Captain America: Civil War Follow-Up: Zemo

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When I was originally putting together this series of articles, I intended to include Zemo in the previous article with “The Rest.”  However, as I considered further, I realized that there is so much more to talk about with regard to Zemo, particularly because I think he will come back to become a major player several years down the line in Phase 4.

After watching Captain America: Civil War, we now have a very good idea exactly where this thing is going to be going over the next few years as the MCU ramps up for the Infinity War in 2018 and 2019.  Each hero who appeared in Civil War received a satisfying arc, and at the end of the movie each of them had a definite trajectory of where their next appearances will come from.  However, the presumptive villain, Helmut Zemo, did not get to do quite as much in this movie as the heroes did—even if he did exactly as much as he needed to do!

Over the last four weeks, I talked about the members of the “Secret Avengers” and “Mighty Avengers,” as well as Captain America’s abandoned shield and the other heroes who do not fit into the other categories and a replacement Captain America.  This time around, I will talk about Zemo and how I think he fits into Marvel’s larger plans moving forward.

This is my last planned article for Captain America: Civil War; next week we’ll get into Daredevil season 2 and how it sets up future Netflix series.

Iron Man 2 RETRO-REVIEW

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en.wikipedia.org

Like I said in last week’s “Retro-Review” regarding The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2 is also considered to be one of the three worst MCU movies.  That assessment is indeed valid, but I do not think that it tells the whole story.  Without going into all the numbers I included last week, Iron Man 2 has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 72%, with an audience rating that is also 72%.  This is the third-lowest of all the MCU movies to-date (ahead of The Incredible Hulk and Thor: The Dark World).  However, even though that isn’t a great rating, it’s still considered “Fresh.”  It’s in the same range as The Wolverine (70%), The Amazing Spider-Man (73%), and Michael Keaton’s Batman (72%).  And you can look at all the movies with lower ratings that I mentioned last week.

So even when Marvel makes a bad movie, it’s really not that bad!

Side Note:  I realize that there’s a lot of variance when it comes to Rotten Tomatoes ratings.  The two reasons that I use Rotten Tomatoes for this are because they compile a ton of different reviews for their ratings and because it’s a quick and easy way to compare how different movies were received.

The Civil War Conflict Has Been Built into the MCU All Along

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Here we are, 4 weeks away from the wide release of Captain America: Civil War.  This movie has been hotly anticipated ever since Disney announced last year that the third Captain America movie would not have the subtitle “Serpent Society,” but instead would be titled Captain America: Civil War.  However, to think that the MCU Civil War has only been building for a couple of years would be to ignore the facts.  It’s not like Tony Stark and Steve Rogers just decided one day that they wanted to disagree about something, picked the Sokovia Accords, and duked it out.  No, this conflict over accountability vs. freedom has actually been built into the very DNA of the Marvel Cinematic Universe virtually since its inception.  You might say that these heroes were always destined to come into conflict, either with each other or with the government; the time and place was the only question left to be answered.

Frankly, this Civil War has been a long time coming.

Sony's Amazing Spider-Man Franchise: What Went Wrong?

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marvel.wikia.com

What happened to Spider-Man?  Sony had such high hopes for him when they acquired his rights.  The first two Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies were so well received that they planned multiple sequels to them.  However, after Spider-Man 3 received poor reviews, things started to change.  Back in 2010, the same year Iron Man 2 was released, Sony was working on its fourth Spider-Man film, a continuation of the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire film series that began in 2002.  However, rather than continue that series, Sony decided to reboot its Spider-Man franchise with The Amazing Spider-Man, a film which was released in 2012, just 2 months after The Avengers changed the game as far as blockbuster superhero film series were concerned.  No longer was it enough to release sequels and the occasional spinoff; the real money was in the shared universe.  When all the movies are independent but interconnected, a fan who wants the full experience has to watch all the films, buy all the films, buy the merchandise from all the films…  A shared universe can have a massive financial payoff for the studio ambitious and smart enough to pull it off.

Naturally, after The Amazing Spider-Man made a respectable $757.9 million at the box office, Sony decided to produce a sequel, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and expand the Amazing Spider-Man universe with multiple sequels and spinoffs.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was intended to serve as the launching point from which several future spinoff movies could follow:  The Amazing Spider-Man 3 and 4 were both announced a year before the release of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, followed 6 months later by the announcement of plans to develop movies based on Venom and the Sinister Six.  Unfortunately, this was when things started going horribly wrong.

When The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was released, it was critically panned and failed to live up to Sony’s expectations commercially ($709 million on a $255 million-budget (according to Wikipedia).  Though it made nearly triple its budget at the box office, it made less than its predecessor on a slightly-larger budget.  However, this was not the movie’s only fault.  The critical reception ultimately doomed the shared universe concept for Sony.  So what went wrong?

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www.josephsheppard.com