Is Maxine characterized in this film than in X, or was I supposed to find the Maxine of X charismatic, confident, capable, etc? Because honestly, I finally watched this last week after seeing io9 praise for it for a while, and I found Maxine frankly annoying. Between her vanity, her rudeness, her coke habit and her…

Meanwhile, the writer of the first movie is stil grumbling about not being contacted for this one. After the studio reminded him he’s been dead for a decade, he said “That hasn’t stopped my publisher yet".

I actually watched X last week, and I really don’t see why people liked it? The characters where on the whole pretty unlikeable and/or annoying, including Maxine, and I hated the fact that most of the horror was just “old people are gross”. I guess I should watch Pearl next, it’s apparently better, but I’m not that…

Also Age of Extinction had the worst scene of the series, where the movie just stops for 5 minutes so a 21-year-old can explain to us why it’s totally ok for him to be sleeping with a 17-year-old. Complete with busting out the relevant law from his wallet. Absolutely dreadful. 

CBS also made Limitless, which was a glorious one-season wonder of an sf procedural. 

Looks pretty good, and it’s on a service I suscribe to, so yeah, I’m watching it.

Wow, such a negative take. I actually thought it was pretty damn funny. It had some creative worldbuilding, Chris Evans is always fun as an asshole, and even the logo is nifty!

More or less that, yeah. Superman wasn't even a Warner Bros movie - it was an independent film by the Salkinds licensing the character from Warner Bros. It had none of the machine Batman 89 had. 

The tie-in movie videogame hasn’t fully disappeared, but it has transformed. Full tie-in games for consoles and PCs are indeed not a thing anymore. But tie-in mobile games are a thing, as are ephemeral tie-in pronotional content in existing online games. The economics amd logistics of how videogames are made nowadays…

Ok, but then don't have her parentage have actual magic powers that saves the heroes bacon more than once during the season and then built your finale about how that parentage is so mysterious even the all-powerful villain can't see it, and then handwave it all with some bullshit "oh we made it important!"

I’m a very casual fan of Who. This season was fun, but most of the episodes dropped the ball of became jyst weird midway through. Like 73 yards started off really interesting and creepy, but then swerved in a bunch of directions, cancelled itself at the end, and we barely got a explanation for what the hell was going…

Sure, Ruby has a right to try to contact her mother... bit springing it on the woman out of the blue in a coffee shop seems like the worst way to do that. Like, Ruby is mighty lucky Louise didn’t just ran away in shock and shame, unable to process the news.

I’m actually mostly with the Doctor on that last point. The way Ruby was went about it, just springing it on her out of the blue at a coffee shop three weeks before a holiday? That was a recipe for disaster. People don’t usually react well to a traumatic past experience rearing up its head unexpectedly in public. I’m…

I can give you that some bits of Spider-Man do feel closer to Donner - the upside-down rain kiss in particular. But I see a lot of Batman 89 influence in the way both Mary Jane and Norman Osborn are characterized and used in the plot. So I'd be comfortable calling it a mix  

You are right about TFA- I still use those subway cups daily. And it had the whole “Force Friday” merch launch event. But even back then it felt alike a throwback to an earlier era of movie marketing to me. 

Yeah, Phantom Menace is the last massive merchandising campaign I remember. The two massive franchise that came right after - Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, absolutely had merch, but their marketing strategy didn’t feel the same at all. They were adaptation of solid, established literary properties, after all.

While we are revisiting the movie with a critical eye, one thing I haven’t seen much writing on and that struck me when rewatching the Burton Batman films a couple years ago is how bad the writing for female characters was in it. Not in any agressively mysoginistic way, but more in a “wow, this is cringe and dated”…

But I would argue Dick Tracy, The Shadow, The Phantom, Darkman, were all Batman 89 ripoff. They all kind of try to do what Batman 89 did visually and structurally. They weren’t advertised as comic-book film, but they were advertised as Batman-like films. Because in many ways, Batman is basically the last surviving…

So I’ll push back on the criticism of Nicholson a bit. I do thinks he makes a good Joker, but he does overfocus on one part of the Joker - the artistic/performer side.

“I feel like so much of Batman 89's success is owed to its marketing. The movie was not a surprise hit. It was a blockbuster by design. That summer every consumer item had a bat symbol on it. [...] This is common practice today, but nobody was doing that in 1989.”