Ouija (2014)

“Hey, guys! Let's make a movie based around a Ouija board! Hasbro would really love that!”

“Uh, I'm not sure that's a good idea at all...”

Then that second guy was dragged out of the board meeting for Satan's Movie Studio, and a gunshot was heard. His body was hung up on a cross in the front lobby to set an example for anyone else with similarly contrarian ideas. Hasbro executives collectively grunted their approval in deep demonic voices like the rumblings of a dragon's bowels. The first guy was promoted to God of the company that same afternoon. Production on the movie Ouija began the next day.

Director: Stiles White

Starring: Olivia Cooke, Douglas Smith

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This was produced by Michael Bay and Brad Fuller, the guys behind a production company called Platinum Dunes. If you don't know who they are, well, they produced a range of movies from merely terrible, like the Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street remakes, to absolute unholy crap like The Purge: Anarchy, The Hitcher remake and The Unborn. Christ, their line-up reads like scrolling through the past history of Cinema Freaks.

Anyway, like all great films, this began production in 2008, six years before it actually came out, and went through a shitload of script changes, director changes and basically everything else, with the promise of a super huge Pirates of the Caribbean style adventure with a huge budget. Yes, a Pirates-level budget for a fucking board game movie.

...I think it's really just time for everyone in Hollywood to go home and spend some time with their families. You know, before their families disown them for stupid shit like making blockbuster films out of board games.

Things seemed to be looking up in 2011 when the film seemed to be dead in the water due to budget issues, but only a few months later, it was unfortunately revived, like some horrible Re-Animator-esque abomination. And now we have to suffer for it. My favorite part is that, apparently, after its botched and horrific revival, they went with a significantly lower budget for the final project, as if to say, "yes, we've come to our senses and realized we can rob audiences of their money and time, for less of a budget."

The movie begins with a blonde girl named Debbie playing with a Ouija board with her friend, Laine. They're both little children at this point, which makes sense, because no one but little children will be scared by the movie.

Then we flash forward years later to when Debbie is a teenager. She never got over that Ouija thing, and she's still playing with it now, because characters in these movies are flatter than concrete outside and have no believable motivations. We see her tossing the board into a fire, which is really rude, because I'm sure her parents paid a lot to buy that piece of shit.

Hmm, that second image doesn't seem right. Let's fix that:

Ahh yes. Much better.

She wanders around for a bit and notices weird things like doors opening and closing slowly by themselves. Usually, when that happens, I call my fucking landlord and tell him the hinges are kind of loose, but I guess here it's supposed to be scary.

Also, the burner is on! Maybe you should pay more attention when you're cooking.

They should just put a pan on the stove and start cooking. Take the chance! Ghosts be damned.

Burning that Ouija board was apparently not the right move, though, as then Debbie gets hanged by a bunch of Christmas lights.

75% of people hang themselves if their parents bought them Hasbro toys as kids.

Based on the sad music and the people in black carrying flowers up to a house, I'm guessing we're supposed to be feeling sad or something.

Maybe...

It's good they put those cliches in the movie, because otherwise I wouldn't feel anything for Debbie. We knew nothing about her – she was basically just put in to be a standard open kill. They spend so much time dwelling on how sad everyone is, though, so I guess I'm just emotionally dead from watching so many of these terrible scenes over and over.

Laine is now also grown up, and she spends her time hanging out in comically anachronistic looking diners with her boyfriend, who seems to think John Hughes movie fashion is still cool. Because I guess Bay and his cohorts all have zero idea what anything in real life is like now. They probably haven't even seen the outside of their board room in years.

Like, totally hip, man. Breakfast Club.

After Debbie's death, Laine spins totally off the rails and demands that all of her friends accompany her to the creepy abandoned house of the dead girl and play the Ouija board to see if there was anything they could have done to prevent her suicide. Which is totally acceptable and sane. “Hey, could we have done anything to prevent you killing yourself? Yes? Wow, I feel better already!”

Let's get real for a second; knowing whether or not you could have stopped someone from committing suicide wouldn't help you at all. Are you insane? Who writes something like that?

I also love how they all accuse each other of moving the Ouija counter thing around just to prank one another. Like that's something these people believe their friends would apparently do a day after their friend committed suicide. Maybe in that case, you guys all need to stop hanging out, because you're all horrible people. Frankly, I think they should have asked the Ouija board if they'd still have careers after this movie. The answer would have, no doubt, disappointed them.

For some reason, they all get up and walk around the house afterward, because despite the fact that all of them have repeatedly stated they don't believe the game works, they're now superstitious. You guys really have the fortitude of a marshmallow left out in the sun, you know.

But they do all end up leaving, and go home, you know, like you do after your friend forces you to play with a Ouija board to work through her insane grief. I love how in one of the next scenes, Laine apologizes to one of the others and says she won't do it again. Yeah, you know, just a normal way of coping – playing with Ouija boards to try and defy the laws of death. You know, time heals all wounds!

All is not well, though, when everyone starts seeing this mysterious phrase “Hi Friend” all over the place. One time it's creepily in a car in the cold...

In this one, a human hand slams on the inside of the window afterward as if someone was inside the car. The girl doesn't question this at all, gets inside the car, and then nothing else happens. I guess the movie was just drunk and forgot to make that scare mean anything.

There's one time where it's written on the wall of a creepy tunnel – though I think that time was just a poor homeless guy being crazy.

The money used to make the movie could have been put to helping the homeless. But instead, the movie was made. Was it worth it?

Another time, it's written on a word processor on a computer screen:

What is wrong with you, movie? Are those things really equivalent? No better way you could've conveyed the horror of the situation? It's really just so evident nobody making this really cared.

If you can believe it, they actually go back and try the Ouija board again after seeing these things, because their sense of consequence and action is so fucked up that even jailed convicts would wonder what they were thinking. This time, the ghost just up and reveals itself to NOT be Debbie, but instead a mysterious evil entity called “DZ.” I just don't get why the ghost revealed itself that fast. Surely a better plan would have been to keep pretending to be their dead friend and lull them into a false sense of security. I'm not even a malignant entity of hell (despite what some people would tell you) and even I can see how this could have been better.

So I guess this one girl dies when she sees the Ouija board ghost in the mirror, and the ghost slams her head against the bathroom sink. It's good to know that, if you die from having your head brutally bashed against hard ceramic, your makeup won't run and all you'll get is a tiny gash on your upper forehead. How cosmetically convenient.

Yup, looks like her face was smashed against a sink...

There's also this other woman, a Spanish housekeeper for Laine's family, who of course knows everything about Ouija boards and has no other character besides that. Wow. You know, they used to cut peoples' hands off for stealing things. Can we reinstate that now, except for people who write hack work racist trash like this that doesn't help anyone? No? Damn. Why does this keep happening when I try to propose new rules?!

After that, if you can believe it, we get a long and drawn out scene where Laine and Pete, who was Debbie's boyfriend, actually sit around and search for clues about who the ghost is that's haunting them. All they have is that name, DZ, but through the convenience of lazy script writing, they find out what they need to know. Apparently, some little girl went missing years ago, and her mother was thought to have killed her, and blah, blah, blah. Whatever!

"My brain is a pile of oatmeal-y mush because of the script, but we found what we needed! Hooray! Durrr...."

This leads Laine to go find the sister of the girl who went missing. The sister is apparently now in a mental hospital because she killed her mother years ago for apparently killing the other sister. If you're confused reading that, don't be; no one cared when writing it. Just go with it.

This character is played by Lin Shaye, who was obviously also in all the Insidious movies. Goddamn, did you just have her blackmailed to keep appearing in all these dumb supernatural movies? Did you just grab her right off the set of Insidious 3 and plop her in a wheelchair for this one? You must at least really be paying her well. Shit.

What kind of awful Satanic magic did you guys use to force her to keep doing all of these films? Jesus. I can't imagine the Kafkaesque nightmare her life must be doing all these pieces of utter garbage year after year. Does she get them confused? Like, she'll be on Insidious 5: The Great Who Cares and then go 'hey, aren't we on Ouija 3: It Still Fucking Sucks?' And then they'll go, no, this is Insidious, and funnel more money into her bank account. And the cycle will continue.

The character here is, somehow, even less substantial than her character from Insidious, as she only exists to spew EVEN MORE soul-sucking exposition – this time about how the only way to stop the killings is to free the little girl ghost from the evil mother ghost. I was bored just writing that sentence, and the movie doesn't seem to care either. It's a carnival of not caring up in this shit. But hey, Hasbro got your money, so I guess they won out in a way.

So we get a very silly scene where they find this dead body under Debbie's old house, and then cut off these stitches on her mouth. I guess for some reason that's what breaks the spell – it's kind of like something out of a really cheap haunted house.

This scene would only be cool if Indiana Jones was in the background stealing a gold chalice or some shit.

After that, it seems like it's all over, but whoops, apparently not! Because the movie doesn't seem to get that we want it to go away and stop annoying us, apparently Lin Shaye's crazy old lady character was lying, and it was the little girl ghost who was evil the whole time, and NOT the mother ghost! Wow. Maybe you shouldn't listen to a murderer who lives in an insane asylum, huh? Maybe that would have been better.

Oh, and then she goes full on cartoon villain and starts cackling insanely about how her evil ghost sister will come save her. She gets dragged off by security, presumably to never be allowed to interact with the outside world again. Man, I really don't think THAT was a good plan...but whatever.

"THANK YOU FOR GETTING ME OUT OF THE MOVIE!"

So the boyfriend gets killed off unceremoniously in a pool, which is a callback to a scene earlier where he played with the pool tarp. That's really clever if the only other movie or TV you've ever seen is Blue's Clues. They also have the gall to insult our intelligence by having him show up with his back to them, as if there's any possibility he's not going to be dead and it's not going to be a stupid jump scare.

Please.

Then right when Laine is about to die, the ghost of Debbie appears very conveniently and stops things right as the movie is reaching its climax – I mean, she could have stepped in earlier, but where would the fun have been in that?

"I had to wait until now, the most dramatically convenient time, because otherwise the movie wouldn't have been good!"
"The movie already isn't good!"
"What? NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"
*Fiery cataclysm of death*

So that's Ouija – what can I say, it wasn't good. The bar was set super low already – it's a corporate product put out to make money for Hasbro. The characters, writing, plot, scary moments, atmosphere and everything else are all terrible. The script is stereotypical and shallow, with zero real meaning to anything that happens. Characters act in ridiculous ways for no reason and the story isn't about anything except “this toy is cool!” Like the 2011 The Thing prequel, it really shows how much active disdain there is for horror in Hollywood – this is a joke to them, and they do not think it's worth their time to put any effort into.

Don't spend your money on this crap. Download it illegally, and then write scathing reviews online. I don't know if that will make a difference, but it's worth it if you really need to vent your annoyance with how bad this movie is, and how bad everything else the people who made it were involved with is. And hey, it's a better pastime then playing with a fucking Ouija board from Hasbro.

Images copyright of their original owners; we own none of them.

Nostalgia, Ghostbusters and the Movies

If you've been on any movie or entertainment site lately, you probably want to kill yourself because of all this Ghostbusters news. If you haven't been, I'll sum it up in the most non-wrist-slittingly-way possible: Sony, that master of franchises, wants to put out a Ghostbusters movie with an all female cast. The Internet reacted poorly as it always does. I personally just thought it was at least something different from a remake with an all male cast, which would just be contrived as hell, so eh, whatever.

But lo and behold...

I swear it's like they're just trying to spite me now.

It's the nostalgia dollar at work again. People just love stuff from when they were kids now. I'm a 20-something millennial whatever, so I can speak from experience – we all just love remembering the late 80s and early-to-mid 90s. Why? I think it's a product of the Internet, fast moving technology and what it's all doing to our poor, putty-like brains.

With the Internet, time moves faster and people are closer together. We grew up with this Internet thing foisted on us by the over-eager minds of big tech companies. With that came the ability of hindsight to things we couldn't just watch normally without a Youtube or torrents. When people my age were young, we watched shows like everyone used to – you know, on the TV and then we had to use our memories. Nostalgia! Then Youtube came along and Netflix followed and it was all a snowball effect from there – no longer did we have to rely on just thinking about things we were nostalgic about. Now we could relive it and watch it in all its glory!

Now, even though it's not that old, we're reliving that sweet nostalgia like 80 year old men discovering childhood favorite storybooks on a trip back to our childhood home before we die of cancer. I know that sounds sardonic, but really I think it's just a human thing that everyone goes through no matter the age – we all love remembering things from when we were younger. Nostalgia doesn't have a time limit. Everything in our pasts has some kind of rosy border.

The problem came when movie studios dug their pudgy fingers into that proverbial rosy-bordered nostalgic pie. As they are wont to do, they turned it from a sort of charming, somewhat happy new trend - “we can watch all our favorite Nickelodeon cartoons on a tiny screen in our bedrooms!” - into a giant corporate megalith: the remakes and reboots we have all come to loathe more and more every year.

This is always how it goes. They listen to us, they listen to the demand – not out of some kind of love for genuine art and fun, but because they see us as money-spewing machines that will churn out dollar bills at the drop of any new movie about something we used to love. That's the corporate machinery at work. Maybe at some minuscule level someone enjoyed what they were doing, but I dunno, I just get the feeling a lot of these guys have to go visit guys wearing cowboy hats in the middle of the night and get threatened with death if they don't obey what they say:

Unfortunately, this is the way it always goes – something starts off genuine, then the big bucks come in, and it becomes a corporate, controlled version of itself. So I imagine we'll probably get a live action Hey Arnold movie with kids from various teen pop acts and maybe Shailene Woodley or Ansel Elgort thrown in as a consolation prize. Or a Rugrats movie that imitates Baby Geniuses. With dialogue written by low-rent Diablo Codys. Maybe they'll make a Powerpuff Girls movie next and then make a male version of that to appease all demographics! The possibilities!

I also just think it's strange how political pretty much everything has become thanks to the Internet. I mean, people always liked to spout off about politics, and movies have always – always – been powerful tools to espouse certain viewpoints. But with the Internet, we can make anything political now! Now, everything that comes out gets scrutinized to no end and held up or beat down by increasingly polarized, extreme opinions. When the all-women Ghostbusters idea came out, people went nuts – some people were hailing it as a victory for feminism; others just beat the old dead horse of “women can't be funny” with some bitching about "feminists ruining everything" to round out the horribleness...either way, it was a circus. Rinse and repeat with the announcement of the all-male one again.

Can't this just be a fun movie? It's fucking Ghostbusters. It was a silly 1980s comedy with great comedians in the starring roles. Now, it's a big political debate. That's what the Internet does, though – it gives all these people voices and they become so loud, they dwarf the qualities of the films we're arguing about. Movies like Ghostbusters aren't so much about the movies themselves now, so much as they are political tug-o-war talking points for feminists and anti-feminists and who the fuck ever else.

Not to say you shouldn't discuss or argue about things that bother you in these films, but you shouldn't lose perspective either. By all means, talk about feminism in movies and the all-white-male demographic of Hollywood's moneymaking elite, but not everything has to be another hurdle in the battlefield for equality – as important as it is for men and women to be equal and for there to be diversity, I just don't see Ghostbusters as being any part of that equation. I guess some people do though, so...more power to you, I guess?

(Plus, the funniest part of the whole "all male Ghostbusters cast" thing is that people have apparently forgotten that they did two movies already with an all-male Ghostbuster cast...so, whether or not you're happy with an all-male cast in some new movie, it's just hilarious that you'd act like this is some unprecedented thing. I get the idea that eventually, in an Idiocracy-esque way, people are going to forget the original Ghostbusters even existed. They'll keep on arguing about the remakes, but then go "who?" when Bill Murray's or Harold Ramis's names come up.)

I'd be lying if I said I expected greatness from a new Ghostbusters movie in 2015. But that's not even the main point, and neither is the male/female cast debate.

The point is that they're only now making any new Ghostbusters movies, because now, people think everything from their childhood is God. Why didn't they make a Ghostbusters III or spin-offs back in the 90s when the original was still fresh? Because there was no market for it then. There is one now, thanks to the nostalgia craze born from the Internet. Hollywood saw dollar signs and decided they could make money off it. That's the truth. It's commercialized, focus-tested nostalgia and it's how they do everything, from superheroes to remakes of classic horror films to now, classic childhood movies and cartoons. Nothing new under this sun, folks.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

Dear Hollywood: Stop Planning Ahead

Movies in the last few years have become a little too homogenous for my liking. It seems like every single movie coming out – at least during the summer blockbuster season – is some kind of sequel, remake or adaptation of something else. Now, this is not something new to any of you reading this blog or most moviegoers who have been awake for the last half-decade – I'm not becoming Captain Obvious on you here.

But I do think something has to be said for the sheer level of planning ahead Hollywood is doing with these – it isn't just that they're making these superhero sequels, book adaptations and spinoffs of popular franchises, but that they're also planning them ahead of time to ridiculous amounts more befitting of a tiger mom planning out her four-year-old's doctorate degree years and years in the future.

You want proof? Well, how about the fact that the new film based off the Harry Potter spin off book Fantastic Creatures and Where to Find them will actually now be MORE THAN A TRILOGY. Keep in mind the original book was like 80 pages and served as a fun little extra add-on to the main series. And now it's going to be like six more movies. If we're lucky.

Look, I get it – people love Harry Potter. I remember reading the books as a kid and have very fond memories; they were great books and they got me more interested in reading books when I was young. That's fine. I know people love the movies too; that's also fine – go wild and love them more than anything if you want. Obviously the movies had to be made as the books were so successful and people wanted to see the characters and events on screen – that happens any time a book gets popular; I have no problem with that.

What I do have a problem with is the absolute ridiculous lengths this is being taken to with this new series – more than three movies for an 80-page book? Are you serious? That's insane. They didn't do it this way back in the 80s. Notice how we didn't get a trilogy for each segment of the Back to the Future movies explaining how the various alternate timelines came to pass. There was no Indiana Jones prequel trilogy where we got to see three movies of him as a kid learning to jump off shit and lash with a whip. Though, honestly I hesitate to say that, as I'm afraid of what might happen next.

It's just too much. The best stories aren't great because they never end and have spinoffs made about minuscule elements of the story – they're great because they end at the right time. The traditional story arc is a beginning, a middle and an end; not a beginning, middle, end and then a billion little side-stories, anecdotes and addendums attached on and forced on the population like a kid who won't eat his veggies with his mouth held open. That's not a real story; it's just not being able to let go of something at the right time. It's no different than a shitty TV show dragging on for twelve seasons long after everyone's done watching.

And it's quite insidious how they hook you in – the persisting argument in favor for these endless spinoffs, rehashes, sequels, is that they're showing us something we need the answer to, or that they're showing us the backstory of something. It's a quite devilish marketing ploy that's really just a thinly-veiled excuse to keep making money – oh, we need to explain this one thing from the original series, so we're throwing billions of dollars and plenty of talented actors, backstage guys and more to GIVE YOU THOSE EXPLANATIONS. Never mind the buckets of money pouring into our pockets and the general dead-eyed cynicism of the rest of the public. It's to answer our questions!

I realize I'm kind of in the minority on this, but I'm going to say it: The best stories don't need tons and tons of explanations. If you can't draw us in with your characters, world-building, plot twists, social commentary or whatever other elements you wanted to convey, and you have to explain pages and pages of exposition and facts and tidbits and then go on to make prequels where you explain your explanations...you probably need to re-work your narrative a little bit. If you can't convey whatever you need to do in your beginning-middle-end story arc, you probably don't need to be making money in Hollywood. But alas – they are anyway.

Aside from that, do good stories need EVERYTHING explained? Can nothing be ambiguous or left to the imagination? I'm not saying everything has to be a Lynchian escapade into the depths of the soul and have all kinds of artsy abstractions, I just think there's something to be said for the power of mystery and of telling a story over explaining every minute detail. The whole matters more than the cogs and gears that make it up, if you know what I mean. Get an emotional message across, and have a point to what you're doing. Then worry about explaining the technical details. But that's just me. Apparently some see it differently, and that's your own prerogative I guess. But even so, there comes a point when explaining and more explaining is just a bad storytelling form.

On the other hand of this two-forked road to hell we have DC and their upcoming “I wish we were as cool as Marvel” attempt, also known as Batman vs Superman. I'll also accept for the name “We forgot what was cool about The Dark Knight and instead accentuated its worst elements.” The Dark Knight was great because it finally gave us a comic book movie that took itself seriously, and no I don't mean in the way that it was gritty and violent. I mean it was serious in that it was an actual movie. It took characters we loved from a different medium and worked them into a real movie with those characters in adapted roles because Christopher Nolan actually understood that film is a different media than comics and you don't need to have everything exactly the fucking same all the time.

These days, you don't really get that. I dunno, but I get the idea a lot of these comic movies are seriously afraid of the batshit "HOW DARE YOU CHANGE A THING FROM OUR HOLY TEXT" crowd on the Internet, because comic movies since then have never reached that same level of cinematic quality. As good as some of the early Marvel movies got, there was always a pervading safeness to them, where it just felt like the sole purpose was for the audience to go 'hey, there's that character I liked! There's that thing I wanted to see happen!' Maybe some people feel differently, but that's kinda what I keep getting from those films.

They have a shitload of other superhero tie-ins set up for the next six years until 2020 – well, bravo. You guys do realize we don't really need every single movie to be lined out for us, right? I mean goddamn. You're already sitting on a ton of money. It's not like peoples' interest will wane if you don't shovel the information down our throats every damn day. Just chill the fuck out!

This whole thing is just out of hand as well because, as many before me have said, WE DON'T NEED THAT MANY SUPERHERO FILMS. Do you guys really think peoples' favorite movies lists are going to be comprised in 15 years of just Marvel and DC adaptations? I wouldn't be complaining if these films were made by genuine fans who just wanted to convey the story, but for the most part, these movies are made just to keep the conveyor belt moving to make more movies after that, whether it's sequels or 'collaboration' films like Avengers or Justice League – that's the only reason they're doing all these separate films, which is a shame because I'm sure under different management, we could get some really gripping and powerful stories out of them. If you're a huge die-hard comic fan, you could probably go further than me here and list off some of the emotional conflicts, drama and social messages that could possibly be tackled, which DC will definitely not do and we'll deservedly hate them for it.

Marvel tends to fare a little better on this aspect, as their films are at least entertaining enough to watch in theaters – but even that is going to wear thin, and probably pretty soon. They got lucky with Guardians of the Galaxy being such a fun, emotional movie, but I just don't think they can keep it up for much longer. People are going to get tired of these films. The comic geeks will stick to their comics and the casual fans will start to move on and go “hey, I really feel like watching a nice drama or a gripping detective mystery.”

"Hmmm...on second thought, Pride and Prejudice sounds good about now!"

It's just the endless stream of sequels and connections – yes, it was an interesting idea, but it's too much now. It's overcooked. There are too many options and people will get burnt out. If you're just making movies that will only exist so you can make more movies, it becomes a cannibalistic process. There eventually won't be any reason to go see more, because you'll just be worn the hell out of all of it. Superhero films are reaching the oversaturation point. It's coming fast, and soon the bottom will drop out and the whole thing will be fucked. Nobody really wants THAT many big-ass movies full of explosions and guys shelling out witty quips. It might sound great at first, but just like that time you ate too many of your grandma's fudge brownies and then spent the rest of the night moaning on the floor in the bathroom – you'll soon find it wasn't what you wanted. It was too much and you got sick of it.

I started this thing weeks ago and more shit keeps coming out that I feel like I could add to it. A Toy Story 4? Really? Granted, the other three are near-flawless kid's movies, so logically I should be excited, but...the third one was such a fucking perfect ending. Why make another? You can end on a high note! It isn't too late! You can still cancel the project before it goes too far down the rabbit hole!

Granted, this is the only part of this article I'm going to say might turn out OK. I mean, yes, I would've rather it ended with the third one. But maybe, just maybe, there's a chance it could be okay - despite my worries of it turning into another sequel-marathon down the road...

I guess really it all boils down to one thing – are these movies going to be good? After all, that is the main consideration when talking about any kind of art – does it succeed at what it wanted to do, and is it quality? It may be presumptuous of me to say so, and some of you may not agree, but I'm going to say no, they probably won't be – at least not as good as any one of them individually might've been, if it was made purely out of a love for storytelling, moviemaking or anything else.

The movies I mentioned in this article, for the most part, are being made just to continue shoveling out more movies after them. They're machinations in a conveyor belt, not integral, impassioned stories. With the sheer volume of crap just lined up to come out years and years from now, planned out as meticulously as a trip itinerary for a busy lawyer, is ANY of it going to have even a little bit of a point to it? Any slightly good ideas in these movies will be lost in the constant static-noise of the rest of them all cluttering up the box office every week. They already have so many big plot elements and events planned out that there won't be any room for actual creativity in the process. Where's the spontaneity, the twists, the original creativity that directors and actors will get to bring to the table? It's incredibly telling that Idris Elba, while working on the last Thor movie, called the process “torture” while he would've rather been working on a more personal project.

But alas – this is just echoes in the wind. What I've said here won't change anything in the big picture. That will have to be left to Hollywood once this whole thing blows up in their face.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.