I think Apple was looking to buy just the movie studio portion and not the company in total.  It would make sense from the standpoint of their own streaming service to grab a movie studio so that they could produce original content with greater ease.

I got an email that it's back in stock, it'll let me pick 2 from the drop down, but it won't let me buy them. 

That seems typically.  I generally check the link every morning and that is how it is right now.  Can select two, but says it can't be delivered to my zip code and that it is out of stock in any store in my area.

Quote from: EdSolo on September  3, 2019, 06:52 AM

The last Spiderman movie proved you don't need Tony Stark in it.  It is the highest grossing Spiderman movie to date.

Really Ed?  Far From Home was completely devoid of Tony Stark?

It was devoid of Robert Downey Jr.  The plot may have revolved around Peter being the heir apparent to Tony, but we didn't even get a RDJ cameo unless you count a picture of him on the school new broadcast.  It is essentially like Luke Skywalker in TFA.  The opening crawl leads one to believe that the plot of the movie would be around finding Luke, only to find out we get a half a minute at best of him on screen.  By comparison, this movie had less actual Tony Stark in it, but did just fine.

Can the next one stand on its own?  Who knows.  Spiderman still had Happy Hogan, Nick Fury, and Maria Hill in it.  It will be pretty jarring for the next one to not have any MCU characters, especially if they can't even be mentioned.

Personally, I think the deal isn't truly dead yet.  If they put out a Venom 2 first and that isn't successful, I think things will get renegotiated.  I foresee Sony having problems with a Spiderman 3 script.  So far, they haven't recycled villains, with the exception of introducing Harry as the Green Goblin at the very end of the second Garfield movie.  Not sure who you would choose at this point if you wanted to go with an unused villain. 

The last Spiderman movie proved you don't need Tony Stark in it.  It is the highest grossing Spiderman movie to date.  Who knows what will happen if Sony goes on their own with Spiderman 3.  It didn't work too well the last time; meaning it never happened with Garfield.

As for the MCU, they are going to run the risk of things being really clunky and hamfisted.  Bringing in the Fantastic Four is one thing, you could just have an origin story that they gained their powers post snap and are younger compared to the Avengers.  Trying to explain away Mutants is going to be something else.  The MCU has done some silly stuff in the past.  I'm looking squarely at Iron Man 3.  The studio claimed they did the whole Trevor/Mandarin thing because they couldn't have a mystical super villain with magic rings; that magic didn't fit in the MCU.  Not too many years later we get Doctor Strange.  We may even be getting the real Mandarin according to current rumors.  The current work around for mutation has not worked all that well in Agents of Shield and Inhumans.  Really, I think if Disney got the complete rights back to Spiderman, we could very likely see an entire MCU reboot so they could build all the properties from the ground up.  At this point, they still have enough star power even without Iron Man and Cap to keep going, but this will all come to a head eventually.  I am pretty surprised the superhero genre has lasted this long.  DC is certainly a mess, but the MCU has been fairly consistent.

It certainly doesn't live up to the first two movies in the series.  Probably on par or a bit worse than Apocalypse.   I'm not sure if this one or X3 is a better telling of the story or not, so that should paint the picture right there.  Captain Marvel was a better representation of the 90's.  I'm not sure they seemed to care as much considering how well they did the 60's and 70's and to some extent the 80's.  For whatever reason, they chose not to use the actual President like they did with Kennedy and Nixon.  They certainly didn't do enough to make the characters look older.  Xavier and Magneto should be ~30 years older than First Class and that certainly doesn't appear to be the case.  They should be approaching the look of Stewart and McKellen from the first movie, but it isn't even close.

It is all a bit problematic since they didn't map out the rules besides Tony saying that when you go into the past, that past is now your future.  I think they were all good with the time travel stuff until they pulled the pre-snap Thanos into the future.  We even have what is essentially a grandfather paradox that isn't even addressed.  Older Nebula kills her younger self.  I think that act there shows there has to be divergent timelines. 

Really, I think any time traveling actions that they took causes multiple divergent timelines.  They go back and gather all the Infinity Stones before Thanos can and use them to undo the snap.  Even though Cap goes back and puts the stones back so the timeline can supposedly play out as it had before, there are changes.  Loki escaping is a pretty big one I would say.  Since the attempt to get the Tesseract failed, I would assume Cap went back to the 70's to drop that stone off.  So the "new" timeline where Loki escapes would still occur which is different than what we saw in the first Avengers movie.  Additionally, we don't see how they convert the stones back to the Tesseract, Loki's staff, and the Aether as they were originally found in the prime timeline.

You never know, but the old EU timeline for Revan was ~4000 BBY while the article mentions "hundreds" of years before the Skywalkers.  You could easily make a trilogy out of all the KOTOR stuff, especially if you include the MMO story lines with the Sith Emperor.  I'm not sure if they would want to rehash a video game or just put a new spin on Revan, much like what has happened with Thrawn going from Legends to canon.

One thing I would like to see would be some sort of series that shows the lineage from Darth Bane to Darth Sidious.  I doubt you could effectively do this in the movies since the Sith were hidden for 1,000 years so you really can't have the Sith vs. Jedi confrontations after Bane establishes the rule of two.  You could probably do it in a series of books or comics though.