TServo2049

Oh, and as to a Lego Batman movie...I dunno. The general audience will probably like it, but there was very little new to the Lego Batman parody to me - in retrospect, it feels like a ton of comic geek/Internet humor (Robot Chicken, I'm a Marvel/I'm a DC, even Atop the Fourth Wall) had already covered the same ground. And actually, Lego Harry Potter would be funny, on one condition: They get Neil Cicierega to write it as a big-budget Potter Puppet Pals movie that substitutes Lego for puppets. And he does all the voices too. I'd see that.

Following up on my speculation on the Star Wars deal, turns out Phil Lord confirmed back in February that the talks with Lucasfilm were done before the Disney sale. Lord quipped that if it had been after, it would have led to "so many lawyers in one room." So even if they still have a legacy agreement to use SW in some capacity in the future, I think it's safe to say that neither Disney/Marvel nor Warner themselves will EVER agree to any kind of deal to put Marvel characters in a movie featuring DC characters and produced by a division of DC's parent company. Steven Spielberg had to move mountains to get Disney and WB to agree to their cartoon characters appearing together in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and there were all sorts of restrictions and compromises made (like Michael Eisner objecting to Porky Pig being the last character seen onscreen, leading to the Tinkerbell cameo). And that was in 1988. And neither Mickey, Donald and co. nor Bugs/Daffy/etc. had billion-dollar "cinematic universe" feature film franchises in direct competition with one another. So as to any hopes of DC/Marvel crossing over in LEGO form, never happening. There's no use even entertaining the hope of it.

About $440M? (BOM had it at $438.4 because - from what TalismanRing said - Fox International also counts Puerto Rico even though it's a U.S. territory that's also counted in domestic. BOM or their source - ERC? - always subtracted PR out of any OS totals which counted it.) Probably won't make it to $450 - though it has outgrossed Up overseas (not sure how big the 3D take was on that). In USD, HTTYD2 did better than Up in quite a few markets, the reason they're only even is probably because Up did much better in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain (probably due to Spain's economic woes, the only post-2009 films to have USD totals higher than Up's $37M were Lo Imposible and Ochos Apellidos Vascos.) Up also did a bit better in the Scandinavian territories, Portugal, Israel and Hong Kong. And Up made $51M in Japan and BOM didn't have China data, but HTTYD2 made $65M in China and still hasn't released in Japan, so those probably cancel each other out. Either way, still a bit underwhelming - the bright side is that it expanded so much from the first in most markets. (And the fact that it's performing on the level of stuff like the first Kung Fu Panda and The Croods makes me wonder if in some respects, this is playing more like a first installment than a sequel, setting up for an increase next time...though probably not as big of an increase as this one had over the first.)

Honestly, IMDB should have never branched out from being a movie data site. That's all it needed to be, I never used anything else on that site. I'd rather have a bunch of little sites that each do one thing well than one huge site that tries to do everything and sucks at everything.

I don't think any of us will sleep tonight.

I had no idea they ever had that; I've had several situations where I've wanted to be able to set up my own showdowns.

I'm thinking that if the worst predictions come true, this could possibly trigger a substantial backlash in Hollywood.

I loved the adjusting tool also, that's probably what I'll miss most. (And it doesn't work on archive.org)

Um...they've owned it for six years. So they'd be buying it to eliminate competition, yet only be getting rid of it NOW?

dp

This thread is a case study in the five stages of grief.

Maybe one of them will set up a new site. I can imagine some people in the industry itself are upset about this. ^CrispyLips And who's to say IMDB didn't like BOM in 2008? Maybe there were sane people there back then who aren't there now (IMDB hadn't metastatized to the same degree it has now).

Col Needham, the IMDB founder, is a nice enough guy from what I saw of him on the Contributors Help boards. I can't imagine he'd have had anything to do with any decision to kill BOM (or anything else stupid that IMDB has done). If the wild speculation is true, it's probably down to the executives at Amazon.

I got Columbus Day off for a couple of grades, then it just stopped (though I honestly can't remember when). I definitely know that by the time I was in high school, the public school system around here was not letting us out. From the reaction of disgust I got from another student when I mused about how we never got Columbus Day off anymore, I am willing to bet that the stuff you mentioned is exactly WHY public schools around here (San Francisco Bay Area) don't observe it as a school holiday. I know that the studios used to actually report it as a 4-day weekend, but some time in the 90s (still before daily numbers were widely available) they stopped doing so. (EDIT: I just pulled up BOM on archive.org - 1995 was the last year that Columbus Day wknd was reported as a 4-day.)

Knowing the long production time for animated features, I'm willing to bet that WB made the deal with Lucasfilm to use the Star Wars characters in The Lego Movie some time before Disney bought them. So I'm sure they wouldn't be able to get a similar deal for the Marvel stuff.

I think so, yes. There are a ton of archives of BOM, so a ton of redundancies, so the historical data can probably be salvaged.

Either that is evidence that the site is not dead...or that IMDb swept in out of nowhere yesterday, fired everyone and shut the site down without any prior notice.

Well at least it doesn't lead back to the charts page again. That's SOMETHING. (Though of course the BOM Twitter feed has been dead silent for the past 24 hours too.)

The cast/crew info is still unparalleled, when the info is legit, accurate and complete. (I should know, I worked my butt off watching obscure movies/TV and copying down credits, and was actually the #1 contributor in 2008.) Of course, I have nowhere near the time I used to (life got in the way), but even if IMDB has turned to crap in some ways, the original core element of cast/crew is still there amid all the garbage that has been built around it.

I want to believe that, but nobody has said anything. And when there is no actual info, rumors will always pour in to fill the void. Sean Saulsbury being skeptical is the only nugget of anything. Maybe someone SHOULD check the headers...

Yeah, I think some are assuming it means he got fired?

Why does anyone automatically assume it will be made pay? I mean, it could certainly happen, but why is it that people automatically jumped to that conclusion without us ever getting any confirmation that the site was even being shut down?

We still don't know anything. At all.

Just remembering when IMDB redesigned their credit/filmography pages on two separate occasions. The contributors' forum went insane on both occasions. First time they walked it back quickly, second time they allowed members to opt out of parts of it (though eventually they took away the legacy versions of the movie pages, except for Combined Details; thankfully, they haven't taken away the ability to view the old filmography style, and that was quite a few years ago). Oh, and I just recall when they rolled the Help board into GetSatisfaction, and dragged their feet on explaining that, no, the Contributors Help board was NOT also going to be shut down and replaced by GetSatisfaction. They could have averted the shitstorm by just telling everyone quickly, but they were eerily silent for a bit, even though the truth ended up being contrary to the rumors. So yes, I can believe that IMDB would change something without notice, and/or take too long to come forward and explain themselves before the rumors and accusations start flying.