leebutler Action, Adventure, Review, Sci-Fi

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) – Four-tunate!

Released: 24th July
Seen: 7th August

The Fantastic Four might be one of those cursed properties when it comes to movies as it seems like every version that’s been attempted has fallen into some kind of major problem. There was the initial attempt to make a movie back in 1994, which was made in order to maintain the rights and was never meant to be released (Go watch Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s the Fantastic Four for more on that, but it was a fucking debacle). After that was the 2005 version, which is the version most people know but ended up being so cheesy and bad that its main legacy was to give Chris Evans a chance to reveal that he was Human Torch for a reference joke in the Deadpool & Wolverine movie. Lastly, there was Fan4stic, a 2015 gritty reboot that was so bad it made people think that the first family of Marvel just couldn’t be made into a film. Every 10 years they’ve tried and every 10 years they have failed to adapt this iconic quartet to film but now it’s time for the iconic Marvel Studios to have a try. After all, the first three adaptations were done by Roger Corman and Fox Studios, but the MCU hadn’t gotten their hands on it yet… and I don’t know what magic the MCU has that everyone else didn’t, but they finally got a version that works.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Review, Sci-Fi

Thunderbolts* (2025) – THUNDER!!

Released: 1st May
Seen: 9th May

The Marvel Cinematic Universe will forever be a legendary moment in cinema, a franchise like this going for almost 2 decades with film and TV series creating this wide interconnected universe is almost unheard of and has rarely been as well executed as it has been here. Lately though, it feels like the MCU has been in a slump since the insane high of Endgame. Sure, there’ve been some bright spots, but nothing rose to the level of the MCU before Thanos snapped his fingers. It felt like everything was so spread out that it was hard to return to what made this franchise special. So here we find ourselves with another entry in the long-running franchise… and it might be the best one since Endgame and possibly in the top 10 of the entire MCU experiment, it’s that good.

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leebutler Action, Adventure, Review, Sci-Fi

Captain America: Brave New World (2025) – Brave And The Bold Choice

Released: 13th February
Seen: 16th February

In 2018, Thanos snapped his fingers and destroyed half of the universe. By doing so, he simultaneously created a point we could mark as the peak of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With the gift of time, we can pretty much state that Phase Three (AKA the era between Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Far From Home) has been the best phase of the MCU, but its absolute peak can pretty much be pinpointed to Infinity War and Endgame, two films that felt like the end of a cinematic crescendo that had been building for a decade up to that point. They were great movies, truly proof of what this genre could be like at its absolute best and probably one of the dumbest moves that Marvel made in terms of story because the problem is that once you hit a high like that, what happens afterwards?

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leebutler Review

Eternals (2021) – Not Your Normal MCU

Released: 3rd November
Seen: 3rd November

Eternals Info

It’s kind of nice having a whole bunch of Marvel films back in cinemas again, with several coming out this year and even more next year, it’s like it was before the world went to hell and back. Well, now it’s time for one of the big ones… Eternals, directed by the woman who brought us Nomadland and that has been getting a thrashing by critics who proclaim it to be the worst MCU film. Is it really the worst MCU film or is this some backlash to actual serious attempts at diversity? Yeah, probably the second one.

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Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) – My Peter Tingle Is… Tingling?

Released: 1st July
Seen: 1st July

STOP READING THIS REVIEW IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN ENDGAME. Right now, if you haven’t seen it… well, tell me what it’s like under that rock of yours, and second go and see that movie so that you’re as caught up as you can get because we’re going to talk about major spoilers from that movie since they make up a large amount of the foundation for this one. Again, I’m going to make the assumption that from this point on you are officially caught up on the major events of Avengers: Endgame and that I can spoil that movie like it was milk left under hot lights in summer. OK, let’s do this.

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Editorial: What Can DC Learn From Marvel

With the recent release of Justice League, DC has proven what a lot of film fans have known for a long time… they aren’t that good at this cinematic universe thing. They’re actually pretty bad at it, they’re not quite at Dark Universe levels but they’re certainly not the gold standard that they want to be. They want to be Marvel, they want to be able to throw out Movie after Movie after Movie and get critical praise out the wazoo for every single one but they can’t, and they won’t until they learn the lessons that Marvel got right from the start. Lesson’s I’ll now just state explicitly so DC can copy my notes and pass this cinematic class.

NOTE: I’m spoiling stuff for Justice League, Batman V Superman, Civil War, The Avengers 1&2, Agents of Shield and Buffy the Vampire Slayer… it’ll make sense soon.

Also, tiny bit rusty at these so apologies if it’s not good.

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