Outside of cricket, I’m not sure there’s a sport that puts the groin region in more danger more often than baseball. It is a constant hazard of the job, as balls get thrown and hit in your general direction, always capable of taking a weird hop right into the your nuts.
This season, we’ve already collected a pickoff throw to the beans on our bingo card this year, courtesy of poor Alcides Escobar, and on Wednesday, Jose Altuve offered up a likewise extremely rare foul tip that went directly into his nuts — not even taking a bounce off the dirt to slow it down.
Usually if there’s a foul tip, it’s the catcher or the umpire who are in the most danger, but Altuve swinging at a pitch well off the plate inside brought himself into the danger zone and of all the places that ball could go after contact, it goes square into the junk. Altuve would take some time to walk it off and try to settle himself, and managed to get a single on a 3-2 count, scoring later in the inning on an Alex Bregman sacrifice fly — although I’d go so far as to say the man that made the greatest sacrifice this inning was Altuve.
“I’ve sat in the shadows for over 14 years allowing the Kardashians to use my name, to abuse my name, make billions of dollars over a decade-and-a-half talking about a topic I’ve never really spoken about,” he said. “I’ve never leaked anything. I have never leaked a sex tape in my life. It has never been a leak. It’s always been a deal and a partnership between Kris Jenner and Kim and me and we’ve always been partners since the beginning of this thing.”
When rumors of the tape first emerged way back in 2006, the former couple went to court along with Vivid Entertainment, the tape’s eventual distributor. Eventually, both reached an agreement with Vivid for the tape to be commercially released. According to Ray J, it was just one of many — all of which he says are in the possession of the Kardashians (which he says Kim kept in a Nike shoe box). “They’re not letting the world know that there’s a bunch of sex tapes that we made but they’re not going anywhere because she has them all,” he confessed.
He also claimed the initial leak was orchestrated by Kris Jenner — Kim’s mother and manager — to generate publicity for the family’s other endeavors, which eventually included a reality show, Keeping Up With The Kardashians. “Once I pitched the idea to [Kim], just playing around a little bit, that’s when she jumped on the idea, talked to her mom and it was out of my hands from there,” Ray J insisted. “From the beginning of us putting this sex tape out, this has been the biggest lie in the industry in the history of entertainment.”
Elsewhere in the story, Ray J provided screenshots of conversations between him and Kim in which he vents his frustrations about the narrative painting him as a villain and she attempts to smooth things over. You can read the full story here.
After an attacker rushed the stage during a stand-up performance at the Netflix Is A Joke comedy festival on Tuesday, Dave Chappelle and the streaming company have both issued statements on the incident that’s brought the infamous Will Smith and Chris Rock slap back into the spotlight. Despite the comedian laughing off the event and making a comedy meal out of the attacker allegedly getting beat down backstage, Chappelle wants to put the whole thing behind him and not let it ruin an “historic” occasion for the veteran comic.
“The performances by Chappelle at the Hollywood Bowl were epic and record-breaking and he refuses to allow last night’s incident to overshadow the magic of this historic moment,” his rep, Carla Sims, says in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. “Dave Chappelle celebrated four nights of comedy and music, setting record-breaking sales for a comedian at the Hollywood Bowl. This run ties Chappelle with Monty Python for the most headlined shows by any comedian at the Hollywood Bowl, reaching 70k fans of diverse backgrounds during the first Netflix Is A Joke: The Festival, and he refuses to allow last night’s incident to overshadow the magic of this historic moment.”
As for Netflix, the streaming giant issued a simple statement condemning violent attacks on comedians. “We care deeply about the safety of creators and we strongly defend the right of stand-up comedians to perform on stage without fear of violence.”
Jamie Foxx has yet to issue a statement, but we’re guessing he’s too busy working on his tackle for tonight’s show. Seriously, if Netflix isn’t paying him to work security, they should probably start.
Running is one of the most expensive free sports you can get involved in. Ask any runner and they’ll tell you that you need the right shoes to avoid injury, but first you need to be properly fitted at a store that analyzes your gait. Most non runners don’t even realize that the way you run requires different running shoes depending on a lot of random sounding things like “heel strike” and “pronation.”
These things sound made up, but they’re real and the wrong shoe can cause joint pain, shin splints, IT Band issues—just a whole host of pain in parts of your body that you didn’t even know existed. Proper shoes are likely the most expensive part of running, but many people get bit by the bug and start entering races which can end up being very costly to their physical health over time.
Unlike most competitive sports, people pick up running at all ages. It’s been found that most runners don’t actually peak until middle age. Elite runners peak closer to 35, but for the rest of us, there’s still plenty of time to find our stride if you’re thinking about just getting started. And it doesn’t take much. A study by Harvard revealed that people running even just 50 minutes or less a week were less likely to die from cardiovascular disease or other causes compared to those that didn’t run at all. So maybe these runners are onto something.
Lester Wright started running in the 1930s when he ran track at Long Branch High School in New Jersey. Wright graduated high school in the ’30s where he not only ran track, but met his wife. The two have been married 80 years and Wright recently celebrated his 100th birthday. He doesn’t let his age stop him from running though. In fact, studies would suggest that running well into your elderly years has significant health benefits, including a lower risk for cardiovascular disease and mitigation of an age related decline in the ability to walk. Wright not only runs, he still competes in races, often being the oldest on the track.
Wright continued his incredible journey with running while serving in the U.S. Army where he fought in World War II, earning four Bronze Battle Stars. When he returned home from war he went to college using the GI Bill before opening up the first African American owned dental lab in Monmouth County, New Jersey where he made prosthetic teeth. Lester still runs the streets of Long Branch at least three times a week, completing 1.5 miles each time and he doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. He recently competed in the 2022 Penn Relays in Philadelphia, where he competed against runners 20 years his junior, with the second oldest runner being 92-years old.
While Wright didn’t win the race, his time was still quick: 26 seconds for the 100-meter dash, though if you ask him, the distance was too short for him to shine. When speaking to APP, the runner said, “At 100 meters, I feel like I’m just getting started. I thought this was nice, but I wanted a longer race.”
“Have you ever heard of Cinema Therapy?” my college-aged daughter asked me one day. I had not. She proceeded to tell me all about this YouTube channel she’s hooked on, in which a licensed therapist and a professional filmmaker—who also happen to be best friends—analyze movies together through each of their expert lenses. I was intrigued, so I checked it out.
Each Cinema Therapy video focuses on some psychological aspect of a film and runs approximately 30 to 40 minutes. Filmmaker Alan Seawright talks about the cinematics that lend themselves to emotional storytelling while licensed therapist Jonathan Decker talks about the mental health elements. With video titles like “MEGAMIND and Nice Guy Syndrome,” “Ranking the Relationships in LOVE ACTUALLY” and “Psychology of a Hero: HULK and Anger Management,” it’s easy to see the appeal. Most people who love movies enjoy analyzing the heck out of the characters in them, and having people who actually know what they’re talking about do so is too good to pass up.
Seawright and Decker met as roommates in college in 2005 and bonded over their love of cinema. More than a decade later, when Decker pitched the idea of creating Cinema Therapy (Decker describes that initial pitch as “a ‘Siskel and Ebert’ meets ‘Mr. Rogers’ kind of thing”), Seawright instantly envisioned what it would look like and why it would work. They were confident they would find an audience for it because of how seamlessly their two fields blend.
“Filmmaking is all about psychology,” says Seawright. “Storytelling in general only connects with an audience when you’re able to help people feel something, and how and why people feel things is all about psychology.”
Decker agrees. “There’s a lot of psychology that goes into screenwriting, or good screenwriting at least,” he says. “Creating worthwhile characters requires a knowledge of human thinking, feeling, and motivations.”
Decker points out that people have always been drawn to stories, whether written or on stage or on screen, to learn lessons about their own lives. We live vicariously through characters, connecting with them emotionally and investing in their journeys.
“But since their stories are not our stories, we have enough distance for objective insight compared to when we’re in the thick of our own problems,” Decker says. “I see movies as a tremendous teaching tool for mental health, emotional wellness, and relationship skills.”
Seawright and Decker have taken on toxic perfectionism in “Encanto,” men’s mental health and masculinity in “Fight Club,” love versus obsession with Severus Snape’s character in “Harry Potter” and more. In one of their more popular videos, they tackled the concept of gaslighting by showing examples of it in Disney’s “Tangled.”
Seawright and Decker analyze heroes and villains as well as romantic, platonic and familial relationships. And they frequently use characters to talk about mental illnesses and personality disorders, which is brilliant. By exploring real psychological and emotional realities through fictional characters, they can talk about individuals we’re all familiar with without breaching anyone’s privacy or personal boundaries. Judging by the thousands of comments their videos receive and the discussions that ensue, people love it.
That’s not to say the channel hasn’t received any hate. People can be fairly fanatical about films and characters they love, and people can also misunderstand or misinterpret things. Plus, let’s face it, when you talk about certain emotional or psychological topics, some self-loathing fellow somewhere is going to react negatively.
Seawright gave their “ARAGORN vs. Toxic Masculinity” episode as an example of when some comments got ugly, but also brushed it off as an anomaly. “Unsurprising, but a pretty decent number of dudes calling us soy-boy cucks or some-such,” he says. “Pretty funny, honestly.”
Both Seawright and Decker say that their fan base overall is incredibly supportive.
“To put yourself out there on the internet is to be criticized and attacked, but it’s a very small percentage,” says Decker. “Most people are kind and appreciative, disagreeing respectfully when disagreements happen.”
“I had no idea that our audience would be as supportive and wonderful as they are,” says Seawright. “Not just to us, but to each other! Seriously, our comments section is one of the kindest places you can find on the internet. There are some trolls in there, but it’s overwhelmingly loving.”
“It’s weird,” he jokes. We’ve all seen what a cesspool the comment section can be, so it’s great to see a space where people are nice to one another.
Seawright and Decker have high hopes for what their viewers will take away from their Cinema Therapy experience.
“I want them to get tools to have healthy relationships, to healthily balance self-acceptance with self-improvement, and to know that getting help is a good thing,” says Decker. “I also would love for them to gain a new appreciation for film, which is such a layered, stunning art form.”
“I hope people will get hope out of it,” says Seawright. “The film education I can provide is pretty meager, and isn’t going to be life-changing in any case. But feeling things with me, and learning about why/how you’re feeling things with Jono is a pretty lofty goal, and I think we’re doing an OK job with it.”
After creating more than 100 episodes, the duo has no plans of stopping. They’re having too much fun and people are enjoying their content. There’s also no shortage of movies for them to talk about, and with mental health being such a hot topic, the therapeutic element of what they do adds value to people’s lives.
“We exist to counter the negativity out there, to unify, uplift and entertain,” says Decker. “We’re sharing skills that change lives, and want people to have so much fun that it hardly feels like learning.”
Check out one of their biggest hits—and most natural fits—as they examine the psychology, relationships, family dynamics and more in Disney’s “Inside Out”:
You can follow Cinema Therapy on YouTube and check out the website as well.
McAdams doesn’t have a huge role in the Doctor Strange sequel, so it’s unlikely she’ll add another incredible line reading to her résumé. But she’s just happy that she was asked back to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. “I can’t believe it’s been six years,” she said about how long it’s been since the original Doctor Strange. “It didn’t feel that long. I sort of try to go with the flow on these things, and it all works out for a reason. There are real masterminds at work with the MCU. So I just really enjoyed the experience of the first one for what it was, and it was just wonderful and exciting and surprising to be back again. So I just went into it with gratitude, and here we are.”
First person who yells “oh no, he died” when someone bites it in Doctor Strange 2 gets $10.
With her upcoming album Face The Wall, Jordana is on a mission to stay true to herself. Face The Wall explores many themes, but above all, Jordana seeks to understand herself. She comes to terms with everything from pandemic isolation and breakups to her faith journey and veganism. With her anthemic album opener “Pressure Points” and groove-infused tracks like “Why,” Jordana pens power pop that packs a punch.
Because her songs seem to have been ripped out of a page in her personal diary, she made sure to take a very hands-on approach to the recording process. The 10-track effort was not only co-produced by Jordana, but she also recorded every instrument herself. Laced with smart and snappy lyrics, her songs draw from a mixture of pop and ’90s alt-rock influences, resulting in her most refreshing and confident project to date.
Ahead of the release of her debut album Face The Wall, which is out May 20 on Grand Jury, Jordana sat down with Uproxx to talk about her love of Grizzly Bear, video games, and tour tattoos in the latest Indie Mixtape Q&A.
What are four words you would use to describe your music?
Inviting, groovy, easy, wavy.
It’s 2050 and the world hasn’t ended and people are still listening to your music. How would you like it to be remembered?
I want people to come to it and analyze it in their own way. Come to it for ease, relaxation, or even high-energy pre-gaming in the summertime, haha. I feel like there’s such a range that it could really be for anything in particular. And I’ll be expanding even more so we’ll see!
What’s your favorite city in the world to perform?
Honestly, Salt Lake City was so so so much fun. Everyone there is so nice and supportive. It was also the biggest show I’ve ever played in my life. But somehow there was a sort of intimacy in that I felt like i knew everyone. It was sick.
Who’s the person who has most inspired your work, and why?
I’ve wanted to prove myself to myself the entire time, but as far as influence goes, I’d say Daniel Rossen. He’s just so effortlessly cool and talented. An actual musical genius.
Where did you eat the best meal of your life?
There’s this Japanese restaurant called Kajitsu in New York. There were so many courses I could barely finish it all, but damn, was all of it good.
What album do you know every word to?
Room On Fire by The Strokes.
What was the best concert you’ve ever attended?
Any time I’ve ever seen this band called Palm was the best time. Just a crazy, magical thing to see and hear a band perform like that together.
What is the best outfit for performing and why?
I honestly think anything you can wear pants/leggings with. Could also be with a dress or something. Just as long as there’s something covering down south. Especially if you’re moving around.
Who’s your favorite person to follow on Twitter and/or Instagram?
What’s your most frequently played song in the van on tour?
Sometimes we would have Real Estate Days, so I’ll say “Had To Hear” by Real Estate, but also Peter Bjorn and John days with “Amsterdam”…Although, I would always request “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Both with Money in My Hand” by Primitive Radio Gods. The TV Girl boys showed me that song and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since.
What’s the last thing you Googled?
“how to get streaming set up for ps4 camera and mic” HAHA. I want to start streaming. I love games, bro.
What album makes for the perfect gift?
In Rainbows by Radiohead all the way.
Where’s the weirdest place you’ve ever crashed while on tour?
Never anywhere too weird, but on the first stop, we stayed at the Club Congress (Hotel Congress) and that place is definitely haunted! The vibes were off in a way, but cool.
What’s the story behind your first or favorite tattoo?
For my first tattoo, I was living in Wichita and my bff Sophie had this tattoo gun and we were just sitting with a group of friends in my living room and she was tattooing us! It was fun. For my favorite one, my most recent, it’s a mountain that covers my left forearm and it’s a tour tattoo with Wyatt from TV Girl. We didn’t get identical ones, but the meaning is still there!
What artists keep you from flipping the channel on the radio?
Honestly I don’t really listen to them, but any Blink-182 is always fun when it comes on.
What’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you?
People I know have done so many nice things for me so it’s so hard to rank the nicest thing, but every time I go to LA, Brad from TV Girl just lets me stay with him, so I don’t have to figure out a place to crash. It’s an ongoing niceness. Very relevant even now. Thanks, Brad!
What’s one piece of advice you’d go back in time to give to your 18-year-old self?
Stop being cringe, but stay excited. Figure it out, betch!
What’s the last show you went to?
Deeper and Spirit of the Beehive.
What movie can you not resist watching when it’s on TV?
Shrek
What’s one of your hidden talents?
I can blink and clap really fast. I can do both at the same time, also while singing.
Face The Wall is out 5/20 via Grand Jury. Pre-order it here.
Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Tim Heidecker is of course best known for helping redefine alternative comedy in the 2000s as part of Tim & Eric, alongside Eric Wareheim. In recent years, though, he’s also gained some footing in the non-comedic music world, like with his well-received 2020 album Fear Of Death. Last month, he announced he has another LP, High School, on the way, and today brings a new single, “Punch In The Gut.”
Heidecker wrote of the song on Instagram, “This one started, thinking about how warren zevon might approach a high school parking lot, high noon style showdown…. but as I worked it, i recalled an incident where a friend of mine was visiting my school and was falsely accused of stealing. He was african american and it felt like profiling to me. There’s a lot of him in the song ‘Buddy’ too. more great playing from Mac DeMarco, Drew Erickson and Eric Johnson.”
Heidecker produced the new album with DeMarco, Johnson (best-known as a member of Fruit Bats, The Shins, and Bonny Light Horseman), and Erickson (who just in 2022 has worked with Lana Del Rey, Father John Misty, and Florence And The Machine). Also involved with the project is Kurt Vile, who features on a song called “Sirens Of Titan.”
Heidecker also recently announced a hybrid tour, on which he will perform both music and comedy. Dates are currently scheduled for July and August.
Listen to “Punch In The Gut” above.
High School is out 6/24 via Spacebomb. Pre-order it here.
Karma might have actually come around and hit the right person for once because a Trump-supporting House of Representative candidate who once made a rape joke at his daughters’ expense has lost his election bid.
Republican Robert Regan was expected to win Michigan’s 74th House District seat in a special election held on Tuesday. The seat needed to be filled after the GOP’s Mark Huizenga, who previously represented the district, was elected to the state Senate in 2020. Republicans have held onto that seat for nearly 30 years, and that part of the state voted red in the 2020 Presidential Election but, apparently, even conservative die-hards draw the line at rape jokes because Regan lost in a landslide.
Just to recap what a garbage-heap of a human being this guy is, earlier this year Regan guested on a Facebook Live panel with fellow Republicans who began suggesting that all of the avenues for overturning Donald Trump’s presidential loss had been exhausted. Regan, who spent most of his campaign harping on about “decertifying” results (because, of course, this guy is a conspiracy theorist on top of everything else) chimed in to make a crass and, frankly disturbing joke about his own daughters being raped.
“You know that’s kind of like having three daughters, and I tell my daughters, well, if rape is inevitable, you should just lie back and enjoy it,” Regan said after others suggested Republicans should just accept Joe Biden’s win.
Regan is also a guy who once claimed that feminism was “a Jewish program to degrade and subjugate white men” and that the war in Ukraine was fake, just like the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, Regan is now so disliked by people in his district that his own daughter urged voters not to go to the polls for him.
So here’s a shout out to cosmic justice for doing its thing.
It’s been 10 years since the Avengers first assembled. And while this is surely an anniversary of note, it is a bit hard to feel nostalgic when we’re currently knee-deep in the superhero team-up era. Supernaturally gifted crusading crews are a dime-a-dozen and stories of good guys uniting to defend galaxies against all-powerful thugs and snap-happy genocidal maniacs are formulaic — even the best of them. But, then again, maybe the fact that supe-squads are now a staple on the big (and small screen) is proof enough of how monumental that first Marvel merger actually was? After all, where would comic book films be without the success ofThe Avengers and all it has inspired?
Looking back helps us imagine, but the short answer is “stuck.” Before Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, and Jeremy Renner lent their star-power to the MCU, comic book films had shown themselves to be in need of a catalyst for expansion that could build on the narrative and technical gains of the preceding 10-12 years.
The occasional sidekick notwithstanding, early superhero fare gave us one good guy, multiple bad guys, and a limited number of storylines to explore within its strict architecture. Even standout films with bold directors (like Tim Burton and Sam Raimi) felt constrained, shackled to tropes that told us to root for the hero and hate the villain, even if the villains felt infinitely more interesting.
When the X-Men entered the game, the blueprint changed. Suddenly the big screen was filled with a more diverse lineup of men and women with singular abilities, distinct personalities, and their own motivating factors. Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine may have been our introduction to the world of mutants, but he wasn’t the only reason why that first film – and some of the ones that followed – worked. With Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and his school for gifted children, an entire world was built, one filled with differently-abled individuals that appealed to the masses. Jackman’s Wolverine was a tortured government experiment on a journey of self-discovery. Anna Paquin’s Rogue was a young girl trying to find where she belonged. Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey was a woman with unlimited powers who was often at war with herself while Halle Berry’s Storm emerged as a natural leader, albeit one with a mysterious past. Instead of pigeonholing its audience into cheering for just one main character, X-Men gave fans a superhero buffet, a pick-your-flavor twist on the genre that opened up the scope of its storytelling and who that storytelling might reach.
But X-Men’s approach to creating a superhero universe had its flaws. Its “villains” were mutants, just like our heroes, but they fell on the opposite side of a moral dilemma about society and its treatment of mutant-kind that didn’t have a clear-cut answer. In a lot of ways, it was interesting, but was it also too cerebral and self-limiting in how many times you could go back to that well?
Jump to 2009, after the X-Men franchise had found itself in need of reinvention, and Warner Bros., inspired by the success of its Christopher Nolan headed Batman reboot series (and with a hunger to repeat that success), turned to the previously thought unfilmable comic classic Watchmen to give fans a more stylistic film with a more grown-up tone with a story that, at times, felt convoluted and grimdark.
Of course, by this time, Marvel had already begun laying the groundwork for its eventual cinematic universe. In 2008 it introduced Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, giving fans a charming, quippy protagonist who was less brooding and dark than those that came before – an aspirational a**hole just trying to do some good in the world. The idea that a hero could be earnest, charismatic, even funny, carried through to other solo outings too, making Marvel characters feel accessible and identifiable in ways their fellow comic book crusaders just didn’t. In Capitan America: The First Avenger, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) was an everyman with dreams of defending his country but even after science experiments and drug enhancements and a showdown with a skull-faced hell reject, the best part of his story was the idea that anyone could do something heroic – that anyone could be the good guy. Even Thor, a self-identified god, came across as the kind of himbo you’d want to hang out with — a hero who wasn’t self-serious with comedic underpinnings Marvel easily exploited for laughs. Despite facing world-ending threats and crippling internal issues, these original Avengers were just a bit irreverent, their stories filled with enough comedy and light-hearted moments to let audiences breathe a bit before the next catastrophe took place.
While that formula was being perfected, Marvel also started teasing its eventual team-up, dropping easter eggs and spinning connecting threads through its solo films. Howard Stark, Tony Stark’s estranged father, was behind the government project that gave Captain America his abilities. In Iron Man, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) approached Tony about a collective of gifted good guys he coined The Avengers Initiative. In Thor, as Hemsworth’s other-worldly royal castoff tried to regain favor by doing penance on Earth, Hawkeye (Renner), Fury’s right-hand man, was keeping watch. And, in RDJ’s second outing as Tony Stark, Johansson would eventually sneak in, teasing audiences by playing an undercover Natasha Romanoff whose job was to spy on Stark for her S.H.I.E.L.D. bosses. Some of these threads were more obvious than others, but they all worked to weave together the bigger picture Marvel had in mind and their payoff came with The Avengers.
With first impressions already made in past films, crafting a story that assembled the MCU’s original squad and tasked them with defeating a familiar foe was a subtly genius move. Fans already recognized the threat Loki – the trickster god who orchestrated much of the chaos in the first Thor film – posed to the team and why foiling his plan to raze New York and rule mankind would prove especially challenging for his brother. Thor couldn’t defeat Loki on his own – not with a Chitari squadron at his command – so he reluctantly sided with Earth’s human defenders.
There are three specific moments from this film that I want to call out for their impact on the genre and pop culture. First, CGI Hulk picking Loki up and slamming him repeatedly into the ground in Stark Tower — a moment that stands as a reminder that sometimes the simple pleasures of these things are worth leaning into. Second, the real triumph of The Avengers came when an uneasy standoff amongst the newly-formed team culminated in a brawl that temporarily fractured the group. It’s that scene engineered by Marvel, one years in the making, that proved a superhero team-up could not only work, but it could also make individual characters more interesting and predictable comic book tropes exciting again. Lastly, the most memorable scene of the movie might be that climactic battle to save Manhattan, raising the bar for everything that followed in terms of craft and scale.
After The Avengers, Marvel and Warner Bros. realized bigger was better (both in terms of villainous ambitions and the size of these stories and casts) and they began cramming as many familiar faces as they could into these epic adventures. Some, like the Russo Brothers’ Endgame and Infinity War installments, worked, some, like David Ayer’s The Suicide Squad and that second Guardians of the Galaxy outing, didn’t. But its influence is still being felt.
The superhero world continues to expand on-screen, introducing innovative ways to unite its heroes with Spider-Man Into The Spider-Verse, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, and series like Loki and WandaVision introducing multiverses and diverging timelines that present internal dilemmas that end up roping in other characters to help solve. It’s a new phase of storytelling, but it’s one that wouldn’t be possible without Marvel betting big with its Avengers Initiative.
The upside of all of this is obvious for these studios and for audiences who never tire of these projects, but while the floor is higher for these things, the ceiling is non-existent, creating risk and stress by way of a mandate to make these things interesting, compelling, fun, and oftentimes, bigger with more and more spectacle. Because if they don’t, then the less committed portion of the audience might get bored and start focusing on any number of other entertainment options with the bigness to captivate and succeed with the masses. It’s an interesting legacy, to be sure for this one film, one that has its positives and negatives, but the anniversary of the thing that opened up the sky is worthy of remembrance for what it inspired.
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