https://tvline.com/2022/07/23/mcu-ph...cret-invasion/
Intrigued particularly by Daredevil: Born Again — the Miller/Mazzuchelli series is one of my favorite superhero stories.
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https://tvline.com/2022/07/23/mcu-ph...cret-invasion/
Intrigued particularly by Daredevil: Born Again — the Miller/Mazzuchelli series is one of my favorite superhero stories.
If that's what I think it is then I would agree. Awhile back I asked for comic suggestions around here and the Daredevil one was the one I ended up enjoying the most, despite having no reason to care about the character before that.
For folks that don't click through, there's a little info on Phase 6 at the link as well:
On Thunderbolts: I had to look up who or what that was. It's an anti-hero group that has had a lot of members over the years. Names of people already in the MCU who have been involved include Photon, Venom, Black Widow, Ant-Man, Luke Cage, Deadpool, Punisher, and Winter Soldier. I'm sure they will bring in some new people, but they certainly have enough people on that list to do it already (with Yelena as Black Widow and maybe Cassie standing in for Ant-Man).Quote:
Originally Posted by Article excerpt
Trailers that have been released:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlOB3UALvrQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7JsKhI2An0
Write-ups on the other stuff shown:
Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3
Ant-Man 3: Quantumania
Spider-Man Freshman Year (D+ animated)
X-Men '97 (D+ animated)
What If? season two (D+ animated)
Forgot a trailer: I Am Groot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7eFpRf4tac
Well, phase 4 has been...eclectic, but I don't want to judge a painting before it's finished. The "everything is actually all happening at the same time" explanation makes some sense...sort of, and I get that they do need to deal with each character's fallout from Endgame, but I'm really hoping when phases 5 and 6 are done we will be able to look back at phase 4 and go, "How did I not see this coming?" with stuff they've buried in these shows but we just don't have enough context to really understand what the bigger picture is.
I've seen some complaints here and there about the lack of an overarching story for Phase 4, but I don't share the concern. Judge each property on its own merits as a self-contained story -- if Infinity War and Endgame had never happened, it would not have detracted from the quality of any of the MCU movies that preceded them.
The explanation I heard from Feige is that all of the phase 4 movies and shows have been taking place pretty much simultaneously, with the exception of Hawkeye maybe taking place a little bit later (and it, of course, failed to mention the giant dude in the ocean). So, for most of the movies/series, the man coming out of the oceans (and the massive tsunami's his "birth" should have caused), haven't happened yet.
Yeah, I don't really buy it either.
I’m a VFX Artist, and I’m Tired of Getting ‘Pixel-F–ked’ by Marvel
Quote:
It’s pretty well known and even darkly joked about across all the visual-effects houses that working on Marvel shows is really hard. When I worked on one movie, it was almost six months of overtime every day. I was working seven days a week, averaging 64 hours a week on a good week. Marvel genuinely works you really hard. I’ve had co-workers sit next to me, break down, and start crying. I’ve had people having anxiety attacks on the phone.
The studio has a lot of power over the effects houses, just because it has so many blockbuster movies coming out one after the other. If you upset Marvel in any way, there’s a very high chance you’re not going to get those projects in the future. So the effects houses are trying to bend over backward to keep Marvel happy.
To get work, the houses bid on a project; they are all trying to come in right under one another’s bids. With Marvel, the bids will typically come in quite a bit under, and Marvel is happy with that relationship, because it saves it money. But what ends up happening is that all Marvel projects tend to be understaffed. Where I would usually have a team of ten VFX artists on a non-Marvel movie, on one Marvel movie, I got two including myself. So every person is doing more work than they need to.
The other thing with Marvel is it’s famous for asking for lots of changes throughout the process. So you’re already overworked, but then Marvel’s asking for regular changes way in excess of what any other client does. And some of those changes are really major. Maybe a month or two before a movie comes out, Marvel will have us change the entire third act. It has really tight turnaround times. So yeah, it’s just not a great situation all around. One visual-effects house could not finish the number of shots and reshoots Marvel was asking for in time, so Marvel had to give my studio the work. Ever since, that house has effectively been blacklisted from getting Marvel work.
Part of the problem comes from the MCU itself — just the sheer number of movies it has. It sets dates, and it’s very inflexible on those dates; yet it’s quite willing to do reshoots and big changes very close to the dates without shifting them up or down. This is not a new dynamic.
I remember going to a presentation by one of the other VFX houses about an early MCU movie, and people were talking about how they were getting “pixel-fucked.” That’s a term we use in the industry when the client will nitpick over every little pixel. Even if you never notice it. A client might say, “This is not exactly what I want,” and you keep working at it. But they have no idea what they want. So they’ll be like, “Can you just try this? Can you just try that?” They’ll want you to change an entire setting, an entire environment, pretty late in a movie.
The main problem is most of Marvel’s directors aren’t familiar with working with visual effects. A lot of them have just done little indies at the Sundance Film Festival and have never worked with VFX. They don’t know how to visualize something that’s not there yet, that’s not on set with them. So Marvel often starts asking for what we call “final renders.” As we’re working through a movie, we’ll send work-in-progress images that are not pretty but show where we’re at. Marvel often asks for them to be delivered at a much higher quality very early on, and that takes a lot of time. Marvel does that because its directors don’t know how to look at the rough images early on and make judgment calls. But that is the way the industry has to work. You can’t show something super pretty when the basics are still being fleshed out.
The other issue is, when we’re in postproduction, we don’t have a director of photography involved. So we’re coming up with the shots a lot of the time. It causes a lot of incongruity. A good example of what happens in these scenarios is the battle scene at the end of Black Panther. The physics are completely off. Suddenly, the characters are jumping around, doing all these crazy moves like action figures in space. Suddenly, the camera is doing these motions that haven’t happened in the rest of the movie. It all looks a bit cartoony. It has broken the visual language of the film.
Things need to change on two ends of the spectrum. Marvel needs to train its directors on working with visual effects and have a better vision out of the gate. The studio needs to hold its directors’ feet to the fire more to commit to what they want. The other thing is unionization. There is a growing movement to do that, because it would help make sure that the VFX houses can’t take bids without having to consider what the impacts would be. Because a lot of the time, it’s like, you get to work on a Marvel show, and you’ll work on that for cheaper just because it’s cool.
Some of the problems I mentioned are universal to every show and every project. But you end up doing less overtime on other shows. You end up being able to push back more on the directors. When they say something like, “Hey, I want this,” you can be like, “This doesn’t make sense.” Not every client has the bullying power of Marvel.
The artist's real beef is not with Marvel, but with his actual employer, i.e., the VFX shop that is desperate to stay in Marvel's good graces. But yeah, the effects people probably should unionize.
Agreed. Unionizing is the only way to force the issue. Otherwise, this is the world they work in now.Quote:
Originally Posted by PPatty
I don't really have anything to add, I just wanted to say that that Wakanda Forever trailer is great.
In case anyone hasn't seen it yet. Looks cool. I guess this leads into Armor Wars?
https://youtu.be/qZVTkn2NjS0
Lego does it again...
MCU's New Black Panther Seemingly Spoiled in Wakanda Forever LEGO Set
Spoiler for LEGO spoiler:
This looks to be much more in the spirit of Ms. Marvel than anything else, which makes me happy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuk77TjvfmE&t=116s
Ok, between this and Secret Invasion I feel like they are getting their mojo back. Or maybe it was Nick Fury that was missing. Not that their recent stuff has been bad, it just seems....directionless. Like, they have an overall story they want to tell but they can't figure out how to do it. Now with Johnathan Majors' legal issues we may never see the rest of it.
Dead on. The earlier phases had a strong focus: introduce the characters, tie them to the infinity stones, bring them together. This phase has been all over the place, and I see two main issues that have caused that. One, a number of movies were about winding up character arcs, and didn't really contribute to the focus in the other films.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dramadon
Two, the multi-step process to introduce the big bad (Kang) hasn't been as direct. Then: Thanos wants infinity stones (shown to be Powerful Items), will use to do bad things: simple, straightforward. Now: there's an infinite number of other universes, and many of them have produced a time traveler (Kang) who has banded together with all his other multiverse selves to rule over everything: huh? Time travel is messy enough if you don't make it closed loop time travel, and you want to mix that, and a pile of bad guys who are all the same bad guys, but there's not apparently a pile of good guys who are all the same good guys fighting the bad guys and ugh, just, ugh.
Multiverse stuff works in comics, where you can print a million different titles and people can pick and choose which matter to them. It's not so great in a movie series, where everything gets shoehorned into the one series and there's no real way to avoid things. I'm hoping that the Kang stuff gets finished off quickly and the multiverse is abandoned, but I doubt I'll get my wish.
This is the right decision, because brand fatigue and genre fatigue are real:
Disney cuts back on Marvel, Star Wars content (cnbc.com)
I agree. Although Iger's tact while saying this was poor.Quote:
Originally Posted by PPatty