Porthos

More seriously: Also have to admit I flat out did NOT expect to see that sort of detail regarding Project Necromancer. Though in retrospect it makes perfect sense. And in fact casts an interesting light on

Bruh

This is exactly what I mean, BTW. If Peltz has said something milquetoast like "Feige is getting overworked/overextended" or "Feige should get back to what he does best and stay focused on a few projects" or similar mealy mouthed things where folks could have applied their own internal thoughts after hearing a dog whistle or three, he would have been in a better position. But he didn't. Peltz attacked literally THE MOST SUCCESSFUL STUDIO HEAD IN HOLLYWOOD OF THE LAST FIFTY YEARS. That... That wasn't wise. IMNSHO. You may feel differently, natch. But put me in Team Unwise.

Did you read the article? For one thing, they got nearly $60m from the UK. Now the article notes it doesn't mention how much it spend on promotion, but it also mentions that it doesn't now how much it made on PVOD/physical sales. Mind there is an awful lot of commentary sprinkled throughout the article, especially when it gets to the board fight at the end. But the not-small amount of money from the UK is in fact part of the equation here.

One last thing. The scary/unsettling/irritating thing isn't that Peltz felt comfortable enough saying inanely bigoted stuff like he did. The scary/unsettling/irritating thing is... enough major shareholders are/were willing to overlook such things and back him anyway. In the end, I have no idea how much it actually cost him. Maybe he was "always" going to lose. But the fact that the CalPERSs of the world still said "Wellll, Iger doesn't have a succession plan in place so let's shake things up/bring in new views!" isn't exactly great news, either. Or rather, no matter how lopsided it eventually is, it shouldn't have been that close.

Okay, not entirely fair. But not entirely unfair, either. Alright, without going into politics too much (and I have to go into it somewhat), one of trends in self-consumption of media is epistemic closure where folks wall themselves off from, let's call them "competing points of view", and regularly consume a diet of news and opinion tailored to one's tastes. This can lead to a feedback loop of accelerated/hardened views where... well I'll spare the thread from analogies, but the last decade or so of social trends in the US are full of them On the right, so called anti-diversity, anti-"woke", anti-liberal social politics has been running rampant. Most nakedly bigoted, some less so. Again, I'll spare the thread from them. But if one is constantly marinating in a Culturally Right Wing Bubble, then knowing when to shut the fuck up (or at least when to play the nuance/dog whistle card) becomes... less clear. Or you feel more comfortable in revealing who you really are. Or have become. So let's take Peltz's statements. He wouldn't have nearly gotten into as much trouble if he channeled South Park and stopped at the "why do we need all women films"/so-called "forced diversity" critique. It would have been just as bad. Sadly, he probably would have been able to get away with it. If he threw the LGBTQ+ community under the bus (or more accurately, actively shoved them into oncoming traffic) even more so. Would have been nakedly partisan, but... Well we live in very partisan times right now. But. He. Couldn't. Stop. That's part of the whole problems with sealing one's self into a bubble. You have no idea how it's going to sound outside of the bubble. Like, take attacking by implication Black Panther. Folks who have observed the overall temperament of places like Twitter over the last couple of years wouldn't be surprised to see Some Big Name Oligarch spouting off about all-Black casts. It fits right in with a whole host of grievance-based politics that have been getting more prominent ever since the mid to late '00s. That he just happened to attack one of *THE* most successful films of the last six years? Well, this is one of the things that can happen when one seals oneself off. Can make similar observations about his attacks on Kevin Feige. But long post is long, so I'll spare the thread. In the end, Peltz either forgot who he was talking to, didn't care who he was talking to, or was spouting off about how unfair to white males anti-good business diversity in entertainment [allegedly] is. He tried to play the "keep politics out of movie making" card. Instead, he played the "keep *MY* [socio-]politics in *MY* movies" card. Why? Once again: ======= That too. But I wanted to explore a bit How We Got Here.

Not the same type of horror, but one could also see this with M3GAN. Absolutely took off like a rocket when it had unexpectedly great reviews very late in the pre-sale cycle. Of course, M3GAN was also pretty meme-y and had a fairly clever social media rollout. But I personally think the stellar RT scores absolutely were a massive shot in the arm, even in the context of the horror genre.

The reason they might not exist is because your very setup is likely very hard to reach. The ratings systems which you hold to here, BY DEFINITION will never be able to have re-appraisals because it'll always have those older ratings as "votes". Only if you have a breakdown of ratings by year could you really see such movement. And I'm not about to do your homework for you by looking through IMDB or other things to see what sort of options I can glean there. You're also mixing a soft analysis (alleged contemporary feelings to things like The Thing) versus an alleged set of hard data points with contemporary films. That is not a like-for-like comparison. Hell, Rotten Tomatoes isn't even set up for re-appraisals, so why would we even use it as a barometer for that sort of thing? I will allow that IMDB is more time sensitive as folks can add to it at any time. But it still has the weight of history on it. I would also note this has very little to do with social media and everything to do with ratings aggregators. If you want to complain about how rating aggregators can freeze things in amber, that's a whole different discussion. But then again, people don't tend to use RT as a current guide as to how a movie is seen, but more of a "how critics saw it at the time", Still, all of this is wildly offtopic. But this smacks of goal post moving and I wanted to make my objections noted.

This is the inherent problem with even looking too deeply at this idea, as just what qualifies as "more/less liked than before" when we have so many more voices now critiquing things. Like, take Gladiator. Might have had some "meh" reviews, but it won Best Picture that year! The acting was similarly acclaimed. Not just eventual Best Actor winner Russell Crowe, but just about the entire damn cast was given glowing reviews from what I remember at the time. But it's also kinda a fuzzy thing. Just exactly when did It's a Wonderful Life cross over from being a mostly "eh" 1940s film to a perennial classic? How many times did folks have to see it while growing up before it shifted? Can anyone actually pinpoint an era, never mind year, when everybody just looked around and said, "Okay, yeah. That's a classic!" Or take the more modern example of Shawshank Redemption. Got glowing reviews at the time, and the public more or less ignored it. How many times, exactly, was it on TNT/TBS before people turned Shawshank into SHAWSHANK! On the flip side, there have been some Oscar winners which have so fallen out of favor that we look back on them now and wonder "just what were they thinking". Not gonna name names, as this thread is already getting somewhat derailed, but it's re-examining some of the Oscar winners of the last twenty years that was forefront on my mind when I said things get re-examined positively and negatively.

... Well, if I actually liked horror, that is (I actually can't stand it). But considering Event Horizon might be the closest thing we ever get to WH40k... that actually sounds interesting. Event Horizon is kinda sorta the exact sort of thing I could see being made into some thing intriguing in Long Form storytelling. ETA::: Going down some rabbit holes and I see that.... Amazon has rights to WH40k?!?

Not even gonna make this a DM as I think it's good General Advice for trackers. I really like that you're sampling more outside of the Twin Cities Metro area. I think you might be surprised at how much the exurbs/outlying areas will fluctuate for given movies, even if judging on a smaller scale. I know that after observing the patterns a while it gave me a decent feeling which films might be more Middle America and which films might be more urban and which might be somewhere inbetween. It also gave me a sense of breakout potential if I saw a theater that normally sells, oh say 20 tickets total for a given genre sell 30 or 40 instead. After watching them long enough, even gave me a sense of sub-genre appeals. Spreading them out enough also let me smooth out most of the outliers if any one particular small theater was relatively over (or under) performing. You might already have a sense of this of course if you've already been keeping an eye on them. But in general, love this. Just... as is always my #1 Piece of Advice: Don't bite off more than you can chew. 🙂

I don't think there's any such thing, is another part of the problem. What there is is just enough people to say "Hey, this film/tv show/whatever" is actually good to reach a level of critical mass where it becomes self-sustaining. Relatedly, where social media comes in is that there really isn't much of a thing as "consensus" anymore. Or at least, it's not as easily reached. What can happen is if someone becomes (re)popular later in the career it can give an incentive to check out their earlier work. To give an example, Keanu Reeves getting popular again recent years led to some reappraisals of some of his lesser known works. Constantine is one that is cited as something that is looked on more fondly now than when it was released, but personally I'm waiting for the day when people discover the brilliance of A Scanner Darkly. But I suspect that one might just be too far out there for most and thus it will probably be forever a lesser-known entry in his filmography. ==== All of this is getting pretty massively off topic, so to preclude a frowny face from mods, I'll consider the posts I made above as my stance on the subject and try to stay away from a tennis volley of back and forth on the subject.

Part of the problem here is... it takes time for things to be re-assessed, positively and negatively. [NB: I AM ***INTENTIONALLY*** staying away from things that have been negatively reassessed as well as Franchise Entries as I don't want to derail the thread] The other part of the problem is the decline of the multichannel bundle and the rise of the streaming package. With multichannel, it was easier to find things randomly on a cable channel somewhere and just sit and watch it. With streaming, unless the Almighty Algorithm finds something for you, you have to go searching for Lost Gems. Anyway, if you want a somewhat specious look at things, I will note that the list over at TV Tropes for Vindicated by History isn't exactly short for the 2000's. I personally disagree with a lot of them (hence my not listing many of them)... but, again: It. Takes. Time. To reassess things. Nearly by definition. I even feel kinda icky including Edge of Tomorrow as that was a case of a very rapid "Whooops, our bad". But I do think it might be the classic case of recent reappraisal. Hell even a certain film from 20*19*, which shall go nameless to stick to my No Franchise Entry rule, has already been reappraised by some — which would seem to run counter to one of your central points about how films will never ever be reappraised thanks to social media.

Speed Racers Done. Also Edge of Tomorrow. Also done. (could throw in Interstellar, but that's more of an edge case of "more appreciated" now than when released)

I.... I do not agree with this thesis. Like, at all. (reappraisal still goes on in both directions, as far as I am concerned)

Y'all have probably got at least a couple of more years of this to look forward to. Hope you enjoy it! 👍

Because people are pissed the fuck off about 2023. That's really it. Sure some are pointing to the lack of a succession plan for Iger (this was CalPERS's fig leaf, ftr). But in the end, they have memories about how dominant Disney was in 2019 and are upset that Disney isn't in a similar place right now. Year-to-year gains don't matter as much when one is competing with all time highs of the somewhat recent past. something something Knock Off The Subtext Porthos something something

Cutting out a lot of the above, but... the main problem with the thesis here is... "they". Who are the "they"? Paul Feig, who wanted to make GB2016? The suits who greenlit it? Producers along the line? Like the central problem to all of this is, the folks who were most integral in the success of the OG GB didn't really want to make a third GB/agree how to make it. And then the person who did want to make a new one and convinced Sony to shell out the money for it wasn't interested in the above scenario. In the end, nearly all of the "problems" with the GB franchise can be laid at the feet of the folks involved in the first not really wanting to do more. That really is a near unsurmountable problem. The rest of the problems can be laid at the feet of folks who just can not let Culture War Catnip go by untouched. (I'd note that it's been nearly EIGHT YEARS since GB2016 and folks are still fighting over it, but then again SW fandom is still feuding about the special editions/prequels so just this is kinda nothing in the grand scheme of things) You're begging me to post the "Tell 'im Wash" clip, aren't you? 😉 I mean, hell, you're not even asking for a "good" script but a "great" one. I get what you're saying, but at the same time projects tend to wind up in development hell for a reason and it's far easier said than done to escape it. Barbie and Andor have proven you can escape development hell. A whole long list of projects also show that time is only one part of the equation. Plus it's not exactly like GBFE (or GBA) could count on 25 years worth of tinkered scripts.

"Porthos beat me to it."

Oh, I see you noted as well that CalPERS backed Peltz. ==== Jokes about CalPERS fiscal intelligence aside, the very fact that some of the CalPERS of the financial world are lining up behind Peltz should give folks pause about how much of a slam dunk this is gonna be. Might be close, might not. But I do think the Trades are right when they note that right now it looks closer than it did even a couple of weeks ago.

Oh, I think it is very related to the above observation. It's just in this case "people hating on Alex Garland" for not engaging in Culture War Churn and therefore concluding that his movie will be milquetoast/uncontroversial/timid. Personally, as I said, I would wait to see just what the movie delivers before concluding it "has nothing to say" or indeed isn't any offering any commentary on Modern Society/Politics, implicit or otherwise.

But I repeat myself. (or to put it another way, the issue folks have isn't with Civil War per se, it's with Other People Holding Bad Wrong Opinions Who Must Be Fought On the Intrawebs)

Now this is an interesting addition to all the variables, isn't it? Toyed with alluding to it in my post but decided against it. But on the other hand it is interesting to note as well that some of the voices on social media that were... let's say eager to jump on the discourse surrounding Joker back in 2019 are now posting Joker themed gifs themselves. Another way to put it is that while Joker 2 once again becoming a social media socioeconomic football is all too real of a possibility, if only because some folks on social media have the impulse control of a kitten hopped up on catnip laced with speed, the memeification of the Arthur Fleck Joker can't be denied. The power walk through the hallway post-donning makeup and the dancing on the steps are two large viral moments but so too is the crying while putting on the makeup in the first place. That is to say, the Arthur Fleck Joker has definitely had a lasting cultural impact, and I don't particularly think there's that much debate on that score (though I could be wrong as some folks will debate almost anything). At the same time what you note here (and yes I'll dance around it to as to not throw the thread into a tailspin) could dampen an appetite for it in a too real sort of way. But, man, I dunno. Virality goes a long ways nowadays. So, yeah. Just have to wait and see, I suppose.