Ask Lemmy

Bill Maher has had a prime television slot since 1993.

That ignorant asshole has been pretending to represent the "left" for 33 years while being a smug reactionary idiot.

Every time a company does a tax write off and trashes the film. If they're canning it, it's ours. It's public domain. Take it as a loss, we subsidize it, then it's ours. Coyote vs Acme is the unicorn that got released. It should never have been thrown away.

Fox screwing Firefly with that stupid broadcast schedule (although it was cancelled before Joss could make it weird)

Star Wars: A LOT of things, but I'll focus on Episode 9 being absolute dog shit

Game of Thrones, I don't think I need to expand on it

Probably the most unforgivable thing is the legacy and ongoing sexual exploitation of minors in the entertainment industry, but I don't think that's what OP had in mind

The end of Battlestar Galactica.

They literally tied up all the loose threads into a bundle labeled "God did it" and then refused to speculate about God because that's distasteful.

It's sci-fi. You speculate. It's what the genre does.

Disney ruined the Star Wars sequels. All the money, all the talent, so much potential, and they pushed out those turds.

They gave the star trek movie reboots to a director that didn't like or watch star trek.

I forgot that they made multiple The Hobbit films.

After watching the first one, I mentally erased their existence.

As a young person, I loved A Wrinkle in Time and the entire set of sequels.

And so I say a heartfelt FUCK YOU to Ava DuVernay, who crappified this masterpiece into vapid pap film that felt like it was written by Kellogg's marketing team in conjunction with the Ad Council of America.

Apparently the film lost $130 million. Thank God there is little chance of a sequel.

LotR should have been 6 movies and The Hobbit should have been 1

Creating consent for the Gaza genocide

I guess a decade of slop media where nothing is sacred and everything must be exploited has hardened my heart from caring about anything anymore. A younger me cared about why the Star Wars sequels are bad or that they cancelled Firefly too quickly or that Community fired Dan Harmon. But all these properties are just tools of corpo oppression at this point. Art doesn't have the same impact if they are just trying to squeeze every last dollar out of them.

You remember Highlander 2?

Yeah, me neither.

Editing to add: Eragon. The only, one singular, thing that film got right was the opening scene. The rest of the film was an epic, blot-out-the-sun middle finger to the book and the fans.

The Halo games.

I think Bungie fumbled a bit but overall did a good job telling the story of Master Chief. Halo 3 really felt like it was intended to be his end because MC was right back where he started - A super weapon kept in cryo, only this time drifting indefinitely into space with very little chance of ever being found.

Then Bungie did Halo: Reach as a follow up and showed you could have a good Halo game without MC as the protagonist, telling a new(ish) story with new characters.

Then of course Microsoft ditched Bungie and kept the IP, now looking at now the vast amount of Halo novels and comics and other media, decided to dig up Master Chief again and shoehorn him into a bunch of other game plots.

I won't say Halo 4/5/Infinite are terrible or anything to that level but I don't think 343 nailed it.
Even more frustrating now that Microsoft seems keen to remaster the whole Halo Master Chief story arc (again).

The engagement bait, algorithmic nature of social media is up there for me. Everything has to be the most extreme, divisive there's no room for gradients and equivalency.

The One Punch Man anime turning into One Frame Man in its third season.

From battles consisting of transparent PNGs sliding from the bottom left to the top right corner of the screen, to ludicrous censoring techniques like replacing a cigarette with a lollipop.

For the fourth season they just inversed the poster from the third season. Tbf it will be actually Season 3 part 2, but it shows they aren't even trying.

Juxtaposed to this is the Dorohedoro anime, that also dropped a new season this year, after six (!) years.

The long wait had a good reason. The animator loves the manga, but was busy working on the Attack on Titan anime and didn't want to rush Dorohedoro's second season. It's a huge improvement over the first season, refining its mix of 3D and 2D hand drawn content into a wonderfully horrifying experience.

The abdication of the 4th estate in guarding the public interests and freedoms people fought and died for.

Media or entertainment? Kinda different animals.

Pretty much any book-to-movie adaptation. 90% are awful. It’s a rare case when they’re better or equal adaptations.

General media? The spinelessness of our news organizations across the board. A free press doesn’t exist, they bend a knee to their corporate billionaire overlords. They don’t tell the whole truth, they hold back, they don’t call a spade a spade. They should be part of the apparatus protecting the common person from the bullshit the rich and government try to sweep under the rug. At best, they’re complicit in their silence, at worst they’re active participants aiding the rich.

Cable “news”. It is entirely responsible for the current state of things.

How different and vastly inferior Ready: Player One the movie was compared to the book.

I've never been so confused and upset at a movie.

Battlestar Galactica, and any other time the writers are just writing down the rabbit hole without having any clue what story they're going to tell. The writers of Battlestar introduced one mystery after another and worked to sell the audience on the belief that they were going somewhere good with all this. They had jack shit and I'm not getting that time back.

Some other offenders:

Star Wars sequels: how the fuck did that get greenlit for like a billion dollars without any living soul knowing what the plot was gonna be

Mulholland Drive: fuck you David Lynch, explain this shit or GTFO. If I want dream logic I'll go to sleep

Lost: J J Abrams you spoiled little rich kid fuckass

Times that didn't happen:

Andor: just an adamantine brick shithouse of storytelling

I hate watching Mexican telenovelas because they are not color graded yellow. Because there is no color grading and the cast is almost entirely white, I keep thinking everything is set in the United States. Super confusing.

Here, try this: https://m4studios.github.io/hobbit-book-edit/

"Second screen content"

Firefly being canceled

Firefly getting cancelled.

The Expanse getting cancelled.

For me, the Mass Effect 3 ending at launch. It's still aggressively mediocre after several patches and DLCs, but the original at launch was genuinely insulting. I have only been invested in a piece of media like that a few times in my life—the shittiness of that ending really ruined me for a few days. It was an entire decade before I could muster up the desire to replay the trilogy. I'll still be mad about it when I'm on my deathbed.

Game of Thrones ending was less disappointing for me.

A lot of the original episodes of Pokemon were never dubbed in Danish. I will never forget. Never forgive.

Star wars. I just have such a love/frustration relationship with it. This includes stuff produced by George Lucas btw.

I feel like it tries to appease all crowds. The family friendly crowd, the autistic nerdy crowd, the politics obsessed crowd and so on.

Andor for example is peak star wars, because it's made specifically for one audience. No one's taking their 6yo to watch this.

The problem is when a kids' show has the prerequisite plot for a show with a totally different audience.

Take the clone wars for example. It started as nothing more than a kids' show. Then, it ended dark. Same with rebels. Look at episode 3. Amazing amazing plot with the transformation of the Republic into the empire. And then you have jar jar binks.

Let's not even begin to talk about Disney.

Star wars just has so much potential due to its huge world and the Jedi/sith stuff. But it's just so frustrating to see how such art can be wounded by the will to earn money.

I know this isn't "the most unforgivable sin" or whatever, but I suppose it's definitely up there. It's the sin of painting an angry face emoji on top of a beautiful and detailed painting of an unimaginabley cruel monster, just so that more toys can be sold.

When I was younger, the Star Wars prequel trilogy killed the franchise for me. Older me has grown more jaded and does not care as much anymore.

The 'Song of Ice and Fire' series by GRRM was bad enough. If the series had ended after the Red Wedding, I would have been at peace. Instead, an entire can of new characters and storylines was opened. The series is unfinished and if any new books come out, they have lost my interest. Now that isn't too bad, but the last seasons of the Game of Thrones series were so poorly written that it killed the books even further for me.

I read that someone mentioned Highlander. For a movie with the tag line 'There can be only one', it sure has many sequels. The original is bad, but in a very fun way. I hold it dear to my heart. The sequels are really forgettable. OTOH, the spinoff television series was not too bad if I remember correctly after 30+ years.

Anything star trek after ST:Enterprise

The movies were all dumbed down pew pew flare flare versions of previous star trek movies, the series were horrendously dumb and badly written, in a show that is about the stories, ethics, morale, etc.

It was awful and the only shining light was the series "The Orville" by Seth McFarlane who is a huge star trek fan and it shows.

When I was a kid, an anchor on a major network news program called mosquitos “flying hypodermic needles”. This was at the height of the AIDS epidemic. It absolutely terrified me.

I was just old enough to understand what the anchor was talking about, but too young to know that the TV news was often exaggerated and should be treated with skepticism. I’m still kinda bitter about that. Scaring the fuck out of a kid is NOT okay.

Violet Evergarden: The Movie

Major Gilbert is revealed to be alive. And she goes back to him. And it's implied to be romantic.

The whole series was about her escaping her past as a child soldier and learning to live a normal life, and they end it by having her go right back to him. But it's okay, he may have made her into a child soldier, but he was kind sometimes, so he's a good guy and definitely not an abuser! And he was the closest thing she ever had to a father figure, but now that she's all grown up she can love him and that's perfectly normal! This is a great finale that doesn't undermine the whole show that led up to it, and isn't fucked up at all!

The rest of the show is still so damn good, just pretend the movie never happened.

Lightyear (2022) had a trailer that is straight up false advertising. The trailer shows him contacting Star Command, something that never occurs in the movie. Still bitter about that.

Battle Los Angeles (2011) probably the biggest gap between the trailer's quality and the film's quality I've ever seen.

Giglie (2003), a movie on a lot of lists for being one of the worst of all time. The story behind it is that Ben Affleck and J-Lo got together during filming. The problem is, it wasn't a romcom. J-Lo's character was a lesbian. But because the of their real life romance, they rewrote the ending so the two get together.

Almost everything JJ Abrams has touched.