Category: Entertainment

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I don’t understand the rage exploding over the Harry Potter delay. More precisely, I suppose I should say I don’t understand the depth of the rage.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was originally scheduled for November, but Warner Bros. has just decided to push it back to June for scheduling purposes.

Is it annoying? Yeah. Is it a personal affront? Not so much.

Maybe I’m jaded, having been through this with movies like Stardust and Serenity, not to mention Sci-Fi Channel’s insane scheduling system that basically treats each “season” as two 10-episode seasons and splits them across what might as well be two years…or, going further back, PTEN’s insistence on holding back the last 4 or 5 episodes of each Babylon 5 season until the following fall, every single year to the point where TNT, after picking up the final season, did the same thing. Pathology got postponed twice, then pulled off the schedule entirely before it finally hit theaters nearly a year after the original release date.

Or maybe it’s just that I like the Harry Potter books better than the movies.

It’s not like it’s been taken off the schedule indefinitely. It’ll still get a theatrical release. I can’t think of any at the moment, but I’ve had movies I really wanted to see get stuck on a shelf, finished, for years. Some of them eventually surfaced as direct-to-DVD releases.

And they’re not delaying production on Deathly Hallows. The actors will still be well within the standard Hollywood “teenager” age range by the time they finish playing 17-year-olds in the final film.

So I can understand being annoyed, but I don’t understand the letter-writing, the petitions, the plans to boycott the film — yes, there are fans who intend to boycott the film if they have to wait for it.

*sigh* I’d better go over to Newsarama and see how crazy the thread about Final Crisis #4 being delayed 2 weeks has gotten. Actually, no, I shouldn’t. I should get some sleep instead.

P.S. Anyone else think that “HP Rebellion” would be a great name for a computer?

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The latest newsletter for the Center Theatre Group includes a mention of The Fly: The Opera.  Yes, The Fly, based on the sci-fi film about a scientist who gets combined with a housefly in a teleportation accident.  And its remake. As an opera. 😯

Plácido Domingo conducts the U.S. premiere of the LA Opera-commissioned opera written by Oscar®-winning composer Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings)based on the original 1957 George Langelaan short story as well as David Cronenberg’s 1986 film, with a libretto by the Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly).

I used to figure, if someone can turn The Phantom of the Opera, Little Shop of Horrors, and Jekyll and Hyde into a musical, nothing should surprise me.  But… seriously…  The Fly? And not just a musical, but an opera? And the creative team: Placido Domingo and David Henry Hwang working with David Cronenberg?

😕

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Possibly jumping the gun, but last night I reserved a backup hotel for next year’s Comic-Con. Although considering that most of the big-name hotels right by the convention center are already booked (though I’m sure they’ve set aside blocks for the convention already) or want incredible amounts of money per night, perhaps it’s not that crazy an idea.

The price and distance are just good enough that I’d be willing to skip the insane reservation crunch when the convention block goes on sale next year, though I’ll probably give it a shot to see if I can get something closer.

Meanwhile, we’re seriously considering hitting WonderCon again next year, which will also give us another excuse to visit people up in the Bay Area. (Not that we should need an excuse, but it seems like we do.)

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Well, probably not, but the complaints over color in Diablo III — specifically that it has some — have got to be the silliest controversy I’ve seen in a long time.

Fans even went in and recolored the screenshots to show what they think it should look like. The link above is an article where one of the game designers goes through and, over and over, points out, “Sure, you might like that better, but it interferes with gameplay.” You know, things like being able to tell the skeletons from the zombies — or from your teammates in a multiplayer game.

Oh, and to the fan who captioned a (relatively) colorful shot with “wow gayness” — I believe the word you’re looking for is gaiety.

(via Comics Should Be Good)

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A couple of things I’d like to do for next year’s Comic-Con International, assuming vacation time and financial situation are compatible:

1. Take the following Monday off. Comic-Con is not relaxing. Even if you don’t go out to parties every night, it’s still exhausting. It wasn’t so bad when we left early on Sunday, but the last two years we’ve stayed all the way to the end of the show. Two-plus hours of driving, plus a stop for dinner, meant we weren’t home until Sunday evening. You’re supposed to be a zombie at the con, not after you get home. It would be much better to take a day to sleep in and recover a bit. (Plus it would allow extra time to do things like sort through photos and post them quickly.)

2. Take the whole week off and make it a vacation. We missed maybe a grand total of 4 hours of daytime programming this year, and still didn’t catch everything we wanted to. (Admittedly, a lot of that involved choosing between simultaneous events.) That doesn’t leave much time to just be in San Diego, except for nighttime. It would be nice to head down the previous weekend and spend a few days as tourists. Maybe hit the Wild Animal Park or something. Then switch hotels on Wednesday and do the con. Certainly our trip to WonderCon earlier this year benefited from taking extra time to do other things.

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It was a bit of a surprise to learn that J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beadle the Bard is actually getting a mass-market printing. This book of short stories, set in the Harry Potter universe with commentary by Dumbledore, was originally released only in a tiny run of seven hand-made copies, sold at auction for charity.

Now the charity is doing a standard hardcover run of the book…and a $100 collector’s edition designed to mimic the original hand-written run. While considerably cheaper than the £1,950,000 Amazon spent to get their copy of the original run, it’s a little more than I’d like to spend. (I mean, I didn’t even spring for the $150 for the special edition of Comic Book Tattoo.) I think I’ll stick with the standard edition.

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As Comic-Con International strains at the boundaries of the San Diego Convention Center, it’s begun spilling over into the city. Go back 4-5 years, and the most you would see would be the occasional street light banner or bus stop advertisement. Now, there are people handing out flyers as far out as the trolley stops, and walking around the Gaslamp in ridiculous mascot costumes (the sandwiches a few years ago, the donuts this year). There are displays near the trolley stops. There are buses wrapped with full advertisements for movies and TV shows, shuttle vans labeled U.S.S. Enterprise — there was even an ice cream truck parked for several days on 5th street with a Eureka ad on the side (and probably something inside it, but I was always on the other side of the street when I saw it).

It’s mainly the TV and film studios (except for the flyers), and it ties into something that author Robert J. Sawyer mentioned at his spotlight panel: Convention-goers are nexuses (well, nexi). We’re the people who are so into movies, TV, games, comics, etc. that we’ll put in the effort, time and expense to go to this kind of event, and we’re likely to talk about it. They’re counting on us going back to our offices or dorm rooms, hanging out with friends, blogging, posting on Twitter, or otherwise telling everyone we know about how cool this and that new movie is going to be.

In short: It’s an advertising blitz designed to kick off word-of-mouth hype, aimed at the crowd that’s both most primed to receive it and most likely to spread it.

With the massive convention floor and unbelievable crowds, they’re doing everything they can to stand out. So we get the viral marketing, like the ads for TruBlood, the Humans-Only Restrooms signs, the army of people in Quarantine outfits, the Neighborhood Watch–style sign for The Spirit. We get the swag. We get the celebrity appearances. We get displays of terra-cotta warriors to advertise The Mummy and replicas of the Owlship from Watchmen.

All that brings in more people, which of course makes the event more attractive to the studios, so they put in more effort, which brings in more people, and they start promoting movies that have nothing to do with comics, sci-fi, fantasy or horror, the genres that used to be the main focus for the con. (I remember thinking that Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was an odd choice to promote at Comic-Con. This year, the sequel blended right in.)

The con seems to have reached an upper limit in terms of the number of people it can handle at the current venue, which is contracted through 2012. I wonder whether Hollywood will demand bigger crowds — which would probably be best handled by spilling into neighboring hotels — or be satisfied with the numbers it’s got.

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