How does Lord of the Rings even count for this metric? It’s not really a trilogy, it’s a ~1000 page book Tolkien delivered complete to his publisher, who then decided to split it into three installments.

It can be the directing, when you jump from a $750,000 indie flick to a $150 million tentpole blockbuster just because you remind Brad Bird of his younger self. That’s apparently what passes for “paying your dues” in Hollywood.

Thor will introduce them as “The Mighty Sons of Coul!”

Hey, like the ending of The One!

I’m not even a horror fan myself, but it’s really good. Much more psychological than jump scares or gore. A lot of it comes down to the sound design.

I figure Thanos will have at least a minimal retinue, if only so they can reveal exposition from the villains’ side through dialogue. Or probably they’ll treat the Infinity Stones like Thanos’ Horcruxes, and there’ll be five or six small teams of heroes, each with their own sidequest to destroy or shut down the power…

Maybe they do the 47 Ronin approach: focus on like half a dozen of them, and the rest are glorified cameos.

The Witch is sooo good. Excellent performances, especially from the younger actors.

You thinking of Shadowshaper?

Counter-counterpoint: Why remake a satire aimed so perfectly at its time and place solely to take advantage of its cultural caché (this would probably be the subject of a Prisoner episode), when you could make something new that actually speaks to today’s fears? In other words, why not greenlight a Black Mirror movie…

I figure if this cast couldn’t make the TV miniseries remake good, what hope in hell does a film adaptation have?

Did you know that the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons used to have rap battles?

So I didn’t like these books a whole lot even when I read them in my early teens and the only things I really had to compare them to were the early Dragonlance books and a few Conan stories. But I actually thought the pilot had potential.

Agriculture and metalworking are two vocations at least as complex as operating a recording/playback device (probably more), and both were done for millennia by illiterate people. My niece was already internalizing the basic operation of smartphone touchscreens before the age of two. Is a tape recorder that much more…

I’m sure we can trust the History Channel to present a historically accurate portrayal of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon,and not get drawn into all the pseudo-historical whackjob conspiracy theories that often surround them.

It’s not the same. The concept of the Chosen One is something coming from within the story. The Chosen One is chosen by Fate, Destiny, some divine entity, a beam of light—whatever—but within the story. The protagonist is something determined by the author—unless the work is intentionally meta, the story doesn’t come…

You are equivocating an in-narrative genre trope (the Chosen One) with an out-of-narrative literary device (the protagonist). The whole point of this exercise is to show the two things are not necessarily the same thing.

No, in the digital age, editors are increasingly asked to do more work in less time and for less pay. That’s assuming the work of editing English-language publications hasn’t been outsourced to countries where English isn’t a primary language. My mother-in-law’s an editor and tells me a lot of her company’s editing…