Where The Mcu Has Begun To Go Wrong, As Seen By An Absolute Nobody Of An Author.

Hi folks, my name is Victor R. Ziblis. I write a series of novels that have DOUBLE DIGIT NUMBERS of fans worldwide. This has made me a thousandaire. Thanks to writing the Dog and Spider Private Investigations series, I have become a baller of epic proportions. When it comes time to gas up my motorcycle, I fearlessly hit the high octane button (after putting in my discount code first, of course) and put up to THREE GALLONS in at a time. When my wife said "Hey, Britbox looks good!" I was able to say, "Don't worry, babe, thanks to my writing we can swing that one more streaming service!" When I take the family to the BK Lounge, (as Dane Cook has coined it) we can all KING size our meals. In the Ziblis household it is, in fact, all about the Hamiltons.

Why am I telling you all this? Why, to set up my credentials as someone who TOTALLY QUALIFIES to criticize the direction of entertainment franchises.

*shifty eyes*

I honestly think we are seeing the MCU falter, and I'm not sure I'm happy about that. It's been 15 years of good comic book movies or so. Comics are seen as less nerdy than ever, blah blah blah. You have all read the articles about this Golden age we are experiencing. Marvel is making mistakes.

Marvel's first mistake was making a Ten Rings (and is there one to rule them all?) movie. That character is so obscure that he started as a riff on Bruce Lee... but ya know what? I've heard of him. He showed up now and then, mostly around Logan when he was away from the X-Men. Sure, I'd have preferred their big first run into Asian-led movies be Jubilee which could have led us into X-Men, but he was a known quantity. Fu Manchu's son, as I recall. He was at his biggest point in the late 70s alongside the same fever that drove Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and other comics that leaned heavily on chop socky and Blaxploitation... but he never went away, he just tended to be less in the limelight much like Cage himself. Bendis came along and changed a lot of that, but that's not in the scope of this article.

I'm 44 years old. I've been a Marvel man since I could first read. Aside from Batwoman (who they screwed up anyway) I was never into DC, no manga, hardly any smaller houses... I was (and still am) a True Believer. I have bought almost every Marvel video game that caught my eye, from Parker Brothers' seminal "Spider Man" all the way to Guardians of the Galaxy. I'll make that sentence say "through" the next time a hundred dollar royalty check comes in... any month now. I'm wearing an avengers t-shirt right now, I see two Spider-Woman collectibles just around my living room TV and have a nice Amanda Conner signed Captain Marvel poster. My love of Spider Woman (the original, Jessica Drew. No not "Petra Parker" I mean the original Jessica Drew!) is a good indicator of my love for the less-beloved characters.

I now admit what it seems so many others are loathe to: I have never heard of the "Eternals." I look over the cast of characters and I don't recognize one single character. The previews give me no reason to care. The best I can glean is these are a bunch of REALLY powerful people who are very keenly interested in Earth being able to serve some goal, but whom were all busy playing Final Fantasy XIV, I guess, every time the Earth was threatened before. Something about Star-Lord's Dad? I'm not sure. Does it matter?

I won't bother going to see it. If this is what the MCU is gonna be, scraping the fringes and trying to puff up nobodies? Yeah, I'm out. How did these johans get a movie before Jessica Drew? You never even have to call her "Spider-Woman" she can just be an agent of SHIELD! Ugh.

I didn't see Shang Chi and I only care about Black Widow to see David Harbour. When Shang Chi appears for free on Disney Plus I'll watch it but Eternals? Nah. I'll read a summary. Maybe.

This is a problem. While suddenly the hipsters came out to claim they always loved The Eternals, the rest of the world went "I... what? Who?" It's not the gay kiss, Disney. It's really not. It failed because you gave characters nobody has ever heard of a headline movie role. I mean... at least Iron Man led us into Nick Fury. Where did the Eternals come from? Yeah, I guess, it's somehow related to Star-Lord's Dad, or maybe not? I'm not sure... and I just don't care. We're starting to notice the product is getting stale... still delicious enough for now, but I'm ready for something else.

That "something else" needs to be beloved characters in different kinds of stories, like say oh... a Deadpool murder mystery where he speaks in noir cliches all the time? If you can't do that? Fine, I'll live. Crank out some more stuff about thor and Winter Soldier in the same vein as what we've already seen but please, PLEASE do something else. "The exact same style of movie you've seen before but with increasingly obscure characters" just isn't gonna cut it, guys.

Take it from me, multi-bajillion dollar company. DOZENS of people worldwide respect my opnion.