I'm re-evaluating 50 Shades. It was a more honest and less exploitative movie.I mean, it is Sony.
Here's another one, found in Hong Kong.
"Madame Spider. Only in cinemas."
Sony Spider-Verse discussion thread
- Thread starter Turtletrekker
- Start date
Oh, I think that's very true. I've felt that way for decades about later works by successful novelists, say -- they tend to be much longer and more self-indulgent than the early ones, and often not as good. Same with filmmakers. The more powerful you get, the fewer people are willing to tell you "no," so you don't get pushed as hard to improve or restrain your excesses.
Early in my writing career, I often thought to myself, "I hope I never become so successful that people are afraid to edit or criticize my work and push me to do better." So far, a quarter-century into my professional career, I remain in no danger of that occurring.
I really wish that... and it seems like good business for... Sony to just Marvel handle the Spiderman stuff. Make an agreement that Marvel has to make x number of movies for Sony to distribute using their properties.
It's like, pure profit on Sony's part.
It's like, pure profit on Sony's part.
Novelists are where I feel it the most - take GRRM's novels as the most blatant examples recently.
I remember an interview with... Jack Whyte I think, a Scottish - Canadian author, talking about how his first novel had to be under a certain amount of pages for the publisher to risk making it, due to the costs of longer books. And as each book was more successful he was allowed more pages.
Outside the interview, to me, his main series just became a sprawling mess at the end, in part because he used the additional pages he was allowed. They got longer and longer and more bloated.
Yeah, I always try to trim out anything I don't need, to do multiple revision passes and streamline whatever I can, regardless of the allowed word count. I mean, now that I'm doing more small-press novels and audionovels with pretty strict maximums, I do have to trim as much as I can, but I try to do it even with tie-ins where I'm free to go longer. I learned early on that you improve a manuscript by streamlining it.
Fantasy is an odd one - I am friends with a fantasy novelist who will remain nameless and from his first very successful novel to his most recent - he has always been told to make them longer because that is what sells in that genre. When I visit him in his very large house it clearly has been a winning strategy.
I wonder if the advent of ebooks has also changed the market - less physical copies, less costs of production, less cost to shelf space - maybe the size restrictions of the past are loosening up? @Christopher can you comment?
I'm no expert, but I do gather that the rise of e-books created a new market for novella-length science fiction, like the Trek e-novellas they used to do (including the couple I wrote). Before, there were only a handful of magazines that would publish novellas, and the modern print-book market preferred novel-length books, but e-books eliminated those length restrictions.
However, I should point out that there's actually very little difference in cost to the publisher between print and e-books. Most of the expense in producing a book is not materials but labor -- the many person-hours of work that are put into writing it, editing it, copyediting and proofing it, typesetting it, designing and creating the cover art, marketing it, etc. While printing small runs or print-on-demand copies can be a significant expense, for a major publisher producing large print runs, economies of scale kick in and the cost of physical printing, storage, and shipping is pennies per book.
So yes, e-books have allowed greater flexibility in the length of books, but in the opposite direction from what I think you're suggesting, and for reasons that have little or nothing to do with production costs. Even with e-books, longer books cost more, presumably because more time and labor goes into their creation. I mean, when you buy a book, you're not paying for the paper; you could buy a blank notebook with the same number of pages for a much lower price. You're paying for the information and ideas on the page, for the thought and time and labor that the author and others put into it.
Getting back to this, I'm currently re-reading a book that's very much an example of this, Isaac Asimov's Foundation's Edge, where he returned to the Foundation series after 32 years. It's nearly twice as long as any of the previous Foundation novels, and it's incredibly long-winded. A large amount of the book is taken up with characters traveling to a destination and talking incessantly about what they might do when they get there, and even more of the book consists of conversations where a less knowledgeable character asks endless questions and a more knowledgeable character lectures them point by point, often about some very basic principle of science or society or strategy. I feel the book could've been half its length, and I'm finding it a slog to get through. It really needed an editor to say "No, you need to trim this down a lot and rethink the structure."
Although the counterpoint is that I've already read most of the novels in the series that Asimov wrote later but were set earlier (the later Robot novels and the two Foundation prequels), and though they're all comparable in length to this one, and all quite talky, none of them was as tedious a read as this one. Perhaps because the dialogue exchanges have more tension and stakes because they're often between characters with adversarial agendas or values, and because there's less walking to the plot and more stuff actually happening.
I think the best examples of that on the movie side would be George Lucas and Peter Jackson, with both of them you can really see where the power and freedom to do whatever they want meant that they really gave in to their some of their worst habits. I really enjoyed their later movies, but you can definitely see the differences between Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit for Jackson, and the original Star Wars trilogy & the prequels for Lucas.
I don't know what's funnier - them trying to explain the character without once mentioning her comic fore-bearer or reveal anything we haven't already seen in the trailer, or how hard the comments are trolling their efforts.
"It's Webbin' Time" indeed.Stare at this picture for a while and tell me you don't hear a bored, emotionless voice saying, "Kill me now. Please, kill me now."
Apparently, Madam Web is set in 2003, and the character being played by Adam Scott is supposed to be Uncle Ben to Tom Holland's Peter Parker.
https://gizmodo.com/madame-web-sony-year-timeline-1851182171
https://gizmodo.com/madame-web-sony-year-timeline-1851182171
So ... this is set in the MCU? Have they told Feige about that?
Perhaps a variant timeline like the ones seen in Loki and What If...?
Sounds like this whole thing is kind of a mess, but that seems pretty standard for Sony's Spider-Manless universe.
Would Sony be allowed to do that? I had just assumed this was set in the same universe as the Venom movies.