LogFAQs > #985573685

Glob posted...

I dont think its quite fair to say that Marvel hasnt made a worthwhile movie since Endgame. While most of them have been mediocre or outright bad, Guardians 3 is some of their best work.

I do. Especially since I included the " a couple minor potential exceptions" corollary.

I could see some people liking Guardians 3, but it's easily the weakest of all the Guardians movies. It's good, but not necessarily great. It's very skippable, especially if you're already alienated by multiple bad movies preceding it.

Someone could point to Deadpool and Wolverine, but that's barely a Disney Marvel film. It started out as a Fox film, and then mostly became a weird nostalgia-fueled fever dream. It's fun (at least one first watch), but not necessarily great.

And then you've got the Spider-Man movies, but those are sort of weird because of the Sony connection, and because again, No Way Home was coasting more on Sony Spider-Man nostalgia than the MCU itself.

Still, that's maybe four (depending on how you look at things) acceptable movies out of 15. With a few more bad movies tacked on if you're aware that the Sony Marvel movies exist (even if they're not part of the MCU). And then a ton of stuff on Disney+ that is basically required viewing (because half the later movies are directly referencing characters or events from those shows). That's a LOT of bad (or mediocre) Marvel movies (and shows) pulling things down, and no one clear stand out to pull people back if they've already checked out from multiple bad movies in a row.



Muscles posted...

Let's face it, marvel just kinda sucks, they got weak heros, really weak villains, and just wanna make cringey "jokes" all movie.

This is one of the things that people definitely complain about - what has been described as the "Whedonification" of Marvel. Every character has to be a sarcastic quippy jackass, with the humor undercutting a lot of otherwise dramatic or emotional scenes.



Muscles posted...

DC isn't much better but at least they still got Batman to save the day, he's really the only superhero I care to see anymore.

The problem there is that it seems like James Gunn is deliberately squelching Batman.

The current impression seems to be that "The Batman" did well financially, and "The Penguin" was fairly well received on MAX, but they both predate and exist outside of James Gunn's control over the DCU. They're proof of Matt Reeves' success, not James Gunn's.

Which puts James Gunn in a really awkward position. If Superman bombs and a potential Batman sequel does well, it makes him look very bad, and jeopardizes his control over the franchise. So to protect himself, he basically has to either prevent Batman from getting a new movie, or he has to take control of Batman himself. But it's hard for him to justify taking it away from Matt Reeves because Matt Reeves is currently a proven success while James Gunn... isn't (yet). At least not with DC.

So basically we probably won't be seeing Batman any time soon... unless Superman is either a wild runaway success (and maybe Supergirl as well), at which point Gunn will feel secure enough to either tolerate or override Matt Reeves, or if Superman is such a catastrophic failure that WB immediately gets cold feet and start to pull power away from him, at which point they might just greenlight Matt Reeves' Batman sequel as a side-project outside of the DCU.

And to be honest, that's probably what they should do anyway. The MCU worked because they sort of started out establishing multiple characters separately before they started to pull them together into a shared universe. But now everyone feels like shared universes are the mandatory thing (so you can have your mega-crossover movies that break box office records). But if you establish and maintain characters as separate franchises, then the failure of one doesn't hurt the others as badly, and it becomes far easier to ignore or reboot characters that aren't working without damaging the ones that are.

It's like how the failure of Superman Returns didn't really negatively impact the success of the Nolan Batman films. Whereas Snyder's DCEU kind of hamstrung all of its individual characters because of the desperation to force them all into a unified team film (which was terrible).