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 LunarSol wrote:
Part of what makes Pepper work is simply that they've been willing to keep advancing their relationship past the will they won't they shlock. It's helped make her smaller appearances post IM3 feel more meaningful and made her prior damsel in distress roles feel as important in hindsight as they did initially.

Black Widow definitely gets stuck with the "there's a girl here! Quick, find her a man!" that you find in pretty much every movie ever. Captain Marvel basically never even approaching that was certainly refreshing.

In fairness, Black Widow has always been somewhat sensual femme fatale who doesn't mind having a hot dude around. However, Banner is, well, not really her type.
Such doesn't really fit to character of Danvers though, unless we consider Marcus. Let us hope they won't bring that reviled storyline to big screen.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

Something refreshing about Captain Marvel was there was no romantic sub-plot like Natalie Portman in Thor, Pepper in Iron Man, that other Doctor in Dr. Strange, etc. There may have been a small bro-mance between the two female pilots, but it was more friendship and mutual respect.

What? Did you completely miss the whole Fury/Goose romance?

They cut that scene outside of Japan.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Backfire wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
Part of what makes Pepper work is simply that they've been willing to keep advancing their relationship past the will they won't they shlock. It's helped make her smaller appearances post IM3 feel more meaningful and made her prior damsel in distress roles feel as important in hindsight as they did initially.

Black Widow definitely gets stuck with the "there's a girl here! Quick, find her a man!" that you find in pretty much every movie ever. Captain Marvel basically never even approaching that was certainly refreshing.

In fairness, Black Widow has always been somewhat sensual femme fatale who doesn't mind having a hot dude around. However, Banner is, well, not really her type.
Such doesn't really fit to character of Danvers though, unless we consider Marcus. Let us hope they won't bring that reviled storyline to big screen.

There is basically zero chance anyone mentions Marcus ever. That's just... no... just no.

I definitely understand the femme fatale angle with BW, it just got misused too many times. A lot of the problem isn't even the misuse, its that it never went anywhere. Like if she ever got an arc about how she's constantly feigning affecting and needs something real to hold onto or something... fine. Even the Banner ship, while weird, could have resulted in something interesting like Hulk being jealous of Banner. It's mostly problematic because of the absence of something more substantial.

I... was not impressed by the movie. Superman syndrome, I think - the main character is too powerful. The visuals were cool, to be sure, but the script just wandered without there ever seeming to be a point other than introducing the character. There was never any kind of real danger, tension or character moments that engage or define her beyond "she's a superpowerful warrior-chick that we wanna shoe-horn into the MCU! Check it out you guys!"
Also, (minor gripe, but it kinda bugs me) why the don't bypass the language filter like this. Reds8n do Fury and a lot of other Shield stuff look like they're from a seventies cop movie rather than a secret organisation from the nineties?

... thinking back, you're not wrong.

It's like Kingsmen 2, where the villain's lair was based on 1980's nostalgia of the 1950's. Instead we got 1990's versions of cops from the 1970's.

Watched it last night.

As a couple hours of visual spectacle, it did its job well. As a coherent narrative plot, it was a total disaster.

Honestly, Captain Marvel herself was the least interesting part of the movie, particularly by the end after going super sayan it just ends up with Superman syndrome (shooting a downed spaceship with photon blast hands to make it fly again, really?).

The Skrull, Rambeau, and Fury were way more engaging in that regard than anything to do directly with the main character.

200% glad they didnt try and ham-fist a romance in there.

Honestly, I think you could have cut Captain Marvel out completely, just had it be Fury and the Skrull and linking Annete Bennings character through to Rambeau instead, and ultimately would have had a better movie (particularly as a Fury backstory), but no macguffin to kill off Thanos for the Avengers

The added background elements could be awesome for future MCU flicks, and overall it wasn't awful.

 Vaktathi wrote:
(shooting a downed spaceship with photon blast hands to make it fly again, really?).

It's not my favorite part of the film by any means, but in its defense she's literally a living version of the engine powering the ship, so its not.... completely... insane?

It looks like the sales drop from Sunday to Monday was huge, a 72% drop in sales. That's noticeably worse than even Batman vs. Superman.

I have to wonder exactly how many of those weekend seats the studio was buying to inflate their own numbers..

 cuda1179 wrote:
I have to wonder exactly how many of those weekend seats the studio was buying to inflate their own numbers..

That's just tinfoil hattery. The whole point of having good sales numbers and making a movie look good is to generate profit, and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on buying empty seats (which somehow nobody noticed in a "sold out" theater) means throwing away the movie's profitability. The only way buying up seats would make any sense is if the cost of doing so is extremely cheap, but then that inherently means that any studio-bought seats can't have any significant effect on the total sales. Given the fact that the reviews so far seem positive overall, with the worst criticism outside of the right-wing lunatic fringe being "it's a generic MCU movie, meh", a sudden revelation of the movie being terrible doesn't make any sense either. If I had to guess I'd say that maybe the controversy pushed some later ticket sales up to opening week, giving it good opening numbers at the cost of showing a steeper drop for the second week.

I just saw the movie today and I thought it was okay. It has pretty much the same problem then many Marvel movie. They push their joke a bit too often and too hard. The acting was competant without being great, but I must admit Larson's voice/tone grates me a little bit, but it's through no fault of her own (I mean I don't really like the sound of her voice, what can she do about that). Stories of lost memories in this sort of media are extremely hard to handle and can get very annoying, but I thought it was fairly well handled. I especially liked how they exposition dumped Carol's past while being mind probed by the Skrulls. I thought it was fairly clever and interesting at least.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
(shooting a downed spaceship with photon blast hands to make it fly again, really?).

It's not my favorite part of the film by any means, but in its defense she's literally a living version of the engine powering the ship, so its not.... completely... insane?

I just viewed it as a fancier version of kicking/punching something to get it working again cliche.

 cuda1179 wrote:
It looks like the sales drop from Sunday to Monday was huge, a 72% drop in sales. That's noticeably worse than even Batman vs. Superman.

I have to wonder exactly how many of those weekend seats the studio was buying to inflate their own numbers..

Other movies in a similar timeframe:
How to Train Your Dragon 3 - drop from Sunday to Monday opening weekend: 85%
* Lego Movie 2: 86%
* Greta: 66%


Similar movie types:

* Avengers: 67%
* Civil War: 68%
* Thor: 68%
* Logan 70%
*Iron Man 2 70%
*Doctor Strange 71%
* Spider Man - Spiderverse 72%
* Iron Man: 74%
*Iron Man 3 74%
* Age of Ultron: 74%
* Winter Soldier: 74%
* Thor Ragnarok: 74%
* Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2: 75%


Definitely proof of a vast, unprecedented conspiracy. *Nods sagely*

Definitely shows how widespread the problem really is.

Oh yes, clear scene of conspiracy. Spending their own money to make it look like they’re making more money, to hide from themselves evidence that their film, that they made and released, isn’t doing as well as they hoped.

*nods parsleyly*

Yes. This whole time we all thought the MCU was a massive successful franchise doing something unprecedented. But lo' we were fools! FOOLS! They tricked us with every sales report!

*nads thymely*

I quite agree!

Don't you see, anything that contradicts cuda's preconceptions just shows how deep the SJW conspiracy goes!

*nods bayleafly*

That there is no evidence is evidence enough that he’s right!

It’s a conspiracy, and apparently, I’m in on it!

 Ouze wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
It looks like the sales drop from Sunday to Monday was huge, a 72% drop in sales. That's noticeably worse than even Batman vs. Superman.

I have to wonder exactly how many of those weekend seats the studio was buying to inflate their own numbers..

Other movies in a similar timeframe:
How to Train Your Dragon 3 - drop from Sunday to Monday opening weekend: 85%
* Lego Movie 2: 86%
* Greta: 66%


Similar movie types:

* Avengers: 67%
* Civil War: 68%
* Thor: 68%
* Logan 70%
*Iron Man 2 70%
*Doctor Strange 71%
* Spider Man - Spiderverse 72%
* Iron Man: 74%
*Iron Man 3 74%
* Age of Ultron: 74%
* Winter Soldier: 74%
* Thor Ragnarok: 74%
* Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2: 75%


Definitely proof of a vast, unprecedented conspiracy. *Nods sagely*

now that you have discovered the secret, expect goons to arrive soon.

Indeed.

Sadly, I suspect we might have heard the last of Ouze...

[Nodding sagely intensifies]

*nods Oregonly*

Indeed so!

 Ouze wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
It looks like the sales drop from Sunday to Monday was huge, a 72% drop in sales. That's noticeably worse than even Batman vs. Superman.

I have to wonder exactly how many of those weekend seats the studio was buying to inflate their own numbers..

Other movies in a similar timeframe:
How to Train Your Dragon 3 - drop from Sunday to Monday opening weekend: 85%
* Lego Movie 2: 86%
* Greta: 66%


Similar movie types:

* Avengers: 67%
* Civil War: 68%
* Thor: 68%
* Logan 70%
*Iron Man 2 70%
*Doctor Strange 71%
* Spider Man - Spiderverse 72%
* Iron Man: 74%
*Iron Man 3 74%
* Age of Ultron: 74%
* Winter Soldier: 74%
* Thor Ragnarok: 74%
* Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2: 75%


Definitely proof of a vast, unprecedented conspiracy. *Nods sagely*

In all fairness, How to Train Your Dragon 3 and Lego Movie 2 are both animated kids films. These are expected to have much larger falls on Mondays, especially during the school year. They depend more on weekend sales. Not to mention that they are sequels, and as a general rule each progressive sequel falls more than the movie before it.

As for the rest of the list, Thor, Logan, and Iron Man 2 & 3 are pretty bad movies. GotG2, Age of Ultron, Spiderverse, and Dr. Strange are passable, but not "good". Setting this as the bar is hardly fair.

As for the studio buying tickets, there were many theaters reporting that dozens of paid-for seats from online ticket sales were no-shows, and these no shows happened in about the same quantity for every showing over the opening weekend. Did a conspiracy actually happen? Maybe, likely not, but let's play devil' advocate and see what it would take. On opening weekend of a major release a studio's take of the ticket price is about 90%. Average ticket price in the US is $8.50. All they'd be loosing is 85 cents per seat. For $750,000 (less than 0.5% of their budget) they could buy 882,000 seats and inflate their own sales by $7.5 million. But why would they do this? Well, at one point the movie was estimated to have a $190 million opening, and then started to plummet quickly. Some estimates put it lower than $100 million. Inflating your own sales numbers could stop a self-fulfilling prophecy of people not going simply because it wasn't selling well.

Yes.

But why?

What’s the point? What do they actually stand to gain? Where’s the advantage. Where’s the profit?

Can you not just accept the film is a pretty decent hit, and made good money?

Are these ‘reports’ from theatres ratified? Or is it just 4chanesque hearsay? A desperate swipe from sad little MRAs who utterly failed to stop the film being a legitimate hit?

Forbes certainly don’t think it’s at all remarkable. They even describe it as ‘an exceptionally boring drop’.

The thing is now with preordering for seats being required you're going to see missing seats more than the old way. Peoples dinner runs late or they decide to do something else or whatever. Sell outs with empty seats happen all the time at my local theater and I'm pretty sure big movie companies aren't buying up seats in 6 screen theatres in Waconia, MN.

 cuda1179 wrote:
In all fairness, How to Train Your Dragon 3 and Lego Movie 2 are both animated kids films.

Lego 2 and Marvel movies share pretty much the same demographic: teenagers and young adults who grew up with the source material. Plus, your argument seems rather stupid. Children movies should perform better then adult movies in theatre since adults work during the day, while young children don't have school and can go to movies with stay-at-home parents or grand parents. All movies will see a big drop in their attendance during the week for the obvious reason of work + school getting in the way. Plus, most people won't see a movie twice in cinema even if it was good. They just dont have the time for it.

As for the rest of the list, Thor, Logan, and Iron Man 2 & 3 are pretty bad movies.

Logan is widely viewed as a very good superhero movie, actually one of the best in the genre. It has a rating of around 92% both in the public and critique sphere of Rotten Tomatoes.

GotG2, Age of Ultron, Spiderverse, and Dr. Strange are passable, but not "good". Setting this as the bar is hardly fair.

Spiderverse is also widely acclaimed and with a similar, extremelt high score from critique and audience alike. Doctor strange also received quite a bit of praise, especially for its visuals, and a score of over 85% both from critique and audience.

If you want to make an argument about Captain Marvel's, here is a simple test. Can it stay at the top of the Box Office until Shazam hits the theater in two weeks? If it can, it seems that Captain Marvel has been well received, if it can't and is dethroned by the very well received How to Train Your Dragon 3 or Lego 2 movies then yes, we could say this movie is a financial fiasco. Note that a movie making a lot of money doesn't mean the movie is good. Tranformers movies were known to be terrible, especially the last ones, yet they did make a tremendous amount of money. Captain Marvel isn't a very good movie (I'd personnaly give it a 65%, but it's not that bad and can surf a long way on the MCU popularity).

Plus, your argument seems rather stupid.

I would have said desperate.

I'm not even sure there are straws to be reaching for here.

There's really no world where a movie that breaks a billion isn't a hit, and Captain Marvel is already at $800 on opening weekend. It's going to hit a billion. That the fallback now is "but the movie makers are buying up the seats" is just laughable. Movies aren't like the publishing industry. You can't artificially inflate your sales numbers to get your movie on top of the best sellers list in this industry.

 cuda1179 wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
It looks like the sales drop from Sunday to Monday was huge, a 72% drop in sales. That's noticeably worse than even Batman vs. Superman.

I have to wonder exactly how many of those weekend seats the studio was buying to inflate their own numbers..

Other movies in a similar timeframe:
How to Train Your Dragon 3 - drop from Sunday to Monday opening weekend: 85%
* Lego Movie 2: 86%
* Greta: 66%


Similar movie types:

* Avengers: 67%
* Civil War: 68%
* Thor: 68%
* Logan 70%
*Iron Man 2 70%
*Doctor Strange 71%
* Spider Man - Spiderverse 72%
* Iron Man: 74%
*Iron Man 3 74%
* Age of Ultron: 74%
* Winter Soldier: 74%
* Thor Ragnarok: 74%
* Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2: 75%


Definitely proof of a vast, unprecedented conspiracy. *Nods sagely*

In all fairness, How to Train Your Dragon 3 and Lego Movie 2 are both animated kids films. These are expected to have much larger falls on Mondays, especially during the school year. They depend more on weekend sales. Not to mention that they are sequels, and as a general rule each progressive sequel falls more than the movie before it.

As for the rest of the list, Thor, Logan, and Iron Man 2 & 3 are pretty bad movies. GotG2, Age of Ultron, Spiderverse, and Dr. Strange are passable, but not "good". Setting this as the bar is hardly fair.

As for the studio buying tickets, there were many theaters reporting that dozens of paid-for seats from online ticket sales were no-shows, and these no shows happened in about the same quantity for every showing over the opening weekend. Did a conspiracy actually happen? Maybe, likely not, but let's play devil' advocate and see what it would take. On opening weekend of a major release a studio's take of the ticket price is about 90%. Average ticket price in the US is $8.50. All they'd be loosing is 85 cents per seat. For $750,000 (less than 0.5% of their budget) they could buy 882,000 seats and inflate their own sales by $7.5 million. But why would they do this? Well, at one point the movie was estimated to have a $190 million opening, and then started to plummet quickly. Some estimates put it lower than $100 million. Inflating your own sales numbers could stop a self-fulfilling prophecy of people not going simply because it wasn't selling well.

First, kids movies tend to be released not during school times. Xmas and spring break and the summer. 2nd, spiderverse passable? Thats idiotic. Its lauded as one of the best movies of the year in a year jam packed with great movies. YOU might not like it but the general consensus is vastly different from your portrayal.


Finally, the only place where studios are buying seats is china. And here is why. The same parent company or umbrella of companies in china own the movie making studio, the movie theaters, and the movie distribution companies. So, when they make the movie, sell out their own theaters, and distribute them to their own guys, it basically costs them nothing because all the profits from each seat sold go right back to the same parent company anyway while boosting falsified critical responses and getting them money in other loop holes from chinese law. This kind of monopoly of the entire industry is illegal in America and not possible.

Your arguments are idiotic. Might as well sign up for the flat earthers.

my theatre was sold out, and I would say a good 4-6 seats were empty..hardly a "empty theatre" and of course screaming kids and cell phone calls etc... caused some folks to leave. pretty typical movie to be honest. nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary.

 cuda1179 wrote:
As for the studio buying tickets, there were many theaters reporting that dozens of paid-for seats from online ticket sales were no-shows, and these no shows happened in about the same quantity for every showing over the opening weekend. Did a conspiracy actually happen? Maybe, likely not, but let's play devil' advocate and see what it would take. On opening weekend of a major release a studio's take of the ticket price is about 90%. Average ticket price in the US is $8.50. All they'd be loosing is 85 cents per seat. For $750,000 (less than 0.5% of their budget) they could buy 882,000 seats and inflate their own sales by $7.5 million. But why would they do this? Well, at one point the movie was estimated to have a $190 million opening, and then started to plummet quickly. Some estimates put it lower than $100 million. Inflating your own sales numbers could stop a self-fulfilling prophecy of people not going simply because it wasn't selling well.

This makes absolutely no sense. Even if we grant every one of your assumptions you're still talking about adding a $7.5 million improvement to a movie that is supposedly falling short of projections by over $90 million. Your fake ticket scam would be making up less than 10% of the missing money. Try to cover the entire $90 million and now you're talking about 5% of the budget spent purely on a PR stunt that's going to be incredibly obvious because half the seats in every "sold out theater" are empty. And all it takes is one employee to leak details of the scam and now you've got a humiliating PR debacle to deal with.

And really, who bases their decision to see a movie on its total ticket sales? Reviews by critics? Sure. Opinions of friends who saw it earlier? Absolutely. But how many people do you honestly think are looking at the financial reports and saying "well, this movie is only making $100 million this week, must be bad" and ignoring the countless reviews saying that it's a typical MCU movie and if you enjoy the genre you'll probably like it? Those numbers are of interest to a certain type of fan, but the majority of potential customers have no clue what a movie's sales numbers are unless they're breaking records enough to be front-page news.

 cuda1179 wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

 cuda1179 wrote:
It looks like the sales drop from Sunday to Monday was huge, a 72% drop in sales. That's noticeably worse than even Batman vs. Superman.

I have to wonder exactly how many of those weekend seats the studio was buying to inflate their own numbers..

Other movies in a similar timeframe:
How to Train Your Dragon 3 - drop from Sunday to Monday opening weekend: 85%
* Lego Movie 2: 86%
* Greta: 66%


Similar movie types:

* Avengers: 67%
* Civil War: 68%
* Thor: 68%
* Logan 70%
*Iron Man 2 70%
*Doctor Strange 71%
* Spider Man - Spiderverse 72%
* Iron Man: 74%
*Iron Man 3 74%
* Age of Ultron: 74%
* Winter Soldier: 74%
* Thor Ragnarok: 74%
* Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2: 75%


Definitely proof of a vast, unprecedented conspiracy. *Nods sagely*

(snip)
As for the rest of the list, Thor, Logan, and Iron Man 2 & 3 are pretty bad movies. GotG2, Age of Ultron, Spiderverse, and Dr. Strange are passable, but not "good". Setting this as the bar is hardly fair.

Oh, Cuda. The first rule of holes. But, here we are. First, you're trying to somehow characterize the (bad) argument into a new one based on critical quality, but no, I'm not going to let you handwave away what you said. You said that the movie had a "huge" 72% drop in sales and that was even worse then the execrable Batman vs Superman. However, if you had thought this out a little, you'd realize that is a laughable, clown shoes argument because that is a big Sunday to Monday drop is pretty normal. I'd guess 95% of the MCU had drops in excess of 50%, and at least a third of them had movies right on par with what Captain Marvel had. Some of the best ones had drops worse. Regardless of the critical merit of those movies or lack thereof, which again wasn't actually the argument, every single one of those movies was a financial success.

I can't wait to see what new metric or outlandish conspiracy theory is invented to explain that ackchyually, this likely billion dollar movie is quite bad. Not popular with left handed tuba players? 100% of the Mars rovers have not seen it? Brie Larson used her paycheck to buy hundreds of thousands of tickets? Unfortunately, I think you're on your own on this one, the rest of the "get woke, go broke" guys seem to have abandoned the thread.