Hey all,
I re-watched
Captain America earlier, and thought to myself, this could have been sooo much better. Red Skull was one of the shittest villain's I've seen in a CBM. It wasn't thought-provoking or anything. A good movie, nothing more.
You're probably wondering why I'm talking trash about a good movie. I'd just like to address the Marvel VS DC war for a sec, as it's how I need to start the Editorial. What people fail to realise is that there are 2 types of CBM. There's the fun, action-orientated ones that aren't meant to make you think about themes and deeper meaning's. And there are the one's with all that. Some examples of the former are
Thor, Iron Man 2, Captain America, X-Men and Spider-Man, while some examples of the latter are
Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, X-Men: First Class and V for Vendetta.
Obviously not everybody wants to have to think when they watch a movie, they just want to go and be entertained for 2 hours or so (I'm looking at you
Transformers). That's the reason why said franchise makes billions. The reason I'm disappointed in Marvel is because they have the ability to be so much more than their movies.
Thor had the chance to be amazing, but there is only one problem: They're scared.
I think the critical mocking of
Green Lantern is a HUGE reason why Marvel will want to continue to play it safe. Before 2008, they were in a terrible place. Most of their movies were being badly handled by their respective studios and even though most of the public liked them, if you look behind the visuals there isn't much else there. Marvel knows that the formula they're using now works perfectly fine with the audience, it brings in the dough and usually gets decent reviews. The only reason I can think of as to why Marvel Studios movies so far have been cookie cutter at best (except for
Iron Man, I don't know what went wrong after that) is because they're afraid that if they change their formula then the public will reject their movies and they'll fail.
Green Lantern and Marvel's previous movies are a good enough example as to why they don't want to change their formula.
With
Iron Man they got lucky. I believe this, because they continued that formula with
The Incredible Hulk and
Iron Man 2 and those movies didn't do so well critically (and in TIH's case, financially as well). So then they found another formula that the audience liked with
Thor and
Cap and I'm worried that they will continue that pattern with
The Avengers. That movie has an even bigger chance than
Thor ever had to be great and I know in my heart that they will be afraid to change their movie structure on their biggest project and biggest gamble. If they do change it and
Avengers ends up amazing, then I'll admit I was wrong. But look at the facts now and you'll see I'm right.
Another example of this is their history with actors and directors. Terrance Howard, Mickey Rourke, Jon Favreau, Edward Norton, Patty Jenkins and Kenneth Branagh (although he says it was "timing") have all left Marvel, and from reading reports Natalie Portman may be on her way out as well. They want too much control on their projects which is making their team leave the studio. If this keeps up then I'm afraid to say, then it'll be bye bye Marvel.
Yet another example is the recent hiring of Alan Taylor as director of
Thor 2. They seem to be going cheap and looking at inexperianced directors. Marvel are essentially being quite mean about this, because the directors know that this is their big break so they'll just follow orders and do their job. They've already done this with Jon Favreau and that turned out okay, so I could be wrong about this. This point doesn't have much backing considering that Favreau made a great movie, and the last movie he directed before that was Elf. Rupert Wyatt falls under that category as well. He was hardly well known and he made one of 2011's best movies (
Rise of the Planet of the Apes), so chances are I'm going to be wrong about this. But from the way it looks to me, hiring Alan Taylor was a bad move.
Will
The Avengers be good or bad? Only time will tell. Wait please, I didn't say it would be bad! I haven't
directly insulted Marvel! The Marveltes, they're outnumbering me! No, no, noooooooooooooooo!