TTRPGWhiz

It never made any sense for Batman to be in the JLA, and not just for 'power scaling' reasons. About the only good excuse for him being there is to study the metas up close and learn their weaknesses.

Not that it could possibly matter less, but: 129 minutes including credits & stingers.

Co-starring Jessica Walter (aka, Lucille Bluth of Arrested Development) as Morgan LeFey!

The Karloff one is for sure iconic, but the liberties it took with The Creature significantly alters that story. It’s sort of its own thing. I really liked the take on Penny Dreadful, but I have a huge soft spot for that show. Branagh’s was pretty darn faithful but I totally agree; he wasn’t ready for it.

Feels like it was only a matter of time before Mia Goth ended up in a Del Toro joint. This looks like it might have good chance to be the “seminal” Frankenstein movie. The competition isn’t particularly fierce.

I feel like the success of The Last of Us (number 5 on Nielsen last month) indicates that violence does not dissuade viewers. I'm also not sure that I buy the baked-in assumption that folks are sitting down as families to watch Loki (or She-Hulk, or F&WS, or really anything MCU). I can't recall any viewership ratings ever that took the presence of on-screen violence into account. How would one even attempt to do that short of individual surveys?

Cripes. Egg on my face for not confirming a run time with multiple sources lol. That’s where the bar is for clickbait, run times? Folks need to find something else more interesting to lie about.

This very much happens in the second Black Panther (well not 'a bunch', but a couple)

Maybe I made a bad assumption about who 'the chef' was in your analogy? Is it not Marvel / Disney?

For sure. But this is more like posting a(nother) negative review on the community board of a 300 person town. The chef ain't ever gonna read it, just potential diners. Also within your rights, but not at all the same thing. Personally, I have no idea if I'll get around to seeing this or not; it's definitely not a priority, and I've kind of checked out on MCU movies the way a lot of MCU fans checked out on comics 10-25 years ago. But I don't find anything so off-putting about this trailer specifically that would lead me to an immediate and unqualified 'no'. Thunderbolts looks cool I guess, I'm sure there will be a rainy day after it hits streaming when I'll check it out. I really like The Sentry mini-series, it'll be neat to see some of that come to life.

1. Generally, trailers produce more questions than answers. Then you go see the movie and learn. 2. Sponsors and investors tend to make claims on what you do with their money because it’s their money. One might assume RiRi isn’t interested in that.

McFarlane Toys have done the usual 'light spoiler' thing with their announcement today. And the runtime was released: 122 minutes feels kinda short, but maybe that's a welcome relief.

Y'all are replying to an 18 month old thread that OP didn't post in again...

Booster’s been around since 1986. He started out as a real glory hound kind of showboat, but he’s had some pretty good arcs over the years. The JLU animated episode “The Greatest Story Never Told” centers him and is a great intro to the character.

A small but relevant FYI on the topic of fake quotes: https://thatparkplace.com/lois-lane-actress-rachel-brosnahan-never-said-superman-is-not-for-everyone/ A Superman For All Seasons.

Angela Spica is The Engineer's 'secret identity'; the actor is María Gabriela de Faría. Have there been updates to the status of The Authority? Last time Gunn talked about it, he did not seem optimistic.

To put a finer point on it: there is an entire cottage industry of “movie critics” who review films through an “anti-woke” lens, and it is neither subtle nor unintentional. That is who they are, who they make content for, and how they market themselves. They aren’t here to critique movies just for quality; they’re also here to critique them for traces of “the agenda”, which is of course never really defined. Peppering reviews of superhero movies with phrases like “modern feminism” and “girl bosses” is just whistling for dogs.

I don’t have a hard and fast definition for it. On one end of the spectrum, there’s legacy outlets like THR, Empire, EW, NYT, Chicago Sun-Times, Rolling Stone, etc. On the other end, there’s some random people with no press passes and a laptop. I’m sure you can see the difference. And I’m talking about the first cohort when I talk about “major outlets”. The…I guess follower count? and readership of varying platforms and critics doesn’t particularly mean anything to me, and I don’t think that’s a very useful metric for deciding if something or someone is a legitimate source of critique. Metacritic has a whole methodology to its scoring that includes more heavily weighting the reviews of certain critics. Not sure what their formula is, but it is an indication that there are varying levels of credibility in the world.

I've acknowledged multiple times that studios do shady stuff. What is the effect of early access, junkets, etc.? We can turn to one of the articles posted earlier. A ratings shift of half a star doesn’t scream “shining a turd” to me. And early access isn’t bribery to me, either. YMMV. “That study acknowledged there was influence and concluded that the result was typically a small rating shift, maybe half a star and/or a delay of 1-3 days for a negative review to be released. The conclusions of that article stated this: “The implication is not that the reviews are grossly inaccurate, on average, but I think as a consumer, you should probably rely on more than one reviewing outlet if you’re making a consumption decision,” says Waguespack."

This is not at all what’s being suggested. The point as it’s been expressed multiple titles has nothing, literally nothing to do with fake reviews. It has to do with whether or not REPUTABLE CRITICS writing for MAJOR OUTLETS have been bribed to write positive reviews. That is it. Everything else is a misreading of what has been written. The entire reason this was even brought up was the suggestion that random internet critics aren’t great sources of information. The exact kind of random internet critics who did in fact receive bribes. These are not the same thing. Some people have inferred that because a bunch of nobodies got paid for positive reviews, then the entire profession is suspect. But those people have not yet been able to produce any examples that prove their belief, so a belief is all it is. Then those people assume that if you don’t share that belief, you must believe that all critics are infallible. There is no in between; you can’t believe that internet randos and Owen Glieberman operate differently. I can understand how it’s hard to follow the logic. Because there isn’t any.

Lol yes, they are. What point do you think you’re making?

It’s not even that deep, it’s basic reading comprehension. ”Can you show me one time that a film critic at a major outlet was bribed?” ”Yes, here is a fake film critic who sent blurbs to a local newspaper, and here is a bunch of unknown Rotten Tomatoes critics being paid off for $50 each.”

lol I’m not going to take the time to point out how much stuff you just made up; anyone who can read can see it. Enjoy your bubble of assumed truths. EDIT: removed some stuff because there’s no point responding to someone who either cannot read or who lives in a different reality. Ta.

First post on page six of this thread. And nobody has disagreed that studios do shady things, or that sites like Rotten Tomatoes are full of sketchy people. The disagreement is about legitimate film critics being bribed, and the complete lack of evidence of this ever happening. That is all. Nobody has said critics are uncompromisable saints. When someone says “X happens all the time” but can’t produce one example, that’s a belief. I’m not questioning anyone’s belief system, but I’m also not going to take it at face value.

That is not what we are talking about. We are talking specifically about movie studios paying for positive reviews. At no point was this about the general concept of “posting false information”. I don’t understand why it’s easier to shift the goal posts than just say, “well I don’t have any evidence other than what I’ve already posted, you’ll just have to take my word for it”.