Marvel Getting in Touch with Itself

I was in the mood for a Marvel movie last night and I was scrolling through the ones on Disney+ I hadn't seen. I hadn't seen the first Wolverine movie from 2009 because everyone said it was really bad, so much so it was gratuitously retconned in the Deadpool movies, complete with insults. I started watching it and, yeah, it's pretty bad. It's kind of dull. Ryan Reynolds is in it as a distinctly not-Deadpool version of Deadpool. It was like having a movie with a Spider-Man who can't climb walls and has a different personality. Why do it? I suppose writers David Benioff and Skip Woods figured their ideas were superior to the source material. That is the same Benioff who adapted Game of Thrones for television so I guess that was par for the course.

So I switched to the original, 2000 X-Men film that introduced Hugh Jackman's Wolverine to the world. What a difference. How good that movie remains. It still feels fresh that it spends time introducing Wolverine, Magneto, and Rogue in very natural, earthly circumstances.

The recent news from Marvel is they're shaking up their release slate in the wake of disappointing box office performances by Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts. It's really a shame because Thunderbolts is actually quite good. I could've told them it wouldn't do well, though. Florence Pugh is very pretty but she looks like a little boy in all the posters. Everyone wears boring black costumes. I remember months back when Grace Randolph was comparing Thunderbolts to Suicide Squad she called Yelena, Pugh's character, the Harley Quinn of the film. Margot Robbie's sexiness as Harley Quinn in the original Suicide Squad movie single-handedly made it a hit and redoubled the character's cultural icon status. Florence Pugh's dowdiness seems to have drawn no-one to the cinema. The sexy Harley Quinn made the otherwise lousy Suicide Squad a hit, so I think it's fair to say the aesthetically unimpressive hair and makeup on Yelena sank the chances of the otherwise well made Thunderbolts. Yeah, you can turn your nose up at the fact that sex sells. But you do so at your peril.