ThaOGDreamWeaver

Hmmm.... ...y'know, I really don't mind. It looks like big, dumb, dino-based fun that isn't taking itself too seriously, and if Koepp, Edwards and ScarJo can entertain me for a couple of hours, I'm good with that.

I'm not sure about OG Bond, but a modern Bond would have to pass UK Special Forces selection and training. Being a fully covert org, SRR's methods aren't as well-known as the other services (and don't have daft celebrity survival TV series about them). But what is known would be a pretty good grounding for a 00 agent: Must be aged 30 or under to apply: male or female. Must have served at least 2 years in any branch of the Services. Must have a personal recommendation from a senior officer. Requires high degree of fitness, endurance and awareness... ...not least because your first challenge is four weeks of yomping backcountry Wales with increasingly heavy loads, hand drawn maps and a compass. Oh, and any use of mapped paths, trails or roads results in automatic failure. Next phase is UKSF standard induction - advanced parachuting, SERE, interrogation resistance. Even less fun. (As is often said: "Death is nature's way of telling you you've just failed SAS training") Beyond that it differs from SAS or SBS, as SRR candidates specialise in areas that match their aptitudes. These are around surveillance (whether electronic or personal), infiltration (stealth, camouflage, burglary), detectivework, vehicle training, close combat (small arms, hand weapons, improvised weapons), social engineering, field medicine and language training. The academic side is considered as or more challenging by candidates as the physical side, which also needs to be maintained at a very high level. Attrition rate is roughly 85% (of a class of 200, roughly 30 earn a grey beret), which is very slightly lower than SAS/SBS intake.

This might be relevant to your interests: Kim Harwood’s 00 Section series, which follows newly-minted agents Johanna, Joe, Sid and Conrad. Bond is an unseen presence for most of it, having apparently been detained by mercenaries… …that could work well as a series play?

TBH, while I salute the Broccoli legacy, I wasn't impressed at all by Spectre: and No Time To Die was a deeply unsatisfying resolution for James Bond's career and legacy. I have a couple of thoughts about where they could go with this, but my favourite is the idea of James Bond being a "legend". Not just the spycraft sense: the persona that someone adopts. But the other kind too. A hero. A monster. A ghost story. A seemingly invincible, undying phantom, whose very name strikes fear into the hearts of warlords, evildoers, and billionaire techbros. The big bad wolf that they tell their stories children about to make sure they stay in bed. So if one Bond dies (or vanishes), someone else could "inherit" the title: come to terms with entering that world and leaving their own behind. The other thing I should mention is that in real life, MI6 - like many other intel agencies - does not have armed agents for legal reasons. (Or at least not ones that do active wetwork: self-defence is reasonable.) For that, they borrow military personnel on secondment, like Commander James Bond, RN. So if you're asking how many 00s there are in River House right now, the answer is none. Nope, these days, and they live out west in Herefordshire, and there's about 500 of 'em. Men and women from all services, volunteering for selection, retrained in small arms, hand-to-hand combat, infiltration, and a whole bunch of other things. Like a modern version of SOE. So Bond does not have to work alone any more. One last thing. I was very wary of the Sky/Universal Day Of The Jackal series, but damn if they haven't pretty much nailed it - largely because of Eddie Redmayne's fantastic performance(s). A Bond series, with at least one mini-mission/setpiece per episode (and/or a mini version of the cold-opens), could work too.

Weekends are generally Fridays (inc Thursday's lates) to Mondays. If a Federal holiday falls within that weekend, they'll adjust to include it. Christmas Day last fell on a Tuesday in 2018, and Aquaman and Mary Poppins Returns both released into that weekend. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3108800001/weekend/?ref_=bo_rl_tab#tabs https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3263137281/weekend/?ref_=bo_rl_tab#tabs And there you go: it reports both the "normal" weekend and the extended weekend from Friday 21st (including Thursday's lates) to Tuesday 25th. That takes Aquaman from $67m to over $100m domestic, and Poppins nearly doubles from $23.5m to $41m.

Same Cap, just with a Beard Of Evil. And maybe throw some retractable Spikes Of Villainy on the shield to make it a buzzsaw. BECAUSE MORE EVIL. For a bet, Captain Hydra will still have some spark of Rogers' fundamental universal decency. (Then again, it'd be much more fun to pretend that when encountering anyone who knew Prime Steve, then lampshade it by betraying everybody.)

Oddly, we're both right for once. Behold another example of Quantum Accounting. Forbes has your $88m figure. Empire puts it at just north of $100m domestic, plus $92.4m international. Confusing, no? But Variety and BoxOfficeMojo point out it's a holiday weekend that included President's Day - so $88.5m over the regular weekend, and another $12m from the Monday. And by Whollyodd rules, you can count the whole five-day weekend from Thursday late previews - which you can count as part of Friday's take - to end Monday for PR purposes. (Wish I got five-day weekends.) If we included the Monday after Winter Soldier's release, they'd have been very slightly ahead: but that was a regular Monday, so a much lower take would have been expected.

I HAVE BEEN SUMMONED... And thanks for the flattery Now what was that question again... [peers over glasses] [staggers back into thread, wheezing, tear-stained with streaks of mascara running down cheeks] Oh sweet Freya in Asgard. That's great. That's the funniest thing I've... I mean really... I... ...Oh wait, you were SERIOUS? 'Scuse me... Okay. OKAY. Right. Answer. Serious DW. Here we go. The answer to that is somewhere between "no" and "hell to the no". This is gonna get kinda long, so get yourself a coffee and buckle up. Quantum accountancy* is what keeps Whollyodd going - as I've whinged about too many times before, I've been on the wrong end of it more than once. Let's start with listed budgets and breakevens. As m'learned coll' @BrandX correctly mentions above, 2.5x to 3.5x budget is industry rule of thumb for "breakeven". ("Bomb" is anything that doesn't go over its own budget, up to about 1.5x-2.5x. Case in point: our favourite flick Morbius made $165m off a $75m production budget, but is still considered a bomb because it was a large upfront budget, a cape flick and had a proper star. A smaller indie flick doesn't carry that kind of expectation). Allow me to introduce you to the concept of the rolling breakeven. A production budget, which would be stated in a press release to IMDB, Variety or Deadline, is widely understood to be the actual line cost of making the flick. Actors. Directors. Techs. Grips and Best Boys (not the kind from WeHo). Transport and Craft Services. And of course, all the CGI nerds. It's also less widely understood to be (a) an estimate at the time the PR went out which probably won't have the works wrapped in - fair enough - and (b) polished a bit to make the studio look good. Either up, so they can look like they can still afford to make big-buck movies, or down, to hide any mistakes. There are an awful lot of things you can include or exclude to make it look better or worse, depending on who's asking: whether it's your shareholders (better), the actors and any other suckers who took net points (worse) or the IRS (hideous). Or for investors, both at once. You might have noticed that about half the creds on recent flicks are for financing companies. Depending on how these companies and their deals are structured, unless the flick is a Morbius-level bomb, they fully expect to make their money back plus their 5%-15% vig... ...while simultaneously making a line loss that they can write off against investors' tax bills, or get payments/tax refunds from nation/state support. (It can be taken to extremes, depending on your local tax regime. This kind of stuff is what funded much of Uwe Boll's reign of evil.) It all depends on what line items you add and when you report them to who. For example, does the stated budget and revenue include or exclude: Speculative development costs Reshoots, post-completion edits, internationalisation/subtitling, airline edits? These are all fairly normal things but where and when you include them matters. The cost of upfront financing - loan arrangement fees, bonds, reinsurance? The cost of marketing? A percentage for the big names who took gross points (a cut of the upfront revenue: famously Alec Guinness, Jack Nicholson and The Rock are big winners here.) Upfront funding from streamers - and do you count those as credits (income), a future cost (loan with interest), or both? A "licence fee" for getting it onto a streaming platform - even if you are/own the streaming platform in question? Fun stuff. So, exactly how bad can this mess get? One cape flick we can mostly** agree was both good and a hit was the OG 1989 Batman. $411m worldwide / $253m domestic at close off a $48m budget - an 8.5x ratio. (And while Marvel may have made a factory of it, the Tim Burton flicks showed you could make a very decent flick from this kind of property, with Proper Actors and Dramatic Stuff an' all, selling a metric flarktonne of lunchboxes, and having Prince write a banging soundtrack for you. Let's skip quietly over the other two flicks. Even, and I say this advisedly, even the Bat-Nipples). Profitable, critically successful, birthed a franchise and arguably a genre. Unqualified success. Except it's not a hit, at least on paper. Still isn't 35 years later. Depending on which calculation you use, by 1991, Batman was $35.1m down - and still quietly losing more money every day, thanks to interest charges from loans arranged. (And WB likely charged a fee to the Bat-production company to do so. Again, you'll notice a lot of films are their own prodco, so that their parent studios can charge or credit line items to/from them as they feel the need to.) And when the flick transferred to HBO online and then MAX, more fees can run round the block for streaming rights and/or charges. Similarly, both MIB and MIB2 were palpable hits (6.5x and 4x budget), but to this day, still haven't made an above-the-line profit. Leaving those who took a "net points" deal, like writer Ed Solomon, with exactly zero revenue. Nada. Nil. Zip. Same bum deal for Stan on the Sony Spiderman movie (until he sued Marvel) : despite the flick taking over $800m, Sony claimed it never cleared dime one. And they're far from the most egregious examples. This can also occasionally work backwards. Some of you may have been (un)fortunate enough to see Matt McConaughaughanaghnhey's 2005 film Sahara, which attempted to cast him in the Indiana Jones hero mould. Didn't work so well for him or at the box office, netting $120m off a $160m budget. Ouch. That kind of thing does not make a studio look good - so you can start stripping off chargeable line items like development or financing and hiding them elsewhere. And if you've got multiple different movie prodcos working, you can shift or share line items such as development or FX onto the balance sheet of a successful flick - making a good project less profitable for tax/revenue share reasons, and making your little mistake less of an embarrassment. With these tactics, Sahara's budget magically shrank by nearly $30m. So - and I apologise for the length of this answer - Hollyweird sits on a throne of lies, on seven hills of broken dreams and fantasy bank statements. And if you ever go there, have fun, enjoy the ride, but be wary - and always keep your receipts. *Quantum accountancy: money can be in the states of present, absent, in transit, "but it's exposure", or spent on a yacht hire in Cannes to promo something else. **Look, a lot of people liked it and without it we wouldn't have got Michelle Pfeiffer as the Cat. So shush.

Yup. Not sure how to compare it, as there's about 13 years of inflation, COVID and movie-palace-luxurification and whatnot between them, but it's already beaten First Avenger and Winter Soldier's opening weekends. Then again, February is not exactly your tentpole month for movies, and the D+ drain of people who'll wait for streaming is a big ol' chunk these days. (Me included). Will it have legs - or wings, I guess?

Dr. Doom. Renaissance villain. Genius scientist. Master of the Mystic Arts.... And just a big ol' nerd.

One of my jobs when I was younger was assistant to a UMUC history professor, who was a genius IQ, regularly consulted for analysis on international crises, and was a thought leader in the diplomatic field. My main jobs were helping with marking deadlines, using email, making sure he got flights on time with his passport and docs, and finding him when he got lost in his own hotel. Again. On the same day. Some stereotypes are just offensively accurate. ...we sure that's gonna work all the time? But I had a similar thought a while back, when just pondering how I'd run Supes' time on Earth. Given there are capes about already (WW for one), a young Clark is going to get noticed, no matter how hard he tries. One option would be for a magic-related hero/heroine to show up in Smallville, possibly undercover as a visiting schools' counsellor, who provides him with glasses with a glaimr that subtly distorts how people and cameras see him. Mind you, looking back at Chris Reeve, he does the whole thing with acting. Watch the physical changes in face, body, movement, pose, everything. And yes, Keaton's Bat-transformation is similar - though rooted in the idea that Bruce and the Bat are two entirely different characters: and as far from the likes of Beetlejuice or any of his other comic characters as you can get. (Also: seriously, go see Birdman. Globe win and Oscar nom fully deserved.) As for what Pedro could do with this... well, we've got only a few seconds of teaser to go on. But I get the sense that this Reed is later on in an acclaimed scientific and caping career, presenting the strong, confident, successful 50s-ideal-dad persona on the surface... and still the same old self-doubting nerd underneath. Pedro's done a lot of different stuff, some fantastic (Beale St., Mando, Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent, Last Of Us)... and some not so much (WW1984, Gladiator II). Can he pull this off? Let's see what he does with this.

Well, invest in one... From the Financial Times: ...little early for April 1st, isn't it? Once you dig into it, it's not the most insane financial product that's been on the market lately. And if someone can rig me up that flying skateboard I've been after since 1989... me happy. Have you seen any evidence of alien activity around lately?

Here's the SuperBowl game trailer (and that big Starship track...) Small update: a tweet (Xeet, whatever) from Marvel Studios Japan explains that asterisk. Maybe.

Ah, James Gunn has a Superbowl Super-tease for us, I wonder what it coulGAAAAHH MY EYES THE GOGGLES THEY DO NOTHING ...seriously, the way James gets away with being this mean to people he calls friends is almost British. I'm impressed.

I’m Scottish, and even I’d say that (a) “best” is relative and (b) this is against the Geneva Convention. (There’s an old hack’s tale that British forces leaked a story to Argentinian papers about “sonic death weapons” in 1982, just before the Falklands landings…)

They're certainly being quite smart. For example, if you're wondering what the weird arrows are for... ask Ed Sullivan. (They're not gonna go full Partridge Family and sing, are they?)

ScarJo goes full Tomb Raider, and digs up an ancient franchise thought lost. Trailer has the Greatest Hits of JP if nothing glaringly original. Fairly standard quest line, slightly dumb ante-upping (oooh, they're too dangerous for the original park?), and slightly too glossy reboot premise (Earth's oxygen levels are lower than they were in the original dino era, so with added pollution, they die out except in very remote locations). Oh, we get a new crew too. Not buying Bridgerton's Jon Bailey as the scientist: Mahershala Ali shouldn't have any trouble as a cheerful smuggler. And there are kids. Hopefully not irritating. That said... ...this is from the original JP scriptwriter, David Koepp, so he should know what he's doing. It also gives Gareth Edwards the big damn toybox he's wanted since his self-produced flick Monsters, which brought him to the world's attention and earned him the chair on Godzilla, followed by Rogue One and The Creator. Not exactly the longest CV in the world - he's still busy consulting on VFX the rest of the time - but damn if it ain't solid. So it's well-trodden territory, but do we think those two - plus ScarJo - can park your backside and your popcorn for another go-round?

I've also heard that the F4 world is its own specific universe - which is why they get drawn into the universe-collapse plotline. (Along with Doom, who may or may not be this 'verse, Deadpool and his 'verse, etc. BTW, there was a full launch party at the US Space And Rocket Museum (which is pretty cool, being a space nerd...)

Caught in a Bad Romulance...

What I picked up was that it was a confident, authoritative, paternal Reed, not the nervous, self-effacing nerd we've seen in other flicks. It's possibly because this Reed has already been through some... stuff... and it's changed him. This may also be why the family are under pressure - from celebrity, the expectation to deliver the world (repeatedly) from increasingly weird forms of eeeebil, and so on. And the Fantasticar does look amazing. Wonder if it comes in black, maybe with some purple pearlescent...

And here we go... Thoughts:

...cheerful stuff... So I had a quick surf through sci-fi movies that were set in the next few years. If you need cheering up, I wouldn't necessarily recommend Children Of Men, though it is a damn fine bit of filmmaking: and the Giorgio Moroder cut of Metropolis is set in 2027. (So even if that turns out to be a dystopia, we get a Freddy Mercury/Adam Ant/Pat Benatar soundtrack. Groovy.) There is one very odd/funny parallel though. Spike Jonze made a rather good little flick called Her set this year, about a nerdy creative slowly falling in love with his AI assistant... played by Scarlett Johansson. Siri was already around when that flick was made, so it's not a major tech leap. But fast forward a few years,and one Sam Altman wants a female voice for OpenAI's assistant Sky. And it sounded eerily like ScarJo. They swore it wasn't ScarJo. Couldn't be ScarJo. Was in no way voicecloned from ScarJo or matched on waveforms. Eventually, they said it was absolutely definitely a different actress, who lives in Canada, and no you can't talk to her. (Haven't heard that one since I was in middle school.) And they took it down. But I'm still not sure they've learned that lesson.