It’s that time of year again

Start a media outlet that talks about new SFF books, and get it noticed by the publicity departments of the various publishers.  The publicists will start sending you info about new releases, interview requests and often free copies.

M.J. Kuhn is a delight. Go get that.

I get what you’re talking about, but Grease 2 is actually quite beloved.  It gave us Michelle Pfeiffer singing “Cool Rider”.  It is legacy cinema.

So, just as much a messy “Well, it’s a reboot, but maybe not these bits” that Crisis on Infinite Earths and New 52 were.   Very DC.

I have a theory that the MCU movies that get people the most annoyed are the ones that are doing a little more heavy lifting for things to come where, when they came out, that “to come” still felt uncertain. People resent something being set-up that they aren’t sure are going to be paid off, because we’ve seen that…

There’s a big difference between “franchise movies,” which have been around for nearly a century, and the current shared universe model, which didn’t emerge as a mature form until Avengers.

There’s a certain... I don’t want to say “Marvel Derangement Syndrome”, but certainly there’s a mindset that something that’s a tiny bit of the movie is actually The Entire Movie. Like how people said the entire third act of Black Widow was “just a CGI Slugfest”, when at most the only part that could be considered…

Does it? There’s a couple minutes about how the Mind Stone is one of six things, but it’s not a LOT of time that it feels like a real diversion from the plot, especially since the Mind Stone is central to Ultron’s creation and Vision’s. But beyond that, there isn’t THAT much set-up for future things, unless you…

I feel compelled to direct you to this absurdly prescient tweet from 2020:

I find so many of the “Marvel is destroying cinema” and “every movie is just a commercial for the next movie” complaints very overblown.  

I mean, you should be right, but I’ve seen people talk about, say, a relationship between someone in the forties and someone in their twenties as being “essentially pedophilia”, so common sense isn’t always in play here.

True.  Again, anecdotal, but I don’t see that same level of revisiting/comfort watch you got with Phase One-Three of MCU.  

Oh, absolutely. Between the much shorter wait and the much smaller loss in fidelity watching at home, the need to see it in the theaters (if “going to the movies” isn’t a big thing to you in the first place) is incredible small.  

The other factor with Way of the Water is the Cameron Factor. Like, the closest thing to a Cameron Flop is The Abyss, and that’s not really a flop in the slightest. His movies do very well because he’s always working to make it something worth seeing.  Every other pop culture element of the Avatar world doesn’t matter.

I mean, the big problem is everyone else went “we need to do shared-universe movies too!” without following any lessons from the MCU of HOW to do it.

True.

There’s also the factor that this movie seems to be trying to get, frankly, Endgame levels of impact without any of the legwork necessary to get there.  

I don’t think it was necessarily that— I don’t think “superhero fatigue” is real, honestly— but I do think everything about this movie was tailored toward a specific kind of superfan of DC and the DCEU movies in specific, that general audiences didn’t even have a toehold. Anecdotal, but I’ve heard several stories from…

While it probably was a contributing factor, I feel like Ezra-Is-A-Horrible-Person is more niche information for folks who pay close attention to such things, too much so to affect general audience interest.