After nearly a decade as arguably China’s favorite Hollywood film franchise, Marvel has seen its last seven Hollywood tentpoles go unreleased in the country. More significant for Disney, however, is the fact that Thor is far from the only Marvel hero to face China’s censors’ wrath. Thor: Ragnarok earned $112 million in China back in 2017, so losing the Middle Kingdom market certainly will ding Love and Thunder’s worldwide sales total. Thor 4 is similarly believed to be stuck in China’s censorship process because of some brief LGBTQ moments, including suggestions that the character Valkyrie (played by Tessa Thompson) is bisexual and that the character Korg is gay. In Lightyear’s case, a same-gender kiss involving the character Hawthorne (voiced by Uzo Aduba) and her partner was believed to have forestalled any chance of release in China, where LGBTQ storytelling is mostly banned from screens big and small (the movie also was banned in the Middle East, Malaysia and Indonesia). Want EARLY access to our videos, uploads, and movie/script reviews? Members get them FIRST! Follow this link to our Discussion Forum.Īnd be sure to check out our Notes Service, where I give my detailed thoughts and suggestions on your script.Thor’s Future After the 'Love and Thunder' Post-Credit Scenesīeijing’s censors never explain nor comment publicly on their decisions, but industry participants inside and outside of China scrutinize such moves carefully and back-channel with authorities to ascertain where the lines are drawn. Oh, and one final thing: I have to give Dobbs credit for not overtly going with a “ they were dead all along!” twist, which he so easily could have given the castle’s nature as a purgatory of sorts. That and the margins being gigantic, and the writing not even getting close to the bottom of the page were things that slightly irritated me during my read. If anything bothered me formatting wise, it was the seemingly random choices of when to indent lines and when not to. It did get a bit tiresome in places, especially towards the end during the big chase scene, but other than that it was perfectly fine by me.

For the most part it works here, describing the next weird thing that happens in glorious detail. It’s there that they learn of a way out and begin their journey towards the exit, followed by a mad dash to escape at the ending.Īlso, it’s worth mentioning that the script is very wordy and descriptive, which is rare these days. They explore the castle for a while before getting clued in as to what’s going on by a helpful ghost. From there on there are roughly three segments. They reach the castle by page twenty, which isn’t bad at all. For example, after a brief teaser giving a glimpse at the overall weirdness of the story, the scenes aboard the ship are relatively short and set up the characters very efficiently before the torpedo hits and they end up in the lifeboat. It moves at a very brisk pace, only letting up at key moments to provide important exposition, which is all well handled and never distracting. It’s more built around shuttling the reader from set piece to set piece, and it’s very effective at doing so.

Writer: Lem Dobbs, best known for Alex Proyas’ Dark City, Stephen Soderbergh’s The Limey, as well as couple of other Soderbergh films.īackground: I wasn’t able to find much out regarding this one, but it seems like the project was on track at Fox for a while in the mid 1980s with Sidney Furie set to direct, only for the main executive supporting it to leave the studio, casting the film into limbo (pardon the pun).Īlright, let’s see how this one stacks up.ġ) Plot Structure/Writing Style: This doesn’t really follow any sort of traditional structure, and the act breaks aren’t immediately obvious. Also, the castle is getting shut down for good by sunrise, so they must find their way out before the place is destroyed with them in it. After contending with its supernatural inhabitants for a spell, they discover that the the castle is a purgatory of sorts designed to hold souls that got lost on their way to the afterlife. Plot: After surviving a shipwreck during WWI, five castaways find themselves in a castle where nothing at all seems to be normal. So I’m back again, this time reviewing a somewhat well known unproduced script. An excerpt from SK’s script review for The Marvel of the Haunted Castle which will be available 04/28/19:

Castle limbo marvel