While it's been confirmed that the X-Men and Fantastic Four will join the MCU 'soon', that's a lot of characters to drop into an existing universe, and maintaining the existing continuity will be near-impossible, although given it's a comic book universe, they've got any number of tricks to blur the lines, and the more recent X-Men movies have taken place in the past anyway. Except for Deadpool, the sequel of which showed the current X-Men still existing in the modern world....the whole timeline's a bit of a muddle, which probably helps.

Yeah yeah, yet another Terminator movie. A series which has been getting progressively worse and more daft as time goes on, 'The Sarah Connor Chronicles' aside, which apparently was pretty decent, but I never really got into. One was great, Two was incredible, Three was meh but had an amazing ending, Four was entirely forgettable, and Five was messy. So why should we care about no. 6? Two reasons...maybe three. I'll come in again.

For starters, James Cameron is producing this, and has worked with the director on the story. Secondly, the director is Tim Miller, of Deadpool fame. Thirdly, they're actively ditching the last three movies - this is a direct, belated sequel to Terminator 2, featuring Linda Hamilton (with a vaguely Hillary Clinton-esque hairdo) and Arnold Schwarzenegger...and that's apparently it for the prior characters, at least as far as anyone's admitting. No John Connor, no Kyle Reese. New characters played by Natalia Reyes and Mackenzie Davis will feature, as seen in the pic above, but other details aren't forthcoming.

So...colour me cautiously optimistic. I think realistically it's not going to match the first two, but I'd settle for a new 'third best Terminator movie', without the qualifier 'but that's not saying much'. Arnie seems to be pretty good at acknowledging his age in recent movies, even the most recent 'Terminator: Ugh', so I assume that will feature...one way or another. Hopefully without a lot of CGI to de-age him, just because that's been done.

Shazam

Zachary Levi, making the jump from Marvel, I wouldn't say was an obvious choice for a superhero, but given his general talent, and of course the history of successful unconventional casting of heroes, Paul Rudd's Ant-Man and Michael Keaton's Batman being the obvious examples, he looks like he can swing it. So I'm cautiously optimistic about this.

Hunter Killer

Look, of course this is going to be garbage. Without meaning to besmirch the poor guy, Gerard Butler hasn't had a great run of late, with Geostorm and London has Fallen being particular examples of...let's say 'dogshit'. So I'm not expecting this to win any Oscars - what it comes down to is whether it'll be enjoyable drivel, or just plain awful. Gary Oldman should lend a sheen of quality to the proceedings, but any movie involving a submarine and Russians but not featuring Sean Connery as a Scotoviet (is that a word?) commander has a pretty high bar to clear.

So the menu is now hopefully better, with the most popular pages more easily accessible, and others still available via dropdown menus in the sidebar. Search is now available on every page via the navigation bar, and the navbar also stays visible as you scroll down the page - something that's not always to everyone's taste, but it's only small, so hopefully will be more convenient than annoying. On mobile devices you can also swipe right to pull out the menu.

This is the start of what will hopefully be an ongoing series of updates & improvements to the site - it's been a bit static for far too long, and frankly it's starting to fall behind a bit in both technology, design and audience. Aside from hundreds of minor tweaks I've been making notes of to work on, one of the bigger things will be better member engagement/community building, eg. a more prominent league table crediting the valued submitters for their hard work.

I've also got various thoughts along the lines of somehow rewarding people for submitting things, be it mistakes, endings, corrections, whatever, because this site wouldn't exist without its contributors! Off the top of my head maybe removing some/all ads for people who submit content. I'm also thinking of adding user reviews and movie ratings, just so people can make themselves heard when they've got opinions on their favourite titles.

I'm also starting to think of a different way of handling submissions, corrections, etc. While I don't want things to descend into a free-for-all in terms of things people write immediately appearing front and centre (trolls are a perpetual pain in the internet's collective neck), there's certainly room for some tweaks, and places where people can comment on entries or discuss them in a more open way. There's also a balance to be struck between my desire to proof-read what goes online, contributors' desire to get things online in a timely fashion, and the fact that I'm just one man. Sadly I don't have enough time to do all the development stuff and check submissions at a reasonable pace - if I'm getting one thing done, 3 other jobs are building up!

Anyway, enough rambling, not least as this will be read by very few people. :-) But if you've made it this far, thank you, and also please let me know your thoughts! Please contact me here and feel free to say what currently works, what doesn't work, what you'd change, what you'd keep the same, etc. Anything from features to design - visually especially, I need all the help I can get in terms of moving things beyond 'functional'. Can't guarantee what will stick and what won't, but I'd appreciate any and all input. Thanks in advance!

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