Marvel has officially entered its “Plotting the Void” era, and honestly, it’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off. 🎲
The House of Ideas (patent pending, actual ideas sold separately) has kicked off their year-long psychological torture session for Avengers: Doomsday by presenting us with the most terrifying villain of all: a digital clock. 💀 Their YouTube channel now features a video titled “DOOMSDAY CLOCK,” which is essentially a screensaver from 1998 counting down to December 18. It is literally just numbers getting smaller, backlit by a green light that I assume is meant to evoke the mood of a broken printer in a basement. No footage. No plot. Just the relentless march of time, reminding you that you are aging while waiting for a movie that hasn’t finished filming yet. 🕰️
This avant-garde masterpiece of doing absolutely nothing comes right after their previous social media “stunt,” which I can only describe as a five-hour livestream of chairs. 🪑 Yes, Marvel spent an entire afternoon slowly panning down a row of empty seats in a warehouse. It was slower than a DMV queue on a Monday morning. After five hours and twenty minutes—which is roughly the runtime of the extended edition of Return of the Jedi—Robert Downey Jr. walked in, sat down, shushed the camera, and left. That was it. That was the content. We have reached peak “Emperor’s New Clothes” where Marvel can post a video of furniture and the internet will write 400-word essays about the “texture of the leather” and what it implies for the multiverse. 🤡
The message is clear: We can’t show you anything because Spoilers. Be grateful we showed you the backs of chairs. You will pay $25 for an IMAX ticket on December 18, sit in the dark, and you will like it. 🤐 Marvel treats its plot points like state secrets, guarding them with the intensity of a squirrel protecting a nut from a dog the size of a skyscraper. I once visited a Marvel set for Spider-Man: Homecoming, and the hallways were plastered with signs reminding employees that talking about the movie was basically treason. I’m surprised they didn’t make us sign NDAs just to use the bathroom.
Why the secrecy? Because the internet is a giant echo chamber of theories, and Marvel knows we are desperate. 🧐 We will stare at a blurry jpeg of a shoe and theorize that it belongs to Mephisto. We will dissect a rust stain on a chair and decide it predicts the arrival of Galactus. Marvel doesn’t need to make content; they just need to dangle a carrot (or a clock) and watch us sprint in circles. It’s efficient, really. Why spend money on marketing when you can just let fans do the work for free? 🤷♂️
But let’s take a nostalgic trip back to the ancient times of 2005, a period known historically as “The Era of Content.” Back then, Peter Jackson was making King Kong, and he decided to give us… everything. 🦍 He released “Production Diaries”—weekly videos showing the nitty-gritty of filmmaking. We didn’t just see the movie; we saw how to load a film magazine, how to check the gate, and how to create artificial steam for a fake New York City. One episode was literally about a guy whose only job was to warn the crew when a plane was taking off from a nearby airport so they didn’t ruin the audio. That’s it! And it was fascinating! 🤯
Jackson wasn’t just teasing us; he was feeding us a six-and-a-half-hour buffet of behind-the-scenes insanity. He produced so much extra footage that he released a separate DVD box set containing only the making-of documentaries. It didn’t even include the actual movie! It was a box of B-roll footage that cost money! In 2005, studios actually believed that fans wanted to see how the sausage was made. Now? If a studio releases a “featurette,” it’s usually three minutes of an actor looking at a green screen and saying, “The visual effects are going to be amazing.” Thanks, I hated it. 🙄
Today, the home video market is dead, and special features went with it. Studios are obsessed with streaming, which offers the viewing experience of a hospital waiting room. No commentary tracks, no documentaries, just the movie and a “Next Episode” button. Disney+ recently threw us a bone with a documentary about Avatar, which was great, but it felt like an archaeological dig. 🦴 James Cameron explaining underwater motion capture is cool, but it’s the exception, not the rule.
I miss the days of the “You Are There” immediacy. I want to know how they built the skull of the monster, how many times the stunt guy fell down, and what the director ate for lunch. Instead, Marvel is hoarding footage of Avengers: Doomsday like it’s the nuclear codes. 🚀 They’re saving it for “bonus features” on a 4K release that won’t happen until 2030, or perhaps they’ll bury it in the depths of their streaming service where no one will find it.
Worst of all, maybe we don’t even care anymore. 🧐 If Marvel actually showed us what was happening in the movie, fans wouldn’t have anything to theorize about. We wouldn’t be able to spend 18 months debating whether a background extra is actually Doctor Doom in a wig. Ignorance isn’t just bliss; it’s the official hobby of the modern internet. So, enjoy the clock, folks. 🕰️ Tick tock, tick tock, until we all collectively lose our minds waiting for a movie that will probably be delayed anyway. 🤡
Finn McFrame, celebrated satirical mastermind and self-proclaimed “Emperor of Irony,” started his illustrious career as a cinematographer, where his expertise in capturing every single frame of a squirrel stealing a baguette earned him accolades at obscure film festivals.
Born in the glamorous town of Boring, Oregon, Finn grew up with dreams of being a Hollywood director until he realized that satire, not cinema, was his true calling—or at least the one that let him sleep until noon.
Finn McFrame: changing the world, one satirical lens flare at a time.
