Endgame had the narrative conceit of The Snap to shrink the cast down by half, and really, it was mostly tertiary characters that were snapped so that the movie could focus on the OG Avengers.

I actually liked how they recontextualized the prophecy within the series. That stuff isn’t there to create meaning for the botched GoT ending where it turns out absolutely nothing mattered around the Prince Who Was Promised. Instead, Aegon’s dream is revealed to be the secret family motivation for the Targaryens to…

Westworld was a very expensive show that completely lost its audience. HBO has been green-lighting final seasons of expensive low rated shows for decades and nearly all their prestige dramas have reached a planned series finale.

I think it was a “do you think Mick Jagger is going to be doing this when he’s 40?” thing, where Cruise didn’t think audiences would accept him playing action roles in his 50s, so he hedged by casting Renner as a younger actor who could take on the heavy lifting in the franchise going forwards. But then it turned out…

Turning Red and Luca were awesome! They would have performed well at the box office if the pandemic never happened.

Nobody ever tells a billionaire they’re full of shit to their face, so they just keep on talking.

Ironically, the problems with Game of Thrones only really started when there was no source material to adapt, because Martin never wrote anything beyond a vague outline on a cocktail napkin.

He used to be! Back during the Bush era I remember him making the rounds bashing the Iraq War and insisting that schools had to go back to teaching civics so that we’d have an informed electorate.

It doesn’t — once the film is released, it belongs to the audience, and the director is just another audience member.

The Tom Hardy casting matters because the rest of the world in Fury Road appears to be much further along in the apocalypse than what we saw in Road Warrior or Thunderdome, when the collapse felt fresh and most adults seemed to remember the war.

I haven’t seen that movie since it came out, but my interpretation was that Joaquin Phoenix’s job was a little bit like Benjamin Sisko’s family-run New Orleans restaurant, where anybody in the galaxy can just use the replicators to make a Cajun meal, and the customers are really paying for the authenticity of a…

If we had unemployment at 40-50% with no hope of it ever improving, there’d be some explosions.

We still haven’t really had a good sci-fi movie about the more realistic threat AI poses — that it may eliminate or severely downsize many different types of work all at once, without creating new human jobs in sufficient numbers to replace them. Previous technological advances have made some labor obsolete but also…

I would argue that the check just hasn’t come due on the streaming series repeatedly messing around with the MCU’s status quo, and that the primary story issue with the MCU is that they’ve branched off in too many directions and added too many new story elements that lack follow-up.

This is one of those baffling successes, where if I squint I can kind of see the appeal, but this was one of the *stupidest* studio movies I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen every Fast and Furious movie), and I can’t quite understand why audiences went nuts for this particular movie.

My theory has been that the hotel failed because its target customers — well off tech bros who love Star Wars — were disproportionately likely to find the in-person roleplaying elements to be deeply socially uncomfortable.

The reaction probably varied. I saw the very first screening at the Ziegfeld in NYC with an audience of die hard Star Wars fans who had waited on line for like six hours. People were applauding and cheering throughout the whole fight. But I’m buying that a less engaged crowd would have giggled, because it’s a very…

Basically all of Disney’s Star Wars content has been worse than the prequels, though.

It is silly, but it’s hard to overstate just how much the opening night crowd lost their shit when finally seeing Yoda in action for the first time. It was a giddy thrill. Of course when CGI advances over the next 25 years and you watch it over and over again and realize he’s just doing Sonic the Hedgehog’s spinball…

Star Trek: Insurrection came out about a year before The Phantom Menace. You know how that movie doesn’t really feel like it takes placeon an alien world, because they obviously just did some location shooting in rural California with a handful of flimsy props in the foreground? How the Ba’Ku don’t feel like they…