itt: consternation and wailing about Zach Snyder's upcoming SUPERMAN/BATMAN film/sequel to MAN OF STEEL -- official title: BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

um, no one likes turds, even with candy

Suicide Squad won't do that poorly; the director/writer has a history of understanding how to make popular films
more power to them if it's a hit; i'm not resentful of DC or of the hero universe they're trying to build. i'm resentful of snyder.

i really think maybe the big problem with this is that they are largely trying to sell the movie on the Batman angle, and it feels like only yesterday that Nolan wrapped up his Batman trilogy. and despite the less-than universal acclaim that series seems to have received here, audiences for the most part LOVED those movies and still do, and why would they want another version of Batman so quickly? also the movie just didn't look fun from the outset, and it looked like shit visually, and even though Nolan fucked up a couple of action scenes his movies actually LOOK ok.

a batman and superman movie shouldn't be a VS thing, it should have been a buddy movie. these guys are so mismatched but they have to solve some crimes together!

https://espngrantland.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/tango-and-cash_146f7db9.jpg

L-R: bruce wayne, clark kent

so strange that they spend all this money on the actors and marketing and universe building and the choice of picking director/writers to best thematically match the material seems almost like an afterthought... i guess they gleaned SOMETHING from the comic book business

it's not that hard! Brad Bird should do Superman! Pay Burton a gazillion dollars and let him do Batman!

On March 10, 2015, It was confirmed that Burton will direct a live-action adaptation of Disney's Dumbo.

It seems like WB is having trouble attracting A-level talent, a problem that's surely going to compound if this movie continues to underperform. It's not unlike the talent roster on the comics, where every soft reboot of the line temporarily piques my interest before I realize that DC still doesn't have many names working on the books.

how did that anecdote from ted turner go again? the one about how Warner is completely underusing Superman/Wonder Woman/Batman and has been for decades? I guess now it's misusing more so.
the fact that they have managed to build a workable television pantheon that they are completely ignoring in favor of pulling in ringers for movie usage is just so goddamn dumb. what is the upside in building a popular flash television show and then not using the actor who plays the flash as the flash in the film?

"Because The Multiverse" is the last half-assed, backpedaling response I've heard to your question.

god help us there if they try to let snyder explain how earth-1 and earth-2 work. i can imagine the nuance
http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e56/tbondurant/jlaearth2_p68.jpg

Michael Bay presents Captain Carrot
http://g1rm.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/multiversity34.png

basically i'm saying you've got to blame Morrison at least a LITTLE that this is the direction the film world went

There's way more people in the comics field I would blame before I blame Morrison, I haven't seen any of his ideas pop up in these films tbh

Morrison goes dark but most of his stuff is ultimately hopeful.

i would argue that morrison is the exemplar of weirdly grim and gritty taken seriously by fanboy and critic alike that snyder is reaching toward; it's a natural progression after miller and moore. he just never quite got past millar.

I disagree. Final Crisis, f'rexample, was kind of a pointed critique of grim n' gritty. Unless you're saying he's the exemplar for people with inadequate reading comprehension, in which case we're back on the same page.

nah, i'm ok w/ blaming snyder like 80%, nolan maybe 20

morrison is some other continuum cuz his stuff is almost always animated by both affection for the medium, deliberately goofy amidst the grimdark (fucking batcow ffs), metafictional, idealistic, concerned with ideas that originate outside comics, and seriously weird as fuck. he's the last person who deserves blame for the "grim and gritty" murderhero crap snyder is peddling.

^^^ Morrison's grimmest and grittiest is probably his Batman run? Which I honestly think is an outlier, even stuff like the Filth has this underlying empathy and hopefulness to it. Morrison also big on benevolent father figures, something Snyder clearly has no interest in/understanding of.

er xp

"...animated by both affection for the medium..."

xxp
we're on the same page. i'm speaking from snyder's perspective and that of the intended audience which (in my very likely elitist and snotty view) is the same people who consider Morrison's work to be taken at face value.
That said, I think Morrison's been doing the same "critique" for so long now that, like Kanye, it doesn't much matter whether it's meta or intended straight; it's just boring. but that's neither here nor there.

Morrison and Moore both delivering diminishing returns at this point

basically i'm saying you've got to blame Morrison at least a LITTLE that this is the direction the film world went
― ulysses, Monday, April 4, 2016

Xposts - Yeah, Morrison's a big Silver Age stan - he likes comics as totally nutso generators of impossible concepts and bizarre feats. See his JLA, or especially All-Star Superman - very close to Reeve spinning the planet backwards to turn back time. Superman is bright and colorful and fundamentally good, and does ridiculous impossible shit every day. A good chunk of his Animal Man is basically him complaining about how Crisis took away all the fun stuff and loopy gimmick characters, and then parodying the grim and gritty trend (as a springboard for a Book of Job thing - why are authors so cruel to their characters, etc.). This doesn't get into his *Batman*, but his Supes I think is in the clear.

Yep. It starts around 60%, then gradually decreases. The overall take is around 50%.

i thought that for these huge tentpole movies the distributors share in the opening week/end is more like 90%. basically, it's extortion. "you want the biggest movie of the summer? OK, you get 10% of opening weekend gross."

for movies farther down the pole, the exhibitors get more, and of course as Batman V Superman heads into third, fourth weeks and eventually 2nd run, the exhibitors will take a bigger and bigger cut. though it's never /that/ big.

His Batman is basically "What if it ALL happened? TDKR and giant penny clown prince of crime and 1930s machine gun Batman".

Also the intended audience for this flick has 0 idea who Morrison is, gtfo with that shit.

xp Alan Moore hasn't really DONE anything in the better part of a decade, has he? I thought the America's Best Comics run was mostly excellent and memorably fun; if you consider that his last meaningful body of work, it holds up fine.

Morrison's Black Glove Batman run (i own all the floppies!) is the last thing of his I give any credence to, but i would say that in the end I prefer Dini's contemporaneous Detective Comics run.

Alan Moore hasn't really DONE anything in the better part of a decade, has he?

cranked out a bunch of LOEG stuff + that Lovecraft thing

xp, i could've worded that better: i'm not implying there's millions of Morrison stans setting the standard for the storyline. I'm suggesting that Snyder's "vision" is for people who _would_ consider Morrison to be taken at face value... or at least (as i imagine Snyder does) with the pop veneer of one degree of meta as a fig leaf to justify intellectual pretense

xp the league of extraordinary gentlemen has been righteously unreadable and i avoided the lovecraft, but that stuff all amounts to about eight issues of comics, no? I don't exactly consider that a denouement... but sure, i guess i can't really argue that i'm not self selecting what i consider to be "done" for moore.

full disclosure: i stopped buying floppies three issues into Batman Incorporated when the self parody moved to Frank Miller levels, so i likely hold Morrison to blame for loss of my late childhood innocence more than i really should

eight issues of comics

idk those Nemo and 20th Century books are longer than yr standard comic book but idk by how much. his productivity's been at about that level for a long time afaict

He's spent a lot of time on that zillion-word Northampton novel.

a goliath alan moore novel falls somewhere between green tea twix and custom gold fronts in the list of things i don't really need

xpost Uhhh...why, then, is the narrative that they make most of their money from concessions? I feel like you have to be running your business like some shit if you can't turn a profit on 50% of big Hollywood movie ticket sales.

― I am very inteligent and dicipline boy (Old Lunch), Monday, April 4, 2016 12:14 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. i'm always kind of amazed that movie theaters are still a thing cos every time i go to a see a movie in a theater and it isn't opening night or a huge film there is usually like 4-5 people sitting in the theater and it's probably like that for most showings. how do these theaters even pay rent on that?

or just the air conditioning bill!

I'm no superhero scholar but this was way better than all the reviews made out. Felt oddly operatic. I liked it better than any of the Nolan movies. Snyder has a lot of flaws but at least he's a blockbuster director with his own identity. His visual sensibility is also more interesting than The Nolan movies. The acting was great too. Only disappointing part was the ending, all too obviously setting up the next film. Feels like a lot of the poor reviews are just blockbuster bashing. But anyone who felt the plot didn't make sense, it wasn't exactly complicated.

bro April Fools day was last Friday mang

please explain the plan of the Senator and the fake (?) terrorists and all that. because it seemed like they were trying to frame Superman by shooting terrorists with bullets, which makes no sense on any level.

(also, those saying the plot 'didn't make sense' weren't saying "we didn't understand the main thrust of the plot" as much as "oh, we know what was happening, and it was really stupid and nonsensical")

The acting was great too.

wait waht

also please explain why the senator felt so confident in Luthor's scheme that she granted him unrestricted access to an alien ship and the body of Zod and then AFTER ALL OF THAT decided at the last minute to not go through with it?

honestly all the senator-Luthor scenes just left me wanting a movie about this crooked senator who is misappropriating homeland security top level materials and staging CIA operations in the name of....doing something about Superman? what exactly was the point of all of that? were they going to pass an anti-Superman bill? make it illegal for him to destroy the planet?

http://www.listen-tome.com/comics/2016-04-04-PLTM300.jpg

green tea twix would be fantastic. alan moore, please invent this.

apparently i made that up! i didn't know!

green tea kit kats are amazing. not a fan of caramel so i'll pass on the Twix.

I found this amusing: a stoned Kevin Smith offering his review. It's slightly incoherent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDsw86ATrQ0