If you were making a movie or TV series based on a venerable, beloved franchise with a fiercely dedicated, generational fan base, would you prefer:
A. Someone who was intimately familiar with the source material and loved it; or,
B. Someone who was ignorant of the source material and didn’t care much for it anyway?
It shouldn’t surprise you at all to learn that a high-ranking producer at Marvel is hot for Option B.
As if it wasn’t obvious enough from simply watching any of the studio’s post-Infinity War output, producer Nate Moore has revealed that he believes the key to Marvel Studios’ success is hiring writers who are “out” of the comic book culture over anyone who loves the source material.
“Success”? It’s widely acknowledged by fans that the “Phase 3” Marvel films are on a steady downhill slide. Box office shows, too, that with the exception of a massive spike for Avengers: Endgame, the most recent movies have been making less and less profit.
Speaking with host Matthew Belloni about his general experience working for the Disney subsidiary [time stamp 17:00], Moore was eventually asked if there was “some kind of a ‘Marvel bootcamp’ or something that you do with these filmmakers to ingratiate them into this world and knowing all the things that they need to know”, to which the producer confirmed “not really”.
Noting that some Marvel writers grew up reading and collecting comics, such as Avengers: Endgame co-director Joe Russo and Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, Moore told Belloni, “one thing I think is interesting, and specifically for writers I would say, is that a lot of times we’re pitched writers who love Marvel, and to me that’s always a red flag”.
So, the writers of two of the most successful recent films were fans. The far and away most successful Marvel films of all time, the original Spider-Man films, were also directed by comic-book fan, Sam Raimi.
But that’s supposed to be a “red flag”?
Turning to provide further support for his argument, Moore then put forth Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder director as “a great example of that too, [because he was like] ‘Hey I know Thor traditionally is a bit stiff, a bit Shakespearean but what if you tweaked it? What if you tweaked the tone completely?’”
“The tone of Ragnarok is all Taika.”
And isn’t that obvious? And even more glaringly obvious with Thor: Love and Thunder? The latter, especially, has been met with a chorus of derision for it’s lame honk-honk attempts at “comedy” and endless pandering to wokeism.
As Bounding Into Comics succinctly puts it, the producer:
Believ[es] himself to be complimenting the director rather than hitting the nail on the head as to why many fans have been turned off by Taika Waititi’s take on the God of Thunder.
Bounding Into Comics
Or, as one disgruntled fan put it: When I pick a writer to work with I always look for someone who shows a complete apathy towards the subject matter.
Which, in fact, seems to be the entirety of Hollywood’s approach, lately.
Nothing else can explain the garbage that is Rings of Power, or the Star Wars sequels.