The Inhumans Torched
September 6, 2017 10:27 AM   Subscribe

 
“Excelsior!”
posted by Fizz at 10:44 AM on September 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


Inhumans as a "prestige" series with an IMAX release was done entirely as a way to placate Ike Perlmutter. The Inhumans were a weird choice for the MCU (imagine GotG only dour) and keeping the project alive in some way let Perlmutter save face after Disney brass promoted Kevin Fiege out from under him.
posted by thecjm at 10:45 AM on September 6, 2017 [7 favorites]


Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.

This seems inaccurate.
posted by ominous_paws at 10:45 AM on September 6, 2017


How does Scott Buck keep getting work?
posted by 1970s Antihero at 10:50 AM on September 6, 2017 [10 favorites]




Disappointing that The Inhumans appears to have poor production values.


Anything that started out as a Jack Kirby project should have insane production values.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:54 AM on September 6, 2017 [34 favorites]


They should have taken this money and made the biggest budget Squirrel Girl. There's no way Inhumans unless it were to go Full Kirby, and the preview was sure as hell NOT Full Kirby.

(Don't tell me you never go Full Kirby, you always go Full Kirby, if such a thing is possible now that Jack is gone.)
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 10:55 AM on September 6, 2017 [26 favorites]


Thor will be going full Kirby
posted by Artw at 10:57 AM on September 6, 2017 [23 favorites]


I like practically everyone in the cast, it's gonna be a damn shame to see them all going down with this inevitably-doomed ship. I really would've enjoyed seeing Anson Mount tackle a well-written version of Black Bolt, but sadly it really doesn't look like that's in the cards.
posted by mstokes650 at 11:04 AM on September 6, 2017


Imagine if Marvel had spent this much hype on the delightful Agent Carter!

Mother fuckers.

*smashes lamp*


Jeez, I'm starting to run out of lamps.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:04 AM on September 6, 2017 [53 favorites]


Over in comics land Marvel has an excellent Black Bolt series written by Saladin Ahmed, if that helps.
posted by Artw at 11:06 AM on September 6, 2017 [6 favorites]


I always wonder how things like this get made. When I was a wee Master Excellent, back in the days before ubiquitous cheap broadband, I'd amuse myself by finding and reading movie scripts online. By and large, the scripts for good movies were genuinely fun to read - even the action-heavy ones, like Terminator or Aliens. Bad movies, on the other hand, were unsurprisingly a slog to get through.

So: How does an executive sit down with the script for Inhumans, and come away thinking "hah! This is a good show, and we should make it happen!"?
posted by Mr. Excellent at 11:08 AM on September 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


So: How does an executive sit down with the script for Inhumans, and come away thinking "hah! This is a good show, and we should make it happen!"?

Because it's the other way around? They decided they're doing a show based on property X, hire a showrunner (before his previous show has even be released to negative reviews), and then start writing the episodes. Even if someone noticed how bad the scripts were it was already too late to cancel without taking a big financial hit.
posted by thecjm at 11:13 AM on September 6, 2017 [10 favorites]


Yeah, nobody makes a film out of a script. They make scripts for films.

(okay, at this level, that's how it works)
posted by Naberius at 11:15 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


I like that Perlmutter has been publicly tied to this so much after it started looking bad, because it seems like a deliberate choice by someone in the organization to make him go down with the ship when it fails. Because everything I've read about his tenure has made him sound awful.
posted by jason_steakums at 11:16 AM on September 6, 2017 [5 favorites]


When the Netflix shows were being produced, the internet buzz was curious. Daredevil came out of the gate strong, and word floated around that the showrunner for Jessica Jones had a lot she wanted to say. Soon thereafter, Luke Cage found a showrunner who talked a lot about what he wanted to say. Then...silence. People openly wondered if Iron Fist would even be made. Maybe it'd be replaced by The Punisher.

Iron Fist gained its showrunner much later in its pre-production period than the first three Netflix/Marvel series. The new guy, Scott Buck, didn't talk about what he wanted to say. The internet vibe was "oh shit, we have to put out a whole other series...fuck, throw it together!" Per the reviews, the show came out about as you'd expect: half-assed and looking fairly cheap. It felt very much like a box-checking exercise. They made it because they had to, and they made it quicker and faster than they should have. The star, Finn Jones, even admitted that he learned some fight choreography -- for a kung fu superhero -- twenty minutes before they shot some scenes.

Now we have Inhumans, and holy shit, it's Iron Fist: Part Deux. The pre-release internet vibe was "oh shit, we have to put out a whole other series...fuck, throw it together!" Per the reviews, the show came out about as you'd expect: half-assed and looking fairly cheap. It felt very much like a box-checking exercise. They made it because they had to, and they made it quicker and faster than they should have.

Perhaps the appeal of Scott Buck is that while his product may not be good, it is finished. When schedules and budgets tighten, that's a majorly marketable skill. Or maybe that's not why he was hired, I don't freakin' know.
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 11:16 AM on September 6, 2017 [24 favorites]


The director of the first two episodes of Inhumans admits he was hired because he can work fast and cheap.
posted by thecjm at 11:20 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


Feige was right to do what he did. Inhumans would have made an excellent movie, if it weren't for Marvel's insistence on retrofitting it to be an X-Men replacement that literally no one cares about. Other than Kamala Khan, no one gives a shit about Inhumans as Off-Brand X-Men. We have the X-Men already. Give us something newer and, god forbid, better.

This is pure speculation, but I'm guessing that's why Matt Fraction parted ways on that series. He gave plenty of early indications that he understood what makes the Inhumans interesting. Marvel clearly didn't go that way at all.

Likewise you'd be nuts to add to the already insane juggling act of handling all the MCU continuity plus all the interference from the suits, and throw in meshing with TV continuity on top of that, especially when you don't control the direction TV's going in. Feige's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but he's made way better choices than Ike Perlmutter.

The director of the first two episodes of Inhumans admits he was hired because he can work fast and cheap.

Yeah, that's Perlmutter's MO. He'll have "do more with less" on his tombstone. Which will probably be made from poured concrete, tastefully stained.
posted by middleclasstool at 11:24 AM on September 6, 2017 [9 favorites]


Yeah, I'm not sure I'm ready for Space Ramsay Bolton. I could just about get through Iron Fist and Defenders was basically an exercise in "how will Danny fuck it up", but man nothing I've seen of the Inhumans previews has really stood out as Must See TV.
posted by Kyol at 11:25 AM on September 6, 2017


All I want to know is whether there's krackle.
posted by Etrigan at 11:35 AM on September 6, 2017 [3 favorites]


Scott Buck keep getting hired because delivering a series of hour-long television shows on schedule and in budget which gets good ratings is extremely hard and relatively few people have shown they can do it. Once you've proven that you can do it, you have to f*ck it up numerous times before you stop getting hired.

An important point to reflect on is that a TV show-runner is a thing of a different sort from a feature director. The former is the CEO of a sizable and complex ongoing business operation and has to be able to run a bunch of creative and financial and operational processes simultaneously. The latter is simply the hub of the creative process, with heavy supervision and support on the business and operational side. Even on the creative side, a director who is young or untried (at all, or at the project's scale) will have a lot of collaborators (writer(s), editor(s), DP) to ease him through things.

Also, I don't think people in the industry hate on Buck for the last seasons of Dexter the way a lot of TV fans and critics do. The last seasons of Dexter were transparent, post-creative-exhaustion money grab for the cast, Showtime and the equity participants in the production, and Buck did as good a job as anyone tending to the grab for the money.
posted by MattD at 11:36 AM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


Wait I thought Legion was the X-Men replacement? And somehow that show turned out to be remarkably good, thanks mostly to its bravery in novel storytelling techniques. OTOH it sure doesn't replace the X-Men for a beat-em-up film frenzy. (And honestly what can replace Stewart and McKellen vamping it up?)

I can remember the exact moment I gave up on the larger MCU. It was Agents of SHIELD, the episode where they brought back Zombie Ward. That was it, I was out. Many thanks to our Fanfare support group for help in making that life-affirming decision.
posted by Nelson at 11:37 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


Wait I thought Legion was the X-Men replacement? And somehow that show turned out to be remarkably good, thanks mostly to its bravery in novel storytelling techniques.

I think you mean completely awesome. Not only is it phenomenally good nontraditional storytelling, it's beautiful.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:38 AM on September 6, 2017 [14 favorites]


Getting a show done on time doesn't mean a lot if nobody wants to watch it. They need to fire Scott Buck, find someone else to be Iron Fist, and shove the colorless Attilan Royal Family aside and concentrate on some new Inhumans. If they're going to push them as mutant replacements, they should study the current X-movies and note that Deadpool and Logan were far superior to the main franchise; I would walk over just about anyone from Apocalypse to have Negasonic Teenage Warhead give me the finger.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:40 AM on September 6, 2017 [10 favorites]


How the hell did they go and make an Inhumans product that wasn't a Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan vehicle? That seems like a massive missed opportunity.
posted by Itaxpica at 11:42 AM on September 6, 2017 [7 favorites]


Wait I thought Legion was the X-Men replacement? And somehow that show turned out to be remarkably good, thanks mostly to its bravery in novel storytelling techniques. OTOH it sure doesn't replace the X-Men for a beat-em-up film frenzy. (And honestly what can replace Stewart and McKellen vamping it up?)

Legion is Fox, Inhumans is Disney (and Disney-owned Marvel) trying to fill the X-Men's niche with something they own the screen rights for. And failing spectacularly.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 11:43 AM on September 6, 2017 [6 favorites]


All I want to know is whether there's krackle.


They didn't have the budget for krackle, so they got a guy to stand off camera and wave a strobe light around.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:44 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


They need to fire Scott Buck, find someone else to be Iron Fist, and shove the colorless Attilan Royal Family aside and concentrate on some new Inhumans.

I think that isn't necessary. I think you do what they did in Defenders, play to the ridiculousness of Danny Rand's milquetoast whiny rich kid privilege somehow being chosen as "The Immortal Iron Fist." ...and then let him actually develop and change. Iron Fist is like the first hipster superhero. He's the embodiment of unearned white privilege (the only white kid in K'un-Lun is the one who beats the dragon? C'mon!) who's slumming it for authenticity. Let the other three Defenders ground him and call him out when he gets bitchy. Superheroes shouldn't be perfect.

Also MORE COLLEEN! COLLEEN IS AWESOME! DAUGHTERS OF THE DRAGON FTW!!!
posted by leotrotsky at 11:45 AM on September 6, 2017 [7 favorites]


A significant chunk of the Hawaii professional acting community ended up in Inhumans and its crushing to us all that its as lousy as it is.
posted by Joey Michaels at 11:47 AM on September 6, 2017 [6 favorites]


After watching the preview a couple of months ago, all I could think was "boring". Granted, I'm not familiar at all with the characters/universe, but the preview most definitely did not spur me me into wanting find out more.


Yeah, I'm not sure I'm ready for Space Ramsay Bolton


I read that as Gordon Ramsay, and decided I would watch the fuck out of Gordon Ramsay in spaaaaaace.
posted by littlesq at 11:49 AM on September 6, 2017 [15 favorites]


The IMAX decision is the one that really boggles the mind. I mean if the previews were at all indicative of the quality of the show, pushing it to IMAX is just asking for it to be torn apart. Far better to release it quietly and work on improving it as you go in hopes of obtaining a loyal audience over time instead of throwing it up for immediate and unforgiving ridicule.

Really though the problem is as much in the complete absence of visual style as the silly storylines. Summoning the spirit of Kirby, Steranko, or Ditko into the look of the shows like SHIELD or the Inhumans would be a huge improvement. Right now, I'd rather see an Inhumanoids live action show than what I saw from Inhumans.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:49 AM on September 6, 2017 [3 favorites]


I've always hated the Inhumans and was as shocked as anyone that Agents of SHIELD made them fairly interesting. This looks like a sharp return to absolutely everything I can't stand about the mythos, though.
posted by eamondaly at 11:50 AM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


Agent Carter's only misstep was cutting Angie out of season 2 and AO3 agrees with me

in contrast, Inhumans seems to have yet to make a step correctly
posted by vibratory manner of working at 11:50 AM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


Okay, all the bad press about this virtually guarantees I'll watch some of it. I won't pay money to see the IMAX stuff, but I'm not above a little morbid rubbernecking. I have to see for myself how bad a professionally-made TV show can be.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 11:56 AM on September 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


I have to see for myself how bad a professionally-made TV show can be.


As long as you're not a Nielsen household...
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:58 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


Other than Kamala Khan, no one gives a shit about Inhumans as Off-Brand X-Men. We have the X-Men already.

Disney/Marvel no longer own the TV/movie rights to the X-Men, Fox does. So as far as they are concerned, the X-Men no longer exist.
posted by sideshow at 11:59 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


in contrast, Inhumans seems to have yet to make a step correctly

Lockjaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 12:10 PM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


The Inhumans push is 100% about Perlmutter wanting a "X-men with the numbers scratched off" team to promote for comic and tv/film projects instead of basically supporting another company's properties by continuing to promote the X-men heavily in comics (and merchandise).

To a certain extent the also have done this in regards to the Fantastic Four who have been essentially sidelined for several years in the Marvel Comic universe.

It's a short sighted strategy because ultimately even if Marvel doesn't get direct revenue benefits from the X-men movies it helps maintain a healthy Marvel movie ecosystem.

I think the fundamental flaw is that the X-men have a substantial built-in fanbase built on decades of promotion and lots of original comic stories to draw on and the Inhumans have basically been poorly developed for decades. I'm not saying that you can't do something cool with them because GotG managed to be a successful exercise but the Inhumans project never looked even remotely healthy.
posted by vuron at 12:18 PM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


> Wait I thought Legion was the X-Men replacement?

Legion is Fox, Inhumans is Disney (and Disney-owned Marvel) trying to fill the X-Men's niche with something they own the screen rights for. And failing spectacularly.


Yeah, I'm talking comics/movies at Marvel here. Marvel is pissed that they can't get the screen rights to X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man back completely. They got enough of a compromise on Spider-Man, they completely stopped making Fantastic Four comics years ago, and they'd kill X-Men comics in a second if they weren't among their biggest sellers. The move to the Inhumans was an attempt to say "Look! Basically the same thing over here! You guys want that?" If it had succeeded, it would have spurred the basis for the movies, probably. But people mostly shrugged at it.

Legion is an out-of-continuity standalone thing that isn't at all an X-Men replacement. As it currently stands, it's barely connected to the X-Men world at all. It is in its own parallel world where we don't even really know what year it is.

And it's also the perfect model for what I'm talking about. Legion could have been Yet Another X-Franchise. Instead they took that character and did something no one had ever seen before on TV. And people went fucking bonkers for it. If Marvel would have had the stones to do that with the Inhumans, they could have potentially made their most interesting and engaging movie ever.

Disney/Marvel no longer own the TV/movie rights to the X-Men, Fox does. So as far as they are concerned, the X-Men no longer exist.

I know they don't own the screen rights. But they still make the comics. Because right now they can't not make them. Inhumans has been their attempt to be able to stop making (or at least scale way back) X-Men comics the way they did FF.
posted by middleclasstool at 12:18 PM on September 6, 2017 [5 favorites]


It's a fast moving thread so I just wanted to point out that the post title is very good.
posted by selfnoise at 12:20 PM on September 6, 2017 [3 favorites]


I read that as Gordon Ramsay, and decided I would watch the fuck out of Gordon Ramsay in spaaaaaace.

I mostly can't stand Gordon Ramsay, but I'd love to see him yelling about the cleanliness of the kitchen in the Star Wars Cantina episode of "Kitchen Nightmares"
posted by thivaia at 12:34 PM on September 6, 2017 [8 favorites]


I had to look up pictures of Scott Buck as I was pretty sure he was just an Alan Smithee stand-in.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 12:51 PM on September 6, 2017


Marvel TV has been a story of diminishing returns for me. I loved the first season of DareDevil, both of Agent Carter, Jessica Jones and then only sort of liked the second DareDevil and Luke Cage, only watched part of the first episode of Iron Fist and have only made it two into The Defenders. I like watching Weaver and it's only 8 episode so I'll probably finish that one. They hire some very good actors for these thing and then don't always seem to know what to do with them.

(on preview) I realize that I totally forgot about Agents of Shield. I made it about 1.5 seasons through that before I threw my hands up.
posted by octothorpe at 1:05 PM on September 6, 2017


Agents of Shield season 4 is great.
posted by Pendragon at 1:12 PM on September 6, 2017 [7 favorites]


Pity, you should catch the last two seasons of AoS, because it was pretty good.
But you knew people were going to chime in about that, lol
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:13 PM on September 6, 2017


As long as you're not a Nielsen household...

We're more like a Leslie Nielsen household.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 1:16 PM on September 6, 2017 [11 favorites]


I love Legion but the economic model of FX lets it succeed with barely a third of the domestic audience of Agents of Shield and in all likelihood an even smaller share of the audience of the Netflix Marvel shows. Moreover, Disney has a ton of momentum in their existing cast and characters on their side of Marvel, while Fox is facing a tough situation with the original X-Men aged out, "First Class" X-Men attritting out soon as well ... only so much you can do with Deadpool, and so you might as well experiment a bit.
posted by MattD at 1:23 PM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]


Legion is the Fargo guys unleashed on a minor X-Men character and producing something that's really quite amazingly Chris Claremont like, despite apparently not wanting to make it too comicbooky* or connected to continuity.

* I mean, it's fairly comicbooky - it's about Professor X's secret son (despite not quite flat out saying that) and has got a pretty deep cut villain in the end.But the Claremonty stuff is more about specific plot beats or themes.
posted by Artw at 1:39 PM on September 6, 2017 [6 favorites]


Chris Claremont is a pretty good inspiration point for a television series; excellent character dynamics, soap-opera stories, an infinite supply of subplots and hanging threads, and superheroics as a pick-your-metaphor-of-choice. The X-Men movies were an instrumental part of Marvel's cinematic evolution, but really should have been an big budget TV series all along.
posted by Eikonaut at 1:52 PM on September 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


Legion is more Sienkiewiczy than it's Claremonty.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:52 PM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


It's very both.
posted by Artw at 2:08 PM on September 6, 2017


Claremont + Sienkiewicz is where you get Demon Bears, so I'm happy with that.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 2:09 PM on September 6, 2017 [8 favorites]


FIngers crossed the New Mutants film isn't garbage.
posted by Artw at 2:16 PM on September 6, 2017 [3 favorites]


*smashes lamp*

I like the mental image this conjours of you on your couch, with a giant box by your side simply marked LAMPS, and a towering pile of debris on the far side of the room.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 2:20 PM on September 6, 2017 [18 favorites]


Agents of Shield season 4 is great.

No, 'cause I watched the first four episodes of season 4 and it was so fucking boring that I literally died and my husband had to bury me in the back yard and then I mysteriously came back, but I came back wrong, but even resurrected zombie me wasn't stupid enough to give Agents of Shield another chance.
posted by Squeak Attack at 2:46 PM on September 6, 2017 [24 favorites]


Chris Claremont is a pretty good inspiration point for a television series

Only if you cut off the inspiration at about the end of Dave Cockrum's second run as X-Men artist. Virtually all of the major characters were eventually either Flanderized or had a long-lost/unknown relative pop out of nowhere with a convenient plot-hook-friendly complication (Legion was, originally, a perfect example of this); "soap-opera stories" is not really a good goal--the continuity was both hopelessly byzantine and ignored anytime Claremont felt like it. The graphic novel model, which is mirrored in the current TV trend of season-long stories that are more or less self-contained (with maybe a few dangling plot hooks to draw people back when the next season rolls out) is much better IMO.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:56 PM on September 6, 2017 [5 favorites]


like the mental image this conjours of you on your couch, with a giant box by your side simply marked LAMPS, and a towering pile of debris on the far side of the room.


Stop sneaking into my apartment while I'm away.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 3:41 PM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


long-lost/unknown relative pop out of nowhere with a convenient plot-hook-friendly complication (Legion was, originally, a perfect example of this)

I have the issue of Uncanny X-men where the Muir Island Saga run ended (somewhere back in the crawlspace at my parents house), and seem to recall that they just dusted off their hands of the Legion character in one or two panels and that was that. Looking back on it now, it was almost a "Poochie died on the way back to his home planet" kind of moment.
posted by Existential Dread at 3:44 PM on September 6, 2017


Well, I hope that this Inhumans project doesn't work, for small-r republican reasons. Blackagar and Medusalith, you may call yourselves King and Queen of the Inhumans, but I don't accept that as a valid basis for governance.

You too, Diana of Themiscyra and Arthur of Atlantis. ESPECIALLY YOU, that dingus who keeps yelling, "Imperius Rex." And don't go hiding in the corner, Mister T'Challa.
posted by Guy Smiley at 3:59 PM on September 6, 2017 [5 favorites]


FIngers crossed the New Mutants film isn't garbage.

They're saying it's a horror film. There's acres of room to fuck that up, but if they don't fuck that up, hoo boy.
posted by middleclasstool at 4:13 PM on September 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


"Imperius Rex."

Sometimes it is "Imperius Sex."
posted by Artw at 4:26 PM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


I've gotten at least some enjoyment out of almost all the Marvel movie and TV adaptations so far, but from the previews, this looks like a slog. If they'd had the budget to go full Kirby, as it were, it could have been fun, but apparently they tried to do it on the cheap.

I'll probably sample an episode or two, if for no other reason than to see Lockjaw as a live-action character, but the "want to watch" factor is pretty low here.
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 4:31 PM on September 6, 2017


The IMAX decision is the one that really boggles the mind.

Nthing this. From a production standpoint I can't believe they'd set themselves up for that - they were asking to be savaged. Blowing it up to IMAX just makes all the wrinkles more obvious. The initial promo photos, to me, made the show look like it had way too low of a budget and when I saw that CNET article, linked to above, bragging about its low budget / bootstrap "charm" I knew the show was going to land with a thud.

The source material, though it deals with domestic intrigues, is cosmic. They'd be much better off either making them into a movie on their own or introduce them in an established character's film series (the Guardians or Thor being the obvious choices). Seriously, the Kree exist in the Guardians films and they created the Inhumans so have a storyline where they leave Earth / the Moon / or are flying in a colony ship looking for answers to their nature and find their creators wanting so they decide to destroy the Kree. Thor and/or the Guardians try to stop them. In the end, they are convinced to move on from that. Include them in the next film cycle where they are front and centre in a movie version of the Annihilation Wave. Use them to help establish Kamala Khan and you can use her to establish the next group of younger Avengers.
posted by Ashwagandha at 4:53 PM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]


Legion is also inspired by the brilliant Si Spurrier's run on X-Men Legacy. I would say that the TV show is closer to Spurrier's Legion than Claremont's.
posted by SageLeVoid at 5:28 PM on September 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


I don't give a shit about actual comic books, but y'all are making me want to watch Legion again (for the, uh, third time) something powerful.
posted by soren_lorensen at 5:37 PM on September 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


>I don't accept that as a valid basis for governance...

>ESPECIALLY YOU, that dingus who keeps yelling, "Imperius Rex."

No worries there. Namor doesn't govern anything, he's got annoyed functionaries figuring out who's gonna collect the garbage in Atlantis while he's out hitting on Sue Storm, beating up the other three, and calling people "surface-man".
posted by Sing Or Swim at 5:59 PM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]




I love Legion but the economic model of FX lets it succeed with barely a third of the domestic audience of Agents of Shield and in all likelihood an even smaller share of the audience of the Netflix Marvel shows.

That's interesting, could you expand on it? Is it just because FX aims for a smaller / more demographically-specific audience?
posted by whir at 7:46 PM on September 6, 2017


Mmm yeah, when I watched the trailer and Medusa's hair just hung there limp, I knew it was going to be a low budget poo fest.

Since having a kid, I just don't have time to waste on low budget crappily made TV. There's enough good stuff being produced now, I can direct my attention elsewhere.
posted by Fleebnork at 6:37 AM on September 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


There's doing more with less - which can be great, really, so much SF inventiveness has come out of that - and there's just doing less.
posted by Artw at 7:15 AM on September 7, 2017 [4 favorites]


I love Legion but the economic model of FX lets it succeed with barely a third of the domestic audience of Agents of Shield and in all likelihood an even smaller share of the audience of the Netflix Marvel shows.

That's interesting, could you expand on it? Is it just because FX aims for a smaller / more demographically-specific audience?


ABC (which airs Agents of Shield) puts on three hours of primetime every night, two hours of late-night every weeknight, news, daytime, weekend programming, sports, special events (e.g., awards shows)...

FX (which airs Legion) puts on about three hours of original programming each week, and they really only do that for prestige and to drive viewers to the far cheaper reruns and movies that occupy FX for the other 165 hours.
posted by Etrigan at 9:05 AM on September 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


If we're talking Iron Fist, no, he fucking needs to die. Write him out entirely, because we really don't need to see another shitty white kid being better at being "Asian"ish than Asians themselves.

Compromise -- Instead of season 2 of Iron Fist starring Danny Rand, convert the show into "The Book of the Iron Fist," an anthology about the past heroes who bore that name. First up: Wu Ao-Shi, the Pirate Queen of Pinghai Bay, who found martial arts to be inefficient and instead channeled her magical punch energy into her bow, which she used to destroy entire enemy ships with arrows that fell like "lightning from God."

That's all direct from the comics and how the fuck is it not a movie already.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:39 AM on September 7, 2017 [11 favorites]


This is a side-note and I don't even know who the Inhumans are but... yesterday I saw this tweet about, as I understand, what the best selling comics are, and my mind was blown.
posted by latkes at 10:01 AM on September 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Yeah, those are bookstore sales of trades I beleive, not the floppy issues you see on comicbook store shelves, but the point is a good one: The over-focus on those floppy issues that the industry, or portions of it, has, is ridiculous. And Marvel in particular is killing itself by killing titles with low floppy sales that sell really well in trade - your Squirrel Girls and the like - because of that ridiculous hyperfocus.
posted by Artw at 10:35 AM on September 7, 2017 [3 favorites]


WAIT IS MARVEL KILLING SQUIRREL GIRL???!!!
posted by latkes at 10:38 AM on September 7, 2017


Not that I know of but it is in that category.

Actually don't hold me to that as there's a lot of chop and change for Generations, their next cluster fuck of an event.
posted by Artw at 10:41 AM on September 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Oh hey, it got mentioned here....

Legacy Isn’t Going to Save Marvel Comics

Monthly print comic sales don’t tell the whole story; publishers are notoriously dodgy about stating digital sales, and books like The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl survive low monthly numbers because of consistent success in trade collections. But these numbers tell us enough to understand that Legacy, Marvel’s upcoming not-quite-a-relaunch that aims to bring back “classic” elements of the Marvel universe without jettisoning recent character additions, addresses few—if any—of Marvel’s current issues.
posted by Artw at 11:02 AM on September 7, 2017


(It's kind of a counter example to the phenomena I was mentioning there, but there are plenty of canceled-at-six-issues titles that are not)
posted by Artw at 11:03 AM on September 7, 2017


Compromise -- Instead of season 2 of Iron Fist starring Danny Rand, convert the show into "The Book of the Iron Fist," an anthology about the past heroes who bore that name.

I'd watch the hell out of that. Those stories are great and would make a great anthology series. Glowing arrows? Fisherman husbands with inferiority complexes? Shiiiiiiiiiiiit.

I'd also be okay with, you know, just recasting with an Asian guy and not saying a word about it. Then get a budget so you could show a dude punching a dragon in the heart. Then adapt the Seven Cities of Heaven storyline.

I might even have grudgingly accepted White Danny if they made him at all likable or relatable. Danny's supposed to be a fuckup, but he's supposed to be an endearing fuckup who can pull it together in a crisis and excel at the one thing he's good at: being the Iron Fist. He's supposed to be charming, in a kind of bumbling puppy way that you might date but never marry, money or no money. But they dropped that ball too. I harbor no small amount of resentment over being denied What Could Have Been.
posted by middleclasstool at 11:28 AM on September 7, 2017 [3 favorites]




I suspect a Kamala Khan show is safe from having Perlmutter throw his weight behind it, for a variety of reasons.
posted by Artw at 11:50 AM on September 7, 2017


> Also MORE COLLEEN! COLLEEN IS AWESOME! DAUGHTERS OF THE DRAGON FTW!!!

Here's what I want to see happen in Iron Fist season 2.
posted by homunculus at 11:51 AM on September 7, 2017


And then Misty goes full badass Pam Grier, as she would, and then WHOA UNEXPLAINED CROSS-DIMENSIONAL PORTAL and suddenly Lin Beifong from Korra is there, bending metal and whooping ass, and there's me in my jammies just eatin' chips and havin' a grand old time
posted by middleclasstool at 11:57 AM on September 7, 2017 [2 favorites]


Squirrel Girl's terrible sales figures make me think less of comics nerds as a group.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:19 PM on September 7, 2017


They're actually pretty good, just not in the one format that comics nerds of a particular type value.
posted by Artw at 12:21 PM on September 7, 2017


(Because it's a stupid format that excludes most people, I suspect)
posted by Artw at 12:22 PM on September 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


It excludes me, and I think the record will show that I quite enjoy superhero comics. I just don't happen to live close enough to a store that sells them to buy physical issues more than a couple of times a year.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 12:23 PM on September 7, 2017


Squirrel Girl is one of the few pieces of media right now that gives me a feeling of relief, joy and optimism.

Even when she's kicking butts, SG is so positive and nice to her foes, patiently explaining why they should consider a change of lifestyle while she knocks them off the planet. The teamwork message is also so strong and hopeful.

Squirrel Girl is good, clean fun in the most feminist, progressive sense.
posted by latkes at 12:26 PM on September 7, 2017 [4 favorites]


They're actually pretty good, just not in the one format that comics nerds of a particular type value.

Tragically, those nerds include everybody in a decision-making capacity at the company that owns her IP. :(
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:29 PM on September 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Squirrel Girl is one of the few pieces of media right now that gives me a feeling of relief, joy and optimism.

New issues are a high point of my month, for all the reasons you mentioned.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:30 PM on September 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


I live close enough to a few comic book shops but I've never actually bought a single comic book from a shop and I'd have no idea how to even begin figuring out how or what to buy and in what order. It's such a strange distribution model to base an industry model on.
posted by octothorpe at 12:33 PM on September 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


SIgns are DC is beginning to take the problems with the single issue market serious and even invest in graphic novels aimed at younger readers. Marvel on the other hand are going big on Lenticular covers and PR clusterfucks.

The Goofus and Galants positions of the big 2 have basically flipped over since the Nu52 days....
posted by Artw at 12:51 PM on September 7, 2017 [1 favorite]


Gallant: offers a selection of graphic novels that can be sold at Scholastic Book Fairs.

Goofus: Insists that you buy his five variant covers, each with a different hologram card.
posted by haileris23 at 1:07 PM on September 7, 2017 [8 favorites]


Did they hire a marketing director from a baseball card company?
posted by octothorpe at 1:37 PM on September 7, 2017 [3 favorites]








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