fantastic_four

Yep, the one unboxing video is pretty good.

What do you mean pre-order SS? Does that mean Silver Surfer or something else? They're unlikely to release another Silver Surfer since they just released one three years ago and again included with Haslab Galactus.

Did it actually ship, or did they just create a label? For 95% of us we're sitting at the label stage. Takes quite a while to box up and slap labels on 22,000 boxes. I've got three coming, and all three are still in the label stage as is true for most of us.

Great episode. Glad they were able to get the full voice cast.

Been a while since I read one of the books or watched the show, but I think the "dark passenger" is the side of him with the urge to kill. Harry Morgan was who guided the dark passenger towards moral killings, and I guess Deborah will be his new guide.

It's Covid coupled with the general lack of knowledge about Shang-Chi. The film has been delayed multiple times. Hasbro designs figures over a year in advance, and they produce them over six months in advance. They had the Shang-Chi figures done well over a year ago, but after the movies were delayed due to Covid they let them sit in warehouses, probably in China. Fast forward to earlier this year, and Marvel has now pushed Shang-Chi back what, twice? Before the last delay Hasbro had already started shipping them from Chinese warehouses to the US. They were already on the way when Marvel delayed the film again. Once they're here the cost to warehouse them is much greater because Hasbro usually just ships them directly onto retailers, and retailers won't hold onto them waiting for Marvel to release their film. So they had to put them on the shelves much earlier this year. I forget what month they came out, but it was something like March. Big box stores like Target and Walmart don't let most of their limited quantity product sit on shelves for long. Action figures can often get as little as one to two months on the pegs before both retailers start clearancing them out. I knew when these figures were hitting the shelves that far before the film they'd be put on clearance long before the film hit. I didn't know for sure they wouldn't sell well and would go to clearance, but I would have bet money on it due to the lack of general knowledge of Shang-Chi. I mean, I may end up wanting these figures myself as a Marvel Legends collector, but I have no idea right now because I haven't seen the film. Thousands of hardcore collectors like me are in the same boat. I did buy Shang-Chi, but that was it, I have no idea who the others are really, although I'm generally aware that Wenwu in your picture is the Mandarin, but I've never read Iron Man much so I have little attachment to the Mandarin, either. Maybe my interest in him will soar after the film, who knows. So it was mostly bad luck due to Covid, but it's also lack of knowledge of the characters. Had these figures been released right before the film was released as they usually try to do they may have sold well. Hard to say, and we'll probably never know now since the box office is also likely to be mediocre due to Covid.

Yeah it was super cheese. However, the effects at the time were extremely impressive. We are talking about a movie thats almost twenty years old. God, is it that old already? The Neo vs Smith fight in Revolutions was, at the time, the best Superman vs. Zod fight we had ever seen. Man of Steel eclipsed it many years later, but up to that point it was absolutely scintillating. That's really the only part of that film I ever re-watch, although I don't think I've re-watched even that part since Man of Steel came out.

Garth Ennis wrote a Spider-Man story called "The Thousand" that is VERY similar to this, but I would argue it's even more dark. It's also part of the 616, I believe--or even if Marvel decided it isn't it certainly could be. The concept is that one of Peter's classmates saw Peter get bit by the spider and then use his powers, so the kid went back to find the spider. It was dead by then, so he did the only thing that was left--he ate it. The result was that it turned him into a colony of spiders that had to seek out hosts to slowly consume their bodies and then move on to the next host. GREAT story, I loved it.

Matrix 2 and 3 aren't as bad as people tend to say, although certainly they pale in comparison to the first film which is one of the finest science fiction films ever made. I won't defend the story and certainly see why so many people didn't like it, but some of the action in both films is absolutely top-notch. I've got a list of the best action sequences ever from films, and there's a sequence in the Matrix Reloaded that's definitely in my top ten. The bit that starts with Neo vs. the Smiths, continuing on to the Merovingian and Persephone scenes, through to fighting the Merovingian's men, and then on to the highway fight is one of the best half-hours of action ever put to film. That bit is HIGHLY re-watchable, and just a bunch of awesome stacked on top of more and more awesome.

Is this confirmed, and do you recall where you heard that? I didn't notice they had changed the Eternals to not originating from the species on the planet they're on.

Thanks! I particularly hadn't realized that Starlin intended Titan to be the moon of Saturn and that later authors ret-conned it to be in another solar system. One thing I'm finding confusing is whether Thanos is an Eternal or a Deviant. There are sources out there claiming both, but more seem to claim he's a Deviant. Wikipedia says he's both and the son of two Eternals, which confuses that whole concept of Eternals supposedly not reproducing.

Any idea when it was ret-conned? This is the first I've heard of it, and I'm interested in following the trail of bread crumbs.

Another deviation is that in the comics Thanos is a Deviant, but this trailer confirms that in the MCU he isn't. They say that they only interfere in human affairs if Deviants are involved, so if Thanos were a Deviant then they would have fought him. But I'm not sure if that makes sense overall anyway. OK, they only act to protect humanity against Deviants. What about protecting themselves from Thanos wiping half of them out with the Infinity stones? THAT'S not a reason to help prevent him from doing what he's doing? Didn't half of the Eternals get wiped out with the snap, too?

Which previous books that shot up after a movie "dropped like a rock"? I only collect the major titles, but all of the issues featuring a major character that got a movie bump didn't drop significantly afterwards.

Yea, it's not looking like a great winter for movies due to delta and the inevitable infection rise we'll see this year that we saw last winter.

Sounds like you have yet to encounter a biter.

Every trailer before this one has been meh, but this one is pretty far from those. I'm actually excited about this movie now.

Oneg The Prober is the most feared Celestial... Or the most desirable, if you're into that kind of thing.

Maybe he and Kirby talked about a better origin for mutants over the course of several years. Silver Surfer #6 is five years after the X-Men started in 1964. Stan also amended his ideas about natural evolution leading to mutants a bit when he created High Evolutionary in Thor 133 and 134 in 1966 and ret-conned Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver into being mutates created by him instead of natural mutants. You could choose Celestials or High Evolutionary as the source of human mutation and it's better than the idea of the X-Men just naturally evolving, but certainly the idea of an ancient civilization like the Celestials is the most viable and well-developed of the two possible sources of the X-Men's superpowers. They're both better than giving the X-Men the same origin as Godzilla--which preceded the X-Men since he became world-famous in the 1950s--which is that radiation just magically altered DNA into something amazing.

Now it has my interest. Also let me see if I can expand that interest. Stan Lee's idea of the X-Men is that evolution goes off in random directions guided by natural selection, so why couldn't it lead to mutants? There's an easy scientific answer to why it couldn't--evolution is extremely gradual, so the idea that we go from an unpowered human to Cyclops, or Magneto, or pick your favorite mutant doesn't jibe with the way evolution has worked everywhere we've observed it. Something like wings took millions of years and trillions upon trillions of slightly-mutated births to evolve; they didn't just magically show up in a single newborn. The kind of big evolutionary leap to get to superpowered humans is complete fantasy with only the loosest connection to evolutionary science. Not to mention the leap needed in basic biochemistry to actually provide MANY orders of magnitude of energy provided to life on Earth by cellular mitochondria to power something like optic blasts or lifting a bridge with magnetism. Mutants aren't just a giant leap forward, they HAVE to be an entirely different form of life than anything currently here. All of that irked Kirby, so he decided to go all the way with the fantasy by imagining that some advanced civilization seeded mutant DNA on Earth to explain where mutants could have come from naturally. That's the Celestials; they intentionally introduced what later Marvel authors called the X-gene into humanity. But Kirby liked the ret-con enough to expand it into its own book completely separate from the X-Men by having the Celestials seed multiple strands of DNA into the worlds they visited. That's the Eternals, and the Deviants are their counterparts.

A bit over two weeks until release. When should the review embargo lift, next Wednesday I guess?

Which Celestial is that? I've seen him before, but I still haven't read enough stories to remember any of their names.

I bet there's at least some passing reference to it at some point during the film.

They could definitely go that route. What would almost exactly mirror the lead-up to the Avengers, however, is for the Eternals post-credit scenes to somehow directly reference the X-Men. In Iron Man they did that with Nick Fury appearing for the first time and telling Stark he was there to talk to him about the Avengers Initiative. The sky's the limit on what they could do in an Eternals post-credits scene, but I'd be shocked if the Eternals post-credits scenes don't reference mutants in any way.

As Buzzetta just said they did exactly this in 2008 with that post-credits scene in Iron Man that took five years to come to fruition. Given how that led to the greatest box office success in film history I give the odds that they try a long build-up again good enough to bet at least a few bills on. There's absolutely no way that Feige does an Eternals movie without tying it to the X-Men when that's the entire origin when Kirby created them. The Celestials and Eternals were Kirby's ret-con to explain how evolution could ever lead to superpowers in mutants.