He’s also tapped to direct Rendezvous with Rama, based on the Arthur C. Clarke novel.

As others have said,Dune (the first one) takes place about 22,000 years into our future. Dune and its sequels then unfold over a period of about 5,000 years.

As a plus point, the OG Japanese songs are much better than total garbage they had her singing in English (it turns out that Harmony Gold’s budget did not stretch to getting genuinely great musicians and songwriters on board). Whether they are good at any absolute level of quality is another question altogether.

I was going to say that Transformers was never “hard sci fi,” but then I remembered the Target: 2006 comics run from 1986 was built around the concept of parallel universes and alternate timelines created through time travel, which was pretty advanced for the time, let alone for its target audience of 5-10 year-olds.

Amtrak Wars is an excellent, original and incredibly bankable series. When Orbit reissued the books a while back, they renamed the main polity the Lone Star Confederation to avoid issues with Amtrak, but I swapped emails with Tilley many years ago and he said that they’d never been approached by Amtrak about it.

Its named for the network itself, which the future civilisation uses as references on maps. The actual physical infrastructure has decayed into nothingness. So, also accurate.

“Amazon had the rights to the Culture for a minute, but pulled the plug for unstated reasons a few years back.”

Villeneuve is apparently lining up Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke as his next movie, which he’ll do to cleanse the palette before Dune Messiah (I suspect the studio may press him on to flip that order though).

Dune and The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy have been trading positions as the biggest-selling SF novel of all time for decades, but it’s telling on the popularity of SF that they’re only at about 25 million each, compared to LotR at somewhere north of ten times that.

The original Macross is literally the same show as the first 36 episodes of Robotech (the Macross/SDF-1/Zentraedi storyline). Robotech takes that exact same footage, dubs somewhat different dialogue in places, re-edits some bits differently and uses different music. So the basic storyline is pretty similar.

Isn’t that the movie version they are releasing? I think there’s only two releases, the 4-episode original and the movie version.

They released all that concept art last year, which looked superb. The rumoured script, not so much.

I believe that all those questions and characters will be addressed in Thunderbolts.

The last Star Trek series not to feature Jonathan Frakes in some capacity was Star Trek: The Animated Series, which aired its final episode, The Counter-Clock Incident, on 12 October 1974, which is almost 50 years ago.

In 10 years, Downey Jr. will be pushing 70. I’m not sure he’s going to be jumping back in the suit and convincingly flying around, and undoing his sacrifice in Endgame would be very dumb.

We had Avengers movies in 2012, 2015, 2018 and 2019, so no more than three years between them. So yeah, this is by far the longest gap between them. They should have probably put a new one into production that was more like Age of Ultron, or even the original, namely the Avengers team up to take down some…

It was always odd they picked an Ant-Man film to unveil him to the movie audiences. The Ant-Man flicks are fun but easily the most disposable in the entire MCU (it’s easy to forget they even exist), so suddenly tying them into the most important future storyline for the franchise is weird. At least with Endgame Ant-Man…

I think the Multiverse is fine as a concept and in some respects it’s been quite a good move. Spider-Man: No Way Home leaned very hard into the idea and was very well-received, and adding Deadpool to the MCU is a no-brainer entertaining idea (we’ll see soon if that works out).

I think, if anything, they’ve had a big problem in moving beyond the core original Avengers lineup. People didn’t necessarily fall in love with the MCU, they fell in love with Robert Downey Jr.’s charismatic performance as Tony Stark and with Chris Evans bringing 101% sincerity to Captain America. The loss of Iron Man…

The MCU has always had a bad guy problem in that the best Marvel comics villains - their equivalent of Batman’s rogue’s gallery - are pretty much all locked into the Fantastic Four, X-Men and Spider-Man characters, which were all out of reach until comparatively recently, or are part-owned by other studios. The MCU…