OncomingStorm93

Landau says the following: "What I think the Alita Army should do is keep peppering our family now at Disney and [let them know] how important it is to have another Alita movie and hopefully we'll venture there one day." So if your best case scenario involves being loud and holding out hope, that doesn't inspire confidence.

Good trailer. Seems like a true crowd pleaser, rather than anything superficially pretentious.

I think it’s a safe assumption that the trailer will debut in front of the convention crowd on the 7th

Right, and Simon Kinberg told Kennedy that Josh Trank was the next visionary, and someone told Kennedy to give the space-western smuggler origin story to animation comedy legends Lord/Miller. So this defeats the argument that there was a long-term plan for the Sequel Trilogy from the onset.

Then why on earth did Lucasfilm hire Colin in the first place? Same reason they hired Josh Trank and Lord/Miller? Lucasfilm clearly has issues being on the same page as their creative talent.

It doesn't matter that JJ got to revisit the ideas he had five years prior, because he wasn't planning on using those ideas anyway. Rian did his own thing. Colin was going to do his own thing. Disney didn't like Colin's thing, so they ditched him and brought back JJ, who, being put on a tight clock to produce this film, resorted to unused concepts from TFA. JJ doesn't get bonus points for 'planning everything from the start' when neither of the directors chosen to follow him up were going to use that blueprint.

Finally WB delays GvK. It was always a horrible idea to release it 10 months after GoTM (even if KotM was, somehow, as big a success as G'14). This was one of the most obvious delay candidates in the history of potentially delayed blockbusters.

On Palps returning: "Well, when you look at this as nine chapters of a story, perhaps the weirder thing would be if Palpatine didn’t return... But when Larry Kasdan and I worked on The Force Awakens, we didn’t do it in a vacuum... So there were discussions about that at the time... And then when Rian was brought on to do The Last Jedi, we met and we talked about things and he wrote his story. And when I read it the script, I realized this didn’t get in the way of anything Larry and I talked about that I thought I’d get to." I love how JJ planned to eventually bring Palps back, despite not committing to the franchise beyond TFA, and letting Rian & Colin do whatever they please. We know Colin wasn't going to use Palps, he said so last week. So JJ is completely talking about his ass when he says Palps returning was "the plan" from TFA.

Damn, they must have cut Tom Hardy's cameo again!

There's a James Bond film coming out in five months? Actually, the non-marketing to date isn't out of the ordinary. First teaser for Skyfall was almost exactly five months before release. From what I can tell, teaser for QoS was about 4 1/2 months before release.

Threat title needs updating.... RT down to 96%

I would argue that Aladdin turned it around after opening weekend, with great WOM. Aladdin's 3.9x multiplier (for the 3 day opening; 4 day holiday opening multiplier was 3.1) is far greater than that of Lion King (2.8) and Beauty and the Beast (2.9). Better than Jungle Book's 3.5x as well.

Regarding the budget, given the very nature of the movie (people are cats), every single frame needs CGI. Every single character on screen at all times will be CGI'd. That's not going to be cheap. Even the past two Avengers films had a couple scenes that didn't need special effects. Additionally, filming only wrapped back in April, and there were reports a few weeks ago that the film wouldn't be ready for early December awards screenings, so clearly the studio has been rushing to get the effects finished. And rushing to finish effects involves throwing more money at the problem. So while I highly doubt it's as high as the reported $300m figure, I would not be surprised at all to learn that the budget is over $200m.