fantastic_four

Season two starts next week on Tuesday. The big question after this season is whether or not Marvel will cancel it since they own the property again. I'm assuming it won't go beyond season two.

What's unclear is if he's saying he rushed production and quality suffered or if you release too many films in too little time that the fan market gets oversaturated and less people want to go see your film. It seems clear the problem is the former, but that he stated it just generically enough to imply the latter. The reason it's clear he rushes it too much is that he probably lost Abrams on Episode VIII because he had such a difficult experience directing Episode VII. He and Kennedy fought Iger tooth and nail to delay the release date but Iger stuck firmly to it. Abrams soldiered through it well, but I assumed the stress and insanely long hours prevented him from wanting to repeat the experience. Abrams doesn't state it that way publicly, but it makes more sense than the reasons he usually gives for not directing another installment of his favorite film series.

I did. You certainly make the open world play sound identical to Spider-Man 2, although I'm assuming improved in various ways. Is that true, is it better? I was mostly wondering how the web-swinging compared. You mentioned that you haven't enjoyed a Spidey game in 10 years--was Spider-Man 2 the last one you played? That one was 14 years ago. I played most Spider-Man games up through about 2010, and the 2004 Spider-Man 2 title is the clear masterpiece up until perhaps this new PS4 title.

I just have no time with twins. Overwatch is giving me the best first-person shooter play I've ever had, and World of Warcraft sucks time up like a vacuum, so I haven't had much reason to try it. I played all the first-person games for decades. Hundreds of hours of online Doom 2 (at the time via modems before the Internet came out), Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, and Call of Duty. Overwatch does everything those did with far better superhero-like characters and better-defined, unique roles for each character, so Blizzard has me by the short hairs giving me little reason to try the latest flavor of the day in that genre.

I really, really want a 50" 4K monitor that can go portrait. No monitor of that size supports that feature. I assume it's a physical challenge to create a stand that can support a monitor that heavy and turn since you never see monitors above 35" with stands that rotate.

I felt like Sony had screwed me in 2016 when they didn't put 4K Blu-Ray support into PS4 Pro. I know I'm in a small group of power users, but come on, Sony! If it's really that expensive, you could have kept me a Sony man for life by putting out two versions of the system--one standard, one "Elite" that had the 4K drive in it.

Has anyone playing PS4 Spider-Man played the 2004 Spider-Man 2 game? By far the two best aspects of the 2004 game were the web-swinging and the free, open-world play where you could go anywhere in the city you wanted to go. It was always so amazing to just run around freely and fight crime wherever it was happening in the city. The sequels to Spider-Man 2 somehow managed to screw both of those standout elements up, and my great hope has been that PS4 Spider-Man re-captures them and hopefully takes them to another level. I know I spent 40 to 80 hours doing nothing in Spider-Man 2 except web-swinging around their virtual rendering of New York and ignoring all the objectives. SO well-done and addicting.

I thought Thanos was a skrull for years due to his race and skrulls both having those lines in their chins.

My biggest frustration with being an early adopter of 4K Blu-Ray discs is that most studios still don't publish titles in a true 4K format. Disney is getting better about it, but they just released Black Panther in true 4K yet released Avengers: Infinity War in 2K up-scaled to 4K. This happened in the very early days of Blu-Ray, too, but by the time Blu-Ray had won over HD-DVD by 2005 most studios had stopped doing it. My understanding is that most of the Disney Marvel Universe films will NEVER be available in true 4K because either the CGI was rendered in 2K, the cameras they recorded with saved everything they captured to a 2K format, or both. The recently-released Avengers 1 and 2 films on 4K disc are both upscaled from 2K.

My main gaming platform has always been the PC; all console games have always been secondary for me. That's been true since I got my first PC back in 1989, and it was mostly true even before that when I mostly played Commodore 64. The main use I've effectively gotten from the PS3 is playing Blu-Ray discs. Same is true for XBox One X, too, particularly since Overwatch came out and zipped up to #2 on my play list behind World of Warcraft. My love for consoles jumped dramatically last year when I bought a 43" 4K monitor that I use for both my PC and my consoles pictured at center below (left monitor is a 34" ultra-widescreen monitor oriented in portrait mode and right is a 28" 2K monitor). Being able to switch platforms all in one setup is REALLY nice, particularly since I use the center 4K monitor for games and can browse the web or watch streaming stuff on the other monitors.

It was definitely a mistake in that it moved a subset of hardcore technophiles like myself off their platform; but it may not have been a mistake from on overall market perspective due to decreased price. We discussed this heavily back in 2016: There's a link at the end of that thread to a highly likely reason they excluded support in 2016 that hypothesizes that since Sony definitely didn't have any cheap 4K Blu-Ray player on the market in 2016--which is different from 2006 when they had been selling Blu-Ray players for years at that point--that it's possible they couldn't have even integrated the electronics into the PS4 Pro for less than $150 to $200 at the time. This article spends 90% of its time enumerating the myriad ways that not including 4K disc support was a huge problem for Sony and huge boon for XBox, and concludes agreeing with Sony's ultimate choice by hypothesizing that they just weren't technically ready to do it yet: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2016/09/16/ps4-pros-missing-4k-blu-ray-drive-the-mistake-sony-had-to-make/#13dfeba539b9 If that author's hypothesis is right, then that's the best support for the idea they will add 4K support to the PS5. Sony's now got a few 4K players on the market and they're MUCH cheaper than they were in 2016.

Yes, that's my recollection as well--Blu-Ray had won well before the PS3 was released, either in 2004 or 2005. So that makes 2006 and 2016 (the release year of the PS4 Pro) the same from that perspective, neither format had significant competition at the time of release.

If you removed the term 4K from your quote above and replaced the year 2016 with 2006, the exact same logic applies to 2K Blu-Ray discs and the Playstation 3--yet Sony built support into that system anyway. The 2K Blu-Ray format was released in early 2006, yet the PS3 released in late 2006 had full support for playing Blu-Ray discs, and it definitely increased the price of the player. What changed a decade later? I ask that rhetorically not knowing their full thinking myself. Was it lessons learned from depressed sales of the PS3? It certainly wasn't that; the PS3 was sold out from day one and was hard to get for half a year or more later. People were selling them on eBay for multiples of the launch price for weeks or months around the release date. I imagine it's all of the factors below and perhaps a few others: XBox's market share in 2016 is significantly higher than it was in 2006. Sony may have thought price point was far more important now than a decade ago. Sony now realizes after watching slow consumer acceptance of 2K Blu-Ray that next-generation format adoption rates are far slower than they could have known back in 2006. Streaming is taking a huge bite out of the disc market that it wasn't in 2006. I haven't seen any recent market share statistics to know if you're right that 4K acceptance is significantly higher in 2018 than it was in 2016. It's definitely higher, but is it SIGNIFICANTLY higher? Are we talking 1% in 2016 and 3% in 2018? Or is the increase far more dramatic, maybe from 2% to 10%? Note that I'm making all those numbers up entirely, I haven't seen any market share statistics on 4K Blu-Ray sales. I just looked for those stats but couldn't find any.

I wouldn't have questioned it either had I not heard their rationalization for not building it into the PS4 Pro. They said in mid-2016 that there wasn't enough market penetration of 4K Blu-Rays to support raising the price by $50 to $100 to add the 4K Blu-Ray support. Will that be significantly different by next Christmas? As a high-end technophile it has always been my assumption that people would eventually move to newer formats, but the reality is that it hasn't happened. The number of people who own standard DVD players still doubles the number who own a device that can play Blu-Rays, and the market share of 4K Blu-Ray players is still just a small fraction of the fractional share 2K Blu-Ray has.

They're not. They said from the start it was going to be a Playstation exclusive. I knew that before I bought my XBox on Black Friday 2017, but it wasn't enough to keep me on Playstation lacking the 4K Blu-Ray support. Which is a shame. I've owned every Playstation until PS4 came out.

I'll most likely wait and see about a PS5. Current speculation is they will announce it for a Christmas 2019 release, and they almost certainly won't announce that for sure until next year so as not to negatively impact Black Friday and Christmas sales this year. I'm probably not getting a PS5 either if it doesn't have 4K Blu-Ray support. I know everything is moving to streaming, but "buying" movies for digital streaming is a complete joke right now, and streaming options are spotty at best. The only reliable way to keep a collection of all the Marvel movies right now is to own them on disc, and if I'm buying new discs, it's only 4K for me ever since I got my XBox One X.

Blair Witch is found footage, i.e. someone holding a cam corder that shakes with the person's hand motion. It's the hand shaking that gives some people motion sickness. Cloverfield was like that too. "Searching" isn't a found footage film, it's a steady camera pointed at the screen of computers and smartphones belonging to John Cho's character, his wife, and his daughter. When you see them or other characters in the film it's because you're looking at video they took of each other, FaceTime, or other online social media involving video. Examples of all that are shown in the trailer.

I'm used to teasers being about 30 seconds like you say, but that Man of Steel example is a minute and a half, so the definition of a "teaser" seems extremely fluid.

Is the Captain Marvel clip a teaser or a trailer? Marvel explicitly described it as the "official trailer," but people here in the thread cutting it slack are doing it citing it as a teaser. As far as I can tell it isn't a teaser, it's the trailer. I haven't paid much attention to how Marvel releases these until just this moment. Do they skip using the term "teaser" these days? Do they always release more than one thing they refer to as a trailer?

I really wanted to get a PS4 to get this game, but I went the XBox One X route after Sony announced there would be no 4K Blu-Ray support in Playstation, a move that still baffles me given that Sony created the 4K Blu-Ray format to begin with. I really freaking loved the previous Spider-Man masterpiece game from 2004, Spider-Man 2, so I knew the potential was here for this game. I'm hugely interested, but I doubt I'll get a PS4 just for this one game.

I'm interested, but I'm skeptical because the art style looks too cutesy.

I wouldn't say that. A Simple Favor was really good.  I saw "Searching" over the weekend and loved it. Truly original film in that the entire film follows the user interfaces of computers that John Cho uses to search for his missing daughter.

What a Frk'n emoji. I actually feel bad... That's just your conscience telling you that you were being a Richard, which you were. But he makes Richard comments like that to others, too, so it just looked like karma to me.

Never heard of frosting before. The lead-in image on the video below illustrates it pretty well, looks like a Hoth gear Luke figure.

The Skrulls I'm far more familiar with from Fantastic Four. Some super-cool Skrull morphing scene would have definitely reeled me in, but maybe they're just not done with the CGI for that yet. I've never had much opinion of the Kree, they've always seemed like generic humanoid aliens to me, I've never seen enough from them to like them in any way. I'm always unimpressed with alien species that are highly humanoid like the Kree...the entire idea of that flies so hard in the face of the reality of evolution.