I used to see similar stuff on signage (places where space/character count was at a premium) long before Latinx got popular in English, usually as a crossed-out “o” in a word, but sometimes just an x in place of the gender-identifying vowel. It functioned as kind of the equivalent of “s/he” in English—a bit of…

I can’t understand why this isn’t exactly the same situation as pronouns. We don’t simply declare that everyone’s default pronoun is “they,” just because some people are nonbinary. People are allowed identify as gendered and to have the pronouns they identify with. And when someone uses “they” as a pronoun…

And given how successful TFA was, my bet would be that Feige would have kept Abrams on for TLJ and never bothered with the three director approach to begin with.

I absolutely agree with you that Kennedy is the person most responsible for the way the sequels turned out—and I say this as someone who loves TLJ—because I still can’t wrap my head around the idea of someone announcing a trilogy, and then trusting three different filmmakers to wing it with no real plan (or anybody…

Anyone else think Twitter saw the way so much of Netflix’s value has recently evaporated, realized that Musk’s ability to leverage $44 billion could disappear just as suddenly, and decided to take the money and run?

We’re living in Elon Musk’s America now. Vegas will only be paying out in crypto.

To me, Rise of Skywalker and STID are outright failures—although I know STID has its fans, it’s a brutally stupid film that betrayed the promise of its predecessor, with a couple of nice moments mixed in. And I can definitely blame him for Rise of Skywalker—the stuff that’s bad about it isn’t TLJ’s fault or even,…

Warner Brothers is the only one that can be blamed for not following the template. Universal was actually following it. pretty closely...just their movies sucked. Plus the monsters are mostly in the public domain, so it was a bad idea to begin with.

Excellent points. Another significant issue with what Universal was trying is that the entire cinematic universe concept depends pretty strongly on owning and controlling the IP. Not only was this Dark Universe having to deal with past (universal) versions of the characters, but, since most (if not all) of the…

The big difference is that Iron Man 2 and Thor 2 made money, so even if critics didn’t enjoy them, audiences accepted them. Even Incredible Hulk performed roughly as expected, particularly given that Norton didn’t promote it because he was angry about losing his writing arbitration. Eternals was both a critical…

The closest anyone else has come is Fox’s X-Men universe, which managed to branch out some successful offshoots (the Mangold Wolverines and the Deadpool series) and successfully reboot itself after losing its creative way in the late ‘00s. And even that only barely holds together.

The problem with Abrams is that while he’s not a great filmmaker or horrible one, that doesn’t actually average out to him being mediocre, either. He’s a guy with some tremendous talents and skills, but equally enormous blind spots and deficits. And he’s never managed to disconnect one from the other, so even when he…

It’s crazy that in the massive diarrhea of content Netflix has produced over the last decade, all the animation projects, good, bad and just plain bizarre that they’ve funded in their “money don’t matter” days, that Bone is the thing that’s left out in the cold. Stupid rat creatures, indeed.

That maybe, if you’re complaining that your career is suffering from negative publicity, extending that negative publicity by repeatedly dragging your ex-wife to court might hurt your reputation worse than your ex-wife writing vaguely about herself as a domestic abuse victim and not naming you. He didn’t lose the…

The eccentricity works to give him the gravitas. The initial setup of Sterling Cooper maps out the firm as having two halves, in one, Roger drinks, womanizes, and brings in and keeps clients. In the other Don drinks, womanizes, and dreams up advertising campaigns. And initially, it’s hard to see where Bert fits in. He…

I love that scene. The end of it is one of the great Don Draper “What the fuck just happened?” faces you get in the whole series, and Hamm’s silent acting throughout (particularly the “this is going south, time for a cigarette” moment) is phenomenal. But that delivery of “who cares,” which Morse repeats exactly the…

The most interesting takeaway from the report (that the statement from Baldwin’s lawyers doesn’t note) was that its findings seem to back Baldwin’s claim that he was directed to point the gun at the camera (and therefore at Hutchins and Souza), and that that wasn’t something he did negligently or just of his own…

I didn’t think studios would be as stupid as to give Rowling the kind of control that she (and the author of 50 Shades of Grey, who got a similar level of script and director approval some years later) got while she was writing the Potter books, either, but they wanted the rights to those stories so bad, they were…

I mainly give a damn because the Depp Cult narrative, leading up to the UK case was, “Just wait until he has his day in court. The truth will out!” And to be honest, I was a little curious about how it would play out, since the defamation case was an unorthodox move by an accused abuser. Maybe there was some evidence…

You’re absolutely right about Eccleston being wasted. Between the makeup and elvish language thing, anybody could’ve played that role. Also, it’s insane that every MCU alien, except Groot, in some way or another speaks English, but Malekith and the elves don’t. Still, I’ve seen characters established with proper…