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In terms of box office performance, the more interesting question is whether it will break Deadpool's February record of $132M for its domestic opening weekend gross. The next best performer is Fifty Shades of Grey at a paltry $85M.

Episode 1 of Altered Carbon. I need to watch it again, with the CC turned on; too much of the dialogue is unintelligible (actors mumble a lot these days). It is interesting so far, though hardly groundbreaking in its recycling of old cyberpunk tropes, but I am not a big fan of the lead actor. I was vaguely aware of the whitewashing accusations thrown at this show going in, but didn't pay that much attention to all the noise. For me, it isn't about some lost opportunity to put an asian actor in the lead role, but just the fact that the asian actor who appears as Takeshi Kovacs in the opening sequence was so compelling and charismatic (to me anyway) that I really wished the story stuck with that "sleeve" for the whole thing.

Well now the alt-press is whining about Marvel's missed opportunity to add LGBTQ representation to Black Panther. It seems to me that Marvel is doomed to disappoint some minority group (or three) with every MCU release just due to the inherent limitations of the 2-hour movie format.

Comics still aren't mainstream. However, action movies with a superhero flavor have become mainstream because, well, at the end of the day people like a good action flick, even if it has the occasional superhero trope woven into it here and there.

If I'm not mistaken, the 6e version of Mechanon can separate his head from his body. Check out that monstrosity of a character build.

It certainly does have that vibe, but I would hesitate to use the loaded term "historic" and go with the more uninflected term "unprecedented" instead. And (so far) it is only unprecedented in the sense that it marks the first time that a major studio has greenlit a black superhero movie with an African-American director and a primarily black cast. This is a good thing to be sure, but I think the movie needs to stand out in more ways than that--and stand the test of time--before it will be recognized as something genuinely "historic".

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Most studios don't aim for "real excitement," but aim for "sufficient curiosity". Whatever gets you to buy a ticket. Studios learned that they could indeed turn a movie with poor pre-release buzz into a box office success with an excessive marketing and advertising push with Charlie's Angels. The advertising department literally bought that movie's success, and studios have been using that move as a go-to play ever since. Marvel is in a slightly different boat. They know they have "sufficient curiosity" in the bag without spending a dime on advertising simply because of the strength of their brand and the current love the public has for the MCU in general. What a big advertising/hype push does for them is drown out all competition so they get all the attention leading up to the movie's release, maximizing first weekend box office potential. They don't need the hype to generate excitement; they need it to turn a $600B return into an $800B return (which has less to do with marketplace excitement and everything to do with marketplace saturation).

You know, when I saw Wargames back in 1983 I loved it and, at the time, thought, Finally a movie that gets being a computer nerd right! It was an important personal touchstone in cinema for me. Of course, for 99% of the movie-going audience, that movie was just another light thriller with some dorky kids in it. Just because that movie was important to me in some intensely personal way (and maybe even for a whole lot of other computer nerds like me), that doesn't mean I accord it some wider significance to our society or our culture. It was a just a movie, and only a fairly decent one (from a purely objective point of view) irrespective of how much I loved it, or how important it was to me, or how many tears of representational joy I shed over it. Yet with movies like Wonder Woman (which I absolutely adored) and Black Panther (which I expect to like very much), we are all expected to celebrate its "cultural importance" and disregard its objective merits as a piece of cinematic storytelling. Impartial criticism is simply not allowed in the highly-charged atmosphere of BLM and Me Too that is shaping the acceptable groupthink today. Nobody is trying to marginalize the importance of these movies to their respective target demos, but we ought to be allowed to assess them from a more objective perspective without being called out as insensitive or dismissive.

Really? This is my least favorite season. It's afflicted with one drab location, a boring storyline (involving incomprehensible time-travel nonsense no less) and cheesy, one-note clichéd villains. The first season run-up to the Hydra reveal was better than this. Ugh.

I don't blame you. Wonder Woman's boots didn't look good on Melissa Benoist:

Quoting from Nerdist news last week: This would seem to indicate that she'll be wearing the black and green outfit for the entirety of her first film.

There was a tv ad last year that showed Supergirl wearing Wonder Woman's boots, so I suppose anything is possible...

It won't be long before Ollie makes an off-hand critical comment about how "That Bat guy brands the criminals he catches."

No.

I wouldn't mind either, but the CW already played their Lesbian Couple card with Alex (and Maggie), and we both know they aren't going to double down on that play. Besides, Supergirl is deemed too wholesome to be gay, even in 2018.

The downside of Monday's episode was the disappointing lack of Saturn Girl. Actually, the bigger issue for me is the relationship they are trying to build between Lena and James. It is interfering with quality Lena/Kara time. Lena and Kara have more chemistry with each other than either of them have (or ever had) with James or Mon-El.

And Asgardians have the dwarves...

Captain Marvel's costume in the comics these days varies from dark blue to medium blue depending on the lighting conditions, with an overall skew towards darker blue, making that third image the closest to comic-book CM. I really like that third version, though I wouldn't mind the blue being kicked up a tiny bit brighter. The DCEU one is fairly accurate for the Snyder aesthetic, but I think the reds would be darker.

As I recall it was mostly instructions on the use of various equipment and so on.

I gave the hero an NPC sidekick.

I do agree with you on that count. They do look, more or less, like evolutionary branches of a common design mindset, at least in its minute details. However, the overall aesthetic is still one that conforms to the boring, black, padded "tech" armor design that countless other characters have been forced to wear since Singer foisted it upon us eighteen years ago. There's a YouTube video that discusses the cultural origins of the classic supersuit and Hollywood's disdain for it, showing many (oh so many) examples from the myriad superhero movies that have come out since 2000's X-Men. When one is so vividly reminded of just how ubiquitous this creatively empty motif has become, it feels like a cut that never heals because it keeps getting abraded and re-opened with every new superhero movie that comes out.

Two things I see very clearly from that photo: First, they darkened (to black) all the gray that used to be in Ant-Man's previous suit, which is hardly surprising given how much of a hard-on Hollywood has for black (as the primary element in) superhero costumes. Second, the swaths of red in his suit add way more color to its appearance than the barely noticeable patches of dark blue on hers. They match only in the sense that they both conform to the generic black supersuit design aesthetic we've been stuck with since the very first X-Men movie.

It works just fine. It's really no different than any other one-on-one RPG experience. The mechanics work the same; it's the feel of the adventures that changes because it is all about the solo character. If you can both get into the spirit of that, then it works great!

Oh I know, but Hawkeye and Black Widow were given similar blackops uniforms to visually connect them (another nod to their Ultimates incarnations, I feel). Now, it would be a bad idea to make the Ant-Man and Wasp costumes identical (or even nearly so), but they are so different from each other that they don't even look like they come from the same movie/sub-franchise, much less from the same technology (and minds that created it).