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I think this was well directed and acted but I feel like the writing didn’t get to the heart of anything. Certainly partly by design as everyone is mostly sort of obliquely talking at each other, but even when it’s supposed to be something direct and real, I never quite connected with the characters. Well, actually, about the direction, I’m not sure how to feel about the last few tennis sequences that got into player first-person and ball POV shots. Audacious and weird but also a little off-putting.

Because I was directly replying to you.

Then that someone just needs to buy a few million tickets then. Norrin Radd hasn’t even sustained an ongoing Silver Surfer comic in two decades, not even with the recognition bump from the second FF movie. In 2014, say, the bottom of the top 100 per month did about 30k issues sold to stores. And not all issues even get sold. Marvel Studios makes blockbusters that have to appeal to everyone. Trading away 10-30k fans to win millions more is absolutely the right choice every time. Black Panther 2 did $181m in its domestic opening weekend. That’s conservatively over 10m tickets sold. Again, that’s just domestic opening weekend, not total worldwide gross. Marvel cannot spend nine figures making these movies to prioritize a fan base that’s literally less than a tenth of one percent of the audience size they’re aiming for.

It totally makes sense that there's a lot of bootleg Deborah Vance merch. Aw no, a protagonist finding a ring right before a big vacation in the second episode of a comedy show's season usually isn't a good thing. =( .... Holy shit, I guessed it wasn't a real engagement ring, but it's a crummy prop from a CW show? That's really funny. Why aren't Deborah's new writers working on finding her a story for going on Late Night? Why is it Damien? ... eh, I don't love her manufacturing an anecdote, but whatever. (BTW, I learned earlier that Carrot Top had a hugely lucrative Vegas residency in real life, so it makes sense in this world that she knows Mr Top.) I like the sudden guest host gig. And how terribly the writers room went before Ava swooped in to save the day. Any show that uses "Shaft in Africa (Addis)" as a musical cue has unimpeachable taste. Oh wow, what a great trick shot with Deb's younger self in the mirror. (I mean more as a great touch than as a virtuoso trick.) And it looks like Deb's guest hosting was fantastic. (Super tangentially related, Adam Pally once did an incredible and incredibly weird turn as a guest host for the Late Late show when a blizzard shut down NYC.) I figured Ava and Ruby would hit some serious disagreements re Deb starting from when Ava lied about how her car crash happened. But oof. The Etsy fan (Ezekiel) was played Guy Braunum, who's also a writer on this show.

What a phenomenal opening shot: drone fly-in to a seamless transition to handheld. Was that transition done entirely real or with some CG stitching? Also, terrific fake out. I don't know why I didn't think the camera staying deliberately behind "Deborah" for so long wasn't going to lead to a fake out. Between her little pop-in show and the stylist, it looks like the problem for Deborah at the start of the season is she's surrounded by yes-men, even among comedy audiences and not just her employees. Oh hey, wunder kid Silas is back! I actually quite enjoy all the flailing Jimmy gets up to in general, and I like taking the show to JFL. I figured at first that guy Jimmy and Kayla was aiming to sign probably sucked, cause it's a red flag they missed his show (and apparently didn't try to catch up by watching some clips on their phones). ... But it turned out he doesn't suck, he's just not going to be a long term client. Is "On the Contrary" directly a swipe at Hasan Minhaj's show, or more of a pastiche of a bunch of politically minded comedy talk shows? I wonder how long till Deborah hires Ava back. Gotta be soon. I feel like a year is about as long as a stand-up can ride the wave of one comedy special. Maybe two if they're a superstar, and Deborah's blown the first year having developed basically no new material. Also, I really liked Ava quoting Deborah's "it never stops being hard" speech from s1.

THR: How Many Showrunners Does It Take to Write a Hit Comedy?

In 616, Hank was a bit abusive too. Apparently it was a miscommunication in the process -- Jim Shooter wrote a different thing than what Bob Hall drew: But anyways, that's where the seed of the idea was planted that got much worse in the Ultimate universe. (A deeper dive into the whole thing here. CW that pages of the very upsetting Ultimate Comics version is also included.) Also in Cap 3, Cap, Bucky, and Black Panther all run down the highway at highway speeds, which is easily at least twice what Usain Bolt hits at his max speed in the 100m. Actually, I think you could make a case MCU Cap was "peak human" up to and including Cap 2 and then the writers quietly gave him and all the super soldiers a huge power boost in Cap 3. Still low tier compared to the heavy hitters of the MCU, but well into superhuman range.

They are effectively zero. A rounding error. The gap between nonzero and "worth influencing a critical casting decision" can be extremely large. Did you... just make up something and not even put fake numbers to it? What if I said instead X goes up? Who's gonna be right? I want to see a statistically sound survey, not you or I making up something that fits with our pre-existing biases.

But he wasn’t! Tony Stark in the comics before 2008 was a billionaire genius playboy drunk, sure, but the wisecracking — the personality — was invented for the movie. Someone had a good take that there really hadn’t been a funny live-action Spider-Man by 2008, the guy who cracks jokes at his enemies’ expense while fighting them, so Marvel Studios basically took that aspect of comics Peter Parker and gave it to MCU Tony Stark. And obviously RDJ was aces at playing that. It was a great character but it wasn’t really comic-accurate*. Really, Tony at that point was a B-list hero in the Marvel Comics stable partly because he didn’t have that much of a personality. And considering Marvel Studios and RDJ never wanted to fully adapt “Demon in a Bottle”, the alcoholism story that’s one of the biggest classics of the Iron Man lore**, they had to figure out some other thing for Tony to be, so… they made him be this guy. * ok, I suppose there was an aspect of flippant rule-breaker in the Ultimate Universe version of Tony. But 616 Tony wasn’t like that. ** I mean, it’s basically his origin, Demon in a Bottle, and Armor Wars.

Bleeding Cool liveblog from Disney's presentation at CinemaCon. The Marvel bits: Fantastic Four and Thunderbolts* will both be shot entirely in IMAX Thunderbolts* will include the asterisk as part of the official title. Marvel will not explain the asterisk until the movie has been released. Deadpool will get a special popcorn bucket

Well, there was this sort of vague haze overall, but then Endgame really made things super concrete that Avengers 1 happened in 2012, and so on. @Kel Varnsen there's already a lot of precedent for actors playing younger in the MCU. Simu Liu was 30-31 at the time of filming Shang-Chi and I'm pretty sure the character is explicitly 24 in the movie. But to go back to his earliest showbiz days as a stock photo model, he didn't really age that much from his early 20s to 31.

That was a one time fluke. AM1’s rules (per Hank, I know, unreliable source) we’re that the QR was inescapable. That’s why Scott’s move at the end was such a heroic sacrifice: he did the right thing at great cost to himself. Then he proved that Hank was wrong and the QR could be escaped but even so, Janet was still stuck there and she’s as smart as Hank and had the same tech. So then the modified rules in AM2 were that the QR is barely escapable under the right circumstances, which our heroes barely manage in order to save Janet. And then in AM3 the rules are further expanded to say that the QR drifts in and out of synch with the main universe, so sometimes it’s more possible than other times. It’s still difficult to escape — I forget what reverse-the-polarity nonsense justified it for Cassie, Hank, and Janet, tbh. Also, the whole thing from the end of AM2 to Endgame was that Scott couldn’t escape at will. That’s why he involuntarily rode out the five year gap in the QR.

Well, the whole thing was that Kang was cut off from his powers in the Quantum Realm too. It may well be that Kang’s not particularly good at martial arts since time powers (as seen with He Who Remains) is a cheat code to life. And the story needed Ant-Man to win. If Kang escaped, then (1) Ant-man doesn’t get a win and (2) story-wise, the MCU would have to go straight into Kang’s endgame, when this was just his introduction. I really think half the reason Marvel execs thought Quantumania was a “banger” is because they were so deep in its development that they remembered all the cut or altered scenes, even when watching later cuts that took out or altered vital pieces. The broad outlines of some really compelling stuff was there, but the execution just blew. Cassie doesn’t have an arc, and Scott’s arc is there but under-executed. And the final heroic sacrifice — Scott wins a sort of Pyhrric victory by trapping Kang and himself in the QR forever — is immediately undone as the movie breaks its own rules to rescue Scott seconds later. To me, these things suggest there was a better movie in there lost in editing, though maybe in the script development stage. I don’t mean to say there’s enough shot footage to cut together a better movie as much as I mean the script had unmet potential.

Yes, we already talked about this article three weeks ago. It's on this very page near the top.

The show was in Netflix’s top ten for English language shows for five weeks, per Deadline. I don’t understand how Netflix made a show that lasted on its top 10 for five weeks (esp considering its binge drop model) and then just cancelled it instead of seeing that as a success to build on.