This. You’d have all sorts of awesome technology in pla; it would clearly be a “super hero universe movie”, just one without Thor and Hulk and such.
A friend of mine claims there was a Damage Control reference in one of the Iron Man films (a van or something), but I never spotted it.
I’m not sure what you mean by “it took the tv show AND the Tim Burton movie to make Batman the movie franchise that Iron Man became with his first movie” in the first place, but I’m assuming you’re measuring their successes against each other based on adjusted revenue or something? In any case, I think Iron Man’s success has a lot to do with it being a top tier Marvel movie in a period of time in which superhero movies are the default summer blockbuster.
That’s not to say that Iron Man wasn’t great. It was, but considering who starred in it and how much money was in the budget, I don’t see how any other outcome could’ve happened.
But you left out the best part, that he did this because he felt there was an imbalance due to there being “more people alive today than had died in the history of the universe”, a claim that pops up in horrible chain-mails every now and again. And is absurdly, obviously, false. And was when the story was written.
Okay, now I’m imagining Thanos getting an e-mail from Starfox forwarded from their dad, Mentor. His finger hovers over the delete key and he says, “HOLD. WHAT IS THIS? COULD IT BE … THE ANSWER I HAVE LONG SOUGHT?!”
What I mean is tv producers and movie producers have been trying to turn superheros into tv shows and movies for a long time. There are some hilarious old Batman movies out there for instance. Most of it has been massively cheesy, sometimes popularly so(ie Batman’s tv show) but cheesy nontheless. It’s the kind of stuff people laugh at, not with.
I think a studio being able to suddenly make Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor into movies that connect with general audiences is a notable achievement. All their best characters are owned by others, so even though comic book adaptations are current blockbusters it’s still something to use previously unknown or seemingly outdated characters to make box office history.
I’d kind of forgotten about Starfox. It might be too soon to do another brothers angle, but it’s be hilarious to see Starfox “the human roofie” in a movie.
I would personally add Green Goblin, Doc Ock, and Kingpin to that list. Not that any of them could stand up to the Avengers, but I think they’ve got the name/face recognition to qualify as A-list. All three you mentioned would make excellent foils for the Avengers, but fucking rights bundles ensure we won’t be seeing that anytime soon.
You forgot the all-important “ma’am” :)
The full quote is “There’s only one god ma’am - and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that”
Classic. Cap is the moral compass of the Marvel universe in the same way as Superman is for the DC universe. Morally totally reliable (so long as he’s not being mind-controlled or anything of course).
I agree it’s quite an achievement.
Apart from the obvious (like good scripts and proper actors), I think it has a lot to do with CGI making look realistic what previously (with older types of special fx) could only look cheesy (i.e. superhuman action).
I think Raimi’s Spider-Man was really the first of this “new wave” of superhero movies (Whedon would agree, as he cites Raimi and Favreau as “showing the way” in his recent “thank you to fans” note). As I said, I think the fight between Spidey and Doc Ock in the second film was the first time comic action super-fighting had really been translated into a movie in such a way that it looked realistic. A certain threshold was crossed.
Realistic enough for jazz, anyway, at that time - but of course it will only keep getting better and better. For example, there was a lot more of a sense of weight and mass in this Hulk than any before (e.g. Ang Lee’s) - like when he’s transforming for the first time and sort of slides and thuds onto the floor, you get a real impression of a very heavy body cued from both the audio and the visual.
Soon as it’s possible to realize on the big screen what your mind’s eye sees when it’s triggered by comic book art, it’s game over. Superheroes are just a lot of fun, for many reasons, from shallow to deep, so I think they’re going to be with us for quite a while, now that they can be depicted in all their power and glory on the big screen. (Sort of like cowboy films used to be - serving an analogous purpose in a way, cheering people up with mostly uplifting, heroic tales.)
In a sense, what’s happening now is a replay, in another medium, of the huge burst of popularity superheroes had through the 40s.
What I’d like to see is less kevlar and more actual tights. The film makers are sort of hiding behind the kevlar. Superheros would actually be more scary and magnificent if they had proper tights, as Alex Ross depicts them. If all you have is the tights, then it’s funny. But if you have the tights and terrifying power, then it’s a whole different ballgame.
Can’t agree there. Marvel’s villain roster is pretty damn strong. Even if the general public isn’t aware of some of them, they’re definite film fodder.
Dr. Doom
Magneto
Galactus
Thanos
Apocalypse
Mister Sinister
Doc Ock
Green Goblin
Venom
The Mandarin
Mephisto
Hydra as a whole
Red Skull
Kingpin
Loki
Onslaught
Kraven
Bullseye
Sabretooth
Any of these could carry a film with the proper creative team behind it. You’ve also got a tremendous roster of b-listers to serve as henchmen and mid-level threats. Unfortunately, very few of them are Avengers villains.
Contrast this with DC, which has almost nothing aside from Lex Luthor, Darkseid and the Bat-villains. I really have no idea how Batman ended up with such a strong rogue’s gallery (the best in comicdom, IMO) while the rest of DC has floundered so badly in the villain department. Maybe just because it’s easier to come up with a threat to a regular dude who wears a batsuit.
Most of the guys you mention are cool villians, but they aren’t planet level villians as would be needed to challenge a team like the Avengers. Personally I would love to see Ultron (and the creation of Vision) as the next bad guy.
Or Justin Bieber.
BtW, would anyone beside me be giddy as a schoolgirl to see one of the old Marvel vs DC comics made as a movie, Batman vs the Hulk or such. Okay then, just me?
Stan Lee was enthusiastic about physics, he just didn’t understand it at all. There’s a scene in one of the first few issues of Fantastic Four where Doctor Doom sticks Mr. Fantastic to wood with a magnet. Yeah.
Fin Fang Foom put you in his pants.
That’s a pretty good list, and maybe it’s just the stories I’ve read, but I think some of those are either too isolated or too small-scale to be really great villains. Like, they had one good story, like Bane, and that’s about it. A great villain should have a psychological element, be a dark reflection of the hero, something like that. So, for some of those, I don’t know if they have that, or really how they relate to their heroes (Bullseye, Kraven, Mandarin, Mister Sinister).
I didn’t mean for my list to be exhaustive though. A lot of that list is great. Spider-man’s villains are actually all pretty good in a 4-color way, they’re mostly well defined and usually are specific foils for Spiderman (strength vs agility, age vs youth, etc). But that means that they don’t really translate to other situations well. Spider-man is just such a human scale story, that it’s hard to compare to Galactus, Mephisto, etc.
Apocalypse is great. Onslaught, just…no.
Well, we know what Avengers 2 will be, and after that, I think they might be tapped out on space for a while. So, I do like Ultron for maybe Avengers 3. The only other thing that I think is the same level would be something like Civil War.
to be fair the first hulk movie wasn’t related to the avengers in the same way as the other movies listed including the second hulk movie.
Eliminating the ang lee hulk and I actually thought I liked IM2 less than the ed norton hulk.
In my list ranking the Avengersverse films, I came to the same conclusion.
No matter what kind of villain they ultimately bring in, I hope the keep the Avengers together when they fight. I hate when you have a team of superheroes, but one of them is fighting over there, two of them are in a separate fight somewhere else, and the others are also off doing their own things. That final fight should always be all of them together fighting in the same ‘arena’ against the same foes.
I would say most of them are planet-level threats, really. Doc Ock and the last three on the list, no, but the rest (including Green Goblin, because Osborne is a dangerous sonofabitch) are definitely Avengers-caliber given the right story. Also I forgot about Baron Zemo and the Masters of Evil.
I am putting my money on Coulson being the basis for the Vision’s brain patterns. Or even Ultron’s.
In movies, all you need is one good story.
True, admittedly I’m kind of bouncing back and forth between “good movie material” and “overall awesome-ness as a villain”. I can’t decide which criteria is more important.