It’s Marvel Cinematic Universe Week at SB Nation and across our team brands! We’re using the superior superhero franchise to guide our coverage for this week, as we pass the two-month mark without sports.
Here at Fear the Fin, I’m going to take on a very stupid mission: to watch every film in the MCU and document every reference made to sports throughout. I’m playing a little fast and loose with my definition of “sports reference,” but I’m going to try to avoid making the same jokes more than once in this series. You’ll see what I mean.
That’s 23 films, totaling 50 hours, by 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, May 10.
(I’m aware the week starts on Sunday, but the next theme week doesn’t start until Monday and I got a late start on this, okay? I’m cutting myself some slack to make this ridiculous thing a complete project.)
I’ll be watching in a chronological order (some films take place around the same time, so it doesn’t matter too much) that is dubbed the “spoiler” version, as post-credit scenes will contain spoilers for movies further along in the timeline, as opposed to release order.
I’ve set up a storystream to help you keep track of each post as they go up — which won’t be on any kind of set schedule, since I’m gonna be putting some weird hours into this thing in order to pull it off. No worries, though — that’s the whole point of having a centralized location. I’d suggest reading them in order, but hey, I’m not your mom.
Reminder that time stamps are approximate, not exact, and may vary based on streaming services.
Look, I didn’t want to have to do this one either, okay? Let’s just get through it.
Thor: The Dark World (2013)
Director: Alan Taylor, Written by Christopher Yost, Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
00:37:50: Loki, bored in his jail cell, is laying down on his back, tossing something into the air and catching it. This solo game of catch is basically the only sports-adjacent activity in this film.
This movie is bad, don’t get me wrong, but someone really said “It’s like they resent being in prison!” during a prison riot and that made me decide to be delighted by how stupid this film is, instead of being bored by it. If you do this enough, you can convince yourself that any comic adaptation is just really committing to the comic book bit and is actually good. X-Men fans have been doing this for years.
Holy shit, Jane is getting a cell phone call while in Asgard. This movie keeps getting dumber.
Previous: Iron Man 3 | Up Next: Captain America: The Winter Soldier
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