fantastic_four

This was supposed to be the kickoff film for the new "Sony Universe" featuring surefire box-office smashes from the Spidey rogues gallery such as Morbius, Silk, Nightwatch, Jackpot, and the Black Cat. Given that it's going about as well as Tom Cruise's "The Mummy" did in kicking off a brand-new Universal Monsters movie universe, it's difficult to see another film. But hey, I never thought this one would get made, so what do I know. I still think this deflates Sony's plans and forces multiple internal meetings about giving the production reins to Marvel Studios. It should be painfully obvious by now that's what needs to happen. It might not simply because all of those planned movies clearly can't all be produced by one man. Why they're even thinking about them at all baffles me though. Morbius? What a rip-off of a vampire that guy is. He was lame even in the 70s, but now that there's a dozen other vampire properties he seems lame to the tenth power. The only character with potential is Black Cat, but even she should start off in a Spidey film, not in her own, but that would put her in the Marvel Universe, so I guess that's not happening. The whole concept of a new "Sony Universe" is lame piled on top of lame with an extra helping of lame on top. Didn't the "Sony Universe" start with the original Spider-Man film in 2002? Or wait, maybe in 2012 when ASM rebooted it? What is this yet another reboot since Homecoming semi-rebooted the last reboot? All these reboots are making me dizzy. Any reboot at all is an admission that you're out of good ideas, but for this to be reboot #4 is just pathetic.

It's not a big deal, I'm just curious as to whether or not they've ever tried to explain it. I wouldn't doubt it if some artist just jacked his size up without worrying at all about the fact that it doesn't seem to make much sense.

Who is SOT? So coy. If memory serves, didn't you have Venom as your forum avatar at one point?

Yea, I really have no idea what people are thinking with Venom's look given that there's nothing to compare it to and nobody is going into detail about what their problem with him is other than bizarre comments like "he's too shiny." I don't get how he's 8 feet tall, but I do like his bulkier look in this as compared to the Venom CGI in Spider-Man 3. It seemed in that film they were making Venom be roughly the same size as Topher Grace, but in this one they've given him the Hulk treatment. I don't think his extreme size is unique to the movie though. When I googled "venom height" earlier I saw a bunch of references to how in the later iterations of Venom in the comics they made him 7' 6" in Venom form at some point, I wasn't aware of that. But I haven't found any explanation for how that's supposed to work with a more normal-sized human inside the suit.

That image is in the second trailer. He lists the guy's major organs and how he's going to eat each one of them.

Why is Venom around 8 feet tall? How is he supposed to be stretching Brock's body like that? In the comic Brock was 6' 3" and 250 pounds so he was naturally big, but it seems they've decided to make him Hulk-big in this film.

Wait, maybe we do know enough about the politics. Perlmutter formed the committee knowing he doesn't know jack about creating a good superhero movie, which is a better idea than DC has ever had aside from unsuccessfully trying Geoff Johns out as their potential Kevin Feige. But it's not as good as what Feige has done, and he knew it, so he convinced Disney to dissolve the committee and separate himself entirely from Perlmutter and his guys. The dissolution of the Creative Committee was probably as simple as being all about Perlmutter. All of the members report to him, not Feige. There are probably multiple fixes, but the first one that should yield the highest quality result that hops to mind is to get Perlmutter out as the head of Marvel and let Feige pick a replacement. There shouldn't be this hard split between the Marvel Comics universe, the Marvel television universe, and the Marvel film universe. There's exactly one reason for that split--Ike Perlmutter and Kevin Feige not working well together. Feige is untouchable, so get rid of Perlmutter.

The TV universe is my main sour point. I want consistently good Daredevil to watch, and while season 1 was sublime and season 2 was OK, I have no idea what I'm getting with Perlmutter's bunch. I want the Feige magic on that side of the fence!!! Oddly this is the one area where DC is doing better than Marvel. I haven't looked closely enough at the structure of the DC television universe yet to understand what they're doing right. No real gems, but also no duds like we're frequently getting on the film side.

Yes. 168 hours in a week, right? He's probably working 70 to 90 now, so he needs to hire an assistant with a bull-whip to get him going on 100+ hour weeks.

Marvel studios will be taking over shortly? Not sure I follow? I assume it's the same conjecture I have, that Amy Pascal's bosses are going to eventually realize the common denominator in the failures in the Spider-Man universe are mostly related to her. Which isn't anything against her in particular; I'm sure she's a fine executive, it's just clear she has no more sense of how to make a good superhero movie than Avi Arad did, or the DC execs do, or whoever has passed through the revolving CEO door at 20th Century Fox did. It's not her background or her area of interest, so there's no reason to think she can ever do what Feige does except when fortune favors her with good directors who take up the creative mantle on their own.

Too many cooks in the kitchen is usually a bad thing. I have 3 other Engineers that have to approve design in my current business (excluding manufacturing feasibility and plant leaders). At my old place, it was myself and 1 other person. Turnaround times are 2 weeks longer here despite being unnecessary. We don't hear much about how Feige controls content, it's just clear that he doesn't parse off the film talent like the Marvel Creative Committee does and therefore has either a far lighter touch or is just better at working with them to create a great product. I know Quesada and some of the other Committee members gave hard creative decisions that Whedon and Jon Favreau hated but that they were forced to live with that negatively impacted both films (Iron Man 2 and Age of Ultron) that caused both directors to stop working with Marvel Studios. This all matters greatly because Feige can't do everything. Marvel's TV universe still mostly sucks and is in need of the Feige special sauce, just not from him directly. He's got to have some people to back him up, and I'm pretty sure there's a viable way to funnel the creative abilities of Marvel writers and/or artists into the film side in a positive way since that's essentially the edge that Feige himself has over his rival studio executives. Everything going through Feige also severely limits how good the film universe can be as it grows. Can Feige really also make sure that Fantastic Four and X-Men do well? What about all of the other future spin-offs? Feige just can't do it all, and it's not ideal for him to even try, despite the overwhelming success he's had relative to everyone else in the film industry.

It was also part of a power play to get out from under Ike Perlmutter's thumb. I still have very little opinion about the dissolution of the Committee other than I don't fully understand the politics between Marvel Studios and Marvel proper, and certainly Feige himself has proven to be doing better without them than with them. I'm still optimistic they can play a valuable role to keep Marvel as a whole creating better films, just not one where they exert the amount of editorial control they previously had.

No doubt, but they've got FAR more control than when Jon Favreau or Joss Whedon had to get all of their ideas past half a dozen or more guys on the Committee. Even if the cooks were really, really highly qualified creators like Quesada, Bendis, Buckley, Fine, etc, it was clearly a case of too many cooks in the kitchen. But that process cranked out two absolute gems in Iron Man and Avengers, so it wasn't the kind of train wrecks we see every other time out from Fox, Sony, and DC.

Exactly why Kevin Feige destroyed the Marvel Creative Committee after Disney bought Marvel Studios. How is that at all similar? The Marvel Creative Committee consisted of a group of the most successful creators of content at Marvel from the past few decades. I'm still not sure how I feel about the failure of that group. On the one hand, Kevin Feige didn't like it and has proven that he alone can guide these films to be of a consistently high quality. On the other hand, if he leaves or dies then as far as anyone can tell from the outside Marvel is just as screwed as DC currently is. I still think that committee can work given a different structure and is probably superior to relying on one man even if it is Saint Feige, hallowed be his name. What is crystal clear is that it really wasn't working as previously organized. The Committee had a slew of wins, but also an almost-equally long list of losses. Marvel lost a dozen or two stars, writers, and directors who clashed with the Committee members, and certainly that had to stop.

It really is the suit. The nature of the symbiote leads to infinite variety that invites the imagination to soar and makes it extremely similar to Green Lantern's power to form any object he can imagine. Only with Venom the power comes from a real second organism who creates an interesting pairing with whoever the symbiote is hosted with. With Spidey the symbiote mostly helped him do good, but with Brock it paired with his darker emotions. Carnage is another symbiote who bonded with a homicidal maniac which leads the suit to carry out far darker constructs than we typically see with Venom. I really loved Venom's depiction in Capcom's video games and how the character pops out with his signature "We are Venom!" line. The bizarre construct shown below during one of his win poses is my favorite from the 1990s Marvel vs. Capcom game.

I agree with everything bad said about Michelinie's original depiction of Eddie Brock and giving all the credit for Venom's popularity to McFarlane's hugely expressive artistic style. Brock's character is just one of the dumbest villains ever created for Spider-Man. I can't even believe he ever graduated middle school much less got a job writing at the Daily Bugle. The symbiote was a cool idea, and McFarlane dialed the idea up to 11. Anything cool about Eddie Brock himself was added by later writers, not Michelinie's scripts in Spidey 298 to 300. I certainly like the revised version of him as an anti-hero than Venom as a pure villain, at least according to the way he was originally written.

I'd like to give a little love back to Amazing Spider-Man, the one with Lizard. I really liked it. It's nowhere near as good as the first two Raimi films, but it's a lot of fun. Andrew Garfield did great in it, and they captured the pure fun and excitement of Spidey's extreme agility and his taunting sense of humor better than Raimi or the overly-serious Tobey Maguire were able to. I actually left that film wanting to take up parkour as a hobby to imagine myself being like the Spidey they depicted in that film.

I feel pretty certain Amy Pascal didn't give Venom to Marvel Studios as some sort of a lame contract/pricing negotiation thing. Nice job, you made the Superhero Hall of Shame by squeezing out a turd in the bottom 10% of critically reviewed superhero films. OK, I'm done ranting. Despite my tirade over the last few posts I'm actually still looking forward to seeing this despite Sony's repeated incompetence with Spider-Man.

The way I know this, by the way, is because both Raimi and Tobey Maguire openly said all of this to the press back after the release of Spider-Man 3 and while they were negotiating with him on a fourth film. Raimi said he'd only do 4 if they gave him complete control back, and after it was clear they wouldn't he bolted. Maguire separately said he agreed with Raimi's perspective and didn't want to be involved if Raimi wasn't given back the reigns. Let me repeat--Sony did this to themselves by forcing Raimi out. Nolan really didn't want to work forever in the superhero genre so there wasn't much Warner Brothers could do to keep him, but Raimi loves this stuff and really wanted to keep doing it. Sony just wouldn't let him. I'm still as bitter today about it was as I was a decade ago.

Coincidentally I just answered this--they lucked out with Raimi, and they killed the golden goose by forcing him, Maguire, and Dunst out as a trio by having no respect for the auteur theory of film. Which is made all the more asanine by Rami's flawless track record on the first two films. Spider-Man 2 is still a masterpiece, and Sony is entirely to blame for that being the last good Spider-Man property they've produced.

The other thing is Sony has consistently proven for almost two decades they haven't the foggiest idea how to make a good superhero movie. Spider-Man was great, Spider-Man 2 was monumentally epic, and Spider-Man 3 was OK. But I give NO credit to them for that and ALL the credit to Sam Raimi, and everything wrong with Spider-Man 3 I blame on Sony. Sony gave Raimi free reign on the first two movies, but they forced him to stick three villains into the third, one of which he fought back against and lost. The result was a watering down of the franchise and the loss of the only good thing they had ever done in hiring Raimi. Similar to the way the only good thing DC has done is to hire Christopher Nolan and later perhaps Patty Jenkins, the only good thing Sony ever did was to hire Raimi, and the worst thing they did was to chase him out of the franchise by taking control away from a director who was in the midst of some of the finest filmmaking we've ever seen in the genre. I seethe every time I think about how badly Sony has managed to screw up Spider-Man with the way they handled Spider-Man 3. Amazing Spider-Man was OK, but it's universally accepted they didn't need to reboot the damn series with an origin re-telling. ASM 2 was just not good. Homecoming was fantastic, but obviously that's because Sony yielded control to Marvel, the best decision they've made in over a decade. And I've been half-expecting Venom to be another example of them just having not the first damn clue how to make a superhero movie like all the other movie execs who've failed before them. The unknown factor for me is the director; I'm unfamiliar with Ruben Fleischer's work. I've consistently heard great things about Zombieland, but I still haven't seen it. Any studio who picks a good director can make a good superhero film even if they have no idea how to do it themselves, but is Sony even still capable of letting that happen? Or did they screw with Fleischer like they did with Raimi or ASM in dictating a reboot? That's a more expanded version of what I said earlier--the best way for me to look at this is it's one step closer to Amy Pascal pulling her head out of her butt and handing production of these films back to Marvel Studios for however long Sony holds the rights to Spider-Man.

I've always cut her slack for the early seasons because she was 14 when season 1 was filmed, but her progression has been minimal at best. She'd be great for Masterpiece Theater productions of Jane Austen novels, but an action heroine?

This is half of the reason I really never understood why Sony was so bullish on a Venom movie. Blade's budget was $45 million, but it's far easier to render Wesley Snipes on screen with a sword cutting in occasional vampire CGI shots than it is a fully-CGI character like Venom, so you knew from the start they couldn't do this character cheaply. Yet the potential income should have been projected to be roughly the same as a dark character like Blade who brought in $70 million in 1998 which translates to about $110 million when adjusted for 2018 dollars. That's not a lot of meat on the bone for a profit on a Venom movie. An effects-heavy character with minimal broad audience appeal has always seemed like the biggest risk in comics movies. As a big fan of Venom I've always been glad they've been persisting like they have in trying to make it happen, but wow, I never understood it from a financial perspective.

Famke Janssen is a super-cool athletic Dutch chick, tall and dark and that's EXACTLY my type, the kind of woman I'd have loved to see two decades ago burying her sword into the skull of a Brit on the plains of Lindisfarne while wearing a Viking shieldmaiden outfit. I love her to death and was thrilled that she was playing Jean after falling in love with her during her sexy-nasty performance as Xenia Onatopp in the Bond film "Goldeneye," but she's a "cool" actress who displays very subtle emotions through her acting style. The only way to develop a strong attachment to Jean quickly in a film or two is to put a "hot" actress in as Jean. Jennifer Lawrence is one example of an actress with a broader emotional range that might work, but even developing an attachment to Lawrence that quickly is too rushed. Dark Phoenix should ideally emerge after 5+ films. Sophie Turner is even colder than Famke. I don't really get why people like her other than beauty; she displays by far the least emotional range of ANYONE on Game of Thrones and the same was true in Apocalypse. Rushing her into Dark Phoenix after one film is just not a good idea. But hey, I already know this story and care about it, so I'm already invested in it enough to be interested in this film. But it's about as far from ideal as I can imagine.