Sometimes it's good to support less known heroes instead of just focusing on popular ones like Wolverine, though
No disrespect but I dont see how I am to be in agreement. lol. As person, who has been around for long even before the Blade 98 movie, there is just way too much stuff here I have read that is was not the historical reality. So I will just go through some of them.
1. It was never about X-MEN at the expense of others, it was simply about what people got into on their own terms, to make a false narrative it was about x-men at the expanse of others and marvel forced xmen on top then lets ask the next truthful question why did it not work with Inhumans and other IPs in the 2010s, Disney in truth started pushing other IPS and they did try to factually bury X-MEN and water down their universe, even to the point, writers were told not to create mutants characters because by the legal clause marvel had with fox. Fox will own those characters in movies by default. However disney push to bury xmen all failed in the end. Also in return, it really did not do much for the MCU IP. I still see GOTG and Iron Man still have zero presence outside movies.
2. While Avengers movies made billions, you have to admit Avengers movies have not carried as much substance as we did like, at least if you stated watching comic films in the 2000s. When it was just x-men or even Spiderman in the early movies age of films in the 2000s, you did not see anyone in the business claiming comic films are bad, or are hurting cinema and are just kids advertisements for toys. The billion dollar Avengers films have not been the best artistic discussion to have due to how manufactured they are and follow a formula. Also X-MEN will never completely have the stigma of been part of a very cooperate movie brand where their directors don't do much and everyone knows these movies are just watered down action comedy by Disney. this point matters and maybe the most important for a series that has movies in their good days good range from X-Men 1 to Logan. this a good advantage that x-men and Spiderman have.
I think some keep underestimating how much of an issue this is, just even 2 days the director of Dune slammed Avengers MCU films as all copy and paste. Would he have said that about X-MEN , 21 years ago or even Spiderman or even the F4 films that everyone apparently hated? It is not rocket science to say in 2021 that cinematic movies are really losing all credibility in a serious conversation about film making and it is going to get worse.
3. The fan division Avengers movies caused in 2012 was not nice. why weren't some just satisfied with the MCU and the Avengers been their top films because that was the cross over event. The MCU has done great so far with their b list IPs, however there was this shallow movement to try and get x-men and Spiderman to the MCU after the 2012 Avengers films and this caused a lot of fan division in marvel, because prior to then, many marvel fans, did did not even think or known there was a separation of the IPs. we did not have to get Spiderman and X-MEN film to crossover or share a link just to enjoy those films.
However this was not the case on the Avengers side and that is not a definition of popularity. if mcu was so prominent and popular than it should not have been pushed so hard on xmen or spiderman even before disney bought fox. Sony at that point got intimidated to hand over the rights to Spiderman, we even had an Avengers Actor, literally demanding Sony return the rights to Marvel. Why do this is you are popular?
https://www.floor8.com/posts/jeremy-...u-01djtm03rf40
Jeremy Renner Calls Out Sony and Asks for Spider-Man to Be Brought Back to MCU
Does this also help that the Avengers and MCU Spiderman films don't even hold a candle to the beloved Sam Raimi films that he directed himself . Renner was also way out of line.
4. lastly as for pop culture standings, to be fair and keeping it real, after what Martin Scorsese said in 2019, pop culture has kept a somewhat distance from Avengers and Marvel movies. Avengers is way too synonymous now as a Disney very very cooperate product that I don't think it can ever be taken seriously in the same way you can take A good Batman or XMEN piece seriously in pop culture. In 2021, you will gain more credibility talking about the impact X-MEN 2000 had on comic films by forcing the genre to grow up than talking about any Avengers films, because even pop culture still has their limits of how much they can reduce their own intellectual commentary to balance out the more dumbed down stuff and with the backlash of comic films, It is best Avengers leave things alone after Endgame and that movie has ran it course because in terms of popularity that is influential to the comics. that is as far as it will go. RDJ is now retired for one.
Iron Man is done everywhere unless RDJ comes back. The character has gone back to the d list. X-MEN or Spiderman are not defined by Tobey Maguire or Hugh Jackman and there is nothing their movies even in the MCU will ever do that will make them get of the a list in the comics or in pop culture. this is the difference.
Last edited by Castle; 09-18-2021 at 04:51 PM.
Buddy you are very mistaken if you think Denis Villeneuve particularly appreciates Spider-man or X-men. The big difference is that blockbusters as a whole have destroyed the mid budget movies over the last 15 years. Hollywood very rarely produces movies with a 60 million budget nowadays, and almost all of them are action movies. Nearly every non-action movie ends up getting the budget of an "independent film" and the rest are blockbusters.
And on top of that, I'm pretty sure that 65% of those blockbusters are superhero movies. That's what these filmmakers are complaining about.
Generally agree with what has been said here. Becoming a Marvel fan in the early 90s, I saw how popular Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Hulk, and the X-Men were. I think the prevailing belief was because a lot of those characters were outsiders and the oppressed. They also had the top talent working on their titles. Avengers were there, but I remember people feeling that someone like Captain America was passe and hokie. Iron Man was cool though.
That's why I was drawn to the Avengers in the late 90s by the way. Because I started to see them as the underdogs. They had the title of "Earth's Mightiest Heroes" but no one seemed to know. Every issue they had to prove that they deserved that title. Even now, with the Avengers becoming THE Marvel team, the iconic heroes of pop culture who are in multi-million/billion dollar movies, I still see them as the underdogs, a group of misfits who have just enough firepower, guts, and willpower to win in the end.
"I am a man of peace."
"A man of peace...who fights like ten tigers."
Justice League was made up of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman their golden trio and that was meant to be the next more relatable version of a team in DC. Marvel already had a team of more uniqueness to itself with X-MEN and F4, that functioned more as a team of family. mutants are a race and the F4 are a family, that went through the same one event that changed them forever.
Also Justice League had stronger comic book stories than Avengers even if I remove the Disney watered down influence of Avengers in the movies and JL had a great long running cartoon in 2002-2006. Which no offence, where doing stories in cartoons, Avengers movies would not even touch.
Avengers main attraction has always been the crossover of the c list and d listers, but even that has its limits and this is why when Spiderman came into the MCU. It has worked against Spiderman. Spiderman is less relevant because no one will ever accept Spiderman is Iron Man jnr because his established persona in the comics are way more impactful than any movie will ever be.
I attribute this to Disney more. It was no secret that once Disney bought Marvel, Disney tried to make their comics line up more with their movies and that meant the ips film right they did not own were getting axed.Marvel didn't exactly place the Avengers at the forefront of their universe until The Ultimates in 2002 or so and then New Avengers in 2004 (or thereabout).
For a while, the goal in the comics was to replace Spiderman with Iron Man, Replace Avengers/Inhumans with X-MEN and just cancel the F4 comics, which they did even if F4 was still selling better than many other c list and d listers
But I think Disney has realised now that movies are not as influential as the comics and their movies are just money machines. so they have kind of sort of given up trying to hard with the comics and movies link. LOL. For you to try and replace Iron Man with Spiderman, you better be sure you will be willing to build a lore for Iron Man that will not need a bigger marvel universe to rest on, Disney could barely do that and that meant that was far more less likley to do so with Avengers/Inhumans X-MEN , at least not when the x-men universe itself is bigger than the MCU IP universe.
The lesson here to be learned is decades quality of substance matters more than quantity of cooperate decision. Although this is comics, it is still a very standard business model you see in the entertainment industry everyday, the C and D list marvel characters are in the same place as many celebrities or pop stars that achieve fame very fast and very mass-manufactured for instance reality tv or social media or joining a manufactured record label boyband , However comparing them and their longevity to veteran a list entertainers like Robert Deniro or Lionel Richie is just not the same thing.
Last edited by Castle; 09-18-2021 at 04:52 PM.
You do know the reason we are even talking of movies is because there used to be this silent rule in the genre, maybe as far back as Superman 78 that the movies and comics should still feel separate. part of this rule is what helped Batman's brand survive the damage of Batman and Robin in 97. This rule has gotten diluted over the years on Marvel's end, and as some has already admitted, the C and D list marvel characters are now defined by this movies, this is the source of their ''popularity'' so the next best question is, what is in the movies? that is actually going to keep them relevant when they stop making them?
Iron Man could have truly been the Batman of Marvel, but he is not and never likely will be. Even if the new batman films is bad and flops, Batman will still be his own thing in the comics away from movies. Cannot say the same of Iron Man or GOTG or Ant Man or Black Panther. Do you know there was a time some art drawing in the comics started looking very much like RDJ himself. That is not how to maintain popularity, talk far less of longevity and what Spiderman, F4 and X-Men has had in good abundance. longevity
I cannot even see how Iron Man will be more popular than Dr Doom in 20 years, with no RDJ MCU films that disney always used for their marketing, unless something drastically happens in Marvel that changes the poor business model they have now where they think interchanging comics and films is a good thing. screen rant was wise enough to write about this crappy business model recently.
https://screenrant.com/avengers-show...inhumans-flop/
Most superhero films succeed, but if a Marvel property bombs, the company will erase the heroes in the comics...and the Inhumans prove it.
The sadder part of this is, only the original c and d list characters all now boosted by the MCU are not immune to this business model. Inhumans being the causality of all. It is safe to say Spiderman, X-MEN and F4 are.
If you want to test the longevity of F4 and how this business model also fails, the answer is seeing how people got more mad at their comics getting cancelled than their 2015 film bombing and getting panned by critics.
Last edited by Castle; 09-18-2021 at 06:15 PM.
That's a mistake Marvel made for many, many years.
Back in the day, Marvel concentrated all their top talent on the X-titles; Marc Silvestri, Whilce Portacio, Jim Lee and even Rob Liefeld made their names off the X-titles. It took until Heroes Reborn and Heroes Return for Marvel to put A-list talent on their non-X-men and non-Spider-man books. After the crash of the industry, Marvel then realized that having a deep successful roster of characters is necessary as opposed to just relying on X-men and Spider-man.
Honestly, I think having Sony and Fox handle the Spider-man and X-men movies was a good thing for the fans. If Marvel had the rights to X-men and Spider-man they would have likely started off with them and we won't have the MCU that we have today
Last edited by Username taken; 09-18-2021 at 06:28 PM.
I can speak only for myself, but when I was a kid all of my friends knew who X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man were. I can vaguely recall a few mentions of Iron Man and Hulk, but nowhere near the others. Almost everyone I knew watched X-Men: The Animated Series, Spider-Man: The Animated Series, and knew of reruns of old Fantastic Four cartoons. This was before the X-Men or Spider-Man movies started.
But now that Black Widow movie box office performance did not reach the full expectations and even Scarlett was sueing Disney for releasing the movie simultaneous release. Do you think Marvel will cancel her solo run soon?
The whole sentence is right. Do you rather support different mutants spotlight issue or a bunch of endless Wolverine titles.
I will chose the X-Men but at the same time I need to change the enviroment by meeting new, raw characters instead of the same popular over again.
Last edited by LAWtoyoto 432; 09-18-2021 at 06:40 PM.
This is from comichron:
Marvel did not publish sales figures for the title for a very long time, but by the time it did, Iron Man was a mid-range seller along with the other Avengers titles. The series peaked above 200,000 copies in the mid-1980s during David Michelinie and Bob Layton's first run on the title; it approached that level again several times before collapsing during the market recession of the mid-1990s.
https://www.comichron.com/titlespotlights/ironman.html
As I mentioned earlier, Iron Man was a pretty big seller (from the charts in the link, it was doing around 300k in the late 1970s and early 1980s). The title was pretty big back then especially when Micheline handeld it. Not X-men or Spider-man big, but was quite successful. There's a reason Marvel went with Iron man and Hulk as the first MCU movies.
In the 1980s, the other Avengers titles were very much in the top 20 (FF while being an Avengers title was massive back then and was in the top 10). The link below is just from capital city distribution because other distributors figures are not readily available.
https://www.comichron.com/monthlycom...03Capital.html
As i said before, I'm old enough to remember the core Avengers characters being fairly popular back in the day. They weren't as big as Spider-man or X-men but they were top sellers until the late 1980 and 1990s. It took a lot of relaunches and billion dollar movies to get them back into prominence.
The Avengers always felt like the least Marvel of all titles.
Marvel rightly or wrongly has this ethos of being edgy anti-establishment rabble-rouser types. How much of that is hot air or fanboy huffing (i.e. "Sega does what Nintendon't!") is up in the air, but basically the idea was Marvel was more edgy than DC.
--The Fantastic Four aka the first family didn't have secret identities were explorers rather than a super-team and Ben Grimm keeps backbiting on Richards and Johnny Storm.
--The X-Men protect and hate the world that fears them.
--Spider-Man is the menace but also the nicest of all superheroes.
In the middle of all this you have The Avengers who are establishment, government sponsored, high-powered superheroes who are feted and publicly loved. They are basically copypasta of the Justice League and to me the Avengers as a team is a case of Marvel deciding to basically become the new boss, same as the old boss.
The fact that the Avengers were for most of their history filled with second-stringers and B and C List characters who can't front their own titles and who could be killed off and have embarrassing things happen to them or do embarrassing things made them interesting. Having Hank Pym build a genocide robot, abuse his wife, get kicked out and essentially quit as a superhero and become a civilian again isn't the kind of thing you can do with a banner title, but mostly they've made it work with Hank who has never really recovered, nor is recoverable, into becoming as he once was.
For me the Avengers were most interesting in the 80s during Roger Stern's run. The other time I liked the Avengers was Hickman's run (where it's basically Fantastic Four but under "The Avengers" logo which you can do because the Avengers don't really have any lore of their own).
The MCU's success with The Avengers for me isn't so much a vindication of the brand as the fact that the MCU did the team-up movie first. They beat DC to the race and put out Avengers before justice league, Thanos before Darkseid, Ultron before Brainiac (or Anti-Monitor or insert Evil-AI from DC). Justice League came first in comics and if WB/DC hadn't f--ked things so badly they could have gotten Justice League first and we might see a different ballgame.
In either case, the Avengers comics haven't seen any fundamental sales rise with the movies, nor Iron Man for that matter. Mostly the comics have been the same as it always was and has seen no move in the needle either way.
Last edited by Revolutionary_Jack; 09-18-2021 at 06:44 PM.
I 100% agree with the bolded.The fact that the Avengers were for most of their history filled with second-stringers and B and C List characters who can't front their own titles and who could be killed off and have embarrassing things happen to them or do embarrassing things made them interesting. Having Hank Pym build a genocide robot, abuse his wife, get kicked out and essentially quit as a superhero and become a civilian again isn't the kind of thing you can do with a banner title, but mostly they've made it work with Hank who has never really recovered, nor is recoverable, into becoming as he once was.