Marvel, Circling the Drain

Disney has pushed the release of Captain America: Brave New World back nine months. Word is they're reshooting acts 1, 2, and 3. That's basically the whole movie.

It's likely that one of the reasons they're reshooting is to remove the Israeli superheroine, Sabra. It's just too controversial a topic for a movie series that Disney is trying to slant towards a younger, more female audience - particularly since young people are sympathizing with the plight of the people of Gaza more and more these days.

I remember when Sabra was introduced back in 1980. Her intro was so painful that it stuck in my mind for decades. "I am Sabra, the Israeli superhero. Like the desert cactus for which I am named, I am sweet to my allies but prickly to my enemies." Or something very close to that. It was painfully stupid even back then!

As for Disney, fuck them. I'm a long-time comic book geek and I was an MCU fan until things turned into shit (specifically with Captain Marvel, Black Panther, Multiverse of Madness, and everything after Endgame except for the Spider-Man movies (technically not part of the MCU) and the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. The problem is, simply enough, shit writing. It's a mistake Hollywood makes again and again. They despise their audiences and see them as morons, so they start putting out stupid, badly-written shit under the assumption that those morons will lap up whatever crap is given them. 

But they CAN'T make people like something that they hate. The most they can do is trick them once, as they did with Captain Marvel: by sandwiching it between Infinity War and Endgame, implying (falsely) that it was necessary to see Captain Marvel in order to "get" Endgame, and - most of all - by spending millions buying tickets to Captain Marvel to artificially pump up numbers. I'm not the only one who found the theater damned closed to empty when I saw Captain Marvel, and that WASN'T the case for any other MCU production up to that point. Disney also bought a shitload of critics and subverted Rotten Tomatoes to boot. And wasn't it around that time that YouTube killed off the ability to see the number of downvotes?

The funny thing is that Feige and the rest of the fuckwits at Disney STILL don't realize what the problem is. They can't, because THEY'RE the problem. Disney has taken Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar, all of which were huge money-makers, and killed them all dead, dead, dead. But they insist that it has to be the FANS who are at fault - never them. It's late-stage capitalism in action.

I'm going to enjoy watching their slow, drawn-out, painful death.