Alternate Wikipedia Infoboxes VI (Do Not Post Current Politics or Political Figures Here)
- Status
Yep, born between 1840 and 1861 (with two sets of twins, the second of which nearly ended with a death)
Macrovison Armada is a game that was originally created by Casey Long as an adaption of the pen-and-paper game Battleship and was very loosely based the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585-1604. It was later turned into a standard Macrovision game included with all Macrovision computers, alongside Solitaire (Which includes Klondike, Spider, Hearts, FreeCell, and Churchill), Ancient Chess (Which contains Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, and the Royal Game of Ur), and The Oregon Trail.
Armada has the player trying to hit 5 ships hidden by the computer. The Galleon (three hits), the Caravel (four hits), the Patache (two hits), and the Pinaza (1 hits). The game will randomize the location and types of ships for each game, with an exclusion of the Pinaza which will only have one no matter the game. The way the player wins is to sink all ships on the map. The player is granted higher points based on how fast the player can sink all of the ships. The timer is shown on the rights and the number of ships sunk is shown on the left. Though, there was a glitch that wouldn't show the missed marks during the game which was very common on the PacificOS Tranquility systems. This was fixed on later operating systems, but that version is the one that sticks in most people's popular culture memories.
(The Infobox thread is dead! Long live the Infobox thread!
I wanted to make something for the occasion, and thus created an alternate replacement of Minesweeper with Battleship. Plus, it's fun to have that unique operating system stuff as shown in the box itself. The green and brown is something I absolutely love. )
So this is basically Battleship by MB?
Macrovison Armada is a game that was originally created by Casey Long as an adaption of the pen-and-paper game Battleship and was very loosely based the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585-1604. It was later turned into a standard Macrovision game included with all Macrovision computers, alongside Solitaire (Which includes Klondike, Spider, Hearts, FreeCell, and Churchill), Ancient Chess (Which contains Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, and the Royal Game of Ur), and The Oregon Trail.
Armada has the player trying to hit 5 ships hidden by the computer. The Galleon (three hits), the Caravel (four hits), the Patache (two hits), and the Pinaza (1 hits). The game will randomize the location and types of ships for each game, with an exclusion of the Pinaza which will only have one no matter the game. The way the player wins is to sink all ships on the map. The player is granted higher points based on how fast the player can sink all of the ships. The timer is shown on the rights and the number of ships sunk is shown on the left. Though, there was a glitch that wouldn't show the missed marks during the game which was very common on the PacificOS Tranquility systems. This was fixed on later operating systems, but that version is the one that sticks in most people's popular culture memories.
(The Infobox thread is dead! Long live the Infobox thread!
I wanted to make something for the occasion, and thus created an alternate replacement of Minesweeper with Battleship. Plus, it's fun to have that unique operating system stuff as shown in the box itself. The green and brown is something I absolutely love. )
If William Henry Harrison was smart and wore warm clothing to his inauguration.
Minor quibble, did he suddenly stop being a Whig when he became President?
With Allied support and supply, Polish forces were able to gain control of most of central Warsaw and establish radio contact with Soviet forces. On 4 August, German forces stopped their retreat and started reinforcing Warsaw. On the same day SS General Erich von dem Bach was appointed commander of all the forces employed against the Uprising. On 5 August forces under command of Heinz Reinefarth started their advance toward the main East-West communication line of Jerusalem Avenue. Their advance was halted, but the regiments began carrying out Heinrich Himmler's orders: behind the lines, special SS, police and Wehrmacht groups went from house to house, shooting the inhabitants regardless of age or gender and burning their bodies. Estimates of civlian casualties range from 20 to 50 thousands or even as high as 100
Despite loss of Wola, Polish resistance strengthened and managed to liberate Gęsiówka camp and free 350 Jews. On 7 August German forces were strengthened by the arrival of tanks using civilians as human shields. After two days of heavy fighting they managed to bisect Wola and reach Bankowy Square. However, by then the net of barricades, street fortifications, and tank obstacles were already well-prepared; both sides reached a stalemate, with heavy house-to-house fighting. With Battle of Radzymin still underway, and Soviet forces being unable to relieve Polish positions stalemate ensued, until arrival of Polish paratroopers from 1st Independent Brigade, and Soviet crossing of Vistula River.
Succesful liberation of Warsaw led to Polish-Soviet advance into rest of Poland, during which underground forces liberated areas either right before or during Soviet advance in cooperation with the Red Army. After negotiations with Stalin and communists, Polish government-in-exile returned to the country and
After the War, Polish borders were shifted to the West (map) with Soviet Union taking former Eastern Poland, and Poland being recompensated with lands taken from Germany (which unkowingly was agreed upon already during negotiations with Soviet Union, as price for cooperation with Home Army). In 1946 parliamentary elections were held in Poland, with Soviet Union hoping to take control of Poland by victory of Soviet-backed communists. Elections however were won by agrarian PSL of Stanisław Mikołajczyk, as Prime Minister Sikorski and communists were blamed for giving up eastern part of the country to the Soviet Union. Shortly before elections was scheduled return of Polish Armed Forces from the West, which was credited with preventing usage of military to falsify elections by communists in government (including Minister of National Defence, Michał-Rola Żymierski) in their favor.
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Minor quibble, did he suddenly stop being a Whig when he became President?
I forgot to edit that.
Here's something of an FDR/New Deal wank
In the mid 1930s, FDR would run into conflict with the Supreme Court. Of the nine justices, three - the so-called "three musketeers": Brandeis, Cardozo, and Stone - generally supported the agenda of the New Deal, but 4 justices - the so-called "four horsemen": Butler, McReynolds, Sutherland, and Van Devanter - generally stood against FDR and the New Deal, while the other two justices, Roberts and Hughes, tended to be swing justices, with Hughes often siding with the liberals but Roberts often siding with the conservatives
The makeup of the Supreme Court was dramatically altered on March 9, 1936, when a random act of tragedy struck - while the two justices were descending a steep flight of stairs, McReynolds slipped on a patch of ice, and in a reflexive, unthinking moment grabbed at Butler, causing him to slip as well. In the ensuing fall, both justices tragically broke their necks and died. As a result, FDR was able to nominate two liberal justices, which shifted the court from a conservative-leaning makeup to a solidly liberal makeup, with 5 liberal justices, 2 swing justices, and 2 conservatives
Going into the 1936 elections, there had been some speculaton that the nomination might go to a moderate to liberal Republican like William Borah or Alf Landon. But in the end, and perhaps aided to some extent by a burst in conservative energy in reaction to the shift in the Supreme Court, it was the staunchly conservative Lester Dickinson, Senator from Iowa and strong and early critic of the New Deal, who after a tumultuous convention managed to win the nomination
Dickinson's staunch conservatism and criticism of the popular FDR and New Deal was very unpopular with the public, and helped drag down the Republican Party as a whole
In the Presidential election, FDR won all but two states, just narrowly losing Maine and Vermont, and winning by a margin of 15 million votes. In the House, the Democrats, Progressives, and Farmer-Labor made gains, pushing the Republican Party to slightly below 10% of the total seats in the House. The Republicans saw similar losses in the Senate, having just over 10% of the Senate after the election. With sizable majorities, FDR and the Democrats, along with their Progressive and Farmer-Labor allies, were poised to defend the New Deal and expand on it as well
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In OTL, one of the issues the Dems ran into after the 1936 elections was the court packing scheme, which ran into public opinion issues and also divided the Democratic Party, empowering not just the GOP but also driving a wedge between the more liberal and more moderate to conservative factions of the Democratic Party. This allowed for the "conservative coalition" between Republicans and the right of the Democrats to largely dominate after the 1938 midterms
Here, instead, FDR simply has no need to push for court packing. Without that causing to/adding to factional issues, the Dems would be able to remain more united and not face the backlash. Furthermore, with the nomination of Dickinson, a conservative, rather than a moderate like Landon who criticized FDR but supported various parts of the New Deal, the Democrats are able to do even better in the 1936 elections, getting more liberal Democrats elected in the north. These factors could lead to the Democrats being able to do more to expand the New Deal, as well as to present a stronger response to the 1937-1938 recession
The Republicans would likely still make some sizable gains in 1938 just because they had lost 4 elections in a row and had little direction possible but upwards at least to some extent, but the stronger performance by the Dems in 1936 as well a more united Democratic Party without the factional strife from court-packing could allow the Dems to limit their losses compared to OTL in 1936. There's also, perhaps, the possibility that the GOP being reduced to such numbers in 1936 could itself make it harder for them as an institution to bounce back, and FDR had considered some ideas to create some sort of liberal party by joining liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans, I don't know if simply having the Dems doing better in 1936 and letting them get more done after due to factors like the Supreme Court could break the GOP enough to let either of those things happen (1936 OTL was still a pretty crushing defeat for the GOP, being the 4th loss in a row) but maybe it could at least lead to those things being more likely down the line
_________________________________________________________________________________
And here's a bigger version of the maps (for the House and Senate, the Presidential map is the same as OTL since the GOP won the only two states they won OTL by such a large margin that this scenario has them still narrowly winning them)
In the mid 1930s, FDR would run into conflict with the Supreme Court. Of the nine justices, three - the so-called "three musketeers": Brandeis, Cardozo, and Stone - generally supported the agenda of the New Deal, but 4 justices - the so-called "four horsemen": Butler, McReynolds, Sutherland, and Van Devanter - generally stood against FDR and the New Deal, while the other two justices, Roberts and Hughes, tended to be swing justices, with Hughes often siding with the liberals but Roberts often siding with the conservatives
The makeup of the Supreme Court was dramatically altered on March 9, 1936, when a random act of tragedy struck - while the two justices were descending a steep flight of stairs, McReynolds slipped on a patch of ice, and in a reflexive, unthinking moment grabbed at Butler, causing him to slip as well. In the ensuing fall, both justices tragically broke their necks and died. As a result, FDR was able to nominate two liberal justices, which shifted the court from a conservative-leaning makeup to a solidly liberal makeup, with 5 liberal justices, 2 swing justices, and 2 conservatives
Going into the 1936 elections, there had been some speculaton that the nomination might go to a moderate to liberal Republican like William Borah or Alf Landon. But in the end, and perhaps aided to some extent by a burst in conservative energy in reaction to the shift in the Supreme Court, it was the staunchly conservative Lester Dickinson, Senator from Iowa and strong and early critic of the New Deal, who after a tumultuous convention managed to win the nomination
Dickinson's staunch conservatism and criticism of the popular FDR and New Deal was very unpopular with the public, and helped drag down the Republican Party as a whole
In the Presidential election, FDR won all but two states, just narrowly losing Maine and Vermont, and winning by a margin of 15 million votes. In the House, the Democrats, Progressives, and Farmer-Labor made gains, pushing the Republican Party to slightly below 10% of the total seats in the House. The Republicans saw similar losses in the Senate, having just over 10% of the Senate after the election. With sizable majorities, FDR and the Democrats, along with their Progressive and Farmer-Labor allies, were poised to defend the New Deal and expand on it as well
_________________________________________________________________________________
In OTL, one of the issues the Dems ran into after the 1936 elections was the court packing scheme, which ran into public opinion issues and also divided the Democratic Party, empowering not just the GOP but also driving a wedge between the more liberal and more moderate to conservative factions of the Democratic Party. This allowed for the "conservative coalition" between Republicans and the right of the Democrats to largely dominate after the 1938 midterms
Here, instead, FDR simply has no need to push for court packing. Without that causing to/adding to factional issues, the Dems would be able to remain more united and not face the backlash. Furthermore, with the nomination of Dickinson, a conservative, rather than a moderate like Landon who criticized FDR but supported various parts of the New Deal, the Democrats are able to do even better in the 1936 elections, getting more liberal Democrats elected in the north. These factors could lead to the Democrats being able to do more to expand the New Deal, as well as to present a stronger response to the 1937-1938 recession
The Republicans would likely still make some sizable gains in 1938 just because they had lost 4 elections in a row and had little direction possible but upwards at least to some extent, but the stronger performance by the Dems in 1936 as well a more united Democratic Party without the factional strife from court-packing could allow the Dems to limit their losses compared to OTL in 1936. There's also, perhaps, the possibility that the GOP being reduced to such numbers in 1936 could itself make it harder for them as an institution to bounce back, and FDR had considered some ideas to create some sort of liberal party by joining liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans, I don't know if simply having the Dems doing better in 1936 and letting them get more done after due to factors like the Supreme Court could break the GOP enough to let either of those things happen (1936 OTL was still a pretty crushing defeat for the GOP, being the 4th loss in a row) but maybe it could at least lead to those things being more likely down the line
_________________________________________________________________________________
And here's a bigger version of the maps (for the House and Senate, the Presidential map is the same as OTL since the GOP won the only two states they won OTL by such a large margin that this scenario has them still narrowly winning them)
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Deleted member 92121
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ME!
Here's a little meta infobox about the infobox threads. * indicates moderator.
DAMN YOU @CrushTheSaboteurs !!! DAMN YOU TO THE "ACCIDENTALY CLICKED EDIT INSTEAD OF PREVIEW PAGE"!!!!!
Also, how did III get to 500 pages in less than 9 months?
III (and IV, somewhat) took place at the height of infobox popularity. Things slowed down for V because the trend faded away, and also because the current politics rule was more strictly enforced, leading to a lot of content being forced to the other thread.
Deleted member 92121
That's interesting. Didn't know that the infoboxes had a hayday.
Background: @Reagent was kind enough to provide me a wikibox for an alternate history scenario that I have been developing largely for my own amusement, and I think that the list is interesting enough to share here. However, devoid of context, said list might feel a little wish fulfillment-y, so I wrote up footnotes describing the studio politics and business machinations that would lead to the production and release of these films, though obviously I am not going to delve into the actual politics of this world.
For reference, here are the actual highest-grossing films of 2015.
1.) To begin with, yes, The Walt Disney Company still purchases Lucasfilm (and, earlier, Marvel Studios) and assumes the reigns of the Star Wars franchise at around the same point that they did in our timeline, as CEO Bob Iger still pursued a strategy of aggressively acquiring properties with appeal to young males, but Disney’s expansion plays out in the context of a somewhat different Hollywood landscape. For instance, George Lucas sold his company only shortly after inking a deal with Netflix to co-produce and stream his long-in-development Star Wars: Underworld series, but more crucially for the first installment in the long-awaited Sequel Trilogy, J. J. Abrams was not seriously considered to helm the project in this timeline. You see, back in early 2007, Abrams decided to focus on adapting Stephen King’s The Dark Tower rather than rebooting Star Trek (that job would fall to another director, but that is another story). The resultant film would be released in 2009 to a… disappointing critical and commercial reaction. After this, Abrams would largely restrict himself to creating television shows and producing other peoples’ movies for a few years. Ergo, when Disney’s acquisition was complete and the time came to select director for Episode VII, newly-installed Lucasfilm president Frank Marshall extended the offer to someone else who was on the shortlist for the job in our world: Guillermo del Toro. Now, this is not an exercise in fan fiction, so I am not going to speculate as to how the storyline of the film would have unfolded differently in world where a different director took the helm (heck, Michael Arndt was not even brought aboard to flesh Lucas’s outline into a full script - that job went to the screenwriting duo of Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz), but if you are interested in that sort of thing, I would suggest reading the thread @Skallagrim posted where he does some fine work reconstructing the evolution of the movie’s plot during the development process. What I can say is that, rather than slavishly attempting to recreate the used future aesthetic of the Original Trilogy, del Toro tries to strike a balance between nostalgia, the unique visuals teased by some of the early Lucasfilm concept art for the Sequel Trilogy, and his own specific stylistic preferences. As a result, when Star Wars: Episode VII - Shadow of the Empire was finally released, the film not only connected with audiences in territories that have traditionally ecstatic about the franchise, such as the United States and Europe, but also received a much stronger reception in countries such as China, where our world’s Sequel Trilogy was undone by a lack of preexisting attachment to the Star Wars brand. This is why the movie grossed noticeably more globally than The Force Awakens. This smashing success helped generate almost unprecedented anticipation for the latter two installments of the Sequel Trilogy, slated to be directed back-to-back by Denis Villeneuve...
(Oh, by the way, Shadow of the Empire was apparently considered as a potential title in our world, the only alternate name that I am aware of, so I am not spinning this out of whole cloth.)
2.) So, it must be noted that the Marvel Cinematic Universe unfolded radically differently in this world. Though Jon Favreau’s Iron Man and Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk were still released in forms largely recognizable to someone from our timeline, things really started to diverge when Marvel Studios secured access to the X-Men in 2010 and Spider-Man in 2011. The former occurred because Fox executives were backed into something of a corner with the property by the early 2010’s. Dismayed by the underperformance of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (worse than in our timeline, as the result of a more competitive 2009 summer blockbuster season), Hugh Jackman finally left the franchise as he very nearly did in our world,, and worse yet, X-Men: First Class was preempted by David S. Goyer’s X-Men Origins: Magneto, which absolutely bombed upon hitting theaters in 2010. So, to bolster flagging public interest in the IP, studio executives struck a deal with Marvel (and, by extension, Disney) not so dissimilar from the one inked between Marvel and Sony in our timeline. This allowed the various X-Men characters to appear in Marvel Studios films and compelled Disney to co-fund movies featuring the mutants (which was arguably to Fox’s benefit anyway, as they had secured the distribution rights to Marvel Cinematic Universe installment through 2012 back in 2008 - Paramount was only ever responsible for Iron Man in this timeline), while Fox retained the right to distribute and retain the lion’s share of the profits from the franchise. Sony, suffering from the effects of a more severe Great Recession generally and the uncertain future of the James Bond franchise in particular, quickly followed Fox’s lead by brokering a similar arrangement in 2011 amidst negotiations that ultimately saw Disney secure the entirety of the merchandising rights to the Spider-Man property. And thus it came to pass that the MCU, which had included a fair number of relatively off-beat, character-focused entries in Phase One, including Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man and Peter Sollett’s Runaways, became bigger, louder, and almost entirely focused on A-list superheroes.
And who better to set the tone for this transition than Zack Snyder? Yes, it was Snyder who was ultimately tapped to helm The Avengers in this world (Joss Whedon would take a pass at the script, but his primary contribution to the franchise would be directing Fox’s rebooted X-Men movies, based heavily on his own Astonishing X-Men arc). After all, he had been considered to direct several Marvel adaptations before, and this was an era when the House of Ideas kept the same batch of filmmakers in contention for multiple projects - remember, Matthew Vaughn was attached to X-Men: The Last Stand and Thor before finally landing with X-Men: First Class (though in this world, he actually does direct Thor). The final result is a movie that was nowhere near as bad as you might expect - producer Kevin Feige’s well-organized machine prevents Snyder from delving too deeply into the grimness and grittiness that defined his DC adaptations in our world, though The Avengers is a bit edgier here, and hews more closely to the style and spirit of The Ultimates. At the end of the day, the prospect of finally seeing Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), the Hulk (Edward Norton), Thor (Daniel Craig), Captain America (Chris Evans), Wolverine (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and Spider-Man (Logan Lerman) team up on the big screen makes this an easy billion-dollar grosser.
This did not prevent a series of massive behind-the-scenes shake-ups from occurring during preproduction for the sequel. Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter, just as tightfisted in this world as he is in ours, thought that The Avengers cost too much money. Snyder refused to nix some of his more ambitious plans for the follow-up, though, and butting heads with Perlmutter became so frustrating that he decided to walk. Salary disputes also caused Edward Norton to quit, and Daniel Craig, who had already reached the end of his three-picture deal with The Avengers and two Thor movies, decided not to re-up. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige used this opportunity to reconfigure what would become Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes into a soft-reboot with a lighter, more colorful tone. Working off the instinct to hire television directors and other offbeat that he has displayed so often in our timeline, Feige tapped the duo of Phil Lord and Chris Miller, primarily known for animation and a series of comedies at Sony, to tackle the project. They drew inspiration from The New Avengers comics, and devised a new lineup accordingly: Iron Man, Captain America, Wolverine and Spider-Man would be joined by Luke Cage (Dwayne Johnson - yes, really), Sentry (Michael Fassbender), and Spider-Woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). However, problems cropped up again once filming commenced. Though the new directors did not oversee nearly as many pricey action sequences as Snyder would have, Lord and Miller encouraged the actors to improvise extensively - in fact, to a degree that began to make Marvel executives nervous. This tendency is apparently what got the two fired from the production of Solo: A Star Wars Story in our world, and the option was briefly considered here, but higher-ups at Disney quickly vetoed the notion. After all, there had already been one high-profile directorial departure from the project (albeit relatively early in the development process), and the studio feared that going through the process again would raise too many alarm bells in the industry. Lord and Miller would keep their jobs, and their gamble on a looser, more freeform approach to the material ultimately paid off. The result was surprisingly good - Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes was a clear improvement over its predecessor, both funnier and somehow deeper than Snyder’s sturm und drang, garnering praise nearly as enthusiastic as that enjoyed by the duo’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in our timeline.
3.) In this timeline, Superman and Batman: World’s Finest was not the first live-action film to feature both of those superheroes. That distinction actually went to George Miller’s Justice League: Mortal, a project that was aborted at nearly the last possible moment in our world but managed to enter production here. Sadly, this would only lead to one of the most shocking tragedies in Hollywood history. On the last day of filming, Miller and much of the film’s core cast would perish in a freak accident. Though Mortal would manage to make the studio’s planned 2009 release date after an intense and delicate post-production process that largely kept Miller’s vision intact, and audience anticipation for an unprecedented gathering of some of DC’s biggest superheroes (including characters such as Wonder Woman, the Flash, and Green Lantern who had never been depicted in the medium up to that point) helped secure the second-biggest global box office haul of the year (after Avatar), Warner Bros. had still been taken back to square one as far as building a cohesive DC cinematic universe was concerned. As such, they redirected their efforts to solo projects for the time being. Aside from closing out Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the biggest priority was reviving the Superman franchise after Bryan Singer’s homage to the Richard Donner movies met a lukewarm reaction in 2006. As in our timeline, the project’s life began as a proposal from Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, and the reboot would contain some of the same plot elements as our world’s Man of Steel, such as a lengthy prologue set on Krypton and the presence of Zod as the villain. However, other commitments prevented Nolan from overseeing Superman: Man of Steel (as the film would eventually be titled) as a producer, and Zack Snyder’s tenure with Marvel Studios meant that he was never a contender to helm this movie. Instead, the job went to… Guillermo del Toro! Yes, he was considered for Man of Steel in our timeline, and his schedule here allowed him to accept the studio’s offer, if barely. In some ways, del Toro modeled his approach to the character as Nolan did with Batman, seeking out an all-star cast. Given that he was already an Oscar winner here, the director did not have a difficult time making this happen. For instance, the role of Jor-El went to Tom Hanks, and Kal-El/Clark Kent/Superman went to one of the other contenders for the director’s chair in both this timeline and our own: Ben Affleck. Yes, plenty of late-night hosts would crack jokes about how he already sort of played the character in Hollywoodland.
Anyway, Superman: Man of Steel would prove much less divisive - and, consequently, much more profitable - than our world’s Man of Steel. However, as he was tapped to launch the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy by Disney, del Toro was forced to vacate the director’s chair for the sequel. Warner Bros. executives asked Affleck if he was interested in directing himself in the follow-up. He was. The decision was made early on to adapt The Death of Superman arc from the comics, which had been a goal for the studio for nearly two decades by that point. In formulating the specific plot, though, Affleck leaned heavily on the broad strokes of his old friend Kevin Smith’s Superman Lives script. Lex Luthor (Bryan Cranston) and Brainiac (Jon Hamm, via motion capture) would serve as the primary antagonists, the latter being responsible for conjuring the monstrous Doomsday into existence. It was not decided until relatively late in the process, though, to expand Batman’s role from a cameo to that of a full-on supporting character. With the persistent success of Marvel Studios lingering in the background, Warner Bros. had relaunched plans for a cinematic universe, and they figured that this movie might as well serve as the springboard. It was for this very reason that some fans would grumble that the Caped Crusader’s presence in a movie where he was one of the title characters felt a little tacked on. Then again, it was all the studio executives could do to convince Christian Bale to return to the role at all. As a basically competent, serviceable Batman/Superman crossover (it probably places somewhere between 75% and 85% on Rotten Tomatoes), Affleck’s movie easily clears a billion dollars worldwide.
4.) Yes, this is a James Bond movie. Would you believe that this was the first film in the series since 2009’s Quantum of Solace? This long gap between installments was primarily the result of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s financial woes, which were made that much worse by this timeline’s sharper financial collapse. Amidst an almost insurmountable pile of debt, the studio filed for bankruptcy about a year earlier here than it did in our timeline, in the back half of 2009. There was speculation that a larger company would buy them out, though many of the most obvious contenders were either busy closing other deals (News Corporation for NBC Universal, TimeWarner for the CBS Corporation, Comcast for Viacom) or else had their own fiscal issues that needed to be sorted out. This crisis left most of the studio’s projects in limbo, including any continuation of the storied Bond franchise. The situation seemed so hopeless that Daniel Craig decided to quietly leave the secret agent role, eventually accepting Marvel’s offer to portray Thor that was apparently extended, and declined, in our world.
Enter Malaysian film producer Riza Aziz. In our timeline, he co-founded Red Granite Pictures, the production company responsible for The Wolf of Wall Street… a movie which would turn out to have been funded with cash illegally siphoned from a Malaysian government-run company, 1MDB. Here, sensing a rare opportunity to seize control of a preexisting Hollywood studio, Aziz dips into his reserve of dirty money and acquires MGM for a steal. A new management team is assembled, one that would include many of the guys who would have founded A24 in our timeline. MGM executives start greenlighting high-profile projects at an astonishing pace, from the passion projects of established auteurs such as Gaspar Noé, Martin Scorsese, and Lars von Trier, subversive experiments from up-and-coming indie directors including Ari Aster, Robert Eggers and the Safdie Brothers, to genre fare including Darren Aronofsky’s RoboCop revival and Roland Emmerich’s long-delayed continuation of (his vision for) Stargate. (In fact, to deflect from serious inquiries about how the recently-bankrupted studio was able to afford all of this, one of Aziz’s first action at MGM’s helm would be to sell his company’s stake in the upcoming Hobbit movies for a substantial sum.) However, the studio’s primary goal was to bring James Bond back to the big screen, and to do so in a way that would generate unprecedented excitement - though, in doing so, Aziz would frequently butt heads with the franchise’s traditional owners at Eon Productions, who would later accuse the producer of attempting to essentially usurp their position.
Enter Quentin Tarantino. In our timeline, the director had worked under the auspices of megaproducers Harvey and Bob Weinstein during their Miramax and TWC years until the long-standing rumors about Harvey’s proclivities boiled over into very public allegations of sexual assault and harrassment in 2017. In this timeline, for reasons that I cannot fully elaborate upon in this thread, an earlier equivalent of the #MeToo movement would rock much of America’s political, business, and media establishment throughout 2009. Ergo, Harvey’s fall would be bumped up by nearly a decade, leading to the total collapse of The Weinstein Company and the eventual buyout of most of their library by Disney, which still owned Miramax (and, in this timeline, would never really get rid of). The domestic distribution rights to Tarantino’s then-upcoming Inglourious Basterds would be picked up by Universal, who also offered to back the director’s next project. Rather than Django Unchained, Tarantino instead goes forward with an Medieval epic featuring graphic violence and a massive cast, including Helen Mirren as a vulgar queen (yes, Tarantino really did consider directing something like this in the early 2010’s, though in our timeline, he dropped the idea in favor of Django). When released in 2012, the movie would perform fairly respectably… though perhaps not quite well enough to justify the massive budget. Studio executives were now growing a little wary about bankrolling the sort of ideas that interested Tarantino, and without the support of his traditional patrons to fall back upon, the director began to seriously consider the prospect of franchise work… which is where his story finally intersected with that of Riza Aziz. Knowing that Tarantino had previously expressed some interest in helming a James Bond movie, Aziz approached the director with just such a proposition, even offering up a fairly high level of creative control (for a major studio tentpole, anyway) in order to entice him. With a great degree of reservation, Tarantino agreed. Though his original plan back in the early 2000’s had been to direct a period adaptation of Casino Royale, the fact that Martin Campbell had already gotten there less than a decade beforehand made that idea redundant. Ergo, Tarantino used a different early Bond novel as the film’s basis: Thunderball. To emphasize that this would not be a straight remake of either the 1965 Bond movie or the non-Eon Never Say Never Again, Tarantino repurposed the title that producer Kevin McClory had planned to use when he tried to bring the story to the screen again in the 1990’s, Warhead 2000 AD, though the exact year was updated to the time of release. The studio insisted on a young, generic, flavor-of-the-moment British actor as the secret agent (think someone like Tom Hardy or Tom Hiddleston, though probably not either of them specifically), but Tarantino was otherwise able to hire whoever he pleased for the cast and crew - Kurt Russell as Felix Leiter, Tim Roth as Blofeld, Sacha Baron Cohen as Emilio Largo (all actors that the director has worked with or attempted to work with in our timeline, though Baron Cohen had to drop out of Django Unchained). Ennio Morricone was brought aboard to compose the score, just as he did for The Hateful Eight historically, and R&B artist Frank Ocean recorded the theme song, winning an Oscar for his effort (in our timeline, Ocean had contributed a song to the soundtrack for Django Unchained that was was ultimately cut from the film). Warhead 2015 AD was released to glowing reviews, easily becoming the biggest hit of not only Tarantino’s career, but also the revitalized, post-bankruptcy MGM. Of course, Riza Aziz’s house of cards would come crashing down not long afterwards, but that is a story for another time…
5.) Fairly straightforward, as I felt that this list would not be realistic without at least one animated family film. An adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story had been in the works at Pixar off-and-on during the late 2000’s and early 2010’s, so it would not be much of a stretch for this project to come to fruition instead of Inside Out. Definitely a solid entry in the studio’s filmography.
6.) Why is this film released under the banner of Disney as opposed to Fox? Well, keep in mind that the aforementioned deal between the two studios to essentially share the X-Men between the two of them only applied to those characters, not the other Marvel properties that Fox held the film rights for: Daredevil and Fantastic Four. In our timeline, the licenses that Fox held to those characters were due to expire in the early 2010’s, but Marvel offered to let them hold onto Daredevil in exchange for the Fantastic Four, or at least Galactus and Silver Surfer. This deal was rejected, which directly precipitated both Josh Trank’s disastrous Fantastic Four and Marvel’s Daredevil on Netflix. When a similar arrangement is proposed here, though, Fox executives accept, not only because of the better working relationship between the studios, but also because their television series featuring the Punisher had turned out to be a massive hit for FX (such a series was considered in our timeline, though in this timeline the project was developed by veterans of The Shield rather than the showrunner of Criminal Minds). The studio now envisioned Daredevil as the subject of a complementary primetime action-drama series after being introduced on The Punisher, and planned to hire Joe Carnahan to write and direct the pilot based on the strength of his earlier pitch for a gritty crime film adaptation of the character.* To that end, Fox simply asked to swap the television rights to Daredevil for the movie rights to the Fantastic Four.
With Marvel’s First Family back in the company fold, Kevin Feige and his compatriots were eager to get the ball rolling on a film featuring the characters as quickly as possible, primarily in order to introduce Galactus as the overarching villain for several future Marvel Cinematic Universe entries - without Whedon at the helm, Thanos was not introduced in The Avengers, eventually being relegated to supporting antagonist status in Guardians of the Galaxy: Annihilation. As for Galactus, I do find it interesting that the folks at Marvel were so eager to work out a deal with Fox to gain access to this character specifically in the early 2010’s, so it is reasonable to speculate that his arrival on Earth was the original long-term goal for the Avengers movies before a loose adaptation of The Infinity Gauntlet and The Infinity War was settled upon after rights issues rendered the previous contingency impossible. In any event, director Brad Bird, who had forged his career at Pixar with movies such as The Incredibles, was brought aboard to spearhead the project, imbuing the finished product with an epic scope in addition to a definite Art Deco/atompunk sensibility. The result was another solid box office win for Marvel Studios, turning a nice profit while setting up several important plot threads for the wider franchise.
*This is OTL, but the link is not embedding for some reason, so if you want to read more...
One-time Daredevil director Joe Carnahan reveals his plan for an aborted trilogy
Sure, we’re psyched that Marvel got the rights to Daredevil back for that upcoming Netflix series — but we almost got something very, very different.
www.syfy.com
7.) Another Marvel movie in the top ten global box office for 2015? Well, just keep in mind that despite the interlocking series of arrangements that allow most of these characters to appear in the same fictional universe, the film rights are still dispersed between several different studios, creating something of superhero movies in the middle part of the decade… but now it just feels as though I am talking about our timeline. Anyway, as in our world, Sony executives had been eager to get this supervillain team-up off the ground, and the fact that they had inked a rights-sharing agreement with Marvel at an earlier point here gave them a solid footing to do so. The first two movies in their Ultimate Spider-Man series, directed by Joe and Anthony Russo and starring Logan Lerman, had been hits for the studio (more so than the Amazing Spider-Man movies had been historically) in no small part due to their association with the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe via Peter Parker’s appearance in The Avengers. As in our world, Sony maintained the right to produce their own Spider-Man spin-off movies without the direct involvement of Marvel Studios or Disney, but unlike our world’s deal (or, at least, the first iteration thereof from 2015, according to my understanding), they could also freely use the same version of the Spider-Man character that appeared in the MCU.
Sinister Six was considered an ideal first step for the studio’s parasitic appendage upon the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as the studio could gauge audience reaction toward the various characters and decided which would receive solo films (and, unlike our world, their thunder was not stolen by Warner Bros. getting to the conceptually similar Suicide Squad first). Adam McKay, who had been primarily known for his goofball comedies with Sony but who had also been in the running to direct Ant-Man in our world, and did contribute to that film’s script,* was hired to direct. The plot revolved around Spider-Man’s reluctant collaboration with some of his traditional nemeses in order to capture Venom, and McKay decided to fill out the cast with several A-listers, including Will Smith as Norman Osborne/Green Goblin, Seth Rogen as Otto Octavius/Doctor Octopus, Danny McBride as Flint Marko/Sandman, and Zac Efron (!) as Eddie Brock/Venom - that list bit was especially important, as Josh Trank’s Venom was the next spin-off on Sony slate. Much of the film’s almost predetermined success can probably be attributed to the fact that large portions of the final product amounted to a fairly straightforward hangout comedy with extensively improvised interaction between the lead cast - simply put, audiences found the movie very funny. Of course, real fans know that the unrated director’s cut is the definitive version, with all of Danny McBride’s swearing left intact.
*Embedding issues:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/adam-mckay-reveals-changes-he-741980#:~:text=Adam%20McKay%20isn't%20directing,help%20rewrite%20the%20potential%20tentpole
8.) After Batman and Superman, Green Lantern was probably the DC character for whom Warner Bros. spent the most effort developing solo projects during the 2000’s. This process was interrupted by the production of Justice League: Mortal, as well as the tragedy on the set of that film (it was expected that the movie’s success would lead to spin-offs, which were already in various stages of development), meaning that preproduction on this movie would not begin in earnest until substantially later than it did in our timeline - Green Lantern was released in the fourth quarter of 2012 as opposed to the summer of 2011. In order to bolster the project’s footing, the studio gauged Tom Cruise’s interest in the role of Hal Jordan (that he would agree to star in Universal’s The Mummy means that the man is not inherently opposed to franchise work). Cruise agreed, on the stipulation that the director’s chair be given to longtime collaborator Christopher McQuarrie. Warner Bros. executives were happy to oblige, and thus they all set out to film a fairly faithful adaptation of the "Secret Origin" story arc.
The result was a reasonably successful film, certainly in comparison to the Martin Campbell/Reynolds box office bomb of our world, so a sequel was naturally pursued. Warner Bros. would return to the Geoff Johns well, using his "Sinestro Corps War" as the basis for the next film, therefore introducing John Stewart (Idris Elba) and Guy Gardner (John Gallagher, Jr.) on the big screen. Not much more to say about this one - this was a perfectly serviceable superhero flick that, alongside Superman and Batman: World’s Finest, represented another step in the path to the studio’s second attempt to launch a Justice League franchise.
9.) So, before we get into this one, let me give you a quick recap of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s post-gubernatorial entertainment career. He actually stepped down from elected office in early 2009 because… well, we probably should not get into that here, but just know that it was not scandalous in a way that negatively reflected upon him. Just know that Schwarzenegger was able to start snagging significant roles again about two years before he did historically. He gained relevance to a new generation of fans by appearing as Odin in Matthew Vaughn’s Thor movies, then returned to the Terminator series courtesy of Universal Pictures and director Rian Johnson. That movie was more critically and commercially successful than our timeline’s Terminator Genisys by a substantial margin, which piqued the studio’s interest in funding Schwarzenegger’s return to his other signature character: Conan the Barbarian. Such a project had been considered by Universal in the mid-2010’s, but in this timeline, they actually go through with it. James Mangold was hired to helm the long-awaited sequel, and original director John Milius was even brought back to contribute to the script.
Now, you may have a hard time believing this, but Legend of Conan was really, really good. All of the stars happened to align to make this shockingly, surprisingly, almost unnecessarily good. Think of it as this timeline’s counterpart to Mad Max: Fury Road (a very well-received continuation of a classic 80’s action franchise) and Mangold’s Logan (the final adventure of a beloved character portrayed by the actor most closely associated with him) rolled into one. I even modeled the box office performance of this movie after that of Logan, which would be good for a spot among the top box office draws of the year in this scenario. And as with Fury Road, this movie defied all expectations by securing a presence at the Oscars - nominations for Best Picture, Best Director (Mangold), and Best Actor in a Leading Role (Schwarzenegger), among others, and even winning the Academy Award for Best Original Score for Jóhann Jóhannson and Bobby Krlic (in fact, it was something of an upset that they beat out Ennio Morricone’s work on Warhead 2015 AD). Implausible? On paper, maybe, but remember that this was the year in our world that Sylvester Stallone was nominated for his Rocky Balboa reprisal in Creed. Sometimes these things actually happen.
10.) Buckle up, because this film’s development history is rather complicated. So, the first thing to know is that Comcast is not able to ink a deal to purchase a majority share of NBC Universal from General Electric in this timeline’s 2009. Rather, it is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation that makes this acquisition, as was apparently considered, though given that he already owned the Fox broadcast network and Fox News, the NBC broadcast network (not to be confused with the company’s television production arm) is sold to Hearst Communications and MSNBC is sold to Microsoft (and rebrand as “Microsoft News”) in order to alleviate antitrust concerns. (This corporate merger would actually create an interesting allohistorical version of The Tonight Show conflict, as Leno actually left NBC to set up a new show at Fox in this timeline before the purchase was announced… meaning that he and O’Brien would remain under one corporate roof anyway). But I am straying off topic. The point is that executives at Comcast, still eager to get into the content production business in order to build synergy with their telecommunications business, are able to nab Viacom as something of a consolation prize. You see, the more severe Great Recession leads to a virtual collapse of Sumner Redstone’s media empire at around this time - indeed, TimeWarner exploits the opportunity as well, buying the CBS Corporation primarily to establish their own foothold in broadcast television. Now in charge of Paramount Pictures and cable networks such as Comedy Central and MTV, Viacom’s owners begin busily pumping out high-profile film and television projects. Installed as the new head of Paramount, Kathleen Kennedy overseas the revitalization of the Star Trek and Transformers franchises (Revenge of the Fallen actually somewhat underperformed in the summer of 2009, given the stiff competition from Justice League: Mortal, so Michael Bay leaves after that installment), as well as heralding new franchises with Jon Favreau’s John Carter of Mars*, Ang Lee’s The Last Airbender, and a surprisingly divisive Hasbro Cinematic Universe.
However, in the eyes of many a cinephile, Comcast/Viacom’s most interesting move was ushering a return of The Godfather series. Hey, if you want high-profile content to play endlessly in an astonishingly censored, bowdlerized form on your newly-acquired web of cable channels… well, it was hard to beat The Godfather, right? I am honestly surprised that Paramount has yet to seriously try something like this in real life, to tell you the truth. It is not as though Francis Ford Coppola has got much better going on. But I digress. A fourth entry in the franchise had actually been worked on in the 1990’s, but was dropped after author Mario Puzo passed away. Here, a crack team of some of the most acclaimed screenwriters and novelists in America is brought together to complete the story, which would function as both a prequel and sequel to the events of the third film (and does not turn out exactly the same as The Family Corleone continuation novel) after Coppola is finally convinced to return. Next, the studio approached an actor who had been linked to the first iteration of the project over a decade beforehand: Leonardo DiCaprio. Once he was brought aboard, everything else fell into place - De Niro, Pacino, and Duvall also signed on, and prominent supporting roles were doled out to other veterans of the gangster genre, from Joe Pesci to a surviving James Gandolfini. The other gimmick was to extensively and experimentally use CGI to de-age the older actors in a manner similar to Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman in our timeline. Okay, but was the movie any good? Well… it was not perfect, but if you are a fan of gangster movies, you would probably find much to enjoy. In any case, the studio backed a massive awards push to secure DiCaprio an Oscar for his performance. In fact, if you doubt that this sort of movie could earn more than $600 million worth of tickets, consider this: The Revenant, our timeline’s 2015 Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle that finally managed to get the man his Oscar gold, actually grossed around $533 million in an impressive awards season run. If we use that as our starting point here, I think that the additional draw of a long-awaited Godfather sequel that reassembles much of the original cast could plausibly account for roughly another $70 million.
*Again, issues with embedding:
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/jon_favreau_reveals_how_h
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Background: @Reagent was kind enough to provide me a wikibox for an alternate history scenario that I have been developing largely for my own amusement, and I think that the list is interesting enough to share here. However, devoid of context, said list might feel a little wish fulfillment-y, so I wrote up footnotes describing the studio politics and business machinations that would lead to the production and release of these films, though obviously I am not going to delve into the actual politics of this world.
For reference, here are the actual highest-grossing films of 2015.
1.) To begin with, yes, The Walt Disney Company still purchases Lucasfilm (and, earlier, Marvel Studios) and assumes the reigns of the Star Wars franchise at around the same point that they did in our timeline, as CEO Bob Iger still pursued a strategy of aggressively acquiring properties with appeal to young males, but Disney’s expansion plays out in the context of a somewhat different Hollywood landscape. For instance, George Lucas sold his company only shortly after inking a deal with Netflix to co-produce and stream his long-in-development Star Wars: Underworld series, but more crucially for the first installment in the long-awaited Sequel Trilogy, J. J. Abrams was not seriously considered to helm the project in this timeline. You see, back in early 2007, Abrams decided to focus on adapting Stephen King’s The Dark Tower rather than rebooting Star Trek (that job would fall to another director, but that is another story). The resultant film would be released in 2009 to a… disappointing critical and commercial reaction. After this, Abrams would largely restrict himself to creating television shows and producing other peoples’ movies for a few years. Ergo, when Disney’s acquisition was complete and the time came to select director for Episode VII, newly-installed Lucasfilm president Frank Marshall extended the offer to someone else who was on the shortlist for the job in our world: Guillermo del Toro. Now, this is not an exercise in fan fiction, so I am not going to speculate as to how the storyline of the film would have unfolded differently in world where a different director took the helm (heck, Michael Arndt was not even brought aboard to flesh Lucas’s outline into a full script - that job went to the screenwriting duo of Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz), but if you are interested in that sort of thing, I would suggest reading the thread @Skallagrim posted where he does some fine work reconstructing the evolution of the movie’s plot during the development process. What I can say is that, rather than slavishly attempting to recreate the used future aesthetic of the Original Trilogy, del Toro tries to strike a balance between nostalgia, the unique visuals teased by some of the early Lucasfilm concept art for the Sequel Trilogy, and his own specific stylistic preferences. As a result, when Star Wars: Episode VII - Shadow of the Empire was finally released, the film not only connected with audiences in territories that have traditionally ecstatic about the franchise, such as the United States and Europe, but also received a much stronger reception in countries such as China, where our world’s Sequel Trilogy was undone by a lack of preexisting attachment to the Star Wars brand. This is why the movie grossed noticeably more globally than The Force Awakens. This smashing success helped generate almost unprecedented anticipation for the latter two installments of the Sequel Trilogy, slated to be directed back-to-back by Denis Villeneuve...
(Oh, by the way, Shadow of the Empire was apparently considered as a potential title in our world, the only alternate name that I am aware of, so I am not spinning this out of whole cloth.)
2.) So, it must be noted that the Marvel Cinematic Universe unfolded radically differently in this world. Though Jon Favreau’s Iron Man and Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk were still released in forms largely recognizable to someone from our timeline, things really started to diverge when Marvel Studios secured access to the X-Men in 2010 and Spider-Man in 2011. The former occurred because Fox executives were backed into something of a corner with the property by the early 2010’s. Dismayed by the underperformance of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (worse than in our timeline, as the result of a more competitive 2009 summer blockbuster season), Hugh Jackman finally left the franchise as he very nearly did in our world,, and worse yet, X-Men: First Class was preempted by David S. Goyer’s X-Men Origins: Magneto, which absolutely bombed upon hitting theaters in 2010. So, to bolster flagging public interest in the IP, studio executives struck a deal with Marvel (and, by extension, Disney) not so dissimilar from the one inked between Marvel and Sony in our timeline. This allowed the various X-Men characters to appear in Marvel Studios films and compelled Disney to co-fund movies featuring the mutants (which was arguably to Fox’s benefit anyway, as they had secured the distribution rights to Marvel Cinematic Universe installment through 2012 back in 2008 - Paramount was only ever responsible for Iron Man in this timeline), while Fox retained the right to distribute and retain the lion’s share of the profits from the franchise. Sony, suffering from the effects of a more severe Great Recession generally and the uncertain future of the James Bond franchise in particular, quickly followed Fox’s lead by brokering a similar arrangement in 2011 amidst negotiations that ultimately saw Disney secure the entirety of the merchandising rights to the Spider-Man property. And thus it came to pass that the MCU, which had included a fair number of relatively off-beat, character-focused entries in Phase One, including Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man and Peter Sollett’s Runaways, became bigger, louder, and almost entirely focused on A-list superheroes.
And who better to set the tone for this transition than Zack Snyder? Yes, it was Snyder who was ultimately tapped to helm The Avengers in this world (Joss Whedon would take a pass at the script, but his primary contribution to the franchise would be directing Fox’s rebooted X-Men movies, based heavily on his own Astonishing X-Men arc). After all, he had been considered to direct several Marvel adaptations before, and this was an era when the House of Ideas kept the same batch of filmmakers in contention for multiple projects - remember, Matthew Vaughn was attached to X-Men: The Last Stand and Thor before finally landing with X-Men: First Class (though in this world, he actually does direct Thor). The final result is a movie that was nowhere near as bad as you might expect - producer Kevin Feige’s well-organized machine prevents Snyder from delving too deeply into the grimness and grittiness that defined his DC adaptations in our world, though The Avengers is a bit edgier here, and hews more closely to the style and spirit of The Ultimates. At the end of the day, the prospect of finally seeing Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), the Hulk (Edward Norton), Thor (Daniel Craig), Captain America (Chris Evans), Wolverine (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and Spider-Man (Logan Lerman) team up on the big screen makes this an easy billion-dollar grosser.
This did not prevent a series of massive behind-the-scenes shake-ups from occurring during preproduction for the sequel. Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter, just as tightfisted in this world as he is in ours, thought that The Avengers cost too much money. Snyder refused to nix some of his more ambitious plans for the follow-up, though, and butting heads with Perlmutter became so frustrating that he decided to walk. Salary disputes also caused Edward Norton to quit, and Daniel Craig, who had already reached the end of his three-picture deal with The Avengers and two Thor movies, decided not to re-up. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige used this opportunity to reconfigure what would become Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes into a soft-reboot with a lighter, more colorful tone. Working off the instinct to hire television directors and other offbeat that he has displayed so often in our timeline, Feige tapped the duo of Phil Lord and Chris Miller, primarily known for animation and a series of comedies at Sony, to tackle the project. They drew inspiration from The New Avengers comics, and devised a new lineup accordingly: Iron Man, Captain America, Wolverine and Spider-Man would be joined by Luke Cage (Dwayne Johnson - yes, really), Sentry (Michael Fassbender), and Spider-Woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). However, problems cropped up again once filming commenced. Though the new directors did not oversee nearly as many pricey action sequences as Snyder would have, Lord and Miller encouraged the actors to improvise extensively - in fact, to a degree that began to make Marvel executives nervous. This tendency is apparently what got the two fired from the production of Solo: A Star Wars Story in our world, and the option was briefly considered here, but higher-ups at Disney quickly vetoed the notion. After all, there had already been one high-profile directorial departure from the project (albeit relatively early in the development process), and the studio feared that going through the process again would raise too many alarm bells in the industry. Lord and Miller would keep their jobs, and their gamble on a looser, more freeform approach to the material ultimately paid off. The result was surprisingly good - Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes was a clear improvement over its predecessor, both funnier and somehow deeper than Snyder’s sturm und drang, garnering praise nearly as enthusiastic as that enjoyed by the duo’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in our timeline.
3.) In this timeline, Superman and Batman: World’s Finest was not the first live-action film to feature both of those superheroes. That distinction actually went to George Miller’s Justice League: Mortal, a project that was aborted at nearly the last possible moment in our world but managed to enter production here. Sadly, this would only lead to one of the most shocking tragedies in Hollywood history. On the last day of filming, Miller and much of the film’s core cast would perish in a freak accident. Though Mortal would manage to make the studio’s planned 2009 release date after an intense and delicate post-production process that largely kept Miller’s vision intact, and audience anticipation for an unprecedented gathering of some of DC’s biggest superheroes (including characters such as Wonder Woman, the Flash, and Green Lantern who had never been depicted in the medium up to that point) helped secure the second-biggest global box office haul of the year (after Avatar), Warner Bros. had still been taken back to square one as far as building a cohesive DC cinematic universe was concerned. As such, they redirected their efforts to solo projects for the time being. Aside from closing out Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the biggest priority was reviving the Superman franchise after Bryan Singer’s homage to the Richard Donner movies met a lukewarm reaction in 2006. As in our timeline, the project’s life began as a proposal from Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, and the reboot would contain some of the same plot elements as our world’s Man of Steel, such as a lengthy prologue set on Krypton and the presence of Zod as the villain. However, other commitments prevented Nolan from overseeing Superman: Man of Steel (as the film would eventually be titled) as a producer, and Zack Snyder’s tenure with Marvel Studios meant that he was never a contender to helm this movie. Instead, the job went to… Guillermo del Toro! Yes, he was considered for Man of Steel in our timeline, and his schedule here allowed him to accept the studio’s offer, if barely. In some ways, del Toro modeled his approach to the character as Nolan did with Batman, seeking out an all-star cast. Given that he was already an Oscar winner here, the director did not have a difficult time making this happen. For instance, the role of Jor-El went to Tom Hanks, and Kal-El/Clark Kent/Superman went to one of the other contenders for the director’s chair in both this timeline and our own: Ben Affleck. Yes, plenty of late-night hosts would crack jokes about how he already sort of played the character in Hollywoodland.
Anyway, Superman: Man of Steel would prove much less divisive - and, consequently, much more profitable - than our world’s Man of Steel. However, as he was tapped to launch the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy by Disney, del Toro was forced to vacate the director’s chair for the sequel. Warner Bros. executives asked Affleck if he was interested in directing himself in the follow-up. He was. The decision was made early on to adapt The Death of Superman arc from the comics, which had been a goal for the studio for nearly two decades by that point. In formulating the specific plot, though, Affleck leaned heavily on the broad strokes of his old friend Kevin Smith’s Superman Lives script. Lex Luthor (Bryan Cranston) and Brainiac (Jon Hamm, via motion capture) would serve as the primary antagonists, the latter being responsible for conjuring the monstrous Doomsday into existence. It was not decided until relatively late in the process, though, to expand Batman’s role from a cameo to that of a full-on supporting character. With the persistent success of Marvel Studios lingering in the background, Warner Bros. had relaunched plans for a cinematic universe, and they figured that this movie might as well serve as the springboard. It was for this very reason that some fans would grumble that the Caped Crusader’s presence in a movie where he was one of the title characters felt a little tacked on. Then again, it was all the studio executives could do to convince Christian Bale to return to the role at all. As a basically competent, serviceable Batman/Superman crossover (it probably places somewhere between 75% and 85% on Rotten Tomatoes), Affleck’s movie easily clears a billion dollars worldwide.
4.) Yes, this is a James Bond movie. Would you believe that this was the first film in the series since 2009’s Quantum of Solace? This long gap between installments was primarily the result of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s financial woes, which were made that much worse by this timeline’s sharper financial collapse. Amidst an almost insurmountable pile of debt, the studio filed for bankruptcy about a year earlier here than it did in our timeline, in the back half of 2009. There was speculation that a larger company would buy them out, though many of the most obvious contenders were either busy closing other deals (News Corporation for NBC Universal, TimeWarner for the CBS Corporation, Comcast for Viacom) or else had their own fiscal issues that needed to be sorted out. This crisis left most of the studio’s projects in limbo, including any continuation of the storied Bond franchise. The situation seemed so hopeless that Daniel Craig decided to quietly leave the secret agent role, eventually accepting Marvel’s offer to portray Thor that was apparently extended, and declined, in our world.
Enter Malaysian film producer Riza Aziz. In our timeline, he co-founded Red Granite Pictures, the production company responsible for The Wolf of Wall Street… a movie which would turn out to have been funded with cash illegally siphoned from a Malaysian government-run company, 1MDB. Here, sensing a rare opportunity to seize control of a preexisting Hollywood studio, Aziz dips into his reserve of dirty money and acquires MGM for a steal. A new management team is assembled, one that would include many of the guys who would have founded A24 in our timeline. MGM executives start greenlighting high-profile projects at an astonishing pace, from the passion projects of established auteurs such as Gaspar Noé, Martin Scorsese, and Lars von Trier, subversive experiments from up-and-coming indie directors including Ari Aster, Robert Eggers and the Safdie Brothers, to genre fare including Darren Aronofsky’s RoboCop revival and Roland Emmerich’s long-delayed continuation of (his vision for) Stargate. (In fact, to deflect from serious inquiries about how the recently-bankrupted studio was able to afford all of this, one of Aziz’s first action at MGM’s helm would be to sell his company’s stake in the upcoming Hobbit movies for a substantial sum.) However, the studio’s primary goal was to bring James Bond back to the big screen, and to do so in a way that would generate unprecedented excitement - though, in doing so, Aziz would frequently butt heads with the franchise’s traditional owners at Eon Productions, who would later accuse the producer of attempting to essentially usurp their position.
Enter Quentin Tarantino. In our timeline, the director had worked under the auspices of megaproducers Harvey and Bob Weinstein during their Miramax and TWC years until the long-standing rumors about Harvey’s proclivities boiled over into very public allegations of sexual assault and harrassment in 2017. In this timeline, for reasons that I cannot fully elaborate upon in this thread, an earlier equivalent of the #MeToo movement would rock much of America’s political, business, and media establishment throughout 2009. Ergo, Harvey’s fall would be bumped up by nearly a decade, leading to the total collapse of The Weinstein Company and the eventual buyout of most of their library by Disney, which still owned Miramax (and, in this timeline, would never really get rid of). The domestic distribution rights to Tarantino’s then-upcoming Inglourious Basterds would be picked up by Universal, who also offered to back the director’s next project. Rather than Django Unchained, Tarantino instead goes forward with an Medieval epic featuring graphic violence and a massive cast, including Helen Mirren as a vulgar queen (yes, Tarantino really did consider directing something like this in the early 2010’s, though in our timeline, he dropped the idea in favor of Django). When released in 2012, the movie would perform fairly respectably… though perhaps not quite well enough to justify the massive budget. Studio executives were now growing a little wary about bankrolling the sort of ideas that interested Tarantino, and without the support of his traditional patrons to fall back upon, the director began to seriously consider the prospect of franchise work… which is where his story finally intersected with that of Riza Aziz. Knowing that Tarantino had previously expressed some interest in helming a James Bond movie, Aziz approached the director with just such a proposition, even offering up a fairly high level of creative control (for a major studio tentpole, anyway) in order to entice him. With a great degree of reservation, Tarantino agreed. Though his original plan back in the early 2000’s had been to direct a period adaptation of Casino Royale, the fact that Martin Campbell had already gotten there less than a decade beforehand made that idea redundant. Ergo, Tarantino used a different early Bond novel as the film’s basis: Thunderball. To emphasize that this would not be a straight remake of either the 1965 Bond movie or the non-Eon Never Say Never Again, Tarantino repurposed the title that producer Kevin McClory had planned to use when he tried to bring the story to the screen again in the 1990’s, Warhead 2000 AD, though the exact year was updated to the time of release. The studio insisted on a young, generic, flavor-of-the-moment British actor as the secret agent (think someone like Tom Hardy or Tom Hiddleston, though probably not either of them specifically), but Tarantino was otherwise able to hire whoever he pleased for the cast and crew - Kurt Russell as Felix Leiter, Tim Roth as Blofeld, Sacha Baron Cohen as Emilio Largo (all actors that the director has worked with or attempted to work with in our timeline, though Baron Cohen had to drop out of Django Unchained). Ennio Morricone was brought aboard to compose the score, just as he did for The Hateful Eight historically, and R&B artist Frank Ocean recorded the theme song, winning an Oscar for his effort (in our timeline, Ocean had contributed a song to the soundtrack for Django Unchained that was was ultimately cut from the film). Warhead 2015 AD was released to glowing reviews, easily becoming the biggest hit of not only Tarantino’s career, but also the revitalized, post-bankruptcy MGM. Of course, Riza Aziz’s house of cards would come crashing down not long afterwards, but that is a story for another time…
5.) Fairly straightforward, as I felt that this list would not be realistic without at least one animated family film. An adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story had been in the works at Pixar off-and-on during the late 2000’s and early 2010’s, so it would not be much of a stretch for this project to come to fruition instead of Inside Out. Definitely a solid entry in the studio’s filmography.
6.) Why is this film released under the banner of Disney as opposed to Fox? Well, keep in mind that the aforementioned deal between the two studios to essentially share the X-Men between the two of them only applied to those characters, not the other Marvel properties that Fox held the film rights for: Daredevil and Fantastic Four. In our timeline, the licenses that Fox held to those characters were due to expire in the early 2010’s, but Marvel offered to let them hold onto Daredevil in exchange for the Fantastic Four, or at least Galactus and Silver Surfer. This deal was rejected, which directly precipitated both Josh Trank’s disastrous Fantastic Four and Marvel’s Daredevil on Netflix. When a similar arrangement is proposed here, though, Fox executives accept, not only because of the better working relationship between the studios, but also because their television series featuring the Punisher had turned out to be a massive hit for FX (such a series was considered in our timeline, though in this timeline the project was developed by veterans of The Shield rather than the showrunner of Criminal Minds). The studio now envisioned Daredevil as the subject of a complementary primetime action-drama series after being introduced on The Punisher, and planned to hire Joe Carnahan to write and direct the pilot based on the strength of his earlier pitch for a gritty crime film adaptation of the character.* To that end, Fox simply asked to swap the television rights to Daredevil for the movie rights to the Fantastic Four.
With Marvel’s First Family back in the company fold, Kevin Feige and his compatriots were eager to get the ball rolling on a film featuring the characters as quickly as possible, primarily in order to introduce Galactus as the overarching villain for several future Marvel Cinematic Universe entries - without Whedon at the helm, Thanos was not introduced in The Avengers, eventually being relegated to supporting antagonist status in Guardians of the Galaxy: Annihilation. As for Galactus, I do find it interesting that the folks at Marvel were so eager to work out a deal with Fox to gain access to this character specifically in the early 2010’s, so it is reasonable to speculate that his arrival on Earth was the original long-term goal for the Avengers movies before a loose adaptation of The Infinity Gauntlet and The Infinity War was settled upon after rights issues rendered the previous contingency impossible. In any event, director Brad Bird, who had forged his career at Pixar with movies such as The Incredibles, was brought aboard to spearhead the project, imbuing the finished product with an epic scope in addition to a definite Art Deco/atompunk sensibility. The result was another solid box office win for Marvel Studios, turning a nice profit while setting up several important plot threads for the wider franchise.
*This is OTL, but the link is not embedding for some reason, so if you want to read more...
One-time Daredevil director Joe Carnahan reveals his plan for an aborted trilogy
Sure, we’re psyched that Marvel got the rights to Daredevil back for that upcoming Netflix series — but we almost got something very, very different.
7.) Another Marvel movie in the top ten global box office for 2015? Well, just keep in mind that despite the interlocking series of arrangements that allow most of these characters to appear in the same fictional universe, the film rights are still dispersed between several different studios, creating something of superhero movies in the middle part of the decade… but now it just feels as though I am talking about our timeline. Anyway, as in our world, Sony executives had been eager to get this supervillain team-up off the ground, and the fact that they had inked a rights-sharing agreement with Marvel at an earlier point here gave them a solid footing to do so. The first two movies in their Ultimate Spider-Man series, directed by Joe and Anthony Russo and starring Logan Lerman, had been hits for the studio (more so than the Amazing Spider-Man movies had been historically) in no small part due to their association with the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe via Peter Parker’s appearance in The Avengers. As in our world, Sony maintained the right to produce their own Spider-Man spin-off movies without the direct involvement of Marvel Studios or Disney, but unlike our world’s deal (or, at least, the first iteration thereof from 2015, according to my understanding), they could also freely use the same version of the Spider-Man character that appeared in the MCU.
Sinister Six was considered an ideal first step for the studio’s parasitic appendage upon the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as the studio could gauge audience reaction toward the various characters and decided which would receive solo films (and, unlike our world, their thunder was not stolen by Warner Bros. getting to the conceptually similar Suicide Squad first). Adam McKay, who had been primarily known for his goofball comedies with Sony but who had also been in the running to direct Ant-Man in our world, and did contribute to that film’s script,* was hired to direct. The plot revolved around Spider-Man’s reluctant collaboration with some of his traditional nemeses in order to capture Venom, and McKay decided to fill out the cast with several A-listers, including Will Smith as Norman Osborne/Green Goblin, Seth Rogen as Otto Octavius/Doctor Octopus, Danny McBride as Flint Marko/Sandman, and Zac Efron (!) as Eddie Brock/Venom - that list bit was especially important, as Josh Trank’s Venom was the next spin-off on Sony slate. Much of the film’s almost predetermined success can probably be attributed to the fact that large portions of the final product amounted to a fairly straightforward hangout comedy with extensively improvised interaction between the lead cast - simply put, audiences found the movie very funny. Of course, real fans know that the unrated director’s cut is the definitive version, with all of Danny McBride’s swearing left intact.
*Embedding issues:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/adam-mckay-reveals-changes-he-741980#:~:text=Adam%20McKay%20isn't%20directing,help%20rewrite%20the%20potential%20tentpole
8.) After Batman and Superman, Green Lantern was probably the DC character for whom Warner Bros. spent the most effort developing solo projects during the 2000’s. This process was interrupted by the production of Justice League: Mortal, as well as the tragedy on the set of that film (it was expected that the movie’s success would lead to spin-offs, which were already in various stages of development), meaning that preproduction on this movie would not begin in earnest until substantially later than it did in our timeline - Green Lantern was released in the fourth quarter of 2012 as opposed to the summer of 2011. In order to bolster the project’s footing, the studio gauged Tom Cruise’s interest in the role of Hal Jordan (that he would agree to star in Universal’s The Mummy means that the man is not inherently opposed to franchise work). Cruise agreed, on the stipulation that the director’s chair be given to longtime collaborator Christopher McQuarrie. Warner Bros. executives were happy to oblige, and thus they all set out to film a fairly faithful adaptation of the "Secret Origin" story arc.
The result was a reasonably successful film, certainly in comparison to the Martin Campbell/Reynolds box office bomb of our world, so a sequel was naturally pursued. Warner Bros. would return to the Geoff Johns well, using his "Sinestro Corps War" as the basis for the next film, therefore introducing John Stewart (Idris Elba) and Guy Gardner (John Gallagher, Jr.) on the big screen. Not much more to say about this one - this was a perfectly serviceable superhero flick that, alongside Superman and Batman: World’s Finest, represented another step in the path to the studio’s second attempt to launch a Justice League franchise.
9.) So, before we get into this one, let me give you a quick recap of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s post-gubernatorial entertainment career. He actually stepped down from elected office in early 2009 because… well, we probably should not get into that here, but just know that it was not scandalous in a way that negatively reflected upon him. Just know that Schwarzenegger was able to start snagging significant roles again about two years before he did historically. He gained relevance to a new generation of fans by appearing as Odin in Matthew Vaughn’s Thor movies, then returned to the Terminator series courtesy of Universal Pictures and director Rian Johnson. That movie was more critically and commercially successful than our timeline’s Terminator Genisys by a substantial margin, which piqued the studio’s interest in funding Schwarzenegger’s return to his other signature character: Conan the Barbarian. Such a project had been considered by Universal in the mid-2010’s, but in this timeline, they actually go through with it. James Mangold was hired to helm the long-awaited sequel, and original director John Milius was even brought back to contribute to the script.
Now, you may have a hard time believing this, but Legend of Conan was really, really good. All of the stars happened to align to make this shockingly, surprisingly, almost unnecessarily good. Think of it as this timeline’s counterpart to Mad Max: Fury Road (a very well-received continuation of a classic 80’s action franchise) and Mangold’s Logan (the final adventure of a beloved character portrayed by the actor most closely associated with him) rolled into one. I even modeled the box office performance of this movie after that of Logan, which would be good for a spot among the top box office draws of the year in this scenario. And as with Fury Road, this movie defied all expectations by securing a presence at the Oscars - nominations for Best Picture, Best Director (Mangold), and Best Actor in a Leading Role (Schwarzenegger), among others, and even winning the Academy Award for Best Original Score for Jóhann Jóhannson and Bobby Krlic (in fact, it was something of an upset that they beat out Ennio Morricone’s work on Warhead 2015 AD). Implausible? On paper, maybe, but remember that this was the year in our world that Sylvester Stallone was nominated for his Rocky Balboa reprisal in Creed. Sometimes these things actually happen.
10.) Buckle up, because this film’s development history is rather complicated. So, the first thing to know is that Comcast is not able to ink a deal to purchase a majority share of NBC Universal from General Electric in this timeline’s 2009. Rather, it is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation that makes this acquisition, as was apparently considered, though given that he already owned the Fox broadcast network and Fox News, the NBC broadcast network (not to be confused with the company’s television production arm) is sold to Hearst Communications and MSNBC is sold to Microsoft (and rebrand as “Microsoft News”) in order to alleviate antitrust concerns. (This corporate merger would actually create an interesting allohistorical version of The Tonight Show conflict, as Leno actually left NBC to set up a new show at Fox in this timeline before the purchase was announced… meaning that he and O’Brien would remain under one corporate roof anyway). But I am straying off topic. The point is that executives at Comcast, still eager to get into the content production business in order to build synergy with their telecommunications business, are able to nab Viacom as something of a consolation prize. You see, the more severe Great Recession leads to a virtual collapse of Sumner Redstone’s media empire at around this time - indeed, TimeWarner exploits the opportunity as well, buying the CBS Corporation primarily to establish their own foothold in broadcast television. Now in charge of Paramount Pictures and cable networks such as Comedy Central and MTV, Viacom’s owners begin busily pumping out high-profile film and television projects. Installed as the new head of Paramount, Kathleen Kennedy overseas the revitalization of the Star Trek and Transformers franchises (Revenge of the Fallen actually somewhat underperformed in the summer of 2009, given the stiff competition from Justice League: Mortal, so Michael Bay leaves after that installment), as well as heralding new franchises with Jon Favreau’s John Carter of Mars*, Ang Lee’s The Last Airbender, and a surprisingly divisive Hasbro Cinematic Universe.
However, in the eyes of many a cinephile, Comcast/Viacom’s most interesting move was ushering a return of The Godfather series. Hey, if you want high-profile content to play endlessly in an astonishingly censored, bowdlerized form on your newly-acquired web of cable channels… well, it was hard to beat The Godfather, right? I am honestly surprised that Paramount has yet to seriously try something like this in real life, to tell you the truth. It is not as though Francis Ford Coppola has got much better going on. But I digress. A fourth entry in the franchise had actually been worked on in the 1990’s, but was dropped after author Mario Puzo passed away. Here, a crack team of some of the most acclaimed screenwriters and novelists in America is brought together to complete the story, which would function as both a prequel and sequel to the events of the third film (and does not turn out exactly the same as The Family Corleone continuation novel) after Coppola is finally convinced to return. Next, the studio approached an actor who had been linked to the first iteration of the project over a decade beforehand: Leonardo DiCaprio. Once he was brought aboard, everything else fell into place - De Niro, Pacino, and Duvall also signed on, and prominent supporting roles were doled out to other veterans of the gangster genre, from Joe Pesci to a surviving James Gandolfini. The other gimmick was to extensively and experimentally use CGI to de-age the older actors in a manner similar to Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman in our timeline. Okay, but was the movie any good? Well… it was not perfect, but if you are a fan of gangster movies, you would probably find much to enjoy. In any case, the studio backed a massive awards push to secure DiCaprio an Oscar for his performance. In fact, if you doubt that this sort of movie could earn more than $600 million worth of tickets, consider this: The Revenant, our timeline’s 2015 Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle that finally managed to get the man his Oscar gold, actually grossed around $533 million in an impressive awards season run. If we use that as our starting point here, I think that the additional draw of a long-awaited Godfather sequel that reassembles much of the original cast could plausibly account for roughly another $70 million.
*Again, issues with embedding:
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/jon_favreau_reveals_how_h
Outstanding. Absolutely outstanding.
- Status