Last week, Zackary Russell and E. Stephen Burnett celebrated the Realm Makers Expo![1. Photo by Felix Mooneeram on Unsplash.] That means this episode is another Stephen solo show. This one reveals a shocking truth: these days Stephen finds a lot more joy in books than he sees at the movie houses. Can fans, including Christians, help save the cinema from synthetic moralities, sloppy franchises, and scandalized/sillified superheroes?

The unfortunate impact is Rotten Tomatoes and other review aggregators regularly give major boosts to movies where reviewers generally lean in a more positive direction, but few people react negatively, by presenting them as having a higher score than movies that were genuinely reviewed better, yet elicited more negative responses.

At the end of the day, everyone has unique tastes, and that includes movie critics, so the notion of taking all those disparate opinions on a movie, distilling it down into a simple thumbs up/down, then aggregating that into an average approval rating and expecting it to be applicable to individual audience members seems very backward. As always, audiences are better off finding a particular reviewer or outlet they tend to agree with and trusting in their reviews, or even better, take a “risk” and go see a movie with an exciting premise, cool marketing, or an actor or director you like and form your own opinion.

I used to be a major proponent of wanting things “comics accurate,” but nowadays I prefer the phrase “comics consistent.” Not all “accurate to the comics” ideas are good, but if you take what consistently is good and works with the characters, you can’t go wrong. That said, all of these Batmen [Adam West, Christian Bale, and Ben Affleck] are great in their own way, and work in their own way for consistent reasons — but that doesn’t mean they all need to be the same.

As we’ve often heard, some movies feel difficult to enjoy! Yet today we want to celebrate animated films across the years, including the artists behind classic characters like Cogsworth, Iago, Pumbaa, Pocahontas, Mulan, and Kronk … and now, coming this fall, the greatest Hero of all. Famed animators and twin brothers Tony Bancroft and Tom Bancroft bring their magic to our studio in advance of their next feature film in cinemas, the traditionally animated Light of the World.