Each year it seems like a million new sequels are getting made. The reasoning behind making them is solid: You’ve had success with a film and want to recapture it in order to make more money with it. Unfortunately that often means something which simply doesn’t live up to what came before. However there are movies where the sequel is just as good or even is better than the original movie. This week’s question:

What is your favorite sequel?

The movie industry as we all know loves to look into their past in order to take properties and make them again. This can turn out great (The Thing), but also can go horribly wrong (I think you’ll be able to think of enough examples yourself). The result is that there are a lot of complaints of there not being enough original movies being made. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but can understand that feeling. This past weekend I was listening to a Filmjunk podcast and they were discussing something which I found interesting. If there is one genre of movies which are quite dependent on technology, it is animated movies. They were talking about something which the game industry has been doing quite a lot lately, which is release “HD” versions of older games. So no changes are made to the game itself, but the graphics get a visual upgrade so they look nice on your HDTV. Their example would be applying this to the first Toy Story movie, which of course was made when the technology to render movies like this was still taking baby steps. So it would get better character models with more detailed texturing, more details in the locations with everything else left untouched (so no changes to the movements/dialogue etc.). I would be very interested in seeing something like that, but how about you?

Would you like to see movie studios update their older (CG) animated movies to current technology, so it will look better?

Although I’m someone who really doesn’t care for the Oscars this is the time of year where you simply can not escape it as everyone is writing about them. So when the nomination were announced last week my mailbox was filled with them. I looked at them once and one thing stood out to me in the animation category, which was that The Lego Movie didn’t get nominated. Besides that nothing else stood out as shocking.

What were your surprises concerning the Oscar nominations?

Something which I always find annoying in this period is that the movies everyone has been raving about in November/December finally show up in the cinemas here. Being patient is difficult when you really want to check out a specific movie. But that’s not what I want to ask you a question about. Many of these movies are either big historical epics or biopics. Now I’m not saying that is a bad thing (recently saw The Imitation Game and thought it was a very good movie), but I always think it is a shame that all these interesting movies are released during the same period to make sure that the Oscar voters remember them. What is you opinion about this?

What do you think of the release dates of Oscar worthy movies towards the end of the year and do you think this is only to make a bigger chance to win?

If there was one movie which got more than average coverage this last few weeks it has been The Interview. Not even because of the movie itself (well, only the concept of it), but because how this movie supposedly was the reason for hacking Sony. The movie was finally released (both in cinema and VOD) just before Christmas and a lot of people have seen it. So I thought it would be a good idea to ask you:

What do you think of the controversy surrounding the movie, the way it has been released and the possible impact on movie studios releasing movies earlier through VOD?