Occasionally I roll out the crystal ball and peek into the future. Sadly, the only future that pops up on the spherical surface deals with movies. My crystal ball is lame and busted like that. No matter, I'll make do with my crippled ball. At the very least it allows me to spread the goods to you, for better or worse. So with the summer movie season churning out budget behemoths on a weekly basis now, I think it's an okay time to glimpse at the fallout, the upcoming trends that you'll be witnessing soon enough. So let's plop the turban on and light this carnival-show doohickey up.

Oh yes, the swirly fog of the future is congealing into something now. I got it. I see 20th Century Fox Studios... no, wait, I see Marvel Studios... transforming into the new Fox... and millions of fanboys dying from aneurysms. Bleak. How can this be? I thought Marvel Studios and their hands on, quality-first approach toward their characters would calm fanboys' fears. Oh, I understand now. Marvel Studios caught the "product-first" greed bug when Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk spawned enough cash to pave the entire surface of the sun.

No Mr. Favreau, we ain't paying you shit for Iron Man 2. There's plenty of hobo music-video directors willing to take a crack at Iron Man 2, and that's payment in itself. I don't care what promises we made about giving you creative input Mr. Norton, we own the scissors when it comes to editing. Moviegoers only give a crap about the CG carnage. Eric Bana. Edward Norton. Larry The Cable Guy. Who gives two-shits who plays Bruce Banner? The day is ours! And we only have a limited number of those days until the scheduled, titanium sealed release date of May 2010 hits. Writers? Filmmakers? Actors? Don't care. Just need to get that product out on that date! After all, we've got stockholders to answer to goddamnit!

Hot damn, the similarities between Fox and future Marvel Studios are uncanny.

Now voices screech out from the crystal ball. Loud, whiney, obnoxious voices. I can just make it out. Why it's almost like a chorus. And I see the floor of the San Diego Comic Con full of geeks, nerds, fanboys and hotties and I hear "George Lucas raped our adolescence!" They all appear to be unhappy about... something. To the point of verbally complaining rather than anonymously on the Internet. I would think they're referring to Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But surely they'd accuse Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford of raping their human developmental stages too? They had as much say in the film as Lucas.

Hmm, now the ball shows the same people standing in line for Star Wars: Clone Wars this summer. And bitching afterwards about Lucas. And now we've jumped to some unspecified date in the future where the same geeks, nerds, fanboys, and hotties buy tickets for Lucas' latest effort - Mutt Williams and the Greaser Patrol. And they bitch about Lucas afterwards. And. Oh. It's an unending loop of monetary transactions and complaining. Almost as if they're paying to bitch!

More voices coming through now. Children. But we're back to the near future. Oh how cute. Every 6-year-old kid in the country is speaking out of their nose, imitating the electric-edged voice of WALL•E. You kids are so lovable. Okay children, enough. Please. No seriously, it was cute at first but if you keep talking like that you're likely to blow out your adenoids. Goddamnit just speak normally would you! You little fuckers are seriously getting on my nerves! Quit it! Quit it! No! Don't start singing in that voice! AHHHHHH!!!!!

Woah, and I though the future for Marvel-loving fanboys was sad. Every parent with 6-year-old kids will have their patience tested come WALL•E's release in a few weeks.

But now I see the same parents, the ones who didn't lodge a bullet in their brain matter after their kids transformed into fleshy WALL•Es. Jesus God, they're pissed. They're dragging their numbed, drooling 6-year-old kids out of The Dark Knight. I can't believe this film is PG-13! Look what it did to my kid. I just got him to stop talking like WALL•E and now the little fella will be catatonic for months. Months, I tell you! That film is way too violent for children. Why isn't it R? Why weren't we families warned that a film about a bat-costumed ninja vigilante fighting a scarred serial killer and a dude with half his face blown off would be too graphic for the children?!? I demand something be done about this! I demand voter-baiting congressmen to decry the fact this "PG-13" movie could be viewed by my 6-year-old kid. I demand that "USA Today," "Entertainment Weekly" and "Newsweek" write moldy, cliché-ridden, superficial pieces on violence in the movies.

Oh, but it doesn't climax there. No, the trite, small-minded outrage reaches critical mass when some knuckle-dragging retard with a closet packed with hand cannons attempts to curve a bullet (as seen in Wanted). Yep, ol' Gunter McDonovan was shooting beer bottles with his fratboy buddies when he got the golden light bulb to pop a round off when swinging his gun arm around like a side-arm baseball pitcher. Dudes, watch me totally curve this bullet! Unfortunately he put a sink-pipe tunnel through the chest of the dude standing next to him.

But Gunter McDonovan isn't the only sample from a shallow gene pool. Soon, unimaginative kids - yes, kids! - (who would have proved Darwin right, regardless if a film threw the idea for self-destruction their way) all over the country are accidently crippling, and killing one another while trying to curve the bullet. This happens to a total of 3 kids in North America. It's a goddamn epidemic scream the talking heads on 24-hour news channels. "How Could Hollywood Be So Irresponsible?" explodes the headline on "People" magazine's cover (right above the tease for "Lohan's Secrets for a Loving Lesbian Relationship"). Paraphrasing the thesis from the article in "People," it's so obvious that Hollywood is making kids, who happen to play with firearms, to do reckless things with them. If the movies never showed heroes doing "cool" things with guns, then the kids, who happen to play with guns, should all be safe!

Looks like the crystal ball is brewing an electrical storm right now. It's gone batshit. I think the bastard is short-circuiting. Better cool it off until the fall. Throw a wet-towel over it and roll it back underneath my bed. Oh yes, the soon-to-be future appears to be a scary, stupid place. But doesn't it always seem that way?