I still can’t stop but think how stretched out the Hobbit films were, for an otherwise short book. That’s a sin that stains forever with me. The Lord of the Rings films, do have their own flaws, but they’re fairly contained and can be debated as to whether they were good or not. I have so much trouble excusing anything with the Hobbit though.
And I hope we never, ever see anyone tackle The Silmarillion. Simply because, there will be so much improvised fluff in that would-be film, that it’d make the Hobbit films blush.
For me, the Mass Effect 3 ending at launch. It’s still aggressively mediocre after several patches and DLCs, but the original at launch was genuinely insulting. I have only been invested in a piece of media like that a few times in my life—the shittiness of that ending really ruined me for a few days. It was an entire decade before I could muster up the desire to replay the trilogy. I’ll still be mad about it when I’m on my deathbed.
Game of Thrones ending was less disappointing for me.
Firefly being canceled
“Second screen content”
Firefly getting cancelled.
The Expanse getting cancelled.
I was upset about the expanse too. Talked to a coworker for a while about it and he said go read the books, just start at book 7 you really won’t be missing much. So I did and immediately knew the 30 year time jump wouldn’t have worked on screen. We still might get more a few years down the line when the actors age up. Also I’m glad I got into the books it was the spark that got me into audiobooks. Started listening to the expanse authors new series and I think that’s getting picked up by Amazon as well.
I actually did start reading the books and then decided to stop and just watch the show, but then I forgot the books existed, so that’s fun I can go and read them now
all the good scifis getting cancelled because it wasnt “drama” enough.
I’m not a dumb man but I never could figure out the expanse, I’d always get lost of what was going on
I had a hard time with season 1 because it kept jumping between so many different things. I gave up on it then tried again after a couple years after hearing. It got sooo good and then got even better. Then I read the books. In the show they needed to introduce a character earlier in the story whereas in the books it’s not until book 2. So that contributed to some of that disjointedness.
Creating consent for the Gaza genocide
A lot of the original episodes of Pokemon were never dubbed in Danish. I will never forget. Never forgive.
This is the level of petty im here for.
Star wars. I just have such a love/frustration relationship with it. This includes stuff produced by George Lucas btw.
I feel like it tries to appease all crowds. The family friendly crowd, the autistic nerdy crowd, the politics obsessed crowd and so on.
Andor for example is peak star wars, because it’s made specifically for one audience. No one’s taking their 6yo to watch this.
The problem is when a kids’ show has the prerequisite plot for a show with a totally different audience.
Take the clone wars for example. It started as nothing more than a kids’ show. Then, it ended dark. Same with rebels. Look at episode 3. Amazing amazing plot with the transformation of the Republic into the empire. And then you have jar jar binks.
Let’s not even begin to talk about Disney.
Star wars just has so much potential due to its huge world and the Jedi/sith stuff. But it’s just so frustrating to see how such art can be wounded by the will to earn money.
I know this isn’t “the most unforgivable sin” or whatever, but I suppose it’s definitely up there. It’s the sin of painting an angry face emoji on top of a beautiful and detailed painting of an unimaginabley cruel monster, just so that more toys can be sold.
Bill Maher has had a prime television slot since 1993.
That ignorant asshole has been pretending to represent the “left” for 33 years while being a smug reactionary idiot.
Podcast recommend: I Hate Bill Maher.
and now he went through the full maga-ficaiton of his personality and hangs out with TRUMP, and fetterman.
Another podcast that ruined me If Books Could Kill. It is increasingly clear to me that being popular and established are two enormous red flags. And, comically, “being a rebel” is part of the armor all these people wear. The podcast covered an economist who labelled himself, “the bad boy of economics” despite being an established professor and having won a ton of prestigious awards… it’s all an act because just coming out as an obvious bootlicker is disqualifying, you have to camouflage yourself with trivial rebellions (Maher smokes pot! omg!) or against people not in the power structure (in Maher’s case, most often women, trans, and gays).
he pretends to be “Aethiest” but he really isnt, since he subscribes to judiasm/zionism just not out loud as right now.
I’m super ignorant about celebrities’ self-marketing but i thought Maher was a libertarian only pretending he wasn’t racist. he actually claimed to be on the leftish region of politics?
In the skewed US scale, yes. He has usually described himself as a liberal, which is as close as anyone on mainstream TV got to being on the left until Bernie Sanders made waves in the 2016 campaign.
He recently had dinner with Trump while kissing his ass and said that he may vote for JD Vance next time because of the woke.
i dont think he was ever left.
Every time a company does a tax write off and trashes the film. If they’re canning it, it’s ours. It’s public domain. Take it as a loss, we subsidize it, then it’s ours. Coyote vs Acme is the unicorn that got released. It should never have been thrown away.
I’ve felt this for a long time. Taxes are for public benefit, if you’re writing off an intellectual property to avoid taxes that property is now for public use.
The ending of Dexter (the original.)
They changed the original ending of LOTR (books), but included the ghost warrior shit in no. 3. They simply could not be killed and just ran through the enemies with zero friction and killed them all. It was such a let down. It ruined the epic battle for me.
I have not read the books btw
Almost everything JJ Abrams has touched.
Fringe was pretty good
I would agree but with the caveat- everything jj Abrams has touched that he didn’t make originally
His original works are fine. Super 8 is up there with some of the better modern scifi movies, his work on lost is legendary. But then you have both star trek and star wars… what a failure to both.
Aw. I actually liked his Star Treks…pretty much in the same way I like remixes or covers of my favorite songs, anyway.
Edit: I enjoyed them for being popcorn flicks and don’t think they overwrite the source material. Just a different take.
Abrams made two amusing Star Trek fanfics.
I liked Lost for the most part, but he is way too fond of throwing out too many unresolved mystery boxes.
You leave Felicity out of this!
nutrek is based in his style of directing, made the shows kinda garbagy, only the animated shows are better.
Fox screwing Firefly with that stupid broadcast schedule (although it was cancelled before Joss could make it weird)
Star Wars: A LOT of things, but I’ll focus on Episode 9 being absolute dog shit
Game of Thrones, I don’t think I need to expand on it
Probably the most unforgivable thing is the legacy and ongoing sexual exploitation of minors in the entertainment industry, but I don’t think that’s what OP had in mind
It would have gotten so weird with Joss! Now it gets to live in my brain where it only gets mildly weird!
On the other hand, a drinking game based on how often there’s a close-up of bare feet would have developed
The graphic novel sequels were actually pretty rad though…but those were sequels to Serenity, to be fair.
Thewhat
Are these generally available for download?
Possibly! Although know what? I got mine from the local library. Many libraries have digital editions too. Worth checking to support your local one if you can. :)
Here’s the most non-reddit, non-amazon-related list of them I could find if that helps!
They do try to do a lot, but I appreciate the effort toward closure and like to imagine how it would have played out on screen.
https://www.librarything.com/nseries/2258/Serenity-Graphic-Novels
I didn’t even bother with Episode 9 after the slap in the face that Episode 8 was. Ugh.
(Love the meme)
The worst part was if I wore any of my many Flash or Green Lantern shirts people would assume it was a Big Bang reference. I had to explain, that no, I was just a nerd.
They just released yet another spinoff last month
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Fails_to_Save_the_Universe
I watched a review of all the BBT series and their spin-offs recently, and they had pretty positive feelings about that. It sounds pretty fun, and how bad can it be if Brian Posehn is in it?
I was wondering that myself. I hate big bang theory with such a seething passion that I’m not sure I can give this a chance 😩
another one? young sheldon wasnt enough.
My first girlfriend loved that shit. It didnt make it past a few months, because she constantly braught me in comparison to one character due to me having autism. Go figure
Disney ruined the Star Wars sequels. All the money, all the talent, so much potential, and they pushed out those turds.
Disney didn’t ruin the Star Wars sequels. They were a terrible idea to begin with. They were built from the ground up as focus-grouped corporate slop built to sell merchandise.
They also had access to a galaxy worth of new york times best sellers, and instead of taking the best ideas from already loved stories, they declared them as non cannon.
They were part of George Lucas’s original intent. What Lucas had in mind, I think we’ll never know, but what we got was certainly not that.
Is that true? I’ve never read that. I also think George Lucas shouldn’t have made sequels either.
Apparently. Didn’t sound better, either…
“The next three movies were going to go into a microbiotic world. There’s this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force.”
— George Lucas
Then Darth Maul becomes the new Jabba the Hut. It sounds… Like ideas I guess. Maybe a weird dream he had one night.
https://shapes.inc/fandom/star-wars-sequel-trilogy-george-lucas-plans/quotes
Edit: also, now we know that Luke wasn’t special after all.
“By the end of the trilogy, Luke would have rebuilt much of the Jedi, and we would have the renewal of the New Republic, with Leia, Senator Organa, becoming the Supreme Chancellor in charge of everything. So she was [the Chosen One].”
— George Lucas
Many years ago I read the George’s first draft of the original Star Wars, and boy-howdy was it a load of old nonsense. He works best when he has an editor prepared to tell him ‘no’.
George undoubtedly said that. However, the idea that there was ever a single master vision that was fiddled with around the edges is kinda his own mythmaking bullshittery, plus wishful/rueful thinking from fans. Any time he was interviewed, that man just proclaimed what whatever he’d been noodling on in the last week, influenced by whatever was going on in his personal life, was always the plan from day one.
Certain core elements seem to persist, but shit like “how many movies,” or “who’s the central core to the narrative” or “exactly WTF are Whills” can go in 180 degree directions depending on the era in which he is discussing them. The analogy I’ve made for George is that all of Star Wars was his American-Graffiti-style garage hot rod. He fixes it up and mods it and rolls it out to show off and race every once in a while, but fundamentally it’s his. He can change whatever the hell he likes, and it’s your problem if you got attached to the red paint job from 10 years ago. This is what I think people are instinctively getting at when they say George doesn’t understand his own creation.
I feel for Lucas. I don’t think he’s fundamentally any different from most creative people, he just made a hugely successful franchise and had a habit of excitedly discussing whatever ideas he had in the moment.
Yeah, most of them sounded VERY ridiculous, but if we could see the ideas of any successful project’s initial stages we’d be losing our minds over it too lol.
Any one of us would be the same way, but we weren’t trying to keep the hyperdrive running on an already ultra-successful forever-money-printing cultural touchstone.
So, I dunno, I’d like some recognition and success but I never wanna be in his position…
For sure. I don’t mean to say he didn’t understand his creation, but rather he hadn’t settled on a final version enough to shoot. It’s Whills and microscopic world and crime boss adventure tale and Leia and politica and Luke with Jedi legacy and its… Whatever the last thing he was thinking about.
Which doesn’t guarantee it would be better than the hot, festering shitpile we got. But it would be hard to do worse.
Okay then who ran those focus groups?
Disney I guess
I assumed that’s what the comment above meant. It was just corporate slop that no one wanted, and there was no passion behind it. They had the IP and all the money in the world to make them good, but they squandered it making total garbage.
I think the subtle difference of opinion is that I don’t think having having a franchise and money is a good enough excuse to make a movie. That’s how corporations make decisions. Tbh that “expand the franchise” mentality is what’s wrong with modern media. I think franchises should die. We don’t need more Star Wars movies. We need new ideas.
I mostly agree with you, but I have no issue with more in a franchise if it’s also bringing new ideas. Andor, for example, did something totally different, and it was great. If they’re willing to do more things like that, and push the boundaries, it’d be fine. Andor was a fluke though. Disney wants to play in their safe little sandbox where they just make shitty products with cute things to sell as merchandise.
