The Four Color Media Monitor

This Hollywood Reporter news talks about a planned Inhumans movie that was supposed to premiere a week or so ago, but hasn't:

In another world, Friday would’ve been the day when Marvel Studios released Inhumans, the big-screen version of the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby characters introduced in 1965’s Fantastic Four No. 45. Four years ago, Marvel Studios announced an Inhumans movie for a Nov. 2, 2018, release, but its lack of existence might be the best news for Marvel Studios given what else the property has suffered through during that period.

Not necessarily. The upcoming Captain Marvel movie - which looks like it's a product of feminist propaganda - could turn out to be an underperformer, so it's not like they've planned ahead very well with everything. But they're right that what was produced for TV didn't work out, and from what I last read about the Power Man and Iron Fist Netflix programs being cancelled, it doesn't look like their TV ventures are turning out well either.

Inhumans was named as the penultimate movie of Marvel Studios’ Phase 3 plans back in October 2014, after months of rumors. Those rumors were fed, in part, by the publishing focus on the property, with the Inhumans being brought to the fore in a storyline called “Inhumanity,” which was described as having “seismic” effects on the Marvel Comic Book Universe by then-editor-in-chief Axel Alonso.

Despite the best efforts of Marvel’s comic book creative staff — and a number of crossover issues with multiple popular titles — that seismic impact was never truly felt, in what might have been the first sign of how poorly the property was going to fare across media over the next few years. Inhuman was postponed, and then went through a change in writers at the last minute, with Matt Fraction being replaced by Charles Soule. It was a switch explained by Alonso in a manner that once again emphasized the importance of the project: “The series that Matt wanted to write would have been good," Alonso said, "but it was not the series we need to lay the foundation for this new universe within the Marvel Universe.”

Inhumans was not the foundation of a new universe within the Marvel Universe; despite heavy promotion, sales were poor and the series was canceled within a year, only to be immediately replaced by two series, Uncanny Inhumans and All-New Inhumans, continuing the storyline. Sales remained low but Uncanny was the more successful of the two, lasting 20 issues — All-New only survived through 11 — before being canceled and once again relaunched with 2017’s Royals and Black Bolt as part of a promotion shared with the X-Men line. Both of those replacements were canceled within a year, and replaced with a five-part miniseries that suggested publishing was finished with the property for a while: Death of the Inhumans.

The idea was to tout Inhumans in place of the usual X-Men ventures (as the title adjectives suggest), which had been mostly downplayed, supposedly due to those infamous issues with Fox studios holding the rights to X-Men until Disney bought out their properties. But it's already a given it wasn't successful, though if they decided to kill off Black Bolt and Medusa's society of humanoids, that was wrong, and doesn't improve the situation at all. Besides, the writers they're employing now are so pretentious and/or saddled with such poor mandates, not to mention disrespectful of onetime continuity/history, it's doubtful Fraction's stories would've been "good" as Alonso claimed.

Given the continued failure of the Inhumans in other media, the lack of the big-budget movie Marvel had announced might be considered a lucky escape for the studio. After all, 10 years into its existence, Marvel hasn’t really suffered a flop yet. Looking at how successful Inhumans has been elsewhere, this might have been the movie to end Marvel’s winning streak. It’s probably for the best the movie didn’t happen.

But again, what if Captain Marvel turns out to be the bad omen they hoped to avoid? It may not be a total fiasco, but that still doesn't mean it won't underperform. I think what's scuttling some of these projects is how they overhype them well before the live action productions are underway, making them sound like they were the biggest blockbusters of all time, even bigger than Fantastic Four and Spider-Man were in better days. The inability to remain faithful to the best of Lee/Kirby's ideas is another problem, as is the injection of ultra-leftism into the stories. This disorganized approach is exactly why the 3rd tier creations at Marvel may not be very successful in the end, and even if the movies do turn out well, one thing is clear: hardly any moviegoers are bound to read the comics.

Labels: bad editors, crossoverloading, golden calf of death, marvel comics, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, X-Men