Distant past, distant future

I just finished watching The Croods, the latest Dreamworks movie to not be as good as I think it should be, though still good enough to tug at my heartstrings a little bit.

I went to add another three-star entry for an animated movie in Letterboxd when I discovered that I could actually add either The Croods or The Croods 2.

As I have discussed before, Letterboxd is again catering its services to time travelers.

In my previous post on the subject, I talked about how the site's open-ended date field allows you to go back to -- well, to the era the Croods actually lived to say you watched The Croods. I gave up going backwards around 400 or 500 B.C., anyway.

Now, it's the site allowing me to say I've seen a movie that won't even be released for another six years.

That's right, The Croods 2 is listed on Letterboxd as a 2019 release. 

It's admirable, if you are a movie website, to get your database ready to go as early as possible, so you are right on top of things when a movie starts being shown in advanced screenings and film festivals and the like. Someone can legitimately say they've seen one of those movies a year or even two years before its general release.

The Croods 2? I'm sure they are only just starting to work on the script.

There are two things I find funny about it already being a database entry in Letterboxd. One is that they added it. The other is that Dreamworks has already both settled on, and publicized, a 2019 release date. I don't know of any other movie whose release date is projected so far in the future.

How hard can it really be to make a Croods sequel, that they'll let the iron get that cold before finishing the movie? I guess it's not that the movie would take that long to make, if that were the only thing they were working on. Rather, it's probably that the pipeline is so full of other middling Dreamworks crap that 2019 is the first vacant slot on the schedule.

From the perspective of Letterboxd, can't someone just set up a calendar reminder on their computer to add it to the database sometime in, I don't know, late 2017? Because now it's one of those things that just makes the site look silly. If I say that I've already watched The Croods 2, then it will appear to my Letterboxd friends as recent activity on my part. They'll wonder how I've already seen this movie that is probably only just being storyboarded, if that. Or more likely, they will just immediately know it's a mistake on the site, something that should have been locked down but wasn't.

Of course, my own Letterboxd diary is so sacrosanct that I can't actually punk them by saying I've watched The Croods 2. I've got my standards ... even if they don't.