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Pondering What the MCU Might Have Done Better

bluntblade

bluntblade

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Seeing as we'd got into this a little previously in another thread, I thought it might be worth putting one aside.

Personally, I subscribe to the view that from Phase 2 onwards, Marvel mostly ended up pushing a kind of amiable stasis. Age of Ultron is the most egregious of the choices to not really challenge the status quo, but we have a whole raft of events which feel like they should've had lasting consequence. In the moment they certainly feel big... but then Hydra is dusted up largely offscreen, no major consequences ever resulted from the Avengers' dissolution, and Wakanda opening up to the world has so far had zero effect as far as we can tell.

This even bites with Thanos. For all that people wax poetic about "everything" being planned out, we don't build to the Big Purple Bad so much as we're teased until one day he just shows up. The "Infinity War" seems to rage for about a week, amounting on Earth to a skirmish, one raid and a single pitched battle. And then it's done, leaving us to skip five years to the resolution.

So for me, the main factor which would improve matters on the story side is proper consequence. Not just in terms of killing characters (though yes, do that when the story demands it) but in terms of having events flow properly from those which preceded them.
 
Not doing Demon in a bottle justice. Kind of jarring when they make the drug addicts the baddies given how RDJ had substance abuse problems in the past.

Yes I know the extremis arc was mixed with bits of the arc where Stane used a woman from the past to break his will and he ends up homeless and bonding with someone who shared the same problems as he did.
 
bluntblade said:
Personally, I subscribe to the view that from Phase 2 onwards, Marvel mostly ended up pushing a kind of amiable stasis. Age of Ultron is the most egregious of the choices to not really challenge the status quo, but we have a whole raft of events which feel like they should've had lasting consequence. In the moment they certainly feel big... but then Hydra is dusted up largely offscreen, no major consequences ever resulted from the Avengers' dissolution, and Wakanda opening up to the world has so far had zero effect as far as we can tell.

This even bites with Thanos. For all that people wax poetic about "everything" being planned out, we don't build to the Big Purple Bad so much as we're teased until one day he just shows up. The "Infinity War" seems to rage for about a week, amounting on Earth to a skirmish, one raid and a single pitched battle. And then it's done, leaving us to skip five years to the resolution.
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The MCU being really really small scale is...certainly a thing. The Age of Ultron and the Infinity War last a few days. The powers of almighty demigods are, in fact, often comparable to muggle hand grenades in their displayed power. The Civil War is a minor scuffle at an airport. And so on.

This was pretty clearly done so that you could have muggles like Black Widow fight alongside the heavy hitters and still have it make sense from a visual standpoint (even if it will never make sense from a logical standpoint). Reinventing the MCU to have characters like Thor and the Hulk display an appropiate level of power would mean that the muggles could never fight with or alongside them, toe to toe. You'd have to have them do Solid Snake stuff on the sidelines and find ways for them to support the team in less fighty ways. "Sneak into the bad guys' fortress, push the big plot important button." That sort of thing.
 
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I have zero idea why Thanos was changed from an omnicidal monster seeking to impress Death, to some sort of cosmic eco-terrorist. Anyone know where that came from?
 
Darth Herobrine said:
I have zero idea why Thanos was changed from an omnicidal monster seeking to impress Death, to some sort of cosmic eco-terrorist. Anyone know where that came from?
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Patrick Willems and chums posited that it's because Marvel have hitched their cart to the horse of realism, and because they were worried a guy being in love with the personification of death would be too out-there.

One thing I really wish Marvel had done is break from the 2 and a half hours standard. Infinity War would have benefitted from more room to breathe a la LotR, while in my mind the idea Black Widow film is 90-110 minutes long and follows on the heels of Winter Soldier, playing much like The Raid, John Wick or Dredd but with Nat, Cap, Hawkeye and Falcon leading some remnant of SHIELD against Hydra.
 
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bluntblade said:
Patrick Willems and chums posited that it's because Marvel have hitched their cart to the horse of realism, and because they were worried a guy being in love with the personification of death would be too out-there.

One thing I really wish Marvel had done is break from the 2 and a half hours standard. Infinity War would have benefitted from more room to breathe a la LotR, while in my mind the idea Black Widow film is 90-110 minutes long and follows on the heels of Winter Soldier, playing much like The Raid, John Wick or Dredd but with Nat, Cap, Hawkeye and Falcon leading some remnant of SHIELD against Hydra.
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Well Hela could replace death quite well. The Decimation benefits her and seeing how he did her a favor by killing most of the Asgardians who tried to stop her. Had she survived Ragnarok she would be a good stand in for death as the Decimation gives her an army of lost souls to unleash on the battered population.
 
That could also work.

I honestly think that the Infinity Saga should have formed more than two films, possibly even its own Phase. Ragnarok could've been the coming of Thanos as he pulls Asgard apart to seize the Tesseract. Odin dies, while Thor and company fight their way free with the survivors, possibly Loki and Heimdall too. The theme of Asgard is Not a Place survives intact, and Thanos' terrifying credentials are cemented. Boom.
 
bluntblade said:
That could also work.

I honestly think that the Infinity Saga should have formed more than two films, possibly even its own Phase. Ragnarok could've been the coming of Thanos as he pulls Asgard apart to seize the Tesseract. Odin dies, while Thor and company fight their way free with the survivors, possibly Loki and Heimdall too. The theme of Asgard is Not a Place survives intact, and Thanos' terrifying credentials are cemented. Boom.
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Plus it also contrasts Hela and Thanos relation to Pepper and Tony. Hela is only in love with Thanos because of his genocidal tendencies and the moment 2014 Thanos returns and she comes to welcome Thanos back like a lovesick woman she gets a blade to the heart.

Also it brings the story full circle. An exiled Asgardian works with Thanos to help him recover the stones, the Avenger Saga ends with an exiled Asgardian working with the 2014 Thanos to get the stones.
 
Serpent Society? I should at this point confess that my actual familiarity with the Marvel comics extends no further than having read quite a lot of Ultimate Spiderman.
 
MCU Hydra needed to either go away after Age of Ultron or get some proper fucking teeth. In a world of Wakadians, Asgardians, Thanos, Captain Marvel and what not, they seemed like a sardine with delusions of grandeur in a sea of sharks.
 
Do the Black Widow movie MUCH earlier. And as a dark movie on her past and why she now wants to redeem herself.

A Loki movie. DUH.
 
I felt the Sokovia Accord plotline was deeply flawed.

First of all, bringing up Lagos and New York is when there is a perfectly serviceable "Ultron" shaped justification where an avenger was clearly at fault.

(Although, now that I think about it, Tony Stark doesn't even have powers, he's just smart and rich, beefing up regulations on dangerous tech is probably a better idea, which clearly didn't meaningfully happen considering the fleet of murder drones Ironman operated)

Gotta go for now, will do write up later
 
Sokhovia also strikes me as a missed opportunity for genuine ideological conflict between the heroes. We never really get Cap's side of the argument, or at least don't have it dramatised. I think that's also where the relative disinterest that the MCU has had in its ordinary people after Ultron also makes for a problem there - we've lost sense of how the superheroes relate to even the US government and military.
 
The main problem as far as I see it is the Avengers movies themselves. They tried so hard to repeat the cycle of the first phase with little indication that building up each Avengers movie with another round of standalone movies was more or less effective than the first time. Each Avengers movie itself just didn't have the impact of the first until Infinity War, and Infinity War's success was mostly driven by Infinity War itself, not the movies that lead up into it.

The MCU probably would have been way better for way longer if they started doing more self-contained director-driven movies like Black Panther and Guardians in the first place instead of pumping more and more money and time into making their universe more of an overly complicated, self-referential ball of yarn.
 
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They should have allowed Edgar Wright to direct the Ant-Man movie he wanted.
 
Oksbad said:
I felt the Sokovia Accord plotline was deeply flawed.

First of all, bringing up Lagos and New York is when there is a perfectly serviceable "Ultron" shaped justification where an avenger was clearly at fault.

(Although, now that I think about it, Tony Stark doesn't even have powers, he's just smart and rich, beefing up regulations on dangerous tech is probably a better idea, which clearly didn't meaningfully happen considering the fleet of murder drones Ironman operated)

Gotta go for now, will do write up later
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*waggles hand*
Eh? It's... debatable how much actual fault can be assigned for Ultron managing to exist, and bringing down Tony with regulations is again debatable in it's effectiveness. His company has so many former contacts with the military-industrial complex (having once comprised much of it) and the degree of technological superiority they have that it's downright terrifying. The point to slap regulations on them was back when Howard was still around. At this point it's such a fucking behemoth that if a fight was picked between Tony and the US government I really wouldn't know who to put money on. Honestly you could easily spin the entire situation into a cyberpunk of your choice complete with corporate extraterritoriality. Imagine Jeff Bezos, but a supergenius polymath. Just with wealth alone Tony could distort the US around him like a latex glove.
 
The Accords should definitely have come up as a problem in Infinity War (another thing which needed more time).

Actually, leaving aside civilians - where are the changes that the world's governments and militaries would have undergone after multiple alien invasions/incursions, and a super robot army? We haven't seen an MCU world leader in seven years or more.
 
Aside from the cookie-cutter plotting that's become endemic to the franchise, a few thoughts:

- Actually give Tony Stark a redemption arc. You can argue his death in Infinity War finally brought this to fruition, but I was thinking more about his own personal movies. I never bought that Tony was really a different person following his experiences in Afghanistan. You get reminded periodically that "oh, he stopped selling weapons" or "he's building clean energy now" but it's usually very tell-not-show in nature. The libertarian screenwriter on Iron Man 2 really helped screw the pooch on this one, but I think part of it was just Marvel Studios didn't want to let the character change too much and screw with a winning formula.

- Actually threatening villains. This isn't just a matter of villains being scary or committing especially sinister acts. It's more the overall problem that many of them don't really feel like that much of a threat to the hero. Red Skull, Malekith, Whiplash (except for the racetrack scene), Ultron, Killian, Ronan, Yellowjacket, all of them and more have this problem. Usually it came down to the villains just not getting that much screentime to explor theirn plans and motivation, but some of it is that many of them seem to be on the backfoot for most of the movie and are defeated relatively easily.

- Spider-Man's relationship with Iron Man. There's a lot to like in the MCU Spider-Man movies, but Spidey has always been Marvel's best everyman character. He's a superhero, but he also can't make rent and his aunt is always sick and his personal life is in shambles. One can cfredit the MCU for going in a different direction, but that direction has been to make the everyman into foster son of a megabillionaire in some movies, and sucking him into the world of globetrotting super spies in another movie. Feels like something is breaking down here.

- Not enough focus on the lives of civilians. One of my favorite aspects of the standard "superhero universe" that you see in Marvel, DC, Astro City, and a bunch of others is that everything is true simultaneously and everybody knows it. Aliens, robots, wizards, mutants, it's all a matter of public record and at a certain point everybody just gets jaded to it. You see this happening to the superheros ("Uh, he's from space, he came here to steal a necklace from a wizard") but not so much everybody else. There hints of it, but in general you don't get many those moments from the comics where Captain Marvel zips by chasing an alien and everybody looks up, then goes back to what they were doing or complain about the chase blocking traffic.

- Doubling down on the really weird stuff. The MCU only goes so far. It includes a lot of weird stuff, like a sentient raccoon being best friends with an alien tree, or Steve Ditko's zany Dr. Strange dimensions, or a planet that is also alive and has a giant face on it, but they always pulls up just a little short. The wizards do mostly martial arts and don't invoke weird extradimensional god-beings. Thanos is obsessed with Death, but isn't literally in love with its anthropomorphic personification. Surtur's a 500 foot tall fire demon, but he's not shown forging his sword with a star as his anvil. There are limits to how weird the MCU is willing to go, some of them seemingly arbitrary, and I think sometimes to its detriment. The risks they take are always very calculated.

- Not doing the evil Captain America movie. Civil War was a fan favorite demand and eventually the MCU executives decided to give the people what they want, but the writers of First Avenger and Winter Soldier said their original idea for a third Captain America movie was for him to fight the evil Captain America of the 1950s, who was created using a flawed serum and went insane with paranoia about Communists. I never liked the Civil War comic and the movie, while it has some nice moments, is very cleary an Avengers movie that happens to focus on Captain America, as opposed to being a Captain America movie, with a lot of square pegs being shoved into round holes to make the whole thing work.

- The Doctor Strange movie. Strange is my favorite Marvel character as an adult, and I just did not care for his stand-alone movie. It bummed me out.
 
I wonder if Thanos actually came in too soon, or just too abruptly. Ultron should've thinned the ranks and left room for more cosmic characters, I reckon.

As for Tony, my big issue is that he needed a redemption arc for his awful hubristic act of creating Ultron. And from what we've seen since, the films don't seem to think the hubris was ever a problem.
 
bluntblade said:
I wonder if Thanos actually came in too soon, or just too abruptly. Ultron should've thinned the ranks and left room for more cosmic characters, I reckon.

As for Tony, my big issue is that he needed a redemption arc for his awful hubristic act of creating Ultron. And from what we've seen since, the films don't seem to think the hubris was ever a problem.
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I feel like the Cosmic Abstracts needed to be introduced more gradually in order for them to work when Thanos was introduced. GotG2 was probably the perfect place to put them, but either Gunn didn't want to shoehorn that stuff in or Marvel Studios chose to leave it on the table. You also could have maybe fit it into Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange, or even Thor: Ragnarok. The fact that they studiously avoided doing in all those other films so makes me lean towards the studio being squeamish about this stuff.

Seems like they're finally going for it though, with the Celestials taking center stage in The Eternals.
 
Idea for the Spiderman films post-Civil War: that's where the Sokovia Accords bite and Peter finds himself caught wrestling with how Tony's sponsorship comes at the expense of being able to be the friendly neighbourhood hero.

I find it weird that no supervillains took advantage of the paralysis which came about with the Accords.
 
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