I don’t know if I ever actually bought an X-men book even in my comic buying days, but it always seemed to me like Marvel comics could be divided into two things: X-Men stuff and everything else. There’s just so damn many of them.

Sawing an upside down woman in half with a hacksaw doesn’t count as cruelty?

Even if I grant that writers may have been slowed in their ability to write because of psychological issues (an iffy argument at best among the writers I know), it still doesn’t mean Disney was forced to greenlight series and films before they were ready. They’d been doing that shit before the pandemic (*cough* Star…

I’ll applaud any time Congress gets off its collective ass to do anything that isn’t blatantly self-serving and/or detrimental to the country as a whole, so let’s just call this one a win.

I’m pretty sure those are synonymous these days.

As a relatively casual comics fan, how many of those major Marvel storylines from X-Men and FF would be new to the screen in general though? The previous X-Men movies have mined a lot of them that I can think of, and FF has already done Silver Surfer and Galactus, which is the biggest one I can think of. I’m sure…

Which will feel cheap and shitty, because without laying the groundwork through the previous movies for that... it will be cheap and shitty.

The pandemic didn’t affect the ability of writers to write good scripts or require Disney to greenlight them when they weren’t ready. The pandemic explains some of the lower box office, but the drop in quality is an unforced error.

I think there are definitely casual viewers who don’t care and will just go see stuff, but I think the problem is that pool is getting smaller for a variety of reasons, some within Marvel’s control and some not.

The number of people willing to go to a movie has decreased because of the myriad other options available…

Everyone’s got their own measure, but you would be one of, if not the literal, first person I’ve ever seen to the quality of the MCU output hasn’t dropped in general since Endgame.

I guess you could make a case that SW hasn’t dropped its quality that far under Disney’s control, but that’s really only because they’ve…

It’s almost like those are storytelling basics. ...Almost.

They hire indie directors because they’re cheap and don’t have much clout. Take someone who’s made a movie with a couple million dollar budget, pay them scale, but put them “in charge” of a $200M movie with huge movie star.

The idea that X-Men is going to save anything in the MCU is a pipe dream. We’ve already had 20+ years of X-Men movies, some some them even pretty good. They’ve already mined some of the biggest story arcs of the comics, at least that someone that isn’t a major comics fan might recognize. They might get a bump from the…

Exactly. They learned exactly the wrong lesson from Civil War, but got away with it in the last two Avengers movies: Civil War worked because it was about relationships, not cramming as many characters as you could into a movie about apocalyptic stakes.

The hacksaw scene is the precisely the way to sum up the series. It reminds me of the quote about Trump politics: “the cruelty is the point.” It’s far more torture porn than Saw or even Hostel ever was.

(Ok, maybe I do understand the appeal, I just don’t share in it)

*Modern AV Club clever

I know there are people that love this series, but I find it absolutely devoid of redeeming value. Both of them are plotless, joyless slogs, with the second one so slow I think it was an intentional effort to test the audience.

Nope. Just the engaging armchair accounting we all do.

But look at it this way— GotG 3's return was roughly on par with its predecessors, but once you take into account the significant inflation of the last few years, that’s a pretty significant drop.

Thanks for the clarification.

FWIW, I don’t get that impression of the general tone of MCU detractors. What I see is people who complain that the overall quality has dropped (which will get no argument from me), and that it’s mostly being made up for with quantity (motive aside, that’s simply a fact).

You seem to be confusing the experience you had with the one had by people that (and this is the crucial part here, so read it twice) are not you.