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I feel like the shows are doing better at making this feel like a connected universe.  They don't actually have to use Grant Gustin or Stephen Amell to make it feel that way.  In Flash, they had a fun little cameo in the Catco office, and in Arrow they had Singh with a cool little Flash cameo.  Little things like that can make things pretty fun.

Eh, I'm just prepping myself.  I really like these characters and really want these movies to be good.  I was genuinely excited about a Affleck directed/written movie, and I'm just worried that we aren't getting that.  I just don't want to lose what, in my opinion, has been the best part of these movies.  Because if the next news is "Affleck out entirely" then it'd be a genuine emergency.

http://www.superherohype.com/news/38990 … t#/slide/1

SHH says that Affleck didn't write the latest version of the script either.  Read into it what you'd like.

I'm just hoping Affleck is still heavily involved.

I can't believe I think that, but I do.

Pardon my ignorance here, but how do these contracts work?  If someone is signed to direct something, are they able to leave any time before production actually begins?  What about writing? 

My eventual question is this: we know Affleck is under contract to play Batman in X number of films.  And that, at some point, he was signed on to star/write/direct.

If he quit the project (which, I know, he didn't do), would he get paid for all three?  Two of the three?  None? 

(Acknowledging that I'm coming at this as the Resident DC Pessimist)

Because I'm wondering if he stepped down as director because it's the one thing he could step down from?  He can't/won't quit as a star, and he's already basically written the script.  So DC is going to pay him for the script, and you gotta think he's okay with that.  But if he's soured on the project or the process, is this the easiest way out while still maximizing his earnings?

Even if it's not an indication of anything, Affleck would be the best director since Nolan to direct a superhero film.  Affleck and Wan are significantly superior directors to anyone who's done a (redacted) movie.  Even if it's not a big deal, it's still to the detriment of the movie.  There's a very small chance they'll be able to get a better director.

See, I don't really know what, if anything, Captain America accomplished in World War II.  The first Cap movie is one of the, if not the number one, weakest movie in the MCU.  To the public, I think he'd have been mostly a cartoon character (and for the most part, he was).  I wonder what, if any, part of his mission against the Red Skull was even publicized.  He participated in both the Battle of New York and the Battle in Sokovia, but he was a minor, street-level player in both of those.  Tony Stark and the Hulk were taking down the big ships, and I'm guessing they would've gotten all the glory.  And if he got any credit at all for what happened in the Winter Soldier, I'm sure he layed low-enough that he wouldn't have gotten a parade for it.

Peter might be brilliant, but he's a kid.  Kids are impressed with flashiness.  Peter is fascinated by technology.  Iron Man would be cool, and Captain America would be lame. That's just the way I'd expect for him to look at it.  Plus, Tony was able to convince adult Peter in the comics - kid Peter wouldn't stand a chance

Again, I'm willing to take "quality" off the table as far as Marvel and DC are concerned.  I don't want to compare how they're doing as much as I like *what* they're doing.  They have a plan, and they have a guy in the middle who acts as an intermediary between the studio and the creative side.  You can say that Feige's doing a shit job, but not that he *has* a shit job. 

The only time we've even heard of instability in Marvel projects was Ant-Man, and Ant-Man was a pretty unique situation because it wasn't designed to fit in the Marvel universe.  Wright ended up leaving the project, and Ant-Man still ended up being a fun little movie.  You don't hear about in-fighting and massive re-shoots and editing coups and stuff like that.  They make a movie, and they release it.  No one ever complains that they didn't get to make the movie they wanted, and there's never any special editions or director's cuts to "fix" the theatrical release.  Maybe they just hire the type of people that won't complain or the type of people that know how to tow the company line.  No idea.  But there's been two movies in the DCEU (it's hard to count Man of Steel since it wasn't designed to be anything but its own thing), and the studio has messed with both of them.

You can talk about both those movies being great on their own, and I'm sure there are millions of people who agree with you.  But it sounds like if they'd just released the extended versions of both movies, they'd have been received better.  So it's not Henry Cavill's fault for being a bad actor or Zach Snyder's bad vision or David Ayer's schizophrenic pacing.  It's a studio that desperately wants a powerhouse cinematic universe, and they panic every time someone says anything borderline negative.

If you think WB is playing all their cards correctly....then I just don't have a good response for that

And FOX isn't doing the show any favors.  They took almost two months off between episodes 11 and 12, and after only being back three episodes, they're going to be off almost *three more* months.

FOX's primetime lineup is bizarre.  Shows are going off the air for months so that entire shows can be shown in between the gaps.  Why not just run shows continuously and uninterrupted?  It doesn't seem to be affecting ratings (the show has been remarkably consistent this year, while down around a million viewers from season two), but it just seems like a really confusing strategy.

Hmmmm....I think that's really it.  I haven't seen either extended version, but if you're right, both movies would've benefited from being released with their "true" versions.  And that's a studio problem.  Snyder made the movie that he wanted, and it was butchered.  Ayer made the movie he wanted, and it was butchered.

That's why I'd like someone to work to protect the integrity of these projects.  Snyder couldn't do it.  Ayer couldn't do it.  Whether you like the movies or not, the Marvel movies are what they are.  You don't have to wait to buy an extended edition of Civil War to understand why Peter is at the airport battle.  You don't have to buy a Black Panther edition because he was edited out of the final film. 

I just think DC suffers from a lack of planning.  They're the studio equivalent of starting to film a script before it's complete.  If you look at Marvel, they have their ducks in a row.  There's a roadmap of what movies are coming, when, and how they'll tie together.  Their "phases" build to something, and they tie together in ways that are easy to understand.

DC's future slate is a mess because their plan is reactionary.  There's Wonder Woman and Justice League.  Aquaman is in preproduction.  Will there be a Flash movie, or are they going to wait to see how Flash goes.  Is the Batman solo film going to happen?  Is there going to be a Man of Steel sequel?  There's now going to be a Black Adam movie - does that go before or after a Shazam movie?  Is there even going to be a Shazam movie?  What about the Deadshot movie?  The Gotham Sirens movie?  Suicide Squad 2?  Where does Justice League 2 fit in?  Green Lantern Corps?  Is Cyborg still getting his own movie?

The problem is that the studio is bothered by everything.  Early returns on Batman made them drastically change that movie.  Early returns on the Suicide Squad trailers caused major re-editing of that movie.  So are future movies going to depend on what movies come out and how they're received?  Is that the correct way to do it?

My question is....why does this particularly matter?  If it's a scientist coming to work on a cure for diabetes who can't get into the country, I understand protesting that.  Or if someone gets stuck over there and can't get back.  I'm against the separation of families.

But if we're strictly talking about refugees fleeing their home....why do they have to come here?  If we have the strictest vetting process, why are they willing to wait?  Where are they waiting out the two years?  Canada has already said they're willing to take anyone that the US rejects so the refugees should be fine.  Canada is great and almost no different, in any way, from the United States.

It sucks that a country made of immigrants is turning away people who desperately need a home, but if other countries will take them in, then they'll be fine.  Are we protesting on behalf of the refugees or are we protesting to make ourselves feel better? 

And, once again, at what point do we stop caring about them?  Because, once again, 1.5 million homeless.

I also watched Flash and Arrow.

Flash - Wally still bothers me.  Having fun as a superhero is one thing, but he wants the celebrity.  I think they have Wally's personality all wrong.  Seems more like Booster Gold.

Arrow - Throwaway line but apparently the VP (after the president died in Invasion) was a woman?  And the DA of Star City has "always wanted her autograph?"  It was a weird line.

Fair enough.

Haha, forget about Marvel then.  The model I'm talking about is the "way any large organization works" - which is to say

                      Guy at the top
                     /          |        \
               Part 1    Part 2    Part 3

Someone needs to be in charge of everything - either deflecting studio interference or making sure the movies follow some sort of cohesive plan.  Otherwise, you go with the "X-Men model" of several movies all contradicting each other.  X-Men, in my opinion, is what can happen when you have too many cooks.  You end up with a collection of odd, incoherent movies that are only tied together by their association with each other.

I don't really care if they tie these movies together.  As far as I'm concerned, they can all be separate movies and then join for a Justice League movie.  The problem is that *they* seem to want to do it as a joined universe, with Flash having two cameos so far and Batman appearing in both Suicide Squad and (allegedly) Wonder Woman.  So as long as they are going to do connections from movie, I'd hope that someone is making sure that there aren't wild contradictions from movie to movie.

That's all I'm saying.

Okay, but I don't even think we're talking about a quality issue.  Take the Marvel quality completely out of it.  What Marvel has is a singular person at the top who is protecting the brand.  If Disney had wanted to edit Captain America mostly out of Civil War because people loved Iron Man, it would be Kevin Feige's job to make sure that didn't happen.  No one was there to do that for Batman/Superman, and it ended up, frankly, making Superman's character look terrible.  If the extended cut had been released, maybe there wouldn't be so much hate for the character, and there'd be more buzz for the universe.

And again, if the studio isn't meddling, directors can make their own movies.  Aquaman can be Aquaman instead of DC Cinematic Universe Episode 6.

I think part of the problem with Warner Bros is that they are way too reactionary.  So instead of following a roadmap (like Marvel is doing), they keep reacting and changing the plan.  Is the universe supposed to be gritty and realistic?  Is it supposed to be a dark examination on what it's like to be a hero?  Are we okay with people dying or not? 

And the problem is that I don't think anyone's sat down and analyzed the rules of this universe.  Man of Steel didn't make any indication that any superhumans existed.  And, yet, we now know that Batman had been around for a long time when Clark was growing up.  We know that Crocodile men exist.  That the US military was assisted by a magical Amazon goddess in World War I.  A costumed hero shouldn't have been as big of a deal as it was.

Then there's Batman.  We're led to believe that Batman is well known and has had most of his career.  But Clark refers to him as "this bat vigilante in Gotham" - it makes him sound like Knox in Batman '89 where Batman has *just started* and no one knows who he is?  He'd already been driving his tank around at least two US cities....people would know who he was.

If DC wants to go against the grain, fine.  If they want their movies to be connected in a universe but otherwise separate, that's great.  But if it's a universe, the universe has to make sense.  And they currently have three movies that feel like they're in very different worlds.  And BvS doesn't even seem to make sense from scene to scene because that world is so confusing.  Not to mention, we have three movies and the only likeable protagonists are the bad guys in Suicide Squad

This is why I'm been preaching that DC needs someone overseeing all of this stuff.  Not because the Marvel way is the best way but because there seems to be so many arms reaching into the pot on this.

Right now, Marvel has a plan.  It's a plan that Informant hates, but Marvel movies feel like Marvel movies.  Somehow, Ant-Man feels like it's in the same universe as Thor and the same universe as Guardians.  The only questions about Marvel are which movies come next.

DC, whether you like the movies or not, is a mess.  There's been almost no buzz on Wonder Woman, which is weird because the trailers were largely very positive.  There's now talk of DC doing a Black Adam solo movie along with a Shazam movie because they hired a star to play the villain before they hired a hero (who will, no matter what, be a bigger star than the hero).  I've heard more details on the Green Lantern Corps movie than the Aquaman movie (and one is in production and the other isn't supposed to come out until 2020).

They need to answer a question - is Zach Snyder's vision for the universe what they want, or do they need to make a change?  Because everything they're doing seems reactionary.  Man of Steel was good but had flaws so they tried to cover up those flaws and throw in Batman.  But then people were so excited about Batman that they turned the Man of Steel sequel into a Batman movie.  Then people hated that.  So they took a dark movie about villains and tried to make it funny and bright, but then that movie didn't make sense.  So they are trying to make Justice League more fun.  It wouldn't surprise me if reactions to all-black Superman made them do massive re-edits and re-shoots to have Justice League primarily take place in the Kryptonian afterlife.  Life Superman meets Contact.

To their credit, they haven't fired Snyder.  And they seem willing, at first, to let directors do their own thing (which Marvel doesn't really do - they allow directors to color the way they want as long as they color within Marvel's lines).  But if they want to do the joint universe thing, they need the universe to live by a set of rules.  Otherwise, it's not a universe at all.

I don't understand the Jerome stuff.  I thought his story ended on a cool note.  If he'd inspired someone who inspired someone who inspired the Joker that might be fine....but is this guy the Joker or not?

That's a really bizarre story.

Trump makes me nervous, but getting to watch Hillary sulk on stage was enough to get me through the next four years

Although the fact that Bill and Hillary are being seen together still makes me think that she's still the favorite for 2020.  Because the only reason she's staying married is for the political capital, and if she's truly done being a politician, she'd divorce him.

Possibly, but what a bummer that would be.  Not only in the story....but in real life because we know she's really dead.  As we saw when Fisher died, Leia means something to people.  And when Fisher was stolen from us, it might mean Leia was stolen from us too.

Movies are generally pretty kind.  Every human being dies, but our heroes don't usually have to.  Christopher Nolan's Batman gets to keep living forever.  Maybe he and Selina get old and have kids and he dies surrounded by grandkids and people that love him.  We can write our own ending, and it can be as happy as we want.  Maybe he finds a Lazarus Pit and lives forever.  We don't have to worry about it.

And when our favorite people die, it usually means something.  Han Solo dying was sad, but it was important.  He was trying to save his son.  He was trying to redeem himself.  He was trying....something.  He knew it was dangerous, and he probably knew, deep down, that it was stupid.  But he didn't care...it was what his heart was telling him to do.

If we open with a funeral, it won't feel like a movie.  It'll feel cheap, and it'll feel.....real.  We don't watch movies for real.  At least, we don't watch Star Wars movies for real.  We know that sometimes people die before their time, but we don't want our heroes to.  Their deaths either don't happen or happen for a reason.

If she dies in her sleep off screen....it's going to be really weird.  I still suspect that Leia was supposed to play a big part in turning Kylo Ren around.  When facing his father, he lashed out.  When facing his mother, he'd turn around. 

And the problem is that, as I've criticized before, Episode 7 wasn't a movie but a pilot for a 3-part TV show.  Every move was a setup for a later move.  I'm guessing Episode 8 is also more about setting up Episode 9 than being a singular movie.  So, as I've been saying, I'm guessing that the choice was between massive rewrites or rolling with a CGI Leia. 

Even if Star Killer Base II blows up Leia's ship during the opening of Episode 9, it's going to feel cheap.  They could set it up like the opening of Star Trek (09), where Leia saves everyone else on board, and it's still going to feel cheap.

Life is cheap.  I don't think (these) movies should be.  I'd love for Leia to live even though Carrie Fisher didn't.  But, as you said, it's a really neat creative challenge.

To be fair, Informant has never been all that pro-Trump.  He was definitely anti-Hillary and in the "lesser of two evils" camp, but he hasn't been "rah rah" Trump.

In other news, Joe Biden got a huge ovation when he was mentioned in the president's farewell address.  Wouldn't it have been nice if the DNC had let him run?

Meryl Streep and countless Hollywood actors can complain all they want about Trump.  But the fact remains that a) he's president and b) this wouldn't even have been an issue if the Democrats had taken this election seriously.

If high-ranking liberal voices just diverted 10% of their energy from protesting Trump into making changes to the Democratic Party, they'd be making so much more positive change.  The more attention Trump gets, the more likely that the Republicans continue to win down-ballot races while corrupt, out-of-touch Clinton cronies continue to run the party into the ground.

All four shows were renewed for the 2017-2018 season!

Yeah, but then you're messing with the emotional beats in two movies.  What if Luke dies in this one?  Or one of the younger characters?  Or if the movie is just sorta depressing at the end like Empire was?  Would Leia dying off screen make it too depressing for a Star Wars film?

In the link Grizzlor gave, they referred to Rogue One as a "road map" - I'm guessing they'll definitely try to make a fully CGI performance work.  If the tech won't be there by 2019, maybe they'll draw it back.  But I'm betting someone is building a fully CGI Leia right now to see how it'd work.

I thought Tarkin looked okay.  I knew he was dead (but didn't realize he was in the movie) so it took me a second to realize it.  My friend, who isn't a Star Wars fan, didn't realize anything was wrong.  My other friend knew something was off but couldn't put his finger on it.  He looked, to me, like a really good video game character.

Leia, on the other hand, looked terrible.  Totally fake, completely took me out of the story.  When you first see her, it's from the back with a double.  I would've just made reference to her being there without showing her if that's the best they could've done.

And, again, maybe people will stage massive boycotts and not see the movie, but I seriously seriously doubt that there'd be enough outrage to affect the bottom line.  If anything, I'd assume that it'd sell *more* tickets because people would watch the movie just to see how they handle Carrie Fisher.  Maybe I'm wrong.

I just don't agree with any of that.  I don't think Disney cares about Carrie Fisher or Mark Hamill's feelings or the fans or the legacy of Star Wars.  I just don't think they do.  Look at Marvel.  It's a money-making machine, but it's a machine.  The movies get made no matter what happens behind the scenes, and they hit their release date no matter what happens.  If someone steps out of line, they're removed.  It doesn't matter if it's directors, actors, producers.  They're about selling toys and selling tickets.

The treatment for Episode IX was written in 2014, and the movie has had a director since 2015.  The guy who wrote the treatment for VIII wrote the treatment for IX.  I'm guessing there were entire story beats written around Leia that flow from 8 to 9.  I'm sure Trevorrow has had a vision for the movie the last two years.  He pitched it, and Disney's army of suits took his ideas and ran them through the Disney Machine(tm) and it's all been rubber stamped and moved forward.

If Leia was only supposed to have a minor part, I can see them adjusting.  But make full-scale changes to the script?  Alter the production schedule at all?  I don't think the suits at Disney would allow that.  Star Wars, like Marvel, is a machine.  They could release Squirrel Girl and Jar-Jar's Crazy Adventure and it'd make a billion dollars, and they know it.  For every offended person that didn't want to see CGI Leia back in her gold bikini, they'd have ten more people salivating over it.

Ironically, I'd think differently if it was still under George Lucas.  I think he genuinely cares, whether or not he has talent.  But Disney doesn't.

They'd only need outside approval if she hasn't already signed away her rights.  As far as I can tell, no one knows the answer to whether or not she did.  They'd cast someone as Leia and then digitally put her face over.  If they can't recreate her voice, they could recast the voice like they did with Tarkin.

Disney has a story they want to tell, and I don't think they're going to alter their plans.  They might make her role lessened, but if Leia was supposed to be a big part of the end of Episode IX, I guarantee that she'll show up.  Maybe with less lines, maybe with a new voice...but she'll show up.