My son and I liked that line too. My son (a teenager) is a “devout” atheist but said “It’s nice to see a hollywood movie pay a little respect to the values of American population.”
I, of course, got 3 age spots on my right arm from that statement. I’m too young for my son to say that. Right? RIGHT?!
It could be argued that the Avengers themselves are second tier, or at least were until this year. Thanos is one of their primary villains. Possibly second only to Ultron as far as Avengers villains go. That may or may not be a compliment. Fighting game fans are generally familiar with him because he was a boss in Capcom’s Marvel Super Heroes and playable in Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
I never really cared about/for the Avengers or the “cosmic” side of the Marvel universe when I was growing up. If you’d told me ten years ago I’d be in love with an Iron Man movie and seeing The Avengers three times inside of four days, I’d have thought you were loony. I’m willing to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt that they can make escapist cinema gold out of the straw that is the Avengers’ comic stories, particularly if Whedon stays involved.
Well, luckily we may not have to do the elemental Mario world gem search, because some of the gems are evidently accounted for. In fact, you’ve already seen a movie with one of them as a key element. Loki’s staff in The Avengers is powered by an Infinity Gem. The Mind Gem, specifically, whose function is fairly obvious.
While I dislike the Pirates sequels, I’d say Davy Jones proves you can get a fine actor-driven performance out of a CG character that isn’t Gollum.
Marvel Studios would agree with you. The Marvel Cinematic Universe consists of the six films that share a single universe. The Ang Lee Hulk is not part of the canon, although to be honest I think you could pull the Ed Norton Hulk movie out of canon without losing much.
I worked with the writer on that series some years back. He was very proud of his creation, and viewed it as similar to DC’s continuity-fixing efforts in Crisis on Infinite Earths. He was genuinely surprised and saddened when Marvel didn’t adopt it as their core canon.
Earth X was pretty batty in places, but it did have a few really elegant solutions for some of the bigger Marvel Unanswered Questions. Goddamn, you had to know your Marvel history to read that series.
Mjolnir is “forged from the heart of a dying star” - that’s some weird science right there.
Technically, everything heavier than helium is forged from the heart of a dying star.
Even poop.
We are made of starpoop.
From bad marriage?
We are all starpoop contimplating the poop.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the starpoop.
As a non comic book reader, for the most part, I think everything related to the Avengers was second tier EXCEPT the Hulk.
I think the Hulk is up there with Batman, Superman, Spiderman, and Wonder Woman as first tier. That is if we include “mainstream audiences will recognize this character” as an element of being first tier.
The Xmen movies made those characters first tier, and now Marvel has done the same with all those Avengers. It is in my opinion a pretty amazing achievement. How many years and movies and tv shows has it taken to get Batman where he is now(megablockbuster franchise)? Iron Man became an equivalent first tier in one movie, one frickin’ movie!
The only place they are lagging is the villains. Loki is now first tier I’d say, but the rest? Mostly forgettable. That is sort of worrisome, through five movies(one Hulk, one Cap/Thor, two IM) we got one memorable, reusable villain. They are going to need to work on that. They need a Joker level villain to balance everything out.
As Matt pointed out above, the Avengers don’t do particularly well, villain-wise. They have Ultron, who’s basically just an evil robot (the details only make it weirder), but I can’t think of anybody else that’s especially good without going into space. I always felt like the avengers were pretty malleable, cast-wise, so there wasn’t enough time to really get a good head of steam against anybody as a coherent whole. And the problem with this case is that the individual members don’t bring much to the party in terms of nemeses.
I won’t make a joke about Pym and restraining orders.
There are only a handful of really A-list villains in the Marvel universe period. Doom, Magneto, Galactus. I get the impression from memory that Marvel tended to do more villain team-ups, since they rarely had anybody who could pull duty themselves (Sinister Six, etc.)
That series (Earth X or maybe Universe X) also explained that Thanos had a Skrull-shaped jaw because his mother had secretly been a Skrull disguised as a Titanian Eternal.
(Also Belasco and Mr. Sinister were time-displaced versions of Nightcrawler and Colossus because, hey, just look at them.)
Hulk, despite being a founding member has spent very little time with the Avengers, so his rogues gallery doesn’t really count. Thor gets you the Absorbing Man and the Wrecking Crew all of whom are pretty cinematic and have the advantage of origins connected to Loki. Enchantress could be a good villain if you downplay the “feminine wiles” aspect and play up the scheming sorceress. (And of course there’s the Ding-a-Ling Familywith their amazing cousin power.)
Captain America gets you various neo-nazi terrorist type organizations like Hydra or AIM as well as Baron Zemo which gets you the Masters of Evil.
Some of Iron Man’s best villains are tied up in the cold war history (Crimson Dynamo, Titanium Man) but he also gets you a bunch of second-tier villains to fill out the Masters of Evil – Melter, Radioactive Man, Beetle, Whirlwind, etc. Fing Fang Foom might be fun if only because it’s a huge giant Godzilla-type monster that’s intelligent rather than just a mindless creature (and is related to the Mandarin and aliens and demons …)
And let’s not forget the Iron Man / Avengers villain everyone wants to see: Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing (MODOK).
I forget sometimes how silly comic books can be. I hope the Avengers take a wrong turn in the sequel and end up going against MODOC (Mental Organism Designed Only for Checkers).
. How many years and movies and tv shows has it taken to get Batman where he is now(megablockbuster franchise)?
Huh? The old TV show was huge. The Tim Burton Batman movies were huge (biggest gross of 1989 by far, a then record opening weekend). The animated series was huge.
Batman always has been a megablockbuster franchise.
Especially poop.
The problem is that a lot of that probably wouldn’t play to the mass market. AIM / Hydra are fine as a backdrop for an evil organization, but there’s no actual villain there. Baron Zemo has a pink mask glued onto his head, and you get into the weird territory where all of Cap’s villains are regular guys with something wrong with their heads.
I think Asgard is pretty tapped out for the general public, and besides, the Enchantress doesn’t even have a name! Not much iconic villainy there. Also, she’s a little too much “girl Loki”.
Maybe Fin Fang Foom would actually work. As you said, an intelligent monster might be enough to differentiate him. MODOK, while awesome, is just…no.
Oh, have we mentioned Klaw yet? He’s made of living sound! Eat it, science!
What was the Marvel comic about the folks who come in after a superhero battle and rebuild? Because while watching the alien invasion taking chunks out of downtown New York, I was thinking that was the next movie they should make.
It took the tv show AND the Tim Burton movie to make Batman the movie franchise that Iron Man became with his first movie. And how much time passed between the 60s tv show and the late 80s movie? That was my point, Marvel managed to do it for these second tier characters, except the Hulk, in one movie.
It’s too bad about the villain situation, it sounds like Loki is pretty much the Joker equivalent. On the bright side that’s good, because it means they have sold the audience enough on Thor’s involvement that they can bring in space alien villains and it works fine. The downside is they just did that with the Avengers movie, so they can’t draw from that well again without the second Avenger movie suffering for it.
