The Smark Avengers - Vol 3, Ep 1: The Smark Avengers Talk About Marvel Films

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

How do you follow up 23 super successful movies? Release a bunch of stuff no one particularly cares about. How do you compete with the largest, multi-genre, crossover movie series of all time? Put out a bunch of stuff full of executive meddling that no one particularly cares about. Join Corey, Dylan, and Jon as they discuss the history of the MCU, crunch some numbers, and discuss whether or not the super hero genre will ever see the same heights again!

By attending this meeting, I consent to being recorded. All right. I wanted, yeah, I wanted to see, like, we're going to let everyone know they're being recorded, but Dylan Bies to the punch on that one. It's been a hot minute since we've all been recording a Skype call. So I guess it's nice to know that they've reminded us once more that we should. It's common courtesy. Let someone know they're being recorded, right?

I mean, I guess, but also if you're getting together to record a show, it would be weird if it wasn't recorded. Yeah, the expectations there. Well, hello, everyone. everyone. My name is Corey and with me is John and Dylan and this is the Smart Avengers. And it's been a hot minute since we've made one of these. Yep. I would say a whole year. It's been it's been about a year. When was the last one? Oh, gee, April. I think. I think April. It's not too bad. No, no. It's been worse. We've done worse.

With the worst episodes? Yes and no. No, all of our episodes have been the five star classics. So this is what, relaunch number three? I think so. Well, I mean, you know, it's in the spirit of comic books that you do relaunches every now and then, right? Yeah, this is a new number one. This is a reboot. Yeah, this is a reboot.

But not really, because we're still keeping the continuity from the old episodes. Yeah, so it's like the Suicide Squad movie that James Gunn did. It's exactly like the Suicide Squad film. it's both in canon and not in canon okay so it's a sequel but it's not a sequel I mean it's not a sequel really this is just a continuation of the show

yeah I mean this isn't like episode one this is like episode no this is volume three episode one oh but really it's like episode 17 or whatever the fuck we're on whatever number it is yes was it to be you making it a 17 I don't think we did. I think we got like six.

Editing. Editing takes time. Okay. Tics is pretty good. Yeah. Well, to kind of give everybody a reminder, this is a comic book and comic book related things show. So for our first episode of 2024, we decided that we were going to get together and talk about not necessarily the death, but the rapid. decline of the superhero genre. Yeah, the obvious decline of the used to be super hot superhero industry. So what we're talking about is we're going to really

parse this down to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the movies that came after the fact. Like, we're not going to get into the 90s Batman movies or, like, Ghost Rider, or the Blade Trinity, or anything like that. We're going to focus solely on, movies that occurred after the MCU officially launched and kind of just talk about the history of it talk about our own experiences with it and when or if we ever fell off

as well as kind of go over some some numbers and talk about some potential root causes as to why they aren't doing as hot as they used to so you know I guess if we're going to start anywhere we start at the beginning which the very first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie was Iron Man with Robert Downey Jr. That in addition to kind of restarting his career kind of gave birth to the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe specifically the end credit the very first end credit scene that people parody the fuck out of now, which is the Samuel L. Jackson telling somebody about the Avengers initiative, which I've been really thinking about lately.

Did they call themselves the Avengers before or after Phil Colson was killed by Loki? Or I can't remember that detail. I'm pretty sure it was before, yeah. I think it was always called the Avengers Initiative. Okay. Do we know why it was called the Avengers Initiative? Who knows? Yeah, because it would imply that something was done that we must avenge.

Yeah, yeah. But then I guess you could say the same for the comics, though, as well. like what was the thing that they were avenging in the first place when like they all came together to stop uh loki from whatever mischief he was up to it's a good point that is a great point actually that well i mean speaking of the avengers a series of movies came after that uh the edward norton incredible hulk is kind of forgettable because edward norton that was his one and done uh iron man two thor and uh captain america the first avenger and that led to the very first Avengers movie that saw these, but really kind of blew up the genre from that point on. Iron Man came out, I was in college. And that was, what, 15 or so years ago? Yep, 2008.

So did you guys, were you immediately on the, you know, there's this Iron Man movie coming out, I'm going to check it out. Did you know who Iron Man was? Like, what is, what is your, entry point into the Marvel Cinematic universe. Yeah, I think we knew who Iron Mountain was because, you know,

I'm going to assume that John also watched the Iron Mountain cartoon that was around in the 90s. Oh, yes. So we both. That started with Tony Stark with a sweet mullet hammer and some stuff. Yeah. We all remember that theme song.

The theme song was amazing, yeah. Class. So, you know, Iron Man, I don't know what it was about that Iron Man film because Iron Man was never like, you know, my favorite was always Spider-Man or the X-Men. I'm like, Iron Man's pretty cool. I'll go see him.

I liked the idea of Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man because I feel like there was a lot of like similarities between the two. You know, two very successful people that kind of like got derailed by alcoholism. And both of them have a mechanical. conical suit that allows him to fly. Yep.

He's like, Robert Daniel Jr. It's very, I mean, he got a lot of trouble with that suit. But I remember when he busted out in the back to school

Rodney Dangerfield movie. Yeah. I had a really, a lot of editing, take that out. Remember the bit in that Charlie Chaplin film we did where he was just one, one time he's this Iron Man. Like,

that's, I don't think. He's a silent Iron Man. Yeah. It was really weird. We're really impressive for the time. You know. The special effects were amazing.

Unbelievable. How did you do that? Still steam funk, though, you know, a lot of steam valves. Yeah. That's, this is what the people have been missing. So they had to like, you know, they had to start somewhere. And at the time, the Avengers, and if this is, if you listen to this and you came in through comics or maybe you just were interested in kind of seeing three strangers talk about this sort of thing. At the time, the Avengers were kind of on life support. comic book wise i think like when did um when did brian michael bendez's

Avengers new Avengers secret Avengers whatever when did that start i thought that was around 2005 2006 yeah so like it was getting some momentum in the comic book world but the Avengers were kind of a non-entity in pop culture uh i know fox had an avengers United We Stand cartoon series. But like to kind of give you some insight into that one, it kind of came about to replace the X-Men cartoon because it shared a lot of the same voice actors. But the main character on that one was Ant-Man slash Giant Man and the Wasp. And like they couldn't use Captain America or Thor or Iron Man even though they were in the opening credits.

They couldn't use any of the good Avengers. No. No. So the cast, it was like it was Ant-Man. slash Giant Man because he did both. The Wasp, Hawkeye, Tigra, Scarlet Witch, the Vision, and Wonder Man was in a few episodes before they did the Ultron storyline.

Hot down. Yeah, yeah. So he was, it was an interesting, a little eclectic run there. But yeah, no, it was not full of the heavy hitters that we, that we're all familiar with when we think of the Avengers. They didn't even have like Quicksilver. Yeah, so the Iron Man kind of kicked it off. Then we had Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, which I kind of think is largely forgettable.

We had Kenneth Branaghs. Some people, people really don't like Iron Mountain, too. I don't know what it was because, oh, geez, I'm forgetting the actor's name now. John, you'll know it. Played Justin Hammer. He was, uh, Sam Rockwell. Sam Rockwell. Sam Rockwell was one of the main villains.

Yeah. He was him and was it Mickey. I was going to say Mickey Roark. I was going to say Mickey Rooney and that's way all. He was playing his character from Breakfast at Tiffany's. We all got insulted on that one. Some deep cuts for people who watch older movies. So we had we had Thor with Kenneth Branagh directing, which I admire the man's restraint

not to cast himself as Thor. That's for you, Shakespeare people out there. Captain America, the first Avenger was after that. And then we had the Avengers movie. And like I said, that's when it kind of blew up in a big way. But we were kind of talking about how we got into it. I know you guys started with the Iron Man movie. Did you like see the others?

Yeah. Yeah. I think that was it, right? The way they wanted to work kind of worked out perfectly was that Iron Man was the first step in the rest of the story. And you watch Iron Man and go, that was a surprisingly good film. I wonder what else if they're going to do and then,

oh, if you liked Iron Man, you're going to like Thor and Captain America. Though, I think, Captain America, I don't think I seen. I think that was,

no, no, I did see the first one. It was the second one I didn't see. Oh, you didn't see Winter Soldier? No, that's the one I didn't see.

No. Oh, really? That's actually the one I liked. I don't know why. There's like a hand, there's a couple that I haven't seen and I don't know why,

but also I haven't been compelled enough to go back and see him. So I'm like, I get it. Captain Margo, whatever, he's got a shield. But the first Iron Man, after that once they teased, there was going to be more Avengers.

Because the first Iron Man was so good, you're like, okay, I'll give them the benefit of the diet hero. Let's see where it leads. And to the credit, a lot of the films that came after that were pretty good. You know? It kept you wanting to see the actual Avengers story. If we may,

see slightly into the smart part of our Smart Avengers title, it's kind of like building a rest to match, you know what I mean? Yeah. You pepper it out until you lead up to the main event. And Avengers was like the main event. Because I think all of us were like,

this is what is building to. None of us knew what was going to happen after that, but like it feels like this is what we're building to. And it worked, you know? Yeah. The Avengers was the, I saw that in the theater. I think I saw it twice.

Which I don't ever do. I've never, I think it's the only instance of my life that I've watched a movie more than once in the theater. Yeah, I went to see it twice too, but that's because I went with my friend the first time and she fell asleep. So we have to go see it again. I must have been that good, huh? From there, we go Iron Man 3, Thor to the Dark World, Captain America Winner's Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers Age of Ultron, Ant Man, and Captain, America Civil War, I will say, will be kind of a, I don't know exactly when the phase three cutoff is, but I'll say that we'll call it there just because of phase three.

Yeah, Civil Wars started phase three. Yeah. Choosing the end on Ant Man, choice. So again, I'm still in the period where I've seen all of these movies in the theater. I think, I think the one that people forget about the most is Thor II Dark World. Yeah, that's, I didn't say that one either. That's a cruel Christopher Eccleston, as our main. main villain. That made me a little sad because I do enjoy Christopher

Eccleston. I like him too. I didn't know he was the mean I haven't seen it so I have no oh yeah yeah he's he doesn't get to do much anyway so you're not awesome yeah it was a lot more drama between Thor and Jane Foster than anything if memory serves okay because that's why people pay attention to Thor isn't it yeah exactly that's what they care about when they're watching I mean we'll talk about it in a bit but I think Tycho Watiti found that out as Well, I don't think that was the problem. So we start phase three with Captain America's Civil War,

Dr. Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Spider-Man Homecoming, Thor Ragnarok, Black Panther, Avengers Infinity War, Ant Man and the Wasp, Captain Marvel, Avengers End Game, and Spider-Man far from home. I fell off. I guess if we're looking at it chronologically, the way that I saw these listed out, I guess I fell off after Ant-Man.

I didn't see... Wow. Thor and the Wasp. No, Ant Man and the Wasp. Thor and the Wasp. I didn't see. So that's like three so far I haven't seen. But the rest of them I did go to the cinema and watch. Yeah, same. I've watched all of them.

Pretty much all of them in the cinema as well. So. Yeah. And own the DVDs. Well, slash Blu-rays. The thing, whenever I watched the first Amman, I'm like, that was the one. Because like up to that point, like the ones I'd seen, they've been pretty much like bangor after banger again if i may or lay in the resting terms

but i'm not i was like i didn't think that was that good well part of civil war as well i think because i was familiar with the comic civil war and i'm like i don't know if that's a way i would have done that you know um so that's where i was starting to see some cracks but i was still enjoyable you know i still has a good time up to that point so i mean if you want to we'll briefly cover the fundamental difference between Captain America's Civil War and the Civil War comic book. Captain America's Civil War, to my knowledge, didn't start off with a school bus full of kids exploding due to a superhero fight gone wrong. Which is the way it should have started. It would have been a little too dark for the MCU, I think.

It was the UN that got blown up instead or part of it, wasn't it? and the Wakandan king and some dignitaries or something got killed. Like you said, I fell off after Ant Man, so I did not see any of these. I watched that film, and I've forgotten the most of it. I like the idea of the first comic Civil War. I think, I don't know how well, like it actually came up a bite, but I really liked the idea of it. And I think they did it.

Like, the bus full of kids exploding, like, it seems really strange when you say, I'd love you on a podcast. But also, like, that's a great way to get people to take something seriously, right? That's exactly how you do it. And how do you get these superheroes who, at this point, were pretty blaze about stuff, right? Like, isn't that a running joke where, like, they just destroy half of whatever city they're supposed to save? And you're like, well, that's just collateral damage. I'm like, you know, it's so hard for them to take this shit.

seriously, like that's a good way to do it. To make them stop and look at themselves and go, maybe we do need to be a bit more regulated. Maybe we do need to slow it down. So I think they did that in the comics better than they did it in the film. That's part of what I didn't totally dig the film on. I think they did a better job in the comics, you know. But they're different beasts, though.

Like the comics have like a different sort of background, like with all the characters and stuff compared to the movies. like obviously you don't have the same characters in the movies like not all of the same cast and like there's different scenarios that they've been through like all the the previous two phases and stuff so like they couldn't do like a direct adaptation from the comic books yeah I think that's that's something I realized like after I watched it I'm like you know what it's different, but what you can't say about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that

to its credit, it has been pretty different and unique, and stuck to its own stories, so it's never been a one-to-one parallel with the comics, so you're like, well, if you understand that, you're like, it's fair enough, you know? It did establish their own continuity and stuck to it. Like I said, we first talked about doing this, kind of the life and death of the MCU

or the seeming death of the MCU. endgame was sort of our cutoff point because that seems to be the last time they really hit their strength. And I feel like a lot of people fell off at that point. So what I did was I compiled all of the box office funds that each of these pulled off. And I also grabbed their Rotten Tomato scores and I put together an average. Would you be interested in knowing what the average between all of these, what is it, 23? films, what the average of their box office was.

Okay. Go for it. I mean, if you want to, you don't have to. $961,260,870. There is some rounding there. So basically it was that $900 million? Yeah, well, you know, if you want to round up basically a billion, but $961 billion. Or $961 million.

So they, you know, made some good money on that. that. And the rotten tomato scores, they did the same thing. I grabbed the rotten tomato scores for each of these movies because that is seen as the quintessential rating anymore.

In fact, you see most trailers will say something in the lines of, you know, certified fresh on rotten tomatoes. The average score is 85% among all of these, all 23 films.

Ah. Yeah, so that's not terrible. I will tell you the, there were a couple that dragged it down. considerably. Would you like to take a guess? Guess what was the lowest drawing Marvel movie from that first group? Do you guess the same man? It's either I'm on mine or I'm on the was.

I would say Thor the Dark World. The Incredible Hulk. 264 million. Would you like to take a guess at the lowest Rotten Tomato score? I mean, I'm going to guess I'm on again. I will tell you this one's a tie. Oh. The two outman film.

Yeah. I was going to say Ant Man and the Wasp. So it's actually it's a tie between the Incredible Hulk and Thor Dark World at 67%. Don't of a bitch. Why do people like Ant Man?

So I will tell you, Ant Man, the first Amman movie did 519 million and the Rotten Tomato score was 83%. And Amman of the Wasp did 476 million. and the Rotten Tomato Score is 87%. What?

Yeah, yeah, they did okay. They did okay. I think the reason, and this is the big thing, if you look at where the Incredible Hulk, it was the second movie, and Thor to Dark World did actually better monetarily than Thor, but it was lower reviewed.

So it did about $200 million more than the first Thor movie. Because I think at that point people knew who it was. Because you're getting that Avengers bump, essentially with Ant Man. Because I mean the you know the Iron Man did 585 million

Incredible Hulk did 264 Iron Man 2 did 624 Thor did 449 Captain America did 370 and then the Avengers came out and those numbers just they didn't get that low again until Amman and the Lost at 476

I told you yeah so if you want to go Amateur the Lost is the lowest monetary drawing movie post Avengers in that first group. What did Iron Man 3 do? Iron Man 3, 1.2 billion and 79%.

That's pretty good. Iron Man 2, though, did 624 million and 72%. Yeah. I liked Iron Man 3. Iron Man 3 was good. I love the twist at the end. I'm like, that's fucking brilliant. Oh, yeah.

That was so good. But I liked all the Iron Man, even the second one I liked it. So that being said, let's, end game was sort of seen as the end game. because it saw Robert Johnny Jr. leaving the role of Iron Man. It saw Chris Evans leaving the role of Captain America. And it also kind of saw Scarlet Johansson

leaving the role of Black Widow. But we'll hop into the post-in-game world of the MCU. There's not as many movies, so it should go pretty quick. We have Black Widow, which was the final Scarlet Johansson. Shang-Chi in the Legend of the Ten Rings, The Eternals, Spider-Man, No Way Home, Dr. Strange in the multiverse of madness, Thor, Love and Thunder,

Black Panther Wakanda Forever, Ant Man and the Wast's Quantumania, Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3, and The Marbles. So, at any point, did you guys fall off of these? Which ones of these did you not see? Yeah, there's a bunch there that I didn't see.

I didn't see the Marbles. I didn't see Black Widow. What was the one after Black Widow? Shang Chi in the legend of the 10 rings. I did not see that one either. The other ones I think I did see, even Atman. And that was my own fault. Like I came out of that film going, well, I'm the idiot here.

This one's on me. I knew it wasn't going to be good. Not that it wasn't good. You know what you mean? Because I thought, funny enough, fucking what's his name. Was it Jonathan Meagers? Yeah. Fucking really good.

And then, you know, I'll let you know. You'd be really good in prison now. Yeah, no, exactly. He's a great fucking actor in prison. I'm like, well, that's hard for me to watch him there. Not impossible, you know. It can be done. Oh, it can be done.

But like, by that point, I think, and I think, John, you're probably in the same page here. If you look at like those films that came before and game and those films that came after end game, some of them are still good, right? Yeah. Spider-Man was good. and I'm sure some of the other ones that I can't remember were good, Garden's Galaxy. But you can see like a big difference in quality with a lot of those films, right? But like you said, before Endgame, it was like heavy hitter after heavy hitter.

Like there was a couple of duds, but not, you know, for the most part, they were firing in all cylinders. Then after Endgame, they didn't keep the pressure on. And I think that's because they didn't know what the next thing was going to be. So like, for example, we said at the beginning, all of the films were later, up to the Avengers film. And then after that, they were all leading up to the Thor, the Thanos storyline.

I don't know why I've got Thor and the fucking brain of it. They all led up to the Thanos storyline, then, you know, end game and stuff like that. So you could see that there was like an end game, an end point in mind for those. But for this, after end game,

like there hasn't been that. There's no structure to it. It's just fun stories for the sake of fun stories. for the sake of fun stories, but they haven't led to anywhere. And that's why I think up to this point, some of those films are fine. They're nice.

They're okay. Some of them have not been okay. But I'm not going to do Eternals. Not a good film. Can we do like a whole episode where I get drunk and just talk about the Eternals? Yeah, I'll just be here. I'll be here to moderate because I did not watch that one either.

Because I remember when they announced it. I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. We're doing Kirby's. like not as good not as good dark side stories like what the fuck's going on here John did you watch the Eternals unfortunately yes

okay so you know exactly what I'm talking about I mean I just don't really understand A the mindset of doing like these little known characters who I've been reading comics a long time and I don't think I've seen any of them pop up in any

of the comics I've ever read but then like B there's just many of them and like trying to introduce them all in one movie you can't really get a sense of character or like uh you know their relationships and stuff and it was just i don't know it seemed destined to be a misfire from the start and well what do you know it turned out it was it was it was kind of i think arrogance is what that was i think they were like we made guardians of the galaxy a thing. So we'll,

yeah. Because before that, Guardians of the Galaxy kind of existed in its own pocket of like books that would be canceled at some point.

And it really was, it was, uh, the, the collaborative work of DNA, which was, uh, Dan Abnant and Andy Lanning,

that really made those characters shine on their own. And even then, like, the, the depictions of Star Lord and the other characters did not match what DNA was doing.

And when they started to make more Guardians comics after the movie, the, those characterizations that DNA made just went away. They just started appearing what the movies were. Right. Like even though the comics at the time

wasn't at all what the film ended up being, which I don't know, again, like to their credit, I think that was part of it because the Guardians of Galaxy wanted to end up being like my absolute favorites of the Marvel films.

And like you said, they made it the success story because before that, I didn't know who the fuck them. Guardians the Galaxy Word. I didn't care. So it was one of those things where I kind of went into the cinema going, okay, let's see if this is

any good. And then it came out of it going, holy fuck, they did it. Like, they made me care about a fucking talking tree and a raccoon. Like, they did it. Yeah. But because it was really, it was tight, it was really fucking well done. All the characters got, the right amount of screen time and

were played perfectly. They're very, very different people. all clearly very different people but Eternals had none of that Eternal had too many people that were all kind of fighting for position and it was hard to care about them because none of them got enough screen time

to tell you who they were, what they were about. It was just a mess and then at the end of it you're like, well, it tried to be like really big and epic but by that point you're like, I don't care.

Nobody cared, you know? Before I go into the numbers for what these movies did. I will say that I'm not counting the Disney Plus series because there is no box office information there. And I think that's really like the money, you know, the dollars and cents of this quite literally. Theoretically, I could find out how many Disney plus subscribers they are

and like multiply that number by the cost of membership. But then again, I'm just counting at that point, how many people could have potentially seen it. And that's not fairly accurate. I did find a number of years. viewer's little chart for like which ones have been the most popular and which ones not so popular.

Yeah, before I jump into those numbers, do you want to go ahead and go over that? Yeah, yeah, sure thing. So, Loki was apparently the most watched of the series. I think it was the first one they released as well, which had a number of 2.5 million views in total. not bad going.

Then it was the Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Moon Night both had 1.8 million each. So Wondervision was the next one with 1.6 million viewers. That was followed by

Hawkeye and She-Hulk which both had 1.5 million viewers. Then secret invasion from last year had 0.99. And the least viewed of all was Miss Marvel with 0.78. Oh, that's not what you want.

No, and it was a pretty decent series as well. It was like quite, you know, fun and energetic and funny as well. Like the lead character was like, you know, someone you kind of wanted to watch. So it's a bit disappointing that I think, you know, people got turned off for whatever reason. But she was the best part of the Marvels as well. Well, I was going to say, like, for, like, their lowest viewed TV show, for that character to be spun off into a film,

for that film to be, I haven't, we don't have the numbers. Corey probably has numbers, but probably like, I do. A pretty low-rated film, like, technically that's not going to look super good, even if the film itself is probably, like, I haven't seen it, but I don't know how good it is, but it's probably good. The show, I've heard, it's pretty good.

Like, you know what I mean? Is it one of those silly internet boycott things when they just boycott somebody that isn't a straight white man? I imagine so. Yeah, I think that's probably a big part of it. I will tell you that a lot of that probably has to do with the fact that the Miss Marvel character

is pushed really, really strongly. Like that Avengers video game that took forever to come out, she's like the main character. She debuted in the comic, through, like, she was an inhuman. And John, I don't want to spoil X-Men stuff for you. I don't really think this is a major spoiler or anything like that. So that she's revealed to actually be a mutant.

Which I think came off the back of the show, because she's revealed to be a mutant in that as well. Yeah, yeah. So, like, she was in, they basically gave her, she had her own series. And then she was, like, one of the main characters of the Champions series. And then they put her in X-Men. So, I mean, she's a character that does not go away. And we'll talk a little bit about that when we move over into another topic. But I can definitely see some people not wanting to see it, just they're fatigued of the character.

Captain Marvel is also a character that gets met with a lot of resistance from the comic book community in general. Just because, like, they seemingly just one day decided that Captain Marvel was the most important female character they had at Marvel and just strapped a rocket to her. Yeah. I mean, I like the Captain Marvel film. I thought that was really good. I remember when I came out, there was an awful lot of that, but we're talking about.

Like, we can't have a fucking woman be, you know, like they were so, everybody was so, well, I say everybody. I mean,

a bunch of nerds imagine that. That's right. I'm talking to you. Yeah. If you're listening to this, but also, you're one of the nerd. Grow up.

Yeah. Like, it was so, it was so silly. Like, Rooh, you know, they did a big boycott about this film and stuff. And, like, you haven't even seen it. And then it turns out the film was actually pretty good. What do you call the, who played Captain Marvel? Breed Morrison. Yeah, she was really good.

Mm-hmm. He's really good. And people are like, oh, look, look, we see this film. I'm like, fine. Just, you know, watch some other fucking film. But this is a really good one, you know? And he had to see that. but I feel like that's part of the rebrand, right?

Like if you look at, again, if you can look at the first half of what we're talking about, it's a lot of Iron Man and Thor and Captain America and, you know, a lot of white dudes. And to their credit, in the second half, they have tried to diversify. Not only is it a lot of characters that aren't super familiar, but it also happens to be a lot of characters there are, you know, different. to regular white dudes. And I don't want to say that that's part of it as well. I think that was a problem with the Eternals.

It really felt like they were crowbar not in. Well, that reminds me of like when they did that press conference for Rogue One, when they were promoting the Star Wars thing. And I remember them saying, like, this is the most diverse cast we ever had. And he's like, okay, that's totally cool. and then Rogue One was kind of weirdly written where you didn't know who any of these characters were and you did not care for the most part?

Yes. And I feel like that's kind of like the Eternal. That's the Turtles. It's cool. It's really cool that they have this like really cool and just saying diverse cast. But like this, the script, the story itself did just did a disservice to that.

It didn't matter if it was a diverse cast or not. It just wasn't good. And the fact that they had tried, like, the fact that they did seem like they were trying to use diversity in this film as one of those salient points made it very clear that it seemed crowbarred in and they didn't have to do that especially whenever they did have loads of other characters they could have used which they you know like what we're talking about the the miss marvels and stuff like this captain marvels that you can do easily and show diversity and show um really good strong characters but it didn't feel like they did that with the eternals you know Well, it was they were basically What the Avengers excelled at is if you'd seen the other movies, you already know who these characters were. So you could focus on more of their interactions instead of establishing them.

Even like when you look at Star Wars and Star Wars was about establishing this massive thing, they focused on just a few characters. And then other characters were just kind of meant to fill in the gaps. Star Trek, which, you know, I'm much more of a Star Trek person than Star Wars person at this point in my life. But like look the next generation is. an ensemble cast, but the main characters are Captain Picard, William Reiker, and Data.

Everybody else on the cast fills in spots. So that was kind of that with the Eternals. I don't know because I didn't watch it, but I know that Icarus was the main dude. I believe he should have been at least because he's kind of the main eternal. Well, yeah, but I don't know.

But he wasn't sort of the main one of the you know, like the main focus of the movie. It was more no. Is it Circe? No, I can't remember. Oh, Circe? I think it was. Yeah. I feel like she was a more, yeah, more

prominent character. But she was kind of a bland character as well. There wasn't much of a reason to care about Well, again, these are not, this is kind of like Jack Kirby's not as good versions of like Darkside and Mr. Miracle and Barta, you know.

You could tell. So there's also, you know, we didn't mention Loki 2, the second season of Loki and Echo, which is going on right now from I understand. Or maybe over now. Oh, yeah, it's finished now. Oh, Jesus Christ. They're doing Daredevil, right? Isn't that coming out to the Disney Plus? Well, they're filming it at the moment because they started filming last year.

And apparently they did not like the way it was turning out. So they've hit the reset button. and brought in some new writers and an actual showrunner to kind of oversee everything. It sounds like it's going to tie more into the Netflix series as well, have a bit more continuity with that. So that will probably help it be a bit more of a success, I think, because people do love those series. That's a good point.

We also did not mention the Netflix series of Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and Daredevil. We also didn't mention agents of shield. But then all of those didn't really connect too much to the MCU. Like you had a few little moments of crossover with agents of shield. Like Samuel Jackson appeared in a couple of episodes and Kobe Spothers as well. But like, yeah, Daredevil and all the Netflix shows were. I'm sure.

Yeah. that they sort of mentioned like Avengers and the Battle of New York and stuff but you didn't see

any sort of evidence of like you know it being in the same world really but yeah I guess now it is so let's go into

the numbers of the post endgame movies the pre end game or in game included did what 961 million

so far of these 10. movies that have come out. It's $693,000,100,000. So, 300 million off. With just 10 films? Just 10.

That is the average of them. Pretty fucking good, really. Yeah. Well, I told you before we started recording, there's some outliers that really helped them out. Did some heavy lifting. Kind of like that first minute of AEW Dynamite. Heavy lifting.

So let's look at the endgame ratings, post in-end game ratings. We went from 85% to 72%. So there's a lot of favorable reviews for some movies that did not draw well. But there was also some heavy lifting done. Do you want to take a stab in the dark as to what the most successful of the post-in-game movies were. Spider-Man? Yeah, 100%.

$1.9 billion. It did the head lifting. It broke the average. Wow. Yeah, but yeah, do the average with all right. We'll drop that off. I'll just link it. Yeah, $559 million. A lot of heavy lift in there.

Yep, sure did. Yeah, $693 before, like what, five something after? What do you think was the, worst of them money-wise i would guess miss marvel no or the marvels the marvels it's surely got to be black widow because that was released during the pandemic wasn't it so i don't know if many people were going to the cinema back then it was actually the marvels one hundred ninety nine million which was just a million off from ant man and the lost quantum medium which did about 200 million

Wow. Yep. Black Widow did 3.79. The other... Don't let the pandemic stop people from being racist. Do you mean? The other movies that did some heavy lifting. Dr. Strange, the Multiverse of Madness, did $955 million.

Wakanda Forever did $859 million. And Guardians of the Galaxy did $8.45. Yeah. The lowest three were Black Widow, Ant Man, the Lost Quantumania, and the Marvels. so you're saying the bottom three were the films that very clearly had women in the title of the film. Yep. Yeah.

Not a good luck, guys. What would you say is the best reviewed, like percentage-wise of these movies? It's close. Oh, I'm going to go with Spider-Man again. Yeah. All right. Yep, Spider-Man was at 93% on Rotten. knows. What do you think was second? Because it's close.

Black Panther? Oh, yeah, Black Panther. No. Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings at 92%. Wow. Really? Yeah. Yeah, maybe it's worth checking out Shang Chi, Dylan. I guess we're going to have to. What do you think the lowest rated one was? I mean, am I going to have to say Miss the Marbles again?

Wait, wait, we're talking to the Eternals here too, aren't we? Yeah. Oh, well, then probably Eternals. This one was also close. I was going to say Thor, Love and Thunder. Yeah. Amin and the Wasp at 46% was the worst. God damn it.

And the Eternals was at 47. I definitely liked Anand about the Eternals. So what is that about you? So yeah, it's within a percentage. Just for your own piece of mind, Thor, Love and Thunder did 63%. I thought that was a fun. film, which is really funny. I thought it tried too hard.

No, I, Tyca didn't give a shit. That's pretty much what that is. It was just a fun, silly film, which a lot of the other Marvel films were. It got, it, it wasn't too long. It did what it wanted to do. And I, no problem. There was a couple of jokes.

And that was it. I liked it. It wasn't amazing, but it wasn't like the worst film. I will say the biggest kind of, just eyeballing it, the biggest difference between money and ratings was Dr. Strange. So Dr. Strange was the second highest box office of these movies, but it only did 73%.

I could see that. I thought Dr. Strange was going to be really fun. John, I want to hear your opinion on this, right? Because this is what I thought. I thought Dr. Strange was going to be a lot of fun because, like, Sam Rimi was directing it. There's going to be a lot of, like, crazy, via practical effects and loads of crazy different. multiverses and I felt like it was a lot of green screen but whenever I saw everything everywhere all at once I'm like that's what dr. strange should have been that's exactly what I thought dr. strange was going to be just fucking mental crazy

shit loads of different universes practical effects like really fun stuff but also a very serious overall story that's what I thought it should have been yeah I thought they should have done more with it like in terms of going to different universes and stuff. But at the same time, it sounds like that's basically the plot to the next Deadpool movie. So maybe they were like, well, let's rein it back a little bit for this one.

So then we can save it for that one and get to all the multiversal stuff, like, you know, down the line. But then if that was their line of thinking, then why call it the multiverse of madness? Right. Exactly.

Any other thoughts? Any of these other movies that were part of this wave? We didn't really say anything about Guardians of the Galaxy volume 3. That was really good. I have a controversial opinion. Uh-oh. Yep. Here I go.

I'm going to say a slur. Fucking records. I. I thought it was okay. I yeah yeah I love Guardians 1 and 2 and I thought number 3

wasn't as good by quite a margin I thought it was okay but just not as much fun I think they again they crowbarred too much stuff in I think part of the problem and I get the idea of it

with Rocket Raku and go back to his home planet or whatever but like part of the fun of Guardians of Galaxy 1 and 2 is Rocket Raccoon. And like, if you just take them out of the film for most of the film, like that's going to make a big difference, you know? Like, I think they could have done a better job mixing that up.

A lot of the characters seemed really, really just not like they used to be. Like, Drax and Mantis were like not how they started. And it didn't seem like character development. It just seemed a little bit like Drax is an idiot and Mantis shouts a lot, you know? I'm like that's this isn't what they used to be. There's a bit near the end, spoiler alert, where they fake that Quill is going to die and he doesn't. You're like, why that was crowbarred in there? There was absolutely no reason for that.

After all, we've already been through in that film. There's no reason for that part. On the weird bit with Gamora and Star Lord, like that, that was just weird all the way through, you know. And what's annoying was, Parts of it were really good, but also, like, a lot of it I just thought was just kind of not that good. Can I raise a flag to something that I thought was really weird? Okay. Why did they put Adam Warlock in it?

Basically, because they set it up in the second one. Oh, they established Adam Warlock in the second one. They were like, well, we got to pay it off. In the mid-credit scene, yeah. There's like the cocoon they showed. And so yeah, I think James Gunn felt like he had to pay it off. Otherwise, people would be asking him constantly. Well, where's Adam Wallach?

He fucking hates being asked questions. I've seen some of his Twitter posts. Well, I think part of that is because they're asking him dumb-ass questions. That's true. That's true. You know what you mean? Yeah, they did. They, they established, they kind of teased Adam Warlock was going to appear at some point.

So, like, it made sense that he did. I knew what I loved the high evolutionary. I thought, like, he was fucking great. He's a great villain. He was so good. I always enjoyed the turns up with the comics. But like as whoever was playing him, fucking perfect. Like so good.

And like his interactions were rocket. That was a lot of fun. I thought he was a great villain. There was good stuff in it, but I'm like, I don't, you know, I don't think it's as good as the first tape. I thought it like,

out of all the Marvel movies is probably the one that packed the most sort of emotional punch. Like it was really... There's a lot of people crying over that raccoon on TikTok. I disagree. Yeah, you've got a black heart, Devin.

That's true, but the doctor said there's nothing he can do about it. I think the second one was so much more like emotionally. The second one, I cried in the cinema. I've never cried in the cinema. And I cried whenever Yonzi died. Oh, it was just looking at Kurt Russell

because I love Kurt Russell. I get him to see him when I see him. But it was, when they do the funeral at the end, the garden is too, like the bit where Rocket Raccoon looks at all the people he came to his funeral and he's like

look how many people are here to see this guy even though he was a jerk that's so bad that he didn't need I'm like that's like that's the perfect because it encapsulates the whole film but it also was perfect

for Rocket's character like that's that's how you do it that felt perfect for that scene and a lot of the stuff in Guardians 3 I felt was a little too crowbar ish you know that's a whole other show

in itself, I think. Maybe, yeah, we'll dive into some of these a little deeper, I feel like at some point. But so we mentioned James Gunn and the Guardians of the Galaxy volume three was James Gunn's final work with Marvel because he has been given basically carte blanche over the DC cinematic universe. And he's made a bunch of announcements already in castings for like Superman, which I'm interested in and Batman and Robin. and I think it's starting off with the creature commandos, which I'm kind of like,

all right, fuck yeah, creature commandos. What's up? But we're going to hop over into what Marvel used to call them the distinguished competition. The DC extended universe and take a look at what their numbers were like, because this was the same time period. So there's going to be a couple exceptions on this one.

Again, not covering any of the things on the CW network because they were not affiliated with it. I'm not going to include Robert Pattinson's The Batman because that is also not, and it's not attached to the DC-C-C-Sin universe, I grab the numbers for the hell of it, but we're going to just look at Zach Snyder's fingerprints and what occurred from it. I will not lie, one of these movies, I forgot was even a thing.

So, Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, Justice League, Aquaman, Shazam, Birds of Prey and the Emancipation of Harley Quinn, that's the one I forgot existed, Wonder Woman 1984, the Suicide Squad, Black Adam, Shazam Fury of the Gods,

the Flash, Blue Beetle, and Aquaman in the Lost Kingdom. So, gentlemen, which of these have you seen? I would have guessed it's probably the worst one. which one did you see? Take a guess is what you would say

is the worst one. I mean, I'm looking at the numbers. I can tell you exactly which one was the worst one. No, in your opinion. Which one I thought

I didn't see all of these. Again, I fell off superhero movies real fucking hard. I think the last one on these I saw was Aquaman. But I had seen all of the ones

aside from Batman v. Superman Dawn of Justice. I can tell you the one I liked the least was of these that I saw was Justice League. I won free tickets to see Justice League too. I didn't even pay money for it.

It's so bad. You got free tickets and it was still shit. Yeah. Shout out to The Laughing Ogre. My local comic book store. I won some random drawing and they were like, here's two tickets for Justice League. I went, fuck yeah, I don't have to pay.

And John, you said Justice League too, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, no. It was Batman versus Superman. and Babylon versus Superman is god awful But I'll tell you what though Like there's an extended version Which I know is a bit of a

You know joke now with Zach Snyder and stuff Like oh Snyder cut But there is a Snyder cut of it Which is like an hour longer And it gives It gives the story more chance to breathe And the character's more chance to kind of yeah, like properly

their motivations and whatnot and why they're doing the things they do. So it's a bit deeper than just, oh, our mom's got the same name. Yeah. And stuff like that.

That was a real problem. Have you not seen the film? No, I didn't see the Law of Justice. I was too much of an homage to Frank Miller and I just can't fucking stand him. That's the crux of the film.

Yeah, basically. That's the me and the married up the same mom. Yeah. No, the same name. Well, that's the problem,

right? All the way through this film, Batman and Superman are having a really, like, really like, forced kind of fight

amongst each other, which, dude, anybody who wants a film would be like, all they had to do was just easily talk to each other once.

Yeah. And they're like, well, that's the end of this. But instead of that, and, which again, like,

you think about Batman being one of the most logical people in the DC universe. Like, they don't ever talk to each other, they just like fucking fight. And then at some point,

Bob was like, oh, my brother's called Martha. And Superman's like, my mother's called Martha too. I'm like, you're fucking kidding me. I will tell you that that's incredibly out of character for Superman as well. Superman would absolutely not engage in a fight if he did not have to. Right, because it's not his, that's not superman's nature, right? That's not the kind of character he is. That's his big thing is Superman's kind.

This is the problem with Zach Snyder and his lack of He basically saw these characters as a kid and thought, well, yeah, they're cool, but I think I can make them cooler. And it's like, well, no, you're not. You're just sort of making them darker, I guess, and a bit more out of character and whatnot. But it's like, it's so far removed from what people were expecting. But then he's got like this whole legion of fans who lap it up. John, do you remember the bit in that film where, like, Batman has, like, a bunch of machine guns? Yeah.

What the fuck? Why are Batman with machine guns? Like, what? Who? And we know the answer to this. Who the fuck thought that's, like, character trait that Batman would have, right? That doesn't make any sense. And I'm not even a huge Batman fan, but I'm like, dude, you don't have to be fucking, you know, the most scholarly Batman fan to know that Batman wouldn't do that.

that shit. All of it seemed really fucking hokey. Really just forced and stupid. I don't like any of this. The fact that they were fighting in the middle of the fight, they realized that they're both their mothers had the first same same first name. And that's why they stopped fighting. Not because of like the reason you guys are actually superheroes to begin with. That's not why you would stop fighting. It's because you put your mothers at the friend. It's not even Superman's real mother. What the fuck are we doing? Well, no. Ma Kent is much more of a mother than his cryptonian mother. She actually raised him, but no, I get what you're saying. Right, but like, what the fuck are we doing here, man? I didn't like that film at all. So I will tell you, I absolutely loved Henry Cavill as a choice for Superman.

I think he had the right look. I think he had the right temperament. I'm very sensitive about Superman because he's like one of my absolute favorite characters. but I had a bad feeling about the Zach Snyder Xen universe when I saw Man of Steel because I watched that movie and really liked it and then I had a conversation with someone about it and the more I talked about it, the more I realized I hated it and it was like the slow undoing of a man. I just was like, wait, hold on, no, his mom was working for Sears. Killed Sodd?

So anyway, anyway, yeah. That's the DC extended universe. John, did you see any of these movies? Which ones did you? Which ones didn't you? I've seen every single one except for Blue Beetle and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. You saw Flashpoint? Well, yeah.

The Michael Keaton thing? Flash. Yeah. Which I'll be honest, I quite enjoyed. I don't know. Well, I guess I do know why people shit all over it because of Ezra Miller. kidnapping people in Hawaii Punching out people doing karaoke

And that's just You know A very small amount of the list of Shenanigans that he's got up to Over the years But I mean I thought it was like a pretty fun movie Not perfect by any stretch

And some of the CGI It was really ugly And Which played Justice League too Yeah It was bad CGI But as a concept And as just a

like a wacky movie it was pretty good um like compare that to something like um black adam which was just so dire just the no redeeming features whatsoever uh what's his name how the fuck have i forgot his name bond oh james brosman pierz prosnan yeah he was pretty good in it but then that that was like the only high spot there's a really interesting trend here because you can see when viewers gave up on the DC extended universe as well when we're looking at the the dollar figures. There is something I do want to call out because you mentioned it. I did not include the Zach Snyder Justice League cut because that was HBO Max exclusive.

And John, if you're able to pull up the figures on that, that's cool. But I did not bother with that because like said, there's no monetary value box office wise. Yeah, I can't be bothered with that either. Fair enough. All right. Five and a half hours of your life. We'll do a quick little review. So before in-game, $961 million, after in-game, $693 million.

The DC extended universe, the thing that came from Zach Snyder essentially started with him, ended without him, $478 million. Huh. Not good, essentially. not as good. No. And we'll look at the average of the rotten tomatoes. We have before in-game, 85%. Post-in-game, 72%.

DC-C Universe, 57%. E! Yeah. It's not too surprising. All right. So you guys were playing a little bit with it. Guess which the worst movie rating was? So who had the lowest Rotten Tomato score?

The flash. Yeah, I'd probably go with the flash as, well. The first suicide squad movie, 26%. What? Yeah, 26%. And I'll give you, I'll give you an interesting little factoid after that, too.

But after that, the second worst was Batman v. Superman Donna Justice at 29. So it was close, Dylan. Yes, that's, I mean, that's 29 is exactly, like, that's fair enough. And after that, it's both Aquaman movies at 34. Wow. Yep. these are really low. Yeah, no, they're not.

They are very low. What do you think the most highest rating ones were? So this is another tie. Well, I heard Wonder Woman was pretty good. Actually, no, I heard Shazam is pretty good. It's not a tie. So there's one that's better and then the second and third is tied.

I'd say Shazam probably number one, because I heard it was pretty good. I'm going to go with Zach Snyder's Justice League just because I figure all is nerd army. I mean, probably. Oh, okay. Yeah, I didn't include it. In that case, oh man, I don't know.

Wonder Woman. Yeah, Wonder Woman. Yeah. Got it right, John. 93%. That's fair. Really good rating. After that, it was a tie between Shazam and the suicide squad by James Gunn at 90%.

Okay. So the interesting little factoid here is you can kind of tell when moviegovers gave up on the DC extended universe. I'll just give you the monetary values. Man of Steel, 668 million. Batman v. Superman Donna Justice, 872 million. A lot of people have high hopes for that. David Ayers Suicide Squad, which had the lowest rating, was at 749 million. People are really excited to see Will Smith, I'm going to guess.

Or just really big Harley Quinn fans. Then we had Wonder Woman at 824 million. Justice League at 661 And surprising considering how low its rating was Aquaman 1 billion 152 million That's the only DC-Xen universe movie to break a billion Wow

That's really strange After that it just nosedives Shazam 367 Birds of Prey and the Emancipation of Harley Quinn 205 Wonder Woman 1984 169 Suicide squad James Gunn 168 Oh this is

They must have been during the pandemic though surely Sure I think it was Black Adam 393 Shazam Fury of the gods 134 The Flash 271 Blue Beetle 130 And Aquaman in the Lost Kingdom 413

So the one that drew the least amount of money And we could It was probably just due to the pandemic was the suicide squad at 168. So it was one of the highest ratings and didn't draw a lot of money. That's surprising. Oh, no, I apologize. It wasn't the suicide squad.

It was Blue Beetle, 130. Oh, yeah, that's, yeah. And you want to know what that has in common with the Marvels? That's shit. Well, it did 78% on Rotten Tomatoes, so it was pretty popular. I mean, I, like, I haven't seen any of, so I couldn't pause that. Wildly inaccurate by me. the Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle, the third Blue Beetle incarnation,

is one of the most pushed characters that DC's had in the last 20 years. And it never seems to pan out. He's had multiple comic series, multiple mini-series. He had an episode on Smallville, I believe. They did an episode with him in Booster Gold. The Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle character, I think they have a lot of, they love him. But I think that for the most part, the fan base. ambivalent.

See, that's what I would have thought the similarities were between them, not just that they were overpushed, but that they were films with minorities in them. Because in the comics, you know, if you're going to push a character a lot,

people still have to buy the comics. At some point, if they don't like a character, they'll stop buying the comics and that will reflect the popularity of the character. You know what you mean? So even though a character

like that is being pushed in the comics, if they're still buying the comics, then they're not that overpushed. There must still be interest in them, you know? Well, yeah, I think it's just every now and then, because I think Jaime appeals to people, but it doesn't appeal to a lot of people. And it could just be that Blue Beetle is not a standalone kind of character.

They have a lot of hope in him. I mean, his version of Blue Beetle is so drastically different from the first incarnation and the second incarnation. I know a lot of people are really reluctant just because the Ted Cord, the second Blue Beetle, who's again, one of my favorite characters, he replaced. And I think a lot of people didn't like that. He's such a cool character. He has an alien, like, device that's fused to his spine and it can make any weapons that he wants and he can fly. And it's blue armored.

So he kind of like appeals to kids. But yeah, no, people didn't care for him. John didn't care for him. John didn't see it. John, obviously not a fan. well I will go and I'm not going to go and watch it but I'll watch it when it comes out

on you know like streaming or whatever well and I think the villain is Susan Sarandon in that movie yeah I like Susan Sarandon yeah she's like 77 years old still looks amazing yeah she could get it classy

that's what we strive for oh yeah we're just like drip in McClough on this show. Oh, I want to make that so much worse, but I'm not going to. Go ahead. Cut this but out if you want, but go ahead. No, we're not going to.

That's more editing for me and I don't want to. I have to redownload the editing software and shit. Anyway, the, one of the movies I did not include in this was the Batman, which was put out in the same kind of time period, but it was not tied to the DC-Extene universe because and that role is played by Ben Affleck, and this is Robert Pattinson. So would you like to know the box office and the Rotten Tomatoes score

for this movie? Yes. This is a movie that I actually did see recently, and I kind of forgot it when I said I fell off superhero movies. The Batman drew $772 million, which was the most that a DC film has drawn since the first Aquaman movie.

and its Rotten Tomato's score was 85%. Pretty good. Pretty good. I know there is, are they still on to make a sequel to that? Because I know it's not included in James Gunn's Batman. Yeah, yeah. Not only are they still doing a sequel, but there's a penguin TV series, which they've been filming for the last year or so as well.

Are they doing that? Yeah, that should. Apparently so. I don't know if it's going to be. have too much connective tissue with it. Like I can't imagine Robert Patterson's going to show up in it as Batman, but who knows? Maybe. Well, there was another one that I did not include here for the same reason, because that was

something that they were, D.C. was saying they were going to do, but that was before the merger with Discovery and then that whole thing came about. They were going to, like, we're going to have movies that don't tie into a cinematic universe. We were just going to do our own thing because in D.C. Elseworlds. is such a huge thing. Joker, which is also getting a sequel, including Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, Joker did $1.74 billion. Wow. So that is the second most they've done, still short of Jason MMO and Aquaman, which I'm sure a lot of Jason MMO and Aquaman was just like Jason Mamo is going to be very wet throughout this movie and he's not going to be wearing a shirt sometimes, which again, I see the appeal of.

and Joker did 69% on Rotten Tomatoes. Wow. Yeah. Remember, Joker didn't do so hot for some people. But that's it, though. This is what we're talking about.

You start making a film just for those weird insows on the internet. So go see it. Well, they're getting a musical version with Lady Gaga's Harley Quinn from my understand. They're going to hate it. They're going to hate it, probably. They're going to absolutely hate it. You heard it.

here first, folks. So there is one more movie that I wanted to include and it's because I wanted to break my own heart. I love Dark Horse Comics, Hellboy. I love Hellboy so much. I've read so many tie-ins and miniseries and

just followed Hellboy and Mike Magnola's work for years now. And I enjoyed the Guillermo del Toro Hellboy movies that came out in the 2000s with Ron Perlman. Fantastic. So they made another hellboy movie in 2019

starring everyone's favorite police officer from the Stranger Things world. And oh yeah, he was in Black Widow as well. He was Red Guardian. Red Guardian. David Haber. Harbor. Harbor.

Harbor. So I saw the news for that movie and I went, Oh, new Hellboy. Awesome. And then I started seeing more and more what this movie was going to be. I went, oh, this is going to be terrible. And wouldn't you know who won the pony as the expression goes?

Did you want to know how much money Elboy made? $75. We'll hire than that. $55 million. Everything else we've discussed has broken $100 million by a good bit. Like I think the lowest that we have, have that did not break it was Blue Beetle at 130 or yeah, Blue Beetle at 130 broke a billion, broke a hundred million.

This did not break 100 million. It was only 55. And it also gave us the lowest Rotten Tomato score out of everything we've talked about. Want to take a stab in the dark of what that one is. Just to let you know, I think the lowest score that we have to this point is David Air Suicide Squad at 26 and it is lower than 26. Seven. I will go 13.

John was closest, 17. But mine had a 7 in it, so... You, yours did have a 7. We will give you credit for that. So, so yeah, people not interested in seeing Hellboy on the silver screen once more. Like I said, did that to myself. I wanted to break my own heart a little bit. Those are the movies. Those are the ratings. Those are the box office numbers.

what seems to be clear so far, just off the data that's in front of us, does it look like Marvel? Not even going to consider DC in the equation. James Gunn has to pull some magic out of a hat to make that work. Not going to include, you know, Hellboy or any of the standalone stuff like the Batman 2 or Joker 2 or whatever. Can Marvel's cinematic universe reach the heights that it once had? I'm going to say yeah probably you know what you mean

I think it's just like we said part of the problem was that but this last fee is they had no direction no big bad they needed to fight all they got to do is like string a couple of films together where they could clearly point at a big bad obviously they might have to rejig some stuff

because of things that went down in the cast in the other king the conqueror exactly which was a sheem because I thought that would have been a great big bad to fight against and you could have led threads to that so I think either they just recast Kang or do something else ever for me I would just recast Kang and keep keep going towards that and then have films where you can see that and the loki thing as well you can put the threads out there build up to a big thing you can do it right if they if if they want to you know

I think the problem that they've had in like the downturn over the last few years is because it's got too big and there's too much going on and too much stuff you have to watch to feel like you kind of you know understand everything so I think they're at the point now where they need to like hit the reset button and it feels like the multiversal saga that they're building towards like it was supposed to be secret wars I'm not sure if that's still going to be the plan probably but like that's that feels like a good opportunity to just kind of redo everything like go back to the beginning almost and cast new actors and the roles and start fresh and I think that will probably be kind of the thing that helps in the most is just a fresh start where people don't have to feel like oh I haven't watched this Disney plus series so I'm not going to get this movie so why bother going to watch it now that was a big thing is that Wanda Vision

was a big driving force into Doctor Strange in the multiverse of madness did they do a good job of establishing why Scarlet Witch had a heel turn in that movie without having to see Wanda Vision kind of

I wouldn't say so I think it was more like dependent on your knowledge of that series like if you if you didn't watch it she basically just shows up straight away well almost straight away as like as a bad guy

yeah yeah I think if you watched the series you would have understood the gravitas of the whole thing whereas I didn't watch the series and I watched the film and I understood but I didn't it did seem a bit like oh that's a bit out of nowhere you know even if you know they do tell you

what happened but you still without the context of having seen the show it is a bit kind of out of nowhere yeah I think a lot of that has to do with because like you said, you really saw the numbers explode after the first Avengers movie.

I think a lot of that did have to go with like Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. In particular. Now, you did say that you did say that the Winter Soldier Falcon show was like the second

highest watched Disney Plus series. So there is some interest in those characters still, even if it's not Chris Evans in particular in the role. But there's just this part of me that thinks that there was this very big driving force of personality

and very big name characters that like, I mean, these other movies like especially phase whatever post in game, they keep introducing new characters. But like these are not heavy hitter characters. Like Thor, love,

and thunder introduced Hercules. Eternal's introduced Black Knight. Eternals also Or no, was it Guardians or whatever that introduced Star Fox? I think that was Eternals as well. Internals? Yeah, Eternal's Ettersters. And Dr. Strange.

Clea? Yeah, that's the one. So it's like they keep introducing new characters, but like they're not heavy hitter characters. And I understand that like not many people really knew Iron Man or Captain America or Thor, but there was a level of recognition with those names. Right.

I think that's a totally different, totally different thing. Like, people weren't familiar with those characters on the screen, but if you look at the people he still bought Captain Market Comics, as opposed to the people he bought a comic with Star Fox in it. You know what you mean? Like, not even as a mean character, just happen to buy a comic with Star Fox in it. Like, that's a big, big difference.

And so I think that's part of it. You could see as the Marvel films went on, the star part getting lower and lower because they had already used a lot of their heavy hitters to that point. So, you know, while it's a good idea to use some of the smaller guys in that kind of role, what you need

is those big guys to cover that. Like, the reason they got away with the Guardians of the Galaxy was they could pick this obscure team out of nowhere because they had the star part of Captain American, Iron Man and Spider-Man at the same time. to tied it over. And you saw that in your numbers for the Fias after end game.

The guys that did the heavy lifting were Spider-Man and Dr. Strange that established characters. And so once you see too many films with too many characters that people just don't get, they're not going to get it. And they're going to stop paying attention

when there's too many of those films. That's why you need the Deadpool to come out again or stuff like this to get people interested. You need these bigger neums to get people invested. Fantastic Four. Like, obviously they've been building, well, not building towards it, but they've been

talking about doing Fantastic Four. I think they announced it like in 2020 or something like that. There was a long time ago. And we're still waiting for like casting news, let alone when it's actually going to come out. But that's one of those big neums that they need to get sort of soon to get people interested because people will be interested in the fantastic. And a proper in an actual.

good, fantastic four film where the bad guy isn't a clod that's what people want. Well, John, you just brought up a really, you brought up with something that I completely forgot about, which was Deadpool. Deadpool was very popular. We didn't talk about any of the X-Men movies either.

Because again, they're not really into the extended universe quite yet. I know that there's some... I know Deadpool is going to be considered part of the extended universe, apparently. Yep. Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to focus on Deadpool because I'm not going to look up all the X-Men movies. I don't want to depress myself even further.

Because I'm a kid of the 90s, as we all are, and the 90s was like the X-Men. Yes. So like that kind of goes back to a point where the Avengers in the 90s looks like what the post-in-game Marvel Cinematic Universe was. So like in the 90s, the Avengers lineup included like Circe and Black Knight and Hercules and Giant Man and Tigra and you know, that was like the brown leather jacket era

of the Avengers where the Avengers were just like a collection of people. Yeah, it's just a bunch of fucking series. Like the heavy hitters. Yeah. And that's what that's what caused when Brian Michael Bendis came in. He did the storyline where Scarlett, which loses her fucking mind. And the Avengers get disassembled and then you start new Avengers.

And that's when he added like Luke Cage and Wolverine to the lineup. Spider-Man, with Spider-Man that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he was. So, all right. Deadpool, the first movie, $782 million. Pretty good. Pretty good.

Rotten Tomato score, 85%. Pretty good. Deadpool 2, which includes Josh Brole on his cable, which I really enjoyed. 785 million So almost Within 3 million of the previous movie Did not lose money Deadpool 2, 84%.

So within one percentage of what it was. So far Deadpool seems to be the most consistent Like character And a lot of that You've got to think as well This is all the more impressive Because both Deadpool movies were rated R movies Yes

Compared to the or the MCU stuff. So, like, typically speaking, rated R movies don't gross as much because they don't have as big an audience because you can't, you know, take your kids to it. So, yeah, it's really impressive. But also, you take into account a couple of things. Like, number one, I think they kind of missed the boat comics-wise. There was a point in time where there was, like, 15 Deadpool comics coming out. And this film came out, like, years after that. but then also the fact that they kept delay in the film and even like not even going through with it

it took somebody to leak the opening part of the film before Fox were able to greenlight it because they saw the fan reaction to it so for a long time it took them you know they were dicking around with it anyway like they I feel like they missed the popularity boat of Deadpool and yet it still was able to you know do really well so I think a lot of the Deadpool success, though, is absolutely driven by, like, Ryan Reynolds' passion for the character. And that very famously started because in a Deadpool comic, somebody asked Deadpool what he looked like without his mask,

and he said he looked like Ryan Reynolds, like, mixed with the Sharpay. Yeah. And I thought that got his attention. He was like, well, I got to play this character. And it wasn't even his first go with the character because that terrible Wolverine movie they made. He played, he played Deadpool. Well, here's the thing. Have you guys seen that film?

Yeah. Which one? The awful Bullring film. Yeah, I think so. You know what the best part of the film is? Which is. The first 15 minutes. Which is where Ron Reynolds is Deadpool and he can talk.

Yeah. Yes. Like, listen, I don't want to be that guy, but also, who the fuck thought what we got to do with Dadpool is? So is Moth shot. What are you fucking? kidding me? Oddly enough, I can see the in character motivation for why

the people experimenting on him did it because his character was a smart ass and was constantly running his mouth. So if they were going to make him a subservant agent for whatever clandestine organization but they didn't want to hear him fucking talk, I could see why they would seal his mouth shut. Right, but also, it's a terrible decision.

Yeah, this is a film people want to watch. You know what you mean? That story. works in a comic. Yep. Because then you don't get to hear Ron Reynolds talking.

Do you remember, I remember when the images of that scene where he reappears with his mouth sealed shut and he's got Baraka arms. And when that first happened, I thought it was fake. I was like, no, they wouldn't do that.

Why would they do that? Like, that was a Photoshop. I can tell by the pixels. Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, it was real. It was real. It was damn real.

It was a piece of work, man. It was real. Because that's what sucks about that film. If you do watch the first 10, 50 minutes of it, it seems like it's going somewhere. And then for the next fucking R and a half, it doesn't. And that's what sucks.

It had like real potential. And they just fucked it up like every step of the way after that. You know what you mean? Watch the first 15 minutes and then just go and do something else. Well, we were talking about, we mentioned we weren't really going to talk about the X-Men movies, but they had some, like, they had some really shining moments.

I thought the first... Should we do, like, an episode about the X-Men films? Yeah, it might work as better as a standalone, just because, like, there are some shining moments, and then there's a lot of moments that aren't. I think there's a lot to talk about just the X-Men films we could do. Yeah, well, again, we're also children of the 90s, so we're always going to be a little more interested in X-Men than some of the other things.

I think all three of us are pretty big X-Men fans. I think that's been well-established on the... the show. So I guess if you know, we're recording a lot longer than we normally do, but there's just a lot to cover between just, I mean, the first wave was 23 movies, you know. So there's a lot to, there's a lot to cover. But if you could like tie a bow on this, what is your main takeaway from kind of going over these movies and what worked, what didn't work, the, how much they made, the ratings. Like, what would you say is your closing statement, Dylan? Oh, okay, number one, don't make another Eternals film. Number two, you can see comics-wise and film-wise, who are your heavy-hitters? Heavy-hitters, like, right off the bat, you're talking about Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America,

even if you're not talking about the X-Men or the Fantastic Four that we don't really have, you know, the film rights to or having come out or whatever. Gloss over that, but you can clearly see who the heavy hitters and they have an ingrained, like, fan bias already. So that's what you want to do. You want to have a Spider-Man film come out. You want it to be good.

Then you're going to get lots of money and lots of ratings. Well, okay. Real quick, we won't go too long on this, but there is another series of movies I completely forgot because of the nature of them, which is you mentioned Spider-Man. Yes. When Marvel got the right to start using Spider-Man, it came with the caveat that Sony could still make movies with Spider-Man characters.

So we're Venom, Venom 2, Morbius, Craven the Hunter, which is coming out next year. Madam Webb, which I think is out this weekend, which is that was, oh boy, when I saw that one, I was fucking surprised. Me too. So like, you look at the DC-Exated universe and you look at that and you're like, maybe DC's not off too bad. I think that's the other takeaway is that even if you look at like Marvel's not so good period like after end game still eclipsed like the whole time that DC have been putting films out that's quite telling less films than DC was putting out yes exactly this wave of Marvel's only 10 and if you think about we didn't talk about it and I'm sure this will be an episode too but do you think about like what we would consider it to be the classic Batman films you know the Michael Keatney's and And the ones from the 90s and stuff. A lot of people went to see them. A lot, a lot of people went to see them.

A fraction of those people went to see Robert Patterson as Batman. Yeah. Is that a generational thing? Or is that just, is that an actor thing? Is it a presentation thing? You know what you mean? I think it's again, I think it, and this is kind of what the argument that's not really been stated so far.

I think it's fatigue. I think that the market just got flooded. I mean, 23 movies. in the first like real big batch and now we've got 10 more and more coming out and DC's doing a second launch when you look at the big heavy hitters for both groups

the heavy hitters should always be bringing in the people Batman should always be bringing in people because people love Batman Spider-Man should always be bringing them Spider-Man brought in people whenever those films sucked ass like that's just what happens so Batman should be bringing people in

if the big guns aren't bringing people in that's when you have to stop and take a look at your product and go, what's going on here? Well, and I think that's what DC's looking at, just because they're hoping that James Gunn can do some of his Guardians of the Galaxy magic and, like, kind of fixed stuff. But again, I think this, the kind of the ship has sailed. I mean, like, look at the difference between how much time had to pass between Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin and Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight, or Batman begins. a good period of time. And I think that's what it's going to take. I think you have to,

you have to let the, you got to let the soil ferment. Is that even an expression? It fucking isn't. I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. You got to let the sourdough starter do what sourdough starter does. I feel like your first one was a way better

to bridge. The sourdough one is not going to catch on. No, it's not going to catch on. All right. I just, for some reason, I really stuck on fermentation. I don't know why. Can we try to get the sour what was it? You have to let the sardo.

Do whatever the sourdough does? Do whatever Sardo does? Can we get that one? Can we get that on the t-shirt? Can that be the Smart Avengers t-shirt? Yeah, I'll get the, uh, I'll get the Etsy store started or the red bubble or whatever. We'll get that sorted. That'll be on our Patreon page, but you have to subscribe to create a Patreon page.

Yeah, we've got like four subscribers. That's good enough, right? Do we have four subscribers? Holy shit. How many of them are? How many of them are us? Three? Yeah, all right.

Damn. What if only two of the subscribers were awesome? Like, wait a minute. John, you son of a bitch. Support the brand. So basically with the last couple of minutes here, Tommy, is that there's so much other shit we could talk about regarding this. I didn't realize how flooded the market was because I forgot about the Sony things and I forgot about Joker and Deadpool and all of the Fox X-Men movies. Holy hell.

I've written some stuff down that we can definitely touch on in the future. Real quick, though, John, what do you think the takeaway is? Because I said my long-ass answer, but what do you think the takeaway from all this is? Sort of what I touched on before. Like, yeah, you can see

where it's been sort of oversaturated and people have lost interest and it's too big and too expansive. But, like, I think both Marvel and DC need to hit that reset. button and obviously DC are doing that now with James Gunn coming in and setting up all these like movies and TV shows which are all going to interconnect and stuff but I think Marvel will benefit from it massively as well especially now that they've got all of the heavy hitter characters

under the Marvel banner the like Disney banner I guess because they've got fantastic four from the start. They've got the X-Men from the start. They've got Daredevil. They can do like a full-blown Marvel universe and like, you know, do more interconnecting stories between all the bigger brands rather than having to rely on bringing in like the B teams and the C teams and Eternals and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, I think I think it is in the downturn, but like like with everything, it will probably pretty quickly turn itself around once they get a chance to start afresh. It's fair. Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's valid.

I don't know. I'm just maybe because, like I said, I fell off really early in it. And I can't really explain why. I think I saw Ant Man and I was like, I can not see any more of these. That's fine. See? Maybe. What I'm saying.

Yeah. Fucking Ant Man. Yeah. Well, you know, if they had started with Hank Pim and not, you know, Scott Lange. Scott Lange. I'd have been maybe a little more invested, although I did like Michael Douglas in that role.

Yeah. They had David Dalshian in it. I love David Dalshian. Put him in, he's fucking Pocodat man. Not a great adoress was right there. What do you mean? Oh,

a lot of people really like the James Gunn Suicide Squad. It had a high, it was like 90%. This guy played a Pocod man. He is an established actor. You know what you mean? He's great, though. If you need somebody to play a fucking weirdo,

he was in Dark Night. He was the Joker henchman that Aaron Eckhart, like, kidnapped and was interrogating. Yeah, he's great. He's creep. James Gordon, didn't he? Yeah. He plays a good creep. He also writes comic books tied all together.

I think he is for DC, for not DC, but Dark Horse, he writes Count Crowley. Okay. He's a big old nerd. Big old goth nerd. Who doesn't love that? Join us next week when we talk about the works of David Dossom. in full detail. Yes.

I'll be totally honestly, he was great in Dune. Holy shit, he was great in Dune. I haven't seen it. Boy, anyway, yeah, I think like you said,

the thing that I, I'm not as optimistic, I guess, as you guys are, I think that there is some just general fatigue. I know that a lot of the established autort kind of directors have frequently come out and said that they're waiting for this to die off.

Scorsesey being the most famous about it. But, uh, you know, I think sometimes comic book movie fans aren't as understanding, I suppose, of people with varying viewpoints. So like when Martin Scorsesey, the man, the myth of the legend says, oh, these things are like, you know, going to an amusement park ride or some bullshit like that and they get really upset about it. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, what are you going to do? Again, to tie things together, a little bit of a correlation between comic book fans and wrestling fans. You know what you mean? Don't like it when other people tell them what they're going to do. the thing. Yeah, they'll criticize your own,

but don't criticize someone else. Yeah, don't have an opinion about the thing I like specifically. I'm like, other people are a lot

opinions, man. Well, that will, I think that'll do it for us. Like you said, there's a bit longer, but there's just a lot of stuff to cover.

Yeah, we're back. We're going to keep doing stuff by the sound of it. I got a better computer that will, uh, hold up to Skype recordings

without turning me into a fucking robot or whatever the hell it was doing. And, uh, yeah, that's actually like the twist in like episode, 17.

We get to episode 17. Yeah. Yeah, it'll be revealed. I'm like, cyborg. Episode 17 of what volume, though? Ah, fuck. Seventh,

four. Yeah, we'll get to volume four. We're like a Marvel comic series now. They'll announce like, oh, it's a new ongoing. And then like partway through you realize it's only going to be like a 12-issue series. But then at the end of it, we do another run, but they started like number 99. They work backwards. in the middle we just reboot it and turn it into a totally new universe so like none of the numbers make any sense we'll have the new 52 smart Avengers the new 52 in which we will strive for 52 episodes and after six six is pretty good going for us yeah no six is great it's been treating as well so far now but that's five x-man plus one more that's all we got to do which we will we will finish the x-men series i know dylan you were also wanting to re go back over beast want to go back and taco with beast we'll actually need to watch that episode again just to make sure we don't cover ground

we covered previously. No, let's do the exact. Let's just repost the same episode, but at the end, post like a 15 minute bit where I talk about current beast. Nobody will notice. The director's cut.

Yes. Oh, no, it's going to have to have the seven hours. The Dylan cut. Yeah. It's got a lot of characterization. Really. Yeah.

What's better cut, you know? This Dylan is much darker and grimer than the other ones. No, because then we're actually going down the road of new beasts. Oh, see.

I think they're going to be, well, again, spoilers. I want to get too ahead of it because I know John trade waits. But, well, you know, we should probably end it. We're getting close to two hours. I reckon John could have probably guessed that. But John could probably guess it we're getting close to two hours. Well, that and also guess how beast is going. We try to be courteous to the people who listen to us.

We will spoil ultimatum for you, though. Because fuck, you don't need to read that. All right, everybody. That's been enough. We'll see you guys later. Goodbye. Goodbye. Bye.