Do you think they actually learned anything from Star Wars? They’ve gone from 5 films in 5 years, to 3 years since Rise of Skywalker and no concrete plans, just an absolute scattergun approach to development with one film after another being announced and none of them ever moving into production.

There’s almost certainly still two years of post-production to be done on Avatar 3. CGI of that quality and quantity takes time, and Way of Water likely won’t have been completely finished until a few weeks before release, so they’ll only be putting all resources into 3 now.

I think the difference is that Avatar doesn’t put out 3+ films every year... So far, it’s put out just 2 in fourteen years.

I believe they’re fully written through to 5. What he’s saying is they shot part of 4 at the same time as 2 and 3 — something to do with getting the actors at the right age (presumably Spider, the human kid, being the main concern).

Phoenix is a fine actor, but for some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on, I find his presence in a movie incredibly off-putting. Not at the same level of irritation as Jared Leto, but in the region of, say, Sean Penn.

The kid appears to be played by a different actor (Armen Nahapetian, apparently), but his face looks so uncanny valley that I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some level of CGI adjusting so his features more closely match Phoenix’s (unless it’s just a crappy airbrushing job on the poster).

If they follow the structure of Part II, there is a natural break point in the middle, but I don’t know if that would work on TV, and I feel like it might be tempting fate given the (undeserved) hate it got in game form. Although I suppose given it would be the final season anyway, there’s not exactly a huge concern…

Will Smith?

Precisely. Experiments like that just wouldn’t work with a weekly release schedule.

The Last of Us is a videogame. If was adapted as-is, it would be filled with samey combat encounters (not to the extent of the gunplay in Uncharted for example, but it would still be a big problem). At absolute minimum, there would have to be some cutting, merging, and/or inventing new situations that have a bit more…

The Witcher is a slightly different case because the source material is prose. People haven’t seen how the story plays out, only read it.

I was gonna say. I just finished the main game, and the animation for walking on snow really stood out — the surface has just the right amount of resistance as Jin plants his foot before it sinks through. For a game that’s great, but often lacking in that sort of attention to detail*, it was a really nice touch.

The same way that a lot of the best superhero movies are considered faithful to the comics they’re drawn from, despite changing tons of things in the process. It’s not about having all the details match up, it’s about getting to the core of the material and taking advantage of the new medium’s strengths. Why would a…

The difference is that anyone can binge a season once it’s finished (as you proved by saying that you just wait until that’s an option — I sometimes do it too), but it’s impossible for the internet to keep in sync in order to discuss a specific episode and speculate about what might come next when the full season is…

I was actually thinking more about stuff like The Queen’s Gambit. It isn’t really built around moments that will get people talking on a week to week basis. It’s just a very well told story.

It’s not due until next year.

It doesn’t have to be weekly. They could do two a week, or daily, or any number of other release schedules, and even a full season drop might sometimes be appropriate, depending on the show in question.

I thought the first season of Discovery actively avoided anything interesting.

It’s probably born of a desire to crow about how many views the trailer got in the 24 hours and ring an extra round of entertainment reporting out of it. If it just drops with no warning, some people might not hear about it until a day or two later and thereby depress the numbers.

The relative success of Discovery and Picard among Trek fans is very confusing to me. I can’t work out why the audience that rejects the Kelvinverse seems to have largely come around and decided these shows are actually quite good. They have far more in common with the Abrams movies than anything from TOS through Voyag…