The thing is there is so much source material that they could refresh it with a completely new take and new characters. But.the shared universe has become unwieldy, both in production a nd in narrative.
What they should be doing is backing off the slavish attention to continuity and letting auteurs do their thing without worrying about setting up future installments or following up stuff that came before. And they seriously need to slow down their rollouts. When it was still new, it was exciting to be getting two new shows and three new movies in this world every year. But the novelty is gone now, so they only have the strength of their stories to hold them up, and lately, those have been suffering because of the brutal production line.
As someone with a bladder over 40 yrs old now (ugh), I think intermissions ought to be mandatory in anything over 2.5 hrs.
If studios want cinema to survive (and at this point I’m not sure they do), they need to stop trying to cater exclusively to the 29-35 yr-old demo.
My parents used to go to movies often. Now they find it a daunting chore because of the online reserved seating. So they just don’t go anymore. I don’t imagine they’re alone in that.
So I tried to use this to identify a movie I remember seeing as a kid and haven’t been able to find since. I described the scene I remember, where an industrial accident releases freezing gas and a worker with a hard hat freezes his arm and it shatters.
As usual, when given specifics, the AI just straight makes shit up.
One movie that fits the description is “The Abyss” (1989), directed by James Cameron. Although it doesn’t involve a freezing gas, it does feature an industrial accident and a worker in a hard hat with a frozen arm. In the film, a team of deep-sea oil drillers encounters a mysterious alien species while working on an underwater drilling platform. During their mission, one of the workers, Bud Brigman (played by Ed Harris), gets his arm trapped in a closing hatch and it becomes frozen due to extreme cold temperatures. In his panic, he runs into a wall, shattering his frozen arm.