{"id":14995,"date":"2015-02-10T09:59:53","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T14:59:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=14995"},"modified":"2015-09-10T16:51:55","modified_gmt":"2015-09-10T20:51:55","slug":"spider-man-and-his-amazing-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2015\/02\/10\/spider-man-and-his-amazing-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"spiderman_1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s just been announced that Spider-Man will be involved with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It seems that Sony is not happy with the current state of the franchise and will reboot it yet again in 2017 in a joint movie with Marvel Studios\/Disney. Sony will still have the final say creatively, but surely Disney will have a major influence. With this new development, it\u2019s probably a good time to evaluate the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole and consider what might happen in years to come.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to forget that just a few years ago, Marvel Studios was the underdog; Iron Man was a pretty risky film back in 2008 and even though the post-credits sequence promised the eventual arrival of the Avengers, such a development was still seen mostly as a pipe dream. It really wasn\u2019t until 2011 with the double punch of Thor and Captain America when it started to actually feel like it could happen. Disney\u2019s acquisition of Marvel in 2009 also helped toward making an Avengers world a reality.<\/p>\n

The Avengers movie was an undeniable success. And while the film is kind of a mess that\u2019s saved by great pacing, it still generated over a billion dollars worldwide. It literally changed the game; both in our expectations and the filmmakers\u2019 methods. Now, everyone is trying to make their movies into \u201cshared\u201d franchises. X-Men: First Class seemed content with keeping very separate from the original X-Men movies (aside from a brilliant Hugh Jackman cameo), but Days of Future Past did everything it could to bridge the new and the old, broadening the scope of all of it. DC and Warner Bros. are shoving Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and probably the Wonder Twins into the next Superman movie to expedite their shared universe.<\/p>\n

But this begs the question: is this sustainable? Like it or not, actors age and their tastes change. Many fear becoming typecast or otherwise held back by their roles. By the time Avengers III comes out (technically Avengers: Infinity War, Part I), it will have been ten years since the start of it all with Iron Man. A decade under the influence of Tony Stark might be all that Robert Downey Jr. can take. But is America ready for a re-cast Iron Man? We\u2019re not talking about a cultural icon here like Batman or Spider-Man \u2013 it\u2019s possible that once RDJ leaves, people will stop caring about Iron Man. The same may be true for Captain America, Thor, et al. Who knows if people will still care about these characters?<\/p>\n

One of the reasons people might not care is they\u2019ll have NEW Avengers to worry about. We\u2019ll be meeting the new guard starting this year with Ant-Man (starring Paul Rudd). Next year we\u2019ll get Dr. Strange (with Benedict Cumberbatch) and in 2018 Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and Captain Marvel (as yet unannounced). It seems obvious that these characters will be taking up the mantle of the Avengers once Downey, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and the others move on to other things. (Sam Jackson will presumably stick around because he\u2019ll appear in anything.) Avengers IV (or Avengers: Infinity War, Part II) will come out in 2019 and I think it\u2019s safe to say the actors involved will move on. Downey, Evans, and Hemsworth in particular will have played the same role in seven movies by that point. Guardians of the Galaxy II will come out in 2017, along with the new Spidey movie, so that will act as a kind of bridge between the past and the future. And it\u2019s very possible that characters from GotG will be involved with the Infinity War.<\/p>\n

Moving into the next decade, provided audiences haven\u2019t gotten sick of the genre, the next Avengers squad could very well be Ant-Man, Dr. Strange, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and Spider-Man. There may even be additional characters who don\u2019t get their own movies, similar to Scarlett Johansson\u2019s Black Widow and Jeremy Renner\u2019s Hawkeye. We\u2019ll probably get three movies for each of those characters and three to four Avengers movies to keep us going until, I guess, Marvel reboots the Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America franchises with new actors. Who knows? Maybe they\u2019ll get the rights back to the X-Men and Fantastic Four and fold them into the MCU as well (but I won\u2019t hold my breath).<\/p>\n

If Marvel and Disney play their cards right, they could keep the milk flowing from this cash cow for another ten years. But the temperament of the movie-going public can be very hard to predict. If you started high school in 2008, you\u2019ll graduate college before Avengers III comes out. Sure, the Harry Potter movies sustained peoples\u2019 interest for eight films, but that was a single story that has an ending. Marvel will undoubtedly keep this story going for years to come (don\u2019t expect any Dark Knight Rises Nolan-style closure here). Every Marvel movie ends with the sense that something bigger is on the way. It remains to be seen if audiences will continue to enjoy that or start to feel like they\u2019re being strung along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s just been announced that Spider-Man will be involved with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It seems that Sony is not happy with the current state of the franchise and will reboot it yet again in 2017 in a joint movie with Marvel Studios\/Disney. Sony will still have the final say creatively, but surely Disney will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pcthugs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14997,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14995\/revisions\/14997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}