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With the superheros in the MCU that have multiple movies made after them, I've noticed that each individual film has its own tag, but that the first film in each series tends to be titled to be simple and after the superhero. E.g.

The problem is that someone searching for questions specific to that first movie in the series while come across a number of questions pertaining to the character them-self. I was reading through questions about the first Iron Man movie and started re-tagging questions pertaining to when someone suggested a better way to re-tag in the comments to this question.

So how should these movies be tagged?

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  • 4
    This is an issue way beyond just the MCU, but with character tags vs. franchise tags in general. See here.
    – user31178
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 18:42
  • 2
    That's why i never like character tags in first place but nice point +1.
    – Ankit Sharma
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 18:42
  • I suppose we could tag the questions with the name of the film in the question and add a tag titled "Franchise".
    – Major Stackings
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 18:56
  • @AnkitSharma You could argue that iron-man is a franchise tag and a film tag, even ignoring its character tag aspect.
    – Molag Bal
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 19:11
  • In theory, yes. But this only becomes an issue if the ambiguous tag (the one for both the character, the franchise, the first movie, and the reboot) gets a large number of questions.
    – SQB
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 19:40
  • The first Captain America movie is Captain America: The First Avenger, not simply Captain America, so that one shouldn't be an issue.
    – Rogue Jedi
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 20:31
  • @RogueJedi, shouldn't, but unfortunately it is an issue, or the proper tag wasn't created at the right moment.
    – raphael
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 20:36
  • @CreationEdge, should I broaden my question to that issue, or can we stick to actions specific to MCU tags and someone else can start the next topic?
    – raphael
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 20:36
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    Up to you on the scope. It's not a problem we can solve retroactively. See our biggest tag, harry-potter. We need to make a decision for going forward and some of the small tags. I think movies like the first Iron Man or Hulk should just have the year appended. How do you separate franchise from character, anyway? You just need to separate independent works from the character/franchise.
    – user31178
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 20:49
  • @CreationEdge Date of the movie makes sense in cases where the movies have reboots as well. I'm thinking in particular about Spider Man, which sounds like it will be rebooted 3 times this century
    – raphael
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 20:52
  • Those movies have subtitles that work. We use dates for some movies and reboots, but if you look at my analysis, it's inconsistent across the board. So, the first person needing the tag makes it up however they see fit. Not a good strategy!
    – user31178
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 20:58
  • @anaranjada why do we need different iron man film franchise tag when we already have MCU tag.
    – Ankit Sharma
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 6:24
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    @AnkitSharma I don’t know. If we give up on tags for specific films, then we could just use marvel-cinematic-universe + iron-man for the films, and marvel-comics + iron-man for the comics. It’s strange having tags for the second and third films, but not the first.
    – Molag Bal
    Commented May 19, 2016 at 12:41
  • The first Captain America film just got a tag: captain-america-tfa. I say we add tags for the other first films too.
    – Molag Bal
    Commented May 27, 2016 at 3:11

1 Answer 1

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We have already had this situation with The Flash, which is both a character/franchise, and the name of a 2014 TV show (and a 1990 TV show that thus far has not had a tag created). So we have for general questions about the character and for questions about the 2014 TV show.

I think that going forward, we should do the same for other characters/franchises that share the name with movies. So for instance, general questions about the character Thor would be under and questions about the 2011 movie would be under .

There are a couple of tags where we use "movie" instead, like for the franchise and for the 1994 movie. However, I think that's problematic for two reasons:

  • In the case of a remake or reboot, it creates ambiguity (e.g. there are four TV series named The Incredible Hulk. And the Stargate example above may be a problem since a reboot is in the works)
  • For a character in multiple movies, like Thor, a tag like a theoretical may be confusing with some people thinking it's about the movie-version of Thor (i.e. the character's representation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe).

Using the year as a suffix avoids both problems, so I believe it is the way to tags should generally be named.

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    We could get a mod to rename the handful of [*-movie] tags.
    – Molag Bal
    Commented May 23, 2016 at 19:55
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    Should we also retroactively clean-up the existing MCU movie/character tags?
    – raphael
    Commented May 23, 2016 at 19:57
  • @raphael Only the bravest souls dare to utter the phrase tag cleanup event. There isn't much support for that sort of thing these days, although I'd be up for it.
    – Molag Bal
    Commented May 23, 2016 at 20:05
  • This is one of two solutions that would make sense. The other solution would be to banish tags for specific films in a series, but tags like captain-america-civil-war are popular enough that I'm reluctant to do that. We should probably just do what this answer proposes and live with the inconsistent tagging on old questions.
    – Molag Bal
    Commented May 23, 2016 at 20:09
  • @raphael If your question was in reference to creating new tags like iron-man-2008, I'd say that we should do that. We could add it to a few questions, but it would be too much retagging to do every question.
    – Molag Bal
    Commented May 23, 2016 at 20:18
  • @anaranjada, if this answer gets 2 more upvotes, then we might have beaten the "NEVER" answer?
    – raphael
    Commented May 23, 2016 at 21:22
  • @raphael We should be able to get enough support to create a few more tags, but if we propose retagging hundreds of questions, the Doom of Retaggers will befall us.
    – Molag Bal
    Commented May 24, 2016 at 0:38

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