fantastic_four

Perhaps they don't have the twins to accompany them ? GOD BLESS ... -jimbo(a friend of jesus) ... You said you skip DC television, but for me, Gotham and Pennyworth were a couple of my favorite shows ever. My twins haven't been to any Marvel movies at all, and until recently they haven't seen any. They just turned 8, so they were a bit young for it. I've been going to Marvel movies with adult friends in the area since they started. Gotham I watched all the seasons of. I think it's the only DC show I've seen more than half of since Smallville.

Yes, although I don't even think about that word Zen much--probably not for over a year until you just mentioned it. But it's the state I live in, allowing me to clear my mind at will whenever it starts to fill with irrational negativity. That's everything I wanted out of it, and I've had it for about 30 years now.

So fire the only guy who's ever done what he's done. The guy Warner Brothers has been searching for their own version of for almost two decades without success. I had high hopes that Geoff Johns would be that guy, but I was skeptical from the start--with good reason, it turned out. Creative types like him usually get frustrated with the business aspect of films after a while when they're relatively young like he was, so I wasn't at all surprised when he stepped down. They never fully gave him control anyway, so I'm still not sure who to blame that on. So, fire a one of one dude in Feige and replace him with...who? Ideally it will be a superfan without writing or art creds like Feige has always been. There was never any danger that Feige would go back to writing or drawing because he didn't have skill at that to even fall back on it like a Geoff Johns did. That's Kathleen Kennedy's problem--she's a stellar producer, but she is NOT a content curator, nor does she appear to have much of an instinct for how to curate content and Star Wars has suffered for it. I'm guessing Kennedy has never known who Figrin D'an is, and that's who they need curating their content--a superfan. Pablo Hidalgo and Dave Filoni are superfans, but both are also writers so they're not ideal candidates. They're still both the best candidates to have creative control over that content, but neither has really been given that control to date so who knows how they'd do.

Pre-pandemic movie theatre chains had it built into their agreements with the studios that those studios would not offer new movies on streaming to compete with theaters. That got eased a bit during the pandemic, although I think one of the big chains wouldn't budge on it, although I don't recall which one--but I'm sure Bosco would because I think he was posting about that chain here when it happened. Now I'm not sure what the agreements are like, but my guess is they've gone back to requiring the studios to not offer blockbusters via streaming up front. They think that what you're proposing will put them completely out of business, and that certainly makes sense to me. My guess is that the studios think as you do and would prefer to offer both, but I doubt it's solely their decision.

David Heyman, Kathleen Kennedy, Jerry Bruckheimer, Neal Moritz, and Frank Marshall are not amused.

I still love going out to the movies. Why don't you guys?

I went in the complete opposite direction thanks to the US legalizing hemp in 2018. Not sure I'm on a low note though. How's your high note going?

I had no idea you were in Generation Z until just now. Welcome to the geriatric ward! Please excuse the smell.

They lost at least a year, didn't they? Nothing at all came out in 2020. Black Widow was supposed to release in May 2020, but it was delayed until July 2021 and all of the other phase 4 films were also pushed back. There were no MCU movies between the July 2019 release of Far From Home and Black Widow in July 2021. I'm not as clear on why they've continued delaying films since then as well, but they've done it half a dozen times now. I notice that more than I used to because I buy Hasbro's action figures for the films, and Marvel has screwed them over repeatedly since COVID. Hasbro tries to get the figures in the store around the release date for films, but Marvel keeps delaying everything so they end up in stores 6+ months early most of the time now. The figures for The Marvels came and went in stores earlier this year, and the same happened for Black Panther 2, Eternals, Multiverse of Madness, Shang-Chi, and Love and Thunder.

Stalling makes sense. That's a lot of money to stall with though. I think we mostly said the same thing--there's no way he's allowed to stall if he hadn't just made Disney more money than any other producer in film history, which is what I meant by resting on his laurels. Or he took the 2-3 year break drotto suggested, except Feige's idea of a break is to trot out the bench warmers like a sports coach whose team is up by so much that it doesn't matter. But he couldn't have known COVID would drag it out this long so I can't fully blame him. The FF would most likely already be out or close to release if not for the delay.

Same, along with Hawkeye. And most of the others, too, at least enough to finish them. But none of them are even close to the quality of the Infinity Saga films, or any of the best "peak TV" series from the past decade or two. If I weren't already in the bag for Marvel I probably wouldn't have watched any of them like I don't watch most of the DC shows.

This thread is teetering on the brink of getting locked. Feige's main problem with the films since Endgame has been twofold--he got severely derailed by Covid which lengthened phases 4 and 5 too much and delayed FF and X-Men, and he rested on his laurels from the Infinity Saga and decided to try to establish C and D list characters without anchoring the phases with more top-tier characters. We would have been on to phase 6 by now and wouldn't be lingering so long on the lack of top-tier characters in phase 4 and 5, but Covid dragged them both out another 1.5 to 2 years which is really accentuating the lack of more compelling characters. His other problem has been trying to tackle Disney Plus series. He knows films, but wow, he does not know how to make great serial television shows. Virtually every one is like a 2-hour movie padded out to 6 to 10 hours. They're all pretty mediocre.

One of my favorite films ever. It's not superhero so it wouldn't qualify for my list, and it's also laughably bad in a LOT of ways so I'm under no illusion that it's an objectively good film, but wow, I friggin love that movie. Probably seen it 10 to 15 times, and I've rewatched half a dozen or so of the best sequences on Youtube many dozens of times such as the "THIS. IS. SPARTA!" scene or the "Give them nothing, but take from them--EVERYTHING!" scene. I've almost started a separate thread on the top action scenes of all time several times over the past few years, but I can't think of a great way to define what a scene or a sequence is. For example Matrix Reloaded really shouldn't be on my objective list because it's not great in many ways, but some of the sequences are just SO outstanding that it deserves recognition for the insane quality of those parts. All of the scenes starting with the many Smiths, continuing on to the Merovingian encounter, to the fight with the Merovingian's men and the ghost twins, up through the highway chase scene is probably the absolute best half-hour or so of action in any movie, ever. INSANELY rewatchable even if the film as a whole isn't.

I'll definitely re-watch Blade at some point, particularly if that Mahershala Ali version ever gets finished.

That's based upon faint memory--I saw the Blade films in the theatre and haven't seen them since. Isn't the third one the one everyone likes best?

My personal preference list is completely different than the one I have in this thread. I'm not even entirely sure what's on it, but I know Daredevil is in the top 10 even though I know it's not a great film. One of the things that pushes it up for me is the soundtrack...it probably has the best soundtrack of any superhero film, period. The Crow is in my top 10 also and it also has a terrific soundtrack, but it's a problematic film from an objective perspective. I also don't even like some of the films in my list here all that much. I don't like Joker for example, but I recognize how good it is in many ways.

I guess I get the gender politics angle umbrage that many take over either Brie Larson or Captain Marvel as a whole, but it's so much more simple than that I don't see why it should be an issue. DC has long had Wonder Woman as one of its most popular characters, but Marvel has NEVER had any equivalent top-tier female character. I had been generally aware of that for decades, so when they first announced the Captain Marvel movie the Wonder Woman movie was either in development or already out, so I figured that was Feige and his team realizing it was long past time to try to sell to girls more than they historically were able to do as compared to DC. He was a producer on Elektra, but that was driven more by Fox's ownership of her rights than her actual popularity. I assumed Feige and his advisors tried to identify what they thought would be the most popular female character in their stable and picked Captain Marvel. Maybe they were right, I dunno. If someone can name another Marvel female character that could potentially be more popular than Danvers please do share...I can't think of any. Disney's primary motivator is greed, and pushing Captain Marvel was primarily driven by that greed. As far as I can tell it worked to an extent because the film did decently and my daughter definitely likes her, although she's still nowhere near as popular as Wonder Woman.

Marvel used to report sales numbers on a page in their comics from time to time before they started using Diamond. After that I think Diamond was reporting them in that magazine they used to print for a long time, "Previews" I think it was called. So sales figures are definitely out there, I just don't know of any one place to find them right now.

No, you're right, people tend to like specific characters more than teams. Having said that there are some teams with no individual character that's more popular than the team. Rorschach is the most popular member of Watchmen with Doctor Manhattan probably being second, but do people really like either of them more than the entire team? I don't think so, I think Watchmen fans like the Watchmen as a whole. I think I could come up with dozens of similar examples. Fantastic Four is probably an example too; I don't think most people like Thing, Reed, Sue, or Johnny more than that team as a whole.

Based on our mutual collecting habits and seeing what you buy in the plastic crack thread, I believe that part of your decision to have kids was to justify your eventual action figure purchases. That definitely would have fueled my decision to have kids if things had gone that way...I was kinda 50/50 on the fence about having kids anyway when I did, which is why I didn't until I was 44. But no, I had seen Marvel Legends back in the early 2000s Toy Biz days, but they just looked completely goofy to me due to the proportions. I was already buying Bowen statues at the time and didn't see a reason to get into those dumb-looking Toy Biz figures. But in 2018 my kids were 2, so I figured I should buy my son a Wolverine since he already really enjoyed the Spider-man and X-Men cartoons. I got him the Apocalypse wave tiger stripe figure, and over the next few months I started playing with it myself and was amazed at how far the articulation and aesthetics had come. I eventually realized that between Hot Toys and the advancements Hasbro had made in making better action figures that they were WAY better than buying statues that are stuck in one position forever.

I'm 52, born March 3, 1971. I thought I remembered you being my age, but you sounded younger when talking about the FF. You're a Pisces? Well that explains everything. First newsstand comic I bought was GI Joe #1 in 1982. The next title I started buying was FF somewhere in the 240s, I imagine whichever issue came out the month GI Joe #1 or #2 came out. It wasn't far into Byrne's run, and I went back and picked up the rest of it at conventions over the next year or two. It was WAY more interesting than GI Joe, but GI Joe had the figures too and Marvel didn't so I stuck with it for a while until I outgrew buying action figures (I re-grew into buying action figures just a few years ago when I had kids ). I vividly recall pretending my GI Joe figures were the FF, or the X-Men, and playing with them as if they were superheroes. I also remember imagining Destro from GI Joe was Doctor Doom. The only concept I had about the popularity of FF at the time was that most of my friends who read comics didn't read FF. But they all read X-Men and were crazy for Wolverine, so that's what I tried next after FF.

I'm 52, born March 3, 1971.

Yeah, Cap was thoughtlessly ranked. I guess they forgot about the super-soldier serum. He didn’t just do push-ups and lift weights. It may have been accurate at the time, I don't really remember. There are two constants with superheroes--big characters tend to keep getting bigger as more writers and artists tackle them, and powers tend to keep getting more powerful. I'd have to research how they defined the limits of his agility and strength over time...maybe they said at one time he had the strength of 2 men, then later 5 men, then even later 10 men, etc. I don't really remember how that changed for him over the decades.

That was Stan Lee taking a victory lap in 1962 in that exaggerated way he's always loved. Writing Fantastic Four was a stretch at the time he did it in 1960 since superhero title sales had been falling for a decade, so when the sales numbers came in and it was a hit he started putting that tagline on starting with issue #4. They've just stuck with it on and off ever since.

You're essentially asking if the FF was as popular as Spidey or the X-Men in the 80s. The answer is clearly no, it wasn't. FF was my own favorite title during the Byrne years, but even then I knew it wasn't as popular as Spidey or X-Men. FF was headed towards likely cancellation before Byrne revived it. He elevated it from C or D level back up to a tier below Spidey and the X-Men. Same thing happened with Frank Miller on Daredevil, he revived interest in it, but he didn't catapult it to the level of Marvel's top heroes, he mostly saved it from possible cancellation.