The alternate term "speculative fiction" probably would have been better as the default name of the genre. That fits equally well whether you are talking about future politics and society or technology, or both, as is frequently the case.

Your right. I haven't read it since the '80s, so my memories are a but hazy. Thanks.

Yeah, just thinking about trying to turn in that gun made a chill run down my spine.

I'll take that over the human animal being a dying memory.

That's why I participate in these comments. When the studio lawyers try to prove that we said we wanted this movie, I want as much evidence to the contrary as possible.

Didn't they just do that? I thought those tribal female Smurfs in the new movie where from Avatar.

And Avatar has an artificial boost in gross because it was charging 3-D prices at a time when that was still a novelty. There is no question that it did amazingly well, but I wonder how high its gross would be at normal ticket prices.

Dark place indeed.

Ease up on the guy. He probably doesn't even own a Marvel.

Of course, the only reason to watch it all is the 3-D effects on a big screen, so even that would fall flat.

"In a probably too-late effort to not be the next United…"

Pretty well. It was a marketing machine. Even if Empire never came out, kids had Star Wars action figure collection, trading cards, curtains, bed sheets. Even if no more movies ever came, it still would have made a big dent in the imagination of my generation.

The Matrix is a different situation though. People didn't just turn on the first movie on its own. Actual sequels came out that people hated and that led them to hate the franchise.

It's hard to compare to anything else because I can't think of an example of another huge hit movie that insisted it was a franchise, yet still hadn't delivered a single follow-up product this many years later.

I think it is also noteworthy that she gave the same answer to a more specific question in the Time interview before that. When you do a lot of interviews, sometimes you just pull the stock answer from your repertoire that you can most easily fit to the question.

It was done by Will Ferrell on SNL about 20 years ago.

When I read about the creepy cult sex practiced of L. Ron Hubbard and his inner circle for the first time, I was actually reminded of The Handmaiden's Tale.

I lived in Kuwait in the '80s, which was pretty to close to being Gilead without fertility issues, and yeah, an openly patriarchal system like that is most horrible for women, but it's still pretty fucking bad for a lot of people. Not that I'd really want a TV adaptation of the book to go on a tangent about that…

Since it was a panel, I'd be curious to see what the other answers to the question were. Moss is playing a single character in the story, one that isn't feminist, but it would be interesting to see how people running the show answered the question. If there is an across-the-board rejection of the idea it is a feminist…

Seems to me that Moss is simply focusing on her part in the show, which is playing one character who is not a feminist. She was asked the question of whether it is a feminist story, and she answered with the fact that Offred is not a feminist character.