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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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a stupid move because the characters that comics fans know and want are Iron Man, Captain America, and so on.

I think the issue was a bit different:

  • Iron Man, etc. became popular because of the MCU movies. Back when Marvel was broke, they sold off the movie rights for all their most popular characters (Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic 4, Hulk), and Iron Man and Captain America were the most popular out of the ones they had left.
  • Captain America wasn't even popular in the first 2 movies he appeared in. I remember in the Honest Trailer for The Avengers[1], they called Captain America "no one's favorite character". He only got popular after The Winter Soldier came out because that movie was really good.

My point being, the MCU could have been just fine without Iron Man and Captain America. They made those characters popular, so they could have done the same thing again—introduce some new characters to the film-going audience and make them compelling. The problem wasn't that they brought in unknown characters, it was that they didn't make those characters compelling.

[1] This is a tangent but re-watching this video reminded me of how when they switched from their old narrator (who does this video) to the new one, tons of people complained that the old one was better. Which was crazy to me? The "new" narrator (not really new at this point, he's been doing it for >10 years) sounds like an actual movie trailer narrator, the old one sounds like a guy who can do a decent impression of a movie trailer narrator.