MCU Post Mortem (Part 2)

MCU Post Mortem (Part 1)


The previous post had the big 4 things I would do to make the MCU franchise better and more cohesive by focusing on big problems. This post is more of a reflection on the MCU in general, and a list of small things I would do to improve it. 


First, reflections.

I honestly didn’t think the MCU thing would work out at first. When Iron Man was first announced, I kinda thought that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. See, to understand that, you have to know a little history about Marvel Comics and their movie deals.

In the 90’s when I was reading/collecting comics, basically for every comic starring Iron Man, Thor, Cap, Doctor Strange, Daredevil, or cosmic stuff that was sold, 15 copies of something Spider-Man related were sold, and probably 20 copies of something X-Men related were sold. In fact, at one point they decided to kill off almost every major character that wasn’t X- or Spider-related and reboot them in a pocket universe with famous and well liked artists to try and garner favor with the masses. It sorta worked, but they still weren’t selling really well.


When the movie deals were cut, Marvel was just trying to get cash to stay afloat because they had overspent and overextended on building the company based off of a misunderstanding of sales figures. They sold the rights to various well known characters to different studios - X-Men and the Fantastic Four to 20th Century Fox, Spider-Man and Ghost Rider to Sony/Columbia, Hulk to Universal, etc. And once the first X-Men and Spider-Man movies got the ball rolling, we got a slew of Marvel movies that were mediocre by today’s standards, but pretty good when compared to the horrible Captain America or Fantastic Four movies made in the 90’s. While I was glad to see some of these get made, I was sad that because of all of the properties being divided up to different studios, they could never cross over.

So when I saw rumors of Iron Man, I wasn’t particularly impressed or pumped. But the first trailer made me kinda excited. And when the movie was over, I was thoroughly impressed and couldn’t wait for more. Once Tony walked into the end of the Incredible Hulk, I got psyched up for a possible crossover, but withheld my excitement because I was pretty sure they’d screw it up somehow. After all, the memory was still fresh of how badly they had dropped the ball on X3, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Spider-Man 3, Elektra, etc. As the MCU got ramped up for Avengers, I kept waiting for the studio to screw it up, but beyond stumbling on Iron Man 3 (and later releasing Captain Marvel), they never really did. I never thought I would have been excited for Ant-Man, or Guardians of the Galaxy, but damn if those weren’t fun movies.

That’s not to say everything was perfect. There are a few little minor bumps that I would love to see them do just to make the continuity tighter, especially when actors are replaced. So here is a list of small (inconsequential) changes in addition to the big four changes from the last post that would just put the sugar on top of the cherry on top of the MCU sundae.

• Deepfake Don Cheadle onto Terrence Howard in Iron Man, as well as John Slattery onto the image of Howard Stark during the “history of Tony” part. (for continuity’s sake)
  
  
• Deepfake Mark Ruffalo onto Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk, and redo Hulk’s CGI to match the rest of the MCU.
  
  
• Fix Thor’s hair, beard, and eyebrows in both Thor and Avengers to match what they looked like starting with Thor: The Dark World.
  
  
• Take off Cap’s neck guard and give him back his chin-strap helmet in Avengers.
  
  
• Have Tony give someone a tour of all of the suits he’s built, explaining that some go on/off easily, some are waterproof, some have more defense or firepower or speed, etc.
  
  
• The sub-plot of Thor bathing in "the water of sight" needs to be re-worked a bit. 
  
  
• Take out some of the one-liners from Guardians Vol. 2 - like two from Drax and another from someone else. Some of them felt forced.
  
  
• The scene in Civil War where Ant-Man instructs Cap to throw the truck at his enlarging disc should have been done by Hawkeye - trying to hit a small object with another small object seems more like a Hawkeye thing to me. 
  
  
• I know it requires extensive planning and is a huge headache, but I really liked the first two seasons of Agents of SHIELD for their connectedness to the movies. The reason it stopped was because of one producer in particular (Ike Perlmutter) and it kinda ruined the effect. So the change would be to somehow incorporate Coulson’s team as well as the Netflix heroes (Daredevil et al.) into the movies somehow and vice versa. One example could be just having Iron Man fly over Mike Peterson's sister's house for Ace's sake (this would only require a small CGI Iron Man, not Robert Downey Jr) in Agents of SHIELD. It would then make Secretary Pierce's comments to Cap about Tony better in Winter Soldier. 
  
  
• Vibraninum needs to be downgraded from “magical bullshit material” (thanks Critical Drinker for that term) that can miraculously heal spinal cord injuries and all the other stuff it can do. Shuri needs to be taken down a couple of notches as well in terms of the fact that she's apparently smarter than Tony and Bruce combined. Her wrist blaster things were good, though.
  
  
• Someone needs to give Wanda a power boost in Infinity War to enable her to destroy the Mind Stone.
  
  
• Make Thor work out a couple of weeks while they’re building the time machine, and a little more after finding out he’s worthy. Also, Critical Drinker’s suggestions would be good too.
  
  
• Just before the "portals" scene, Thanos should have told Cap to give up, and he would grunt out a, "I can do this all day."
  
  
• Taken out the "A-Force" Scene and given the gauntlet to Mantis. Specifically take Wasp out. It makes no sense for the heroes who are trying to get the gauntlet to the van to have half of the team trying to fix the van fly all the way across the battlefield just to pose with all the other women.
  
  
• In the background of the “portals” scene of Endgame, we should see Daredevil, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones, Deathlok, Ghost Rider, and Daisy Johnson but never have the camera focus on them so that people who haven’t seen the shows don’t feel like they’re missing out, while those who did watch them get a little easter egg. 
  
  
• Coulson should have been hiding behind a bush or post at Tony’s funeral with a nod and a wink from Fury.
  
  
• Eliminate all of the Skrulls elements from Spider-Man: Far From Home and just make them regular Fury/Hill with a couple of dialogue changes. Since I am intending this to be the last movie, take out the cliffhanger of Spidey’s identity reveal.

Finally, I would have had a little more planning on the music side of things. One advantage George Lucas had with the 6 Star Wars and 3 Indiana Jones films (yes, that's an accurate count of both franchises) is that he got the same composer to do all of the movies. Besides just being the best in the business, he got to plan out musically what happened across movies and not feel like he needed to show up the previous composer or anything. Williams developed themes for characters and used them at appropriate times in multiple movies so they all sound like they're part of the same story. Also see Howard Shore and the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies for something similar. 

As it is, each Iron Man movie had its own composer who scrapped the previous guy's work and inserted his own. Between the 3 movies and three themes, it's hard to nail down what Iron Man sounds like. There was even a fourth motif made for Spider-Man: Homecoming when Tony showed up to help Peter with the ferry problem. As such, there's no real definitive musical cue that can readily be associated with the character, and that's kinda disappointing to me. 

I felt that Brian Tyler, while composing his own Thor theme in The Dark World, did make it similar enough to Patrick Doyle's more regal theme that it was hard to distinguish upon first hearing it, and felt like an evolution of the previous theme. John Ottman did something similar for X2 where he took Michael Kamen's theme and improved it. Danny Elfman also put his own spin on the Avengers theme in Age of Ultron, but his contribution was a more divergent than Tyler or Ottman's offerings. 

Obviously, getting one guy to do the whole MCU would be unfeasible, so my proposal would be to hire one guy to do the Iron Man trilogy, someone different to do the Thor trilogy, someone different to do the Cap trilogy, etc. Finally, hiring one guy to do all 4 Avengers films and having him incorporate the themes from the other movies when applicable. 

We did get a little taste of this here and there. Alan Silvestri did the music for both Captain America: The First Avenger and Avengers, so we heard Cap's theme throughout the movie and some AC/DC when Iron Man shows up in Germany. Brian Tyler put a little bit of Cap's theme into Thor: The Dark World when Loki looked like Cap. And we got to hear the theme from the first Thor movie when Thor sits on his throne at the end of Ragnarok. 

But we could have used a lot more of that. Hearing the Hulk theme after Wanda messed with his mind in Age of Ultron, or hearing the Spider-Man theme mixed with the Avengers theme when he's trying to move the gauntlet in Endgame would have been epic.