I do wonder this because I have shat on super hero stuff in the past and I do think normies have completely ruined it. At the same time though could it be salvaged in some way? I was thinking in terms of some kind of 3D animated short or movie and yes I am partially floating this idea because I do appreciate simple storytelling and it doesn't even necessarily have to be super hero stuff.
Hollywood and Disney really are fucking up so hard they can't even manage to get such a basic formulae right. I bet these types of movies and shows would be even better if they were uncensored and shocker had blood in them etc. depending on what kind of super hero it was. Graphic gore and blood would probably help keep the normies away from ruining it and they wouldn't let children watch it either.
They've done well in the past. Hell the MCU was mostly apolitical until after Endgame and those printed money
It helps that alot of the MCU stuff was fairly smart writing and cinematography for what amounts to pop culture.
Turns out if you do stuff with the assumption that your audience aren't mouth-breathing retards, people actually like that.
Is that what those movies were? I stopped watching after the abomination that was Civil War.
I wouldn't call MCU movies to be particularly smart writing, though.
Compared to most hollywood stuff, they were.
A contrast I like to make is between Dark City(awesome movie) and Ms Marvel(uh...)
There are two versions of Dark City - one that has a silent intro, and another that has a long monologue by one of the characters that completely spoils the plot to the movie within the first minute. Why? Because producers thought the audience would be too stupid to realize what was going on. (I highly endorse watching Dark City, but the one without the monologue).
And as much as I dislike Ms Marvel(because... yeah), the one thing it actually does right is immediately throw you into the middle of the action, in media res, without explaining anything and expecting the audience to actually keep up with what's being shown without some ham-fisted exposition. Had it been done by normal hollywood, the movie would have opened up with a long monologue by Carol Danvers describing the long, tortured conflict with the skrulls or some such.
That's part of the reason alot of the Marvel movies were so good. No exposition, no flashbacks, no elaboration of what came before - you get tossed into the metaphorical deep end and are expected to actually fucking swim for once, rather than wear your floaties.
I've seen Dark City way back. Not sure which one I saw. It's was a bit stilted. As for Ms. Marvel, she was part of the MCU and was going to be an origin story, a concept familiar to the audience.
I think I once read the Supreme Power series by Marvel on a whim one day. I remember it even had a black supremacist character (and the comic didn't portray that as a good thing at all) - a rarity even in based fiction.
As for the actual topic, I think it's worth my word that yeah, it's possible. Vox Day has written a comic series on Arktoons called Alt-Hero that pretty much fits the bill from what I know about it:
https://www.arkhaven.com/comics/superhero/alt-hero
I did have a few odd ideas for a toei-style superhero series, but I don't think I have the exact resources to put them into fruition, at least not right now.
It was apolitical until Disney bought them around 2014.
The MCU was mostly fuckin' great until then, and even then the downswing was very shallow until Brie Larson was cast.
I still maintain that Kamala Khan had a ton of potential in the idea, had they not been so afraid to make her look weak.
Imagine if her more-devout brother tried to honor-kill in her sleep for disgracing Allah by showing too much skin, she wakes up just before he strikes, a scuffle ensues, her noise wakes up their father, the brother gets one good stab in, and the dad barges in, seeing Kamala having tied herself into actual knots to restrain him, her wound is seen closing up, and that's how her secret comes out to the family.
...My brain goes to dark places sometimes. But doesn't that sound neat?
That sounds good, haha.
Wow, thanks.
Maybe it's just because I think the idea of a stretchy shapeshifter girl is awesome, but I'm sure I could write at least one comic issue better than whoever's really in charge.
I tried to show the bad side of Islam while also making the rest of the family look good--I especially wanted her father Yusuf to come out not really understanding what's going on with her, but still loving his daughter as family.
One Punch Man is already great.
Everyone denies it but MHA was pretty sick at its height
It never stopped being good, although I will grant you that nothing is going to top The United States of Smash.
I think it's overrated.
But overrated does not mean bad.
You can be the greatest of all time and still be overrated.
Eri kind of dampened the overall hype surrounding the series (regeneration powers as a whole kinda did that tbh)
i feel Horikoshi nearly wrote himself into a corner with Star and Stripe being a straight up reality bender, that was only defeated by plot convenience
I do not like the current arc in the manga I kinda stopped reading and would have to read for almost 50 chapters. Dunno if it switched arcs yet again but it did seem like the final one. I feel it peaked a while ago and is now just trudging along. Imho for me the peak was the my villain academia part.
was. Murata version turned to absolute shit around the later chapters of the Monster Association arc and never recovered.
I love one punch and that definitely springs to mind that's not a complex story either they just made sure to do great character design and action.
Alright but why is he barely featured in S2 of his own show?
Recently re-watched Blade 1 and despite its many flaw it is so much better than anything the MSHEU even came close to.
The formula is really simple.
DEI restrictions, and unfirable diversity hire commissars on staff, make this formula impossible to execute for any project that has a significant budget
Good example of "action women" is the Nik Kahn character in Extraction 2. She fights all male enemy combatants through the movie, but it isn't the usual women tossing around men as an equal trope. She is shown being vulnerable to raw physical power when she gets caught out in situations where they can use it on her, and has to dodge and avoid while countering. As the movie progresses you see her get more and more worn down, too.
It would be extremely funny to see a super hero franchise startup that has women and men getting along with each other because especially if the women were attractive that would make feminists seethe and go completely insane.
Blade 1 isn't just a good super hero flick, it's just an all-around excellent action-horror movie where we have the very rare case of a main "good guy" being more badass and ruthless than the actual villains. It's such a rare anomaly that everything about that film came together perfectly -- Wesley Snipes would leave notes around the set saying that he "was Blade", and they could not have cast better (Michael Jai White also had the skillset to be Blade, but there was a silent menace that Snipes possessed that made him a force to be reckoned with on-screen).
Combined with the sharp cinematography from Theo Van de Sande and that opening scene featuring New Order's awesome acid--fusion-techno, plus choreography that was well ahead of its time, the movie is a real trip that just comes together really well. It's one of the few movies from the 90s that was unapologetically masculine.
Yeah iirc the woman in Blade1 had a purpose as well. She wasn't some strong independent woman who don't need no man, but she did have an established skillset that was interesting and useful for the plot (gene therapy to cure vampirism). It wasn't some random skill the plot needed her to pick up in a ten second handwave explanation either.
Almost like back then they knew how to write female supporting characters in a male-centric action movie without going full feminazi on you.
Regarding number 7, I assume that means it's okay if the character was already black to begin with, such as Blade (of course) and Luke Cage.
Luke Cage had some really cool moments in the comics, but I'd never trust them to do him well in a movie or series today.
Actor Nicolas Coppola was a big fan, to the point of changing his surname to honor him...
In my re-watch of Blade with 2020+ sensitivities to race marxism I didn't see a single instance of it through the whole movie.
Colored are fine as a main character and most of the cast even. It is the race baiting that tends to come with a colored cast that makes for a bad movie.
I mean, Asia already shows this to be the case, the My Hero Academia fanbase alone shows you can easily do that.
With the western ones, no because they have a death grip around their IP, did we forget a few years ago when Disney tried to get a higher percentage of Spider man films and Sony told them to fuck off and threatened to pull him out of MCU? That death grip on IP means they are also trapped with the writers that ruined them so there's no real saving them.
Best off making new superheroes and just waiting for the companies that hold the IPs to fail.
Thing that's getting me is super hero stuff is not complex, you can also go as simple or complex as you like with the animation itself and can get away with it if it's at least decent. I'm pondering a lot, it's not like sci-fi where you do have to be more elaborate to get any kind of credibility in that sphere.
Invincible on Amazon Prime has a lot of graphic violence and blood and still feels kinda woke to me. Quality superhero genre stuff will always have a good chance of being successful but the days of it always being the dominant force at the box office are probably over. Westerns were once all the rage, and now although people are willing to go see a decent cowboy movie they’re not the cultural touchstone they once were.
Wokies write with a lot of nihilist mean-spiritedness and have no problem with making stuff gory and violent if it aligns with their values, which usually involves a subversion of traditional ones. The Boys is another example. Or take the graphic eyeball removal scene in ST Picard, for a character whose former actor had defied the MeToo movement. Grittiness, gratuitousness and moral greyness was an interesting twist on hero stories for a while, then it became a meme, then became a tool in the service of a new moral order.
And most of it wasn't even in the comic. The rampage Nolan goes on while fighting Mark doesn't turn out that way. Any human deaths are a consequence of the two literally flying through buildings and subway station structures, not literally through people face first as the cartoon does. Or grabbing a pilot and exploding his head in one hand.
The whole thing is just Amazon wanting their own version of The Boys which is hilariously tragic since that itself fucked up adapting a comic which would have been far better if done faithfully. But then that's never going to happen.
Because it is, see why in my reply to Smith1980 below.
https://kotakuinaction2.win/p/17sP6TUFhh/x/c/4Z8kMGVNthu
Wasn't the boys on amazon already?
I have some of the comics and I’ll read those or get an omnibus. I heard it was good but they race swapped a character
They did more than just that.
The titular character Invincible, Mark, is now half asian because his mother, Debbie, is now asian for some reason.
Rexsplode is now hispanic, which also means Rudy is now hispanic as Rudy creates a clone body to use from Rex. There are several timeskips throughout the comic and after the last one Rudy literally looks like a fully haired Lex Luthor with green eyes, pale skin, and vibrant red hair.
Amber, Mark's first girlfriend, is now black. For bonus points she ends up getting a black eye from her second boyfriend, so that's domestic abuse and black girl wrapped up into one.
They also change several important parts of the story so it no longer makes sense, like having Nolan kill off the Guardians of the Globe in the very first episode of the cartoon despite the fact his only happens in the comic after he learns Mark has finally started getting his powers. That manifestation is the powderkeg for basically everything that happens in the story and yet for whatever reason Kirkman decided to rearrange things and up the gore and graphic deaths in the Amazon cartoon.
Wow. I’ll just get the comic book then.
it's one of the most popular comics on the site I've mentioned before, whether this is entirely natural or now propped up by normies also viewing the page is up for debate however without access to a timeline of the viewed data.
It has its ups and downs, mostly because the whole thing despicts the ups and downs of Mark's life, but it still manages to stick the landing and actually end on something that isn't like modern rushed crap.
They made Mark’s best friend flamboyantly gay too.
That's mostly because the Ctrl Left can't do nuance. Mark's friend ends up coming out as gay dozens of issues down the series but the cartoon not only starts with the character as gay but goes full flaming stereotype from the get go.
Western Super Hero comics are bloated beyond belief. No one knows where to start or what's good. Self contained stories with a beginning and an ending might work, but doing that requires you to start with a new IP, and stand out in an oversaturated market.
Might make more sense to have a different genre be your first IP, then launch your superhero off the back of that.
It's a rough market right now, for sure.
I start by walking away from them and heading either to the manga section or at least to check out comics that aren't from DC and Marvel. Fucking festering bog those two...
Going edgy doesn't save a show or series. Heck, it may turn off the original fans. DC, Marvel, Image and others fell for that trap in the 90's. I got sick of being angry, blood, and then fights for no good reason. I think Civil War by Disney was way better than the comics for that reason.
Yeah a lot of people complained about MCU Civil War not being as big and grandiose as in the comics, but I thought the movie adaptation was far superior in the sense that it was far more complex how it was staged and what the fallout was.
Captain America: Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, and Infinity War are basically the height of the Marvel film's cinematic storytelling. No surprise given that it has the same writers and directors and all three films connect wonderfully in terms of the character arcs and storytelling (especially Captain America, who never wavered from his moral convictions, even though him not being completely forthright with Tony is what caused a pretty big rift between the two).
Those are probably the only three films out of the whole MCU catalogue that I think fondly of in the same way I think fondly of the complexity and layers of themes that were covered with the TDK trilogy.
Even the language and culture in Civil War was great. That was the only time I've seen an American movie have someone speaking sweetly in German.
Even if the woke weren't ruining the flicks superhero fatigue would set in. Most fads don't last long. The only reason superheroes have lasted as long as they have is nothing has stepped forward to replace them, and Hollywood's creative death prevents them from creating something new so the studios keep milking the same franchises over and over.
Think about it this way. Super hero films started getting big in the early 2000s. We are almost at the mid-20s. Westerns, Tarzan, Davy Crockett, '80s action flicks, adventure serials and other fads didn't last this long. But again, the death of Hollywood creativity, plus over reliance on the green screen and CGI and control freak tendencies of the left simply prevent anything new and bold from taking the place of the superhero films even as they get worse and worse and worse.
Deadpool 3 is going to do well because people know a Deadpool movie is going to have jokes, violence, familiar characters acting the way you expect them to, and no gender shit or female empowerment as a central plot point.
Didn't D2 have their lesbian stronk woman insert in it.
It also directly killed a woman because they had to make Domino black with a huge afro, so the stunt woman wasn't wearing a helmet (so you could see her big afro and that she was black) and crashed and died.
So Deadpool unironically has a literal death count for its wokeness.
Don't forget that the stunt double was horribly under qualified, because having a qualified white person wear a costume to look like a black woman would be racist.
I found out through watching interviews from the Viking Samurai that Hollywood has been doing this DEI nonsense from well before DEI became an ESG standard.
It turned out that they were trying to do the same kind of race-mandated nonsense even back in the 90s for crew and stunts. A producer was talking about how Hollywood execs came to the set one day on Marked For Death after receiving a complaint from a Karen, and were chastising the producers and film crew for having Chinese stunt guys with brown face paint and dreadlock wigs for the fight scenes with Seagal because they were his students, and non-students were known for being notoriously injured by Seagal during his fight scenes, so crew and Seagal all preferred the safety of working with his students because they knew how to sell his moves and, most importantly, knew how to take the falls without having their limbs broken.
The producer was being chewed out by the execs who were complaining that it was "racist" having Chinese dress up as black guys and that they needed to hire actual black guys for the stunts.
The producer soundly told them that the Chinese were actually qualified to take the falls and that they were able to get through filming the fight scenes relatively quickly thanks to them being trained, which required fewer takes and less set resets. What got the execs' attention is when the producer said, "Would you rather us waste more money hiring untrained black stunt crew to waste more money risking them being injured and hospitalised and delaying the filming of the film just to get the right races in the roles for being thrown around?"
When he explained to them the risk of having untrained minorities injured, high hospital bills as a result, and delayed filming (which would bloat the budget -- and at their current production schedule I believe he mentioned that they were under budget at the time when the execs showed up) the execs quickly shut up and left the set.
He spoke in the universal language of money.
I'm going to be very carefully on the lookout for that because I really enjoyed Deadpool 1 and it pissed me off they kept featuring her while killing off everybody else as part of the 'joke'.
Eric July did decently with his ISOM sales and spinoffs.
It's sort of a chicken-and-egg thing though where he already had a social media presence which made sales and crowdfunding easier. A lot of people who support what he's trying to do think the work itself is pretty mid.
All of the EVS and Comicsgate backbiting surrounding a thin-skinned YTuber just trying to make and sell comic books really shows that it's a shitshow everywhere even when the SJWs aren't involved.
Absolutely. Any genre could do well, but particularly superhero movies because they're decent choices for family outings, dates, etc.
Look at the popularity of any of the Conan the Barbarian/ Batman/ Shadow/ Solomon Kane/ John Carter stuff in the last few decades. What's being experienced now isn't genre fatigue so much as cash cow milking fatigue.
It could do well as long as it was written well. The woke trash is only half of the problem. The problem is that the entertainment industry is now filled with "writers" who can't write for shit. Yes, it is a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing with the wokeness, but that doesn't change the fact that you could toss them all onto the dung heap tomorrow and it would still take a generation to re-create an atmosphere that could attract and foster talent and competence.
Short answer: Yes.
Evidence: millennia of tales passed down, even in pre-history prior to written language, that told of brave men facing adversity (other men and threats both natural and supernatural). They fight and suffer and prevail in the pursuit of honor for themselves, their people, and their way of life.
Absolutely. People like reading about people doing heroic things. Whether that is utilizing special powers or just simple acts of heroism, such tales will, when written well, be desirable to the public at large.
Be Iron Man
Be Iron, man.
I wouldn't expect anything that comes out of Hollywood to be worth watching thematically. Themes like duty, honor, and loyalty are not seen in movies going way back, to the 1960s and even further.
Well written films can and do get made, and do well with audiences. TG: Maverick was a 1.5 billion dollar movie, and it was tightly written with zero woke anything in it.
Do well with the audience? Yes, sure.
Just look at any well received action movie/series in recent times. Action heroes are not much different than super heroes.
A single man trained in combat well enough that he defeats dozens if not hundred of enemies is essentially a super hero. The super power isn't really shiny besides "he fights really well", but it's still a power that no enemy possesses.
Now use the same format and move a bit into the fantasy territory. The super power is now something fantastic like flying. And increase the power level of the baddies as well - tech that isn't possible yet. Like flying combat suits that outperforms all "normal" soldiers in the movie's world. Congratulations, you now have a super hero movie. If you want you can add some stuff like he came to the power, blabla, no one really cares.
If they would just write not one dimensional boring characters that have zero faults and never have to work at anything, it'd be fine. Like they used to before it got infected.
But they've chosen not to. So I have chosen to not care about the thing I used to care about. It'll die off, and those that want better will take up the mantle, because the parasites will move to find a new host.
it depends mostly on writer, their talent/skill level, the scope of the project and the casting desisions and err climate for lack of a better term which is prime for it atm.
Woke stuff in them have killed any excitement, the fatigue everyone mentions is just that. Going to see a super-hero movie today is like eating a Big Mac.
In mu opinion, super-hero movies need to take a break for a few years and then return with something different and fresh.
The Dark Knight was one of the best movies ever made, and it was non woke. Batman the Animated Series and Batman Beyond aren't woke and they are universally celebrated.
Honestly, I'm less tired of super hero stuff and more tired of shitty half assed woke super zero stuff.
Yes. You'd just have to do it according to its own rules. Which will never happen. In the format that serves its strengths, which will also never happen
The way to do it has always been TV serials releasing in the old weekly schedule, leading to crossover movies every few years.
I mean anime like Solo Levelling have been doing well no?
Odd because it started as Korean--it was a manhwa, their version of manga--and South Korea is so feminist that their birthrate is below 1.
gritty batman and the punisher.. should be the blue print.
Proper superhero stuff is inherently anti-woke.
The hero, first off all, has to possess unshakable positive moral values ...
He (or she, or it) is also generally very special in some way. (This is kind of true for all stories, even the "everyday Joe" types become special because of their involvement in the story (Ash, Arthur Dent)). If he isn't born special (Superman), then he works his ass off to BECOME special (Batman, Iron Man).
Woke philosophy is born of stuff like "You can be anything you want to be when you grow up because you are SPECIAL just because you are a human" messaging would have us believe that any piece of trash can become a "superhero" just by putting on a costume and kicking unpopular butt (modern Harley Quinn). That's not a superhero, that's a cargo-cult effigy of one.
If you're looking for gory superhero action, I might recommend watching Kamen Rider Amazons, which is pretty nasty. I've only watched the first season since I heard the second season is where the quality went down the drain.
a movie with good characters and a good plot could do well. so not comic movies, by definition.