We currently live in the movie age I only dared dream of as a child: all my favorite heroes rendered big as life on the big screen. It's only kind of a shame I've outgrown it to some degree. But nostaliga is a hell of a drug, so I dutifully watch the majority of them anyway, from the clunkers to the keepers. And while I'm not so interested in seeing spider-man's origin story for the umpteenth time anymore, I am interested in the broader phenomenon of the comic book industries shift in focus from print to cinema.
To be sure, both DC and Marvel and printing books and promoting the hell out of them, but sometime since Iron Man and Iron Man busted into the screen, it seems the central canon of their myth-making has shifted quite rapidly from the print universe to the MCU. With that, the movies themselves have begun to resemble comics books in editing an execution in a way that really hinders the story-telling, imo.
It used to be you'd watch more or less a complete movie, more or less contained with itself, with only Agent Coulson and the little bits at the end hinting at a broader lead-in to the Avengers movie. Since the Avengers, however, the movies themselves seem more like summer comic book events, with all the positives and negatives that go along with it. All your favorite heroes in one place? Check. Broader tie-ins to spin-off stories? Check. Epic-scope action but so many moving pieces there's no time to actually focus on any one character or idea with any depth? Check, check, a thousand times check.
I was addicted to comic books for quite a while. The main culprit was an addictive personality and the teaser at the end of ever issue. It didn't matter how tidily an individual issue was at the end, there'd always be some sort of non-sequitor] leading into the next plot. For me, it was just enough of a hook to get me into the next issue "What does mister sinister have planned!!!?", even if it made no sense in the context of the current issue. It was aesthetically damaging to the story of the issue, while completely functional in giving me a reason to tune in next week too. I found it and my inability to not check the next week out completely annoying.
Unfortunately, the MCU movies are turning into this type of story-telling almost exclusively. Avengers 2 was so busy setting up all the spin-offs and sequels it almost didn't have time to tell the story it was actually there to tell. It felt much more like comic book editing and storytelling, especially in the worst sort of pulpy, "I promise the real pay-off is in the next issue" kind of way.
It took me a long time to figure this out, but the primary motive of the storyteller plays an important part of the storytelling experience. There's stories that an artist has to tell because they are truth, beauty and wonder and there are stories a corporation tells because it's building a franchise and it matters less that the stories express the truth, beauty and wonder of the world, which they might, than viewers buy the next installment. They're trying to run a business here after all.
I'm not saying the latter style of storytelling is evil or anything, but I prefer the former, which generally only occurs in a utopian ideal where whether the story makes enough money to feed the artist isn't really a factor. If you write to eat you write to please others more than yourself, and that's not wrong. That said, it feels like the current editorship at the MCU in particular, (the complete bro-run clusterfuck that is the DCCU is better left untouched for my current purposes) has lost a certain sense of subtlety in weaving it's universe together.
GotG was delightful in part, I believe, because it had so little connection to the MCU at the time, and no reason to include material irrelevant to the proceedings at hand. In fact, I'd argue that the parts of the movie that dragged the most were the bits with Thanos, precisely because they were there as a placeholder to tie it in to the larger MCU, with the implicit promise of a pay-off down the road. Avengers 2, on the other hand, was all the more insufferable because it felt like the action occasionally got paused, and an editor walked out from behind the screen, coughed into a mic and said, "See this? This has nothing to do with the movie, be sure to watch Thor 3 to get the rest of the story!" In a comic book this kind of asterisk is skippable, in a movie it grinds momentum to a halt.
All of which is to say, in terms of tying all the MCU movies together, less would be so much more. It WAS so much more pre-avengers. I feel like the editors and producers have lost sight of the fact that ALL that is necessary to get my ass in a seat for the next installment, is to make this one so good I'll leave the theater hungry for more. This was my experience with Fury Road, and I didn't even know a sequel was in the works until after. The movie itself certainly didn't waste time horning that in. I'm hoping someone above my paygrade can gently remind the folks in the Disney story-telling empire of the beauty of simplicity.
When I was young and dumb, among my greatest wishes was that before the end of the world, Lucas would get around to making the Star Wars prequels he'd always hinted at and special effects would get good enough to bring all my favorite superheroes to life. I never imagined that so many of these movies would so unnecessarily leaving me feeling so hollow. Be careful what you wish for kids.
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