Although I'm generally a fairly hardcore superhero movie fan and see them all, i thought I was stuck in the superhero fatigue because very few things have really hit for me the last few years. But then you get Across the Spider-Verse and realize the problem isn't the genre, the problem is that most of the stuff has just not been very good lately. Passable, sure, but not good, and extremely rare lately to feel like I'm watching anything special.

Can't speak much for Elemental other than from the little bit of marketing I have seen it didn't feel like anything particularly new, just a skin on previous Pixar sorts of stories. I saw Flash this weekend because I'm a big fan, and overall it was about what I expected. I don't trust any hype around DC these days, so I figured I'd get a decent popcorn flick with some solid fan service for old-heads like myself that love Keaton's Batman. And that's pretty much what it was.

If you saw the trailer and have a few brain cells that knock into each other, you probably had the movie pegged going in. If you've already read or watched previous incarnations of Flashpoint, you pretty much know the story. The things that would be novel/interesting about this movie re: multiverse and using characters from other continuities and such feel entirely derivative coming in after No Way Home, Everything Everywhere All At Once (which is a superhero movie, fight me) and really, really suffers coming out a week after Across the Spider-Verse which has some similar story beats, but just does it waaaaayyyyyy better. I've already re-watched AtSV, and it is just jam-packed with what I can only describe as "good-taste." ItSV was groundbreaking for a lot of reasons, and to your point, it looks anything but bland. Even with that as the measure going in, I didn't expect AtSV to still be so visually it's own movie and still groundbreaking in it's own right.

When you add in the meta for this movie and knowing that it's unlikely to go anywhere relevant to the new DCEU or even casual fans just hearing about all of the Ezra bullshit (plus tbh I really, really don't think he's appealing as Barry or in general for this role) I think they were lucky to end up at 55mil. Really, the marketing team for this movie deserves a raise based on that alone as they managed to get most of the stink off of this and make it feel like an event movie.

Yeah I think you've hit the nail on the head there. Along with seeming like zootopia and inside out, I also don't think it's really obvious what the film is about. I'm fine with films being vague but they also need to be intriguing. I just think it's a shame as I'm a massive fan of animation so I want it all to do well. I definitely need to find time to go see across the spider verse, the first one was amazing.

Yeah. It looks like a character driven cartoon going up against summer action tent poles. It probably should have come out in April or November or sormething.