cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/18397465

It’s been six years since Steve Rodgers handed over Captain America reigns to Sam Wilson, Aka The Falcon, in “Avengers: Endgame.” Wilson (Anthony Mackie) will be the lead of Julius Onah’s “Captain America: Brave New World.” A trailer was released in the summer.

Two different cuts of the film test screened last week, and plot details for one of the cuts have leaked online. The person who attended didn’t seem to like the movie all that much.

Based on the folks I’ve spoken to, those who attended were either given a red or green bracelet and were split up into two different theaters. The reactions I’ve heard have not been very kind to this movie, which is being described as “inessential” and “flat.”

Reshoots on ‘Brave New World’ happened in August. This could explain why two different cuts were shown. Last year, after receiving negative test scores in another screening, and Marvel themselves underwhelmed by an early cut they saw of the film, ‘Brave New World’ was delayed to February 2025. Extensive reshoots were called, with “three major action sequences” having been filmed, between May and August 2024 in Atlanta.

‘Brave New World’ had originally wrapped filming in June 2023, and was set for a July 2024 release date, but it’s now turned into this monstrous mess for Marvel. You just don’t push a movie this big out of your calendar, and then decide to dump it in February, unless major trouble is brewing.

Last December, Matthew Orton was hired by Marvel to pen “additional scenes and material”. Orton’s work was shot during this summer’s reshoots. They’ve also added new characters to the story. Will audiences even show up to a Captain America movie that doesn’t star Chris Evans?

  • TommySoda@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    22
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    5 hours ago

    I mentally checked out of the MCU after Endgame. The only Marvel content I’ve seen beyond that is Guardians of the Galaxy 3.

    • wjrii@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      4 hours ago

      I watch pretty much all of it still. Eventually. Sometimes months later. I think Echo is the only one I haven’t finished, but I saw several of them months late.

      It’s mostly fine, but that’s about as far as I’d go. Among other issues, Multiverses dangle the specter of irrelevance in front of every story. I know it’s not always there in the script, but the meta commentary that everyone is replaceable and any event can be undone unavoidably reduces the stakes and my investment in characters. If they bother to make a point of concluding the “multiverse” arc, it needs to be something that promises to make the storytelling crutch mechanic of crossing between them much harder to invoke in the future. It can be utter handwavium, but I need that promise from the Marvel Industrial Complex to me as an audience member.

      Then more generally, the Marvel “house style” is either so overwhelming that it ends up the equivalent of pleasant but low-stakes episodic TV from the before-times with 23 episodes per season, or else it’s shoehorned into a halfhearted attempt to let a director or showrunner do their thing and reduces the effectiveness of both. There was good TV then, and there is good Marvel now, but the specialness has worn off.