Marvel Cinematic Universe Running Thread

[mirth]

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/How-Marvel-Sticking-It-Fox-Over-X-Men-82997.html

[Centurion40]

Fantastic Four 2 sequel still going ahead as planned?

http://collider.com/fantastic-four-2-sequel-simon-kinberg-focused-on-script-and-reuniting-cast/

Well, they have nowhere to go but up.  But why throw good money after bad?

[JasonPratt]

Fantastic Four 2 sequel still going ahead as planned?

http://collider.com/fantastic-four-2-sequel-simon-kinberg-focused-on-script-and-reuniting-cast/

Well, they have nowhere to go but up.  But why throw good money after bad?

That's how we got Rise of the Silver Surfer!

...wait.

[eyebiter]

Terminator Genesis made enough money overseas (China) to green light a sequel.  F4 squared might go ahead for similar reasons.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2015/09/15/a-fantastic-four-sequel-would-be-a-box-office-game-changer/

[mirth]

[Sir Slash]

Love it.

[JasonPratt]

Avengers 2: roughly one week of Ultron 

[mirth]

Avengers 2: roughly one week of Ultron 

Heh. The movie didn't exactly capture the sweep of the comic book series :P

[mirth]

[mirth]

This is hilarious!

[JasonPratt]

Would have been funnier had the sound clips been Red Reddington from The Blacklist.

[JasonPratt]

Rewatched Av2 last night -- got the Blu for my birthday.

Got the same weird feeling I did in the theater, that I ought to love the movie, but something just seems continually out of synch or halting about it.

I finally decided part of my problem is that the MCU have routinely had trouble getting good musical scores for their films -- none have beaten Iron Man 1, and the only others to distantly approach that one have been the first Cap movie and Av1, not-coincidentally composed by the same guy.

This film goes back to having not only such a generic sounding musical score that it might as well have been a temp track from a radio commercial sound bed, but also kept reminding the audience that the Avengers have a pretty decent musical theme -- but ONLY BRIEFLY REMINDING! It would play a few bars every 45 minutes or so, sometimes in a minor key, usually in the background so that by the time it's noticed the music is back to being blah. This weird schizophrenia even continued in the final credit sequence, with an attempt to make a triumphant new theme out of the nothing that came before, occasionally peppered with bars from "the Avengers theme". (Once Thanos did his mid-credit scene, and the credits shifted to the normal credit roll, a more robust version of the Avengers theme finally cued in, but by then I didn't care anymore.)

I'm sure this has been contributing to my impression that the movie keeps threatening to be great. I don't know what legal-rights issue reared its head, but it hobbled the film for me.

[Centurion40]

1. Happy Belated Birthday

2. Av2 left me feeling flat.

3. That being said, no Marvel movie has connected with me in the way that IM1, and Av1 did.  But X-Men Days of Future Past came pretty dammed close; best Quicksilver EVER!

[Nefaro]

Av2 left me feeling flat.

Same.

[JasonPratt]

Watched Ant-Man last night with Dad, and a Mom who could not have possibly cared less. Dad enjoyed it well enough.

I liked it a lot, even though the script felt like it was trying too hard to crib from Iron Man (1). I could see some of the script-stapling, too, such as the occasional explanation for the bad guy's evilness being that the Pym Particles were messing with his brain, even though he had no more obvious exposure to them than anyone else in the movie (such as his own technicians). Some items were made randomly larger for no reason toward the end of the movie (such as a toy train, and an ant that ends up a doggy pet), which I felt sure was setting up for a Giant-Man finale although I couldn't figure out why that would be appropriate. And the main villain's chief tech problem made no sense: he can't shrink living creatures without destroying them (and say hi/bye to one scene of Yellowjacket's offensive shrink gun which never reappears, though a nice canon touch), but has a suit and is entirely (and correctly) sure that Pym used to go out as a secret military operative in such a suit. Why he wouldn't have tried to shrink a test animal in something like that suit sooner, is beyond my understanding.

Appreciated the various nods and tie-ins to other MCU properties, including the original Howard Stark actor (from IM2) returning as an older Stark for the prologue along with Haley Atwell grousing around in terrible middle-old-aged woman makeup as Peggy Carter. On the other hand, CGI (???) Gecko-era Michael Douglas looked amazing in that scene (and part of me hopes that since they shadow-teased hard that Janet can be recovered, they'll cast his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones next time... though she sure doesn't look Wasp-ish and never has.) I was surprised that the movie teased Ant-Man as being the first of Cap's allies in the upcoming Civil War movie, as I hadn't heard of him even being in it. I was perversely annoyed by the Avengers theme song being used far more appropriately in an Ant-Man movie than even once in the whole last Avengers movie!

The action was classic Ant-Man (including some Wasp action in a flashback scene), as I fully expected by now from Marvel Studios. The humor and language was harder-edged than I expected from the property, although maybe I should have expected it with this being a Scott Lang Ant-Man origin story.

Overall I'd say this movie deserved to make more money than it did, despite it being inherently a much harder sell than even GotGalaxy. I'm not the world's biggest fan of the AntFamily (for want of a better term) side of Marvel canon, and like most Marvel fans I would have much preferred focusing on the Wasp. "It's about damn time," indeed. At least the movie constantly agrees with this sentiment and so breaks over backward to try to justify why she isn't the one in the suit, acknowledging that although the justification makes sense from Henry's perspective (which I'd say they succeed in establishing, after working hard against odds to do so), really Hope should be the one inheriting the role.

Too bad the next movie won't be named "The Wasp and Ant-Man". Not too late to fix that, though!