Haaaaaa, no.
How do I put this. Warning: lengthy scrawl ahead.
So, there's this whole, dark/gritty/"realistic" thing that's shown up in recent DC-Universe superhero movies. Bob has done his best to heap fairly indiscriminate hatred on said franchises, often in spite of having mixed-to-positive feelings about the movies presented at the time of first watching.
Tired though I am of that, I don't want to harp; I don't agree, but that's his right, and I think I have a measure of understanding of where it comes from. Dark/gritty/"realistic" pushes his buttons and clashes with what I suspect are somewhat nostalgia-tinged memories of more fun, light, upbeat superheroes of his past. I don't even mean to suggest that there shouldn't be a more varied palette of tone in the tv/video/film versions of the DC Universe; "Arrow" gives me a big old headache, and I remember the TV version of "Flash" that so badly wanted to be Batman; it was kind of embarrassing.
Further, I suspect how MB feels about d/g/"r"'s rulership of certain parts of the modern superhero mindspace is not unlike how I feel about, say, "Transformers" movies, or Adam Sandler movies: they're horrible, but their financial success inevitably means there will be more of them. Even though we're capable of so much better.
So, yeah, I think I get that.
But.
I'm not entirely sure MB has grasped that the way Marvel is oh-so-carefully handling its movie/tv franchises, while not intrinsically d/g/"r" itself, is most definitely a parallel response to a similar problem that d/g/"r" is trying to address.
Namely: a story about superheroes is not inherently a story that's relatable to the people watching it.
DC's answer to this has been mostly in the worlds it has presented. We may quietly laugh at the unlikelihood of a millionaire taking to the streets with his high-tech armor and his martial arts training to combat crime (and no one quite figuring out how his two personas intersect), but it presents a world with enough parallels to our own that most of us suspend disbelief. Batman's story is human-scale, in a lot of ways; the people seem mortal and breakable, the villains not all that far off of the news stories that horrify us in the daily paper. The recent "Man of Steel" tried something similar in suggesting that god-like powers didn't always convey the ability to prevent human-scale tragedy and loss.
Marvel has taken a different route, where the crises and situations are more super-heroic but the characters and their relationships are more flawed and relatable. Tony Stark is arrogant and self-destructive. Bruce Banner lives in fear of the powers that have made him a hermit and a fugitive. Thor has a dysfunctional family and obligations that he doesn't know if he can live up to. Steve Rogers is an optimist in a cynical world, one where his abilities give him the ability to answer that cynicism- but only to a degree.
More, in the Avengers world, those pieces have been slotted together with incredible care, creating a Jenga-like tower where the impossible, the unlikely, and the human still manage to mesh. Tony is still vulnerable outside of his suit. Thor's mortal allies are suddenly dealing with the attentions of god-like adversaries. The Hulk can't be certain of self-control. The Captain symbolizes the ideals of a country that may fall short of those ideals. New pieces are slotted in, and old ones are slotted out, always with care: today's adversary is the dark elves, the next day's the American military.
What you don't tend to see? Asgardian vampires injected with super-soldier vaccine using Skrull technology led by alternative-earth evil versions of the heroes... Because that's where the business tends to go bugf@#%.
And this is the problem with letting slavish love of comics, particularly older comics, be the guiding light of new media ventures. After fifty, sixty, seventy years of backstory and lore, most of these inter-connected worlds have, indeed, gone bugf@#%. So much so that characters have been resurrected multiple times, rebooted multiple times, re-costumed, re-imagined, given "what ifs" and gaiden stories, different nationalities, races, sexes, sexual orientations, desperately trying to keep enough plates spinning that the shards on the floor don't capture too much attention. The comics aren't the place this has all worked perfectly well in the past; the comics are the place where we've seen how badly everything can go haywire when a hundred different writers with different priorities work on very vaguely the same work for several decades.
Where anything can happen, we stop relating, stop caring. Marvel's recent efforts have paid off in part because they are relatable and understandable to someone who doesn't know the significance of side-character X from issue #36; that scholars of "the lore" might get a moment of glee was a bonus, but not the whole point of the endeavor. There's a difference between creating a deep and interconnected world where everything miraculously seems to fit together and jamming anything and everything from the attic into the box and shaking it, hoping it all eventually falls into place.
So... Fourth-wall sniping "She Hulk"? Out-of-left-field Superman-level power "Sentry"? Blade? "Let's just stick vampires in a show that doesn't acknowledge the existence of precognitives, just because it would be 'fun'...?"
I confess I don't have absolute confidence, even with as much care as they've been taking, that Marvel will keep this delicate balancing act going forever. Offerings like "Ant Man" and "Guardians of the Galaxy" have me slightly concerned that we may be about to see the Jenga game at its tipping point, though I truly hope I'm mistaken.
I'll further admit that Agents of Shield is of increasingly waning interest to me, not because of a lack of Marvel-dom, but because most of the characters behave more like children pretending to be secret agents than actual adults.
But I am reasonably confident that sticking a wish-list of colorful superheroes into the works with no regard for how or whether they might actually fit into a new and perilous media continuity not only is not the answer for re-invigorating AoS, but a good way to accelerate screwing up Marvel's new success six ways from Sunday.
