Film Land - How Do You Solve a Problem Like Thor?

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Edited by Robert Beach

I have a lot of tangents that develop as I do these articles, and one of the most prominent ones has become “how do you solve a problem like Thor?” It’s a question that’s hung around Marvel’s neck like a dead weight ever since 2013 when Thor: The Dark World’s derailment came to a crushing finale. Thor's mighty sequel hammer lost to Hunger Games: Catching Fire at the box office. 

Overall, it’s easy to see how Thor ended up on the fringes of Marvel’s slate. The first Thor was a refreshing and fun fantasy comedy. It served as the world’s introduction to Marvel’s cosmic mythology and acted as the most child-friendly Marvel superhero production. 

Since then, Guardians of the Galaxy has come in as the new face of Marvel cosmic, and the Studio has reclaimed (Editor's Note: joint custody) the rights to Spider-Man to make it their kid-friendly franchise. Even Thor’s possible role as a mystics and magic franchise is teetering now that Dr. Strange and Iron Fist are on the way.  

It also doesn’t help that Chris Hemsworth has proved himself the least versatile of the main Marvel actors. With all that looming overhead, I still ask "how do you solve a problem like Thor?" And the answer from Thor: Ragnarok seems to be this: just make it a Hulk movie. 

Film Land - Has Marvel Lost Faith in Dr. Strange?

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Edited by Robert Beach

At the time of writing, we are about three months out of from Marvel’s next film entry and possible first major failure Dr. Strange. I don’t make that failure claim lightly either. Despite being three months from release, this film has gotten shockingly little fanfare or production push, especially in comparison to other Marvel releases. This might be a response to the relative dead zone Marvel is releasing the movie in. 

Their previous November release was Thor: The Dark World, which was released against Hunger Games: Catching Fire and got completely crushed by it. With Dr. Strange, Marvel has set it up with no competition in a time of the year notoriously free of blockbusters, to the point where even bad movies like Spectre can make a killing. Even still, there’s a "specter" of doubt that hangs over Dr. Strange. I’m starting to wonder whether or not Marvel expects the film to be bad. 

Marvel Phase 2 Review

The release of any Marvel film brings with it the question of “where does it rank among all the other Marvel movies.”  However, in the case of Ant-Man that question brings with it an added amount of weight and focus, as Ant-Man is also the conclusion to Marvel’s entire Phase 2 enterprise.  This was meant as the big, showy example of everything Marvel could with both Disney’s money and the assured popularity of a mass fan base in the wake of Phase 1’s success at finding an audience for their B & C-list heroes.  Oh there have been installments in phase 2 meant to broaden Marvel’s character rosters but more often than not that job fell to the sidebars of individual films.  New characters like Iron Patriot, The Vision, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, and the Falcon weren’t the focus of this experimental phase.  No, the big push of phase 2 has been capitalizing on previous success to move things around for the overall Marvel Cinematic Universe story and there’s no getting around the truth that for the most part it just didn’t work.  

Ranking Marvel Phase 2

With the release of Ant-Man we celebrate the conclusion of Marvel’s Phase 2.  A shorter event than phase 1 by about a year, Marvel’s second phase stretched from Iron Man 3 in 2013 all the way up to Ant-Man this year and included 6 Marvel movies including plenty of blockbuster installments and a few less than spectacular numbers.  To celebrate this conclusion and to cap off the 9 month wait till Captain America: Civil War let’s rank the Phase 2 Marvel films from least to best.