Movies & TV

so here's my shitty dilettante summary. MCU spent like multiple movies building up towards Thanos aka Josh Brolin. little drips and drabs here and there over the course of probably half a dozen movies for probably something like 2 years, until eventually he's the primary antagonist for two big ass movies, back to back. that's decent story telling: slowly winding it up, building tension for a long time until the audience is braying for resolution. there are only so many god-tier level baddies in the comics and Thanos was one of them. then they killed his ass, and went back in time and killed him again, so the guy is done-zo. like, whoever at disney thought it was OK for star wars to just keep bringing back clones of palpatine over and over was locked out of the marvel story sessions, thank god lol.

after the whole Thanos thing ends, we had the Loki TV show (two seasons) that provided a bunch of amusing and well executed context/lore for this whole "multiverse" thing and then we got movies about all these alternate universes crossing over into each other, and over the course of like multiple movies we start getting the impression that there's a god-tier dangerous villain at the center of this multiverse thing. also, its important to note, that a major plot point is that the stakes were much higher now than they were in those earlier movies. a supervillain from the distant future (i think) named Kang who conquered his universe and then sought to conquer all universes across all timelines. one version of him is such an a-hole that many of the other mostly a-hole versions of him banded together to lock his ass down. but then he got out of this pseudo-prison. sort of. it was kind of this "oh shit, we've possibly inadvertently freed a cosmic villain infinitely worse than thanos" vibe.

it's a super complicated context to establish in a narrative because there's all these realities and versions of this guy touching on things, appearing in the background stories of other marvel characters, and they are all being meticulously woven together while setting up that the most dangerous version of him is out there. and through it all, this guy, Kang (and all alternate versions of him) are portrayed by Jonathan Majors.

like Josh Brolin, Jonathan Majors is a talented professional actor. MFA from Yale School of Drama, yadda yadda, appeared in some solid art house stuff (Last Black Man in San Francisco), and was experiencing this moment in his career where he was appearing in everything (one of the Creed movies) while receiving critical acclaim, including an HBO miniseries (Lovecraft Country) and some US army recruitment campaign. and he's being established as this major character (playing dozens of different versions of himself) by Marvel Studios, so he's got to be banking while also staying as outrageously jacked as they make every superhero actor be in those movies.

(CW: intimate partner violence) anyway in 2023 Jon Majors (aka MCU's Kang) gets arrested for assault and harassment of an ex-girlfriend. i didn't really look into it closely because those stories make me really upset, but the evidence and context must have been fairly damning to the point of a giant capital formation not being able to spin anything or out lawyer the prosecution, because his agency dropped him, the military dropped his spots, he was released from all his projects, and then he was convicted.

so marvel studios drops him and that all makes sense. but, while i think they could have tried recasting the role and done some kind of wink, wink lampshading to acknowledge a different guy in the role, instead they just severed this entire interwoven series of story arcs and pretended like it didn't matter, with no resolution to any of it.

instead, it's like they took all these side stories that were meant to be a background preamble to the next big phase of the story, and started dumping them out as the main plot we are expected to give a shit about. it's very much an industrial management process response.... "the new microwave is a cock up, let's pivot to fridges and get something out by xmas." but that doesn't really work with stories. if you don't tie up all these narrative threads, you end up with a big mess and people aren't sure what they're even looking forward to anymore.

instead, it's just like, "oh there's a new marvel movie. who is in this one? pedro pascal is reed richards in a retrofuturistic alternate earth. oh that's kinda cool, i guess?" it's a story, it's comics, i'm sure the production value will be through the roof, but there's nothing on the menu for the larger arc.... so what is there to get invested in?