DC and Warner are making multiple Batman movies at once with different actors

[puredrifting]

does anyone remember the days when the biggest movies featured normal, everyday people challenging powers and systems far greater than themselves, vs. watching superhumans bash each other in an endlessly looping physics-defying bacchanalia of explosions?

Superhero movies can go screw.

I concur. I was so blessed to have worked as a classic title producer at a production company for years, I was in charge of producing documentaries,
bonus features and other content all revolving around some of the most landmark cinema ever created, at least by Hollywood. I've spent immeasurable hours researching
the minutae of films created a century ago at the Herrick Library https://www.oscars.org/library and at many private collections of Universities all over the
world. I've had unfettered access to the Disney Vaults and many more studio archives at Warner Bros. Fox and Sony. I've had a really hard, decade long look at what
makes cinema and most of the films in theaters since the late 90s/early 2000s fall pretty short of that ideal.

For me, cinema mutated into television, other than a few quality films per year that are produced that are actually cinema and not Superhero/franchise product.
There is amazing work being created for TV and streamers but theatrical, produced by studios, is basically irrelevant to me, it has no meaning, it's product for
an audience that inexpelicably thinks it's great entertainment and doesn't even know what cinema is. If you've only consumed junk food your entire life, you
aren't going to "get", want or care about a finely prepared dining experience, you don't know what you don't know. No judgement of people who consume that
product, it's all they've known and they like it. Nothing wrong with that, but it's never going back to where it used to be.

It's nice that a few great pieces slip through the system here and there, they do. I too really like Dunkirk and there have been a few more over the past few years
that were amazing, semi mainstream films, The Artist, Hugo, The Shape of Water and a few others leap to mind. But can you imagine any of those type films
getting financed and made in 2021?

With this shake up to the studios and theater chains, I fear that these predictions are right. If theaters do ever come back, it will just be with bigger product.
Cinema is now a 6 or 8 hour movie, chopped up and parceled out on streaming services and that's okay by me. I'll miss going to the theater and maybe my little local art house
theater will hang on but mass market theater going, for me, is a none issue, I have zero interest in seeing the latest product.

I'm not bitter about it, perhaps a little frustrated but it's the way of the world now and it's only going to degrade more. Shorter attention spans, less substance, little or no literary roots,
no star system, no film factory, studio system aesthetic. No more studio moguls, or modern Edith Heads or John Fords or Preston Sturges, that's sad but that's how it is.

 

[ahalpert]

Really? I think it's an almost certainty there's that many alien species and more. This is the Hubble deep field photograph, which is a photo of a thought to be dark patch of sky exposed for a very long time.

It captured almost 3,000 galaxies in that miniscule part of the sky. I think it's more implausible that we'll ever have faster than light travel, which rules out going to anything but the most nearby solar systems in a human life span. But there is certainly tons of alien life. Now, intelligent life that has evolved in roughly our same time of existence that is capable of traveling to our planet, maybe much less so. But if we ever have the kind of space travel depicted in Star Trek we'd likely find a galaxy and universe teeming with life.

Well, it's all just speculative isn't it. But -

1. The idea that you'll run into an endless diversity of "humanoid" species that look like us but with different ears and noses is just silly and obviously the product of needing to work with human actors and a limited FX budget.



More likely, you'll encounter things like the crystalline entity:



Even more likely, you only encounter bacteria.

2. Earth is in such a goldilocks zone in so many ways. Size of our star, distance from our star, stability of orbit and not too many meteorites clobbering us anymore. It took the right mix of ingredients and a long enough time without getting clobbered for us to develop to where we are. The number of equally opportune places for life to develop in the universe is a vanishingly small percentage of the total available star systems.

3. But sure, there could be other life. Maybe even exciting other life.

There are theories for FTL space travel. One involves shrinking the space in front of the ship and growing it behind you. And of course there are wormholes. So, I guess they mostly revolve around lowering the distance between 2 points rather than going super fast. Anyway, who knows what advances in space travel await us.

Of course, you could simply spend a long trip in stasis. and when you wake up from a refreshing nap, everyone you ever knew is dead and you're at alpha centauri

 

[Batutta]

The number of equally opportune places for life to develop in the universe is a vanishingly small percentage of the total available star systems.

Not when there is such an gargatuanly high number of star systems per galaxy, let alone the universe. Seriously, the numbers are not something the human mind can really grasp. For all intents and purposes it's an almost infinite number. The number is so high, it's almost a certainty as well there are probably millions of humanoid life forms, as well as in every other shape imaginable. Obviously Star Trek did what it did for budgetary reasons.

 

[ahalpert]

Maybe I'm being too myopic. It's so hard to say.

One study suggests that there are only about 36 intelligent civilizations in the Milky way. That's based on the notion that life can only evolve in the same conditions that we did. But that might be true, who knows. And star trek largely takes place in a single quadrant of the milky way.

How many intelligent alien civilizations are out there among the hundreds of billions of stars in the spiral arms of the Milky Way? According to a new calculation, the answer is 36.

That number assumes that life on Earth is more or less representative of the way that life evolves anywhere in the universe — on a rocky planet an appropriate distance away from a suitable star, after about 5 billion years. If that assumption is true, humanity may not exactly be alone in the galaxy, but any neighbors are probably too far away to ever meet.

Related: 9 strange, scientific excuses for why humans haven't found aliens yet

On the other hand, that assumption that life everywhere will evolve on the same timeline as life on Earth is a huge one, said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, who was not involved in the new study. That means that the seeming precision of the calculations is misleading.

"If you relax those big, big assumptions, those numbers can be anything you want," Shostak told Live Science.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.livescience.com/amp/how-many-alien-civilizations-exist.html

 

[groveChuck]

About 20 years ago when I was a hot young screenwriter for a minute... Didn't buy my pitch.

And there went your opportunity to write dialogue for aliens of color... But hey, better to have been hot for a minute than cold for life. Or to have been born primordial ooze on another planet with slightly lower aspirations.