I was struck by how everyone was insisting that Way of Water was going to be a flop because the original Avatar had “no cultural footprint,” and it ended up earning over $2B+ despite that. Along with Maverick, it was the sort of old-fashioned sequel that’s a continuation of just one movie, not the latest in a…

I’ve always said that if Universal was really serious about the Dark Universe, they should’ve ended the 2017 Mummy with a Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury-style cameo from Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz as Rick and Evelyn O’Connell as the heads of the SHIELD-type anti-monster organization. They’re immortal now, they’ve…

One of the funniest/dumbest things I saw on Twitter over the weekend was a complaint from a DCEU fan about the studio making them feel like they had to care about an old Batman from a movie they’d never heard of. They even referred to the 1989 Batman as an “underground” movie, like it was something very few people had…

Asteroid City and No Hard Feelings cracked the top ten this past weekend, which suggests to me a change is coming — small, maybe, but substantial.

The Marvel and Marvel-branded movies are doing fine. GotG 3 and Across The Spider-Verse are massive hits with around $840M and $550M, respectively. Even Quantumania earned around half a billion dollars, which is far from bomb territory. Maybe the level of excitement isn’t quite around the insane peaks of 2018-19, but…

I was wondering what might have caused such a low box office too.

I kinda feel like this is the end of “shared universes are the future of movies.” Marvel isn’t going anywhere, but it has a first mover advantage. It’s like Star Wars was back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Almost all of the studios tried to do their own big budget PG genre movies, and none of them managed to recreate Lucas’…

Quantumania underperformed expectations, but it won’t kill a 100-year-old studio. That’s the key difference.

I’d forgotten about Moneypenny, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen either of the Dalton Bonds, and apart from GoldenEye I’ve only seen each of the Brosnan movies once.

Chris Taylor’s How Star Wars Conquered The Universe is another good one, especially in exploring Lucas’ genre influences. One of the more interesting revelations in the book is that Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces was not a big influence on the development of the first movie. Lucas had read the book while he was…

Absolutely baffling to me that you would have real firearms on a movie set in the 2020s. Was it that hard to find a prop gun? 

I grew up with the original movies and had some of the paperback novels and comics, and honestly there wasn’t a whole lot of “lore” in them that wasn’t in the movies. The novelization of Star Wars (or ANH) had references to the Sith and the Emperor’s real name, but that was about it. The notion of there being this…

He probably had piles of those magazines lying around the bathrooms in Skywalker Ranch.

Lucky us.

In the feudal wastelands of the post-broadband outback we shall be known as the DVD Farmers.

One thing I will say in their defense is that it’s still pretty easy to quit most of them, so if you’re done with that one show you wanted to see, you can end your subscription fast. I did that with MAX this week for obvious reasons and it took me maybe all of thirty seconds.

Prodigy has no WGA coverage.

The 4K of Strange New Worlds S1 is really nice.

Why would people stop torrenting it?

The prequels at least expanded the universe; there really wasn’t a lot of “lore” in the OT. (Maybe in the comics and novels from the ‘70s and ‘80s, but not the movies themselves.) That, to me, is one of their saving graces — we saw more of the civilized galaxy instead of its outskirts.