Thanks for the post I enjoyed it 
I think that the authors underestimated the lethality of the bo staff. I don’t know if Rafaello’s sai are pointed or dull, and I don’t know if nunchako can be lethal, but I’m confident a wooden staff is a lethal weapon (it can shatter a skull). Wooden training swords, for example, are considered more dangerous than metal ones, because metal ones are flexible, wooden ones are rigid and they can kill you
There is this famous story of that samurai Musashi who was fighting with two katanas, he was headed to a duel with the other most famous samurai at the time who was using an extra long nodachi, and he didn’t like his chances because his reach was shorter, so he simply carved a wooden katana that was longer than his and killed him
It’s similar to how Gandalf was sent to fight Sauron, even though Gandalf didn’t want to face Sauron.
The classical villain turned into a misunderstood anti-hero in new films is an overly saturated modern trope and it tires me. The first time it was done it was probably great fun, but now it’s just getting old, to me. Examples include:
This year they will be releasing a film about one of Cinderella’s sisters, Lilith, being a misunderstood anti-hero
God, I’m behind on the upcoming film slate.
My mind has primarily been on the inevitable Wuthering Heights discourse.
No, Ishmael, I haven’t seen Marty Supreme yet.
Please trust that I’m trying.
Some friends of mine were going through every adaptation of Wuthering Heights and would make jokes about the different ones and I could never keep up. Because they’re like “wow this is so Wuthering Heights (2011)” and it’s like I don’t KNOW what that means…
The only one I know is Wuthering High School
I also know that there’s a test for adaptations of Wuthering Heights, which is “did they make Heathcliff white”, and many adaptations fail this test and thus entirely undermine the narrative of the book, but a surprising selection of otherwise-outlandish adaptations still manage to pass the test
Maleficiant was never evil. She was just petty. And she had the reason to be (even in the original fairy tail.) The “anti-hero” film just shows what would she be like if she known Aurora during her life…
As for Cinderella’s step sisters, there is a Disney sequel, which shows at least one of her step sister isn’t that evil, once she is removed from her mother’s influence. It’s not a really new concept…
(For Cruella I believe the new and the old Cruella just sharing the name, but there are actually different characters… It just doesn’t fit for me.)
Happy birbday
worb mach when
Firstly, I agree that you’re correct to observe the trend in modern remakes recharacterising villains as something else; beyond that I think it’s a more nuanced topic than what’s being presented here, because while some movies can just be lazy and sorta gaslight the audience over it, other times it’s really not that harmful.
I assume you’re talking about Predator: Badlands specifically, going off the wikipedia description, but I haven’t seen it so I can’t address it. Ash already discussed how Maleficent is more of a “What-If” than a character assassination; sure she had a traumatic backstory in her own movie retelling, but it’s used as a way to explain rather than justify her reason to be vindictive at first. The story doesn’t lie and say she cast the wrong spell or that Aurora’s fairy godmother’s were actually evil. Overall, the movie does what it sets out to do and accomplishes it well.
In regards to Venom and Cruella, these characters are very different to their source materials. Both stories act like spinoffs rather than prequels and don’t even tackle the battles their villains undertook in their original stories — Venom doesn’t fight Spiderman, Cruella doesn’t meet a puppy hoard at all — so these are basically just original stories using familiar names as a leaping board for the audience to know who they’re seeing, but nothing else.
So yeah, Maleficent falls into “fan fiction” territory whilst Venom and Cruella fall into “original story but I copied your homework to write my protagonist” and that’s it.
Without any research, I imagine this story would fall into the second category, because writing in the first could possibly be really dangerous or maybe a quite significant tale on perpetuating abuse (but in that case you wouldn’t write it as a Cinderella story instead of being standalone); which means it’ll just be a more or less basic feudal setting with a flawed regretful protagonist and magic existing without it feeling like a deus ex machina because the Cinderella story established its existence, but it otherwise will be a separate story entirely and that seems lazy.
holy true
did they include limbus company
@Aleph okay so im going to go see Marty Supreme in an hour or so
youd better be fuckin right about the film being good
also yes i feel like the ground floor of any Wuthering Heights adaptation has to be “Is Heathcliff white?” because it’s like. So fucking important to get that detail right
you can do White Heathcliff but you have to very very carefully understand what implications about the story you’re changing by doing that
Limbus Company was the motivating factor ehre