Is This Something?

Running Man remake with Maverick's Val Kilmer replacement, Glen Powell.

To be honest I didn't like the first Running Man much. I don't really like Steven King.

This already came out. It's supposedly pretty good.

Angel Studios has a more fantastical kids movie on the way.

A Dracula in Paris, by Luc Besson. Looks like a remake of the Coppola film, but in French. And with Christoph Waltz, who just might be Austrian Pedro Pascal.

No, that's too harsh. I'm just tired of him.

The latest Fantastic Four trailer confirms that it's twee nonsense intended for gay babies.

You know that Hollywood cuts films' running lengths when it's a bad movie? The idea is that word of mouth will end all interest in the film, so you need to cram as many showings into a day as possible, to give yourself the best chance to make money before word gets out.

I remember the John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd bomb Neighbors was so bad that an executive recommended just cutting it to the minimal possible length and "advertising the hell out of it" to make as much money in the first few days as possible. Which is what they did.*

So it's not exactly reassuring for the dozen remaining fans of the MCU that Fantastic Four just got a trim.

Marvel fans expecting a super-sized runtime for The Fantastic Four: First Steps might want to reset their clocks. While AMC Theatres previously listed the film at a generous 130 minutes, the theater chain has just quietly shaved that down. The upcoming MCU reboot is now officially clocking in at 115 minutes, making it the shortest Marvel Studios release of 2025. For context, that's 1 hour and 55 minutes -- a fairly standard runtime by most blockbuster standards, but surprisingly compact for an MCU film that's introducing a brand-new reality, a massive villain like Galactus, and Marvel's First Family all in one go.

I know theaters are hurting because Hollywood is producing such total garbage but this will only make people less willing to go to theaters:

* By the way: When a studio knows they have a stinker, they cut everything except what they consider the most important parts of a movie. The most important parts are emotional payoff scenes and special effects/action scenes. So they don't get cut.

But what gets cut is the emotional build-up scenes and scenes in which the plot is explained. Emotional resolutions come out of nowhere without set-up; plot events and reveals just happen without any logical plot connecting them. That's why a lot of bad movies also make no sense and feel incomplete -- the studio cut all the scenes that made the movie a complete story in the interest of slashing the running length down to the minimum possible. They routinely turn boring and bad movies into boring, bad, and bewildering movies. This is an improvement, they figure.

At least it results in more showings in the first weekend.

posted by Ace at 04:20 PM

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