Free Republic

The video game Star Wars Outlaws is to be released this week. The game is set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi — so in the universe of the original, still-greatest film trilogy — and has been several years in development. According to its “narrative director” Navid Khavari, “We didn’t just look at the original films, we looked at George Lucas’s own inspirations: Akira Kurosawa, World War Two movies like The Dambusters and spaghetti westerns. You see the care that was taken in that original trilogy to make it tonally consistent. We need to make this...

Disney's been in a magical world of trouble over the last several years, ever since the company decided to pick a fight with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the culture war and go all-in on diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of its core programming at the expense of its longtime customers, traditional American families. A string of movie failures hit Disney's bottom line in 2023 and 2024, most notably with "The Marvels," which opened as their worst-performing box office film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They also experienced flops within Pixar, with their latest, "Elemental," performing terribly at the...

Billionaire Nelson Peltz criticized Disney's film strategy as pursuing woke messaging instead of simply being entertaining. Owner of Trian Fund Management, Peltz has been rumored since 2023 to be seeking seats on Disney's board of directors for his company. With a reported $3.5 billion stake in the company, the investor has criticized CEO Bob Iger's reinstatement and other company moves. With Peltz launching criticisms at the company, Disney has claimed that Peltz hasn't "presented a single strategic idea" over the course of two years that he has campaigned for board seats. Peltz was asked in a recent interview about the...

Martin Scorsese thinks Marvel films aren’t cinema. “The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes,” he wrote in a New York Times article in 2019, written after a wave of backlash from superhero fans and directors alike. Earlier that year, Marvel’s three-hour blockbuster Avengers: Endgame had garnered over $2.7 billion. For a while it was the highest-grossing film ever made. People turned up to see it in spandex catsuits. You couldn’t move for replica infinity stones. Some theaters, eager to fill the demand, screened the...

In other news - the fight between Elon Musk and Disney CEO Bob Iger has added another chapter. The CEO of X is now looking for people who want to sue Disney for discrimination, even offering to help pay for their legal fees. Musk's call to arms comes on the same day that actress Gina Carano filed a lawsuit against Disney and Lucasfilm, accusing them of wrongfully terminating her from her role in “The Mandalorian.” Musk is also helping to pay for her case. The new addition to the feud comes on the heels of Disney’s first-quarter earnings report, in...

So much has been said of Marvel Studios being punked by their masters at Disney to make everything as "woke" as possible to force 'political correctness' down everyones throats whether they like it or not. The jury's in from 2023 and it said the profits from such projects took a severe hit BECAUSE of film companies wimping out from threats from some super-minorities with official-seeming stationary. EXACTLY like how Anheiser-Busch, Target and others ended up wondering where all the money went they were assured they'd get from going along with those overly-vocal minorities' demands. I started watching "Loki" with a...

We talk a lot about how woke Disney-owned Marvel is, but it's biggest competitor DC isn't learning any lessons Marvel's failures. In fact, they seem to be going all out to go out of business first. The bi-sexual Superman comic they launched lasted all of one year. Then there were the shameless diversity covers that essentially equated Hispanic people with food. Remarkably, Dr. Jill Biden's breakfast tacos didn't make the cut. Sorry, San Antonio! And now, DC is trying again by introducing a new gay-Green Lantern title called Green Lantern: Alan Scott. And if turning another superhero into a flaming...

My badWhen Iron Man came out in 2008, I really liked it. Tony Stark had never really interested me in the comics, once I realized I was never going to be rich enough to build my own flying armor. But Robert Downey Jr. gave the character something he’d never had before: a personality.Then, every few months for the past 15 years, there’s been another Marvel movie. And another. And another. Usually, they’ve been pretty good. Especially for children of the ‘70s and ‘80s, who grew up with the Incredible Hulk live-action show, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, and the occasional...

So it’s been unsettling to find out the Avengers are Earth-bound, after all. “The Marvels,” the 33rd installment in the MCU and the sequel to 2019’s billion-dollar behemoth “Captain Marvel,” cratered with $47 million in North America and $63 million internationally — the lowest opening weekend in the franchise’s history. Before this weekend, the worst debut belonged to 2008’s “The Incredible Hulk” ($55.4 million, not adjusted for inflation), which premiered at the dawn of the MCU.

Even if you're not a loyal reader of mine, you can tell that Disney is in the midst of a slow but sure collapse, and while all of its properties are undergoing some form of trouble, the one undergoing the most noticeable critical failure is Marvel. The once indefatigable Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) went from being a multi-billion dollar golden goose for Disney to becoming one of the stones dragging it to the sea floor. While many heard the alarms blaring now for years and saw the collapse coming for some time, it was common practice for the access media...

The Marvel Cinematic Universe and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.You feel it; I know you do because we all do. That deep, aching, existential pain lamenting our civilizational decline: things cannot continue like this, and we know who’s causing it. They haunt our institutions while facilitating the dissolution of our social fabric.I refer, of course, to the scourge of superheroes.How Did We Get Here?Since the turn of the century, there have been dozens of superhero movies and TV shows (primarily produced by Marvel and DC studios, respective subsidiaries of Disney and Warner Brothers). And despite...

LOS ANGELES, CA — As writers and actors continue to strike against the insatiable greed of the studio executives who have oppressed them for years, The world is now in its third month of realizing they're just fine without Hollywood. "At first I was worried, but then I remembered that Hollywood doesn't really contribute anything of meaningful value to the world whatsoever," said one local woman. "Without Hollywood, I can still go outside, spend time with my kids, and catch up on decades worth of classic films that are much better than anything they make today!" "Thanks for helping me...

This month, though, Marvel officially declared the Punisher persona non grata, eliminating the character as readers know him. Did he go out in a blaze of glory? No, in typical woke fashion Frank Castle is captured by progressive heroes, chained up and forced to go through a struggle session in which he is admonished as a murderer and a terrorist. Marvel even brings the Punisher’s wife back from the dead, only so that she can divorce him and take his money and property, and then inform him that his lifelong crusade against the criminal underworld was all for nothing. The...

Scarlett Johansson said the set of the early MCU films was like a "big sausage party." Johansson, who played Black Widow, made the comments on an appearance on "The Goop Podcast." Gwyneth Paltrow, who hosts the podcast, said the cast was "psyched" to have Johansson join them. While reminiscing on her early days in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Scarlett Johansson said she very much felt the lack of female representation. During a recent conversation with Gwyneth Paltrow on "The Goop Podcast," Johansson, 38, reflected on her acting career as well as her journey within the Marvel franchise. Johansson played Natasha...

Celebrated filmmaker Quentin Tarantino is facing criticism for candid comments he made about actors in Marvel movies not being legitimate stars. [snip] “I don’t love them,” Tarantino said of Marvel films. “No, I don’t. I don’t hate them. But I don’t love them. I mean, look, I used to collect Marvel comics like crazy when I was a kid.” “There’s an aspect that if these movies were coming out when I was in my twenties, I would totally be f***king happy and totally love them. [But] they wouldn’t be the only movies being made, they would be those movies amongst...

Acclaimed director James Cameron had some harsh words for comic book characters, claiming that Marvel and DC superheroes are emotionally immature. The 68-year-old “Titanic” director told The New York Times that because the characters in these universes don’t have the responsibility of marriage and fatherhood, they’re often not as evolved as they could be. They also act in immature ways because of it. “When I look at these big, spectacular films — I’m looking at you, Marvel and DC — it doesn’t matter how old the characters are, they all act like they’re in college,” Cameron told the publication. “They...

Marvel Studios announced it would take a "new approach" to Israeli superheroine Sabra in response to extensive criticism by anti-Israel activists following the announcement that the character would be introduced to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the upcoming film Captain America: New World Order, played by Israeli actress Shira Haas. “While our characters and stories are inspired by the comics, they are always freshly imagined for the screen and today’s audience, and the filmmakers are taking a new approach with the character Sabra who was first introduced in the comics over 40 years ago," Marvel told Variety on Friday. The...

Long before Agents of SHIELD, Cloak and Dagger, or Daredevil, Marvel tried to make its mark on TV...with mixed results....

The Washington Post cheered a reported ban of a gamer who made a pro-America modification that offended the rainbow-praising Big Tech overlords. The Post seethed in a story headlined — “‘Spider-Man’ modification scene turns into Pride flag battlefield” — about how the celebration of the newly released PC version of the LGBTQ+-friendly 2018 game “Marvel’s Spider-Man” was being spoiled by “United States flags.” Huh? In The Post’s own words, some gamers tried to thwart any celebration around last week’s release of the PC game “by taking aim at a very specific target: Pride flags.” The offending gamer, “a modder going...

Hollywood star Natalie Portman has expressed her love that Disney-Marvel’s latest Thor sequel is being received as the “gayest” Marvel movie ever made. In an interview with the actress, entertainment journalist Andrew Freund laid out his hypothesis about Thor: Love and Thunder, which opens in the U.S. on Friday. “Is it safe to say that this is the gayest movie ever made in the MCU [Marvel comic universe]?” Portman replied, “I love that reading of it. Yes! I love that.” Freund went on to elaborate his theory, citing sequences where the characters are flying on rainbows. The actress said, “That...