Let’s not forget the popular ascendancy of the Avengers characters was also coupled with Marvel doing everything possible to bury the long dominant X-books in order to undermine Fox’s rival film franchise.
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Keep imagining Universal executives talking about how people in theaters are gonna go apeshit when the Dark Universe logo comes up
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I remember when Iron Man first came out a bunch of people at my college were excited enough to all go for a midnight showing. And when we left the theater there was a huge line of people outside the theater entrance, which was inside a mall, waiting for the 2am and 4 am showings. So I remember people being amped for it even back then, somehow.
Since we were the privileged few to get the midnight showing we yelled spoilers at the line like “Tony Stark is Iron Man!”
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how warped is a perspective that can produce this statement without any irony
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Yeah, there’s some revisionism in acting like superhero movies weren’t a relatively safe bet by 2008. Singer’s X-Men series was doing great. The third Raimi Spider-man had been out for a year. Batman Begins was huge in 2005 and the Dark Knight was one of the most hyped releases ever. To my memory, the question in 2008 wasn’t “are superhero movies really a viable risk?” (as they had seemed after both the Superman and Batman series wound down into disappointing nonsense and so much as “will the insanely successful superhero movie boom be able to last much longer? it’s half a decade old already!”
Admittedly, Iron Man had less instant name cachet than Spider-man or Batman or Wolverine or even Hulk in 2008. But Downey’s star was already on the rise and the marketing for the movie as the can’t-miss-hit-of-early-summer was huge.
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I forgot that Iron Man was directed by the guy who directed Daredevil lol
I keep looking for the joke in this and the fact I can’t find it is breaking me a little
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The idea that the devotion of fans to a franchise gives them some special access to it is commonplace, but what does all that Easter egg-hunting, symbolism-decoding, and blind speculation actually translate to? Fandom is a closed system, one in which meaning is derived from a belief that deep, repeated readings of a text will reveal some truth about it, even as that truth remains of interest only to fellow-travelers who bring similar discipline to their pop culture studies. For a critic to view this sort of relationship to a television show as anything other than delusional is perplexing, and only bolsters the sense among fans of the righteousness of their obsession.
In truth, there is nothing particularly special about being a fan of Game of Thrones , or Disney movies, or The Real World . As the success of Grantland demonstrated, fans are fans. Longtime Mets partisans are as apt to moan about Syndergaard’s latest trip to the disabled list as they are to rattle off the team’s 1986 lineup with pride; Bachelor fans can remember in miraculous detail during which episode of Season 17 Ashley H. exited and why. Such esoteric knowledge is the currency of fandom, and all fandoms have their own version of it. At the end of the day, though, there’s no real difference between showing up to a movie screening in Princess Leia buns or an Iron Man suit. You’re still just rooting for laundry.
The reluctance of critics to skeptically examine fandom’s dominance in today’s pop culture has allowed for the construction of a grand apparatus of fan service journalism, one that leaves its practitioners with no choice but to perpetuate franchise monoculture, even as their content seeks to reassure readers, again and again, that there is something unique about liking Batman. Moreover, these websites now find themselves in a position where their editorial judgement is in danger of being thrown out the window. No matter how ham-handed HBO’s planned Game of Thrones prequel ends up being, aren’t Vulture and The Ringer incentivized to make sure it’s a hit? If the Avengers movies gave Nerdist a decade’s worth of content, why wouldn’t the site do everything in its power to ensure the planned sequels to Doctor Strange and Black Panther break the box office? As long as networks and studios keep rehashing the same intellectual property, pop culture journalists seem poised to keep fans as engaged as possible in order to garner a few crumbs off of the studio execs’ banquet table. Meanwhile, original programming, unless it can drum up a Stranger Things -style fandom out of thin air by riffing endlessly on nostalgia and franchises of yore, is poised to slip ever further out of vogue.
Let’s return, for a moment, to 1996 and the nadir of Marvel’s cultural influence. The films that made over a $100 million that year? Mission: Impossible , Independence Day , The Birdcage , Jerry Maguire —all the blockbuster explosions, aliens, and bombast summer audiences could stomach, plus a dash of humor and humanity thrown in for good measure. Most importantly though, every title was, in some way, novel. This year? Avengers: Endgame , Captain Marvel , Toy Story 4 , Spider-Man: Far From Home . For the fans, it’s a banner year. For anyone who wishes to meet a new character, or, who knows, maybe even just watch some human beings talk to each other—for anyone like that, there are Netflix shows in Swedish to catch up on. The monoculture, I regret to report, is alive and well. The only difference is that now it wears spandex.
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How has this thread gotten like 100 more posts since SB con started.
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As an extension of that, though, thinking about movie culture, you show a distinction between high and low cinema and how its seen in Polyester, and it made me think a little bit of Scorsese’s comments recently about Marvel movies not being cinema. I wonder what you make of the whole thing?
Yes, well. He has a right to feel that. I don’t see many of those movies either. I’m not saying they’re bad, they’re just not my cup of tea. These movies that make 100bn dollars and it doesn’t even enter my consciousness. I don’t like special effects, really. I like dialogue and wit and movie stars. And many of those movies are made for China, who don’t want any of those things – they want special effects. It’s amazing to me that they can do it, but it never looks real to me. And to me, its cheesy special effects that are more fun. It’s a science project, not a movie. But then, I’m obviously in the minority, because the American art cinemas are doing pretty terribly, and the bad commercial movies are doing better than ever.
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it just dawned on me that the scorsese/marvel debate is basically just a rehash of the gen x / millennial debate about whether or not there’s such a thing as ‘selling out,’ except its now pushed back two generations into a no holds barred zoomer/boomer thing
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except these are both basically proxies for a debate within a microgeneration of young gen x’ers and old millennials, i.e. the only people to have ever been able to make a career out of writing their sincere opinions about stuff on the internet
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what da fuck is a cinema?
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A place where movies are shown?
it is so deeply insulting that these rich hacks are doing this “im just a poor 'ol boy from cleveland” act. its true, people in the midwest all have a collective traumatic brain injury and we all shut down when someone says the word “cinema.” maybe next the russos will tell people about our long-suffering plight of being stuck with the footmobiles from the flintstones instead of cars as well
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What’s hilarious about that is the one reply, which points out that Cleveland has a really well known art house theater called the Cinematheque (which I know the Russos know about, because I think they got one of their pre-Marvel movies shown there (also it is ACROSS THE STREET from where one of them went to college)(and also down the street from the shitty racist neighborhood they claim to be from)) and the CIFF and like, quit it with this “i’m just a due who likes flicks” shit, guys. It’s embarrassing shit, but I know you all love to play it up for the whooping masses, so.
Like man, Cleveland sure sucks in a lot of ways, but that ain’t one of them, ya shitholes.
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“Ultimately, we define cinema as a film that can bring people together to have a shared, emotional experience,” Joe tells The Hollywood Reporter.
The Russos grew up devouring genre movies and art house films alike. They would frequent their local art house theater in Cleveland and spend hours debating the merits of the films they saw. The siblings would also stay up late on Saturdays to watch late-night genre movies with their father, devouring films like The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham 123 , both of which they cite as inspirations for 21 Bridges .
“When we look at the box office [of] Avengers: Endgame , we don’t see that as a signifier of financial success, we see it as a signifier of emotional success,” says Joe of the film, which earned $2.78 billion globally. “It’s a movie that had an unprecedented impact on audiences around the world in the way that they shared that narrative and the way that they experienced it. And the emotions they felt watching it.”
Ultimately I guess it’s a “yeah, we’ve seen the art cinema thing. but really movies are just movies and people saw the movies we made and isn’t that what matters most?” kinda thing
which gets very little traction with me but whatever
Yeah, in every conversation I have had with a nerd about this stuff, it alsmot always comes down to “well lots of people like them, so they must be good movies” and like oh god, what a horrible metric to judge artistic value by.