#the best thing they’ve released since Black Panther 2 imo

[ohsnapitzmarvel]

I genuinely believe Echo is the best content Marvel has released in years. It blows right past all of the other recent projects and it’s a shame more people aren’t watching it

[raptorific]

i've been scrolling through your blog for a bit and i just wanna say that i think that D.C. went through a rough stage a while back and marvel took full advantage of that shit and it sucks like DC could make the superhero movie of the century and people would be like :/ it's D.C. tho n not marvel while marvel can crank out some ass shit that they wrote in three days and as long as it has some "cool" actor people will praise that shit like it's fucking jesus himself in movie form n just ughhhhhh

I mean, I honestly don’t think DC’s had much of a rough stage since the unspeakably bad Burton-Schumacher Batman films of the 80s and 90s. Their film studio was just about dead after that and they tried to make a few other things happen but they just sorta fizzled at best and crashed and burned at worst. “Batman Begins” frankly revitalized the superhero genre and the Nolan series maintained relative consistency in terms of tone and story for the seven years it spanned. 

The Nolan Batman movies were a catalyst for change in the genre for a couple of reasons, but the largest of them is that suddenly superhero movies were actually viewed as, like, legit movies and not just shallow popcorn films. DC and Marvel took two very different approaches to this. 

DC doubled down on the Nolan series’ more grounded, human, artistic take on the superhero genre and tried to showcase their superheroes as flawed and vulnerable, which is great because it’s kind of their comics’ strong suit. Marvel went in the exact opposite direction and created movies that were outlandish fantasies-- and this is not a dig, outlandish fantasy is a hell of a lot of fun and it was necessary for them to establish a distinct identity that plays more to their comics’ strengths. 

See, DC is more character-oriented and Marvel is more story-oriented. It’s why DC can basically have a whole graphic novel where Batman just sits around introspecting and have it be good, and why Marvel can tell a more compelling story about characters nobody’s ever heard of. When they try to take on the other’s strengths, you end up with something unwatchably bad, which brings me back to the subject of DC’s supposed “rough patch” and the quality double standard where DC delivering anything short of absolute perfection is marked as a miserable failure while Marvel can phone it in and still have people rave about their movies:

DC’s films, since the Nolan trilogy revived their film studio from the brink, has had exactly one major misstep, and it happened because they tried to emulate the success of Marvel’s smash success “Iron Man” in tone with the Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern film. Believe it or not, Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, and Suicide Squad were all relatively successful films commercially and were enjoyed by most of their audience. The people who hated them were much louder and more obnoxious about it, but DC’s movies actually do have a passionate fanbase and they’re really only gaining more fans with each movie they release. Their one major flop was “Green Lantern” and the main problem with that is that most people aren’t gonna enjoy a faithful adaptation of Green Lantern comics because Green Lantern comics are by and large inaccessible

Marvel, on the other hand, produces more Misses than Hits. They’ve got some amazing films (Iron Man 1, Captain America, CA:TWS, Avengers 1) but they’ve also got a whole bunch of films that are bland and mediocre at best and soul-crushingly unwatchable at worst (Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, Civil War, Age of Ultron, Guardians of the Galaxy, the list goes on but so many of their movies have been so forgettable I can’t be bothered)

So this sounds like I’m refuting your point, but I think it really says something that DC’s films are considered to have had a “rough patch” of one movie whose biggest fault is that it was mediocre compared to the more recent superhero fare of Iron Man 1 and The Dark Knight, while Marvel can produce hours upon hours of tangled inaccessible shlock that’s led to people being so fatigued by their universe that the most exciting thing a Marvel trailer can contain at this point is "indications that they’re finally going Off Brand”

Anyway yeah you’re right on most counts, specifically that Marvel’s early successes largely came from an attempt to distinguish themselves from DC’s most popular superhero films, which were very insulated in terms of continuity (Batman Begins and Superman Returns, for example, don’t reference taking place in the same world as one another) and people really liked Marvel’s movies having clear crossovers building to a team-up (Fury mentions the Avengers in “Iron Man,” Tony shows up in “Incredible Hulk,” Tony’s dad is in Cap 1, Natasha shows up in Iron Man 2, etc.) and there was a really satisfying payoff to that in “The Avengers”

The problem is that now every movie just tries to up the ante on that payoff and we get diminishing returns. Do you know how many superheroes need to be in a Captain America movie at all? One. Do you know how many superheroes played a major role in the plot of Cap 3? I count eleven off the top of my head, and that’s for a solo movie! By contrast, Avengers 1, a team movie with an ensemble cast, had seven superheroes playing a major role if you count Fury as a superhero (which IMO you should). And instead of trying to deliver something new in other films, they just keep trying to double down on “look how much continuity!” to the point where I’m honestly fatigued just looking at the poster for “Infinity War” because at my last count there were over two dozen main characters and ScarJo has threatened us with even more cameos and crossovers than that. 

That’s one of the (many) reasons I’m looking forward to Black Panther. You know who I didn’t see in that trailer? Anyone from any other goddamn marvel movie other than Black Panther. It looks like they’re finally trying to deliver something new instead of just trying to deliver something that’s The Same But Louder.

Anyway point is you’re right that Marvel spent their first five years setting up a payoff and have spent the five years since delivering that payoff trying in vain to get lightning to strike a second time, and unfortunately their formula is treated as the scientific standard for superhero films to the point that making a movie that doesn’t adhere to that formula is seen as a failure for some ungodly reason