I was once held up in a grocery store checkout line by a woman who refused to let a man bag her groceries.

I paid close attention during The Marvels to see just how much I needed to know in order to understand it. Kamala’s entire origin story is told the first time she holds up her bangle; that she has a complicated family isn’t even vaguely essential to understanding the plot. Monica does away with her origin story in a…

Domestic box office rankings, post-Endgame:

2021 — #1 No Way Home, #2 Shang-Chi, #4 Black Widow, #6 Eternals
2022 — #2 Wakanda Forever, #3 Multiverse of Madness, #8 Love & Thunder
2023 — #3 Across the Spider-Verse, #4 GotG3, #8 Quantumania, #30 The Marvels

Yes, I understand that two of those are Sony projects (though…

Right, but Messiah was him writing without someone more powerful than him trying to talk him into/out of certain things, which Campbell was legendary/notorious for. The reason most of the super-famous Golden Age writers stopped writing for Astounding was because of ideas Campbell was not only enthused about, but kept…

That’s an awful lot of story, and you have to manage some pretty huge character swings. I think you’re fine sticking to Messiah if you just show the things that, in the book, are instead talked about in the past or future tense. Which is what Villeneuve would do anyway.

I sometimes wonder if it was really Herbert who failed (which I agree he did; it’s there, but it’s overwhelmed by the hero narrative). Unlike most of the work that followed, Dune was published in pieces under the watchful eye of the period’s most influential editor, John W. Campbell. And Campbell would’ve been very,…

Life of Duncans, more likely. It has potential: waking up in a tank that may or may not be a giant salamander, creepy dwarves singing at you, sex with Paul’s underage sister, getting crushed by a giant worm, getting crushed by a giant worm, getting crushed by a giant worm, getting crushed by a giant worm, getting…

The end of Messiah is a reasonable place to end Paul’s story. Chani’s as well, though Villeneuve has already completely upended how that works in the second book (and it’s about half the plot, so it’s not like it can be blithely ignored). I guess we’ll see how he deals with that, if he does indeed make the film.

I don’t either. You’d have to invent stuff to fill the empty space.

It’s the dilemma that anyone trying to adapt this story faces, because in the books all this is throughly explained by internal narrative. Lynch tried to preserve some of that and it didn’t really work. Villeneuve tried to put most of it in actual dialogue, but because he doesn’t enjoy dialogue there was a lot…

(spoilers for future books)

It’s interesting how much I hated most of the major characterization changes in LoTR (while generally loving the movies, overall), but I was fine with almost all of them in Dune. Chani walking...well, riding...away makes complete sense, given what preceded it. The movie didn’t need Alia, but it gave us a version of…

The other thing is that you absolutely don’t need Chalamet around to film any potential adaptation of Children; The Prophet could look like anyone. In theory, you’d want to get Rebecca Ferguson and Jason Momoa back, but since I doubt anyone’s ever going to do it before the latter looks like an extremely buff Unabomber,…

There’s still time for Poison Ivy 5: Heal the Bits.

My guess is that they’re going to extend the story a bit, at least into the early days of the jihad. By the end of Dune, Paul already knows it’s going to spiral out of his or anyone else’s control, because he’s seen it and had ominous conversations about it. The text doesn’t hit you over the head with it like Messiah…

for Monica you would have needed to watch WandaVision to see how she got her powers and you would have needed to watch Ms. Marvel to learn anything about Kamala.

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I’m 95% certain they wanted Boseman’s Black Panther to fill the Iron Man/leadership role and Shuri to fill the Tony Stark/tech genius role. Alas...

Exactly. L&T isn’t a “bad movie” as that’s usually defined. It’s two good movies (the Gorr movie and the Jane movie, though I see no reason those two couldn’t be knit together), with a screwball comedy...which might be knee-slapping in another context...that ruins both of them.

50 Shades Dobbier