ZZoMBiE13 said:
I'd love to see what might happen if they added Lady Thor or, dare I hope, Beta Ray Bill for one of the Avengers films.
I know eventually they'll have to do something to keep the films going after the current group runs out their contracts or whatever, but man the MCU was a perfect storm of great casting with great directors making amazing cinema that I really enjoyed. Here's hoping whoever they get for Avengers mk 2 will be equally as great.
Since they've already got Falcon set up to be Captain America in the comics and Lady Thor is currently riding high, this seems highly plausible. Brodie can sub in for Iron Man and anyone can replace Black Widow and Hawkeye. The only real trouble I can see is that the Avengers without HULK would pretty much suck.
EDIT: Forgot to mention just how much I hope Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers) gets a movie of her own. The current run in comics is going really well from what I hear. Again, here's hoping.
I think that not all that much is going to change to be honest, I suspect all the discussion on these grounds is simply a form of advertising. In today's world what's going on behind the scenes interests and excites people as much as the movies themselves. I imagine Marvel starts rumors just to keep their stuff in the limelight right now, they probably have a whole team of social media plants running all over the place to generate this stuff.
At the end of the day the guys playing The Avengers aren't that big a deal, they largely became a big deal because of the Marvel stuff. Chris Evans has very little on his plate, and despite him talking about "taking a break" or wanting to retire I just can't see him staying out of the game and giving up the fame and fortune he aspired to this long when he finally has it. Robert Downy Jr. is only valuable right now because he's Iron Man, he gets lots of film offers BECAUSE of Iron Man, the guy wrecked his life and was almost literally pulled out of a gutter, they didn't even want to cast him initially because he made such a mess out of things for himself. The man does not seem stupid and already made his mistakes, I think at the end of the day he might push for more money, but he knows what his fan base wants, and knows how he could fall again and what it's like to hit bottom. I think he'll keep being Iron Man as long as people want him to be Iron Man. Scarlet Johansson is just coming into her own for the kinds of movies she wants to make, and let's be honest, she's a good actress, but a big part of her appeal is her looks and sex appeal and she gets older every year. I can't see her walking away from the paydays, "Black Widow" arguably put her in the A-list, and really to keep her all they really have to do is offer her that Black Widow movie she wants and she'll probably eat out of a dog dish at their staff meetings if they ask her to. Chris Hemsworth is in the same basic case, pretty much being the male version of Scarlet Johansson, he's there for the sex appeal in the other direction, and he's already getting his starring roles, what's his career going to be like if he stops being "Thor" moving from being an A-lister doing blockbusters to a male lead in goofy romantic comedies? He probably did something, but other than Thor I mostly remember him as the male jock from "Cabin In The Woods", which was good, but Thor is pretty much the best thing he has going. Jeremy Renner was supposed to go places, but he didn't seem to really explode like some people expected, his "Hansel and Gretel" movie
was just okay. Samuel L. Jackson sort of forced his way into the role, as opposed to being asked to do it. The story I keep hearing is that when they did "The Ultimate Universe" not expecting it to be around as long, someone though it would be cool to make Nick Fury look like him. As you know from the way guys like Todd Macfarlane got sued (By the real "Tony Twist") if a celebrity complains they have room for legal action. Sam pretty much told them it was cool, as long as he got to play the character if they ever did a movie, years later they actually did start making movies and thus this agreement was invoked. Basically he wants to be there.
Pretty much any of these guys would probably regret it if they walked away and their money ran out while they tried to keep acting like an A-lister hoping for movies that might not come without piggybacking off of their "Avengers" fame. Those riding on sex appeal might get a couple of films but they wouldn't even be close to what they are making now in terms of paydays, fame, and exposure.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if they do play games with the casting, and make it look like there is behind the scenes tension at the same time. All of that generates attention. The actors get to stoke their egos while people beg them to come back, people discuss the new ones, and inevitably they bring the old guys back. As a general rule comics always revert back to the established status quo. In the end if they decide to replace the actors you'll see new guys playing these roles, NOT supporting cast stepping up.
Look at it this way, everyone seems to think Rhodey can step up and be Iron Man and point to how he did this in the comics, and then went on to become "War Machine". That worked as a gimmick to sell comics for a while while people waited for the old one, but it also worked because he had support from Stark and his technology, Rhodey isn't stupid but he's not a genius, and part of the whole appeal of "Iron Man" isn't just the armor and all of it's weapons, but the arrogant genius of the guy inside the armor. Indeed half the thing with Iron Man is that he runs into things that he can't blast his way through, oftentimes gets trashed, and then comes back with the perfect solution because Tony Stark is one of the smartest men on the planet. Beating the Iron Man armor has never really been the point, you have to beat the guy inside of it. Rhodey is great as a supporting character, War Machine works wonderfully as a way of bringing in some extra muscle, or to be trashed to sell the credentials of a new threat (especially in a shared continuity when they want to lead into an Iron Man story but the actual Iron Man is busy in another storyline for the moment). Bucky or Falcon being Cap both happened but again, largely just as attention getters for Steve.
All of the things that have been mentioned could happen, but I doubt they will remain for the long term in an ongoing franchise. I'll also say that the one I find least likely is Falcon taking over for Cap. I say this because they seemed to put a lot of time and effort into developing his costume and justifying why it exists, a sort of hybrid between the original "wing glider and bird" version and the later "Wakandan armor" version. I don't think they will retire that. Besides they have plans to promote two of Marvel's longest running "Black Heroes" we have Luke Cage getting a TV series and apparently "Black Panther" is already under production, they don't really need the diversity points, especially seeing as Cap and Black Panther are kind of redundant on a lot of levels (match ups between them are classic).
I'll also say that I wouldn't equate short term success with a character that should get a movie. Like it or not some characters simply work better as supporting characters or as part of an ensemble cast. Scarlet Witch, Gambit, and others have all tried to hold down their own books for many years and inevitably failed. Ms. Marvel is another one of these, she's always popular enough for people to want around, but after an initial run (like many such things) her titles
seem to inevitably die. Guardians Of The Galaxy sort of worked because of it's comparative obscurity even compared to various "support characters" and also because it was an ensemble cast and none of those characters had to hold down a movie on their own.
Let me put it to you this way, other than generating controversy can you name one major storyline that Ms. Marvel was starring in that wasn't playing off other characters, or so heavily connected to ongoing lore and backstory that it defies easy trimming for a movie to capture the essence of it? I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's not something most fans can do, where really a lot of what you see in the current movies are based around well known lore, and make nods to those kinds of storylines.
Not to mention you need to think in terms of doing the FX properly, which is why they power down characters. See, one of Marvel's big techniques is to do the flashier stuff with almost complete CGI and green screen. When you see Iron Man flying around and doing stuff for example a lot of it is a cartoon, and the fact that he's in armor makes it easy. Ms. Marvel for example does not do things that way, she runs around in a costume and flies as a person, which means they need to do more "Superman" type effects and then on top of that splice it with the pure CGI stuff and make it look seamless. With Falcon it was all live action to an extent so it wasn't quite as jarring. On top of this her powers are heavily energy based and you'll notice for example that while he's around, the amount of time characters like "Iron Man" actually fire is lower than you might think (I've read how expensive a convincing energy blast can be, going back to things like Star Trek and why they don't use phasers and such more often). The point I'm getting at here is that your talking a huge, expensive, movie with a character that treads a lot of the same territory as say "Green Lantern" which was an absolute disaster. To do Ms. Marvel you might run into similar problems (human head bouncing around obviously animated screen) and if you put her into a movie with an already inflated FX budget with conflicting styles... heh.
I'm not saying they won't do some lesser characters, and I anticipate we'll see a much-powered down version of Ms. Marvel at some point given what they have already dropped, but I don't think your going to see that many individual
hero movies, especially with characters that haven't been able to hold down titles and even appearances regularly. See, one of the things that you need to understand about "The Avengers" is that in the comics it's a lot different than the movies, the comics exist as a sort of "dumping ground" for characters that are popular but not popular enough to hold down their own books or appearance schedule. Despite the original "big name" formation it's generally been one or two big name heroes (like Cap and Iron Man) and a bunch of B an C listers. Characters created and being experimented with hoping they become more popular, or characters flagging in interest but still popular enough to have some of that interest so they get dumped into a team book. Very popular characters with stories people want to tell move to, or go back to, their own titles in rotations of a sort. To use Ms. Marvel as an example she's functionally been "kicked off the team" before albeit mostly by the writers because nobody really cared enough to keep her around. That whole "rape of Ms. Marvel" thing happened because it was callous in the way the characters just dismissed her reason for leaving as "yet another excuse why this character won't be around", and this was the reason the writers came up with to stop writing her. The irony is that if there was some outrage over the way that was handled, the character probably wouldn't be around now, because really that's arguably what saved her by getting people interested. While many people might see it this way nowadays since she's succeeded somewhat on her own, it could be argued Ms. Marvel's greatest contribution to Marvel and Comics in general was getting raped, impregnated with an "evil baby", and being dismissed for it and not having had the situation handled realistically because the writers didn't think it through. Of course at the same time they reason why people leave shared team books can be ridiculous all around, but that one happened to hit some raw nerves at just the right time and remain in the public eye long enough to become a feminist rallying point.
