The biggest Comic Con of the year starts tomorrow, so here's a quick reminder of how we always have and will continue to handle comic movie related news.

I wish I could get really excited about SDCC. I wish I could revel in the torrent of information that comes out and all of the star panels and new movie posters. It's all right up my alley, but the problem is that every year I have to spend this entire weekend arguing with fans. People who hear about something going on at Comic Con and choose to take this time to become personally offended by our rules, or hit me with walls of text about why we should change our rules for this weekend.

It's just not going to happen. We don't change our rules every time a new Star Wars movie comes out, and we aren't going to change how we define news so that every answer at a comic con panel can take up our entire front page. Believe it or not, there is still movie news happening outside of SDCC that fits under our definitions of news. There is no shortage of news, only a major uptick in rumor and speculation as everyone at SDCC tries to entice us and tease us.

In this subreddit we define movie news as information that has been confirmed by a studio and is specific to a movie with major distribution. Sometimes we allow news that is confirmed by a major actor or director involved with the project, but we have to be careful with these because actors and directors actually have a lot less say in what does and doesn't get made than you may think. With this definition we have no bias against comic book movies, or any specific comic book property. These rules were originally made to combat the amount of fluff news we got from popular properties, but we mostly hold to it across the board. Here's some examples of things that count as news:

• Studio announces new Green Lantern film. X actor and Y director are attached.

• X director has exited Y film during production, neither the studio nor the director has commented.

• X Actor says the papers are signed and he is playing DC's Hitman in an upcoming film.

• A full trailer for upcoming film.

• A significant poster for an upcoming film, if it is one of many posters released over a long period of time, it needs to have a first look at something. A character we haven't seen in a trailer or another poster is usually what we look for.

Things that we don't consider hardline news are a little more vague, and sometimes they don't actually affect anything. Here's some examples.

• X Actor says he would love to play DC's Hitman.

• X Director says they've written a script for Green Lantern at the request of DC.

• Has X Director exited Y production? Sources are saying they have.

• A teaser trailer (usually less than a minute with very little information, sometimes we allow these as initial announcements. Like, if a movie is announced by way of a short visual that's considered news. If a movie has been announced for a long time and they drop a short visual on us then we probably won't allow it.) or a TV Spot (usually just a shorter recut of other official trailers. 3-5 seconds of new footage not found in other trailers is not reason enough to be allowed.)

• A poster for an upcoming film, the third one released this week and has all of the same characters we have already seen, but in a different art style.

• X actor on Disney "They are literally Satan."

• A sequel to Shrek 5 is being written, as a comic/musical.

• LEAKS. This is a big one and I get it. The internet seems like the obvious place to spread leaks. The problem is that they are always awful quality, and when it comes to Comic Con they are usually either things we wouldn't allow anyways (like short visual teasers or a logo) or things that will get released on YouTube soon anyways. When you post a video of a trailer you took in a dark room with bad sound and people around you screaming, then an hour later the legit trailer gets posted by the studio, you're making things very difficult for us. We either have to allow both (nope), remove one once the other is posted (but muh discussion and upvotes!), or only keep the first one, which is the poor quality one. Easy fix here, no leaks allowed.

It may seem like I'm targeting comic movies with those examples, but the fact is that we only have this saturation in marketing with popular franchises. It's not about keeping popular movies down, it's about sending a message making sure all kind of movies get a fair chance to be represented on this sub. There are huge subs for franchise films, this is a general movies sub. Our users would like to talk about all movies, not just the ones that already have huge followings. If this list of rules seems really unfair to you, I only ask that you remember that these are our daily rules and we didn't make them up to punish certain IPs at comic con, and also that to most of our users, this is actually a very fair list of rules.

At the end of the day, we want to ensure that the stories found on this subreddit are trustworthy and tangible and that all majorly distributed films get a chance to be discussed. That is our main goal. If you believe we are being paid to keep certain stories down or that we just really hate your favorite comic, that's fine and we know we can't convince you otherwise. Let's just cut down the threats, doxxing, and witch hunting this year. Please? Speaking of which, comments will be disabled for this post. We've heard all the arguments and we've been called shills enough times. If you have questions, bring them to modmail.

As a general note, whenever something big happens that we wouldn't usually allow (for example when Superbowl comes around and we know we're about to be hit with lots of TV spots), sometimes we decide to make a megathread. That way users still have access to the information but it's not taking up a spot on our front page, it's using a sticky spot that we had free anyways. We honestly consider this a win/win and we don't understand why people report those threads. The only catch is that we are normal people who have jobs. We may not get to it right away, and I guess all I can ask here is that you understand that. Seems pretty simple but you'd be surprised.

Submitted July 19, 2018 at 12:35AM by LiteraryBoner https://ift.tt/2uwPZ3D