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Why the dragonball syndrome works well with MCU but fails in X-Men?


Dragonball syndrome is the type of story that constantly raising the bar to absurd levels.

Superhero movies like MCU and X-Men started humbly with regular people that have a little more power (a robot suit, or a set of really strong claws) to defeat villains and save the day.

As in Dragon Ball, the bar is constantly raised and now we end up with celestial beings, gods and cosmic entities to fight againts.

MCU does this remarkably well. However, for X-Men, the higher the power levels the worse the movies became. Logan was great because it's back into small scale level again. X-Men: First Class was great because mutants just being mutants. Apocalypse was terrible because they started to make mutants to be ancient Gods. Last Stand was bad when Jean Grey became somekind of supernatural fire deity or something. And now we have this movie, which is presumably bad. They've jumped the shark.

But how come a guy in a nonsensical nano-suit (Iron Man) could battle Star Wars aliens and what not and still make damn sense? Even a guy that shoots arrows! A guy that shoot arrows fighting alongside Supermen and Superwomen and Superracoon and Supertree. It's crazy!

Why doesn't it work for X-Men??

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Last Stand was bad because Jean Grey's powers in the movie were nowhere near as grandiose and huge-scale as they were in the comics. She should be flying around the universe destroying entire planets and civilizations, not just disintegrating a few ground troops.

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It would work if the overall quality of the films were better. The bigger threats are built a lot better in the MCU than they are in the X-Men where they tend to be rushed. Just wait til Marvel starts making X-Men films.

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I agree Fox rushed both X-Men and F4 movies , i'm pretty sure Marvel Studios will take their time and make terrific movies if they cast the right actors

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The bar never seems to rise much for the X-Men movies, which is part of the problem. There's always a mutant with a plot device power who the bad guys use to either kill all humans or kill all mutants. They haven't moved much beyond Guy With Claws, either. Remember, as powerful as Xavier or Jean Grey were, a guy with claws eventually took the out. Things might change with this movie, but the X-Men films never went into the crazier parts of the franchise such as the Savage Land, or the Shi'Ar Empire. We never got Onslaught and while Apocalypse was pretty powerful, there's a lot of weird cosmic stuff they could have done with the character in his film debut.

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I think Apocalypse raised the bar, but you're right... They only raised the antagonists and not the X-Men themselves. I mean, Iron Man is still a guy in a robot suit, but the suit advances along with the bar raised by the antagonists. I don't think it's even iron now.

OTOH, X-Men keeps making the claw guy to magically overcome any challenges. No upgraded claws, no new superpower, no new weapon, no nothing. He just, somehow, win in the end.

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Every Iron Man suit after the MK-I was never iron. He explains it in the first movie.

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Ah, good to know.

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MCU does it well because they set it up early on. We were hinted at Thanos in 2012. Plus we were already exposed to god-like beings in Thor. In addition to that they kept adding infinity stones. It works if its done gradually. Since we had already seen other worlds and planets by the time of Infinity War it didn't feel out of place to have Tony and Peter stuck on a distant planet.

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This story was huge in comics many years ago.

It had alien superbeings showing up to try to kill her and the climax took place on the moon.

The problem with Fox films is they don't use the source material that everyone loved and they cheapen things up a lot. If they actually used the original stories they would be far more successful.

Marvel films include a lot of original stories elements.

Also, Fox seems to focus a lot on young people as actors. That loses something because most superheroes are adults. People doing advanced science tend to be adults, etc. Having kids play the roles looks weird and many actors that age probably can't imagine the pain and stress of being a superhero, and so their acting is flat.

The Star Wars prequels had that issue with the Darth Vader actor. I could see on his face that he didn't understand the character.

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I have to say it bothered me in the marvel movies too. In endgame the big battle at the end is quite stupid: you have some of these heroes clearly waaaaay stronger than others, yet they all fight the same way (meaning, they can defeat the same kind of monsters or face similar resistance from them). You would expect the stronger ones killing the big monsters and the weaker ones killing the small enemies, but no. Or maybe the strong hero killing a ton of small enemies that were a threat for weaker heroes. No again.

Anyway, other than that, they managed to raise the bar because:
1- They have given improvements to the heroes all the time (so, like in dragon ball, the heroes "work out" and become better fighters than before, with higher "power level").
2- They are given trick solutions (in endgame, for instance, they KNOW they need the stones to defeat Thanos, or they would lose with their own strenght because he is stronger than all of them put together).
This doesn't happen in x-men, who are produced by Singer in the same fashion of a kid playing with his toys and having wolverine fight against a sentinel and then psylock comes over and she has a mental sword but professor x uses his powers and.....
That's not very clever writing.

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Really good observation. I agree entirely.

MCU movies may have flaws all right, but now I can safely say that Disney's Marvel has THE BEST movie producers the world has ever seen.

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