Marvel Cinematic Universe

I don't really get why Disney is complaining now. They were in the netflix 'spend massive amounts to expand quickly' phase and it worked pretty well for them. They went from zero to she loads of subscribers pretty fast. The intention can't have been to recoup the costs on the shows/movies they were commissioning, just to build a massive subscriber base.

That said, the budgets were kind of nuts and pretty unsustainable. Switching to more regular TV-sized budgets is probably a good plan. And having 2-3 shows a year, with more than 6 episodes per show.

So basically back to the Arrowverse / Agents of Shield / The Gifted / Agent Carter / etc... regular TV model.

Don't you dare besmirch the Arrowverse, those shows knew how to get wild. I'd watch any of them over most of the D+ Marvel content.

I wasn't besmirching, honest!

Though actually the Arrowverse did kinda end up suffering from the same thing as the MCU is now... too much stuff and too hard to keep up with it all.

But they're all examples of how to do reasonably fun superhero tv shows without spending $100M an episode, and keep them going for years.

A lot of the budgets do sound like a 'You don't think they actually spent ten thousand dollars on a hammer and thirty thousand for a toilet seat?' accounting scams.

But, wrt the arrowverse, I think the MCUs problem is that it drowned itself under the weight of expectation. The deal was that the arrowverse was cheap, inconsequential bullshit that you would get every week for six months and people were fine with that. Everything in the MCU is an event and you expect 'Prestige TV' from all of the shows.

Agents of Shield had it right and its kind of wild they deliberately phased that out for basically being purposely B-Tier.

I’d have preferred the tv stuff to bypass a lot of the superhero side of things. Why not a series about the creation of Hydra or whatever Samuel L Jackson used to be up to. A series about normal people while the heroes are breaking things.

I dunno but more superheroes or using existing ones for tv seems a bad choice.

I’d lost track of whether the fallout at the end of Secret Invasion was meant to be before or after Marvels but I guess those Skrulls were a separate colony?

I've not seen Secret Invasion, so can't comment on that, but I would say the TV shows have mostly been their own thing and have felt mostly TV-sized, despite the film sized budgets.

Wandavision was a quirky little story and tonally unique (at least, it was before the stuff outside Wanda's created world encroached more and more into it), as well as being a rarity in modern TV with it actually being fairly episodic; Loki, similarly, is Loki off having a timey-wimey adventure that would have felt weird with Captain America turning up for; Ms Marvel is a highschool teen drama with some big stakes, but mostly presented in a low-key way, where the final confrontation takes place around the school; She-Hulk, as someone has already said, was a lawyering sitcom, again, mostly with suitably sized stakes for that sort of show; Hawkeye was a fun Christmas romp around New York, without many world shattering events taking place.

Oh, and there was The Falcon and The Winter Soldier... Some stuff happened and then a boat was cleaned. I can't really remember anything about it.

The budgets for all of those were obscene, but I would say the thing that makes them so obscene is the fact that they don't really show on the screen (with the exception of Loki). The stories aren't really that big in scale and the CGI was all pretty mediocre.

It does say something that after 32 movies the plot of the latest is literally Spaceballs

Wonder when they’re making the films with Harry Styles or Charlize Theron. Or when something will happen with Vision and White Vision. Or the one with Kit Harrington, or what’s going on with America Chavez, or Hercules who was sent off to kill Thor, Hulk’s son, the legendary Star Lord returning and so on.

It’s a complete mess and none of the end credits things have gone anywhere and there’s no sign most of them will.

I dunno, I think it's definitely true that their end credit teases have been all over the place and somewhat disappointing, I think (unless Bob Iger has forced them to literally rethink all of their plans) we'll see most of them again.

Hercules and Whoever Charlie Theron Is Playing will be in the sequels to their films, which seem a safe bet; America Chavez (etc) will probably be in Young Avengers, which likewise looks fairly nailed-on despite The Marvels flopping; White Vision I think is going to be in the next Avengers, etc.

The big question marks are really anything that happened in Eternals. I guess that might include Blade, although I thought that was due to start shooting around about now?

(Of the 2025-scheduled films, the one that I can't possibly see being released within 18 months is Fantastic Four, which as far as we know still hasn't been cast)

In the original run the end credits teased where the story was heading for each Avengers film entry. The films were largely self contained stories, a little fan service for comic book readers, and little bits that made more sense in hindsight.

Now the films seem more interested in what is to come, and the post credit scenes are inconsequential. GotG3 worked because it was just a Guardians film.

I was expecting Disney to drop the ball with this one, but the trailer is reassuring. Roll on July.

That's a cracking trailer. Looking forward to a Marvel movie for the first time in a long time.