The Looming Rape And Murder Of The James Bond IP By Amazon

James Bond is dead, he died in the closing minutes of No Time To Die though many would say the death happened earlier. However thanks to the ever corrupting influence of money the corpse will be resurrected made to wear a dress and call itself Shirley and tell you it’s preferred pronouns , it will dance to the agenda beat and apologise for ever existing in the first place.

For those unaware this Cinema Issues article is about Amazon buying out the few remaining guard rails on the James Bond IP so they now have complete and utter access to it. Those of you savvy may think ha-ha Jenifer Salke is out at Amazon the rape of the IP won’t happen, the woman who said that she deliberately ignores the male audience for these properties in order to put female characters centre focus and feminise the brand is gone. Her trailblazers a mix of bitter nobodies with shows soon to be seen the axe, however, I say to you her ideas didn’t come from her, oh no she may have believed similar things, but those pushing through the agenda are far higher and she is but a cog in a machine.

As of the moment of writing this, a month or maybe two since all this went down it is clear that the rape is still coming even without Salke. For a start Amy Pascal is being brought in to Shepard the project forward, yes the alleged coke fiend who once threw a sandwich a Kevin Feige and one of the many voices behind the failed Venomverse. Follow that up with the rumoured goodies that Amazon is going to try and threaten us with over the coming years including an American spin off on Bond, without any of the British charm, a Money Penny series as we need to see the inner lives and no doubt lewd moments of Bond’s secretary, and of course the all important female Bond rebrand, when they get rid of that evil and sickening straight white lead and replace him with a young queer woman of colour who can do everything Bond ever could with ease. Janine Bond can save the day from the evil industrialist, or religious leader, whilst still having enough time to fly carbon neutral and also attack the terfs.

All of these projects would cost Amazon money and further damage the brand and push away fans, but possibly the thing that could kill it would be to do a new Bond film with a man, and have him spend the whole time being brow beaten and told how incompetent and bad he is whilst he apologises and says yes I am awful, that truly would kill the brand stone dead.

I have never counted Bond amongst beloved franchises of mine, I have seen most of them and some of them are better than others, but writing about this as someone who is a student of cinema and someone who is British the death of this franchise which seems all but certain if these are the plans, could forever change Hollywood for the worse

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A Corpse Is Defiled: The Second Death Of Doctor Who

Doctor Babes has left the building.

So as many of you know I have been pretty hands off with Doctor Who since the Whittaker era, I might write a Cinema Issues piece here or there about the declining ratings or review the Christmas special, but by and large I have checked out.

I am only here really to gloat. To laugh at the manbabies and shills who still defend it, I have shown up to the funeral and I am speaking some home truths.

So as many of you know the series has been bleeding viewers for a long time, since just before Whittaker, and that has only got worse. Disney came on board to fund and distribute the show on Disney + expecting a certain level of ratings, it has not provided them with that, and as such series three of the new run is looking increasingly like it is not happening. Disney want numbers, the BBC wants numbers.

Then there was the news this week that Doctor Babes himself has quit the show as he is running off to Hollywood to play even more stereotypical gay roles. He was perfectly fine in Sex Education but the various roles he has done since have just been variants on that, even his role in Who. It is not his fault he was such a terrible Doctor he was cast to tick a box and send a certain message and he was given bad scripts to work with, there is a level to this that is not his fault. I have a feeling that the BBC tried to claw this back and downplay it saying he hasn’t quit and that they are waiting to see how season two does, but of course they would say that they wouldn’t admit the series is about to be shelved as then people really would tune out the new episodes.

The BBC is wondering what went wrong, the blue haired people on Blue Sky like it why isn’t it massively successful, well the silent majority has spoken. Doctor Who has always been a progressive show but when you are hiring trans writers who have previously written books aimed at children that talk about the best apps for gay sex and positions for it, then you know things are in trouble.

Hopefully the failure of this show disgraces RTD, who let’s face it probably has some skeletons in his closet, and prevents him from ever coming near the franchise again.

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Where Have All The Good Guys Gone: The MCU Slips Into Apathy, A Retrospective

I haven’t seen the film and this isn’t a review, this is an assessment piece on the current state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe from the perspective of audience engagement. The comments passed in this piece regarding Captain America Brave New World, are based on several key factors firstly the Cinema Score, a low b, which was lower than that of The Marvel’s and also Antman Quantomania, the critical Rotten Tomatoes score currently at 52% at the time of writing, on the broader fan consensus online which suggests that the film is middling not great not terrible. I would also like to address that on Rotten Tomatoes the film has an 82% audience score, though this could be inflated.

All of these things taken together paint a picture of the sorry state of the MCU, especially when you compare this release to the last few, sans Deadpool and Wolverine as it was disconnected and more of a love letter to the Fox X-Men films. The remaining films on the slate for this year also do little to reassure people that things are going to get better in the near term.

So the question is what went wrong and where do things go from here?

I would say the reasons why this film is struggling and why other Marvel films are struggling are numerous but also quite obvious. Firstly, folks don’t like homework, since the advent of Disney + not only has there been more content, perhaps too much, but also new requirements. To understand Brave New World fully folks would need to have watched The Incredible Hulk from almost twenty years ago, Falcon and the Winter Soldier and also The Eternals. That is 5+ hours of commitment just to watch the latest film in the universe and increasingly folks are getting sick of having to make it.

What can be done to fix this? At the current stage nothing, the projects that are already in development will suffer from it. However, for further down the line stuff there can be an importance placed on telling original and disconnected stories, there can also be an effort to cleverly use exposition within the films to bring folks up to speed on what they need to know from these other series, this would hurt Marvel’s numbers on rewatches but would encourage the casuals to return. They could also do a previously on at the start of each project including films, unorthodox but potentially a solution.

Secondly is the problem that these characters just are not a draw. Marvel got high on their own supply and started to believe the mythology surrounding them, thinking that they could turn anyone into a billion dollar grosser, and for a while when everything was seen as required viewing in order to get the Infinity Saga’s broader narrative it worked, however, in the disconnected and seemingly aimless Multiverse Saga this has been proven untrue. The issue here is twofold firstly the Multiverse Saga is objectively a failure, fans are not connecting, due to the glut of content things feel deluded and far to disconnected. Moreover there does not seem to be a clear direction in which it is going, yes to comics fans it is clear we are getting Battleworld the Beyonder and likely God Emperor Doom, however, for casuals it just seems to be without purpose at the moment. Secondly, it is clear that the MCU has tentpole characters that folks need to see often in order to stay invested, this can be Spider-Man, it could be Doctor Strange, it could be Wanda, it could be the founding Avengers, regardless, due to the massive uptick in production we are getting less and less projects with these tentpole characters and more and more ancillary stuff with characters people just don’t care about and that is leading to apathy. The idea that Marvel film are not events anymore sums this up rather well.

What can be done about it?

Well I have said it before and I’ll say it again, they need to do a purge. By that I mean, the Marvel slate no matter if they have announced it or not needs to be studied and second guessed, some of these films and tv shows with provably unpopular characters, I am looking at you Iron Heart with your multiple failed comics runs, should be written off and never released. It does not matter if they are done and ready to go or in production you need to trim back all this fat and get back to the core characters people care about. The Thunderbolts is the antithesis of my point, a group of mostly recent and Disney + era characters that no one cares about. The film will be met with apathy. Furthermore, there needs to be a cleaning house of the higher ups at Marvel that greenlit all these projects, who thought Echo and Agatha needed there own shows, as whoever did should not have a job. I would levy this at Feige himself, if his eye has come off the ball he should be replaced.

Finally, is the idea of escapism. Media should exist to provide audiences with a means of escaping from their lives, yes some cover real world issues, but superhero films should not. Again this is a twofold problem for Marvel, the MCU could use real world politics themes and ideas to influence it’s films, but they don’t have good writers. What I mean by that is that they don’t have writers who can be subtle and who can weave it in in a nuanced way, they have people who need to show scenes of Sam being denied a lone simply because he is black, as the scene tells it, in order to be incredibly heavy handed in its messaging. This is a problem as then audiences feel like they are being preached at and feel like the films are becoming political which is a turn off both for those that don’t agree with the politics but also those who don’t want to engage with politics. Secondly, bringing in heavy handed real world political issues such as presenting, according to reviews, Ross as a stand in for Trump, it stops the world from feeling different and new and instead makes it feel like a reflection of our own which isn’t what people want.

How can this be fixed?

Honestly this is probably the simplest, by hiring better writers, one who can use politics in a subtle way and put themes into films without it being overt and making the film politicised.

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Cinema Issues: State Of The Box Office Address Start Of 2025

Written by Luke Barnes

In this cinema issues article we are discussing the contraction of the entertainment industry. If one was to cast their gaze upon the 2025 release schedule it would be perfectly acceptable for them to ask what happened to make it to 2025? For those of you that don’t know, with the destruction of COVID and the writer’s strikes, there was a mantra in Hollywood to make it to 2025 as this was seemingly the year when things would get back to the 2019 normal. This was pre the wildfires.

As such this mythical 2025 was going to also see the box office recover to 2019 levels, as it’s been steadily below over these past few years, and in order to do that there was going to be a lot more films releasing each month than in previous years. However, to go back to our opening image there is in fact not a lot of films releasing each week in 2025 so far. Whilst yes there will be some films set to come out in 2025 that have not yet been given formal announcements and release dates, it seems the idea of masses of new releases might be a pipe dream, why is this?

Crucially there are two things Hollywood didn’t account for with the 2025 dream, the first being an obvious and sustained change in audience viewing habits, with more people waiting to watch films at home, being more choosy with the films they watch due to higher ticket costs, and of course the audience’s rejection of slop. The second key fact is the death of the movie star. When discussing the death of the movie star it can’t be stressed enough how important the rise of social media has been, influences and youtubers have given the public new role models seemingly more accessible, more down to earth, and more like them. Audiences have begun craving authenticity, as such the very performative and fake world of Hollywood has lost its allure, the actors who still maintain rabid fanbases do so with a keen use of social media or by giving off the persona of being nice people, whether true or not.

The death of the movie star has left Hollywood unable to move forward, it needs radical change to continue to exist, yet if there’s one thing Hollywood executives are frightened of doing it’s doing anything new. As such I expect 2025’s box office to languish behind 2024 which wasn’t good to begin with, we’re miles off from 2019. I believe looking at the calendar now and of course there can always be new announcements and upsets, but I would say that there is one surefire billion grosser film in the fourth coming Jurassic World, and possibly another in Superman if the stars align. That aside the box office looks quite sick this year, there are not a lot of films and the ones that are don’t seem to have the draw that could make the box office healthy.

The worst thing is in its floundering attempt to combat these problems Hollywood won’t take drastic action, the action of course that’s needed is a slashing of film budgets in half or more, in addition, films need to stop pushing divisive messaging and being targeted towards niche and specific minorities rather than the widest possible audience. Hollywood needs to decentralise, it needs to move outside of the LA ecosystem, films need to be made on a budget of $50 million, a raft of new original films costing that amount or below could allow for greater creativity and potentially some new franchises rather than mining the same wells.

As we head towards the end of this piece you can expect to see Hollywood shrink in the coming year and become more reliant on re-releases.

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Cinema Issues: The Truth About Toxic Fans

Written by Luke Barnes

In this cinema issues article we are discussing the currently pushed idea of the toxic fan and using some critical thinking skills.

So firstly it would be remiss to say that no elements of racism and bigotry exist in fandom or that people getting doxed or sent death threats doesn’t happen as it does, by both sides frequently. There are always bad apples in every bunch, however, things are being twisted.

The first thing to address is the matter of proportion, this is that within a fandom be they left right or whatever there will be bad apples, but they are a small number, to say a whole fandom is anything based on a few people is inherently in bad faith.

Onto the next point, misuse. So people online use terms like racist and bigot like they are going out of fashion and crucially they use them incorrectly. The most common way of this is that they say anyone who says something they don’t like or who criticises something they like is bigoted. This is not only silly and degrading to the terms themselves but also it leads then for the echo chamber to echo that now the fandom are all bigoted when they may not be at all and the original inciting incident was just someone saying they didn’t like the sound design of a film.

A final thing to consider is the idea of tribalism and scapegoats, it is very nice for a studio when a film comes out and does badly to go we didn’t make a bad film the fans are just toxic. Moreover, those who like the film can just rally behind that line and not thinking critically buy into it and go yeah I really liked it so anyone that doesn’t must have another reason for not liking it, enter the they are bigots line.

Overall, whilst there is and always will be an element of toxicity in fandoms, criticising a film, casting choice, plot point or whatever is non toxic, someone disliking a film you like is non toxic, someone saying they didn’t like the costumes in a show is not bigoted or racist and you are devaluing those terms by using them so casually. The war against toxic fans by some online and by studios is not only blown up way out of proportion and enflamed by political tribalism, but also unwinnable and frankly wrongheaded. As often a lot of the people who are calling people toxic are being that themselves by going after people they don’t like online.

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Cinema Issues: The Postmortem Of Doctor Who

Written by Luke Barnes

In this cinema issues article we are dissecting the first season of New, New Who and doing a post mortem to see what went so badly wrong with it.

So lets get something out of the way right quick, the series is in a bad way, I don’t care if you think it was some of the most stunning and brave Who ever, the ratings are a slow death. The Legend Of Ruby Tuesday and another episode this season both posted record low viewership numbers for the show, some of the lowest in the shows history. Look it up. Things are bad, and there is even talk that the filmed season batch of episodes may not get released as the BBC debates what to do with them, likely they will get released and the show will just be put on ice come this time next year.

Anyway, as the BBC starts to question everything and panic about its in development Who spin-offs, we will look at what went wrong with these episodes.

I think the main issue a lot of people had with these season was that fundamentally it wasn’t Who, never before have I seen the Doctor have so many dance numbers and act more like a local tiktoker trying to make it big than an alien. In addition the fact that the Doctor called everyone ‘babes’ constantly didn’t make it feel like Who it made it feel as though the Doctor had suddenly become another person.

Moreover, the series was heavily political with a number of controversial hot button issues forced in, just for the show to keep a desperate hold of its increasingly radically progressive audience. Some of it didn’t even make sense like when those people who not be saved by the Doctor because he was black and would rather die, what horribly on the nose message was that supposed to be pushing as it felt like a straw man argument. These ideas where repeated over the course of the season, the issue with clearly taking a side politically is that it then alienates your audience and makes you start to loose chunks of people. It is always better to present two sides and let the audience make up their own mind.

Furthermore, who at Disney or the BBC thought it was a good idea to allow cast and creators to attack the fans, whoever it was I would say is the most responsible for the bad feeling and reception to this season. This is mainly due to the fact of actors telling fans to screw off and then being shocked when their show has bad viewership, you do not treat your fans like that you just don’t. Yet these people look down on their fans and think they don’t need them, how wrong they are.

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Cinema Issues: The Acolyte Is Cancelled Looks Like Star Wars Isn’t A YA Female Brand After All

Written by Luke Barnes

Image credit, What’s On Disney Plus

In this cinema issues article we are talking about the much deserved cancellation of the Acolyte.

So lets get a few things out of the way first, Disney is a business they cancel things if they don’t have good ratings or make them money, the Acolyte did neither. Disney did not give in to the toxic fans, you overly assume the importance Disney places on any of their customers opinions or politics, it is as simple as did it make this number? No, then it is cancelled. Also Disney does not care about how some shows need a few seasons to find an audience, again did it hit the number they wanted? No, then it is cancelled.

Now let’s talk about why it was so poorly viewed.

Rumour has it that Disney is angry with star of the show Amandla Stenberg, saying that her diss track to own the haters, actually hurt the show in the long run as it caused people to turn off. Looks like Disney knows that attacking fans isn’t the way to go about it, I wonder if they will still do it when Skeleton Crew comes out.

It also might be time to call it on the idea of turning Star Wars into a girl-power brand. Audience data collected by the Wrap says that over 70% of Star Wars’ audience is older males, and the figure only seems to be increasing as time goes by, efforts like this to bring in a different sort of fan are not pushing the needle enough to change that and are also alienating that 70% therefore leading the series to not have enough viewers to stay on.

It may be time for Disney and Kathy to except Star Wars for what it is, a nerdy franchise mainly consumed by older guys and one that will become irrelevant in a few decades when these people start to die off. The idea of bringing in new fans by doing new things isn’t working, this show desperately tried to do that and had the worst viewing figures of all Disney + Star Wars so it might be time to accept new fans aren’t coming in big enough numbers to make the change over survivable for the brand.

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Rings Of Power Season 2: Can It Be Saved?

Written by Luke Barnes

In this cinema issues article we are talking about The Rings Of Power and what I believe it needs to do in order to be a better second season and in order to set the series up for long term success.

Now as a Tolkien fan I have a very complicated relationship with this show, there is a part of me that thinks it shouldn’t exist, and when I watched the first few episodes of the first season I was convinced it was little more than current year trash. However, as I advanced beyond that I did think there were some good ideas there, deeply buried but there, and I began to warm to it more by the end of the first season. As such I want to suggest ways that the second season could improve on the first and turn the show around, because lets face it by Amazon’s own admission, in the end, the majority of people didn’t finish the first season.

Before we get into it I want to say this is all just my opinion, nothing to cry about, some of it will be changes they can make this season and some will be possible changes they can make before a maybe possibly season 3. The idea of if this show can even be saved will also be discussed.

I think the fundamental issue with ROP that was there in the first season and will be there in season 2 is the fact that those who make the show do not understand or like the IP. As such they inject other things into in order to try and get more people in whilst driving away people who might actually like the show, take for example the fact in the new season they are teasing a romance between Galadriel, Morfydd Clarke, and Sauron, Charlie Vickers which just shows that the creators do not know these characters. They are doing this in an effort to try and get social media shippers to care, and to appear like it is A YA show, they are doing this when they could just use Celeborn instead. Doing things like the YA shipping makes me think that the show can’t be saved.

Moving on I think the show needs to focus on less characters, the Harfoots need to go away as do the Numenorian’s, I would also cut out the Dwarf’s and just have it be about Sauron trying to corrupt different groups of people with Galadriel and Elron in toe to stop him. All the stuff with the Stranger too I would cut out, we just don’t need it, the show is trying to tell too many stories at once.

I would also hype up events rather than going look guys the first black elf, this is tokenistic and irritating virtue signalling. You should have natural diversity and not make a big deal of it just be like yes this is the world, you don’t need to show them off its weird. Look at how House Of The Dragon does it for example, much better.

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The Desperate Doctor Doom Debacle

Written by Luke Barnes

In this cinema issues article we are talking about the reveal of Doctor Doom in the MCU and the casting news.

So as we all know Robert Downey Jr. is back in the MCU playing Doctor Doom. This news has divided a lot of people, for me personally I am mixed to trepidatious on it. However, before we go any further I just want to address the milk toast folks that go ‘oh MCU fans are toxic they are judging something before they have even seen it’, as their brains slowly trickle down their backs. The whole point of casting reveals is to generate buzz and attention be that good or bad, the whole point is to get people talking so by going oh you’re toxic for talking about it negatively, even your big daddies over at Disney would tell you to shut up.

That said let’s get into it.

I think the biggest issue with the casting is that it ruins Tony Stark’s sacrifice in Endgame and yes I know it won’t be the actual Tony Stark but rather a variant Doom/Iron Man Hybrid. However, to a lay audience they will just go ‘oh look it is Iron Man’ I thought he was dead, and so it will mean people will be both confused and then asking why is he a villain and killing his friends, to a basic understander of the franchise it could almost ruin the character entirely. Though I imagine Marvel Studios will go to great lengths to show how he is not Tony Stark, we may never even see Downey Jr’s face.

From that you have the fact that this Doom will not be the Victor Von Doom that people want, it is a Tony Stark variant, meaning that the actual peasant to ruler Doom may never appear in the MCU. This then means that a character a lot of people were looking forward to has been abandoned for the cynical ploy of getting Downey Jr back. Also it means that the Fantastic Four will have a different origin story as if this variant is from their universe it will be that their Tony Stark went bad, rather than Von Doom existing as a contemporary and even friend in the early days to the Baxter clan.

Personally, I think the best thing that could happen would be that the Tony Stark variant either never takes his mask off and is in fact not a variant and it is Downey Jr playing Von Doom, or that the actual real Von Doom usurps power from the Stark variant at the end of Doomsday and then becomes God Emperor Doom going into Secret Wars.

Ultimately, whilst it is nice to have Downey Jr back, the cynical ploy could add to the MCU’s woes in the long term.

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Cinema Issues: The Era Of The Virtue Signalling Celebrity

Written by Luke Barnes

In this cinema issues article we are talking about the era of the virtue signalling celebrity. As many of you may know my position is that celebrities should keep their politics to themselves, no one and I mean no one wants to hear about how a millionaire likely nepo baby thinks the world should be. To make matters worse a lot of the time these people either don’t know what they are talking about or are just reading from pre-prepared statements to try and say the right things to get people to give them praise for being progressive. It is never meant genuinely.

People say oh they are celebrities with a platform they should be championing social ideals and saying this is how society should be, but no, they are not politicians or community leaders they are actors people’s whose job it is to entertain not to moralise or tell you how to live you life.

The issue with things is everyone is afraid of being cancelled, everyone is worried if they don’t say the right thing, take the right position, they might get dropped or lose everything and in that position you don’t have real people anymore you have robots. People who are just going through the motions saying things and doing things simply because they have to.

We should not need to know actors politics, but if we have to their should be an equal balance of left and right wing people in Hollywood. There should never, in Hollywood or anywhere else, be one dominant group that tells the rest how they can think and what is correct thought and what is wrong thought that is inherently dystopian. Yet that is Hollywood, where there is one line to tread, and I think in many ways that is why you are seeing success coming from outside Hollywood and you are seeing people turn away from them, as people hate the Californian bubble.

It’s the fact that not only do these people think they are great and virtuous but it is the distain they have the fans or the watchers that really makes them insufferable as they look down on them and think that they are dirty little people who need to be made to think correctly.

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