The seeds are already planted in the books to a degree that Dany will not be the fabled protector everyone is expecting. She’s naive, thrust into being a ruler too quickly (in Mereen) and is just overall proving to be kind of a shitty leader.

You got one thing wrong:

I like the Dead Poets Society reference. Have a star...

IT’s one of those things that you don’t think about until you have it and use it and go “Why didn’t get this sooner?”

This. I had the MS ergo one and it was AWESOME. Alas no backlighting and I’d rather have that

I say we change the national bird to the falcon. No reason to use the same bird as the Nazis.

I ordered the BD/DVD combo pack this week; it should arrive tomorrow. The label in the picture says that it includes “deleted scenes”, which apparently includes the missing host segment.

to be fair...

Okay, let’s get into it.

Agreed. The hype cycle around trailers and leaks is also important, which isn’t possible through pure-streaming the same way it was pre-pandemic. The big films that have released exclusively on streaming the past year (WW84, Soul...) have felt so disposable compared to blockbusters released pre-pandemic.

I feel the same was about arcades. But surely people will abandon their PS5s and rush back to the communal gaming experience of their local coin-ops just as soon as COVID is over and the 90s come back.

Thats one very positive view on the cinema experience.

So the stereotype about Americans applauding films is true?

I’ve watched Back to the Future countless times but never had the chance to watch it in the cinema. Because I was a baby. I have never laughed whilst watching it, until I went to a trilogy screening in 2015. I’ve never had a more concrete example of the power inherent in a communal viewing experience than that.

To be quite honest, as a movie theater manager form 2003-2018, we were all pretty well convinced by 2015 that the industry was dying due to home streaming, and the market for theaters would collapse. It was only a matter of time.

Absolutely. I know there’s a bunch of people on the Internet, esp. on io9, who are going to poo-poo it, but this time last year, I sat in a full theater that exploded in cheers at the stinger of the Sonic movie with the highly anticipated appearance of a certain two-tailed fox, and sorry, that’s not replicable on my…

Live Theater and concerts yes, definitely group experiences. Movies? Ehhh. I disagree. I’d much I rather sit on the couch with my wife and watch a movie, on my schedule, than sit with strangers in a theater. I know my wife never wants to deal with a guy falling asleep on her for two hours again.

I enjoyed Aquaman more than all but about 5-6 Marvel movies. That movie was fun as fuck and I still enjoy flipping over to it when it’s on TV.

did you watch either of those movies? Aquaman was not a good movie regardless of its box office draw