For those who know is there another arc in the comics that they could use to create something with the scope of the Avengers et al franchise?
I do sort of wonder where they go from here. Maybe some sort of DC/Marvel crossover thing (DC letting Marvel steer hopefully)?
What's the word on the street for the plans for the franchise?
No idea, but I think most people with fingers on or near the pulse reckon it's going to be something big and cosmic, though nobody outside Marvel really knows what. Eternals is supposed to set some stuff up, but I don't think we've seen any hints of it yet.
There is another thing planned, I think it's The Immortals or The Eternals? I forget. Don't know anything about it.
I guess the Annihilation stories would be an option if they want to continue the grand space cosmic sort of thing, but they would have to make it a lot more interesting. It would work well as a Guardians - Capt Marvel - Annihilation triple bill. Maybe add in Spiderman too.
The thing is, there's a feedback loop going on now where the films have been influencing the comic for ten years now. More recent comic arcs must have been written with an eye to what works in the MCU and intending to appeal to that audience, so adapting those might be more sensible, although I haven't read any recent marvel comics so I don't know what's there.
I wonder though, now that they've made twenty films and made the MCU a thing in it's own right, do they need to keep adapting? It's not like they really took much more than a concept from a lot of the arcs they used. Maybe it's time to write something genuinely new?
I'd like them to spend some time on smaller-scope, individual movies for a while. Avoid large-scale teamups in favour of the occasional crossover, let the characters breathe before they introduce the next Thanos. Especially if, as rumours suggest and fanboys dream, that Marvel are going to be doing stuff with the X-Men and Fantastic Four as well.
Though I suspect the limited-run Disney+ stuff is going to be handling most of the small-scale stuff and the cinema output will continue the shōnen manga power escalation route – especially if the trajectory they've taken "friendly neighbourhood" Spider-Man is anything to go by…
I think adding in the X-men would be a mistake. There is more than enough going on and keeping the X-men distinct seems to work better. Also we've had what, 18 years of X-men films already. Lets have something new.
There's no way in hell they're going to keep the X-Men out. But I think it could work okay, as long as they keep it to a small, core group and not try and bring in everyone all at once.
But that's not X-men. X-Men is about prejudice against and fear of the growing number of people with powers. You can't really tell that story if there's only half a dozen of them.
"Mutants" as a group obviously needs to be a thing (it'll be interesting to see if they use that for some of the other new character origins instead of trying to make Inhumans a thing again), but we don't need to jump straight to an Avengers Endgame number of X-Men.
There's no chance in hell they'll do Wolverine again this soon though, is there? I realise the approach to recasting and rebooting Spider-Man has set a precedent for a new actor in the MCU, but I'd assume that Hugh Jackman is Logan for most comic book movie fans, after playing the character for eighteen years.
I was only half-joking about just getting Dafne Keen to do it, but I think if they are going to try, they should do something very different; introducing Laura as Wolverine Prime for the MCU would be a heck of a thing.
The Umbrella Academy season 2 is coming July 31st. Did anyone else watch this? I'm quite looking forward to it.
I loved the first series. Definitely looking forward to the second.
Just finished Star Wars Rebels. I really enjoyed it. Some low-key small scale stuff which you don't usually see in Star Wars with occasional gorgeous, desolate landscapes and chunky space ships.
So, I've reached the end of Season 2 of The Expanse. I'm not very positive about it, which tends to meet with stony silence from fans of the show. Look, I'm glad it exists. It's fairly hard scifi as these things go and I'm glad stuff like it can be made. But dear god the acting and most of the scripts are piss poor. In fact, the casting is baffling. It's like a mix of decent actors and random people they asked if they wanted to have a shot as they wandered past the set?
White lead dudebro. Awful. The mechanic woman is sort of OK, but the chemistry between her and the lead dude is terrible. Has as much passion and believably as a Tory press conference. Space policeman with cool hair, he was fine. Martian pilot man, meh. Space Jayne 2, I mean, OK. Not like the character has range. The Martian commando woman, no (she is peak amdram). Most of the Earth government people, terrible. Government lady woman, probably OK but let her just act in her native language and subtitle plis. All the belters, ridiculous accent just don't do it. The famous actor here thinks he's playing for some sort of acting award (leader of the belters, freedom fighter dude) but is also excruciating. Seriously the right hand woman of Fred space station dude too what the fuck is going on there? Her accent is even more ludicrous. Most of the rest are forgettable or shite. The botany dude is OK I suppose in a sort of dull way. And the scripts they have to deal with are so ponderous anyway, I wonder if even good actors could've done much more with them.
The plot is passable I suppose, if a bit hackneyed. And some of the more monsterish bits of it feel like a Buffy episode (in a good and bad way - but seriously, the cargo hold section, what the actual fuck was that?), but it just all seems like such a shame. If you can get the money to do scifi like this, why end up producing stuff as mediocre as this. Think of the source material they passed up on, the actors they could've got…. I'll still watch Season 3 but it's a case of just soldiering on now. And I know SeAsOn ThReE iS tHe BeSt so you never know….
Compare this to something like the BSG reboot though (the first few seasons) and well…
Over twenty years late to the party on this one but why did no-one tell me that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the best things ever? Halfway through season 2 and it's absolutely amazing.
Season 2 was the best one, if I remember right, but it stayed at least decent pretty much throughout. I think any time Angel and Spike were in one of the Whedonverse series at the same time it was immediately better though.
I've been contemplating restarting it all as my 'when I'm not (wanting to be) paying full attention' fodder, as I've seen them all before anyway, and then I can bring in Angel when I get to the appropriate point too.
Seasons 2 and 3 are still great. People have different opinions on which other seasons are worth watching. The best episodes are in the latter seasons, but so are the worst.
I'm inclined to agree, for the most part - I don't like the 'Adam' season that much, from what I remember, but then I think 'Hush' is probably the best episode they ever did.
I enjoyed season 1, which already in retrospect by the middle of season 2 looks like a prototype for a much better show, so I'm hoping I'm going to enjoy this one throughout.
I'm not sure I've ever seen anything that balances humour and drama quite so expertly, and the way the various long-term arcs are built up is just masterful. Of course it all looks a bit cheesy these days (and probably always did) but the dialogue and writing hasn't aged a day.
Angel also stands up quite nicely to the test of time.
Angel's not on any streaming services though as far as I can see. Probably because it's not HD.
Buffy's had an HD remaster and it's an absolutely terrible one - early seasons have been cropped to 16:9 so heads are sometimes out of shot, later seasons have been expanded to 16:9 so you can sometimes see film crew at the edge of the screen, and they've screwed up the colour grading. It's not even good HD because they've applied so much edge enhancement and noise reduction that everyone looks waxy. Everyone who worked on the show has disowned this HD version. So maybe it's best that they haven't butchered Angel in the same way.
I am the only person in the world, near as I can tell, that really liked Buffy season 5.
I thought season 5 was great. But we are in the minority.
I think Angel was on Amazon for a while, maybe it's gone now.
One interesting thing is how, I guess nerdy or geeky the Wheedon-esque dialogue was at the time. That sort of snappy, witty, endlessly quotable thing that basically now forms the bedrock of the whole of popular culture. I suppose Marvel comics started it to a degree, but I can't think of many more TV shows before Buffy that really put it front and centre.
It's good to see that everything about Willow and Xander and the rest that made them a bit weird and outsiders in 1999 ended up being the norm for almost all teenage interaction now. But it gave a real feeling of belonging if you were watching it at the time (and essentially, subconsciously, felt you were 20 years ahead of the curve).
I'm not sure I really disliked any of the seasons - they all had ups and downs. Season 1 was struggling to find an identity a bit, 2 and 3 hummed along nicely and after that you perhaps had standout episodes better than anything that had come before, but also absolute stinkers.
Season 4 generally is garbage, but the last episode, where they're hinted through their dreams by the First, is probably the best, most accurate depiction of actual dreams in media.
The thing that's impressed me so far (and yes, I'm only on season 2, but this was evident in season 1 too) is just how consistent the writing is. Characters don't change randomly based on the needs of individual episodes. Stuff is set up way in advance. Endings feel earned. Now of course this should be basic stuff but I've watched so much stuff lately where this isn't the case: where the writers are clearly just making it all up on the fly and it shows. Buffy's a class act compared to that.
Plus, of course, there's an episode in Season 1 called "I Robot, You Jane" where Willow gets stalked by a demon that's taken refuge in the internet, and not just the internet of course but the 1997 internet. It's absolutely terrible - but also the entire episode is the exact TV equivalent of this kid and therefore it's all somehow amazing at the same time.
I went back and watched some Season 2 last night after Gar mentioning it. It's true, you really notice the fact somebody is actually planning something out, rather than throwing shit at the screen to see what sticks. I know pretty much all of them did OK after Buffy (isn't SMG now some sort of cake baking guru on American TV? Alyson Hannigan did films, TV presenting and How I Met Your Mother, Borneaz did Angel and Bones….etc… ) but poor ol' Nicholas Brendon :( Although he is channelling the spirit of Chandler in Friends pretty hard in Buffy I think he really should've gone on to bigger and better things.
I finally got round to watching Killing Eve. Finished the first season during the week, it's very watchable. I was expecting it to be more tense and suspenseful, and at points it it certainly ticked those boxes, but overall it just felt fun.
I've heard mixed things about were it goes from here but I'm happy to keep watching it.
The second series of Killing Eve got a lot of flak and I’m not sure why. I enjoyed it as much as the first. Haven’t got around to the third series yet though.
I thought lockdown was going to be brilliant for watching TV series. Haven't managed very many but just finished Escape at Dannemora which came as a recommendation from the Adam Buxton podcast when he had Joe Cornish on recently.
It's quite good & engaging – stars Benicio Del Toro, Paul Dano and Patricia Arquette and is directed by Ben Stiller. It's a prison break drama which potentially doesn't sound all that exciting but is really well done. There's a subplot about painting in prison and they show some of the real art works at the very very end of the series. Discussion about that was what hooked me into watching it.
Watched series 3 of Ozark, mostly in the middle of the night with subs on and a child passed out on me. We're also watching Jason Bateman in The Outsider, the Stephen King adaptation that seemed to go down well at the beginning of the year. It's interesting and getting creepier as it goes.
We watched S3 of Killing Eve which a friend group had been pretty cool on but I think it gets better as it goes.
Quick Buffy question: I'm at the start of season 4 now which is the point at which Angel started too.
Angel's not on any streaming services at the moment so will I be missing much by simply watching Buffy through to the end? I know there are a number of crossovers but I'm assuming that neither series will absolutely depend on the other in order to make sense.
Nah, you're fine. I didn't watch any Angel until after I'd finished Buffy, and any relevant plot points are covered in a "previously on…" segment.
Cool. There are some very nerdy episode-by-episode viewing guides out there and to be honest it all looked too exhausting to bother with. I briefly considered getting Angel on DVD but then thought it's all more hassle than it's worth and it's bound to come back onto one of the services sooner rather than later. I can wait.
We've been watching Cursed on Netflix, a melodramatic fantasy-heavy YA retelling/remix of Arthurian legend with too many characters and the visual fidelity of a low-budget episode of Doctor Who. Everyone looks far too clean, accents are variously wobbly, and there are about five plots going on, only half of which seem to be related to the main thread.
It's kind of campy fun, though; some of the supporting cast are putting in way more effort than the thing deserves, and so far the only thing that's really bugging me (and only me) is that the inscription on the central macguffin sword is unpronounceable gibberish that they thought they could hide by putting it in ogham. I don't know why they wouldn't just make up a nonsense script is they're not going to make it say something.
We've been watching that too, well I say "we", but I mean Charly has, I normally browse Reddit whilst shes watching it, I think she's got two episodes to go. The best thing about it is Merlin and that's not saying alot.
It's a damn sight better than most of the shite Sarah's folks usually watch…
Also, I forgot to mention it before, but Arthur's teeth are incredibly distracting.
Watched the first episode of Season 2 of The Boys, Homelander is still far and away the best part of the show. Already annoyed with Hughie and Starlight.
I am the only person in the world, near as I can tell, that really liked Buffy season 5.
I've just finished this today. You're right, it's really good, easily one of the best (and way better than season 4). Spike carries most of it but The Body in particular is a fantastic, and unrelenting, episode of TV that really showed what this show is capable of at its best.
Season 5 of The Expanse has a trailer and a release date.
The first three episodes land on December 16th, with the rest of the season – a total of ten episodes – coming weekly.
How many seasons are they planning (or likely) to do?
There are eight books published, with the ninth and final due next year; the first couple of seasons didn't track exactly with where the books started/ended (Leviathan Wakes took a season and a half), but they caught up with the first three books by the end of season 3, and season 4 covered all of a single book. Season 5 appears to follow that trend, so I'd expect to see them max out at nine.
It somehow looks even worse than I expected.
We've watched the whole of Money Heist on Netflix in an embarrassingly short space of time. It's superbly uncomplicated fun - pure popcorn entertainment that reminds me of 24 in its prime. It's a Spanish series so make sure you watch it with subtitles rather than the fairly ropey dub it defaults to.
Lost interest after the first season but it's pretty good.
Anyone watching The Boys S2? Not really sure what to make of it. Thought it started strong but it's floundering a bit. Stormfront is great though.
I finished it this week, Stormfront was great, finally a character besides Homelander to have that kind of draw. I would also say it floundered and the ending just has me wondering what to think of it all, dunno where they're going to go from there.
Still…. Stormfront eh? Yep.
Yep. Also I haven't read the comics, so her Spoiler - click to show sudden rampage through that house rather shocked me. As did her white supremacism but damn. She plays a complete cunt really well too, she has a few exchanges with people that really show how much of a complete troll she is.
Have you seen the Whale scene yet? That and one Kimiko scene this season really stood out to me. 
The Whale scene to be fair, while quite amusing is possibly where they're pushing too hard for meme-level content. I think the subtle fuckery of Homelander is where it shines most.
The love scenes are universally terrible.
The boys has extremely strong 'we're just making this shit up as we go' energy.
Did we just end up with Season 2 finishing up on a BoTh SiDeS Spongebob meme?
Did it just go full Ubisoft?
Sorry, what do you mean?