Marvel Is In Crisis

The MCU did something I once thought was impossible: they created a massive shared universe that’s just like reading the comics in late 80s/early 90s. The downside is, this also leads to overexposure and brand glut that almost killed comics in the late 90s and nearly led to Marvel Comics bankruptcy. The same problems they’re having now happens in the comic industry.

This isn’t just an MCU problem, it’s in most every bit of media at this point… it’s not story telling, it’s not art, it’s content. And it’s being controlled by a few execs who know nothing of the material or the craft, following an algorithm and appeasing bottom lines. No one is making something they WANT to make, their producing product they’re told to make. From movies, streaming shows, video games.

Did you know in the Variety news article, Johnathon Majors described that through the use of focus groups, he discovered that the overriding feelings longtime fans had for the franchise had slowly turned into disappointment and sadness. He also described how top executives did not believe this would affect their profits, with many plans being made to focus not on growing the consumer base but harvesting their existing fanbase for as long as possible. He has since coined this phenomenon as the "Blue Harvest"

Bringing back the original Avengers would honestly make me even less interested in the upcoming Avengers movies than I already am. The ones who aren't around had their stories wrapped up, let them go. But honestly, I've always felt that the Kang and multiverse nonsense was all just to facilitate bringing the X-Men into the MCU without having someone "create" mutants, all with the added benefit of allowing fanservice, so it's all just noise to me.

I watched Wandavision, Loki, some of What If, and then it just became too much. Watching all those shows and movies started feeling like a chore, and I tuned out.

Disney was just dedicated to adapting Marvel comics to the point that they've adopted the release structure of comics as well. Spew out something new every single week with no end in sight. This structure is why the comic industry crashed just before the film industry saved it.

The way 1000 Kangs are defeated is if the guy who screamed Rodney is retconned into the story and defeats him.

Hearing the stories of the “ideas” people have at marvel and Lucasfilm that are so horrible and obviously doomed to failure just reinforces to me that most successful people aren’t actually smarter or better than normal people, they just had a few good ideas one time and then people put them in charge. The confusing part to me is how the problems with marvel and their solutions seem to be so obvious to everyone else. Fewer stories, focus on building up characters and making us care about them and don’t be afraid to take a break to build up anticipation.

The main issue here is that this has all become "product" - a bunch of execs making purely financial decisions without wanting to create anything really high standard. There are some amazing comicbook stories that could easily be adapted - hope they look forward rather than backwards 😞

Fantastic four and X-men need to be approached with the exact way of thinking they approached Iron Man in 2008.

We've gone from a smaller group of characters who were distinct and had charisma and a couple of memorable villains. Now we have dozens and dozens of characters, storylines that require 6+ hours of viewing per arc, and a literal infinite number of universes where everything can be rewound and the stakes feel non existent with villains you can't even name or remember. The MCU started with the most interesting characters and arcs and in the years since we've been radiating further and further out into no man's land.

using the Simu Liu stock photos was a pretty genius editing move lol

5:49 This is some good ass editing. You'd never know in the podcast episode Mason gave James so much GRIEF for bringing up a random guy 😂

It literally isn't hard, just make good movies. Invincible shows people aren't sick of superheores, they're sick of bad scripts.

Problem with having so much stuff is that you almost have to skip some stuff and once you skip some stuff your inclined to skip more stuff. Like I haven’t watched bp2, quantum mania, werewolf by night, ms marvel, she hulk, Thor love and thunder, black widow, hawk eye, secret wars probably more, there’s just so much stuff and once your off the boat it’s daunting to get back on.

They should have just chilled for a lil bit after endgame

Re: 13:42, I think GotG 3 did well & people liked it mainly because it had a simple story: Rocket gets hurt & guardians have to save him. We didn't need to catch up on lore understand this

I don't really get why Disney thinks "oh, the reason we are failing is because the characters/actors from movies people like aren't in it. If we put them in all our problems will go away". And this isn't with just Marvel. All the Disney live action remakes follow the same trend. They think just bringing back the characters they'll make a profit. The writing, directing, acting, effects, message/theme, character portrayal, etc don't seem to be taken into consideration, which is what MADE the characters the ones we love

I would be nice if Marvel actually wrote a script for a movie before they film. Im sick of hearing about marvel films being completely remade weeks before release. As for the avengers coming back, people dont want that, people want to see xmen and fantastic 4 but we wont be seeing them for years thanks to contractual obligations.

Maybe they should just take a break and reboot with the F4 and X-Men in a different continuity and with a different vibe, writing style and maybe with stakes dragged back down to earth. (I mean... It's been 15 overstuffed and relatively samey years...) It just seems like such a perfect opportunity to reset, suddenly having those characters that people know and will show up to see.