KutuluMike

A Guide to the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse

In a previous blog post, we examined the history and future of the various DC Comics cinematic franchises that make up what I (apparently alone) am calling the DC Cinematic Multiverse. But DC isn’t the only company to have a massive tangle of cinematic universes under its belt. It’s long-time rival Marvel has been even more prolific when it comes to adapting their material for the large and small screen. Unlike DC, though, Marvel gave up control over much of it’s catalog during the dark times (the 1996 bankruptcy and subsequent reorganization), resulting it several different studios having access to bits and pieces of the Marvel world. To this day there is still a lot of confusion over who has what rights, who can be in which films, and on-screen with who else, and which films belong to which shared canon.

Note: As with the DC post, I am mostly ignoring the animated parts of the Marvel multi-verse. There have been 36 (to date) animated shows and about a dozen animated movies.  In general, with two notable exceptions, these shows all exist in their own separate universes, with their own separate designations in the Marvel reality catalog, and otherwise play no role in the live-action TV or movie worlds.

So, as we did with DC, lets see if we can make some sense of of the tangled mess that is the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse.

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Lego Marvel’s Avengers – A First Look

The latest entry in TT Games’ highly successful Lego video game series is Lego Marvel’s Avengers. Similar to the Lego Harry Potter and Lego Star Wars games, Lego Marvel’s Avengers is an adaptation of multiple movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; specifically, the content of the game covers portions of Captain America: The First Avenger; Avengers; Thor 2: The Dark World;Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier, and Avengers: Age of Ultron. I recently picked up this game and played through the first few levels, and thought I would share my initial impressions.

PLEASE NOTE: This is not a “review” of the video game; I wouldn’t consider myself qualified to score it relative to all other video games. As a fan of Marvel and of Lego video games in general, this is just my first impression on where this game falls among it’s peers.

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A Guide To The DC Cinematic Multiverse

As we prepare for the first in a long line of tightly-integrated films based on popular DC characters, this seems like a good time to take a look at the current state of DC Comics foray into television and movies. In this post, we’ll take a look at the history, and the current status, of the DC Cinematic Multiverse (a term I just made up.) That is, we’re going to look at all of DC’s movie and television adaptations, and see how they are (or aren’t) related.

A quick note: I’m intentionally excluding animated shows from this discussion. While I’m a huge fan of DC’s animated work, for the most part these shows played by a much looser set of rules (Batman and Robin meet Scooby Doo, for example), which tend to muddy the waters. For our purposes here, we’re going to define cinematic as meaning live-action adaptations only.

With that out of the way, let’s start with…

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Fantastic Four: A (mildly spoilery) review!

This weekend, Fox released their latest Marvel comic book adaptation, a reboot of the Fantastic Four franchise. The previous two Fantastic Four films weren’t very well received, and Fox was likely hoping to cash in on the post-Iron Man comics boom to change that perception. If so, it didn’t work out as they’d hoped. What follows is a review of the movie, what went right, what went wrong, and where Fox may go from here.

Overall Impressions

The movie wasn’t terrible. Despite what you might read on Rotten Tomatoes, this wasn’t anywhere near the worst comic book movie I’ve seen; it’s not even the worst comic book movie Fox has ever released. For starters, it’s definitely an improvement on the previous Fantastic Four and Rise of the Silver, not to mention Daredevil and Elektra. Having said that, it doesn’t hold up well at all compared to the Marvel Studios movies, or X-Men franchise. If anything, the movie was disappointingly mediocre. Mediocre, because it’s just kind of there: there’s a story, and it occurs, and there’s people and they get powers and they sort-of use them, but by the end of the film, you feel like they never got around to the interesting part. And disappointing, because it could have been better: it’s obvious that there was a much better movie just begging to be released, but we’ll likely never get to see it. Adding to the disappointment is the fact that the trailer promised so much more: whatever movie that trailer was from, I would have much rather seen that than Fantastic Four.

In the end, it wasn’t a complete waste of time — it wasn’t offensively bad coughcoughGhostRider2coughcough. But I don’t really think there’s much of an audience that’s going to be happy to pay for this movie. If you’re a fan of the Fantastic Four, this movie will anger you, and if you’re a fan of superhero movies, it will disappoint you. (For reference: its the first Marvel movie since before Iron Man that I’m not going to see twice, and that includes Thor 2).

Rating: 2/10 (mostly for the acting and the first act); wait for Netflix.

For the rest of this review, there will be some broad spoilers, so if you’re planning to go see it, you might want to stop and come back later. But since you probably aren’t, you can read on…

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