Man, "Infinity War" was so good! And we're gonna get The Fantastic Four and The X-Men and maybe Marvel has to share Spider-Man with Sony, but that's okay! Things are going so well, Marvel Studios is perfect! Well, almost perfect.
After Sony agreed to share Spider-Man and Disney bought Fox and it's superheroes, I thought to myself that the MCU was nearing perfection. While Warner Bros owns DC Comics and has all it's pieces on the table, Marvel made it's success by doing movies about relatively B-List characters because they couldn't use their popular ones. Instead of an MCU Spider-Man we got Iron Man, instead of MCU X-Men, we had The Guardians of The Galaxy, and in the end that worked out great as writers and directors made people care about these characters, popularize them, and further insert them into the cultural zeitgeist. Oh, first time I used that word. But The MCU isn't perfect. And this doesn't come down to my opinions about a certain character or movie, it comes down to a severed connection that we can't ignore.
Currently, The Agents of SHIELD are dealing with an alien invasion. The reason you might not know that is because these aliens aren't from the Marvel movies and are not mentioned in the movies. The Avengers, after ten long years, are still unaware that Phil Coulson is alive. When Iron Man went to recruit a superpowered person in New York, it wasn't Daredevil or Jessica Jones, it was Spider-Man. Doctor Strange probably doesn't even know Ghost Rider exists. With newer shows like "Cloak & Dagger", "The Runaways" and "The New Warriors" gracing our TV screens, one has to wonder when these small-screen heroes are going to step to the big leagues. After all, Luke Cage was an Avenger, Iron Fist has fought alongside Doctor Strange, Hawkeye was married to Mockingbird. So when are any of those things going to happen? Look, I don't expect Iron Man to appear in "Luke Cage" season two or for Mockingbird to show up in the next Marvel movie as Hawkeye's clingy ex-girlfriend, just as I don't expect anything from the comics to be translated to film perfectly. However, when the whole motto of your cinematic universe is "it's all connected" and it isn't, you might have some screws you want to tighten.
"The Avengers" worked because it brought together four different superheroes from their four different films and said "they all exist in the same world". And no other studio has done that. At least, not to this scale. Now, Universal Studios wants a monster-themed cinematic universe, now Hasbro wants a cinematic universe with GI Joe and Transformers. Fox tried it, Sony tried it, hell, even M. Night Shyamalan did a sequel to "Unbreakable" called "Split" SEVENTEEN years after the first film was released! And in 2019 he's doing a third one where Split and Glass fight Unbreakable! You can't tell me he planned on doing that twelve years before The Avengers was a thing.
Marvel Studios is all about the "team-up" idea. Hulk was in Thor 3, Iron Man in Spider-Man's film, "Captain America: Civil War" was just "Avengers 2: Let's Try That Again". And "Infinity War" takes that world bridging concept to the next level. Thor and The Guardians, Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, even small stuff like Okoye teaming up with Black Widow. But for as open as the MCU is, the Netflix and TV shows are treated as "additional content". They aren't treated with the same respect and magnitude as the films. And look, between "Iron Fist" and "Inhumans" I get it. I get why people want to skip that stuff. But just because those shows don't have as many viewers as the films doesn't mean you can't acknowledge them. Just have a scene in "Spider-Man 2: That Venom Movie Will Suck" where Spidey is swinging around at night and he swings by Daredevil. Spidey yells "Hi, Daredevil" and Daredevil says "Hey". And that's it. Just have Doctor Strange mention Kun-Lun. Just have Coulson send Tony Stark a voicemail. Maybe Steve Rogers needs someone found and he hires "an alcoholic detective" to find them. It's that easy.
Jeph Loeb has been the Executive Vice President and Head of Television at Marvel Television since 2010 and he has been given the job of putting characters on TV. And I like the guy's work. The Marvel Color Series, "Batman: The Long Halloween", "Superman/Batman", "Fallen Son", he's done great work. But I just wish he had more push and more motivation to make something happen with Kevin Feige and the movie directors. Or, at the least, I wish Feige would remind The Russo Brothers and Ryan Coogler and whoever else they got right now that there are more Marvel characters they can use. Imagine how stoked Charlie Cox would be to get a one minute cameo in a Spider-Man movie. Imagine how stoked The Russo Brothers would be if they could have Luke Cage help Thor and Hulk fight Thanos or something! And imagine how stoked the fans would be if they saw Phil Coulson reunite with the original Avengers. It works for the actors, it works for the directors, and it works for the fans.
At the end of the day, this is film culture and television culture we're talking about here. Two industries that depend on each other, but hate to mix. The TV people don't want to ride off the success of the films, and the film people don't want to stoop to using daytime television content in their big summer blockbusters. Until the MCU grows stale and they need a new element to their universe to spice things up, they don't need Daredevil or The Punisher or any one else from TV. And by the time all the casual Marvel Fans actually drop out it will be too late and the characters we've grown with on TV will be too old, too busy, or too irrelevant to bring Luke Cage into Black Panther 3 or The Punisher into X-Men 2. Ten years from now, that "Break Glass In Case of Boredom" will be covered in so much dust even Stormbreaker won't dust it off.
Thanks for reading.
Put the first two episodes of "Inhumans" in theaters they said, it'll work out great they said.
No comments:
Post a Comment