I lost interest in the MCU, despite seeing the earlier ones as they came out.
Part of what signaled the collapse for me was not Deadpool, but Taika Waititi's take on Thor. You can't parody *your own product* and expect fans to take it seriously. People want to see Thor beat up villains and save the world.
Instead they gave us "NOT ANOTHER SUPERHERO MOVIE".
If they want this to be a "universe" that keeps fans invested, they needed message discipline (clean up the completely disparate tone across the movies and - far too many - tv shows). Get your plot holes filled. And don't give your formula, ready-to-heat, movie model to some show-off director to turn into his auteur project (see also Zach Snyder).
I thought that the idea of showing the plasticity of the superhero genre via coding various MCU films as subgenre works--a political thriller! a comedy-buddy picture! a war movie with a cast of misfits! was a solid approach. Superhero comics are kind of blood type AB: universal recipients of genre templates from elsewhere. You can have an X-Men story that's a police procedural, a X-Men story that's a film noir, a X-Men story that's a spaghetti Western, etc. So I thought that maybe that was the plan--not so much to just hand movies over to directors and let them do whatever they want, but to parcel out characters and storylines to someone with a smart thematic take. But yeah, then they had Waititi go from the more disciplined/on-point Ragnarok to the horribleness of Love and Thunder, a movie I hated so much that I almost walked out halfway through. Or The Eternals, which had no discernible aesthetic or purpose. But that's another sign that they wanted to walk away from having this be a big connected story that would have narrative and characterization consequences. That's hard to lay out and more importantly, it means your intellectual property isn't in the same timeless state at the end that it was in the beginning--can't keep selling those Iron Man underoos if Iron Man's dead.
I lost interest in the MCU, despite seeing the earlier ones as they came out.
Part of what signaled the collapse for me was not Deadpool, but Taika Waititi's take on Thor. You can't parody *your own product* and expect fans to take it seriously. People want to see Thor beat up villains and save the world.
Instead they gave us "NOT ANOTHER SUPERHERO MOVIE".
If they want this to be a "universe" that keeps fans invested, they needed message discipline (clean up the completely disparate tone across the movies and - far too many - tv shows). Get your plot holes filled. And don't give your formula, ready-to-heat, movie model to some show-off director to turn into his auteur project (see also Zach Snyder).
I thought that the idea of showing the plasticity of the superhero genre via coding various MCU films as subgenre works--a political thriller! a comedy-buddy picture! a war movie with a cast of misfits! was a solid approach. Superhero comics are kind of blood type AB: universal recipients of genre templates from elsewhere. You can have an X-Men story that's a police procedural, a X-Men story that's a film noir, a X-Men story that's a spaghetti Western, etc. So I thought that maybe that was the plan--not so much to just hand movies over to directors and let them do whatever they want, but to parcel out characters and storylines to someone with a smart thematic take. But yeah, then they had Waititi go from the more disciplined/on-point Ragnarok to the horribleness of Love and Thunder, a movie I hated so much that I almost walked out halfway through. Or The Eternals, which had no discernible aesthetic or purpose. But that's another sign that they wanted to walk away from having this be a big connected story that would have narrative and characterization consequences. That's hard to lay out and more importantly, it means your intellectual property isn't in the same timeless state at the end that it was in the beginning--can't keep selling those Iron Man underoos if Iron Man's dead.