Break down the Marvel superhero movies for a n00b, wouldja?

Movies
21

This bears deliberately (re, I think) stating, and I’m pretty sure you get it, but this is only a movie thing. Someone else owns the rights to X-men versus Avengers. Obviously in the comics it’s all one big happy family (insofar as you can have a happy family when dozens of different writers are contributing to a continuity. I.e. you really can’t). I don’t even know if Spidey belongs to one or the other studio or some third studio.

Spidey Reboot - ugh. Emma Stone is delightful. Garfield is not terrible. But Rhys Ifans (whom I quite like) is wasted as the villain and it’s horribly plotted. A bad movie. IMO, the villains are critically important to a super hero movie. This is why Spiderman 1 and 2 work so well. Dafoe is a terrific Osborne the Elder (and does a good job paving the way for Harry; it’s just spiderman 3 dropped the ball), and Molina was awesome (and tragic) as Doc Oc. Speaking of villains. . .

Loki is why you should care about Thor. I’m with Morton. . . Thor 1 (and Captain America) is enjoyable/fun. Loki drives it. You need to understand, Marvel Asgardians are an advanced race with the powers of SUPER SCIENCE, ish. There’s sorcery and enchantments but it is all blended in with the technological marvels of Asgard. Thor is not really a god. Though the question of advanced beings being worshiped by their lessers comes up in the books (as you would expect). Heimsworth does a good job with the role. But it’s Hiddleston’s Loki who drives this. He’s remarkable, and maybe the best movie super villain of all time (ok, maybe tied with Ledger’s Joker). I was glad I saw Thor 2 but it’s a more problematic movie. Loki (and Thor’s) character arcs in it are incredibly satisfying. It does a better job of wasting it’s other Villain than the Spiderman reboot. FWIW, the movie timelines in rough chronological order:

Captain America -> Thor/Iron Man-> Iron Man 2 -> Avengers -> Iron Man 3/Thor 2/Captain America 2

You’ll be happy you watched Captain America and Thor before Avengers, I agree with Morton on that point. I’ll echo others and say not to worry about the previous Hulk movies.

For point of reference, I would rank:

X1<>X2 > First Class>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>X3

Iron man >> Iron Man 2 > Iron Man 3

Spiderman 1 + 2 >>>>> all other spidey films.

Thor/Captain America > Thor 2.

Avengers better than all of them.

Thor always seemed like the absolutely stupidest idea for a superhero

You know, I can’t think of anything off hand but I promise you there’s worse.

Is the TV series with SHIELD any good?

No :(

It frequently feels like the only way it’s related to the Marvel Movieverse is because people say the name shield, and Clark Gregg. It has some acting that is inclined towards wooden in critical roles. And the stories just haven’t been especially satisfying so far. This is all very unfortunate.

22

Good post, peacedog, although I would quibble with a few of your rankings. The one that really stands out is this:

I thought Iron Man 2 was pretty weak, myself. Of all the Avengers prequels, I’d rank it last, and Iron Man 3 is considerably better.

23

Iron Man 2 is very weak. But Iron Man 3 is worse.

24

Everyone always says that so I guess you (they?) might be right but I have a hard time viewing Iron Man and Captain America as B list heroes. I was never a huge comic reader in the 80’s but those two and the Avengers in general were A listers to me. Much more so than the X-Men.

25

Yeah, I would say the B-listers were the ones that did not get prequel movies - Black Widow and Hawkeye. The others are all A-listers in the Marvel Universe to my mind.

26

This is so, so wrong. Iron Man 3 is the best movie in that franchise to date.

And FWIW, the Avengers is supposedly Marvel’s most A-list team and the members of the Avengers that have their own titles are some of their headliners. But I personally never read the Avengers or any of the related solo titles and was all over Spider-man and X-Men and X-Men related titles, so YMMV.

27

You should really watch Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man before you see Avengers. Avengers is really great if you know the basic backstory of each character.

28

Great thread! I am also a bit obsessed with Marvel Heroes, despite having not purchased a comic book since Reagan was president. I’d like to learn more of the ‘lore.’ Of course, I am mostly playing Deadpool, who appears to have no movie of his own.

I have been thinking about trying Marvel’s IPad app. Evidently, for $80 a year, you can stream most of their back catalog. I imagine that’s a pretty big chunk of stuff. Anyone have any advice there?

29

So I just watched Ironman 2, and I can certainly get a lot of the criticism of it. It was fine, silly fun for the most part…and for a superhero movie it does what it needs to do.

Having said that…Sam Rockwell’s performance in that movie is absolute genius. Genius! When he’s telling the dude to “try on” the drone turret as a helmet I thought I was going to cry from laughing so hard.

30

They are my rankings, I don’t much care about anyone else’s or what people think of mine. Or about lots of other stuff but never mind. They are my ratings and everyone else is free to have their own. They are aligned only with my own wants/needs/preferences. Nobody else is taken into account.

I would not put Iron Man 3 above 2. They’re both movies with strengths but a lot of problems, and I found both inferior to the first. Iron Man 1 might be my favorite Marvel movie after Avengers. Well, it’s in a class with the first two Spiderman movies, for sho.

31

Yes! He was amazing. Iron Man 2 is a movie I’ve come to like more over time. Originally I was disappointed (I LOVE Iron Man). I saw it maybe one more time and then finally saw Iron Man 3. I then went back and watched it. . . and I liked it more than I remembered (and while I cam out of Iron Man 3 thinking “it was better than 2”, I changed my mind. Repeated viewings of Iron Man 3 have not changed that). Tony’s “shit this is hard yo!” phase still gets on my nerve’s a bit. I didn’t care for Whiplash; he was under-done(especially relative to Stain in the first movie, who is on screen less maybe but does much more). But everything else about the movie works well, even if it is a bit long. The movie was just a disappointment after Iron Man.

32

The use of B-list here (I’m guessing at rshetts’ meaning, but I know it’s how I think of it) doesn’t so much refer to their in-world power/prominence, but rather their popularity among the audience. Up through the 90s, there were only a handful of superhero properties that in my opinion could be considered A-list: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, probably Wonder Woman. In the 90s, the X-Men TV show started to increase their visibility and the movie established them as definitely A-list. But until the Marvel Studios push got off the ground, this was it for the A-list. Not only were the above the only superhero properties that the average person might recognize, but among comic fans their titles were far more popular than everyone else (Wonder Woman kind of drops off the list here, because she’s usually appealed more to the casual fans than the hardcore and DC has struggled to find a purpose and a good creative team for her). I haven’t kept track over the years, but I know that when I was into comics in the early 90s Marvel was publishing four Spider-Man titles and seven X-titles monthly, which got lots of attention and were available in most stores that had a magazine section, while Cap, Iron Man, and Thor each had a single title, with two Avengers titles following two different teams, and none of the preceding were visible outside comic shops.

At this point, the Avengers are easily the hottest property that Marvel owns, but I think 100% of that can be credited to the quality of the movies. In fact, I remember when Iron Man was being hyped in advance of its release I was fully expecting it to follow what was at that time the Marvel track record - Daredevil, Fantastic Four, Elektra, and Ghost Rider. Marvel apparently figured out that actually putting forth the effort to make the movies good might pay off, and thus the Avengers had the chance to rise because Iron Man was the first non-Spider, non-X movie to actually be excellent. So I think Iron Man, Cap, and Thor went into the series of movies as B-list but came out A-list because of the quality of the films alone.

Note that I am leaving Blade out of the above, mainly because I don’t think it had much impact on public perception of comics. The Blade movies were popular, but so far as I know it didn’t translate into popularity for the comics. I think it might be because the movie doesn’t feel very superheroic. I think it was received as urban fantasy and did more to influence stuff like Underworld than superhero movies. However, it was very important in that it attracted money to fund Marvel’s future film projects.

33

This I cannot abide. (I can allow you to have the opinion, of course; I just can’t let it go unanswered.)

Iron Man 3 got almost everything right. It understands its characters. It understands how to create drama & stakes in a superhero context. It knows how to make us laugh. It gets that tone can be variable AND consistent better than any movie I’ve seen since In Bruges (yes, I just went there), turning on a dime yet maintaining its overall lighthearted feel. And it finally gave us a great villain in an Iron Man movie, something which has been missing from the beginning.

Looking back, I like Iron Man 3 more than the first one (which remains the best origins movie I’ve seen), and I have a tough time deciding how to size it up against The Avengers.

34

I think the Hulk character is done so well in Avengers that I wouldn’t bother with the other two recent Hulk movies. Captain America and the first Thor? Yes. Iron Man 1 and 3, yes, IM2 if you’re a fan of the character. Of the other stuff, Xmen FC is really good, January Jones aside.

The first two Spiderman movies were entertaining enough but I’m not exactly clamoring for more Spiderman action anymore. Too many trips to the origin story is probably why. Imagine if in the first four Iron Man movies(counting Avengers) we saw the Tony Stark character get two origin stories, that’s basically what Sony has done with Spiderman.

35

In the late 70’s/early eighties every kid knew Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and The Hulk. Perhaps the difference is that I don’t consider this an A list group of superheroes. They are beyond that as general cultural icons. The A list of superheroes would then include the next level down. The Flash, Spiderman, Captain America, The Fantastic Four, the JLA as a group (from the Superfriends show) and perhaps Iron Man. Maybe the X-men although I don’t remember them being really known until later. I have no idea how popular these characters were among fans who bought magazines but they were well known.

36

Yep, my post was more joking about the perception of the marvel heroes than anything else. I will say that Iron Man’s status has increased substantially as a result of the movies, though. Casting Robert Downey Jr. was pretty much the perfect choice and both RDJ and Marvel/Disney have profited incredibly well from that choice.

37

Absolutely. RDJr is the franchise.

38

Nope, he was correct - Iron Man 3 is just awful - other than some fun RDJ bits, it’s easily the worst Marvel-made superhero movie.

Iron Man 2 is definitely underrated. It’s worthwhile for Sam Rockwell, and Mickey Rourke is decent too. The endings for all of the Iron Man movies are pretty weak, but Iron Man 2 is the least painful of them. Anything with Robert Downey is still worth sitting through.

39

I like Rockwell, but I hate his Justin Hammer character. He’s far too incompetent, self absorbed, and stupid to be at all believable as the head of a major weapons concern. I think he’s the worst part of the entire movie, but I blame the script and not the actor.

40

I can go along with you on Iron Man 2 being underrated, since I liked it okay and most people seem to think it’s awful, but on no planet is Iron Man 3 awful, or even weaker than any of the other Marvel movies except Avengers. (And it was never going to be the event that Avengers was.) Certainly not a planet where the Thor movies were ever made. I don’t hate those films by any means but the bits that work for me are Hiddleston’s Loki and gags about Thor’s struggling to adjust to Earth customs, with a side of Kat Dennings’ character, and that’s only maybe a third of each movie, the rest of which is pretty by the numbers superheroing and mostly off Earth in other realms I don’t know enough about to care about. Iron Man 3 had me delighted virtually throughout. And yes, much of that was RDJ, who’s always worthwhile, but I think IM3 has virtually everything I liked about Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and moreover the sort of notes that appear in my favorite superhero comics - the ones that are willing to take the premise seriously but refuse to treat it with the sort of leadfooted earnestness that can make it laughable (in the wrong way) and dull.