The Marvels , you know that new superhero movie

[Lemmy]

This was in response to people convinced that another trailer for The Marvels was the straw that would break the camel's back and collapse their media empire or whatever.

No one said that either. Or anything even close to that.

GotG 3 was pretty solid, IMO. I also enjoyed the D&D movie, even if it apparently didn't do well overall...perhaps I might have a bit of bias due to enjoying the source material, perhaps Wizards sandbagged themselves by being overtly evil near the release, who knows? John Wick 4 was also enjoyable enough.

I also quite enjoyed the live action One Piece adaptation. Never got into the original anime, and I understand skepticism as most live action adaptations of Anime are dodgy at best....but this one actually was surprisingly decent.

Sure, lots of rough entries all in all, but a few good bits here and there.

GotG3 is what I'm calling "barely a success" (financially). The movie was pretty good, but while it actually made a profit, it wasn't exactly a resounding success. The D&D movie also flopped, IIRC.

You're right about John Wick and One Piece, though.

- John Wick, I don't remember the numbers , but it probably made a lot of money.
- One Piece was actually well done and apparently a major success... I didn't think Netflix had it in them. Apparently, one of the reasons is that Oda had a lot of say in its writing and production, unlike the creator of Cowboy Bebop (who doesn't actually own the IP, IIRC).

[sktarq]

- John Wick, I don't remember the numbers , but it probably made a lot of money.

Wick did very well, in large part due to keeping costs down

What I actually said is that Disney isn't dying. This was in response to people convinced that another trailer for The Marvels was the straw that would break the camel's back and collapse their media empire or whatever.

While I'm sure a few extremists may have said that far more were of the "this proves Disney is in trouble" camp. Where trouble =/= immanent bankruptcy. That chorus has been growing over the past couple years as Disney has not returned post pandemic even to the weakened state other players have reached (some of whom have been forthcoming that they are having issues and what is being done to change that. WB under Zazlav for example and shifting the DCEU to Gunn (which who knows how that will work out). Now there was a lot of debate about this idea and if anything The Marvels has broken the camels back about that narrative. So it has become more normal to see questions about this in industry trades or quarterly investor calls as issues of concern. It has been mentioned in the growing shareholder proxy fight that is brewing around the board (and thus supporting the stock price). Yes it has been growing for a while...there was an article about how Iger was undermining Chapek and organized his return a couple months back that was not complimentary but I'd say the Marvels would be where the momentum shifted. And while yeah sure some are hyperbolic to dismiss the whole argument with those fringe voices is erroneous and dismissive IMO.

One of issues is that the studios, while they make up a small part of the business directly, are largely responsible for driving business to the other (non sport) sectors as well as allowing premium pricing abilities with those. (Why people will buy super expensive plastic knick-knacks if they have Disney attached. So studio result weakness will eventually translate into weaknesses in other areas (and are already seeing some of that in things like toy shelf space in major retailers etc)

But yeah it is more a narrative change than anything but still important in its way.

Also Disney as a % of the North American Box office has been going down since 2019
2015=21.0%
2016=25.9%
2017=23.1%
2018=26.4%
2019=32.9%
2020=10.7%
2021=20.5%
2022=18.4%
2023=17.3%

Now I think that shows that Disney has been both relying on its big brands Princesses, Pixar, Star Wars, and MCU and all have been if anything stronger than its competitors for a time. Non Disney NA box office bounced between $8-9BB/year from 2024 thru 2018 and looking at $6.014BB in 22 and $6.725 in 23. So we have a roughly 78% recovery by non Disney studios and a 40% recovery by Disney. So even with noisy data and a large base effect these things are starting to matter. And all that is on revenue and ignores cost issues.

[Mechalich]

Now I think that shows that Disney has been both relying on its big brands Princesses, Pixar, Star Wars, and MCU and all have been if anything stronger than its competitors for a time. Non Disney NA box office bounced between $8-9BB/year from 2024 thru 2018 and looking at $6.014BB in 22 and $6.725 in 23. So we have a roughly 78% recovery by non Disney studios and a 40% recovery by Disney. So even with noisy data and a large base effect these things are starting to matter. And all that is on revenue and ignores cost issues.

The interesting question is how that recovery compares to Warner Bros, Universal, Paramount, and Sony (and 20th Century Studios if they're still doing their own accounting), and how the box office has shifted with growth by Lionsgate, A24, Focus, and other non-traditional participants. 2023 had a sizeable pile of NA Box Office money go to tiny Angel Studios (Sound of Freedom) and directly into the pockets of Taylor Swift (the Eras Tour film was produced without a studio through a partnership with AMC). There has been a shift, but it's definitely noisy.

I agree that Disney is suffering from reliance on its large brands. It makes fewer movies and expects each movie to be bigger, so the flops count harder. Notably, Disney doesn't make any horror films, which tend to be major profit generators (while there are no horror films in the 2023 top ten, there are 10 in the 2023 top fifty). If, going forward, the success of blockbusters is going to be erratic and unpredictable compared to the previous decade, then Disney is badly positioned to take advantage of this.

[Tyndmyr]

Since we're chatting Disney....Wish just came out, and I have seen it. It is...okay.

Financially, it does not seem likely to reverse Disney's trend, with an utterly abysmal opening weekend. Plot wise, it's really nothing new. You've seen this before. You won't be surprised at any point in the film. Oh, there are some cute animals and what not...the film does pretty decent at animating things cutely, and that's a point in its favor, but the references to other Disney things are way, way too overt, and we've still got some other story problems.

Plot discussion:

Spoiler

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So, Disney is going through a phase of not having a true villain. Encanto already did this, with the nominal villain being the matriarch of the family....but she's not entirely villainous. Her motives are ultimately good, even if some miscommunication happens and there's some tension. There's conflict, but not true villainy, yknow?

The same's true here. The king is really trying to be a good king. He is understanding. The people really do like him, and have agreed to this state of affairs. The entire initial conflict is basically just miscommunication, with neither side playing the villain role. His insecurity causes him to eventually open the Book of Bad Magic, which makes him overtly, irredeemably evil, I guess, but not in a way that has any lasting consequences for anyone. More just the colors change to green, and there's a lot of cackling and acting the part. There's a deeper question here about the nature of dreams, consent, etc, but...Disney gonna Disney. The guy with green magic laughing manically is the bad guy, and he must be stopped in the big finale, obviously. And he will be, simply by people wanting him to be. They don't have to actually do anything, it's just...it happens.

This is both extremely predictable, with every element being foreshadowed to the point of hamfistedly telling the audience the same thing several times, and sort of unsatisfying. Pretty much everything the characters do ends up being largely irrelevant, since literally anything and everything is just undone by wanting it to be, which I guess could have been done pretty much whenever the characters wanted to. Oh, sure, there's lots of scampering around and hijinks, but none of it matters. Even with the understanding that it's a Disney movie with a kids level of violence and stakes, there's usually somewhat more threat of evil, and at least a supposed need to act to prevent really bad stuff. Without that, the whole affair is largely forgettable.

Edit:
There was a trailer for Inside Out Two. There appears to also be a Zootopia 2, a Toy Story 5, and the aforementioned Frozen 3 and 4 coming out. I am filled with apathy.

[gbaji]

The Eternals is the biggest disappointment, for me, as a movie. The idea was bold, interesting and different. The execution and integration with the wider MCU was lacking, IMO. I fear the same thing will happen when Marvel inevitably gets around to adding Sentry to the MCU.

Yeah. The Eternals had the potential to be a really nice bridging story, giving some bigger scope history to Earth, its heroes, origins, purpose, etc. A kind of "here's how things fit in on a cosmic scale". The problem is that the characters themselves, while again having great potential, just kinda felt flat. And the "cosmic stuff", was not really thought out completely either. It almost felt like they weren't sure if they really wanted to go there, so they kinda went halfway to see how people reacted, so that they could just pull the plug if needed. That sort of tepid approach is almost always going to guarantee failure though.

Even just historical consistency had some problems. Not sure if this was a holdover from the original comic series or not, but I just remember kinda scraching my head at the end of the film. Ok. So Celestial leader guy was planting seeds to grow more celestials. Great. Needed to grow life in a specific way to create the "spark" needed (which was a nice tie in to GotG2 actually). Also great. He's done this many times in the past, with many planets, with Earth just being the most recent one about to "flower" so to speak. All good so far.

But then we get to the Deviants. Hmm... So, the original plan was to create this super powerful and violent race of beasts to trim away any evolutionary paths that wouldn't lead to the desdired result (say like dionosaurs and such). Ok. Got it. But they ended up being too violent and uncontrolled and were killing the species intended to develop, so they needed to be stopped from doing that, so he creates a second set of super powered beings to cull the Deviants from these planets and stop them from breaking the whole process. Ok. All good. All set in motion long ago, so he's got no choice but to create Eternals on all these worlds to stop the Deviants. Oh... wait. Except this exact same set of Eternals have memories of past planets they have worked on. So when they complete their mission on a planet (which takes like millions of years), he wipes their memories, reshapes them for the next planet that needs them, and sends them off to do it all again? Um... Wait. If it takes millions of years for each of these planets to do this, and this same set of Eternals has gone through this cycle many times, then why hasn't he just fixed the Deviants to prevent the need for Eternals in the first place?

Why is he, after doing this for presumably billions of years, still creating the same Deviants with the same flaw, and putting them on new planets and setting the same problem and conflict into motion? He should have fixed this problem long before Earth and the Eternals on it ever came along for this process in the first place. The historical timeline just doesn't make any sense here.

I get that they were trying to adhere to the comic history here, and that history includes a long running conflict between the Deviants and the Eternals, so I guess they felt that if they had Eternals they had to have Deviants as well, but honestly, the actual story they did in the film didn't need the Deviants at all. They were completely unnecessary and added nothing at all to it. Their only purpose in the story was to explain why the Eternals were created in the first place. Which, if this was the "first generation" of planets that had been seeded like this, and thus the problem with the Deviants wasn't know when the seeding was done, the existence of both Deviants and Eternals on Earth makes sense. But the moment they added in "and they have memories of having done this many many times in the past", the whole thing falls apart. And sure, we could assume that the Deviants were introduced into the process on many planets, all at once, hundreds of millions of years ago, and the realization that this was a problem and the creation of Eternals to solve this maybe just in the last few million, the timeline might still work (maybe). But that's never really clarified in the film itself (and still makes the scale of time and the number of cycles they've gone through problematic just from a math pov).

Dunno. Just seems like if you are going to the trouble to add some kind of cosmic level stuff into the setting, maybe spend a little time actually thinking it through and making it "fit". And if there's stuff from the source comics that doesn't work, then leave them out. They could trvially have left the Deviants out of the story entirely. Just say that the Eternals were created to protect humanity from extinction all along, and move foward from there. The exact same story, with the exact same conflict, and the exact same resolution could have been filmed, but now with more focus on the characters and events themselves instead of what was more or less a side diversion (The Deviants had absolutely zero impact on the plot of the film, so every second they were there was a second lost in the film).

So... yeah. Not "bad" in terms of overall concept and idea. Just "badly implemented". They needed to figure out what they wanted to accomplish with this story before the wrote and fiilmed it, instead of kinda half-assing the whole thing.

[Zalabim]

...

But then we get to the Deviants. Hmm... So, the original plan was to create this super powerful and violent race of beasts to trim away any evolutionary paths that wouldn't lead to the desdired result (say like dionosaurs and such). Ok. Got it. But they ended up being too violent and uncontrolled and were killing the species intended to develop, so they needed to be stopped from doing that, so he creates a second set of super powered beings to cull the Deviants from these planets and stop them from breaking the whole process. Ok. All good. All set in motion long ago, so he's got no choice but to create Eternals on all these worlds to stop the Deviants. Oh... wait. Except this exact same set of Eternals have memories of past planets they have worked on. So when they complete their mission on a planet (which takes like millions of years), he wipes their memories, reshapes them for the next planet that needs them, and sends them off to do it all again? Um... Wait. If it takes millions of years for each of these planets to do this, and this same set of Eternals has gone through this cycle many times, then why hasn't he just fixed the Deviants to prevent the need for Eternals in the first place?

Why is he, after doing this for presumably billions of years, still creating the same Deviants with the same flaw, and putting them on new planets and setting the same problem and conflict into motion? He should have fixed this problem long before Earth and the Eternals on it ever came along for this process in the first place. The historical timeline just doesn't make any sense here.

I get that they were trying to adhere to the comic history here, and that history includes a long running conflict between the Deviants and the Eternals, so I guess they felt that if they had Eternals they had to have Deviants as well, but honestly, the actual story they did in the film didn't need the Deviants at all. They were completely unnecessary and added nothing at all to it. Their only purpose in the story was to explain why the Eternals were created in the first place. Which, if this was the "first generation" of planets that had been seeded like this, and thus the problem with the Deviants wasn't know when the seeding was done, the existence of both Deviants and Eternals on Earth makes sense. But the moment they added in "and they have memories of having done this many many times in the past", the whole thing falls apart. And sure, we could assume that the Deviants were introduced into the process on many planets, all at once, hundreds of millions of years ago, and the realization that this was a problem and the creation of Eternals to solve this maybe just in the last few million, the timeline might still work (maybe). But that's never really clarified in the film itself (and still makes the scale of time and the number of cycles they've gone through problematic just from a math pov).

Dunno. Just seems like if you are going to the trouble to add some kind of cosmic level stuff into the setting, maybe spend a little time actually thinking it through and making it "fit". And if there's stuff from the source comics that doesn't work, then leave them out. They could trvially have left the Deviants out of the story entirely. Just say that the Eternals were created to protect humanity from extinction all along, and move foward from there. The exact same story, with the exact same conflict, and the exact same resolution could have been filmed, but now with more focus on the characters and events themselves instead of what was more or less a side diversion (The Deviants had absolutely zero impact on the plot of the film, so every second they were there was a second lost in the film).

So... yeah. Not "bad" in terms of overall concept and idea. Just "badly implemented". They needed to figure out what they wanted to accomplish with this story before the wrote and fiilmed it, instead of kinda half-assing the whole thing.

I get critiquing how the Deviants were used in the film. As far as I know, the concept for them for the film is not the one used in comics. But I have to say that complaints about the Deviants existing on Earth at all seems like just grasping at straws. How would you fix the self-replicating, evolving super predator species? It can't be done. You can't just stop using them, unless you're okay with a planet populated by sapient cephalopods. The whole Deviants vs Eternals thing has worked at least once before. Why change?

[gbaji]

I get critiquing how the Deviants were used in the film. As far as I know, the concept for them for the film is not the one used in comics. But I have to say that complaints about the Deviants existing on Earth at all seems like just grasping at straws. How would you fix the self-replicating, evolving super predator species? It can't be done. You can't just stop using them, unless you're okay with a planet populated by sapient cephalopods. The whole Deviants vs Eternals thing has worked at least once before. Why change?

Because it's an arbitrarily self-supporting "solution"? Why not just remove the Deviants from the equation entirely and just put just the Eternals on the planet? The Eternals could certainly kill off undesired species if they wanted to, and help the one they want thrive.

And that's assuming they could not simply fix the programming in the Deviants to make them work as intended (or design and create a new species that "does the right thing"). Remember, the fact that they went after the desired sentient species in addition to all the other large dangerous predatory species was a flaw. They were supposed to kill species in group A, while leaving those in group B alone. Someting went wrong. I get creating Eternals as a solution to deal with this on the planets you've already seeded with Deviants (a patch for the beta version of your plan), but why keep on deploying the exact same design of Deviants, with the exact same flaw, to new planets?

That just makes zero sense.

[Zalabim]

Because it's an arbitrarily self-supporting "solution"? Why not just remove the Deviants from the equation entirely and just put just the Eternals on the planet? The Eternals could certainly kill off undesired species if they wanted to, and help the one they want thrive.

And that's assuming they could not simply fix the programming in the Deviants to make them work as intended (or design and create a new species that "does the right thing"). Remember, the fact that they went after the desired sentient species in addition to all the other large dangerous predatory species was a flaw. They were supposed to kill species in group A, while leaving those in group B alone. Someting went wrong. I get creating Eternals as a solution to deal with this on the planets you've already seeded with Deviants (a patch for the beta version of your plan), but why keep on deploying the exact same design of Deviants, with the exact same flaw, to new planets?

That just makes zero sense.

There is no flaw in the Deviants that you can correct. They are meant to kill any predator species that can harm your vaguely defined "desired type of intelligent life." It's an impossible problem. On Earth, humans are the desired kind of intelligent life and also the only species likely to wipe out humans. Therefore the Deviants will see them as valid targets. It's inevitable.

As to why not just use Eternals for everything: Because it's cheaper. You can launch one small, self-replicating, evolving proto-predator Deviant onto a developing world at a fraction of the cost to your own personal energy that it takes to create enough Eternals to range over an entire planet. Then there's the mental, emotional, and physical toll involved on the Eternals. The Deviants do this willingly/inherently as part of their natural survival. The Eternals would be doing it as a job, alone on a planet with no other intelligent life for Ages, and they already have problems with wearing out mentally over great periods of time, or growing too attached to their charges when they don't watch them evolve from small, furry animals. That's why you don't tell them all that the whole population is meant as a sacrifice someday. The whole idea of "if they wanted to" is carrying a lot of weight. It's hard to make an Eternal that will happily murder some animals but also mentor some others. You could make something that hates everything but furry creatures, mammals is the goal, but then you miss out on humans (not that furry), and they won't kill lions, tigers, and bears.

You also kinda have to wait until there is a sufficiently intelligent species on the planet before you can design the Eternals for guiding that planet. It's not 100% necessary, but does heaps of work to move the process along.

[MarkVIIIMarc]

I saw the Marvels and liked the first 2/3rds of it.

Battles in the first part were good and different. The jokes were funny. It worked for me.

The movie COULD have been fifteen minutes longer to further explain some things but I'll give em, it was fast paced

Spoiler

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The first Captain Marvel moview was similar in my opinion. Captain Marvel was too OP by the end and it.

[gbaji]

There is no flaw in the Deviants that you can correct. They are meant to kill any predator species that can harm your vaguely defined "desired type of intelligent life." It's an impossible problem. On Earth, humans are the desired kind of intelligent life and also the only species likely to wipe out humans. Therefore the Deviants will see them as valid targets. It's inevitable.

Except that the Deviants weren't attacking the desired intelligent species on the seeded planets due to some sort of whacky "they're attacking themselves, so we must protect them by killing them" sort of logic. They were doing it because their own genetic programming was flawed, and they were seeing any species that rose to the top of the food chain as being a valid target, and not carving out an exception for the one that they were specifically programmed *not* to kill.

This is not some insurmountable problem. If you could design/create the Deviants in the first place, and program them to kill apex predators, specifically to allow for the rise of a species with the specific desired attributes you are looking for, you should be able to design them such that they don't actually ever attack that species once it evolves and takes that spot. The fact that they didn't refrain from killing the desired species was a massive flaw in their design. It makes sense to create the Eternals to deal with this problem on the very first batch of planets that were seeded. But it makes zero sense to keep on releasing the same Deviants with the same flaw onto planet after planet, from that point onward.

If this had been a one-off thing, it would be fine. But the moment they introduced the whole "erased memories of doing this dozens or more times in the past on different worlds", the whole thing just falls apart logically for me.

There's a difference between suspending disbelief (Celestials exist, seed specific forms of life to create new celestials, create deviants to weed out apex predators that may prevent that desired form of life to evolve), and suspending common sense (I'm going to keep introducing the same problem into my work, over and over, for a few billion years, because the plot says so).

You also kinda have to wait until there is a sufficiently intelligent species on the planet before you can design the Eternals for guiding that planet. It's not 100% necessary, but does heaps of work to move the process along.

Again though, if the only reason the Eternals are necessary in the first place, is to wipe out the Deviants once the desired species evolves, because they will otherwise wipe out that deisred species, then their purpose ceases to exist if you simply fix the Deviants in the first place. If we take your earlier statement that creating Eternals is an expense (even designing and empowering them would), why not save yourself this cost, spent over and over, and just not introduce the problem in the first place? Heck. Even if there had been some kind of mention that "occasionally, the Deviant programming breaks down and they do this sort of thing, so he creates a set of Eternals to deal with it", I might have accepted the premise a bit more. But the way it was presented, this was the exact route all planets followed, every single time, over and over.

I get how they got there. It was a writing trap. They needed the Eternals to discover "the truth" of what they were doing. Having them recover repressed memories of past lives on previous planets does this. But, by introducing that into the Eternal's past, it created another problem. One which they didn't seem to notice, much less address in the film.

[Tyndmyr]

Honestly, if you just axe the amnesia and make it the first set of worlds they've had this mission on, pretty much all you lose is pointless aspects of the plot. The fundamental conflicts are all still there. Just have only a few people be informed of their true mission, and you've got all the right ingredients, and you've saved some screen time for actual character development.

[Wintermoot]

I could be misremembering, but I thought the eternals were divided into two groups

Those designed to help guide and evolve the intelligent/chosen species of the planet
Those designed to fight deviants.

So in the movie

Ajak, Sersi, Sprite, Phastos, Makkari and Druig are eternals designed to help humans grow. With powers that help to that end (storytellers, technology designers, messengers, transmuters, healers and mind-changers)

Meanwhile Ikaris, Kingo, Thena and Gilgamesh are pure combat fleshbots there to kill Deviants.

So presumably, the first class were created first before the deviants. Then the second class were created after the deviants to deal with the self-created problem.

Granted, this was a somewhat discombobulated way to shelve characters created in the comics for different reasons into the slots the movie created, but I thought that was the idea.

[warty goblin]

I don't think the problem with the Eternals was that the Deviants didn't make sense - Thanos' plan is 100% dumb as rocks, but Infinity War works (pretty well) as a movie because Thanos works as a character. The problem with the Eternals was that the characters were all boring. You could have the most exquisitely logical backstory ever penned, but with a cast of characters as interesting as beige bathroom tile, nobody's gonna care.

[Ranxerox]

I don't think the problem with the Eternals was that the Deviants didn't make sense - Thanos' plan is 100% dumb as rocks, but Infinity War works (pretty well) as a movie because Thanos works as a character. The problem with the Eternals was that the characters were all boring. You could have the most exquisitely logical backstory ever penned, but with a cast of characters as interesting as beige bathroom tile, nobody's gonna care.

Personally, I liked the Eternals, both the movie and the characters. I appreciated than none of them wanted to be superheroes or to go around saving the world. They had spent thousands of years fighting Deviants, believed that they had killed all of them and were taking a well earned retirement. Having nothing left to prove is something that I can relate to. So they acted, did teaching, raised a family, started cults; you know, normal stuff. Personally, I found them much more relatable than Tony Stark, Peter Parker, or Thor. I was rooting for them, and consequently found the ending poignant.

Obviously, many other people found them otherwise. Well, you all do you.

[Zalabim]

I get how they got there. It was a writing trap. They needed the Eternals to discover "the truth" of what they were doing. Having them recover repressed memories of past lives on previous planets does this. But, by introducing that into the Eternal's past, it created another problem. One which they didn't seem to notice, much less address in the film.

The dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. The Eternals mission on Earth lasted ~7000 years. They could have finished over 9,000 planets just since then. The standard cycle from seed to emergence of a celestial is described as eons. That's 1,000,000,000's, billions with a B, years. So while I don't see any reason for the process to be changed if it is cyclical, the Eternals have definitely not been at this for billions of years.

The Eternals are an example of a Celestial creation trying to avoid the problems with the Deviants. They do not evolve or reproduce. They are static and finite, and they still turn out to not do their job or turn on the Celestials directly. So you can't just wave your hands and say Celestials should have fixed it like it's so easy. The Deviants are self-replicating, rapidly-evolving, predator-hunting organisms. You can wish they wouldn't attack some kind of species that doesn't even exist when you create the Deviants, but there is no easy way to describe that objective, and it's impossible to encode that objective permanently into their being.

Now while the Deviants didn't do everything exactly as planned, they can still be viewed as a positive feature by putting pressure on the desired species to grow, adapt, and evolve, as well as providing a way in to the nascent culture for your later insertion of Eternals to further guide their development. The Celestials are already lying to most of the Eternals about the purpose of their mission, killing Deviants to protect humans, so it's no stretch to include a fictionalized story about why they have to kill Deviants in the first place. Plus I'm sure some writer wanted to have a point about how both sides of the conflict are created and used by the Celestials to their own secret ends.

I'm sick of people failing to understand simple science fiction and blaming it on the fiction, instead of their own failing education. You don't have to like the story. Just don't wear your ignorance out by stretching it all over the internet.[EDIT:]I think there has to be a better way of explaining this.

[gbaji]

I don't think the problem with the Eternals was that the Deviants didn't make sense - Thanos' plan is 100% dumb as rocks, but Infinity War works (pretty well) as a movie because Thanos works as a character. The problem with the Eternals was that the characters were all boring. You could have the most exquisitely logical backstory ever penned, but with a cast of characters as interesting as beige bathroom tile, nobody's gonna care.

Sure. But Thanos was the main bad guy that the good guys were fighting against, so there was some conservation of nuttiness I suppose. The Deviants were a more or less irrelevant side point to the actual story and primary threat that the film actually addressed. They were background to explain why the Eternals were there in the first place. It was just poorly written backgroud is what I'm trying to say.

The dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. The Eternals mission on Earth lasted ~7000 years. They could have finished over 9,000 planets just since then. The standard cycle from seed to emergence of a celestial is described as eons. That's 1,000,000,000's, billions with a B, years. So while I don't see any reason for the process to be changed if it is cyclical, the Eternals have definitely not been at this for billions of years.

I only watched the film once, and it's been a while, so I don't recall how long they were stated as having been on Earth. But humans as a species started showing up about 2 million years ago, and other pre-evolutionary stages would have been earlier. In fact, at any point in time, there would always be an apex predator, and presumably the deviants would have gone after them, eventually getting down to chewing up *everything* living on the darn planet. I guess we could assume some sort of pause, or calm phases in there, or something else that would limit them. Otherwise, the Deviants should always just evolve to become the apex predators and wipe everything else out anyway.

Or we could assume that they become the apex predators, but then it just takes them that long to decide that humans (or whatever intelligent species is there) are tasty or something.

Now while the Deviants didn't do everything exactly as planned, they can still be viewed as a positive feature by putting pressure on the desired species to grow, adapt, and evolve, as well as providing a way in to the nascent culture for your later insertion of Eternals to further guide their development. The Celestials are already lying to most of the Eternals about the purpose of their mission, killing Deviants to protect humans, so it's no stretch to include a fictionalized story about why they have to kill Deviants in the first place. Plus I'm sure some writer wanted to have a point about how both sides of the conflict are created and used by the Celestials to their own secret ends.

Eh. Maybe required a better explanation then. Is the point to relieve evolutionary pressure on the desired species by wiping out the apex predators, but then leaving that species alone? Or to provide that pressure by attacking and forcing it to develop tools to learn how to fight back with those?

I actually agree that there is a decent middle ground that could be found here, and that the "flaw" is just a minor bit of miscalculation that made the Deviants just a little too threatening to the target species too soon, or sometimes evolved to powerfully and outpaced the target species' ability to develop tools to defend themselves, or whatever. But that middle ground was not found by the writers in the film as it was presented to the audience.

I'm sick of people failing to understand simple science fiction and blaming it on the fiction, instead of their own failing education. You don't have to like the story. Just don't wear your ignorance out by stretching it all over the internet.[EDIT:]I think there has to be a better way of explaining this.

I think that in this case, that critique applies far more to the folks who wrote that film than the folks who are criticizing that aspect of the film. I'll also point out that the first half of "science fiction" is "science". So writers should maybe at least attempt to make what they write fit the basic concepts of science. See also my point about suspension of disbelief. I have no problems believing that Star Trek style transporters can exist in a sci-fi story. Just toss some mumbo jumbo, and you're golden. But if you've established that it works in a particular manner, then you need to be consistent about how it works. "Science" is not about what it true or untrue, but what is repeatable and consistent (we test and measure, and get the same results each time).

If you're going to squeeze something like Deviants into the evolutionary process on a planet like Earth, you really should do your homework and decide *how* they do that. Just making them massive monsters who show up and have to be killed and more or less not giving them another thought, really cheapens what could have been an interesting backstory. Then making them more or less irrelevant to the actual story you are telling just wastes our time. The actual story told us that the fact that they went after Humans was a flaw. We can debate how much of one and how it could have been fixed, of course. But that was the stated reason in the film for why the Eternals existed. We can also speculate other reasons (like the powers they had tying into development of the target species). But that's *also* not stated as a reason for their existence either.

Literally, like 1 or 2 additional total minutes of dialogue (or just some minor changes to the dialogue that was present) could have veered this out of "this doesn't make sense" and into "ah hah! That's brilliant!" territory. I guess what bothers me is that they were so close to a really good idea and backstory, and more or less fumbled on the 5 yard line.

[warty goblin]

I think calling any of the Marvel movies science fiction, and evaluating their world building in SF terms, is probably a category error and definitely setting oneself up for disappointment.

Because, like, all the world building is crap. This isn't new or isolated to Eternals, it's always been crap, and it will always be crap because the movies do not care about consequences and ripple effects and systems. The only things that matter are the immediate nonsense plot and the ongoing character arcs of the super people in this particular movie.

That's it. It's universe-impacting scale scoped down to the emotional and world building horizons of a movie about two people getting divorced. If you're really invested in whether John or Jane gets the nice china the huge stakes make it feel super epic. If you're not, it makes it feel shallow and narcissistic.

[Ramza00]

The dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. The Eternals mission on Earth lasted ~7000 years. They could have finished over 9,000 planets just since then. The standard cycle from seed to emergence of a celestial is described as eons. That's 1,000,000,000's, billions with a B, years. So while I don't see any reason for the process to be changed if it is cyclical, the Eternals have definitely not been at this for billions of years.

The Eternals are an example of a Celestial creation trying to avoid the problems with the Deviants. They do not evolve or reproduce. They are static and finite, and they still turn out to not do their job or turn on the Celestials directly. So you can't just wave your hands and say Celestials should have fixed it like it's so easy. The Deviants are self-replicating, rapidly-evolving, predator-hunting organisms. You can wish they wouldn't attack some kind of species that doesn't even exist when you create the Deviants, but there is no easy way to describe that objective, and it's impossible to encode that objective permanently into their being.

Now while the Deviants didn't do everything exactly as planned, they can still be viewed as a positive feature by putting pressure on the desired species to grow, adapt, and evolve, as well as providing a way in to the nascent culture for your later insertion of Eternals to further guide their development. The Celestials are already lying to most of the Eternals about the purpose of their mission, killing Deviants to protect humans, so it's no stretch to include a fictionalized story about why they have to kill Deviants in the first place. Plus I'm sure some writer wanted to have a point about how both sides of the conflict are created and used by the Celestials to their own secret ends.

I'm sick of people failing to understand simple science fiction and blaming it on the fiction, instead of their own failing education. You don't have to like the story. Just don't wear your ignorance out by stretching it all over the internet.[EDIT:]I think there has to be a better way of explaining this.

In Greek a philosophy prior to plato they were obsessed with this new technological and sociological invention which was money in the form of coins you carry in a purse or clothing or on one’s tongue. Coins were a 220 year old invention when Socrates died, and Plato was obsessed with them for Coins allowed power to not be limited to your city, or your cities army but instead we are now talking many cities in a greater world-Kosmos-universe. Philosophy but also Athenian Tragedy Drama, and Comedy Drama were technological and sociological inventions to grapple with how coins changed everything with society in the last two hundred and twenty years. (Athens did not mint Owl Coins until 110 years before Socrates death, and they were farmers until 80 years before the guys death, their neighbours across the sea and the south of them had coins 150 to 220 years before Socrates death so at first they were distrustful of coins and then learned to love them when they started to become an empire during Socrates life who died at age 71)

So before Plato lots of the philosophers who took up the issue of coins talked about the Limited and the Unlimited ^{Philolaus, Anaximander, Anaxagoras, and others} as key concepts. Thus those early Greek Philosophers (who were not Athens based) prior to plato believe humans and also money are both limitless and limited at the same time. We are trapped in a circle of reincarnation (ouroboros eating its own tale like a snake and the wheel of fortune go here.) The city or a family may reproduce infinitely, but an individual human life is limited, and you either go west to these blessed isles after death, or one is trapped in a cycle of reincarnation where after you die you become an earth spirit (a daimon to bless / curse friends and family) and eventually you get a new body again.

At the same time a coin can be exchange dozens perhaps a thousand of times buying goods and services so often, yet it is merely 1 unit of account being exchange. The coin is limited and limitless at the same time.

====






The Deviants are the Unlimited, infinite potential but the potential evolves and changes and thus not even the Celestials and their God Like power can foresee what the Deviants can do. The Deviants are the tolkiens elves.

The eternals are limited but reset-able, they are the tools that sculpt the infinite and are disposable. The eternals are the mortal men doomed to die. Thus their only fate is to accept their fate or to do a rebellion and craft their own purpose.

Do the eternals accept they are part of a much larger system or do they rebel?

[Delicious Taffy]

They sit around on their asses, making bad jokes about saliva beer.

[GloatingSwine]

They sit around on their asses, making bad jokes about saliva beer.

You forgot “debating the trolley problem”.

[Tyndmyr]

In Greek a philosophy prior to plato they were obsessed with this new technological and sociological invention which was money in the form of coins you carry in a purse or clothing or on one’s tongue. Coins were a 220 year old invention when Socrates died, and Plato was obsessed with them for Coins allowed power to not be limited to your city, or your cities army but instead we are now talking many cities in a greater world-Kosmos-universe. Philosophy but also Athenian Tragedy Drama, and Comedy Drama were technological and sociological inventions to grapple with how coins changed everything with society in the last two hundred and twenty years. (Athens did not mint Owl Coins until 110 years before Socrates death, and they were farmers until 80 years before the guys death, their neighbours across the sea and the south of them had coins 150 to 220 years before Socrates death so at first they were distrustful of coins and then learned to love them when they started to become an empire during Socrates life who died at age 71)

I'm going to disagree that this was any sort of obsession. 220 years is a long time. Thanks to historical viewpoints, we may view this era as compressed, because to us, it was all pretty long ago, but 220 years ago from the modern time would be the era of discovering the mere existence of the first asteroid, the US was brand spanking new, the loom was invented, the uses of coal gas were discovered and so on. We treat none of these things as new discoveries we are obsessed with.

And...the oldest surviving coin is most definitely not the oldest instance of currency. We have documentation of the shekel standard going back to 3000 BC. Furthermore, I've actually read Plato, and he's definitely not fixated on coins.

This is weird, kind of ahistorical, and a real leap to try to connect to The Eternals in any case.

[gbaji]

I'm going to disagree that this was any sort of obsession. 220 years is a long time. Thanks to historical viewpoints, we may view this era as compressed, because to us, it was all pretty long ago, but 220 years ago from the modern time would be the era of discovering the mere existence of the first asteroid, the US was brand spanking new, the loom was invented, the uses of coal gas were discovered and so on. We treat none of these things as new discoveries we are obsessed with.

To be fair though, it's not about compressing time historically, but that communication and the spread of ideas was much much much slower then than now. 220 years is a short enough gap in that environment that we absolutely can assume that the implementation of such things was still "new" and certainly the sociological effects were still being discussed and debated (among those who did such things, which was also far fewer and much farther between then).

I'm also not sure what Plato and coins has to do with this topic either though. I mean, I guess we could say that currency/coinnage does change the concept of "property" a bit. But I also tend to think that there's a host of other concepts going on there, over a much longer period of time, that had a series of other political, social, and economic effects. Heck. Creation of roads and traderoutes was pretty darn massive too. Increasing labor specialization as societies shifted from subsistence hunter/gather/herder modes into larger settlements (population density in any one location is a direct function of your trade network essentially). And yeah, you also kinda have to have some sort of currency for *any* of that to work.

I'm just not sure how important the philosophical question of the value of a coin as an object versus as a medium of exchange was to the process. And, to the degree it was, we certainly did not see that impact western civilizations until much much later (printed/paper money basically). Are we jumping from Plato to Marco Polo in one leap here?

[Ramza00]

I'm going to disagree that this was any sort of obsession. 220 years is a long time. Thanks to historical viewpoints, we may view this era as compressed, because to us, it was all pretty long ago, but 220 years ago from the modern time would be the era of discovering the mere existence of the first asteroid, the US was brand spanking new, the loom was invented, the uses of coal gas were discovered and so on. We treat none of these things as new discoveries we are obsessed with.

And...the oldest surviving coin is most definitely not the oldest instance of currency. We have documentation of the shekel standard going back to 3000 BC. Furthermore, I've actually read Plato, and he's definitely not fixated on coins.

This is weird, kind of ahistorical, and a real leap to try to connect to The Eternals in any case.

the book I am thinking about is Prof Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy (2004), he has done several books other since that one with this thesis and it is well respected in academia. It is a 330 page tome published by Cambridge University. Way more stuff than I can get into here and that would be a waste of time segue
^{Regardless I did not want to get stuck with Plato (it is kind of important his obsession for different city states accepted coins while other ones like Sparta as a point did not as a point of pride. And Sparta just won the war against Athens. So the tech existed for 220 years but not in all the places of the Mediterranean.)}
But I was not trying to invoke Plato but the guys who came before Plato, and how people had different ideas of where things come from, like the world was all water or all air or all fire. Or the world is all eternal but it resets like the Eternals or it flows and evolves like the Deviants.

If one is exploring an Eternals movie, and decide to have the Deviants and the Humans and you are telling a five thousand or ten thousand journey, for better or worse you are doing metaphysics and world building 😬 aka philosophy of how the cosmos is structured.

-----

And Money-Currency existed thousands of years prior to Money-Coins, just like we had cities of a 100k people thousands of years prior to Athens and Sparta.

Money was just different prior to coins, it was weird stuff with an immediate use value, or was some form of jewelry, and dozens of other types of Money prior to coins became one of the default stores of value.
-----







Edit 2: Sorry for bringing up money as a circulation of flow, units that the Celestials were trying to harvest much like humans harvest food, or mine metals, or circulate a flow of currency where people trade and produce a myriad of things in a greater economy.

Next time I will use different metaphors to describe the circulation of flow. Eternal and Deviants are like positive feedback and negative feedback in a nuclear power plant. Without the correct flow of positive and negative feedback of a nuclear power plant you have a nuclear bomb and not a power plant. Thus engineers have a system where they have control rods to slow down a reaction to make it harder to go boom (or just get the fissile material and its surrounding substances to be less hot temperature wise) while they also have a way to speed up the same reaction. Positive Feedback makes the nuclear reactor more like a bomb, and negative feedback to slow it all down.

The Celestials build humanity in a cave, with a box of scraps, none of this clean energy reactions

[Delicious Taffy]

You forgot “debating the trolley problem”.

No, I didn't. I left it out on purpose because it has no relevance to the plot.

[Ramza00]

Waisting time in the movie theater before the preview trailers start. And it is not the same comparison for this is a different theater.

But the Boy and the Heron has more people in the theater than the Marvels did on opening day with my subjective experience.

And the Mean Girls trailer just started so chow!

[warty goblin]

Since this is also the Disney fails thread, I just saw Wish. Spoilers, but it's bad and deserved to bomb.

I don't mean mediocre, or predictable, or average. It's a badly made movie. This is detectable from nearly the word go.

See, it opens on a storybook, which lays out the backstory while the protagonist reads the text. Somehow this incredibly basic thing is badly cut. Then we meet our actual protagonist, who has exactly one personality treat, adorkable. To compensate for this, the adorkable meter is cranked right up past 10 to the red line separating 11 and cringe. If you took a shot every time she does the oops I'm a dorky lovable klutz grin, you'd pass out inside 50 minutes.

Then we get the first song. This is musically boring and contains no character development or anything. Instead Disney song stuff happens while the characters sing the same background information as the storybook opening. Imagine if Beauty and the Beast did its stained glass opening montage, then the next scene was the villagers singing about how there's a cursed castle in the woods.

This is where I'd generally describe the plot and the characters. I can't, because there isn't one, and there aren't any. Besides Cringeadork the heroine, there's her mother, who exists, her grandfather who is old, her friend who bakes cookies and has a crutch so Representation Points, a goat sidekick who I think is designed to get vegans to reconsider, and a group of sidekicks who manage nearly 0.5 distinguishing characteristics each. Within 2 hours you will be unable to remember anything about any of these. Oh, and then there's Star, the magic star the protagonist wishes on. Star is one of those super simple pudgy designs with eyes and a mouth that makes cure little noises instead of talking and it's hideous and I hate it so much.

The, ahem, plot, involves the evil sorcerer King Magnifico taking people's wishes then mostly not granting them. This is bad because people can't remember their wishes, and this maybe kinda makes them vaguely sad I guess. The heroine discovers this like 25 minutes in, except its not really a discovery so much as just restating the backstory a third time except bad now. If you think this is overly repetitive, hold onto your butts because at this point the plot ceases to be a plot, and instead becomes a movie length Positive Affirmation Message repeating how important it is to Have A Dream (preferably of visiting a Disney theme park). There's a lot of very dull sturm und drang after this, but it comes to the same point every single time. Just stick your head in the shower and yell "My Nonspecific Dream is Generically Important!" until your ears bleed and you'll have the same experience.

I will now end on a positive note, and discuss the 2.5 positive things about this movie. The half positive is sometimes the animations, particularly the backgrounds, are gorgeous fairytale things that you want to get lost in. Then it loses half a point because the character designs are agonizingly generic CGI animated movie stock and do not work with the backgrounds. The next positive thing is that the protagonist isn't special, and the community as a whole saves the day, rather than the lead. This is, on its own, well done enough that I nearly cared, which given the dreck that proceeded it is an accomplishment.

Lastly, Chris Pine clearly had a blast making this, and when he goes full villain mode doesn't so much steal the scene as create a scene out of raw inspirational muck through sheer force of personality. This movie is bad and Pine is the only fun part, to the point I'm pretty sure he had 300% more fun making it than I did watching it.

[Lemmy]

Sounds like a fitting follow-up for The Marvels.

[Ramza00]

warty goblin sounds like you are describing a perfect child’s movie

for a certain type of child. Yes I would prefer the darker moody angsty movies of the Disney Renaissance. But you also need an aladdin adventure* movie for not all kids vibe with the dark moody theater kid energy, some kids are upbeat warm things who love adventure.


*I am saying Aladdin feels different than Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, Hunchback. Aladdin is more like The Great Mouse Detective, Oliver and Company, Itself, Hercules, etc.

[warty goblin]

The problem with Wish isn't that its an upbeat kids adventure. I liked Aladdin quite a bit, hell I liked Minions, and Minions is pure child-focused adventure refined to a grade I don't think Disney has ever even approached.

The problem with Wish is that it's a profoundly badly written story. Yes I know it's a kid's movie, I'm not expecting subtlety, but subtlety is distinct from incompetence. Aladdin is not a subtle movie. This does not stop it being a competent movie. Aladdin the character has a want (be seen as rich) and a need (be honest and respectful) and over the course of the film grows from the want to the need. He has an arc, growth, learning. All of this is communicated to the audience very effectively and efficiently.

Wish has none of that. Asha, the protagonist, doesn't really learn anything throughout the movie. Hell, the big reveal that the bad guy is bad is just restating facts that have already been communicated to the audience three times except it's bad now because the guy everybody gives their wishes to so he can decide if he wants to grant them isn't granting the wish of somebody the protagonist cares about. That's it, thats the big reveal. The villain's diabolical plan is to do exactly what his entire kingdom is explicitly on board with him doing and knows he does, just that it's sad for the protagonist.

Then there's the matter of Star. Star is closest to the Jinni from Aladdin, but the Jinni is a character who wants things and takes action and does stuff. Star does exactly one thing in the entire movie that matters; makes a big glowy light that scares the villain so he eventually uses evil magic and turns fully evil but not before he gets talked out of it once. Otherwise you could remove Star entirely and lose nothing but some merchandising opportunities*. A Disney movie has a literal wishing star descend from heaven and not matter.

And the entire movie is like this. It builds up wishes as these super important key aspects of people, but forgetting about them just makes you maybe kinda slightly dull and lazy. The stakes are somehow both super high and astonishingly low. Magnifico's whole heel turn is because he wants to protect people from the pain of not fulfilling their wish, but the movie never really confronts that this will happen to some people, and by returning the wishes Asha is setting folks up for pain. You can argue that this is better than being a pointless amnesiac, but aside from one line from one person this is completely ignored. This is frustrating because there's a really good point about working towards goals you might fail at in there, and handling failure and its attendant pain, and it ignores it completely. What you get instead is an empty feel good platitude, just, like, have a wish. It's important, for, uh, reasons. Also apparently you can live a long happy life not knowing what it is. But have one!

Basically it's a 2 hour long inspirational Instagram meme with a pointless talking goat. If you want a picture of some roses with the words "You won't believe the power of your Dreams" written over top in loopy purple letters but its a movie with chicken butt jokes you pay $12 to see, well, congratulations, your wish came true.



*technically Star also makes the animals talk. It's a Disney movie, you can just have the animals talk, it's fine.

[gbaji]

This is frustrating because there's a really good point about working towards goals you might fail at in there, and handling failure and its attendant pain, and it ignores it completely.

Disney, in the current climate, is terrified of offending people with this very message though. So they have to water it down to the point where you are expecting it, but it's not there, and you note its absence as a result. Which makes the final product just feel... off.

What's the old saying?: You can please some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, but if you try to please all of the people all of the time, you end up with watered down, sanitized, garbage that no one wants to actually pay money for (Ok. I may have paraphrased that last bit). Worse, they aren't even trying to "please all the people, all the time", they're trying to "not offend any people, any time", which is an even more aburd exercise in futility. Pick a theme for a film, commit to it, stick to it. Some people will love it. Some may hate it. That's fine. But being so afraid of anyone hating something, that you shy away from anything interesting or meaningful, will guarantee a "meh" reaction from everyone.

And that's pretty much the current Disney. So afraid of their own shadow, that they're just spinning in place.