fantastic_four

Namoris still owned by Universal. That's just distribution rights, isn't it? I know with Hulk Universal has distribution rights but not production rights which is why Marvel is free to put Hulk in whatever movie they want, but Universal gets the distribution cut of standalone Hulk movies.

How would Leia have any idea that Han meant anything at all to Rey? Her reaction to Rey still makes NO sense to me given that they're strangers, and if those hypothesized reasons were the actual reasons, Abrams should have shown something to set it up. And even assuming those hypothesized reasons were all true, where was Finn's big hug? They both were around Han the same amount of time and were both right there when he died. I had seen your quoted reasoning before I posted, but it's not enough to explain the tenderness of the hug. I've also seen the idea posited that Force-sensitive people recognize each other and that was the reason for their affinity, but I don't like that, either. "Because the Force" can be a lame, catch-all reason for almost everything that defies explanation that you want to explain, and I want them to stop doing that. I HATED the idea that somehow Luke can project the Force across many light-years in an instant...how the heck is THAT supposed to work? It moves things further from any science-based reasoning at all and more towards magic. Although I suppose I should just stop trying to make any sense out of the ideas shown in Star Wars movie. Even as a kid I remember thinking when Han said the Millennium Falcon runs at "1.5 times the speed of light" that it makes no sense given that most star systems are many light YEARS apart, so even if say Hoth and Dagobah are as close together as Earth's closest star system Alpha Centauri, that's still 4 light years, meaning it would take the Falcon about two and a half years to make the trip.

yah, this thread is accelerating to forbidden territory of politics quickly. You do know Ailes can't make money cause he is DEAD right? The reason Disney/Fox isnt an anti-trust issue, is because they are leaving news and sports out of the deal, (Disney owns ABC), otherwise it would get blocked for sure. When has ANY studio merger been blocked by the Department of Justice? Big merges have happened plenty of times over the past century, but I can't recall any of them being blocked. We're talking about entertainment here, not something functional like phone or Internet services that causes them to watch mergers in that arena far more closely.

I keep two separate lists in my head--my favorite superhero movies, and separately the ones I think are best. That top five list I gave was the ones that are objectively best. The two lists are similar but not the same; for example, the Daredevil movie is in my personal top ten list, but I recognize that it's got a ton of problems that place it into the bottom half of all superhero movies. But most of the problems didn't diminish my enjoyment of one of my favorite characters on-screen, and the film had enough strong points--particularly the soundtrack, which is DEFINITELY a top five superhero film soundtrack if you were to rate the movies on just that facet alone--that I enjoy re-watching it.

Given the revelations in this film about Rey's possible parentage, two major elements from Force Awakens are now not making sense to me in retrospect: In Force Awakens, from the very first time Kylo Ren hears about Rey in the scene below he seems unusually interested in her. His interest was so intense throughout the film that I assumed that J.J. Abrams was telling us that he already knew who she was and all about her Force sensitivity. So what, Rian Johnson dropped that entirely? The way I'm understanding the Last Jedi,the first time Kylo ever met or heard of her was during the events of Force Awakens, and if that's the case, why was he so fixated on her throughout the film? When Leia first meets Rey in Force Awakens shown in the second clip below, she greets her warmly with a long, lingering hug like she already knows who she is despite the fact that it's the first time either of them have ever met. Why did that happen given that Last Jedi is suggesting Rey is a stranger to all of the current characters? The thing to remember about what Kylo said is that he got the information about Rey's parents from reading her own mind, so it's not clear that he got it right or that he's even telling the truth about whatever he saw from her memories.

I enjoyed the film. I've got some of the same complaints listed already in the thread but it didn't ruin the film for me. The big mid-movie lightsaber fight was AWESOME, although the big death during it was anti-climactic in that it took a character that had promise and just wiped it out before that promise was ever fulfilled. I don't get the end movie death at all. Seemed like an allusion to Obi-Wan's death, but far more pointless. But I never fully understood Obi-Wan choosing to die, either, other than how he said it would make him "more powerful than you could ever imagine." Which I don't see how it did.

But Anakin's dad was absolutely epic...have YOU ever been raped by the Force before?

They did, but it's that luck that creates the best films, and I think that's his point and it's a valid one. DC similarly lucked out with Christopher Nolan and the Dark Knight films, but letting a great director make a great movie is the path to the best success. It's also the path to the stinkiest bombs of all time, too, when you put the wrong directors on a film, so it's a double-edged sword. I put the top 5 superhero films of all time as something similar to this list: The Dark Knight Spider-Man 2 Batman Begins Logan Iron Man I'm less sure about #5 on that list because the villain in that movie is lame, but the first hour of that movie is absolutely scintillating and the top four are solidly thought through. All four of those were the result of a great director being given the freedom to execute a fantastic vision, and Quicksilver's point about Marvel directors not being given that freedom means we may only see consistently fun, solid movies, but no truly great ones. I'm not sure he's wrong, but I'm also not convinced it's right, either, and I think it's absolutely possible for a top 5 film to come out of Feige's stable. Either way it's an interesting idea to contemplate as we watch the movies come out the next few years.

The Feige era movies are memorable, of course they are. But I do agree that most of them don't crack the top 5 superhero films of all time, whereas Logan most definitely does. But I also wouldn't put ANY of them in the bottom half of all superhero movies, either. They're turning out consistently good content. But to say none of them crack the top 20? Yes, some do. Avengers does. Iron Man does...you could say that preceded Disney's purchase of Marvel in 2009, but it's Feige that dictates these movies, not Disney, so you should be looking at the movies of the Feige era when this Marvel cinematic universe began. Homecoming and Civil War are top 20, not top 10 though.

I'm screwing up my own ability to not have Last Jedi spoiled by talking about spoiler etiquette in this thread, so I'll take the discussion to a new one. Been meaning to do that for about a year or three anyway. I'll search for an existing thread dedicated to the best way to avoid spoiling movies and shows, and if I can't find one I'll start a new one.

That's not what I'm presuming at all. If I can't see it this weekend, I'll skip the thread until I do. I still haven't read the Punisher thread because I'm not through the series yet. EVERYONE has a different idea about how long everyone else should not openly discuss a film, and it revolves entirely around how long THEY take to see a film. Should it be opening weekend only? Opening month? Entire theatrical run? I've seen no consensus over the years when the topic comes up, just a preference based entirely upon how much time the person themselves has to go to films or watch shows. I started a discussion about what really happened in the ending to Birdman three months after it opened and just before it exited theaters and had a dozen old fogies from the Water Cooler who don't go to theater films jumping down my throat about spoilers. If there's a thread about a film or a show and you haven't seen it yet, what's the solution--two threads for every show or movie, one with spoilers and one without, or hundreds of pages of dialogue buried in spoiler threads? There's a foolproof way to solve it that the new forums facilitate--don't even click on a thread after a film or show's release until you've seen it. Anything short of that and you're going to get spoiled eventually.

You shouldn't need to hide spoilers in tags starting today. I'm signing off of this thread until after I see it tomorrow. This, by the way, is one reason I love the new forums. With the old forums, I would have had to avoid the entire sub-forum to pick up where I left off on this thread, because once you went into a sub-forum ALL messages in ALL threads were marked as read once you enter the sub-forum. Now, each thread is tracked separately, so I can exit gracefully today and re-enter after I've seen the film, losing nothing I've read to date and nothing I haven't read yet.

Are you sure Metacritic does that? I would think they would translate a 3 out of 4 stars as a 75 score. The fact that their point scale is 100 points suggests they do it to retain the precision you're saying they lose. Similarly, I would think Rotten Tomatoes would translate that 3 out of 4 as a 7.5. Where did you hear they round up or round down, and more importantly that they do it differently from each other with one going up and one going down? Good info on the Metacritic score corresponding more closely to the Rotten Tomatoes top critics. Using just the top critics average rating, here are the updated numbers for the Star Wars films. They almost all get closer to the Metacritic scores when just looking at top critics, particularly Empire Strikes Back. Episode IV - RT 8.5, Metacritic 92 Episode V - RT 8.2, Metacritic 81 Episode VI - RT 7.2, Metacritic 53 Episode I - RT 5.5, Metacritic 51 Episode II - RT 6.2, Metacritic 54 Episode III - RT 7.0, Metacritic 68 Episode VII - RT 8.2, Metacritic 81 Episode VIII - RT 8.3, Metacritic 86

And in this scene Johnny is once again portrayed by Chris Evans, Captain America walks up to him, looks him up and down, and asks him "Who the hell are YOU?!?!"

I can't be sure how big a part the Josh Trank tanking played in this, but if it played any part at all, it was well worth the tank. THANK YOU JOSH TRANK!!!

That's because Nolan grounded Batman in a reality not entirely unlike our own, but all of those other titles you just mentioned feature heroes with superpowers. Nolan explicitly stated that his Batman does not exist in the larger DC universe, and when offered Superman he said he wouldn't direct it because he didn't know how to ground the character into a realistic context. It's always impossible from the outside to tell exactly who is responsible for what between a screenwriter and a director, but I assume that most of what is good about Man of Steel came far more from the screenplay written by Christopher Nolan and his buddy David Goyer (who also wrote The Dark Knight) and far less from Zack Snyder.

I expect he stays dead. The Fox universe just ends after the films currently in production are over, and with it Quicksilver goes away. Good riddance since he's a cheap copy of Flash, but I did enjoy his two big bullet-time sequences in the last few X-Men films.

Actually the entire reason I like the Fantastic Four is that I started collecting comics in 1982, and that was shortly after the Byrne run was ramping up. I went back and read reprints of the earlier issues only due to Byrne sparking my interest in the group. So I'm a very special case in being a fan of the group, albeit one that I'm sure a number of you other old fogeys can relate to as well. Having said that, I enjoyed the Waid/Wieringo run on FF just as much as the Byrne run, but the sales of that run weren't particularly high.

It's still a tough, very uncertain prospect to turn the FF into a film. Marvel has dropped the title entirely from comics, and it hasn't enjoyed significant success since the Byrne run in the 1980s. A part of them dropping it was definitely to starve Fox out, but they also said they weren't sure what to do with the title, an idea that does mesh with the low sales it has had over the last decade. Despite my user ID and the fact that I own a high grade full run of the title, FF isn't my favorite superhero title by a long shot, and they do seem dated. It's possible to do them well, but very challenging as Tim Story and Josh Trank demonstrated. I trust Feige to work it out though given that everything he touches turns to gold.

Does anyone know how the Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes average rating scores differ? I thought that both scores are theoretically calculated in a similar way--by taking a critic's score, converting it to a more standard scale of 10 points, and averaging all critic scores together--but I just realized they do differ significantly sometimes, as is evident in the scores below for all of the main Star Wars films: Episode IV - RT 8.6, Metacritic 92 Episode V - RT 8.9, Metacritic 81 Episode VI - RT 7.2, Metacritic 53 Episode I - RT 6.0, Metacritic 51 Episode II - RT 6.7, Metacritic 54 Episode III - RT 7.3, Metacritic 68 Episode VII - RT 8.2, Metacritic 81 Episode VII - RT 8.2, Metacritic 81 Episode VIII - RT 8.2, Metacritic 86 Just for comparison Metacritic's highest-rated superhero film is The Dark Knight and that only got an 82, so an 86 is an exceptionally high score for them to give to Last Jedi. Looking at those scores, I agree more with the Rotten Tomatoes average rating because Empire Strikes Back is the best film and RT reflects that, whereas Metacritic has the original film as best by a wide margin of 11 points over Empire. Having said that, there's certainly a case to be made that Episode IV broke such new ground that it's a more significant film overall, a fact reflected by the fact that it's the first sci-fi film to ever get nominated for an Oscar whereas Episode V wasn't nominated at all. Is the difference in how they compute the scores, or is the difference in the critics they choose to include in their scoring?

Disney explicitly said this morning that the Fantastic Four will now be a part of the main Marvel film universe.

Me neither. In general I'm not upgrading anything to 4K, but this set I will.

You sure? His Wikipedia page still has him as the head of Marvel Entertainment. This article claims that the reports of his stepping down were misunderstood: https://www.bleedingcool.com/2017/07/18/no-marvel-chairman-ike-perlmutter-didnt-just-step-change-title/