I mean ultimately the box office is always a roller coaster. The new Mission Impossible got great reviews and audience reception numbers, but still underperformed. Although that was also affected that it came just before the juggernauts that Barbie and Oppenheimer turned out to be, but still.

If you adjust for inflation, even the successful Marvel movies are performing less well. The box office hasn’t come back to its pre-Covid days. You had the strike which limited promotion. In this case, I think the promotion it likely would have benefitted the most from would have been throwing Iman Vellani into the…

It’s getting harder to believe they’re still in high school than Demogorgons, Mind Flayers, Vecba, mind powers... COMBINED!

You mean the one that AVClub put at sixth best?

A show that has been on for nearly 40 years is bound to reboot itself, consciously or not.

They brought back one of Moe’s old girlfriends from a previous season and they got engaged. Also Comic Book Guy met a woman online and they got married.

I would say so. It was a mishmash of Saw and Seven, without pulling any punches for it being a cartoon. 

“ (I remember thinking it was weird that they had Moe and Comic Book Guy find spouses).”

And ending just as they enter mirkwood would be perfect as they house of beorn is a nice ending (denouement) after the excape from the wolves and goblins.

That video really lays out how it all went horribly to shit.

The three Hobbit films combined grossed a shade under $3 billion just from the cinema box office alone. To paraphrase Dick Jones from OCP in Robocop, "Who cares if they were good or not?".

One thing I love about those old movies on TCM is that they were tight.  There are definitely some famously long standouts, but for the most part they were trim and slim, and that’s what I look for in a film.

It’s what happens when you have been greenlit (and given money) for three movies, have one movie worth of material, change directors at the last second, and have done almost no planning. It’s basically the opposite of the preparation for LoTR. 

I expect the people of Waco are happy. They single-handedly screwed up the affordable housing market there, between direct price increases, home conversions to rental properties, and property tax bills jumping proportionately. Their Silos development has been positive for the city at large but Waco was known as a…

As a former union organizer, I have always said the best way to keep it union out of your shop, is to treat your workers, right, and compensate them fairly. Now as much as this article is trying to point out that only a few people disagree with the union, the factors as of now only a few people support one as well.…

I really need to re-read Lot, the audiobook has been loaded on my phone for a couple years as a backup. 

I rather liked that short story King wrote, “One for the Road” which delves into the aftermath of the events of the main novel, and it really drives home this creep factor, of Salem’s Lot being this desolate town, that locals from neighboring towns just avoid after dark...

Thank you, you nailed it. I grew up in rural Maine, actually not too far off from King’s real life stomping grounds, and I very much related to the book in that way. When I was younger, it was a pretty well-off mill town. Then, the mills closing combined with the beginning of the opioid epidemic - it almost did feel…

King himself is quite explicit that this is what ‘Salem’s Lot was about for him - small towns in the middle of nowhere dying out. Perhaps part of the problem of setting it in a more recent milieu is that this is only exacerbated in the modern world; I can’t imagine Ben and Susan “meeting cute” in the way they do in…

See, I think it could work, if the people making these adaptations understood what Salem’s Lot is about. Every adaptation has sought to make a movie about vampires. That’s not what Salem’s Lot is about. It’s about how the places you grew up in change and die. I always imagined Salem’s Lot as being a stand in for those…