• http://www.theonion.com/content/news/michael_bay_signs_50m_deal_to_fuck?utm_source=a-section

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LOS ANGELES—In the largest deal ever made to shit out a movie, Warner Bros. and director Michael Bay announced a landmark $50 million agreement this week to monumentally fuck up ThunderCats.

"I couldn't be more excited to completely fuck this up," said Bay, who plans to begin production on destroying the live-action adaptation next month. "ThunderCats has a great story, endearing characters, action, adventure, space-travel, and fantasy. It will be an honor to run it into the ground."

"I'll use every directorial tool I have to suck the very life and charm out of this beloved cartoon," added Bay, claiming that the film could turn out to be the most colossal piece of shit he's ever worked on. "I won't rest until I get every last scene exactly wrong."

According to executives, Warner Bros. settled on Bay after a 12-month search of Hollywood's most reviled directors, including Joel Schumacher, Roland Emmerich, and Brett Ratner. In the end, the studio decided only Bay could be relied upon to deliver a 220-minute cinematic clusterfuck with enough tedious performances, overblown cinematography, and CGI explosions to make even the most casual fan want to scratch their eyes out.

"No filmmaker working today has Bay's ability to somehow direct his actors to be both emotionless and melodramatic at once," Warner Bros. CEO Barry Meyer said. "And I personally can't wait to see how he needlessly overcomplicates the plot."

Bay reportedly only agreed to fuck up ThunderCats after several specific conditions were written into his contract. According to the terms of the deal, Bay must be allowed to eliminate the character Panthro entirely to focus on the asinine relationship between Snarf and Snarfer, and include nearly 22 minutes of frenetic, impossible-to-follow action sequences that he hopes will annoy the living Christ out of audiences.

"We're just getting started on the storyboards, but I've already got a lot of really contrived ideas about zooming in way too close and shooting everything at nauseating angles," said Bay, who claimed viewers won't be able to tell if the climactic final battle is between two blurry elbows or a half dozen leopard-print pillows. "I promise you'll walk out of the theater feeling like you just flushed $12 down the toilet."

"You will all fucking hate me," he continued.

Hollywood insiders agreed that Bay—who has reportedly been closely involved in each of the 45 progressively worse rewrites of the script—was a natural choice to take a steaming dump on the popular ThunderCats property.

"Michael Bay has this innate sense of how to ruin a great story," Variety reporter Todd Brick said. "His ability to create astonishing plot holes, pepper dialogue with groan-inducing clichés, and abandon storylines halfway through is unparalleled. He was born to destroy this movie."

Though he admitted there was still "a lot of fucking up to do" before the script attains his trademark shit-slicked sheen, Bay has recruited hack writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci to punch-up the screenplay with hollow characters and by-the-numbers jokes about kitty litter boxes and hair balls.

But all the time and effort, Bay claimed, is worth it to ensure that he fucks ThunderCats up as badly as he knows he can.

"Ever since I failed to ruin Scarlett Johansson's career with The Island, I've been looking for a challenge like this," Bay said. "Who knows? With Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and ThunderCats coming out in the same year, I may finally reach my goal of making all of America hate cinema forever."

He's got a movie coming out to start off the summer big giant blockbuster season. He's in a dozen books a month and thats only going to get worse (or better depending on your perspective) as the movie approaches. 


I'll make the safe bet and say Wolverine makes more appearances in more comics than any other character in 2009 and his movie pulls in more cash than any other comic movie except for possibly Transformers 2: Attack of the Bad Director.

I'll echo Satyrquaze's blog and say Punisher War Zone will no doubt suck. Thomas Jane bailing on his own volition- that was the first sign the script wasn't up to snuff. No big (or even B-list) name actors lining up to play any character- also not particularly inspiring. Adding to that, the advertising campaign, or lack thereof, tells me Marvel isn't really putting much muscle behind this one and thats says something. Early reviews have eviscerated it, with the only silver lining being that it is ultra-violent & has some nice action sequences. Granted they had a couple guys that worked on Iron Man's screenplay working on this one too, there is some hope there that it won't entirely suck. If it does suck, it'll show how significant pros like Robert Downey Jr., Jon Favreau, Stephen Platt, etc were to Iron Man's success.

Can Punisher be done right? Probably. Have Garth Ennis sitting next to the director's chair through the whole movie and Steve Dillon or someone that knows how Punisher should look doing storyboarding, and Marvel might have a higher chance of success.

People might be getting too excited about Marvel turning around their reputation for mediocrity after Iron Man & the 2008 Hulk showed that they can do things right. After all it was just last year that the craptacular crapfests Fantastic Four 2 & Ghost Rider came out.


All that said I still might see it if I have nothing better to do on Saturday.

Today NiteFly submitted the 100,000th issue with a cover to the site's database- The Eudaemon #2.

Not bad for a site thats only been online for 21 months.  

Just as a comparison- some stats from other sites:

Comics.org -
4,504 Publishers/imprints
30,647 Series
389,004 books (120,547 indexed)
673,534 Story objects (characters, things, etc)
2,133,876 credits
188,434 covers

Comics.org just passed 120,000 comics indexed- meaning the creator, date published, & character info was filled in.  We don't have that stat but I'm guessing we've got a long way to go.


Comicbookdb.com established in September 2005-

Issues:	138759	Issues per day:	124.71	Titles:	18914
Creators:	19391	Characters:	25974	Covers:	127540

Comicvine-
100,013 issues
9,873 volumes/series/titles
6,468 creators (some dupes in that number)
44,878 characters (lots of dupes though)
507 locations
621 publishers
302 story arcs
Somewhere around 488,309 images