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    #51
    That says it all. I think there are a large number of completists following one or both of the stables.

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      #52
      A lot of people legitimately liked Aquaman and it was better than this.

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        #53
        Well, yes.

        And presumably a better film would make more.

        But I tend to agree with Sits that the studios would rather just keep churning out "product" and collect virtually assured profits rather than take the time, effort and money a thoughtful re-boot would entail.

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          #54
          We’ll see. I’m not sure how it’s going to work since very few people are going to see it in a theater and it’s not going to fix HBO Max’ basic problems.* It may not be considered a success.

          WB isn’t really “churning” out DC movies. It took them forever to get around to doing the Snyderverse films and they still haven’t come up with a plan for where that will go next since those failed. There’s supposedly been a Green Lantern Corp film in the works since the Ryan Reynolds one underachieved and it’s still just “in development.” Shazam 2 isn’t scheduled until 2023. It’s all haphazard and a lot of it is halfass.

          Meanwhile, Disney just announced about a dozen Marvel projects and 10 Lucasfilm projects. Disney has shifted its focus to its streaming service with great success. ATT/WB/HBO could do that too if they created some more original shows on it that people really want to watch.


          *HBOM problem isn’t the quality of what it has. It has a lot of great old films, HBO stuff, animation, stuff for kids, etc. But it hasn’t managed to connect with a big audience yet.

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            #55
            Which camp was the Silver Surfer in and did anyone try a movie? I never read DC or Marvel comics (a good friend had a huge collection of 60s-70s Batman and Superman) but SS was the only character I found moderately intriguing. Would be tough to transfer to movie I suppose, and maybe not well enough known.

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              #56
              Oh boy.

              He was in one of the many bad Fantastic Four films that sony made.


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                #57
                Oh well. See how little I know about these movies?

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                  #58
                  Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View Post
                  Meanwhile, Disney just announced about a dozen Marvel projects and 10 Lucasfilm projects. Disney has shifted its focus to its streaming service with great success. ATT/WB/HBO could do that too if they created some more original shows on it that people really want to watch.
                  At the risk of going off on one about nerds, why should they when they can slap the right logo (Star Wars/Marvel/Harry Potter) logo on any old shite and a million nerds will lap it up? There are twenty three MCU movies for a reason.

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                    #59
                    Yeah, but most of those 23 films are pretty good. A remarkably high success rate.

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                      #60
                      That's an odd statement Snake because arguably the MCU has created a lot more fans than would have existed otherwise. Take Guardians of the Galaxy, for example. That was barely a comic before the fipm came out, but it has become hugely popular after finding an audience via the MCU.

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                        #61
                        The point was that it was still yet another comic book adaptation. It's all it is - as ursus, says, it's just product. Whether they are actually any good or not is irrelevant, they just suck up all the air into an endless treadmill of the same fucking invulnerable CGI ping pong balls causing huge amounts of CGI damage to save the fabled CGI land/planet of Xafragl. And leaving aside the fact that they are all fucking invulnerable, they still get plot-armoured up the wazoo because they have to be in the one three years down the line where all the invulnerables have to team up against someone who is also invulnerable and threatening the fabled galaxy of Xafragl and I don't give a fuck because there's no fucking peril, no stakes, no nothing except the movie equivalent of cardboard calories.

                        Sorry, I promised I wouldn't go off on one and ended up doing so.

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                          #62
                          Originally posted by Ray de Galles View Post
                          Can everyone just see WW84 and they say how awful it is? I acknowledge that's not going to be easy for most of the UK posters with Tier 3 closing cinemas everywhere so perhaps everyone can just cut straight to the chase and say it's awful without having seen it?
                          I'm happy to say that it's awful, from everything I've heard about it. I was never going to go see it at the picture house mind. Saw the first one on telly, and it was ok. But then I thought Aquaman was kind of ok ish, watched at home.



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                            #63
                            WW84 has lost its "certified fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Or so a news headline Google thought I might be interested in tells me.

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                              #64
                              I got the same headline despite never having seen any of the films

                              Which makes me wonder about the role this thread played in that recommendation

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                                #65
                                The Big Picture podcast was surprisingly positive about it despite not liking even more things about it than I did.

                                Listening to that, it occurred to me that, in addition to making bad hires, DC is just trying to have it too many ways. They want an interconnected universe, but they also want to give directors some freedom otherwise those directors won’t do it, and they want each film to be unique, and yet not too unique.

                                And that’s just making it all a mishmash. In this case, Patty Jenkins wanted this to be different in that nobody dies at all and Diana ultimately wins by talking sense into people rather than winning a battle. That could have worked, maybe. It might not have had much action, but it could have been at least a coherent retelling of the Gift of the Magi/Monkey’s Paw plot with a few action bits.

                                But either she or the studio realizes that it’s still a superhero movie, so they shoved in a whole final battle with Cheetah that feels incoherent and unnecessary. It could have been used in a sequel or not at all. And that fight scene in the mall early on also felt shoehorned in. Wonder Woman shouldn’t have to be fighting middle-aged incompetent thieves. But clearly they saw that they had too much boring shit in the middle and, instead of working on that, just added an action scene.

                                It also would have made more sense to not have Chris Pine in it, as Steve Trevor’s return and Diana’s inability to not move on for 60 years raises various plot issues, but fans like him, so there he is.

                                It’s trying to please too many different kinds of audiences while also making the director happy. That’s not likely to work very often.

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                                  #66
                                  Originally posted by Snake Plissken View Post
                                  The point was that it was still yet another comic book adaptation. It's all it is - as ursus, says, it's just product. Whether they are actually any good or not is irrelevant, they just suck up all the air into an endless treadmill of the same fucking invulnerable CGI ping pong balls causing huge amounts of CGI damage to save the fabled CGI land/planet of Xafragl. And leaving aside the fact that they are all fucking invulnerable, they still get plot-armoured up the wazoo because they have to be in the one three years down the line where all the invulnerables have to team up against someone who is also invulnerable and threatening the fabled galaxy of Xafragl and I don't give a fuck because there's no fucking peril, no stakes, no nothing except the movie equivalent of cardboard calories.

                                  Sorry, I promised I wouldn't go off on one and ended up doing so.
                                  That’s not really true. Because the actors only sign up for a limited number of films, the characters can die and the stories do end. In the Avengers, Tony Stark died. Steve Rogers quit.

                                  In the Christian Bale Batman series, he gets progressively more jaded and physically exhausted and then retires anonymously.*

                                  I like that Daniel Craig’s Bond has an actual character arc. In the first one he did, he was new to the job and fucks up badly In the one they’re waiting to release, he’s retired. I expect he may die in the end of it. Along the way, M died and was replaced. In the first 20 Bond films, there really was no continuity or character development at all.


                                  Insofar as this is all that Hollywood makes now - which isn’t really true - it’s because this is all that makes money. There’s no money to be made on DVDs now, so the only films being made for theaters are expensive, noisy ones that can make a billion dollars by appealing to kids worldwide or indies that are so cheap to make that they’re not too worried about the return.

                                  Everything else in the middle is going to either not get made at all or be on a streaming channel, but for the new services, that only makes sense if it helps to gain new subscribers. Marketing people won’t get many subscribers by just assuring them that they have unique, high quality series and films. But “new Star Wars show” or “new Pixar film” attracts attention.

                                  HBO, in the past, managed to make some novel stuff by getting people to trust the brand so much that they’d be willing to at least try anything HBO put on Sunday (and now also Monday) night. And the critics will at least take a look at it. So something like Euphoria or Industry gets a big head start whereas if it were on any other channel, it would struggle to reach anyone.

                                  But that is not working with HBO Max because, somehow, most people still don’t understand what HBO Max is or how to get it, even though it’s not complicated.

                                  Netflix and Amazon Prime have enough subscribers now that anything they put on there will get some attention. It’s mostly shit that increasingly looks a lot like old network TV. But every now and then they slip in something unexpected like Queens Gambit and it catches on. Usually it doesn’t. But hopefully they’ll keep taking those kinds of chances.






                                  *Yes, the bad guys lose and the city is saved, but there wouldn’t be much of a plot otherwise. Besides, all genres have conventions. It’s always been that way since the ancient Greeks. Even the “surprise twist ending” is a conventional structure now. I prefer a hopeful resolution. Real life has enough uncertainty, loss and disappointments.
                                  Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 27-12-2020, 22:46.

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                                    #67
                                    Patty Jenkins is interviewed on Mark Maron's show today.
                                    If nothing else, at least she has a basic grasp of the characters. Which is more than can be said for Zach Snyder.

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                                      #68
                                      I didn't realise that as well as directing WW84 she co-wrote and produced it and wonder how significant it is that she only directed the far superior original film.

                                      I was talking to a cinephile friend about our problems with the film (though he found it meh as opposed to terrible as I did) thing. I mentioned to him something that I didn't put in my original post here which is quite how little Wonder Woman there actually is in the movie - there seemed to be far more of Diana Prince acting like some kind of detective.

                                      Even when she was Wonder Woman she was mostly depowered. I can't think of any superhero film (other than origin movies) where the civilian altar-ego dominates so much, though I'm sure someone here will be able to suggest some.

                                      The plot is still one of the major issues though. It was like the anti-Tenet, so thin that could barely follow it as opposed to the problem being how densely plotted it is.



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                                        #69
                                        The only other examples I can recall would be Iron Man 3 and Superman 2 (of the old Christopher Reeves series) but those managed to get more action in.

                                        I think it's why the ending felt disjointed and it felt like it takes too long to get going. They had to tack on more action scenes with the title character because they'd wasted too much time in the middle with her in the office and in her apartment. The first one did a better job of weaving the romance story in with the ass-kicking superheroics. But the action scene on the road is good as is the bit where she figures out how to fly (that started in the comics in the 80s). It just needed more of that and less of Max Lord and less chit chat at the Smithsonian.

                                        An interesting note from that interview. Jenkins said that in the original, she didn't want to have Aries do the big CGI thing and become a big god at the end. She just wanted him to look like a normal-looking dude who happened to be the God of War. I guess that would be a subtle Banality of Evil type thing. But the studio demanded a bigger, more spectacular ending boss battle. She said she was willing to bend on that and liked the ideas for how they did it, but didn't have enough time to do it right.

                                        I wonder if the opposite happened on this one. They had six extra months. Maybe more shit was shoehorned in or they messed with it too much with too many producers giving notes? She didn't say that, of course. She's not going to say anything bad about a movie she's still promoting.

                                        She talks a lot about how her dad, a fighter pilot, dying when she was 7 in non-combat accident how that was the defining experience of her life. It made her love the Christopher Reeve Superman (recall that, in those films, Clark Kent's dad dies before he becomes Superman). It's also why she likes Steve Trevor and wants to do Rogue Squadron. She idolized her late dad and, by extension, old school pilots. She also has tried to do a Chuck Yeager biopic but the rights to his life are tied up somehow.

                                        Anyway, this is far more time than we should have spent discussing a mediocre film.

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                                          #70
                                          Put me in the underwhelmed camp, sadly, especially as the first film was great (the going over the top scene was a superb piece of action). I didn't even realise Pedro Pascal was Maxwell Lord until he introduced himself in the Smithsonian. At least we were spared the sight of him shooting poor old Ted Kord in the face.

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                                            #71
                                            Count me in the hugely disappointed camp. It had the potential to be a good film with a decent plot to build on but there was just too much added on and it just turned into a gloopy mess, like buying an ice-cream then asking for every single topping on it.
                                            The shoehorned mall scene was bad enough but the finale was what really ruined it.
                                            I know it's a superhero movie and the leading characters are incredible powerful beings or supremely malevolent villains, and I can work with that, but the everyday normal people in them need to be everyday normal people, and the idea that everyone in the entire world would have the good conscience to rescind their wish is pitiful to be honest, especially when there was a much simpler ending available to them, ie someone who really cares about him, such as his son, or someone who cares about what has happened, merely wishing that the stone had never existed in the first place.

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                                              #72
                                              Also where was Roy Wood?

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                                                #73
                                                So, three years later, and wondering whether this could be as bad as all that, and with a 2 for £10 deal on blu-rays in Asda, I've finally seen this.

                                                And, actually, I kind of liked it. I preferred it to a lot of recent superhero movies I've seen. Admittedly the main point of the movie - about wishes being granted - was done in Bruce Almighty several decades ago. But I found it interesting enough.

                                                I did have a couple of breaks to get snacks and have a whizz. As a one sitting viewing it would feel a bit long.

                                                Edit - and I really liked the cameo at the end.
                                                Last edited by Patrick Thistle; 27-03-2023, 22:48.

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