cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/18397465
It’s been six years since Steve Rodgers handed over Captain America reigns to Sam Wilson, Aka The Falcon, in “Avengers: Endgame.” Wilson (Anthony Mackie) will be the lead of Julius Onah’s “Captain America: Brave New World.” A trailer was released in the summer.
Two different cuts of the film test screened last week, and plot details for one of the cuts have leaked online. The person who attended didn’t seem to like the movie all that much.
Based on the folks I’ve spoken to, those who attended were either given a red or green bracelet and were split up into two different theaters. The reactions I’ve heard have not been very kind to this movie, which is being described as “inessential” and “flat.”
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Reshoots on ‘Brave New World’ happened in August. This could explain why two different cuts were shown. Last year, after receiving negative test scores in another screening, and Marvel themselves underwhelmed by an early cut they saw of the film, ‘Brave New World’ was delayed to February 2025. Extensive reshoots were called, with “three major action sequences” having been filmed, between May and August 2024 in Atlanta.
‘Brave New World’ had originally wrapped filming in June 2023, and was set for a July 2024 release date, but it’s now turned into this monstrous mess for Marvel. You just don’t push a movie this big out of your calendar, and then decide to dump it in February, unless major trouble is brewing.
Last December, Matthew Orton was hired by Marvel to pen “additional scenes and material”. Orton’s work was shot during this summer’s reshoots. They’ve also added new characters to the story. Will audiences even show up to a Captain America movie that doesn’t star Chris Evans?
Inessential is a good word for it. It’s a marvel story nobody was begging for
Not only that, but the superhero bit is getting played out. Comics can have some real depth (and some real dumb stuff) but I feel like they haven’t done much besides the usual “not hero, gets powers, struggles with bad guy, understands powers, beats bad guy, happy ending, sequel teaser”.
They need to mix it up. Gimme a superhero crime drama, a romance novel, a true comedy not just quips, etc. They have a whole universe and years of content to draw from and they keep telling the same story over and over.
It’s well known that Marvel has done a wide variety of genres. The period piece/war movie, the Shakespearean drama, the heist movie, the space opera, the mystic stuff, the ethnic sociology piece, the spy movie - and then there’s the TV shows like Wanda’s literal sitcom, the mental drama in Moon Knight, surviving with general trauma in Hawkeye, a bit of classic horror with Werewolf by night, Agatha is doing pure witch drama, Falcon and WS was an international buddy cop show… Black Widow tried going hard as a super spy thriller (the Soviet style sleeper cell family that breaks up then reunites, the international assassin syndicate), it was just terribly done.
A lot of these do have their own genre and just happen to feature someone with superpowers. Is Winter Soldier (Cap 2 I mean) not just James Bond with a frisbee and the muscles to hold a helicopter or punch a car? Is Ant-Man 1 really a superhero movie if you take him out of Civil War and Avengers? Sure, there’s some overlap, and it’s never really “pure so-and-so genre” but always in the context of this shared universe. But it’s definitely more varied than some give it credit for.
It’s only in the latest phases that they don’t know what else to do while still introducing new faces (yes, there’s been a bunch of misses, but some are still working well). Would Blade as a gothic horror romance work? Is too much special effects the problem?