Welcome to the Weekly Movie Thread, your place on the Avocado to discuss films with your fellow commenters. Want to make a recommendation? Looking for recommendations? Want to share your opinions of movies, both new and classic?

This week sees the release of the Captain Marvel sequel, The Marvels. This was a bit of surprise to me. I originally wasn’t going to make this the featured movie for this week, confident as I was that this movie would get its release date pushed back like many other movies this fall due to the combined writers strike and actors strike. The Marvels will debut, though, perhaps fulfilling the promise of when Tenet was released in 2020 to save movie theaters during a difficult time.

One of the reasons studios are moving around release dates is that the actors won’t be available to do appearance to promote their movies. We didn’t get to see Brie Larson, Iman Vellani, and Teyonah Parris act all chummy at this year’s Comic-Con for example.

While it would be easy to say that no one pays attention to such things, I think there is typically a positive effect. Barbie and Oppenheimer were the last two bonafide blockbusters this year, and both were the last movies to have actors promoting the movies before the strike began. Meanwhile, it’s possible that The Flash was hampered substantially when its main star was too poisonous to have in interviews.

I suppose Disney is banking that the Marvel brand itself is so strong that having actors promote the film was no longer needed. We’ll see what happens this weekend.

Today’s bonus prompt: has a promotional tour by an actor actually made you interested in watching a movie?

Just from my experience: I once stayed up to watch Conan’s interview with Paul Rudd for Ant-Man. It was already well known that Rudd would be showing a Mac and Me clip, and I wanted to watch it real time. I can’t say I was excited to see the movie. The Edgar Wright debacle was still fresh in my mind. I was bracing for the movie to be a hot mess that was passed around from director to director but having zero vision due to the invisible hand of studio meddling (like Justice League turned out to be). But Rudd’s breezy repartee with Conan put me at ease, assuring me that even if the movie turned out to be disjointed it had the right leading man.

Also the Ant-Man trailer being interrupted by Mac and Me was delightful.