Kevin Feige disbands Marvel's CREATIVE COMMITTEE 3 3

[paqart]

On 8/27/2024 at 7:13 PM, VintageComics said:

It feels that way.

And it may not necessarily be that Feige is bad, it's just that it takes a certain team chemistry for success, where the checks and balances of the team create a balance or synergy for success. 

Maybe doing away with some of those checks and balances by absolving the committee saved time and money, but it certainly didn't seem to help success much, so which is the better compromise?

I thought this was interesting. 

This is another old quote (this one from 2016), and as I was reading through the thread I noticed that there seemed to be a distinct cultural shift at the MCU around that time. 

 

 

The exact moment the MCU turned is when the woman at the MIT elevator in Civil War chided Tony Stark. That scene was excruciatingly stupid and waken. From then on, every movie became progressively worse. Ragnarok was the first fully awful movie, soon followed by many more with only a few bright spots.

[paqart]

On 8/28/2024 at 4:12 PM, fantastic_four said:

Two reasons for this.  The first I won't go into depth on, but it's fairly obvious--Feige isn't as good at television series as he is with films.  I wish he'd off-load these to someone else, because most Marvel series seem like films stretched out to take longer.  It's easier to credit Perlmutter for having the best Marvel show to date in Daredevil, so I'm unconvinced that Feige should really be steering the ship on the shows.

For the films I mostly blame bad timing with the Fox acquisition coupled with Covid.  Feige's original plan would have had the post-Endgame B-list movies wrapping up around 2022, but Covid extended the Phase 4 and 5 times dramatically and we're still trying to get through phase 5.  And I don't think you can blame Covid for the delays in 2023 and 2024, yet they still keep happening.  You could say Feige rested on his laurels too much by trying to get the bench players more playing time, i.e. Shang-Chi, Captain Marvel, Black Panther, etc.  Other than Spider-Man there are no A-listers in phase 4 or 5, so one could have predicted them to be a bit mediocre from the moment they were announced--and certainly many of us did predict that and realized Feige was trying to develop the lesser characters following the dramatic success of Endgame.

We'll see what happens with Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Avengers from here on out.  FF would already have come out by now if not for Covid, so maybe we wouldn't have been questioning what's wrong with the MCU so much if it had never happened.  Or maybe FF ends up being mediocre and we'd still be discussing what's wrong with the MCU, who knows, but we'd definitely be heading for Phase 7 by now without that delay.

After Covid, I have zero interest in going to a movie theater. On top of that, the MCU content now stinks. It was great because the stories were not only fantastic, but very well coordinated. No longer.

[paqart]

On 8/28/2024 at 4:30 PM, fantastic_four said:

The weirdest thing about the faltering of the MCU is listening to critics try to reckon with it.  I've been hearing them celebrate the "fall of superhero movies" to varying degrees for almost two years now, and I chuckle every time I hear it.

The heroic myth will never go away; it just changes forms.  People have clamored for tales of heroism since the beginning of the printed page, and even before that they would get them via live plays.  Superhero films will be here for quite a while, and the MCU only faltered due to short-term issues.

Most critics hate reviewing superhero films, but I have bad news for them--there has been no "fall of superhero films," and in all likelihood Feige will straighten out the mess.  And maybe we'll get lucky and James Gunn cleans up DC Films and those critics will keep having to review films they hate for the rest of all of our lives.  

Personally, I think Sony's Marvel villain movies are better than the MCU movies.

[ExNihilo]

On 10/1/2024 at 9:14 PM, paqart said:

Personally, I think Sony's Marvel villain movies are better than the MCU movies.

Edited Wednesday at 04:19 AM by ExNihilo

[paqart]

On 8/28/2024 at 4:46 PM, VintageComics said:

Yes, the actors. Again, it was word of mouth so I could be wrong, but bases on the convo I had, we were not going to see anything FF or X-men before 2025 and that seems to be holding true so far. 

This is a no-brainer, and what everyone was expecting. For whatever reason, Marvel has lost their long term vision and has reverted back to DC style movies, pouring out junk with no real cohesive plan. It's annoying after what we've come to expect with the Avengers run up.

You saw that they teased Galactus in San Diego with the drone light display, right? They'd be absolutely DUMB not to use Galactus in the same way Thanos was used.

If they're leading up to Secret Wars, couldn't it be that Secret Wars is used in a similar in the way that Civil War was used, as a building block towards Endgame?

I'm not familiar with the 2015 Secret Wars storyline but I can see it used as an arc, to build toward some climax, 20 movies later. 

I can't even begin to wonder why they thought Kang was a good idea.

If we don't see Doom, Galactus and others used in a significant way as they did with Thanos and others in the Avengers saga, it'll prove that Feige has lost his mind. This is really the moment when it has to happen for Marvel. It's make-it-or-break-it time. 

Kang would have been a great villain, orcould have been. Unfortunately, the writing was lacking and the actor who played Kang was awful. No offense to the people who liked him, but his halting delivery was more irritating than eccentric or quirky. If all they wanted was a black actor, they should have gone with someone like Denzel Washington. Otherwise, they could have gone with someone like James Woods.

[paqart]

On 10/2/2024 at 12:18 AM, ExNihilo said:

Laugh clown, laugh. Starting with Civil War, the MCU mostly stinks. Before that, everything in the MCU was fantastic. What Sony is getting right is the character of the villains even if the production values aren't as strong.

[Silver Surfer]

On 10/1/2024 at 9:20 PM, paqart said:

Kang would have been a great villain, orcould have been. Unfortunately, the writing was lacking and the actor who played Kang was awful. No offense to the people who liked him, but his halting delivery was more irritating than eccentric or quirky. If all they wanted was a black actor, they should have gone with someone like Denzel Washington. Otherwise, they could have gone with someone like James Woods.

Wasn’t a fan of the actor but I’m not sure changing him would have helped much. I’m so done with the whole TVA stuff. 

[koollectablz]

I agree.  For me, the real mistake was the TVA, and really the time travel deus ex machina at all.  It just meant that anything is possible for any character at any time.  Equalling no peril, also if the character development isn't working?  Just get a new version from this or that timeline.  I recognise I'm not the target audience but my nephews certainly were and they also just noped out at that point.

From Endgame on I've found the MCU to be progressively insulting to its audience really.  Which is a shame.  And now we have RDJ coming back as a different character?  Sigh.

[fantastic_four]

On 10/2/2024 at 12:26 AM, paqart said:

Starting with Civil War, the MCU mostly stinks.

Civil War, Infinity War, Endgame, and No Way Home are four of the top 15 superhero films of all time.  What is it that's ruining it for you--is it really the political elements they started working in beginning with that one scene in Civil War you mentioned that I'll quote below?  Those are VERY minor elements in all of the MCU films you're referring to, so you're carrying your own bias into these films if that's what ruined it for you.

On 10/2/2024 at 12:06 AM, paqart said:

The exact moment the MCU turned is when the woman at the MIT elevator in Civil War chided Tony Stark. That scene was excruciatingly stupid and waken. From then on, every movie became progressively worse.

 

[fantastic_four]

On 10/2/2024 at 5:15 AM, koollectablz said:

I agree.  For me, the real mistake was the TVA, and really the time travel deus ex machina at all.  It just meant that anything is possible for any character at any time.  Equalling no peril, also if the character development isn't working?  Just get a new version from this or that timeline.  I recognise I'm not the target audience but my nephews certainly were and they also just noped out at that point.

From Endgame on I've found the MCU to be progressively insulting to its audience really.  Which is a shame.  And now we have RDJ coming back as a different character?  Sigh.

I generally agree.  That's the fatal flaw of Endgame; you can't introduce travelling back in time into virtually ANY story and have it make sense.  Back to the Future is pure fantasy; you can't go back and just change a few events and have just a few minor changes to the future.  Every single one of the infinity of individual moments, objects, people, and events that you interact with in the past changes the future, and it will change the future in large and completely unpredictable ways.  Ray Bradbury's short story "A Sound of Thunder" illustrates this well--someone goes back to the Cretaceous age to hunt a T-Rex at the moment of death it was already going to have, accidentally steps on a butterfly, and when they return to the future EVERYTHING about human society is COMPLETELY changed.  Every action you take in every microsecond--every breath you take, every bacteria your lungs take in, EVERYTHING--changes the future.  It just doesn't work at all, and when you have characters doing as many impactful things as the characters do in Endgame then it's just ludicrously implausible.

For now our understanding of the physics of time suggests going backwards is impossible, but if we ever do figure it out then using it AT ALL will become the most powerful weapon we could possibly conceive of.  Going to the past at all isn't like shaking a snow globe where everything settles back down to the way it was; it's FAR more similar to subjecting the place you're going to the 10-mile wide Chicxulub meteor that slammed into Earth and caused the extinction event that carved out parts of the Gulf of Mexico and wiped out the dinosaurs.  But we all suspend disbelief about plenty of story elements in all fantasy and science fiction, so fine, let's just ignore that everything the Endgame Avengers do in the past would have completely changed the future far beyond what was shown in the film.  It's pretty easy to ignore so it's still a great film.

The multiverse is a good thing to have in a universe of serialized fiction as large and complex as the MCU or DC universe, so I'm completely fine with it being there.  I enjoy parallel universes like Miller's Dark Knight, Marvel's Old Man Logan, or Marvel's Miles Morales and the Spider-Verse, so it's great to use a multiverse to vary the storytelling.  But to base ALL of your content on it, and more importantly to use it as your excuse for why the actors keep shuffling in and out of your serialized films--NO, a thousand times NO.  It makes for content that even superfans can't relate to as well.  We all live in one universe in one timeline, and in serialized fiction we mostly want to see characters who experience that same existence.

Feige thinks that the multiverse makes his casting more consistent without doing the classic actor replacements like we're all used to in serialized fiction such as Batman, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, etc etc...and sure, yes, it certainly does.  But he's losing the audience's ability to relate to the character within the limited context that all life lives within.  He's prioritizing the audience's relationship with the actors over the audience's relationship with the character itself, and he's wrong.  We want continuity, not a universe shuffle because RDJ or Chris Evans are ready to quit the A-list Marvel roles like Iron Man or Captain America.

Casting RDJ as Doom suggests that Feige hasn't learned that he just needs to replace actors as they come and go yet, but I'm suspending judgement until we see what he does with it.  

Edited Wednesday at 12:35 PM by fantastic_four

[koollectablz]

Tbh I was hoping for a hard reboot with FF.  Toss the multiverse aside and try to get back to just fun entertaining films without constant 'universe ending' threats.  I really liked Endgame mainly as it literally was just that, an end to the films.

For the past few years the MCU has suffered from the age old... just because they can do things doesn't necessarily mean they should.

Even the biggest hit of this year Deadpool/Wolverine explicitly states and nudge nudge tells the audience that it's plotline is ridiculous.  When you get to the point of parodying your own films (yet still being part of it) that should really be a massive wake up.  Once you get into parody then I don't see how you can get back to cause/effect narratives.  At the moment we're in the realms of watching that bit in the Simpsons where Poochie got killed going back to his home planet.

[drotto]

On 8/28/2024 at 4:12 PM, fantastic_four said:

Two reasons for this.  The first I won't go into depth on, but it's fairly obvious--Feige isn't as good at television series as he is with films.  I wish he'd off-load these to someone else, because most Marvel series seem like films stretched out to take longer.  It's easier to credit Perlmutter for having the best Marvel show to date in Daredevil, so I'm unconvinced that Feige should really be steering the ship on the shows.

For the films I mostly blame bad timing with the Fox acquisition coupled with Covid.  Feige's original plan would have had the post-Endgame B-list movies wrapping up around 2022, but Covid extended the Phase 4 and 5 times dramatically and we're still trying to get through phase 5.  And I don't think you can blame Covid for the delays in 2023 and 2024, yet they still keep happening.  You could say Feige rested on his laurels too much by trying to get the bench players more playing time, i.e. Shang-Chi, Captain Marvel, Black Panther, etc.  Other than Spider-Man there are no A-listers in phase 4 or 5, so one could have predicted them to be a bit mediocre from the moment they were announced--and certainly many of us did predict that and realized Feige was trying to develop the lesser characters following the dramatic success of Endgame.

We'll see what happens with Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Avengers from here on out.  FF would already have come out by now if not for Covid, so maybe we wouldn't have been questioning what's wrong with the MCU so much if it had never happened.  Or maybe FF ends up being mediocre and we'd still be discussing what's wrong with the MCU, who knows, but we'd definitely be heading for Phase 7 by now without that delay.

I would argue Feige working basically alone in a vacuum is a massive issue with MCU, not just he is not as good at TV. Through Endgame, the MCU had basically been mapped out by the Story group, as well as other individuals that have been slowly pushed out of marvel. I think Feige was far less of a creative mastermind, but more of a good manager that was able to pull together then best ideas presented for the first 3 phases. He did this job extremely well. This is proven by the clear decline in the MCU with him essentially acting as the sole creative force starting in phase 4. Feige works best when others are double checking him, and willing to speak up to oppose some of his natural tendencies. He received a disproportionate amount of the accolades for the success of the MCU, leading Disney to the falsely believe (and general public perception)  that he was the sole reason for the success of the MCU. Through phase 3 it was much more of a collaborative success, built by many other such as John Favreau, Ike Perlmutter, The Russo Brothers, and many others. 

 

This idea that other people's  input is needed and it is not all Feige is illustrated by the movies that have worked.  Spider-Man No Way home worked, because Feige while having a lot of control still had to deal with Sony's input. Deadpool and Wolverine worked, but this was almost all Ryan Reynolds and his creative team. See a trend? Lately the less Feige the better.  This is not to say he was not a key component to the success of the MCU, but it is clear that allowing new ideas and more varied creative input then happened during Phases 4 and 5, is needed to give it a chance to come back. 

[Axelrod]

On 10/2/2024 at 12:26 AM, paqart said:

Starting with Civil War, the MCU mostly stinks. Before that, everything in the MCU was fantastic. 

Well, that is certainly a take one can have!

[VintageComics]

On 10/2/2024 at 9:52 AM, drotto said:

I would argue Feige working basically alone in a vacuum is a massive issue with MCU, not just he is not as good at TV. Through Endgame, the MCU had basically been mapped out by the Story group, as well as other individuals that have been slowly pushed out of marvel. I think Feige was far less of a creative mastermind, but more of a good manager that was able to pull together then best ideas presented for the first 3 phases. He did this job extremely well. This is proven by the clear decline in the MCU with him essentially acting as the sole creative force starting in phase 4. Feige works best when others are double checking him, and willing to speak up to oppose some of his natural tendencies. He received a disproportionate amount of the accolades for the success of the MCU, leading Disney to the falsely believe (and general public perception)  that he was the sole reason for the success of the MCU. Through phase 3 it was much more of a collaborative success, built by many other such as John Favreau, Ike Perlmutter, The Russo Brothers, and many others. 

 

This idea that other people's  input is needed and it is not all Feige is illustrated by the movies that have worked.  Spider-Man No Way home worked, because Feige while having a lot of control still had to deal with Sony's input. Deadpool and Wolverine worked, but this was almost all Ryan Reynolds and his creative team. See a trend? Lately the less Feige the better.  This is not to say he was not a key component to the success of the MCU, but it is clear that allowing new ideas and more varied creative input then happened during Phases 4 and 5, is needed to give it a chance to come back. 

Yup. That's the picture that's starting to form. Feige is unable to do it alone. 

The Emperor has no clothes. 

[Bosco685]

On 10/2/2024 at 7:38 AM, fantastic_four said:

Civil War, Infinity War, Endgame, and No Way Home are four of the top 15 superhero films of all time.  What is it that's ruining it for you--is it really the political elements they started working in beginning with that one scene in Civil War you mentioned that I'll quote below?  Those are VERY minor elements in all of the MCU films you're referring to, so you're carrying your own bias into these films if that's what ruined it for you.

 

Out of the four you mentioned probably based on box office, three of those I appreciate but it is Infinity War and Spider-Man: No Way Home that truly stands out. Especially with the expert way the two films worked in so many characters in a relevant, meaningful and impactful end state. While with Civil War you had many characters floating in and out with screen time - I love that Black Panther-Zemo final scene...

...the end result is at times messy. And with Endgame I recently went back to rewatch Infinity War and Endgame over two days and I was thoroughly satisfied with the former, and disappointed with the latter. Endgame tried to play too much on the years of emotional buildup in getting to know these characters, but at times felt like they were there to fill screen space. Like the big "Avengers Assemble' scene with the sorcerer's portal delivering all of Wakanda, The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Ravagers, the remaining Asgard army and any other characters they could cram in to take on the massive Thanos forces (including Captain Marvel flying in).

It will be interesting to read paqart's opinions on these films.

[VintageComics]

Well, that's annoying. I had a long post typed and it disappeared. 

I'm using Mozilla, Windows and it was the only window I had opened.

@CGC Mike

Any suggestions on why this keeps happening???

[Bosco685]

[Bosco685]

[paqart]

On 10/2/2024 at 5:15 AM, koollectablz said:

I agree.  For me, the real mistake was the TVA, and really the time travel deus ex machina at all.  It just meant that anything is possible for any character at any time.  Equalling no peril, also if the character development isn't working?  Just get a new version from this or that timeline.  I recognise I'm not the target audience but my nephews certainly were and they also just noped out at that point.

From Endgame on I've found the MCU to be progressively insulting to its audience really.  Which is a shame.  And now we have RDJ coming back as a different character?  Sigh.

Right. Same for replacing Rhodey early on. Why not do the samme for Kang? Makes me wonder if they lost confidence in the story.

[VintageComics]

On 10/2/2024 at 3:32 PM, Bosco685 said:

Oh, I know they're out to get me. 

Edited Wednesday at 08:26 PM by VintageComics