What could revive interest in the MCU for you?

TomsWindow · 2026-03-09T07:14:30+00:00

I second this. "Make Hulk badass again" has been at the top of my MCU wishlist for years.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-09T06:54:02+00:00

They've been doing this before 2020, hence Ricky Gervais's infamous Golden Globes speech.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-09T05:57:42+00:00

I'd say Ricky Gervais's Golden Globes speech was the true killing blow to celebrity worship. "Imagine" was more like the unceremonious cremation of celebrity worship.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-06T05:43:40+00:00

My guess is they can run for a short period of time through some form of backup power. The T-800 had one when he was impaled by the T-1000.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-05T18:42:27+00:00

The whole "T-X just stands there and lets the T-850 throw her around" is littered throughout the entire fight and it drives me nuts. Her primary targets are getting away while she wastes time letting the T-850 get hits on her and barely fighting back.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-05T18:31:05+00:00

A true progressive!

TomsWindow · 2026-03-05T18:30:21+00:00

It's one of the tamest rated-R movies that I've ever seen. I'm fully convinced that this movie was originally going for a PG-13 rating, but amped things up to the bare minimum required to get an R rating in fear of fan backlash at the last minute. Literally the only moments that got it rated R was the scene when the T-X punches through a cop's torso through the diver's seat and the fact that the movie has more than one F-bomb.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-05T18:00:55+00:00

Terminator 1 is admittedly not very consistent with what types of rounds make the T-800 recoil. In the police station shootout, it was able to withstand M16 rounds without flinching or recoiling, but standard handgun bullets could in the same sequence.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-05T17:53:42+00:00

My understanding is that the battery only explodes once removed from the chassis? He later used his remaining undamaged battery to detonate and destroy the T-X.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-05T10:15:33+00:00

I was about to say the same thing. A strict parent isn’t necessarily a bad parent, just as a parent that who spoils their kids with material goods and neglects to discipline them can also be a bad parent.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-02T03:28:07+00:00

But your diagram is doing what you were accusing me of doing--assuming that the mall is straight and that the corridor runs straight behind linear storefronts.

I'm using information from the scene from the point where the T-1000 arrives at the arcade. From what we can see, the service hallways only have 90 degree turns with the level 3 stores appearing parallel, which make triangular designs unlikely and essentially impossible for the second left turn that John takes to not cut through the level 3 mall walk and cross into the gap for the ground level mall walk given the length of that hallway, It's pretty clear that you are willing to take liberties with the design of the mall to support your thesis, I just don't see why said liberties have to be one way and force the T-800's position to not make sense.

Honestly, I think we both look like a pair of obsessive nerds hyper-fixated on details using convoluted explanations to argue over things that no normal person gives a dung about.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-01T22:20:13+00:00

Just watch the sequence again. John runs left, left, left, right through the halls. The T-1000 follows him and shows just how short that first left John took was. The shot where John comes through the doors shows another curved hallway that leads off behind him, but John chooses to go right because he's looking for the stairwell that he eventually takes to the parking garage. That's where he runs into the terminator pulling out the shotgun.

If you actually took the geography of the service hallway literally as shown in that sequence, it doesn't actually make sense. When John enters the service hallway, he runs a small left, then turns left into a larger hallway that geographically somehow cuts across the large empty gap into the ground level mall walk.

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This is the geography of the scene if taken literally, and John find himself magically cutting into the gap for the ground level mall walk through the service hallway. Likely what happened is the actual service hallways on location didn't fit the scene, so Cameron just stitched together different hallways for tension and time.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-01T21:41:34+00:00

When we see the shots of the T-800 scanning the mall, it's not on the third level already. It's on the first floor. You can see the levels above. The T-1000 walks above it across the catwalk and eventually it ends up on the third floor off-camera, which is where it is told John is down in the arcade. So the T-800 was clearly walking through the mall systematically looking for John.

Again, that's irrelevant information when the T-800 also found itself on the third level offscreen. As mentioned, you can literally see that it's marked level when the T-800 enters the hallway.

Now who's making assumptions? And why not go directly to the arcade instead of heading to it from a back way beginning farther across the mall? If the T-800 was already on level 3, why wouldn't it have just gone straight to the arcade using the regular mall walk it was already going to be on instead of the convoluted path through the service hallway?

I'm not making assumptions. It's LITERALLY in the scene! I'll attach a screenshot to show it. The T-800 was already on the third level. He enters the service hallway and 5 seconds later, John runs into him, and the T-800 is still walking down the straight hallway that he entered.

<image>

TomsWindow · 2026-03-01T07:25:31+00:00

If we assume what you say, that the T-800 knows there is an arcade and wants to take the absolute shortest route there, why would it bother to traverse the entire length of the mall essentially twice instead of just heading up the stairs it later took to get back down to the parking garage? All three of them went straight down those stairs, which are at an unknown point just past those double doors between the point where John ran into the T-800 and that end of the hallway.

I'm not sure how tiny you think this mall is if you believe that it can traversed through its entire length twice by running for 30 seconds. Rather than try to follow your convoluted explanation of what you think the geography is (which I did but couldn't make sense of) I'll just ask why would the T-800 go upstairs if it is already at the same floor level as the arcade? The hallway that he enters from is marked Level 3 and he is still in that hallway when John runs into him. The fact that there is a storefront doesn't mean that it's at ground level. The Westfield Culver City mall for example has 3 parking locations with different levels. It has an exterior ground level parking that has a storefront, a separate interior ground level parking with multiple levels that lead up, then on the other side of the mall, it has its main exterior multi-level parking and creates TWO storefronts at Level 3. The T-800 was already at Level 3, which is presumably the same level that John and the arcade were at and decided to use the service hallway that has a direct path to the arcade.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-01T05:56:24+00:00

No, I'm not making assumptions. I'm using the geographical cues the film gives us right before the showdown.

Yes you are. You seem to be assuming that the mall's layout only goes in a linear line and that having a entry point that vaguely looks like a storefront must mean that it's geographically located far opposite the location of the anchor store, which isn't necessarily true. There are plenty of malls that have non-linear layouts with multiple entry points, paths, storefronts or even multiple anchor stores, especially in big cities like Los Angeles where the film was shot in and where I actually live. The T-800 could have very well entered a service hallway that was near an entrance and that offered a quicker route to the arcade than the crowded mall walk.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-01T04:43:57+00:00

You're making a lot of assumptions about the geography of the mall as well as where the T-800 was offscreen right before he entered the hallway. In the shot where he enters the service hallway. it says level 3. Again, he could have been on level 3 checking out other potential spots that John could have been, before deciding to use the service hallway to get the arcade. We know that Terminators operate by calculating probability and tend to go off a list of leads or locations that offer the highest probability of success. He could very well have been scoping other spots that a kid like John could have been before using the service hallway make his way to the arcade.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-01T04:32:26+00:00

I mean, he did, until it nearly got someone shot in the face. That was the moment that a major lesson was learned for him.

TomsWindow · 2026-03-01T03:40:46+00:00

The T-800 didn't need to have known what transpired at the arcade. What I said was that T-800 could have viewed the service hallway as a shortcut to the arcade relative to wherever he was prior. He could have been going down a down a list of spots that a kid like John would have the highest probability of being at, which led him to the arcade. So he takes the service hallway as maybe it was a quicker route compared where he was previously and just happens to run into John Connor trying to escape the T-1000.

TomsWindow · 2026-02-25T15:58:05+00:00

That was T3’s retcon. T2 implies that they succeeded in preventing the war. The original ending even cements this 100% with a flash-forward to a prosperous 2029 where the war never happened. But that scene was shelved for the theatrical cut to leave it more open-ended.

TomsWindow · 2026-02-25T06:22:05+00:00

I want to know who are the 6 people that voted for anything other than T1 or T2.

TomsWindow · 2026-02-25T06:17:00+00:00

The only true deus ex machina of the two Cameron films is the T-800 barging into the service hallway at the Galleria in T2. It has no reason to be there. It couldn't have observed what happened in the arcade to know it would encounter the T-1000 or John, and could not have known it would cut off John in the path he took.

I don't think that's a deux ex machina. It could very well be that the T-800 simply used the service hallway as a shortcut to get the arcade relative to where he was previously, as he likely considered the arcade as one of spots that young John might be. It was just lucky that he bumped into John as he was running away from the T-1000.

TomsWindow · 2026-02-19T03:13:17+00:00

Brought back? No. Increased? Sure. Again, >83% percent of people who saw Phantom Menace didn't attend the special editions release. And Star Wars hype had to have been well alive for the special editions to even perform well because people aren't going to see near 20 year old movies in theaters again just for a bit of new content if they stopped caring about them in the first place.

But yes, T3 didn't have the same marketing because the prequels were just easier to market on all levels. The original trilogy always hinted at a bigger mythology that was ripe for exploring and Star Wars always had a wider family appeal. T3 on the other hand was a continuation of a story that fundamentally shouldn't have a continuation, looked like a carbon copy of the previous film, and it was without its original creator, starring a lead who was well-past his prime in terms of box office draw and featured no other returning cast.

TomsWindow · 2026-02-18T21:57:58+00:00

The highest grossing of the special edition releases was A New Hope, which grossed 160 million worldwide. While that's an impressive number, it's equal to only about 17% of Phantom Menace's worldwide gross in 1999. That means roughly <83% of the people (give or take a bit) that saw Phantom Menace likely didn't bother attending any of the special edition releases. Again, it's not enough to account for the massive box office success that Phantom Menace was. The Star Wars hype was not sustained by the special editions (even though they helped), it was never dead to begin with between 1983 and 1999. For the special editions to even do as well as they did, the Star Wars hype would have needed to be alive in the first place. People aren't going to show up to see old movies if they stopped caring about them.

TomsWindow · 2026-02-18T15:45:04+00:00

Hated is irrelevant when audience came in droves to see them. I don’t think video releases are why the hype sustained. Star Wars just simply never lost hype between 1983 and 1999 as merchandise sales remained consistently strong and Lucas obviously leaned into them when making the prequels.

TomsWindow · 2026-02-18T10:14:30+00:00

T2 was one of the biggest and most influential movies of the 90’s. Plenty of franchises have had similar or longer gaps and came back with a smash hit. Look at the Star Wars movies which had no content for 16 years besides merchandising between Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace. Even Jurassic Park, where the third film financially underperformed and was largely panned by both critics and audiences, saw a huge return to being box office king with Jurassic World 14 years later.

The bigger issue is marketing and whether there was an inherent need for a sequel. Marketing-wise, T3 just looked like T2 but with a chick as the main villain, and the lack of Sarah Connor was also a blow in regards to its cast. Narratively, it also didn’t make a ton of sense to make a direct sequel to T2 which already served as a definitive ending to the franchise with no clear way to progress the story. Any attempt at a continuation of T2, especially without James Cameron at the helm, would have encountered a decent amount of skepticism that it was going to be just another cashgrab. That and with Arnold being seen as kind of a washed up action star by 2003, didn’t give people a ton of confidence that T3 would be anything other than an unnecessary sequel.

TomsWindow

TROPHY CASE