Deadlines? What Deadlines?

My friend, you need to clean the schmutz off your glasses because that movie was nothing like Dances with Wolves. Dune part 1 took me in its arms and spooned me for a solid 156 minutes. Avatar 2 strapped me to the rail and took me in holes I didn't know I had. In a good way. Recommend.

Avatar 2 was amazing. The Oppenheimer trailer played. I imagine it will drop online soon. It looks like there will be a lot of post war stuff (in black and White) and pre-war / Manhattan project stuff (in color). You get a brief glimpse of Damon as Gen. Groves and RDj as Strauss. There's one scene where it looks like he's talking to someone (maybe Szilard) about setting the atmosphere on fire.

Just got back. Still processing it. So many emotional moments for me. More than once I wanted to scream, "Kill all humans!!!" and then in one particular scene they were killing, like, a lot of humans. I turned to my niece and said, "This movie is amazing!"

So, you get to pay for a movie ticket to see a cam copy? This rocks. https://celluloidjunkie.com/2022/12/13/russian-cinemas-set-to-screen-pirated-copies-of-avatar-the-way-of-water/

@ithanos Did the Oppenhiemer trailer play before the film?

Lobo. They're all going to play Lobo.

Speaking of dog avatars, There are more and more giant puppies appearing at the dog park. A 12 month old hound dog (might have been a ridgeback or bloodhound). He's at the age where his size and agility don't quite align. You could hear him barking (that characteristic, squeaky "a-woof") from the moment they entered the parking lot. He comes in and charges over to us to say hello. After that he was just a lanky blur of paws and jowls and ears for about 10 minutes. Making friends. He must have gone from one end of the park to the other about 20 times. A 10 month old St Bernard. Huge and friendly. He collapsed in my lap and demanded belly rubs. I obliged while I chatted with his owner. Lots of similarly aged labradoodles. A German Sheppard. A pit bull. Lots of energy; freaked out by the space and the new friends. A disturbing number of them are rescues. Apparently a lot of people are giving up pets they acquired during the pandemic.

"Quite simply." LOOOOOOOOOOOOL!!!

Nuh uh. "Best DC film since The Dark Knight". Look it up. I'm not convinced she's entirely to blame for WW84. That things got "film by committee" written all over it.

Statement from Patty Jenkins.

I wear glasses as well and I'm seeing it in 3D. I'll report how that works. If it doesn't I can always take off my glasses. My prescription isn't that strong and we're only 4 rows back so I might be close enough not to need them.

Winning.

This describes some of the highest grossing and highest rated films of the last decade.

Purely for research purposes I'm sure. Make sure you take plenty of water.

All I know is that "little man / little boy" monologue really hit me in the feels. I think I need to call my mom.

Yeah sure, blame the "college wifi". Punk.

Wow.

Wow. The POTUS is kind of an asshole. "Robots with lightsabers for eyes". That's the hardest I've laughed since Jerry almost scored with his mom.

WTF?!? They couldn't get the Trump administration to OK that? Just promise a crawl at the beginning of the movie, "A very special thanks to President Donald J Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump; but not Tiffany." Job done. How big do you want it? How do you fuck that up?

I just got mine. Thursday. IMAX 3D. Dead center and four rows back from the screen. My body is ready.

The highest grossing film of all time in China is The Battle at Lake Changjin, which was released September of 2021. according to Wikipedia, it made $913 million USD. I don't know the situation on the ground in China, but if Covid restrictions are a problem for Chinese cinema, they seem to be handling it. This is fascinating. Is there an online archive of this stuff? I'd be interested to see the T2 stuff specifically. Still, it's encouraging to know that most of us did not lose our shit back then. Not shitless, therefore, not beyond reason.

I'd say this glorious human cares. Like a lot. Maybe too much. This was from five days ago. The movie opens five days from now. That theater is about 80% sold out. All the moneys. I kind of agree with this except for Terminator 2. No one thought in those terms back then because we hadn't collectively lost our shit yet. The brilliance of Titanic was that it made the ship and its sinking a sub plot and instead focussed on Jack and Rose. Maybe that had been done before; maybe not, but I remember thinking that it wasn't the movie I was expecting when I saw it.

Well, you gotta build the factory before it can churn out the first can of peas. I wonder if Cameron isn't being a bit hyperbolic. Generally, shooting films back to back tends to be a bit more economical. The LOTR films were huge, ensemble, VFX heavy films with a (claimed) production budget of around $100 million each. I'm sure favorable exchange rates and local subsidies helped with that but still. Compare that with Avengers: Endgame which had a budget of $350 million. For Avatar's break even to be that high you'd be approaching $1 billion for production and marketing. I doubt even Cameron could find ways to spend that kind of money, unless Covid lockdowns in NZ really ballooned the budget. I had also heard that much of the costs for the subsequent Avatar films (infrastructure, logistics and digital assets maybe) were kind of front loaded on this film; so there might be some weird accounting going on there.

$205 mil roughly equals the entire box office run from its 2009 release in China. Thee. Point. One. Billion. $

Yes! Now we will see if my "unreliable-narrator-humans-as-animals" theory for which I was so mercilessly mocked plays out. I'll want apologies in writing, Suckas. nom,nom,nom,nom,nom,nom,nom,nom,nom...