Announcing My Marvel Marathon

I am here to announce the beginning of my Marvel Marathon, a nice little run where I will write a little review every single Marvel Studios movie up until The Avengers. I'm only going to review the movies Marvel has made by themselves, meaning Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Punisher, Daredevil are off limits (I do want to review Howard The Duck sometime....) I feel these are in a class all in their own. For example, Spider-Man was not made by Marvel, it was made by Sony in association with Marvel. Iron Man was made by Marvel and distributed by Paramount. I will probably review those "other" movies at some point, but for now I'm just going to look at the true Marvel movies.

Now for a little history lesson. Marvel Studios has technically been around since the 1990's, but they got beaten through the dust for a while. They really only co-produced movies like Spider-Man and X-Men, while the studios took over the actual creative duties. The result was a mixed bag. The first Spider-Man movie was not perfect, and neither was the first X-Men. But both were still good movies. Spider-Man 2 remains one of my favourite comic book movies. I think it's a shame how it was treated. Everyone loved this movie when it came out. Then Spider-Man 3 came out, and suddenly everyone hates the Sam Raimi movies, something I heard all the time when the reboot was coming out. I also think X-Men 2 is a good movie, but I do find it a bit overrated. Outside of that, the movies kind of sucked. Ang Lee's Hulk was a disaster. It went off on tangents, it was boring and had a terrible villain that was basically an insult to the Hulk's comic book origins, something I read religiously as a kid. I hate the Fantastic Four movies, but I won't say any more: that's another review. After the hatred spawned from the crap-tastic Spider-Man 3 and X-Men 3, Marvel decided to make a change. Marvel Studios decided they were going to make their own movies, and they would be distributed by Paramount. They were going to feature characters from the Avengers in their own films and finally tie together into an Avengers movie. Many doubted it would happen, simply because such an idea was crazy. Crossover movies are few and far between. How would they get all of the actors back together? Well, it did happen. I've already said I love The Avengers, but the same is not necessarily true for all of the movies. I'm going to review them all in the next few days, so stay tuned.