@therealsilvermane

On 3/25/2023 at 8:46 PM, Axelrod said:

My very premature prediction:  the charges will be dropped when the woman in question decides not to prosecute.  

According to news reports, the woman in question has already recanted her statement to the police.

From Jonathan Majors' attorney via a Fox News article:

"Jonathan Majors is completely innocent and is provably the victim of an altercation with a woman he knows. We are quickly gathering and presenting evidence to the District Attorney with the expectation that all charges will be dropped imminently," Priya Chaudhry, Majors’ criminal defense lawyer, told Fox News Digital. "This evidence includes video footage from the vehicle where this episode took place, witness testimony from the driver and others who both saw and heard the episode, and most importantly, two written statements from the woman recanting these allegations,"  the statement continued. "All the evidence proves that Mr. Majors is entirely innocent and did not assault her whatsoever. Unfortunately, this incident came about because this woman was having an emotional crisis, for which she was taken to a hospital yesterday. The NYPD is required to make an arrest in these situations, and this is the only reason Mr. Majors was arrested. We expect these charges to be dropped soon," the statement concluded.

If anything, we should have learned from the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard case that the male isn't always the aggressor in some domestic dispute cases. Best to step back and let the drama play out before permanently ruining people's lives.

On 3/26/2023 at 10:34 AM, drotto said:

This assumes the MCU has already not partially collapsed (which it has).  The only movies I have any confidence in are Guardians and Deadpool.  The Marvels is boarderline DOA already, and the majority of 5 and 6 are built on Kang.  You can spin things how you like, but that is the reality.  

 

I am not saying this is true or confirmed, but it is a massive problem for the MCU no matter how you cut it.  I garentee Disney is having emergency meetings right now.

The Phase Five films are: QuAnt-uMania, GOTGV3, The Marvels, CA New World Order, Thunderbolts, Blade, and Deadpool 3. Out of those 7 films, it looks like only  Quantumania and Deadpool 3 are connected to Kang or the TVA.

The Phase Five Disney+ series are so far: Secret Invasion, Loki 2, Ironheart, Echo, Agatha, and Daredevil Born Again. Out of those six series, it looks like only Loki 2 is connected to Kang. 

That’s 2 out of 7 movies and 1 out of 6 Disney+ series. That’s not a majority of Kang stories by any means or equation. That’s the reality.

Another reality is that Marvel has a lot invested in Captain Marvel. She’s the company’s namesake hero. Kevin Feige, who’s in charge of the comics now, will establish Carol Danvers as the leader of the Avengers in May. Marvel Studios pushed back The Marvels to make sure the movie is the best it can be. If they didn’t care about the movie they wouldn’t have pushed it back. Maybe you hope The Marvels is DOA, but Marvel Studios is obviously taking steps to ensure The Marvels is a success, regardless if the haters show up for it or not. 

Finally, Marvel Studios was born on making things up and changing things as they go along. They were molded by it. If any studio can get over this Jonathan Majors issue, Disney and Marvel Studios can.

On 3/25/2023 at 9:51 PM, drotto said:

If true, this could cause Phase 5 and 6 to collapse.

No way.

GOTG3, Secret Invasion, The Marvels, Captain America New World Order, and Daredevil Born Again shouldn’t be dependent on a Kang storyline from what I can tell. Marvel can stay the course with those projects besides refilming a mid-credits scene or two. 

It will be interesting to see what Marvel does with Loki 2. I think they still release Loki 2 as-is whether they fire Jonathan Majors or not.

As for Shang Chi 2 (rumored to be a Kang story), Fantastic Four, Moon Knight Season 2, and whatever else is rumored to be connected to Kang, recast reshuffle and carry on.

On 3/25/2023 at 11:29 PM, thegiftedone45 said:

Anyone else think Ezra Miller and DC are happy the spotlight has been shifted?

If Marvel eventually fires Jonathan Majors and recasts Kang, DC might look worse for ignoring sociopathic behavior by its sociopathic actors.

Karen Gillan official apology for her Gardeners of the Galaxy Vol 3 poster pose:

To walk back my critique of WandaVision’s finale, it still accomplished the two most important things of most every MCU story: 1)  it powered up the main hero, Wanda into the Scarlet Witch 2) and it addressed the heart of the story, giving Wanda a more meaningful way (for her) to say goodbye to the Vision she knew. My critique was more about the different sub-plots involving secondary characters all coming together and getting solved in what seemed like a rushed manner. 

Not an official statement from Marvel. 

On 3/24/2023 at 5:25 PM, paperheart said:

DCPU going out with a fatigued whimper

2.) Shazam! Fury of the Gods (WB) 4,071 theaters, Fri $2.4M, 3-day $9.05M (-70%), Total $45.6M/ Wk 2

DCPU as in “pee-ew”, that’s a good one. 

On 3/25/2023 at 8:33 AM, TupennyConan said:

It is hard for me to find anything wrong with this show worth typing. IMO, it was a success.   

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Ms Marvel series. I think I would’ve just liked a finale that matched my expectations that had been built up by the otherwise excellent show, I think. I should probably go back and binge the show again to get a second opinion. 

On 3/25/2023 at 7:38 AM, TupennyConan said:

I was so excited to see WandaVision. Endgame was in the past & COVID had interrupted new MCU content. WV was terrific - up until the resolution. That poor finish set-up what was to come. I don't know why what was to come has been such a failure. There were some other great Disney+ shows, even with their various flaws: WBN, Hawkeye, What If? Even the less impressive shows had plenty to like. My lady friend loved She-Hulk, therefore I enjoyed it, too. I'm a Hulk & She-Hulk fanboy, additionally. The movies were much harder to like. I understand your point about the blip-crutch. I also give the social politics & bad VFX the side-eye. None of these alone account for what has gone wrong. I'm sorry to see Alonso go. While I never really knew her, I've always known her name. It was synonymous with the MCU miracle. If she was a negative or if she contributed to the failures, then perhaps things will improve.       

Well I can’t argue about the WandaVision finale. What had been built up to that point had been so interesting and complex to me, I was wondering how Marvel would wrap it up in just one episode. And it was wrapped up with a Pulp Fiction-like superhero mishmash party brawl that didn’t really go to anyplace really interesting, to me. A few of the Disney+ Marvel shows have ended this way for me, including Falcon Winter Soldier, Ms Marvel, and Moon Knight. I would’ve liked a real “woah!” ending that left me thinking, and I’m referring to the main story, not the added-on epilogue cliffhanger scenes like Wanda thumbing through Darkholde or Kamala swapping places with Carol. Loki, so far, has really been the only series so far that left me with that “woah!” feeling, again outside of the added-on epilogue cliffhanger scenes.

I myself am a not-puny Hulk fan, and enjoyed She-Hulk enough that I thought my partner might like this one, who, except for Thor Black Panther and Captain Marvel, doesn’t care about the MCU outside of knowing I’m a fan. She really liked the show and was there for every episode but didn’t like the 4th wall breaking finale and thought it was cheap. I told her it was like the comics, and her reply was she doesn’t care about the comics, she just wanted a better ending. An older lady friend of ours who is a big MCU fan liked the show at first but then got turned off by all the silliness mid-way through and hasn’t finished it as far as I know. Anyway, I’ve been interested to know what women fans have thought of the show.

On 3/24/2023 at 7:33 AM, jsilverjanet said:

The blip is disneys crutch for bad or original story telling

Is it bad storytelling? If the MCU is one long connected story, you can’t ignore that five year period when half of all life disappeared and then magically came back. That’s pretty disruptive and I argue would be bad storytelling to simply ignore it.

Further, the Thanos event could be analogous to our own recent real world plague event, where it was almost literally years lost. For the MCU, it’s a realistic way to explain how status quos changed and maybe new heroes emerged because old heroes vanished. 

Either way, if you have a fictional world that is constantly building upon what happened previously, you can’t ignore the Thanos event.

On 3/24/2023 at 8:04 AM, theCapraAegagrus said:

You could have maybe 1 episode of the new series dedicated to The Decimation (calling their return "The Blip" is so hay). Otherwise, it's a waste of time spending so much time dwelling on the past.

The word “decimation” is argued by linguists to be a largely misused word (like “enormity”) because “to decimate” linguistically means to reduce a group by a tenth of its number.

On 3/24/2023 at 12:48 PM, drotto said:

Ok, your right.  They admit that the original reports made it sound like a deepfake, but the director is now saying she was filmed remotely live and inserted in the scene.

Wrong thread

On 3/24/2023 at 12:13 PM, Gatsby77 said:

Matt Murdock's overt Christianity - and Catholicism - predates Miller.

He meets with a priest to discuss faith in # 119 - and, while I haven't read it in decades, I'm fairly sure he briefly touches on his faith in # 53 as well.

I’m not as familiar with a lot of DD pre-Miller. I did look at #119. No doubt Matt was probably established as Irish Catholic early on, but the overt use of Christian symbols, metaphors, and story themes didn’t get used in Daredevil until Born Again, as far as I know. It’s barely even in Miller’s first DD run, excepting #177 where the devil is used as a visual metaphor.

Probably going to be something like two Disney+ series and one or two Holiday Specials annually.

On 3/24/2023 at 12:17 PM, drotto said:

But granted this part more or less confirms Gal Gadot is out, as this was all done with a body double and face swap.

I'm not sure if you've seen FOTG, but in the Wonder Woman date scene, yes, we never see Diana's face, only her body, so for sure that was probably a body double. But it's definitely Gal Gadot's Diana who shows up at the end of FOTG. 

On 3/24/2023 at 11:21 AM, troy.division said:

Was Zendaya Gwen?
I thought she was portraying M.J.
(Michelle Jones-Watson...according the internet)

You’re right, sfcityduck got his Parker gals crossed but you still get his point.

And is anyone gonna bring up Wonder Woman going on a date with Billy Batson Shazam? I guess Greek goddesses like ‘em young? And between WW84 and FOTG, Princess Diana sure displays a weird love life.

On 3/24/2023 at 10:40 AM, jcjames said:

Daredevil. It was integral to his character, and his most classic storylines as well.

 

I believe it was Frank Miller who first tied Christian themes into the Daredevil mythos with the Born Again storyline. My theory is that Mr Miller was influenced by the cinema of Martin Scorsese who infused Catholicism and sin into almost everything he did. I see Daredevil Born Again as almost an evolution of Batman Year One, which to me is basically Batman meets Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. My analysis anyway.

On 3/23/2023 at 5:52 PM, drotto said:

They are viewing original Hulk as toxic masculinity out of control, when it originally ment to be an extreme personification of the inner rage and turmoil that can exist in all people. But through a modern lens, they gave us the softer gentler Hulk, in a way of suggesting that men can and should evolve beyond that toxicity.

Or maybe the Russo Brothers and the Captain America writers simply  don’t know what to do with over-powered  protagonists when it comes to the main story, hence the subtle reason for de-powering Hulk and Thor in Endgame and having strongest Avenger Carol Danvers only at the beginning and end of the movie. Which I believe is what the Russo Bros said in interviews.

On 3/23/2023 at 3:28 PM, PopKulture said:

I was dwelling on this after my last response to your same post. It's a subtle point, but I think an important one to posit: doesn't our strength really lie in our unity in spite of our diversity? Heterogeneity is the easy part: that our ships - mostly - should sail in the same direction is really the crux of our modern experiment. 

I actually didn’t dwell on that statement too long. It’s the nice answer anyway. Probably our strength actually lies in our superior firepower, taxpayer funded war chest, and isolated geographic location between two oceans.

On 3/23/2023 at 1:08 PM, drotto said:

It has less to do with the progression (which I have issues with) of the character as opposed to the utter dislike Banner has for earlier versions of himself.  Instead of showing pride at how far he has come, he basically disowns his previous self.  He also dismisses, that despite the anger and the rage, he did manage to do great and heroic things in that state. That version of him was not all bad. I also belive that the Hulk can not be cured, but rather Bruce getting incrementally better at control, and coming to terms with the potential monster. He is not excepting his previous self (a key to getting better physcologically) but essentially disavowing that self. The character progression is passed off as a joke as opposed to the difficult journey that it was.

 

As an aside, and this was touched on in Ragnorrock, despite his best efforts,  that beast is still inside and can "win" at times. So yes, Hulk can get dumber at times.  

 

It is also a jab at fans who like that angrier more agreesive version of the Hulk.  Basically calling them unevolved for not evolving with him. People loved that version of the Hulk, and this is making fun of that. I find the unpredictable version to be far more compelling showing the inner turmoil and conflict, while the smart version is very bland. I also find smart Hulk insufferable at times. So yes, progressing the character has left us with a far less interesting, and often boring character.

The problem with Hulk is you can’t do any real storytelling with him because of his child-like behavior that isn’t accountable to an adult mind. Hulk can’t make the adult choices that progress the character’s story. Those choices either have to be made by the human Bruce Banner or the adult people around him. That’s fine if we have a full length Hulk movie with supporting characters to do that, but Marvel Studios can’t make a solo Hulk movie under Disney. And frankly, Bruce Banner is kind of boring visually, as much as I like Mark Ruffalo. And too much “Hulk Smash” also would get boring after a while. So we have the character progression where Banner is able to have the look and strength of Hulk and the voice and mind of Banner. Thus, we can then have the more visually interesting Hulk who can make the more interesting story choices of Bruce Banner. In a movie or show where Hulk is part of an ensemble, it’s actually more interesting IMO. For instance, how much more interesting was it in Endgame that it was big green Hulk having breakfast in a diner, experimenting on Scott Lang, and convincing Thor to join the fight as opposed to puny Banner doing the talking? As a supporting character in an ensemble movie or someone else’s show where Banner’s mind is needed, utilizing Smart Hulk is far more interesting. IMO.