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Well, the problem with something like that is that a movie can't have too many beats like that.  If Leia were to suddenly die in the beginning of the movie, that's a huge deal.  So if Leia dies early on, does someone else have to live that was supposed to die so that you don't have too many major deaths?  If Leia dies in the middle of the movie, does her absence become noticeable?  Same with the end.

It reminds me of Leo on the West Wing.  Originally, the plan was for Santos to lose the election, but when John Spencer suddenly died, they changed the ending because they didn't think it'd be right for Santos to lose his VP and the election.  So Santos ended up winning, and the entire ending for the show had to be changed.

Disney isn't playing around with these movies.  Everything is created to sell toys and make money.  I don't think they're going to be cool with changing the story and major character beats because of this.  It'd be the same thing if, say, Robert Downey Jr. were to die before Infinity War is completed.  They'd take the CGI models they have, and they'd finish the movie with Iron Man.  Not including him would mean less toys and less star power.

People went to see Furious 7 to see about Paul Walker and how they handled his death.  If they indicated that Princess Leia would appear, it'd be a huge marketing move.  Buy CGI Action Leia!  Buy CGI Force Ghost Leia!  Buy "FAMILY PHOTO LEIA and COMPANY" toys!  $59.99 for the whole set!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI5u5m_F9zE

Mr Sunday Movies did a video on this, specifically because of Carrie Fisher.  We are seeing CGI performances more and more these days, and he shows a bunch of them.  Paul Walker was CGI replaced for Furious 7, and they've made mention of the idea of bringing back the CGI model in future movies.

If they want to do it, they'll do it.  If they feel she's necessary to the story, they'll do it.  That's what they did with Tarkin.  That guy wasn't essential to the plot (they could've easily made Crennick a character who interacted with Tarkin off screen), but they added him because they wanted to.  So I don't think they're going to kill Leia off screen if they weren't originally planning on it.  I think we'll get a fully CGI Leia in Episode IX, and if they were really planning on her having a big part, I don't think they'll have any issue with a Tarkin-like "substantial" role for her.

I'm sure, between Episodes 7 and 8, they'll have enough of her "old" voice to create something new, and I'm sure they scanned her for her "cameo" in Rogue One so her physical form should already be scanned.  And as Mr. Sunday Movies mentioned, she might've already signed away the right to her image so they might not need approval from anyone.  It could upset people, but I doubt it'd be enough to hurt Disney's bottom line.  Which, at the end of the day, is what they care about.

I don't know about that.  Peter Cushing died 22 years ago, and he was still a major player in Rogue One.  I imagine they could use the same technology they used for him for Carrie.  I mean, heck, they've already got the model made from Rogue One.  Age it appropriately, and she could be the star of Episode 9.

I'm not saying they should, but they've had no problems resurrecting actors so far.  I don't see why they'd make an exception this time.

Well, I think Smallville was hamstrung by the fact that it never knew what it was.  It was created when the network was more "teenage love" than anything else, and so the show was dominated by relationship issues.  Clark couldn't worry about his dead classmates because he had to worry about what Lana said or how to get her into his life.  Even when the show moved to a more serialized show with less "freaks of the week", it was more about love triangles than superpowers.

Then there was the rules.  "No flights, no tights" held strong for a while until Clark finally flew in just the fourth season.  Then the "no tights" rule was all that was left, and that seemed to be kept for arbitrary reasons.  When you have Green Arrow and the Justice League essentially wearing costumes, Clark's ever-changing wardrobe of jackets seemed disingenuous.  By the time they finally allowed the suit, they didn't have access to the whole thing so could only show the chestplate or on a mannequin.

Then there were the times when the show wanted to be more than it was.  It had a season building up to a fight with Doomsday until they realized they couldn't do Doomsday.  The same thing happened with Darkseid.  It reminds me a little bit of season 5 of sliders, where the creative team built up to an epic finale but then realized that they were a Sci-Fi show that couldn't do feature film - level CGI work.

I have fond memories of Smallville, and I've recently stuck my toe back in the water when I read a clickbait article about all the heroes that were on the show.  It was essentially the Arrowverse + the DCCU way before its time.  For all the big deal made about "Heroes vs Aliens", Smallville had that many heroes on screen quite a few times.  Outside of Batman and Wonder Woman, they showed just about every DC hero possible from big (Flash, Aquaman) to small (Booster Gold, the Wonder Twins).  From the JSA to the Legion.  The amount of ground it covered makes it look so ambitious for the time, and it's no wonder that the Arrowverse is its legacy.

It's one reason why I'd like to see Smallville brought into the Arrowverse multiverse somehow.  Without Smallville, there'd be no Arrow or Flash or Legends or Supergirl.  There might not be a Gotham or even an Agents of SHIELD.  They showed that superheroes worked on the small screen.

And while the show was a muddled mess, I still love Tom Welling as Clark and Michael Rosenbaum as Lex.

ARROW spoilers

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Bah, I forgot about Earth 2 Laurel being on Earth 1.  Thanks, spoiler promo!

The problem is that these people have all the money.  Instead of letting you sell your solar power invention, they'd buy it from you (paying you basically whatever you want) to buy it.  They'd say they'd be working with it, but after a while, it'd go away.  Cheap energy doesn't do anyone in power any good - the companies can't sell it, and the government loses a ton of lobbying money.

It's the same with pharmaceutical companies.  It's cheaper to cure diseases than to treat them.  It's why medicine is a huge industry, and we haven't cured much of anything in the last half century.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/21/politics/ … index.html

Democrats want someone new.  The establishment is still in charge.  Get excited for another 70+ white person no one wants to run in 2020!

I absolutely agree with that.  There probably isn't.  But that doesn't mean that the studio won't want to rerelease next year or prior to Suicide Squad 2 a re-edited cut with the Joker stuff.  It happens all the time.  There've been about 20 versions of Terminator 2

Well, with Suicide Squad, it's almost certainly just the first extended cut.  This one doesn't include the Joker stuff, so there'll be a "Joker's Wild" edition at some point.

I wonder if they could've done something sorta revolutionary and make it into a miniseries of sorts.  Distribute it themselves on their own website.  Then it could've been 4 hours, and people could watch it in episodes. 

I have no idea what it would cost to make that work financially, though.  $20 a viewing?  More?

I don't think the Russian hacking had any effect on Senate races.  People kept saying that Trump was going to hurt Republicans down ballot, and that didn't happen.  I don't think it was because Trump was popular, but I think it's because pundits think too much of the connection between the president and down-ballot candidates. 

The senate races were close, but they lost.  The presidential election was close, but they lost.  It was a devastating election, and the people in charge should be gone.  They bet everything on Hillary Clinton, and they need to pay the price.  The fact that everyone in charge still has their job shows just how corrupt the party leaders are.

What's crazy is that Democrats should be furious at their party leadership, and they're not.  If people were protesting Pelosi and the DNC, they'd get fresh leadership.  Hopefully they turn their attention from Trump and focus internally, or they're going to run into the same problems in 2018 and 2020.  And hopefully the party can go back to being something that people believe in.  Because, right now, it's hard to tell the DNC from the RNC.

Has the Democratic Party done anything to fix whatever mistakes led to them losing so much?  Has anyone quit or been fired? 

Or is it just going to be four more years of complaining while not fixing anything?

I mean, it's definitely possible.  She doesn't have a huge role (like DMD, I had to check to make sure she was alive and she's in the final shot of the midseason finale), and she could definitely be rolled back.  If it were any other show, I'd guess that.

But it's Walking Dead, and people die all the time.  It's probably easier for everyone involved if they just kill her off.

I guess Sasha ain't long for Walking Dead, despite what the news outlets are saying.

Wow, Arrow's midseason finale had some legit surprises on a series of shows that have been pretty bad about surprises.  The Evelyn stuff wasn't one because that was spoiled for us, and I don't particularly care about her character.

But Oliver killing Billy?  I was assuming that Billy *was* Prometheus (and he still might be), and tricking Oliver into killing him is a pretty great move.  I'm hoping that Prometheus is someone else because it sorta kills the move if he is Billy.

Then Laurel.  It can't be Flashpoint, right?  Because no one would remember her dying if she didn't really die.  I was thinking it might be Legends that caused her to come back, but it couldn't have been them either, I don't think.  It has to be Prometheus, but I'm not sure how he'd pull that off.

I was sorta annoyed by all the references to Flashpoint and the crossover, though.  I get that they'd probably all still be talking about it, but it felt a bit forced.

Not sure, but it still references Starling City.

Did you notice Ford's handshake with Bernard at the end?  They say you can identify a host by their handshake....

....the Ford that died was a host.

I actually thought the Lucifer storyline has been pretty good, and I thought Rick Springfield did a pretty good job in the role.  I liked that Lucifer is just emotionally distraught and doesn't have a master plan.  I think it's a pretty cool idea for a villain.

Well, that would make sense.  I heard about it on the Weekly Planet, which is an Australian-based podcast.

To be fair, he could've created the spark and handed it to someone great.  We don't know.  I was looking forward to a Fuller-led series, but whoever is running it could do a great job.

I also heard that it's going to also be shown on Netflix so now I don't have to steal it

Yes.  I would.  Email me

(If you already did, I haven't checked )

Hahah, I really do think it's the way it should go.  I also think, when Arrow ends, Stephen Amell could sign a similar deal.  Probably not possible since he'd demand "star" money, but it'd certainly be fun for him to continue to pop up in the Arrowverse even after Arrow is over.

And Legends would be a hitch, but not as much as you'd think.  They already do less than the normal shows, and their characters could still float around for 5-6 episodes of the other shows (and, of course, the Arrow/Flash/Supergirl characters could still pop up on their show.

Until they figure out the universe thing, the hardest would actually be Supergirl.  Since they don't seem to have any characters that overlap (notice that Earth 1 and Kara's Earth have a different president).

Well of course they shouldn't do it, but I'm worried that they will.  I read something about Grant Gustin only having a contract through the end of this season, but I can't find that article anymore so maybe I made it up.

I really liked the first part (I haven't watched tonight's Arrow yet).  What I liked is that it did feel like an event - not just a crossover.  The previous ones felt like contained episodes of each show with guest stars.  This felt like an episode of "Arrowverse: the Show" - I didn't feel like the show really babied any viewers.  They handled some real stuff (fighting Vigilante instead of just some random dude, Stein meeting his daughter, Diggle finding out about Sara, etc) and I thought most of the meetings were pretty organic and fun.  Cisco working with Ray, Stein reuniting with Caitlin, and the Kara/Barry and Barry/Oliver stuff was pretty cool.

And the aliens are dangerous enough to warrant a team-up but faceless enough that we didn't have to spend much time building them up to be feared/understood.

Now some negatives:

- I don't love much about Flashpoint.  I like that they're taking it as seriously as they should, but whiny Cisco is no fun (like whiny Felicity was no fun).  And whiny Barry is no fun.
- Wally does not work for me.  He throws this pity party for himself because he's not a speedster, and then he throws a pity party when people don't love his powers as much as he does.  Wally West is a great character, and I don't think he's being portrayed very well at all.  He's zero fun, and he's got zero charisma.
-The newspaper article changed to show a different writer, but it still says Starling City.  Does Central City's paper not acknowledge the new name for Star City, does it eventually change back, or was it a mistake?  Also, as a former journalist, that article is horribly written for a hard-news piece.  Writes much more like a human interest fluff piece.  Snapper Carr would never put that in his paper.

Well, we say that Trump is worse, but I'm not 100% sure he is.  They run in a lot of the same circles....including private sex parties with underage girls.  When Trump talks about Bill, I would tend to believe him.  I think they're very similar, but Bill is much more tactful about it.

Every time a celebrity complains about Trump, I laugh.  If the Democrats had taken this election even a little seriously, they would've won in a landslide.  The Republican Party is still divided about Trump.  The Democrats ran a candidate *so unpopular* that she was defeated by a portion of the Republican Party.

This was the most winnable election in history, and the party decided it was more important to feed Hillary's lust for power.  And now they're paying for it.

Well, the Marvel films hold up to minimal levels of questioning.  Take Hydra, for example.  There's an explanation for how Hydra could exist in Captain America: the First Avenger and then still exist in Captain America: the Winter Soldier.  Is it a great explanation?  No.  But they tried. 

In Star Wars, they just expect us to substitute "First Order" for "Empire" and "Rebellion" for "Resistance" and just carry on.  But what doesn't make sense is how they got there.  Or why any of the designations were changed in the first place. 

I imagine new designations make it seem like the victories in Return of the Jedi were true victories:

- Luke defeated the Empire
- The Empire is destroyed forever
- The New Republic was formed

And, yeah, I can start connecting some dots.  Someone (Snoke?) took control of the remnants of the Empire and built the First Order in its image.  Even without a leader, the Empire still had an unlimited number of troops/ships with commanders that we'd have to assume have no loyalty to the New Republic.  So even if the New Republic took *some* control of Empire troops, there'd still be, again, unlimited numbers that they wouldn't be able to control.

But, even then, the new designations don't make sense.  The Empire would still be the Empire even if Palpatine died.  The Roman Empire didn't become something different because one Caesar died.  Even if the Romans failed to conquer some random town in France, the emperor wouldn't completely rebrand as something else.  If anything, the "Empire" designation would be more appropriate to show that they never actually lost power.

But let's say that, as PR move, the remnants of the Empire just became the First Order.  Why the Resistance?  Why are they not just the "Army of the New Republic?"  Why is Leia in the Resistance and not the Army of the New Republic?  In fact, why is every member of the former Rebellion now members of the Resistance? 

At the end of the day, it would've been easier to keep things.  The Empire is still around.  There was a power struggle, but someone (Snoke) took over and the Empire never lost much of its power.  The Rebellion is still around and is separate from the New Republic, which is just-about dead and clinging to a single random system.   One reason Luke left is because all the work he did was for nothing.

Question - Did Romney or McCain have widespread recounts, or was Gore the last time this happened?

I watched it again.  I still just don't see the appeal of this movie.  It's just nostalgia...there's nothing more to it.

The problem is that I leave with so many questions that I wonder how it's possible that I've just watched a 150-minute movie.

Things we know about Rey: she's brave, she's strong with the Force, she has a mysterious past.
Things we know about Finn: he's brave, he's noble, and he has a mysterious past.
Things we know about Poe: he's brave, he's a good pilot, and we know nothing about his past.
Things we know about Maz: she's been around 1000 years with a mysterious past.

And these are the main characters! 

I know Luke and Han aren't great characters in A New Hope, but we knew some things about Luke.  His father died at the hands of Darth Vader.  He was a great warrior, a great friend, and a great pilot.  Luke lives with his aunt and uncle.  He wants to leave the planet because he feels a pull to the bigger conflicts.

All we know about Rey is that she feels a pull to the bigger conflicts and wants to fight....but instead of wanting to leave, she wants to stay.  But we don't know anything about her parents and almost nothing of her past.

The movie is so secretive, not letting us know anything to try and set up a number of "I am your father" moments, but that means that nostalgia has to carry the entire film.  And for a lot of people, that was enough.  For me, I'm wondering what the Hell happened.

I watch the scene where the Starkiller base fires and destroys that system, and it raises a hundred questions that the movie refuses to give any insight into.  How did the First Order rise from the rubble of the Empire to, once again, be the most powerful force of the galaxy?  Who is the New Republic, and why is its capital in some system we've never heard of (instead of Coruscant?  Why are the Resistance and the New Republic separate?  Shouldn't the Resistance just be the fleet of the New Republic?  Why does Princess Leia work for the Resistance and not the New Republic?

And I get that this is a movie that can afford to raise questions and not answer them because movies 8 and 9 would be coming no matter what.  This is season one of a show that's guaranteed to be renewed.  And, yeah, there's enough fun stuff in the movie that you don't ask the questions until later.

But, really, this movie couldn't afford to give us anything?  Anything at all?