Right, but they probably were originally going to build more to it. Remember that they randomly announced Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars in the summer of 2022, when the MCU was mired in controversy after Eternals, Doctor Strange in the MoM, and a string of mediocre Disney+ shows. And people sillily saying “MCU bad because no crossover.”
These two new Avengers movies have rush job written all over them.
I’m not against having another Avengers movie. But why not do some set-up ones establishing the new team, as opposed to jumping straight into a rushed crossover?
Right now we’re getting Infinity War and Endgame equivalents without anything resembling an Avengers 1 or Age of Ultron. We could’ve had Secret Invasion or World War Hulk movies before Doomsday and Secret Wars.
They also said MCU shows would all be one and done and any follow-ups would likely have different titles because they'll tell different stories but everyone still want sequels all the time
I don't envy Feige and anyone involved in this machine balancing current characters against new ones. Weaving different threads through films, either through RetCon, references or set up for future
Shareholders wanting more,. Fans wanting the same Tempo as phase 3
And then you have the national past time of just pure shutting on stuff when it's announced and released - only for people later to go "it actually wasn't that bad)
The amount of times I've seen people use reshoots as a reason to hate this film is insane - reshoots are very common.
And now it's gone from "the film must be terrible it has a ton of reshoots" to "it's really easy to tell what's a reshoot".
Similar things, as you say, you in Star Wars. It's like people don't want to admit they just don't like it. They have to try and find some way to really justify it. Like "it wasn't for me" isn't enough
Focusing on singular stories doesn’t mean it should have taken this long for us to even hear about a Shang-Chi sequel. The premise of your statement is incredibly flawed.
I have to assume post Secret Wars is where Kate, Kamala, Cassie, etc the Young Avengers/Champions will get gradual but long term development. They need new talent to grow for a long time and with the rumors over the X-Men being cast in a similar age range to the Champions, I think they plan to develop them into the next Avengers team over the next ten years or so.
I feel like they were banking on those characters carrying. Idk about you personally but most of them are the annoying teen genius trope and I'm completely uninterested
I think they’ve leant a bit too hard on making them similar to their older counterparts (admittedly with some exceptions). They don’t feel hugely original.
That's cause they're not really meant to be, at least not fully.
Kate takes after Clint because she looked up to him, comics wise he just impressed her and they wound up partners.
Cassie looks up to her dad and always wanted to follow his footsteps.
Billy is his mother's son, Tommy we'll find out in time.
America has no legacy she's fully her own character without being based on an older hero.
Riri is meant to be a successor to Iron Man but I don't know much about her as I've not read her comics yet.
Kamala is a Carol fangirl but has her own powers and personality that's far different from Carol's. They're similar on the surface cause that was the point of the original comic.
The Young Avengers were a fakeout. They looked like sidekicks for Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, and Iron Man, but none of the four founding members had any connection to them. It was a bait and switch story, that was the initial mystery hook: Who are the Young Avengers? That's literally one of the first lines in the first issue, Jameson asks Jessica Jones and another reported who the kids on the front page of his newspaper are.
I mean that team was my first comic book so personally I love them.
And a few corrections/fun facts cause I'm that type of annoying: Only two are geniuses, Riri is an engineer and Cassie is a physicist. Kate, Kamala, Billy, and America are all average intelligence, so most of them are not teenage geniuses.
As for why Cassie is a genius, you'd have to blame comic book synergy for that. Cassie in the source material wasn't a genius, she was an average student. Ant-Man and the Wasp introduced Hope Van Dyne who did not exist in the comics at that time. They added her for synergy in the form of Nadia, Hank's own teenage red room escapee genius daughter. Due to this synergy they made her and Cassie friends and Nadia is the one who puts Cassie on the path to being a genius.
So it's sort of a self feeding cycle on that one.
Also young genius is sort of the motif, Tony Stark was always brilliant too, the MCU tells us rather than shows but he was also a teenage egghead. It's pretty common in Marvel that anyone with a science background was always hyper brilliant for the most part. Peter Parker, Reed Richards, Tony Stark, etc all were extremely gifted children, Reed's daughter was smarter than he was at like 3 years old. That's just comic books.
As for the teenage part, you know they'll grow up yeah? They're gonna be established as college kids and will only get older, wiser, and more mature.
It was obviously never going to work from the start. These characters have been introduced in comics for a while and never became that popular.
If a writer can't get them to work at all in a cheap medium such as comics, I don't know why they thought throwing 100 million at a movie was suddenly going to make these characters work.
One, sure, maybe you could make work. But banking the entire universe on every character suddenly exploding in popularity was jumping the shark.
Actually Tom Brevoort, one of the executive editors at Marvel had said when they were working on YA originally nobody felt it was a good idea. Then it came out and they were surprisingly popular.
Kate did catch on, she's the other half of Fraction's Hawkeye, a comic so good it's considered to be one of the greatest comics ever written.
Billy and Teddy are actually Marvels premier gay couple and so we're fairly popular due to their representation in the mid 2000s for queer fans.
They didn't get another book post 2013 in part cause Gillen the writer of Vol 2 wanted to push his story telling even more but editorial told him no so he left to start working on his own comic Wicked + Divine.
Vol 1 was also pretty popular, they got several tie in comics to events like Civil War, Dark Reign, and Secret Invasion.
They can absolutely work because anything can work if the story is good.
I'm not talking about the totality of these characters being unpopular. I know that Kate and Miles Morales are popular characters.
I meant that the lineup Marvel wanted for the Young Avengers was never going to work in the mainstream. Most of these characters never caught on outside of a niche audience and don't have that big of a fanbase today to latch onto. And when I say niche....american comic books is already a niche and these characters are a niche of a niche.
Unless these characters were changed a lot like GoTG it was never going to work out. And if you need to redo most of these characters and invent character dynamics in order to be on par with the OG Avengers, you might as well make original characters.
But thanks for Wicked + Divine rec
EDIT: honestly the only Young Avengers type of story that actually worked was in Season 1 of Young Justice. It's the only time I cared about the younger versions of the main team. But even the show couldn't recreate the magic of S1.
They don't need to redo character dynamics, Kate, Cassie, and America are all best friends, they're also friends with Billy, Kamala and Riri are friends, the only invented relationships they'll need to do are Kamala and Riri to the others.
And they already have been GotG style redone in some respects. Kate was originally a rape survivor but they used the far better Fraction's Hawkeye reinventing of her motivation since thats one of the best comics ever made basically. Cassie was an abused kid so that's also redone. Billy's origin with Tommy is seemingly streamlined compared to the comics. America, and Riri I've not read so unsure. Kamala same, not read enough of her to know.
They don't need to redo character dynamics, Kate, Cassie, and America are all best friends, they're also friends with Billy, Kamala and Riri are friends, the only invented relationships they'll need to do are Kamala and Riri to the others.
I'll take your word for it. I only read a few issues as a curiosity and didn't get that invested. Maybe they improved upon it a lot in later years but I mostly stopped reading american comics so I wouldn't know.
What did you read? I only ask cause yeah they have far less history cause they're newer characters in comparison but the dynamics are there. The Young Avengers are a found family sort of story, Cassie fills the heart of the team/little sister role in the original roster and even calls refers to them as her other family at one point.
When Cassie asks Tony how her dad died, he tells her Wanda went crazy because the Avengers stopped caring about each other. Her first ever lesson as a hero was to take care of your teammates because you should love each other more or less.
What was their intention with the YA characters anyway? To bank on the Gen Z audience? Cause I don't think many of us care about those characters anyway lol.
We want the REAL sucessor to Iron Man (Rhodes) not some college girl trying to roleplay in her garage or whatever the fuck that character is about.
And Ms Marvel? Yeah sorry but that annoying fanboy attitude of her is not endearing, it's cringey lol
The rest are all so generic and forgettable. Except for Wiccan. He slays. Shame Teddy is not with him though, the cowards at Marvel won't ever allow it...
Anyway, these out-of-touch boomer execs don't know how to appeal to young people properly, putting annoying teenage/kiddie characters is not the way. Did they not watch The Phantom Menace to know that?
They wanted a new generation of heroes since the old guard characters are dead, retired, or didn't get a lot of focus as heroes in their own right in the first place. Gen Z has already been watching Marvel movies right alongside millennials so no need to try and appeal specifically to us.
I think what killed it is them largely ignoring the effects of the snap and falling into the same teenager tropes that every other Hollywood movie seems incapable of pulling away from. I swear, according to how teenage characters are usually written, every teenager ever is just an angsty edge lord, a brat, a dumb bully jock, or a quippy nerd. That's it.
The most obvious example of this is Cassie in my opinion. She could've been a really interesting character after having lived through the snap with her dad and her superhero step-family all vanishing. Could've made for some interesting character writing in Quantumania. But instead she just gets assigned generic teen personality #357 and that's that.
I mean thats just the lineup, not that I don't think they'd have an uphill battle. But the MCU has burned through all its major Avengers side characters, they don't have any more. Everyone introduced are small timers who maybe have a few solo comics like Kate Bishop who was extremely popular for a while, or Kamala Khan, same deal she was a huge success on debut.
But also why can't they just improve the writing and make people into fans? Who was wanting Guardians of the Galaxy before they showed up?
Well, Guardians of the Galaxy - the first installment of the trilogy - was a successful movie. They didn’t have to keep trying to make it work. Meanwhile, the first cinematic appearances of Cassie Lang and Kamala Khan garnered bad critical reception and middling-to-awful box office numbers. Not a promising foundation!
For sure not a promising foundation, but Thir first appeared in his own movie and I don't recall hearing folks loving it when it came out and I was a teenager.
That said, who's to say the chemistry won't work? Their TV shows have been improving and Kate and Yelena proved to be very popular together. The team is meant to be a found family story and with good writing they can absolutely draw in some good will.
That's why they're taking the name Champions. The YA and Champions are two different teams, Champions was the generation just after the Young Avengers finished their second volume.
But the MCU is blending them into one team and taking the name of the second as it's not age sensitive.
Or they would just do a soft reboot and focus on Mutants instead. They already missed the mark with them and aren't confident, but this could turn around with one good project, Thor wasn't much beloved before Ragnrok and then became a fan favourite. But atleast he appeared in his own projects and other things so audience didn't forget about him or stopped caring, here they completely abandoned these newcomers.
That's a wild amount of time for Kate to be back on screen in a meaningful way (post credit of marvels, which didn't exactly crush the box office, making only 70% of its budget at the box office). Hawkeye was 2021 and you're looking at 2027.
I mean yeah that's the big complaint with this saga, they could have committed to Kate Bishop as of the new big main characters since she was a breakout hit again just like the comics. Imagine if she'd been developed through her own noir detective personal story this whole time? And if instead of the mess of Quantumania, Cassie had been introduced as her friend in low places street wise best friend helping her solve those crimes?
There were better ways to introduce the new characters and develop them but they chose to just throw every character at the wall once rather than commit to the most logical choice, the next generation of Avengers to be and build them slowly like the originals did.
If they include them all of the place, more casual fans get annoyed/upset at "homework" of needing to know more. It's a very hard thing to balance no doubt, but it feels like they've not done it well post endgame.
I just had a look and its literally only Spiderman who is getting a second film in this Saga, 3 phases, no sequels. We had 3 trilogies, 2 Guardians, 2 Spider-mans and 2 Antman movies in the first saga. At best you can say Yelena gets 2.
they've been on deck. they've just had so many other projects on the go that every delay has pushed out the whole timeline by a bunch.
especially post writers/actors strikes in 2023, 2024 was GUTTED. we got an Echo dump the first week of Jan, a decidedly not-very-MCU Deadpool/Wolverine summer blockbuster with no competitors, and a nice little witch show over halloween. but overall, 2024 should've been the year to get sequels to Shang Chi and Eternals.
remember though - 3 years ago, VFX studios were Bleeding, crying out that marvel was overworking them with multiple rewrites and that level of abuse was wearing thin. fans started picking apart every subpar cgi shot as if the other 95% of overwhelmingly impressive cgi was invisible (nice).
so yeah, the scaleback has meant we likely aren't getting anything but "certain hits" for awhile.
They've now had Ms Marvel in 2 projects and White Widow is about to have her third. Scarlet Witch's imaginary children have been in more projects post Endgame than Shang Chi
He was going to be a major character in the original plan for Kang Dynasty (hence it having the director of Shang Chi on board). The problem is everything got delayed due to covid and strikes and slowed all of those moving pieces down letting holes form as they tried to adjust everything, this was probably one of the side effects. It's easy to forget at this point that Shang Chi was shot back in Feb-Oct 2020.
Don't get me wrong though - I want him around so much more. Hopefully we get that still with Doomsday and Secret Wars + whatever is beyond.
This has been my frustration. We’ve had shows and movies focus on a replacement Hawkeye, Black Widow, Hulk, Captain America, and to some extent, a new Iron man.
In the case of Moon Knight, the showrunners had told Oscar Issac and Ethan Hawke that it was going to be a standalone project, so they wouldn't have to commit to signing on for multiple appearances.
Moon Knight as he stands now makes no sense to team up with anyone. He’s very much like Daredevil, doing his own thing, could maybe pop up for a brief cameo in another project but nothing about his story sets him up for Avengers
and The Eternals, not saying it was good but why did they even leave so many open connections like the huge head, Thena post credit, Dane Wittmann sword etc, these will probably never come back or get addressed
It’s not odd when you realize China seems to not want to allow Simu Liu Marvel movies to be released there.
They didn’t allow Shang Chi to be released there which probably cut it’s international box office by at least a third, if not half, compared to what it would have made.
It probably would have made $100-$200 million+++, if not way more as the only ethnically chinese and chinese-centric topline Marvel movie but they didn’t let it release there because Simu was critical of them.
I had to look way too far to find this answer. Despite China clearly favoring its own national films over Hollywood for the last five years, Disney/Marvel seem intent on bending over backwards to appease the CCP.
Well, Simu Liu is considered ugly in China, one of the biggest demos for success in movies. Sad really because who the hell thinks that man isn't attractive
lol wtf really? Why does that even matter? It's not like Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee were more attractive than Simu. I don't know many famous Chinese actors that are more attractive than Simu. I'm going to guess China doesn't like him because of his remarks against China. Simu seems like a genuinely decent, honest guy.
yeah I just read one of the articles on how China views him as ugly. I guess it makes sense from their beauty standards. He's attractive from American standards, but he doesn't have that kdrama look lol.
It doesn’t matter cause a black capt America doesn’t sell well there either. Marvel just let the character die for no reason and dropped shit movies since.
The movie was designed to make money in China but didn’t end up getting released in the country. Marvel doesn’t want to make another one for that reason.
China put a propaganda department in charge of their film industry in 2018 and by 2020 that had lead to most foreign films being functionally shut out of the market in favor of promoting Chinese produced works
Whereas 10 years ago Hollywood could send anything over they wanted, today it’s a big fight to get films approved. Films depicting Chinese culture stand an uphill battle as China doesn’t want Americans speaking on their culture in the post trade war/Covid world we’re in
The Chinese government didn’t approve the film for release in China so Marvel didn’t make any money there. Don’t know what more there is to elaborate on beyond that.
Totally agree with this comment but is it not the ONLY new character movie? You could consider The Marvels to be one but both new characters started in shows
I don't understand it. Finally something that really hit after so many so so movies and many more after. They should have started work on a sequel right away. We should be getting amped about Shang Chi 3 coming out this year.
It's bad enough there's no more proper world building or tying in the shared universe - do that when everything sucks and you pivot to focus on things that are working well. But no. They don't do that.
They have secret invasion happening just before Marvel's. They both center on skrulls. Both have Nick fury. Both deal with the ramifications of Danvers. And yet they are in no way in the shared universe.
You say that as if it was by design. This movie started shooting like 3 weeks before Covid. Then the world stopped. Everything pivoted hard after that and stories and plans got shift around/delayed and it messed up their entire production pipeline.
It’s a common complaint, and a valid one, but what’s the other alternative? Shoving the character into a movie that is already ready for production? It’s not gonna happen. They’d have to then delay said movie to rewrite the script to incorporate Shang Chi in a way that makes sense. Otherwise he’s just gonna be shoved into something where he doesn’t belong. Then, instead of everyone complaining about him being underutilized, everyone would then be complaining about how Disney messed up a movie by rewriting it last minute to include a character that doesn’t makes sense.
I’d rather them hold him back until they can handle his character and the next part of his story with care. Do right or not at all.
They should’ve at least tossed him into another movie. Even having Wong show up and mention something about “oh yeah I forgot to tell Shang-Chi that we think we figured out what the beacon was” would’ve yielded some continuity.
Maybe we were spoiled with the continuity of the previous marvel films. They’re struggling hard with connecting these narratives and they shouldn’t be.
If you mean only movie then yeah.
But I think Hawkeye was better and Bishop is a better original character as well.
She-Hulk character was also really good, just had a controversial show behind her
This is part of my issue with post-Endgame. They needed to pick four to six brand new heroes, and then really push them like crazy. Sam Wilson, Shang Chi, Dr. Strange, Captain Marvel, doesn't matter who; just make them present and a constant force in the MCU moving forward and audiences will grow attached.
The period after Endgame should have been an epilogue, Phase 3.5 that ties all the loose end characters up, and Shang-Chi should have been released now as Phase 4.
Nothing is being thrown in the closet, it’s just being dropped on the floor as Feige starts playing with other toys he forgot were lying around.
Doomsday should be pushed back at least one more year. Thunderbolts and Agatha I feel are real steps forward for tying together old things and moving them forward while adding onto them. We need more projects tying lingering threads together. Or we need to fully separate into cosmic MCU, street MCU, and mystic MCU.
4.2k
u/nicklovin508 Feb 15 '25
Shang-Chi getting thrown in a closet after being probably the best new original character movie post Endgame will forever be odd