cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/18397465
It’s been six years since Steve Rodgers handed over Captain America reigns to Sam Wilson, Aka The Falcon, in “Avengers: Endgame.” Wilson (Anthony Mackie) will be the lead of Julius Onah’s “Captain America: Brave New World.” A trailer was released in the summer.
Two different cuts of the film test screened last week, and plot details for one of the cuts have leaked online. The person who attended didn’t seem to like the movie all that much.
Based on the folks I’ve spoken to, those who attended were either given a red or green bracelet and were split up into two different theaters. The reactions I’ve heard have not been very kind to this movie, which is being described as “inessential” and “flat.”
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Reshoots on ‘Brave New World’ happened in August. This could explain why two different cuts were shown. Last year, after receiving negative test scores in another screening, and Marvel themselves underwhelmed by an early cut they saw of the film, ‘Brave New World’ was delayed to February 2025. Extensive reshoots were called, with “three major action sequences” having been filmed, between May and August 2024 in Atlanta.
‘Brave New World’ had originally wrapped filming in June 2023, and was set for a July 2024 release date, but it’s now turned into this monstrous mess for Marvel. You just don’t push a movie this big out of your calendar, and then decide to dump it in February, unless major trouble is brewing.
Last December, Matthew Orton was hired by Marvel to pen “additional scenes and material”. Orton’s work was shot during this summer’s reshoots. They’ve also added new characters to the story. Will audiences even show up to a Captain America movie that doesn’t star Chris Evans?
I mentally checked out of the MCU after Endgame. The only Marvel content I've seen beyond that is Guardians of the Galaxy 3.
I watch pretty much all of it still. Eventually. Sometimes months later. I think Echo is the only one I haven't finished, but I saw several of them months late.
It's mostly fine, but that's about as far as I'd go. Among other issues, Multiverses dangle the specter of irrelevance in front of every story. I know it's not always there in the script, but the meta commentary that everyone is replaceable and any event can be undone unavoidably reduces the stakes and my investment in characters. If they bother to make a point of concluding the "multiverse" arc, it needs to be something that promises to make the storytelling ~~crutch~~ mechanic of crossing between them much harder to invoke in the future. It can be utter handwavium, but I need that promise from the Marvel Industrial Complex to me as an audience member.
Then more generally, the Marvel "house style" is either so overwhelming that it ends up the equivalent of pleasant but low-stakes episodic TV from the before-times with 23 episodes per season, or else it's shoehorned into a halfhearted attempt to let a director or showrunner do their thing and reduces the effectiveness of both. There was good TV then, and there is good Marvel now, but the specialness has worn off.
I was wondering how they were going to pull off multiverse shenanigans in a movie series and it turns out they just weren't!
I hear this a lot, but except in "What If..." for one character, they've never even hinted at doing this. I understand that it's always hanging there, but is that a real concern or an imaginary one?
Tony invented time travel and it's clear by the end of Endgame they can use it whenever. However no one ever says that lowers the stakes even though clearly everything can be fixed by that too.
Every story could just be solved by having Thor and/or Captain Marvel show up. They're invincible. They have super strong powers. And yet we're understanding when they don't show up and solve everything.
Again I understand the concern, but I feel like they are imagined and not what is being told.
I can assure you after Secret Wars that will be the case.
Wasn't the time travel pretty clearly multiversal in nature, though? They wouldn't be able to change their own past, only create a different future for another universe.
It's pretty hand wavy, even though Hulk explains. For example Steve goes back and stays in the past, but it also becomes the future for everyone else. Or did we change which universe we followed when Steve stayed in the past?
I believe it's implied that Steve traveled back to our timeline for the end of the movie.
It'd be real odd for just one scene to follow that logic while every other one doesn't.
It was ambiguous. He also mentioned it being hard to just sit back and watch as the events of Avengers one occurred IIRC, which implied he needed to sit back to avoid affecting the timeline.
This was also going to be my response since I see this “anyone can come back” mentioned often, because of the Multiverse. Thanos: Dead, Tony Stark: Dead, Cap: Gone, Black Widow: Dead, HawkEye: likely retiring. The only two that came back were Gamora, because James Gunn had a story to finish, and Loki, which resulted in one of my favorite shows and was mostly isolated. Even without the “multiverse” aspect of it, heroes can come back from the dead in many ways.
Hell, they could easily have done a “Nomad” show of Cap and his adventures with Peggy in the new timeline in the past, but they opted not to do that.
I forgot about Gamora, largely because it isn't a drop in, it's a whole film to understand that it isn't a drop in.
In terms of Cap (Steve Rogers), I fully expect them to cash that in someday, but honestly I'm ok with that. Not day one, but someday.
I liked Loki (esp the season 2 ending) but I can understand why others didn't. It's slow and attempting to be more cerebral than it really is. But IMO it's still far better than all the films. I watched the whole Antman quantumania movie and I honestly couldn't tell you what it was about.
You're missing surprisingly little.
IW + Endgame were such a high note to end on, they basically killed the series because everything else dies in comparison.
Gotg was fun, and well executed, but otherwise there's basically been nothing, except Loki which was excellent, but then Deadpool and wolverine tried and fell over themselves in my book.