Marvel Forever

Hey, this is Kirk R. Thatcher, the punk on the bus in Star Trek 4. First of all, I hate you. Secondly, you're listening to Movie Meltdown. And I.

The following feature has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America. It is intended for mature audiences and parental discretion is advised. It's showtime, folks. Enjoy the show. Our nuclear reactor, pumping out one million kilowatts of power.

Hey, is this one of those comic book movies, man? Oh, am I in Black Panther? What's up and welcome to Movie Meltdown. I'm Brian. And I'm your fanatic, George.

And we're coming to you live via digital recording from the Oddity Studios for another Super Series session. That's right. It's been a little while. I was thinking earlier today, I was like, was Thor the last one? And it was.

It was, yeah. Thor was. I thought normally we kind of ease our way in with whatever the last series was, which at the time we talked about Ms. Marvel. Right.

So we have not had any full on discussions about She-Hulk. Nor Werewolf by Night. Oh, that's true. Yeah, I think you brought it up on one of the music when they're the Halloween episode. Yeah, I did, yeah.

But we, yeah, we haven't, I hadn't watched it at the time. So I have seen it since then and all of She-Hulk. So where would you like to begin on those? Well, definitely, I really enjoyed She-Hulk. I had to, of course, you know, some people, you know, they know I'm the Marvel guy.

And so some folks want to talk to me about, you know, shows upcoming or questions about And so a lot of the things I would see is like, oh, well, she's breaking the fourth wall just like Deadpool does. Skrrt! Hold up. Miss She-Hulk was doing that shit in the 80s a good five, seven or eight years before Deadpool was a twinkle in his daddy's eye. So.

She hulked it at first. But her schtick is different than Deadpool's. Because Deadpool is actually doing schtick. Oh, yeah. He's making references.

He's doing bits. His is full-on comedy. And it's supposed to be. Where she's just addressing the reader slash audience. Right.

And sometimes she's making social commentary, sometimes she's making jokes, or sometimes she's literally ripping the pages out of her own comic book because she's dissatisfied with what's going on, and says, no, this is going to happen instead, and she literally did that in her own show. Well, what's funny is I would get, because they didn't really do a ton of it, so I got towards the end there, and I was like, you know, they're barely even doing this break in the fourth wall thing until we got to that last episode. And I was like, Oh, did they also realize they haven't been turned? They're like, Whoa, we're saving up. We got to get it all in, in this last episode.

Cause then it goes off the rails in that last episode. And I think it's sometimes it is subtle. And sometimes she does, you know, big things or whatnot, or like, you know, she's ripping out their own, her pages of her comic book threatening. If you don't buy this, I'm going to tear up your X-Men comics or something like that. You know, you know, stuff like that.

So it, You know, she's always kind of had that little bit, too. But it is kind of subtle. But there's, like, a lot of times, too, like, a lot of the, you know, whether she's breaking the fourth wall, it's the commentary in the episode that's going on. And She-Hulk was the best place for that to get, like, women in the workplace sort of commentary. Social commentary on...

You know, how a woman should appear, how she should act, how she should be sexually involved and stuff like that. So we're just hitting all those nails on there. So you knew this show was going to piss off a whole lot of incels. And it did. It did.

I certainly wasn't pissed off. I enjoyed it every step of the way. But I also got to a place by the end of it that I'll also kind of come back to somewhere down the line here. By the end, I was like, where are we going with this show? And I know it was trying to do something different.

And I think it was successful in trying to be a different format. It's trying to be, it's a half hour. It's a sitcom, kind of. It's a workplace sitcom, sort of. Like, it is breaking a fourth wall.

Like, it's doing a lot of different things that the other ones weren't doing. But it also, like, I don't know that we were getting anywhere. So, like, I wanted a little more of, like, Where are we going with this show? And I know the other one sometimes focused too much on trying to thread the needle for the next thing and get this going and put this arc into place. And, like, she wasn't worried about the majority of that stuff.

But, like, I feel like it needed a little more of direction of where it was going by the end of it. Because then it wrapped up with its crazy ending and I was like, well, that was enjoyable, but... Had I not watched that entire run, I don't know that it would have been that big a deal. Not just in the Marvel, like, oh, I'll miss out, but also just personally. I'm like, it was fine.

I liked a lot of parts of it, but I don't know that I got so much out of it that like, oh my God, how can I not have watched this show? I was like, it was fine. I enjoyed it. I think we're kind of getting to the precedent now where some of these shows are coming out and they're merely an introduction to the character or a certain piece of the Marvel Universe that we haven't seen before. There's a lot of that going on that, again, I will get back to.

Yeah, we're definitely seeing that much more in Phase 4 than we've seen previously because, again, like I've said before, we're rebuilding the team again. We're rebuilding the world after the events of Endgame, essentially. There are no more Avengers. Tony Stark is dead. Captain America's retired an old man now, you know?

Thor's kind of. Off doing his own thing. He might be the only one kind of coming back. Maybe. Possibly.

I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I'll see him come back for the big stuff. If he doesn't kill himself on his new series. Did you see the new Hemsworth series? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Where he's going to potentially kill himself. Yeah, Limitless. So I guess if he survives, he might be back for the big movies. I still want to watch that, though. I still kind of.

It's... Once again, him just... any excuse for him to take his shirt off. And I'm like, well, no, I get it. If I look like that, I wouldn't own a shirt, I suppose. I wouldn't own pants.

So, yeah. I'd be doing some Emperor's New Clothes kind of shit. Like, hey, what's up? I think he's just pulling an audience just like that. But, you know, She-Hulk, it's kind of, here's the weird thing about She-Hulk.

In her own books, there really isn't a larger plot. It is very much a workplace comedy. It's kind of her life story. sort of thing like that. She has some bad guys she fights, but when she deals with the big shit, that's when she's an Avenger, that's when she's the Fantastic Four. Yeah.

So she deals with the big shit over there, but when she's in her own thing, she avoids that kind of stuff because she wants to be a lawyer, not a superhero. Which may be why again the most enjoyable thing was the crossover with daredevil so maybe the more she gets involved with other superhero stuff the more i'll like her involvement with it whereas by herself it was just kind of like that was amusing but it didn't really do anything but like adding him in and her and matt hooking up was kind of fun and i was like i could see this go somewhere let's get them like a little sitcom together and they could have like a mad about you with superheroes, you know. And you know the funny thing is that, and the, let's see, I mean, Daredevil has been around since the early 60s.

She-Hulk's been around since the late 70s, early 80s. In the entire history of the two of them being around, in the Marvel Universe, they have never been an item. So for the shows to finally, like, Why have these two never... They have the same fucking job. I mean, it's not often you get...

Captain America, when he's not being Captain America, he's an artist. He does cartoons or comics or whatever else. But it's like we've never had two people that have the same damn job. Especially one like that, where they go against each other in the real world. You normally...

That's the only way you would meet them, is you'd be in a courtroom, you know, arguing against each other. Or, you know, some kind of legal advice, I think. But, yeah. So, yeah, that was inspiring. But I love, too, the whole reaction.

Like, you know, there were a lot of fanboys who wanted to protect Daredevil. Because, like, oh, he's a good Catholic boy. I was like, um, yeah. You know how you get all those Catholics? That's kind of what you have to do.

Yeah, and, like, he also has confessions. So, you know, but... Yeah, and I love the whole return of the red and gold suit. Yeah. Because, of course, you know, the TV.

The ketchup and mustard. Yeah, the TV fans have never seen this before, but that was his... OG suit when he was introduced. Of course, it looked more brownish in the comics, but they put the gold in, or the red is a little bit better. But yeah, he was rocking those colors for a little bit, and they said, you know what, let's make this guy all red, because he's a daredevil, devil, let's do the red.

It looks cool in the original series version, but yeah, it's good to throw that in for the fans. Yeah, so... It also makes sense, too, that he would want a new suit because if Born Again, the new Daredevil series that's coming up next year, is supposed to follow the events of the Netflix series, then he would not want to go back to his traditional red and black because Bullseye, if you remember the last season, was running around in his colors killing people in the name of Daredevil. So he doesn't want to look like Daredevil anymore, even though he is Daredevil and he's hanging out in L.A., Which is kind of weird, you know? I mean, he's done that where he's moved out of New York.

There was a whole run where he was in San Francisco and he would wear, like, a red, like, three-piece suit. Like, he didn't even wear the costume. He was doing Daredevil shit and doing legal stuff, but he was like, I'm not going to run around in the costume anymore. I'm in a new city, new thing, whatever else. So, yeah.

But, yeah, I did thoroughly enjoy She-Hulk. The whole... kevin feige thing and kevin being his big ai robot that was inspired. Again it is amusing but in amusing in only a way that they could have come up with on this entire giant journey like it's not something you could write without this whole stupid crazy trip we've been on so he had a little hat too he had it it was at least fun from that. Angle Yeah, and of course, she's dropping like, oh, where's the X-Men? Because that's what every fan wants to know.

It's like, we want the X-Men. We can't afford them. What are you talking about? Oh, they're coming. They're coming.

Deadpool will sucker Logan back, but other than that, we can't afford him. Well, I was going to say, this movie here dropped a huge bomb that a lot of Marvel fans, the comic fans, were expecting, and we were granted that boon as well. Jumping to the very end? No, no, no. Not jumping to the very end.

Not even that one? Not even that one. We'll get into it when we start talking about the movie. Okay. The interesting thing I've seen about some people talking about Black Panther is it's been well-received.

People enjoy it. Some people enjoy it more than others. The ones who don't enjoy it as much, I don't think, realize how many things they did in this movie that are setting you huge precedences for the real world kind of stuff. Now we're talking like big cosmic kind of stuff, but like real world kind of shit. You know, like they kind of dropped the ball in the last Spider-Man movie when basically like Stark Tech's getting raided and now Stark Tech's on the open markets.

Yeah. They kind of dropped the ball with saying how big of a deal that is. They dropped a couple bombs in this movie. One being a very real world thing, one being kind of going into the superhero kind of stuff that are huge. Yeah.

So, but yeah, we'll get into those in a sec. Well then, my only other wrap up is I really liked Werewolf by Night. I watched it maybe. On Halloween? Like it was right there at Halloween.

And I love the black and white. I love the look of it. And I really liked the characters. So it is one of those... I do want to see by the end we get our like almost buddy comedy.

I'm like, I want to watch these two. I don't care what they get into. This is going to be great. So I also like Elsa Bloodstone. Yeah.

I like that they add her in and she's got, she's already building this relationship with them. So I really want to see kind of the three of them get into crazy adventures. So yeah, I'm definitely hoping we see, and I'm assuming they wouldn't make this if they didn't have a plan. So I'm assuming we will see more of all three of them. I would love that as well.

It does kind of set in some nice precedences. The wonderful thing about Werewolf by Night is if you've never seen any of the Marvel stuff, you don't know an Avengers or Spider-Man or whatever else, you can go into this movie completely cold and enjoy yourself. It definitely works on its own. Yeah, especially if you enjoy like the universal monster kind of movies. Because it definitely is a throwback to that.

But I love the fact, because it's in black and white, you can get away with a lot more gore in this movie. Oh, yeah. It's bloody. It's bloody as all hell, but it's all black and white. So you don't see the red, it makes it fine.

Yeah, that's what I love about how we handle violence in this country. Oh, if we just take the red out of it, it's okay. Well, that's true, because they'll always switch anything that's like some sort of mutant or an alien. You make it green, it can be as gory as you want. You can rip arms off and spurt blood out as long as it's green blood.

Suddenly, oh no, it's fine. Yeah. So, yeah, as long as you change the color, it's only red that somehow freaks people out. I'm like, it's the same thing. Whatever.

But, yeah, again, this movie does set up some fun precedents, though, because, okay, it obviously sets up that, you know, Ted, the man thing. They never call him the man thing in the movie. They just call him Ted because his name is Ted, actually. But, you know, Ted and Jack Russell had worked together previously. They knew each other, whatever else.

But possibly they're working either for or with some sort of organization because Jack, he's kind of proven, is not a tech guy. Yeah. Even though he had that little trinket that's supposed to blow up the wall, he didn't know how to fucking use it. He didn't do it, right? Yeah.

He didn't do it right. He didn't know how to use it. So it's like someone gave him that and said, use this to blow up the wall to get the hell out. So they're working with somebody. Yeah.

And so, yeah. And of course, again, with Elsa, at the end, she kind of gets the bloodstone. And I love the whole... You know, kind of the homage to Wizard of Oz. You know, somewhere where the rainbow is playing and everything switches to color.

Her day has changed. She's now kind of the lead monster hunter. That's the fun thing, too. For not knowing anything about these three characters, they got them down very well, very quickly. Yeah, and set up this universe so that we can move forward with it and continue using all three of those characters.

And I was kind of curious as to which version of Jack Russell we were going to see Because over the years, he's kind of been one of two things. He's either been tortured by the fact that he's a werewolf and is kind of not in control of things. Or it's the later version where he is in control of things and seems to be pretty okay about it. He's accepted it and he's in control of the changes and control of the abilities and the power. Unless he gets horribly injured, then he does kind of go berserk.

But for the most part, though, he is in control of the wolf and... He has accepted that as his life and whatever else. Well, and he's so downplaying everything. He's so calm about the situation they're in for as much as he can be. And he's not overselling how powerful he is.

He's kind of dorky, which is what makes him a likable character. So I really kind of enjoyed him. We spend the most time with him, really. So it's like I was glad because I was afraid if we're setting this stuff up and you bring in somebody who's super... self-serious and tortured like we're not necessarily going to want to spend time with him but he's really fun especially once we get the him working with her and then our team up by the end there. So yep i want to see all three of them yeah so um i haven't heard anything now granted uh disney was uh pleased and also surprised with this with the success of this one because it was widely streamed had great reception critical and fan whatever else so I haven't heard anything more about them delving into the Monsterverse.

At this point, the next kind of thing we'll be seeing of that realm will be the Blade movie, whenever that happens to be coming out. It's having a little bit of production issues. They need a new director, and apparently the star's not happy with the script. That happens. It does.

So hopefully they get that stuff fixed, because I'm really enjoying seeing Marshall Ali play Blade. I want this to happen. I don't want it to be a bad movie. So take your time with it. Do whatever needs to be done.

Just don't rush it. Let's get it done right. Make a good movie. But I would definitely... What I would love is we get once a year around Halloween time a new one-shot of the monster.

It doesn't have to be a cold werewolf by night, but... Just a different monster-themed thing. A new entry in that. So, you know... Bring us the characters we know.

Introduce some new ones. Because there are a lot other... I mean, we got some tons of... All the classic... We got Dracula.

We got a mummy. We got a Frankenstein. Yeah. We got a guy... Here's the funny thing.

We have two different kinds of zombies in the Marvel Universe. We have the traditional, old school, like he was kind of almost like a voodoo kind of zombie. Like he wears this medallion that has resurrected him. And he has a bit of supernatural abilities. But he is technically a zombie.

But he doesn't like eat people. Then fast forward to Mr. Robert Kirkman of Walking Dead fame going into the MCU going, hey, you know what would be fun? If we create an alternate universe where there's a zombie plague going on so we got zombie versions of our Marvel heroes eating people but they also still have their abilities. Which is one of my favorite What If episodes.

I loved that one. And they've made multiple entries in the comics from the Marvel Zombies franchise. And of course it's going to have its own show coming up too. Another animated series. that's coming up, I think, in a year or two. It's down the pike a little bit, but it's being built.

It's like, yes, this will be a TV. This will be the first TVMA offering that Disney will be putting out because you can't have a, even with an animated, you still can't have a zombie thing without having a lot of gore and. Violence in it. Somebody's got to eat some brains and chew on somebody's arm. So we're going to get it.

So if you love that episode of What If, you're going to get a whole series of that. Oh, yeah. That was a lot of fun. Yeah, so there's a lot of other classic zombie guys. I love to see that stuff.

But the big rumor is that Marvel realized that maybe we have a really good device to use to introduce other aspects of the Marvel Universe that we haven't yet. So they're like, well, we're wanting to roll out mutants in a certain way. Here's an idea. What if we do a series of one-shots where we pick, like, six to eight characters within the mutant universe that you cannot do a mutant universe without. You have to have your Professor X, you have to have your Magneto, you have to have your Jean Grey, your Wolverine, and then pick whoever else.

Sinister Apocalypse, Emma Frost, Scott Summers, whoever else. Any other characters you want to throw in there. But have them get their own individual one-hour things to introduce you to them. See how, you know, for the readers, what kind of changes they make to introduce them to the MCU proper. And then once we get into like the larger event stuff and you want to bring these characters in, they're already there.

You don't need a proper introduction because you introduced them over here. Which is, it's getting so out of control at this point. Like as we're going to move forward here, like there's so many different things at play and so many different pieces in everything that Working towards something else, somewhere else. Again, sometimes not even in the same medium. It is interesting how the hell they can orchestrate all this and keep any of it straight at this point.

I know they started that way, but it was a slow start. Whereas now, they are knee-deep in so many different projects and in different places that everything is working towards not one, but five different things. It's a lot to keep up with. It is. And of course, I mean, this, you know, Black Panther 2 basically is kind of the...

Technically, we will be getting the Guardians of the Galaxy holiday special coming up. Very soon. Yeah, later this month. Yeah, right before Thanksgiving. So technically, that is the last thing in there.

But... Movie-wise. Movie-wise, Black Panther 2 is the culmination of Phase 4. The end of the phase, yeah. Yeah, so...

Ant-Man and the Wasp of Quantumania coming out in February will be our first entry to Phase 5. Phase 5 is kind of where shit starts to roll. I think we're going to start seeing the greater plots in play. I think we're going to start seeing all of our pieces start to come together. Because that trailer for Ant-Man itself is loaded.

Yeah. I got that too, so thankfully, yeah. If you know what you're looking for, there's a lot of stuff in that movie. And a lot of questions that it's going to have to answer in pretense to, you know, introducing Kang and then what he's doing in the quantum realm. Well, I definitely want to get to all those things.

So let's just get to the movie. Yes, we will. Get more out of life. Go out to a movie. Out, out.

Out, out. Out of the night. Out, out. His people did not. Call him general or king.

They called him Kukulkan, the feather serpent god. Killing him will risk eternal war. He's coming for the surface world. Let me know what you whisper. They have lost.

Show them who we are. Lift me up Hold me. Down This episode's. Out on the Town feature is Black Panther colon. Wakanda Forever.

The year is 2022. The director, Ryan Coogler, and the plot, according to IMDb, the people of Wakanda fight to protect their home from intervening world powers as they mourn the death of their king, T'Challa. Spoiler alert! There's a lot of stuff going on here. I'm sure we're going to ruin everything and have theories and thoughts about a whole bunch of stuff in the future.

If you want to not have any of that ruined, hopefully by now you've already seen it. Fair warning. Where to begin? Well, I mean, that it's a very stark opening and I was kind of curious how they were going to do how they're going to kill him off. That's what I was wondering if we were going to come in and he's still around if we're and we're kind of like it's kind of both like we're right there at the moment of which is.

And I didn't know, like, are they going to, is he going to be in the middle of a battle and get killed? Or they went very real world. Yeah, he had some sort of disease. They weren't specific to what it was. Yeah, which I mean, I kind of liked because, again, you can attach it to Chadwick as much as you want.

If you want it to be like a tribute to him that he also put up the same fight and like that's. again, that's kind of nice because I feel like you've got a whole bunch of people that were really attached to this actor. Yeah. And as much as they're invested in the character, they really like this guy. And like, that was kind of hard for everybody. The director, I feel like more than anyone, like he almost scrapped the whole project because he was so like this.

He even described him as his hero, you know, something like this, this was a really important guy in not just this project, but for a lot of people, In a lot of ways. So it's a big thing to have to deal with at the beginning of your movie. So it is interesting that they kept it pretty close to reality from that angle. Yeah. And also that that's one of the more realistic things I liked because it's that thing that comes, you know, when we finally got that Logan movie is like, yeah, you've got all these powers, but eventually your body's just going to stop.

It's just going to give up. Something is going to work its way through. you're going to get old. You're going to get a disease. You're going to get something that's not going to, no matter what your powers are, can't save you. And you're still going to die like that.

That was like a pretty cold way to deal with this. And like, that's life. So like, I do kind of like a little bit of as unrealistic as many things are in this movie. That's the harsh reality that, you know, they're kind of dealing with coming into this movie. So that's where we start.

Yeah. Again, too. It's like, I, you kind of, Get a good setup for kind of, you know, what Shuri's mindset is going to be throughout the film. Like, she's going to be blaming herself for not saving him in time. Yeah.

You know, sort of thing like that. But, yeah, I knew that, like I said, I was curious how they were going to do this because I knew going into the film that he was not able to shoot anything. Yeah. Like, literally his last performance was the two episodes of What If. I was going to say, the voice work he did for them.

Yeah, that was literally his last performance for the MCU. I was so glad they used all of that. Like, they kept bringing him into other episodes. And I was like, well, this is great because we actually get a lot with his character, even though he was already well gone in the real world at that point. So it was nice to still have these little pieces. out there of this same character and the same performance.

And yeah, I liked that we got a little of that, but nothing going into this movie. So, yeah, but yeah, so yeah, I just, it was interesting set up with, you know, how they were going to do things. Of course, you know, we knew that, you know, this is definitely, you know, despite all the other action and stuff that's going on, this whole movie is basically a funeral dirge for, you know, not only T'Challa, but for Chadwick himself. Yeah. You know, we proved that when we got to the opening scene, marvel thing which i thought was wonderful too because it's absolutely silent you're seeing all of chadwick you know his you know images and stuff like that the artist performances and the theater itself was 100.

Silent yeah i was watching it going oh we've never done this before but i was also like we've never lost a lead either like we've killed the characters but the actual actors are all still around This is the first time we've had to deal with this. Yeah, we can still bring back Robert Downey Jr. We can do a flashback or something. Yeah, we can bring him back, but he's done now. So yeah, this is the first time we've kind of addressed that in the universe and our lives.

Yeah, so even more so than what Stan Lee's tribute to the Captain Marvel opening. This one hit Far more. Because, like, you know, yes, Stan Lee laid the groundwork for many of these characters and built a universe. Yadda Yadda, he was also in his 90s. We kind of expected him to get.

And his on-screen performances were all of five seconds sometimes. Right, yeah. So you didn't spend. As much time with him in the movies. In the real world, plenty of people were invested in him.

And like you said, the audience itself, especially the African-American audience, had such a deep connection to Chadwick. And he, they... So it was such a reciprocal sort of thing like that. It was just such a wonder. The whole social movement when the first Black Panther came out, I was just loving it.

Yeah. Absolutely loving it. Well, and it wasn't just focus. That's what I think I told on the show before. I saw a month or so after this dorky teenage white kid wearing a Black Panther shirt.

And I was like, that's amazing. Like that he crossed over enough to still bring in the normal comic book kids. While at the same time, there is this huge outpouring of, of, you know, everybody in the black community. That's like, finally we have someone, we have a superhero. Like, so the fact that it's still, it didn't alienate any of the, the rest of the dorky white kids that get their way in every other movie out there.

It's like, this still works so that they were, you know entertained by it as a superhero movie but at the same time it had this other life and this other movement that kind of was inspiring really so it's it's it's an impressive thing they did in that first movie which makes this twice as hard to kind of follow up on yeah i mean. That's always been the inspiring and impressive thing about the character of t'challa anyways like you know yes there have been a lot of other black superheroes throughout you know marvel and dc's history but t'challa is a king it's like yes he's a superhero yes he's a human being He is also a king. So he has that, you know, nobility, that regal, that, you know, intelligence, that, you know, worldliness, whatever else, that leadership that carries him that has so much other stuff that brings with it.

So, I mean, he stands out even amongst his own superhero peers. Yeah. Even people who are far more powerful than he is, they still, you know, they tip the cap to King T'Challa. And he played it that way, too. Yeah.

Which... again, is so impressive as an actor because within that first movie, he's essentially the most boring character because he's just... He's always put together. He's always... polished and like ready to go where everybody else like his sister's got all these goofy things and like everybody else they bring in is way more entertaining whereas he is just calm and collected and ready to take care of business so it's like as an actor like you could definitely put on way more of a show and get more you know screen time and more in fun scenes but I'm like he's just so reserved about it all that I'm like man that is restraint for an actor to be like it's okay you guys get all the thunder and I'm just going to hold this movie together.

That's impressive, again. It's kind of a loss, too, because for anybody who's a comic fan that knows, when we finally introduce Namor, and of course we couldn't call them Atlanteans in the movie because Aquaman beat us in the punch, which I find is hilarious because the character of Namor the Sub-Mariner, he's the original Marvel character. It's him and the original Human Torch, which is an android, not the Fantastic Four guy. Different character. Same powers, different character.

Those... I mean, the first issue of Marvel Comics that came out in the 40s, those two guys are on the fucking cover. Yeah. So, it's like... Yeah, actually, there's Human Torch on the cover, and then Amor's got his own thing there, too.

But, yeah, it's like, he is literally the two oldest characters in the MCU, and so they had Atlantis, they had all that kind of stuff, like, and now, you know, the Aquaman movie came out, we can't do that. But, I love the whole adaptation of the Mayan culture and... And so we're basically calling it Talocon, which in my end is Atlantis. Is the real thing that they, yeah, they actually have this theory once again. But the fans were kind of, the movie fans were cheated because seeing the rivalry of basically two kings in the MCU is very interesting.

Because in the comics, Namor, as we see in this movie, kind of mirroring that as well, toes that villain-hero line. He's both. Yeah. What he also is is probably the biggest asshole in the Marvel Universe, overshadowing Quicksilver, who is the second biggest asshole in the Marvel Universe. And these guys are supposed to be heroes.

But yeah, Namor is a dick because he is so arrogant. He is so hypocritical because he only cares about the surface world. When it suits him or when he absolutely knows that what happens on the surface will affect what happens in Atlantis. Yeah. 90% of the time, he is loyal to Atlantis, except when they throw him out and then he wants us surface rollers to give him a hand.

Go screw yourself, you arrogant ass. But yeah, Black Panther and Namor have had huge conflicts over the years in the comics. To one point, we're kind of very similar in the movie. Atlantis floods Wakanda and kills hundreds upon thousands of Wakandans in an attack. You know, an act of war, literally.

And so we have the two countries fighting each other. So, yeah, they don't get along very well. Sometimes they do when Namor's behaving himself and he's not causing trouble in Wakanda and there's a larger threat where the Avengers have to get together. And we've got to pull this asshole out of the D-list as well. But...

For the most part, these guys do not like each other, and so we would have probably seen a performance of Chadwick have to lose his shit. It is interesting because, yeah, in looking at stuff today, getting this together, I was like, this is what they were still planning for the sequel. Even when he was going to be our lead still, this was going to be the other story, the villain or whatever that they have to go up against was still essentially the same thing, which is where I have most of my issues. If we want to get into that. I will say, and this has happened a lot lately, it's become a very trendy thing for people that do not care to just trash Marvel movies because it's easy to do.

Because they are such a target at this point. Sure. That's the shorthand for a big dumb Hollywood movie. Whatever, Marvel movies. So I know and hear a lot of people that just talk bad about Marvel for the sake of it.

Because it's easy. And they don't even pay attention to it. Right. Most of the time, but they will still go out of their way to slam Marvel. Which I am not that, obviously, because I keep talking about all these.

But, if I have issues with it, I have issues with it. So, that's the first thing I will say is this, as a movie, I think did a great job of being a tribute. And helping, not just the characters, but the audience to sort of deal with what happened. So I think all of that is done really well, both in our intro, and by the end of the movie, there's a big tribute. So it's like we get both of these that are really well done and I think really tie it all together.

My issue with it is I don't care about the fish people. Okay. Like, and as you said, it's legit old school Marvel. It's not, but again, it's not just Marvel. I've said that for years.

I'm like, there's a reason everybody makes fun of Aquaman because he lives. Under the water and he talks to fish. It's not, I don't know. To me, that's always a weird thing sell and they've again both companies have their own guy they've got millions of issues of this going on but I'm like even as a kid I was like I don't want to read about seahorses I don't care so I feel like they're fighting that battle at least for me I don't know if other people have this issue but I feel like it's really not just superhero movies in general it's really hard to take a water battle of any kind and make it work You know, even if you're trying to do something as coordinate a fight scene, it's a million times harder underwater.

If you're making Thunderball, this is going to be difficult. If you're making Waterworld, this is an uphill battle and it's probably not going to go real well. So it's like everything that's just trying to take a battle scene and do it in the middle of the water. is really hard to do and make effective. And I feel like they fought with that this whole movie, in my opinion. I have no problem with water movies and stuff like that.

I tend to enjoy them, and I enjoyed this one as well. I think what's always been the intriguing difference for me between Namor and Aquaman is the fact that Namor, you can't trust him. Aquaman, yes. He's had to go dark a couple of times. But for the most part, he is a hero.

Namor is not. Though he's billed as one, not. Even sometimes to his own people, he's not a hero. So that was kind of the intriguing thing for me. And yeah, it's kind of weird.

With Aquaman, it's like, okay, again, they had to change some stuff for Namor to basically not make him a Johnny-come-lately, which is also irritating. because... It's not true. Very much like, you know, basically Aquaman, his father was a sailor, you know, in a coastal area, loved a merwoman, and they had... Like you do. And they had Namor.

We've all had that happen. Yeah, but Namor doesn't date back as old as he does to basically we're talking like the original Mayans and the Spanish invading them and kind of wiping their culture off the face of the earth sort of thing. Yeah. So he's not that old, but he is older than many other Marvel characters. And as they dropped in basically when the scene where Shuri is basically brought down to Talocan and gets to see everything.

Yeah. For one, he drops the fact that he's essentially the first mutant, which that is 100% accurate. That's the big thing, yeah. Okay. Yes.

That was established in the books about 20 years ago. They're like, oh, wait a minute. You know what? It's like, we never thought about this guy before. Technically.

I can't remember which writer it was that came up with it, but it was kind of like, you know, okay, he's, you know, born with his abilities because, you know, he was half man, half Atlantean. Yeah. So he was one of those, what do we normally call those in the Marvel Universe? Mutants. Oh, yeah, mutants.

Okay, well, he kind of goes back before World War II. Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay, so he's the First Mutant then, huh? Oh, shit, okay, I guess he is. Well, hey, guess what, Namor, you got a new designation now.

You know, you're Underwater Sea King, Asshole, and First Mutant. So there you go. But I feel like they, while we're still on that train, I guess, I feel, And it's what I was worried about going into this. When I saw that that's the direction they were going with the story and the villain, I'm just like, that's going to be a lot of trying to make that work. Because we've gotten pretty good at all the other Marvel movies of like, okay, we're in a cityscape, we're out in the field, it's people kicking each other's ass.

So in this one, as soon as I saw it, I was like, you're going to have to find a way. Either you're underwater doing bad water fights, or... every time they fight you're gonna have to find some weird way for them to jump out of the water and fight on the land which is kind of what we keep getting they just have to find a way every time like where can we fight so that we can kind of set this up like a more traditional fight but they're water people so they really wouldn't be up here but we have to find it just seems like you're reaching by a couple of different times and i'm just like was this a good idea i don't know again i wasn't as over sold on the water people idea but Okay, yeah, but fair enough.

Yeah, but again, I knew going into it kind of what some of these characters were going to do. But the other thing this movie lays down is a couple interesting things. One, they really nail home kind of the Wakanda versus the world sort of thing, mentality. And where it is now, where it probably wouldn't have been this way if we still had our hero. But him suddenly being gone, it's like, oh, now they... have to coordinate all this without him around.

Yeah. And they're not doing very well. That's kind of the interesting thing is that, you know, traditionally in the Marvel Universe and the comics, you know, I keep saying this phrase again, but I'm going to keep doing this. But traditionally, Wakanda always was the outside. And even though superheroes, namely the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, knew of Black Panther and Wakanda and Vibranium, you know, Cap's shield was built out of Vibranium.

Yeah. So they knew about all this stuff, but it wasn't something that was exploited to the Or if government powers knew it was always a clandestine operation, they were going to go in and try to do stuff. So them being kind of like open on the world front of like, hey, here's our stuff and here's our things that we have. And at first we wanted to work with you guys, but now you're going to be, you know, you're going to be a-holes about it. And you're going to try to steal from us.

And you think you can because we're vulnerable, but we're really not. So that was a great scene. I did like that scene, yeah. But then having kind of, you know, talocon mirroring that same thing where they're a secret society they have stuff that people would want as well they have advanced technology and resources and yada yada yada you know so that's kind of nice mirroring there so we got you know two societies that maybe have a very tenuous you know uh alliance by the end of the movie yeah but you still know that the nanosecond that namor can get the upper hand he will take it yeah The other thing, though, that's huge was that vibranium has always been associated with Wakanda. It's only in Wakanda.

It comes from there. The meteorite landed there in the mountain, all that kind of jazz. Now we have established that vibranium is elsewhere. There's at least one other deposit somewhere, if not more. And if not more.

So that's huge. That gives us humongous real-world MacGuffin that now, as we saw with basically... When Julia Louise Dreyfuss came out of that truck, I said the only thing that came to my mind, shit. Well, I mean, they set her up as going to be something. Like from the very beginning, the new Captain America, when, you know, it's like we've got her in there and you can see she's already working against the system more or less.

And then we see her get a black widow. And to her own agenda and is super powerful in some way, but we don't really know how. So we've seen her come back at least once since then. And now, like, this is, I guess, her first movie appearance. And I still kind of wish she had more to do.

Like, she's just there to kind of be a jerk and screw over, which we find out is her ex-husband. Yeah, that was a big one there. She was like, oh, she was married to Ross? Interesting. Like, oh, shit.

She will definitely get her own movie with the Thunderbolts. I'm sure. Yeah, that's because now we kind of have, like, an idea... of more what that movie is going to be about because, like, okay, she's got this group of people that are basically, like, you know, a lot of ne'er-do-wells, essentially. The cast-offs of the hero world. Not necessarily cast-offs.

Basically, this is their own suicide squad. Yeah, pretty much. These are the folks that can get the dirty job done if a dirty job needs to be done, and they don't feel too terribly bad about it. Of course, they will be manipulated or forced into it in some way, shape, or form, I'm sure. But, yeah, that's the thing is that this is kind of a new status... for the character of, uh, Valeria Contessa de Fontaine.

Uh, she was traditionally a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent back in the day. Um, she was one of the very few female agents that was showcased in the old books because it was the 60s and whatever else. Uh, later on, normally she was kind of like Fury's girlfriend kind of thing. You know, like it was kind of an off and on thing they had, but whatever else. Uh, they reinvented her in the 80s and basically they needed a whole thing called Nick Fury versus S.H.I.E.L.D. where basically the, the, you know, for whatever reason, S.H.I.E.L.D. turned on Fury, you find out HYDRA is behind it or whatever else.

Yeah, the Civil War plot, or no, the Winter Soldier plot, essentially, yeah. Well, they've used HYDRA infiltrating S.H.I.E.L.D. as a plot point more than a few times. I'm sure. It's been a lot of years. These were two horrible organizations.

You know, one's making terrorist things and one's supposed to be Handling all the world's security, but they themselves get compromised on a regular basis. But nonetheless, Valeria is a class A heel. And so, yeah, for her to be kind of in this mode and running a organization that doesn't care much for superhero activity and all their... bullshit, and she's quote-unquote here to serve the people of this country and do right and whatever else. Like, yeah. Oh, man.

You're going to be such a problem. Yeah. So, yeah. And I love that they got Julia the Weed Driver to play her. She is great at it.

She just kills it. But it's just like, yeah, when she got out of the truck, I'm like, shit. Here we go. It's like, oh, my God. So, yeah.

So that was a lot of fun. Well, that's what I do. did like like for as much and i don't think i realized how long it was going to be so getting in i was like after a while you kind of feel the length in the midpoint like before like in the them trying to decide are we enemies or not area i'm like this is maybe a little too long by the time we get to the first real fight i'm like okay now we're back into the action it's okay but like i feel like That middle part was maybe a little long. Once you get to the rest of the end, it moves pretty good and it carries on. But that lead up just kind of drags its feet a little bit. Yeah, I'll agree.

There was a bit of a lull. But, you know, they did recover, as you said, so I was fine with it. But I did, yeah, outside of fish people, the rest of it I really enjoy. Like, I do like we've brought in... Essentially, we finally found our new Iron Man.

Yes. And they snuck that in. They kind of did the Civil War thing of like, oh, yeah, look, here's Black Panther. Because he didn't get his own movie first off. They just kind of work him into another movie.

And you're like, oh, well, this is kind of our origin story for Black Panther. And we get that with this one, too. So we get the Iron Heart that will be without ever actually calling her that. Within the movie, they don't ever say that, right? She's even credited that way, I noticed, but...

They don't ever really give her a title, more or less. And, of course, you see her knocking out when she's building the suit. You see her knocking out Ironheart, which is kind of cool, too. Yeah. I think, of course, I'm looking forward to the series now they've set her up.

Dominic Thorne did an awesome job as Riri. I didn't know that's who she was, so I kept seeing the Target commercial going, why is this girl pestering kids in Target? And then the movie started. I was like, oh, that is her. Okay, well, that makes more sense now.

Yeah, I'm loving those Target commercials because I knew who she was. That's kind of the fun thing about this movie. It's like, okay, we've got basically four female leads of color, and half of them are STEM, basically. And are just black. Bad asses.

Brilliant and willing to kick people's ass when need be. So it's like strong in every sense. Yeah. Which is what we want from our female leads. And then we go and turn Shuri into an action hero as well.

And she pulls that off too. So it's like, yeah. Okay. So it's like, yeah, there's some... I wish they would have done a little more heavy on the marketing about that, but yeah, it's like, come on, folks.

Yeah, they snuck that one in there that, like, I knew it was coming because I knew the series is coming, but yeah, I didn't realize they were shoving her into this as much as she is because she becomes kind of a big part in the middle, and then she's not, and then she comes back with a suit. So, like, it kind of balances out by the end of the movie. Yeah, I knew they were introducing Riri. I was curious how they were going to do it because at first, myself and some friends of mine at the old comic book shop, we were doing some speculation on this movie. And so one of the things we speculated about was possibly like, you know, some of these Wakandan outreach centers that they sort of put in the States basically give kids in, you know, poor communities, you know, access to education or whatever else.

So maybe we thought, oh, they discovered her through there and then brought her to Wakanda seeing her talent. Yeah. And then, oh, okay, no, she builds this thing. And it basically was like she essentially had built something in a science experiment class and the government essentially stole that from her. Yeah.

Which sounds about right. Which sounds about right, yeah. That's how it would work. But yeah, that's the thing. For a character who was so heavily connected to Iron Man in the comics because she was the legacy character and being able to still introduce her, be 100% her character, but not have Iron Man in it was fantastic.

Again, they really do a good job of introducing her and then very quickly kind of establishing who she is. So much so that like, I already was glad. Like, I know it's a series because I'm like, as much as I don't care about the other stuff going on over here, I really like what we're doing with her. Like, I want to see way more with her. And then I know that's coming now.

So that, yeah, I do like her introduction and I like her character and how much potential there is to do stuff with her. Now, I am still curious. There's still one element to Ironheart which... If they want to really get some attention to her show. I haven't heard if they're going to do this or not.

If they are, they're keeping it under wraps to make it a big surprise. But, of course, like, you know, in the comics when they introduce the character, Tony is involved in a big event that's going on. And so he, in a quiet moment, meets Riri, has conversations with her, sees that basically she got kicked out of MIT because she She wasn't going to class because she was basically building her own Iron Man suit from scratch. Like, she didn't steal any plans. She literally saw him do that and go, oh, I can do that because this and this and this.

I mean, in the MCU, they kind of substituted Spider-Man. I mean, he became that version, more or less, in a totally different way. But that's the relationship there that we don't get with this one. But now it's... Just sort of the legacy of Tony Stark, I guess.

But I love the fact that they still kept it basically very much like Tony. She loves getting her hands dirty building something. Oh, yeah. But like Peter, she doesn't have to use the best materials. She can use found materials and still get the job done.

Yeah, yeah. So they got the best of both worlds with their science, you know, stuff like that. And also, the biggest thing is when I first saw that muscle car... I'm like, wasn't that the same car that was in Hawkeye and the big chase, you know, when he and Kate Bishop are in the car and there's a big chase. He's like, isn't that the same car?

So I was like, tie it all in. It's like, is there, will we get into the series where maybe like that's her car and it's parked and they steal her car and there we have a connection. Yeah. Maybe we see Kate Bishop somewhere down the line. Because she and Riri are friends.

I would definitely like to see them team up as we move forward. Yeah. So that's a connection maybe we'll see down the road, hopefully. But yeah, just the way they did Riri with introducing her, building the suit, having an Iron Man sort of look, but also having an original look to it. Like, yeah.

And of course. It's almost like the first Iron Man suit. It's the clunky version, but as we see, she's got the... the skills. So if you give her a little more funding, she can put together some pretty impressive stuff. I'm assuming.

So, so yeah, so I was very happy with her introduction. I mean, definitely even, I mean, I thought they got Namor really well, but I was, I was enjoying Riria a lot more. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Uh, but one big thing they also dropped in literally actually the same scene where, you know, Shuri is being introduced to Talocan and seeing this whole world and Namor's giving his whole origin and, And all that kind of stuff.

Another thing he dropped, they kind of let slide in there, is that she is not the first visitor to Talocon from the surface world. So the question is, who has been down there before? Where are we tying this in? Because there was a lot of speculation by fans that maybe we were going to be introduced to a certain Victor Von Doom in this movie. And. you know, maybe that's kind of a Easter egg for later on down the line.

That's basically the, the throwaway line and end game where we're detecting earthquakes in the Atlantic ocean sort of thing. Yeah. That's the thing. It's like, I knew this was coming. Cause even there they were dropping that hint.

I love it too. And the fans picked up on that. Like, Oh no, no, no, no. We're not talking about Atlantis. No, we're not talking about Atlantis.

No, because we're talking about Talocon. Cause we're changing that name. Yeah. Cause we're changing the name. Yeah.

So yeah, that, that was fun there. So maybe we'll see that. But, um, An interesting thing, though, I have read for certain is that in the upcoming Fantastic Four movie, Dr. Doom will not be the villain, as well he should not be. That's the thing that the other three Fantastic Four films have made a mistake.

While Dr. Doom has extremely close ties with Reed Richards, he does not have any ties to the formation of the Fantastic Four or the acquirement of their abilities. Right. He got his own shit because basically he and Reed were in college together. Ben was also in college with him as well.

And basically Doom and Reed were very much rivals because they're very intelligent and Doom has a humongous ego. So that's why they were competing. So Doom is doing this experiment. Reed comes in and says, hey, your math is wrong because this, this, this. And he's like, if you, buddy, I'm right, you're wrong.

Kiss my ass. Then basically Doom proceeds to blow up his own dormitory, injuring his face and almost killing a lot of other people at the same time. This gets him booted out of college. He's stripped of all of his grants and everything like that. Ruins his academic career and as a scientist and whatever else.

So basically when he took the name Dr. Doom, he wasn't actually a doctor. He just took that damn name because he thought he was. Well, it's catchy, you know. Well, I mean, his name is Victor Von Doom.

That's the important part, as long as it's catchy. But he blames Reed 100% for that whole thing. So then years later, you know, Reed and his buddies, they go off in space and they get the powers and they come back down. And then three or four issues down the road in the Fantastic Four, they go to Latveria and, oh, hey, there's that asshole I knew in college. He's running an Eastern European country and wearing an iron suit.

Shit. So, yeah. So while they're very much tied, he's not the first villain. The Mole Man and the, you know, the underground people, stuff like that, underground monsters, we've seen that cover the very first Fantastic Four. That's our first villain.

See, that's what I was thinking earlier. I was like, that's why I was like, I guess if we're doing some unseen... civilization that nobody on earth seems to know about. That's, you know, that's why you go to the underwater wing. Cause that's the only place where you can hide. I was like, but what about the center of the earth?

So I was thinking like you can get that King Kong flip upside down world. And there's a whole nother world inside of your planet. So I'm like, we could do that. We don't need fish people. We could have mole people.

That would be way more fun. Well, we have fish people. Well, now we have both. Yeah, we have both. And basically anywhere you can think of that we need a universe put in there, there is one.

You know, the quantum realm is the universe that's beneath our universe. Like literally when we shrink down to tiny microscopic level, there's a whole other world down there too. So, you know. Well, that's a, and that's, as I said earlier, let's go ahead and get into it. Cause that is one that I wanted to throw out there.

There's plenty of other specifics about this movie we can come back to, but because there's so much, this, this movie, I feel like maybe more than anything else recently feels like it's doing a lot of the coordinating and planning and, and again, almost real world fixing of where we are now. So much so because, you know, we lost our lead, uh, But then also like, well, we got to get this ready for the next thing and this ready for the next. I mean, the Iron Man 2 syndrome of like, okay, we got to get everything going on this. We got somewhere to be. We got to have all these pieces in play.

So it is one of those, like how many different things do we have going at the same time? that are we all going to come together at one big thing? Because we have the Quantum Realm going here, but then we just finished up the Doctor Strange, which we have the whole other thing that he's got going on that's going to go horribly wrong and come back to haunt us. So how tied are all of these things going to be into one big thing, or these separate side universes for separate side adventures. I would say as far as the dark domain stuff goes the doctor strange stuff that's probably coming up within his next film or you know maybe that's hinted at the end of the next blade one and maybe we get kind of a Yeah, they've hinted around they wanted to do some version of the Midnight Suns, which is basically the supernatural team of heroes.

But that's going to be separate from Crazy Quantum insanity that happens in the next movie. And see, that's the thing, is that they've dubbed this entry, this next phase, or not necessarily phase, this next saga is the multiverse saga. So we're dealing with a whole lot of other plates spinning here. So, yeah, Strange has got this problem coming up here. He has a third eye now, too.

That may be a problem later on as well. That happens with a lot of people. We're going to have the Guardians having their own issues in space. Basically, the events of Part 2 coming to bite him back in the ass with Adam Warlock showing up and then whatever else happens in there. I think the High Evolutionary is supposed to be. villain in there so he's a guy that basically likes kind of like dr morrow likes toying around with genetics and saying you know what would be really fun is if we had a monkey uh uh you know turtle.

Dude this is also what i do on the side yeah so he. Kind of he likes toying around with that kind of jazz um with the quantum realm stuff and with kang coming up as our next big bad That is a lot of timey-wimey stuff. That's a lot of alternate universe. That's where our main multiversal action comes from, is from Kang. Yeah.

Because the big implications with Kang is that, you know, there are multiple versions of Kang. We already kind of get a taste of that at the end of the first season of Loki. Yeah, they definitely work. Him in heavily there, along with another insanity, too. But at least, again, that's another one of those that's just... almost laying groundwork more than telling a story for me.

Anyway, I had way more issues with them not going anywhere until the very last episode. And then we're like, here's an information dump for a whole bunch of future things. Here you go. So, but yeah, basically with, with Kang, think Genghis Khan with a time machine and he goes and conquers. And then basically he's conquered so much throughout the multiverse, throughout time itself, that he essentially gets bored with his own shit and starts becoming nice and does that for a short, short period of time, maybe a few hundred years, and then basically decides that, okay, I'm now going to put myself in this position of Lord of Time because I've been doing this for so long.

I know all the ins and outs of things. I'm now running the time stream sort of stuff. So you all come to me. I'm the boss now. And then he puts himself in that position, runs that for a while, and then we get to the point where we see him and Loki where he is Literally at the end of his line.

And he's old. He's bored. I'm bored with everything. He's seen it all. He's done it all.

He knows it all. And what only takes him by surprise is when he doesn't know what's coming next. And that's literally at the moment his death. But the other versions of Kang that we haven't seen yet are probably far more dangerous. So the curious thing is this Kang that we see here.

He's coming off as maybe he's asking Ant-Man for help in the trailer. What's he asking him for? Did he conquer the Quantum Realm in his time-y sort of thing like that? Or is this another version of Kang that may be a nicer one? Because what we implicate for coming up in Season 2 of Loki is the more despotic, conqueror sort of Kang that we see at the end of that and everything kind of changed over.

So there's a lot of implications there. It's like, is this one, like, is he just trying to manipulate Ant-Man into doing something and he's really bad? Or is this a nice Kang and we're going to see evil Kangs coming up later on down the line? Yeah. You know, Jonathan Major's got himself a hell of a role because he can basically do multiple versions of the same damn character.

Yeah. There's definitely a lot to work with there. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff. But you're right. Wakanda Forever did a good job of setting up a lot of real world stuff. a lot of their future problems.

But almost at the cost of the story, I feel like. As much as I said that going back to Iron Man 2, I feel like that movie almost more than any probably suffers with the setting the pieces into motion for all of this and this and that. Where this one, again, I feel like what's going on in the main story is the thing I'm least interested in. I'm way more interested in Ironheart. I'm way more interested in setting this up and the things that are coming from it, even like the basic, you know, relationships.

It's like watching some of the Wakandans and like where they're going to go down the line is way more interesting than, than fighting the fish people. So like, again, I'm, I feel that. And I feel like by the end, I think it's super successful as a, as a tribute, you know, to our lead and to the whole Wakanda idea. But does it do that much damage? within the story of what it's trying to tell. And then the other thing I was trying to decide is are they done with the basic version of Wakanda that we've been, you know, what would have been coming out of that first movie because we don't have our lead.

Do we, does he take it in a whole different direction now? Because I saw looking at, you know, Googlers, I will give him points. This thing gorgeous looks so good. So like as a director, I, visually he can deliver and then some but he also like looking at the list there it's like the next thing is switching over to tv so are we not doing more wakanda movies is there not another because again we've set her up now as our new black panther so are we just going to start working her into other adventures are we gonna see her show up on the tv show but like There aren't any rumors as to Black Panther 3. Next up is the TV series as an offshoot thing.

And I think that's just the next thing coming. They set up stuff for Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness for stuff to come, but we haven't got an announcement for Doctor Strange 3 yet. But that one, I feel like, had a very specific direction. Even with him, what happened in that movie was its own solid little story, and then set up two or three different directions they can go with that stuff. Where I don't, I don't know.

I feel like there was so much other stuff going on that's already represented somewhere else. Like, the Wakanda just sort of finished up and we're like, okay, we've kind of found peace as, you know, people. We did our big tribute to, you know, our lost hero and we've got a new Black Panther now. But, like, it didn't feel like it was, and now we're going here. Like, it was just like, and that's our tribute.

Thank you for coming. Like, it doesn't feel like it had momentum that was going anywhere as, like, Black Panther 3. Like, it was just... sort of almost wrapping up where we stand with Wakanda and we're still going to use them in the future. But I don't know. Like, I don't know.

And so much of that is probably tied into losing Chadwick, but I don't know. Like, I just kind of felt that in this movie of like, did they not know for sure where to go with the overall story? And they're busy focusing on the side characters and going to give them the TV series to do that with and not worry so much about a big, I don't know, But just put her into the upcoming Avengers or another side movie somewhere else. Right. I think they kind of do both of these things.

I think, for one, it is kind of like, oh, this is closing a bit of a chapter. It's like, okay, here are things that are going to be now in Wakanda without T'Challa around. Without Chadwick Boseman being present in the universe. I think it also kind of subtly sets up three different things. One, it sets up Wakanda's new place in the world now where basically we are kind of at conflict with the rest of the world because we have something that they want.

And are willing to get kind of shady about trying to get it from us. So I think there's going to be definitely when we get the Thunderbolts movie we're going to see a shitload of that. I think we may see a little bit of that possibly in Armor Wars as well because of course that's going to be dealing with Rhodey kind of dealing with Stark Tech being on the open market and have to basically save his dead friend's good name and his technology, Vibranium may come into play for there as well because the technologies are very linked. The other thing is, of course, we have set up this new character, Ironheart, who's a legacy character. We're going to have ties to Wakanda with her in her series, so that would be a good part to see some of those characters pop up through there as well.

Obviously, Black Panther and the Wakandans will be linked to the larger stories, the Avengers movies that are to come in the future. So we're going to see that. But what our cut scene does there is, for one, it takes care of our recasting problem. Yeah. It solves that one, but it also sets up a lot of future conflicts and stories of protecting the legacy of T'Challa, protecting that secret, and then how quickly are we going to age this kid?

That's what I was going to say. Age-wise, we've got it way down the line before we get to the passing the torch in that way but yeah are we going to focus on her for a while or are we just going to jump again we can travel through time so are we going to jump ahead in time and see like a grown-up version already kind of taking over and. It's possible there too and another thing too they kind of you know buried the lead on this one as well if you weren't paying attention is that nikea and toussaint they survived the snap yeah yeah they they those Those five years he spent growing up. So, you know, basically, you know, it kind of sucked because essentially he lost his father twice. Yeah.

Once when they thought, you know, the lost everybody got dusted when he came back. But then basically lost him again to this whatever disease it was. It made more sense by the time you get to the end and like, OK, this is why she left. But also like he had nothing to do with them because he couldn't the first time. And then they had a little interaction there for a while and then he was gone again.

So it does set up this sort of reason why he was out of his life, you know, growing up, why they weren't just a family. You didn't have that option when you're snapped out of existence. But also kind of gives it, like, this reason why she was gone and started this whole new life, too. To keep him sort of under wraps and raise him, you know, away from Wakanda. But still, like, hopefully bring up a good child and one that's ready to take over, assuming they want to pass the election.

And that kid's cute as a butt. Which is, yeah, super good for them as a casting. Like, let's get this super cute kid. So I do wonder, are they going to jump ahead or are they going to hang on to that? get some mileage out of the super cute kid mode for a while. Well, I mean, that's kind of the interesting thing is if you think about it, basically, it only took essentially three movies to get Scott Lang's daughter, Cassie, grown up age, because basically we get like, you know, first two movies, she's a little kid.

And then basically we get after end game. And of course, you know, she's grown up now. And then, Why we recast her for the new Quantumania. But they recast her for whatever reason. So this poor character has been four different actresses.

So we recast her for Quantumania. And now she's obviously in her 20s. And has taken up the superheroing a little bit. And the adventuring and the science-y stuff as well. So that's kind of cool to set her up for that.

So we may... they may age this kid quickly. They may, since we're dealing with multiversal timey wimey stuff that we somehow pull a grownup, you know, to challenge you. But I mean, it doesn't take long. That's the thing with kids. Five, six years is a huge jump.

So yeah, that's, that's, it's not that far out of whack when we get to the, the Ant-Man thing, because again, you jump ahead five years and it's like, Oh, she's not a little kid anymore. Like it makes a big difference. So yeah, it's, it's kind of that same thing. So that's, Just sort of planting that seed there of like, you can do kind of whatever with him. So that's, that's interesting.

So yeah, I'm, I'm more interested, I guess, cause I know that's coming, but what they want to do with the sister, I do really like, cause I mean, it was sort of up in the air. They could give the black Panther title to someone else too. So I do, we all kind of wanted that just because it is such a family thing. It has been, you know, sort of right. All about that, you know, that group that those four people are, three of which are dead by the end of this movie.

So it's like, all she's got left is, is that legacy of Black Panther. So I do like that she gets to be in the suit. Now, once she is in the suit, you realize, damn, she is skinny. Once she got in there, I was like, man, she is a tiny girl. Like, I knew that before, but it really highlights it when she's crammed into that suit.

Yeah. Thankfully, the heart-shaped herb does. Yeah, she's super-powered, so it's all good. That thing is, in the comics, Shuri has been taking the mantle of the Black Panther twice. Yeah.

And she's taken the ruler of Wakanda once. There was a conflict that Doom went to war with Wakanda, and basically, the results... T'Challa pulled a couple of moves that basically... They won the battle, but basically he lost favor in the eyes of his own people because he had to basically just pull some dirty shit. Yeah.

And so he was stripped of the throne. Shuri takes over, takes over the Maxwell Black Panther. Eventually, you know, T'Challa gets the role back. And then I think currently in the books, he's lost... Is a Black Panther, but he is not king.

There is now a... Basically, the council that was in Wakanda. The council now runs Wakanda, and Shuri is on that council. Well, that seems like that's what she did here, right? Because she's the new Black Panther, but by the end, we've got someone else stepping up to get into the battle for king.

So. Now, that's kind of... That's an even baller move there, because she sends a proxy... Yeah. For the fight.

Instead of her defending her own honor, she sends M'Baku to do it. So that's a baller move there. So again, that just shows Shuri's scoffing at old tradition because it's an old tradition. Would it be to take the title for her to take over as queen? Or would it be for him to be king and she's just going to be Black Panther?

No, no, no. She basically... has other things to do. Again, like she really doesn't need to sit there and be queen because that she's, she's being a super genius building things. And oh, by the way, black Panther, like she's got more than enough on her plate as it is. And it may be that the council does end up taking over, uh, why she may be kind of like an honorary queen.

Yeah. Uh, you know, but that was, that was kind of a fun thing is that, you know, they still had the ceremony. She is technically queen of Wakanda. She is the black Panther, uh, But for this honorary tradition of defending her own position as a new, you know, ruler, she sends a proxy because she has other things to do. So, you know, so yeah, this is a new mode, but yeah, we'll basically, will we see Shuri on the throne?

Or will she kind of like have a council instead? And the council is the ruling thing, and she's on the council. That's the thing right now in the comics. Shuri is on this ruling council. T'Challa is not.

Because, again, T'Challa screwed up, and. He's, you know. So, yeah. I mean, again, I don't need to see her sit around and be queen. There's so many more cool things she could be doing from our end, from the audience end.

I'd much rather see her out there kicking people's ass and building cool machines to blast. I do like at one point she has kind of the guns on her suit. I'm like, I like her tooling it so that she has her own suit. It's not like a knockoff of her brother's. It's her version of the suit and what it should be.

Yeah. Also, I kind of wish they would have done this. It was a cool look in the books. But her suit, of course, you know, the traditional suit is, you know, the skin tight black suit. Her suit has got like some like furry shoulders and has got some more of like. animal adornments on it, aside from just being the all-black suit.

Yeah. So she stepped up the fashion a little bit on the suit. Yeah. Which they kind of mirror that a little bit with the purple and the gold accents. Yeah, it's got a little more color to it, but.

Yeah, this is definitely a different suit, different person wearing it, but... This was, like you said, setting up a lot of other things in the MCU down the line. It kind of is that movie to do that. But at the same time, I think it's kind of setting up the large... It wasn't so much a, this is definitely the direction we're going.

It's, this is now the new status for Wakanda. It's finishing out the old deal and like giving you, here's where we can go in a lot of different directions with all these different characters. I do like if we're bringing in old stuff. The return of Michael B. Jordan is kind of awesome.

Yeah. Whether it not be in the real world or not, like just the fact that they got him to come back is awesome. So yeah, I really liked that scene. And I got to give my buddy Tommy Crane credits because we were doing our speculation train, whatever else. And there were two points that Tommy himself speculated on and he was 100% about it.

And one of those things was the fact that when Shuri goes to see her ancestral plane, She will not see her brother. She will not see her father. She will not see her mother. She'll see Killmonger. And that would be interesting as all shit.

I'm like, dude, if that happens, that's going to be great. And as soon as that happens, I'm sitting there going, Tommy, you son of a bitch. You're right. So, yeah. So that was, you know, that was amazing that he nailed that sort of thing.

He's so great at that. Anyway, and that was almost the danger of that first movie is that he's... he's more charismatic, you know, he's like he, and he has a real story that you're like, no, I'm kind of siding with this guy until he gets to, you know, to the point of murdering, you know, it's like up until that point, I'm on your side, man. And even after he's done murdering people, you still kind of like him again. So yeah, you still understand why he got to that point. So it's like, as long as you don't murder me, I guess.

Yeah. Like he was still like, I understood why he was angry. I understood why he wanted to, you know, he thought he deserved this. Like it, There's so many times where I feel like they don't give us a good villain. Killmonger was awesome and kind of a shame that we had to lose him.

So it was good to even have this little moment of him in this one because, yeah, he's, as a character and as an actor, he's amazing. Yeah, but it also really told us where Shuri's head was. When she's getting this honor and this power bestowed upon her, She's not coming into it like T'Challa did. She's coming into it with vengeance. It's not with noble mind.

It's nothing but vengeance. Which is the only thing I think from the action end of it, I'm really glad where they ended with it. Because it is, again, to be as important in the real world as the story is. And to watch people in the real world continually just kill each other for no good reason. Right.

It's like that's almost what we need to be. Again, do I think I'm that am i somebody who'd be way more into the vengeance version of it and want to take out fish man yeah probably because again in that moment it would make more sense for her to do that to protect her people to get the vengeance that she feels like she deserves but from the story standpoint from the hero standpoint if she's going to be a hero she needs to be that she needs to have that nobility of like i'm better than that and i do need to and so much as a tribute to her brother because that's the kind of thing he would have done even in like when we're introduced to him like civil war he is ready to kill the winter soldier like it is nothing but vengeance and by the end of the movie, he's housing him, you know, he's like, he comes full circle enough to see that not only is that not the answer to kill the bad guy, as we find out the real bad guy, but in, you know, this person that I was so angry at, I now find as an ally, and like, I can find common ground, and like, I don't know, there's, there's so much to that that mirrors what he was as a person that, yeah, I'm so glad to see them kind of wrap it up the way they did.

And again, almost more for real world reasons. Like this is the lesson that we need to learn from this is not the vengeance version. Again, I don't think I would have gone that route. I'm, I'm a horrible person and I would have just shoved a pike through his head, but no, no, I, as a hero, you need to be better than that. Yeah.

But it was, it was interesting though, with how kind of everything played out and how things set up and, Yeah, again, now we've got two essentially secret societies that, like I said, with a very tenuous alliance. But yeah, it will not last. I'm sure. Because, I mean, unless they want to make a complete interesting turn and kind of have Wakanda go the other way, where they basically... That's what I was wondering.

If they legitimately team up together, these two societies, versus. The U.S. Government, the rest of the world, like anyone else that's trying to come after them for, if nothing else, the vibranium. But even just as their secrets that they hold, like it would be interesting if they end up having to legitimately be allies and go against, you know, the people who used to be considered the good guys. But now they just want power and ways to destroy people in new and creative versions.

Yeah. Yeah, so there's a lot of implications. But yeah, I mean, there's so much kind of coming in the future. Because yeah, we've got lots of real world stuff that is going on. But then there's all the multiversal timey-wimey stuff coming up too.

And of course, we've got double dose of Avengers movies coming the next few years as well. Yeah, I mean, it's been back and forth. Because I was thinking that because this is capping off this phase... I've said it on the last episode. I think like, I feel like there's a lot of wheel spinning on some of these movies that are just like, look, we can't really get anywhere yet.

We're going to set it up. We got to do this and this, but we can't really do any of that yet. Cause it's the next phase. So it's like, it's been back and forth. I really liked what they were doing with the Spider-Man movie.

I liked Dr. Strange, but just about all the rest of them along the way have been like, look, there's only so much we can accomplish and that's it. So I don't know. I, It's been back and forth. I feel like this also kind of suffers from that.

But the other things it's doing, it's doing so well that it's still a great experience overall. It's just, again, there's only so much they can do. Plus, they had the real world juggling of how do we deal with losing our lead? How do we continue this? And move into the direction we need to while still finishing up his story, starting her new story, introducing this new character.

Here's a whole new group of people. Like, it's a lot of stuff that is juggling there. But, yeah, I feel like it's headed in a good direction, but it didn't give them a whole lot of a chance to tell much of an individual story because they had so many other things they were doing along the way. Yeah. I mean, that's sometimes it can be perceived as a problem.

Um, but again, it's kind of like, it's the interesting thing that they've done here. We're basically comic readers. We're used to this sort of thing. We're used to basically six different plots being spun around. And sometimes the events will unfold quickly.

Sometimes they unfold over a long period of time and the trigger isn't pulled too much later. And so we have to kind of set up things and wait for stuff to happen or whatever else. Um, And it's interesting that they do this in the movies. We're going to start seeing them now that James Gunn and Peter Safran are in charge over at DC, kind of having a Kevin Feige role. Yeah.

We're going to see probably a lot more world building over in DC in the next coming years. We're not going to see it this year or next year or whatever else. It'll be interesting because, I mean, they've got it down to a science at Marvel. So, like, we've watched DC fumble it several times now. Yeah.

And using one of the Marvel guys to do it is even more weird. But I will defend the fact that in the two projects that James Gunn developed, being the Suicide Squad movie and Peacemaker, in those two projects alone, he set up other elements of the DC universe, introducing either physically getting to see characters we never thought we'd see before, or even just name-dropping characters. characters like okay it's one thing to say green arrow it's a completely different thing to name drop batmite which basically if you're a superman fan and you know mr mitzel clicks yeah which is basically an imp from the fifth dimension he bends reality and does whatever he wants to do batmite same dude we're not not same guy but same universe same place he just has a fascination with batman and he's not so much of a shithead Like, he wants to be Batman.

That's why he dresses like Batman. He wants to do nice hero things. Sometimes he screws it up because whatever else. But unlike Mr. Mitzelplix, he wants to be a good guy.

Whereas Mitzelplix loves being chaos. Well, that's what I always give James Gunn credit. Like, he's... Again, what he was doing before. Like, just as a filmmaker in the early days, as low budget and goofy as the stuff was, he was so good at it and made him so likable that...

And then giving him this huge Marvel Universe and all this money to play with. And he did it better than most people. And had control over and a plan more than most people. Which is also why DC wanted to steal him. So, yeah, it's interesting to see what he's done.

Definitely with the Suicide Squad, which was rescuing another project that somebody had tanked. So, yeah, he's really good at keeping stuff in check and fresh. fun along the way, which not all of them can do as well. Yeah, so he's got, they'll have a little bit of catching up to do over in the DC universe of world building and things, whatever else. But that's the one thing they've done great with Marvel is that, you know, if you're deep enough into this stuff as fans, you're looking for the world building stuff as well. I mean, yeah, you know, sometimes, you know, it's executed well where you get both the world building and the focusing on an individual movie, whatever else.

So, you know, whether or not Wakanda forever achieve both remains to be seen. I still enjoyed it, but, of course, I did see a lot of the big world-building stuff that is happening. Yeah. Which is interesting that they did a lot more real-world stuff in that. We know, like, the bigger, timey-wimey stuff is coming in other projects, but, oh, yeah, here's some real-world MacGuffins as well to deal with.

Yeah. The fact that, hey, you know, we're adding one more to the mutant list. We, you know, started with Kamala Khan, but, oh, hey, guess what? We, you know, we got one guy that came before her. Yeah.

So we have now two mutants, we officially in the MCU, and the fact that Vibranium is no longer... a proprietary resource of Wakanda. It's now in other places. Yeah, I forgot. Now we've also got the new Marvel thing coming up, which had a whole bunch of other stuff they introduced with Ms. Marvel.

So that's a whole lot of other monkey wrenches thrown into it. And that's going to be spacey stuff. And where that all ties in, I guess maybe we'll see after we get a trailer or something like that. But that's definitely going to be spacey stuff. So is it going to be spacey?

In the same way that the Guardians down the line is going to be? Or is it a different area of spacey craziness? I don't know because... There's so much in the works. Because for one, okay, we got that last scene where basically, you know, we found out that the band she had was basically a quantum band.

So she has now switched places with wherever Carol Danvers was at the moment. Yeah. But then we're also going to be bringing in Monica Rambeau. So we basically have all three of the Marvel's... Even though they're basically going to establish her as Photon, they're not going to give her the legacy that they see at one point.

She was also a Captain Marvel. But they're at least sticking the three Marvels together in something, in a project, doing things like that. How they're all going to tie in together remains to be seen. Where it all takes place, I don't know just yet. Aside from casting and stuff like that, there really hasn't been any revelations of what's going to happen in this movie.

And again, what I thought they did so well with Ms. Marvel was like, they set up this story and they put into play all of this stuff, but didn't sacrifice any of it. Like we didn't know anything about them as Marvel. Well, the captain Marvel tie into it till that last second. Yeah.

And like, other than that, like we were just busy building this character and telling her story. And they focused on that really well. So I liked that we still get it by the end, but we didn't spend a whole lot of time. We didn't give a whole lot of extra stuff thrown in to distract from her story. So the way they did that was, I think, almost perfect.

So they can do a little more of that, I feel like. Just focus on the story and throw that in there when you need to and then tie them together in the next thing. We established that Kamala was a big fan. when it comes to Carol Danvers. So that was the connection there. The next phase of the MCU is going to be going to a lot of different places.

Because we've got the Quantum Realm. We're going to see more spacey stuff. We're going to see wherever the place the Guardians are going to take us to for their film. Plus monsters are still coming down the line. Yeah, we got more monster stuff.

Well, Blade was supposed to be next year, but now it's probably going to be until 24. So I think, I can't remember if Thunderbolts is going to be 23 or 24. I know next year is going to be packed. Yeah, because next up is Ant-Man, right? But then after that is the Marvels for too long either.

Yeah, and then we're going to have, you know, this thing is we're going to have so many like series and movies coming. For Marvel. So they're kind of making up for lost time with the pandemic. Yeah. I mean, they really did kind of drop off for a while, which everybody did, but.

Yeah, it set us back a little bit there. So set back the timeline a bit there, but yeah. Yeah. So I just, I'm just very excited for a lot of what the future is going to hold for this next phase of things. Of course, I mean, we're all still in the, this, this next saga, this multiverse saga.

So we're at the beginning stages of it. Cause that's the thing is that it's kind of, The fun thing is if you didn't read the comics the first time around when we're creating the Avengers and setting up the Infinity Gauntlet stuff, you didn't know where it was going either. You're just like, okay, here's all these introductions, all these superheroes, and here's some bad guys. And who's that purple dude? And then, oh, okay, that purple dude's coming up again here.

Oh, wait a minute. Now we got some bigger things. So we still haven't unfolded yet to where we're going here. But I think next year in February with Ant-Man coming out, that's going to be– I think the door's going to get kicked wide open as to where we're going and what our main problem's going to be. It does look insane.

It does. Based on that trailer. And that's good. As close as we get to the Doctor Strange insanity, which was pretty crazy. Mostly, I liked the last movie way more, so I like that level of dark insanity more.

So yeah, this one, I don't know if it's going dark and creepy, but it's definitely going weird, so. I don't think it's going dark and creepy, but weird, yes. Because, I mean, we're in the, you know, Quantum Realm stuff's gonna be some cool stuff. But yeah, not necessarily dark and creepy, unless we're dealing with some Some Kang stuff may be dark and creepy. Could be.

But, yeah. I've done a couple interesting little Easter eggs recently with Mr. Scott Lang. Because I can't remember which... If it was the Spider-Man...

Last Spider-Man movie or something like that. But there was a little Easter egg dropped in there about... That Scott had a podcast. Called, like, Big Me, Little Tiny Me or something like that. And the.

Opening scene, we're watching CNN and they're announcing the death of T'Challa. If you looked at the crawl, Scott Lang's got a book out. It's a tell-all autobiography. And people will still not know who he is. I like that he will just, so far at least, never get any respect.

Thank you, Spider-Man. He's like, ugh. That was almost as good as, you want a picture with me? No, no? All right, fine.

Ah, come on, this guy wants to. He'll just never... Get any respect. That's fun. That's kind of, yeah.

Except at Baskin-Robbins where he's employed the century. I mean, you know, hand out little plastic scoops, free samples. Well, I mean, you know, you work at, you know, Baskin-Robbins by day and then save the multiverse by night, you know, from Thanos. You know, that's going above and beyond the call of duty there. Maybe he will also save Baskin-Robbins.

Because I thought most of them were under by now. So he might have to rescue the whole franchise. There's just a little Baskin Robbins in my town. Actually, there's two. Most of them are gone, though.

Compared to, they used to be all over the place. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's not near as many. So I was concerned the whole thing was going to pull. But maybe with Ant-Man's help, we can rescue this ice cream franchise.

That's his real focus. And, you know, save the universe or whatever. But mostly ice cream. Oh. Yeah, and another fun thing I learned, too, is that apparently, I haven't heard what the titles were, but they had a hard time picking what the subtitle for this Black Panther movie was going to be.

Yeah. Which, it's funny because Wakanda forever. I was going to say, that would be the easiest one, I feel like, is where they landed. Yeah, it does, but apparently there were hundreds they were going through and kind of, you know... Yeah, let's try this one.

Maybe this one. So they land on Wakanda forever. That just seemed very obvious. I feel like everything else about where that movie was going would have been the hard part. Like, oh, we don't have a lead.

Oh, our story's all shot to hell. But the subtitle would be the easiest thing to come up with. Black Panther 2. Fuck cancer. Really?

I don't know. I was like, yeah, that's the carryover from everything is Wakanda forever, man. So, but yeah, again, I was entertained by the film. I think it achieved, you know, a very fitting tribute to Chadwick and then end up being, you know, Ramonda as well. I was kind of irritated about you losing Angela Bassett.

Yeah. She's amazing. I mean, we knew that, but like the whole scene where she goes off on everything, she's lost. I'm like, that's a powerful, I mean, that is one of those, like they can start flashing Oscar clip at the bottom. Cause I mean, it was that level of like amazing performance there.

And yeah, I don't know that anyone else will care along those lines, but for Marvel Universe, that's a hell of a performance. So yeah, it is kind of sad that, especially when it doesn't even go anywhere, like it isn't like... And then, you know, because of that, we end up, you know, putting down this whole society that was evildoers and they need to die. And like, no, now we're allies with them, even though they killed your mom. Now you are being really noble because. yeah pike through the head well yeah and i didn't get 100 clear if that was supposed to be like namor's daughter that was killed or if he just kind of just like you're my child as in a child of atlantis sort of thing like that you know sort of thing but basically they.

Killed some of his people that he didn't care about and so that's what caused. Him to that's another one of those that kind of bugged me we spent a lot more time with him than i feel like we need to well i mean we didn't get it like but i don't dislike the actor i think he did a good job he does come off as like a A formidable villain, but like, I don't know. We spend a lot of time with him in that middle part there. And I'm like, by the end, I'm like, I don't really care that much about him to have logged in as much time as we did with them. He could have been more of a caricature and it wouldn't have affected the story any.

Maybe down the line he'll actually be more useful, but I don't know. I think we needed to spend a little more time on him because he's such a complex character. Yeah, if he's going to be more. Like, I don't know. I feel like we didn't get that much out of where we went with it.

It was fine. Like, it... It's one movie. Time will tell what's going to be there. Interesting fun fact.

We have seen Chinook. I can't remember what his last name is, but the gentleman who played Namor. We've actually seen him once before, but it was a long time ago. The Constantine movie. The beginning of the movie where basically the Spear of Destiny is being passed around and we see a little kid run off with it that's possessed.

That was him. So we weren't really introducing him at all. He's been around the whole time. A buddy of mine pointed that out as well. I'm like, no kidding.

That was him, huh? He was a skinny little kid then, but he filled out quite a lot. Maybe he'll come back as we get Constantine II, which is supposedly in the works now. So maybe we can work him back in. Don't get me started on that Constantine II.

It's not that I have any hatred at all for the movie or for Keanu Reeves. We all love Keanu now. It's okay. But when we've had, for a number of years, Matt Ryan play the role of Constine on television, two series, making multiple appearances throughout other series, throughout the CW-verse, doing animated films and whatever else, basically carrying this role of Constine for longer than Keanu had it. Well longer, yeah.

And. He, A, is British, because the character Constantine is. He looks like him. And he acts a hell of a lot more like him than Keanu did in the movie. Keanu's totally British.

What are you talking about? Why are we waiting so long to do this? I mean, I know Keanu enjoyed the character. He enjoyed his time in the movie. He enjoyed working with Francis Lawrence, who directed the film.

But why we waited so long to do a sequel... And why now? Because like, well, it is interesting that like we've built up, like we've almost redeemed his character with this other guy. Yeah. And now as soon as it's popular again, they're just like, ah, forget you.

We're going back to this guy over here that everybody hated when he did it. But now we love him for playing a different character. So we're going to let him go back to that guy and screw you for carrying it around this last five to 10 years. You know, thanks a lot, but we'll take it back from you now. Yeah.

Yeah. So it just kind of like, it kind of rubs me the wrong way. It's like, And it would be confusing to use Matt Ryan in any way, shape, or form unless, like, I don't know, he goes into some mirror world or. Something like that. Multiverse event.

Yeah, I mean, well, it's all kinds of weird shit could happen. Like, he could see himself in the mirror and he looks like Matt Ryan. And he did, like, that's the thing. As much as I didn't like the show he was on, he was, like, the best part of it. Like, anything I watched in that crazy little universe that built up there, he was always good at doing that.

And, like, he really did seem like he had a handle on... The character that people knew before Keanu came along. He was doing a better job at doing that. And his powers and everything sort of worked better along those lines. But yeah, that's...

And what's also interesting too is that if you've seen the Sandman series, it's on Netflix. They have the Constantine character on there, but they gender swapped it. Because basically Neil Gaiman's like, I want to make this thing 100% separate. From the DC universe. Even though in the comics, the Sandman and the DC universe are, they are linked.

Yeah. But he's like, I want to keep this as a separate thing, a separate world, not for the superhero stuff. So he gender swapped and made it, you know, she's Lady Joanna Constantine. Nice. Aside from having boobs and a vagina, it's the same character.

She's smarmy. She will screw anything that moves. That's what I was going to say. It doesn't really matter what gender. Constantine doesn't seem to care.

She smokes. She drinks. She's shifty. She's shady. She's selfish.

It's everything the character you want, except she's prettier than Matt Ryan. Sorry, Matt. What are you going to do? It's weird. We've got three iterations of the same character.

Two are highly accurate. One is kind of there. But he's a big star. Of the other two, how many have played John Wick? Sorry, guys.

People really like John Wick. But this is like John Wick 5, the Constantine years. But I'm at least curious now with the accuracy we've seen from Matt Ryan's performance as Constantine, will we see some of that rub off on Keanu? Yeah, I mean, because, again, it's almost redeemed the character a little bit in recent years that maybe now we can lean more towards that character versus the entirely different thing that he was doing that first movie. Because I would like to see him be far more unlikable in the sequel than he was in the original.

Because that's the thing is that You know, he's somewhat unlikable, somewhat curt, you know, whatnot. For the most part, though, he's. He's still just sort of Keanu. Like, yeah. He's still kind of a nice guy.

I want to see him be a bit more dickish. Yeah. And, you know, granted, you know, Constantine still does do the right thing, but sometimes, like, he has to, like, sacrifice his friends to get the job done, and unfortunately his friends are not in on the plan. They're being sacrificed. Oops.

Yeah, there's some difficulty there, so, you know. So there you go. Wizards. Even more crazy comic book stuff. Wizards.

What are you going to do, man? Yeah. But, yeah, I agree. I think the most successful thing about this is the sort of tribute to both the character and the actor. That is 100%.

It does that. And by the end, I mean, we already kind of touched on the big. Mid-credits scene that we also didn't get a post-credits scene? What's that about? Usually they've been throwing tons of in there.

Now this time, I sat there the whole time and was like, really? Nothing? Well, see, I think that was, I'd heard ahead of time that we were going to get only one scene. Yeah. But I heard that the scene was a big one.

Which it is, I will give it. It is a big scene, yeah. But I was like, is that them being respectful? I think it's true. Because they kind of did that with that last Avengers, too, of like, okay, we just killed Iron Man and let's go out on a subtle note and not do a big, oh, look, here's...

Samuel L. Jackson showing up again. Well, and the thing, too, is that, you know, Endgame was literally the ending of that saga. That whole arc, yeah. So we couldn't necessarily drop stuff for the future, even though they kind of would send some applications.

Even though they did, they just changed their mind, because then they used it in the Scarlet Witch setup. Like, that was originally supposed to be the post-credits. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, so it's, you know, there's some stuff they end up setting up down the line, but it's like, we want to have this, like, this is a definitive kind of, stopping point for that so phase four you know the end with Black Panther kind of Wakanda Forever kind of ending that does twofold thing one it is a bit of an honoring of Chadwick and then giving this legacy character you know a new showcase here but it also is like this is kind of a stop to here's maybe like the end of all of our introductions yeah of all of our new heroes and You know, it's like we've got our Shang-Chi.

We've got our Moon Knights. We've got our Ms. Marvels. You know, we've got a new Wakandan Black Panther now. You know, we've got possibly some new Avengers coming up down the line.

Stuff like that. Maybe some young legacy heroes coming down the line as well. So we've got a lot of things. A lot of stuff in play in this last phase. So now basically Ant-Man starting the new phase is going to be like, okay, here's building to our larger conflict.

It's like, yeah, we've got some real world stuff going on too. We're going to deal with some other shows and whatnot. But in the movies... We're dealing with Kang. We're dealing with the timey-wimey stuff.

We're heading towards it slowly but surely. And I will be there to hold everyone's hand and explain things when shit starts getting hairy. I'm sure I will have a lot of ridiculous questions. That's what I do. I mean, if you just pick apart the Ant-Man trailer and some of the weird shit we see, like basically Ant-Man running alongside other versions of himself as they seem to be dissolving away, like how kind of You know, Wanda took out Mr.

Fantastic. Basically turned him into Silly String. So it's like, what's up with all that? What's up with all these people kind of coming over the hillside looking like warriors approaching Ant-Man and all them? Who are those dudes?

And what's all this going on here? I just like his daughter also gets a suit. So we can have the whole family in crazy bug suits. Well, of course. I mean, you can't stay in the quantum realm for too long and not be affected by it without having some kind of protection.

Does she get to be like the termite or something? What bug character can we turn her into? Well, that's the thing. Actually, Cassie does not take a bug character. Oh, man.

Well, see, they got Ant-Man, they got Wasp. So what other bug are you going to do that sounds cool? Termite. Termites are super cool. She doesn't take that because in the comics, what she ends up doing is she doesn't do the tiny growth.

She does the overgrowth. So she takes the name Stature because she likes to get big. Well, they do make use of the big. Any chance they've got so far. So whether or not Cassie's going to start using that, because that's the thing is we know she gets a suit.

We know she's involved in the adventure and stuff, but we haven't seen what her power set's going to look like. So is she going to And big and basically be, you know, giant Cassie. That was what was always an odd choice. For a guy named Ant-Man, you get giant a whole lot, dude. But that's a nod to the fact that Hank Pym has basically been Ant-Man.

He's been Giant-Man. He's been Yellowjacket. He's been Goliath. And then he went by his own damn name, Hank Pym. I do like that he's hanging in there too.

And now we get way more Michelle Pfeiffer in this one. So I was glad to see that. And I love that whole implication of Michelle Pfeiffer. It's like she. I've been here.

Like, I've been here. Why are you signaling? What is she so afraid of? Is she afraid of Kang? Or is there something else that she's afraid of?

Mm-hmm. So, yeah. So I just. Again, that's a. So we kind of get to an end of one part.

We get to the end of a section of this very large book that is the multiverse saga. Yeah. And so now our next chapter starts up next year in February with Ant-Man. And shit's going to get. Weird, folks.

I believe it. I'm just setting you up for it. But yeah, points to... I still want to give credit to Ryan Coogler. I do want to see...

Is he going to... I mean, this is the only thing he's done since he started on this... You know, it's like he's... Well, he did. The Creed movies, too.

Well, no, I'm saying, well, again, he did the first one, and then he got involved in this, and he couldn't do the second one because of that. Now, he's still connected to them. Yeah. Because that's what I noticed. I also got the new Creed trailer at the beginning of that.

Yeah. And directed by Michael B. Jordan. Yeah. But then I also, looking at the...

Because he doesn't have director stuff coming up for feature, but he did have a story by credit for that third Creed movie. So he is still connected to it all. But I do want to see now that he's got... Because he jumped to this status real quick. It's like Fruitvale Station, Creed, and then this is what he's done since then.

So it's like, is he going to veer off and do a regular non-Marvel-y movie? I'd kind of like to see what else he does as a director. Because again, visuals... And the fact that he, coming from doing a couple of movies... is thrown in the middle of this and has juggled it pretty well, especially losing one of his best friends and hero like along the way and still delivered a movie that at least looks and continues to do all these things that this had to do. Like he's, he's a hell of a director.

So I do want to see where he's going to go if he's staying with Marvel or if he's going to take a break and do other stuff either way. Like he's, he's such an amazing director. I want to see what else he can work on. Some interviews he's done, I have a feeling he's leaning towards taking a break from Marvel and doing something else. I mean, yeah, there is just that gap.

Because I was looking, I was like, did he at least do something in between? But no, it's like he went from making Black Panther to working on the next one and then dealing with all the aftermath of losing his best friend. So it's like, yeah, it's... Taken a toll on him, I'm assuming. So it would be nice to see him do something normal again.

Yeah, Ryan has kind of implicated that. This one definitely took a toll on him. So either he's going to take a very long vacation, or he will move to a much smaller project for the next thing he does. But I'm sure this is not the last we've seen of him as a director in Marvel. because he's proven himself twice over as basically doing, you know, very great films, beautiful movies, and they also bring in the money. Yeah.

And Marvel loves all of that. That's, again. so many times they take these up and coming directors and throw them in the middle of this and then it goes to hell. So he was like the exception of like, no, you came from, you know, a little indie movie that you made by yourself to thrown in the middle of Marvel and then delivered at the time, the biggest box office ever. So like, that's pretty impressive. So yeah, he can handle that end of it too.

So I do want to see where he goes after this. Yeah. I'd like to see more from him definitely with other films and with other Marvel stuff too. But yeah, give the man a good, yeah he deserves to take a break yeah yeah get yourself a nice island vacation for a good six months make a. Nice little indie movie you know spend some time with your family you can still make an indie drama with michael b jordan and it'll be all good you can work him into anything because he is also amazing so it's good to see they're still working together they're still still seem to be tight because i think he's still Executive producer on the new Creed.

That new Creed looks good. It looks cool. You got Killmonger versus Kang. It looks good. Every time I see Jonathan Majors in something, I just like him more.

I was glad to see that on there. All right. Well, we've, as per usual, been all over the Marvel Universe and back. It's a big space. We'll be back for Ant-Man, I suppose.

Yep. Until then, I'm sure we'll find something else to talk about. Oh, I'm sure we will. We can always have a thorough discussion of the new Weird Al movie. Because I've already watched that three times.

Or, you know, our Christmas edition of Violent Night. You can watch David Harbour beat people up as Santa. Oh, and you would appreciate this. There's a comic company called American Mythology Productions. And they've been grabbing little franchises here and there and trying stuff.

They've recently done Night of the Living Dead. They've done Fright Night, Willy's Wonderland. Their next entry, Silent Night, Deadly Night. Well, there we go. First issue coming out in time for the holidays.

There could be a tie-in to that coming up in the very near future. Yeah. As you may have already heard. I can't wait to get naughty. So, we'll see if we come up with anything between now and the end of this year.

But if not, we know Ant-Man is waiting in the wings there. No pun intended. No, that's Wasp. The flying ants have wings, damn it. Nah, they don't count.

Those are just some sort of mosquito or something. Cheating. I'm going to get an entomologist after you to kick your ass. On that note, let's round this out. So, Otherwise, that about does it.

We will return next time. Same geek feed. Thanks for listening. Y'all take care now. She's scratching at my door in the middle of the night.

Got a little black panther, she is insane She gets high in the middle of the day She's scratching at my brain The way she traps around She's insane She's my little black panther of love. I got a little back there, you know she has her say. She gets high in the middle of the day. If she wants it, she will and she can't go the other way. If you see her coming, you better not pay.

She's scratching at my brain The way she traps you out She's insane. You know she feels all right. She's my little black belt. And she rules the night. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. She's scratching at my brain. The way she drives around.

She's insane. You know she feels alright. She's my little black battle lover. And she rules the night. She's my little black battle lover.

Good stuff. A whole lot of stuff. Much like the Marvel Universe. There's a whole lot of stuff going on. There is.

Good lord. This episode is a production of Movie Meltdown, produced and edited by the Audity Studios, with opening music performed by the Empires. For more on how to sponsor or support the show, email producer at moviemeltdown.com. Talk hard! This program is a proud member of the Battleship Pretension Fleet.