A YouTube Clip Does Not A Movie Make

“Hey, I found a clip of Ironheart fighting a giant fire-breathing gorilla.”

“I saw it. Don’t know the context though.”

“Who cares? Giant fire-breathing gorilla!”

“Yeah, I’m rooting for him, too, but how was he muted from Rocket Raccoon?”

“Does it really matter?”

Yes. Yes it does. Before I go off on the latest stupidity from Marvel Studios I wanted to put this rant together not just for added context but because I might want to refer to it in the future. I’ve mentioned this as a problem with comic writers, but it seems to be worse in movies. I can’t even call it new. Jon Peters wanted to have a giant spider because he saw a documentary about how deadly a predator a spider is. When he couldn’t get Superman to fight it, he got race-swapped Jim West to find it. (The worse crime isn’t Will Smith playing Robert Conrad’s character, it’s replacing Dr. Loveless, a little person recurring villain in the show, with an exaggerated Southern racist jackass stereotype in a steampunk wheelchair. Michael Dunn should be insulted.) Michael Bay probably only took on Transformers to live his dream of cutting a bus in half. (Yes, he actually said he always wanted to film that scene.)

I’m not even going to do my own exaggeration and say something stupid like “the majority of movies out there seem to just be movie clips with a framing device”. The Epic Movie franchise is only that in parody form, because someone decided to make a parody movie franchise out of movie trailers and it’s as dumb as it sounds. That doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, or that other media is doing the same thing. It’s like they’re forming a whole movie around one particular scene they want to make. This is a stupid way to make a movie.

I can’t give you a statistic but the fact that it exists at all is disturbing.  I can tell you that Peters didn’t start producing a movie saying “I want an excuse to fight a giant spider”, though those movies exist without him. He just tried to shove the moment into a story whether it made sense or not. And very little about Wild Wild West the movie made sense. The same with Bay and the bus being sliced in half in Transformers. This was a case of just shoving it into an existing story. This isn’t good, either, because that thing you really always wanted to do has to make sense. Really, the trend would stop there, but now there are scenes that seem to be the reason the story exists. One would come to mind except that the context surrounding it is so dull and uninteresting I can’t remember it.

It’s the whole “jangling keys” thing I seem to be making a theme this week. Superhero movies suffer the most because so much money is spent on some flash action sequence, but fans complain about the story. James Cameron’s “Avatar” movies have interesting worldbuilding but a weak story behind it. Some screenwriters want to create a scene with certain gags or a certain effect/sequence, but barely have enough material to make a short story. In a good short story you’d have Ironheart fighting the giant fire-breathing dragon, get pummeled, and then a real hero would come along and defeat the monster. (No, I don’t care what gender the real hero is. There’s only one good Ironheart and it’s not anything Marvel Comics or Marvel Studios made.) That would be it. We wouldn’t need to tie Rocket Raccoon in, context would be easy because it’s a short story (gorilla pops up and smashes stuff, Marvel Rising‘s Riri sees it, armors up, and goes into action to be a hero, or comics/MCU Riri goes into action to show off how superior she is and win because “representation” and lazy writing), and that would satisfy. It’s how most fanfilms, fanfics, or even fan comics go. A short story due to budget and not being able to make money off a property you don’t own.

Except the creators don’t want to make a short story. They want to make a movie…for the wrong reasons. They want the prestige, the money, the resume, and the status symbol because that matters more than entertaining the audience. So while they only have a short story they shoehorn in a plot that allows them to get the resources to make Ironheart vs giant fire-breathing gorilla (imaging King Kong with heartburn, I guess) but the studio won’t create a short to draw attention to their MCU. They want a movie or a series. So you get a story that only exists to shoehorn that scene, or a moment of characters talking and cracking jokes, or the real story they want to tell about people, or something they can wrap a speech into about the latest cause du jour they want to TED Talk the audience with about how terrible the human race is (or part of one race in particular).

What they don’t understand is those cool clips that we all share from or on YouTube, Tiktok, Facebook, and so on are only cool because of the story surrounding it. Seeing it either reminds us of how great the movie was or how great we wish it was because that clip was the only good thing about it, when the real reason was having Riri’s female friend have a bar mitzvah because it’s another boys thing that needs to be claimed. If the story somehow makes an anthropomorphic space raccoon into a giant fire-breathing gorilla make sense and be cool, then the scene is important. Maybe Rocket took a blast meant for Groot or even Star Lord. Still doesn’t explain why a gorilla because the director didn’t want to do a giant raccoon, but we know how little they care when it comes to fueling their egos. Perhaps Ironheart is the only one with something that can fight a giant fire-breathing gorilla and she struggles because that’s a useful idiot she can exploit fellow “hero” she needs to rescue but can’t allow to destroy the city because it looks bad on her already poor record. A cool fight is really only cool with the context of why it’s taking place.

Based on my actual trip to my cousin’s lakeside cabin.

It’s why I reject the idea that Godzilla fighting other kaiju should be the only thing in the movie beginning to end. There’s a reason that doesn’t happen, or why a dinosaur movie has to have tasty humans running from them. It sounds good for a scene, but for a full 90 minutes? Even pro wrestling knows when to stop their matches before they get boring. It’s like a never ending firework show, an example I use because I’ve seen it happen. You need a reason to have the monsters fight and a reason to care beyond being a pro wrestling match. So the enemy monster is controlled by aliens or time-travelling humans, or even the good humans who are sick of Godzilla stepping on their homes. It’s not like the Transformers doing a movie without humans like Transformers One or the current Cyberworld series on YouTube. That works because the Transformers are characters with personalities. With Godzilla you can do one comic with just Godzilla fighting a monster, but a whole series requires more. Even a narrator making the kaiju feel like characters could work, but you can’t make a ninety minute fight out of Godzilla versus that same fire-breathing gorilla. Look at the King Kong crossovers. You need a reason to care. You need characters, not gimmicks, flashy effects, and lame quips.

An exciting battle or funny moment really needs that context to really matter. If there’s a scene you want to do, but can’t fit it into a full story, just do a short story. It works for me with Jake & Leon. I want to do a gag about Hulk flipping a house because he misunderstood what Tony said about home renovation. I want to do a bit about a man rescuing a princess he doesn’t want to marry. I can’t make a full tale out of that and shoving it into a longer one might feel out of place and obviously shoved in. So doing a bit in three panels of a four panel comic serves the goal. Now whatever longform story I might want to do has a better chance to be good because it’s built around a plot, not a scene. A bunch of gags or fights (or gag fights) barely connected by a weak plot not only leads to a waste of a good 90+ minutes, but it means that scene you wanted to do now has LESS impact instead of more.

If your biggest goal in life is to get on a movieclips channel, then you aren’t the right person to be making a story. A fight scene without a good story around it is a scene nobody is going to care about. Guess what Marvel Studios is doing as I write this. Yeah, we’ll get into that.