Yeah, but the original Richard Donner Superman movie was basically it. I think Superman 2 did well at the box office and then 3 and 4 both underperformed. Other 90s comic book movies included The Phantom, The Shadow, The Punisher, Captain America, Judge Dredd, Steel, Mystery Men…

Every non-Batman superhero movie had bombed up to that point. They didn’t do any business until X-Men and the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies.

Now that’s a good line reading!

The wife must have just been toxic as a producer. She probably didn’t know what she was doing and fostered a lot of resentment among the crew. There’s no other reason HBO would take a stand like this, knowing it would make things super weird with the showrunner of their most expensive and culturally relevant series.…

But didn’t OG Connery fans think Craig was a Gen X fuckboy when he was announced? At some point you just get old and the current Bond is younger than you. I didn’t think it would also happen to me :(

If they’re following up on the insane Greg/Quentin/Tanya murder plot, which they kind of have to because they left Greg’s fate completely up in the air, then they have to bring back Portia at a White Lotus resort. And the way to explain how she’s able to afford the stay is, Albie is paying for it (well, via Dom’s…

Oh the Navy definitely thought they were cooperating with a recruitment ad. But I found the movie subtly subversive, in that Tom Cruise so thoroughly pounds every level of the Navy into submission that the institution looks weak. The entire brass is forced to admit by the end that Tom Cruise is, in fact, awesome and…

There’s something a little weird about these reviewers trying to analyze the popular appeal of the movie while being fairly out of touch with the audience’s sensibilities. No, viewers were not angry about the military being portrayed in a flattering light, or about the movie being “heteronormative,” because most…

Many cinematic detective franchises have gotten stuck with the first case as the franchise name. The Thin Man and The Pink Panther both spring to mind. Rian Johnson is no doubt aware of this, but it’s basically been a convention since the early talkie era.

The first season of The Sopranos actually aired about a year before Analyze This came out. A number of critics compared the latter unfavorably. I remember Ebert said something like “The Sopranos has unfortunately exposed how thin and schticky Ramis’ approach to the material is.” But what’s funny in considering the…

Was… was Everything Everywhere All At Once really a Temple of Doom sequel?

There are a lot of things about Temple of Doom being a prequel that don’t really make sense (e.g. why is Indy still a skeptic in Raiders after seeing the Sankara stones in action and all of the other supernatural stuff?), but they could have addressed Short Round in Last Crusade. Either with a cameo, or a line about…

This is in no way a defense of Crystal Skull, but how else were they supposed to handle Henry Jones Sr. and Marcus Brody? Connery was firmly retired and Denholm Elliot was long dead. I can see why they had that scene where they showed their Last Crusade-era headshots and were just like “Eh it’s sad they both died last…

I think Westworld was uniquely vulnerable to being “disappeared” in a way that most of HBO’s back catalog is not.

I’m using “prose” here to mean fiction written in the form of novels, novellas and short stories. There’s not really a catch-all term for this that I’m aware of, so if you want to get into a semantic argument about the meaning of “prose,” that’s not really worth my time.

Burn the witch!

I think The Abyss’ reputation is still harmed to this day by some of the baffling choices made in the theatrical cut, which leaves the movie with a third act that doesn’t really pay off the NTIs or resolve the WW3 subplot. I remember seeing this movie in a theater as a kid, and on the drive home all we talked about…

I think Terminator 1 is just a masterpiece of low-budget filmmaking. Everything about the story is engineered so that Cameron can capture the audience’s imagination without showing too much on screen.

The Abyss feels kind of low there, but I’m not sure where else you place it with a filmmaker who has never made a bad movie after Piranha 2. 

How is Pugh possibly going to handle promoting a movie directed by a guy she used to date? It’s not like that’s been happening for over a hundred years or anything.