fantastic_four

I still remember the early run on that Yoda figure. It was sold out throughout almost all of 1980 when Empire Strikes Back came out. I was a nine-year old calling every department store in my area for weeks trying to get one.

The more violent the character the more the R rating helps. It was always pretty lame to see Wolverine nail people with his claws and see no visible effect before Logan. Venom is a pretty violent character, so it'd be nice if they had made it R. The fact that they didn't suggests they're skeptical of the film's quality or appeal and want to widen the available audience.

He's 5' 10". But Marvel has consistently shown they don't really care how tall actors are relative to comic characters so it's all academic. The only time I've seen them make much effort was in casting Tyler Mane at 6' 9" as Sabretooth and Daniel Cudmore at 6' 7" as Colossus. But they subsequently cast Liev Schreiber as Sabretooth, so they eventually decided they'd rather have a good actor than a good body fit.

I don't get people's complaints about the CGI. This is the best and most realistic I can imagine the symbiote looking. It's not a particularly realistic concept for an organism--which is a huge part of its appeal for me since it can do so many physically-impossible but fantastic things--so it's going to look unrealistic by its very nature.

The only reason he even got the role is because Dougray Scott had to drop out due to a scheduling conflict with his major role in "Mission Impossible 2." I'm not sure he wouldn't have been better, although Jackman was definitely good. But I can see plenty of actors being great at machismo, anger, and a feral instinct.

Deadpool got that similar kind of resistance, until I guess he made bank at the box office. Yea, definitely. But I'm not sure Venom translates as well as Deadpool does. His sense of humor is universally appealing, but the symbiote behavior and Venom's nasty attitude and violent tendencies don't have nearly as wide an appeal. I love all of it, but I know most people don't, particularly women.

Gen X too since he was introduced in 1988. When I began to like him around 1990 I found that older collectors thought he was dumb. I've seen similar attitudes among older collectors in this forum. I get it since he's such an extreme character, he's definitely not for everyone.

I never thought it was possible to do a Venom film that more than half of people would enjoy. Everything that has made the character popular with comic fans absolutely, positively would never appeal to a mass audience. The trailers appeal to me as a fan of the character, but they confirm my suspicions that most people were never going to like a movie about Venom.

Hadn't thought about that movie in a while, but when I just looked it up I see they're planning a new version of it to be released next year with Jamie Foxx as Spawn. I also hadn't thought about until now just how much of the symbiote powers McFarlane carried over into the behavior of Spawn's costume.

Looks good, but it also doesn't look mainstream. As a fan of the character I'm looking forward to it, but I know he's too bizarre and violent for most people. I guess that's fine as long as they didn't spend too much on the budget.

What a strange mix of toy genres, but I guess the mixing together of two things you love when you're 4 years old makes sense even when it really doesn't. Had I seen this in the store when I was 13 when Secret Wars came out I would've just been like WTF?

How should the following analogy be completed? Kevin Feige is to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as __________ is to the __________ Comics Universe. Is there an equivalent to Feige in comics history? He's not Stan Lee because Stan wrote content but Feige doesn't. But Feige is guiding the selection of screenwriters, directors, and story elements so well I wonder if there's SOME equivalent to him from comics history. Someone like Jim Shooter or Joe Quesada, maybe, but both of those guys wrote and/or did art from time to time, although not so much during their time as Editor in Chief. And I'm not sure either of those guys did for Marvel comics what Feige has done for the movies. Maybe he's a modern day Martin Goodman--they're in roughly the same roles--but I'm not sure you can attribute much to Goodman and that Lee, Kirby, and Ditko deserve all the credit. Or does Feige have no close equivalent?

I found it credible until I read that part...then it seemed like an exaggeration. How could BOTH of them be worse than the worst?

The only way they can make this right is to cast Anna Taylor-Joy as a recurring character in Marvel movies.

Fantastic Four return to the page in August and Wolverine returns from the dead to Marvel in September. You've got to assume both returned so close to each other almost entirely due to this buy.

"Jurassic World: The Expendables" will be the title, and both you and I will get an executive producer credit for all the fine work we just did.

I hold out some hope for improvement for the next one. Since all the dinosaurs got out, it's possible to think the next one might be a "War For the Planet of the Apes"-type film that's actually a "War For the Planet of the Dinosaurs." However, I didn't see enough male/female pairs of each species escape to hold out a ton of hope for that actually being the case...the more likely scenario I see playing out is that they just get killed and/or rounded up and re-caged.

Does it feel like a whiff given that the first Ant-Man made under $200 million? I doubt they expected it to significantly outperform that one.

Westworld gets nominated for every major category in the Emmys it could have been--best drama, best actress (Evan Rachel Wood), best actor (Jeffrey Wright AND Ed Harris), best supporting actress (Thandi Newton), and best guest actor (Jimmi Simpson). It received a similar number of nominations last year but lost them all.

They'd definitely need a different safety protocol for Shogun World. Nolan said during an old interview that the Westworld bullets can injure but not kill the guests, so your example of a shot to the groin definitely wouldn't be great. Nolan also said during season one that the hosts also have a "lifeguard" protocol to try to prevent the guests from getting hurt, so I'm guessing that would similarly prevent them from aiming for the 'nads of the guests. That wouldn't entirely prevent the guests from hurting each other though. I'm not sure they put the guests in the same simulation without them knowing who each other are though. William and Logan knew they were both guests in season one.

I doubt she's dead. I saw her lying on the ground, then the two techs being instructed to save whatever hosts they could at the end. Since she spared both of those two techs and the Asian one seemed to sympathize with her situation I assumed she'd be the first one they worked on. They don't feel pain if their program is off, but even so there would have to be levels of damage that would disable their motor functions.

Nolan said during season one that the guns have a mechanism to determine if they're shooting at a guest or a host, and if it's a guest, the bullets are fired at a dramatically reduced velocity that won't penetrate human flesh. He said they brainstormed that as a tweak to how guns worked in the 1973 Westworld film where the guns simply wouldn't fire at all when pointed at guests. As for why some hosts can take bullets and some can't, they explicitly explained this during several episodes during both seasons--the ability for hosts to experience pain is a program that can be turned on or off. Dolores had hers turned off last season, and Maeve's was off from the time she forced the tech to tweak her settings in season one all the way up until Charlotte Hale had another tech turn it back on during the sequence where he also took away her ability to control other hosts via the mesh network. The only shot that ended up impacting the function of Dolores at all was the one that Bernard fired in the finale that impacted with her brain ball/control unit after he shot her in the head.

There's also a difference between saying that I don't enjoy working on a Rubik's cube and claiming that Ernő Rubik screwed up and his cube has no viable solution.

Too much to answer in a post, but if you're going to assume that because it's not obvious that it's a plot hole, then Westworld definitely isn't a show you're ever going to enjoy.