The DiF dudes were right in their commentary. One of invincible inflatable punching-doll Avengers had to die to raise the stakes for them, reveal vulnerability, and lower the character-count, and Hawkeye is the most expendable with his lame bow-and-arrow. The Dark Ages are over, bro. We've been using guns since the 15th century at least.

^ This relates to the earlier 'do big loud dumb summer blockbusters get a free pass from criticism?' debate.

Do 'CG effects demonstrations' count as movies? If we spend our money on them, knowing full well it's going to be dumb, do we have to right to wail about them being dumb?

There's also another factor that'll contribute to the future quality of big budget movies - the Chinese box office. The US domestic box office is becoming less important, which means producers will need to pay attention to what plays well in China. The Chinese have been isolated from western culture for so long and therefore didn't grow up with 1980s action movies that we sneer at now. It's all new for them. And if they love their new-found movie diet of cartoon wall-to-wall explosions without dialogue and simplistic good v evil plotlines, then that doesn't encourage sophistication and subtlety, morally ambiguity or self-aware genre references.

If you look at the top 100 all-time on box office mojo, US domestic box office used to be over half of total worldwide gross. Now the current top ten averages about a third, some even have a quarter, and that'll only continue to shrink.

I suppose Civilization is a popular game and you're playing God. -ish. Except you wouldn't play Civilization in God-Mode i.e. where everything always ended up your way all the time. Otherwise you're basically left with Autocad.

I'm just trying to get into Loki's mind to figure out his motivation. If ants are to us what we are to Loki, then I can't really work out what he's trying to achieve. "Look Dad, here's my ant-farm I built myself - it's all mine."

But as Dorkman said, Loki could be just mad, so anything goes.

Where did Jesus promise the end of all wicked people? Is there a specific quote from a Bible verse?