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Spider-Man, X-Men, Wolverine, Fantastic Four and other non Marvel Studios films.


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the three of us who went to see XMen DOFP last night.. none of us gave it more than a C+... which to us meant "Eh.. go see it in theaters but not something you'd have to see day 1.

 

One of the problems (to me) with the X-Men series is that it's so.. self-contained.. not meaning self-contained as in X-Men is all there is (although that's another thing against it compared to the various Avengers titles).. I mean, it seems like humanity is only there to give mutants something to fight about. Even the "good" mutants are seperate from the rest of humanity. There's none of the interaction that a Captain America has with normal Shield like folks.. or the connection Tony Stark has with Pepper Potts and Rhodey. The non-mutant world is only there to give the mutants something to fight over.

 

Oh, and the other thing that bothered me. Trask was arrested for selling state secrets. Not, you know, killing and dissecting people.

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T'other thing they're going to have to address is how these guys with similar powers are related to each other. Havoc obviously isn't Cyclops' little brother, but are we supposed to think that the two guys with energy projection powers and the same last name aren't related (when we know mutation is genetic). Is the Toad marine in DoFP the father of Brotherhood Toad in X-Men 1? Does Nightcrawler now no longer exist because his dad died before he could get Mystique up the duff?

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Late to the party but I liked Amazing Spiderman 2. It was fun. Going in I'm not expecting a potential best picture nominee, it's a fucking comic book movie. You gotta kinda turn your brain off a little for these movies. Sure the rubber suit Electro had on being zapped into the wires isn't exactly plausible but neither is a radioactive spider bite giving someone spider powers.

Garfield is too confident as Peter for sure but he is a fantastic Spiderman. I'm curious how a Sinister 6 movie would work. So the villains are the lead and we get a small amount of Spiderman and no Peter Parker? That's going to be a challenge on a few levels.

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Saw DoFP today, enjoyed it far more than I expected to.  It might be my favorite super hero movie of the past 15 years , though that owes more to not seeing a lot of the Marvel comic movies and often not liking the usual suspects (Nolan's Batman films were worth seeing once, but I wouldn't watch them again even if they're free on TNT.  Didn't care for Man of Steel, Winter Soldier, etc.).  The only comic book movie I've enjoyed nearly as much was Avengers and DoFP had much better plotting.

 

If nothing else, DoFP got me interested in renting First Class later this week.  Think I'll skip Wolverine and the other X-films, though.  i probably saw X-Man and X-2 when they first came out, anyways.

 

One thing that bugged me, Magneto seems to be making things up as he went along.  So, to prevent the dystopian future Wolverine came back to warn them about, Mags decides to just kill Mystique.  Ok, makes sense.  This has the unfortunate result of setting Trask on the path to creating the adaptive Sentinels, by giving Trask access to Mystique's blood.  Rather than reflect on his role in wrecking the future, Mags then hotwires the Sentinels and.... decides to hold the White House hostage and maybe kill the President (again) - all of this on tv, of course.  Hijacking the sentinels seemed like a good plan to scare off public support.  Trying to off the president and a few hundred civilians... not so much.

 

I know, the answer is that Mags is a mutant terrorist who doesn't believe in peaceful coexistence.  Still, if his plan was to off Trask and the president himself, why try to kill Mystique?

 

Seeing the "sendoff" of the present day cast at the end reminded me that the franchise - and comic book movies, in general - are attracting better actors these days.  I have no need to see James Marsden and Famke Janssen on the big screen if you can get Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence instead.  And JL's role used to be played by Rebecca Romijn, who as an actress makes a great supermodel.

 

Had fun.  May be the only Marvel movie I like this year (1-2 so far),  Planning on going to Guardians of the Galaxy because I love the Starlin cosmic stuff from the comics and really enjoyed the Abnett/Lanning cosmic books from earlier this century.  Also, I'm a big Everwood fan and never thought Chris Pratt would get another steady gig, so seeing him star in a major summer blockbuster is kinda odd.  But the movie still doesn't look like my thing.

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Lets not overreact here.  It's at 678 million world wide.  The rumored break-even point was something like 750 million.  That's not taking into account merchandise sales and dvd/blu-ray/digital sales, and eventually streaming rights/tv rights/etc and ppv and blah blah blah.

 

The movie isn't going to end up actually costing Sony money.  My guess is they probably scale down the budget a bit, but they aren't done.

 

You see about that.  All that sexy merchandise money, Sony gets none of it.  In 2011, Disney traded Sony any financial stake in the live-action movies in exchange for all the merchandising rights.  So Disney/Marvel controls all the Spidey merchandise.  Sony gets none of that.  

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So Marvel/Disney doesn't make anything from the X-Men/FF/Spidey movies, but they get all the merchandising money.  How much are we talking about?  I would think even the merchandising from a flop like Fantastic Four or a minor hit like ASM2 would amount to a fair bit.

 

There's a rumor going around that Marvel is going to cancel the Fantastic Four comic(s) until they get the movie rights back, and maybe cut promotion of the X-Men books for the same reason.  I've been trying to figure out how that helps them much in the long run.

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So Marvel/Disney doesn't make anything from the X-Men/FF/Spidey movies, but they get all the merchandising money.  How much are we talking about?  I would think even the merchandising from a flop like Fantastic Four or a minor hit like ASM2 would amount to a fair bit.

 

There's a rumor going around that Marvel is going to cancel the Fantastic Four comic(s) until they get the movie rights back, and maybe cut promotion of the X-Men books for the same reason.  I've been trying to figure out how that helps them much in the long run.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/business/media/disney-profits-soar-as-most-divisions-show-strength.html?_r=0

 

Per the above article, Iron Man and Marvel-related merchandise generated $200 million in operating income for first quarter 2013. 

 

http://adage.com/article/media/avengers-bulking-6-billion-marvel-licensing-machine/234572/

 

This article said the Marvel division of Disney generated $6 billion in retail merchandise sales in 2011.  So basically, they make more money from the merch than the film division.

 

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One of the problems (to me) with the X-Men series is that it's so.. self-contained.. not meaning self-contained as in X-Men is all there is (although that's another thing against it compared to the various Avengers titles).. I mean, it seems like humanity is only there to give mutants something to fight about. Even the "good" mutants are seperate from the rest of humanity. There's none of the interaction that a Captain America has with normal Shield like folks.. or the connection Tony Stark has with Pepper Potts and Rhodey. The non-mutant world is only there to give the mutants something to fight over.

I don't really agree with this, but I will say that Moira MacTaggert was missed in DOFP. Not that there was much room in an already stuffed movie to slot her in.

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It's funny, this talk of the merch. There's action figures for Captain America: Winter Soldier. There were figs for Avengers (still are). But there's not a single toy for DOFP. I don't think I've seen any toys for ASM2 either. I seriously just realized that.

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