By George Robbins
The Star Wars franchise is one that spans a couple of generations and has reached a level of worldwide acclaim that many series hope for. It has become a franchise that has become known as the “most successful film merchandising franchise” according to the Guinness World Records. The franchise has even managed to solidify its place as the fifth highest grossing media franchise of all time. This just goes to show how popular the franchise is as a whole and this gives a lot of leeway with how Disney can handle the franchise moving forward. They have already tried doing everything they could within the past few years just to make the franchise even more marketable than it already is. From the newest films to the series that they have been showing and developing over the years since the acquisition.
As of recent releases, we got the sequel trilogy which has been relatively hit-or-miss with long-time fans and liked by the newest generation of young fans. With those movies came the opportunity to create all new kinds of merchandise which further expanded upon the marketability of the franchise as a whole. Disney had expanded upon the already successful franchise with the release of ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens‘ and gave themselves an entirely new opportunity to make the franchise even greater. This is how we ended up with not only the newest trilogy, but also the side story films that we got in the off years. Unfortunately these films were not really meant to last and the ideas for any new ones were scrapped after the release of the second film.
The first of the side stories to release was ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story‘ which told the story of the rebel team that obtained the schematics for the Death Star before the events of the first film. The film ended up being relatively successful but not as much as the new trilogy that Disney had been working on. Still, they would go on to release the next side story two years later, ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story.’ While reviews for the film were generally mixed, the overall consensus was that the movie wasn’t really bad, but it was not really what people wanted to see. This resulted in Disney taking this fact to heart and cancelling any more side story films that were supposed to release. Now that the new trilogy has ended and the newest series based in the universe, ‘The Mandalorian,’ has been successful the possibility of new side story films has become a reality again.
While people may have made complaints about the ‘Solo’ film, many fans actually want a second film to continue the story of the first. By the end of the first film, there was a cliffhanger that showed a possible conspiracy against Han Solo moving forward. So with a cliffhanger ending for the first film and a decent crowd asking for the sequel to the film, there is possible talk of a new film coming at some point. Actor Alden Ehrenreich, who played the titular Han Solo, has said that he is willing to return to the role if certain conditions for the film are met. For those wondering what those conditions are, he did actually say that the biggest thing for him would be the quality of the story. This was the biggest point of contention for the first film, so it isn’t much of a surprise that this would be the case. If the story content is compelling and interesting while also making a lot of sense, then both the actors and the audience will love the film. So hopefully we will see him return to reprise the role because it will mean that the story may be worth it for fans.
By George Robbins
As of now most, if not all, live-events in the U.S. have been canceled through the remainder of the year due to the coronavirus pandemic. This has resulted in a number of events either being delayed to a later date or canceled in their entirety with refunds given out to people who paid to go already. Thus we now have numerous people that can no longer go to any live events such as conventions and they now have refunds or they put their money towards admission for next year or the year after. Of the remaining events that had been planned for the year was Comic-Con which sees some of the largest crowds with people from all over the world. It is no surprise that of all of the events this year, this would be the one that would get canceled.
While it may not be much of a surprise that San Diego Comic-Con was canceled for this year, it was a surprise that they would have an online event. Many other conventions have been canceled for this year and many will not have online events in their stead. For instance, the Star Wars Celebration convention is held every year to both give praise to the series and to announce new content for the universe. This event was canceled just like everyone expected it to be, but what no one really expected was that the event would not be back until summer of 2022. At this point, many companies are expecting things to carry on as they are for years and this is shown with this announcement.
Comic-Con announcing the fact that it will be having an online convention to help make up for the lack of the live-event gives a little bit of light for people. It means that they can now attend the convention they love, albeit in a different way than usual. While it also means that they can not meet people face-to-face, it does mean that they can see what they might have wanted to see if the convention was still going. Another up-side to this whole thing is that the admission for the online event is totally free and it appears as though we will be able to explore a virtual hub and marketplace. This gives an opportunity for vendors to market some of their new wares even though they can’t show them off the way they usually do. They are also not the only ones doing something like this, with DC FanDome taking place next month.
Unfortunately, there are some things that just end up being lost in translation between the actual live event and the new plans for the online edition. The first notice that this would be an issue was that Marvel Studios announced that they will not be showcasing anything and will not be attending at all. Now it appears that nothing will be appearing from Star Wars at this new At-Home Edition of Comic-Con and this is in light of it being only a week away. This doesn’t exactly bode well for the event because with DC hosting its own event and Star Wars and Marvel Studios not appearing, there leaves some outside groups to make up for the lack of content. Thus the event may not end up being what people expect it to be and it could end up being a total wash. There is no knowing for sure until the event takes place next weekend, so let’s hope it is what people want.
By George Robbins
There has been a lot of heat on the Disney Parks sector of Disney as of late and it is for a relatively good reason, but it seems they are trying to assure people’s safety. The reopening of Disney Parks all over the world has managed to keep itself in the news and most recently, Disney has been trying to reopen their parks stateside. Following their announced intentions of opening the parks stateside again, they announced the official reopening date for Disney World as being on July 11th and over a few days they would be opening all of the Disney World parks. This announcement was met with almost immediate backlash due to the fact that the State of Florida was beginning to have surges in coronavirus cases again. Despite these protests, they reopened their gates to the public and gave them the chance to re-enter the park.
Disney World was not the only set of parks that Disney wanted to reopen as they also wanted to reopen their Disneyland Park in California. When the surge in virus cases was announced, the state government in California said that they would not allow the park to reopen like they planned. Otherwise the plan was to reopen the park on July 17th with the same limited capacity that they had planned on giving all of their parks along with other safety restrictions. Not only was this plan scrapped due to the rise in cases, but also due to the fact that most of the state is once again shut down. The rise in cases has been dangerous enough to warrant the Governor to shut down many businesses across the state again.
This has been something that was anticipated and it is not at all that surprising because California was one of the states that was taking the longest to reopen its businesses. Now that they have seen the spike in cases, it was only a matter of time before everything shut down again. So with plans for reopening Disneyland thrown out of the window, the Disney Company had nothing other than Disney World to turn to. This has been a heavily conflicted topic for the past couple of weeks now with many of the Disney Parks employees worried about what will happen now that the parks are opened up. Disney has assured people that they will be keeping people in check so that the virus can’t spread any more than it already is.
The State of Florida is one of the worst states currently in terms of how many new cases there are on a daily basis and how many deaths there are daily. With this in mind, Disney World is trying to enforce the rules that are in place to keep people from further spreading the virus. One of the biggest things they are doing to address the issue is having people maintaining social distancing and limiting the number of park occupants per day. On top of this, all guests to the parks must keep their face masks on at all time, even when they are on rides in order to keep things as clean as possible. They are even going as far as not allowing people to buy their ride photos if they don’t keep their masks on. We’ll see how their efforts pay off in the coming weeks and if it was a good idea for them to open at all.
By George Robbins
The ‘Power Rangers‘ series is one that has been around for many, many years at this point and still continues on to this day. It has stayed within public knowledge due to the many years spent by the TV series building up knowledge of the titular characters. No matter what the subject is or how crazy the plots of each serialization end up being, the ‘Power Rangers’ has remained essentially the same as time went on. There are many who grew up watching it that keep the flame alive, so to speak, for the series today and it is the reason why they are still prominent in this day and age. It should really not be any kind of surprise that there would end up being yet another ‘Power Rangers’ film in production, but unlike the last film that was made as a reboot, the new one will continue with the continuity of the TV shows.
The original serialization, otherwise known as the ‘Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers,’ was a show that children born in the late 80’s and children born in the 90’s fell in love with. The first series ran for a strong three years with a movie to help encapsulate what made it great and to revitalize the series. After that movie, there was another one which led the way into the next series of the show and served as a perfect tie-in to explain how they planned on moving from one generation to the next. These were met by a lot of fans falling in love with the series; with fans of the originals going on to watch the next few iterations of Rangers. When Haim Saban made the serialization and put it on TV, he created a fan base that would go on for generations.
While many of the original fans of the series have stopped watching the newest iterations of the Rangers and their exploits on television, it hasn’t changed the fact that those people still love the characters. The most recent film, aptly named ‘Saban’s Power Rangers,’ was not a big hit like the studio thought it might be. The film was a reboot of the original story and it was supposed to tell a story that took seasons to tell on television within a limited amount of time. This gave fans of the original characters something to complain about and resulted in the film not being as well done as they would have hoped. There is now some glimmer of hope for fans as it was recently announced that there would yet again be another film based upon the characters.
The biggest worry going into this new film is that it will just repeat what the reboot film had done, and we will end up with something that people feel doesn’t really encapsulate what the original series was. While this new movie will be a reboot of sorts, it will also tie into the stories that people have seen over the past 27 years of the serialization’s existence. This new movie is reportedly going to include the past series’ and will include suits from those series as well as past Zords. This lends a lot of opportunity to the movie which is supposed to somehow tie-in to all of the previous years of content. Hopefully it will end up being a film that fans of all ages enjoy, but it is a steep hill that the movie will have to climb as time goes on.
By George Robbins
As we all know at this point, there are many points of contention in regards to some of the storylines in the ‘Avengers: Infinity War‘ movie. Some of these things are based on information we received long after the release of the movie and they were revealed by the filmmakers. Of course content is going to end up being cut from movies because it either doesn’t fit into the allotted time or it doesn’t fit into the story of the movie. This is what happened with a lot with the two most recent ‘Avengers’ films. There are parts of the story that many people feel were unnecessarily glossed over in favor of spending more time on other stuff throughout the films. Going into ‘Avengers: Endgame,’ one of the questions on many people’s minds was why Smart Hulk was a thing and when did it even happen.
In ‘Infinity War,’ the Hulk played a minor role throughout the film as a whole due to us only really seeing him at the beginning of the film. Following the end of ‘Thor: Ragnarok‘ many people, myself included, wanted very much to see more of the Hulk going into the end of the Infinity War Saga. He played such a major role in that film and we got to see another side of him, which just made us want more Hulk. He never really had much dimensionality to him in his previous outings where all he did was destroy whatever was in front of him. By the end of ‘Ragnarok’ he was a unique character with a personality all his own and we wanted to see this part of him moving forward. At the start of ‘Infinity War’ we thought we would see that again, but sadly it was not meant to be.
The Hulk being one of the first people Thanos fought in the movie was meant to be an introduction into just how powerful he was as a character even without the Infinity Stones. This sets up the tension for the rest of the movie where even the strongest character doesn’t seem like much of a threat to the Mad Titan. We would not see the Hulk for the remainder of the film and would only really see him again after the 5-year time skip going from ‘Infinity War’ to ‘Endgame.’ Even when we got to see him again, he was no longer the Hulk that we remembered and we got to see Smart Hulk. This new version of Hulk was one that combined the strength of the Hulk with the intelligence of Bruce Banner, which gave us an entirely new character to look at for the film. However, this was not originally meant to be our first introduction to the character.
During the final battle in Wakanda at the end of ‘Avengers: Infinity War,’ Bruce Banner is forced to fight against one of Thanos’ lieutenants, Cull Obsidian. He fights him in the Hulkbuster armor which has the capabilities of the Hulk but without the precise control that the Hulk has in combat. During this scene, the Hulk refuses to fight again, so Banner must do all he can to beat Obsidian on his own. Originally, this was meant to be the moment where Smart Hulk was introduced and he was meant to emerge from the Hulkbuster armor to fight Obsidian. He was then supposed to be approached by Natasha, who would try to calm him down like she used to only for her to find out he was in complete control. However, according to the filmmakers, this didn’t seem like the proper time to do this and they felt that Banner succeeding in fighting on his own made for a better character arc. Whether this is really true is unknown as it would be up to fans to decide, but we won’t really get a chance to see it.
By George Robbins
As of now, it has been a question on many different people’s minds as to when it is, exactly, that productions will actually start back up again. Some productions have managed to keep going during these past few months because they only had to do VFX or the movie they are working on is animated. This has allowed for some productions to keep working while also giving some people time off that is warranted given everything going on in the world. People has still managed to find their way back to the production sets and some movies have started up their production again. Unfortunately, some of those productions won’t be able to start up again so easily due to the size of the production itself.
Included in the list of films that were going to have a hard time starting up again is ‘The Batman‘ which has a massive production crew and a lot of effort going into it. The upcoming film is another film that is finding itself placed in the DC Extended Universe. That being said, the film is a standalone film that sees the titular Bat go up against villains like Penguin, The Riddler, and Catwoman. At least this is what we expect to happen given the casting choices and the roles they will be playing. According to the actors, the script for the movie is a strong one that has a lot of potential which is a great thing to hear about the film. Even if they say that about the film, we have no idea what it is really about at this point or if the characters even have roles as large as we think they do. We will just have to wait for the movie to release to find out.
Although the film is slated for a 2021 release, it doesn’t bode well that it was just announced that the movie would be starting from scratch. Originally, they had started principal photography and filming in the U.K., starting with London, but it seems that this will no longer be the case. It seems that when the coronavirus pandemic hit, the crew had only managed to finish about one fourth of the overall film. Instead of shooting on location, it seems that they will be building sets in studio to continue the filming of the movie and that the date they will resume the production will be set in September some time. As of now, the film’s release date is set for October of 2021 after it was changed from summer of 2021, so let’s hope it doesn’t get pushed back even further.
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