5% intro to the trailer (why?!?!)

If that doesn’t look like the coolest, multi-dimensional Spider-Man story imaginable, well, we don’t know what does.

At least he doesn’t look like he just walked off the Riverdale set any more. It made it incredibly difficult to take the first game seriously.

it’s always at the very end of a season, usually right after the big season finale battle

You’re misreading it. It’s coincidental that the total revenue is the same as the global box office numbers.

That’s fine, but those aren’t movies. This is where adaptation comes into play — emphasis and focus sometimes need to be shifted to suit the medium. As far as possible, a movie should feel like a complete chapter in its own right, because even if a sequel is shot back-to-back, it’s usually at least a year away.

Maybe. I just know I spent the back half of the film thinking they were running out of time to reach Zalem, having set it up as a clear goal, and then it ended without her getting there. Possibly that distracted me from further issues with what they did include.

Oldboy (if the Korean version counts). Or Crying Freeman.

I thought Alita was a mess, in large part because they didn’t make it self-contained enough (which, outside of a Lord of the Rings back-to-back situation, is a terrible approach to launching a movie franchise). It fairly quickly established Alita’s motivation as “I need to get to Zalem” and ended with “I need to get…

And that was with the support of the anti-woke brigade, who were loudly championing it as counter-programming to Captain Marvel (because Brie Larson had dared to suggest that the target audience for A Wrinkle in Time is perhaps not well represented amongst all the older white men being paid to review it).

Or maybe people are exhausted of superhero films?

I would say that Bong Joon-ho is far too talented to not have faith in him, but then I never expected Gemini Man to be such a disappointment with Ang Lee at the helm. I did fucking detest Life of Pi, but it was well made, whereas Gemini Man is so generic and uninspired that it could’ve been credited to any old hack…

movies are still a great way to sell music

Since when is a popular recording artist doing a song for a movie (most likely to play over the credits) a “flex”, or something only the might of Disney’s dollars could pull off? It’s not remotely unusual and has been going on forever. Probably half the Best Song nominations at the Oscars are for precisely this sort…

Except this is Indiana Jones, not Game of Thrones. The journey won’t be retrospectively seen as a waste of time, because Raiders, Temple of Doom, and Last Crusade were all standalone stories. They don’t need an “ending”. Whatever happens, those films will always be as good as they are.

Let’s pretend for a moment that the rumour is accurate... What fucking difference does it make?

I’ve no doubt that’s what they’re going for, but “Dial of Destiny” though? Neither part sounds cool or intriguing or even punchy. Clock is a much punchier word than dial, for example, so “Clock of Destiny” might work. Or, to steal from His Dark Materials’ US publisher, perhaps “Compass of Destiny”. (I don’t love…

It’s a dreadful title, but I thought the trailer itself was pretty good. Although James Mangold is a very decent director, his previous work has leaned serious and dramatic over entertaining pulp, so I wasn’t getting my hopes up, but this leaves me cautiously optimistic.

It’s better than you’re giving it credit for. It’s no masterpiece, and on a narrative level it’s nothing that hasn’t been done before, but it is a story that’s being told very, very competently. That may sound like I’m damning it with faint praise, but it’s an awful lot more than you can say for most wannabe…

Agreed. It’s useful for a lot of basic tasks, but I’ve never ordered anything through it because voice control for such things seems so much more unwieldy than using your phone/tablet/computer where you can see what you’re doing and easily compare alternatives.