Last week, Pixar released their 27th feature film, Elemental and it has had… less than stellar box office reception despite having pretty rave reviews. This has actually been a problem with all Pixar films in the pandemic era, which has led some critics and fans to ponder is the Pixar era over? Are audiences tired…
Category: Movies and Film
e272. Why Are So Many Superhero Adaptations So Very, Very, Bad?
There certainly are a lot of superheroes adaptations. In fact, some people would say there’s too many. And yet, they just keep coming and coming. In fact, one of them, The Flash, is bombing at the box office right now, all while Across Spider-verse is getting constant acclaim? What makes a superhero adaptation good and…
Call From Comments: Thoughts on Adapting Superheroes
(From Mav: This is a guest blog for an upcoming episode. We’re recording it soon, so give us your thoughts really quick! Take it away, John!) From John: Like most genres, adaptation has been the key to the superhero’s popularity and longevity, spreading across multiple media to capture as wide an audience as possible. While the…
e271. Crossing The Spider-Verse
Have we done a show about multiversal superhero movies? It feels like it’s come up before… as though this were just a thing that we feel the need to talk about a lot. Oh well. Certainly we haven’t done this talking about Spider-man movies specifically? Or maybe we have! In any case, it’s time to…
e270. Why Do Fans Hate Things They Love?
If you ever talk to a big fan of Star Wars you’ll probably quickly find that they hate just about as much about Star Wars as they love. The same can be said of Star Trek fans, comic fans, Disney fans and frankly pretty much any fandom that you can imagine. As much of fandom…
e269. Wide World of Disney Reboots
Last weekend Disney released their most recent in an ever expanding series of live action reboots of animated classics. This time they chose the Little Mermaid, and it seems to be gaining a pretty good measure of success. However that’s not always the case, in fact some of them have been panned pretty hard critically…
Call For Comments: On Live Action Remakes
From Mav: Hannah has been suggesting that we do a show on Live Action Remakes… particularly the recent string of Disney ones, but I guess not technically limited to it. She’s also been very busy of late and hasn’t had time to do a call for comments, and I keep saying we should get back…
e268. Fasterer and Furiouserer
Two years ago, when Monica first joined the show, we celebrated the release of the ninth Fast & Furious movie by devoting a whole episode to discussing the the cultural appeal of the Fast franchise and explaining how it made an important cultural statement about the breakdown of the distinction of high and low culture.…
e267. Ages of Superhero Movies!
On previous episodes we have discussed the ages of comic book superheroes and the ages of Disney movies, but recently we started questioning if perhaps movie superheroes followed different structures than comic book superheroes… even if that’s where they are adapted from. This seemed like the kind of thing that we might want to discuss…
Call for Comments: Indiana Jones and the Limits of the Adventure Fiction
July 6, 2023
From Hannah: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny premiered in theaters this past weekend to, shall we say, mixed results both critically and commercially. (And, in fact, from what I can gather some of this podcast’s hosts have differing opinions on this film. But isn’t that the starting point for some of our best…