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Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

stratigo said:
I think that Disney flogging the shit out of their VFX contractors is actually leading to worse and sloppier CGI.
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Oh, that's well documented. But it's also the philosophy with which they approach it, which itself often contributes to that crap treatment (in particular the complaints of "pixel-fucking").

Also I think the homogenous nature of action designed without the input of directors and cinematographers is adding to the sense of homogeneity in the MCU. There's lots of "this is really a gritty spy movie/space opera/psychological thriller" hype, but if you look at the filmmaking style, that gritty spy movie looks pretty much the same as that space opera.

And with the exception of a little Raimi-cam and Gorr-induced colour drain, that goes for the vast majority of the action here. Which is a particular problem when you're shooting sagas about iconic, larger-than-life characters.
 
Vympel said:
IMO MCU movies have been graded on a curve for a very long time and that seems to have started to wear off with Eternals. We're only going to see more and more of this going forward unless they shake something up. And not just critical reception wise, but box office too (see above re: Ant-Man's recent collapse, its not gonna make a lot, comparatively speaking).

Watching a new Marvel movie after watching something like Puss in Boots 2, Maverick or Avatar 2 feels like moving back in with your parents as an adult.
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I think moviegoing audiences are more..."resilient" is not the word I'm looking for, but it's close. They are far more "tolerant", I guess, than critics/sections of the Internet believes? One only needs to look at Michael Bay's Transformers, which have never been any good outside maybe the novelty of the first one, and yet, despite constant critical panning every installment, people kept watching them and have them rake in billions until The Last Knight was so bad even the average Joe thought it was shit. The Fast and Furious franchise is also not high cinema and have similar/forgettable plots, but people still go watch them and they still make billions. Even DC, which has had way more failures under its belt, has people willing to give it a chance to the point I have seen lots of excitement for Flash of all things despite Ezra Miller's everything (well, Shazam 2 and Aquaman 2 looks to be in trouble tho lol).

I can't predict the future, but I do think it's still premature to say this is what will happen with future movies based on Quantumania. The Ant-Man movies, while charming, have never been big money makers people were excited to see. And post-Eternals movies include No Way Home, Multiverse of Madness, and Wakanda Forever, which all did very well (despite Multiverse having tons of problems plotwise). One might say that's because Spider-Man and Black Panther are already popular on their own regardless of their MCU affiliation, but in that case, if the worst case scenario is people not seeing MCU movies outside the sub-franchises they like (Spidey, Black Panther, GotG, Avengers), it's not that dire.

More creative risks is a good thing, but the public is fickle on what that means and whether they will go for it. Sometimes you get GotG, Ragnarök, Wandavision, or Werewolf by Night, and people like that a lot. Other times you get Eternals and Love&Thunder and people are just not on board, especially the first where the director pretty much had as much liberty to do what she wanted. If the reception gives mixed messages, I feel like Disney is going to get the message to just continue playing it safe like it does with most of Star Wars (I know it has a bit of a different problem but bear with me), and then we end up in a situation where once in a while there is a Mandalorian or an Andor, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule.

EDIT: a lot of the discussion about the MCU these days just feel like this skit to me

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzlb3PzdNJk
 
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all fictions said:
Other times you get Eternals and Love&Thunder and people are just not on board, especially the first where the director pretty much had as much liberty to do what she wanted.
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Eternals is notable for having done very well on streaming, despite it's poor theatrical showing.

Edit: which may just be reflective of some titles people don't want to spend 15 dollars to see, or sit through for three hours without being able to pause, without some kind of really compelling hook, but they still want to see it at some point.
 
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stratigo said:
I think that Disney flogging the shit out of their VFX contractors is actually leading to worse and sloppier CGI.
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Vulture put out an article about this the other day.

www.vulture.com

‘Honestly, I Equate It to Human Greed’

Three VFX workers break down why Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania looks the way it does.
www.vulture.com www.vulture.com

It turns out critics aren't the only ones who feel that the computer-generated imagery on Quantumania could have used a bit more fine-tuning. Some of the very VFX technicians and artists who created those sequences — who spoke with Vulture on condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation — agree that the film's CGI-quality-control measures were subpar. Two of the three people we interviewed admitted that "shortcuts" were taken and said critical resources were diverted away to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever — the follow-up to 2018's $1.34 billion–grossing Black Panther — which was in postproduction around the same time as Quantumania. Several of the same effects houses worked on both films, creating competition for the most highly skilled VFX workers.

Like previous criticism leveled at Marvel by effects techs tired of being "pixel-fucked" and pursuing unionization, these workers say the project was severely understaffed while facing an unrealistically short deadline to hit Ant-Man's long-established Presidents' Day bow. The upshot: a grueling slog during which filmmakers and studio executives "nitpicked" and revised vast swaths of Quantumania without budgeting enough time to implement the changes, forcing VFX workers to toil as many as 80 hours per week for months. "This was like a second wave of what happened with James Cameron on Titanic, where the compositors were basically taking naps under their desks, because there wasn't enough time between shifts to go back home, then come back," one of the techs said. "Now, the entirety of the industry that has been touched by Marvel is permanently seared, and that's what's causing the most burnout."
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Basically extended grueling video game crunch, but for movies.
 
Tbh the MCU has a ton of well-liked characters to lean on (I'd argue that was probably the key commercial weakness of Eternals rather than Chloe Zhao's minor stylistic deviations) so it's unlikely we're going to see any rapid falling-off.

I suppose the question is how long they can sustain interest with this level of homogeneity. Admittedly that's spread to much of SW's live-action output in the last few years and not many people seem troubled by that. I recall outrage at Eternals and MoM looking a little different, which seemed wild to me when those flourishes were so minor.

Though the fact that they've shifted so far towards the cosmic with recent films might exacerbate things on the fatigue front. It really highlights how stylistically nondescript the films tend to be.
 
Guess the appeal of the MCU finally is gone at last. Its sad, but Phase 4's underperformance was heralding the end of an era
 
gyrobot said:
Guess the appeal of the MCU finally is gone at last. Its sad, but Phase 4's underperformance was heralding the end of an era
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all fictions said:
Quite jumping the guns there, aren't we?
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Marvel didn't spend this much on the opening of Phase 5 to make less than $500M. This is a big ass problem and the kind of stuff that produces panicked corrections.

In terms of their known future slate, I think only Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a safe bet.

The Marvels ... ehhhh (hot tip: if they'd like it to make more money maybe call it Captain Marvel 2. At this point no one outside certified-MCU-brains knows what 'the Marvels' even means).

Thunderbolts? Probable bomb, who are any of these people except for Bucky

Captain America 4 might do alright.

Blade - who knows, its in development hell.
 
I mean, yeah. Pre-Endgame Marvel put out maybe three movies a year, and the connective tissue between them was pretty light and open ended (usually just enough to tease the next film).

Now they're pumping out like 30+ hours of material spread across film and TV, and you basically have to watch all of it to understand what the hell is even going on. Like, if you skipped WandaVision, Multiverse of Madness is basically nonsense. Loki is basically required reading in order to understand Kang's whole deal, etc.

No one likes doing homework, especially when it's more and more esoteric nerdy inside baseball shit.
 
The best thing Marvel could do is just to not release anything in a year. Just a year, not that long in the grand scheme of history. Let the industry breathe a little, and put Marvel fans on a diet.

Of course, this would be the smart move, so they won't do it.
 
Hykal94 said:
The best thing Marvel could do is just to not release anything in a year. Just a year, not that long in the grand scheme of history. Let the industry breathe a little, and put Marvel fans on a diet.

Of course, this would be the smart move, so they won't do it.
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I mean, that's literally what happened in 2020, and clearly that did not solve anything.
gyrobot said:
but Phase 4's underperformance was heralding the end of an era
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If you look at the reception, leaving aside TV shows, Phase 4 made more than Phase 2 moneywise and the movies that did badly critically were Eternals and Thor 4 (and barely at that). "Underperforming" is overselling it.
Vympel said:
Marvel didn't spend this much on the opening of Phase 5 to make less than $500M. This is a big ass problem and the kind of stuff that produces panicked corrections.
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I really doubt it.

Because it is, at the end of the day, one movie. It would be one thing if it were successive failures back to back, like what happened with BvS/Suicide Squad 1/Justice League, but so far it's just the one that didn't bring in as much as it could have. And Kang was one of the things that were praised in the movie, and was also part of the beloved Loki show, he is popular enough that they won't discard him. Unless there are more major setbacks, a complete rehaul of the planned slate seems unlikely IMO and more costly than keeping it going and seeing what happens.

That's why the doom prediction seems way too premature when the sample size so far consists of one example.

(EDIT: Of course, executives are pod people so their reactions may have completely no relation to how the average person reacts but trying to predict what they would do is fruitless.)
 
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I mean I think the problem was not any other underlying issues but just that the movie kinda sucked? Johnathan Majors was amazing but he couldn't save that script.

Like I think bad word of mouth hit this movie harder than any mcu fatigue could.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
I mean, yeah. Pre-Endgame Marvel put out maybe three movies a year, and the connective tissue between them was pretty light and open ended (usually just enough to tease the next film).

Now they're pumping out like 30+ hours of material spread across film and TV, and you basically have to watch all of it to understand what the hell is even going on. Like, if you skipped WandaVision, Multiverse of Madness is basically nonsense. Loki is basically required reading in order to understand Kang's whole deal, etc.

No one likes doing homework, especially when it's more and more esoteric nerdy inside baseball shit.
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I haven't seen Eternals so I genuinely thought this shit was a joke and not something from a Marvel movie, but that their post credit scenes have gone from showing Thor's hammer in a crater to whatever this is supposed to be is a canary in the coal-mine moment




all fictions said:
(EDIT: Of course, executives are pod people so their reactions may have completely no relation to how the average person reacts but trying to predict what they would do is fruitless.)
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Yeah true this is why I termed it as 'panicked correction' - a rational person would look at what worked (Jonathan Majors, clearly) and what didn't and maybe do a measured re-evaluation but studio execs are not human
 
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150 million dollars in profit isn't a bomb. It's not a runaway hit, but it's basically a solid blockbuster movie
 
Tbh I don't think we're in the "suddenly" phase of the collapse here. If we are in one (and let's not forget only a year ago, No Way Home was still high in the Top 10)
 
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Vympel said:
I haven't seen Eternals so I genuinely thought this shit was a joke and not something from a Marvel movie, but that their post credit scenes have gone from showing Thor's hammer in a crater to whatever this is supposed to be is a canary in the coal-mine moment
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Pip the Troll. He's not the most obscure character even discounting characters who only appeared in the comics once or twice, but he's definitely on the obscure end for recurring characters who have played roles in major crossovers.
 
Vympel said:
I haven't seen Eternals so I genuinely thought this shit was a joke and not something from a Marvel movie, but that their post credit scenes have gone from showing Thor's hammer in a crater to whatever this is supposed to be is a canary in the coal-mine moment
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To be fair, to be fair, I think people who saw that scene were more distracted by suddenly Harry Styles.

But that was before Don't Worry Darling exposed us to Actor Harry Styles, which probably dimmed his star power a bit lol.
 
It didn't help that we only knew Actor Harry Styles as a supporting player in Dunkirk. Maybe didn't help that it was very "I am a Character! A great big Character!" when your brain is also going "err, why is Harry Styles here?"

Also I'd been bored and disappointed all the way through and our food had been so late we had had to get our money back and run to the cinema, so I was very hungry.
 
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