Is there any reason for the weirdly aggressive tone of your reply or are you just a jerk by nature?

I have no idea. It must have filled the cinema void in a lot of markets. Looking at the breakdown of where it made all its money, it’s not just in China, but if there are films that blow a hole in the notion that ‘films in theaters are dead’ this year, it’s that one and the other Chinese hit and F9, not necessarily…

In the comic books, for years, the original Venom was almost entirely defined by his connection to Spider-Man. The character literally didn’t exist outside of that connection. He came into existence as a synthesis of two distinct characters who both had significant grudges against Peter Parker himself and his costumed…

It also basically ruins the entire synthesis of Spider-Man as a character, the reality that Peter Parker sacrifices almost all happiness in his life because of the sense of guilt he has because he believes his inaction directly resulted in his uncle’s death and his determination that he would never be responsible for…

Fast 9 has outperformed every movie in 2021 except the Chinese comedy Hi, Mom, which has grossed $822 million worldwide, all of it outside the United States. The AV Club, (and most media opinion writers), routinely hunt and peck which particular type of revenue stream they are going to isolate to fit with their given…

I guess the same could be argued of the entire original trilogy, which is one of the things that makes the sequel trilogy so loathsome.

When making these thinly veiled editorialized news pieces, why does Barsanti never account for the reality that Black Widow had a second revenue stream that Shang Chi doesn’t have and when the two revenue streams are combined, Black Widow has relatively comfortably outgrossed Shang Chi?

After years and years of hip, hyperaware about the tropes of horror stories media, watching a miniseries in which the basic premise was that no one in the story had apparently ever heard of a vampire was... strange and somehow kind of off-putting.

Back in the day, everything was, “SUDDENLY the <whatever it is this issue>!”

I was less irritated by Han Solo dying that I was the notion that 40 years after the fact, one of the heroes of the Rebellion was reduced to trying to pull off the same scams and heists he’d been doing before he ever became involved.  It was basically like the creators of the sequel trilogy decided that Han Solo never…

What If...? is kind of an interesting exercise in storytelling. It is by far the thing Marvel has produced that is completely and absolutely dependent on the viewers’ foreknowledge of the original movies to be narratively effective.  Because of that, none of the normal rules of storytelling apply and, in a vacuum, I…

I’m not sure how hopeful ‘the guy who wanted to start WWIII by proliferating vibranium weapons all over the globe became the Black Panther in this reality’ was.

The only season I could conceivably see Gellar being nominated for is 5.   Her performance in ‘The Body’ episode was far and away the best performance she’s ever given in anything.

Yeah, the one thing that has never made the translation from the comics to the movies is the notion that Peter becomes much, much funnier in the Spider-Man costume, mostly to mask how frightened he is almost every time he goes into a fight.  Spider-Man fight scenes are some of the funniest comic book scenes I’ve ever…

Yeah, I can see that.  I would also say that neither he nor Emma Stone were at all the problem with those movies and if they’d had better material to work with, they would have really shone in those roles.

I am pretty sure that Andrew Garfield in no way prefers to be just a fan instead of getting paid tens of millions of dollars per movie to play the role.

Well, clearly Yelena has a grudge against Hawkeye because the Julia Louis-Dreyfus character has successfully lied to her about him being responsible for Natasha’s death.  Which seems like it would be a difficult thing to do since there are people with greater firsthand knowledge who could actually fully explain the…

This is sort of a unicorn. A movie that A.A. Dowd apparently thought was a lot better than I thought it was. I thought this movie was terrible in execution, full of disjarring music and sound cues, a weak lead performance by Annabelle Wallis, and a plot that had to over-explain itself throughout because the central…

I would argue that the Julia Stiles season was very good, but it was not nearly as good as the John Lithgow season so it suffers in comparison. I would even argue that the Julia Stiles season was better than season 2 in my personal ranking of Dexter seasons.

The bugs and exploits were so crazy on that game, you could go from having full light side points to full dark side points and back again - all in the same run on the same character.