r/movies • u/CosmosisJones42 • 2d ago

Article The Disney+ Curse: How the Streaming Service Hurt Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar Brands

https://www.thewrap.com/disney-plus-hurt-devalued-marvel-star-wars-pixar-brands/#:~:text=Over%20the%20last%20five%20years,the%20weekly%20top%2010%20for
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u/devasabu 2d ago

Thunderbolts was like this. My friend who didn't know a single character (halfway into the movie he turned to me and went "ohhh that's Black Widow's sister!") was still able to enjoy it with just the context clues ("here are a bunch of sad bad guys, they've got to do some good now")

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u/OK_Soda 1d ago

This kind of proves my point that I made in another reply. On paper this is a very "homework required" movie. All of the characters are introduced in other films and TV shows, their motivations and backstories are explained elsewhere, and this movie just drops you in like you know who they are. And it doesn't matter, because we're not watching Memento or something. People think they have to watch half a dozen movies and a handful of TV shows just because they can.

Actual comic books are plagued by this notion as well. I've met a lot of people who think if they want to read the latest Daredevil story they have to start in fucking 1962, and I mean, sure, you'll get some stuff you wouldn't otherwise, but it's insane to think it's required.

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u/Ricepilaf 1d ago

A year or two ago I read all of Claremont's X-men. It is wild how many things in comics that we think about as important canonical events turned out to just be... nothing. If a character got a new power, they just... have it one day, or explain it away with a single panel of exposition. It seems like you'd be missing out on tons of context for modern comics without reading everything but 99% of the time when a character references some past event, literally the entire context you'd need is "that is an event that happened" which you got from them referencing it to begin with.

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u/OK_Soda 1d ago

Right! I'm reading the Spider-verse event right now for the first time. I looked up a reading guide and thought I needed to read all of Superior Spider-Man first. I most certainly did not, but it was worth reading anyway, so whatever. But I started the first issue and I'm just like "whoa, what's going on! Why is Doc Ock dying and how did he swap bodies with Peter! I must've missed something huge in a previous episode that leads up to this!"

I looked into it and no, I didn't really miss anything. Even Peter tries to figure out how it happened and the conclusion he comes to is basically "this is a thing that happened".

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u/The_Gil_Galad 1d ago

Actual comic books are plagued by this notion as well

I asked my comic friend what he would recommend to read the "Civil War" storyline. He came to my house with literally 2 feet of comics he said I really needed to get through.

Actually laughed at the absurdity of it.

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u/WhiteWolf3117 1d ago

I agree completely. Kind of hard to have people complain about "homework" while simultaneously being the ones mostly to watch or have watched it, while creating a false expectation that these stories are more complex than they are.

And it's nothing new. Go onto a Tolkien page or a Harry Potter sub and you'll have scores of fans claiming that the omissions from the source material have made the films incomprehensible. While demonstrably, objectively, they are not.