Deadlines? What Deadlines?

Finally some proof! Behold! There are probably robots in the case!!! Chilling. Speaking of coordinated attacks, who's responsible for this I wonder? I mean, someone had to mastermind this, right?

John Galt. Nice. Bots:

This checks out. I was thinking recently that my masturbation has become very repetitive and machine-like of late.

Snyder targeted people at the studio? From the same article that accused Fisher of colluding with Snyder with no evidence. The first time we see the collusion claim in print was the Vulture piece a few month back, Who are Whedon's defenders? Don't know. But this claim doesn't surface publicly before that. "Snyder tricked him"? Touch grass. I've seen video of Fiona and read her imperfect English on the website she set up. If she isn't a Chinese national shes done an amazing job pretending to be one for 4 years because why not. As to why she didn't respond, I know that she was dealing with health issues on and off for a while. There were several periods where she would be inactive on social media because of it. That could be why. Or maybe they just don't give a shit about Rolling Stone in China. The kinds of details an award winning journo would investigate. - Also, regarding the click bait RS headline,

Yeah, and that's all it is. "An implication". There's a lot of that in this article. And there was plenty of Snyder Cut fan promotion that had nothing to do with Fiona Zheng. Justice Con 2020 for example, which was pulling in more views than Comic-Con at home at times. Also the November 2019 hashtag trend event. This is the second time Fisher has been low-key accused of making shit up to slander one Director/Studio for the benefit of another. With. Zero. Evidence. And how this "benefits" the other director I have no idea. What Snyder has done to demonstrate he's capable of that kind of petty behavior I have no idea. Do you think Fisher's doing his career any favors with this? Doubt it. Do you think either of them are stupid enough to plot this out together? Oh, that's right, I forgot he's Lex Luthor now. I guess that makes Ray his Otis or Ms. Tessmacher. This is full on tinfoil hat nonsense. And it's only Ray Fisher that's being singled out with this accusation. You think that might make him a bit salty?

Everything in that article is either an anonymous source, innuendo or, "this sure looks weird huh?" She literally compares Snyder to Lex Luthor, which only proves to me that CBM's pop culture hedgemony has truly jumped the shark. It's clearly rotting some peoples brains. Also, If Snyder was able to sucker WB executives into spending millions of dollars because of something that is so obviously a machine campaign: a) Zaslav needs to fire every singe one of these fucking idiots, Right. Now. Even if they were merely in the room while the project was being discussed, broom their worthless asses, tout suite. Anything less would be stealing from your shareholders. Also WW84 was shit. b) Snyder should be running that studio. Would you rather have Lex Luthor working for you or against you? C'mon.

Ah, yes the anonymous "DC Warner Bros. inside source" again. Is this the same one who said: The film would never ever be released? (media outlets were reporting this just a few months before the announcement) Ben Affleck wouldn't return as Batman? No additional footage would be shot for ZSJL (eg. the entire epilogue of the film)? That Keirsey Clemons was removed from 2017 JL by Snyder and not by Whedon? And would someone please tell me when Jason Momoa's Frosty the Snowman film is being released? The article doesn't mention it. Totally a coincidence that this comes out in the same day as the ZSJL digital release BTW. A couple of comments: Regarding the precipitous drop in the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut hashtag after the announcement. The reason it dropped was because it makes no sense to use the hashtag after the announcement was made. After the announcement, people stopped tweeting that and immediately started tweeting #thesnydercut, #zacksnydersjusticeleague, #zsjl and the like. All of which trended and none of which are mentioned in the article. Regarding forsnydercut.com, Fiona Zheng doesn't "purport to be from China", she is a fan from China. She appeared at DC fandome in 2020. Maybe she was a robot. I don't know. Regarding Martian Manhunter; That's hilarious. "Future plans"? DC has announced about a dozen projects in the last 10 years that never came to be but this is the first I've heard of any plans for a cinematic Martian Manhunter. They told Snyder to remove Green Lantern from ZSJL because of "future plans" and, to my knowledge, they haven't shot a single frame of film for Green Lantern Corps; more than two years since the Snyder cut announcement. The article mentions another article from the wrap about bots and the Oscars fan favorite award. This article came about a week or two after another article appeared in the wrap about measures the academy was taking to prevent cyber fuckery from influencing the vote. Also, who even cares? This was obviously a cynical attempt make the Oscars more relevant to millennials by giving an MCU film some kind of award and it didn't work. Whatever. Finally, and this is starting to piss me off, the specter of Ray Fischer's accusations being a put-on at the behest of Snyder. I have never heard Snyder ever say an unkind word about Whedon or any other CBM director. Even when he was asked about the JL reshoots, he could have come down hard on Whedon but his response was muted. I have also heard plenty of praise from people who've worked with him that his sets are enjoyable places to be and he treats everyone with respect. I gotta wonder why Gal Gadot or any of the other people who've spoken about Whedon's behavior aren't getting this nonsense. Ray Fisher "Declining to comment" is also a bit fishy. He received an email on Sunday night (24 hours before publication) and was asked to respond by 6:00PM Monday (yesterday). The next day he receives an email at 5:12 saying the deadline had passed. I don't know what to make of that. Maybe wires got crossed with a time difference or something. But does it make sense to contact the person, with no power to stop the article from being published, not knowing their schedule or what they're doing or if they even check their email outside of business hours, for a comment right before you're going to publish?

I think I'm going to try that one.

This was the crash that convinced me that maybe paved runoff isn't all its cracked up to be. When Webber came back down he broke two corners of the car (right front and left rear), and the other two look to be been intact to some degree. Regardless, he was a surf board; and he lost zero speed between the track boundary and the tire wall. Maybe I wasn't paying attention because I don't remember much commentary about it beyond the severity of the accident. But I think the FIA came to the same conclusion because we're starting to see gravel in some places again.

Great scene. Signature Paulie glare at the finish.

He had an interesting life.

Misery. C'mon.

And his dedication to tiny trapezius muscles. 'Loved him in The Way of the Gun. The only admirable character in the film.

I've only seen clips but I did get the impression that it had remarkably high production values while simlutaneously full-on embracing B-movie shlock. Much more interesting to me than the recent Jurassic films.

Regarding the budget, TG:M is reported to have cost $175M to produce. That places it firmly in a galaxy of $150-$200m blockbuster films. Definitely not an indie picture, but not remarkable enough to be newsworthy either. And there are definitely a few duds in its immediate orbit. The Meg cost $178 million?!? Good for them.

Cruise' MI franchise films an his recent sci fi efforts have had all of those things and, while they've mostly done well, non of them have done this well.

Is it tho? I mean, I guess it sort of does but not in the same way as something like WW84 and Stranger Things. It's also got a lot more going for it than that. I'll say it again, the last 30 minutes of TG:M is fucking intense; in a way that the final battle of most Avengers movies isn't. On top of brilliant visuals and editing, you aren't breaking the tension every 1.5 minutes to inject some meh banter or some sight gag, which seems to be par for the course for a lot of superhero stuff. The characters in this film also don't have the kind of plot armor that goes along with a shared universe franchise. I view this film a bit like The Color of Money. Technically, it's a sequel to The Hustler, but you didn't have to see the latter to enjoy the former. I never even made the connection between those two until long after I'd seen it. What's amazing is that there's less separation in time between those two films (25 years) than there is between TG and TG:M.

...and still going. This thing's got some legs. It's currently trading number one spot with Elvis day to day. I was sure Jurassic World would beat it globally by virtue of the fact that it got a China release and those films tend to do quite well overseas. Based on how it's tracking, I'm not so sure. It's domestic performance is well below JW: Fallen Kingdom and way below Jurassic World 2015. At the rate it's going, it'll top out at $360-$370 mil domestically. If TG:M does $1.1-$1.3b globally, it's pretty unlikely JW:D will do the $750+ overseas it needs to beat that. Lightyear is another one that's coming in below expectations. Everyone is keeping their piggy bank moneys for Avatar 2 I guess.

I have NEVER seen someone get roasted like this. Stunning.

I kind of assumed it was a proxy for Iran; even if it kind of looks like British Columbia. For no other reason than (I think) Iran is the only country still flying F-14's. They inherited them from the Shah's regime. But it's not like I sat in the theater pointing at the screen with a tortured, horrified face because of "the militarism!". Actual propaganda tends to be a lot more subtle. If I was Brett I'd be way more outraged at Captain Marvel and whether or not Stark Industries is a proxy for Lockheed Martin. One of the reasons Star Wars was so popular was because you could read almost anything you wanted into the conflict. For some, the empire represented American imperialism and the plucky rebels were the Vietnamese. For others, the empire was the Soviet Union and the freedom loving Rebels were the freedom loving west. There are no wrong answers here. This is like the the articles published years ago talking about how '300' would lead to war with Iran: - Anyone savvy enough to connect ancient Persia with modern Iran isn't going to advocate for war because of a fantasy film. - It's been over a decade since and I think it's safe to say that film didn't move the needle on international relations at all. - The Iranian governments "outrage" occurred during that 15 minutes in 2007/2008 when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became the darling of segments of the American left. I have a lot of sympathy for Iran given how they've been screwed by the western powers, but that doesn't mean their government isn't perfectly capable of playing a cynical culture war game. At the time, the Bush administration was using pretty extreme saber rattling rhetoric and there were no shortage of American pundits calling M.A. the new Hitler and using "Munich" analogies. He ended up getting voted out of office BTW. Hardly the next Hitler. - If that movie is supposed to be an allegory between a hypothetical American/Iranian war, The Persian army in that scenario clearly represents the Americans.

That's awesome. Tell it, sister.

Breathtaking.

Ezra meanwhile...

So this thing has some legs apparently. After 17 days in cinemas, it's about to eclipse Dr Strange 2 domestically (38 days, ~$400m) and has earned about $750m internationally. If it doesn't get completely swamped by the summer blockbusters coming out in the next month or so, there's an outside chance it'll be Cruise' first billion dollar film. Well done him.