The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - March 21, 2024


Marvel is Dead - Here's how Disney kill it

Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Spider-Man Peter Parker Hal Jordan Nick Fury Uncle Ben Superman Achilles Odyssey Marvel Batman Chris
The CBC Commits a Crime Against Comedy Trudeau's Lies on the Carbon Tax are just tiresome

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

182.31

Word count

2,116

Sentence count

159

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Eternals 2 has been cancelled by Marvel, and it's a big deal. This signals the end of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the death of what Marvel was. I discuss why this is bad news for the future of the company.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.800 So there's a small bit of news that I actually think is a major, potentially trillions of dollars worth of news, and that would be that the Eternals 2 has been cancelled by Marvel.
00:00:10.880 Now, no one really liked Eternals 1, it's not a big deal, no one was looking forward to Eternals 2, but to me, this does signal the actual death of what Marvel was, for this reason.
00:00:21.840 This is a $200-$300 million promise they did not fulfill.
00:00:25.980 Now, one of Marvel's key successes as a business was the post-credit scene, right, you remember sitting there in Iron Man 1, you wait to the end of the post-credit scene, oh, Nick Fury comes, we tease in Avengers, right, and you would go, and by investing five minutes at the end of each movie, this is called marketing-wise or psychology-wise, it's like the foot-in-the-door technique, if people are willing to agree to a small request, they're then more likely to agree to a larger request that follows it up, right?
00:00:52.760 So if you're going to invest five minutes sitting there at the end of whatever Marvel movie, to invest time to see a 30-second clip of what could tease in the next movie, right, if you've already spent five minutes waiting around for Thor 2, a teaser, you're then more likely to, when it comes out, okay, say, all right, I'll pay the $20 to go see Thor 2 in theaters now.
00:01:12.840 You then wait another five minutes to the end of the movie.
00:01:14.720 You had this unbroken chain of Easter egg lead-ups that ended in the endgame because it kind of did the climax, but this has now been broken.
00:01:23.920 Eternals 2 was teased at the end of Eternals 1, and I also did a good amount of time in the movie setting up the plot for the second, which I can't remember because no one really cares about it.
00:01:33.280 This is a $200 million promise it didn't fulfill, which means now when you sit at the end of a Marvel movie, this isn't a guaranteed promise of what's to come.
00:01:45.140 This is a speculative maybe, and that is a massively different thing for all Marvel fans.
00:01:50.780 It now means there's less incentive to wait at the end of the movie sitting there, and okay, maybe if it's an interesting one, I'll see the post-cut scene on the internet or whatever if I really care.
00:02:01.400 But the investment people are making in Marvel will no longer be there because the unbroken chain is now broken.
00:02:09.440 Now, there's two reasons why Disney is killed.
00:02:11.780 Number one on this thing is like the over-corporatization of it, right, producing mass amount of content, all this stuff on Disney+, not everyone has Disney+,
00:02:19.180 so they stop really doing the teasers for the next thing because you already have Disney+, you don't really need to do it.
00:02:23.780 But they sort of broke formula, pumped people full of mass amount of content, you know, they lost the narrative through line of a general story.
00:02:32.440 And listen, narrative through lines to a story are pretty important to a story.
00:02:36.820 So they've broken all that.
00:02:38.220 Then you have the major culprit, which is like woke nonsense, right?
00:02:41.860 We got here.
00:02:42.820 It's a fun thing.
00:02:43.500 Everyone gets to rant about it on the internet.
00:02:44.940 I think there's a lot of really good people who do great stuff criticizing the modern Hollywood woke culture. 0.99
00:02:50.680 And then, yeah, there's some people who suck at it who every time they see a woman or a gay person scream about nothing to the heavens and make everyone look ridiculous. 0.93
00:02:57.680 But for the most part, there's a reason why there is an entire economy of, let's say, like anti-woke cultural content creators because there is a problem of woke nonsense in our movies. 0.95
00:03:09.020 So this brings me to my thesis here on Disney-Marvel Minds Importance.
00:03:13.120 Now, this is like the cultural arm of the Liberal Democratic Party, right?
00:03:17.820 Hollywood is used to often push the message.
00:03:20.720 But they're injecting messages into superheroes and it's not working.
00:03:24.840 Why?
00:03:25.780 The reason we are given in common pop culture or common discourse to why these movies aren't working anymore is there is superhero fatigue.
00:03:36.540 We've seen a lot of superhero movies.
00:03:38.020 We did 15 years.
00:03:38.880 Everyone's kind of tired of them.
00:03:40.220 I don't think that's true.
00:03:41.060 I don't think that's true at all.
00:03:42.180 I think there's still – I still think the appetite for superhero movies is as high as it's ever been.
00:03:49.780 I'd just say they're not fulfilling the general promises.
00:03:53.180 Superheroes – a friend once said this to me and I think it's very true.
00:03:56.100 Superheroes are American mythological creatures.
00:03:58.760 And they follow American values of philosophy pretty hard.
00:04:03.640 I mean Superman, truth, justice in the American way.
00:04:06.880 But American heroes generally are individualistic.
00:04:11.860 They have a personal trait that distinguishes them to – for the audience to understand why this person was chosen.
00:04:16.980 Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern, has incredible willpower.
00:04:20.460 Willpower is the thing that powers it.
00:04:22.000 This is why he's really good at this.
00:04:23.700 Batman, there's a certain psychotic determination and drive that makes him able to be a superhero.
00:04:30.700 There's an individual defining characteristic to why they can do it.
00:04:34.220 You know, they have powers or ability and then they have to go on a personal journey to accept responsibility to fight for good.
00:04:42.420 That is an American mythological creature or a superhero.
00:04:44.700 You know, juxtapose that to the Asian type, mostly Japanese, which is often the hero is the representation of or manifestation of something cultural or the environment or society. 0.69
00:04:55.960 They then fight to bring balance back to the world.
00:05:00.580 That's often what Japanese superheroes are doing.
00:05:02.680 And both of them work for different reasons.
00:05:06.000 And, you know, Americans like Japanese heroes, Japanese like American heroes.
00:05:08.680 But these are the two different heroes.
00:05:10.820 Your superheroes are primarily American mythological creatures.
00:05:14.700 They're archetypes.
00:05:16.160 And when you go against this and you break down the archetype, you get something that's not a superhero so people don't attach to it.
00:05:26.360 Like if you look at superheroes, they're just as important to our mythology as like Hercules, Odysseus, you know, all of that.
00:05:34.020 Like the Iliad and the Odyssey are great literature and they've stood the test of time.
00:05:37.520 But they were most likely the Marvel and DC comics of their day where kids and adults could get behind it.
00:05:43.440 But these heroes, they're demigods.
00:05:47.080 Superheroes are demigods that fight for good.
00:05:49.040 And they are not interesting in their fight.
00:05:51.360 They're interesting in why they fight.
00:05:53.740 There's nothing interesting about a hero with no flaws, which is your Captain Marvel.
00:05:59.620 Juxtapose this to a, you know, a Greek thing.
00:06:02.640 Achilles, the greatest warrior of all time.
00:06:04.080 Invulnerable.
00:06:04.760 Except for one part of his heel which didn't get the invulnerability dip when his mom something something.
00:06:09.780 What's the most interesting part of Achilles?
00:06:11.480 What do we remember about Achilles?
00:06:13.160 His heel.
00:06:14.180 It's the most famous thing about him.
00:06:16.140 Astleets, to this day, are just a rupture of his Achilles.
00:06:18.540 It's a part of your literal body.
00:06:19.960 That's how famous this is.
00:06:21.120 The flaw.
00:06:21.500 But the reason why woke stories don't work is because the heroes no longer have flaws.
00:06:30.940 Or the old heroes are so incredibly flawed and their character arc is not to fix their own flaws,
00:06:37.140 but to accept that the new generation, the new people are so strong and powerful and they must step aside
00:06:42.620 and abdicate responsibility in favor of the new people who never really take responsibility.
00:06:48.800 They're just so awesome in their own right.
00:06:52.300 The story doesn't work.
00:06:53.960 And when the story doesn't work, people don't attach to it.
00:06:57.320 And then people don't see these movies and you get $100 million flops that cost people lots of money.
00:07:01.400 But I will say again, I think there's incredibly high appetite for superhero movies even right now.
00:07:08.840 The new stuff, Spider-Man, made a billion dollars.
00:07:10.860 The new Guardians.
00:07:11.800 If you do these things right, people will want to go see them.
00:07:14.980 There's a reason they're still making the Batman one and, you know,
00:07:17.320 they have this whole DC universe invested in it too and people are interested to see where it goes.
00:07:22.440 This still drives the Western imagination because superheroes say something fundamentally
00:07:29.540 about our society and we want to put ourselves in the position of these superheroes.
00:07:36.480 And that's what makes it interesting, which is why, again,
00:07:38.980 the end fight of a superhero movie isn't the interesting part of a superhero movie.
00:07:43.280 They fight a sky beam in a CGI army.
00:07:45.820 The interesting thing that people like about superheroes is the choices they make and the consequences of them.
00:07:51.700 This is like the perfect superhero arc is the first Spider-Man trilogy.
00:07:57.780 First movie.
00:07:59.060 Origin story.
00:08:00.140 Uncle Ben dies.
00:08:01.020 He has to learn to be a superhero.
00:08:02.400 He has to train.
00:08:03.140 He has to balance his life.
00:08:04.080 It's about becoming.
00:08:04.980 That's interesting.
00:08:06.040 Right?
00:08:06.460 Second one, which was a very successful movie, is about the choice of being a superhero.
00:08:11.200 Right?
00:08:11.340 He starts to lose his power.
00:08:12.060 It's about dealing with the consequences of being a superhero.
00:08:15.120 Like the ultimate example of the responsibility question is Spider-Man.
00:08:19.040 Right?
00:08:19.280 The literal thing.
00:08:20.000 With great power comes great responsibility.
00:08:21.680 This is what the second movie is about.
00:08:23.820 It has a theme.
00:08:24.780 It has a character arc.
00:08:25.680 It's a movie about Peter Parker, not about Spider-Man.
00:08:28.780 Peter Parker must accept responsibility for what it takes and the consequences of being Spider-Man and understand that it's worse not to be Spider-Man.
00:08:37.740 Maybe someone must be a hero.
00:08:39.780 This is a narrative arc and a character arc.
00:08:42.660 Then he has an end fight scene with the villain, which is a payoff, but it's not really needed.
00:08:47.440 I mean, it is needed, but it's not the most interesting part of the movie.
00:08:50.300 Then you have a third movie, which has no basic plot.
00:08:52.420 There's a space goo and Venom and he dances around.
00:08:54.920 Right?
00:08:55.000 There's no real character building or interesting set.
00:08:58.580 It's just bringing back a bunch of characters, mishmashing them around Spider-Man and then going kabingo.
00:09:03.920 That doesn't work.
00:09:04.740 I bring this all up to say, to go back to, I think there's still an appetite for superheroes.
00:09:11.700 And that's going to be found to mention.
00:09:12.660 There's going to be a good superhero movie and someone's going to learn this.
00:09:15.280 But superhero movies are going to continue to fail if they have woke nonsense in them.
00:09:18.900 Right? 0.99
00:09:19.040 If people write them and they're like, put a chick in it and make her gay and lame. 0.99
00:09:24.040 Right? 0.99
00:09:24.220 The South Park line.
00:09:25.540 And the problem with that is not that there's women in these movies. 1.00
00:09:28.920 It's that woke people can't write women because they don't give them flaws. 1.00
00:09:32.200 They make them perfect from the beginning to the end.
00:09:34.200 And this means they are not actual human beings.
00:09:37.300 They don't have a character arc and no one will attach themselves to it.
00:09:40.880 It's why Captain Marvel doesn't inspire tons of girls around the world because she's not a woman. 1.00
00:09:45.400 She's not a human being. 0.98
00:09:46.200 She's not an anything.
00:09:47.520 It's not even a symbol or an ideology.
00:09:49.040 She's just a, she's a CGI, Chris.
00:09:51.480 She's a CGI thing floating around the screen. 0.86
00:09:54.320 It's interesting because Disney, a major corporation, which we all know their internal politics,
00:10:00.960 will have to make a trillion, billion to trillion dollar decision eventually.
00:10:06.300 They're going to learn.
00:10:07.020 And eventually the executives at Disney will learn that if they do woke nonsense,
00:10:11.920 if they try and tear down everything we love, then they're going to lose billions of dollars.
00:10:17.200 But if they pump up what makes superheroes great, which is truth, justice, and the American way, actual Western values,
00:10:23.380 and they have individuals who are making choices, accepting responsibility, and fighting for good, they'll make billions of dollars.
00:10:29.980 And that should stop pumping the, and in order to make billions of dollars, they'll need to pump positive Western messaging into Western civilization.
00:10:38.780 So I think that's very interesting.
00:10:40.940 That's coming down the pipeline.
00:10:41.960 This is all sort of a 10-year theory now on adjustment.
00:10:44.800 But I do see a lot of good news from this random Eternals 2 being canceled because it is the symbol that, you know, Marvel, as you know it, is dead.
00:10:54.600 It's not the same thing.
00:10:55.560 And it will have to make a choice, an interesting choice, like a hero.
00:10:58.840 They have to either take responsibility for their actions, choose to do better, and succeed, or fail, collapse, and become the villain.
00:11:06.400 Thank you.