Franchise Fatigue (2)

General Thunderbolt Ross definitely comes from the comics. He was J Jonah Jameson to the Hulk’s Spider-Man, or, at times, Captain Ahab to the Great Green Whale: the non-player character who hates the main good guy for no very good reason. That was very much part of the Format: Chris Claremont felt obligated to supply his pisspoor Captain Britain with a bad tempered British peeler who hated superheroes because his daughter or possibly wife had been killed by one. The Red Hulk was one of those very-last-thing-you-expected twists that comic books love to do. The Green Hulk was being menaced by a Big Red version of himself, and it was eventually revealed that Red Hulk was his old foe General Ross come back from the dead to haunt him. Not a bad twist if you were there: but there is something quite tiring about watching every single member of every single supporting cast—Gwen Stacey, Flash Thompson, Jane Foster—gradually being transformed into either a superhero or a supervillain. 

Ross was a major character in the Incredible Hulk movie. It followed Stan Lee’s excellent plot-engine: Ross despises the weak Bruce and hates the strong Hulk; his daughter Betty is scared of the strong Hulk but loves the weak Bruce. There is a big scene at the end of Captain America: Brave New World in which Ross and Betty are finally reconciled. Because in the Incredible Hulk she was mad at Dad for trying to kill the Hulk even after Dad learned he was really Bruce. 

But that was very nearly twenty years ago. 

I mean, maybe I am the wrong sort of nerd, or maybe I love Tolkien and Star Wars too much and the Marvel Cinematic Universe not enough. Apparently Thunderbolt Ross has appeared once or twice since 2008. And very possibly when Harrison Ford is introduced as President Ross, maybe you thought “Cool, that politician guy from Avengers: Civil War who had a brief cameo in Endgame, I have been wondering what happened to him, I sure hope he makes it up with his daughter.” 

And maybe I should have thought that too. But I didn’t.

A very long time ago I was inordinately rude about a TV show called Babylon 5 because (I said at the time) it was a story arc in search of a story; a sequence of weak, sub Star-Trek episodes which moved fairly interesting playing pieces around a quite well developed science fiction backstory. It probably had more merit than I gave it credit for, although, god knows, I have no intention of ever watching it again to find out. It made clever use of early CGI to create an iconography which was neither exactly like George Lucas nor exactly like Gene Roddenbury. And the backstory that was unfurled at such tortuous length was relatively interesting. But I think I would stand by the very rude essay: it aspires to a condition where the person who has only read the Wikipedia page was no worse off than the person who had watched the TV show. The factual summary was just as interesting as the actual episode. It was a back-story delivery mechanism.

 I know people who adopted this exact approach to Harry Potter: reading Wikipedia instead of JK Rowling. There are people who sincerely prefer David Day to JRR Tolkien.

Now, I am a very long way from wanting to be inordinately rude about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Captain America: Brave New World is perfectly penetrable, and loads of fun. There is a new President; and a new guy in the Captain America suit. The New Cap goes to Washington with New Cap’s New Sidekick and the Old Guy who the government once experimented on; and the Old Guy tries to assassinate the President. Although it is obvious to everyone that he has been mind-controlled, New Cap has to spend the movie clearing his friend’s name. (It turns out that he has been mind-controlled.) There is an absolutely stonking sky battle in which New Cap and New Cap’s New Sidekick have to prevent rogue American fighters triggering a war with Japan (over the body of the dead space god from the Eternals movie). It turns out that a Villain with a grudge against the President has been doing the mind-controlling. He has also been feeding the President drugs laced with PlotDevicium, the same substance that originally turned Bruce Banner into Hulk. So during a press conference, the President loses it completely, turns into Red Hulk and has an absolutely stonking fight with New Cap and New Cap’s New Sidekick. Lots of throwing people through buildings and destroying historical monuments and people staggering back onto their feet after they are down for the count. A real sense of Red Hulk being the strongest one there is and New Cap having huge amounts of guts to stand up to him. It’s a really impressive fight scene. But for anything to be really riding on it, we have to be keeping track of quite a lot of plot threads from quite a lot of previous movies. Otherwise it is just a really really impressive fight scene. Did I mention that I really, really like really, really impressive fight scenes?

Who is the film for? Audiences who just come for the fight scenes and don’t expect to know what is going on? Or people who do their homework and read the character studies in Brodie’s Notes the night before the exam? Or should we posit the existence of people who have watched everything in the franchise seventeen times and who know who Ruth-Bat Seraph is without anyone telling them? 

Quite a lot of us are somewhere in the middle. You know that you know; some people don’t know that they don’t know. But I know that I don’t know, and I sometimes find that a little frustrating.

Disney is burning through the core Marvel Characters at a rate of parsecs; exhausting the mythic potential of the Big Names (Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor) and having to replace them with teams of Second Division characters. 

The Second Division characters are pretty good. I liked the first Ant Man movie. Ms. Marvel (comic book and TV show) is some of the most superhero related fun I have had in years. I liked the Eternals: I suppose  someone had to. I wish I’d liked Shang Chi more. Truthfully, I hankered for something more like the 1970s version, although I fully understand that the 1970s version was ever so slightly incredibly racist.

Kenneth Brannagh’s Thor movie was so good that it ruined Thor: he told pretty much all the Thor stories that there are and left his successor's with nowhere else to go. In a comic, you can throw a different villain at a character every month for six hundred and twenty one months: Thor fights a bank robber; Thor fights commies; Thor fights Loki; Thor fights commie alien bank robbers in league with Loki. When you only get one movie every two and a half years, that’s not going to be artistically satisfying. So the Marvel Cinematic Thor has grown into an entirely different character: which is in one sense Good, because it means the character has growth and development, but in another sense Bad because you sit through each movie saying “So, remind me, has Asgard still been destroyed, where is he living nowadays, is Odin currently dead, is Loki a good guy or a bad guy this week…?” 

Batman and Superman reboot on an annual basis; but it always remains the case that Superman is an alien disguised as a journalist, and Batman is a screwed up rich kid with a cave in his basement. The endless multiple versions are even quite fun: what will the Joker be like this time; who will this year’s Alfred be? But Superman and Batman are myths, and myths are what Hollywood understands. Having exhausted the mythical elements of Thor and Captain America in the first couple of movies there is nowhere else for them to go. 

The correct approach would have been to embrace the fact that superhero stories are really about the villains. The follow up to The Tragedy of Peter Parker is not The Tragedy of Peter Parker Part II: it’s The Tragedy of Otto Octavius, featuring Peter Parker as the personification of divine nemesis. That is one reason why the 1992 Batman animated series is still held up as an exemplar of how to adapt comics to other media.

Captain America’s main enemies have always been Nazis. Sometimes Commies and sometimes Eye Rakkies, I grant you; but he always ends up fighting Hydra (thinly disguised Nazis), the Sons of the Serpent (thinly disguised Nazis) and the Red Skull (a not at all thinly disguised Nazi)

So. Here we are in 2025. The Red Skull is running America, and his minions are very cross indeed with Captain America: Brave New World. 

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