Marvel Cinematic Universe, Phase Three and BEYOOOOONND

[Cygnia]

James Gunn Back On as 'Guardians of the Galaxy 3' Director

[Spence]

35 minutes ago, L. Marcus said:

Also, Judge Dredd.

Who?

 

?

[archer]

27 minutes ago, Cygnia said:

James Gunn Back On as 'Guardians of the Galaxy 3' Director

 

I'll admit I didn't see that coming.

[L. Marcus]

2 minutes ago, Spence said:

Who?

 

?

Contempt of court. Three months jail.

[Hugh Neilson]

1 hour ago, RDU Neil said:

If you look at the first 25 years of Marvel, up to about the time Shooter took over, and definitely before they were sold, there was a strong continuity and a general sense of development over time. Look at Scott Summers between first appearance and the height of the Claremont/Byrne/Austin era... he went from a skinny teen to a grown man, dealing with significant relationship issues, etc. Look at Sue Storm becoming Invisible Woman, of the birth and raising of Franklin Richards (granted, he didn't grow up enough, but)... Look at Peter Parker going from skinny high schooler to a post-grad, then in the working world, becoming an adult, etc. Look at how they treated characters from earlier times (the Invaders and such) most/all aging and or dying, only Cap still young because of freak freezing, or Namor because he wasn't human. They killed Thunderbird, Captain Marvel, Jean Grey... and they had not brought them back, yet. It was NOT a perfect year-for-year alignment, but the Marvel Universe tended toward growing up as it expanded. Think of all the classic *See Issue #44 of the FF! type of blurbs that showed stories were being written with a conscious, shared history.

 

If I am recalling correctly (Wikipedia confirms I am...), Reed served in WW II (behind enemy lines in occupied France) and Sue was the "girl next door".  Ben Grimm also served in WW II.  They also roomed together in college, and the Dr. Doom flashbacks made it pretty clear they were not mature students.  So let's say that makes them born in 1920, 23 years old in 1943 (old enough to be graduates, Reed speeding through multiple PhDs, and serving in the military).  That makes them 45 in 1965, so they should have been on social security by the mid-1980s.  Suzy would have had her first kid in her mid-40s.

 

Similarly, after that first 25 years, Spidy and Cyclops should have been pushing 40 by that time (assume they was 16 in 1963, so born in 1947).  They stopped aging once they graduated, it seems.

 

Thunderbird was literally created to  be killed.   Mar-vell and Jean died in the 80s, so they would have to come back pretty fast (Mar-Vell's defining story is probably Death of..., so one of the very few I would never expect to see coming back).  Sgt. Nick Fury must have been a 1920 or so birth as well, which would put him well past retirement age when running around with SHIELD in the '80s.  Mid-40s when the MU was getting rolling, too.

 

The "see issue..." reflects continuity, not realistic aging or passage of time.

 

 

[Hugh Neilson]

2 hours ago, RDU Neil said:

I know that there are many market forces working against this kind of thing, but Marvel's original take was a purposeful shared universe in a way that had never been done before. It always promised more than it could deliver, but at least it tried in the first era. It has long since given up on that. The MCU had creative aspects that actually forces this to be the case. I also think the audience market would NOT stand for a casual reboot the way the Spider-man movies kept doing. Clearly audiences had tired of that, and once Spider-man was part of the MCU, I think that kind of "James Bond just keeps going, embodied by new guy over and over again" motif is played out. At least it will certainly be a much harder sell for modern audiences. (And it only worked when the main character/property existed solely on their own, not in a shared universe.) If the MCU supposedly continues, and ten years from now, they are have a third or fourth new actor playing Spider-man and he is still a teenager in high-school, I do NOT think audiences will go for it. If somehow the MCU continues and Spider-Man has five more movies over the next decade, I'd expect, and I think audiences would expect, that Peter Parker grows up with Tom Holland and we see that growth over the course of the films. THAT is the difference I think the MCU has made that the comics have long since abandoned. 

 

Tom Holland is 22, so not a high school student.  What year was he in, again, in his own movie, after Civil War (and some time after the spider bite) and before IW?  I think someone suggested he will have one year of high school in each moving, so in another 6 - 8 years, Pete should be 18 or so, while Holland will be late 20s to 30.  Will we see movies after Peter graduates?  Probably.  Might he complete university in the movies?  I could see it.  Will we be watching Spidey save his teen-age daughter on the silver screen?  I'd bet against it.

 

Marvel has "soft rebooted" the whole universe, and there have been a few hard reboots as well.  Remember everyone but Spidey and the X-Men moving to a new universe, after Onslaught?  Remember them all coming back?

[Ternaugh]

2 hours ago, Cygnia said:

James Gunn Back On as 'Guardians of the Galaxy 3' Director

 

The Fox acquisition will close on March 20. My guess is that Gunn's "time out" was so that there wouldn't be any objections.

[RDU Neil]

1 hour ago, Hugh Neilson said:

Tom Holland is 22, so not a high school student.

 

Are you really being this literal, or are you just trying to argue for arguments sake? I didn't say the actors had to absolutely align their ages with the characters they played, but that as time passes the movie going audience is going to expect the characters to grow, assuming the shared universe where they continue to have time clearly passing between movies. Sure, Tom Holland can pass off as a HS student, and maybe could for a while... the point I was making is that the audience wouldn't expect him to if the overall MCU continues to advance like it has. They would expect Spider-man to grow up, rather than an everlasting series of high school adventures.

 

As for Grimm and Reed... they actually did try to explain the big age difference between Reed and Sue during the Byrne years, and it retrospectively is creepy as hell (she was a child infatuated with this man until she became "old enough"... seriously creepy). And I've already indicated that they weren't perfect in their attempts at change over time, but they TRIED to keep it in mind and had an overall sense of growth and change. IMO, they could have done even more... like clearly Reed and Ben aren't human any longer. Reed is an energy being or something inside a pliable form. Ben is... whatever the THing is. The best stories would be played out over years, IMO, where Johnny and Sue, who are still nominally human if you want them to be, continue to age, but Ben and Reed stay the same. THAT introduces real pathos to a long term arc that I'd love to see. Those are powerful themes to run in the background of the sci-fi, super action plots. That kind of thing can bring real gravitas to stories that are otherwise shallow, trope filled, self-referential fan fiction. 

[Pattern Ghost]

All this discussion makes me think of Wild Cards. They did a pretty good job handling this very situation.

[Ternaugh]

23 minutes ago, Pattern Ghost said:

All this discussion makes me think of Wild Cards. They did a pretty good job handling this very situation.

 

BTW, there's two series based on Wild Cards in development by Universal for Hulu.

 

https://deadline.com/2018/11/wild-cards-2-tv-series-george-r-r-martin-books-hulu-andrew-martin-1202501424/

[Hermit]

3 hours ago, Cygnia said:

James Gunn Back On as 'Guardians of the Galaxy 3' Director

 

I didn't see that coming either, but I am glad to hear it.

 

 

[Greywind]

They should have waited until after Endgame fixed the universe to announce that.

[Hugh Neilson]

2 hours ago, RDU Neil said:

I didn't say the actors had to absolutely align their ages with the characters they played, but that as time passes the movie going audience is going to expect the characters to grow, assuming the shared universe where they continue to have time clearly passing between movies. Sure, Tom Holland can pass off as a HS student, and maybe could for a while... the point I was making is that the audience wouldn't expect him to if the overall MCU continues to advance like it has. They would expect Spider-man to grow up, rather than an everlasting series of high school adventures.

 

When does James Bond get too old for this super-spy work and take on a desk job, passing the torch to a young protege?  Does anyone expect him to change?  Perhaps people expect Tom Holland to play Spidey from high school though college and right on through to the Old Folks Home, or maybe they expect a new actor when Tom is too old to convincingly portray a young adult.

 

2 hours ago, RDU Neil said:

As for Grimm and Reed... they actually did try to explain the big age difference between Reed and Sue during the Byrne years, and it retrospectively is creepy as hell (she was a child infatuated with this man until she became "old enough"... seriously creepy). And I've already indicated that they weren't perfect in their attempts at change over time, but they TRIED to keep it in mind and had an overall sense of growth and change. IMO, they could have done even more... like clearly Reed and Ben aren't human any longer. Reed is an energy being or something inside a pliable form. Ben is... whatever the THing is. The best stories would be played out over years, IMO, where Johnny and Sue, who are still nominally human if you want them to be, continue to age, but Ben and Reed stay the same.

 

The Reed/Sue age difference was not there in the early FF.  That was a Byrne retcon.  It was an '80s story (about issue 210 - 212) that showed Ben, Reed and Sue will all age normally - the Skrulls "executed" them with a weapon that accelerated their aging processes (Torch was not there).  They all proceeded to dotage at a comparable pace.

 

2 hours ago, RDU Neil said:

 The best stories would be played out over years, IMO, where Johnny and Sue, who are still nominally human if you want them to be, continue to age, but Ben and Reed stay the same. THAT introduces real pathos to a long term arc that I'd love to see. Those are powerful themes to run in the background of the sci-fi, super action plots. That kind of thing can bring real gravitas to stories that are otherwise shallow, trope filled, self-referential fan fiction. 

 

While I think that could be interesting, I would not do it to my long-term intellectual property.  I'd be more inclined to create a group about which a finite story arc would play out, perhaps over many years but not over five decades of publication, to tell that story.  Or it might show up in the Ultimate Universe (I think they have, or had, your vision of Reed there).

 

 

[Greywind]

Sue dropped first. Storm women have a tendency to die young according to Johnny.

[zslane]

5 hours ago, archer said:

 

I'll admit I didn't see that coming.

 

I'm shocked as well. Just goes to show you that in Hollywood, profit potential always outweighs negative PR potential after enough time has passed for the furor to blow over. However, this could blow up in Disney's face as the inevitable social media outrage will likely cause considerable discomfort for the Mouse House, at least for a while.

 

The timing of this reveal is interesting, seeing as how it happened in between the release of Captain Marvel and the impending release of Avengers: Endgame, two movies Disney is likely counting on to dominate the cultural conversation to such an extent that nobody really notices or cares about this James Gunn news.

[mattingly]

[Starlord]

Lucky guy.

[mattingly]

Perhaps, but I don't know if even I would really want to watch Endgame 14,000,605 times.

 

[Lord Liaden]

MCU Dr. Strange really stepped up his game from his origin movie, and is now almost on par with his comic-book analogue. And a lot of people who watched Infinity War were impressed. I'd say his next solo film has a good shot at joining the billion-dollar b.o. club.

[Bazza]

1 hour ago, mattingly said:

Perhaps, but I don't know if even I would really want to watch Endgame 14,000,605 times.

 

 

It’s no that bad, each one is different. 

[Pattern Ghost]

1 hour ago, Lord Liaden said:

the billion-dollar b.o. club.

 

That's some serious body odor.

[zslane]

It just occurred to me that with half of all life extinguished in the MCU, that means you've still got--presumably--about a dozen supremely pissed off Celestials out there. The Avengers shouldn't be the only beings in the MCU multiverse looking to "avenge" what Thanos did, and in fact, many of the others should be able to find him and get to him a lot faster than the Avengers.

 

[Greywind]

And the poor Watchers could only watch as half their number got dusted.

[Grailknight]

10 hours ago, zslane said:

It just occurred to me that with half of all life extinguished in the MCU, that means you've still got--presumably--about a dozen supremely pissed off Celestials out there. The Avengers shouldn't be the only beings in the MCU multiverse looking to "avenge" what Thanos did, and in fact, many of the others should be able to find him and get to him a lot faster than the Avengers.

 

 

It depends, in the movie it appears that the Gauntlet may have been destroyed by the snap, but in the comics it was working just fine afterwards. If it is still even partially functional,the Celestials will give Thanos a wide berth. Only us humans are pigheaded enough to tilt at that windmill.

[Bazza]