The Nerdz Lounge.

Ra said:
Spoiler Warning : Skip this article if you are one of the various individuals over the last 9 weeks who didn't watch WandaVision......


‘WandaVision’ Failed to Deliver Things That Were Never Promised to Me
by Matt Goldberg @ Collider.com


wandavision-x-men-doctor-strange.png



Who wants to watch a show about grief when I’m supposed to be getting sold on future Marvel things?

For two months now, I’ve gone on Twitter after episodes of WandaVision, and everyone has been speculating about what’s to come. The astrophysicist that Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) mentioned? That has to be Reed Richards because a new Fantastic Four movie is in the works. Sure, they haven’t even finished a script and director Jon Watts is still working on Spider-Man: No Way Home and a major piece of casting like that almost always leaks out in some form, but I was promised by the Internet that John Krasinski would play Reed Richards, which of course means that his real-world wife Emily Blunt was also being cast as Sue Storm aka The Invisible Woman. The Internet said so, and because Monica said the word “astrophysicist” that means Fantastic Four. Twitter told me so.

Also, because Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) is dealing with magic, that also means Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) has to show up. We know that Olsen is part of the cast of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and so Doctor Strange had to appear in WandaVision. That’s not even a question; the only question is when Cumberbatch was making his cameo appearance so that we could get ready for the next Marvel movie. Even though it’s not next and doesn’t even come out until 2022, we need some kind of teaser. If you don’t tease the next Marvel thing, then what are we even doing here?

So imagine my utter rage and disappointment when WandaVision turned out to be a grief drama. UGH. FEELINGS. If I wanted to watch Elizabeth Olsen in a TV series about grief, I would watch Sorry for Your Loss, which I haven’t, but I’m just saying it’s an option. But my superhero shows are supposed to be about giving me more superheroes. It’s supposed to be a teaser machine where instead of enjoying the current narrative, I need to be sold on the next narrative. What does Wanda’s emotional state possibly tell me about whether or not Mephisto is going to come along later?

By treating Wanda’s story as one about grief, loss, and healing, Marvel denied me the chance to connect my comic book knowledge to the movies. Do you think we read comic books for fun? NO. We read them so we can amass a bunch of knowledge about storylines and then feel secure that we’re ahead of the curve when the movies come along to repeat those storylines. I haven’t been burned this badly by Marvel since The Mandarin turned out to be just an actor in Iron Man 3. Why would you play with my expectations, Marvel? To surprise me? To bring me joy? The only joy I feel is when my fan theories are proved correct so that people know I’m smart.

I don’t watch Marvel stuff to feel feelings or to think about my emotions or consider my place in the world or my relationships with others. I watch them for two reasons: 1) To acknowledge comic books (the more obscure the better, so as to reward my efforts), and 2) to tease future Marvel projects at the expense of the one I’m currently watching. We all know that the best part of Avengers: Age of Ultron is when Thor (Chris Hemsworth) goes on his vision quest because that clued us into the Infinity Stones even though stones had already been mentioned the previous year in Guardians of the Galaxy. I also think we can all agree that Iron Man 2 is the best Marvel movie because it does so much heavy lifting in setting up future Marvel movies. And in my opinion, there has not been a better Marvel scene than the one in Thor where Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) is in a bucket to introduce us to Hawkeye.

WandaVision denied us all of these great kinds of moments that were not promised by the show in any way, but they were promised to us by the fandom, which is obviously more important than the thing they’re supposedly a fan of. If you’re not listening to the fans, then what are you even doing? Crafting a story with a strong character arc to explore a universal emotion that resonates deeply with the viewer? Who wants that?! Looking back at WandaVision, all I see are a bunch of missed opportunities. Instead of using the series to introduce the X-Men, they just turned it into a gag about a guy named Ralph Bohner, which, while objectively hilarious, did not support my fan theory, so the show failed. WandaVision made me look foolish, and all entertainment must support my ego.

I really hope that Marvel learns from the errors they made with WandaVision. We can’t allow studios to enable creators to entrust their audience with emotions and thematic resonance. The whole point of an interconnected superhero universe is to abandon the main plotline as soon as it gets to selling us on the next thing in the interconnected superhero universe. Rather than selling us on Fantastic Four or Doctor Strange 2 or the arrival of mutants—things that we have already been sold on and will watch no matter what—WandaVision was about feelings and characters and that’s just unacceptable. I do not watch superhero movies and shows to think and feel. I watch them so that my fandom is affirmed, and being a fan means always looking ahead to the next thing rather than spending time in the present. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to start theorizing about when we can expect Chris Evans to make a cameo in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Click to expand...
I'm skipping until I finish streaming the season.
 
Ra said:
Spoiler Warning : Skip this article if you are one of the various individuals over the last 9 weeks who didn't watch WandaVision......


‘WandaVision’ Failed to Deliver Things That Were Never Promised to Me
by Matt Goldberg @ Collider.com


wandavision-x-men-doctor-strange.png



Who wants to watch a show about grief when I’m supposed to be getting sold on future Marvel things?

For two months now, I’ve gone on Twitter after episodes of WandaVision, and everyone has been speculating about what’s to come. The astrophysicist that Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) mentioned? That has to be Reed Richards because a new Fantastic Four movie is in the works. Sure, they haven’t even finished a script and director Jon Watts is still working on Spider-Man: No Way Home and a major piece of casting like that almost always leaks out in some form, but I was promised by the Internet that John Krasinski would play Reed Richards, which of course means that his real-world wife Emily Blunt was also being cast as Sue Storm aka The Invisible Woman. The Internet said so, and because Monica said the word “astrophysicist” that means Fantastic Four. Twitter told me so.

Also, because Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) is dealing with magic, that also means Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) has to show up. We know that Olsen is part of the cast of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and so Doctor Strange had to appear in WandaVision. That’s not even a question; the only question is when Cumberbatch was making his cameo appearance so that we could get ready for the next Marvel movie. Even though it’s not next and doesn’t even come out until 2022, we need some kind of teaser. If you don’t tease the next Marvel thing, then what are we even doing here?

So imagine my utter rage and disappointment when WandaVision turned out to be a grief drama. UGH. FEELINGS. If I wanted to watch Elizabeth Olsen in a TV series about grief, I would watch Sorry for Your Loss, which I haven’t, but I’m just saying it’s an option. But my superhero shows are supposed to be about giving me more superheroes. It’s supposed to be a teaser machine where instead of enjoying the current narrative, I need to be sold on the next narrative. What does Wanda’s emotional state possibly tell me about whether or not Mephisto is going to come along later?

By treating Wanda’s story as one about grief, loss, and healing, Marvel denied me the chance to connect my comic book knowledge to the movies. Do you think we read comic books for fun? NO. We read them so we can amass a bunch of knowledge about storylines and then feel secure that we’re ahead of the curve when the movies come along to repeat those storylines. I haven’t been burned this badly by Marvel since The Mandarin turned out to be just an actor in Iron Man 3. Why would you play with my expectations, Marvel? To surprise me? To bring me joy? The only joy I feel is when my fan theories are proved correct so that people know I’m smart.

I don’t watch Marvel stuff to feel feelings or to think about my emotions or consider my place in the world or my relationships with others. I watch them for two reasons: 1) To acknowledge comic books (the more obscure the better, so as to reward my efforts), and 2) to tease future Marvel projects at the expense of the one I’m currently watching. We all know that the best part of Avengers: Age of Ultron is when Thor (Chris Hemsworth) goes on his vision quest because that clued us into the Infinity Stones even though stones had already been mentioned the previous year in Guardians of the Galaxy. I also think we can all agree that Iron Man 2 is the best Marvel movie because it does so much heavy lifting in setting up future Marvel movies. And in my opinion, there has not been a better Marvel scene than the one in Thor where Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) is in a bucket to introduce us to Hawkeye.

WandaVision denied us all of these great kinds of moments that were not promised by the show in any way, but they were promised to us by the fandom, which is obviously more important than the thing they’re supposedly a fan of. If you’re not listening to the fans, then what are you even doing? Crafting a story with a strong character arc to explore a universal emotion that resonates deeply with the viewer? Who wants that?! Looking back at WandaVision, all I see are a bunch of missed opportunities. Instead of using the series to introduce the X-Men, they just turned it into a gag about a guy named Ralph Bohner, which, while objectively hilarious, did not support my fan theory, so the show failed. WandaVision made me look foolish, and all entertainment must support my ego.

I really hope that Marvel learns from the errors they made with WandaVision. We can’t allow studios to enable creators to entrust their audience with emotions and thematic resonance. The whole point of an interconnected superhero universe is to abandon the main plotline as soon as it gets to selling us on the next thing in the interconnected superhero universe. Rather than selling us on Fantastic Four or Doctor Strange 2 or the arrival of mutants—things that we have already been sold on and will watch no matter what—WandaVision was about feelings and characters and that’s just unacceptable. I do not watch superhero movies and shows to think and feel. I watch them so that my fandom is affirmed, and being a fan means always looking ahead to the next thing rather than spending time in the present. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to start theorizing about when we can expect Chris Evans to make a cameo in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Click to expand...

I agree with most of what he is saying, but not all of it.
I've always said that fans are a part of the creative process. Anyone who creates a piece of fiction and sells it to the public has entered into a defacto covenant with their consumers. So when Marvel, Star Wars, or Game of Thrones tease people, string them along, or outright lie to them, fans do have a right to voice their displeasure. The people who made Wandavision are the same people who made every other Marvel project, so it's disingenuous for the writer of this article to imply that fans are out of line for expecting this show to follow the Marvel formula. Marvel has a long history of teasing upcoming plots and shoehorning characters into movies or shows to titillate fans. For example,
  • The Captain America prototype shield in Iron Mans workshop in Iron Man 1
  • Hawkeyes first cameo MCU appearance in Thor
  • Spider-Mans first appearance in the MCU was out of left-field and only done for fans service.
  • The "green guy" and "magic hammer" references in The Netflix shows.
  • The earthquake under the ocean reference in Endgame was confirmed to be a nod to Namor.
  • Roady's looking back at the chrome Iron-Man suit in IM1 and saying "next time" was a tease for War Machine
  • Captain America being able to budge Thor's hammer in Age of Ultron was a tease for the big moment in Endgame.

These are just a few examples.

So when they cast Evan Peters as fake Quicksilver, and when Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen joked about the big "Luke Skywalker" moment, what were fans going to think?
 
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Zack Snyder's Justice League Love Triangle Proves He Doesn't Get DC's Trinity


justice-league.jpg



Zack Snyder's vision for Justice League has been quite divisive, and not just for fans who wondered if his bleak, violent vision was the way to go, but for Warner Bros. It's why executives were keen to have Joss Whedon add humor and that Marvel spin to the film when the Snyders stepped away, but with the #SnyderCut coming to HBO Max soon, audiences are getting more insight into the behind-the-scenes battles that took place creatively. However, Snyder's revelation that a love triangle between Batman, Superman and Lois Lane would take place in the sequels shows he doesn't get DC's Trinity at all.

After Superman's death, Bruce Wayne would have gotten Lois Lane pregnant. Bruce then realized Superman was needed again, and he'd help revive him to fight Darkseid. Eventually, the Bat sacrificed himself and Superman raised the child as his own. Later sequels then had Lois showing her grown-up son the Bat-cave, admitting the truth of his lineage and giving rise to a new Dark Knight.

This is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, Lois and Bruce had shown no prior romantic interest in each other. Also, it'd be odd for Lois to find solace in someone who had a hand in Kal-El's death. Had Bruce not acted out of rage, maybe they could have fought Doomsday differently and Superman could still be alive. It doesn't make sense for her anguish to lead her to Bruce, or for him to cope with his own grief by wooing her.

Furthermore, stoking the drama through their love child simply retreads areas of Superman Returns. Lois hiding the truth from Bruce about being the father of her baby feels extremely similar to when Brandon Routh's turn in the cape had Lois hiding that her son was Superman's kid. This kind of drama just feels out of place in a movie where Earth's at war with Apokolips. In addition, the fact that Snyder has Bruce and Wonder Woman flirting in both Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, yet doesn't follow up on that relationship shows that he doesn't understand what makes these heroes tick. In actuality, Bruce's resolve goes beyond the grave, so it doesn't make sense for him to pursue a romance with Lois after ruining her life or to just move on from his established flirtation with Diana.


wonder-woman-batman-Cropped-1.jpg


Loyalty is a powerful thread between the Trinity, after all, so apart from Bruce moving in on Lois, it doesn't sit right that he and Diana didn't form a deeper bond. They've had multiple sentimental discussions on loss, duty and if they could move on and have happy lives in time. Thus, a romance between Bruce and Diana feels more organic.

Discarding Diana as a potential love interest who may sincerely care for Bruce also feels like Snyder didn't know what to do with her character. Instead, this new love triangle feels forced in terms of emotion, drama and shock value, and rather than cementing the heroes as pillars of virtue, it feels more like a lusty soap opera than an epic space drama.
 
5m1o59llamm61.jpg

Every DC Related Project that WB and HBO is working on with an eye to come out in 2021 or 2022.
I am looking forward to Static, and I have always wanted a good Static and Blue Beetle Teamup.
As I mentioned in my long breakdown of DC diversity, I think they have the best chance on the Teen Front to push Marvel.
 
Thump said:
I agree with most of what he is saying, but not all of it.
I've always said that fans are a part of the creative process. Anyone who creates a piece of fiction and sells it to the public has entered into a defacto covenant with their consumers. So when Marvel, Star Wars, or Game of Thrones tease people, string them along, or outright lie to them, fans do have a right to voice their displeasure. The people who made Wandavision are the same people who made every other Marvel project, so it's disingenuous for the writer of this article to imply that fans are out of line for expecting this show to follow the Marvel formula. Marvel has a long history of teasing upcoming plots and shoehorning characters into movies or shows to titillate fans. For example,
  • The Captain America prototype shield in Iron Mans workshop in Iron Man 1
  • Hawkeyes first cameo MCU appearance in Thor
  • Spider-Mans first appearance in the MCU was out of left-field and only done for fans service.
  • The "green guy" and "magic hammer" references in The Netflix shows.
  • The earthquake under the ocean reference in Endgame was confirmed to be a nod to Namor.
  • Roady's looking back at the chrome Iron-Man suit in IM1 and saying "next time" was a tease for War Machine
  • Captain America being able to budge Thor's hammer in Age of Ultron was a tease for the big moment in Endgame.

These are just a few examples.

So when they cast Evan Peters as fake Quicksilver, and when Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen joked about the big "Luke Skywalker" moment, what were fans going to think?
Click to expand...
Ra said:
Spoiler Warning : Skip this article if you are one of the various individuals over the last 9 weeks who didn't watch WandaVision......


‘WandaVision’ Failed to Deliver Things That Were Never Promised to Me
by Matt Goldberg @ Collider.com


wandavision-x-men-doctor-strange.png



Who wants to watch a show about grief when I’m supposed to be getting sold on future Marvel things?

For two months now, I’ve gone on Twitter after episodes of WandaVision, and everyone has been speculating about what’s to come. The astrophysicist that Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) mentioned? That has to be Reed Richards because a new Fantastic Four movie is in the works. Sure, they haven’t even finished a script and director Jon Watts is still working on Spider-Man: No Way Home and a major piece of casting like that almost always leaks out in some form, but I was promised by the Internet that John Krasinski would play Reed Richards, which of course means that his real-world wife Emily Blunt was also being cast as Sue Storm aka The Invisible Woman. The Internet said so, and because Monica said the word “astrophysicist” that means Fantastic Four. Twitter told me so.

Also, because Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) is dealing with magic, that also means Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) has to show up. We know that Olsen is part of the cast of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and so Doctor Strange had to appear in WandaVision. That’s not even a question; the only question is when Cumberbatch was making his cameo appearance so that we could get ready for the next Marvel movie. Even though it’s not next and doesn’t even come out until 2022, we need some kind of teaser. If you don’t tease the next Marvel thing, then what are we even doing here?

So imagine my utter rage and disappointment when WandaVision turned out to be a grief drama. UGH. FEELINGS. If I wanted to watch Elizabeth Olsen in a TV series about grief, I would watch Sorry for Your Loss, which I haven’t, but I’m just saying it’s an option. But my superhero shows are supposed to be about giving me more superheroes. It’s supposed to be a teaser machine where instead of enjoying the current narrative, I need to be sold on the next narrative. What does Wanda’s emotional state possibly tell me about whether or not Mephisto is going to come along later?

By treating Wanda’s story as one about grief, loss, and healing, Marvel denied me the chance to connect my comic book knowledge to the movies. Do you think we read comic books for fun? NO. We read them so we can amass a bunch of knowledge about storylines and then feel secure that we’re ahead of the curve when the movies come along to repeat those storylines. I haven’t been burned this badly by Marvel since The Mandarin turned out to be just an actor in Iron Man 3. Why would you play with my expectations, Marvel? To surprise me? To bring me joy? The only joy I feel is when my fan theories are proved correct so that people know I’m smart.

I don’t watch Marvel stuff to feel feelings or to think about my emotions or consider my place in the world or my relationships with others. I watch them for two reasons: 1) To acknowledge comic books (the more obscure the better, so as to reward my efforts), and 2) to tease future Marvel projects at the expense of the one I’m currently watching. We all know that the best part of Avengers: Age of Ultron is when Thor (Chris Hemsworth) goes on his vision quest because that clued us into the Infinity Stones even though stones had already been mentioned the previous year in Guardians of the Galaxy. I also think we can all agree that Iron Man 2 is the best Marvel movie because it does so much heavy lifting in setting up future Marvel movies. And in my opinion, there has not been a better Marvel scene than the one in Thor where Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) is in a bucket to introduce us to Hawkeye.

WandaVision denied us all of these great kinds of moments that were not promised by the show in any way, but they were promised to us by the fandom, which is obviously more important than the thing they’re supposedly a fan of. If you’re not listening to the fans, then what are you even doing? Crafting a story with a strong character arc to explore a universal emotion that resonates deeply with the viewer? Who wants that?! Looking back at WandaVision, all I see are a bunch of missed opportunities. Instead of using the series to introduce the X-Men, they just turned it into a gag about a guy named Ralph Bohner, which, while objectively hilarious, did not support my fan theory, so the show failed. WandaVision made me look foolish, and all entertainment must support my ego.

I really hope that Marvel learns from the errors they made with WandaVision. We can’t allow studios to enable creators to entrust their audience with emotions and thematic resonance. The whole point of an interconnected superhero universe is to abandon the main plotline as soon as it gets to selling us on the next thing in the interconnected superhero universe. Rather than selling us on Fantastic Four or Doctor Strange 2 or the arrival of mutants—things that we have already been sold on and will watch no matter what—WandaVision was about feelings and characters and that’s just unacceptable. I do not watch superhero movies and shows to think and feel. I watch them so that my fandom is affirmed, and being a fan means always looking ahead to the next thing rather than spending time in the present. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to start theorizing about when we can expect Chris Evans to make a cameo in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
Click to expand...

From what I’m hearing, they wanted to have a much bigger payoff, but COVID messed everything up and they had to cut things and finish it the best way they could. When, I heard that, a lot of the gripes I had with the finale made sense.

The thing that kept bugging me was this:
What I still don’t understand is how was Vision’s body property of the
U.S. Government? He was made from Stark Industries materials and intellectual property. And, he died in Wakanda. A nation that is notoriously heavy handed about letting foreigners in. No way Wakanda let’s them take his body. Especially, given that he was in their care when he died.

Did I miss where they explained it?
 
samson1701 said:
From what I’m hearing, they wanted to have a much bigger payoff, but COVID messed everything up and they had to cut things and finish it the best way they could. When, I heard that, a lot of the gripes I had with the finale made sense.

The thing that kept bugging me was this:
What I still don’t understand is how was Vision’s body property of the
U.S. Government? He was made from Stark Industries materials and intellectual property. And, he died in Wakanda. A nation that is notoriously heavy handed about letting foreigners in. No way Wakanda let’s them take his body. Especially, given that he was in their care when he died.

Did I miss where they explained it?
Click to expand...

They didn't touch on it. We're talking about a five year time span where the entire world was traumatized & dealing with half of it's population just dusting out of existence, so I'm sure there will be things we eventually find out about the state of the world & how they handle things after the snap eventually to expand on the little bit we got in Endgame.

People need to start watching these MCU projects as live action comic book stories rather than conventional movies IMO because that's how they are & have been playing everything. We aren't going to get all the answers in one single go around.
 
samson1701 said:
From what I’m hearing, they wanted to have a much bigger payoff, but COVID messed everything up and they had to cut things and finish it the best way they could. When, I heard that, a lot of the gripes I had with the finale made sense.

The thing that kept bugging me was this:
What I still don’t understand is how was Vision’s body property of the
U.S. Government? He was made from Stark Industries materials and intellectual property. And, he died in Wakanda. A nation that is notoriously heavy handed about letting foreigners in. No way Wakanda let’s them take his body. Especially, given that he was in their care when he died.

Did I miss where they explained it?
Click to expand...
Ra said:
They didn't touch on it. We're talking about a five year time span where the entire world was traumatized & dealing with half of it's population just dusting out of existence, so I'm sure there will be things we eventually find out about the state of the world & how they handle things after the snap eventually to expand on the little bit we got in Endgame.

People need to start watching these MCU projects as live action comic book stories rather than conventional movies IMO because that's how they are & have been playing everything. We aren't going to get all the answers in one single go around.
Click to expand...

The surviving heroes from the battle in Wakanda probably took Visions body with them back to Avengers HQ. Since The Vision was technically Stark technology and Stark Industries is/was an American arms manufacturer, the U.S. government (and by default SWORD) probably claimed it as American property. The surviving Avengers were probably in no mental shape to be thinking about the final resting place of Vision when the Universe was falling apart.
 
Thump said:
The surviving heroes from the battle in Wakanda probably took Visions body with them back to Avengers HQ. Since The Vision was technically Stark technology and Stark Industries is/was an American arms manufacturer, the U.S. government (and by default SWORD) probably claimed it as American property. The surviving Avengers were probably in no mental shape to be thinking about the final resting place of Vision when the Universe was falling apart.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't be surprised if the why & how of Vision's remains ending up in SWORD's possession is something that gets mentioned in the Armor Wars series. Could also possibly be where we next see the White Vision unless the plan is to use him to be the motivation for a different phase centric story arc altogether.
 
Batman: The Court of Owls Coming to the DC Animated Universe


The world of Batman: The Animated Series continues to live on via new comic books. DC Comics has announced a follow-up to 2020's digital-first series Batman: The Adventures Continue, and it's bringing another major piece of comic lore into the BTAS universe.

Batman: The Adventures Continue Season II reunites the entire creative team from the first volume - writers Alan Burnett and Paul Dini, artist Ty Templeton and colorist Monica Kubina. Whereas the first series set about adding former Robin Jason Todd into BTAS continuity, the sequel focuses on a more recent addition to Batman's rogues' gallery, the Court of Owls.

Here's DC's official description for the series:

Gotham City is changing. After Mayor Hill is killed by a mysterious assailant, Batman finds himself tracking down an ancient order that’s long been buried under the streets of Gotham: The Court of Owls. But what does this group have to gain from the death of Mayor Hill…and how can Deadman help the Dark Knight? Will the clues lead Batman to an ancient Gotham City legend?


59563b1372289164.jpg




https://bit.ly/3vjD1nq
 
HBO Max has dropped a new trailer for Zack Snyder's 4-hour director's cut of Justice League, which will be available to stream on March 18th.


 
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