Captain Marvel storms to $455m opening weekend

You mean comic fans that you know. That pool is as wide and varied as we have mutants on the BBS, and IMHO a lot of this rhetoric stems from folks who believe that they are either the only type of fan out there, or that their type is the only type that matters for reasons.

Share and defend your reasons, or your friends, or your social group. Don’t forcibly attribute your beliefs onto others, please.

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Huh. I can name folk I know personally who do.

You may have worsened your credibility problem a bit there.

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Ok I give. I thought I was sharing my reasons, and I was basing comic fans (i do not know) off the poor selling book. (or is that wrong too?)
How am I forcing anything on anybody?

It is quite easy to disprove this theory. Just look up any of the critics who gave Captain Marvel a bad review and see their history where they gave other Marvel movies bad reviews. Like this one Mick LaSalle from the San Francisco Chronicle. He gave both Captain Marvel and Avengers: Infinity War a bad review. He also gave Disney’s Mary Poppins a bad review. He will be back to review other Disney movies to give them more bad reviews. That is just one I pulled at random, there are many others.

There is no protection of movies critical scores. I mean you mentioned that Rotten Tomatoes is owned partly by Warner Brothers. Wouldn’t that be motivation for them to give bad reviews against Disney, a competitor? Also shouldn’t WB had their superhero movies then had been protected when they were very badly reviewed?

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Most comics, especially Marvel comics have been rebooted countless of times. Example in the last 10 years there has been 8 different reboots of Marvel’s Iron Man. The first issues of a new series always sells well which gives publishers like Marvel incentive to reboot a comic. It is unfortunate as while it helps short term sales, it is not always good for long term readers.

The Captain Marvel comic isn’t selling well right now, that is true but there was a time that it sold well. Not in the top 10 but certainly in the top 30 or 40 so when Kelly Sue DeConnick was writing it. DeConnick came up with the Carol Corps which gain quite a fandom. At the time Marvel didn’t have much Captain Marvel merch and the Carol Corps started to making their own t-shirts, hats and merchandise.

That said, once again the most recent Captain Marvel isn’t selling very well. Getting a bit more into the weeds of it, a lot of the Captain Marvel fans got pissed off with Marvel after the Civil War 2 storyline. It was about a new character who could predict future events which some heroes were using to stop future crimes. Marvel decided leading up the side of arresting people for future crimes would be Captain Marvel. A lot of fans felt that betrayed her character and changed her character to fit their major event plotline.

Also the writer who brought Captain Marvel new interest and popularity was Kelly Sue DeConnick and she left the comic. Take away their favorite writer and make major changes to the character and Marvel ended up losing a good chunk of their audience.

That said, the current author writing Captain Marvel is Margaret Stohl who has written several young adult novels. While comics have estimates published, how comics are selling online or in book stores is unknown. We have no idea if Stohl has a fanbase pulling in sales in bookstores, book fairs and online.

With all that said, something else to keep in mind is that comic book sales aren’t actually a good indicator of how well a movie adaptation will do. Guardians of the Galaxy had a few good runs but was never a best selling comic. Yet Marvel Studios and James Gunn made a great adaptation of it that has become hugely popular.

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Blocking individual critics from press screenings occasionally happens. Though it’s very controversial and it tends not to work out too well for the company doing it and most don’t.

The thing being exaggerated here is the same access journalism problem that hits most press coverage, and is measurably worse in other fields.

For the entertainment business this takes the form of positive coverage of shows and movies, to maintain access to things like celebrity interviews, photos. And for the purposes of popular movies, tempering coverage for early promo material. Those set pictures, cast interviews, set visits, early footage and early detail releases (like say the title of the new Star Wars, or casting info).

But most critics don’t do that sort of coverage, or even work for publications that do. So they don’t need to engage with it. It’s mostly a feature of your glossy celebrity gossip tabloids, and publications like Entertainment Weekly. That make their nut by having the stars be just like us and occasionally getting the cast of the latest tent pole on the cover. Though it does impact fan and pop culture publications (like Scifi Wire referenced up thread) that specialize in covering genre material. The former don’t generally offer reviews at all, instead offering positive blurbs where everything is awesome. And the later, while they may fear it, haven’t generally found themselves cut out due to negative reviews. You need look no further than the fact that these places are still welcome at press screenings and still get info from WB and Fox, despite regular extremely negative reviews and coverage of shit like 4tastic and Batman vs Superman: Skull Humpers.

So the claim that it has a material impact on agregate critic scores is frankly, conspiracy.

And yet the claim is usually that RT is disadvantaging WB and favoring Marvel.

Which doesn’t have much bearing the movie. Guardians had only recently been relaunched when the movie was announced and it was cancelled due to low sales shortly after. And the original run was never particularly popular, didn’t last long, and had been pretty much forgotten at the time.

And these days the comics are more merch for the films than anything. Successful movies drive sales of comics not the other way around. The “built in audience” aspect of this has been inverted. And the whole fans being entitled to XYZ thing has never really held water. Generally these companies do not owe you anything, and you don’t get (nor should you have) a creative say in what they produce.

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Thanks for that. I have a gift certificate lying around so maybe I’ll go see it. It’s relatively new iirc though so I’ll probably try to go to into the spiderverse if the drafthouse still has it…

Spiderverse was better, like much better. Even in a technical sense it’s an amazing bit of work.

But I haven’t seen it still playing anywhere. And the bootleggy ends of the internet have HD copies available already. So it’s probably going to hit streaming and home release soon, dunno if release dates for that are out yet. So if it’s a matter of the gift cert/money rather than one of wanting to see it on the big screen, you might be better off seeing CM and catching Spiderverse at home in a bit.

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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is already out on digital platforms and will be release on DVD & blu-ray March 19. After the Oscar win at the end of February, they did one last big push in the theatres and it’s still hanging around in a few theatres but not many and likely won’t be too much longer.

Personally, I really liked Captain Marvel but I agree that Into the Spider-Verse is a much better movie. They were definitely breaking new ground in how they manage to animate it, taking influence from how comics are drawn in ways that haven’t been really done before by animation. I ordered artbook for the movie back in January but it still hasn’t arrived yet as it’s been so incredibly popular, sold out just about everywhere and on back order.

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The thing that impressed me most was how they used the short comings and problems with 3d animation to represent the weird. Like they mixed in a lot of digital artifacting with all that Jack Kirby comic weird.

Generally I don’t like 3d animation, I find it ugly, clunky, and artistically limiting. But they found some really interesting ways to use it to their benefit.

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I’m glad it’s doing well.

Overall, I thought it wasn’t great, but both the character and the actress were likable enough that they more than make up for the plot and pacing issues. I’d give it 8/10

So… Movie doesn’t make my MCU top 5, but character does.

I don’t think that is much of a spoiler to say that it isn’t a terran cat, but an alien life form instead. I think that is fairly common knowledge for those watching the MCU and easily noticed the name of the species in very common news space articles.

What would be a spoiler is what that species can do and potentially does in this or any other film!!

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I thought it suffered a little from trying to cram in too much. What I’d love to have seen (firing up my time machine) would have been just the origin story part, but made a couple years ago. THEN just the Kree/Skrull part and her return to Earth as the lead up to Infinity War II.

But Brie Larson sells the shit out of the character, and I’ll line up for any excuse to put her in more movies.

Honestly, the choices they’ve made with what to keep, what to throw away, and what to change, have been probably my favorite thing about the MCU as a whole.

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Here’s the thing about that…they are not comparable films.

You cannot even begin to try to ask a live action movie to do what can be done in an animated film…especially when we are talking about things like Superheroes.

Are they both fruit…sure. But they are not both Apples. Captain marvel is an apple…it’s a great apple…one of the best types of apples. Into the Spiderverse is a Mango…how do you even compare those?

Might as well try comparing Scrabble to World of Warcraft.

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I’m curious…beyond her origin part, what else did you get from this that they were “cramming in”?

because I kind of only saw her origin.

Honestly, I think Splinter put it better than I could:

The central narrative—the whole damn story—is blurry and ill-defined to the point that by the time the Big Reveal(s) happen and the final-act set pieces start to unfurl, you’re sitting in the theater trying to remember why the hell you care about who’s getting punched. It’s as though the movie has its feet on two pieces moving in different (not opposite) directions—the desire to play in the MCU sandbox and the desire to tell Captain Marvel’s origin story—and never really makes a choice about which one it wants to be.

Again, that’s separate from the character or the acting, both of which I thought were good enough to make up for the above shortcomings.

$455m opener? The misogygamers did want her to smile more. Who’s smiling now guys?

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I didn’t think Wonder Woman was all that good- But I distinctly noticed that everything I didn’t like about it all seemed like things that specifically connected it to the other DC movies. I think if they had just given Jenkins free reign, it would have been 10 times better.

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It was indeed surprisingly good. Really nailed the weirdness of comics in a way we rarely see in film.

The trailers did not do it justice. Happy to see it still did well though.

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I disagree with a lot there, but replying fully here would be one big spoiler blur. I will send a DM about it.

Suffice to say, the splinter article simply missed the point of the story entirely.

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