Bruce Timm and team. A large majority of the ones in recent years are from people that worked with/under him or have come in after but he was the man. There's a bit more to it than that but overall that is the gist of it. I used to track who was making what for years in the late 90s and early 2000s. Andrea Romano (yep, mom of Ray) was his head voice casting agent who got us all those iconic voices of the day. He's the one who did Batman/Superman/Batman Beyond/JL/JLU to name a few. A hero of mine. At the time I was pretty burnt out on DC and he brought me back to the fold.
Yep, in the end, the number$ speak for themselves regardless of our personal tastes or professional reviews, and sure there's been some less than stellar MCU number$ for a few projects, but the majority hit a profitable status and often set records. Warner has had a haphazard approach to its DC properties and its branding has suffered immensely from it. I've no doubt that Disney's Marvel revenue will continue to drop due to fatigue but currently, it is still a juggernaut regardless of who doesn't like them.
I was wondering how long it'd take for that to happen. Past leadership seems to just have thought they could just throw seeds in any direction along with money to make things grow without ever truly researching each market. Prior to HBOMax there were like what, 3 or 4 different HBO app/services? Then comes the Discovery buyout which to some degree just recreates that same strategy by not instantly absorbing it. It's going to be a long and interesting year for the folks at Warner. I think this is only the beginning, from The CW to Discovery, to all the things they have their hands on I'm expecting a lot of drastic changes. It's hard to keep track of all the brush fires they've got going or the ships taking water.
The animated side of things is where DC has always outshined Marvel.
The good thing about comics is that they usually have a large multi-verse which allows them to showcase different versions of the same character. Primarily, it was a tool to help different writers retcon and get around the fact that other writers did things differently. It also created a way for entire reboots of the timeline periodically.
I don't know how anyone can still take the fatigue argument seriously. It was BS with Star Wars, it is BS in the MCU as well. It falls apart when you see how actually well written movies like Spider Man no way home perform.
That's not a good thing at all. If they want a different character, then make a different character, why rewrite an existing one? It makes no sense.
I think Guardians of the Galaxy was too cheesy and tryhard. I liked the humour and 4th wall breaking in Deadpool, but it expended all the mileage in that gimmick. And as such I think Deadpool 2 was terrible, it tries to do the same, but no joke is funny when told a second time, no matter how exaggerated.
What? How does reading harm reading abilities? I've had a few Superman and Spider Man comics, I think they were sent to me by my US relatives. And I've been kicking myself ever since as they all got lost somewhere between then and now, those classic issues might even be rare for all I know.
It is the same for me, I remember nothing about any of the characters. But I still expect good writing, and most comic based movies fail at that miserably.
Spider-Man No Way Home had the advantage of a pandemic and lack of any real competition. It also had the novelty of mixing characters from three different generations into one movie which drew fans from various age group demographics for that nostalgic feeling. The MCU movies are still doing well but neither Dr. Strange nor Thor managed to perform similarly, although both still did have impressive numbers compared to various other DC or Sony projects (Morbius). The fact that Sony keeps delaying the next Spider-verse animated movie despite all the awards the first one won points to them rethinking things as well.
I can't remember who anymore but I know we had stuff like that in the U.S. from 40's-60's.
And the Eternals or Shang chi didn't? I'm not mentioning Black Widow because it got an early streaming release.
What that really shows is if a movie is good quality and aimed to please the fans it will perform well. Fatigue is a myth invented by people trying to defend the lackluster performance of their mediocre or worse movies. There could be 100 new MCU movies in a year, if they were all brilliant masterpieces people would watch them all without hesitation. It's not like they just hung their fatigue up for No way home. No, it was a movie they were interested in, and liked, so the good word of mouth carried the movie for weeks on top of the good initial performance.
The audience is getting tired, but it's not from mcu movies, it's from low quality movies. And Warner seems to be the first to act, on that, possibly because of how dire straits they are in. Disney can afford a few more years of blunders before they are forced to course correct.
They essentielly reduced the property into a mediocre TV show level, and they are trying to spin it as a win. I mean look at the state of Star Wars merchandise, that's the real indicator of fan enthusiasm.
I'd bet you anything that nobody would be bemoaning the number of projects announced if the track record of phase 4 was as good as the previous ones.
Not denying the quality issues but going back to your own experiences of what you walked out of and why only shows how our personal opinions on quality are subjective. Many of those movies broke records regardless if any of us in this thread liked or disliked them. There have been some projects that people thought would do well but flopped like Eternals. Many thought Shang Chi would flop but it did great. Black Widow was almost doomed from the start as that iron went cold years ago, I'm sorry, I couldn't stand that movie. It should've been launched between Iron Man 1 and 2, not after the character was dead. Again, going back to this thread and Zaslav's actions, he is looking at the numbers, not what people claim is quality, for his decisions and that is why Batgirl and many shows have been chopped.
I liked the super hero movie craze as much as anyone but its almost as if that's all that Hollywood produces at this point. Even I've given up keeping up with all of them and I'm tired of them.
I think everyone knows at this point there was a time I was pretty hardcore with it and I'm burned out. There are only a few projects I'd like to see and to my knowledge are not in the works but at this point, I consider it a good thing. The other side of it all is that I used to be somewhat obsessive in getting physical copies of things even if I didn't like them just to keep the collection complete. I realized about six months ago I never actually got the last SW movie and decided why bother. That's kind of huge for me since I've bought just about everything in every media form since the 80s. It's far from being the only one either as I haven't gotten the new Dr. Strange, even though I did like it, either along with either Suicide Squad (liked the JG one) movie, The Batman (really liked it but not sure when I'll be in the mood to watch again), and many more I can't remember right now. I suppose streaming is partly to blame but also that I'm just no longer in the mood to re-watch them.
Firstly,
Can I say that I am disappointed that this was not some sort of Batman and Scooby Doo universe crossover?
I enjoyed those as well for similar reasons, with the exception of Venom, which I haven't seen. The Guardians of the Galaxy films were probably my favorite of those, if I had to choose. Rocket was great. I suppose I'll have to give Venom a shot, seeing that it has the Zarathustra seal of approval.
I tried on several occasions (in my youth) to read comic books, but never found them engaging. The artwork, while impressive, wasn't an effective storytelling device. But that's just me. I did have some friends that read them and they were well-adjusted, intelligent people, so no offense is intended toward comic book fans. At the time, it also felt as though the comic book industry had moved on to selling speculative investments similar to sports trading cards, as opposed to something intended for consumption.