production for an added FOUR BILLION people? The Blip is a seismic shift in story telling that Marvel could have mined for stories for a decade or more but instead they swept it under the rug

It's definitely interesting but there are limits. If the world gets too different from ours (and the high-flying alien sci-fi stuff, not to mention literal magic, already gets it dangerously close to that) then it becomes too much of a fantasy setting for anything to make sense anymore. There's a reason Far From Home reduced the returning people from the blip to being almost a punchline.

I feel they are doing a good job of zooming in on certain bits of pathos resulting from the blip, like Monica waking up in the hospital and realizing her mother died 5 years prior in what felt like the blink of an eye to her. I think there's room for more of those, but the setting seems to be moving on.

[Ramza00]

I like Captain Marvel 2019, it is a good movie, not a great movie but this is just tv with bigger budgets.

One problem I feel people are circling around but are not naming, is what is the name of Carols Desire in the MCU? For in that 2019 movie her desire was robbed from her, and she had to be part of larger projects that other people chose for her, like her father, like the Kree Supreme Intelligence, like the Kree mentor figure who she blasted and I can not recall the name … but hey that is 80% of the MCU characters recede in the background when not in use … the Jude Law character

So Carols desire in the 2019 movie is the desire to have desire, to have her own agency. She had that with her roommate / common law wife Maria, aka Lt Troubles mother. But due to the Kree Accident and Brainwashing, the thing that literally gave Carol her powers all those memories, those desires were washed away like electroshock therapy, like the guy who did the philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig's)

What is Carol’s core besides helping others, and getting lost in the quest, what is her memories and her desires when her memories (and thus her desires) have been robbed of her?







The answer is we are looking at the wrong MCU prototype, MCU Carol is not Captain America, no she is Bucky Barnes the Winter Soldier.. Thus any future arc for Carol has one of two paths and they selected the second one. Path 1 is the adventuring teenage boy who is a fish out of water on a grand adventure and he discovers who he is via the heroes journey. Path 2 is often coded feminine but also can be coded as old man syndrome, the lost soul the grail knight who has no roots or community and via helping and teaching others (thus coded as feminine or old mentor man for it involves teaching and assistance) the lost soul is reintegrated into community.

Thus Captain Marvel 3 / The Marvels 2 is going to be like the Karate Kid and Ms. Marvel / Kamala is going to help Carol find her hearts true desire while they seek to recover Lt. Trouble / Monica Rambeau.





And hopefully Monica gets to be a badass by herself when she is assisting the X-Men. I am 30% resentful that she seems to be the third wheel and not the main event.

[Dragonus45]

We're aligned in that both of our stances are based on their actions. You think their movies are not doing nearly enough, I think they're doing far more than most. Two pairs of eyes regarding the same actions and coming to different conclusions based on our individual perspectives. That's life.

No credit for partial answers, it's well past the point you can feed scraps and pretend it's a meal.

Part of the problem with Carol's Captain Marvel is that Marvel does not really want to engage with Carol's past in the comics, as the high heel wearing, bathing suit clad Ms. Marvel.

I don't think they need to go that far back, but much like Mar-Vell was kind of a boring character who existed for copyright purposes and was so boring they had to create most of the Comsic Marvel cosmology ,the best parts of Marvel lore fore certain, for him to bounce off of Carol kind of had nothing going for her for forever other then being a character who existed because someone has to be named Captain Marvel to keep screwing over Billy Batson (and I say this as one of the few people who actually is a Captain Mar-Vell fan, there are like five of us. We have support meetings on Tuesdays). Then they picked without a doubt out of the most WTF ways to write out of the comics ever and post that when she was kind of drifting, had some alcoholism issues, went through her whole arc in House of M and became really interesting. And then kind of lost all that in the last decade because Comic Books Suck and all characters are trapped in a perpetual purgatory doomed to repeat their character arcs for eternity but a little worse each time. But the MCU wanted to just straight to badass last 2000s Captain Marvel and had some weird idea for a character arc where she barely emotes at all all movie but gets yelled at for being emotional and then blows up the Kree while apparently committing some unintentional genocide on the side. Tee-hee-hee I guess. But her arc has been flat and shallow beyond belief and shoving two more characters into her movie in what can be best described as a screen test for her replacements did not do her any favors there. The first movie gets away with it because Marvel could do no wrong at it's height and you even went to see the bad ones, Thor 2 probably could have broken a billion in you released right before Endgame. Now the MCU is running cold and they couldn't even advertise, and yes that was a huge deal because Iman Vellani is a national treasure even if the Ms Marvel show was just average and she could almost certainly put buts in seats. Even people who hated the movie are posting positively about stuff her saying recently she has opinions about the universe designation of the MCU and if she could have done more press stuff she might have been able to connect on that.

[Psyren]

No credit for partial answers, it's well past the point you can feed scraps and pretend it's a meal.

Yeah yeah, I'm fully aware that you're giving no credit. We at least agree on Iman Vellani.

One problem I feel people are circling around but are not naming, is what is the name of Carols Desire in the MCU? For in that 2019 movie her desire was robbed from her, and she had to be part of larger projects that other people chose for her, like her father, like the Kree Supreme Intelligence, like the Kree mentor figure who she blasted and I can not recall the name … but hey that is 80% of the MCU characters recede in the background when not in use … the Jude Law character

So Carols desire in the 2019 movie is the desire to have desire, to have her own agency. She had that with her roommate / common law wife Maria, aka Lt Troubles mother. But due to the Kree Accident and Brainwashing, the thing that literally gave Carol her powers all those memories, those desires were washed away like electroshock therapy, like the guy who did the philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig's)

What is Carol’s core besides helping others, and getting lost in the quest, what is her memories and her desires when her memories (and thus her desires) have been robbed of her?

I think positioning her as a more morally gray Superman to match Marvel's morally grayer setting could work. Again though, the big problem I see is that she lacks a Luthor/Zod/Braniac as well as lacking a core ethos to match up with Clark's "immigrants make us better" and "old-fashioned idealism isn't so old-fashioned" themes.

The answer is we are looking at the wrong MCU prototype, MCU Carol is not Captain America, no she is Bucky Barnes the Winter Soldier.. Thus any future arc for Carol has one of two paths and they selected the second one. Path 1 is the adventuring teenage boy who is a fish out of water on a grand adventure and he discovers who he is via the heroes journey. Path 2 is often coded feminine but also can be coded as old man syndrome, the lost soul the grail knight who has no roots or community and via helping and teaching others (thus coded as feminine or old mentor man for it involves teaching and assistance) the lost soul is reintegrated into community.

Thus Captain Marvel 3 / The Marvels 2 is going to be like the Karate Kid and Ms. Marvel / Kamala is going to help Carol find her hearts true desire while they seek to recover Lt. Trouble / Monica Rambeau.

I could see that working. Again though, it'll be tough to not have Iman steal the show since she'll probably be the soul of the franchise moving forward (hell, they're already making her be the next generation's Nick Fury, only driven by fangirling as opposed to fear.)

And hopefully Monica gets to be a badass by herself when she is assisting the X-Men. I am 30% resentful that she seems to be the third wheel and not the main event.

I'm am REALLY looking forward to Monica kicking ass in

Spoiler

Show

the Mutant universe. Though part of me kind of wishes Carol had been the one to get sealed on the other side, both so she could find herself in a fish out of water scenario over there, and to set up the first proper live action Rogue, like, ever.

[Tyndmyr]

It's definitely interesting but there are limits. If the world gets too different from ours (and the high-flying alien sci-fi stuff, not to mention literal magic, already gets it dangerously close to that) then it becomes too much of a fantasy setting for anything to make sense anymore. There's a reason Far From Home reduced the returning people from the blip to being almost a punchline.

Eh, the Dune universe is pretty far from ours, but I'm pretty stoked for the next round of it.

I don't mind a world different from ours. Just so long as it's an interesting one.

[gbaji]

We aren't talking about the world Psyren, we are talking about Disney. Who will gladly crow about representation and rake in good will and then undercut and abandon those "principles" when it might hurt the bottom line. They don't get credit for that and it's embarrassing to the entire community that people keep trying to say they should. I'm not here to argue for scraps and thank Walt for the privilege.

I think when a company like Disney is bothering to put these elements in, in the first place, and having to edit them out to play in countries that have reestrictions on such things, that's literally the "best they can do" here. It's not like Disney can change the policies/laws of every nation around the world, just because they want to.

If nothing less than the impossible will satisfy some people, then the correct response is to not bother trying to please that group at all. If me trying to please someone, but not being able to do it perfectly/completely gets me more flack than not bothering to try at all, guess what I'm going to do? Take the "moving the chains" win where you can.

You’d be right if Carol Danvers joined the team in, say, Age of Ultron like the behind-the-scenes stuff says she was originally going to, but post-Endgame I can’t think of anyone better than Captain Marvel to lead a new Avengers team that fights threats across the universe like Galactus or errant Celestials threatening to judge civilisations to determine if they’re worthy of their continued existence. Heck, could you imagine the Shi’ar Empire showing up on Earth one day because this primordial creature known as the Phoenix just destroyed their home world and chose a human from Earth to be its host and Captain Marvel is like “If you think I’m letting you invade Earth you’re pretty stupid” and then she gets into an epic fight with Gladiator?

That would be really really cool. I do get Marvel's hesitancy on this though. A couple people have touched on this already. You make things too "different", and the setting is no longer "Earth, just likes ours, but with superheroes". But that's what most people actually want in superhero stories, so you have to be careful.

I can also state, from long experience reading comic books, that moving characters into a more galactic scale, is often the kiss of death. You can certainly have some characters and stories that take place "out there" (GotG has been great about this). But I do think that most of the core stuff has to be on Earth, and about Earth. Doesn't mean you can't have galactic level stuff come to Earth. And yeah, I agree with the poster that mentioned above that the rest of the galaxy's empires should be very much aware and interested in Earth right now as a result of the Infinity Gems stuff, but we haven't seen much come of that except for the pretty darn mediocre Secret Invasion stuff.

I also agree that a second Captain Marvel film was really really needed. Could have filled in who she was and how she fit into the wider universe a bit. I actually liked the first film. I thought it hit the points it needed to hit, and was a great "beginning/origin" for the character. But then they... didn't do anything with it. Brief bits at the beginning and the end of Endgame, and that's it. They could have used this film to actually set up other interactions between her and other characters/events in the franchise. By waiting so long, and then lumping everything together into this film instead, it left a hole where the character development could have been.

Or, as several people have also pointed out, maybe less nonsense in this film, and more time spent doing some character deep diving instead? Monica Rambeau could have used some of this too (though honestly, I felt I knew more about what motivated her from watching Wandavison than I did about Carol from her previous appearances, including an entire feature film, so there is that). And yeah, this was kind of a unique situation due to the somewhat unique nature of her origin story/film. She literally recovers from induced memory loss, and has to figure out who she is. So we literally don't know who she is when she shows up later, and then they kinda don't spend any time on that. Missed opportunity IMO.

The folks scattered around the internet who found that rather harmless scene annoying deserved to be annoyed in my view, though that's ultimately only a secondary reason why I liked it. I'm glad Feige included it and I'll take three more.

Yeah. That scene didn't bother me at all, and I'm not sure it really bothered anyone who saw it. I think about 1000x more people were bothered by all the internet/media numskullls making such a big deal about how great it was for being in the film in the first place, than cared about it actually being there. And sure, there was a bit of cringe to the scene (cause it was so very very obviously put in exactly to get that reaction from said group of internet/media numbskulls). But no more or less cringe worthy than any of a number of silly poses, positions, statements, jokes, comments, etc, that get tossed into films like this.

And to be fair to Marvel with that scene, they had been pretty consistently criticised for being a male focused genre/setting (for like years). So yeah, highlighting the women characters in the setting did make a lot of sense. And it checked the boxes for these kinds of scenes. It was brief, got to the point, and didn't detract from the scene it was in at all.

Why are superhero movies any worse at that, or held to a higher standard for that, than any other fantasy movie? I didn't walk into Lord of the Rings or Moana expecting some kind of seismic call to action. Superhero movies are primarily character pieces that deal with themes like found family, balancing personal obligations with career, breaking rules to do what's right, maintaining hope in the face of long odds... and yes, the power of a diverse team with varied backgrounds and skillsets, in the case of an ensemble film, which this one is. All of those things can be inspiring.

Huh. I wrote the bit above, and didn't even think that it also applied to this bit (seriously, was mostly quoting to respond to the first part). Um... Same deal. It's set in "our Earth, but with superheroes". So there is some expectation that "real world" issues will come up and be addressed in some way (even if the names are often changed to protect the innocent/guilty).

Do I think they are sometimes overly judged on this aspect? Yeah. Absolutely. See my point about Disney in general above. IME, folks who are really motivated by or care about some cause or movement, sometimes make the mistake of taking an "absolute victory or bust!" approach. Which I happen to think can run the risk of actually being counterproductive over time. As you say, not everything needs to be a call to action, or a meaningful and current-issue targetted message. And also as you say, the actual story can still be quite inspiring and interesting despite that. They don't have to pound people over the head with a "can't miss this" reference to specific things, to still get a much broader "if we work together we can overcome things" message. Yeah. Maybe that's too bland for some people, but I happen to think that's probably the most important message of all. And that's one that most superhero stories do have (usually).

[VampiricLongbow]

To be fair a lot of the logistics of the Snap are remarkably mundane and ultimately unimportant. It's the psychological impact that we need to see more of. We got a little of it in WandaVision with Maria Rambeau sitting there next to her terminally ill mother one minute and returning five years later to find she passed away, but outside of amusing gags in the Spider-Man movies there hasn't really been as much emphasis as you'd expect.

But they are incredibly important issues. Issues that should have been talked about and discussed before they snapped everyone back.

The biggest problem, of course, is the scale. Thanos killed half of all life in the entire universe, yet all too often characters act as though it only really happened on Earth. I am legitimately amazed that no alien race showed up during those five years to ask what the bloody hell happened. Like... what are the Infinity Gems? How did Thanos get all six? Why did Earth have half of them at one point? Why didn't Earth stop Thanos or destroy the Infinity Gems they had? Why didn't anyone involved tell anyone else what was going on? Every army in the universe would have descended upon Thanos to stop him killing half of all life in it and it's not just armies either. Superheroes from across the universe would have gotten involved. Even if the Eternals couldn't directly intervene in mortal affairs and stop Thanos themselves, surely if they had known he intended to use the Infinity Gems - which were created by the Celestials themselves - they could have dropped Arishem a note telling him? At least then he could've been like "sorry purple guy those aren't for you to use". So why was no one warned of what Thanos was doing? Surely "purple maniac is trying to gather the Infinity Gems to kill half of all life in the universe" should at least be on the evening news?

I do not believe what Tony Stark demanded of the Avengers - they they blink everyone back, 5 years later - was entirely ethical or moral. Especially, when you start conceptualizing how many people across the entire universe were suddenly returned to life. Failing to prevent Thanos from gaining the gems is not a crime, unilaterally snapping everyone back all because 1 man did not want to lose his daughter is pretty messed up. The Avengers are absolutely guilty of crimes. As I alluded to above, societies collapsed and were barely getting back on their feet, then suddenly they have to feed, cloth, shelter trillions of new people. How many people starved because society writ large across the universe was not given the proper lead time to prepare for the return?

Which I get, the pew pew fun movies don't want to deal with the consequences of their poorly constructed narrative decision but still... I do not like it! I would have loved to set an entire era of stories during the blip. Show how society changed and adapted, how people moved on and rebuilt their lives. Then have Ant Man come back with the magic solution to rectify the Snap.

That's probably just the DM in me wanted to dive into an interesting narrative.

I would have expected some sort of tribunal held before representatives of the most powerful civilisations in the universe to decide whether or not Earth's Mightiest Heroes are complicit in or responsible for the deaths of over half of all life in the universe and what, if any, punishment they deserve.

I imagine there would be thousands and thousands of potential tribunals as every society would demand to individually try the Avengers for their crimes.

[Mechalich]

I do not believe what Tony Stark demanded of the Avengers - they they blink everyone back, 5 years later - was entirely ethical or moral. Especially, when you start conceptualizing how many people across the entire universe were suddenly returned to life. Failing to prevent Thanos from gaining the gems is not a crime, unilaterally snapping everyone back all because 1 man did not want to lose his daughter is pretty messed up. The Avengers are absolutely guilty of crimes. As I alluded to above, societies collapsed and were barely getting back on their feet, then suddenly they have to feed, cloth, shelter trillions of new people. How many people starved because society writ large across the universe was not given the proper lead time to prepare for the return?

Whether it was ethical or moral or not is less important than the fact that the Blip introduced an entire universe of bizarre complications that make a mess of the setting. The Falcon and The Winter Soldier was massively incoherent as a series because it was quite clear no one had a real grasp on what the consequences of the whole scenario really were, and while many subsequent Marvel entries have tried to simply elide the issue, it is a problem hanging over the whole franchise. The obvious solution was to simply undo the Snap entirely, erasing those five years from existence entirely. That wouldn't have been entirely ethical either, but it would have been simple.