I don’t think I was aware at first either… I looked it up, I think. Kovich is great, though.
Excellent post, agree with it 100%. As a long time comics reader, I also enjoy how people now assume that Iron Man was a main character. He was C to D tier. The stuff that was good with Marvel was sold off for cash - X-Men, Spider-Man, even Hulk.
I think part of the reason Marvel stopped taking risks is Disney is highly risk averse. None of their offerings recently have challenged anything, in fact they’re even removing characters from upcoming releases that might cause a specific group of extremely loud American minority to gripe.
The first Iron Man was lightning in a bottle. Took a fairly publicly unknown character, updated him to current times, put an actor in who was pretty much blacklisted at the time but was ironically recovering from some of the same issues as the character, and put it out there. It opened against a Dark Knight (established and popular Nolan Batman) and still did 600 million, which was still the second top grossing movie of the year.
I think the riskiest Marvel has done recently was the Loki TV series. It pulled in so much fringe stuff and had a massive CGI budget but ended up having killer writing and acting. And instead of taking that as a queue, they did Secret Invasion which was somehow more money and far worse.
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Wandavision and Agatha All Along were both excellent, too, in my opinion. I don’t know why Agatha didn’t get more attention. That series was really good. And the cast? Wow. And I would say both Wandavision and Agatha were risky. Those are not your standard superhero fare.
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Wandavision was good until the last episode. It just lost the spark, which in my head is because they were writing Doctor Strange and had decided to use her so had to suddenly put in elements/leave others out.
Agatha was ok for me. Cast, yes, top tier, especially Hahn who gave every impression of loving the part and throwing everything into it. I figured out who Teen was pretty quickly and found him to a bit too whiney and distracting from Plaza and Hahn killing it.
One series I enjoyed far more than I expected was Hawkeye. It leveraged a lot of his recent comics and was goofy, which is what I was looking for at the time. The plot was transparent, especially if you’ve read the comics, the “villain” (don’t know how to do spoilers so I’ll leave it at that) felt forced as a backdoor pilot, and Hailee’s character felt almost extra, but the pacing was pretty good.
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Don’t forget the Fantastic Four. Movie rights for that only reverted back to Marvel in 2019 when Disney bought Fox. As bad as the 2005 and 2007 movies may have been (I didn’t see them) they still earned hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office.
I don’t know if the new MCU Fantastic Four will be any good or not but I wish it was an entirely stand-alone thing with no connections whatsoever to the rest of the MCU multiverse.
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They weren’t that bad. They weren’t good, either. The acting was fine. Doctor Doom was a little weird, but it wasn’t the actor’s fault (who just passed away, RIP), but superhero movies of that era were scared to really go all in n a character like Doctor Doom, because. . . well, it’s a weird looking character, objectively. So they tried to make him more real, somehow, and it really didn’t work. Other than that, the movie was fine. The Silver Surfer sequel had the same problem. They were unwilling to depict Galactus as he was in the comics. So they made him an amorphous space cloud. That, along with the badly CGI’d Silver Surfer, and it just didn’t pull it off.
Now, the 2015 reboot? Hot garbage. There is nothing redeemable about that movie, except maybe Michael B Jordan.
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OH!
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I wish they made more animated movies of comic book superheroes. Not all of them of course, but for the characters and stories that are a bit more out there its easier to buy into the world when its animated. The problem though is that in the US animated features are typically seen as being primarily for kids.
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I vaguely recall a Red Sonja movie being shopped around to be made some years ago. Never thought it’d get made
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Looks like they are going for 80s swords and sandals throwback!
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I appreciate that they made fun of the scalemail bikini in the trailer
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Indeed! Although, the monster towards the end looks Cg and I kind of wish they’d done stop motion instead…
Also…
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If i could wave a wand and be able to make a Red Sonja movie i would like to make it in a similar vein to the original Conan movie. What i mean by that is a slower paced action movie with a focused story, and do as much of it with practical effects, judging by the trailer it looks like there’s a lot going on with big set pieces.
But i do hope that the movie that did get made does well, i’m also curious if they’ll make any references to Conan since they inhabit the same world.
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Robert Sheehan! Almost didn’t recognise him, he’s come a long way since his Misfits days.
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He’s such an amazing actor, it’s cool to see him in this
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Yes, i really enjoyed him in The Umbrella Academy, but Klaus always felt like an extension of his Misfits character to me.
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I don’t know anything about that actress, but huge respect to anyone making a go of it in Hollywood with the name Matilda Lutz without changing that name. That is not a Hollywood name. Not that long ago, they probably would have made her use Anna Lucia or something.
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Maybe… but I think that these days, less people are anglicizing their names than used to be… I know that Martin Sheen has talked about regretting having to do that, and of course one of his sons kept his more Latino sounding name (Emilio - the non-nutty one)… Name diversity is much more prevalent now, I think. 20 or 30 years ago someone like Željko Ivanek would have changed his name, because that’s a very deeply ethnic name (Croatian, I believe) but I think less people will dismiss him out of hand due to his name these days. There is probably still some old guard racists who are like “you can’t sound too much like a Jew” but not nearly as much now.
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That’s definitely still around. Or at least it was as recently as shortly before Chloe Bennet was cast in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. She has said in several interviews that she just wasn’t getting a lot of auditions as Chloe Wang. Or, when she did, they were for stereotypically Asian parts. Bennet is actually her father’s first name.
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Yeah, it’s gonna depend on the casting director, often times… it sucks that there is STILL this kind of stupid racism at play, though.
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