Menor the Destroyer

Given how weak Tuesdays have been this year that is a lot better than I expected.

For me meta can go more bad than good, though that descriptor itself could mean a variety of things, but it immediately made me think of some of the meta stuff in TLJ which I hated (thought it was a complete misrepresentation of previous films). Only 3 posts down. You know what to do.

It's good though. 90 pages now. We won't hit 100 but let's see how far it can go.

It doesn't look that wacky to me. Just looks like the same stuff we have seen from this series previously.

Frankly, I was never that invested in any of the characters, even Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus. To me it was the biggest weakness of these movies. The action scenes were nice and the worldbuilding intriguing, but it's hard to stay engaged when I just don't care much what happens to these people.

I mean there are a couple of other posts below agreeing with him... Personally the tease doesn't do much for me but I will wait for the real trailer to say anything more.

Spider-Man really lucked out until Dead Man's Chest. Reloaded, Shrek 2, Spider-Man 2, and ROTS all would have crushed the record with Friday openings.

@charlie Jatinder going for those last 12 pages all by himself.

I liked the first two (though didn't like the first as much as most), don't really remember much about the third other than it being supremely messy. I think this has the potential to do well but the HBO Max release will be a big drag, especially since it targets an older audience.

You'll get your number when you fix this damn door!

I can't see the full article either but this doesn't seem to have any new info, just that it hasn't gotten a date yet.

Average does not matter since the MCU releases a lot more movies. As I said if you compare the biggest movies to the biggest movies, Furious does not fare so well. EG > F7, IW > F8, and don't tell me that F9 would have come anywhere close to TA or AOU overseas with that huge China drop. There was a time in 2015-17 where Furious was the top dog overseas but not anymore. Frankly with the way F9 dropped I won't be surprised if Jurassic has surpassed Fast overseas by now, we will see how Dominion does.

I'm liking the score on first listen. I like that Shang-Chi's theme is a blend of his father's and mother's. It's a good theme too, I was able to hum it as I walked out so it has some memorability at least.

Crouching Tiger did very well in the US.

Oh yeah if he gets a serve he will be top 10. I was shocked to see someone who was able to outgrind Novak in long rallies like that. More impressed with him than when I saw Korda at Wimbledon. On the bolded, I actually don't think I agree. There have been quite a few players who have given Djokovic a tough first couple of sets before he pulls away (Nadal in the first 3 sets at FO, Berrettini in the final 2 at FO, Shapo at Wimbledon, there were several at the AO, though I wasn't able to watch those to see if they were as close as the scoreline seemed). Musetti actually played very similar to this (though his playstyle was very different ofc) where he played lights out the first two sets and then fell apart physically. The difference, for me, is more in the way he plays. He plays very high percentage tennis and is able to win an impressive amount of points without having to rely on massive weapons. The others (Rafa excepted but that is an unfair comparison) mostly relied on redlining which is not sustainable. He has really strong fundamentals.

I started watching during that game. Really good stuff but Brooksby will not be going deep in slams with that serve. He hits great groundstrokes and moves really well but having to fight for every single service game eventually broke him physically. Djokovic-Berrettini will be a fun QF though but I don't think Berrettini has a varied enough game to win it. Zverev and Medvedev (if they make it that far) will be the big tests for Novak. Those should be some really good matches.

I don't think 2 movies doing 1 billion OS qualifies as consistency. F6 did around 550 OS in the same year that Iron Man 3 did 800. F9 in normalcy may have done around 700 OS which has been done by MCU movies like FFH, CM.

There is a good distribution of Indian films in the US. With the Chinese-American population being bigger, it's definitely odd we don't have as good of one for Chinese-language films.

I don't know where people are getting this idea that F9 would hit 1B OS without the pandemic. China didn't have any pandemic restrictions when it opened and it dropped almost 200 million compared to F8, which itself barely broke 1B OS. Also are IW and Endgame not MCU films? Why should they be ignored here?

Paul Walker's death absolutely brought a lot of attention to the Fast franchise. F7 had a massive surge from 6. F8 retained some of that hype but the franchise has gone into decline (F9, in markets where things were mostly normal at the time like USA and China, did very similar to the spinoff H&S). I think F10/11 (don't know exactly what the plan is) will get an ending bump but I don't think it will be enough to return to the highs of F7. Especially since F9 had pretty meh WOM in many markets.

You're comparing the biggest Furious entry to the 3rd-biggest MCU entry. Obviously it will look worse. F7 should be compared to Endgame and F8 to IW since those are the 2 biggest of the respective franchises. We had a "solo entry" of the Fast franchise in H&S, that did 585M international. Obviously a very good gross but several MCU solos have beaten that.

MCU is much bigger. Yeah Fast films will beat some of the solo films but they won't be coming close to Avengers movies now that the franchise has come back to earth in China. Solid #2 for now, let's see how JW Dominion does to be sure of it though. Also I would say 1 billion overseas would be incredibly unlikely even in normalcy considering it dropped big time in China and F8 did just above 1b. USA gross, though higher than many of us expected, was still well down from F8 -- and it opened at the best point for Covid cases.

V2 should not be compared to TSS. It will be way stronger OS.

This for sure. We needed a moment of true reconciliation for both his arc and Shang-Chi's. Him giving up the rings was an attempt at that but was too short. There needed to be some actual words (just a few).

Yeah, I agree with that. V2 has much more going for it than TSS, which is why I'm predicting a stable gross domestically (OS will probably drop of course, but no movie can do much about that). And of course it will be theatrical exclusive. But I don't think V2 destroying TSS's gross will have much to do with reception per se, more to do with these other factors.