And even with Hulk once they found their actor (Ruffalo who I think is much better than Norton in the role), they stuck with him. Heck, with the death of Chadwick Boseman Marvel COULD have recast it but chose not to do so.
As it turns out I actually enjoyed Black Panther more when there's no Black Panther for the first 3/4ths of the new movie, but at that point a different actor/actress indeed stepped into the role. But it was handled with great sensitivity toward Boseman.
How many freakin' super hero movies can one watch? It's always the same story of good guy vs bad guy within the eye candy of set and costume design and CGI effects. They're putting on a gala show that dazzles the eyes and ears. Been there, done that at least ten times since they started making super hero movies. I didn't read comic books printed in 4 color process on rag paper in my teens. Warren Publishing's Creepy and Eerie magazine I preferred drawn with a steel quill pen and #3 sable brush in gorgeous black India ink on white illustration board by the likes of artists such as Esteban Maroto. Don't see any movies made from the characters in those magazines, but they were not about super heros with capes and special rings and stylized costumes. I agree with QT's opinion that Marvel super hero movies are stripping off the old movie star mystique from actors because the actors are only functioning as generic figures referenced from comic books who read the lines and emote and react to a situation none of us can relate to because it's fantasy escapism which doesn't stretch the emotional muscle and push the boundaries of story telling. A movie star is made a star by how they project on screen their personality and god given charm and essence that go way beyond their looks by reacting to situations that folks can identify with. Flame On! ....a Fantastic 4 reference. And I didn't read that comic book either but watched the movie which I liked.
Very true but they could have done it. Now, the negative backlash may have been substantial. To me even recasting Captain America or Iron Man (unless they were alternate world versions) would also have faced backlash though not for the same reasons. Marvel fans live up to the ‘FANatic portion as do Star Wars ones.
A large part of the appeal of the MCU is how they’ve been able to tell an ongoing, interlocking story much like the comics with mostly the same actors. May not appeal to you but does appeal to greatly to viewers who have been following the story. Not even DC / Warner Bros have been able to do this correctly or competently in a live action setting and have mostly given up trying. Big part of why the Marvel series stands out.
Yet, they'll set a double standard when they recast another actor that died, like supposedly how William Hurt's General Ross will be recast with Harrison Ford. When you pick and choose when it's "respectful" to recast a role, you're walking on thin ice. For my money, they should have recast Boseman. They could have handled it with respect and given another young star a chance to shine in this role.
On the upside, it would be fun if Ross dies, and then Indy dies in that movie too. Let Harrison Ford die in every franchise!
Ryan Coogler made the choice not to recast BP, not Marvel. And I’m guessing you’ve not seen Wakanda Forever given some of what you wrote.
I think it's big budget studio's answer to the success of multi-season TV shows in the age of streaming. How are they gonna compete with that and put arses in the seats when their whole model has been "one and done" and then possibly a remake or sequel or two or three. MCU has rather brilliantly out-multi-seasoned the multi-season TV show.
"Black Panther" became huge in the Black community, and they embraced it in a way that went beyond "fanaticism". That's why I think the loss of CB was nearly unique. It helped that the "BP" folklore indicates T'challa wasn't the first/only BP, so that left open the door for a "new BP" more easily than other characters...
General Ross was a supporting character. And see comment above about the way "BP" was seen in the Black community.
Definitely—and the only thing streaming really had on that level (that’s not an MCU show on D+) was Game Of Thrones.
It might seem like this is a fitting analogy but Westerns were extremely cheap to produce and they didn't necessarily come at the expense of cutting-edge fare. If anything, it was the second wave of the studio system infrastructure combined with the moral codes of the time that created the paradigm to which Tarantino refers. The modern emphasis on franchise-building is more akin to the 1980s in that it's prompted the major studios (and their parent conglomerates) to put the bulk of their resources behind wildly expensive content. Combine that with post-modern ideological codes—spoken or unspoken—and it's no wonder that you end up with so many movies that are purely entertaining, thematically shallow, or insufferably pandering. Just as in the past, however, smaller production companies come along to fill the void created when the system swings to extremes, leaving the middle ground sort of wide open. The MCU comes substantially preceded by a studio fixation on franchise-making and world-building. If anything, television's pivot toward higher production values and bigger talent is the response to the paradigm shifts in film, not the other way around. Or at the very least, it's a feedback loop that runs both ways. Kevin Feige basically picked up where previous franchise models left off but figured out a way (brilliantly, I agree) to deliver consistency across the entire spectrum--one doesn't really need to bring TV into it to understand why or how he pulled it off. To my knowledge, this thing was well underway before stuff like "Game of Thrones" came along.
S'funny. You'd think this 'super-hero' phase in cinema is something new!!! Howzabout Tarzan Zorro Sherlock Holmes Robin Hood Superman Universal Monsters Endless Pirates Endless Cowboys Endless Science Fiction Endless cops and robbers .....it isn't even cyclical, it's a constant since the beginning of cinema (and tv for that matter), is now and forever shall be! In other words, they've figured out what makes them the most money! Always has and always will be about the money.
Franchise and world building, yes. But not in the production of such a strategically interlocked two dozen or more movies, i.e., universe. Sopranos more than any other show changed people's thinking about multiseason TV and I'm saying that change is what presaged MCU. Of course films influenced TV. But as a sign that it now bleeds both ways more than ever, you have movie stars now appearing in TV shows with much greater frequency.
This is true but historically speaking, it creates a gap in the market for edgier fare. In the 1960s and 1970s, the collapse of the studio system and the dismantling of the Hayes Code ushered in a new era of filmmaking and found the directors taking more creative control over their output, with executives kind of scrambling around to figure out what worked. Then movies like "Jaws," "Rocky," and "Star Wars" came along while stuff like "Heaven's Gate" failed on a level so spectacular that it essentially tanked a major studio, hence the end of New Hollywood. Toward the end of the decade, the indie film market explodes and we see more challenging mainstream fare moving into the 1990s. Does it mean there was no challenging fare released in the middle of the 1980s? Of course not. The market is huge and there are always going to be multiple kinds of movies co-existing. But when Tarantino makes these points, he's referring to broader industry trends that are often kind of obvious. I get that but what I'm saying is that Kevin Feige kind of picked up where previous models left off by taking the world-building mentality of something like the "Star Wars" franchise and extending it across an entire studio's output. He might have been partially inspired by the direction TV was taking but it could've happened regardless because all the seeds were there. If anything, the comic books themselves kind of provided the groundwork because they did a similar thing. Okay, but a major reason that movie stars are migrating to TV is just as easily the result of Marvel's effect on filmmaking as it is the result of The Sopranos' effect on television. Bear in mind that shows like The Sopranos can lead to an actor being forever associated with one particular character, which isn't something that would've appealed to major movie stars during the first decade of the 2000s. Nowadays, it's a different landscape.
Also to add to this list: Aliens Predator Terminator Robocop Halloween Nightmare On Elm Street Friday The 13th Halloween Saw Conjuring and spinoffs Fast & Furious John Wick Harry Potter / Beasts Pirates Of The Caribbean Ghostbusters reboots/remakes Uncharted Pixar Minions movies Hunger Games Twilight 50 Shades Of Softcore Porn Hollywood scream about art but they love their cash cow franchises. Incidentally, I’ve also read that Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film began the obsession with tracking the opening weekend box office take.
The modern studio system template didn't go away in the 1990s, but it took more risks in the wake of directors like Tarantino and Soderbergh. Keep in mind that in the 1980s and 1990s, mid-range adult dramas (Rain Man, Good Morning Vietnam, Pulp Fiction) could generate serious box office revenue. This once again veers away from Tarantino's original points. He's not so naive as to think that Hollywood isn't about profit. He's saying that there are distinct eras in which risks are nurtured and other eras in which they're suppressed.
Again, this is Tarantino and others clinging to a bygone era and a mentality that if something isn't on the silver screen, it doesn't count. Streaming has arguably taken more risks than you're liable to see in the multiplexes, or from the supposed auteurs. Tarantino's idea of "taking risks" now is setting his films in the slave-holding era so his characters can utter the N-word 1,000 times.
What an extreme oversimplification on multiple fronts. For starters, Tarantino has expressed time and again that he thinks the industry moves in cycles so he's not really clinging to anything at all. Secondly, the "risks" these streaming services take are often little more than letting an auteur do whatever the heck they want to typically forgettable results and achieving almost no cultural impact at large and certainly not moving the dial any given direction. Something like "Blonde" would be a good example of actual modern risk-taking--even if it kind of fell flat among audiences--but no one is arguing that these films don't exist. Again, it's about the state of the industry in terms of cultural impact and broader trends, not individual counter-examples (how is this so hard to grasp?). I would also add that the overwhelming majority of streaming content is either generic garbage or a failed attempt at relevance. The rest usually takes the form of an under-nourished auteurist project that would have probably benefited from a few executive notes. Unfortunately, the kind of executives who would have provided those notes don't really exist outside of a few production shingles. And associating Tarantino's idea of "taking risks" to the use of the N-word is so cloyingly indicative of our current paradigm that it basically reinforces the very thing he's talking about. Perhaps you can see if Vox is hiring.
