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There's this idea floating around that what little attention Gunn's movie is able to grab is because of Harley Quinn. If so, why is that? I mean, why is this character popular with mainstream audiences? And who exactly is Harley Quinn's primary demographic these days?
 
I have a theory about why she is popular, but it isn't a theory that the fourth wave feminists who have adopted her as their spirit animal would want to hear.

Pfft.  More like unemployed youngsters that are all agog over grunge and short shorts. 
 
The character was a fun and entertaining one. 
But that character died and completely disappeared years ago. 
 
But you are correct that that mess we saw in the recent movies was lackluster and not interesting.  Especially after deleting the very traits that made up the core concept of the character.

Lonely middle aged men  She's not nearly as popular as they keep treating her as, and she's honestly not a very interesting character.  She's great in small bits or to play off Joker but not how we've seen in the movies so far.

There's this idea floating around that what little attention Gunn's movie is able to grab is because of Harley Quinn. If so, why is that? I mean, why is this character popular with mainstream audiences? And who exactly is Harley Quinn's primary demographic these days?
 
I have a theory about why she is popular, but it isn't a theory that the fourth wave feminists who have adopted her as their spirit animal would want to hear.

There's this idea floating around that what little attention Gunn's movie is able to grab is because of Harley Quinn. If so, why is that? I mean, why is this character popular with mainstream audiences? And who exactly is Harley Quinn's primary demographic these days?
 
I have a theory about why she is popular, but it isn't a theory that the fourth wave feminists who have adopted her as their spirit animal would want to hear.

I can almost guarantee you that Feige will not bother with any characters that appeared in Agents of Shield who didn't appear in one of his MCU movies first (ala Phil Coulson and Peggy Carter). They have the taint of "ruined by Jeff Loeb" on them. Besides, Feige doesn't need any of those characters. He has the entire stockpile of characters from the Marvel vault at his disposal, and he knows he can pretty much make any of them interesting/popular if he puts the effort in.

Okay, then maybe I can sell you on the same idea, but just expressed differently. Rather than think of Action Hero as a rewrite/revamp of Dark Champions, consider publishing an entirely new genre book on the same level as Champions, Fantasy Hero, and Star Hero, but called Action Hero. It would cover the territory of action/adventure cinema: war, spy/espionage, counter-terror, martial arts, whatever Fast/Furious is, etc. That would leave Dark Champions 6e to focus more clearly on vigilante justice and "dark superheroes", freeing it from the burden of being an ad hoc catch-all for everything and anything action-oriented in a modern setting.

In terms of "unfolding", as dmjalund puts it, I would revamp Dark Champions for 6e and call it Action Hero, and then put out a Danger International campaign book, providing a complete espionage campaign setting.

Justice League isn't terrible.  I consider it on par with the worst Marvel films, and fun in some parts.  It could have been great but is deeply flawed.  What's frustrating and sad is that they could have avoided those flaws so easily, but they're exactly what DC seems to WANT in their movies.
 
Sometimes I wonder if DC isn't trying to "out-Marvel" Marvel by having its superheroes "down to earth" with "real life problems" the way the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man did when they first came out.  So DC stands out by doing what Marvel did to them, in the 60s.

Except Stan Lee understood what a hero was, what superheroes are supposed to do, and how to keep characters likable, fun, and interesting despite having flaws and difficulties.  Yes, the Thing and Human Torch used to fight, but they were good buddies who really cared about each other still.  Yes, Spider-Man had the worst luck but still when he strapped on that costume, he had a blast and was fun to read.  All that seems to have eluded DC entirely except for a fluke in Wonder Woman.
 

That's exactly the comparison that DC has to overcome. Marvel Studios has developed a reputation for consistent entertainment. They've had very few outright clunkers, and at this point the audience assumes that a new Marvel movie will at minimum be fun, and may even be exceptional. But the DC theater audience has been burned more often than satisfied, and they've grown wary of spending their movie budget on new releases.

I think it is a bit disingenuous for people to call the theatrical version of the movie "Joss-tice League", as if Whedon was the visionary mastermind behind what we got. The real culprits were WB execs who couldn't keep their meddling fingers out of the pie, even when Snyder was in charge. Whedon was merely the knife with which they butchered what Snyder had begun. Geoff Johns gleefully engineered Snyder's removal and convinced Whedon to take the reins for a nice, fat paycheck. Whedon was never going to have the time or resources to make what anyone would truly call "his Justice League". His greatest failure, in my view, was in agreeing to the job in the first place, and putting himself in a position to take all the blame for what ended up on screen.
 
The fact that the "Snyder Cut" is, by many accounts, merely different--but not necessarily better--is testament to the fact that the movie was flawed at its foundations, and that no amount of re-working was ever going to save it and make it great. It seems to me that any glowing praise for it is coming primarily from DC fanboys who are desperate for a win here. I would not be surprised if the Snyder Cut fades from memory and is forgotten in a few years as WB moves on to the next series of disconnected movies of inconsistent quality.

I think it is a bit disingenuous for people to call the theatrical version of the movie "Joss-tice League", as if Whedon was the visionary mastermind behind what we got. The real culprits were WB execs who couldn't keep their meddling fingers out of the pie, even when Snyder was in charge. Whedon was merely the knife with which they butchered what Snyder had begun. Geoff Johns gleefully engineered Snyder's removal and convinced Whedon to take the reins for a nice, fat paycheck. Whedon was never going to have the time or resources to make what anyone would truly call "his Justice League". His greatest failure, in my view, was in agreeing to the job in the first place, and putting himself in a position to take all the blame for what ended up on screen.
 
The fact that the "Snyder Cut" is, by many accounts, merely different--but not necessarily better--is testament to the fact that the movie was flawed at its foundations, and that no amount of re-working was ever going to save it and make it great. It seems to me that any glowing praise for it is coming primarily from DC fanboys who are desperate for a win here. I would not be surprised if the Snyder Cut fades from memory and is forgotten in a few years as WB moves on to the next series of disconnected movies of inconsistent quality.

I think it is a bit disingenuous for people to call the theatrical version of the movie "Joss-tice League", as if Whedon was the visionary mastermind behind what we got. The real culprits were WB execs who couldn't keep their meddling fingers out of the pie, even when Snyder was in charge. Whedon was merely the knife with which they butchered what Snyder had begun. Geoff Johns gleefully engineered Snyder's removal and convinced Whedon to take the reins for a nice, fat paycheck. Whedon was never going to have the time or resources to make what anyone would truly call "his Justice League". His greatest failure, in my view, was in agreeing to the job in the first place, and putting himself in a position to take all the blame for what ended up on screen.
 
The fact that the "Snyder Cut" is, by many accounts, merely different--but not necessarily better--is testament to the fact that the movie was flawed at its foundations, and that no amount of re-working was ever going to save it and make it great. It seems to me that any glowing praise for it is coming primarily from DC fanboys who are desperate for a win here. I would not be surprised if the Snyder Cut fades from memory and is forgotten in a few years as WB moves on to the next series of disconnected movies of inconsistent quality.

I think it is a bit disingenuous for people to call the theatrical version of the movie "Joss-tice League", as if Whedon was the visionary mastermind behind what we got. The real culprits were WB execs who couldn't keep their meddling fingers out of the pie, even when Snyder was in charge. Whedon was merely the knife with which they butchered what Snyder had begun. Geoff Johns gleefully engineered Snyder's removal and convinced Whedon to take the reins for a nice, fat paycheck. Whedon was never going to have the time or resources to make what anyone would truly call "his Justice League". His greatest failure, in my view, was in agreeing to the job in the first place, and putting himself in a position to take all the blame for what ended up on screen.
 
The fact that the "Snyder Cut" is, by many accounts, merely different--but not necessarily better--is testament to the fact that the movie was flawed at its foundations, and that no amount of re-working was ever going to save it and make it great. It seems to me that any glowing praise for it is coming primarily from DC fanboys who are desperate for a win here. I would not be surprised if the Snyder Cut fades from memory and is forgotten in a few years as WB moves on to the next series of disconnected movies of inconsistent quality.

It's a shame Amazon Prime didn't see it that way when they were pitched The Boys. Of course, I'm sure they feel mighty proud of themselves given how successful the show has been in connecting with viewers who have as much contempt for superheroes as Garth Ennis does.

The core of their character absolutely should be set in stone. It is literally what defines them as characters. However, the full spectrum of those core personality traits can, and should, be explored and evolved in careful, nuanced ways over time. In that context, I would not categorize Snyder's Superman as a carefully curated, nuanced exploration of the character. It would categorize it as something of a hatchet job.
 
With Wonder Woman it is harder to tell if she was more responsibly handled since we didn't get to see her personality evolve between 1918 and 1984. But I would expect that for a woman who had lived for hundreds of years prior to her first interaction with "Man's World", her core character would have been firmly established and not subject to dramatic shifts. Not even the horrors of the Great War would change a warrior princess like Diana enough to strip her of her core identity and value set. That's why it is difficult to watch her suddenly transition from warrior to sentinel without any explanation whatsoever.

I don't think any Far From Home in-universe characters were shown undertaking such an analysis. Why is this relevant?

I don't think any Far From Home in-universe characters were shown undertaking such an analysis. Why is this relevant?

It sounds more like something a Bat-Kaiju  would do.

Thanos is evil!  Pure evil I tell you!
 
 

I plotted a graph of Legendary Kong's growth, fitting it to two values we know (his size in 1973 and 2021), and one value I'm throwing in just for fun (his height as given in the promotional materials for the original 1933 film). Based on the resulting curve, it is evident that Legendary Kong is still on an upward growth trajectory.
 
 

I think in order to make an obsession with Lady Death work, they would have needed to establish Lady Death as a character long before hand, and introduce Thanos' obsession with her as well. Otherwise it just comes out of the blue, and it wouldn't resonate with audiences who will have never seen that unrequited relationship established in any way. It isn't the "personification of death" that is the problem, it is the unwillingness to develop the necessary characters and relationships ahead of time to make the story compelling.
 
But also, and this isn't stated outright by the writers, the direction they chose allows them to make a socio-political statement about irresponsible plundering of natural resources and unrestricted population growth.

In which case, it is *VITAL* that Godzilla kill him in this movie.  At this rate he will be bigger than the moon in another few decades!

If the Infinity Gauntlet allowed Thanos to do anything with/to the universe, then he could have installed a cosmic process that performed the same culling action whenever any planet's population outstripped its resources by some metric, combined with a process that restored the planet's resources a bit. This cosmic cron job would keep everything balanced, forever, especially for those intelligent species that caught on to what was happening and managed to curate their resources and manage their populations themselves. I get that Thanos was insane, but why couldn't he have thought like an insane engineer rather than just an insane bureaucrat?

I plotted a graph of Legendary Kong's growth, fitting it to two values we know (his size in 1973 and 2021), and one value I'm throwing in just for fun (his height as given in the promotional materials for the original 1933 film). Based on the resulting curve, it is evident that Legendary Kong is still on an upward growth trajectory.