Top Gun soared past Doctor Strange 2 (the latter still leads in foreign gross, but it will never hit a billion, which was surely the expectation for the very expensive tentpole film). Jurassic World Domination, which I've seen and is terrible, will probably beat The Batman (having done better in foreign markets). Lightyear might be the biggest bomb of the year--I have no idea what Pixar or Disney were thinking, although like most failures it held up better domestically. Will the renewal of Bob Chapek at Disney result in the MCU halting down the path to irrelevance? It's difficult to say, but if so the results are likely 2-3 years away (apparently not soon enough to save The Fantastic Four, but the X-Men aren't yet locked in).
Speaking of Chapek, there's speculation that Ms. Marvel was buried behind Kenobi due to corporate politics (the inference cf, with Chapek behind it's reshoots and his opponents fronting the former). Whether that's true or not, it has made almost no impact (ratings are some time away, but expected to be low). Kenobi, on the other hand, has been typically divisive in the increasingly small Star Wars fanbase.
Sony's casting continues to trend away from the MCU's, with Madame Web apparently adding Emma Roberts as Spider-Gwen (despite her age, 31). This is one casting where race-swapping wasn't an option, but picking an established actress like Roberts veers from the Disney trend.
Before I read anything about it I assumed the sequel to Willow would suck (because modern adaptations almost always do), but I had no idea that Erin Kellyman (Falcon and the Winter Soldier et al) was in a key role--you'd think they'd want someone with acting talent, but apparently not.
This is ancillary, but at least one Amazon executive involved in The Wheel of Time disaster has now exited. It's far too late to rescue the IP, whose second season was filmed before the reaction to the first, nor is she the principal reason for its issues, but it's at least a step in the right direction. I don't expect Amazon to go through the house cleaning WB is currently in the midst of and Disney has started--at least, not yet.
I've been surprised that many of my younger friends (30 and under) are unfamiliar with the term Mary Sue. I had no idea it had fallen out of use and there doesn't seem to be any new term to replace it. I wonder if this is because so many leads in popular novels and entertainment are Mary Sues, ergo they don't understand the issue. Speaking of those reading efforts, I've wondered if I should write about my frustrating attempts to find good, new authors in the fantasy field--it seems out of the purview of this blog, but I may go through it in a separate article.
The industry has finally turned on Ezra Miller, capped by a Rolling Stone article (about the state of a woman and her children on the Miller ranch) and then Variety taking their buried story (surely at the behest of WB) in 2020 about the assault of an Icelandic woman along with the newer story of a German woman with whom there was a 'friends with benefits' arrangement for a time. Miller still hasn't be fired, nor The Flash put on hold, but it does seem inevitable at this point.
This article was written by Peter Levi
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