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Seto Kaiba

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About Seto Kaiba

  • Birthday 08/22/1985

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    http://www.Macross2.net/m3/m3.html
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    MacrossMike

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  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Auburn Hills
  • Interests
    Anime (duh), Antique Firearms, Cryptography, Mechanical Design

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Giving Witch Hunter Robin a HD rewatch next. Good times. Sunrise had a lot going for it back in the late 90's and early 2000s.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It's all about what's probable. Really, Johansson probably should be considering suing Periwinkle Ent. over the negligent handling of her contract. That the attorneys representing them, and her, in negotiations with Disney's Marvel Studios focused exclusively on bonuses tied to the gross box office receipts shows a lack of foresight completely independent of the changes that the pandemic forced upon the industry. Streaming has been on the rise for ages as a supplement/replacement for the home video market, and "personal digital library" sort of streaming arrangements like Apple's and Google's are a nontrivial profit center for studios. If her agency had asked for a share of streaming revenues from the film too, she'd be sitting pretty on a share of the $60 million and counting Disney+ has raked in from Black Widow to console herself about the loss of box office bonuses with.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Since Funimation added it to their catalog a while back, I just finished up the high-def remaster of Outlaw Star. It's impressive how well this series holds up over twenty years after its release. Kind of a bloody tragedy the spinoff was complete garbage.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Hopefully the film or its supplemental materials will offer an explanation in the not-too-distant future. As strapped as Xaos was for cash during the closing phases of the war with Windermere, it's kind of hard to credit that they would have the capital to do a major overhaul on their VFs for Delta Flight when something like 1/3 of their forces were wiped out and their motherships are heavily damaged.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Exactly... this whole brouhaha is about the fundamental assumptions that were made when the contracts were drafted pre-pandemic. Periwinkle Entertainment - and likely most of the rest of the industry - didn't think it was worth the extra trouble to explicitly define various terms in the contract they negotiated in light of how the industry operated at the time. When the pandemic forced theaters to close, the industry had to radically rethink its whole mode of operation and the assumptions underpinning those undefined terms were no longer valid. So now you have this situation where Disney complied with the letter of the contract, but Periwinkle and Johansson are crying foul because the new reality of the industry means the assumptions they tied their compensation to were faulty and won't produce as much money. EDIT: I suspect Periwinkle Ent. was expecting Black Widow to be a billion dollar affair like Captain Marvel, and are especially put out that its box office performance is middling at best. That definitely explains the wishful-thinking argument that they make that the movie would've made megabucks if only Marvel kept delaying it until the theaters recover (if they ever do). Disney lists the current global take from Black Widow at $334.5M. That said, those budgets don't include advertising spending... which, all things considered, likely means another $150-200M in spending that needs to be recouped for the film to break even. With the Disney+ sales factored in, they're likely close to, or already past, the break-even point for the film. I've seen it said that receipts for Disney+ put sales of the film at around $60M just for premium streaming. At the very least, it's in no danger of being the worst-performing MCU film... it's already blown well past the 2008 The Incredible Hulk film that only grossed $265M on a $150M budget. I wouldn't go so far as to call it trash. It's definitely a bad movie, IMO... but if you find everyone doing their worst fake Russian accent amusing it could almost be a good-bad movie. Many of the MCU movies were practically a license to print money, so Johansson and Periwinkle Ent.'s belief that this movie could've been a blockbuster aren't exactly unfounded. Especially since this was supposed to be a big to-do for the girl power crowd similar to Captain Marvel. ... you could lose the "on the internet" part and it'd still be true. It's been true of humanity in general for... as long as there's been humanity in general.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    ... I'm beginning to see that, yes. So much of the Star Wars plot seems to depend on coincidence and sheer dumb luck, or as the writers call it "the will of the force". I loathe that as a literary device, because it robs the characters of any semblance of agency. (In that context, I can also kind of see why fans are so enamored of Grand Admiral Thrawn from the old novels. He seems to be the only character in the entire franchise who actually had his sh*t together and whose plans made actual logical sense.) At least half the cast of Rise of Skywalker falls into that category... and one of them is heavily implied to be an actual Calrissian.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... as I pointed out a few posts ago, the actual goal behind this lawsuit is pretty transparent. This lawsuit is so short on legal merit that it has very little chance of success if it gets to a judicial review, discovery, and petitioning. It's clearly not meant to succeed. It's performative litigation. Its goal is to be publicized as widely as possible and in as inflammatory a manner as possible. They want to use the public pressure generated by the 24/7 news cycle and a horde of internet white knights to twist Disney's arm in the public sphere so Disney'll cut them a check to make the bad PR go away. The actual content of the suit is pretty stupid, but the tactic isn't, and its lack of legal merit is borderline irrelevant because it's not intended to ever go before a judge. It's a tool.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yes and no. If you read the filing, Johansson and Periwinkle Ent.'s attorneys openly admit the contract doesn't actually stipulate that. The only language they were able to find in the contract that defined "wide theatrical release" was a condition regarding the minimum acceptable number of screens showing the film (1,500). The actual argument being made in the filing is that Johansson and Periwinkle Entertainment believed the term "wide theatrical release" to also mean "released exclusively in theaters" based on pre-pandemic business practices in which a release to streaming was broadly analogous in nature and scheduling to a home video release. It's not actually defined that way in the contract. They're asking the court to enforce their belief of what the contract should mean over what it actually says. The contract also, incidentally, mentions that the release is at the producer's discretion and that Johansson is entitled to "consultation" about the release... but there's nothing that her attorneys could present to say she had any leverage to renegotiate the contract based on changes in the release plan. This suit has very little chance of gaining any traction at all, because Periwinkle and Johansson are arguing against the language of the contract as it is written. It's unfortunate, but this is a good lesson in why you always explicitly define any terms which are not defined by the law in your contracts.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    OK, so help me out here... because this seems awfully contrived. (As if the whole sequel trilogy wasn't... but hey.) A highly conspicuous government official who is secretly evil and his not-so-secretly evil mentor who is hopefully much less conspicuous f*ck off on a business trip to the Runner Up for Planet Most Deserving of the Title of "Nowhere" to get some random lady they've just met pregnant with magical space AIDS? Why her? Why did they have to fly all the way to the planet farthest from the bright center of the universe for a dark side booty call? You can't tell me it wouldn't have been easier to just tap his secretary for the job and pretend that it was the product of some good old fashioned political philandering. Or was this some space magic ritual thing where the winds of fate got some rando they've never met pregnant and they just kinda trusted they'd find The Chosen One out of the trillions and trillions of people that must be living in the galaxy through sheer dumb luck (AKA "the force"). This seems less "sinister plan" and more "drunken dark lord's bar bet".
  10. Seto Kaiba
    ... wut.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    And you're probably better off for that. Rise of Skywalker was a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The Emperor comes back from the dead for no adequately explored reason. There's a great deal of nonsense about a chain of macguffins that will lead our heroes to his secret evil lair that takes up most of the actual movie. Many pointless in-jokes are made. Rey learns she's the Emperor's granddaughter, Ben/Kylo dies, Rey moves to Tattooine and commits identity theft by claiming to be part of the Skywalker family. The whole nine episode film arc is now the Palpatine Saga not the Skywalker Saga.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... the painful irony being that they had several better designs already, from Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy, the Macross Delta modeling books, and Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried:
  13. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, this angle kind of exaggerates the actual increase in bulk... it's mostly in the wings. The inner wing surface appears to have been bulked up a bit to make room for the larger arms. The ordnance container on this version also looks a lot larger because the Kairos Plus's beam gunpod is lot larger than the standard issue one, being nearly as big as the pod itself.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    "Messer! The punchable surface at the top of your neck is back!"
  15. Seto Kaiba
    We don't have to... because the Factual Background section of this filing by the attorneys representing Johansson and her agency, Periwinkle Entertainment, is quite literally meant to be (as in, "this is how it's supposed to work") the facts of the matter put forward in the manner that best supports their claim. If the contract stipulated that Black Widow was required to be released exclusively in theaters for a period of time, the Factual Background section of the filing would contain quotes from the relevant verbiage. What they have - and remember, these are the facts laid out by Johansson and Periwinkle's attourneys to best support their claim against Disney and Marvel Studios - amounts to a complaint that Disney violated the spirit of the contract rather than the letter. The filing itself indirectly admits that Disney and Marvel have complied with the letter of the contract in terms of how it defines a "wide theatrical release" (playing on 1,500+ screens worldwide), and is making bizarre Karen-esque argument that the court should enforce what Johansson and Periwinkle Entetaiment believe the term should mean rather than how the term is defined in the actual language of the contract. Not really, no. We're reading the filing prepared by the attorneys representing Johansson and Periwinkle Entertainment and seeing what's there for anyone to see... that there's little to nothing in the way of support for the claim they're making in a presentation of the factual background cherrypicked and specifically tailored to best support that claim. A fair amount of it - like the claim that Disney is passively supporting piracy of its own IP by sending movies to Disney+ or the one about how the pandemic is going to just vanish in a few months - is just gun-eating insanity. I'm not a lawyer, but I have enough experience with contract law and IP law from my day job for this to feel like a spurious and incredibly flimsy lawsuit to me. My suspicion is that this lawsuit is not intended to succeed, or even make it past the initial review and petitioning. This move is pure theater - far better acting than Johansson's own - intended to allow Periwinkle Entertainment to apply pressure to Disney in the public sphere to give them money they're not actually contractually entitled to. This is all about Johansson and her agency having buyer's remorse over the contract they signed over a year before the pandemic started being a poor fit to the new realities of the industry.
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