battlewraith

That's nonsense. It's silly. A well crafted story with a talented cast and crew might be successful. A lot of them fail. Some may achieve a cult following and be regarded as classics long after their run. Others might be hot garbage but make a lot of money based on spectacle or some other reason. Some of these movies that are being trashed now might have been seen as amazing if they had been done a few years sooner, or in a media landscape that wasn't saturated with a certain kind of film. Some that are acclaimed now will probably be forgotten fairly quickly. The assumptions being made here are the opposite: that well made, quality films do well financially. Particularly low budget films. Okay, well maybe instead of Christopher Nolan and Oppenheimer we should be lauding Tyler Perry and Medea, hmmm?

Yeah complete disconnect with my point here. Aiming at a wider range of demographics as a strategy does not mean that ticket sales are going to be up. Audiences are down for a number of reasons, fallout from Covid, competition from streaming, etc. Also, box office numbers are starting to take a hit from the rise of Chinese filmmaking starting to take more of the Asian market.

Riiight and have you done this? Like what makes you think that the people making these movies don't see what they are doing as exactly that? I love this hindsight mentality that armchair critics have--"Hey, the LOTR movies were huge hits because it had a great story, great actors, and so on. So just do that again." As if Peter Jackson was able to continue that level of quality for the Hobbit movies, when he presumably had more control and more resources to work with. Not. Untalented actors huh? Ezra Miller is a lunatic. But I saw that Flash movie and his acting wasn't the problem. He was cast in the part because of his previous performances in other projects, they didn't just randomly select some weird guy. Yeah they're probably doing that to a certain extant. It certainly helps that there actually oodles of xenophobes, racists, misogynists and whatnot on social media pissing and moaning about movies and trying to tank them before they even open. Godzilla: Minus One is a Godzilla movie. How many other well crafted and acted foreign films are doing those kinds of numbers? You really think that speaks to the point you're making? And the thing about Hollywood budgets is this: it's an industry. It doesn't matter whether spending all that money on a film pays off with respect to profit. The money is spent to keep the machinery running--to keep all those creative teams employed. Flops are not only expected, they use creative bookkeeping to act like high grossing films performed poorly.

That might be the case. It could be that SJWs have infected everything and are just trashing cinema. But personally I think this is all about money and that the studio execs actually know what they're doing despite complaining about bombs. The marketing strategy where you make a lot of films, particularly action movies, aimed at white guys was gold in the past but doesn't work that well now. Movies are expensive and there is a ton more competition from video games, streaming sports, etc. You can't float the industry on them any more. So the bean counters are packing in more demographics as the target audience and I actually think this is more successful and/or necessary than pissy youtube critics think it is.

Ok, so "the message" is things like multiculturalism, diversity, being supportive of lgbtq--stuff like that? It might seem clear to you, but it's kind of vague to me. Some douche snearing "the message" over this picture is not really that explanatory. But if I was trying to explain to the industry what they need to do in order to be more successful, it would be something like this: 1. Go back to stories and characterizations solely of straight white people. 2. The men do shit and the women look good and are supportive of the men. 3. Assume a white, north American (probably Christian) audience. Is that the strategy?

What do you mean by "the message"? What message?

I don't watch a lot of these shows but Legion from 2017 was really good, had three seasons, and I don't ever hear it brought up in these discussions.

Yes, but I think this is also part of the problem. There's such an impulse to have these films tell epic sagas and be taken seriously as dramas that they start to fall apart as actual comic book movies. I saw The Marvels and it was entertaining when it was the three main superhero characters goofing around together. But then you had to sit through this intrigue about the Kree empire and the skrulls and Carol having not returned to take care of Monica after the blip and blah blah blah. The first Captain Marvel movie was out 4 years ago. I barely remembered all that backstory. And they always seem to think that there needs to be this world ending threat for basically every superhero movie.

There might simply be a glut of too many superhero movies. It looks like The Marvels took in $197 million worldwide and was the lowest grossing MCU film. Blue Beetle took in $128 million and was the lowest grossing DCU film. We'll see how Aquaman does.

Thank you kind sir!

The numbers are saying that it failed at the box office. That doesn't tell you why it flopped. John Carpenter's The Thing is, in my opinion, one of the best films ever made and at release it not only bombed but was absolutely despised by critics. Dredd with Karl Urban kicked ass and it didn't even make it's money back.

I enjoyed the first Captain Marvel movie. Part of me really wants to get enthused by this one but I can’t. Because the last Dr. Strange movie sucked so badly. Because of that movie, I skipped Quantumania—which my wife and kid saw and claim sucked. So I am definitely burned on Marvel movies. Did you even read the article? It details reactionary attacks on female centered projects in general and Brie Larson in particular. But it mentions that the first Captain Marvel movie and Barbie, both of which were strongly targeted by he-man woman hater types, we’re both hugely profitable (also the Little Mermaid remake and Elemental did well). The article does not actually claim to know a “real reason” the movie is underperforming. It does relay the thoughts of cultural luminaries like Ben Shapiro and Tim Pool.

It looks like Festivus has come early this year. You've already started with the airing of grievances!

Yeah I don't think there was actually an argument here. Just a single intolerable downvote.

Midjourney prompt: "douchebag Superman"

When I saw the lion's drop of blood fall into Kraven's wound, I instantly thought of this:

If the problem of bumping into disagreeable people in this MMO hasn't been solved by now, after almost 20 years, I'm not sure what people would expect to be done about it now.

The dysfunction of the suggestions forum is on a par with the US Congress.

The vast majority of people playing this game are dedicated to sitting. Many of them have invested in comfy chairs.

Sometimes the AI takes you on a career spiral:

So this kind of term started circulating online, what 10-15 years ago? And like most slangy forum things, it can vary in what it actually means depending on the context in which it is said--but there is generally an implied idictment of someone's character or motives involved, no? So Troo, not only are you dropping a somewhat contentious terd here, it's an old desiccated husk of a terd that you dug up from the yard. Probably somebody else's yard. Is this quaint nothingburger the best we can expect from you now? Or is there an ulterior motive here? Are these devs hot but you just don't want to come out and say it?

Midjourney added a new type of prompt called "describe." You upload an image with this prompt and it kicks out 4 different text prompts that the application thinks describes the image. You can then enter each of these prompts to see what it actually creates. I tried it with the Draggynn image above: The set on the bottom is the original image entered again in conjunction with one of the text prompts kicked out by /describe.

I have a subscription to Midjourney and have been playing around with it a lot. I did spend some time trying to see if I could use it to generate cool versions of coh characters. The answer right now I think is no. You can probably enter a prompt that will produce a superhero-ish character that might be in the same ballpark as your character. But if you really care about the details you've chosen in the character designer, which I think most players do, you're not going to get that kind of fidelity out of the AI unless you're much more sophisticated in your use of the algorithms and have some sort of dedicated data set that it's employing to generate images. It's very hard, for example to get it do masks and weapons with any kind of predictability. My older son is generating a lot of images of melee style weaponry and it's kicking out a lot of things that look like a cross between a weapon and exercise equipment. I uploaded images of masked superhero characters I've drawn in the hopes of guiding the AI towards the results I wanted. But it's clear that the AI sees the mask as a visual pattern on the surface of the face--so I ended up with characters with panda faces or face tattoos. Of course this is all subject to change as the technology develops and my prompting could be lacking. But I did spend many hours testing parameters to see if I could get it to work. AI is incredible. I think that people interested in fanart of their characters absolutely should look into it. But unless you have just a very generic desire for pretty pictures, it's not going to replace an artist. It's better thought of, IMO, as steroids for your imagination. It's amazing at ideation. If you have a vague idea of something you want, AI can instantly generate well rendered visions of that thing. And this includes ideas for lighting and compositions, color schemes, etc. So imagine you are looking to commission an artist to do art of your character. If it's just a simple character sheet, AI is not going to be that much of a help. But if this is a complex image of your character's origin, fighting their arch enemy on the streets of Paris in the 1940s, AI can quickly generate a wealth of reference imagery that would be really useful in creating that image. Also you the commissioner can get a clearer idea of what you want and you can SHOW the artist rather than trying to put things into descriptive language.

Very sad loss, especially at only age 60. RIP.