Every time you see an interview with someone involved with one of the many Marvel properties, the secrecy surrounding the movies and TV shows is always a big topic. It’s understandable for Marvel and Disney to want to keep their major properties shrouded in mystery, especially with events like Comic-Con and D23 out to whip fans into a frenzy. It also plays into the spoiler culture we deal with online. People get very, very upset over spoilers on a daily basis and it seems that much of the media plays into that by providing moments that are spoiler-bait.
Personally, the focus on spoilers and avoiding them is something that I feel is overplayed with most media, despite scientific studies to the contrary. I can understand wanting to go in fresh, but most seem to go to extreme lengths in order to show their displeasure with spoilers or keep them hidden. If spoiled material is the only reason to watch, why even watch in the first place. I’m likely wrong, but it doesn’t excuse going to extreme lengths. Marvel has gone further than that apparently and Luke Cage‘s Mike Colter proves as much during his interview with Conan on Monday.
Now this could very well just be late night chat fodder, but it still highlights how far Marvel already goes to keep things under wraps on their productions. Maybe it’s the very real backlash against spoilers with the comics properties and the storylines that plays into it, but Colter doesn’t paint a fun picture for someone acting in a Marvel movie or TV show:
Somebody here is working with Marvel, so if something I do or say doesn’t jibe well with what they want, they’re there to correct me. After a while, they got past and they started putting [the script] in a computer, so if you want to do something you had to like to put your finger print on there, you had to put a little swab of saliva, you had to put it inside this little thing, you had to send it away. I mean, that’s what you had to do to get the computer to open up. And then you leave it for like ten seconds, it closes again and you have do the thing all over again. So it’s like this whole thing where you have to do all these passwords, just to get into your own file.
“You’re learning your character literally like three lines at a time,” said Conan after hearing that and it just highlights how absurd the whole thing sounds. And while this all might be foolishness to make a fun interview, especially the saliva part, it’s believable because it is Marvel. The people in the shadows, watching what actors say and do — or what Stan Lee says during convention appearances — follows around each media appearance. They’re almost better at security than the federal government, especially if they’re forcing you to use fingerprints on top of everything else just to read a script.
That said, it’s working for them. They consistently have one of the better showings during Comic-Con and the fan anticipation for their projects can usually be parlay into successes across the many different media platforms. Vertical Integration and synergy at work, like good corporate buzzwords should.
We should still calm down about spoilers, though. Just spoil everything, including the end of our lives. Tell us all how it’s going to happen and make the decisions about what we’re doing until that time a little easier.
(Via Team Coco)
