ThaOGDreamWeaver

Laurie Johnson - Theme from The Professionals

Edgar Winter Group - Free Ride

Command & Conquer Red Alert - Hell March

So, farewell then to a fine detective, a great basketball coach, a submarine commander, rogue film producer… …and, of course, the ruler of Australia and greatest criminal mind of our time. Not to mention by all accounts a thoroughly nice bloke in person with a phenomenal memory for everyone he'd work with, from crew and craft services up... ...well, unless you hacked him off by not learning your lines. One person who gave him an awesome writeup was Mel Brooks. Gene was mates with Gene Wilder, found out about Young Frankenstein while they were playing tennis, and asked if there was any way he could sneak in a cameo. With Gene being pretty much the biggest star of the time, there's no way they could pay him more than scale. But he just wanted to do it. And this is the scene Mel gave him, alongside Peter Boyle... though the last line is Gene's ad-lib. And if it's a slightly abrupt cut to static on the sound, it's because that broke Mel and the rest of the crew.

Dropkick Murphys - Ten Times More

David Zaslav strikes again... Monolith (makers of one of my all-time favourites, No-One Lives Forever, as well as many other decent titles like F.E.A.R.), PlayerFirst (the fun if flawed MultiVersus) and WB San Diego will all be shuttered, with any live servers getting rapidly sunsetted. The upcoming Wonder Woman game, which has been in dev for 3+ years, is getting Batgirl'd as a tax loss. WB will concentrate on core franchises - the Mortal Kombat, LOTR and H***y P****r titles (despite MK1 and the HP sportsball game being responsible for a lot of the underperformance, along with Kill The Justice League.) Honestly think WB wouldn't know what to do with a creative team if they bit them on the backside.

Trek lore is that humans spread from the Earth and encountered aliens... well, as alien as 60s prosthetics and makeup would allow - and either teamed up with them or fought them as part of the Federation. So you see a lot more of them. Wars lore is that humanity arose on the old Core Worlds - Coruscant claimed to be the original homeworld, but they're snotty buggers - and then sent out gen-ships and sleeper ships, either cutting deals with or just overrunning local species to set up outposts. (Darth Plagueis the Wise considered humanity to be the most adaptable species, not least because of their sheer, dumb bloody-mindedness to succeed in the face of suffering. And therefore rather useful to the Sith.) But beyond the lore, the famously grumpy* Tony Gilroy is famously not a massive Wars or sci-fi fan, and wanted to tell a human drama story using the Wars toybox. With that in mind, it's unlikely aliens (even Hera or Zeb) are likely to make an appearance, as it would take the audience a little more work to connect with them. *Every writer has their own favourite vox auctoris character - and they're usually easy to spot as they'll get the best speeches. Tony's was Kino Loy.

$290m worldwide would be a pretty good haul for most movies, but a wide release with $180m+ of budget spent upfront… not great. If they run a similar longtail into April/May, it’s likely to finish on par with Quantumania at $450m to $500m. Not a bomb, but nowhere near expectations. I get the feeling the movie didn’t quite know what it wanted to be. The extensive reshoots (introducing a whole new character arc - not that I’d ever complain about more Giancarlo on screen…) would give the lie to that. Dodgy, half-finished CGI and a rather clunky setup for the Red Hulk finale didn’t help. Which suggests that the Prez might have been a stronger antagonist at one point, or Tim Blake Nelson’s Leader character got shredded in the edit suite. (I appreciate Tim deciding to go with practical prosthetics for this one so he could act and have cast reactions, but… couldn’t they afford one of Rick Baker’s apprentices?)

Steve Earle - The Revolution Starts Now

Here. We. Go. Arright, here we go:

Roberta Flack - The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (2006 Remaster) ❤️‍🔥

"Vince was right. Dammit." Fun little interview EPK about coming back to these characters, how they've evolved between the two series, and doing Proper Serious Acting in a cape series.

EPICA - The Ghost In Me (Danse Macabre)

Enigma - Sadeness (part 1)

Skerryvore - Take My Hand (Live at Hoolie) 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Supernatural/Shaun Of The Dead crossover miniseries. Trapped between universes, the Winchesters wind up haunting a South London pub. (Conveniently also called The Winchester, and which turns out to be the reason their great-great-grandparents picked their new name when they emigrated.) Unable to leave unless someone carries something with them, they're trapped in a world of pork scratchings, warm beer and Queen. Enter Shaun and his mostly de-zombified friend Ed - now well under control thanks to regular doses of ZTC, though left 100lbs lighter and ripped, with astonishing Hulk-like strength, and curious addictions to TV cookery series and Peperami. The Winchesters need to use their knowledge, experience and newfound ghostly powers to help our hapless heroes, as they tangle with suburban demons, vampiric MPs, cannibalistic hipsters and The Ancients Of The Library to save London - and once again, the world. Can they return themselves to life and (hopefully) the right universe... ...and beyond all that, confront the terrifying secret that caused their ancestor Harry Wainwright to leave London for Boston, and help found the Men of Letters?

I knew Bezos reminded me of somebody.

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.