Does anyone hate MCU films?

[Cyke]

Social consciousness is in the fabric of X-Men, they don’t do it just to look like they’re woke. Only recently the MCU is doing something to pretend like they are woke.

It's that kind of gatekeeping that hampers and contradicts activism, not promotes it -- and no one other than the communities that are centered by those topics are the authorities for it. BP and Captain Marvel were intentionally staffed by representation behind the scenes in key positions precisely to nail those topics on the head (and this is where Dr. Strange and Iron Fist failed). If anything, gatekeeping is more performative than sincere since it's not promoting, but controlling, and controlling is the exact opposite of what you look for when you're trying to build movements (if we're staying true to the X-Men, this is why Xavier preached human/mutant coalitions, rather than Magneto prioritizing the takedown of human supremacy).

And a reminder that Black Panther was made by Lee and Kirby specifically because there were no Black heroes coming from a place of Black empowerment back then -- almost all Black comic characters at the time (however few of them there were) came from some stereotypical but ultimately subservient or inferior role. Don McGregor explicitly had Panther fight white supremacy in the mid 70s. And you would cause an uproar of social media proprortions if you said Christopher Priest and (especially) Ta-Nahisi Coates were posers -- and yet the BP MCU material is straight form all those names, utilized and directed by Ryan Coogler, whose first film brought attention to Oscar Grant's murder -- one of the pivotal moments in the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. That's a far, far cry from pretending to be woke, given all those collective CVs. The same way Lee and Kirby tapped into their observations on race and experiences as Jewish men to write the X-Men -- that same approach has to be credited to the life of Black Panther just as much.

And same with Captain Marvel and Chris Claremont's personal quest to depict more and more powerful women on page -- that's why the in the mid-late 80s, the X-Men were outnumbered by the X-Women, and why he placed so much emphasis on Jean, Storm, and Kitty. When women writers in the last decade carried on Claremont's traditions in writing Carol, it propelled her own popularity. But those women writers were able to do so because they had a lens and experience that Claremont didn't have by virtue of not being a woman, and it's something that Claremont encouraged of his female successors. So likewise for Captain Marvel and the build-up into other media, it cannot be dismissed with such cynicism if we're affording the X-Men a great amount of sincerity.

If we can give the X-Men that leeway to perform their politics, we have to afford that to other properties, too; Star Trek was doing it to a wider audience before the X-Men reached that level, after all, and social justice was woven into the fabric of Trek since the pilot. So what if the X-Men are famous for it? That doesn't mean they're the only ones that are allowed to do it. Others should be given the chance to do it without cynicism, and judging from the aforementioned think pieces and academic works, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and others are doing it in ways that promotes and fleshes out intellectual and activist discourse.

Franchises stay alive because they make money, yes. But Disney go way beyond this by flooding the market with three movies a year, that’s what I mean by cash grab.

Disney can because they have the capacity to do it, with an entire division devoted to just that corner. If Fox had the capacity and resources to do so, they would have -- that's a studio's dream. That's nothing to fault. No one complained about output in 2016, when Fox released Apocalypse and Deadpool in the same year. Fox's original plan for 2019 was to see the release of both Dark Phoenix and New Mutants, until the latter was pushed to 2020 and then ran into further release complications. There may have been complaints and concerns here or there about quality, but not quantity.