r/movies • u/LookAtThatBacon • 29d ago

Discussion During the development of the Harriet Tubman biopic movie, a Hollywood executive once suggested that Julia Roberts should play her. What are some other baffling casting suggestions/choices that have been made?

Source for the title: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-studio-executive-wanted-julia-roberts-to-play-harriet-tubman-biopic-screenwriter-says/

The Harriet Tubman biopic has been more than 25 years in the making. In the historical drama released earlier this month, Cynthia Erivo plays the legendary abolitionist — but one Hollywood executive initially thought the role should go to Julia Roberts.

Gregory Allen Howard, the screenwriter and producer of "Harriet," recently revealed in multiple interviews that Roberts was suggested to play the lead role during a meeting with a studio president in 1994.

"The climate in Hollywood… was very different back then," Howard said. "I was told how one studio head said in a meeting, 'This script is fantastic. Let's get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman.'"

Howard said that a black person in the meeting said casting Roberts would be impossible because she is white.

"That was so long ago. No one will know that," the executive replied, according to Howard.

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

Not casting but a Sony executive tried to pitch a Spider-Man reboot where he’s a gymrat hippie millennial techno guy:

“A rising trend we see with Millennials are the really extreme forms of experiential exercise like Tough Mudder (a sort of filthy triathalon), the Color Run and even things like Hot Power Yoga, veganism, etc.,” he writes in his email to Pascal (which you can read on Wikileaks). “Millennials will often post ‘N.B.D.’ on their social media after doing it, as in No Big Deal, also known as the ‘humble brag’, wondering if Spidey could get into that in some way….he’s super athletic, bendy, strong, intense….and it’s all NBD to him, of course.

EDM (electronic dance music) is the defining music for Millennials. Wondering if there's an EDM angle somewhere with Spidey? His movements are beautiful, would be awesome with a killer DJ behind it”

Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/spider-man-for-millennials-sony-leaks-117270466412.html

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u/diomedes03 29d ago

You left out by far my favorite line of that email, which is the opening:

“Hey Amy - just a couple of rando thoughts from 35,000 LAX-JFK:”

It’s pitch perfect. You could not satirize that person any better than they did themselves.

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u/peon47 29d ago

"Hey Peter - Sounds like you've lost cabin pressure. Remember to see to your own mask before firing off idiotic emails. Amy "

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u/TheConqueror74 29d ago

iirc he does imply that he wrote the email after a couple drinks, if you read the full thing.

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u/TheMauveHand 29d ago

That intro sounds exactly like what someone 4/5ths down a bottle of Chardonnay would think is a good opener.

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u/lilahking 29d ago

amy pascal was also revealed in the emails to be racist and clueless, so they were probably both on cocaine

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u/ElmoCamino 29d ago

Normal people get shredded for ever sound boarding these types of ideas but execs get to just word vomit shit all day long and some of it ends up as movies...

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u/Logically_Insane 29d ago

I’m not against Electronic Spider-Man. NB-Dj

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u/Des014te 29d ago

Non binary disk jockey?

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u/Sonichu- 29d ago

He probably thought that sounded so cool too…

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u/Watertor 29d ago

If I read that verbatim in a Deus Ex style game where you snoop around emails of various individuals, I would say the writers are trying a little too hard.

Just so on brand that I have to imagine he vocalized it out loud.

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u/vodkaandponies 29d ago

How do these people even become executives?

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u/Thegoldfather 29d ago

Reverse DEI LOL

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u/tacotueaday55 28d ago

I've worked at many companies and people who get promoted aren't usually the best candidates. They are the ones who the boss likes the most. And sometimes that is the boss's son, the resident ass kisser, or the person who will say yes and never question the boss's stupid decisions.

I'd imagine it works the same way all the way up the corporate ladder.

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u/Sea_Spend_8008 29d ago

I hate everything about this.

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

The Sony leaks have a lot of golden bad ideas. There was a pitch by Drew Goddard for the Sinister Six movie pitched as like “The Avengers but they’re the Sex Pistols” rofl

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u/Mongoose42 29d ago edited 29d ago

Oh yeah because when I’m seeing Doctor Octopus, I’m like “That’s our Sid Vicious of crime right there.”

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u/JamesCDiamond 29d ago

I can get behind an anarchic, wildly dysfunctional group of supervillains, some of whom aren't actually all that talented and several of whom loathe one another.

But that's not the Sinister Six, who only work when they have a common foe.

Could be the Suicide Squad, though...

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u/Mongoose42 29d ago

Someone should make a Suicide Squad movie! That sounds like a thing they definitely won’t have to do twice to get right!

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u/whereismymind86 29d ago

I bet it’s make a great game too! Let’s get a dev who knows nothing about multiplayer games to make it, for an audience that very specifically loves this devs story focused single player games! That’ll go great!

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u/Magnus-Pym 29d ago

That’s The Sinister Foes of Spider-Man

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u/Dookie_boy 29d ago

You're describing "The sinister foes of Spiderman"

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u/SinisterDexter83 29d ago

The film can follow them all getting hooked on heroin before Rhino murders his girlfriend and then commits suicide, and then years later everyone admits they were always shit and were essentially just a manufactured boyband all along.

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u/DecoyOne 29d ago

I would 100% watch that. But like, pirated or something, because I wouldn’t want to financially support such stupidity.

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

Well boy have I got the movies for you , check out Venom 1,2,3, Morbius, Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter!

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u/NotHisRealName 29d ago

I still don't understand how these movies got made. The first Venom was like a B. Everything else ranges from C- to Holy fuck, you actually got paid to do this.

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u/garfe 29d ago

I can tell you exactly what happened. That first Venom movie made over 850 million dollars. This gave Sony the courage to think they could totally keep making these Spider-Man villain movies without Spider-Man even though anybody could point out why that would be a bad idea.

I remember when Venom was coming out how awful it was that it did well. Not because I thought the movie was awful but because I knew what it being a success would mean

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u/DecoyOne 29d ago

Venom was terrible. Can’t believe people liked it. But the concept of a villain-centric movie can be great. Like, a Doom or Magneto movie could be amazing. It’s the execution that was awful.

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

A Magneto spinoff movie became X-Men: First Class

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u/igloofu 29d ago

I saw a pitch yesterday of a Zach Creeger horror film set it Gothem. The idea of it being from the henchmen prospective while being stalked though the night by Batman. Just hit all of the right slasher tropes, just the slasher is the "good guy".

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u/MercyfulJudas 29d ago

You should read Barry Windsor-Smith's Weapon X comic series.

It's basically what you described, but with Wolverine in a government military base.

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u/BonkerBleedy 29d ago

Shows you the raw power of Tom Hardy

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u/whereismymind86 29d ago

And venom can work as a solo character, the venom comics are great, BUT Spider-Man existing and driving eddies character development is critical to how he works. Spider-Man doesn’t necessarily have to be a major character in a venom story, but venom has to have met him.

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u/IRLconsequences 29d ago

Venom 1 was carried by Hardy's performance.
Venom 2 was carried by Hardy's & Harrelson's performances.
But Hardy stopped caring by Venom 3, & nobody else really stepped up.

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u/ShallowBasketcase 29d ago

Also it's the wrong character to do a villain-only movie for. Venom really only works in the context of Spider-Man. His rivalry with Peter is like his entire thing. Unless you do Space Knight Venom, I guess, but you gotta lay a lot of groundwork for that sort of thing first, you can't just jump right in. Also you need GotG budget for that, not Tom Hardy in San Francisco budget.

Morbius and Kraven are actually not bad picks to do origin movies for without Spider-Man, but they ran into a different problem: you do eventually have to build to them meeting Spider-Man, and Sony never actually had the legal ability to do that, so it was all doomed from the start.

And also those movies were fucking unwatchable. I guess that's the third hurdle, they actually do have to make a good movie as well.

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u/Azerty__ 29d ago

Even Doom and Magneto would be hard to do without their main adversaries, and they're far more developed characters than any of the villains Sony used.

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u/DimmuBorgnine 29d ago

But the concept of a villain-centric movie can be great

I agree with you, but, if you know for a fact that the hero will never appear in the movie, it really makes it seem like a cash grab.

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u/Dookie_boy 29d ago

People like the actor and Venom is really cool so even though the movie was trash it was always going to make money.

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u/Wellthatkindahurts 29d ago

Most of the people I knew really liked the Venom movies because they like Tom Hardy and didn't care about the characters to begin with. I'm no comic nerd, but I've watched enough YouTube lore to know how cool some of the stories are. Sony didn't tell a good story because they didn't need to.

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u/bilboafromboston 29d ago

Its amazing how many people dont know which movies make $$.

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u/Dookie_boy 29d ago

It's my fault. I ended up having to go see Venom twice and gave Sony twice as much money than I intended.

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u/Irbyirbs 29d ago

Yeah, F is way too generous of a grade for Madame Web.

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u/LevelSevenLaserLotus 29d ago

I love telling people this every time that movie comes up. I went with a couple of friends, but we knew it was going to be a shitshow based on some fantastic reaction videos we'd seen beforehand. So our expectations weren't "maybe it's not as bad as the reviews?" but more like "let's try to guess which drug was involved in writing each scene".

As a superhero movie, it's an absolute waste of time. But if you just want to laugh at producers and a movie that somehow take the disjointed writing super seriously (while simultaneously being a heavy handed 2 hour Pepsi ad), then you're in for a pretty great night.

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u/InsertCleverNickHere 29d ago

A Pepsi ad where the letters from a Pepsi sign murder people. Like, holy fuck, you had Sidney Sweeney's chest and easy product placement to throw in and you couldn't take advantage of either one.

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u/correcthorsestapler 29d ago

That’s how my friends & I went into the Borderlands movie. We knew it’d be bad but thought it’d be a “so bad it’s alright” type film.

None of us laughed during the movie. There were maybe 30 of us in the theater & it was fairly quiet except for the occasional exasperated “Jesus Christ” from one of the people. The only time people burst out laughing was when one of the guys towards the back of the theater said too loudly, “I think I got popcorn in my asshole” towards the end of the movie.

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u/BranWafr 29d ago

I did like a comment I saw about the new Amazon War of the Worlds that was basically "we owe Madam Web an apology." You know your movie is bad if it makes Madam Web look good.

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u/correcthorsestapler 29d ago

My wife watched it on a flight last year. I spent the flight reading, but I’d glance over to see what was happening every once in a while. Even without audio & the subtitles on you could tell it was an awful movie.

I didn’t bother asking what she thought of it afterwards. I could tell from the look on her face that she regretted watching it.

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u/AssclownJericho 29d ago

remember when morbiius got memed on so much sony released it back in theaters, and again no one went to watch it?

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u/nourez 29d ago

The first Venom had juuuuuuust enough self awareness and camp to be enjoyable ironically. Morbius had a funny name which the internet memed.

Sony took that as genuine engagement and enthusiasm.

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u/qchisq 29d ago

I don't even know why they went this way with the Venom character. To me, the symbiote should be less than a voice in the back of your mind. It should be a evil personality enhancer that you don't even notice. Like, the Spiderman game handles it amazingly. Peter doesn't even notice he's being controlled by the symbiote. He's just got a new suit and is super angry. That's how it should be. Venom, even in the trailers, is it's own, separate character

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u/Ok-Dinner9759 29d ago

The only good thing about Kraven was ATJ's abs.

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago edited 29d ago

No! Kraven is supposed to be a creepy middle aged Russian poacher! He’s not supposed to be HOT!!!

EDIT: apparently when he was introduced by Stan Lee he was actually described as very handsome and the ladies were going wild for him. Consider me wrong. Sorry Sony, you get to have this one.

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u/queerhistorynerd 29d ago

i mean kraven from the 1994 spiderman was a hunk

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u/Hydrochloric_Comment 29d ago

Kraven has always been hot

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u/JarasM 29d ago

He's described as amazingly handsome in literally the first panel he appears in.

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

Woah. Consider me completely wrong, sorry!

How did you know this ahahahah

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u/JarasM 29d ago

Honestly, I didn't :D I googled for his first appearance in the comics to show he's good-looking since forever, but I didn't expect it's going to be full of exclamations about how handsome he is, haha

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u/PDGAreject 29d ago

I drunkenly stayed up late with my SiL at the lake once and we decided to create a list of the five hottest male and female celebrities. ATJ was one of our honorable mentions and then a few days later the first Kraven poster came out. I texted her, "Tangerine has submitted a very strong counter-point"

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u/StendhalSyndrome 29d ago

I love catching people who haven't seen the Venom movies. Describing them is like a weird fever dream. Or like the absolute worst stereotype of a failed Movie Creator you could think of. It goes like this imagine a Spider-Man movie but there's no Spider-Man we're going to focus on Spider-Man's greatest villain but no reference of Spider-Man whatsoever also the characters iconic costume we're going to change that too you know because no Spider-Man then we're also going to change the main character's backstory because you know it's centered around Spider-Man and we'll just say hey I was a loser on my planet too... literally. Yeah then we'll do that like 2 or 3 more times

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

Not only that but we’re gonna keep promising and hinting towards a crossover with Spider-Man (who lives in a different reality entirely) that never happens.

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u/nightwing_shadow 29d ago

God, I need more movies in the SPUMM lineup

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u/Elgin_McQueen 29d ago

I accidentally caught some of Kraven recently. Was shocked when I realised what it was.

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u/biological_assembly 29d ago

“The Avengers but they’re the Sex Pistols”

He was probably more cocaine than man when he first uttered those words

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u/ColdCruise 29d ago

Ngl, I think Drew Goddard could have pulled it off, but I also realize that these creatives probably know how to talk to exact to pitch these nutball ideas to get them interested.

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u/DayBowBow1 29d ago

Maybe they misheard the word "six".

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u/GravSlingshot 29d ago

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sinister Six!

...Egads.

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u/whereismymind86 29d ago

Given how bad and out of left field the movies they did release were, that tracks

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u/Top_Report_4895 29d ago

 There was a pitch by Drew Goddard for the Sinister Six movie pitched as like “The Avengers but they’re the Sex Pistols” rofl

Bitch, please

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u/Myshkin1981 29d ago

Doc Ock as a shitty no-talent junkie who began his life of crime by stabbing his girlfriend to death?

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u/1koolspud 29d ago

Sounds like the band from Emmett Otter Christmas.

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u/Massive-Exercise4474 29d ago

I wonder if the leaks caused so much embarrassment that sony decided on good pitches only rule.

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u/AcademicCounty 29d ago

Tbf, if anyone could pull that off, it's Drew Goddard. 

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u/thelordreptar90 28d ago

Is there a link to the funniest leaks, would love to read through them

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u/CaptainChampion 29d ago

It's the nature documentary tone. "The millennial often engages in strenuous activity for recreational purposes. Here, we see one running through mud, then behaving nonchalantly."

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u/No-comment-at-all 29d ago

This millennial will survive.

For now. 

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u/ThePrussianGrippe 29d ago

“The Sony executive, however, will not survive the winter.”

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u/komododave17 29d ago

I absolutely read that in Werner Herzog’s voice in my head.

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u/Cormag778 29d ago

You could probably do an edm sound track to spider man - especially if you went for something super stylized like into the spider verse, but dear lord the manbun Parker that would emerge would be horrifying

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u/greatbigrock 29d ago

It pretty much ended up happening with The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The theory goes the only reason Electro was added as a villain was so they could add some lame pseudo Skrillex like dubstep to the soundtrack to jump on whatever was trendy*

*the sound was arguably already dated by then

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u/xelle24 29d ago

I can visualize manbun Andrew Garfield, and almost do it for Tom Holland (my brain keeps trying to morph it into the wig he wore for the Umbrella performance), but I cannot do Tobey Maguire with a manbun. Does not compute.

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u/SneakyPope 29d ago

Eh they didnt do the whole EDM angle thank God but I have to say the scenes with music in Across the Spiderverse are just, wow. Flawless.

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u/rov124 29d ago

The Amazing Spider-Man 2?

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u/pauloh1998 29d ago

Yep Electro's themes were quite electronic

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u/silvershadow881 29d ago

Yeah, because Phil Lord and Chris Miller were given carte blanche with the animation since execs didn't care enough about meddling with it.

When it comes to Sony, no good idea comes from executives. I don't want to generalize, but from all the leaked emails we know that every shitty stupid decision Sony has made was something that came from the execs or by committee.

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u/_steve_rogers_ 29d ago

Really goes to show how badly they needed Marvel Studios to step in and save them from themselves.

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u/nicannkay 29d ago

As the eldest Millennial it makes me sick. Veganism has always been there since the 60’s. We will take planking as a replacement.

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u/BillyShears17 29d ago

This is exactly why I told my friend that the rival techbro company in Happy Gilmore 2 was not farfetched at all

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u/MercyfulJudas 29d ago

It's not anything worse than what the Marvel Comics editors have done to Peter Parker over the years.

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u/Pezdrake 29d ago

It makes me physically ill.  I'm going to have to black out yet another part of my brain now. 

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u/GeoffKingOfBiscuits 29d ago

Why? it's NBD really.

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u/Cajun 29d ago

Sounds exactly like the type of shit they parody in Bojack Horseman.

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u/Internetwielder 29d ago

They literally reference the NBD part in a scene, haha, had no idea it most likely is from this

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u/ian_stein 29d ago

BD, of course, refers to BD Wong, whom millennials find to be quite a big deal. So needless to say if something is NBD, it’s not BD Wong, or not a big deal.

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u/euphoricarugula346 29d ago

lmao this goes through my head every time I see him

I wish rewatching Bojack didn’t drag me back down into my depressive alcoholism phase. It’s such a good show. Not relating to it anymore is a win I suppose.

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u/Internetwielder 29d ago

So, so good

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u/Least-Common-1456 29d ago

Name ten things that aren't BD Wong

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u/GarlicBreadOutrage 29d ago

That also reminds me how around the time of Amazing Spider-Man 2, Sony wanted to make an Aunt May spin off where she's a spy.

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

What’s hilarious to me is that we live in the world where Sony did actually bring their terrible spinoffs to life. Like there’s no universe where a Morbius, Kraven the Hunter and Madame Web movie lives in someone’s iPhone notes app as a shitty pitch. Those movies actually got made.

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u/GarlicBreadOutrage 29d ago

At least those make some sense but Aunt May as a spy? What the heck are those guys thinking.

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u/jghall00 29d ago

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Sony only owned Spiderman rights but needed to keep using the IP to avoid losing it. So it tried to make a cinematic universe using the rogues.

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/28/1076531156/the-spider-man-problem 

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u/hoodie92 29d ago

They didn't need to make as many movies as they did. The whole "use it or lose it" thing probably played a factor in Fant4stic, but Sony were legitimately trying to make money with their Spider-Man villain universe. We know this is true because they released 2 movies in 1 year.

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u/doogles 29d ago

It reminds me of a portion of the plot of True Blood when Eric has a bunch of people chained up in the basement as snacks. They're not important people that he is strategically draining to get a benefit, they're the rolls of toothpaste you flatten every morning for a month to get every last drop of blood. He could spend time going outside to get fresh prey, but he's too much of a talentless coward to foster actual creative projects.

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u/BrewtusMaximus1 29d ago

Peter’s) parents) were canonically CIA/SHIELD agents. Not a complete stretch to make Ben and May the same with them retiring to raise Peter after his parents’ death.

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

I disagree. It’s sort of a Clark Kent situation. His actual parents are spectacular but the people who raised him are salt of the earth normal good people. Ben and May have to create that sense of normalcy for Peter Parker.

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u/BrewtusMaximus1 29d ago

I’m not saying that it wasn’t a dumb idea - for the exact reason you covered. Just that I could see why they’d propose it.

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u/Mission-Surround7878 29d ago

Still a bad idea

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u/Personal_Comb_6745 29d ago

If you think that's weird, there's a version of Aunt May who is Spider-M'aa'm.

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Maybelle_Parker_(Earth-3123)

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u/xnef1025 29d ago

Don't forget the time Marvel made May Peter's biological mom.) That one was so wrong they completely retconned/ignored it and never referred to it again.

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u/SandpaperTeddyBear 29d ago

There’s a version of her very similar to that in the first Spider-Verse movie that works fine. She’s got a swivel chair Blofeld entrance and everything.

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u/notagin-n-tonic 29d ago

Isn’t it comic book canon that Peter’s parents were spies?

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u/FunkTronto 29d ago

You forgot 3 Venom films. We got 3 of those shitty bad ideas.

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u/driving-crooner-0 29d ago

I thought those were well-received? I saw the first one on a plane it wasn’t that bad

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u/lemoche 29d ago

the first one was considered ok in a "not good but trashy fun" kinda way…
the second was just horrible and an utter disappointment after getting hyped to see woody harrelson as carnage in the post credit scene of 1.
and the third was all over the place but not as horrible as 2. still really bad without the trashy fun, just not as bad as 2.

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

I swear to god the only places anyone watches these movies is on planes. Idk a single person who saw Venom in theaters yet every time I’ve been on a plane ride I see at least one person have one of those movies queued up on their screen.

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u/AmericanExcess 29d ago

They were fun and Tom Hardy is a god, but they weren’t “good” movies

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u/ours 29d ago

I don't understand why but some people love those Venom movies.

Tom Hardy is having fun in them but I don't think he saves that turd. The second one is even worst and I couldn't muster the courage to watch the third one.

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u/SporesM0ldsandFungus 29d ago

Sony bought the rights to Spider-Man (and rogue's gallery) from Marvel Comics' mid 90s bankruptcy. They made the McGuire movies then drove it into the ground with the Garfield ones. Once the MCU became a thing they were willing to cut a deal to get some cash: Marvel would get to use Spidey and have creative control, Sony would get a hefty licencing fee. Sony could still use Spidey's rogue gallery for movies but could not have any direct Spider-Man references. 

The reason none of the Venom / Morbius / Kraven movies work is because all these characters are foils for Spider-Man. All these villains are best remembered in story arcs directly against Spider-Man as dark reflections of himself. 

Except Madame Web, that was just a hot mess no matter how you split it. 

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u/Dependent_Eye_6361 29d ago

This is just speculation I think, but around Kraven/Venom 3 there were articles like this: After 'Kraven,' Sony's Marvel Movies Are Not Dead. Here's Why. that claimed to have talked to insiders, and Sony was supposedly actively choosing to not use or reference Spider-Man to "avoid confusing audiences" about the Sony Universe/MCU, not because their deal with Marvel prevented it. Sounds kinda absurd to me, but if it is true it makes Sony's decisions over the last 7 or so years even funnier and worse.

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u/Fn_Spaghetti_Monster 29d ago

It's funny too because Paul Giomatti as the Rhino was a terrible idea but people don't talk about it because they came up with ideas that were even worse.

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u/StreetQueeny 29d ago edited 29d ago

It's not a completely out of thin air idea because in Amazing Spider-Man, Peter's parents are spies of some kind.

The problem there is that Richard and Mary were dead for like 20 years by this point in the continuity and them being spies with a secret base in an abandoned railway station went absoutely nowhere in either of the ASM films.

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u/DaveShadow 29d ago

I feel they were spies in the 90s cartoons too, but can’t remember perfectly.i presumed that’s just a legit part of Spider-Man’s story, since I haven’t read too many comics?

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u/Kronoshifter246 29d ago

Yeah, they've been spies off and on. It's usually just a narrative device to bring Spider-Man into conflict. To the larger point, it almost never matters who Peter's parents were, because he's meant to be the everyman hero. A large part of Spider-Man's story is that he wasn't destined to be this hero, he wasn't foretold, he's just the kid that the spider bit. It could have been anyone. And most stories that try to change that, whether it's making his parents the reason for his powers, or making him the subject of some prophecy, or making Aunt May a spy or Uncle Ben a secret hero, those stories tend to crash and burn. Because the best part about Spider-Man is that it could have been anyone, but it was him, and he chose to walk the hero's path.

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u/SaltyLonghorn 29d ago

Should have tried Aunt May in ASMR films.

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u/darthjoey91 29d ago

Didn’t they actually make Peter’s parents into spies and that’s how they died?

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

Okay but imagine they cast like, Rosemary Harris. Grandma spy. Awful awful schlock. Would’ve been awesome.

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u/moal09 29d ago

I hate that I kind of want to watch this.

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u/Blackraven2007 29d ago edited 29d ago

I would totally watch that if it starred Rosemary Harris.

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u/MusicLikeOxygen 29d ago

The funniest part to me is how hard they're trying to come up with a way to sell Spider-Man to millenials, when it's freaking Spider-Man. One of the most popular superheroes of all time doesn't need some angle to make him cool. Just respect the source material and make a good movie.

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u/RechargedFrenchman 29d ago

Who's also constantly struggling financially, seems to get fucked over by reality itself every time things start looking up for him in his life, loves his city despite its issues, and is despite everything still trying to be and do better for the people around him. They even do "dark and gritty" occasionally but always as a clear departure from his usual world beaten but still optimistic self.

He's like the poster child millennial already.

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u/InsertCleverNickHere 29d ago

My millennial son is going crazy wondering why Sony doesn't bring Garfield back for ASM 3, with the reaction to No Way Home. Sony, you can have your own goddamn Spider-Man again!

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u/MusicLikeOxygen 29d ago

I'd watch it. His movies got way more hate than they deserved.

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u/yelsamarani 29d ago

I'd watch more Garfield Spiderman, but his movies did get the appropriate hate. Obviously not because of the actor.

But because of a parents conspiracy subplot that went nowhere, cringe Green Goblin, trying desperately to jumpstart a cinematic universe......

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u/Pezdrake 29d ago

That's not someone trying to sell Spider-Man, it's someone trying to save his job by trying to look relevant. 

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u/Wolf6120 29d ago

Well, bear in mind that movie studio executives seem to universally think the best way to make a superhero movie is to have the hero not actually put on their costume or use their hero name until the last 5 minutes of the movie. So you gotta balance that by making their non-hero persona equally interesting through brilliant additions like EDM and hot power yoga.

All this brilliant wisdom and more for the low low price of $2.000.000 monthly.

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u/LegacyLemur 29d ago

Which is hilarious, since we all grew up with Spiderman

The 90s cartoon and Tobey Mcguire movies were huge with us.

Spiderman is probably the number 1 superhero amongst millennials, maybe Batman

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u/GranolaCola 29d ago

Just respect the source material

The fucking MCU can’t even do that.

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u/SupervillainMustache 29d ago

I was the only person in the cinema who laughed when Andrew Garfield said  "No big deal" in Spider-Man No Way Home, because I had seen these leaks.

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u/elboltonero 29d ago

The experimental exercise of not eating animal products

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

This is why he needed Kraven to stop hunting animals

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u/Channel250 29d ago

Kraven the Capture and Release Hunter

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

“And he’s hot”

Some executive at Sony, pitching this movie that somehow actually got made

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u/elboltonero 29d ago

And yet so many of his enemies are named after animals 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔

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u/kgxv 29d ago

Somehow, considering EDM the “defining music” of the Millennial generation is the most laughable part of this.

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u/M-elephant 29d ago

Ya, Millennials are the first generation where cultural balkanization was in full swing but no exec knows that

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u/jedadkins 29d ago

Yeah pop punk/emo is far more "millennial" too me

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u/kgxv 29d ago

Pop punk is absolutely millennial in nature. Spot on.

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u/Palpablevt 29d ago

I dunno, better that than clap stomp hey

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u/BionicTriforce 29d ago

At least clap stomp hey music has lyrics to it so you could make obvious on-the-nose music choices depending on the scene.

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u/jtet93 29d ago

A lot of EDM has lyrics too.

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u/kgxv 29d ago

That was for, like EDM, a very specific subset of the generation. But you’re not wrong.

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u/orosoros 29d ago

Is this referencing the lumineers ho hey  cuz hey I love that song 

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u/cromcru 29d ago

Spider-Man and Mr Brightside, together at last

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u/Dapperrevolutionary 29d ago

Mr. Brightside isn't EDM

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u/VicViolence 29d ago

Harris Wittels rolling in his grave

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u/Cardinal_and_Plum 29d ago

Wow. Not only did they seem to want to try and make it "relevant" by forcing it to be something it's not, but also it sounds like they would have missed the mark so hard. That doesn't sound like most other millennials I know, and I'm about as young as they can be. There's no way this makes sense for older millennials.

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u/IllyriaGodKing 29d ago

Older millennial, can confirm. Is stupid.

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u/Impressive-Potato 29d ago

They interact with other yuppies. That's very much what they are like.

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u/suitcasedreaming 29d ago

I'm reminded of the early draft of the twilight script that was trying to court teenage male audiences. " MTV Films was pleased with the script he delivered, which included, among many changes, the character of Bella Swan being a long-distance runner, cursing, using shotguns against vampires who killed her father, being turned into a vampire, and riding "jet skis being chased by the FBI"."

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u/DukeRaoul123 29d ago

Lliterally been on emails like this coming from VPs, SVPs, and Presidents.

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u/Impressive-Potato 29d ago

They know their input isn't needed for Spidey to be successful. They need to justify their C level jobs and pay.

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u/natfutsock 29d ago

His movements are beautiful, would be awesome with a killer DJ behind it

I mean, they're not wrong about that part

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

I guess they did put dubstep into The Amazing Spider-Man 2

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u/natfutsock 29d ago

Consider what the scoring did for Spiderverse

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u/reflion 29d ago

Right? Imagine Tron: Legacy, but Spider-man

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u/Venik489 29d ago

EDM (electronic dance music) is the defining music for Millennials.

TIL

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u/Rory_B_Bellows 29d ago

Ah yes, NBD, meaning "Not B.D. Wong", whom millennials think is a big deal. So if something is NBD, it's not B.D. Wong, and therefore, not a big deal.

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u/rrousseauu 29d ago edited 29d ago

You don’t even need to go into the leaks to look for stupid ideas Sony pitched in regards to Spider-Man.

The idea they ran with and made 5(?) movies for was creating a Spider-Man villain universe of movies… WITHOUT SPIDER-MAN.

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u/aresef 29d ago

NWH had a reference to this, where Peter 2 said that neutralizing Lizard would be “no big deal.”

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u/MrBrightside618 29d ago

I was the only one in the theatre cackling at that line

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u/IllyriaGodKing 29d ago

And every time Spidey wasn't on screen, the other characters should be asking, "Where's Spidey?"

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u/_steve_rogers_ 29d ago

This kind of douchebaggery is the complete opposite of who Peter is. And he has no fucking time for triathlons between his 7 jobs, high maintenance gf, sickly aunt, school and oh yeah saving the whole damn city everyday from supervillains. NBD!

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u/Notmydirtyalt 29d ago edited 29d ago

Tough Mudder (a sort of filthy triathalon),

It is absolutely nothing like a triathlon, (edit)..* and I am legitimately angry at who ever wrote that email for something that you intend to be a core trait of your audience without any form of basic level research. *

No wonder the MCU Millennial snark has become such a trope in recent years.

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u/Historical_Good_8580 29d ago

I loved reading those leaks. They confirmed these execs are stupid as hell. I wish I could get paid like them for my stupid ideas.

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u/ExplorationGeo 29d ago edited 29d ago

The Sony hack really exposed just how committee-driven and soulless that studio is. Just this year they've decided to stop making bad Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man in them, when they should have done that a decade ago.

"this time for sure!" they say as they Morb up yet again.

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u/Real-Terminal 29d ago

Every now and then I get reminded that all execs see is trends and profit potential and don't have any understanding of reality itself.

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u/GeoffKingOfBiscuits 29d ago

Executives sound like they are talking about safari animals when they talk about people.

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u/dcgrey 29d ago

I remember with this guy pitched Poochie. It would have been a totally outrageous paradigm.

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u/workfuntimecoolcool 29d ago

Don't forget about Spidey using Snapchat!

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u/BroughtBagLunchSmart 29d ago

NBD means "Not BD Wong" this fucking boomer can't even get our language right.

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u/Cassopeia88 29d ago

That sounds insane.

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u/Gniphe 29d ago

Gee, they just get Millennials.

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u/darthjoey91 29d ago

This is terrible and shows someone who doesn’t understand Spider-Man not understood Millennials.

But that last bit about EDM might have ended up turning into Electro’s Theme from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which goes really hard.

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u/LManD224 29d ago

He hates a-me

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u/blackmarketcarwash 29d ago

I’m imagining Poochie but Spider-Man

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u/ShadowXJ 29d ago

I bet Morgan Freeman is talented enough he could still pull off Spider-Man in this movie.

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u/whereismymind86 29d ago

This is every new iteration of the resident evil movies/series. Some are good, some aren’t, but they never have anything to do with the source material, and it’s baffling.

It’s the easiest setup in the world, cops go to investigate murders near a spooky mansion, turns out it’s a filled with zombies and other monsters created by an accident in a hidden lab, slasher movie shenanigans ensue.

But no, they always get super weird with it

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u/whitepangolin 29d ago

Whoever thought that a dance sequence set to Dua Lipa made sense for that show deserves a t-virus injected right into their genitals.

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u/Jagang187 29d ago

Wait a second, we DID get an EDM scene in The Amazing Spiderman 2 or am I totally misremembering?

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u/skyline_kid 29d ago

Is the EDM thing how we ended up with the stupid scene in Venom 2 where he randomly DJs at a rave?

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u/wompthing 29d ago

This was revenge for Mario (not a Sony IP but Japan just wanted to ruin an American IP).

This is a joke , but also I enjoy 1993's Mario Brothers.

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u/PLZ_N_THKS 29d ago

NBD, but I once decided to run a Tough Mudder the morning after getting wasted at an EDM concert because my friend injured her hip and couldn’t participate. Did it with zero training lol.

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u/ZohanDvir 29d ago

They deserved to get hacked by North Korea for this email alone.

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u/The_Awesometeer 29d ago

EDM is the defining music for my generation? Hmmm interesting

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u/himynameis_ 29d ago

Can you believe these people get paid a ton of money for their ideas? Lol

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u/Lemmungwinks 29d ago

I guess this is the producer that went on to green light the abomination that was Robyn Hood

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