There was definitely an element of nostalgia to the TFA campaign. I felt like a lot of the “kids” merch was really aimed at people in their 40s seeking to relive the excitement of being a fan in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

That strikes me as more foreshadowing for the sequels, which had become an inescapable part of ‘00s genre filmmaking. Harry and MJ are pretty important in the later movies, whereas Knox and Vicki disappear entirely after Batman (though Vicki warrants a passing mention in Return).

Noted, but that describes a big chunk of ‘80s and ‘90s Hollywood movies in general. It’s just assumed that pretty women don’t mind being hit on, even if they’re just minding their own business.

I bet this song would help Moss-Bachrach get into the right frame of mind.

Mandalorian S1 and Andor are apples and oranges, though. The former is an episodic with a few recurring characters and some loose story arcs. The latter is a dense serial top-loaded with franchise lore, with lots of supporting characters broken into four movie-like blocs. Mandalorian tends to be a “planet of the week”…

I don’t think that Batman “mainstreamed” comics fandom any more than any other superhero movie of the period. I think the speculator market of the earlier ‘90s played a bigger role. Once people realized you could get rich by hoarding specific issues of X-Force and Youngblood, comics were suddenly seen as a “serious”…

The Crow is definitely in the “indie, almost nobody seeing it knows it’s based on a comic book” category.

Properly speaking, most of those ‘90s movies are about pulp characters with deep roots in Depression era popular culture, even Rocketeer, which was an ‘80s indie series but one based heavily on 1930s and ‘40s science heroes. And that was mainly a generational thing. The people greenlighting and making movies had grown…

I think nowadays there’s more interest in virality, in finding some memetic aspect of the movie that can be dispersed and disseminated through social media rather than a concentrated effort at getting everyone’s attention. It also helps that most big movies are based on some sort of other media, or are a part of a…

It reminds me a bit of Myers in Del Toro’s Hellboy, the idea being that the main character is too weird for audiences to relate to, so they need a “regular guy” identification figure who can walk them through the outermost narrative frame. And in both cases the audience surrogate is largely irrelevant by the end of…

Returns is glorious (no superhero movie would be allowed to be that weird or perverse today) but it has approximately jack-squat to do with Batman.

The thing that always struck me, even watching it in the theater as a teenager, is that the first half hour is very good and then it just sort of gets baggy and shapeless until the big finale. It’s probably not a coincidence that 30 minutes is about when Nicholson falls into the vat and turns into the Joker. From that…

Two things about Batman:

Me when I see it’s a slideshow:

I think we’re kind of there already. Some of the later Mandalorian eps felt more like something out of an anthology show.

I get that, but the Adam West Batman is itself basically a parody. The Watchmen characters can’t themselves be in on the joke, and that show was pretty much the definition of being in on the joke.

Did they say that was their intention? Because if not, I don’t know if I’d buy that. People knew the Adam West Batman show was silly when it was on. I would say the costumes should reflect the character personalities and backstories.

Seems like there should be a “Does The Wookiee Die?” site for Star Wars things.

I saw Little Murders for the first time a few months back — the whole thing is streaming on YouTube gratis — and he was incredible in his brief role as a hippie priest officiating the marriage between the main characters.

I imagine Yoda will turn up in an extended cameo before this is all over. It’d be a helluva thing if it turned out that he’d been involved in a coverup.