Was thinking about this / discussing it recently, and we realized that you could totally put the Dol Guldur stuff at the start of a third movie, without messing up Gandalf's timeline.

Okay, about GOTG, I've said it before, others have said it, but it does bear repeating:

I'm with you. If, as seems to have been hinted so far, the first movie ends with Bilbo and the dwarves escaping from the elves in the barrels, then it could either truly end with "and there's Laketown" or with their actual arrival and greeting at Laketown, but largely leaving the bulk of their arrival to open the…

Not to mention eight billion little plastic souvenir Liberties scattered all over the world. And so on, and so on...

...Yes.? You're right, of course. I saw a documentary about the Essex and its influence on Melville not that long ago, which was really interesting as before that I hadn't actually heard about it.

Everything I've read about it states that the bodies were never found (even fairly recent stuff). At least one wetsuit, possibly both, washed up on shore later, and one was slashed as if from a shark attack. But I don't think anyone really knows exactly how they died. (If, as suggested above, they faked their…

I hadn't heard that part; the last I'd read, people wondered if it was a murder-suicide because of some strange behavior on the husband's part prior to their disappearing.

Sure. Again, I'm not saying that he's a wonderful man. I was saying that you can't slam him for "being in the process of trying to shut down a pub" (present tense) when he is not, in fact, now in the process of doing that, because it was settled many months ago. You can certainly say, "he acted like a dick about the…

It's more being pedantic; in the U.S., "Holmes's" is now recognized as a correct form. So you could run into either form, and both are correct.

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Open Water is a survival movie about a couple on a scuba-diving expedition who get left behind by their boat.

I was wondering that, but I'm guessing it's the "alternate history" reference in the last line.

I thought it had been reported that the whole Hobbit pub thing had been amicably settled? Zaentz eventually allowed the pub to keep using the name for a token annual license fee. That was months ago. (Although I also remember an April Fools post somewhere about how the settlement involved Warner Bros. or someone…

To be fair, I don't think that angling for a bigger payoff is why the Tolkien estate isn't interested in selling the rights to the rest of the material.

OUAT: well, in Fables, they decided that the various fairy tale and nursery rhyme Jacks were all the SAME Jack. I wonder if OUAT will be going that route?

Well, you're right that it's the simpler explanation.

No, Superman doesn't have wingtips. He does have the tips of his toes, though. Could be what they're going for. He's not actually a perfectly blunt object.

You've never been flying in a plane and seen the wingtip vortices form contrails? (It's pretty cool.) They do get formed by stuff besides the engine exhaust. It depends on the air the object is moving through.

Hang on — how is "Tauriel" a "cringey made up fake Tolkien sounding name"? It's based solidly enough on Tolkien's languages and naming conventions — "daughter of the forest", from the Sindarin elements "taure" and the suffix "-iel". It seems like about as good a name for a Woodelf as "green leaf" does.

A decent variation idea could be to start with the ones I listed above, but then part of the plot of the rest of the movie is meeting and eventually recruiting a new team member that is one of the less well known ones (like Martian Manhunter).

Well, yes. But TA basically used witty banter and rapport to help the audience get over some of its absurdity of premise, and it did so successfully. So it's not that we need a lot more serious treatments of superheroes because we have to be afraid to invite laughter, lest it become the kind of laughter that…