the decline in the MCU's quality of writing has been happening for years. Endgame, Far From Home, No Way Home, none of them are written well. Why is it only now that audiences are rejecting bad writing and the MCU? This explanation does not make sense. Something else is the problem, not the quality of the writing.
>Endgame
Culmination of a decade's worth of storytelling, and the biggest crossover yet
>Far From Home
Spider-Man
>No Way Home
>see above, but also nostalgia/crossover hype
Bad writing can be excused if there are other draws. Does the film star fan-favorite characters? Is it a continuation of a story people are invested in? The latest one had nothing going for it at all
I thought the Spider movies executed pretty well on their premises. We can argue whether they were optimal premises and such, but they did what they were trying to do. They're not like, say, Quantumania, that wanted to be a family in a fantastical realm against the next Big Bad film and just turned out mush and failed to do what it was trying to do.
NWH's execution didn't match the premise IMO. From the trailers I expected some crazy romp through the multiverse instead of doing villain rehab. Though I doubt that mattered because all those returning actors would've been enough to get people to see the movie
Agreed. I wanted it to be a nightmarish funhouse with one multiverse after another.
Or have the characters actually go through the Raimi and Webb-verses.
Reddit would have loved it but it just seems kind of pointless to me. The settings of those two movies aren't interesting enough whereas expanding on Dafoe's Goblin was worth every second of screentime
Could have worked if they were nightmare fuel versions of said universes, warped.
capeshit "critics" everybody
"Multiverse of Madness" should have been legit-terrifying, akin to a bad acid trip. Doctor Strange should have been fighting desperately just to escape it.
I don't really understand where your interpretation came from. Nothing in the trailer showed any telltale universe differences, the closest was the Dr Strange stuff. The villain rehab wasn't shown aside from some hints that Doc Ock would end up on Peters side, but that was a plus to me, because I don't want literally everything in the trailer and I enjoyed that plot. It mattered much less to methat they were other cinematic villains than that it's very on brand for Spiderman, and it was nice to see him SUCCEED at something before the universe went back to shitting on him.
It was mostly the Dr. Strange stuff, but the from emphasis on "multiverse" in the trailer, the scenes of the mirror dimension, and the title of the title itself being "No Way Home", I had assumed it would've been about visiting the other movie universes instead of having those characters come to the mainline one. Similar deal with MoM too
Not that I think it was a bad film because expectations didn't match the final product, it was just unexpected
Not to mention we could have had NIGHTMARE as the villain from the misleading trailer.
That's fair enough!
Yeah, MoM deserved every bit of "that was it!?" that it got in response. It's like they had a bunch of boxes to check and forgot that they were promising a weird, scary experience.
>A Spiderman movie should have been about strange.
Your supplier is putting bad additives in the product
well to be fair, Scarlet Witch was pretty fricking scary at times, though her turn is too sudden, she went from hero to horror film monster instantly.
It was literally called "DOCTOR STRANGE: Multiverse Of Madness". It was NOT a damn Spiderman film.
having fricking Shuma-Gorrath, the BIGGEST Strange villain, be just some demon that, somehow, Scarlet Witch sic'd on him, is fricking moronic.
You should review what most of the comments in that chain are talking about. Tip: Not MoM
So what? Multiverse Of Madness still sucked.
>From the trailers I expected
Your dumb expectations didn't match the real product
Nightmare would have been the perfect villain, preventing Doctor Strange from escaping his situation.
Basically the film was a failure of imagination.
They're reasonable expectations given at least two different posts ITT had the same idea. It's not Kangaroo Jack or Bridge to Terabithia levels of misleading, but still
Incidentally, did anyone expect Endgame being a time heist?
Don't care. Should have been about Nightmare tormenting Doctor Strange.
Alan Moore literally built his name off of being an attention whoring shock jock with nothing of substance to say. Most of you homosexuals are too young to remember but when Watchmen actually came out he spent the entire time sucking a wiener with each side of his mouth about what it actually "meant" and how it was and wasn't a political commentary depending on who he was talking to.
Shut up, Rasputin. They weren't giving the audience what they wanted OR what they needed.
After Endgame audiences stuck around for a bit to see what happened next, now they've seen it and it's disappointing.
Fans were invested in the characters. A lot of the main characters' stories ended with Endgame, and Black Panther's actor died IRL, but a lot of the popular characters who are still around have been treated terribly in recent years, while the new characters just aren't catching on the same way.
You can call the earlier movies badly written or bad stories if you want, but they were crowd-pleasing popcorn movies. Now we have bad stories, badly written, that are doing things the audience really doesn't want to see.
They're also stupidly committed to this Multiverse Saga nonsense and under the deluded impression that they can build two entire phases of the MCU out of nostalgia memberberries cameos from 20 year old pre-MCU Marvel movies most of which nobody really cares about anymore outside of the Spider-Man ones.
>After Endgame audiences stuck around for a bit to see what happened next, now they've seen it and it's disappointing.
This. The movies in 2021 got released during Covid and had an excuse for underperforming, while the early Disney+ shows drew sizeable audiences and people liked them, most of the things the MCU has done over 2022-2023 really turned audiences off and people are checking out.
>Turns out reshoots can massively add to the cost but they can't save a bad story.
Sometimes the story is so flawed and conceptually wrong that the only solution is to just not do it in the first place. Feige and his cronies have been increasingly focused on adapting material from the last 20 years of Marvel comics, and there's A LOT more bad than good in those years.
It's like comics, people put up with bad art or writing if there is something good but not both.
Now we have bad writing, meh cgi, meh characters
Death of a Thousand Flops. Disney doesn't have the money to send shills here and elsewhere to form public opinion anymore. Or the freedom to cook their books.
>Disney doesn't have the money to send shills here
Disney could literally buy the Earth if they decided to drop the pretense.
The Mouse never dies.
Get with the times. Disney's currently in financial ruin.
The MCU has always been shit since phase 2. We just have more women and minority leads in projects so now it's a problem.
I kinda wish they explored Mysterio's softer side more.
"Poor kid." "For what's it worth, I'm sorry." Could have mined Peter's disappointment in Mysterio for more emotional payoff.
I believe there are a couple deleted scenes to that effect, but they decided to go harder on the "now that he doesn't have to conceal it, the true Mysterio is an unrepentant butthole." And I think that works better, considering for the final fight he's just straight to murdering Spiderman at any opportunity, finishing with a spiteful destruction of his normal life. It'd be weird to have him with any sympathetic moments after the reveal, or they'd have to change a lot more, especially if they wanted to leave it on that specific cliffhanger.
Being a good writer and being someone who can convince film executives you’re a good writer are two entirely different and often mutually exclusive skillsets
Endgame was closure for Infinity War. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a fun event to watch with the rest of the world and send the characters off.
Hot take probably but Far from Home I like more than the other MCU Spider-Man movies because it focused on Peter’s psyche. In Homecoming and No Way Home he is under the wing of older heroes. Tony, and the elder Spider-Men.
thank god Steve got his Thanos moment, now with the ability to actually fight at all, compared to the comics.
its a shame Disney has devoured themselves internally and fricked it all up, there are a ton of amazing Comic stories, it isn't like people are tired of Supe's, they are just tired of shitty boring ones.
if they can fix their shit, a reboot could do gangbusters but they need new blood badly.
all they need to do is a 90's stylized X-Men live action, complete with cel shading highlights and visible onomatopoeia when someone like Wolverine SNIKT's.
just have the trailer be an exact recreation of this, and my ass is in the theater seat.
That might get you watching, but everyone here needs to wake up, look at how the X-Men movies we already have performed and understand that an X-Men reboot is not going to be the thing that saves the MCU and make billions. You might also want to look at the comics and pay attention to how the X-Men books are made by gays for gays now. You're not going to get 90s Jim Lee X-Men for straight male audiences in a 2020s movie.
here's the rub.
there's only so much you can do with the movie format, only so much plot can fit in one, alot of these comic stories are too big to adapt into a single movie.
Gorr the Godslayer shittily done in Love and Thunder comes to mind.. even if they did it well, its at least 2 full movies of story, hilariousy the went the opposite, he's barely in the movie, and none of horror of the mystery of the character like the comic's setup ever occured, Thor knows of him immediately, instead of him being a mysterious off the cuff foe from his long past, now back to haunt him.
There's limitations of the 2-hour-max format sure, but at the same time it doesn't mean it's not possible to work out a serviceable adaptation.
That said, they definitely dropped the ball on Thor 4. It's both the Valkyrie story and the God Butcher story yet feels like neither
Poor Doctor Strange 2, remembered only as the 2nd best multiverse movie of 2022
Actual issue starts around Age of Ultron, it's where you see the start of the frick up chain reactions with them killing off Ultron rather than saving him for later despite being one of their few good villains, and introducing SW and Vision, who mainly exist to suck the life out of scenes. But those are pretty forgivable overall.
But it keeps going from there with Iron Man 3, the slop that was Winter Soldier, etc into Civil War. But all still manageable until you hit Infinity War/Ragnarok/Captain Marvel, all of which weren't just bad but were outright insulting in various ways.
Endgame's biggest issue ends up being that it's stuck trying to patch up a good conclusion from the shitpile that Infinity War hands it, where IW literally wasted 6 hours of your life by not mattering fricking at all and ensuring that Ragnarok might as well not have happened because nothing changed in effect there all while blatantly trying to fake you out and manipulate you emotionally despite the contract shit being well known and literally part of the marketing for IW/Endgame. So in a movie where they desperately need to be cementing their newer characters as successors and do a passing of the torch, they're wasting your time treating you like a moron by trying to instead burn valuable screen time for those characters writing them out of the first 2/3rds of the next movie for a shitty attempt at emotional manipulation.
Endgame was stuck cleaning up after that and it meant it didn't have time to also fix the problem IW introduced of having knocked the bottom out from the boat moving forward, it did a good damn job, objectively it's better than most of the prior films, but it still had try and patch shit which was crippling. Follow that up with the fact that nobody fricking liked Brie Larson, Chadwick fricking died, and Sony pulled more shit to turn Spider-Man into a tumor on the MCU, and now it has no fricking central pillars moving forward. That's why they're flailing like this.
also writing these characters stories from the comics doesn't work when you plan on killing them, likely for good, in a couple of films, which most of them are barely in.
Captain America is legit the best character in the films, and all the writing hints that he's here to stay, this is his world and he has to let go of the past, yadda yada just like the comics.
and in the comics, its true, here? they always planned to have him go to the past and essentialy die because the next we see him he's 90 years old and assumedly dies of old age between that and the next film.
yet they still wrote the stories like he wasn't going to retire.
MCU's problem is also its initial strength.
every film, for a decade+ was OOOOH WE ARE BUILDING UP TO SOMETHING, all the characters, all the nods, everything is OOH JUST YOU WAIT, WE ARE BUILDING UP, EVERYTHING IS GOING TOWARD SOMETTTTHIING.
and then it was two movies, two pretty good super hero movies.
the real thing they should have done is ran the MCU like a Sheperds Tone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzNzgsAE4F0
with this I mean, while they are building to a pay off, start building towards another payoff, this is quite literally how comics work.
instead they blew their load, and forgot to build up audiences for anything that mattered after.
>Marvel is trying to setup the Incursion Storyline
>has mentioned it once in MoM and nowhere else.
>now is doing Kang Dynasty.
what is going ON at Marvel? after that is Secret Wars, almost everyone who mattered in that story is fricking DEAD in the MCU, and Holland sure as frick can't lead a film.
>what is going ON at Marvel? after that is Secret Wars, almost everyone who mattered in that story is fricking DEAD in the MCU, and Holland sure as frick can't lead a film.
They almost never adapt stories 1 for 1 anyway. (Winter Soldier is the closest, and even it only uses maybe one or two lines of dialogue from the comics.) If they do that storyline they'll do it with whatever cast they have.
My problem is I found the Incursion business so boring that as soon as they said "Incursion" in MoM I fell asl
...Sorry, sorry. Saying "Incursion" just mak
1. Feige decided to put together his own team of in-house writers, instead of hiring experienced writers like Markus & McFeely (who had done the Narnia movies). Both Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Ant-Man: Quantumania were written by Rick & Morty writers who had never written a film before, and nothing has changed my judgment that they weren't ready.
2. The pandemic made everything worse because everyone was sitting at home and figuring out how to write movies with all the story conferences being remote, all the while they were worried that the theatrical movie business might be wiped out (instead of the way it turned out, which is still alive but very badly damaged). It doesn't surprise anyone that some of these movies were written via Zoom and that the stories were not really worked out by the time they began shooting.
3. Feige was spread too thin with the massive Disney-mandated glut of MCU content. He thought this would be OK because he could give his notes after the shooting was done and then they'd fix everything in reshoots. Turns out reshoots can massively add to the cost but they can't save a bad story.
Feige is a fricking moron and clearly is one of the many rocks around Disney's neck
also I don't think any of them had any idea how moronic it was to have their next big Villain, well one of him anyways, Kang, lose in such a humiliating way in his first big appearance.
Reminder that Kang wasn't going to be the next big villain, he was just going to be one-off for the third Ant-Man but then Marvel thought that Majors was such a good actor that they started to build a phase around his character
>Rick and Morty writers
UGH. Even "Helluva Boss" writers would have been better.
>Even "Helluva Boss" writers would have been better.
Jesus, let's not go overboard here, Anon.
...Or jinx it, for that matter.
people gave Endgame a pass because it was literally THE ending and the jumping off point for everyone that still cared, Spider-Man got a pass because it's Spider-Man