The Friday Free-For-All makes its debut

This week, we're looking at DC's big swing

It’s Friday, August 21, so let’s have a Free-For-All!

Moving forward, Fridays are going to be the only free day here at the newsletter. I’ve got a lot of good stuff planned for the fall, and it’s only fair that it’s going to be for the people who are keeping the lights on around here.

I want to make sure we keep this one day free, though, because I’d like to have one day where I publish things that are part of the larger conversation or encouraging some kind of engagement. The rules remain the same… whatever I’m talking about, I want you to use this space to talk about whatever is on your mind. My thoughts are just a prompt, but certainly not the only thing that would be worth some discussion.

This isn’t meant to be a completely closed ecosystem, but I want to reward the people who actually put their money behind their support of the newsletter. That means a lot, especially right now, and I would encourage you guys if you’re on the fence to take a chance for a few months. It’s $7. It’s not even what you’d pay for lunch. And it’ll give you a full month of advertising free writing about film that is beholden to no one… except you.

Tomorrow is the DC Fandome event, and while I am fairly jaded about promotional events aimed at fans, it looks like they’re doing this one right.

This summer’s Comic-Con was a dud. There’s no polite way to put it. It was like watching a bunch of conference calls with people discussing what they might do on a real panel. I tapped out early on and I didn’t hear anything that indicated I made a mistake. Most significantly, there was no buzz generated from anything that happened as part of Comic-Con. That’s the entire point of those events now, unfortunately, and by that metric, it was a disaster. No one watched them, and certainly no one talked about them. There was no “news” breathlessly repeated by clickbait mills, so it was the proverbial tree falling in an empty forest. It didn’t happen.

I have a feeling DC will make some noise this weekend. For one thing, they’ve put all of this together already. They have it scheduled rigorously, and fans can decide when they want to watch things thanks to an online scheduler. They’re doing panels on James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad and Matt Reeves’ The Batman and Wonder Woman 1984 and I’ll check out all of those, which will all presumably show the audience something. I doubt it’s going to be earth-shattering, but at this point, in this atrophied publicity landscape, anything that moves the needle is going to be considered a huge win. All they have to do is get people talking and they’ll accomplish the goal of the event.

Honestly, one of the events that will make the biggest noise tomorrow is Zack Snyder’s debut of his trailer for Zack Snyder’s Justice League: The Zack Synder Cut of A Film By Zack Snyder. Good for him. It doesn’t matter at this point what happens with the finished product. The fact that he’s getting to go back and put together his alternate-timeline take on the film is the victory. Everything else is just gravy. It’s going straight to HBOMax so there’s no pressure on it to perform at the box-office. It’s a best case scenario for a filmmaker. The people who have been frantic for him to get to do this work are going to lose their minds at seeing actual new footage tomorrow, and it will help make it seem like more of a real thing after years of being a hypothetical. This comes on the heels of Ray Fisher announcing that Warner Bros. is opening a third-party independent investigation into the abusive work atmosphere during the reshoots on Justice League, so it feels like Snyder’s finally getting the rebound from all of the personal tragedy that landed on him a few years ago, and tomorrow is a major moment in that rebound for him and for his fans as well.

Honestly, the thing I’m most excited about is the Rocksteady panel on their upcoming game Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. Rocksteady’s Batman games are easily some of the best licensed titles I’ve ever played, genuinely capturing the experience of being Batman with clever gameplay and a stupendous combat system. Batman is a character who makes sense for video games, while Superman has always proven to be more of a problem thanks to the scale of his super-powers. The notion of pitting the Suicide Squad against the Justice League opens up all sorts of possibilities for gameplay, and it gives them a way to drop in Superman without having the success of the entire game depending on whether they get him right or not.

One of tomorrow’s panels is called “Introducing Flash,” followed immediately by “Beyond Batman,” and I’m curious if either of those will address the casting news for Andy Muschietti’s Flash film. I’m all aboard if they’re going to get as many live-action Batmen to join the cast as possible. They’ve got Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck. Cool! Now get Christian Bale and George Clooney and Val Kilmer. And then throw in some of the animated voices! Diedrich Bader and Kevin Conroy and Jason O’Mara and Jeremy Sisto and Will Arnett and, hell, throw in Roger Craig Smith from the video games while you’re at it. Go for it. Get as weird with the multiverse shit as you want, DC. If you’re going to do it, lean in.

I’ve always felt torn about that James Bond idea of retrofitting it so they eventually reveal that “James Bond” is a code name, handed down from person to person, allowing for Connery and Moore and Dalton and Craig and Lazenby and Brosnan to all exist in the same universe. On the one hand, I’d love to see the film they could have made at a certain point when you could have gotten all those people together. I don’t think that’s remotely viable now, and that’s a shame. But beyond the logistics, I think that kind of solution is fun in the moment but also erases any genuine character tension might exist within each of those interpretations. It’s more of a party game for hardcore nerds than an actual narrative solution to anything. What DC is proposing is different because they have The Flash right there, ready to fracture reality by changing the timeline, opening up all kinds of opportunities for them to let different filmmakers work different riffs on the same character at the same time.

I may not love every choice they’ve made, but I like the decision by DC to embrace the idea that, film to film, continuity really doesn’t matter. I like that they seem like they’re willing to approach each film as its own thing, and whatever creative choices might be fun for that film, they’re willing to take those swings. And these are some big swings we’re talking about. Michael Keaton’s Batman and Ben Affleck’s Batman in the same film sounds like the irrational rantings of a message board nerd, not like something we’re actually getting in a film in a few years. That’s cool. It feels like the kind of thing someone proposed and then everyone just kept daring each other to keep going to see how far they’d get with it, and it’ll be fun to see what they’ve actually got planned.

The one story I would point out to you that isn’t getting a lot of attention but that deserves it concerns the new management at MGM’s Orion Pictures. Orion is one of those names that means something particular to me because of my associations with the films I saw the logo on while I was growing up, but it hasn’t been a serious player for a while now. It feels like the appointment of Alana Mayo as president of the company is a significant shift for them. I’ve said before that you can talk about inclusion all day long, but until you make changes in the actual people who are making the decisions about what does or doesn’t get made, you won’t see any real change in the actual films.

Mayo’s been running Michael B. Jordan’s Outlier Society for a while now, and she’s put together a solid slate of films there, and I am genuinely curious to see what she makes of Orion. I want to see that company do well, and I’d love to see them emerge as another home for smart commercial risks, something Mayo’s perfectly suited for. She won’t have complete autonomy, of course, since Orion now exists as part of the larger MGM structure, but Michael De Luca, who now runs MGM, is hardly the old-school model of a studio executive.

With Ron Meyer out of Universal this week, it feels like the Hollywood that existed when I moved to Los Angeles 30 years ago simply doesn’t exist anymore. Power doesn’t work the same way. People don’t watch things the same way. What people watch isn’t the same at all. Everything’s changed, and I’ve watched this entire cycle happen, and I honestly don’t think this industry learns anything from its own history, either recent or distant. If anything, it feels like less value is placed on experience because everything is so chaotic that it doesn’t matter as much. It feels like this could be that Easy Rider moment when everything is on the verge of burning down, and what remains to be seen is who will be the one to tap into this cultural moment in a way that unites us. Whoever pulls that off is going to have the first real blockbuster of the coronavirus era, and my guess is they won’t even realize they’re doing it while they’re doing it. The audience is going to be the one to decide. It certainly won’t be anyone whose film or TV is overtly about this era. Instead, it’s going to be someone who captures the anxiety and the uncertainty in a way that we can process and digest.

But for now, are any of you going to pay attention to any of this over the weekend? Do you have any other entertainment plans? I’m going to try the open beta for The Avengers on both XBox and PS4 just to see what the difference is. I pre-ordered the game back in January for XBox so my kids and I can both play it on our machines, which are linked, so I know where I’ll end up playing it overall. It’ll be fun to compare them, though.

Don’t forget, subscribers… what used to be the Friday Spotlight will be landing in the afternoon on Sunday now, to get you ready for the week ahead. That will include my ongoing media diary and some in-depth discussion of the mistake theater owners and studios are about to make.

Talk to you then.

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Image courtesy of Rocksteady Games