fantastic_four

I was introduced to him around 1981 by the X-Men. He almost single-handedly drove the success of that title then and now, although interest in him in parallel drove interest in mutants as a whole, so now the whole team is pretty popular. This is all evident in the films as well. Once Marvel could cross Spidey over they did, and they've kept doing it. Same with Wolverine at Fox, they maximized him as the center of the X-Men films and then his solo films knowing he was their biggest asset.

I started this thread in 2018 with a list of the top 25 superhero films, comic or not. Most of them are from the comics, but I'm not including movies like Road to Perdition, Ghost World, etc because they don't feature superheroes, and I am including superhero films that weren't from comics like the Matrix or the Incredibles. As new movies were released since then i just kept adding new ones to the list if they merited it and I never shrunk it which is why I said top 35. This is my latest from page five, and none of those more mediocre titles you just mentioned are anywhere near making it: The Dark Knight Spider-Man 2 Batman Begins Logan Iron Man Spider-Man: No Way Home Avengers: Infinity War Avengers Captain America: Civil War Avengers: Endgame Black Panther The Dark Knight Rises Captain America: The Winter Soldier The Matrix Joker X-Men: First Class Spider-Man: Homecoming Superman Spider-Man: Far From Home Thor: Ragnarok Deadpool The Incredibles Spider-Man Watchmen Captain Marvel Wonder Woman Batman Returns Superman II X-Men: Days of Future Past Guardians of the Galaxy Batman The Matrix Reloaded Deadpool 2 Unbreakable

No, I'm talking about since 1963 for Spidey, and since some year between 1975 and 1980 for Wolverine. It's easy to see that once Marvel started creating multiple titles for the same character that they did more for Spidey and Wolverine than any other character throughout the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and beyond. Wolverine didn't start out mega-popular like Spidey did right from the start, but he grew to Spidey status either in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Or maybe Spidey is all alone at the top, Logan is right below, and everyone else is below those two tiers. Spidey has definitely had FAR more titles than any other Marvel character. There are times in the 80s and 90s when he had five or more titles per month all to himself--examples include Amazing Spider-Man, Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, Marvel Tales, etc etc. I don't recall any time when Logan had 5+ titles like Spidey has had at times.

I don't see that popularity the tiers you'd group superheroes into has significantly changed since you were a kid. Spider-Man and Wolverine have LONG been Marvel's most popular heroes, and that's still true today. FF was never at the level of popularity that Spidey and Logan are, and neither were the X-Men in any iteration, Hulk, or any Avenger member or the group as a whole. Maybe if you grouped Cap and Iron Man as a third tier in the 80s and 90s the MCU films boosted them to second tier. But none of them have come close to touching Spidey or Logan in popularity.

The usual pattern for Marvel films is that the early reviews on the meta-review sites skew high, and as more reviews come in they start to go down. So if a film is around say 80% after the first few hours of a review embargo being lifted then it usually ends up around 70% to 75%. For some reason this film is reversing that pattern. It started out around 55% and has steadily risen up to around 61%. WTF? Why are these Captain Marvel films reversing usual trends even among professional critics? Do superhero fan critics tend to hate Brie Larson, too, and it isn't until the mainstream critics get their reviews in closer to the film's release date that the consensus raises the score?

Gave it some thought but I don't think any 2022 or 2023 films yet crack my latest list in this thread. But I still haven't seen The Flash. Is that a top 35 of all time superhero film?

No, you're in the majority of fans and critics, and I also suspect you're in the majority within people who post regularly in this forum. We just don't feel as compelled to keep hailing the quality of a 2018 film as much as others feel compelled to keep dumping on it. There's a separate thread in this forum where people rank the best superhero films, and I still have Captain Marvel somewhere in the second half of the top 30 or so.

Mostly agree, except that No Way Home exists and Marvel made it, plus it's even better than Endgame.

I agree. But the other films from this phase for the most part didn't exceed 50 pages in length even long after they were released. This one is over 100 pages and it hasn't even come out yet. People are feeling more compelled to take a dump on this movie than any other from this phase. Why? I'm not paying close attention to this film so it's certainly possible people have seen more about it than I have, but why that translates to "I MUST WARN OTHERS" to this extent is bizarre. I wouldn't find it bizarre at all and would have chalked it up to me not paying attention to the film if the same thing hadn't happened five years ago when Captain Marvel released.

I'm well familiar with the mindset of loving to hate films before they come out. I've seen it in these forums and in the fan "reviews" for films before anyone's even seen them. But the volume of people both in these forums and in other places online who love to hate Captain Marvel and now The Marvels isn't something I've seen much, with one exception--Star Wars films have always drawn this kind of ire. Any of them released after the original trilogy have a diehard set of haters who can't get enough of hating on those films. But I get it--they were kids when they saw the original trilogy, they had adult-level criticism when they saw the prequels, and they complained about a million things that they didn't complain about when they were kids because they were, well, kids, and they didn't notice the same things back then. I'm not as clear on why the Captain Marvel films are drawing so many pre-release haters. If you don't like something--or think you won't like something--the usual reaction is to ignore it. For some reason larger numbers than I'm used to can't ignore these Captain Marvel movies--they feel compelled to just continually talk about how much they're going to suck before they come out, and once they're out they can't get enough of repetitively dancing on the imagined graves of those films. And maybe this film WILL get buried by the reviews, but I really have no idea. I do know that Captain Marvel wasn't a terrible film, but there was a HUGE amount of chatter about why it actually was an awful film separate from the general fan and critical response. WTF is that--why do people do it? Why do you guys who have dozens of posts in this thread already dumping on this film feel compelled to do it?

Review embargo lifts in an hour and a half at noon EST, so the meta-review sites should start compiling them throughout the afternoon.

Him getting dropped by his agency is old news, but the reason they dropped him is new and they didn't disclose it at the time. And the charges against him were not all cleared. The prosecutors dropped some of the charges they were investigating after the video and woman's testimony came out, but not all of them.

Review embargo doesn't lift until two days before the film starts. They don't always wait this late to lift review embargos. For Disney that has always been for logistical reasons and not the frequent ploy by studios to delay reviews when they know critics will pan a film, but every time they wait late I wonder if this time will be the first time they do it to minimize bad reviews.

If you enjoyed the last episode of season 1 then you HAVE to watch episode 3--it's almost as good. I thought the final episode of Loki season 1 is the single best episode of the Disney Plus shows by far. The end of Wandavision was pretty good too, but not as good as the He Who Remains episode. Really hope Majors gets past his personal issues because he's riveting as Kang.

Seemed clear it's the Kree lady accuser in the trailer. She sounded pretty salty when it started. What is up with these Kree accusers, anyway? On Earth we call them prosecutors, and I don't think they go around whacking and zapping people with giant hammers.

So everybody's dead?!?! I assume that's not actually the case, though. Which is the problem with time travel and multiverses--nothing ever seems real or permanent.

Love that Elektra Daredevil figure. The heads from the other Elektra figures also fit onto that version you bought.

Not if the value of human labor falls significantly--in other words if AI and robotics ends up replacing a very large number of humans in the work force. To date humans have always been able to find new work that automation can't do, but if automation starts to become capable of everything then capitalism begins to break down. Money is a made-up concept that is meant to represent the value of labor, but if labor begins to lose value then money itself begins to also lose value. There are many different patches to deal with this--income redistribution is the simplest one, which most countries are already doing to varying extents--but all of them have their own cons. The extreme example of this in fiction is the Jetsons, Star Trek, or Wall-E. If humans aren't needed to perform labor then money means nothing.

Is a lion corrupt for eating a gazelle? Of course not; it has no other choice. 90% of companies fail, and if the 10% that succeed weren't the most competitive and prioritized morality and ethics over survival then it would be north of 99% of companies that failed. Blame the game, not the players. Capitalism is the worst economic system in the world except for every other economic system. Try to take heart in the fact that capitalism can't last forever, and as Marx forecasted in the mid-19th century it will be technology that causes it to stop working. I used to think the world was corrupt as well. Luckily that started early for me; I felt that way from about age 16 until 23. The way to get past that malaise is to look at what is likely to be next when capitalism fails. Here's a decent introduction to that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-capitalism

Isn't everyone in this show a villain besides the TVA employees?

I don't know how large organizations would ever share income based upon profit. It assumes every business makes money every year--but that's not always the case. Sometimes business is bad and companies lose money. Employees don't work for free in those years. Hollywood and the sports leagues HEMORRHAGED money during Covid. Actors and athletes weren't working for free in 2020 and 2021.

The NBA uses revenue, not profit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_Collective_Bargaining_Agreement

Even when you're being completely unreasonable they act like you're totally right. I've always heard that Bezos demands that classic "the customer is always right" attitude across Amazon's entire shopping experience. What pisses me off the most about them is the way they jack prices up above MSRP regularly even on items that are readily available from other smaller retailers. I'm talking here about items sold by Amazon, not by the third-party sellers that are pervasive on their site. They have automatic price checking bots that check larger retailers, and if they have no major competitors for an item they usually jack the price up on that item. Walmart does this now too, but they're TERRIBLE at it. They will jack up prices to double or triple MSRP on items sold by and fulfilled by themselves, and it's really irritating. I don't even trust Amazon and Walmart as a place to check market prices on food, clothes, furniture, etc anymore since they jack prices up unreasonably high so often.

None of the tech based companies chase profit. They pursue balance sheet value, through % of market share. They are not focussed on the profit and loss performance, that is secondary. Sports unions split based upon revenue as well. I only follow the NBA, and for decades they've had a roughly 50/50 split between the players and owners that varies from contract to contract. I recall it being 48% / 52% at one point in the past, but it usually hovers around 50/50. Not sure why it would be harder for studios to split based upon revenue than it would be for sports teams...

There's a checkbox on the Amazon checkout screen that shows up for some items indicating that if you don't specify otherwise Amazon might ship it directly in the manufacturer's packaging. I see that checkbox showing up for that batmobile when I add it to my cart and go to checkout. So if you don't notice it's there you may or may not have it shipped like yours was. If you click the "Ship in Amazon Packaging" button beneath the warning then they ship it inside of one of their boxes. Most of the time I don't care because I'm going to toss the packaging anyway, but sometimes I do because I'm buying something that I may try to re-sell later in which case I ship it in Amazon's packaging. Usually they ship it in their own packaging anyway even if you don't specify. I've forgotten to specify it many times--or not forgotten and left it alone because I didn't care--and I've still never had something shipped directly in the manufacturer's packaging. I have no idea which items they do this for. I think in general it's larger items, but I could easily be wrong.