Today on the 5: Marvel is apparently editing the trailer for Captain America: Brave New World to remove references to a plot point about an attempted presidential assasintaion in light of reent events. I thought this was misgudied when done in the past and I see this move the same way. There are rare cases where it makes sense, but this doesn't strike me as one of them.
Ozone Nightmare
Unnecessary Revisions
Welcome to your daily five for Thursday, July 25th, 2024. Within the last, I think two or three weeks Marvel had released a trailer for the upcoming Captain America movie, which I believe is subtitled Brave New World, where Sam Wilson now the Falcon becomes Captain America. I watched the trailer and I thought, okay, nope, that's a Marvel trailer. And I like the Sam Wilson character and I like Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson. So I'll admit, I have a little bit of interest in that because I like him in that role, and I thought he was excellent in the Winter Soldier film and watched the trailer and went, okay, nope, I can see where they're trying to go with this. Feels a little bit more like they're trying to recapture that Winter Soldier vibe with it being more of like a political thriller type of thing, which is a positive. And then I happened across something earlier, I want to say yesterday where they said that the trailer, initially in international markets, but I believe it's now been revised everywhere, or at least everywhere that there's updated versions of it, had removed the allusions to a political assassination attempt of the Harrison Ford president character. And this is, of course, following the events of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. And, you know, I have to admit, I don't understand that. I also didn't understand, just so everyone understand, is it clear this isn't a political thing specifically, this isn't me saying who cares if they tried to assassinate Trump, it's not that. I had the same reaction, and I don't know how many people remember this, and some of you may not have even been alive when this happened, but back when 9/11 occurred, right before that, or right after, they were planning to release a trailer for Spider-Man. In fact, there was a trailer you can find it on YouTube, where Spider-Man, I don't know why I said Spider-Man so weirdly just there, Spider-Man creates a web between the twin towers to catch people trying to escape in a helicopter. It's fantastic. It's a wonderful teaser trailer. I mean, it's so perfectly embodied, Spider-Man. And they remove that because they want it to be sensitive to the fact that 9/11 had just happened. And I didn't understand that either, because in neither of these movies, in neither of these cases, are they inferring or even recreating the exact same events? They're not mimicking real life, they just happen to have a correlation to real-life events. One thing where I think it was appropriate was there was a spin-off from the X-Files, from characters in that show called the Lone Gunman. And in the pilot episode for the Lone Gunman, there was an attempt to crash a plane, a passenger jet, into the World Trade Center. And they opted not to. I think they didn't air the pilot. I think now, of course, it's been released because there's enough time, but they didn't air that pilot because, or maybe they altered it, but they basically took that part out because that was really close to the 9/11 attacks. That makes sense. That is, that could actually cause people to really have a very negative reaction because you are more or less depicting what actually happened. Not exactly, but it's far closer than just showing the Twin Towers or just having a presidential assassination attempt. Who cares how close is the event? It's not as if it's a character that's supposed to be Donald Trump. Spider-Man wasn't attempting to collapse the Twin Towers to catch the helicopter, and so I don't understand this. And this is not me saying, "Oh, cancel culture, whatever." It's not that. But this feels like it's an overreaction just because something is similar. If we're going to get this sensitive about these things, then I never want to see a film that has rape again, which I would actually be very happy with. I never want to see a film where certain types of torture of people or animals or children or whatever happens again because I'm sure that stuff happens all the time, and yet we don't see and I'm not calling for censorship. I'm not doing that. Please don't misunderstand what I'm saying here. I'm actually saying the opposite. That there are times where we have to be able to look at something and say, "Yes, okay." There is a very vague similarity between these events, but they're nowhere near actually mirroring each other. It's not as if the Harrison Ford character was at a rally saying, "Make America a wonderful again," and then got shot at, and then they were celebrating it. That's not, I'm pretty sure, what the plot of the movie is. It just so happens that there's a presidential assassination attempt in a film trailer, and you have to alter that just because it happened to happen in real life. Yeah, I don't get that. Again, just so we're keeping all the political stuff out of it, I thought the same thing with the Twin Towers thing with Spider-Man, and that was right after it happened, and I lived in New York when it happened, so it's not like I experienced everything around that, and even then I thought, "Yeah, but that's not the same thing." I mean, just seeing the towers now, we can't even see them. So I think unless, again, long-government thing, I totally understand. That's a different scenario. That type of thing I get, but this, I don't know. Something about this just feels like it's an overreaction to me, but maybe I'm out. Maybe this is a controversial opinion. Maybe everybody listening to this will say, "No, no, they really should move it to be sensitive." So you let me know if you think I'm wrong, but this makes no sense to me later.