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Martin Scorsese thinks Marvel films aren’t cinema. “The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes,” he wrote in a New York Times article in 2019, written after a wave of backlash from superhero fans and directors alike. Earlier that year, Marvel’s three-hour blockbuster Avengers: Endgame had garnered over $2.7 billion. For a while it was the highest-grossing film ever made. People turned up to see it in spandex catsuits. You couldn’t move for replica infinity stones. Some theaters, eager to fill the demand, screened the...

The sum total endgame of this reveal is the line, a canonical declaration that Loki dates men and women, with no effect on his character or the narrative.The MCU officially has their first openly gay main character. Sort of.Midway through episode three of the latest MCU Disney Plus series “Loki,” a small conversation between the God of Mischief and an alternate universe version of himself called Sylvie reveals that both have a dating history of impermanent dalliances with both men and women. Lasting under 30 seconds, the bit of dialogue serves little plot function except to show the bonding between...

"I feel quite strongly that Guantánamo doesn’t have a place in our world"Benedict Cumberbatch says he wants Guantánamo Bay closed after working on ‘The Mauritanian’ "I feel quite strongly that Guantánamo doesn’t have a place in our world" Benedict Cumberbatch has said he wants Guantánamo Bay closed following his work on recent film The Mauritanian. The film, which is being produced by SunnyMarch – an independent film and television company that Cumberbatch jointly owns – explores the experiences of Mohamedou Ould Slahi who was incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay for 14 years without charge. After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the...

In a year devoid of blockbuster movies in theaters, Disney has sought to rival Netflix as the leader in on-demand streaming, but questions remain about its approach.

 Bob Chapek, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, will later today deliver to investors the entertainment giant’s annual report. Even worse than the rest of Hollywood, Disney has been hit hard by the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns. Most theme parks remain shuttered, tens of thousands of employees have been laid off, and revenue from theatrical film releases has gone from billions in 2019 to nearly zero this year. It’s no accident that today...

To state the obvious, comic book publishing is in serious trouble, with a business model that almost literally has no future. Yet comic books are a source of intellectual property for exploitation in all sorts of popular media and have never have greater potential. So, why is this? Why do comics as a storytelling form (superhero and otherwise) have such an enormous impact on popular culture but comic book publishers are struggling to survive? Why are publishers almost universally failing to succeed at actual publishing? My basic answer is— they're pursuing the *wrong market.* And they've been doing so, with...

Marvel Studios has made no secret that its upcoming fall tentpole “The Eternals” will feature its first openly gay superhero. In a new interview with Logo, “Eternals” actor Haaz Sleiman reveals his character is one half of the gay couple that appears in the movie. Sleiman says his character is “married to the gay superhero Phastos, played by ‘Atlanta’s’ Brian Tyree Henry, and we represent a gay family and have a child.” Marvel’s parent company Disney has promised significant gay moments in past tentpoles only for them to not be too explicit (who can forget the live-action “Beauty and the...

Marvel Studios and Kevin Feige have taken a drastic and different approach to the MCU when they released Captain Marvel and cast Brie Larson, as the films no longer care about telling a quality story, but instead, only care about pushing a politically correct agenda. That agenda came to a full realisation with the announcement of Marvel's Phase 4 plans at the recent San Diego Comic-Con which includes Black Widow, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Eternals, Shang-Chi, WandaVision, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Loki, What If?, Hawkeye, Thor: Love and Thunder, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel and Moon Knight....

Something we’ve known for a while about The Eternals is that it’ll introduce the MCU’s first ever openly gay hero. We’re not sure which of the movie’s starry ensemble will take that role, but Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has now shared some fresh details about the mystery character, saying the following: “The Eternals will feature Marvel’s first openly gay character. He’s married and has a family and it’s part of who he is.” The full ensemble for The Eternals was revealed at D23 yesterday and we now know that Angelina Jolie is Thena, Richard Madden is Ikaris, Salma Hayek...

Dark Phoenix was not the X-Men movie that moviegoers were looking forward to: Critics showed that with a 22% Rotten Tomatoes score, while audiences demonstrated that both in exits (B- CinemaScore, lowest ever for the franchise, and an awful 69% positive on PostTrak) and with their wallets, only spending $33M stateside, the lowest debut ever for the Fox/Marvel mutant franchise. Even though Dark Phoenix is the No. 1 winner around the globe with $140M –down substantially from the worldwide launches of X-Men: Days of Future Past ($262.9M), Logan ($247.4M) and X-Men: Apocalypse ($166.6M), finance experts tell us that the tale...

As Marvel Studios begins its search for the cast of the 2020 feature film, The Eternals, we at That Hashtag Show have learned that they are looking to cast an openly gay actor for a lead role in the film. During the press coverage of Ant-Man and The Wasp last year, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige stated that the studio was working towards bringing a new, LGBTQ character to the mix in the near future. As it turns out, that future is nearly upon us as the studio searches for an actor, 30-49, who “physically looks like a superhero” for...

Marvel Studios is fast-tracking Shang-Chi to be its first superhero movie tentpole franchise with an Asian protagonist. The studio has set Chinese-American scribe Dave Callaham to write the screenplay, and Deadline hears Marvel is already looking at a number of Asian and Asian-American directors who want to do something as potentially monumental as was accomplished in Marvel’s first viable Best Picture candidate, Black Panther. That film tied into African and African American cultures and the sensibilities of its nearly all-black cast, with a black director in Ryan Coogler and writer in Joe Robert Cole. The goal here is to do...

Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige says there will be two LGBTQ characters in future films — and we already know one of them. We just don’t know exactly who he means. In an interview about with Gregory Ellwood of The Playlist, Feige answer “yes” to the question: “When are we getting a Gay, Bi, LGBTQ, out character in the MCU? Is it even in the works?” When asked if they’re characters we’ve already seen, or characters who will be new to the story line, Feige replied: “Both… Both ones you’ve seen and ones you haven’t seen.” The answers were tight-lipped,...

It looks like Ms. Marvel is finally one step closer to joining the MCU. During an interview with the BBC, Kevin Feige revealed that a film with the Muslim teen superhero Kamala Khan is "definitely sort of in the works". "Captain Marvel's shooting right now with Brie Larson," Feige said. "Ms. Marvel, which is another character in the comic books, the Muslim hero who is inspired by Captain Marvel, is definitely sort of in the works. We have plans for that once we've introduced Captain Marvel to the world." The character, who is of Pakistani descent from New Jersey, is...