re: Is the MCU dying? Thor: Love & Thunder tumbles 68% at the box office in its second weekend

This is the first major MCU movie I didn't see in its first week. Nor will I see it anytime soon - just have other things to do. Anyone know when it hits Disney+?

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F4 is a B level movie, it's going to bomb.

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Fantastic Four is hard to do well because the characters don't have much in the way of character. Reed smart, Johnny immature, Sue wallflower, Ben ugly. Reed doesn't have the character of Tony Stark, Johnny isn't relatable like Peter Parker.

They were an early iteration of Marvel superheroes and the creators hadn't really figured out how to develop fundamental character hooks. The only relatable thing about them was that they bickered.

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Gender-swapped core characters is the definition of woke.

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But there's nothing gender-swapped here. That's where you're wrong.

Carol Danvers first appeared in the Marvel comics in 1968. In 1977 she made her first appearance as Ms Marvel (Captain Marvel). I guess that's technically gender swapped, but I know that's not what you mean. Are you calling the decision to turn Carol Danvers into Ms Marvel 45 years ago "woke?" Should we go down the long list of other male heroes that have female counterparts? Or how about female heroes that have male counterparts? Is that woke as well?

I'm assuming the gender-swapped Captain America you're referring to is Captain Carter. She first appeared actually in a mobile phone game back in 2013, and then again in a comic, Exiles #3 in 2018.

There's nothing woke about this, like I said originally it's just you looking for a reason to be offended, and there are definitely reasons the MCU has fallen off ever so slightly. But wokeness isn't one of them. If you want to talk about Disney as a whole, we can have that conversation, but the MCU has not been a part of that.

What they have done is adapted characters that already have a history, characters that haven't even been created by Disney might I add, into the MCU. There's nothing woke about that. To think it is, is just frankly moronic on your part. Plus, the other things you mentioned, like America Chavez having two moms, or Korg having a boyfriend, are again, long running material from the comics that way predate Disney, and two are so miniscule in the grand scheme of the movies they appear in (for seconds), it's not even worth discussing. But here we are.

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Neither were Marvel Studios movies.

FF is a little campy so it’s hard to get right.

We’ll see how this one goes x

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I know, I'm just saying it's not like FF can't flop.

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There is also an enormous chance a marvel adds in a lot of other hero’s to pump attendance as this looks like a capstone movie on Phase 4.

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Pumping in a bunch of characters is smart but man having FF as the capstone sounds like a bad idea. Phase four has just been terrible and it looks like it could easily stay that way.

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Gender-swapped core characters is the definition of woke.

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I don't know about woke, but it is definitely LAZY.

Comics have been doing it forever. Supergirl and Batgirl come to mind - Supergirl first appeared in 1958 and Batgirl in 1961. They were hugely popular and stuck around, though their histories got kind of jacked up when DC started trying different things (as they weren't the primary characters like Superman and Batman, DC probably felt more comfortable killing them off - Supergirl during Crisis on Infinite Earths - or maiming them - Batgirl during the Killing Joke). Marvel didn't do this nearly so often, but they did bring out She-Hulk in 1980 and Spider-Woman in 1977. All of these predate the current political climate.

Ultimately they all took incredibly popular characters (Hulk was insanely popular from the 60s to the 80s) and created female versions of them. Most of the time they had identical costumes and powers to their predecessors, with only Spider-Woman being very different. The thing they had in common with each other was a built-in fanbase. It made it easy to draw in fans.

I'm not saying that politics didn't play a part, but generally speaking I never underestimate the power of human laziness. It's easier to take an existing character and slap boobs on them than create a brand new one - and in the declining comic book market it's even harder to come up with new characters period. We are decades removed from the heydays of comic books. It's a niche market now, honestly.

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don't know about woke, but it is definitely LAZY.

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For the most part, I actually agree with you.

In my view, what’s different from when the characters were created (lazy) compared to Disney using them on film (woke) is the company making the male versions incompetent so the females can be the true hero of the stories. Star Wars example but Rey (Luke), Leia (Luke and now Obi Wan is a buffoon) and Reva (Vader) immediately come to mind.

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Not really. I have a big arse tv and a nice enough sound system.

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And it still won't do it justice.

Home theaters are not a substitute for the theater experience. The Batman at home feels like a completely different experience compared to seeing it in the theater, especially with the length of the movie. There’s too many distractions at home so you miss some of the emotion in the impactful scenes

You’re not wrong but at the same time the convenience difference and cost is so great that if you have small kids watching on D+ is VERY appealing