KnightWing

Take an... anti-shot?

This, basically.

Just got a Wii U; my Nintendo Network ID is EchoLeader.

I see what you did there.

Lucy came well after Iron Man 2.

Shhhh... don't tell Warner Bros.

If you mean besides Thor and Star-Lord, sure.

This photo of Justin Lin is pretty hilarious.

I liked it a fair bit. Probably my second favorite Christmas special after A Christmas Carol.

I'd rather have Justin Lin as director than Edgar Wright, as weird as that sounds to say out loud.

Um... well... he knows how to handle a stupidly intricate mythology, that's for sure.

Given how lame that "Legolas, you must go and seek out Aragorn a young ranger" bit was, I kind of doubt it would have been good. But it might have made the Hobbit movies themselves better by virtue of being trimmed down, so maybe.

Totally.

It really sucks. Normally when people ask me where to start with Lord of the Rings, I say that the easiest and best way is to start with the extended cuts of the LOTR films, then read the books afterward. If they're heavy reader-types then I reverse those. But with The Hobbit, I'm seriously just going to say to skip the movies altogether. Unlike the LOTR films, which did a great job of expressing the main ideas of the books in a dramatic fashion, the Hobbit movies add nothing good that wasn't already there.* *Except the "Misty Mountains" song/theme in the first movie; that was pretty great. But the lyrics of it were already in the book, so...

That actually bothered me. There's no basis in the fiction for her going "dark" like that, other than her speech in Lorien where she says that if she took the ring, she would then become an evil queen. It was neat in the FOTR film to visually illustrate it with her transforming, but to actually take it a step further in this one and show her turning dark on her own, without the ring's influence, was too much. Galadriel is actually known as one of the most righteous and pure characters in Tolkien's legendarium; having her turn dark not only contradicts the morality of magic (which is a huge deal in LOTR), but it's honestly just a reference to something that happened only in the movies anyway.

This is a really fun look back at Series 8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbyVmJIv3kY

The Silmarillion would actually be amazing if they ever had the chance to do it. It would have the opposite problem of The Hobbit, that being that there's actually too much story content to deal with—which would put it in a similar position to the LOTR films. The thing is that the film rights to The Silmarillion still rest with the Tolkien estate, and they've been adamant about holding onto them.

About $40 mil, which is probably less than what the hack cost them. They might not want to risk playing with fire, especially if they won't get back a ton of money from box office profits now anyway.

Well, I mean, I always feel like when there's more story to come, there's always room to be optimistic for where things are going. But this was the last one, so... yeah. Just read the book instead.

Saw the third movie tonight. My general reaction is, "eh, whatever." It was one thing to have the last two movies feel like incomplete stories that were just "there," but now that it's all said and done... I think when I recommend The Hobbit to people I'll just tell them to read the book.

At this point, I actually prefer Tom Kane's Yoda from The Clone Wars to Oz's Yoda from the prequels. Something about Oz's performance really changed between the trilogies, and not for the better. It could have been a choice, but it might not have been. Tom Kane said that for The Clone Wars, George Lucas specifically asked him to play Yoda "like Empire Yoda" rather than match Oz's prequel-era Yoda voice.

300 mil is a gigantic budget if it doesn't include marketing. But if it does, then the real budget is probably only $150-$200 mil or so, which is par for the course.

If that includes marketing then that makes sense.

I could go and give counter-points to all of that, but I feel like at this point we're basically playing tennis and no one is winning. I guess my point is that if you're going to look for plot holes, it's only fair to apply the same amount of thinking into figuring out why those holes might not be holes in the first place. There's actually an argument to be made that if they spent time explaining other characters' absences—Rhodey is in Afghanistan; Cap is busy with SHIELD on the West Coast; Hulk is busy trying not to have a breakdown in an alley somewhere; Hawkeye is busy writing his book, "I MATTER TOO"—that might be a disservice to the films themselves.

I think Batman has enough varying interpretations that it's possible to never really stop making Batman movies, TV shows, and games so long as they don't use the exact same version every time. I think Spider-Man's problem is more that the movies themselves haven't been well-made in all the ways they need to be. I agree about the X-men crossover causing problems, but then that's always a problem with X-Men in the Marvel universe. There's a ton of super-powered beings but somehow only the mutants are hated. There's in-universe reasons, of course, but none of them are quite good enough. It's why X-Men usually works best on its own. But I don't really think that Avengers has caused any real logic holes in the solo films, and it wouldn't be a problem for Spider-Man either. Out of all the Avengers, Thor is really the only one you'd expect to show up randomly whenever he's needed (being a massively powerful god with a teleport bridge and all), but he's been busy in Asgard. Iron Man isn't going to show up all the time, especially since he blew up all his suits in Iron Man 3. But he still did have an influence on Cap 3, what with the repulsors on the helicarriers and Maria hill joining Stark Industries. Hawkeye... honestly, in the MCU, can you imagine anyone going, "We need help... SOMEONE CALL HAWKEYE!"? It woulda been nice if they'd mentioned his whereabouts in Cap 2, but it's hardly a plot hole. Black Widow actually did show up in Cap 2, so there's that. Cap himself is busy with SHIELD. He could have conceivably helped Tony out in Iron Man 3, but they're not exactly friends and Tony seemed to want to handle everything himself. As for why Spider-Man wasn't in the Battle of New York? Well, for one thing, that battle was localized to a single area in the city ("Anything gets more than three blocks out, you turn it back or you turn it to ash!") and didn't last for very long. Maybe Peter was in Queens at the time and didn't get over there; maybe he was grieving for Gwen at the time. Hell, the United States military didn't even show up, nor did anyone from SHIELD. I'd be really happy if they just had Marvel take over the current Spider-Man movie series. It's been close enough to the comics' storyline anyway that it shouldn't matter. They can just tell new stories at this point and it would all work out fine.