I get the impression that everybody prefers the version they saw first, so if you saw the play first, the movie is shit out of luck.

I don't know who could've pulled that part off as written, and Hanks isn't exactly bad in the movie, but yeah, he's not really believable in the performance either.

How could forcing them to pull down videos that they have literally no claim over possibly not be worse than forcing them to pull down videos that they own?

I recognized the Cure girl, but only because they put her in a Cure T-shirt and had said in advance that she had a cameo but not as her original character. I had no idea about the rest of them.

He's not really JB at all in Mars Attacks!, though.

30 years for Stallone was "Rocky Balboa" which is literally about him being an old man.
30 years for Neeson is a tough call; he's been around for 30+ years, sure, but I think the question implies a certain level of stardom that he didn't have until Schindler (or at least Darkman), so he still has a few years.

I'd assume that's because it wasn't #5.

McKellen was almost caught in the same trap, but he turned down a part against his agent's advice ("You can't say no to a Tom Cruise movie!!").

I like the "exploding fish tank" thing; maybe nowadays that's too small to count as a set piece, but it's still a cool scene.

Whatever it is, I betcha it involves fire.

Especially when you factor in that Disney is locking down all the up-and-comers who would be perfect for it with promises of Star Wars and superheroes.

Any analogy where the second movie in a franchise is like the second album by a group with a hit album that suddenly forces out an album before they're really ready, full of ideas they half-developed when making the first one before throwing them out, all in service of striking while the iron is hot rather than…

I think that it's a question of too small a sample size. I mean, 50% of the live-action features he has directed is Mission: Impossible 4, and any style he subsequently develops was pretty nascent anyway.

That's not a good reason to sell yourself on.

And then Tomorrowland is when he tries to run the bases?

Cruise tends to defer to directors, but this is the one big thing he has left, so he might want to do less of that. It seems like the M:I franchise made a conscious choice to jump away from really powerful directors (like Woo, during the brief time when they had him) and more towards good directors with Hollywood…

"very loud and obvious plan" - that's not really the opposite of what they do, is it?

After audiences so strongly rejected him as an action lead, it was nice of him to go back to being the sidekick guy.

I went and checked his filmography, and *maybe* he phoned in "Oblivion", but that's the only one where you could even make a case for it. So, well done, good point.

Whatever that is made out of, one thing you can bet is that it isn't hair, so it doesn't count.