Marvel Cinematic Universe Thread

Oh no, please no more Fantastic Four. I can’t take another.

I'm sure you are more interested in seeing Moonlight 2.

To be honest, as a long-term comic book fan, I feel like most major superheroes have maybe three great stories worth translating into a movie. Just for example, Iron Man really only had two great story lines in comics: Demon in a Bottle and the Armor Wars. As his greatest nemesis, Mandarin deserved a movie too, but he came with too much Yellow Peril baggage to successfully translate into a modern Marvel movie.

So far, the MCU (and tv shows) have already covered most of the great characters and stories that were introduced in the '60s and '70s. The only major omissions are Namor, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, and Shang-Chi. And most of these omissions are due to legal issues that could be hammered out with enough money. Oh, and the real Defenders, as opposed to the street-level team on Netflix.

The real Defenders would feature Dr. Strange, Hulk, Valkyrie, and Nighthawk, and also maybe Namor and the Silver Surfer. The real Defenders ran for 120+ issues in their original series. Of all those issues, Iron Fist appeared once, and both Luke Cage and Daredevil showed up a few times. Jessica Jones didn't even exist back then.

So if Marvel's next phase is going to feature 20 more movies, they are going to need to include some '80s material and later, but the creativity got pretty thin after 1980 and especially after 1990. Cloak and Dagger always looked cool, but there wasn't much depth to the characters and their adventures. Excalibur would be a potentially good team to cover, featuring Captain Britain, Kitty Pryde, and Nightcrawler. And that's about it. After 1990, the only popular/interesting Marvel creations are Jessica Jones, Gambit, and Deadpool. Maybe Exiles, for a dimension-hopping team that is heavy with mutants. Marvel also had some success with licensed characters that they lost the rights to, including Conan, Rom, Godzilla, and the Micronauts. Marvel did some good stuff with Dracula and Hercules, but they are both generic characters that people don't automatically associate with Marvel.

After that, they are really scraping the bottom of the barrel. I would enjoy a Deathlok comic, if it was as gritty as the Astonishing Tales run of the mid-'70s. They could do a Marvel Team-Up movies, pairing Spider-man with a few other heroes in shorter adventures linked by an overall threat. They could do the same with Ben Grimm, maybe make it a Project Pegasus story, but so far no movie director has delivered a great Ben Grimm.

Great post, Barnes. I didn't see until I finished posting my own long-ass post.

I forgot about Moon Knight, but he could be good as long as they stay away from making him a Batman wannabe. They could focus on the werewolf hunting, the mental illness, and/or the connection to the Egyptian pantheon.

And great idea regarding Brad Bird directing the Fantastic Four. The only big mistake made with the MCU so far was not getting the rights back to the FF, because they are the explorers of the Marvel Universe and should have been a significant presence in the early MCU movie releases. And for mysterious reasons, no director so far has been able to put a respectable Dr. Doom on the big screen, and he is like an awesome meld of the best parts of Iron Man and Darth Vader, plus has his own country and a time machine.

If the next wave did include the Fantastic Four, they could roll out awesome versions of Doctor Doom and Namor, then roll Namor into a proper rollout of the real Defenders, and maybe do a Super-Villain Team-Up movie featuring Namor and Doom. Also, make Doom a major connecting menace to various next wave movies, like they did with Loki.

That is a really good point- once you implement those big, major storylines that are worth implementing...you start to get into some stuff that in the comics was more or less filler between the major arcs. And the MCU has kind of played fast and loose with certain storylines- exhausting most of Planet Hulk in Thor: Ragnarok for example. Planet Hulk could have been a standalone movie on its own, and it would be one of the best Hulk stories (the best, IMO).

I think the Fox stuff is going to create a new influx of content. They will start from 0 with X-Men, just like they did with Spider-Man. X-Men will be the next flagship property, and from there there can be a Storm feature, a new Wolverine line, a Magneto film, etc. They are not beholden to use the original Fox stuff, which now looks very dated and behind the curve outside of Logan.

There is also the possibility that within the next ten years (!) there will be enough of a bedrock for MCU screenwriters to start writing ORIGINAL storylines. That could be interesting. Or horrible.

I meant to comment on Englehart- he is one of the most underappreciated writers in all of comics. He was really pushing forward during a time when comics were still chiefly sold off of "Hey Kids, Comics!" spin racks at the grocery store. His Cap stuff is awesome, and it does prefigure the sophisticated and nuanced Brubaker take. Cap was a very politically challenging figure in the post-Vietnam world, and he resolved that by making him both a patriot and a rebel- which is still where Cap is the best. Probably because that embodies the idealized American spirit so succinctly in those two terms.

A Shang Chi movie...ha! Yeah. Probably not!

The New Mutants film looks...I don't know. I never thought of New Mutants as a horror property. Not really sure what the reasoning is there, but who knows? Maybe it'll be something.

Any solid rumors about Infinity War? Always figured that would be a good time to do a soft reboot of sorts. You know, have Thanos thin the ranks a bit. Hasn't Chris Evan's said he'd rather be directing? And I'm sure Disney is getting tired of cutting those checks to RDJ now that these movies stand on their own. It's not like they can't revive and recast them later, that shit happens all the time in comics.

Infinity War would be the perfect way to launch a reboot and give the existing MCU a fine send-off.

Oh I don't think they'd just nuke the whole thing, more a soft reboot. Like kill off some of the characters, maybe refocus the story on some of the newer ones like Spiderman and Black Panther.

Besides, we've been building to this for a decade, it'll be lame if everything is resolved neatly and everyone safe by the end of it.

Got my tickets for Avengers 3. Hard to get too excited because I'm expecting a cliffhanger but it does look like it'll be good.

Captain Marvel trailer has dropped;



I wish I could buy tickets right now.

That movie looks awesome, can't wait to see it.

Already whining online from MRAs about her being some sort of "Mary Sue" who is "too powerful." I'm like...yeah, Thor took a blast from an actual star and lived, so....shut the fuck up

I bought a few of her comics back in the '70s when she was Ms. Marvel. I kind of like that they picked a decent actress instead of an attractive blonde. She looks like she can take a punch from a supervillain.

I know nothing about Captain Marvel, but the movie looks great. I like Brie Larson and she looks badass. I thought Wonder Woman was great and the little girl in me is excited to see another female superhero on the screen.

On the one hand it makes sense to make Captain Marvel as the MCU’s first woman-leading film as the comics gave her a major redesign a few years ago and was popular enough to put her the Captain America role in Civil War II.

On the other she has as wonky and messy a background as any you’ll find in comics, the movie is even leaning into it with the memory loss and Jude Law as Mar-Vell supposedly.

Just look at this:

comicsalliance.com/comics-everybody-the-...y-of-captain-marvel/

I love that trailer. No idea why.