‘Captain America: Brave New World’ Is Marvel’s Rock Bottom. Now What?

Sean and Amanda are joined by Chris Ryan to review the utter mess that is ‘Captain America: Brave New World.’ They discuss its various rewrites, the ways the movie shows its seams, why Harrison Ford is even interested in taking roles like this, and what it means for the end of Phase 5 in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Chris Ryan Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner Video Producer: Jack Sanders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi everyone, it's Amy Poehler and I'm launching a new podcast called Good Hang. In preparation for that, I asked some of my friends to send in some videos and give me some advice.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Just be yourself and the guests will come.

• 0:13Speaker 02

  Don't be the celebrity that this is their like sixth thing they're doing.

• 0:16Amanda Dobbins?

  I love true crime and cooking podcasts. Is there any way you could combine the two?

• 0:21Speaker 00

  Well, everyone has an opinion and a podcast. So, join me for Good Hang. It's rough out there. We're just trying to lighten it up a little.

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• 0:43Speaker 05

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• 0:48Amanda Dobbins?

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• 1:22Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Finacy.

• 1:23Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Amanda Donovan.

• 1:23Sean Fennessey?

  And this is the Big Picture A Conversation Show about America.

• 1:27Amanda Dobbins?

  A brave new world.

• 1:29Sean Fennessey?

  This is America! Chris Ryan is here today for a State of the Union address on this episode we will talk about. Captain America: Brave New World. It's a new film from Marvel. Amanda, are you excited about this conversation?

• 1:49Amanda Dobbins?

  I am thrilled to bring people behind the scenes. We decided to do this episode about 10 minutes ago. So we have seen the film.

• 1:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:59Amanda Dobbins?

  We saw it together.

• 2:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:01Amanda Dobbins?

  We had a lovely dinner beforehand. I was in a great mood.

• 2:04Sean Fennessey?

  Where did we eat?

• 2:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, Wood Ranch?

• 2:07Sean Fennessey?

  Wood Ranch.

• 2:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, the Burbank Wood Ranch.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  You had ribs.

• 2:11Amanda Dobbins?

  I did. I love ribs.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:13Amanda Dobbins?

  And.

• 2:13Sean Fennessey?

  We had the classic ribs.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Chicken breasts.

• 2:15Sean Fennessey?

  Pulled pork.

• 2:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 2:17Sean Fennessey?

  Triumph it.

• 2:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. But we did not get to have dessert because there was a misunderstanding about what time the screening started. That's okay. We got there. We got our seats. We saw the film. So in a way, I'm as prepared as I need to be.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  And I thought maybe this would be a good idea to do kind of impromptu like this because this is a film that kind of like it starts to escape the consciousness even as the stinger is coming to a close. So I wanted to talk about it as quick, as close to the actual experience as possible.

• 2:46Sean Fennessey?

  I think your instincts were right. This is the 35th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It comes to us from Julius Ona. It is written by roughly 19 people.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Yes, including Malcolm Spellman, who worked on Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the TV series that had previously featured Sam Wilson.

• 3:03Sean Fennessey?

  So thank you for bringing that up. Sam Wilson, of course, has taken up the mantle of Captain America. You asked me during the film, when did that happen? I believe it was officially at the end of Avengers Endgame when Steve Rogers went back into the past to be with his beloved Haley Atwell. And to that I say, who among us would not travel back in time to be with Haley Atwell?

• 3:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Completely agree with you. That was also one of the scenes with like the Captain America cute butt jokes. So, right?

• 3:26Sean Fennessey?

  Sure. Yes.

• 3:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that was a.

• 3:28Sean Fennessey?

  That's how you chart time in the MCU.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Dancing as an old man and he has a cute butt.

• 3:32Amanda Dobbins?

  They, there's like a recurring thing in it about him having a cute butt. They made a couple of jokes about it. It's fine. Like I, you know, I like humor too.

• 3:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I asked you before and I, the movie started.

• 3:45Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 3:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I did ask you some questions during the film and we can get into why I needed to ask those questions later.

• 3:51Sean Fennessey?

  There are a great many reasons why.

• 3:53Amanda Dobbins?

  But I don't want people like in my mentions being like, how dare you? I, I want, I asked you to set the scene for me and I asked you, when did he become Captain America? And I also asked you whether we would get to see him become Captain America in any meaningful way, whether there was a ceremony, some sort of medallion like the DJ's and I, you know, I just.

• 4:15Sean Fennessey?

  I want to say, I think that that was a missed opportunity. He just sort of started doing it in this television series.

• 4:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 4:21Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Um, which aired, I think in 2021, it was the second series that aired in the Marvel TV experiment after Wandavision.

• 4:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Wandavision. Um, this and Loki was right around this too.

• 4:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. So they were roughly around the same time. Maybe it was third. And that show is relevant to this conversation for a variety of reasons. One of the challenges of this movie is, is that it's not so much an evolution of the Marvel story, but as a series of loose ends being tied up around a lot of other older Marvel stories, not just the 2021 TV show, not just, say, the recent film Eternals, which came out three years ago, but also significantly and almost primarily the 2008 movie, The Incredible Hulk, directed by Louis Leterrier and starring Edward Norton and William Hurt. Mm hmm. Now, neither of those men portray characters currently in the MCU that still exist. In fact, one of those men is no longer alive.

• 5:17Amanda Dobbins?

  As actors.

• 5:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 5:18Amanda Dobbins?

  But the Hulk is still in the MCU and Thunderbolt Ross is still in the MCU.

• 5:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. So we've got a movie that is speaking directly to plot developments from a movie that came out 17 years ago and has been largely ignored.

• 5:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Like pre Tony Stark canon.

• 5:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And it is still a part of the MCU and that character still matters to the MCU because now Mark Ruffalo, of course, plays the Incredible Hulk. But Captain America Brave New World, well, let's just, we'll, we'll, we'll have it out right here.

• 5:47Sean Fennessey?

  What did you think of the movie Chris Ryan?

• 5:49Amanda Dobbins?

  I went into this with a pretty open mind, honestly, and like I was kind of willing to be surprised. I really enjoyed the last trailer and I thought this was one of the worst superhero movies I've ever seen, probably because it's not a superhero movie at all. It's trying to be a political thriller and like a an espionage thriller, but I thought this was brutal and it was like kind of. I couldn't tell if it was a catastrophe that had been stitched back together, or perhaps like what they really want to be making right now, which is directorless slop that they assemble and like draw back threads to previous things that they need to do or whatever. I thought maybe this would be a really cool new step for them or an exciting movie.

• 6:31Amanda Dobbins?

  And instead, it seems like it's basically like a tax write off for a bunch of other properties that they needed to get off their books.

• 6:38Sean Fennessey?

  Amanda, what did you think?

• 6:39Amanda Dobbins?

  This sucked, straight up. And I know everyone expects me to say that, but I also went in with an open heart in the sense of, we got to go out to dinner on a weeknight and Harrison Ford was in this film. And typically I have liked the Captain America movies more out of the, you know, Marvel firmament, I suppose, but I thought it made no sense. It was very clearly like tying up a bunch of things that I didn't even remember or had never seen. So in terms of having to do your homework before it was, I don't know if you could have done enough homework to be able to follow what was going on here,

• 7:20Amanda Dobbins?

  but it felt sort of contextless, confusing, obviously like poorly executed. I thought, I mean, this CGI is like inexcusable, I think. And I also thought like the fight scenes were pretty lame, if only just because I spent my time being like, well, that's not Anthony Mackie. And that's not Anthony Mackie. You could see the cuts. You could see the doubles. I thought that the, I need exposition in movies like this at like at some point. You know, you would like it to be deftly or entertainingly done, but like I, I guess I kind of need to know what's going on.

• 7:59Amanda Dobbins?

  But it was all boring exposition that still somehow did not explain to me what was going on. I didn't even really understand what it was trying to communicate in terms of like, Morals or ideas about superheroes, America, good, evil,

• 8:20Amanda Dobbins?

  natural resources.

• 8:21Sean Fennessey?

  Radiation.

• 8:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I, you know, or hostages. And I didn't have a good time.

• 8:30Sean Fennessey?

  This movie is quite poor. It is really one of the, one of the poorest in the history of the MCU. It's been, been quite a backslide since 2019 into, I think, not just a vague cultural irrelevance, because some of these movies still do make money, but a very overt discomfort with decisions that were made in the aftermath of Endgame, and then an attempt to kind of like unwind and rewind and refocus and reset. This movie, more than any other movie in the last five years, there was a lot of public awareness. Yeah. Of reshoots, of restructurings, of recastings, of ripping it up and starting again.

• 9:14Sean Fennessey?

  And even your common Marvel movie fan had a lot of awareness of this stuff going in. For example, Giancarlo Esposito plays a, one of the heavy, sort of like the false flag heavy, like kind of a fake out of who we think the villain of the movie is going to be. He plays a character named Sidewinder, who's in the serpent society.

• 9:33Sean Fennessey?

  They shot the whole movie and then decided to add him to the movie. And so they just reshoot and re-edited significant parts of the movie to add this character to the movie, who's like critically important to the, whatever the, the story is, in terms of like setting up who the actual villain of the story is and all this other stuff. So you can see every stitch. Yes. Throughout the movie. You can feel every awkward cut, all that exposition you're talking about. The way he vanishes in the middle of the second act, and they're like, you're done now. The fact that he's barely in a frame with Anthony Mackie throughout the whole movie. Yeah, but the fact that like the, his, the end of his shooting schedule, like clearly coincided with like what, what they could get is what you see on screen.

• 10:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 10:17Sean Fennessey?

  They can't have him be a part of the third act.

• 10:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, because he simply was not there. It was not available.

• 10:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and it's a tricky thing, right? Obviously, I thought that Falcon and Winter Soldier was a mess, but actually was had making an earnest effort to be about something. I thought it really fumbled the bag in its finale. It's like a really, really misbegotten finale, and this felt like an extension of the finale where it was sort of like, you know, that show made an effort, especially in the first two episodes, to really show Sam's life, like show his sister, show where he comes from. I think he's from Louisiana.

• 10:50Amanda Dobbins?

  He's got like the fishing boat that he's.

• 10:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and he's like, it was like, a character piece inside of a story about kind of power and the way that the Avengers could or could not reintegrate into a common society. You know, it wasn't high art, but at least was.

• 11:03Amanda Dobbins?

  That's my ideas, though.

• 11:04Sean Fennessey?

  It was trying to be.

• 11:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Forgotten cap thing with Carl Unley is, which gets brought up again in this film.

• 11:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, so the Isaiah Bradley character, who is a so- super soldier serum taker, who then is wrongfully imprisoned and then is introduced in the story in that TV show. The movie, because it knows most people didn't watch the TV show, basically needs to like re-explain who he is by having, for example, in this movie, Danny Ramirez, who is the new Falcon, be introduced to Isaiah Bradley and then say, wait, you are this guy who did this thing and was wrongfully imprisoned for 30 years. And so like when you're watching the movie, whether you've seen the TV show or not, you know that this is writing that is not even meant to like accomplish anything other than to fill in the gaps for people who don't know about the gaps.

• 11:50Amanda Dobbins?

  I was telling her last night, like there was an N plus one article a little while ago about Netflix movies and about how Netflix kind of pushes writers sometimes to write their expository dialogue as if somebody's not actually looking at the screen. So I felt like that was very, very present in this film where you would be told where they were going. They would arrive somewhere. You would see a sign on the screen that says they've arrived where they are going. And then they would be like, here we are at Camp Echo. And I was like, I know. I was listening two minutes ago. Like, do you think that, like, how addled do you think your audience is that they wouldn't be able to sustain that?

• 12:25Speaker 05

  And then Amanda was, made the right point. It was like, that's probably because they're stitching everything together from different shoots and from different storylines. That they're like, we have to like, kind of even create a through line for ourselves as we're making this film.

• 12:38Sean Fennessey?

  And whether it's intentional or not, even though we're close movie watchers in theory, like it feels very insulting when you're watching the movie to watch a character say a series of consecutive sentences that they never would. The way that the president portrayed by Harrison Ford in this movie talks is not how the president would talk. We know that that's not how the president would talk, where he would have to over enunciate something to what is essentially a vigilante hero who has made his way into the White House. Why would you give that person any information whatsoever? So the writing in this movie is absolutely dreadful and some of it is a function of that stitching and some of it is just really bad. The performances are okay.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  No, they're not.

• 13:15Amanda Dobbins?

  They're not. They're really not okay.

• 13:17Speaker 05

  They're like, they're like Danny Ramirez and Harrison Ford are like charming enough and I.

• 13:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, they have like charisma and Danny Ramirez is given like exposition duty and also like jokey Robin duty.

• 13:29Sean Fennessey?

  He's very Robin in this movie.

• 13:31Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, he's like incredibly likeable.

• 13:34Sean Fennessey?

  He's charismatic as an actor, for sure. Yeah.

• 13:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Like he has, he has literally nothing to do.

• 13:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Anthony Mackie, not an actor I've really ever loved, but I think.

• 13:43Speaker 05

  He's also played this part for like 12 years now.

• 13:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And the whole movie itself, I, you know, one of the themes of the movie is living up to expectations, you know, stepping, stepping in for somebody, you know? Like when you're, you go on leave, CR's got to sit in that chair.

• 13:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Sean Fennessey?

  And he's the whole time.

• 14:04Amanda Dobbins?

  We don't have to worry about that anymore.

• 14:05Sean Fennessey?

  But in that time when, when he did, you know, when you sat in for Conclave.

• 14:10Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 14:11Sean Fennessey?

  Which some would say you were born to do, but nevertheless. People are thinking, what's Amanda thinking about Conclave? What does she think? What does she, we'll never know.

• 14:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:18Sean Fennessey?

  We'll never know.

• 14:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Back in time, slow dancing with her bow.

• 14:21Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. So Steve Rogers was laid up in bed and Sam had to step up.

• 14:26Amanda Dobbins?

  I know.

• 14:27Sean Fennessey?

  And fill in. And how'd you do?

• 14:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Falcon and the, uh, and the papal conclave. I think I did okay.

• 14:31Sean Fennessey?

  You did great.

• 14:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 14:32Sean Fennessey?

  Um, Sam's pretty hung up on this.

• 14:34Amanda Dobbins?

  I think I did a deep, deep Disney plus TV series version of that.

• 14:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Amanda Dobbins?

  You know?

• 14:38Sean Fennessey?

  And Chris Evans i- is a complicated movie star who's been catching a lot of strays here in recent times. But he was a darn good Captain America. He was very, very good in what is actually a very boring character. And he brought something, I think, very hard to describe, but, um, meaningful. And it's cool that the movie knows that and is trying to address that. But Anthony Mackie never quite rises to it and the writing really doesn't serve him well.

• 15:04Amanda Dobbins?

  There's a couple of things in, uh, watching this film that I was, I, I, I, so I know that like, it would be easy to come here and be like, fuck this movie. And so I was really, really, really trying to like, go into it and try and understand some of the choices that got made. And the best excuse I can make for the way the film looks and the way that the action sequences play out is that they are essentially trying to move away from any kind of like cinematic execution of these scenes and these set pieces and move into an almost entirely like, uh, replica of the comic book experience.

• 15:37Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, now, anybody who reads comic books know that different artists have different, like, light schemes and work with shadow and have different conceptions of the characters and show them in these different ways. And this is the flattest possible way. It's lit in this overhead, like, you know, sort of fluorescence. All the furniture is kind of like set furniture that they have brought in from TV studio the next, next door. When you're looking at like Harrison Ford on a destroyer in the war room, and the lighting in the background is like, it's like a eighth grade play version of like how you would kind of set decorate that. And it's kind of start staggering because you're like, you are Disney and Marvel, like presumably.

• 16:21Amanda Dobbins?

  You could actually rent out an actual destroyer and shoot this on there, but it all looks so fake. To a way that you're just like, you become so numb to it after a while. Like, there's no excitement in exciting scenes.

• 16:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. No, I think there's two, two things that you hit on that I think are important. One, the scenes that are not fight scenes. Compare those scenes to the non-fight scenes in Black Panther. Look at how Black Panther is shot. Look at the way that images are framed. Look at the angle that he chooses to shoot actors from. Look at the way that he communicates villainy or heroism. Or ambiguity in a character or confusion. You might not like Black Panther because it has a lot of CGI fighting at the end and you find that incoherent. But as a director, there's a lot of choices being made. In a movie like this, it does feel like everybody was like, okay, we got four hours.

• 17:13Sean Fennessey?

  To get this in the easiest way possible. Let's just get it done. Yes, exactly. We gotta make sure that we, Harrison Ford has to leave at four. So before he leaves to go have some tea and sit on his porch. Let's get what we need from him. And I gotta say, like, he's trying in this movie. He's trying to give a performance. He's way too old. To be the president and to be a person who is like. I mean, unfortunately not. I know.

• 17:42Sean Fennessey?

  It's upsetting. The text is true, but it is true because.

• 17:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Sleepy Thunderbolt.

• 17:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's not quite a Biden-esque, but there is just something strange where even in his line deliveries. He's trying to conjure the Air Force One. Right. Steeliness.

• 17:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 17:58Sean Fennessey?

  And he can't quite get there anymore. And of course it happens to all. It's coming for us all. I got no beef with Harrison Ford. I love the man. He's given me so much as a movie fan. Yeah. But even somebody as gifted as him at making movies like this better than they have any right to be. And using Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games as clear models for what this movie wants to be, or at least wants to remind you of. And not being able to get it going, setting aside all of the Red Hulk stuff, which we can get into momentarily.

• 18:25Sean Fennessey?

  I walked away from the movie thinking, why, why the hell did Harrison Ford do this? Like, why does he, I know money is nice and I know relevance is something that movie stars get addicted to. And they could, there's something fun about being part of a big project, but. Just seemed like a huge waste of his time. We've only, we've got like two more Harrison Ford movies left here and this is one of them. And that just sucks.

• 18:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I think he's just in a real like, I like to work mode. Like he's made another season in 1923.

• 18:49Sean Fennessey?

  You know. I mean, and it does seem like he has a lot of control, right? So it like, he can leave at four, you know? And he's not gonna be there at four oh two because they didn't get like the, the dogwoods or the, Cherry blossoms. You know, just so.

• 19:06Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, planes are expensive, you know? So, I mean, I know that you did the money, you waved away the money thing, but like aviation is an expensive hobby. I know, but I mean, this is one of the five most successful actors in Hollywood for thirty consecutive years. Like, how much? I don't know, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna pocket watch Harrison Ford. I think I get to like, this is like, why does Ridley Scott make two movies a year? I think because they think if they stop, like something's gonna happen. Yeah, I just, my thing is just like, why this? Right. Why, of all the things, why this? Well, that's an indictment on Hollywood, then. Like, that there's not more material out there for these people to choose from and be like, oh, I'd like to make this, like, I'll be a judge in this, in this movie, rather than I'm Thunderbolt Ross and I have a Red Hulk inside of me.

• 19:46Sean Fennessey?

  Invariably, I can't do one of these MCU episodes without talking about what they're trying to get over the line, story-wise, in some detail. And while driving Amanda either to boredom or insanity. Mm-hmm. But this movie is trying to do a bunch of things that will be consequential in some way? Even though. I think it was more accounting for everything that had happened before. So there's like lip service paid to the snap, there's lip service paid to Eternals, the Hulk, obviously, there's secret invasion stuff, there's Falcon and Winter Soldier. It's like wrapping up a lot of the street-level Marvel stuff that they've kind of set in motion, that I think they are now gonna get rid of.

• 20:31Sean Fennessey?

  What was the finale of Falcon and Winter Soldier that you thought was? I don't wanna misremember exactly what happened, but he like, the same way that this movie has this very uncomfortable relationship to like, whether torture methodology in political practice is like right or not right. It similarly had a sort of like, ultimately, we need to be on the side of the federal government. Like, we may stand in the face of power, but power also resonates. Like, it's very, you remember what I'm talking about? Yeah, there's just like a lot of stuff with Wyatt Russell's character in the show that like kinda goes up and down and then seems to have been like excised, but put back in.

• 21:13Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, there, there, there's ideas that you see in this movie.

• 21:18Amanda Dobbins?

  About whether or not these black men feel like properly recognized by the government they're serving in.

• 21:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 21:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Kind of get started in Falcon and the Soul Soldier and are among the like more interesting ideas that they have actually tried to to reckon with. And there's just something kind of staggering about it coming out now as like the American military and the federal government obviously go through the changes it's going through. We're like, wow, like it's like things have we've come so we've gone so low in so little amount of time.

• 21:49Sean Fennessey?

  Right. This is also a movie that it's like, we need to examine um American politics' relationship to the military state, but also we're going to do so by having a guy with like future technology blasting rockets through the sky all day long to be the good guy, you know, it's like, it's all very unexamined, you know, it's like, not so good to have, you know, the B one bomber or fighter jets, but if you're a guy who has Wakandan technology that can blow things up, that's cool, like it doesn't, it doesn't really have a point of view.

• 22:21Amanda Dobbins?

  The guy who has Wakandan technology who can blow things up is.

• 22:26Sean Fennessey?

  Captain America.

• 22:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Captain America, who used to be Falcon.

• 22:28Sean Fennessey?

  Correct.

• 22:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And the His suit. The suit that made him Falcon was made of vibranium, which is the Wakandan thing. Yeah.

• 22:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 22:38Amanda Dobbins?

  But that's not what's inside of the celestial island. Right, that's the the new. Adamantium. Plutonium or whatever.

• 22:45Sean Fennessey?

  We are fully spoiling now the movie.

• 22:47Amanda Dobbins?

  We didn't already fully spoil it?

• 22:48Sean Fennessey?

  Not really.

• 22:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Is that a big reveal?

• 22:50Sean Fennessey?

  Well, to me, the biggest, the biggest reveal, or at least the most like, that little tingly thing I get where I'm like, okay, at least they gave me this feeling I had was in the first act of the movie, it's revealed that the celestial that emerged from the earth at the end of Eternals, which was largely unremarked upon in all other Marvel movies, despite it being a world historical event, um, inside of it, they have discovered a material and natural resource called adamantium. You were confused when you saw this, Chris and I both very excitedly turned to you and said, that's what's inside of Wolverine, you know, that's the precious metal that.

• 23:27Amanda Dobbins?

  In Chris's defense. That, no, that was like, that was, Chris had the very nice, like, hey, that's Daredevil moment that is normally for you of, hey, Wolverine's claws are made of adamantium. Cause you knew I wouldn't know that. Or his bones. I can't remember.

• 23:41Sean Fennessey?

  His, his, his skeleton.

• 23:42Amanda Dobbins?

  His exoskeleton.

• 23:43Sean Fennessey?

  And, and his claws.

• 23:45Amanda Dobbins?

  So he, was Wolverine constructed out of adamantium? He was made into like a kind of super soldier by.

• 23:54Sean Fennessey?

  Striker.

• 23:54Amanda Dobbins?

  General Striker.

• 23:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, who was portrayed famously in the Wolverine films by Brian Cox.

• 23:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 23:59Sean Fennessey?

  Of Succession fame.

• 24:00Amanda Dobbins?

  But so adamantium was added to him. Yeah.

• 24:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 24:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Presumably from the celestial island.

• 24:06Sean Fennessey?

  His bones were fused with.

• 24:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where'd they get the adamantium? We didn't know that. Was it like natural occurring in him?

• 24:12Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know the original origins. There's some retconning going on here. This is an X-Men dog whistle. This whole thing is like, guess what, guys? We got X-Men and it's coming.

• 24:21Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's.

• 24:21Sean Fennessey?

  So sit tight for another three phases until we give you X-Men.

• 24:24Amanda Dobbins?

  They said that with the, the, the fat head.

• 24:28Sean Fennessey?

  Oh.

• 24:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, when Beast was introduced at the end of Quantum Mania, that was also an X-Men dog whistle. There have been a number of these over the years.

• 24:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Some full spoilers now for Brave New World?

• 24:37Sean Fennessey?

  Full spoilers.

• 24:42Sean Fennessey?

  Spoiler warning.

• 24:44Amanda Dobbins?

  When Tim Blake Nelson at the end of the film is like, I've looked at the statistical probabilities and there are other universes that is the other realities that will eventually come into play in the next couple of dozen movies.

• 24:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he just refers to them as the others, but the expectation there is that.

• 25:01Amanda Dobbins?

  The others are. Like the Fantastic Four, they're in a different timeline than everything else, you know? And so when we watched this credit sequence. Which came after nine minutes of credits. Yeah, and we were schooled that I wasn't allowed to make sure my children were okay on my phone during that time. That's what the Disney person was saying to you, yeah.

• 25:24Amanda Dobbins?

  I, they just, he said some things and then you guys both muttered like, secret wars?

• 25:30Sean Fennessey?

  Secret wars.

• 25:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, and so the secret wars are. All like the heroes. Everyone is fighting all together?

• 25:37Sean Fennessey?

  I'll give you a little bit of context.

• 25:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 25:39Sean Fennessey?

  This is the second to last movie in Phase Five. Okay, Phase Five has been tough sledding.

• 25:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 25:44Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, the next movie is Thunderbolts and then Phase Five is over.

• 25:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Thunderbolts and another film.

• 25:48Sean Fennessey?

  That has been reshot and rewritten.

• 25:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. How are you feeling about Thunderbolts today, big guy?

• 25:53Sean Fennessey?

  I'm I'm pro Thunderbolts.

• 25:54Amanda Dobbins?

  I know. I heard. I listened to the podcast.

• 25:56Sean Fennessey?

  I I I'm where I was the other day when we recorded, which is I think it looks fine. Looks cool. Um, I I I my expectations were really low for this movie. They're higher for Thunderbolts, but to me, they're kind of like closing all business on this era. And now in phase six, which starts in July with the Fantastic Four movie, these are the movies that are in phase six. Fantastic Four, Avengers Doomsday, in which Robert Downey Jr. Returns as Dr. Doom. Spider-Man Four and Avengers Secret Wars, which is one of the biggest crossover event Marvel stories ever told. I think it was originally in the eighties and Redone by Hickman. And then redone in the 2010s.

• 26:36Sean Fennessey?

  Those those are big movies. All of those movies have to make a billion dollars. They all are huge movies with huge expectations. The expectations on the fourth Captain America movie on Thunderbolts, these are smaller things.

• 26:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 26:48Sean Fennessey?

  It's almost like they're trying to get out all of the like mistakes that they made now so that they can get to the real stuff. So the reason to see this movie, if you're an idiot like me, or just a huge fan of these movies, is like, what are the little pellets that they've left on the ground for us? Adam Antium is one of them.

• 27:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 27:06Sean Fennessey?

  Which is a different thing than he would have said six years ago. When it would be, well, another reason to see this movie is that it might at least make gestures towards a kind of film that we like. It might be a political thriller. It might be, you know, like a sort of interstellar comedy. It might be something, you know, and now The first Captain America movie is a Gary Cooper war movie, you know? They have kind of like now arrived at like a flat slop exposition dump. So I think this just puts a tremendous amount of pressure on Fantastic Four being good.

• 27:43Amanda Dobbins?

  And I think it'll do really, I think it'll make a billion dollars or whatever. I think it'll be really big. I think people want to like these things. But this was like, we are truly in the, like, it's closing time. The lights have gone on, the overhead lights are on and we are like, oh shit, I'm still at the.

• 27:57Sean Fennessey?

  And that's why when you said that everybody's like more optimistic, I was pushing back on that a little bit because I knew this was gonna be bad. I don't think I thought it was gonna be this bad.

• 28:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Sean Fennessey?

  But I had a really good feeling it wasn't gonna work and it's a coin flip on Thunderbolts. It might stink. We really don't know.

• 28:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 28:11Sean Fennessey?

  If they mess up the next five, it's kinda over. Like, it's over. And it doesn't mean that they, those movies won't still exist, but it just means that they take on a much smaller mind share. And then I think Hollywood is gonna freak out because they've been able to depend upon these movies so deeply. I mean, Superman's part of this conversation.

• 28:28Amanda Dobbins?

  They still might be able to depend on this. It still might make ninety million dollars.

• 28:32Sean Fennessey?

  I might, I, you know, I could be wrong and I was wrong with Wolverine and Deadpool and Wolverine, but like, doesn't this feel like a movie that's gonna have a huge opening weekend and then a big drop in the second weekend? Because the word of mouth can be pretty bad. Like, even the people who love these movies, I've never heard more groaning walking out of a comic book movie than I did last night.

• 28:51Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, the theater was silent. Yeah. And people were wearing like Magneto t-shirts. No cheering, no laughter, no anything.

• 29:01Sean Fennessey?

  That's not a good sign.

• 29:02Amanda Dobbins?

  No. There was a little bit of recognition

• 29:06Amanda Dobbins?

  when Sebastian Stan came on screen. Well, yeah. I mean, that, that is the one thing that Thunderbolts has going for it, is that like, the whole movie lit up. When he filmed, he did his two hours or however long it took for him to make that one. Yeah.

• 29:19Sean Fennessey?

  And he, I think his, he's always been a fan favorite, Bucky, but I think particularly the, this like confirmation of him as a person who has entered a different stage of Hollywood success, being Academy Award nominated, being so critically acclaimed in the last few years. Um, I think it's huge for Marvel to be associated with an actor like that and they helped build him up to become an even more famous person. But I think he also just represents like an energy that people miss in the movies. And that scene, which I'm sure was a rewrite, and I'm sure like it felt like they helicoptered him in at the last minute. And frankly, is it absolutely insane because he's either a congressman or running for Congress?

• 29:58Speaker 04

  He's running for Congress.

• 29:59Sean Fennessey?

  And he's a former Soviet asset assassin?

• 30:01Amanda Dobbins?

  This is literally, so we walked out of the theater and you just kept yelling, "He is a Soviet asset!"

• 30:07Speaker 04

  You went full Mueller she-rater.

• 30:08Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, it's insane.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  This is Russian propaganda.

• 30:11Sean Fennessey?

  But like, this man killed world leaders and he is in Congress.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Well?

• 30:15Sean Fennessey?

  What state does he represent?

• 30:17Speaker 04

  Florida?

• 30:18Amanda Dobbins?

  When, which one? Who did he, when did that happen?

• 30:22Speaker 04

  He, didn't he kill?

• 30:23Sean Fennessey?

  Which leaders?

• 30:24Speaker 04

  To Charles' dad?

• 30:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Which movie?

• 30:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, oops.

• 30:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 30:28Amanda Dobbins?

  That's not good.

• 30:29Sean Fennessey?

  Fucking king of Wakanda.

• 30:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Oh, you don't want to do that.

• 30:33Sean Fennessey?

  You don't want that?

• 30:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  You don't sleep at night if you do that.

• 30:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Sean Fennessey?

  Did he actually do that or did Crossbones do that? Your boy Frank Gorillo?

• 30:41Speaker 04

  He gets blamed for it. I haven't seen, I can't remember the last time I watched Winter Soldier.

• 30:43Sean Fennessey?

  Where you at on Gorilla these days? You feeling good?

• 30:46Speaker 04

  What was he just?

• 30:47Sean Fennessey?

  Werewolves? Did you watch that?

• 30:49Speaker 04

  I didn't.

• 30:49Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Is that one Amanda? Werewolves?

• 30:51Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 30:52Speaker 04

  There's something else I wanted to talk about here.

• 30:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Who is the president at the end of this movie?

• 30:57Speaker 04

  Oh, we don't know.

• 30:58Sean Fennessey?

  We don't know.

• 30:58Speaker 04

  We don't know.

• 30:59Sean Fennessey?

  It's not Harrison Ford because, and now is the time to speak of Red Hulk. He, after one hour and 52 minutes, emerges as Red Hulk, even though they've been promoting the shit out of this movie being a Red Hulk movie. They made me wait a lot longer to see that sequence than I expected.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  He almost becomes Red Hulk on the boat.

• 31:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 31:18Amanda Dobbins?

  He does it a couple of times. He bangs the fists like a few times, you know?

• 31:22Sean Fennessey?

  They tease it.

• 31:23Amanda Dobbins?

  It's like Kendrick at the Super Bowl, but not good.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Not like us comes right at the edge. He edges.

• 31:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I, well, we were discussing this with a movie like Companion in terms of giving away a lot in the trailers to get, because the studios are nervous that people aren't going to show up. And they were nervous about this movie and they want people to come. You got Harrison Ford, you got him to sign up to be Red Hulk.

• 31:46Sean Fennessey?

  One, do you think it was a good idea that they did, that they put that at the center of the campaign of the movie? And two, did you think any of that stuff worked?

• 31:55Speaker 04

  I think that they didn't have a choice because I don't think anyone really is tracking what the Falcon to Captain America plot is. I don't think that Falcon and Winter Soldier was a warmly received. Show, I think they had some things to like, but I don't think anybody's like, ah, of course, I remember exactly what happened. So they needed some sort of world destroying thing in the movie. That was like, here's why you come. These movies are supposed to be super, super, you know, like you're supposed to see something that you would not ordinarily see.

• 32:28Speaker 04

  I don't know if it makes a difference that he, I, I think it's annoying that it really only happens the last 20 minutes of the movie.

• 32:36Speaker 04

  But it's, it's not like I wanted to see Harrison Ford transform three more times.

• 32:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I will say there was a moment, maybe about an hour in or 45 minutes in, I don't know. I, I mean, it was immediately apparent that this movie just did not work, but.

• 32:51Sean Fennessey?

  I agree, within the first scene.

• 32:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  It's a 10 minute exposition dump about what happened in the Hulk.

• 32:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. And then I think like I turned to you and I was just like, who wrote this? And you were like 45 people. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like.

• 33:03Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's five story by credits and three screenplay credits.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  I think it's like four or five screenplay credits. Yeah.

• 33:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Anyway, at some point before like my mood really got away from me, I was like, well, this stinks, but like at some point Harrison Ford will be Red Hulk and like, maybe I'll, maybe that'll be fun, you know, like maybe I like that. I think I even thought like, oh, maybe they like saved all the CGI money for Red Hulk.

• 33:30Amanda Dobbins?

  They did not, uh, they, they did not budget anything in terms of energy, time or resources to making that good.

• 33:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 33:37Amanda Dobbins?

  And that was a real bummer.

• 33:40Sean Fennessey?

  I still have a part of my lizard brain that likes watching how two characters with different powers fight. Like, I don't, that's, I'm, I was, I was nine years old once and I thought that was cool to think about.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  Did you notice that like, he has as much ease and or difficulty fighting Red Hulk as he pretty much does red shirts that he comes across over the course of the movie?

• 34:03Sean Fennessey?

  It's true. And it's a historically a problem with all action movies.

• 34:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:08Sean Fennessey?

  Um, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger had this issue too, where he would be like having trouble dispatching a normal man, but then like dominating, you know, someone who was twice his size. But in this case, it's particularly egregious. I think part of that could be like, well, that's kind of the charm of Sam is that Sam is not superpowered.

• 34:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. He talks about not taking the super serum.

• 34:26Sean Fennessey?

  You know, he doesn't take the super serum. He's a guy, which I think makes him kind of a, he's a good hero.

• 34:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but I don't.

• 34:32Sean Fennessey?

  It's not a good movie.

• 34:32Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't even. I think that they effectively communicated like his powers visually, or even like how he fights because or what his tools are. I mean, I, you know, Wakanda, he's got wings. They like, he can throw the shield. He can do other things, but the, I, the way that they, the way that they're framing the Hulk versus Sam, and some of that is like size discrepancy. Plus you got like a CGI White House in there. So, you know, there's like perspective stuff.

• 35:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Amanda Dobbins?

  But you just don't see him. Like, I don't even know how he was fighting. I mean, I guess he was like throwing the shield or like flying around, but you don't. To your point about like, I like seeing people with different powers fight. I didn't really feel like I saw them fighting.

• 35:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think it was, again, I don't, I really don't have to spend time on this. I'm sorry, but it's more just like, what were the ways in which Sam determined Red Hulk's weaknesses? That's like reading, that's what reading convo is, you know? Cause like he just cuts him with his cape a bunch and then he finally gets him to remember the cherry blossoms and walking with Betty.

• 35:33Amanda Dobbins?

  They're so ugly.

• 35:35Sean Fennessey?

  The cherry blossoms?

• 35:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Fake cherry blossoms are so ugly. I was just really upset.

• 35:40Sean Fennessey?

  I do like a cherry blossom.

• 35:41Amanda Dobbins?

  I love a cherry blossom. And even, by the way, like.

• 35:44Sean Fennessey?

  That writing is terrible.

• 35:45Amanda Dobbins?

  A real life fate, like a practical fake cherry blossom, like made of like silk or, you know, materials or whatever, like can be very beautiful, but the CGI ones, two thumbs down.

• 35:59Speaker 04

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• 36:11Speaker 05

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• 36:16Amanda Dobbins?

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• 36:44Speaker 01

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• 37:15Speaker 05

  I tried to go back through my head and be like, what did I like about this movie? Like, where were some stuff that was cool? Julius Ona, who I really don't even know what to say about him as a filmmaker, because his last two movies, I think, are This and The Cloverfield Paradox, which I remember.

• 37:31Sean Fennessey?

  He made one in between called Loose.

• 37:33Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 37:34Sean Fennessey?

  Which is a very strange and confrontational drama about race.

• 37:39Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 37:40Sean Fennessey?

  That I liked, but I'm not sure was fully thought through. Do you remember this movie? I do remember it. I did not like it.

• 37:50Sean Fennessey?

  I think what I remembered is that...

• 37:53Speaker 05

  Octavia Spencer's in that?

• 37:54Sean Fennessey?

  Octavia Spencer and it's Calvin Harrison Jr. It is. Who I think is, doesn't usually work for me, the performances.

• 38:02Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 38:03Sean Fennessey?

  Tim Roth and Naomi Watts play the adoptive parents of Calvin Harrison Jr.

• 38:10Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 38:11Sean Fennessey?

  And it's unclear if he is being singled out because he's a young black man with white parents, or if he actually is up to trouble, basically. And the movie is a bit strange. I think it's an adaptation of a novel, but kind of, it's kind of like The Cloverfield Paradox. I'm like, I don't, what does this tell you about point of view?

• 38:34Speaker 05

  The Cloverfield Paradox also got taken away from me at a certain point. I only remember that because it was the night the Eagles won the Super Bowl, is when Cloverfield Paradox came out.

• 38:41Sean Fennessey?

  Remember, at your house, at your old house.

• 38:43Speaker 05

  So I do think that some of the stuff that's like in quote unquote DC in the beginning of the movie with Isaiah Bradley's...

• 38:51Sean Fennessey?

  Manchurian Candidate moment and all that stuff with like the song and the flashing phones and the assassins is cool. And

• 39:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Sort of, but even there, it's like,

• 39:02Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, it's not

• 39:02Amanda Dobbins?

  It takes them literally an hour and a half for someone to be like, it's mind control, which is like, literally, that is a direct quote.

• 39:09Sean Fennessey?

  You're so right.

• 39:10Amanda Dobbins?

  And it was like, no shit, I heard the song the first time. Like, I've seen a movie before.

• 39:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and I guess in a, in a different world, like Ross's relationship to the leader, Samuel Stern's, right? Uh, Tim Blake Nelson's character and him being like, I was gonna die. I needed to stay alive so that I could be forgiven by my daughter. But then I double crossed this guy and now he's feeding me poison and making me into the Red Hulk is kinda cool.

• 39:40Sean Fennessey?

  It's not, it's really not well done. Yeah.

• 39:42Amanda Dobbins?

  No, it's very, it's very, very confusing.

• 39:44Sean Fennessey?

  The idea though of like a president being beholden to a shadowy figure.

• 39:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Sean Fennessey?

  I think there's a lot of on paper stuff, as I said, that like, we're doing Clear and Present Danger with the Hulk and a guy who can fly is, for me, I'm like, I would love to see that. Sure. Um, they didn't make that movie, you know, they, they made a movie where Harrison Ford is the president and barks at people. But it doesn't really have any of that. And a lot of it goes to some of that physical production stuff that doesn't work. A lot of it goes to the fact that like, the mind control one in particular, like the whole movie theater groaned when that happened. People were just like, are you serious? I'm deeply fascinated by like whether or not because a lot of these shows suffer from the same kind of like, this feels like it was reshoot or this feels like they had to like stitch this together. We are pretty much since the end of the Avengers run in this stretch of Marvel product that

• 40:34Sean Fennessey?

  kind of is substandard professionally, or falls short of ready to be released kind of standards. Yeah. And I'm not like, you know, if this, you could get into like, are we sure Kevin Feige is the right person to be running it? Relative to the bar that they set. But why can't they, why can't

• 40:49Speaker 05

  That they just like make a two hour movie like I don't understand why that's so hard. And I don't understand why.

• 40:54Sean Fennessey?

  It's payback for all the success that came on the first wave. The the genius of the first 20 movies. Is that they somehow created this Jenga tower of movie storytelling, which had never been done before. Where all the pieces fit and it culminated in the one of the biggest movie going experiences ever. In the Infinity War and Endgame thing, which. I was like, they fucking did it, man. This is super cool that they did this. And now they have to pay the piper, which is that every story that they do now has to be interconnected and has to make sense. And it's not feasible when they've gotten so big with all of the TV shows and all of the movies and they won't let a movie stand alone. Because the audiences won't accept that anymore. They will not accept.

• 41:30Speaker 05

  It's going all the way the other way where I feel like audiences are like the the sort of. It's hard to describe the atmosphere in that movie theater as people sat through. All those credits and like the page after page after page of VFX artists. Salute to you guys. Sorry, like I'm not trying to be disparaging.

• 41:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:50Speaker 05

  And you're just like. I can't believe I'm just so trained that I have to sit here and wait for this cutscene. And then the stinger comes and it sucks so bad. And it's almost like fuck you guys for waiting like.

• 42:03Sean Fennessey?

  It felt that way a few times now.

• 42:04Speaker 05

  For 10 minutes to see. Anthony Mackie talked to Tim Blake Nelson about an unexplicit. You know, at least like when when it happens in Doctor Strange, like Charlize Theron shows up, you know, like goddamn.

• 42:16Sean Fennessey?

  Harry Styles showed up once and we were like, all right, well, that was amusing at least. And okay, that that brings me to my next. Point of discussion because this came up immediately after the movie ended. Which is that you guys started talking about how Madame Web was better. Or at least you liked it more.

• 42:31Speaker 05

  I liked the experience of seeing Madame Web more than watching Brave New World.

• 42:34Sean Fennessey?

  It's you know, last year was a really tough year for comic book movies. There were three different. Um Sony related Marvel stories, Spider-Man related Marvel stories, or all of which were very bad. And there was Deadpool and Wolverine, which was a huge hit. And the conversation that we were having was, is it better for a movie to be awful while accidentally amusing? Like Madame Web? And to a lesser extent, Craven the Hunter and the Venom movies? Or to just passably? Move the ball forward, but be actively unfun to watch? Like, I was, I was like, when is this gonna end? When I was watching it.

• 43:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Brave New World.

• 43:10Sean Fennessey?

  Brave New World. So? It did give you adamantium. It did clarify the Eternals thing, which was completely bizarre. It did, I guess, close the book on Incredible Hulk. It does.

• 43:24Amanda Dobbins?

  How did it do that? Why did I ask that?

• 43:27Sean Fennessey?

  By? Making it clear that Thaddeus Ross is imprisoned and that he, but he has closed the emotional loop with his daughter. And?

• 43:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 43:37Sean Fennessey?

  They did give us a Red Hulk moment, which, even if it didn't come off that well, is something that is like comic book lore and is exciting.

• 43:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 43:45Sean Fennessey?

  And then I think also? Doesn't explicitly state, but makes it clear that Thunderbolts? Is? An offshoot of a lot of the vision that Ross? Had as a leader?

• 43:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 43:56Sean Fennessey?

  Cause he brings to Mackie, I want to restart the Avengers. And that that's gonna, that's clearly what's gonna happen in Thunderbolts, is they're gonna restart the Avengers with all of these vigilantes.

• 44:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Presumably Sebastian Stan loses his congressional race.

• 44:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Will then become the new Avengers.

• 44:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. But they're going to seem really B-team up against Fantastic Four and eventually X-Men and all the other characters that are gonna come in.

• 44:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Didn't you guys say on the watch at some point that they're gonna then?

• 44:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Redo all the timelines so that the original Avengers can come back? Uh, I think they'll come back in different, I mean, obviously like Downey's playing Doom. Uh, but I think they will bring Chris Evans back in some way because? When they already did.

• 44:36Amanda Dobbins?

  It's the same thing that happens in Deadpool and Wolverine, where it's like, oh, here's all these different? Portals of reality that you can just have? A constant kind of cavalcade of guest stars.

• 44:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. So also say, like, they did a bunch of stuff that got you thinking about the future, which I guess is.

• 44:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is cool for you. I don't, I.

• 44:54Sean Fennessey?

  It's not even cool for me anymore, is what I'm saying. Like, it stopped being cool for me five years ago.

• 44:57Amanda Dobbins?

  But to your question of? Is it better to be like? A bad, but sometimes enjoyable movie that doesn't move the project forward versus quote unquote, moving the project forward, but not having any fun. I wholeheartedly vote for Madame Web. You know, because at least you get Dakota.

• 45:21Speaker 05

  Pepsi can.

• 45:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and like Dakota Johnson being like dead.

• 45:23Speaker 05

  There's nothing weird, not even anything weird in this movie or like personal at all.

• 45:27Sean Fennessey?

  Nothing personal. I mean, there's plenty of weird, just the character of Leader is such a weird character. It's like Tim Legelson with a green brain.

• 45:34Speaker 05

  They almost seemed like they were like, well, we don't really know if we want to do this.

• 45:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's like, it's played straight.

• 45:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, if it had been a James Gunn movie, it would have been like, he would have had a fucking huge brain and it would have been insane. It would have been funny and these movies aren't funny anymore. Uh, the special effects are not good. The fight scenes are kind of dull. There's really no consequences to 80% of the action set pieces.

• 45:57Speaker 05

  It's tough, man. I like these movies a lot. I used to like these movies like a fair amount and it's just sort of strange. I just, I wonder how long they can hold. Cause when do you lose the essential 40% of your audience? It's like, I don't really understand. I'm just going because they're fun movies.

• 46:14Sean Fennessey?

  Well, we watched this happen with the TV shows where the TV shows kind of started at a high, right? Where it was Wandavision, Loki and this show to a lesser extent. And it was like flawed, maybe a little too long.

• 46:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 46:26Sean Fennessey?

  But well made for the most part, felt contained, but with consequences. And then slowly but surely they started just like clearly losing anybody who could be described as less than a super fan. And I stopped watching them and I waited my whole life for this shit to happen. And I just don't care. I gotta watch any of the shows anymore at all. And I'm still in like, you know, I'm a more engaged, elevated person. There's a whole rung of people beneath me that is probably somewhere between me and you.

• 46:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 46:56Sean Fennessey?

  You know, where you probably, if you were not doing the show, would see one out of every five at most.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  You would have baby gone seen like Endgame and Infinity War. I think Phoebe, I think my wife saw one.

• 47:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I leaned in with us to see Endgame.

• 47:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and I think.

• 47:09Speaker 05

  I think they went saw Logan.

• 47:10Sean Fennessey?

  Or sort of like the same way.

• 47:11Amanda Dobbins?

  No, Phoebe and I saw Logan.

• 47:12Sean Fennessey?

  They were kind of Barbenheimer-esque, like everyone's seeing this. We all, we at least gotta go see it thing. But once they start losing everybody below me, the business is in trouble.

• 47:23Speaker 05

  They're in danger of turning off the Midnight Boys Ringerverse squad because they're like, this looks like.

• 47:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, can we talk about that for a second?

• 47:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, like, when does, when does the production value and the, like, when does that break? Because it

• 47:37Sean Fennessey?

  I thought this was the worst yet.

• 47:39Amanda Dobbins?

  It is so noticeably awful. And, you know, I have, I, I don't care for, like, the comic book aesthetic. You know, it's never gonna look like beautiful, fine art to me. But it's just, they, they can't make it work.

• 47:56Speaker 05

  I mean, it's just gone down. I mean, if you go back and

• 47:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Of course, and it used to at least be acceptable.

• 48:01Speaker 05

  Iron Man 3 looks like the fucking

• 48:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally, and the fight scenes at least, like, made sense. And you believed that someone, you know, they were connected to the story. Like, I just, if you're only going to these movies to see Red Hulk and Captain America fight.

• 48:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 48:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, at this point, I don't even think the movies are delivering a positive experience, like, a positive, like, fight.

• 48:24Speaker 05

  It feels like they're, it almost feels like there's a story right now about Disney realizes that they may be over, overpricing their parks experience.

• 48:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:35Speaker 05

  But they're addicted to finding new ways of squeezing a hundred, a thousand, or whatever, out of people by offering, like, Fastpass Lightning Scheme or whatever. And they're just like, we have to keep cranking it. Like, there's no way to come back off of it.

• 48:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Speaker 05

  And when you watch this, you're kind of like, did you guys just decide, we're all so stupid, we'll go see it no matter what? So why pay money

• 48:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 48:57Speaker 05

  for someone who's like, I have a point of view. This is what I want. I need you to build this set. I don't want to shoot in Hungary. You know, I want to shoot it in.

• 49:05Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm just, let's go, let's even like the slightly nicer version. It's not even that they're like, well, like, maybe we don't have the ability. Like, maybe, maybe like technology is not there what it is.

• 49:15Sean Fennessey?

  It's not what it is.

• 49:16Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I, like, at the scale that they're talking about.

• 49:18Sean Fennessey?

  Jurassic Park in 1993. Like, it's

• 49:19Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I guess so, that's true.

• 49:21Sean Fennessey?

  To me

• 49:21Speaker 05

  Watch Rogue One 10, like, 10 years ago. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, we can't make Disney can make

• 49:25Amanda Dobbins?

  But at the scale that they're trying to do it.

• 49:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think there's

• 49:27Amanda Dobbins?

  But the amount of time and the amount of stuff that they're, like,

• 49:30Sean Fennessey?

  It's really, really hard, and I don't know at what stage the pre-vis and then having to close the effects relative to the reshoots. Because the reshoots are built in, but this was more reshoots than usual, as I understand it. But whether or not the reshoots compounded on them to the point where there was just not enough money left to get the visuals. Just as a point of conversation. The directors of the Phase Four movies are Kate Shortland, Destin Daniel Cretton, Chloé Zhao, John Watts, Sam Raimi, Taika Waititi, and Ryan Coogler. Regardless of what you think about those movies, that's a lot of directors with strong visions. Not all of those movies work all the time, but there are images, even CGI oriented images, like the black and white stuff in Thor: Love and Thunder, which is a movie I think is terrible.

• 50:12Sean Fennessey?

  That stuff looks amazing. You know, there's stuff in the Raimi movie that is really cool.

• 50:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:17Sean Fennessey?

  This movie has none of that. It doesn't have a shred of vision. It doesn't have a shred of like wow, or pop, or daring. Like, there's just nothing in it that makes you go like, well, at least there was a person who had an idea that was different from what we've seen in the other movies.

• 50:32Speaker 05

  I mean, I think there's shots in this where it looks like, and it's not a shot at him. It's like, I think Ford's reading off a prompter. Like, you know, he's like, standing with Mackie here, but he's like, not looking in Mackie's face. He's kind of looking over his shoulder. I'm like, I think he's probably-

• 50:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Or Mackie's not there.

• 50:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, and he's got to read a bunch of stuff that's like, alright, you guys just gave me this page, so I have to, I have to talk about what I decided to do in Harlem in 2008, the Hulk, you know?

• 50:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 50:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Is Harrison Ford outside at any point?

• 51:02Sean Fennessey?

  Just when he gives the speech.

• 51:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, oh, like the Rose Garden. Yeah, but even that is like a set.

• 51:08Speaker 05

  No, he's in the Japanese president's like palace for a second. They're outside in that garden. Yeah, you're right.

• 51:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, no, no.

• 51:16Speaker 05

  The whole idea is he's got to go into this bunker because there's been an assassination.

• 51:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, so but he's like, he is in the bunker for most of the time in one location.

• 51:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 51:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, in one set that they built in like his trailer outside of 1920, whatever.

• 51:31Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. I, I think it's entirely possible that this is a speed bump and that things recover with, maybe not even Fantastic Four specifically, but that the Avengers movies, because-

• 51:43Speaker 05

  The Russos come back.

• 51:44Sean Fennessey?

  They're so too big to fail and the Russos know what they're doing with these big, you know, erector set movies where like, all this stuff has to make sense together. I mean, they've done it. They were literally already done it before, like multiple times. But it's also possible that they don't, and that they don't do it fast enough. To salvage all this new terrain that they have potentially to ply with the Fox acquisition, which I never would have guessed. I just would never would have guessed who would have gotten to this point. This could be seen as a wild overreaction to one really bad movie. Or not?

• 52:17Speaker 05

  I think it's the culmination of a kind of like, there was a bunch of different places where you'd be like, well, it was COVID. Well, it was the strikes. Well, it was a changing of the guard and you gotta like build up these new stories and they've had

• 52:29Speaker 05

  circumstances come in, Jonathan Majors, like all these things that have like affected how they were maybe trying to build things. But for me, I think it's repeated offenses of there just being too many cooks in the kitchen or like the directors or writers being removed where you're just like, I, the most nefarious cynical idea I have about this is that they are like preparing American audiences to accept AI versions of this stuff and that they are essentially like, we are gonna build an expectation. You guys have such low expectations of this that we can literally manufacture Sam Wilson stories like every three months with like digital.

• 53:07Sean Fennessey?

  You might be right.

• 53:07Amanda Dobbins?

  He's right. You read the list of directors from phase four. All like people who know what they're doing. And we talked about no matter what, you know, there was, there was something to hold on to. And my instinct was like, but does like, do Disney and Marvel want that? Like, do they actually want any individuality? Did the experiment of hiring cool directors to like, put their spin on these things yields what they wanted? Or do they just want more like gruel to feed out to people who are like, yay! Comics.

• 53:38Sean Fennessey?

  It's so tricky. I mean, I think they just got really high on their own supply of Thor, Ragnarok and Black Panther, both being risky choices to go with Taika Waititi and Ryan Coogler and those movies being two of the best movies that they ever made. And both huge hits for B tier characters. So then they were like, we're feeling ourselves. We know what we're doing. We can do this over and over again. And now all of a sudden, it's Matt Shakman and the Russo's and that Daniel Destin-Cretin coming in because John Watts doesn't want to make a fourth Spider-Man movie.

• 54:08Sean Fennessey?

  So I think they've definitely tired of that strategy. Um, you know, I just, okay, let me, let's pull back just a little bit before we close this. Cinematic universes has become something that was, did not really exist 20 years ago. Was not really a way we thought about movies. We did have like sequels to individual movies. But we never had this thing where you'd have multiple characters crossing over and these huge skyscraper-esque constructions of storytelling. It's kind of infected and infested lots of different kinds of movies, the Fast and the Furious movies.

• 54:42Speaker 05

  Den of Thieves.

• 54:43Sean Fennessey?

  Den of Thieves is aspiring to a cinematic universe. It is, it is for sure.

• 54:48Sean Fennessey?

  Is this sustainable? It's obviously not really good. It's not really good for movies. It has been quite destructive for even the idea of sequels. It's kind of fucked up the idea of a fun sequel. Is it sustainable? Do you think it will continue to exist in the way that it does?

• 55:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 55:06Sean Fennessey?

  Just because it's easier to get people's asses in seats with this?

• 55:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, absolutely. And, and also because I think for people who are making these things, and by the people who are making these things, I mean the corporations and not the filmmakers. Like, do they really care at some point whether they're giving you? I mean, I guess they sort of make more money from a movie, but like maybe not, and maybe it's easier to just like, you know, make 15 really inexpensive TV show type things that you can watch on your, you know, they, they just want widgets, right? That they can slot in.

• 55:40Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know, but movies are still a thing that when they work have the highest payout.

• 55:46Speaker 05

  I definitely think you're onto something here. I was thinking about this with Ballerino a lot. The John Wick story where you're just like, man, the first Wick is perfect. They never thought they would make a sequel. The sequels are cool. The fourth one is where they've just, but the John Wick, the fourth John Wick movie looks so beautiful compared to these movies. I think I would be way more open to the cinematic universe stuff if they put any emphasis on the cinema part.

• 56:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 56:16Speaker 05

  And not everything on the universe.

• 56:17Sean Fennessey?

  That is like the response to the like, why does it, maybe we don't have the technology question. It's like, you do, you just have to like kill Keanu Reeves in the process of making the movie to make it look great. And they're not going to do that, obviously. I, I find it to be very dispiriting as someone who is in this professional seed. And I used to wonder, when I was a kid and I would read interviews with film critics and they would be so despairing. You would watch Siskel and Ebert talk about Halloween five on their show and they were miserable. They were like, I can't fucking believe I've got to choke down.

• 56:52Speaker 05

  Now it's fun to go back and watch that shit. Yeah.

• 56:53Sean Fennessey?

  I know. And that, because that stuff is, seems quaint by comparison. But they were so mad at how American movies had been just completely diluted and reduced down to the stupidest fucking thing for a 13 year old. They were so mad. And I was like, these guys don't get it.

• 57:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm 13.

• 57:13Sean Fennessey?

  They don't get what's fun about going to the movies. And I'm in my 40s and I'm thinking about it. And you know what? I'm sure there's a 13 year olds who's gonna be like, Anthony Mackie is my favorite actor and I love, I love that this guy.

• 57:25Speaker 05

  Came back.

• 57:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And I'm not taking that away from any of those kids, but in my position now, I'm like, so another 10 years of Marvel for me? Really?

• 57:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 57:34Sean Fennessey?

  And I'm sure you feel even worse.

• 57:36Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, in, in some ways I don't feel as bad because for a long time, it's been like, do I have fun at one of these things or do I not have fun at one of these things? And most of the time I don't, but every once in a while, you know, they pulled it off and that's just going to be more of that. So. To the 13 year old, I would say this isn't even fun, you know? And I guess if you're 13.

• 57:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 57:59Amanda Dobbins?

  If you're 13 and you have fun, like, life's, life's hard. Good job, you, you know, for, but.

• 58:05Speaker 05

  But if you're like mostly interfacing with things as vertical video and you're like.

• 58:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 58:09Speaker 05

  You know, you know what I mean? Your attention span is like.

• 58:11Sean Fennessey?

  This movie really gets your attention with the five foot two Mossad agent in the film.

• 58:16Speaker 05

  What the fuck, dog? What happened there?

• 58:19Sean Fennessey?

  Ruth, AKA, uh, Seraph.

• 58:22Speaker 05

  An Israeli born widow. Not widow, like a, like in the widow program, the racial vice.

• 58:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 58:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, um, in the comics, she is a mutant. And, um, she is very clearly like an IDF soldier. Um, and in this film, sort of retconned into being part of the widow program, I guess.

• 58:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:41Sean Fennessey?

  But like, what the hell was that character? Why is that character even in this movie?

• 58:45Speaker 05

  It's like the president seems to have two head security agents, right?

• 58:51Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know.

• 58:52Speaker 05

  Cause Rokomor plays the other one, right? Like, like.

• 58:55Sean Fennessey?

  But like she was Secret Service. I guess she's like head of the Department of Defense detail. I, again, like another thing where it's like, why is this character here?

• 59:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:02Amanda Dobbins?

  No idea.

• 59:03Sean Fennessey?

  What did it accomplish in the movie?

• 59:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I, nothing. I mean, I guess they needed to have a woman in there.

• 59:08Sean Fennessey?

  That's what it was.

• 59:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 59:09Sean Fennessey?

  Checking boxes.

• 59:10Speaker 05

  There's all these movies where, uh, you, you'd say your mileage may vary. And it might, this, there might be a person out there is like, this is awesome. And maybe there is a 13 year old out there is just like, Sam Wilson is my favorite Avenger ever. And this is so cool. But man, I, I kind of wonder with this one, whether people are going to be like, oh, this just didn't do anything. This didn't do anything for me. I, and I like these movies and I want these stories and I, I, I make it my business to know all about what's happening in these things. And they're just like this, just on a bare bones, like fundamental, like was this movie assembled well and put together well? And did it look cool? And did the action sing? And it's like, no, man, it didn't. I don't even think that's up for debate.

• 59:53Sean Fennessey?

  Any closing thoughts?

• 59:54Amanda Dobbins?

  I think if you're 25. And you thought this was fun? I want you to ask more for your life. I think thirteen's okay, twenty-five. You're still in a phase of discovery in your life, but I think we could discover more.

• 1:00:08Speaker 05

  I'll be very curious to see whether there's any, like, what's the delta between like a critical reception for this film? And the box office and like, is there just enough of a, of a sustainable engine of like interest in these movies? No matter what they are to go. And like, these are regardless of what you say, familiar faces. There is a Hulk, there is Falcon who's been in these movies, like people will probably anticipate Bucky Barnes making an appearance like. This is a little bit of old sheet music, so I'll be very curious to see what this makes. But if there's any justice in the world, I don't think it'll make a lot because I'd like them to get better.

• 1:00:45Sean Fennessey?

  Deadpool and Wolverine is a movie that I felt very comfortable saying is borderline dangerous to the future of Hollywood storytelling. But as you guys recall, because we saw it together, I laughed the whole time. I was like, this is really funny. It's stupid.

• 1:01:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Bone density.

• 1:01:02Speaker 05

  That was also a film that they let Ryan Reynolds make exactly to his own specifications.

• 1:01:06Sean Fennessey?

  That was the point I was gonna make was I was like, they didn't fuck with that too much. There were certain things that they probably didn't let him do ultimately, but he got to do his thing. And he's mostly gotten to do his thing. Now, I don't think Ryan Reynolds should get to do his thing all the time. See twenty twenty-five news cycle, but.

• 1:01:22Amanda Dobbins?

  You know what? I honestly, I, I, he's, I, I, I don't, I guess I'm not.

• 1:01:29Sean Fennessey?

  Team Ryan, team Ryan.

• 1:01:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Basically, listen, he just yelled at him.

• 1:01:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, and.

• 1:01:35Sean Fennessey?

  Um, okay, that's, I think we need to have some, a little more, a deeper critical lens on what's what he's up to.

• 1:01:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. And also is trying to like ruin this guy. Well, listen.

• 1:01:43Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it goes much deeper than that, in my opinion.

• 1:01:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:01:46Sean Fennessey?

  But I don't have any evidence to support those claims, so I will just say.

• 1:01:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:01:51Sean Fennessey?

  Examine the text, then think of the subtext.

• 1:01:53Speaker 05

  Did you examine the text? Did you read a lot of the, the court filings?

• 1:01:57Amanda Dobbins?

  I have read a lot of them and I wouldn't want to be texting with. But I just like the basic, I mean, like the text that Justin Baldoni claims is like, oh, he's so nice to me. It's like the most like obsequious, annoying, like fake, obsequious, annoying, trying to get what I want, like Hollywood thing of all time. So that's not a conversation I would want to be having.

• 1:02:18Sean Fennessey?

  And I am taking no one's side in that circumstance. I'm just saying that um, there are powerful forces at work.

• 1:02:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:02:27Sean Fennessey?

  What do you think about that?

• 1:02:28Speaker 05

  Like, uh, Thunderbolt Ross?

• 1:02:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, akin to Red Hulks, certainly. Um, Chris, thanks for coming on board this train with us.

• 1:02:37Speaker 05

  Thought it was gonna be funnier. I thought I would be funnier about it, but then I got depressed.

• 1:02:41Sean Fennessey?

  This was a solemn and angry episode of The Big Picture.

• 1:02:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I told you we should have flipped them.

• 1:02:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Amanda Dobbins?

  I know we couldn't. Listen, like time and schedule and all sorts of things.

• 1:02:52Sean Fennessey?

  Robert Wagner and his ability to participate in a draft episode, which is coming next week. Also, next week, we'll be talking about Paddington in Peru, and I'll be talking about what the desecration of that cinematic universe.

• 1:03:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you want to come tomorrow?

• 1:03:05Speaker 05

  To the movie?

• 1:03:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, with me and Knox.

• 1:03:07Speaker 05

  I think I'm going to MJ Lenderman. Is it the same?

• 1:03:09Amanda Dobbins?

  No, it's at 3:45.

• 1:03:13Sean Fennessey?

  We'll also talk about another extended cinematic universe, Bridget Jones 4: Mad About the Boy.

• 1:03:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Sean Fennessey?

  That's the fourth film in the Bridget Jones story. And um, we're gonna try.

• 1:03:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Christopher, have you read Bridget Jones?

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:03:27Amanda Dobbins?

  I like.

• 1:03:28Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know who, what you think you're doing where like men of a certain age have read Bridget Jones. Like, I don't know a single man who's read that book.

• 1:03:34Amanda Dobbins?

  But Chris is like enlightened, you know?

• 1:03:37Sean Fennessey?

  No, he's not. Chris watches Lioness and jerks off. What are you talking about?

• 1:03:45Sean Fennessey?

  Chris is not reading Bridget Jones?

• 1:03:47Amanda Dobbins?

  I just feel like.

• 1:03:48Sean Fennessey?

  This is my brother. This is my literal brother.

• 1:03:51Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know, but you know, he's an Anglophile. It's like, it's very charming.

• 1:03:55Speaker 05

  Uh, I'm sure you're right. Yeah. I don't want to take anything away from what they've accomplished.

• 1:04:01Sean Fennessey?

  The most apoplectic that you've been since you came back.

• 1:04:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Have you ever seen a Bridget Jones movie?

• 1:04:05Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:04:05Amanda Dobbins?

  What in the fuck is wrong with you?

• 1:04:07Speaker 05

  I'm sorry. I just haven't. I haven't. I haven't.

• 1:04:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Remember how you'd never seen Singin' in the Rain until you watched it with Knox?

• 1:04:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, that was great.

• 1:04:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, I, you know, that's fine. And you want the third chair.

• 1:04:18Sean Fennessey?

  Really weird expectations of men. Like, it's something we should explore more deeply in the future.

• 1:04:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, are they weird? Or is it how everyone should be? And it's like, you're not.

• 1:04:29Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's your fascistic tendencies that rise to the surface where you're like, this is how it is, and I will accept no other.

• 1:04:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, because I'm dealing with an entire society of men being like, this is how it is all the time.

• 1:04:42Sean Fennessey?

  Well, no, no, no.

• 1:04:42Amanda Dobbins?

  And I'm like, no, over here, this is how it is.

• 1:04:44Sean Fennessey?

  We're doing an episode about Bridget Jones, are we not?

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  A secret.

• 1:04:47Amanda Dobbins?

  And you couldn't read the book. It's very light reading. It's breezy.

• 1:04:51Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't read whatever this Captain America movie was based on either.

• 1:04:55Speaker 05

  He's reading The Odyssey and Vineland.

• 1:04:57Sean Fennessey?

  I am reading, I'm rereading Vineland.

• 1:05:00Speaker 05

  Book club Vineland?

• 1:05:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. But also, you could read Bridget Jones. You could read it tonight. You could read it, yeah.

• 1:05:07Sean Fennessey?

  Um, no.

• 1:05:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:05:10Sean Fennessey?

  But we will talk about the movie on the show. And we're gonna try to do something that might be a horrible idea, and that might actually be offensive to Chris. But we're gonna try to build the American-British movie canon.

• 1:05:22Speaker 05

  That's okay. I feel like you guys are really well suited to do that.

• 1:05:24Sean Fennessey?

  What Americans think are great British movies in the 21st century.

• 1:05:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm sure also that all of our British listeners will be thrilled by this.

• 1:05:33Sean Fennessey?

  They'll wanna assassinate us, but it's okay. We'll have fun. Well, don't spoil it.

• 1:05:37Speaker 05

  But that's what we're talking about.

• 1:05:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Speaker 05

  American guys being like, Snatch is really good.

• 1:05:42Sean Fennessey?

  Right, that's the thing. That will be like what I can contribute, but I think Amanda has a lot more text.

• 1:05:46Amanda Dobbins?

  I think also, American women being like Bridget Jones' Diary starring an American.

• 1:05:51Speaker 05

  I want you to know that I respect them. My administration, they will have a seat.

• 1:05:57Amanda Dobbins?

  I just think you would like, kind of be charmed by the book.

• 1:05:59Speaker 05

  I think I would be too. It's not like, I'm not trying to be a dick. I literally barely can make it through like Mike Sando's six takeaways from a Super Bowl victory by my two.

• 1:06:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Diary entry form, like you actually could get through this.

• 1:06:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I think The Turner Diaries is written similarly, so. Um.

• 1:06:17Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm.

• 1:06:19Sean Fennessey?

  I appreciate.

• 1:06:22Amanda Dobbins?

  I went to this fucking Marvel movie.

• 1:06:24Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 1:06:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Forty minutes early.

• 1:06:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Because you're an idiot, and I didn't even say anything. I was like, I guess Sean is gonna be a psycho.

• 1:06:33Sean Fennessey?

  The one time you piped down, and you should've said something.

• 1:06:36Amanda Dobbins?

  I was trying to be supportive. I was meeting you.

• 1:06:38Speaker 05

  I was very surprised that you weren't like, let's get a dessert.

• 1:06:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Where you were. I know, but I thought he was like, being so crazy. And I was like, I got invited to Wood Ranch. Like, this is, like, Sean.

• 1:06:48Sean Fennessey?

  Time, I'm gonna do it. I don't understand. What if it was Chris's idea? It was a good idea. I don't like, that's fine. So I met you where you were. What does it matter if I read Bridget Jones? Just don't be a dick.

• 1:06:58Speaker 05

  You guys should save this for the Bridget Jones episode.

• 1:07:01Sean Fennessey?

  Well, Yasi will be here, so we won't be this fervid.

• 1:07:04Speaker 05

  Oh, you guys don't really fight in front of Yasi?

• 1:07:06Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, we're working up to it. I mean, it's Newark, you know? So, okay. Well, great job, everybody. Thanks to Jack Sanders for his work and for staying till 4:49 PM on a Wednesday. Jack, thank you. This is a double session.

• 1:07:21Speaker 05

  This is all time you get back tomorrow, brother.

• 1:07:23Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks to our producer, Robert Wagner.

• 1:07:26Speaker 05

  What's future Jack gonna do with his life?

• 1:07:28Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe he should check out an early screening of Captain America: Brave New World. Thanks for listening along and watching this show. And have you been watching the big picture on YouTube?

• 1:07:36Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:07:37Sean Fennessey?

  And what do you think? Good experience?

• 1:07:38Speaker 05

  It's a good experience. Did you know The Watch is on platform, on video, on Spotify?

• 1:07:41Sean Fennessey?

  I did, because I listened to The Watch. We are coming, coming to the, to the Spotify platform soon.

• 1:07:48Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:07:49Sean Fennessey?

  I can't say when.

• 1:07:50Speaker 05

  Join me.

• 1:07:51Sean Fennessey?

  It may be.

• 1:07:52Speaker 05

  The Spotify cinematic universe.

• 1:07:53Sean Fennessey?

  How does that affect, like, my data saving? I don't know the answer to that question, and I won't even try to answer it. But we will see you next week.