Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Coming Soon To A Theater Near You (well, February)



There's also a film called Coyote vs Acme in the can but unreleased, if this does well, we might see the other.

I am SOOO looking forward to this! From the people who did the most recent Jumanji movie, which gives me great hope that this will also be as entertaining.

Granted, they had good reason: Majors was convicted earlier today of assaulting a woman in a car. There are allegations of many other assaults, and there has been a hue and cry to fire him for many months as these allegations have started surfacing. One movie that he starred in - not a Marvel movie - was pulled from release because of this.

This bodes ill for the MCU. It's rough on a movie franchise to fire the next Big Bad when your big tent pole movie for 2026 was Avengers: Kang Dynasty. Thus far, Kang has only appeared in one movie: Ant Man and Wasp: Quantumania (which sucked, IMO) and in both seasons of the Loki series on Disney+. This Rolling Stone article lays out some possible ways to get around the firing of Majors.

The obvious solution is finding another actor, of which there are several options. People have been re-cast in movie series on a regular basis, this is totally doable.

For me, personally, I'd like to see them either dump or postpone the Kang series. The last Ant Man movie was not good, and it wasn't because of Majors: it was because they lost the path of Ant Man, a wise-cracking Average Joe. The great humor that was in the first two movies was completely gone and it just wasn't worth it for me. The thing that made the MCU work for me was the build-up to Thanos: you had all of these individual heroes eventually coming together, and a Big Bad emerges that took their combined strengths to defeat. Now the band is broken up, Cap and Tony are dead (for the time being), some new people are being introduced, let's get some individual movies out and rebuild the team rather than throwing another huge Big Bad on the screen!

AND ANOTHER THING! Stop referencing stuff from the Disney+ streaming service in the movies! There should be a firewall between those sides! That really ticks me off. AND GET OFF MY LAWN!

;-)

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/jonathan-majors-kang-marvel-fired-mcu-future-domestic-violence-loki-avengers-1234931990/

More on the conviction of John Majors for assaulting his then-girlfriend:
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/jonathan-majors-found-guilty-domestic-violence-trial-1234928607/

To me, this looks like an awesome movie with lots of humor and action. To them, or their bots, it is 'Disney forcing their woke feminist crap on us' and dishonoring the Marvel tradition, or some shit like that.

Just before it left our local theater, I saw the new Ant Man/Wasp Quadraphenia, or whatever it was called, and was bitterly disappointed because the two previous Ant Man movies were so funny! This looks like one I can look forward to lots of laughs in. The first Captain Marvel movie - four years ago! - was excellent, can't wait to re-watch it to refresh the character in my mind.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/brie-larson-the-marvels-mcu-fanboys-misogyny-freak-out-youtube-trailer-trolled-1234714518/

No information except that it's being made. A joint production of Aardman Animation, Netflix, and the BBC.

I'm curious who will voice Wallace since the actor, Peter Sallis, passed away in '17.

Still, something to really look forward to! Makes me want to see Shaun the Sheep again.

https://comicbook.com/anime/news/wallace-gromit-new-movie-2023/

DOJ trashed the Paramount ruling that prevented studios from owning theater chains.

70 years ago, there were 8 movie studios that produced a vast majority of movies seen. Now Disney by itself produces 40% of the box office gross. Obviously things are different in the Year of the Plague, but you get my point. Seventy years ago, a consent decree was entered in to by Paramount and the other studios that they would divest themselves from the theaters they owned because they were complete vertical monopolies. And where they weren't owning the theater, they were forcing others to buy complete package bundles: a movie, plus other movies, plus short features - where all the theater wanted was the first movie.

Disney is already doing this, screwing over boutique art houses by locking up movies like The Fly and The Day The Earth Stood Still, doing their '20 years in the vault' shit. There's no reason to do it, it just makes it more valuable when they start a restore in 15 years and re-release it in 20. But it completely screws over art houses who rely on such films for festivals.

It really hurts movie lovers like me and my friends. I was the president of a club called the Phoenix Fantasy Film Society for over 30 years. There was absolutely no benefit to the theaters for this consent decree to be cancelled by DOJ, the only benefit is to people like Disney that allows them to grow ever more larger and rapacious.

Meanwhile, I have my doubts that my local theater chain will survive the pandemic. They have three large complexes, one near me and two in Las Cruces. They're not a great chain and exist only in New Mexico and frankly, they're kinda stupid about their schedule timing and their movie selection. BUT THEY'RE ALL I HAVE. Let's face it, how can you safely see a movie? The basic dynamics can sort of be done safely - IF YOU WEAR A MASK ALL THE TIME. The problem is a vast amount of theater profit is driven by concessions, and you can't wear a mask and munch strangely-flavored popcorn and suck down high-fructose corn syrup. So their profit margins are going to be really bad. And it's not a huge amount of money to set up a pretty decent home theater these days and relive the glories of movies past at home with much better concessions for a lot less, and non-sticky floors! (I hope!)

And if our local theater chain dies, I can't see Disney swooping in. Maybe Cinemark will expand up from El Paso, but everyone is hurting. Disney itself is down over $5,000,000,000 last quarter: some people theorizing they could get bought up by Amazon, Alphabet, or Apple! That would be an interesting turn of the mouse!

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/why-movie-theaters-are-in-trouble-after-doj-nixes-70-year-old-case/

Got some things to vent about.

But some non-spoilery things first.

It was a better ending to a nine-movie slog than I expected, but at the same time it kinda broke parts of the previous two movies of the final trilogy. Which, to me, means that they desperately needed someone like Joss overseeing the entire final three movies to maintain the story over the entire arc. I found that very disappointing. I won't say George could've done better: he proved that he couldn't with eps 1-3, I think they gave JJ too much leash.

On to the parts that disappointed me.
( Read more... )

Such relief. I was on tenterhooks waiting for them to reconcile. I couldn't sleep. My blood pressure was through the roof.

Oh, wait. None of that was true.

They reconciled to make another bajillion dollars. Spidey will do another two Spider-Man movies and appear in at least one more MCU title, most likely an Avengers movie. Next Spidey movie in the Homecoming series will be July 2021.

When I posted about the breakup originally on August 21, I said "I expect there will be a reconciliation. After all, Spider-Man drifted in and out of the Avengers over the years. And there's just too much money for both Sony and The Giant Rat for them not to reach a mutually satisfying agreement."

HOW COULD I HAVE BEEN SO WRONG! /s

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/09/sony-marvel-bury-the-hatchet-so-spider-man-can-stay-in-the-mcu/

"Definitely not a good time to be a Nazi!"

Starring Taika Waititi as a boy's imaginary friend - Adolph Hitler.



https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/09/taika-waititi-plays-imaginary-adolf-hitler-for-laughs-in-jojo-rabbit-trailer/

Waititi is the maker of such amazing films as What We Do In The Shadows, In Search of the Wilderpeople, and a little film called Thor: Ragnarok, and apparently he's also involved in the Disney+ production of The Mandalorian. Also appearing in this film are Scarlett Johansen as the boy's mother, Sam Rockwell, and Rebel Wilson.

Opens mid-October.

The King's Man, featuring Lawrence of Arabia, Rasputin, and Mata Hari. Starring, among others, Ralph Riennes, Liam Niesson, and Stanley Tucci. Apparently they filmed the 4th Kingsman movie back to back with this one, so I expect we may see it late 2020 or early '21.

I quite enjoyed the first two, broadly-speaking. There were parts I did not like, but I thought they were fun takes on the spy genre. This one looks quite interesting for a WW I spy film.



https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/07/lawrence-of-arabia-takes-on-rasputin-in-first-trailer-for-the-kings-man/