Superheroes!

Laurana Kanan said:
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I think that's a solid lineup. :thumbsup: I've become a big fan of Pedro Pascal's work in what feels like a short time. I'm not sure I knew who he was, 5 years ago. Kirby, Quinn and Moss-Bachrach I think I've seen only once or twice each, but I've liked them all. That artwork has a 'retro' feel to it. The robot has kind of a '70s-'80s look (I'm thinking of things like Short Circuit and The Black Hole). Hard to know if that implies the movie will be set in an earlier era, or if this artist was just going for a vibe.
 
EgonSpengler said:
James Gun on threads the other day: "Love @davebautista. Who would you like to see Dave play in the DCU?"

I'm not logged in, so I can't see all of the 1,000+ replies, but the trend seems to be to cast Bautista as a villain. Hugo Strange, Mr. Freeze, Bane, Darkseid, Brainiac, and Solomon Grundy were all mentioned. Also someone called Atrocitus, who I assume from the name is a villain. A couple of people suggested Kilowog, who I know is a Green Lantern only because someone posted a picture. I assume he's a Good Guy? Other heroes named were Martian Manhunter, Swamp Thing, and Wildcat from the JSA. One person suggested Lobo, but I feel like Jason Momoa has that one locked, provided he and Gunn can get on the same page.

My lean is that Bautista should play a hero, just so we can see him in more than one movie, but I do think he'd be great as any of those villains. There aren't many actors or movie stars with his physique. otoh, none of those characters seem to naturally take advantage of his skill as a comedic actor, and I don't know how much of a dramatic actor he is. I just saw Bushwick the other day, and my reaction to his dramatic performance in that was "don't quit your day job", but (a) the script was not great, and (b) that was 7-8 years ago. Could he play a tragic villain, like Mr. Freeze or Solomon Grundy, or a psycho like Bane or Darkseid? No idea.

I'm dying to see some Superman villains besides Lex Luthor, Zod and Doomsday, and Brainiac seems like he's got next. I feel like Brainiac must be a tough character to write, and would require a skilled performance to make compelling. I think the natural impulse would be to make him "coldly logical" and whatnot, which if not written and performed well could just come off as wooden and boring. (The too-obvious idea I had years ago was to make Brainiac a kind of Kryptonian AI, a cross between Skynet and Ultron. It's way too late for that now, though, that idea's been beaten to death.)
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Bautista has played a hero (at least once) in a movie. In that Shaymalan film. Though for a time you might suspect he is just crazy.
Anyway, he is very good as an actor, imo, and very likeable. No reason to reduce him to a 1d villain (nor a 1d hero) :)
 
Laurana Kanan said:
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EgonSpengler said:
I think that's a solid lineup. :thumbsup: I've become a big fan of Pedro Pascal's work in what feels like a short time. I'm not sure I knew who he was, 5 years ago. Kirby, Quinn and Moss-Bachrach I think I've seen only once or twice each, but I've liked them all. That artwork has a 'retro' feel to it. The robot has kind of a '70s-'80s look (I'm thinking of things like Short Circuit and The Black Hole). Hard to know if that implies the movie will be set in an earlier era, or if this artist was just going for a vibe.
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Oh, duh. It's H.E.R.B.I.E. from the '70s cartoon.



---
Kyriakos said:
Bautista has played a hero (at least once) in a movie. In that Shaymalan film. Though for a time you might suspect he is just crazy.
Anyway, he is very good as an actor, imo, and very likeable. No reason to reduce him to a 1d villain (nor a 1d hero) [IMG alt=":)"]https://forums.civfanatics.com/data/assets/smilies/smile.gif[/IMG]
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I think he's mostly played heroes. I will reserve judgment on his dramatic acting until I've seen something more recent, but he's certainly a good comedic actor.
 
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Wow, Madame Web is getting friggin' carpet-bombed in reviews. Rotten Tomatoes 14%, Metacritic 29. I mean, I wasn't gonna see it anyway, but still, yikes... "[Madame Web] represents a kind of weaponized incompetence, hostile and assaultive." One of the best reviews, according to Metacritic, said, "It’s a travesty, a disaster, a blight on the history of superheroes and cinema itself. I enjoyed the hell out of it." (I'm gonna have to remember the phrase "weaponized incompetence", that's awesome.) :lol:
 
Like The Marvels, a movie full of women getting trashed, as if nurd d00dz ain't the target audience.

-As it happens, Dr. My Sister turned out to have seen the The Marvels the other night, before I shared this surmise, and she very much agrees.
 
Buster's Uncle said:
Like The Marvels, a movie full of women getting trashed, as if nurd d00dz ain't the target audience.

-As it happens, Dr. My Sister turned out to have seen the The Marvels the other night, before I shared this surmise, and she very much agrees.
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Well, yes, I suppose "nurd d00dz" are the target audience for a superhero movie, but movie critics as a group are not nerds, at least not in the same way (they're movie-nerds, obviously, but I'm assuming that's not what you meant). I scrolled down the list of Top Critics on the Rotten Tomatoes page for Madame Web, and I counted 13 women and 28 men. Of the 7 who gave the movie a positive review, 3 were women and 4 were men, so the women were slightly more likely to like it, although not by much, and still, most of the women didn't like it. The audience score is way higher than the critics' score: 54%. While I haven't tried to break it down by gender, we can probably assume that the audience score includes more 'nerds' because those would be the people more predisposed to watching the movie in the first place. (I'm assuming most people are like me, and tend to watch movies they expect to enjoy. Professional critics are forced to watched almost everything, but regular folk pick & choose.)

Metacritic is a different ballgame. Their audience score is just as dismal as their critics' score. I've noticed, not just with this movie, that Metacritic's audience scores are always compiled from many, many fewer entries than the audience score at Rotten Tomatoes. 107 vs "250+" in the case of Madame Web. I don't know why the difference is so big. It could be that Metacritic just has many fewer users.

Over on Letterboxd, the movie has a 1.8 (out of 5) across all users, which would include any critics who are on the site. I'm not sure if there's any way to get a demographic breakdown of a movie's scores on Letterboxd, although now that I'm thinking about it, it might be interesting, maybe even useful, to see a movie's ratings sorted by all sorts of things. Gender, age group, and timestamp (e.g. recent ratings vs older ratings; ratings after a movie's streaming release vs ratings during the movie's theatrical window), to name three. You could even get a snapshot of a movie's rating among people who've rated and/or liked similar movies (e.g. if Madame Web has a Letterboxd tag "Spider-Man", you could see the rating given only by people who generally give Spider-Man movies high ratings).


p.s. Also, I wouldn't say The Marvels got trashed: RT Critics 62%, Metacritic critics 50. "So-so" is probably what I would take from that, and indeed, I thought it was so-so. The user scores on the sites are wildly different, though: 82% from 2500+ user ratings on RT; a 2.7 out of 5 on Letterboxd; and only a 3.8 (out of 10) from 654 user scores on Metacritic. I have no idea what explains the wide variation between the three groups of viewers. (Worth noting that RT and Metacritic ratings measure slightly different things. If every single person who watched a movie thought it was "okay" - nobodly loved it and nobody hated it - you could see a film get a 100% on RT and a 60 on Metacritic.)
 
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EgonSpengler said:
Wow, Madame Web is getting friggin' carpet-bombed in reviews. Rotten Tomatoes 14%, Metacritic 29. I mean, I wasn't gonna see it anyway, but still, yikes... "[Madame Web] represents a kind of weaponized incompetence, hostile and assaultive." One of the best reviews, according to Metacritic, said, "It’s a travesty, a disaster, a blight on the history of superheroes and cinema itself. I enjoyed the hell out of it." (I'm gonna have to remember the phrase "weaponized incompetence", that's awesome.) :lol:
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I think it'll be a good disaster watch. Every review I've seen has said it's the worst superhero movie ever made, including Catwoman and Morbius. I didn't actually think Morbius was that bad, but I watched it with very low expectations. I'm sure Madame Web could be entertaining with the same approach.
 
EgonSpengler said:
Well, yes, I suppose "nurd d00dz" are the target audience for a superhero movie, but movie critics as a group are not nerds, at least not in the same way (they're movie-nerds, obviously, but I'm assuming that's not what you meant). I scrolled down the list of Top Critics on the Rotten Tomatoes page for Madame Web, and I counted 13 women and 28 men. Of the 7 who gave the movie a positive review, 3 were women and 4 were men, so the women were slightly more likely to like it, although not by much, and still, most of the women didn't like it. The audience score is way higher than the critics' score: 54%. While I haven't tried to break it down by gender, we can probably assume that the audience score includes more 'nerds' because those would be the people more predisposed to watching the movie in the first place. (I'm assuming most people are like me, and tend to watch movies they expect to enjoy. Professional critics are forced to watched almost everything, but regular folk pick & choose.)

Metacritic is a different ballgame. Their audience score is just as dismal as their critics' score. I've noticed, not just with this movie, that Metacritic's audience scores are always compiled from many, many fewer entries than the audience score at Rotten Tomatoes. 107 vs "250+" in the case of Madame Web. I don't know why the difference is so big. It could be that Metacritic just has many fewer users.

Over on Letterboxd, the movie has a 1.8 (out of 5) across all users, which would include any critics who are on the site. I'm not sure if there's any way to get a demographic breakdown of a movie's scores on Letterboxd, although now that I'm thinking about it, it might be interesting, maybe even useful, to see a movie's ratings sorted by all sorts of things. Gender, age group, and timestamp (e.g. recent ratings vs older ratings; ratings after a movie's streaming release vs ratings during the movie's theatrical window), to name three. You could even get a snapshot of a movie's rating among people who've rated and/or liked similar movies (e.g. if Madame Web has a Letterboxd tag "Spider-Man", you could see the rating given only by people who generally give Spider-Man movies high ratings).


p.s. Also, I wouldn't say The Marvels got trashed: RT Critics 62%, Metacritic critics 50. "So-so" is probably what I would take from that, and indeed, I thought it was so-so. The user scores on the sites are wildly different, though: 82% from 2500+ user ratings on RT; a 2.7 out of 5 on Letterboxd; and only a 3.8 (out of 10) from 654 user scores on Metacritic. I have no idea what explains the wide variation between the three groups of viewers. (Worth noting that RT and Metacritic ratings measure slightly different things. If every single person who watched a movie thought it was "okay" - nobodly loved it and nobody hated it - you could see a film get a 100% on RT and a 60 on Metacritic.)
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....Still, there's significant -unexamined, unconscious mostly- misogyny going on. It's nerd culture stuff, for all that it's gone mainstream. You should see how angry the comments get on comic book sites...
 
Synobun said:
I think it'll be a good disaster watch. Every review I've seen has said it's the worst superhero movie ever made, including Catwoman and Morbius. I didn't actually think Morbius was that bad, but I watched it with very low expectations. I'm sure Madame Web could be entertaining with the same approach.
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I don't think I've seen many of the most-despised superhero movies. I did see Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987), Batman & Robin (1997), Blade Trinity (2004) and Elektra (2005). I haven't seen Steel, Catwoman, Green Lantern, Fantastic Four (2015), Suicide Squad, Morbius, Dark Phoenix, or the Hellboy reboot.

Buster's Uncle said:
....Still, there's significant -unexamined, unconscious mostly- misogyny going on. It's nerd culture stuff, for all that it's gone mainstream. You should see how angry the comments get on comic book sites...
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Well, sure, if you look for the trolls on whose feet that shoe might fit, you'll find them. But it seems evident to me that Madame Web is getting roundly trashed because it's terrible, and that The Marvels was not roundly trashed at all. Were there people who trashed it? Of course. I don't even have to check to know that. There are people who trash everything. Are some of the people who trashed these movies misogynist donkeys? I wouldn't doubt it, but they don't seem to be driving the overall reactions to either of those movies. I see no reason to give them more credit than they deserve. They want us to think they matter, and that their pithy little phrases like "go woke, go broke" have a little kernel of uncomfortable truth to them, but they don't and they don't. To all the little turds out there: Barbie made a billion dollars and looking in the mirror will be the only time you get to see a boob for free.
 
Buster's Uncle said:
....Still, there's significant -unexamined, unconscious mostly- misogyny going on. It's nerd culture stuff, for all that it's gone mainstream. You should see how angry the comments get on comic book sites...
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While I definitely think there's an aspect of this to all women-lead superhero movies, for me at least, The Marvels was actually decent. Not that I have any strong negative feelings for Madame Web (I watched Morbius for similar reasons to Syn, and it wasn't terrible, though Matt Smith was definitely a highlight), but the line between Captain Marvel (whose lead actress found herself targeted by the culture war for pro-women's empowerment comments she made one time in public, or whatever the flimsy reason was) and Madame Web doesn't seem as straightforward.

That said, I absolutely have seen that kind of demographics make judgemental comments without having seen it. Just as I saw when Echo was announced, or when What If? Season 2 centred around the new female superhero Kahhori. Or with Zendaya as MJ (to bring us back to Sony a bit). The list goes on. I'm sure if Dakota Johnson dared to have an opinion on something publicly, she'd be similarly targeted. But the Sony Spiderverse series of things is increasingly perceived (especially in nerd culture circles) as Sony's desperate attempt to hang onto the IP.

(which is another fun tangent, I certainly think Sony are being idiots with it, but at the same time, Disney owning everything under the sun isn't great either)
 
As I was pointing out - it's a matter of who the movie was intended for, a bit of the kind of nuance nurdz are so very bad at perceiving.

I've no idea if Madame Web is any good, mind --- but the same sort of online venom pops up every time a comics character is gender and/or race swapped...
 
Gorbles said:
While I definitely think there's an aspect of this to all women-lead superhero movies, for me at least, The Marvels was actually decent. Not that I have any strong negative feelings for Madame Web (I watched Morbius for similar reasons to Syn, and it wasn't terrible, though Matt Smith was definitely a highlight), but the line between Captain Marvel (whose lead actress found herself targeted by the culture war for pro-women's empowerment comments she made one time in public, or whatever the flimsy reason was) and Madame Web doesn't seem as straightforward.

That said, I absolutely have seen that kind of demographics make judgemental comments without having seen it. Just as I saw when Echo was announced, or when What If? Season 2 centred around the new female superhero Kahhori. Or with Zendaya as MJ (to bring us back to Sony a bit). The list goes on. I'm sure if Dakota Johnson dared to have an opinion on something publicly, she'd be similarly targeted. But the Sony Spiderverse series of things is increasingly perceived (especially in nerd culture circles) as Sony's desperate attempt to hang onto the IP.

(which is another fun tangent, I certainly think Sony are being idiots with it, but at the same time, Disney owning everything under the sun isn't great either)
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The MCU Spider-Man movies are another great example of how far removed from the bulk of humanity the trolls and donkeys really are.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017): $880 million
Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019): $1.13 billion
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021): $1.9 billion

Of course Zendaya isn't the franchise lead, but anyone who thought casting her as MJ was a mistake... boy, they couldn't have gotten a bigger glass of Shut-Up Juice, as The Rock used to say. :lol: It's only one of the most successful entertainment franchises in human history (and the movies are actually good, too, imo - we shouldn't conflate popular with quality, but in this case, I think these movies are both).
 
Arakhor said:
Now I'm genuinely excited for that. That cartoon was my introduction to Marvel and superheroes in general.
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Although the comics were always a part of my experience (though not as avidly as some) and I loved that old TSR licensed Marvel tablietop RPG with the FASERIP system (I still have a slightly tattered copy on my bookshelf), the two TV series based on Marvel characters that stand out most notably from my youth were the old '60's Spider-Man series with the iconic theme-song and the stock animation (that was already well into syndication, at the time), and the Hulk series with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno. But I remember a friend of mine a while back who just loved the first X-Men movie by Fox21, and thought it was one of the best movies ever made. But, he had no idea it was based on a comicbook, he thought it was an original IP made for the movie.
 
The first X-Men film was pretty good, but I'm biased in that it had both Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart in starring roles. :)
 
Turns out Superman & Lois got the Old Yeller treatment because WB didn't want a competing Superman within the new DCEU: https://www.thewrap.com/cw-brad-schwartz-dennis-miller-interview-linear-tv-strategy/

“We went to our partners at CBS and Warner Bros., and we just were like, ‘We’re partners on these things, you sell them randomly around. Here’s our economics…’ We can’t keep losing the amount of money we were on the shows,” Schwartz explained. “Very collaboratively, everyone got together and we pushed these four shows forward.”

Schwartz noted that if these four series continue to perform from a ratings perspective, and at their current cost, “there’s no reason why you wouldn’t keep doing them.”

(Schwartz clarified that, despite how well “Superman & Lois” has performed, the decision to end the DC property came from Warner Bros. — “They don’t want a competing Superman product in the marketplace,” Schwartz said, referring to James Gunn’s 2025 movie “Superman: Legacy.”)
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Pretty silly, IMO.
 
Patine said:
Let's face it. Superman & Lois was NOT going to be a Young and the Restless, Neighbours, Seasame Street, The Last of the Summer Wine, or The Simpsons for series longevity...
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Whatever conversation in your mind this was a part of, I'm not sure it has much to do with me or what I posted.
 
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