I'm kind of annoyed right now.

I got back to finishing Tomb Raider 2013 since the post about the remaster. I am enjoying how they handled Lara and her crew, it's a gritty game with emotion and depth. I check out YouTube to see some more content about it and it turns out they have a Netflix show. Awesome, right? Nope, the few clips I checked out were garbage and all reviews seem to share the same view, they essentially pulled another "Velma".

I suppose what really gets to me is the fact they didn't have to butcher an existing IP to make the show they did. Now I'll spend the rest of my playthrough with the knowledge it's downhill from here.

You're kind. They only do parodies : )

I'm not sure why you'd even think that, Netflix shows are pretty much uniformly awful. I mean ok, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance was great, but I'm pretty sure The Jim Henson Company deserves all the credit for that. Netflix pretty much deliberately makes crap. They aim for "second screen content" - bland, simple, stupid, painfuly slow shows people are supposed to have on while they scroll through social media on their phones. And I'm not making this up. I'm not really sure why though. I mean, the Angelina Jolie movies were already absolutely gow-awful, why would some tv show you can just not watch now ruin the game for you?

I mean, I'm no fan of Tomb Raider, I didn't like any iteration of the games, but I've seen plenty of my beloved franchises done dirty, even long, long ago (say hello to Highlander 2 everybody), but it never ruined the stuff I liked for me.

Well Highlander 2 is a fun one as it has been re-edited a few times and has even had the story altered to remove some of the more naff elements and the theatrical cut is now impossible to find anywhere (admit-tingly it's been a few years since I last looked but normally you can only find the Renegade version of Director's cuts).

But regardless it is a fun watch as a popcorn flick and you can tell Michael Ironside was just having a blast chewing up the scenery.

I believe it, I only use it to watch foreign shows here and there, most things on there are uninteresting unless you're really into watching just about anything. Thankfully it's not my subscription. I was never really into the TR games before so I haven't seen those. It's more of a combination of media companies ignoring their audience lately and then finding out about this who-is-this-for show for a game I just started enjoying. You're right that it really shouldn't change my opinion of the games, my thoughts right now should fizzle out.

Oh yeah, it's quite fun to watch. But if you were to treat it seriously and as really part of the same narrative as the first movie then it's just horrendous. That's exactly my point, that you have to kind of learn to compartmentalise these things.

Yeah, I don't know what you were expecting, much less from Netflix of all places these days.

And as I recall, nearly all adaptations of Tomb Raider have been farcical.

Very true, sorry if I came off harsh in my original post. It's just a fun movie on it's own....... wonder if that reboot that was being planned is still a thing.

Not at all. Depends which one :D But the latest one, with Henry Cavill is, I think, still on. The last I heard they're supposed to start shooting it in January. I doubt it will live up to the original, it's such a unique and very 80s thing, but I really I just hope that whatever it ends up being it won't be boring. The Highlander franchise is such a glorious mess of bizarre, completely incompatible entries I can pretty much forgive the new movie everything except for ending up a bland Marvel wannabe, like that Tom Cruise The Mummy a few years back.

They absolutely nailed one thing though - the casting. Angelina Jolie in the Tomb Raider outfit was enough to make the movies budgetary successes.

Why does that really matter though? They can proclaim whatever they want canon. If it sucks or doesn't make any sense, you don't have to accept it. Especially not let it retroactively ruin everything from the same IP/franchise. Ignore the shitty stuff, embrace the good stuff. I've been ignoring Star Wars since 2017, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying everything from the universe that came before, be it games or movies. If the current owners of whatever won't treat something with respect, they are not worthy of respect from the end customer.

Because while one can ignore such things.. the fact remains something is canon to the older works of something thus it informs what comes next and cause division/divide in the fans .. among other things granted I may be abit biased here given I am a comic book reader(more so a Marvel guy ) but I have seen the same troubles the comic communities have in these ''confirmed canon to other media installment'' things

Marvel just solved that problem with their "Multiverse" where everything coexists. So everything is "cannon".

Only if whoever works on the next entry choses to acknowledge it. Colonial Marines was supposedly canon to the movies, but I'll be damned surprised if that's ever recognised in any future instalments of Aliens. That's the problem with these franchises that go on forever, across multiple media, with dozens of people making decisions and IP's getting bought and sold... canon becomes an impossibly fleeting thing. I used to scoff at the idea of "head canon" and people picking and choosing, but that that was years ago, before almost every franchise out there got so many sequels, prequels and spin-off comics and video games, that pretending there's some one "canon" became a fool's errand, regardless of who made what "official" at any given point.

Hell, even the aforementioned Highlander series got itself into a mess like that ahead of most franchises. Pretty much every entry in that series, movie or tv show, exists in it's own separate universe, in which different things are and aren't canon.

That's not to say I think canon should not matter at all. When it is preserved and respected it help with fantastic storytelling. Rather I'm saying is that so many writers write like it doesn't matter, the only way to preserve any kind of coherence in a franchise is to do it yourself. I wish that were not the case, that more franchises were like Babylon 5 where one guy held the reins and kept things (mostly) in line, but unfortunately the only way for that to be the case is for a franchise to become totally obscure.