Captain Marvel crushes completely ridiculous success metric

Captain Marvel has become the seventh film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to break $1 billion. It’s an incredibly significant metric for multiple reasons but perhaps most importantly because achieving $1 billion was a made-up measure of success by people looking for reasons to call the film a failure.

It wasn’t until after Captain Marvel‘s record breaking opening weekend that sites pushing for the film’s failure started to move the goalposts. Before the opening weekend, sites like Bounding Into Comics and Cosmic Book News had started telling their readers the film would be a complete failure if it didn’t break $100 million.

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Endgame Plus Dark Phoenix Equals A Secret Wars Film

We can preserve the X-Men and Avengers Universes while still bringing all of the heroes together. The stingers for Avengers: Endgame and X-Men: Dark Phoenix should start setting up a Secret Wars film. Here’s how…

Avengers Endgame plus Dark Phoenix equals Secret Wars film

Disney has acquired Fox and with it comes the Marvel’s X-Men and all of the related properties. We don’t know when we’ll start seeing mutants in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but we do know it’s coming. This fact is cause to celebrate for fans who believe the MCU should reflect the comics. For others, (*raises hand*) there’s some hand-wringing as to what Disnification might mean for what’s become one of the more cinematically adventurous Universes under the superhero film genre. We’d be happy if the X-Men stayed in their own Universe (also, I’ll admit I’m one of the few people who would be totally fine with the Spideyverse staying with Sony).

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DC Universe Subscription: First Impressions

DC Universe is the new digital portal putting the many media iterations of DC, from comics to shows to movies, literally at your fingertips. Is the DC Universe subscription worth the introductory cost of $74.99 per year or $7.99 per month? I signed up for a year and here are my first impressions.

DC Universe subscription

This isn’t Marvel Unlimited. DC fans have been waiting for a DC digital service similar to what Marvel offers ever since…well…since Marvel launched Marvel Unlimited. In this early version of DC Universe, the company is offering both more and less than Marvel Unlimited. DC wants fans to have one place to find comics, television shows, films, and character biographies. They’re also attempting to build a community through discussion forums, regular giveaways, and a daily streaming show.

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The case against a shared Spideyverse / X-Men / MCU Universe, part two

Oh right. Spider-Man once had six arms. That happened.
Oh right. Spider-Man once had six arms. That happened.

Contrary to the possible misrepresentation of Sony Co-Chair Amy Pascal’s comments, an expanding Universe based solely around Spider-Man has a great deal of potential. Yes, there is a risk of Spideyverse exhaustion (although the reboot being so successful in spite of it being less than five years after the Raimi trilogy suggests otherwise), but I believe Pascal was suggesting Spiderverse-based films that don’t necessarily include Spider-Man. Unfortunately, with superhero films, we’re locked into the blockbuster mentality. That’s why I think Sony may be the best bet when it comes to breaking open a larger Spider-Man Universe. Sony has shown by continuing franchises like Resident Evil and Underworld that they’re  comfortable with their subsidiaries occasionally turning a profit of less than $100 million. This is where I see many of the Spideyverse spin-off films falling. Again, this all comes down to who has the rights to the below characters.

(note: this is part two in a series exploring why we don’t need the X-Men and Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. See part one here.)

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Requiem for an Engine: The Warren Ellis comic board’s legacy

It was a strange and fruitful blip in the online comic community. Writer Warren Ellis’s comic book message board The Engine ran from early September 2005 to Aug. 31, 2007, birthing in its short life new comic books, ongoing collaborative superteams, Eisner and Harvey Award-winning projects, and at least one marriage.

My affectionate memories are not only those of a participant, but of one of six hand-picked moderators (or Filthy Assistants, or Enforcers, or Attack Wombs, or…) from its birth to retirement. I spent hours a day reading, enforcing, and talking Engine, so it looms large in my memory as a crucible of comic history. The Engine was uniquely suited to making things happen, not just talking about them, and I’m heading back into the mid-aughts to explore what made it such fertile ground and why its echoes affect comics to this day.

The Engine logo by Brian Wood
The Engine logo by Brian Wood

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change”

The Engine’s original charter called for a unique structure: protected sections for published or contracted-to-publish creators working outside the superhero genre. Somewhere in the mid-aughts web small indie fora devoted to a particular creator’s work no doubt puttered along nicely, but major comic sites simply didn’t excise superheroes.

A few days before The Engine went live, Ellis expounded on his two primary intentions in 8/29/05’s Bad Signal e-newsletter:

[The Engine] serves two purposes: a point for conversation about FELL, DESOLATION JONES and my other adult-oriented, non-superhero, creator owned works. There are loads of other places for people to talk about PLANETARY, NEXTWAVE, JACK CROSS, ULTIMATE SECRET and all. And also a stage for like-minded creators, involved in original non-superhero work, to talk about what they’re doing. That, you’ll note, is not an all-inclusive and all-welcoming stance, and I’m going to be selective about it, too. There’ll also, with luck, be a space for pros to talk that’ll be read-only to everyone else: there are conversations worth having in public that wouldn’t survive thread-drift from the audience.
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