fantastic_four

Is Luke hiding on Ahch-To from Kylo Ren and the First Order all that different from Obi-Wan hiding on Tatooine or Yoda hiding on Dagobah from Palpatine and the Empire? Not sure why we'd be expecting Luke to be more resourceful at solo'ing a galactic empire than past Jedi masters were.

He's keeping them all MOC? That's VERY uncommon for any kid under 10. One thing I like about the Black Series of 6" Star Wars figures is the box is designed to be opened and re-used if you want to. That 3.75" line your son is collecting has the classic bubbles you have to rip apart to get to the figure.

I couldn't be more disappointed. The armored Superman and Batman figures are the highlights, but everything else is mediocre. None of that is my issue...it's the 7 inch scale. They won't fit in with the more standard 6" scale other toy companies make, so there's no chance of mixing them in with my Marvel displays. It's probably going to be all Mafex DC figures in my display since they're using the more standard scale.

As head of Star Wars, Kennedy seems to have more hits than misses. Which would put her in the same boat as virtually every other producer of serial content except for one thing--the existence of Kevin Feige. Ever since he illustrated that you can consistently and repeatedly guide serial content to both critical and box office excellence we tend to clamor for more. Clearly Bob Iger does, too, which is why he's giving Feige a movie. I wouldn't mind if the real goal of Feige's movie is just to have him train Kathleen Kennedy on more effective ways to manage serial content. He almost certainly has NOTHING to teach her about movie production, but that's not the job she took as the head of LucasFilm, she also took on Lucas's job as caretaker of the content when he sold to Disney. She's not really doing a LOT better than any other film producers have done in that role. Maybe a bit better than Avi Arad did at Marvel/Sony/Fox before Feige ascended, but not by much.

RELEASE THIS NOW!!!

Listened to Todd Philips on "Fresh Air" this week. He reiterated multiple times that the events of the film aren't meant to be taken literally, that EVERYTHING is just the way the Joker chooses to tell it this once. He again quoted that panel from Killing Joke talking about how if he has to have a past, he prefers it to be multiple choice...he pointed out how he called the film "Joker" as opposed to "The Joker," meaning it's not even necessarily the Joker from Batman...and he pointed out that in the promotional materials that refer to the film as an origin story, he made sure it was described as "an" origin story, not "the" origin story to imply that since we're seeing this from the point of view of Joker, who knows what or what isn't true that's shown on screen. So there's no point in sweating how events are shown on screen since Joker is just telling the story he wants to tell. The whole idea of Thomas Wayne being his dad or punching him in the face is just as likely to be his own invention as everything else explicitly illustrated to be falsely narrated in the film.

That was 100% Taika Waititi since it's the only episode he directed. Sounded like it could have come straight out of Thor: Ragnarok or What We Do In the Shadows.

Japan invaded China and most of the rest of the region multiple times over the last few centuries. Japan's history of imperial expansion is long, and it's amazing how much they've redirected their focus as a society into economics and technology since World War 2. So yea, China is still touchy about Japan, as is Korea and plenty of other countries in the region.

Half the Star Wars films had Force ghosts...including the final cut of Rise of Skywalker.

Who do you think was at the end of the episode? That little jangling sound they played at the end of the episode matched the jangling sound Boba Fett made in Empire Strikes Back so you've got to assume it's him. We now know that guy at the end of episode 5 was Moff Gideon, right? I don't recall hearing him with jangling sounds in episodes 7 and 8, but he definitely had the cape and boots we saw at the end looking at that dead bounty hunter.

My top ten Star Wars sequences: Darth Maul vs. Qui-Gonn and Obi-Wan (Phantom Menace) Vader hallway (Rogue One) Yoda vs. Dooku (Attack of the Clones) Anakin and Obi-Wan vs. General Grievous's fleet (opening sequence from Revenge of the Sith) Anakin vs. Obi-Wan (end of Revenge of the Sith) Millennium Falcon vs. Imperial fleet (Empire Strikes Back) Millennium Falcon vs. Imperial fleet at Death Star 2 (Return of the Jedi) Obi-Wan vs. General Grievous (Revenge of the Sith) Imperial AT-AT walkers vs. rebel forces on Hoth (Empire Strikes Back) Clone army vs. Trade Federation army (Attack of the Clones) How did I forget to insert the end battle from episode 3 of the Mandalorian in there?!?! It's somewhere in the middle of this list between #5 and #9. INSANELY rewatchable scene that's a dream come true for Boba Fett fans (details in spoilers for those who haven't seen the show yet):

Very interesting. Especially the behind-the-scenes strategy to trip up Bad Robot. A lot of bidding took place with this production company. I'd love some names in there in place for the generic word "Disney." Who was the one meddling--Kathleen Kennedy? Pablo Hidalgo? Or someone else? I suppose it doesn't really matter because it all comes back to Kathleen Kennedy in the end, so we can safely insert her name in there every time the word "Disney" is used. If true, this all sounds like the type of production with the Marvel Creative Committee continuously rejecting Joss Whedon's ideas on Age of Ultron that drove him nuts and caused him to withdraw from Marvel movies. My understanding is that Feige's work mostly comes with picking a good director, giving them a roadmap for the overall direction of the Marvel story phases that they have to fit inside of, and then letting them have a ton of freedom within that framework. Sounds like KK or her people don't work that way at all and preferred to micromanage. NO directors like that stuff, and it virtually always leads to inferior movies due to having a greatly mixed storytelling vision. So while Feige and the MCU doesn't purely support the auteur theory where one director has complete creative control to guide the vision for a film to greatness that Scorsese was complaining about last year, Feige does allow for far more director control and unified vision than this type of collaboration where producers micromanage and frequently override director decisions without even a discussion. Hopefully this is the main value Feige ends up adding with whatever his involvement with Star Wars ends up being--he either trains KK on how to do her job, or he picks her successor.

That makes sense because I'm sure they saw some degree of subscription drop just within the last week now that The Mandalorian is over.

That sounds like a way to summarize at least half of the science fiction films I've ever seen, if not the great majority of them. DEFINITELY every Indiana Jones movie can be trivialized in that way.

Why are Star Wars fans more prone to hyperbole than Marvel and DC fans? When people were unhappy with something like Batman vs. Superman I don't recall reactions quite as extreme as "I'LL NEVER BE HAPPY AGAIN." I guess it's because of the infrequency with which they're released. But with the cartoons being so spectacular, and now the Mandalorian being great, I don't get that kind of reaction with Rise of Skywalker. Plenty of other Star Wars content to turn to now that wasn't an option 15+ years ago aside from the Dark Horse comics and various novels.

Time for Disney to buy Paramount from CBS. Or just buy CBS. Or just buy Viacom. Whatever it takes, Iger, get to it!

I'm sure you'll get it within months...the original version sold out pretty much immediately.

My guess is that Shuma Gorath is the big bad given the title since travelling between universes and dimensions and conquering them is his entire thing. He's so bizarre that I loved playing him in Marvel vs. Capcom, so if it's him I'm definitely looking forward to it.

Is there reason to think that Chinese audiences will actually like Shang-Chi? He's CLEARLY a part of the wave of "Bruceploitation" characters who spawned immediately after Bruce Lee's death, and many of the depictions of Shang-Chi in comics seem to use photographs of Bruce Lee for his likeness. The fact that he was Fu Manchu's son in the comics is double-cringeworthy, and it's no surprise that Chinese audiences would have active reason to dislike him because of that alone aside from the Bruce Lee ripoff element. I'm guessing that Marvel ditched Fu Manchu as a part of Shang-Chi's design at some point though, and there's NO way he'll ever be mentioned seriously in the film. So will Chinese people enjoy this, or will they reject it as crude cultural appropriation by the West? I know almost nothing about the character. I believe the only time I read him growing up was when he crossed over into a Spidey title. I was generally interested in him, but even as a kid he seemed like an unoriginal Bruce Lee ripoff. But that's all subjective opinion without ever reading his titles, so for all I know he grew past his origin as a Bruce Lee clone and became fantastic at some point.

Same. I had that at #9 and then #10 in my list before editing it out, but it's really good. The main thing dragging that down is Palpatine...he wasn't as stiff as Vader from the original trilogy, but he was close. Actually he was JUST as stiff, they just spiced it up with his maniacal laughing and using CGI to have him hopping around more than Vader did. The most ridiculous saber battle in any movie is Palpatine vs. Mace Windu, Kit Fisto, Agen Kolar, and Saesee Tiin. I really hate that they punked all three of those guys in seconds and that we almost never got to see Windu showing off why he's a premiere saber fighter. I love Ian McDiarmid's acting in the films, but his physical skill with a saber was awful.

Totally forgot about Obi-Wan, should be great. I'm going to be IMMERSED in Star Wars for most of the next year because I JUST finished Clone Wars season 1 this week so I've got well over 200 episodes of mostly solid stories ahead.

The television shows are in such a good place I'm fine with the films disappearing for a while. Mandalorian rocks, and Clone Wars is coming back in February. If those are the only two outlets for new content I'm satisfied, particularly given that they can probably do YEARS of stories building up Boba Fett at some point like they were starting to do back in 2014 when Disney shortsightedly cancelled Clone Wars.

Started back up on the Clone Wars series...damn that series is SO good, most episodes are as good as half of the live action films. Give Dave Filoni creative control of Star Wars, NOW!

He also did it about two seconds after Luke scored a hit on his right bicep, and that's a part of him that was still left intact after Obi-Wan wrecked him on Mustafar. Every lightsaber battle gets better and better as time went on. This one was far better than the one from Episode IV, and the theatrics of the fights in Episode VI were better than V. But the prequels took it to an entirely new level, and the fights in the Abrams films didn't even eclipse those, surprisingly. I'd rank Rey vs. Kylo Ren in that forest somewhere in the top 20 had I continued beyond a top 10, but it just wasn't as good as many of the saber battles from the prequels.

I never really liked ANY old Vader lightsaber battle. Vader was particularly stiff in the original trilogy, so when Ray Park as a martial artist and stuntman took up the role of Darth Maul and was jumping around dynamically my mind was absolutely blown. After that I can't look at any original trilogy lightsaber battle with any affection. That's why the Rogue One Vader sequence was so awesome--Vader instantaneously transformed from overrated to the biggest badass in the galaxy.