Fanboys Anonymous

Welcome to another edition of WEEK IN GEEK here at Fanboys Anonymous—a rundown of some of the events, news and stories that went down over the past few days in the geek culture spectrum.


Here are some of the topics I felt like voicing my opinions about:

Tony Stark Will Return (Kind of) in Black Widow

It was revealed in a somewhat casual manner that Robert Downey Jr would be reprising the role of Tony Stark for Black Widow in what we can assume will be a cameo. This is because the movie is set after Civil War and before Infinity War, so he would naturally be alive.

Very cool. I hate the idea that they did this movie now, rather than before Infinity War came out, but if they're going to do it, they at least needed to do it right and not pretend like it's a post-Endgame type scenario, and this will go a long way in reminding people that it's of a different time frame.

Jurassic World: Battle at Big Rock

Very interesting that they decided to do this short. People don't do shorts. Maybe they're looking for an Oscar to drive up interest before the third film? Maybe they just really, really liked this idea and figured "screw it, let's do a short instead of trying to make a whole movie out of this" or something?

Realistically, this couldn't have been a long movie unless they padded out the whole idea of a new family and all, which would have been a little too much like Jurassic World. It isn't worth all that just to set up and pay off a little girl using a crossbow.

But I did like the footage in the credits of the dinosaurs showing up in regular spots throughout the world. Very cool way to ease into the next movie.

Peacock

NBC will (of course) have its own streaming service, which will be named Peacock. They plan on doing reboots of a bunch of shows like Saved By the Bell and The Office, because these past few years have shown that executives have no ideas other than to redo things that were done before.

They also want to rip off the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe by trying to tie different TV shows together to make an "NBC Comedy Universe"...which can't possibly work out well. Even though plenty of shows used to be connected by backdoor pilots and everything, and that's worked a lot in the past, that was a different structure than what the MCU brings to the table. They can't just have Brooklyn Nine-Nine cross over with A.P. Bio and say "that'll work, because Captain America and Iron Man did."