What are your biggest disappointments with the MCU?

[Cure]

Originally Posted by Leo656

Frankly, I was never in love with the "Quicksilver" in the X-Men movies like everyone else is/was - he's a Set Piece, not a "character", and it's a funny gag but they recycled it to the point where it wasn't as funny or memorable after the first time - so I was very wide open to seeing a new, and possible even better take on the character in "Age of Ultron".

Quicksilver was in one X-Men movie when Age of Ultron came out.

[PizzaPower1985]

I've been avoiding this thread because I'm a Marvel Comics fan and I have a lot of VENOM to spew. I'll try to be nice and keep it to 5 so I don't rant but... here are MY biggest disappointments (saving my big one for the bottom):

1) Captain America The First Avenger was a great film. The sequels and everything after that have not been the same.

2) Nick Fury should be a white man. And without DumDum Dugan, he's not really himself.

3) Captain Marvel is not Carol Danvers. Carol Danvers IS Ms. Marvel and Binary and if we're being generous, Warbird... at one point in continuity she was even related to Rogue. Where the F*** is Mar-Vel? Stop the revisionist B.S.

4) The F.F. should have made the first MCU film, not Iron Man. In fact, without the F.F. why is it even called the MCU exactly? Heard they were being introduced soon and I no longer care.

5) An Avengers team without Wonder Man? Seriously? The banter and arguments between him and Cap alone would have been GOLD!

Extra: An MCU without X-men (or the F.F.) leaves a lot of questions for me. I'm bitter and old I guess.

Also, the costumes pretty much suck nearly across the board. The only ones who remotely look like the characters are: Black Panther, Cap (in his first film), and Iron Man. Even Hulk's face has little to do with the Hulked out Banner of the comics but Ruffalo doesn't look like Bruce either so. He's not lanky enough. Now Ed Norton made a good Banner.

And now the BIG ONE:

Robert Downey Jr. IS NOT Tony Stark. The suit looks great but Downey is playing a different character. He's Stark in name only. The Tony I know, from his classic stories, was NOT A GOOF. The Tony I know had a lot of self doubt and a lot of angst. Downey just plays him like Chandler Bing from Friends i.e. "I make jokes and use humor and sarcasm as a defense mechanism because deep down I'm really sad and conflicted."

Downey is not Tony!

[TMNTFanatic4Life]

Biggest one for me is The Mandarin. Some liked that twist but I didnt. Give me the real Mandarin as a main villain!


And just a smaller one as a nitpick rather than a disappointment....I wish Bucky got Cap's Shield at the end in Endgame instead of Sam.

[sdp]

Originally Posted by PizzaPower1985

2) Nick Fury should be a white man. And without DumDum Dugan, he's not really himself.

4) The F.F. should have made the first MCU film, not Iron Man. In fact, without the F.F. why is it even called the MCU exactly? Heard they were being introduced soon and I no longer care.

5) An Avengers team without Wonder Man? Seriously? The banter and arguments between him and Cap alone would have been GOLD!

Robert Downey Jr. IS NOT Tony Stark. The suit looks great but Downey is playing a different character. He's Stark in name only. The Tony I know, from his classic stories, was NOT A GOOF. The Tony I know had a lot of self doubt and a lot of angst. Downey just plays him like Chandler Bing from Friends i.e. "I make jokes and use humor and sarcasm as a defense mechanism because deep down I'm really sad and conflicted."

Downey is not Tony!

I prefer White Nick Fury as well but when Ultimate Fury was modeled after Samuel L Jackson, it'd be dumb not to use him, literally perfect casting.

To me the lack of Antman and Wasp in Avengers was a bigger no, no. Wonder Man is lame to me, but I understood. But having Ultron without Antman? poor choice.

To me Iron Man was always boring until the movie, Downey was what made the character work for me (and most of the people), let's be honest despite being in the Avengers, Iron Man wasn't exactly an A lister before the movie, he might've been big with comic fans but that's about it.

[Coola Yagami]

Funny thing is, before the movie I never knew Iron Man was well... an Iron Man so to speak. Appearance-wise in the few comics I've seen him in, Iron Man isn't that much bigger than the rest of the heroes, so I never had the idea he was a dude in a suit of armor like that. Plus I had no idea of the shrapnel in his heart and the reactor thing that tied him not just to the suit but to his heart.

[Andrew NDB]

Rewatching the MCU with my daughter, who is watching it all for the first time. Actually by her request... for years she didn't want to watch any comic book movies, really. At least superhero ones. I think her new little buddies are into them and she wants to know what the hubbub is about.

We just finished Winter Soldier, about to rewatch Guardians and then get into Avengers 2 and all that.

Anyway, some new irritations that occur to me:

* Lady Sif, yes, big setup and 0 payoff. Everything comes down to that 2nd Thor movie -- that's where the wheels came off. There was great potential there, destroyed by "Let's make this mostly a Loki story and cut everything else out." Though... I know there was a lot more Dark Elves stuff cut out but do we even know if there was good Lady Sif stuff left on the cutting room floor at all? If not, that was a design flaw to begin with. I thought I remember Jamie Alexander commenting that there was a big thing cut out, but it's been many years and I'm hazy on it.

* The mind stone being inside Loki's scepter. I don't think this was originally the plan at all and it's a big stretch to make it out that Loki was running around with two Infinity stones... moreso that Thanos was OK with that and even sponsoring that.

* Making the Captain America "trilogy" a big event thing. The first movie is almost a perfect movie and script... then they go and do two back-to-back big MCU-level event movies that should have been standalone things. Which could be excused except... where is the "real" Captain America 2 or 3? There seems to be no interest.

* Black Widow and Hawkeye. I DO have higher hopes than most for the Black Widow movie, but it's largely too little too late at this stage, especially for Hawkeye. 10 years later, we finally get a Hawkeye project... and it's apparently a "passing the torch" nonsense already? Pfft. gtfoh.

* I see really no compelling reason we couldn't have got a proper Iron Man 4 in the midst of Phase 3.

My daughter's thoughts. Well, these are all PG-13 movies and this is a 13 year-old kid... so I guess they're for her, anyway. Generally speaking:

* She loves all 3 of the Iron Man movies. Laughed a lot.

* Considers the Captain America movies the "second worst" of the bunch, the last of which being the "Hulk" movies, consisting of only the Norton movie which is all she's seen. I considered showing her the Eric Bana Hulk movie first, which DOES exist as a stealth prequel to the Norton movie, but nah.

* Likes that Tony doesn't get along with Steve much.

* Seems to really like Pepper Potts. Also, Black Widow.

And that's about it.

[neatoman]

I have always been under the assumption that there were more than a few changes in the plans when it came to the Infinity Stones. Like I seriously doubt Loki's staff is the only one that was changed to be one, I'm betting the Tesseract and Aether were also not really meant to be Infinity Stones either and I'm guessing the Eye of Agamotto wasn't one in the earlier drafts of Doctor Strange either. It just kind of seems like someone realised it wasn't a good idea to dedicate several movies to introducing the majority of these things and just reworked a bunch of already established plot devices to being them.

That's probably the main reason they have different colors than they did in the comics. It doesn't make much sense to change such a detail just because. Obviously in the comics, the Cosmic Cube, Vision's Solar Gem and the Eye of Agamotto have nothing to with the Infinity Gems, nor does the powers of Carol, Wanda or Pietro.

Like if I had to guess, I'd say they originally planned on adapting the earlier Thanos story where he used the Cosmic Cube but instead went with the Infinity Gauntlet when they realised they could make more more movies.

[Leo656]

Like everybody else, they just made 90% of it up as they went along, tweaking and retconning things to fit as necessary. You'll never convince me otherwise.

Disney/Marvel gets a ton of credit for "having a clear plan and sticking to it" with regard to their shared universe, but that's nonsense. You can see the Scotch tape everywhere if you bother to look. They simply do a better job of burying/hiding any behind-the-scenes shake-ups and drama than WB and other companies do, and the movies are generally crowd-pleasing enough so that any attempts to point out inconsistencies gets you smacked for "thinking too hard." After all, "They're just goofy super-hero movies, man! Don't overthink it! Geez!"

[IMJ]

The truth about the MCU is that they are event movies and they gave people something to be excited about. Combine that with the general level of self-centered focus from people who go through life reacting instead of thinking, and you'll find that there was often over-excitment and over-gratification upon an MCU release.

There is actually a lot of lackluster content and some very crap content amidst those flicks. Again, when Iron Man 3 came out, there was a world of mouth-breathers out there literally telling everyone that it was "the best Marvel Movie YET!" which is incredibly far from the truth. Marvel Studios would have you believe that Captain Marvel had filled theaters and that their weren't 2 completely forgettable Thor flicks.

The same people who came out of theaters championing the "groundbreaking black superhero masterpiece" of Black Panther ignored movies like Blade from 20 years earlier. Those same people felt the best criticism they could give Iron Man 2 was that "there's too much Avengers setup" even though that's not even a valid criticism of that movie.

The point is that there are a lot of Marvel movie missteps that are covered up by the general mouth breather population.

[drgon78]

I love the first two captain America movies, but to the 3rd one is an Avengers 2.5 more then anything else.

[Leo656]

Yeah, the first Captain America flick was one of the ones I really, really liked, and I was disappointed that it was quickly made obvious how less time going forward was going to be spent on his as his own character and more on him as "an Avenger", and everything that went with that.

The Ups and Downs of a shared cinematic universe, I guess. Once it becomes clear that "an event" is on the horizon, all stories and characters merely become part of the build to that event, and the individual pieces become less important than the larger whole.

[neatoman]

What I meant the cosmic cube plan isn't so much a "plan" and more of a "we'll do this if we don't get to make a trillion movies".

Basically imagine this, Avengers ends with the Thanos cliffhanger, correct? So as the movie made a crazy amount of money as did Iron Man 3, they went ahead and made the following movies about collecting the Infinity Stones, which if I remember correctly, were never directly mentioned until Guardians of the Galaxy.

However, imagine a scenario in which Avengers still made money, but closer to 700 million or so. In this scenario they might not be entirely confident they will get to 20 movies like they did. Thus, instead of making a bunch of movies establishing the Infinity Gems, the Tesseract can just turn out to be a Cosmic Cube in need of more charge and that what Thanos would use, maybe around movie 10 or so.

Of course they're just making crap up as they go along, I'm just saying it's probably no coincidence the Tesseract looks just like a Cosmic Cube, because that's probably what it would have been if they didn't get to make a phase 3.

[sdp]

Wasn't the Thanos ending of Avengers added in the last moments by Whedon just to add something at the end for extra "umph"? If Avengers hadn't made a lot of money perhaps they would've continued to try to make the MCU more grounded like the phase 1 movies were

[Andrew NDB]

They definitely had the stones on the brain as early as Thor (the gauntlet in Asgard that got retconned later on) but certainly with Thor 2. When Odin is doing his big spiel about the Aether, he mentions the other gems, which is mentions "usually are stones, except the Aether....which keeps a liquid state."

[ranger_scout]

That Disney hired a terrible person like Joss Whedon to direct the first two Avengers films and for picking an actor to play the Hulk whose acting made me feel very uncomfortable in Avengers: Infinity War that I could never watch it again after two viewings. That actor is also controversial on a multitude of levels and needs to stop being so woke with his protests and on his social media accounts.

Mark Ruffalo apologizes for tweet suggesting Israel committed ‘genocide’

[Coola Yagami]

Originally Posted by ranger_scout

That Disney hired a terrible person like Joss Whedon to direct the first two Avengers films and for picking an actor to play the Hulk whose acting made me feel very uncomfortable in Avengers: Infinity War that I could never watch it again after two viewings. That actor is also controversial on a multitude of levels and needs to stop being so woke with his protests and on his social media accounts.

Mark Ruffalo apologizes for tweet suggesting Israel committed ‘genocide’

Who cares?

And what about his acting in Infinity War in particular made you uncomfortable??

[sdp]

I know that I am not known for posting unpopular opinions but Avengers 1 is mediocre, there's just nothing exciting about it.

[ranger_scout]

Originally Posted by Coola Yagami

And what about his acting in Infinity War in particular made you uncomfortable??

His entire performance, but the moments where he was constantly trying to make the Hulk come out were especially bad. Bruce wasn't as smart that time around and was just simply coming across hammy buffoon throughout the entire movie. I felt like was watching someone playing a superhero like Jim Carrey or Bette Midler would and that just doesn't work in the world of superheros.

[Coola Yagami]

Originally Posted by sdp

I know that I am not known for posting unpopular opinions but Avengers 1 is mediocre, there's just nothing exciting about it.

To be honest the movie was a very straightforward plot. The whole point was just the spectacle of seeing all of these characters crossover and really start off the the whole 'cinematic universe' thing.

It's the equivalent of if we saw a movie with Adam West Batman, Linda Carter Wonder Woman, Van Williams Green Hornet and Chris Reeves Superman all together back in the day.

[Andrew NDB]

Avengers 1 did what it was supposed to. I was satisfied, as was most of the planet.