Category: Features
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What Makes a Good Adaptation?
For quite a long time, almost as long as cinema has existed, movie studios have turned to adaptions to bring them their next big blockbuster, taking stories from the page and putting them on the screen. But despite the practice they’ve had, Hollywood still doesn’t seem to have found a…
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The Need for New Ideas in Hollywood
The figures for the domestic (US) box office in 2024 were down just 3% on 2023, which doesn’t sound too bad, all things considered. It’s a total of over $8 billion all told, which sounds like a good number, until you start to look a bit deeper, and see what…
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Why is “binge watching” so popular?
One of the things I hate most about streaming is the ‘binge drop’, where an entire season’s worth of episodes are dropped all at once on streaming platforms like Netflix and Prime Video. They are bad for storytelling, bad for building fandoms, and don’t even seem like the most logical…
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Nostalgia and Self-Reference in Movies
Watching any recent sequel to a legacy franchise can feel like you’re playing nostalgia bongo, with the amount of references and callbacks to previous moments from the franchise’s history. Think the mini Stay Puft marshmallow men in Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Frozen Empire, or the reuse of famous quotes in Alien:…
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‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’: A Sad Ending to the Sequel Trilogy
When I think of The Rise of Skywalker, I can’t really be as hard on this movie as I might. Yes, it’s bad, but it came off the back of something even worse, The Last Jedi. It had to try and fix that movie’s problems and bring the whole sequel…
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‘Jurassic Park 3’ is an Older Kind of Sequel
Hollywood loves a sequel and so do fans, so it’s no surprise that when a movie does well enough at the box office, it inevitably leads to the studio making a follow up, keeping fans engaged without having to go through the trouble of starting a completely new franchise and…
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‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’, A Point of No Return
I’ve talked about The Force Awakens, so it’s time to continue with my retrospective on the Star Wars sequels and move onto the next movie, The Last Jedi. After seeing TFA, I was unsure what to think of the story being told here, but thought that its follow up might…
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‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’: An Underwhelming Start to the Sequels
There’s been a lot of stuff said about the Star Wars sequel trilogy, so I thought I’d add my own thoughts here. I know I’m late to the party and a lot of what I’ll say has been covered before, but I wasn’t in the Star Wars fandom back in…
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What if Luminara Had Trained Ezra Bridger?
What would have happened if the upright Jedi master had trained the kid from Lothal?
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Can Hollywood Take Advantage of the Monster Movie Hype?
The first few months of 2024 have been a rocky one at the cinema, but if there’s one undisputed winner, it’s Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, the latest entry in the MonsterVerse from Warner Bros and Legendary Pictures. There are a lot of explanations for why this movie has…
Films and Fiction 