How Much of an Endgame is Avengers: Endgame Going to Be?

The MCU launched in 2008 with Iron Man, and the massive success of that first film allowed them to come together for the insanely huge Avengers, which propelled the MCU to become the biggest film franchise of all time - even Star Wars, the 10-going-on-11 film mega-blockbuster that it is, is in a distant second place with half the money the MCU has generated (and about half as many films.)

Warning: this post will have unmarked spoilers for Infinity War.

But as you might notice, 2008 was ten years ago, and people like Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, and Chris Evans have been playing their various iconic superheroes for over a decade.

Many years ago, Infinity War was going to be a two-parter, and in practice it is, only that the second movie is called Endgame instead.

Given that the Infinity Stone saga and Thanos as a villain have been building up since the first Avengers movie (we found out that Loki and the Chitauri were working on his behalf in the post-credits scene) it makes sense that this final confrontation, after the horrific losses at the end of Infinity War and the need - both for the Marvel Universe and for us as an audience - to find a way to get a cosmic do-over, should be a major transformational moment in the MCU.

Other than the definitely-getting-reversed snap, the MCU hasn't killed off any major superheroes. But given the gravity of what is happening, not to mention the fact that some of these actors might be getting ready to move on or becoming more and more expensive with each film, I think there is a high possibility that some of the core Avengers characters are either getting killed off or taken out of the franchise permanently.

To my mind, the most likely candidates are Iron Man and Captain America. Their relationship (and conflict in Civil War) has been central to the Avengers' story, and the films have focused the most on their arcs - arcs that are sort of mirror images of one another, Cap as the idealist waking up in a more complex world and Tony as the cynic who learns to be a hero - means that specifically the two of them making the ultimate sacrifice would be a fitting end to their stories.

(Though part of me hopes that Dr. Strange will use his time magic to instead send Steve back to the 40s so he can live the life that he missed.)

Though a number of them are dust in the wind right now, recent movies have established a new group of heroes who could easily form the core of the Avengers moving forwards: Black Panther and Captain Marvel are both super-popular. Spider Man, arguably the most popular Marvel character overall, has gotten a fantastic and MCU-compliant version in his latest iteration. We've got Dr. Strange, too. Basically, there are a lot of people who could step in and fill the shoes of the first generation of Avengers, and if Disney/Marvel want to keep printing money, they just need to figure out how best to arrange the personalities of these characters to find interesting dynamics like the ones that the original crew had.

While Thor has had his own trilogy along with Iron Man and Captain America, there's a part of me that feel like we only just realized his potential as a character in Thor: Ragnarok, and so somehow I feel like there's more they could do with him, even though he's been a part of the series slightly longer than Cap.

Meanwhile, we're finally (finally) getting a Black Widow movie, though this could be a prequel, so it might not say anything about Natasha Romanoff's future in the franchise. And Hawkeye... well, he was never the most popular Avenger, but damn if anyone deserves to just retire to his nice ranch in the country to raise his family, he does.

Finally, Hulk is great as he is - popping up in other peoples' movies or the Avengers ones.

Really I think the huge transformation to look for is losing Iron Man and Captain America - it, assuming it happens as I guess it will, will change the feeling of the MCU.

It's crazy to think so soon after Captain Marvel that we're getting this next month, but it'll be very interesting to see how it goes down.

I don't think the MCU is going anywhere (we're sure to get sequels to Black Panther and Captain Marvel at least) but this is probably a good moment to take a step back and see how these movies have become the gold standard of blockbuster filmmaking. It's something unique that people will look back on and study in decades' time.

Get Out

I know that I am SUPER late to the party on this one. But better late than never, and I'm really glad I finally got around to this. In a scene about a third or halfway through the movie (those who have seen the film will know it as the "teacup scene," I thought to myself: "This movie needs to be taught in film school."

Having now seen the movie, I can see why it won an Oscar for original screenplay. The level of narrative economy in this film is fantastic. There are a thousand little details you might not notice at first but that all come together to contribute to the chilling narrative.

The acting is also fantastic, and... I don't really know how to put this, but it all seems so perfectly calibrated to the needs of the film. It's not something I often think about when it comes to acting - because an actor is playing a single character in most cases, there's a kind of internal process that we can often recognize as really brilliant performance. Indeed, we sometimes see great performances in movies that are otherwise mediocre. But here, the performances, particularly of Daniel Kaluuya (Chris) and Alison Williams (Rose,) work in such synchronicity with the needs of the film that... I don't know, it's really good.

Now, this movie was spoiled for me pretty heavily before I saw it, which did allow me to catch a lot of details I might have otherwise missed, but also prevented me from being terribly shocked by its developments (though the truth of its big twist was more horrifying than I realized, for reasons I'll get to after the cut.)

Anyway, beware of spoilers beyond this point.

Captain Marvel

So there's finally a female-led MCU movie, which is a good thing, though it freaking took long enough. They've had Scarlett Johansson playing Black Widow for what, almost a decade at this point? And a Cold-War-spy-thriller-style solo movie for her writes itself. But later is better than never.

Obviously Captain Marvel is going to be looked at in the context of the protagonist's gender, but I don't think you really need to hear the take of some dude who shares a gender and ethnicity with 19 of the previous 20 movies' protagonists beyond just: "more of this please."

I think the weirdest thing for me is, as an older millennial, (I think I'm one year shy of Xennial, if that year is 1985, ) is seeing this movie that mines the 1990s - the decade I really feel I grew up in - for nostalgic jokes. Our protagonist, who at the time is known as "Vers," (pronounced to rhyme with beers,) winds up on Earth crashing through the roof of a then-ubiquitous Blockbuster Video (apparently there's only one left that exists today.)

Apart from having her go far enough away that Nick Fury never contacted her in the previous Avengers-level crises, there's not a ton of justification for setting the film in the '90s, beyond the awesome music and fashion (as someone who always groaned at 80s nostalgia I am all in for the 90s.)

The movie primarily functions as a buddy-film between Vers (Brie Larson) and a 24-year-younger Nick Fury. Samuel L. Jackson became a household name after his star-making role in Pulp Fiction, which came out one year before Captain Marvel is set. Digital wizardry and make-up is used to make Jackson and Clark Gregg's Phil Coulson look significantly younger. I'll leave it to you whether you think 70-year-old Jackson (I know his age because he has the exact same birthday as my dad) looks like he's in his mid-forties, but while it maybe looks like he's wearing a wig, I think the effect is not too off-putting, which is good given that he's one of the biggest characters in the movie.

Anyway, Vers is a member of the Kree civilization, and a part of an elite commando team led by her mentor Yon-Rogg (Jude Law) that is hunting Skrull agents - the Kree are mostly blue (with some exceptions) human-looking aliens while the Skrull are goblin-like creatures who can alter their appearance and even genetics to pass as anyone they've seen. We actually see a couple Kree characters from Guardians of the Galaxy: Lee Pace's Ronan the Accuser and Djimon Hounsou's Korath, the latter of whom is on Vers' team.

After Vers is captured by the Skrull, she escapes her mind-delving interrogation and winds up crash-landing on Earth.

While chasing down the Skrull agents who have landed there as well, she is stopped by Nick Fury, and soon manages to convince him of the threat, and they try to track down the aeronautics facility the Skrull are trying to find, which is where Vers discovers that she's actually human, or at least was before the Kree gave her some kind of blood transfusion.

Let's head into spoiler territory (I count the preceding stuff as what you'd glean from the trailer.)