Ask HN: Has Marvel got out of hand?

no franchise longs survives resort to time travel.

The Temporal Consistency Agency find it convenient that the concept be regarded risible.

I was talking about that w/ my son, how it's just been years (Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014?) since we cared about a Marvel movie.

Have the cultural undercurrents that made the franchise popular in the first place abated at all?

It's tough to top their arc with Infinity Way/Endgame. They definitely need to regain focus on where they want to go since they are introducing so many new characters.

Given that new releases still top the box office, audiences haven't hit the peak yet.

While I'm not into the MCU in any way, I do see that 2 of the top 10 domestic box office draws were released in the last year. The latest Thor seems to be on track to be the 10th best if opening weekend is a predictor.

So as long as the MCU can bring in 1.3 billion a shot (like the latest Spiderman) they would appear to have little incentive change what appears to be working.

4Tbps over a single fibre [1] does seems a bit over the top.

Oh, one "L", carry on.

[1]: https://www.marvell.com/products/optical-modules.html

> It’s as if they just copy and paste

I don't see it. Love and Thunder was nothing like Moon Knight, which was nothing like Ms. Marvel, which was nothing like Doctor Strange. Can you point out what you think was generic, or how Thor looks aesthetically the same as Doctor Strange?

I do think it's strange that phase 4 has more hours of content than phases 1-3 combined.

It's just Disney milking the Marvel cow. We all knew this is how it'd go with the acquisition, extremely predictable.

That's what was so refreshing about Top Gun Maverick. It was mostly practical effects instead of CGI overload.

Yes, but not for any of the reasons that you have listed. The current problem with Marvel is that the overall universe is unfocused, even as the individual movies are on average still decent. I don't know what they are building to as a part of Phase 4 which is a huge departure from Phases 2 and 3.

I mean, people keep watching those new films and they make bank. They'll move on to a different franchise when it stops becoming profitable.

This has been true almost the whole time, with only occasional exceptions. They rarely take any chances on the themes (when they bother to have any of note at all), pull back before making any kind of point or taking any kind of stance on the rare occasions that they do, have mostly-terrible original music (and often make poor use of their soundtrack in general) which is why they've switched to just mining pop hits for soundtracks (a nice work-around for that problem, but it gets old after a while), and in terms of cinematography are oatmeal for the most part—bland and flavorless. There are endless YouTube videos analyzing essentially all of these failures.

At this point they're on such a conveyor belt that they do a bunch of the CG before shooting starts or they have a final script. But, again, that's not new, they've been operating that way for a while.

[EDIT] I write this as someone who's seen just about everything except a couple of the most recent films. To be clear, the overall project is pretty impressive, but part of why it's impressive is that they've managed to consistently be almost bad enough to be actually-bad, while still holding it together enough that they're not quite bad-bad, just... economical, profitable, and low-risk. And they do consistently manage to make entire films that hold together OK in terms of plotting, pacing, et c., which one might think wouldn't be impressive except... well, I'll refrain from mentioning my #1-with-a-bullet example of a high-budget recent-ish film (from Disney, even!) that completely fails at those basics to such a degree that it deserves to be studied in film class for its failures, for fear of veering into an offtopic flame war, but let's just say that's not a given so it's a bit impressive they've had essentially no complete face-plants over so many films.

The 4th wall's about to break. There's been cracks in it for a while now. So it's a moot point.

(You probably noticed the 5D/Web5 discussions starting to tip finally ...)

What Marvel is releasing won't be what you're focused on as the adventure of life will be far more fantastic than anything we could ever put into a book.

I have lost track of them now. It is giving me "Fast and Furious" vibes which is not a good benchmark to compete with. Too many, too often. They are milking it like crazy.

Everyone is just ripping off DBZ. Fight, Lose, Train, Fight, Win!

And add a healthy dose of screaming in between each step.

If you compare them to what DC is doing, I think they are doing fine. I would be interested to see a chart comparing DC vs Marvel rotten tomato scores. For that matter, Marvel rotten tomato scores over time.

Their release schedule isn't that different than previous years.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that some people here are simply feeling the vibe less right now -- it's likely because of the woman-centered vibe, and HN leans dudeward.

As a woman, I think this is great! :D But it also means that if that's not your thing (and it can be, blamelessly, not your thing!) the content is going to appear more "generic" (in the words of OP,) more self-similar, as we humans tend to notice variations and differences in things that appeal to us. Wines, clothes, cars, guns, teas, pens, whatever. If it fascinates you, it's gonna have depth.

But if it doesn't? You're gonna see an undifferentiated wash.

This is the mechanism behind why I can get hyper-technical in my kitchen -- I like food -- but cars, which one of my old boyfriends was obssessed with, all seem more or less interchangeable. Same-y. Cut-and-paste.

Because I wasn't into cars, I couldn't really tell them apart.

But since I'm into food, I see tiny details! I can ~go on~ about the specific differences in, say, grades of USA steak, they are so different lol

No adult should be watching super hero shows. Also this discussion belongs on reddit.

I kind of lost track after Captain America with a occasional step in like Dr. Strange and I've never been able to keep up. So many movies, so many series, so many sequels, so much content... to the point I can't distinguish it anymore.

How can you watch Ms Marvel and think this is copy paste or looks generic? The characters, culture, and art style are pretty unique and make the show quite enjoyable, and I am generally uninterested in the Marvel universe.

Loki was also very different and had a unique look.

Each one of these little series has been pretty enjoyable and different, and I found myself pleasantly surprised. The movies however are not my cup of tea and do seem repetitive and generic with some notable exceptions like Thor Ragnarok.

IMHO Marvel became a victim of it's own (incredibly successful) formula. Avengers EndGame was truly an incredible movie to top off a decade of great story-telling across multiple solo and team movies where both the heroes and the antagonists were steadily built up until the absolute crescendo that was EndGame.

Of course the storyline was riddled with plotholes and was logically a bit messy and the movies ranged from great to not-so-great, but it delivered that incredible build-up-and-release that everyone was waiting for (I literally screamt, laughed, clapped and cried in that one movie alongside a packed theater)

But since that high, since that chapter closed beautifully, the new "phase" of Marvel needs a lot of the same world building from zero, but now, everything feels much more formulaic. Add to it, directors getting more freedom to be stylistically seperate (eg. the new Thor is more comedy, the new Strange had elements of horror) means that the fanbase has no coherent thread to hold onto.

Finally, just a reminder that most of us are now a decade older (and hopefully wiser ;)) and don't really want to follow movies + TV series which are now critical to even understand canon (eg. I had never watched any of the earlier MCU TV series, but never missed them, but I know if someone skipped Wandaverse, then the new Strange movie will be missing a lot of context)

Isn't everything produced for mass appeal algorithmic? They even have a tropes wiki. And i'd take that any day over the arthouse originals the Elevated folks spawn.

At the end it's economics that dictate what goes out hand or not.

I cant remember the last Marvel film I watched, it may have been Endgame. I find them to be rather grey, passionless affairs, lacking in any depth or decent character development.

I watched Top Gun Maverick last week and it was so much better as an action/adventure film than the multitude of Superhero films released over the last 15 years. The ariel dogfights were a hundred times more exhilirating than anything in a Marvel film.

It’s become formulaic, and Marvel seems very self-aware of this… which is why they seem to be doing their damn best to serve something different each time. It seems almost desperate? But the underlying tones remain the same.

I’m getting bored, and this is coming from a former avid comic book fan (as a kid) who went f’ing ape shit went it became “real” via movies. First time I saw Iron Man I completely geeked out.

And that’s the problem. 15 years later, I’m bored. Other movies outside of the marvel universe continue to excite me. This very much feels like a stale relationship… it’s me, not Marvel? But then I saw this post and realized others may feel the same way.

I couldn’t even begin to suggest what they should try next.