Purple
(She/Her)
So earlier today, a friend showed me this image:
Now, we all like a good alternate history thing right? There was a similar thing to this with "all the actors from the American Doctor Who" a while ago, that was pretty great, but this is just finding equivalent actors to the ones in the movies that we have. To me, it's way way way more interesting to make a game out of what we'd have gotten if we had somehow ACTUALLY gotten an Avengers movie, or trilogy even, somewhere in the 90s. So, here's the basic setup:
You are an executive at Sony Pictures who has somehow made someone happy enough to indulge you in pursuing this idea. Your studio has the rights to Spiderman and the X-Men. STRICTLY SPEAKING these came out in the 2000s, but we have to start planning from somewhere, and you're still gonna be in the '90s if you're doing boardroom pitches involving those. So, Toby McGuire is Spiderman, Hugh Jackman is Wolverine, your bosses full on mandate they go into this movie you're working in no matter what. Anyone else you want to pull in from X-Men is up for grabs too, but we don't have an unlimited casting budget. We're not like playing with Disney money here.
Past that, you have enough pull to bring other Marvel film projects in the works under your umbrella. You can get the IPs back for your Avengers thing, provided you let these people do their things without too much meddling, and you don't go recasting. So, David Hasselhoff is Nick Fury. And much as it pains me to say it because I'd totally want Reb Brown, Matt Salinger is Captain America. Meanwhile there is this shaky project in the works with some hack director and some obscure B-movie actor where Marvel is planning to jump ship because it's a minor character anyway, but if for some reason you want to bail out that sinking ship and buy into this trainwreck in the works, Jeffrey Combs is Doctor Strange.
The Incredible Hulk is kind of a wild card. Depending where you're jumping into the time stream, you can get back Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno by throwing enough money at the people doing that Death of the Incredible Hulk thing in 1990 to keep them available. Alternatively someone's talking about letting this Chinese guy do a take maybe with Eric Bana and some weird looking special effects. You can also just not use him, because I mean ideally we should be sticking to roster as it stands TODAY. Gotta get casting picks for Black Knight, Cersei, and Crystal. The characters all the kids know about.
Beyond those mandates, you have some wiggle room. You can put some pressure on movies to come out up to let's say 5 years earlier than they did in our timeline (highly recommended you do this with the original Spiderman and X-Men so you have some big hits in the genre to justify your plans with and characters already introduced), and you can delay anything out to like 2005. If I bolded casting, you need to throw them in SOMEWHERE (with the exception of Doctor Strange who you can leave out completely if, you know, you just want to leave Jeffrey Combs on the table like that).
You have, again, realistic budget limitations. Prior to the release of Spiderman/X-Men, or a movie you can honestly argue would have the same impact, we are in the range of like 50-100 million dollars so you can't just go and cast all the big name actors at once. Once there's proof off concept you can double the high end of that, maybe a bit more. All your planning has to take place before the stroke of midnight, December 31st, 1999, but again, actual production can stretch way into the 2000s without your involvement. No adapting storylines from comics that weren't already written by or in the 90s. At least one needs to be very recent, and at least a good bit XTREME.
Bronze rank: Pitch and cast a viable movie.
Silver rank: Pitch and cast a viable trilogy.
Gold rank: Pitch and cast a trilogy where people totally love them when they start off and really by movie 3 they're sufficiently satisfied and kinda burned out that we know to pack it in there and everyone feels pretty good about it and nobody feels a strong need to take a swing at all of this again in a few years leading to some dark and terrible timeline where there's just nothing at all out there for big splashy action movies BESIDES superhero stuff for sustained decades.
If you really want to be a purist, you can alternately try your hand at working out the early 2000s Avengers, where you don't have to play fast and loose with the release dates of Spiderman and X-Men, but you ARE obligated to include Ben Affleck as Daredevil, Nick Cage as Ghostrider, and you are contractually obligated for one whole movie to be a big ol' crossover with the 2005 Fantastic Four. Also you don't get to have Jeffrey Combs. You waited too long and the deal got cancelled and we just got Doctor Mordred. Shame on you.
Now, we all like a good alternate history thing right? There was a similar thing to this with "all the actors from the American Doctor Who" a while ago, that was pretty great, but this is just finding equivalent actors to the ones in the movies that we have. To me, it's way way way more interesting to make a game out of what we'd have gotten if we had somehow ACTUALLY gotten an Avengers movie, or trilogy even, somewhere in the 90s. So, here's the basic setup:
You are an executive at Sony Pictures who has somehow made someone happy enough to indulge you in pursuing this idea. Your studio has the rights to Spiderman and the X-Men. STRICTLY SPEAKING these came out in the 2000s, but we have to start planning from somewhere, and you're still gonna be in the '90s if you're doing boardroom pitches involving those. So, Toby McGuire is Spiderman, Hugh Jackman is Wolverine, your bosses full on mandate they go into this movie you're working in no matter what. Anyone else you want to pull in from X-Men is up for grabs too, but we don't have an unlimited casting budget. We're not like playing with Disney money here.
Past that, you have enough pull to bring other Marvel film projects in the works under your umbrella. You can get the IPs back for your Avengers thing, provided you let these people do their things without too much meddling, and you don't go recasting. So, David Hasselhoff is Nick Fury. And much as it pains me to say it because I'd totally want Reb Brown, Matt Salinger is Captain America. Meanwhile there is this shaky project in the works with some hack director and some obscure B-movie actor where Marvel is planning to jump ship because it's a minor character anyway, but if for some reason you want to bail out that sinking ship and buy into this trainwreck in the works, Jeffrey Combs is Doctor Strange.
The Incredible Hulk is kind of a wild card. Depending where you're jumping into the time stream, you can get back Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno by throwing enough money at the people doing that Death of the Incredible Hulk thing in 1990 to keep them available. Alternatively someone's talking about letting this Chinese guy do a take maybe with Eric Bana and some weird looking special effects. You can also just not use him, because I mean ideally we should be sticking to roster as it stands TODAY. Gotta get casting picks for Black Knight, Cersei, and Crystal. The characters all the kids know about.
Beyond those mandates, you have some wiggle room. You can put some pressure on movies to come out up to let's say 5 years earlier than they did in our timeline (highly recommended you do this with the original Spiderman and X-Men so you have some big hits in the genre to justify your plans with and characters already introduced), and you can delay anything out to like 2005. If I bolded casting, you need to throw them in SOMEWHERE (with the exception of Doctor Strange who you can leave out completely if, you know, you just want to leave Jeffrey Combs on the table like that).
You have, again, realistic budget limitations. Prior to the release of Spiderman/X-Men, or a movie you can honestly argue would have the same impact, we are in the range of like 50-100 million dollars so you can't just go and cast all the big name actors at once. Once there's proof off concept you can double the high end of that, maybe a bit more. All your planning has to take place before the stroke of midnight, December 31st, 1999, but again, actual production can stretch way into the 2000s without your involvement. No adapting storylines from comics that weren't already written by or in the 90s. At least one needs to be very recent, and at least a good bit XTREME.
Bronze rank: Pitch and cast a viable movie.
Silver rank: Pitch and cast a viable trilogy.
Gold rank: Pitch and cast a trilogy where people totally love them when they start off and really by movie 3 they're sufficiently satisfied and kinda burned out that we know to pack it in there and everyone feels pretty good about it and nobody feels a strong need to take a swing at all of this again in a few years leading to some dark and terrible timeline where there's just nothing at all out there for big splashy action movies BESIDES superhero stuff for sustained decades.
If you really want to be a purist, you can alternately try your hand at working out the early 2000s Avengers, where you don't have to play fast and loose with the release dates of Spiderman and X-Men, but you ARE obligated to include Ben Affleck as Daredevil, Nick Cage as Ghostrider, and you are contractually obligated for one whole movie to be a big ol' crossover with the 2005 Fantastic Four. Also you don't get to have Jeffrey Combs. You waited too long and the deal got cancelled and we just got Doctor Mordred. Shame on you.
