fantastic_four

I feel the same way because I loved all of those films too, particularly 300 and Watchmen. I've watched 300 probably half a dozen times and Watchmen three or four times. I can't get enough of that smoking male machismo from 300.

Just went up within the last fifteen minutes.

Same. I liked him more than most other Batmans. I never understood people's issue with him in the 2003 Daredevil film either. All the problems in that film were around him, not in his performance. Every complaint about him I heard was actually a complaint about the way the Matt Murdock character always has been in the comics. I figured Matt as a character wouldn't be a hit on the big screen, but it didn't occur to me until after the release that Affleck would take the blame for how people don't find Matt Murdock charismatic.

It was 43% yesterday. Metacritic score is 48, and for comparison BvS was 44 and Suicide Squad was 40, so it's marginally better than both of those. Seems like a lock that Snyder won't be doing the sequel. If he does, then clearly Geoff Johns isn't really in charge or has taken leave of his senses.

Also just found out that Fox owned RT from 2005 to 2010. I can't find any real bias towards Fox or WB movies from them, although there's plenty of accusations of bias AGAINST WB in these forums and elsewhere around the web ever since BvS came out.

That's pretty much how I felt about it. I wasn't bored and I wasn't sorry I saw it, but it wasn't memorable. The Justice League trailer made me feel the same way; I wasn't sorry I sat through it, but it didn't make me want to see the film.

You and me both. I simply just won't watch it. I love the FF and consider it disrespectful to them if I gave that film one second of my time. It's the only fully-released superhero film I know of where you can truly say it pooped the bed. Catwoman sucked, but it was a finished film with an aesthetic that you either liked a little or you hated. The Trank FF film, however, saw him get fired, replaced, and the new director re-shoot huge chunks of the film in what was universally described as an awkward, ill-fitting way. Had they kept Trank till the end and he had finished the film I would have seen it, but the studio's mis-management of an admittedly bad situation with Trank makes me consider it not even a finished film. It's just something they screwed up on and chose to release anyway.

I take that back. There's one film the critical reviews prevented me from ever seeing--the Josh Trank Fantastic Four film. I've still never seen that, and I have no plans to ever do so. I'm afraid it would be too painful to sit through.

I do, but then Sam Raimi and Christopher Nolan came along and raised the bar for me. Thanks to them I do care, but it's not a disqualifying factor. I saw BvS and will likely see this, although maybe not in the theatre.

Interesting. Is this the first film they've reviewed, or have they done it for a while now? I suppose I'm fine with it as long as they're mixed in equally with all the others.

It makes the stink of the Warner Brothers affiliation stink even more than it already did.

I'm guessing you're limiting that to just Extended Universe films? Certainly the best villains for both Marvel and DC by far are outside of their recent EU films.

AAAAAAAHHHHH

Sheesh, I'm seeing that Flixster bought RT in 2010, and Warner Brothers bought Flixster in 2011. I remember when that Flixster logo went up on the site back then, but I didn't realize they were owned by WB. Apparently WB sold Flixster to Comcast last year but retained a 30% ownership. So they owned them in full for five years. RT doesn't do their own reviews, but the bias would come in the way they select critics to include reviews for--they could choose ones with a history of being friendly to their own brands. This really sounds awful. Makes me want to know who owns Metacritic now!

First I've heard of it. How long have they had that stake? Any studio owning any portion of any source of criticism is a conflict of interest that undermines the critical source. If this is true, it severely damages their credibility.

I imagine the next thing to think about for the future of DC movies is how much control of this film Geoff Johns really had in terms of evaluating him fairly as the next possible Kevin Feige. Yes, he threw himself into it, but Zack Snyder had already been chosen as director before he got his current job, so I'm not really sure how much he could have done to change this from being a Zack Snyder style of film. Feige in a position of control simply never would have chosen Snyder. And the same goes for the success of Wonder Woman--Patty Jenkins was already on board before Johns took the helm, so you can't credit that to him either. It's the next films by new directors that will be all on him. Is Matt Reeves on the new Batman the first real Geoff Johns hire?

Nice job, Rotten Tomatoes, you inspired me to go first to Metacritic and MRQE since you decided to artificially hold back the Justice League score.

The Tomatometer score is just positives divided by total number of reviews multiplied by 100 to get a percentage. Why would they wait a day to do such simple math? It's easily do-able in your head.

If the embargo lifts tonight, why does their ad for the embargo lift say it happens Thursday?

Are they a part of it? All I heard is that the Fox and Fox News networks would still be owned by Fox, so I assumed the Simpsons would stay since it airs on the Fox network. If they're not a part of it, you're right that putting a price on the properties beyond X-Men and FF is key, and I was only really thinking about the X-Men in valuing them at $2 to $3 billion with Fox most likely going for $4 to $10 billion. What would have been the biggest properties besides the Marvel ones?

It's interesting to think about how much those rights are worth. That's an exceedingly complex number to come up with. One thing you have to evaluate is how long will the superhero movie gravy train last. If superheroes are the modern-day movie equivalent of Westerns, then Westerns lasted from the beginning of film (earliest Western was the 1903 film "The Great Train Robbery") all the way through the 1960s. And if film had been around for 200 years before the 20th century, one would assume they would have been popular throughout that time as well for one overriding reason--stories about heroic acts are immortal. They've been with us throughout the history of literature and media, with the most famous examples throughout the millennia being the Illiad, Odyssey, Beowulf, or the Arthur legend. If history is a guide, heroic archetypes will be with us forever--but that doesn't guarantee superhero films will last forever. But something like them will endure, it just might not be superheroes. Technology killed westerns and relegated the genre to the quaintness of history, and that same technology is what gave birth to superheroes. What form of the heroic myth could supplant superheroes? Nothing I can see for now. Their appeal will likely be eclipsed at some point in the indefinite future by some genre that's difficult or impossible to predict, but there's nothing visible on the horizon. Superhero films being viable for decades to come is a conservative estimate; the real number could end up being centuries. So whatever the number is that Fox should get, it is likely a large one. Disney bought Marvel for $4 billion and Lucasfilm's properties for $4 billion. Maybe Fox asked for that same amount, although if they were never serious about it I could see them asking for $10 billion or more. I imagine I'd put a price of about $2 billion to $3 billion if we assume the X-Men is worth more than the combined worth of the rest of Marvel's library. Certainly the history of the market for the X-Men puts the value of it and Spider-Man well above anything else Marvel has ever produced, notwithstanding the increased value of the Avengers, etc instilled by the outstanding success of all the Marvel Studio movies over the past decade. But I bet Disney has to cough up another $4 billion minimum to get the rights to X-Men or Spider-Man back. And unless Fox or Sony get into financial trouble I bet they hold out for something closer to $10 billion.

Since Disney first approached Fox on this, one would assume that the talks went like this: Disney: How much do you want? Fox: All the money. Disney: No, really. Fox: Ok...all the money, but you get to keep a smidgen of the money. Disney: OK, we'll get back to you when you're feeling more sober. The real news is that Fox took this meeting at all. Were they really looking to sell for some reason, or were they just hoping to bend Disney over in a historic way? If they do have some issue compelling them to make that sale, then the talks will eventually resume once both sides get to a number south of the unrealistic one Fox most likely gave them this week.

The only thing I've learned is that I have a new appreciation for Netflix releasing everything at once; with those shows, I avoid the thread until after I've watched the season if it's a show I definitely want to see. With these one-episode-per-week shows, these threads are vulnerable to people who don't give a hoot about spoilers spoiling future episodes for everyone. And given that you don't even acknowledge it as a mistake, I suppose my options are live with it, stop reading threads on the weeklies, or just put you on ignore. Haven't worked out the best option yet.

Because I don't track episode numbers. I had no idea what episode we were on until I read the spoiler and realized it was for something we hadn't seen yet.