fantastic_four

I hope this is included as a deleted scene on the Blu-ray. I'm going to be disappointed if it didn't make it into the theatrical cut.

You probably deserved it.

I don't recall competing with or sharing hostility with anyone on the road. I speed, but not competitively, and my mind is almost always somewhere else listening to podcasts. The funniest moment I've had is someone in a sports car was weaving and bobbing through cars on a 2-lane highway where the speed limit was 65 at somewhere near 100. They had a personalized license that read PWNED, which told me they were a HIGHLY competitive driver. About five minutes after they blew past me I saw them pulled over on the side of the road by a cop, so the obvious thought occurred immediately to me--yep, you just got pwned.

Never had that happen nor seen it happen to anyone. Why did they run you off? Was there some sort of shared hostility with the people who did it?

His priorities are well sorted out. You can have plenty of kids, but there will only be one premiere for The Batman.

That's the exact sort of warning I hear sixth scale collectors frequently give with leaving most figures in anything except a straight vanilla pose for extended periods of time--that it will lead to the material cracking such as in the example below.

Just went to check and don't see it in GPA now. Can you check again if you can still see it? Sometimes GPA removes outliers if they have reason to believe they're invalid sales. Most of those come from eBay.

I almost pulled the trigger on him too, but I really don't want to go down the sixth scale rabbit hole...they just take up too much space. I'm also still skeptical of the materials and articulation on sixth scale. How is his articulation? I've read dozens and dozens of posts from Hot Toys collectors saying that if you leave those in dynamic poses you're risking the clothing or synthetic material around the joints cracking. That sounds like more conflicting responsibilities than I want with an "action" figure.

They're also pretty tightly linked together in their story, aren't they? Seems like what Strange did in No Way Home either relates to or possibly causes the events in Multiverse of Madness. It's almost like MoM is a sequel, or a part 2 to No Way Home, although one that if you're only a Spider-Man fan you can skip if the multiverse story doesn't appeal to you.

The ONLY topic I debate is comic book grading. Debate is a tool best used for achieving some social or political end, not a mode of discussion used arbitrarily. But I haven't debated grading in over a decade, so 99.9% of what I've ever posted here is navigating the interest--or, if necessary and not overly unpleasant, the egos--of whoever I'm talking to, searching their brain for whatever information is in the topic at hand that I'm interested in. If you go back to 2002 you can definitely find me using more logical fallacy then than now with a gradual decrease in usage over time. Meh...like most things, we learn, and later we un-learn. It decreases every year as I identify more and more fallacies that I may have indiscriminately used in the past.

Yea, I assume they DO want Spider-Man film rights back, but at this point have to just wait for Sony to struggle at some point and be forced to sell. Love how Amy Pascal likes the dangle yanking Spidey back out of the MCU to the press during contract negotiations...classy move to threaten to shank the fans every few years.

You either discuss to explore and learn, or you do it to feed your ego. I've learned to easily identify the latter--they inevitably use logical fallacy, particularly ad hominems which we've just seen numerous examples of over the past two pages. If you're discussing for fun and not ego it's NEVER worth engaging with the Master Debaters.

THANKS!!! So they sort of swapped rights back in 2011--Sony got Marvel's cut of movies, and Disney got Sony's cut of merchandise. Kind of a weird deal, but it makes some sense given that Sony doesn't do toys and doesn't have the relationships with toy manufacturers that Disney does. I'm somewhat surprised Disney would give up their cut of the films, though, given how massively profitable Spider-Man films were up through 2011. Feels like Sony won that deal, although that's impossible to say since we don't know how much both paid for the rights they got.

So you're sure neither Fox nor Sony ever had merchandising rights? There are two reasons I thought neither had merchandising rights. One is I've just never heard that they did, but the other is what I mentioned above--Toy Biz and Hasbro were making figures for all of their films, and Toy Biz was owned by Perlmutter and Arad. But I can't say for absolute certain that Sony and/or Fox weren't getting some cut of the profits from toys--I've just never heard that they were.

I thought Marvel sold ONLY film rights to Sony and Fox, and neither of those companies EVER had merchandising rights--am I off on that? Both Toy Biz and Hasbro made Marvel Legends action figures for most Spidey and X-Men films aside from the 2010s when Perlmutter was freezing out Fox.

Heh, we used the same metaphor several minutes apart. Isn't killing Wolverine cutting off your nose to spite your face? I didn't get it at the time nor do I get it now, but hey, they got Fox, so maybe it did have an effect.

Yea I agree. Cancelling FF--and PARTICULARLY killing off Wolverine--seemed like cutting off your nose to spite your face and a drop in the bucket for what it would take for Fox to no longer look at X-Men as profitable. But at the time Perlmutter did it he was no longer in charge of Marvel Studios, so he HAD to have had cooperation or possibly even a directive from above to do it for the good of Feige's Marvel Studios. It seems likely Iger had to at minimum sign off on it. I'm also guessing the freeze-out of Fox extended to toys since both Toy Biz and Hasbro were making movie X-Men action figures before that time period Wolverine was dead in the comics, but we didn't see new ones until after Disney had acquired Fox. There was also never a toy freeze-out with any Sony Spider-Man movies, so whatever it was clearly was pointed specifically at Fox.

Huge fan. I'm pretty sure he's never done any creative work professionally aside from film production. He strikes me as a huge dork like most of us are, too.

All of it was to freeze out Fox from getting promoted by Marvel's comics. It worked, didn't it? Fox sold their rights back to Marvel, and as soon as the deal was committed to by both sides he brought the FF back, Wolverine got resurrected, and they started making new mutant characters again. Perlmutter is a mixed bag and I don't agree with everything he's done, but he's far from all bad. While his Marvel Creative Committee wasn't ideal it was still better than what every studio before Feige and Marvel Studios were doing, and it was better than what Sony and DC have going. And I'm not sure his freezing out the Fox properties wasn't instrumental in getting Fox to sell to Disney. I also give him HUGE props for the Marvel action figures he headed up with Toy Biz. They're still going strong today with Hasbro and were truly innovative in the toy industry. I often wonder why Perlmutter froze out Fox but not Sony. I really have no idea, but clearly he had some specific reason to think it would work with Fox but not Sony. Maybe he somehow knew they were struggling and would eventually look to sell the film division.

Yea, Avi Arad and Ike Perlmutter owned Toy Biz. Perlmutter was Arad's boss at Marvel, and Arad ran Marvel Studios until 2006. Feige didn't really politic Arad out of a job that I'm aware of; or maybe he did, who knows, probably only the two of them. Arad stepped down as head of Marvel Studios while Spider-Man 3 was filming due to a fight over how to manage the films with his boss. I've never heard the specifics of what Arad and Perlmutter's beef was, but Sam Raimi was complaining before Spider-Man 3 even started filming about Arad dictating major elements of the screenplay to him so I don't know for sure but have to assume that was involved in the dispute with Perlmutter. If anyone has heard more specifics about Arad stepping down as head of Marvel Studios please do share. He still continued to do work with Marvel and still does, he just stopped running the show in 2006. By then Spidey 3 was already filming and Arad forcing Raimi to include Venom as a third villain in the film was set in stone. Raimi wanted the film to focus on Sandman, but Arad wouldn't allow it. Feige was selected by Perlmutter to effectively replace Arad after Arad stepped down. Arad hired Feige because of his expertise with the Marvel Universe and produced all of the Sony and Fox films along with Arad, so it made complete sense for Perlmutter to elevate Feige. After Disney bought Marvel Feige eventually got out from under Perlmutter thanks to Bob Iger forcing it to happen, but that was many years later. Those are some of the broad strokes, and I expect there are a zillion more details. Surely there's a book by now detailing the history of Marvel Studios--anybody seen a good one?

Why, what is it you don't like about her? I know nothing at all about her except she can somehow travel between universes in the multiverse, which makes it clear why she's in this film.

Because they're the next two movies I want to see, and that's the only reason.

I would normally expect The Batman to be better than Multiverse of Madness based solely upon the trailers, but I'm expecting this film to be better for one central reason--Sam Raimi directed two of the best Marvel movies ever. And he did everything within his power to fight the third Spidey from stinking despite Avi Arad mucking everything up, lost the fight, threw down an ultimatum to Arad to never do that to him again, Arad refused, so he walked away from the franchise along with Maguire and Dunst. Yea, I'm sure most fans blame Raimi for Spidey 3 stinking, but it absolutely, positively, 100% was NOT him, because he explicitly and vociferously warned Arad not to include any of the stuff that stunk in that film, and Arad refused. Much to Arad's own detriment, by the way, since Feige used that failure to get control of Marvel Studios, so in that sense Spidey 3 stinking was a MASSIVE boon to us all. In my eyes Raimi is still unblemished as a superior director of superhero films. I don't expect everything to be a gem--even Nolan couldn't do that with Batman--but this one has MASSIVE potential to be a gem since Raimi's first love is horror, and this film looks to be a great mix of superhero action and horror. I'm cautiously optimistic that this could be really, really great. Definitely looks better than the first one, and Raimi makes me think this one will be better than what also looks to be a superior effort from Matt Reeves.

I hypothesized that realizing I didn't know when this is set nor how long dwarves live, but you answered both so thanks. All I knew was he looked familiar, so I guess it IS Tormund.

Yeah he' a big hit as an NFT as well. Almost 200 gems Are you selling that one? I'll give you 500 quatloos straight up.