Category: Blog

“Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a totally coherent system bound to context and behavior.” — Kenneth L. Pike

The web has accents. So should our design systems.

Design Systems as Living Languages

Design systems aren’t component libraries—they’re living languages. Tokens are phonemes, components are words, patterns are phrases, layouts are sentences. The conversations we build with users become the stories our products tell.

But here’s what we’ve forgotten: the more fluently a language is spoken, the more accents it can support without losing meaning. English in Scotland differs from English in Sydney, yet both are unmistakably English. The language adapts to context while preserving core meaning. This couldn’t be more obvious to me, a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, who learned English with an American accent, and lives in Sydney.

Our design systems must work the same way. Rigid adherence to visual rules creates brittle systems that break under contextual pressure. Fluent systems bend without breaking.

Consistency becomes a prison

The promise of design systems was simple: consistent components would accelerate development and unify experiences. But as systems matured and products grew more complex, that promise has become a prison. Teams file “exception” requests by the hundreds. Products launch with workarounds instead of system components. Designers spend more time defending consistency than solving user problems.

Our design systems must learn to speak dialects.

A design dialect is a systematic adaptation of a design system that maintains core principles while developing new patterns for specific contexts. Unlike one-off customizations or brand themes, dialects preserve the system’s essential grammar while expanding its vocabulary to serve different users, environments, or constraints.

When Perfect Consistency Fails

At Booking.com, I learned this lesson the hard way. We A/B-tested everything—color, copy, button shapes, even logo colors. As a professional with a graphic design education and experience building brand style guides, I found this shocking. While everyone fell in love with Airbnb’s pristine design system, Booking grew into a giant without ever considering visual consistency.  

The chaos taught me something profound: consistency isn’t ROI; solved problems are.

At Shopify. Polaris () was our crown jewel—a mature design language perfect for merchants on laptops. As a product team, we were expected to adopt Polaris as-is. Then my fulfillment team hit an “Oh, Ship!” moment, as we faced the challenge of building an app for warehouse pickers using our interface on shared, battered Android scanners in dim aisles, wearing thick gloves, scanning dozens of items per minute, many with limited levels of English understanding.

Task completion with standard Polaris: 0%.

Every component that worked beautifully for merchants failed completely for pickers. White backgrounds created glare. 44px tap targets were invisible to gloved fingers. Sentence-case labels took too long to parse. Multi-step flows confused non-native speakers.

We faced a choice: abandon Polaris entirely, or teach it to speak warehouse.

The Birth of a Dialect

We chose evolution over revolution. Working within Polaris’s core principles—clarity, efficiency, consistency—we developed what we now call a design dialect:

Constraint	Fluent Move	Rationale
Glare & low light	Dark surfaces + light text	Reduce glare on low-DPI screens
Gloves & haste	90px tap targets (~2cm)	Accommodate thick gloves
Multilingual	Single-task screens, plain language	Reduce cognitive load

Result: Task completion jumped from 0% to 100%. Onboarding time dropped from three weeks to one shift.

This wasn’t customization or theming—this was a dialect: a systematic adaptation that maintained Polaris’s core grammar while developing new vocabulary for a specific context. Polaris hadn’t failed; it had learned to speak warehouse.

The Flexibility Framework

At Atlassian, working on the Jira platform—itself a system within the larger Atlassian system—I pushed for formalizing this insight. With dozens of products sharing a design language across different codebases, we needed systematic flexibility so we built directly into our ways of working. The old model—exception requests and special approvals—was failing at scale.

We developed the Flexibility Framework to help designers define how flexible they wanted their components to be:

Tier	Action	Ownership
Consistent	Adopt unchanged	Platform locks design + code
Opinionated	Adapt within bounds	Platform provides smart defaults, products customize
Flexible	Extend freely	Platform defines behavior, products own presentation

During a navigation redesign, we tiered every element. Logo and global search stayed Consistent. Breadcrumbs and contextual actions became Flexible. Product teams could immediately see where innovation was welcome and where consistency mattered.

The Decision Ladder

Flexibility needs boundaries. We created a simple ladder for evaluating when rules should bend:

Good: Ship with existing system components. Fast, consistent, proven.

Better: Stretch a component slightly. Document the change. Contribute improvements back to the system for all to use.

Best: Prototype the ideal experience first. If user testing validates the benefit, update the system to support it.

The key question: “Which option lets users succeed fastest?”

Rules are tools, not relics.

Unity Beats Uniformity

Gmail, Drive, and Maps are unmistakably Google—yet each speaks with its own accent. They achieve unity through shared principles, not cloned components. One extra week of debate over button color costs roughly $30K in engineer time.

Unity is a brand outcome; fluency is a user outcome. When the two clash, side with the user.

Governance Without Gates

How do you maintain coherence while enabling dialects? Treat your system like a living vocabulary:

Document every deviation – e.g., dialects/warehouse.md with before/after screenshots and rationale.

Promote shared patterns – when three teams adopt a dialect independently, review it for core inclusion.

Deprecate with context – retire old idioms via flags and migration notes, never a big-bang purge.

A living dictionary scales better than a frozen rulebook.

Start Small: Your First Dialect

Ready to introduce dialects? Start with one broken experience:

This week: Find one user flow where perfect consistency blocks task completion. Could be mobile users struggling with desktop-sized components, or accessibility needs your standard patterns don’t address.

Document the context: What makes standard patterns fail here? Environmental constraints? User capabilities? Task urgency?

Design one systematic change: Focus on behavior over aesthetics. If gloves are the problem, bigger targets aren’t “”breaking the system””—they’re serving the user. Earn the variations and make them intentional.

Test and measure: Does the change improve task completion? Time to productivity? User satisfaction?

Show the savings: If that dialect frees even half a sprint, fluency has paid for itself.

Beyond the Component Library

We’re not managing design systems anymore—we’re cultivating design languages. Languages that grow with their speakers. Languages that develop accents without losing meaning. Languages that serve human needs over aesthetic ideals.

The warehouse workers who went from 0% to 100% task completion didn’t care that our buttons broke the style guide. They cared that the buttons finally worked.

Your users feel the same way. Give your system permission to speak their language.

There’s been a lot of chatter in recent years about great TV shows delivering underwhelming final seasons, but realistically, these seasons tend to inspire mixed reactions rather than outright disgust. Beyond the bubble of the relentless social media dunking they got, many people loved how Stranger Things and The Boys concluded. Game of Thrones, though? […]

The post The Best Final Seasons of TV appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the years following the release of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios was in a tight spot. It had to rebuild, and it had to do so during a time when both fan hunger and the Disney+ content machine demanded more, more, more.

As a result, Marvel had a long string of hits and misses in Phase 4, some of which amounted to cutting its own bangs in the mirror and cry-laughing at the aftermath. It had broken up with its long-term boyfriends like Iron Man and Steve Rogers and decided to go speed dating. What would be a good match for this post-Endgame Marvel? Only time, and a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck, would tell.

Phase 4 sure was messy. Seven films, eight TV shows, and two specials messy. But y’know what? I’m starting to look back on those times and really appreciate all that nonsense. Not the standout stuff like WandaVision, Loki, Werewolf by Night, and Hawkeye. I already appreciated those. No, I’m talking about some of the absolutely ludicrous Phase 4 moments that certainly raised a few eyebrows at the time but can now finally get their due as gloriously weird occurrences in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Minus She-Hulk twerking. We’ve heard enough about that for a lifetime.

Please note that the following moments will not be addressed in a professional manner.

Ray Winstone’s Russian Accent Revealed

It’s no secret that I love a terrible accent, but in a movie filled with questionable Russian accents, Ray Winstone’s reigns supreme in Black Widow. Landing somewhere between Cockney and South African instead of any kind of Russian dialect, it’s clear that Winstone might have ordered his accent from Temu, and we were all left to deal with the consequences.

As the villainous overseer of the Red Room, Winstone’s turn as Dreykov is aurally challenging, to say the least, but while everyone was chuckling at his efforts to portray the Russian general we’d been hearing about since the first Avengers movie, he had a surprising supporter in dialect coach Adrienne Nelson, who seemed to enjoy it regardless. “Dreykov, his acting was so mesmerizing that the dialect issues became not so much a distraction as a curiosity,” she told Slate. “I wondered if the British and Russian colors I was hearing had to do with his backstory.”

The British colors? Certainly not a part of Dreykov’s backstory in the MCU, no, but the accent itself is so much fun! How can you stay mad at it? And though I should mention that Russell Crowe later gave Winstone a run for his money in Phase 4’s Thor: Love and Thunder, the latter’s Russian efforts win out as the best worst accent in MCU history.

Harry Styles Arrives

Eternals had a lot of problems, but its most enduring one was being the first Phase 4 movie to have a post-credits scene that was set to go absolutely nowhere. It took the cake because it briefly introduced Starfox, Thanos’s adopted brother, who was a prince and a space outlaw or something. It doesn’t really matter, let’s be honest. He never came back, nor did the Eternals themselves.

Starfox was played by pop singer and sometimes actor Harry Styles in a bit of stunt casting so blinding it that it actually hurt to look at it directly. To fully survive it, you’d have had to close your eyes like Indy and Marion at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even then, you’d be cursed with less than 20/20 vision for all eternity.

It didn’t help that Starfox was accompanied by a Patton Oswalt-voiced Pip the Troll in some of the worst CGI the MCU has ever done, but now that all this is in my rearview, I feel like I can take almost any stunt casting Marvel can throw at me. Have Britney Spears come out at the end of Avengers: Secret Wars and blow up the multiverse, yelling, “It’s Britney, bitch.” I am now immune. I can take it. Harry Styles has prepared me for anything. Only fear is the mind-killer.

Stormbreaker’s Jealous

Stray to any Marvel Reddit thread about the worst MCU films ever and you’ll see a lot of people crowning Thor: Love and Thunder. They’ll tell you there’s no one who likes the God of Thunder’s fourquel, and that it should be consigned to the bin of Marvel Studios mistakes where it belongs. But there are people who like it! There are tens of us who didn’t really mind how silly the movie turned out after returning director Taika Waititi decided to lean much further into the wacky humor of Thor: Ragnarok, and I’d argue that one of the best bits of the film is one that its detractors bring up time and again as genuinely diabolical: Waititi’s notion that Thor’s weapons might be sentient.

During Love and Thunder, there’s a moment where Thor retreats to the bow of his Viking longship, the Aegir, and discusses Mjolnir coming back into his orbit with Stormbreaker, wondering if the latter might be jealous of the former. “Are we good?” he asks, pouring a beer on the axe. “Sorry we’ve been fighting lately.” Though there’s no indication that Thor’s doing anything other than anthropomorphizing both weapons, his banter with them is so silly that I genuinely find it delightful. You may not agree, but that’s alright. We can agree to disagree.

However, I think this kind of back-and-forth throughout Love and Thunder complements Gorr’s opposing struggle with All-Black the Necrosword, a powerful, corrupting weapon that binds his lifeforce to its blade. Positing that Mjolnir or Stormbreaker also might be sentient is a nice touch, given that all the weapons are key parts of the story.

Eh, like I said, maybe we’ll just agree to disagree on this one!

Shang-Chi Rides a Dragon

This is perhaps a controversial one because I think a lot of people very much enjoyed the final act of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and so did I! Still, at the end of the movie, when Shang-Chi eventually mounts The Great Protector, a giant fuck-off dragon who guards the hidden realm of Ta Lo, it’s easy to ask yourself what the hell is even happening anymore, especially when this climactic moment follows a sudden run-in with Iron Man 3’s Trevor Slattery, who is bounding around with an inexplicable CGI creature, and some painful BMW product placement in the middle of an impossible forest.

All that said, I can’t be mad at a fuck-off dragon emerging from the depths and reviving our hero so that he can beat a demon hell-bent on absorbing some souls because the hero’s dad thought his dead mum might be in there somewhere. Wait, what was this movie about?

Egypt Kaiju Fight

During a final showdown between Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) and Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) in Marvel’s divisive Moon Knight, Egyptian gods Khonshu and Ammit get in on the action by blowing up to kaiju size and fighting each other under Cairo’s night sky. Destroying pyramids and all sorts while Spector blips in and out of his different personalities, he and Khonshu eventually emerge triumphant from the battle because of course they do; yet no one in the MCU ever mentions the wonders and consequences of this kaiju face-off ever again.

Why? Because there will be no further reason to refer to it again. Moon Knight was a “one-and-done” show for Marvel, and unlike Civil War’s key plot point that the Avengers are causing too much damage or Brave New World finally telling everyone that Tiamut’s massive Celestial corpse is rich in Adamantium, there’s simply no need to address it. What happened in Egypt stays in Egypt.

And hey, y’know what I don’t love about a kaiju fight? Nothing. Every single one is a gift. Moon Knight’s is a bit of fun nonsense that lends even greater stakes to Spector’s showdown with Harlow and the special effects aren’t terrible either. It’s ludicrous, but frankly, if all this happened in a Moon Knight comic I was reading, I’d be delighted.

Red Means Go

Back when Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was first released in 2022, I found myself infuriated by it for various reasons. Some of those reasons were narrative and some were character-based, but there were also little things that bothered me like the fact that, given the chance to explore the big, wild multiverse, the bulk of Stephen Strange’s walking-around time was monopolized by a jaunt where he and America Chavez could revisit old memories, eat pizza balls, brush up against a wink-wink Bruce Campbell street vendor and learn that red actually means go when it comes to traffic control. It’s no three seashells.

But in the years since the sequel’s debut, I’ve come to be less annoyed by all of its missed opportunities and reliance on Raimi-isms and stunt cameos. “Red means go” is the absolute least they could do in Strange and Chavez’s multiversal bonding time, but my moaning about it actually came back to haunt me when I got a new Bosch fridge freezer and called the company’s maintenance team out to fix it, only to be told that a permanent red light glowing from the front panel was no cause for alarm and simply meant the power was on. Alas, this effectively removed my ability to complain about “red means go” forever.

Let’s Fix a Boat

Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier explored what happened after Sam Wilson received Captain America’s shield and poor Bucky Barnes was left behind on the lawn like an abandoned puppy following Steve Rogers’s return from putting back the Infinity Stones in Avengers: Endgame. As Sam and Bucky teamed up to stop an anti-patriotism group called the Flag Smashers, they bickered their way across the world and clashed with new Cap John Walker in several action-packed sequences, pausing in the penultimate episode to bond and fix up the Wilson family boat in a montage that could least damningly be described as fine and most damningly described as cringe.

In the midst of dealing with a pissed-off Walker stripped of his Captain America title, and a Flag Smasher group planning god knows what as their next explosive statement, Wilson and Barnes’s inevitable bonding sesh comes at the most irritating possible moment in the series, but I’ve started looking back at the “let’s fix a boat” scene with much less annoyance than I did at the time. After all, it was important to make sure the audience knew these guys had properly buried the hatchet of being mildly peeved with each other so they could reunite them for two minutes in Brave New World and assure us that Bucky didn’t really need all that therapy for going through decades of torture and abuse. Sometimes, fixing a boat with a new pal is just as effective. Probably. Actually, never mind.

The MCU’s Briefest Mask

We’re not leaving The Falcon and the Winter Soldier behind just yet, because the limited series also gave us one of the most “oh, come on” moments ever when it first streamed on Disney+.

Having previously released a teaser video of Baron Helmut J. Zemo’s return following the carnage he caused in Captain America: Civil War, I was initially delighted to see that Daniel Brühl, reprising his villainous role from that MCU threequel, would be sporting his iconic purple mask in the upcoming show.

Technically, Marvel delivered. Zemo pops his mask on for about 30 seconds during a shootout in Madripoor with Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier after retrieving it from his family’s storage garage. But 30 seconds wasn’t enough for me. As a longtime Zemo fan, thrilled that he was coming back to the MCU, I just felt utterly deflated that he only wore his mask for as long as it took to close some browser tabs.

But hey, at least I did get to see Baron Zemo in his purple mask, albeit briefly. And since the character is still alive in the MCU, maybe I’ll get to see it again one day. Here’s hoping.

Any ludicrous but fun Phase 4 moments lingering for you? As always, let me know in the comments!

The post Celebrating the Most Ludicrous Moments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4 appeared first on Den of Geek.

Sony had a big surprise in store for fans of Until Dawn during this month’s State of Play, announcing a long-awaited sequel to its 2015 hit survival horror game and dropping a trailer that teased a new nightmare for a fresh gaggle of young adults (and returning cast member Peter Stormare) who will be embarking […]

The post Until Dawn 2 Finally Confirmed – But There’s a Catch appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the years following the release of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios was in a tight spot. It had to rebuild, and it had to do so during a time when both fan hunger and the Disney+ content machine demanded more, more, more.

As a result, Marvel had a long string of hits and misses in Phase 4, some of which amounted to cutting its own bangs in the mirror and cry-laughing at the aftermath. It had broken up with its long-term boyfriends like Iron Man and Steve Rogers and decided to go speed dating. What would be a good match for this post-Endgame Marvel? Only time, and a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck, would tell.

Phase 4 sure was messy. Seven films, eight TV shows, and two specials messy. But y’know what? I’m starting to look back on those times and really appreciate all that nonsense. Not the standout stuff like WandaVision, Loki, Werewolf by Night, and Hawkeye. I already appreciated those. No, I’m talking about some of the absolutely ludicrous Phase 4 moments that certainly raised a few eyebrows at the time but can now finally get their due as gloriously weird occurrences in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Minus She-Hulk twerking. We’ve heard enough about that for a lifetime.

Please note that the following moments will not be addressed in a professional manner.

Ray Winstone’s Russian Accent Revealed

It’s no secret that I love a terrible accent, but in a movie filled with questionable Russian accents, Ray Winstone’s reigns supreme in Black Widow. Landing somewhere between Cockney and South African instead of any kind of Russian dialect, it’s clear that Winstone might have ordered his accent from Temu, and we were all left to deal with the consequences.

As the villainous overseer of the Red Room, Winstone’s turn as Dreykov is aurally challenging, to say the least, but while everyone was chuckling at his efforts to portray the Russian general we’d been hearing about since the first Avengers movie, he had a surprising supporter in dialect coach Adrienne Nelson, who seemed to enjoy it regardless. “Dreykov, his acting was so mesmerizing that the dialect issues became not so much a distraction as a curiosity,” she told Slate. “I wondered if the British and Russian colors I was hearing had to do with his backstory.”

The British colors? Certainly not a part of Dreykov’s backstory in the MCU, no, but the accent itself is so much fun! How can you stay mad at it? And though I should mention that Russell Crowe later gave Winstone a run for his money in Phase 4’s Thor: Love and Thunder, the latter’s Russian efforts win out as the best worst accent in MCU history.

Harry Styles Arrives

Eternals had a lot of problems, but its most enduring one was being the first Phase 4 movie to have a post-credits scene that was set to go absolutely nowhere. It took the cake because it briefly introduced Starfox, Thanos’s adopted brother, who was a prince and a space outlaw or something. It doesn’t really matter, let’s be honest. He never came back, nor did the Eternals themselves.

Starfox was played by pop singer and sometimes actor Harry Styles in a bit of stunt casting so blinding it that it actually hurt to look at it directly. To fully survive it, you’d have had to close your eyes like Indy and Marion at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even then, you’d be cursed with less than 20/20 vision for all eternity.

It didn’t help that Starfox was accompanied by a Patton Oswalt-voiced Pip the Troll in some of the worst CGI the MCU has ever done, but now that all this is in my rearview, I feel like I can take almost any stunt casting Marvel can throw at me. Have Britney Spears come out at the end of Avengers: Secret Wars and blow up the multiverse, yelling, “It’s Britney, bitch.” I am now immune. I can take it. Harry Styles has prepared me for anything. Only fear is the mind-killer.

Stormbreaker’s Jealous

Stray to any Marvel Reddit thread about the worst MCU films ever and you’ll see a lot of people crowning Thor: Love and Thunder. They’ll tell you there’s no one who likes the God of Thunder’s fourquel, and that it should be consigned to the bin of Marvel Studios mistakes where it belongs. But there are people who like it! There are tens of us who didn’t really mind how silly the movie turned out after returning director Taika Waititi decided to lean much further into the wacky humor of Thor: Ragnarok, and I’d argue that one of the best bits of the film is one that its detractors bring up time and again as genuinely diabolical: Waititi’s notion that Thor’s weapons might be sentient.

During Love and Thunder, there’s a moment where Thor retreats to the bow of his Viking longship, the Aegir, and discusses Mjolnir coming back into his orbit with Stormbreaker, wondering if the latter might be jealous of the former. “Are we good?” he asks, pouring a beer on the axe. “Sorry we’ve been fighting lately.” Though there’s no indication that Thor’s doing anything other than anthropomorphizing both weapons, his banter with them is so silly that I genuinely find it delightful. You may not agree, but that’s alright. We can agree to disagree.

However, I think this kind of back-and-forth throughout Love and Thunder complements Gorr’s opposing struggle with All-Black the Necrosword, a powerful, corrupting weapon that binds his lifeforce to its blade. Positing that Mjolnir or Stormbreaker also might be sentient is a nice touch, given that all the weapons are key parts of the story.

Eh, like I said, maybe we’ll just agree to disagree on this one!

Shang-Chi Rides a Dragon

This is perhaps a controversial one because I think a lot of people very much enjoyed the final act of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and so did I! Still, at the end of the movie, when Shang-Chi eventually mounts The Great Protector, a giant fuck-off dragon who guards the hidden realm of Ta Lo, it’s easy to ask yourself what the hell is even happening anymore, especially when this climactic moment follows a sudden run-in with Iron Man 3’s Trevor Slattery, who is bounding around with an inexplicable CGI creature, and some painful BMW product placement in the middle of an impossible forest.

All that said, I can’t be mad at a fuck-off dragon emerging from the depths and reviving our hero so that he can beat a demon hell-bent on absorbing some souls because the hero’s dad thought his dead mum might be in there somewhere. Wait, what was this movie about?

Egypt Kaiju Fight

During a final showdown between Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) and Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) in Marvel’s divisive Moon Knight, Egyptian gods Khonshu and Ammit get in on the action by blowing up to kaiju size and fighting each other under Cairo’s night sky. Destroying pyramids and all sorts while Spector blips in and out of his different personalities, he and Khonshu eventually emerge triumphant from the battle because of course they do; yet no one in the MCU ever mentions the wonders and consequences of this kaiju face-off ever again.

Why? Because there will be no further reason to refer to it again. Moon Knight was a “one-and-done” show for Marvel, and unlike Civil War’s key plot point that the Avengers are causing too much damage or Brave New World finally telling everyone that Tiamut’s massive Celestial corpse is rich in Adamantium, there’s simply no need to address it. What happened in Egypt stays in Egypt.

And hey, y’know what I don’t love about a kaiju fight? Nothing. Every single one is a gift. Moon Knight’s is a bit of fun nonsense that lends even greater stakes to Spector’s showdown with Harlow and the special effects aren’t terrible either. It’s ludicrous, but frankly, if all this happened in a Moon Knight comic I was reading, I’d be delighted.

Red Means Go

Back when Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was first released in 2022, I found myself infuriated by it for various reasons. Some of those reasons were narrative and some were character-based, but there were also little things that bothered me like the fact that, given the chance to explore the big, wild multiverse, the bulk of Stephen Strange’s walking-around time was monopolized by a jaunt where he and America Chavez could revisit old memories, eat pizza balls, brush up against a wink-wink Bruce Campbell street vendor and learn that red actually means go when it comes to traffic control. It’s no three seashells.

But in the years since the sequel’s debut, I’ve come to be less annoyed by all of its missed opportunities and reliance on Raimi-isms and stunt cameos. “Red means go” is the absolute least they could do in Strange and Chavez’s multiversal bonding time, but my moaning about it actually came back to haunt me when I got a new Bosch fridge freezer and called the company’s maintenance team out to fix it, only to be told that a permanent red light glowing from the front panel was no cause for alarm and simply meant the power was on. Alas, this effectively removed my ability to complain about “red means go” forever.

Let’s Fix a Boat

Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier explored what happened after Sam Wilson received Captain America’s shield and poor Bucky Barnes was left behind on the lawn like an abandoned puppy following Steve Rogers’s return from putting back the Infinity Stones in Avengers: Endgame. As Sam and Bucky teamed up to stop an anti-patriotism group called the Flag Smashers, they bickered their way across the world and clashed with new Cap John Walker in several action-packed sequences, pausing in the penultimate episode to bond and fix up the Wilson family boat in a montage that could least damningly be described as fine and most damningly described as cringe.

In the midst of dealing with a pissed-off Walker stripped of his Captain America title, and a Flag Smasher group planning god knows what as their next explosive statement, Wilson and Barnes’s inevitable bonding sesh comes at the most irritating possible moment in the series, but I’ve started looking back at the “let’s fix a boat” scene with much less annoyance than I did at the time. After all, it was important to make sure the audience knew these guys had properly buried the hatchet of being mildly peeved with each other so they could reunite them for two minutes in Brave New World and assure us that Bucky didn’t really need all that therapy for going through decades of torture and abuse. Sometimes, fixing a boat with a new pal is just as effective. Probably. Actually, never mind.

The MCU’s Briefest Mask

We’re not leaving The Falcon and the Winter Soldier behind just yet, because the limited series also gave us one of the most “oh, come on” moments ever when it first streamed on Disney+.

Having previously released a teaser video of Baron Helmut J. Zemo’s return following the carnage he caused in Captain America: Civil War, I was initially delighted to see that Daniel Brühl, reprising his villainous role from that MCU threequel, would be sporting his iconic purple mask in the upcoming show.

Technically, Marvel delivered. Zemo pops his mask on for about 30 seconds during a shootout in Madripoor with Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier after retrieving it from his family’s storage garage. But 30 seconds wasn’t enough for me. As a longtime Zemo fan, thrilled that he was coming back to the MCU, I just felt utterly deflated that he only wore his mask for as long as it took to close some browser tabs.

But hey, at least I did get to see Baron Zemo in his purple mask, albeit briefly. And since the character is still alive in the MCU, maybe I’ll get to see it again one day. Here’s hoping.

Any ludicrous but fun Phase 4 moments lingering for you? As always, let me know in the comments!

The post Celebrating the Most Ludicrous Moments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4 appeared first on Den of Geek.

Tom Holland and Jon Bernthal have been buddies for a long time. The pair first worked together on the 2017 Irish medieval film Pilgrimage and were auditioning for their Marvel roles as Peter Parker and Frank Castle before the indie film’s release. Needless to say, they both landed their respective jobs! But while Bernthal’s antihero […]

The post Tom Holland Ready for R-Rated Punisher Crossover After Spider-Man: Brand New Day appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the years following the release of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios was in a tight spot. It had to rebuild, and it had to do so during a time when both fan hunger and the Disney+ content machine demanded more, more, more.

As a result, Marvel had a long string of hits and misses in Phase 4, some of which amounted to cutting its own bangs in the mirror and cry-laughing at the aftermath. It had broken up with its long-term boyfriends like Iron Man and Steve Rogers and decided to go speed dating. What would be a good match for this post-Endgame Marvel? Only time, and a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck, would tell.

Phase 4 sure was messy. Seven films, eight TV shows, and two specials messy. But y’know what? I’m starting to look back on those times and really appreciate all that nonsense. Not the standout stuff like WandaVision, Loki, Werewolf by Night, and Hawkeye. I already appreciated those. No, I’m talking about some of the absolutely ludicrous Phase 4 moments that certainly raised a few eyebrows at the time but can now finally get their due as gloriously weird occurrences in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Minus She-Hulk twerking. We’ve heard enough about that for a lifetime.

Please note that the following moments will not be addressed in a professional manner.

Ray Winstone’s Russian Accent Revealed

It’s no secret that I love a terrible accent, but in a movie filled with questionable Russian accents, Ray Winstone’s reigns supreme in Black Widow. Landing somewhere between Cockney and South African instead of any kind of Russian dialect, it’s clear that Winstone might have ordered his accent from Temu, and we were all left to deal with the consequences.

As the villainous overseer of the Red Room, Winstone’s turn as Dreykov is aurally challenging, to say the least, but while everyone was chuckling at his efforts to portray the Russian general we’d been hearing about since the first Avengers movie, he had a surprising supporter in dialect coach Adrienne Nelson, who seemed to enjoy it regardless. “Dreykov, his acting was so mesmerizing that the dialect issues became not so much a distraction as a curiosity,” she told Slate. “I wondered if the British and Russian colors I was hearing had to do with his backstory.”

The British colors? Certainly not a part of Dreykov’s backstory in the MCU, no, but the accent itself is so much fun! How can you stay mad at it? And though I should mention that Russell Crowe later gave Winstone a run for his money in Phase 4’s Thor: Love and Thunder, the latter’s Russian efforts win out as the best worst accent in MCU history.

Harry Styles Arrives

Eternals had a lot of problems, but its most enduring one was being the first Phase 4 movie to have a post-credits scene that was set to go absolutely nowhere. It took the cake because it briefly introduced Starfox, Thanos’s adopted brother, who was a prince and a space outlaw or something. It doesn’t really matter, let’s be honest. He never came back, nor did the Eternals themselves.

Starfox was played by pop singer and sometimes actor Harry Styles in a bit of stunt casting so blinding it that it actually hurt to look at it directly. To fully survive it, you’d have had to close your eyes like Indy and Marion at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even then, you’d be cursed with less than 20/20 vision for all eternity.

It didn’t help that Starfox was accompanied by a Patton Oswalt-voiced Pip the Troll in some of the worst CGI the MCU has ever done, but now that all this is in my rearview, I feel like I can take almost any stunt casting Marvel can throw at me. Have Britney Spears come out at the end of Avengers: Secret Wars and blow up the multiverse, yelling, “It’s Britney, bitch.” I am now immune. I can take it. Harry Styles has prepared me for anything. Only fear is the mind-killer.

Stormbreaker’s Jealous

Stray to any Marvel Reddit thread about the worst MCU films ever and you’ll see a lot of people crowning Thor: Love and Thunder. They’ll tell you there’s no one who likes the God of Thunder’s fourquel, and that it should be consigned to the bin of Marvel Studios mistakes where it belongs. But there are people who like it! There are tens of us who didn’t really mind how silly the movie turned out after returning director Taika Waititi decided to lean much further into the wacky humor of Thor: Ragnarok, and I’d argue that one of the best bits of the film is one that its detractors bring up time and again as genuinely diabolical: Waititi’s notion that Thor’s weapons might be sentient.

During Love and Thunder, there’s a moment where Thor retreats to the bow of his Viking longship, the Aegir, and discusses Mjolnir coming back into his orbit with Stormbreaker, wondering if the latter might be jealous of the former. “Are we good?” he asks, pouring a beer on the axe. “Sorry we’ve been fighting lately.” Though there’s no indication that Thor’s doing anything other than anthropomorphizing both weapons, his banter with them is so silly that I genuinely find it delightful. You may not agree, but that’s alright. We can agree to disagree.

However, I think this kind of back-and-forth throughout Love and Thunder complements Gorr’s opposing struggle with All-Black the Necrosword, a powerful, corrupting weapon that binds his lifeforce to its blade. Positing that Mjolnir or Stormbreaker also might be sentient is a nice touch, given that all the weapons are key parts of the story.

Eh, like I said, maybe we’ll just agree to disagree on this one!

Shang-Chi Rides a Dragon

This is perhaps a controversial one because I think a lot of people very much enjoyed the final act of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and so did I! Still, at the end of the movie, when Shang-Chi eventually mounts The Great Protector, a giant fuck-off dragon who guards the hidden realm of Ta Lo, it’s easy to ask yourself what the hell is even happening anymore, especially when this climactic moment follows a sudden run-in with Iron Man 3’s Trevor Slattery, who is bounding around with an inexplicable CGI creature, and some painful BMW product placement in the middle of an impossible forest.

All that said, I can’t be mad at a fuck-off dragon emerging from the depths and reviving our hero so that he can beat a demon hell-bent on absorbing some souls because the hero’s dad thought his dead mum might be in there somewhere. Wait, what was this movie about?

Egypt Kaiju Fight

During a final showdown between Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) and Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) in Marvel’s divisive Moon Knight, Egyptian gods Khonshu and Ammit get in on the action by blowing up to kaiju size and fighting each other under Cairo’s night sky. Destroying pyramids and all sorts while Spector blips in and out of his different personalities, he and Khonshu eventually emerge triumphant from the battle because of course they do; yet no one in the MCU ever mentions the wonders and consequences of this kaiju face-off ever again.

Why? Because there will be no further reason to refer to it again. Moon Knight was a “one-and-done” show for Marvel, and unlike Civil War’s key plot point that the Avengers are causing too much damage or Brave New World finally telling everyone that Tiamut’s massive Celestial corpse is rich in Adamantium, there’s simply no need to address it. What happened in Egypt stays in Egypt.

And hey, y’know what I don’t love about a kaiju fight? Nothing. Every single one is a gift. Moon Knight’s is a bit of fun nonsense that lends even greater stakes to Spector’s showdown with Harlow and the special effects aren’t terrible either. It’s ludicrous, but frankly, if all this happened in a Moon Knight comic I was reading, I’d be delighted.

Red Means Go

Back when Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was first released in 2022, I found myself infuriated by it for various reasons. Some of those reasons were narrative and some were character-based, but there were also little things that bothered me like the fact that, given the chance to explore the big, wild multiverse, the bulk of Stephen Strange’s walking-around time was monopolized by a jaunt where he and America Chavez could revisit old memories, eat pizza balls, brush up against a wink-wink Bruce Campbell street vendor and learn that red actually means go when it comes to traffic control. It’s no three seashells.

But in the years since the sequel’s debut, I’ve come to be less annoyed by all of its missed opportunities and reliance on Raimi-isms and stunt cameos. “Red means go” is the absolute least they could do in Strange and Chavez’s multiversal bonding time, but my moaning about it actually came back to haunt me when I got a new Bosch fridge freezer and called the company’s maintenance team out to fix it, only to be told that a permanent red light glowing from the front panel was no cause for alarm and simply meant the power was on. Alas, this effectively removed my ability to complain about “red means go” forever.

Let’s Fix a Boat

Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier explored what happened after Sam Wilson received Captain America’s shield and poor Bucky Barnes was left behind on the lawn like an abandoned puppy following Steve Rogers’s return from putting back the Infinity Stones in Avengers: Endgame. As Sam and Bucky teamed up to stop an anti-patriotism group called the Flag Smashers, they bickered their way across the world and clashed with new Cap John Walker in several action-packed sequences, pausing in the penultimate episode to bond and fix up the Wilson family boat in a montage that could least damningly be described as fine and most damningly described as cringe.

In the midst of dealing with a pissed-off Walker stripped of his Captain America title, and a Flag Smasher group planning god knows what as their next explosive statement, Wilson and Barnes’s inevitable bonding sesh comes at the most irritating possible moment in the series, but I’ve started looking back at the “let’s fix a boat” scene with much less annoyance than I did at the time. After all, it was important to make sure the audience knew these guys had properly buried the hatchet of being mildly peeved with each other so they could reunite them for two minutes in Brave New World and assure us that Bucky didn’t really need all that therapy for going through decades of torture and abuse. Sometimes, fixing a boat with a new pal is just as effective. Probably. Actually, never mind.

The MCU’s Briefest Mask

We’re not leaving The Falcon and the Winter Soldier behind just yet, because the limited series also gave us one of the most “oh, come on” moments ever when it first streamed on Disney+.

Having previously released a teaser video of Baron Helmut J. Zemo’s return following the carnage he caused in Captain America: Civil War, I was initially delighted to see that Daniel Brühl, reprising his villainous role from that MCU threequel, would be sporting his iconic purple mask in the upcoming show.

Technically, Marvel delivered. Zemo pops his mask on for about 30 seconds during a shootout in Madripoor with Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier after retrieving it from his family’s storage garage. But 30 seconds wasn’t enough for me. As a longtime Zemo fan, thrilled that he was coming back to the MCU, I just felt utterly deflated that he only wore his mask for as long as it took to close some browser tabs.

But hey, at least I did get to see Baron Zemo in his purple mask, albeit briefly. And since the character is still alive in the MCU, maybe I’ll get to see it again one day. Here’s hoping.

Any ludicrous but fun Phase 4 moments lingering for you? As always, let me know in the comments!

The post Celebrating the Most Ludicrous Moments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4 appeared first on Den of Geek.

For decades, back-to-school movies were for other old people. You had the Rodney Dangerfield comedy from 1986, Billy Madison in 1995, Never Been Kissed in 1999, and 21 Jump Street in 2012. Millennials could certainly enjoy these flicks, because it’s always funny to see out-of-touch old people get their comeuppance from young, hip people who […]

The post Trailer for Hulu Comedy Never Change! Confirms Millennials Are Old Now appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the years following the release of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios was in a tight spot. It had to rebuild, and it had to do so during a time when both fan hunger and the Disney+ content machine demanded more, more, more.

As a result, Marvel had a long string of hits and misses in Phase 4, some of which amounted to cutting its own bangs in the mirror and cry-laughing at the aftermath. It had broken up with its long-term boyfriends like Iron Man and Steve Rogers and decided to go speed dating. What would be a good match for this post-Endgame Marvel? Only time, and a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck, would tell.

Phase 4 sure was messy. Seven films, eight TV shows, and two specials messy. But y’know what? I’m starting to look back on those times and really appreciate all that nonsense. Not the standout stuff like WandaVision, Loki, Werewolf by Night, and Hawkeye. I already appreciated those. No, I’m talking about some of the absolutely ludicrous Phase 4 moments that certainly raised a few eyebrows at the time but can now finally get their due as gloriously weird occurrences in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Minus She-Hulk twerking. We’ve heard enough about that for a lifetime.

Please note that the following moments will not be addressed in a professional manner.

Ray Winstone’s Russian Accent Revealed

It’s no secret that I love a terrible accent, but in a movie filled with questionable Russian accents, Ray Winstone’s reigns supreme in Black Widow. Landing somewhere between Cockney and South African instead of any kind of Russian dialect, it’s clear that Winstone might have ordered his accent from Temu, and we were all left to deal with the consequences.

As the villainous overseer of the Red Room, Winstone’s turn as Dreykov is aurally challenging, to say the least, but while everyone was chuckling at his efforts to portray the Russian general we’d been hearing about since the first Avengers movie, he had a surprising supporter in dialect coach Adrienne Nelson, who seemed to enjoy it regardless. “Dreykov, his acting was so mesmerizing that the dialect issues became not so much a distraction as a curiosity,” she told Slate. “I wondered if the British and Russian colors I was hearing had to do with his backstory.”

The British colors? Certainly not a part of Dreykov’s backstory in the MCU, no, but the accent itself is so much fun! How can you stay mad at it? And though I should mention that Russell Crowe later gave Winstone a run for his money in Phase 4’s Thor: Love and Thunder, the latter’s Russian efforts win out as the best worst accent in MCU history.

Harry Styles Arrives

Eternals had a lot of problems, but its most enduring one was being the first Phase 4 movie to have a post-credits scene that was set to go absolutely nowhere. It took the cake because it briefly introduced Starfox, Thanos’s adopted brother, who was a prince and a space outlaw or something. It doesn’t really matter, let’s be honest. He never came back, nor did the Eternals themselves.

Starfox was played by pop singer and sometimes actor Harry Styles in a bit of stunt casting so blinding it that it actually hurt to look at it directly. To fully survive it, you’d have had to close your eyes like Indy and Marion at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even then, you’d be cursed with less than 20/20 vision for all eternity.

It didn’t help that Starfox was accompanied by a Patton Oswalt-voiced Pip the Troll in some of the worst CGI the MCU has ever done, but now that all this is in my rearview, I feel like I can take almost any stunt casting Marvel can throw at me. Have Britney Spears come out at the end of Avengers: Secret Wars and blow up the multiverse, yelling, “It’s Britney, bitch.” I am now immune. I can take it. Harry Styles has prepared me for anything. Only fear is the mind-killer.

Stormbreaker’s Jealous

Stray to any Marvel Reddit thread about the worst MCU films ever and you’ll see a lot of people crowning Thor: Love and Thunder. They’ll tell you there’s no one who likes the God of Thunder’s fourquel, and that it should be consigned to the bin of Marvel Studios mistakes where it belongs. But there are people who like it! There are tens of us who didn’t really mind how silly the movie turned out after returning director Taika Waititi decided to lean much further into the wacky humor of Thor: Ragnarok, and I’d argue that one of the best bits of the film is one that its detractors bring up time and again as genuinely diabolical: Waititi’s notion that Thor’s weapons might be sentient.

During Love and Thunder, there’s a moment where Thor retreats to the bow of his Viking longship, the Aegir, and discusses Mjolnir coming back into his orbit with Stormbreaker, wondering if the latter might be jealous of the former. “Are we good?” he asks, pouring a beer on the axe. “Sorry we’ve been fighting lately.” Though there’s no indication that Thor’s doing anything other than anthropomorphizing both weapons, his banter with them is so silly that I genuinely find it delightful. You may not agree, but that’s alright. We can agree to disagree.

However, I think this kind of back-and-forth throughout Love and Thunder complements Gorr’s opposing struggle with All-Black the Necrosword, a powerful, corrupting weapon that binds his lifeforce to its blade. Positing that Mjolnir or Stormbreaker also might be sentient is a nice touch, given that all the weapons are key parts of the story.

Eh, like I said, maybe we’ll just agree to disagree on this one!

Shang-Chi Rides a Dragon

This is perhaps a controversial one because I think a lot of people very much enjoyed the final act of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and so did I! Still, at the end of the movie, when Shang-Chi eventually mounts The Great Protector, a giant fuck-off dragon who guards the hidden realm of Ta Lo, it’s easy to ask yourself what the hell is even happening anymore, especially when this climactic moment follows a sudden run-in with Iron Man 3’s Trevor Slattery, who is bounding around with an inexplicable CGI creature, and some painful BMW product placement in the middle of an impossible forest.

All that said, I can’t be mad at a fuck-off dragon emerging from the depths and reviving our hero so that he can beat a demon hell-bent on absorbing some souls because the hero’s dad thought his dead mum might be in there somewhere. Wait, what was this movie about?

Egypt Kaiju Fight

During a final showdown between Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) and Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) in Marvel’s divisive Moon Knight, Egyptian gods Khonshu and Ammit get in on the action by blowing up to kaiju size and fighting each other under Cairo’s night sky. Destroying pyramids and all sorts while Spector blips in and out of his different personalities, he and Khonshu eventually emerge triumphant from the battle because of course they do; yet no one in the MCU ever mentions the wonders and consequences of this kaiju face-off ever again.

Why? Because there will be no further reason to refer to it again. Moon Knight was a “one-and-done” show for Marvel, and unlike Civil War’s key plot point that the Avengers are causing too much damage or Brave New World finally telling everyone that Tiamut’s massive Celestial corpse is rich in Adamantium, there’s simply no need to address it. What happened in Egypt stays in Egypt.

And hey, y’know what I don’t love about a kaiju fight? Nothing. Every single one is a gift. Moon Knight’s is a bit of fun nonsense that lends even greater stakes to Spector’s showdown with Harlow and the special effects aren’t terrible either. It’s ludicrous, but frankly, if all this happened in a Moon Knight comic I was reading, I’d be delighted.

Red Means Go

Back when Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was first released in 2022, I found myself infuriated by it for various reasons. Some of those reasons were narrative and some were character-based, but there were also little things that bothered me like the fact that, given the chance to explore the big, wild multiverse, the bulk of Stephen Strange’s walking-around time was monopolized by a jaunt where he and America Chavez could revisit old memories, eat pizza balls, brush up against a wink-wink Bruce Campbell street vendor and learn that red actually means go when it comes to traffic control. It’s no three seashells.

But in the years since the sequel’s debut, I’ve come to be less annoyed by all of its missed opportunities and reliance on Raimi-isms and stunt cameos. “Red means go” is the absolute least they could do in Strange and Chavez’s multiversal bonding time, but my moaning about it actually came back to haunt me when I got a new Bosch fridge freezer and called the company’s maintenance team out to fix it, only to be told that a permanent red light glowing from the front panel was no cause for alarm and simply meant the power was on. Alas, this effectively removed my ability to complain about “red means go” forever.

Let’s Fix a Boat

Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier explored what happened after Sam Wilson received Captain America’s shield and poor Bucky Barnes was left behind on the lawn like an abandoned puppy following Steve Rogers’s return from putting back the Infinity Stones in Avengers: Endgame. As Sam and Bucky teamed up to stop an anti-patriotism group called the Flag Smashers, they bickered their way across the world and clashed with new Cap John Walker in several action-packed sequences, pausing in the penultimate episode to bond and fix up the Wilson family boat in a montage that could least damningly be described as fine and most damningly described as cringe.

In the midst of dealing with a pissed-off Walker stripped of his Captain America title, and a Flag Smasher group planning god knows what as their next explosive statement, Wilson and Barnes’s inevitable bonding sesh comes at the most irritating possible moment in the series, but I’ve started looking back at the “let’s fix a boat” scene with much less annoyance than I did at the time. After all, it was important to make sure the audience knew these guys had properly buried the hatchet of being mildly peeved with each other so they could reunite them for two minutes in Brave New World and assure us that Bucky didn’t really need all that therapy for going through decades of torture and abuse. Sometimes, fixing a boat with a new pal is just as effective. Probably. Actually, never mind.

The MCU’s Briefest Mask

We’re not leaving The Falcon and the Winter Soldier behind just yet, because the limited series also gave us one of the most “oh, come on” moments ever when it first streamed on Disney+.

Having previously released a teaser video of Baron Helmut J. Zemo’s return following the carnage he caused in Captain America: Civil War, I was initially delighted to see that Daniel Brühl, reprising his villainous role from that MCU threequel, would be sporting his iconic purple mask in the upcoming show.

Technically, Marvel delivered. Zemo pops his mask on for about 30 seconds during a shootout in Madripoor with Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier after retrieving it from his family’s storage garage. But 30 seconds wasn’t enough for me. As a longtime Zemo fan, thrilled that he was coming back to the MCU, I just felt utterly deflated that he only wore his mask for as long as it took to close some browser tabs.

But hey, at least I did get to see Baron Zemo in his purple mask, albeit briefly. And since the character is still alive in the MCU, maybe I’ll get to see it again one day. Here’s hoping.

Any ludicrous but fun Phase 4 moments lingering for you? As always, let me know in the comments!

The post Celebrating the Most Ludicrous Moments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4 appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Backrooms. Backrooms, the long-awaited A24 horror movie directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, hit theaters last week with a lot of expectations from the audience of Parsons’ previous short film series, The Backrooms (Found Footage), which has more than 80 million views on YouTube. While Parsons has said that the feature-length […]

The post Backrooms Easter Eggs: The Important Details That Set Up More Stories appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the years following the release of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios was in a tight spot. It had to rebuild, and it had to do so during a time when both fan hunger and the Disney+ content machine demanded more, more, more.

As a result, Marvel had a long string of hits and misses in Phase 4, some of which amounted to cutting its own bangs in the mirror and cry-laughing at the aftermath. It had broken up with its long-term boyfriends like Iron Man and Steve Rogers and decided to go speed dating. What would be a good match for this post-Endgame Marvel? Only time, and a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck, would tell.

Phase 4 sure was messy. Seven films, eight TV shows, and two specials messy. But y’know what? I’m starting to look back on those times and really appreciate all that nonsense. Not the standout stuff like WandaVision, Loki, Werewolf by Night, and Hawkeye. I already appreciated those. No, I’m talking about some of the absolutely ludicrous Phase 4 moments that certainly raised a few eyebrows at the time but can now finally get their due as gloriously weird occurrences in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Minus She-Hulk twerking. We’ve heard enough about that for a lifetime.

Please note that the following moments will not be addressed in a professional manner.

Ray Winstone’s Russian Accent Revealed

It’s no secret that I love a terrible accent, but in a movie filled with questionable Russian accents, Ray Winstone’s reigns supreme in Black Widow. Landing somewhere between Cockney and South African instead of any kind of Russian dialect, it’s clear that Winstone might have ordered his accent from Temu, and we were all left to deal with the consequences.

As the villainous overseer of the Red Room, Winstone’s turn as Dreykov is aurally challenging, to say the least, but while everyone was chuckling at his efforts to portray the Russian general we’d been hearing about since the first Avengers movie, he had a surprising supporter in dialect coach Adrienne Nelson, who seemed to enjoy it regardless. “Dreykov, his acting was so mesmerizing that the dialect issues became not so much a distraction as a curiosity,” she told Slate. “I wondered if the British and Russian colors I was hearing had to do with his backstory.”

The British colors? Certainly not a part of Dreykov’s backstory in the MCU, no, but the accent itself is so much fun! How can you stay mad at it? And though I should mention that Russell Crowe later gave Winstone a run for his money in Phase 4’s Thor: Love and Thunder, the latter’s Russian efforts win out as the best worst accent in MCU history.

Harry Styles Arrives

Eternals had a lot of problems, but its most enduring one was being the first Phase 4 movie to have a post-credits scene that was set to go absolutely nowhere. It took the cake because it briefly introduced Starfox, Thanos’s adopted brother, who was a prince and a space outlaw or something. It doesn’t really matter, let’s be honest. He never came back, nor did the Eternals themselves.

Starfox was played by pop singer and sometimes actor Harry Styles in a bit of stunt casting so blinding it that it actually hurt to look at it directly. To fully survive it, you’d have had to close your eyes like Indy and Marion at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even then, you’d be cursed with less than 20/20 vision for all eternity.

It didn’t help that Starfox was accompanied by a Patton Oswalt-voiced Pip the Troll in some of the worst CGI the MCU has ever done, but now that all this is in my rearview, I feel like I can take almost any stunt casting Marvel can throw at me. Have Britney Spears come out at the end of Avengers: Secret Wars and blow up the multiverse, yelling, “It’s Britney, bitch.” I am now immune. I can take it. Harry Styles has prepared me for anything. Only fear is the mind-killer.

Stormbreaker’s Jealous

Stray to any Marvel Reddit thread about the worst MCU films ever and you’ll see a lot of people crowning Thor: Love and Thunder. They’ll tell you there’s no one who likes the God of Thunder’s fourquel, and that it should be consigned to the bin of Marvel Studios mistakes where it belongs. But there are people who like it! There are tens of us who didn’t really mind how silly the movie turned out after returning director Taika Waititi decided to lean much further into the wacky humor of Thor: Ragnarok, and I’d argue that one of the best bits of the film is one that its detractors bring up time and again as genuinely diabolical: Waititi’s notion that Thor’s weapons might be sentient.

During Love and Thunder, there’s a moment where Thor retreats to the bow of his Viking longship, the Aegir, and discusses Mjolnir coming back into his orbit with Stormbreaker, wondering if the latter might be jealous of the former. “Are we good?” he asks, pouring a beer on the axe. “Sorry we’ve been fighting lately.” Though there’s no indication that Thor’s doing anything other than anthropomorphizing both weapons, his banter with them is so silly that I genuinely find it delightful. You may not agree, but that’s alright. We can agree to disagree.

However, I think this kind of back-and-forth throughout Love and Thunder complements Gorr’s opposing struggle with All-Black the Necrosword, a powerful, corrupting weapon that binds his lifeforce to its blade. Positing that Mjolnir or Stormbreaker also might be sentient is a nice touch, given that all the weapons are key parts of the story.

Eh, like I said, maybe we’ll just agree to disagree on this one!

Shang-Chi Rides a Dragon

This is perhaps a controversial one because I think a lot of people very much enjoyed the final act of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and so did I! Still, at the end of the movie, when Shang-Chi eventually mounts The Great Protector, a giant fuck-off dragon who guards the hidden realm of Ta Lo, it’s easy to ask yourself what the hell is even happening anymore, especially when this climactic moment follows a sudden run-in with Iron Man 3’s Trevor Slattery, who is bounding around with an inexplicable CGI creature, and some painful BMW product placement in the middle of an impossible forest.

All that said, I can’t be mad at a fuck-off dragon emerging from the depths and reviving our hero so that he can beat a demon hell-bent on absorbing some souls because the hero’s dad thought his dead mum might be in there somewhere. Wait, what was this movie about?

Egypt Kaiju Fight

During a final showdown between Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) and Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) in Marvel’s divisive Moon Knight, Egyptian gods Khonshu and Ammit get in on the action by blowing up to kaiju size and fighting each other under Cairo’s night sky. Destroying pyramids and all sorts while Spector blips in and out of his different personalities, he and Khonshu eventually emerge triumphant from the battle because of course they do; yet no one in the MCU ever mentions the wonders and consequences of this kaiju face-off ever again.

Why? Because there will be no further reason to refer to it again. Moon Knight was a “one-and-done” show for Marvel, and unlike Civil War’s key plot point that the Avengers are causing too much damage or Brave New World finally telling everyone that Tiamut’s massive Celestial corpse is rich in Adamantium, there’s simply no need to address it. What happened in Egypt stays in Egypt.

And hey, y’know what I don’t love about a kaiju fight? Nothing. Every single one is a gift. Moon Knight’s is a bit of fun nonsense that lends even greater stakes to Spector’s showdown with Harlow and the special effects aren’t terrible either. It’s ludicrous, but frankly, if all this happened in a Moon Knight comic I was reading, I’d be delighted.

Red Means Go

Back when Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was first released in 2022, I found myself infuriated by it for various reasons. Some of those reasons were narrative and some were character-based, but there were also little things that bothered me like the fact that, given the chance to explore the big, wild multiverse, the bulk of Stephen Strange’s walking-around time was monopolized by a jaunt where he and America Chavez could revisit old memories, eat pizza balls, brush up against a wink-wink Bruce Campbell street vendor and learn that red actually means go when it comes to traffic control. It’s no three seashells.

But in the years since the sequel’s debut, I’ve come to be less annoyed by all of its missed opportunities and reliance on Raimi-isms and stunt cameos. “Red means go” is the absolute least they could do in Strange and Chavez’s multiversal bonding time, but my moaning about it actually came back to haunt me when I got a new Bosch fridge freezer and called the company’s maintenance team out to fix it, only to be told that a permanent red light glowing from the front panel was no cause for alarm and simply meant the power was on. Alas, this effectively removed my ability to complain about “red means go” forever.

Let’s Fix a Boat

Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier explored what happened after Sam Wilson received Captain America’s shield and poor Bucky Barnes was left behind on the lawn like an abandoned puppy following Steve Rogers’s return from putting back the Infinity Stones in Avengers: Endgame. As Sam and Bucky teamed up to stop an anti-patriotism group called the Flag Smashers, they bickered their way across the world and clashed with new Cap John Walker in several action-packed sequences, pausing in the penultimate episode to bond and fix up the Wilson family boat in a montage that could least damningly be described as fine and most damningly described as cringe.

In the midst of dealing with a pissed-off Walker stripped of his Captain America title, and a Flag Smasher group planning god knows what as their next explosive statement, Wilson and Barnes’s inevitable bonding sesh comes at the most irritating possible moment in the series, but I’ve started looking back at the “let’s fix a boat” scene with much less annoyance than I did at the time. After all, it was important to make sure the audience knew these guys had properly buried the hatchet of being mildly peeved with each other so they could reunite them for two minutes in Brave New World and assure us that Bucky didn’t really need all that therapy for going through decades of torture and abuse. Sometimes, fixing a boat with a new pal is just as effective. Probably. Actually, never mind.

The MCU’s Briefest Mask

We’re not leaving The Falcon and the Winter Soldier behind just yet, because the limited series also gave us one of the most “oh, come on” moments ever when it first streamed on Disney+.

Having previously released a teaser video of Baron Helmut J. Zemo’s return following the carnage he caused in Captain America: Civil War, I was initially delighted to see that Daniel Brühl, reprising his villainous role from that MCU threequel, would be sporting his iconic purple mask in the upcoming show.

Technically, Marvel delivered. Zemo pops his mask on for about 30 seconds during a shootout in Madripoor with Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier after retrieving it from his family’s storage garage. But 30 seconds wasn’t enough for me. As a longtime Zemo fan, thrilled that he was coming back to the MCU, I just felt utterly deflated that he only wore his mask for as long as it took to close some browser tabs.

But hey, at least I did get to see Baron Zemo in his purple mask, albeit briefly. And since the character is still alive in the MCU, maybe I’ll get to see it again one day. Here’s hoping.

Any ludicrous but fun Phase 4 moments lingering for you? As always, let me know in the comments!

The post Celebrating the Most Ludicrous Moments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4 appeared first on Den of Geek.

It’s a warm spring day outside of London when I step onto a backlot at Leavesden Studios. Yet as judged by the rubble and ruin falling down around me and a group of fellow journalists who traverse the debris before our eyes, it might as well be another planet. One that’s on it’s last legs. […]

The post Supergirl Movie Walks Among the Ghosts of Krypton: A Set Report appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the years following the release of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios was in a tight spot. It had to rebuild, and it had to do so during a time when both fan hunger and the Disney+ content machine demanded more, more, more.

As a result, Marvel had a long string of hits and misses in Phase 4, some of which amounted to cutting its own bangs in the mirror and cry-laughing at the aftermath. It had broken up with its long-term boyfriends like Iron Man and Steve Rogers and decided to go speed dating. What would be a good match for this post-Endgame Marvel? Only time, and a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck, would tell.

Phase 4 sure was messy. Seven films, eight TV shows, and two specials messy. But y’know what? I’m starting to look back on those times and really appreciate all that nonsense. Not the standout stuff like WandaVision, Loki, Werewolf by Night, and Hawkeye. I already appreciated those. No, I’m talking about some of the absolutely ludicrous Phase 4 moments that certainly raised a few eyebrows at the time but can now finally get their due as gloriously weird occurrences in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Minus She-Hulk twerking. We’ve heard enough about that for a lifetime.

Please note that the following moments will not be addressed in a professional manner.

Ray Winstone’s Russian Accent Revealed

It’s no secret that I love a terrible accent, but in a movie filled with questionable Russian accents, Ray Winstone’s reigns supreme in Black Widow. Landing somewhere between Cockney and South African instead of any kind of Russian dialect, it’s clear that Winstone might have ordered his accent from Temu, and we were all left to deal with the consequences.

As the villainous overseer of the Red Room, Winstone’s turn as Dreykov is aurally challenging, to say the least, but while everyone was chuckling at his efforts to portray the Russian general we’d been hearing about since the first Avengers movie, he had a surprising supporter in dialect coach Adrienne Nelson, who seemed to enjoy it regardless. “Dreykov, his acting was so mesmerizing that the dialect issues became not so much a distraction as a curiosity,” she told Slate. “I wondered if the British and Russian colors I was hearing had to do with his backstory.”

The British colors? Certainly not a part of Dreykov’s backstory in the MCU, no, but the accent itself is so much fun! How can you stay mad at it? And though I should mention that Russell Crowe later gave Winstone a run for his money in Phase 4’s Thor: Love and Thunder, the latter’s Russian efforts win out as the best worst accent in MCU history.

Harry Styles Arrives

Eternals had a lot of problems, but its most enduring one was being the first Phase 4 movie to have a post-credits scene that was set to go absolutely nowhere. It took the cake because it briefly introduced Starfox, Thanos’s adopted brother, who was a prince and a space outlaw or something. It doesn’t really matter, let’s be honest. He never came back, nor did the Eternals themselves.

Starfox was played by pop singer and sometimes actor Harry Styles in a bit of stunt casting so blinding it that it actually hurt to look at it directly. To fully survive it, you’d have had to close your eyes like Indy and Marion at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even then, you’d be cursed with less than 20/20 vision for all eternity.

It didn’t help that Starfox was accompanied by a Patton Oswalt-voiced Pip the Troll in some of the worst CGI the MCU has ever done, but now that all this is in my rearview, I feel like I can take almost any stunt casting Marvel can throw at me. Have Britney Spears come out at the end of Avengers: Secret Wars and blow up the multiverse, yelling, “It’s Britney, bitch.” I am now immune. I can take it. Harry Styles has prepared me for anything. Only fear is the mind-killer.

Stormbreaker’s Jealous

Stray to any Marvel Reddit thread about the worst MCU films ever and you’ll see a lot of people crowning Thor: Love and Thunder. They’ll tell you there’s no one who likes the God of Thunder’s fourquel, and that it should be consigned to the bin of Marvel Studios mistakes where it belongs. But there are people who like it! There are tens of us who didn’t really mind how silly the movie turned out after returning director Taika Waititi decided to lean much further into the wacky humor of Thor: Ragnarok, and I’d argue that one of the best bits of the film is one that its detractors bring up time and again as genuinely diabolical: Waititi’s notion that Thor’s weapons might be sentient.

During Love and Thunder, there’s a moment where Thor retreats to the bow of his Viking longship, the Aegir, and discusses Mjolnir coming back into his orbit with Stormbreaker, wondering if the latter might be jealous of the former. “Are we good?” he asks, pouring a beer on the axe. “Sorry we’ve been fighting lately.” Though there’s no indication that Thor’s doing anything other than anthropomorphizing both weapons, his banter with them is so silly that I genuinely find it delightful. You may not agree, but that’s alright. We can agree to disagree.

However, I think this kind of back-and-forth throughout Love and Thunder complements Gorr’s opposing struggle with All-Black the Necrosword, a powerful, corrupting weapon that binds his lifeforce to its blade. Positing that Mjolnir or Stormbreaker also might be sentient is a nice touch, given that all the weapons are key parts of the story.

Eh, like I said, maybe we’ll just agree to disagree on this one!

Shang-Chi Rides a Dragon

This is perhaps a controversial one because I think a lot of people very much enjoyed the final act of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and so did I! Still, at the end of the movie, when Shang-Chi eventually mounts The Great Protector, a giant fuck-off dragon who guards the hidden realm of Ta Lo, it’s easy to ask yourself what the hell is even happening anymore, especially when this climactic moment follows a sudden run-in with Iron Man 3’s Trevor Slattery, who is bounding around with an inexplicable CGI creature, and some painful BMW product placement in the middle of an impossible forest.

All that said, I can’t be mad at a fuck-off dragon emerging from the depths and reviving our hero so that he can beat a demon hell-bent on absorbing some souls because the hero’s dad thought his dead mum might be in there somewhere. Wait, what was this movie about?

Egypt Kaiju Fight

During a final showdown between Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) and Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) in Marvel’s divisive Moon Knight, Egyptian gods Khonshu and Ammit get in on the action by blowing up to kaiju size and fighting each other under Cairo’s night sky. Destroying pyramids and all sorts while Spector blips in and out of his different personalities, he and Khonshu eventually emerge triumphant from the battle because of course they do; yet no one in the MCU ever mentions the wonders and consequences of this kaiju face-off ever again.

Why? Because there will be no further reason to refer to it again. Moon Knight was a “one-and-done” show for Marvel, and unlike Civil War’s key plot point that the Avengers are causing too much damage or Brave New World finally telling everyone that Tiamut’s massive Celestial corpse is rich in Adamantium, there’s simply no need to address it. What happened in Egypt stays in Egypt.

And hey, y’know what I don’t love about a kaiju fight? Nothing. Every single one is a gift. Moon Knight’s is a bit of fun nonsense that lends even greater stakes to Spector’s showdown with Harlow and the special effects aren’t terrible either. It’s ludicrous, but frankly, if all this happened in a Moon Knight comic I was reading, I’d be delighted.

Red Means Go

Back when Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was first released in 2022, I found myself infuriated by it for various reasons. Some of those reasons were narrative and some were character-based, but there were also little things that bothered me like the fact that, given the chance to explore the big, wild multiverse, the bulk of Stephen Strange’s walking-around time was monopolized by a jaunt where he and America Chavez could revisit old memories, eat pizza balls, brush up against a wink-wink Bruce Campbell street vendor and learn that red actually means go when it comes to traffic control. It’s no three seashells.

But in the years since the sequel’s debut, I’ve come to be less annoyed by all of its missed opportunities and reliance on Raimi-isms and stunt cameos. “Red means go” is the absolute least they could do in Strange and Chavez’s multiversal bonding time, but my moaning about it actually came back to haunt me when I got a new Bosch fridge freezer and called the company’s maintenance team out to fix it, only to be told that a permanent red light glowing from the front panel was no cause for alarm and simply meant the power was on. Alas, this effectively removed my ability to complain about “red means go” forever.

Let’s Fix a Boat

Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier explored what happened after Sam Wilson received Captain America’s shield and poor Bucky Barnes was left behind on the lawn like an abandoned puppy following Steve Rogers’s return from putting back the Infinity Stones in Avengers: Endgame. As Sam and Bucky teamed up to stop an anti-patriotism group called the Flag Smashers, they bickered their way across the world and clashed with new Cap John Walker in several action-packed sequences, pausing in the penultimate episode to bond and fix up the Wilson family boat in a montage that could least damningly be described as fine and most damningly described as cringe.

In the midst of dealing with a pissed-off Walker stripped of his Captain America title, and a Flag Smasher group planning god knows what as their next explosive statement, Wilson and Barnes’s inevitable bonding sesh comes at the most irritating possible moment in the series, but I’ve started looking back at the “let’s fix a boat” scene with much less annoyance than I did at the time. After all, it was important to make sure the audience knew these guys had properly buried the hatchet of being mildly peeved with each other so they could reunite them for two minutes in Brave New World and assure us that Bucky didn’t really need all that therapy for going through decades of torture and abuse. Sometimes, fixing a boat with a new pal is just as effective. Probably. Actually, never mind.

The MCU’s Briefest Mask

We’re not leaving The Falcon and the Winter Soldier behind just yet, because the limited series also gave us one of the most “oh, come on” moments ever when it first streamed on Disney+.

Having previously released a teaser video of Baron Helmut J. Zemo’s return following the carnage he caused in Captain America: Civil War, I was initially delighted to see that Daniel Brühl, reprising his villainous role from that MCU threequel, would be sporting his iconic purple mask in the upcoming show.

Technically, Marvel delivered. Zemo pops his mask on for about 30 seconds during a shootout in Madripoor with Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier after retrieving it from his family’s storage garage. But 30 seconds wasn’t enough for me. As a longtime Zemo fan, thrilled that he was coming back to the MCU, I just felt utterly deflated that he only wore his mask for as long as it took to close some browser tabs.

But hey, at least I did get to see Baron Zemo in his purple mask, albeit briefly. And since the character is still alive in the MCU, maybe I’ll get to see it again one day. Here’s hoping.

Any ludicrous but fun Phase 4 moments lingering for you? As always, let me know in the comments!

The post Celebrating the Most Ludicrous Moments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4 appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the years following the release of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios was in a tight spot. It had to rebuild, and it had to do so during a time when both fan hunger and the Disney+ content machine demanded more, more, more. As a result, Marvel had a long string of hits and misses in […]

The post Celebrating the Most Ludicrous Moments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4 appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the years following the release of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios was in a tight spot. It had to rebuild, and it had to do so during a time when both fan hunger and the Disney+ content machine demanded more, more, more.

As a result, Marvel had a long string of hits and misses in Phase 4, some of which amounted to cutting its own bangs in the mirror and cry-laughing at the aftermath. It had broken up with its long-term boyfriends like Iron Man and Steve Rogers and decided to go speed dating. What would be a good match for this post-Endgame Marvel? Only time, and a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck, would tell.

Phase 4 sure was messy. Seven films, eight TV shows, and two specials messy. But y’know what? I’m starting to look back on those times and really appreciate all that nonsense. Not the standout stuff like WandaVision, Loki, Werewolf by Night, and Hawkeye. I already appreciated those. No, I’m talking about some of the absolutely ludicrous Phase 4 moments that certainly raised a few eyebrows at the time but can now finally get their due as gloriously weird occurrences in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Minus She-Hulk twerking. We’ve heard enough about that for a lifetime.

Please note that the following moments will not be addressed in a professional manner.

Ray Winstone’s Russian Accent Revealed

It’s no secret that I love a terrible accent, but in a movie filled with questionable Russian accents, Ray Winstone’s reigns supreme in Black Widow. Landing somewhere between Cockney and South African instead of any kind of Russian dialect, it’s clear that Winstone might have ordered his accent from Temu, and we were all left to deal with the consequences.

As the villainous overseer of the Red Room, Winstone’s turn as Dreykov is aurally challenging, to say the least, but while everyone was chuckling at his efforts to portray the Russian general we’d been hearing about since the first Avengers movie, he had a surprising supporter in dialect coach Adrienne Nelson, who seemed to enjoy it regardless. “Dreykov, his acting was so mesmerizing that the dialect issues became not so much a distraction as a curiosity,” she told Slate. “I wondered if the British and Russian colors I was hearing had to do with his backstory.”

The British colors? Certainly not a part of Dreykov’s backstory in the MCU, no, but the accent itself is so much fun! How can you stay mad at it? And though I should mention that Russell Crowe later gave Winstone a run for his money in Phase 4’s Thor: Love and Thunder, the latter’s Russian efforts win out as the best worst accent in MCU history.

Harry Styles Arrives

Eternals had a lot of problems, but its most enduring one was being the first Phase 4 movie to have a post-credits scene that was set to go absolutely nowhere. It took the cake because it briefly introduced Starfox, Thanos’s adopted brother, who was a prince and a space outlaw or something. It doesn’t really matter, let’s be honest. He never came back, nor did the Eternals themselves.

Starfox was played by pop singer and sometimes actor Harry Styles in a bit of stunt casting so blinding it that it actually hurt to look at it directly. To fully survive it, you’d have had to close your eyes like Indy and Marion at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even then, you’d be cursed with less than 20/20 vision for all eternity.

It didn’t help that Starfox was accompanied by a Patton Oswalt-voiced Pip the Troll in some of the worst CGI the MCU has ever done, but now that all this is in my rearview, I feel like I can take almost any stunt casting Marvel can throw at me. Have Britney Spears come out at the end of Avengers: Secret Wars and blow up the multiverse, yelling, “It’s Britney, bitch.” I am now immune. I can take it. Harry Styles has prepared me for anything. Only fear is the mind-killer.

Stormbreaker’s Jealous

Stray to any Marvel Reddit thread about the worst MCU films ever and you’ll see a lot of people crowning Thor: Love and Thunder. They’ll tell you there’s no one who likes the God of Thunder’s fourquel, and that it should be consigned to the bin of Marvel Studios mistakes where it belongs. But there are people who like it! There are tens of us who didn’t really mind how silly the movie turned out after returning director Taika Waititi decided to lean much further into the wacky humor of Thor: Ragnarok, and I’d argue that one of the best bits of the film is one that its detractors bring up time and again as genuinely diabolical: Waititi’s notion that Thor’s weapons might be sentient.

During Love and Thunder, there’s a moment where Thor retreats to the bow of his Viking longship, the Aegir, and discusses Mjolnir coming back into his orbit with Stormbreaker, wondering if the latter might be jealous of the former. “Are we good?” he asks, pouring a beer on the axe. “Sorry we’ve been fighting lately.” Though there’s no indication that Thor’s doing anything other than anthropomorphizing both weapons, his banter with them is so silly that I genuinely find it delightful. You may not agree, but that’s alright. We can agree to disagree.

However, I think this kind of back-and-forth throughout Love and Thunder complements Gorr’s opposing struggle with All-Black the Necrosword, a powerful, corrupting weapon that binds his lifeforce to its blade. Positing that Mjolnir or Stormbreaker also might be sentient is a nice touch, given that all the weapons are key parts of the story.

Eh, like I said, maybe we’ll just agree to disagree on this one!

Shang-Chi Rides a Dragon

This is perhaps a controversial one because I think a lot of people very much enjoyed the final act of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and so did I! Still, at the end of the movie, when Shang-Chi eventually mounts The Great Protector, a giant fuck-off dragon who guards the hidden realm of Ta Lo, it’s easy to ask yourself what the hell is even happening anymore, especially when this climactic moment follows a sudden run-in with Iron Man 3’s Trevor Slattery, who is bounding around with an inexplicable CGI creature, and some painful BMW product placement in the middle of an impossible forest.

All that said, I can’t be mad at a fuck-off dragon emerging from the depths and reviving our hero so that he can beat a demon hell-bent on absorbing some souls because the hero’s dad thought his dead mum might be in there somewhere. Wait, what was this movie about?

Egypt Kaiju Fight

During a final showdown between Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) and Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) in Marvel’s divisive Moon Knight, Egyptian gods Khonshu and Ammit get in on the action by blowing up to kaiju size and fighting each other under Cairo’s night sky. Destroying pyramids and all sorts while Spector blips in and out of his different personalities, he and Khonshu eventually emerge triumphant from the battle because of course they do; yet no one in the MCU ever mentions the wonders and consequences of this kaiju face-off ever again.

Why? Because there will be no further reason to refer to it again. Moon Knight was a “one-and-done” show for Marvel, and unlike Civil War’s key plot point that the Avengers are causing too much damage or Brave New World finally telling everyone that Tiamut’s massive Celestial corpse is rich in Adamantium, there’s simply no need to address it. What happened in Egypt stays in Egypt.

And hey, y’know what I don’t love about a kaiju fight? Nothing. Every single one is a gift. Moon Knight’s is a bit of fun nonsense that lends even greater stakes to Spector’s showdown with Harlow and the special effects aren’t terrible either. It’s ludicrous, but frankly, if all this happened in a Moon Knight comic I was reading, I’d be delighted.

Red Means Go

Back when Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was first released in 2022, I found myself infuriated by it for various reasons. Some of those reasons were narrative and some were character-based, but there were also little things that bothered me like the fact that, given the chance to explore the big, wild multiverse, the bulk of Stephen Strange’s walking-around time was monopolized by a jaunt where he and America Chavez could revisit old memories, eat pizza balls, brush up against a wink-wink Bruce Campbell street vendor and learn that red actually means go when it comes to traffic control. It’s no three seashells.

But in the years since the sequel’s debut, I’ve come to be less annoyed by all of its missed opportunities and reliance on Raimi-isms and stunt cameos. “Red means go” is the absolute least they could do in Strange and Chavez’s multiversal bonding time, but my moaning about it actually came back to haunt me when I got a new Bosch fridge freezer and called the company’s maintenance team out to fix it, only to be told that a permanent red light glowing from the front panel was no cause for alarm and simply meant the power was on. Alas, this effectively removed my ability to complain about “red means go” forever.

Let’s Fix a Boat

Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier explored what happened after Sam Wilson received Captain America’s shield and poor Bucky Barnes was left behind on the lawn like an abandoned puppy following Steve Rogers’s return from putting back the Infinity Stones in Avengers: Endgame. As Sam and Bucky teamed up to stop an anti-patriotism group called the Flag Smashers, they bickered their way across the world and clashed with new Cap John Walker in several action-packed sequences, pausing in the penultimate episode to bond and fix up the Wilson family boat in a montage that could least damningly be described as fine and most damningly described as cringe.

In the midst of dealing with a pissed-off Walker stripped of his Captain America title, and a Flag Smasher group planning god knows what as their next explosive statement, Wilson and Barnes’s inevitable bonding sesh comes at the most irritating possible moment in the series, but I’ve started looking back at the “let’s fix a boat” scene with much less annoyance than I did at the time. After all, it was important to make sure the audience knew these guys had properly buried the hatchet of being mildly peeved with each other so they could reunite them for two minutes in Brave New World and assure us that Bucky didn’t really need all that therapy for going through decades of torture and abuse. Sometimes, fixing a boat with a new pal is just as effective. Probably. Actually, never mind.

The MCU’s Briefest Mask

We’re not leaving The Falcon and the Winter Soldier behind just yet, because the limited series also gave us one of the most “oh, come on” moments ever when it first streamed on Disney+.

Having previously released a teaser video of Baron Helmut J. Zemo’s return following the carnage he caused in Captain America: Civil War, I was initially delighted to see that Daniel Brühl, reprising his villainous role from that MCU threequel, would be sporting his iconic purple mask in the upcoming show.

Technically, Marvel delivered. Zemo pops his mask on for about 30 seconds during a shootout in Madripoor with Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier after retrieving it from his family’s storage garage. But 30 seconds wasn’t enough for me. As a longtime Zemo fan, thrilled that he was coming back to the MCU, I just felt utterly deflated that he only wore his mask for as long as it took to close some browser tabs.

But hey, at least I did get to see Baron Zemo in his purple mask, albeit briefly. And since the character is still alive in the MCU, maybe I’ll get to see it again one day. Here’s hoping.

Any ludicrous but fun Phase 4 moments lingering for you? As always, let me know in the comments!

The post Celebrating the Most Ludicrous Moments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4 appeared first on Den of Geek.

Criminal. Liar. Thief. A Kingsagent sent to test the loyalty of the citizenry, who killed a good man for criticizing the ruler. That’s how Krem of the Yellow Hills is described in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely. We knew that Krem would get an upgrade to be the big bad […]

The post Supergirl Trailer Shows Off Upgraded Big Bad appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the years following the release of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios was in a tight spot. It had to rebuild, and it had to do so during a time when both fan hunger and the Disney+ content machine demanded more, more, more.

As a result, Marvel had a long string of hits and misses in Phase 4, some of which amounted to cutting its own bangs in the mirror and cry-laughing at the aftermath. It had broken up with its long-term boyfriends like Iron Man and Steve Rogers and decided to go speed dating. What would be a good match for this post-Endgame Marvel? Only time, and a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck, would tell.

Phase 4 sure was messy. Seven films, eight TV shows, and two specials messy. But y’know what? I’m starting to look back on those times and really appreciate all that nonsense. Not the standout stuff like WandaVision, Loki, Werewolf by Night, and Hawkeye. I already appreciated those. No, I’m talking about some of the absolutely ludicrous Phase 4 moments that certainly raised a few eyebrows at the time but can now finally get their due as gloriously weird occurrences in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Minus She-Hulk twerking. We’ve heard enough about that for a lifetime.

Please note that the following moments will not be addressed in a professional manner.

Ray Winstone’s Russian Accent Revealed

It’s no secret that I love a terrible accent, but in a movie filled with questionable Russian accents, Ray Winstone’s reigns supreme in Black Widow. Landing somewhere between Cockney and South African instead of any kind of Russian dialect, it’s clear that Winstone might have ordered his accent from Temu, and we were all left to deal with the consequences.

As the villainous overseer of the Red Room, Winstone’s turn as Dreykov is aurally challenging, to say the least, but while everyone was chuckling at his efforts to portray the Russian general we’d been hearing about since the first Avengers movie, he had a surprising supporter in dialect coach Adrienne Nelson, who seemed to enjoy it regardless. “Dreykov, his acting was so mesmerizing that the dialect issues became not so much a distraction as a curiosity,” she told Slate. “I wondered if the British and Russian colors I was hearing had to do with his backstory.”

The British colors? Certainly not a part of Dreykov’s backstory in the MCU, no, but the accent itself is so much fun! How can you stay mad at it? And though I should mention that Russell Crowe later gave Winstone a run for his money in Phase 4’s Thor: Love and Thunder, the latter’s Russian efforts win out as the best worst accent in MCU history.

Harry Styles Arrives

Eternals had a lot of problems, but its most enduring one was being the first Phase 4 movie to have a post-credits scene that was set to go absolutely nowhere. It took the cake because it briefly introduced Starfox, Thanos’s adopted brother, who was a prince and a space outlaw or something. It doesn’t really matter, let’s be honest. He never came back, nor did the Eternals themselves.

Starfox was played by pop singer and sometimes actor Harry Styles in a bit of stunt casting so blinding it that it actually hurt to look at it directly. To fully survive it, you’d have had to close your eyes like Indy and Marion at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even then, you’d be cursed with less than 20/20 vision for all eternity.

It didn’t help that Starfox was accompanied by a Patton Oswalt-voiced Pip the Troll in some of the worst CGI the MCU has ever done, but now that all this is in my rearview, I feel like I can take almost any stunt casting Marvel can throw at me. Have Britney Spears come out at the end of Avengers: Secret Wars and blow up the multiverse, yelling, “It’s Britney, bitch.” I am now immune. I can take it. Harry Styles has prepared me for anything. Only fear is the mind-killer.

Stormbreaker’s Jealous

Stray to any Marvel Reddit thread about the worst MCU films ever and you’ll see a lot of people crowning Thor: Love and Thunder. They’ll tell you there’s no one who likes the God of Thunder’s fourquel, and that it should be consigned to the bin of Marvel Studios mistakes where it belongs. But there are people who like it! There are tens of us who didn’t really mind how silly the movie turned out after returning director Taika Waititi decided to lean much further into the wacky humor of Thor: Ragnarok, and I’d argue that one of the best bits of the film is one that its detractors bring up time and again as genuinely diabolical: Waititi’s notion that Thor’s weapons might be sentient.

During Love and Thunder, there’s a moment where Thor retreats to the bow of his Viking longship, the Aegir, and discusses Mjolnir coming back into his orbit with Stormbreaker, wondering if the latter might be jealous of the former. “Are we good?” he asks, pouring a beer on the axe. “Sorry we’ve been fighting lately.” Though there’s no indication that Thor’s doing anything other than anthropomorphizing both weapons, his banter with them is so silly that I genuinely find it delightful. You may not agree, but that’s alright. We can agree to disagree.

However, I think this kind of back-and-forth throughout Love and Thunder complements Gorr’s opposing struggle with All-Black the Necrosword, a powerful, corrupting weapon that binds his lifeforce to its blade. Positing that Mjolnir or Stormbreaker also might be sentient is a nice touch, given that all the weapons are key parts of the story.

Eh, like I said, maybe we’ll just agree to disagree on this one!

Shang-Chi Rides a Dragon

This is perhaps a controversial one because I think a lot of people very much enjoyed the final act of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and so did I! Still, at the end of the movie, when Shang-Chi eventually mounts The Great Protector, a giant fuck-off dragon who guards the hidden realm of Ta Lo, it’s easy to ask yourself what the hell is even happening anymore, especially when this climactic moment follows a sudden run-in with Iron Man 3’s Trevor Slattery, who is bounding around with an inexplicable CGI creature, and some painful BMW product placement in the middle of an impossible forest.

All that said, I can’t be mad at a fuck-off dragon emerging from the depths and reviving our hero so that he can beat a demon hell-bent on absorbing some souls because the hero’s dad thought his dead mum might be in there somewhere. Wait, what was this movie about?

Egypt Kaiju Fight

During a final showdown between Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) and Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) in Marvel’s divisive Moon Knight, Egyptian gods Khonshu and Ammit get in on the action by blowing up to kaiju size and fighting each other under Cairo’s night sky. Destroying pyramids and all sorts while Spector blips in and out of his different personalities, he and Khonshu eventually emerge triumphant from the battle because of course they do; yet no one in the MCU ever mentions the wonders and consequences of this kaiju face-off ever again.

Why? Because there will be no further reason to refer to it again. Moon Knight was a “one-and-done” show for Marvel, and unlike Civil War’s key plot point that the Avengers are causing too much damage or Brave New World finally telling everyone that Tiamut’s massive Celestial corpse is rich in Adamantium, there’s simply no need to address it. What happened in Egypt stays in Egypt.

And hey, y’know what I don’t love about a kaiju fight? Nothing. Every single one is a gift. Moon Knight’s is a bit of fun nonsense that lends even greater stakes to Spector’s showdown with Harlow and the special effects aren’t terrible either. It’s ludicrous, but frankly, if all this happened in a Moon Knight comic I was reading, I’d be delighted.

Red Means Go

Back when Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was first released in 2022, I found myself infuriated by it for various reasons. Some of those reasons were narrative and some were character-based, but there were also little things that bothered me like the fact that, given the chance to explore the big, wild multiverse, the bulk of Stephen Strange’s walking-around time was monopolized by a jaunt where he and America Chavez could revisit old memories, eat pizza balls, brush up against a wink-wink Bruce Campbell street vendor and learn that red actually means go when it comes to traffic control. It’s no three seashells.

But in the years since the sequel’s debut, I’ve come to be less annoyed by all of its missed opportunities and reliance on Raimi-isms and stunt cameos. “Red means go” is the absolute least they could do in Strange and Chavez’s multiversal bonding time, but my moaning about it actually came back to haunt me when I got a new Bosch fridge freezer and called the company’s maintenance team out to fix it, only to be told that a permanent red light glowing from the front panel was no cause for alarm and simply meant the power was on. Alas, this effectively removed my ability to complain about “red means go” forever.

Let’s Fix a Boat

Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier explored what happened after Sam Wilson received Captain America’s shield and poor Bucky Barnes was left behind on the lawn like an abandoned puppy following Steve Rogers’s return from putting back the Infinity Stones in Avengers: Endgame. As Sam and Bucky teamed up to stop an anti-patriotism group called the Flag Smashers, they bickered their way across the world and clashed with new Cap John Walker in several action-packed sequences, pausing in the penultimate episode to bond and fix up the Wilson family boat in a montage that could least damningly be described as fine and most damningly described as cringe.

In the midst of dealing with a pissed-off Walker stripped of his Captain America title, and a Flag Smasher group planning god knows what as their next explosive statement, Wilson and Barnes’s inevitable bonding sesh comes at the most irritating possible moment in the series, but I’ve started looking back at the “let’s fix a boat” scene with much less annoyance than I did at the time. After all, it was important to make sure the audience knew these guys had properly buried the hatchet of being mildly peeved with each other so they could reunite them for two minutes in Brave New World and assure us that Bucky didn’t really need all that therapy for going through decades of torture and abuse. Sometimes, fixing a boat with a new pal is just as effective. Probably. Actually, never mind.

The MCU’s Briefest Mask

We’re not leaving The Falcon and the Winter Soldier behind just yet, because the limited series also gave us one of the most “oh, come on” moments ever when it first streamed on Disney+.

Having previously released a teaser video of Baron Helmut J. Zemo’s return following the carnage he caused in Captain America: Civil War, I was initially delighted to see that Daniel Brühl, reprising his villainous role from that MCU threequel, would be sporting his iconic purple mask in the upcoming show.

Technically, Marvel delivered. Zemo pops his mask on for about 30 seconds during a shootout in Madripoor with Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier after retrieving it from his family’s storage garage. But 30 seconds wasn’t enough for me. As a longtime Zemo fan, thrilled that he was coming back to the MCU, I just felt utterly deflated that he only wore his mask for as long as it took to close some browser tabs.

But hey, at least I did get to see Baron Zemo in his purple mask, albeit briefly. And since the character is still alive in the MCU, maybe I’ll get to see it again one day. Here’s hoping.

Any ludicrous but fun Phase 4 moments lingering for you? As always, let me know in the comments!

The post Celebrating the Most Ludicrous Moments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4 appeared first on Den of Geek.

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The post Why a Wildly Underrated Crime Thriller Is Dominating Comic Sales Right Now appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the years following the release of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios was in a tight spot. It had to rebuild, and it had to do so during a time when both fan hunger and the Disney+ content machine demanded more, more, more.

As a result, Marvel had a long string of hits and misses in Phase 4, some of which amounted to cutting its own bangs in the mirror and cry-laughing at the aftermath. It had broken up with its long-term boyfriends like Iron Man and Steve Rogers and decided to go speed dating. What would be a good match for this post-Endgame Marvel? Only time, and a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck, would tell.

Phase 4 sure was messy. Seven films, eight TV shows, and two specials messy. But y’know what? I’m starting to look back on those times and really appreciate all that nonsense. Not the standout stuff like WandaVision, Loki, Werewolf by Night, and Hawkeye. I already appreciated those. No, I’m talking about some of the absolutely ludicrous Phase 4 moments that certainly raised a few eyebrows at the time but can now finally get their due as gloriously weird occurrences in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Minus She-Hulk twerking. We’ve heard enough about that for a lifetime.

Please note that the following moments will not be addressed in a professional manner.

Ray Winstone’s Russian Accent Revealed

It’s no secret that I love a terrible accent, but in a movie filled with questionable Russian accents, Ray Winstone’s reigns supreme in Black Widow. Landing somewhere between Cockney and South African instead of any kind of Russian dialect, it’s clear that Winstone might have ordered his accent from Temu, and we were all left to deal with the consequences.

As the villainous overseer of the Red Room, Winstone’s turn as Dreykov is aurally challenging, to say the least, but while everyone was chuckling at his efforts to portray the Russian general we’d been hearing about since the first Avengers movie, he had a surprising supporter in dialect coach Adrienne Nelson, who seemed to enjoy it regardless. “Dreykov, his acting was so mesmerizing that the dialect issues became not so much a distraction as a curiosity,” she told Slate. “I wondered if the British and Russian colors I was hearing had to do with his backstory.”

The British colors? Certainly not a part of Dreykov’s backstory in the MCU, no, but the accent itself is so much fun! How can you stay mad at it? And though I should mention that Russell Crowe later gave Winstone a run for his money in Phase 4’s Thor: Love and Thunder, the latter’s Russian efforts win out as the best worst accent in MCU history.

Harry Styles Arrives

Eternals had a lot of problems, but its most enduring one was being the first Phase 4 movie to have a post-credits scene that was set to go absolutely nowhere. It took the cake because it briefly introduced Starfox, Thanos’s adopted brother, who was a prince and a space outlaw or something. It doesn’t really matter, let’s be honest. He never came back, nor did the Eternals themselves.

Starfox was played by pop singer and sometimes actor Harry Styles in a bit of stunt casting so blinding it that it actually hurt to look at it directly. To fully survive it, you’d have had to close your eyes like Indy and Marion at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even then, you’d be cursed with less than 20/20 vision for all eternity.

It didn’t help that Starfox was accompanied by a Patton Oswalt-voiced Pip the Troll in some of the worst CGI the MCU has ever done, but now that all this is in my rearview, I feel like I can take almost any stunt casting Marvel can throw at me. Have Britney Spears come out at the end of Avengers: Secret Wars and blow up the multiverse, yelling, “It’s Britney, bitch.” I am now immune. I can take it. Harry Styles has prepared me for anything. Only fear is the mind-killer.

Stormbreaker’s Jealous

Stray to any Marvel Reddit thread about the worst MCU films ever and you’ll see a lot of people crowning Thor: Love and Thunder. They’ll tell you there’s no one who likes the God of Thunder’s fourquel, and that it should be consigned to the bin of Marvel Studios mistakes where it belongs. But there are people who like it! There are tens of us who didn’t really mind how silly the movie turned out after returning director Taika Waititi decided to lean much further into the wacky humor of Thor: Ragnarok, and I’d argue that one of the best bits of the film is one that its detractors bring up time and again as genuinely diabolical: Waititi’s notion that Thor’s weapons might be sentient.

During Love and Thunder, there’s a moment where Thor retreats to the bow of his Viking longship, the Aegir, and discusses Mjolnir coming back into his orbit with Stormbreaker, wondering if the latter might be jealous of the former. “Are we good?” he asks, pouring a beer on the axe. “Sorry we’ve been fighting lately.” Though there’s no indication that Thor’s doing anything other than anthropomorphizing both weapons, his banter with them is so silly that I genuinely find it delightful. You may not agree, but that’s alright. We can agree to disagree.

However, I think this kind of back-and-forth throughout Love and Thunder complements Gorr’s opposing struggle with All-Black the Necrosword, a powerful, corrupting weapon that binds his lifeforce to its blade. Positing that Mjolnir or Stormbreaker also might be sentient is a nice touch, given that all the weapons are key parts of the story.

Eh, like I said, maybe we’ll just agree to disagree on this one!

Shang-Chi Rides a Dragon

This is perhaps a controversial one because I think a lot of people very much enjoyed the final act of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and so did I! Still, at the end of the movie, when Shang-Chi eventually mounts The Great Protector, a giant fuck-off dragon who guards the hidden realm of Ta Lo, it’s easy to ask yourself what the hell is even happening anymore, especially when this climactic moment follows a sudden run-in with Iron Man 3’s Trevor Slattery, who is bounding around with an inexplicable CGI creature, and some painful BMW product placement in the middle of an impossible forest.

All that said, I can’t be mad at a fuck-off dragon emerging from the depths and reviving our hero so that he can beat a demon hell-bent on absorbing some souls because the hero’s dad thought his dead mum might be in there somewhere. Wait, what was this movie about?

Egypt Kaiju Fight

During a final showdown between Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) and Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) in Marvel’s divisive Moon Knight, Egyptian gods Khonshu and Ammit get in on the action by blowing up to kaiju size and fighting each other under Cairo’s night sky. Destroying pyramids and all sorts while Spector blips in and out of his different personalities, he and Khonshu eventually emerge triumphant from the battle because of course they do; yet no one in the MCU ever mentions the wonders and consequences of this kaiju face-off ever again.

Why? Because there will be no further reason to refer to it again. Moon Knight was a “one-and-done” show for Marvel, and unlike Civil War’s key plot point that the Avengers are causing too much damage or Brave New World finally telling everyone that Tiamut’s massive Celestial corpse is rich in Adamantium, there’s simply no need to address it. What happened in Egypt stays in Egypt.

And hey, y’know what I don’t love about a kaiju fight? Nothing. Every single one is a gift. Moon Knight’s is a bit of fun nonsense that lends even greater stakes to Spector’s showdown with Harlow and the special effects aren’t terrible either. It’s ludicrous, but frankly, if all this happened in a Moon Knight comic I was reading, I’d be delighted.

Red Means Go

Back when Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was first released in 2022, I found myself infuriated by it for various reasons. Some of those reasons were narrative and some were character-based, but there were also little things that bothered me like the fact that, given the chance to explore the big, wild multiverse, the bulk of Stephen Strange’s walking-around time was monopolized by a jaunt where he and America Chavez could revisit old memories, eat pizza balls, brush up against a wink-wink Bruce Campbell street vendor and learn that red actually means go when it comes to traffic control. It’s no three seashells.

But in the years since the sequel’s debut, I’ve come to be less annoyed by all of its missed opportunities and reliance on Raimi-isms and stunt cameos. “Red means go” is the absolute least they could do in Strange and Chavez’s multiversal bonding time, but my moaning about it actually came back to haunt me when I got a new Bosch fridge freezer and called the company’s maintenance team out to fix it, only to be told that a permanent red light glowing from the front panel was no cause for alarm and simply meant the power was on. Alas, this effectively removed my ability to complain about “red means go” forever.

Let’s Fix a Boat

Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier explored what happened after Sam Wilson received Captain America’s shield and poor Bucky Barnes was left behind on the lawn like an abandoned puppy following Steve Rogers’s return from putting back the Infinity Stones in Avengers: Endgame. As Sam and Bucky teamed up to stop an anti-patriotism group called the Flag Smashers, they bickered their way across the world and clashed with new Cap John Walker in several action-packed sequences, pausing in the penultimate episode to bond and fix up the Wilson family boat in a montage that could least damningly be described as fine and most damningly described as cringe.

In the midst of dealing with a pissed-off Walker stripped of his Captain America title, and a Flag Smasher group planning god knows what as their next explosive statement, Wilson and Barnes’s inevitable bonding sesh comes at the most irritating possible moment in the series, but I’ve started looking back at the “let’s fix a boat” scene with much less annoyance than I did at the time. After all, it was important to make sure the audience knew these guys had properly buried the hatchet of being mildly peeved with each other so they could reunite them for two minutes in Brave New World and assure us that Bucky didn’t really need all that therapy for going through decades of torture and abuse. Sometimes, fixing a boat with a new pal is just as effective. Probably. Actually, never mind.

The MCU’s Briefest Mask

We’re not leaving The Falcon and the Winter Soldier behind just yet, because the limited series also gave us one of the most “oh, come on” moments ever when it first streamed on Disney+.

Having previously released a teaser video of Baron Helmut J. Zemo’s return following the carnage he caused in Captain America: Civil War, I was initially delighted to see that Daniel Brühl, reprising his villainous role from that MCU threequel, would be sporting his iconic purple mask in the upcoming show.

Technically, Marvel delivered. Zemo pops his mask on for about 30 seconds during a shootout in Madripoor with Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier after retrieving it from his family’s storage garage. But 30 seconds wasn’t enough for me. As a longtime Zemo fan, thrilled that he was coming back to the MCU, I just felt utterly deflated that he only wore his mask for as long as it took to close some browser tabs.

But hey, at least I did get to see Baron Zemo in his purple mask, albeit briefly. And since the character is still alive in the MCU, maybe I’ll get to see it again one day. Here’s hoping.

Any ludicrous but fun Phase 4 moments lingering for you? As always, let me know in the comments!

The post Celebrating the Most Ludicrous Moments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase 4 appeared first on Den of Geek.