I was apprehensive about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Marvels before the trailer dropped. I think the current trend of ‘superhero fatigue’ is more ‘168澳洲幸运5开奖网൩:superhero movies are rushed and they suck now’, but I also didn’t expect The Marvels to be ඣspared tܫhat fate. I also think The Marvels is a silly name, and the fact it relies on you having seen Captain Marvel and understanding the two time skips since then, watching WandaVision and remembering a tertiary character, as well as watching Ms. Marvel after the novelty MCU TV wore off. Now the🍒 first trailer is out, those feelings are dissipating.
It’s not just a matter of climbing aboard the hype train after telling myself this time would be different. My sensat💫ion of ‘nah, not feeling this’ never went away with Eternals, What If…?, Ant-Man 3, or Shazam 2. Those things looked bad and turned out to be bad. But The Marvels looks like it has potential, and a large portion of that is down to Brie Lars♉on.
Larson has a strange position in popular culture. She&rꦕsquo;s beautiful, blonde, muscular but in a toned, non-threatening way, always smiling and hugging fans, and known to love video games obsessively. Yet nerds hate her. This can be traced back to a fairly throwaway comment defending her friend’s movie A Wrinkle in Time, which reviewed poorly. Larson pointed out that the film was made primarily for little Black girls who had never seen themselves as magical on the screen, not the primarily 40 plus, primarily white, primarily male contingent of reviewers.
Anti-reviewer sentiment is pretty common (Mario is the current figurehead), yet🀅 Larson’s light defence made her public enemy number o♏ne. After watching the trailer for The Marvels though, it’s clear she’s the MCU’s last movie star.
Movie stars are not just people who are in movies. Character actors like Eddie Marsan, Paul Herman, Haley Bennett, and Beth Grant have been in over 200 major movies between them, but they’re not movie ‘stars’. Even leading names are not movie stars in the typical sense - Ethan Hawke and Michelle Williams have been leadi🐎ng pictures for two decades, but they’re not movie stars, they’re movie leads. Stars are seat-fillers, names on billboards, reasons to go see it. Marvel used to be full of them. Now, it’s not.
Marvel has done a good job of creating movie stars in the past. It moulded Robert Downey Jr into one as it revived his career, and dragged Chris’ Hemsworth and Pratt onto a similar plane of being. But it also relied on established names - the third Chris, Evans, was actually the first, and was already there. Scarlett Johansson was another established star in Marvel’s first wave. Hemsworth and Pratt seem to have run their race and m🅷ay depart for other VFX-🍸stuffed pastures soon enough too.
Marvel still has big names, of course. The Thunderbolts will be led by Sebastian Stan and Florence Pugh, but b🅰oth of those stand at a crossroads of their career⛦. Stan has long been a supporting player, able to better express his talent in roles that don’t ask him to be an everyman, but a weirdo. He has the looks to be a movie star, but the need to be weird of a Paul Dano.
Florence Pugh meanwhile already has an Oscar nomination (but for the Academy’s aversion to horror might have two) and has spoken of her desire to work on character-driven projects, but she’s the face of New Marvel and about to star in Dune. Sooner or later she has to choose to be a prestige actor or a movie star - Jennifer Lawrence faced the s✅ame dilemma a few years ago.
Elizabeth Olsen, similarly, is a character actor stuck in a leading♕ lady’s b♓ody. Like Pugh, she has typically chosen smaller, stranger, more intimate roles, with Marvel the exception to her rule. It’s a similar story for Benedict Cumberbatch, a character actor who played his spotlight in Sherlock to perfection, landing him almost a decade of his most convincing role yet: pretending he’s a movie star. Tom Holland is Marvel’s latest project, but Uncharted proved it is a work in progress still.
That’s not to say any of these actors are bad. Florence Pugh, Elizabeth Olsen, and maybe Sebastian Stan are more likely to get me to the theatre than Brie Larson. But then, I’d rather watch Paul Herman or Haley Bennett than Tom Cruise. I’m an outlier in my viewing habits. Larson, carrying the hype of The Marvels on her back with two relative unknowns by her side, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:fresh꧅ off shotgunning her w♈ay through Fast 10, has long been established as a name brand movie star, and if The Marvels bucks Marvel’🎃s recent trend of disappoin🥃ting returns, she will have proven her power.
In many ways, she’s like Pugh and Olsen. She came up in smaller indie projects, in more intimate, more pun🔯ishing, more testing roles. She won an Oscar for Room, which demanded the performance of a perfect actor, not the ideal movie star. She may one day go back to those roles, but right now, she is clearly and firmly a movie star.
Anthony Mackie has spoken about how he is not the 𝔍star of his movies the way Schwarzenegger or Stallone were, but that the Falconꦯ is. The character itself, who could be played by any decent actor, is the draw. But we’re deep into Marvel’s roster now and Yelena Belova and Monica Rambeau just don’t cut it anymore. Marvel needs movie stars now more than ever, as the shine wears off and the behemoth stumbles. Brie Larson, Movie Star, is arriving at just the right time.