(SPOILERS) Infinity War and Beyond (Marvel Thread)

[Grath]

Sam Raimi in talks to direct Doctor Strange sequel

This would instantly make Doctor Strange the Marvel film I'm most interested in seeing, up from its current status of "Eh"

Do we get Bandicoot Cabbagepatch with an emo haircut dancing down the street?

[KingRoyal]

Don't even try and pretend that wouldn't be miles better than the first Doctor Strange.

[Thad]

Sam Raimi in talks to direct Doctor Strange sequel

This would instantly make Doctor Strange the Marvel film I'm most interested in seeing, up from its current status of "Eh"

Raimi appears to have accidentally confirmed it.

[beatbandito]

I just saw Far From Home and at the end Mr. Happy says "give me the spear" and Ned responds "it's a halberd" but it's actually a poleaxe.

So basically fuck this franchise, I'm done.

[Niku]

as the last tv-show-ostensibly-actually-tied-to-the-movies standing, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is partway through its final season and has basically gone full on "fuck it all" in a really fun way. season six felt like a particularly dire nadir for the show, but seven has bounced back in much the same way endgame decided to do its victory lap; time travel and "who cares if the rules make sense". every two episodes the cast heads to another decade as they follow time-hopping robots through various important points in the hydra/shield history. if you never liked the show or the cast, it won't change your mind much, but everyone seems to be having a much better time, deke is no longer The Most Obnoxious Character Ever, and while we didn't get Peggy Carter when they jumped into the fifties her partner from Agent Carter got to least rep the series.

supposedly next week they're heading into the eighties .. complete with Phil Coulson as Max Headroom in some capacity.

overall i'm going to miss the show when it's done; there are some reeeeeeally low lows, and some cast members just absolutely never clicked with me, but on average the highs were a lot of fun. i think this season, at least so far, is right up there with season four's ghost rider / virtual reality world storylines.

[Thad]

I wouldn't say I enjoyed the first episode of WandaVision, but I respected the craft, dedication, and sheer chutzpah in its deliberate banality. It's a note-perfect sendup of dumb, unfunny sitcoms of the '50s and early '60s. Particularly grating and simultaneously perfect is the laugh track which fires in exactly the wrong places -- lines that aren't just not funny, they're not even jokes.

Disney must have real faith in Kevin Feige, or in the Marvel brand, to lead off the Marvel Studios TV efforts with such a pure exercise in anticomedy.

Or perhaps that's why they decided to kick it off with two episodes, because the second episode has a lot more laughs, but they're cheap laughs (Vision is drunk).

At any rate, I'm impressed by how weird this show is, not just for Marvel but in general. It's a show that does things wrong, on purpose, because it's supposed to feel wrong. And I'm looking forward to seeing where it's going.

[Niku]

I really liked it, but I totally get anyone who would be completely turned off by it. My brain is broken nostalgia wise to kinda enjoying the shit that played on Nick at Nite when I was growing up. I think it's shot really well too; the moment where they break from the set-up during the first episode to switch away from the three camera cinematography works great. My biggest disappointment so far, and one they've got plenty of time yet to rectify, is that the big problem with Wanda and Vision in the movies is we have so little time to actually have them be characters that getting emotionally invested in their specific problems is kind of an ask; and it's one they've sidestepped by throwing things right into the deep end instead of using the long form opportunity to get to know them before all chaos breaks loose. D+ has these little "Legends" things that are supposed to get you up to speed on what's been up with Wanda and Vision and they .. literally just condense all of their scenes YouTube highlights style into 7 and 6 minutes apiece. If Marvel's going to continue releasing two to three movies a year, I really hope they're planning on letting the characters breathe and get some internality to them in the television shows that they pretty much can't when they're part of increasingly juggled ensembles. The characters spending all their time so far in heightened pastiche kinda precludes that.

Anyway, It's very much Superhero Pleasantville to start, and Pleasantville is cool. I think Falcon and Eyeshadow is gonna be a lot more of a fastball down the center for Marvel, so I'm gonna enjoy this while it lasts.

wild speculation/casting spoilers for WandaVision: kinda loving the rumor that evan peters is going to show up and play mephisto, but it would be even better if he showed up and played pietro. also ag-nes is 100% agatha harkness, so said rumor that mephisto is her unseen husband works for me so far.

I literally just read Tom King's Vision mini-series like a month or two ago in preparation for this; so far it seems like there's not a lot of overlap aside from "superheroes move into suburbs, are weird", but I definitely recommend it on its own merits.

[Thad]

I literally just read Tom King's Vision mini-series like a month or two ago in preparation for this; so far it seems like there's not a lot of overlap aside from "superheroes move into suburbs, are weird", but I definitely recommend it on its own merits.

Yeah, it's fantastic. I wasn't expecting a horror comic going in, but it's a great damn horror comic. King's really good at portraying depression, the existential dread of mundanity. His Mister Miracle series (with aritst Mitch Gerads) is another great book along the same lines. There's one issue in particular, where Scott and Barda are fighting the forces of Apokolips while simultaneously discussing how they're going to arrange furniture in their new apartment, that really stuck in my brain. (He's also working with Ava DuVernay on the upcoming New Gods movie, which...okay, I'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's good enough at this to understand that that shit would never work in a movie.)

There's a lot of King's work I haven't read (never picked up his higher-profile books like Grayson or Batman) and some that really didn't work for me (I picked up the first issue of Heroes in Crisis, didn't care for it, grabbed a copy of #2 that I found on the ground next to a Dumpster, read it, and conceded that the person who left it there had a point), but Vision and Mister Miracle were both something special. And like you say, WandaVision doesn't really share anything with the King/Walta Vision series except "Vision in the suburbs" and the pervasive, suffocating sense that Something Is Wrong, but those aren't bad jumping-off points, either.

[Thad]

Oh neat. I thought Zemo was wasted in Civil War; good to see him get another bite at the apple. Furry collar and all.

They've also got a pic of USAgent, which kinda gets my wheels turning. I don't think the MCU can do a proper original Thunderbolts adaptation now since they already did the "supervillain pretends to be a hero" story in Spider-Man: Far from Home, but I could see something like Dark Avengers, where the Thunderbolts actually replaced the Avengers. (I read a few issues, thought it had a great hook but Bendis is just not for me.) Neither USAgent nor Zemo was actually in that comic, but you could slot them into the same elevator pitch.

That's just me spitballing here. But if the show's including both the crappy Great Value store-brand Captain America and a supervillain whose most prominent storyline in the past 25 years has been the one where he created a superhero team that was actually made up of villains, it does get me thinking.

[Thad]

Saw a good writeup on the Inhumans TV series.

Crazy fun fact: Anson Mount decided, entirely on his own, to develop a totally original form of sign language for the show that would have no overlap whatsoever with standard American Sign Language (since logically, Black Bolt wouldn’t have any way of LEARNING ASL while stuck up on the moon). His system incorporated the underlying rules of ASL without duplicating any of the specific signs, and he studied orchestra conductors while developing it; in the end, he created a 50-page document detailing his language, and expressed interest in developing it over future seasons into a full-fledged constructed language like Klingon or Dothraki. That guy was too good for this show…

[Büge]

[Thad]

So if I know my MCU, I guess this means the next time we see Wanda she'll be played by Mark Ruffalo?

[zaratustra]

Loki is... not very good. it has Aesthetics and then Crocodile Loki and that's about it. None of the characters have any sort of chemistry and it must have taken some real genius at the Marvel-Disney complex to take a character whose entire reason is to rile other people and put him in situations where he can't really rile anyone.

It's embarassing how better Wandavision was. Legion was better too but that's not embarassing since no show can upstage Legion.

[mharr]

The value of Loki is directly proportional to how hard you wanna bang Tom Hiddleston, which I can't honestly claim as a zero.

[Niku]

Loki is... not very good.

I DISAGREE

The value of Loki is directly proportional to how hard you wanna bang Tom Hiddleston, which I can't honestly claim as a zero.

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THIS

[mharr]

Seriously though, this six episode arc was ultimately an origin story / reboot, which are never as good as getting into the weeds with established worlds and characters. As lore dumps go it was pretty good.

[Lottel]

I disagree and I would toss a bone to Hiddleston maybe 5% of the time. It was a good enough time travel show and had some fun with it along the way.
I've also read I think all of the comic appearances with the various Lokis in the last 30 years recently so that helps. A lot of Loki since 2000 has all been about the themes of trying to break away from who the universe expects you to be and not being able to, as well as fighting alternate versions of yourself, and rewriting time to control your own destiny. Themes that are pretty unsubtly present in the show.

I would say this was the most enjoyable MCU show. Wandavision really died for me after maybe the second or third episode with only a "I see what they did there" for entertainment after that.

FatWS was a hot, predictable mess. I think we all agree on that.

[mharr]

Aye, it makes sense that it'd work a lot better for someone already familiar with previous versions of these characters and settings, our household opinions are divided along similar lines. As a mostly Vertigo reader with only peripheral awareness of superhero canon, six episodes just wasn't enough time or space to introduce so much stuff and have it live and breathe. They were packing in the TVA itself, key agents, troops and the judge, Sylvie progressing from credible threat through Narcissus' Mirror love interest to Ally at breakneck speed, plot-central time travel mechanics that override the movie ones(?) and a new, apparently Thanos++ level threat at the eleventh hour. (But also just some guy you can stab with a knife.)

Most of this, I think inevitably given the constraints, felt more told than shown, then it was capped with a quantum shenanigans cliffhanger that apparently annuls most of the interpersonal character development that did manage to happen. I have a headache.

[Thad]

I liked Richard Grant.

And I laughed at the Polybius machine.

[Grath]

I don't generally swing Loki's way and I never read the comics (the comics I read during my misspent youth were like... Tintin, Asterix and Obelix, and Barefoot Gen...) but I generally enjoyed MCU Doctor Who.

Falcon and the Winter Soldier was still the worst one.