TrueGentleman

With the notable exception of Vincent Price's Witchfinder General, a.k.a. The Conqueror Worm (1968), a gruesome cult film in which Price delivers an unusually restrained performance as the sadistic titular villain.

(c.f. Steve Coogan's Hammer films parody TV series Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible for truly comic relief)

The Shining and Rosemary's Baby are definitely great horror films, though they do revolve around marriages that are, well, troubled. Add to those the psychological thrillers Gaslight and Suspicion, as well as Repulsion and Diabolique (the original, not the remake).

As for more supernatural horror movies, the cult film Carnival of Souls has a reputation for being truly eerie, and The Innocents is supposed to be as good as above-mentioned The Haunting (I need to catch up on my Netflix, clearly).

There's plenty of blame to go around for everyone besides Richard Cook: See the previously linked The Inside Story of How John Carter Was Doomed by Its First Trailer. Incidentally, Disney can expect to lose $120M this quarter alone thanks to this fiasco.

Anyway, here's a mashup of the box office to illustrate what went wrong:

Thank you - that would be great.

... But why can't we caption it here on these forums, where we already have established a CoH community? Some of us are rather uncomfortable with Facebook's privacy-unfriendly policies, such as their never-ending web tracking (a.k.a. eternal cookies).

Many reviewers won't lift a finger to do the homework on a movie, so anything that's not in the press packet will likely be missed. (And movie reviewers wonder why their vocation isn't held in very high regard?)

That seems to be the consensus from what the marketing folks refer to as "the target demographic", yet this doesn't seem to have translated into a word-of-mouth boost at the box office. A 55% drop from opening weekend is bad news, even if the overseas receipts are holding steady.

What you call "mature", others might call "decadent". Although there's an argument to be made for eliminating grind in this game, e.g. defeat X enemies to achieve Y weapon customization unlock, there's another against paying to bypass immersive content, e.g. the Alignment Change token.

The only equation that Paragon Studios is concerned about is how many of those complaints will result in lost revenue (from cancelled VIP subscriptions to Preems drifting away from the game again).

Far from it. CoH's old tech, boosted by UltraMode, does an emminently credible job of rendering the "bad part of town" look for King's Row. It has a much harder time presenting natural and razed environments. Contrast Perez Park or Boomtown with the First Ward for ideas on where to prioritize renovating zones.

Adding interiors to landmark buildings would be a great, easy way to spruce up familiar zones without having to redo them from the ground up. Ditto updating existing storylines or adding new ones.

<chortle>

Whedon brought it on himself by attempting to turn his cable-grade concept into a network-friendly series. The pilot showed a much more complex and intriguing execution of its decidely adult themes. That said, Fox gave Dollhouse a second season mainly because sexy outfits for Eliza Dushku are cheaper than dinosaur CGI.

Don't forget Fran Kranz and Miracle Laurie. (Dollhouse is probably the only show in which the cast's names are more unusual than their characters'.)

Quite so, except that currently, television and movie producers insist on adding teen drama and family adventure to genre projects, no matter how rotely written, in order to capture the elusive mainstream audience. Naturally, the bigger the budget, the more anxious they are to "four-quad" a project by attempting to appeal to multiple audience demographics at once. It's as though they don't trust audiences to appreciate a high-concept idea without "relatable" surrogates.

It makes one positively nostalgic for the old days of sci-fi b-movies in which all the characters were cardboard and the moster was rubber. At least there was no pretense back then.

That and the relentless hype over this button-pushing genre series from a big name producer (Dinosaurs! Time travel! Spielberg! All the suspense of Lost without the dangling mysteries! Don't worry about the family and teen drama that's sneaking in!). It's one thing to have one's tastes catered to; it's another to be pandered to.

Or, in the best of both worlds, we can play with other people via a magic box telling us amazing stories, such as in City of Heroes, to name only one of many MMORPGs out there on our personal computers.

Thanks for the link - that's an interesting opening weekend postmortem. There's a similar expose behind this disappointment-in-the-making at Vulture: The Inside Story of How John Carter Was Doomed by Its First Trailer. It's much the same story of studio office politics, the directorial ego of a trufan, and a marketing campaign that seemed almost deliberately obtuse. Seriously, why wasn't the tag line "From the creator of Tarzan" or at least "By the director of WALL-E and Finding Nemo"? No wonder the abysmal Lorax movie, which did everything right except the adaptation of the source material, clobbered it.

Like Stanton, I devoured Burroughs's Mars books as a kid, which might be my problem with his treatment of the subject matter: It's too much his own. Nothing in what I've seen so far truly brings to life either what I imagined reading them or even the old pulp and sci-fi cover art of the paperbacks I found.

This is "A Princess of Mars":



This is just too much red filter in Photoshop*:



* EDIT: Presumably to make up for the beige wash that defines the movie's look. Mars is the "Red Planet", not the "Khaki Planet".

Fair enough, I suppose. Smith, Gillan, and Darvill are all on the tall side. Still, one of the hallmarks of the classic Daleks was that they were shorter than the rest of the cast, making them deceptively less threatening. (Joe Ahearne, the director of the New Who episode "Dalek", said in some interview or another that he didn't take it seriously as the story's antagonist until it started killing everyone in the script.) Making them taller and bulkier doesn't really contribute to what makes the Daleks menacing.

On the topic of old school Daleks, here's the trailer for the fan-made restaging of the lost Power of the Daleks.

I also put money down on the Gunslinger pack thanks to Dink's hard work revising it (and I'd have bought the Magic and Steampunk ones if I hadn't already).

Excellent suggestions - and applicable to the similarly revised Magic and Steampunk costume packs.

And next we can have Batman Babies with Bruce Wayne and his rogues gallery in kindergarten!

Is your point that the tail wags the dog? "Auntie" has a different mandate and a different institutional culture than Sky or the typical advertiser-driven US network TV. Doctor Who tie-in toys are fine, but when Doctor Who ties in with toys, then it's a problem. For an audience raised on Transformers and similar toy commercials disguised childrens shows, it might not be noticeable, but it's aesthetically indefensible.

The kindest explanation for the Power Rangers-style design is that since Doctor Who doesn't have the budget to produce a full-blown Dalek army and CGI Daleks don't have the same presence, they wanted a visually distinctive redesign. That only invites the question of what was wrong with the new series's previously updated design for the Daleks.

Talk to me when BBC America officially produces Doctor Who. The Beeb gets almost three-quarters of its funding from the license fee, nearly 80% when government grants are included.

Thanks for the tip, sunshine, but actually, I try not to watch the episodes that look like crap - Victory of the Daleks slipped in, to my regret, since I watched it with less discerning friends - and I buy the ones on DVD that are good.

Or rather, that they've been doing on a regular basis for the past five months. This is an ongoing problem that undermines the concept of CoH Freedom as a microtransaction-subscription hybrid. Instead players get their points _and_ reward tokens up front if purchased directly but only irregularly as part of their subscription package. Obviously the MTX method looks better than the "VIP" one.