The Occasional Blargh

Often there are two ways to tell a story.

Dustin Rowles of Pajiba has this to say about the unlikely success of The Avengers.

A collection of second-tier superheroes from a comic-book brand that had been churning out mediocre efforts in a marketplace suffering from superhero fatigue directed by a guy with a series of low-rated mostly unsuccessful television series and only one feature film to his name, a $25 million grossing cult film. That’ll never work.

A commenter to that very article takes issue with the “unlikely” part of the equation.

I, too, am completely blown away that a massively-hyped culmination of years of movies and a marketing blitz that most franchises would kill for combined with a director and property that the entire internet has had sloppy nerd boners over for years made money.

That sure showed them!

 

It’s been a while since someone declared as broken a business model he didn’t like. Patrick Rhone uses the clever conceit of using his daughter to illustrate his argument which appears to be there should be an unlimited selection of immediately available entertainment, but that it shouldn’t be paid for through advertisement, nor should anything be advertised before it was immediately available at the moment. Now, his daughter does go about asking good questions, but Rhone does not really bother to answer his daughter’s question in a meaningful way. He’d rather imply that them executives are just being silly.

It’d be interesting to hear his daughter’s questions when there is far less to watch on the iPad from Netflix, and how it could be so even if daddy is paying more to Netflix.

Good morning, readers. I am in beautiful, frozen New York on a brief sabbatical from the infuriating tech press. Thanks to a victory from a Twitter raffle, I will get to attend a preview of Justice League: Doom, from which the above picture comes from. (And that is the excuse I’m using to post a pic of Wonder Woman here.) The direct-to-video movie, written by the late Dwayne McDuffie, is an adaptation of the JLA comic book miniseries Tower of Babel written by Mark Waid.

Batman has been secretly coming up with plans to take down other members of the Justice League. You never know when Superman may go rogue, or just become a dick. Of course, you may never know when the league’s enemies will get those files. (OK, honestly, that’s the type of thing you’re not supposed to write down.)

Still, I’m hoping it is a good show. It’s one of the last things written by the beloved and acclaimed McDuffie, and it is a sort of reunion for the vocal cast of Bruce Timm’s Justice League animated series. (Timm now produces these direct-to-video movies, as well as the upcoming Green Lantern animated series.)

The movie goes on sale on February 28th.