I think Phantom will be significantly less impressive on the big screen, because you always see big, sweeping scenes like that in the movie, whereas when you see Phantom in the theater it's unbelievable impressive because they did all that on a stage, right in front of your eyes.

Everything I've seen and heard of the filmed Phantom leads me to believe that it will suck enourmously.

Everything that makes the show what it is is expressed via stagecraft, emphasis on stage. It could theoretically be adapted for the screen, but that's not what they're doing -- note Harold Prince's name in the production credits. They've taken a deeply intrinsically theatrical show and filmed it. It's going to feel wrong on every level possible.

The wrongness of casting a fucking model to play the Phantom himself (who, if the trailer is any indication, can't even fucking sing) needs no explanation.

(Signed, Too Old To Really Care About Any Of This, But When Has That Ever Stopped Me Before?)

I'm reading this IMDB snippet on His Dark Materials, and I agree that it would be pretty unsellable on a large scale with the anti-religious bent.

Fans of the Philip Pullman novel His Dark Materials have expressed outrage over news that director-screenwriter Chris Weitz (American Pie) has removed references to God and the Catholic church in the movie. Weitz told a website set up by fans of the novel, bridgetothestars.net, that New Line Cinema, the company producing the film, has "expressed worry about the possibility of perceived anti-religiosity." He said that the studio had told him that if the references remained, the project would become "unviable financially." He remarked that he had discussed the matter with Pullman, who had told him that the role of the Authority (God) in his book, could be transformed into "any arbitrary establishment that curtails the freedom of the individual." The religious villains in the film, he said, "may appear in more subtle guises." He added: "you will probably not hear of the 'Church.'" One fan posted a message on the website calling the changes a "blatant cop-out to the Bible Belt of America."

It is quite possible to read that as having New Line as the Authority, isn't it?

That tickles me.

The wrongness of casting a fucking model to play the Phantom himself (who, if the trailer is any indication, can't even fucking sing) needs no explanation.

But will his costume have fake nipples and a codpiece? This is Schumacher we're talking about after all, right?

(who, if the trailer is any indication, can't even fucking sing)

And, y'know, there's no reason not to put a little movie magic in here.

But will his costume have fake nipples and a codpiece?

Oh, I hope it does. But then, I'm a firm believer in crashing and burning with style.

I'm with Jessica on the concern about Gerard Butler's Phantom singing. Truth to tell, I have an unwholesome crush on GB and don't want to have it crushed under my heel.

And ita, I really want to see Elektra too...I guess I'm just full of concern about dashed expectations today.

::ratcheting down the yearn-o-meter::

Gerard Butler is/was a model?

Everything I've seen and heard of the filmed Phantom leads me to believe that it will suck enourmously.

I'm still going to go see it. Over-the-top cheese with pretty costumes will almost always get me into a movie theatre.

t hops on the Jilli train

t toots the black silk whistle

I went to see Blade: Trinity last night. Since there's an old adage about not saying anything if you can't say something nice, I'll grant that the explosions were neat, the vampire pomeranian was hilarious, and Dominic Purcell wasn't nearly as awful as I'd feared .

That said, the title role could have been played by a video store stand-up cutout of Wesley Snipes in the non-fight scenes and no one would have known the difference.

Jessica Biel has a promising career ahead of her as a stuntwoman. As an actress, not so much.

While I like Ryan Reynolds and appreciate that he packed on 30 pounds of extra muscle while simultaneously wearing pants sufficiently low-slung that we could verify his natural hair color, his running comedic commentary got old fast.

Kris Kristofferson, Callum Keith Rennie, and Natasha Lyonne were criminally underused.

Unfortunately, Triple H was not.

I applaud the choice of Parker Posey as one of the villains, saving $ on whitening makeup and the CGI to make her character look like a walking skeleton. But with all the stunt training everyone got, couldn't someone have taught her how to speak around prosthetic fangs? it's hard to be intimidated by a villain who sounds like Sylvester from the Warner Bros. cartoons. Ask Tweety.

Why bother identifying the Big Bad as Dracula if you're then going to contradict his origin, call him something else, and hire an actor who can only speak modern colloquial English with no accent? For that matter, why identify him as a vampire at all, since he seemed to share no common traits with any of the vampires we've seen in the Blade setting?

To sum up, the Blade trilogy was best in its opening moments at the Blood Bath rave to the sound of the Pump panel "Confusion" remix, and has been on a steady downward curve from the instant that sequence ended.