Yeah, absolutely, what the MCU took from the Ultimate comics is very superficial, almost entirely just appearances and costumes, specifically the designs that were a move away from some of the more “comic-booky” elements and the spandex costumes of traditional Marvel - but that very much sets a tone that impacts everything else. And although the Marvel movie leadership has changed, that grounded, “street clothes” style has remained, even for Guardians, where they potentially could have gone nuts. FF is very much a “spandex” set of characters, so there’s a certain amount of tonal dissonance that has to be reconciled in introducing them to the MCU. (And like I said, using some elements of the Ultimates FF in the last movie didn’t seem to go over well, so I don’t imagine we’ll see any Ultimates influence in the MCU FF.)
Has it?
Cause the new Thor movie has both Thors in full on armor, while Thor Ragnarok had this guy, Hella in spandex with them horns. And even the very first Thor has a pretty comic accurate Loki look.
The New Doctor Strange finally debuted a version of the Scarlet Witch costume from the comics. And Strange’s on screen costume has always been pretty comics accurate. Falcon and the Winter Soldier went with a pretty direct comic translation of Sam Wilson’s Captain America suit and the US agent outfit. Moon Knight was right off the page. Practically nothing in Black Panther would qualify as grounded “street cloths”.
And the second Guardians featured straight up golden people.
Plus Spider-Man
To a certain extent this is a target that’s just moved, and continues to move. Marvel has been pushing more toward comic accurate looks, especially since 2015 when Kevin Feige took over the movie division directly. And especially, especially now that he’s in charge of Marvel in total. While designs in comics have also continue to change and update.
To a certain extent it’s starting things out with Hulk and Iron Man, which aren’t exactly spandex and high fantasy. Iron Man is a character who literally wears street cloths, and puts a robot suit on over them.
But there’s also a thing with putting super heroes on film. Plan spandex, or any single color stretch fabric. Apparently doesn’t shoot well. It’s difficult to light, and uninteresting on frame. And it sets up it’s own expectations and impacts on tone. One that’s kinda hokey, and low budget.
Simply put reality isn’t the comic book page, and any comic costume will have to be executed in more “grounded” fashion by virtue of having to look real and functional in the real world. Aside from shifting ever more comicbook with them, more recent Marvel approaches have looked heavily at athletic ware. The original spandex and capes format with Superhero outfits was drawn from weight lifter’s and gymnast’s unitards and singlets of the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. So it’s a kinda brilliant idea. But also allowed a lot of SYNERGY with Nike, Under Armor and the like.
I really doubt we’ll see much from the Ultimate universe at all aside from an eventual introduction for Miles Morales.
Opinions on the Ultimate Universe haven’t been too positive for a while. And in particular on Ultimates, or any other bit of it from Mark Millar.
Ultimate Spider-Man was really the only full on successful bit of the Ultimate Universe. And most of it is pretty damn good. Ultimate X-Men seems pretty well forgotten but it was pretty good here and there. Ultimates was a hit when it was released, and got a follow up. But it only ever ran 26 issues, and pretty soon after it debuted the response to it got pretty negative.
It’s a nasty, visually ugly comic.
Ultimate FF didn’t seem to ever get a positive response, and I don’t think it sold particularly well. And of note is that Ultimate Reed Richards is currently an interdimensional super villain in the main Marvel comics.
Yeah, that’s still been the baseline. They’ve (slowly) added more costumes, but outside the space and Wakanda settings, many of the characters - particularly villains - are being introduced (and staying) with street clothes.
It’s an interesting approach - although there’s a ton of characters where they didn’t even do a translated version of the comic costumes. (Part of this is that they’re introducing tons of characters in the various shows, where there’s not the budget or time to flesh out a good-looking version of the comic costume, but it’s also often taking them multiple appearances to build up to any sort of comic-y costume. How many movies did it take to work up to even a subdued Scarlet Witch outfit?)
That’s because it’s objectively ridiculous to expect a woman superhero/supervillain to go into battle wearing a one-piece swimsuit and heels.
It’s generally true of comic book costumes that they make absolutely no sense outside the completely weird, entirely self-referential context of comic books and are objectively ridiculous as “real world” outfits. The success of the MCU is that they don’t ask the question, “Why do people feel the need to run around in their underwear when they develop superpowers?” but instead come up with designs that make some sense, at the very least.
Ultimately they come from costumes in real-life venues like circuses and professional wrestling, so maybe not objectively ridiculous
They’re subjectively ridiculous if we expect Batman to be qualitatively different from any other WWE characters
If anything, efforts to make the costumes more serious and dignified make them less realistic
Yeah, that was their origin, but a) that cultural reference is largely lost (they’re referencing century+ old costumes of strong-men and wrestlers, who really don’t wear those outfits anymore), and b) almost 80 years of heavily self-referential design evolution has heavily divorced them from those origins anyways. (And that’s leaving aside that “superheroes” aren’t expected to look - or be - like wrestlers anymore.) Comic book characters look like… comic book characters.
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