The launch of Venu Sports will be delayed after a federal judge granted FuboTV’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the planned sports streaming venture by ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery.
U.S. District Judge Margaret M. Garnett in the Southern District of New York said in her 69-page ruling that Fubo was likely to be successful in proving that the joint venture would violate antitrust laws, and Fubo and consumers would “face irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction.”
ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery said they would appeal the ruling.
FuboTV filed the lawsuit two weeks after ESPN, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery and Hulu announced their plan to offer a sports streaming service on Feb. 6.
FuboTV said in its filing that it has tried for years to offer a sports-only streaming service but has been prevented from doing so because of ESPN. Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery have imposed bundling requirements on FuboTV which it says forces “Fubo to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to license and broadcast content that its customers do not want or need.”
“Today’s ruling is a victory not only for Fubo but also for consumers. This decision will help ensure that consumers have access to a more competitive marketplace with multiple sports streaming options,” Fubo co-founder and CEO David Gandler said in a statement. “But our fight continues. Fubo has said all along that we seek equal treatment from these media giants, and a level playing field in our industry.”
“A fair and competitive marketplace is necessary to provide consumers with multiple, robust and more affordable sports streaming options,” Gandler continued. “We will continue to fight for fairness and for what’s best for consumers.”
Venu Sports announced on Aug. 1 it would be available for $42.99 per month with its planned launch in the fall.
The platform would include offerings from 14 linear networks — ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, SEC Network, ACC Network, ESPNEWS, ABC, FOX, FS1, FS2, Big Ten Network, TNT, TBS, truTV — as well as ESPN+.
Subscribers would have the ability to bundle the product with Disney+, Hulu and/or Max.
ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery said in a joint statement: “We believe that Fubo’s arguments are wrong on the facts and the law, and that Fubo has failed to prove it is legally entitled to a preliminary injunction. Venu Sports is a pro-competitive option that aims to enhance consumer choice by reaching a segment of viewers who currently are not served by existing subscription options.”
ESPN, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery will each share one-third ownership in the joint venture.
The ruling also drew reaction from cable and satellite companies, who are watching with interest due to their bundling requirements and what companies generally charge in subscriber fees.
In a statement provided to CBS News Friday evening, a spokesperson for DirectTV said, “We are pleased with the court decision and believe that it appropriately recognizes the potential harms of allowing major programmers to license their content to an affiliated distributor on more favorable terms than they license their content to third parties.”
Warner Bros. has just released Watchmen: Chapter 1, the first half of a new animated adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ groundbreaking superhero murder mystery. In honor of its VOD premiere, io9 sat down with director Brandon Vietti, as well as actors Katee Sackhoff and Titus Welliver, who voice brand-new takes on Silk Spectre/Laurie Juspeczyk and Rorschach/Walter Kovacs.
As this was a rare opportunity, we couldn’t resist asking a few additional questions about their previous work, including The Mandalorian, The X-Files, and Scooby-Doo! Wrestlemania Mystery. First up is director Vietti, who was keen to discuss adapting the first half of the 12-issue limited series into a deft, 80-minute feature.
Gordon Jackson, io9: You’ve been with Warner Brothers Animation for a long time, right?
Brandon Vietti: Twenty years.
io9: Twenty years, and you’ve worked on many different incarnations of Batman—The Brave and the Bold, Under the Red Hood, Batman vs Dracula, the Scooby-Doo/Wrestlemania crossover…
Vietti: I did.
io9: …and now you’re on Watchmen. How do you feel about that?
Vietti: It was intimidating. But also tremendous joy, because I respect the material so much. I was a fan of the book. The complexity of the storytelling, the characters, the world-building—it’s unmatched. And while it was a daunting task to kind of step into all of that world-building, amazing craftsmanship, and the prestige that comes along with it, it was also fun for me. I love that kind of puzzle-solving involved in trying to adapt. It works so well on the printed page, so to bring it into the filmmaking medium—but specifically to the animated medium—to really capture all of the strengths of animation, the unique voice of animation in adapting this material. It was just a lot of fun for me and my entire group.
io9: Going into this, was there something you knew you wanted to do differently than the Zack Snyder movie? Had you at any point said to yourself, “This hasn’t been done before. I really want to adapt this the way I see it”?
Vietti: I try not to waste too much on Zack’s amazing movie or the amazing motion comic that came before us. Those are great adaptations, and with any adaptation, any artist that comes in to adapt great material is going to bring a different voice to it. I didn’t want to disrespect any of the artists that came before me by straight-up copying, but my goal, our task that we set for ourselves, was to focus on the original comic and do the best we could in adapting this to animation. To answer your question, though, I think for me, the most fun is the sequence with Dr. Manhattan on Mars.
Vietti: Absolutely. I think I had a lot of ideas for how to sort of mix some of that material, using editing, using transitions, using sound design, to hopefully allow the audience to experience what Dr. Manhattan experiences in perceiving multiple points of time simultaneously. That’s something that I think a comic book would have difficultly portraying. A film can do it very well. I think animation can do it best. So to me, that was the biggest creative push in trying to find a way to sell to the audience, “What it’s like to be Dr. Manhattan?” How do you get in his head and perceive multiple points of time? And that was an example of embracing the strengths of animation in our storyline.
io9: Did you feel intimidated by Dr. Manhattan? The character’s been meme’d so much, in recent years. He’s been parodied a lot. You didn’t feel like there was anything that you had to navigate around…
Vietti: I wanted to really make this come through. I mean, hopefully what we did does come through.
io9: It does. But the image of him sitting on the rock on Mars—there’s a popular meme surrounding that. Were you warned against putting that image in there?
Vietti: I gotta say, it never crossed my mind that the fact that it’s been meme’d a lot. Again, my entire focus was capturing the spirit of the original book.
io9: The script by J. Michael Straczynski is so tight, yet he didn’t add or remove a single word. Did you feel the text itself was absolutely sacrosanct?
Vietti: Yeah, but there’s a lot of work that he did. He really was the key to unlocking how to translate … I keep saying … 12 books into a movie format. It’s difficult. The pacing that you do for an individual issue of 12 issues is different than what you would do for a movie. So with all of his vast experience in TV and film, he was able to go in there and find a better way for us, for the filmmaking media. Sort of reorganize some scenes. Make very difficult cuts. We didn’t want to cut anything. We have so much screen time. We had to make some hard choices for editing, organization material, cutting material. And he was really the key in helping unlock the best way to format the movie for two chapters.
io9: The integration of the Black Freighter narrative was very clever.
Vietti: Yeah, I remember one of our first meetings he was super energized about Black Freighter. The Freighter, as Alan Moore wrote it, always had these interesting poetic resonances with what was going on outside of the comic and the characters. And Straczynski really had a bunch of other ideas too within our new format because of the challenges of the adaptation. And I sort of integrate that stuff in a slightly different way, but it still feels like it was done in the book. And of course that really gave me a great filmmaking opportunity to- again, I think works best in animation—cutting back and forth between the events, the visual of a comic book panel, the visual of an animated frame. Personally, I felt was something that would work better, be more successful, and doing the same trick with live action as a contrast of visual.
After we spoke to Vietti, Katee Sackhoff was generous enough to discuss her performance as the Silk Spectre—among other things.
io9: So, Watchmen: How excited were you to join this?
Katee Sackhoff: Oh my gosh. You know, every time I sort of get asked to do a voiceover animation, I look at the content. I look at if it’s something that I’m intrigued to see. And when I saw Watchmen come across my desk, I was like, oh, yeah, no, I have to do this. I have to do this. This is super cool.
io9: When it comes to voice acting, you’ve already been Poison Ivy, She-Hulk, Black Cat, and Robot Chicken‘s Bitch Pudding. Your performance in this felt legitimately anguished.
Sackhoff: Thank you. I think Laurie—I identified with a lot of the things that she feels. I felt her pain and I felt what it’s like to love somebody with all of your heart and not feel enough. I know what those things feel like. And I wanted the audience to hear it in her. Because I find her to be so strong, but incredibly vulnerable. And, you know, when you see when she’s not getting what she needs, that her heart breaks. So, yeah.
io9: Did you record all of your lines by yourself, or did you get to be in the same room as Titus Welliver and everybody?
Sackhoff: I didn’t, sadly. You know, Titus and I have had the pleasure of working together once in person on Mandalorian. And then we’ve done quite a bit of voiceover jobs together at this point but we’ve never recorded together. So I think that’s next for us. We’re going to have to at some point get in a room. But wouldn’t that have been awesome? Every time I do a voiceover job, I always think to myself, “God, wouldn’t this have been awesome to be able to coordinate all these people and get in a room together?” But it never seems to happen.
io9: So, speaking of Mandalorian, as Bo-Katan, you have that famous image of yourself sitting on the throne. How difficult was that to pose and how much thought went into it? Was there a lot of maneuvering? Were they like, “Katee, could you shift here?” Or did you just nail it in one go?
Sackhoff: Live-action is a lot more challenging than voiceover. And there are times where I wish that Bo was still in voiceover. Holding that position was incredibly difficult and painful and not natural. But I think it looked absolutely cool on camera. So it was the right choice. But it was definitely not natural.
io9: And speaking of Bitch Pudding—I’ve always wanted to ask you about this. What was the origin of that? How were you asked to play her? Was that a voice you always had on deck?
Sackhoff: You know what’s funny is that voiceover work doesn’t come naturally to me. And one of the things with Seth Green and Matt [Senreich] that is so awesome is that they bring you in and they pull these voices out of me because they’re there. We just have to find them. Okay, and so Bitch Pudding was—I went in to play [Battlestar Galactica‘s] Starbuck. And you know, they’re notoriously cheap over there. And I was done in about five minutes. And then they were like, “Well, maybe you should play these other characters.” Because we bought you for 30 minutes and one of the characters was Bitch Pudding. And I don’t know where that character came from.
io9: Your guttural soul.
Sackhoff: Somewhere deep within that anguish part. It’s a lot easier to play Laurie, I have to tell you.
io9: So Silk Spectre was something you didn’t have to really pull at?
Sackhoff: She was just there. And like I said, I understood her anguish. I understand who she is as a person. And this story is great. I love it. I love that they’re staying true to the book. And I’m excited to see what fans think.
io9: The integration of all the details was amazing. Did you get a script first, or just read your lines as written on the day you recorded?
Sackhoff: No, so I did get the script. As soon as the idea came across of doing this, in playing Silk Spectre, the script does come to you. And I read the script and they sort of practiced it in the idea of like, you know, this is true in the book. And that was enough for me to sign on. And I really, really loved it. And then working with Brandon was so great. And, you know, he really helped me channel into the pain in Laurie and making sure that that would come across.
io9: Did you have anything in mind about your performance that you wanted to do differently from the live-action movie and Malin Ackerman’s portrayal?
Sackhoff: Oh gosh. You know, what’s funny is I’ve had the pleasure multiple times of taking characters that were not originated by myself and making them my own. And I think that this is, you know, what makes Laurie special is no different than that. I love what was established by the talent to [play her] before me. And I think that that comparison, though, would, for myself … is something that I just can’t do. So as soon as I signed on to do this, I did not go and look at any more Watchmen because I knew at that point that I would be trying to emulate instead of create.
Finally, we spoke to Titus Welliver about his kinder, gentler performance as Rorschach.
io9: How excited were you to join this and voice Rorschach?
Titus Welliver: Oh, very privileged and extremely excited. I got the book when it first came out and have been a huge fan of it for years. And like everyone else who was a fan of the book, teasing over the years that there would someday be a movie … and finally, Zack Snyder makes the film and [it’s] great. And so to be a part of this, which is basically a, you know, the animated feature and the amazing job with the animation are basically the panels come to life. So it’s an honor.
io9: How much tuning and calibration did you have to do with the gravel in your voice before deciding “I’m going to go this far, no further”?
Welliver: It took a minute and we recorded a portion of it on the first day and there was something that was nagging me and we kind of came back together and I just said there’s something that’s not right. So obviously I couldn’t do I wasn’t going to do a straight lift of Jackie [Earle Haley]’s performance, but his performance was great. And there was something there and I wanted to pay homage to his work. It was incredible. We found it on the second day and now all the vocal training I had in conservatory. None of that came in the play because it was all, “Raaah.”
io9: Yeah, it sounded like your voice must have been shot after a couple hours.
Welliver: Right.
io9: So, your version of Rorschach felt a little more nuanced—almost as if he were on the spectrum. He wasn’t exactly cultivating this persona to push people away, he was being his authentic self and didn’t understand people’s reactions to it. Was that something you were aiming for?
Welliver: Yeah. And actually, the director and I, we kind of talked about that because I’d said, regardless of characters [being] good, bad or indifferent on a level, in his journey, his moral compass is moving in the right direction. But he’s in this process, and the fact that he’s dealing with all the stuff that he’s dealing with … It’s not that you have to make a character likable, but I felt like I wanted to leave something there that would resonate with people that were watching it [and] that there was something there with a level of humanity in that character. And that’s difficult … that part of it was really, really interesting to do. So I’m glad that that came through.
io9: His friendship with Dan really shines through. When he breaks into his house and apologizes, “Sorry, I ate your beans,” that felt like a legitimate concern on his part and not just a power move.
Welliver: Yeah. You’re you’re you’re spot on with that. It’s hard when you’re in something, you’re trying. That’s my intent. You know, process of recording these things, there’s some stuff that you have to kind of withdraw. But we were really given the amount of time to really find it and do it properly. So it wasn’t just like, “Yeah, it’s not good. Let’s go.” We really, really took our time. And I think having only seen clips and stuff in the trailer and not seen it, I’m really excited to see it. So I’m going to finally get to do that.
io9: And you recorded all of your lines in isolation, right? No one else was in the booth with you?
Welliver: Yeah. No, I didn’t get to meet—I mean, I knew Katee from Mandalorian. And also we both worked on a Batman thing [Batman: The Long Halloween] … So yeah, there wasn’t any of that interaction, unfortunately, but in a way it was kind of cool because everybody had the freedom to kind of stay on what you needed to do on task.
io9: We’re huge fans of Deadwood. You didn’t come back for the movie, though. You were filming Bosch, right?
Welliver: Yeah, yeah. That kind of precluded me. I would have loved to come back. But yeah, Bosch, I was shooting that. But I thought they did a great job with it. So it’s really cool to see those characters again.
io9: Were there plans for Silas that you were privy to?
Welliver: There had been talk about it ages ago, but you know, that’s been an ongoing conversation for years. “Oh, they’re going to do it. Oh, they’re not going to do it.” … There [weren’t] any further conversations beyond that. But I was disappointed only because I loved playing that character. It was such a tight family of actors under the brilliant umbrella of David Milch. So I was bummed, but I thought [the movie] was great.
io9:You were also in a fan-favorite episode of The X-Files, “Darkness Falls.”
Welliver: Oh, it was a great experience, but it was hard. It poured rain the entire time. Yeah, thank you. But it was wonderful and it forged a relationship with David Duchovny and Jason Beghe and Gillian Anderson. It was a wonderful experience. I was a fan of the show. I desperately wanted to do it. I remember my manager at the time said, “Oh, that show’s going to be off the air.” And I said, “I think it’s a really good show. I want to do it.” So the opportunity came along and I did it. And I fired that manager because he was very wrong.
Watchmen: Chapter 1 stars the voices of Titus Welliver, Katee Sackhoff, Corey Burton, Adrienne Barbeau, Kelly Hu, Michael Cerveris, Jeffrey Combs, Phil Lamarr, Matthew Rhys, Yuri Lowenthal, Geoff Pierson, Dwight Shultz, Kari Wahlgren, John Marshall Jones, Max Koch, Jason Spisak, and Rick D. Wasserman.
It’s available to stream now on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home; the 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray versions arrive August 27.
Charles Barkley is blasting the NBA’s move to snub a broadcast deal from Warner Bros. Discovery to continue airing games in favor of teaming with Amazon, claiming the pro basketball league is choosing money over fans.
The NBA announced this week that it had inked 11-year agreements to air games on Amazon Prime Video, Disney and NBC. Warner Bros. owns cable channel TNT, which has carried NBA games for nearly four decades as well as “Inside the NBA,” an Emmy-award winning show hosted by Barkley, Ernie Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith.
“Clearly, the NBA has wanted to break up with us from the beginning,” Barkley wrote in a social media post on Friday. “I’m not sure TNT ever had a chance. TNT matched the money. The league knows Amazon and these tech companies are the only ones willing to pay for the rights when they double in the future. The NBA didn’t want to piss them off.”
“It’s a sad day when owners and commissioners choose money over the fans,” he added. “It just sucks.”
(L-R) Shaquille O’Neal, Ernie Johnson Jr., Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley speak onstage an NBA awards banquet on June 25, 2018, in Santa Monica, Calif.
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Turner Sports
The NBA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about Barkley’s statement.
Warner Bros. files suit
Warner Bros. Discovery isn’t taking the rejection lying down. The media giant on Friday filed a lawsuit against the NBA in New York state court in Manhattan. It is requesting an order to delay the league’s new deal from taking effect for the 2025-26 season, along with a judgment that Warner Bros. Discovery matched Amazon Prime Video’s offer.
The company also claims that its existing agreement with the NBA gives it the right to match any competing offers to broadcast games, according to the suit.
“Given the NBA’s unjustified rejection of our matching of a third-party offer, we have taken legal action to enforce our rights,” TNT Sports said in a statement. “We strongly believe this is not just our contractual right, but also in the best interest of fans who want to keep watching our industry-leading NBA content with the choice and flexibility we offer them through our widely distributed WBD video-first distribution platforms — including TNT and Max.”
NBA spokesman Mike Bass said in a statement that Warner Bros. Discovery’s claims are “without merit” and that “our lawyers will address them.”
The NBA’s new broadcast pact leaves the fate of “Inside the NBA” unclear. The new deals means that games will be televised on a mix of both broadcast TV and streaming services, including Amazon Prime as well as Peacock and ESPN’s upcoming standalone streaming service, expected to launch in 2025. The agreements are worth a combined $76 billion, according to the Associated Press.
In an interview with The Athletic, Barkley said Friday he will continue his 10-year, $210 million contract with TNT Sports or consider offers from Amazon, ESPN or NBC.
Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.
A new Entertainment Weekly feature looks back at Halle Berry’s infamousCatwoman on its 20th anniversary, shedding light on the project’s troubled production history while also celebrating its unlikely critical reappraisal. The article is highly recommended reading, as it’s full of stellar quotes from director Pitof, producer Denise Di Novi, screenwriter John Brancato, and Halle Berry, herself.
No matter how you may feel about the movie, Berry gushed about her experience working on it, stating it permanently altered her into real-life cat person. “I became a cat lover because of it. I just rescued four kitties I found in my yard three weeks ago,” she said. “I’m a Catwoman through and through because of that experience and those relationships. That experience changed me.”
Berry revealed Warner Bros. gifted her with a cat for inspiration before filming. “They gave me a cat early on because I didn’t have one,” she said. “His name was Playdough. I watched, studied, and learned how cats think. I didn’t have the responsibility of children and family; I was just a woman alone with a lot of idle time to focus on this. I was full-on cat, all the time. I’d crawl around my house, trying to jump on my counters, thinking, If I were a cat, how would I get up there? I was in it 24/7.”
While the image of Berry leaping from her own countertops is amusing, Gotham‘s two Catwoman actresses Lili Simmons and Camren Bocondova believe it payed off. “Halle’s performance is iconic,” Simmons said. “When you think of Catwoman, you think of her; her fluidity in movement while nailing every scene; effortlessly sexy, powerful, and grounded.”
Bicondovca echoed her sentiment, adding, “Halle inspired me as an actress throughout those five years [on Gotham] and still does! Halle is a powerhouse with crazy athleticism, versatility, and depth. Her work is reflective of her consistent effort to be curious and knowledgeable about her characters. She showed that in her rendition of Catwoman and is still doing it 20 years later.”
Praise for Catwoman performances tends not to include Berry’s turn—the go-to names are usually Julie Newmar, Michelle Pfieffer, and Eartha Kitt—so their enthusiasm is contagious. That Berry made sure to emphasize Catwoman’s feline aspects comes in stark contrast to some of the character’s more recent portrayals from Anne Hathaway and Zoe Kravitz (the former is never seen with a cat; the latter is obviously uncomfortable holding one).
If that wasn’t enough, the article also contains some interesting notes about the studio, who were positive about the film’s bizarre, overarching threat—a skin-dissolving face cream cultivated from bubonic plague cultures—as long as the finished film contained no plague-carrying rats. As Brancato notes, “At the time, Botox was relatively new, so the idea of a cosmetic based on the bubonic plague seemed like a funny idea … the power that controlled the movie was studio executives. Everything came from them—specifically Jeff Robinov, who was [the motion picture head at] Warner Bros. After we’d done a draft, he put everything on index cards, called us to his office, and on a giant whiteboard, rearranged the script. ‘Move this here, get rid of this idea of rats—we don’t like rats—get rid of her internal process of becoming a cat.’ He tossed everything I thought was good in our earlier work. We had an oddly cobbled-together version of the script.”
The article additionally confirms Brancato and co-writer Michael Ferris were fired from the project “twice,” prompting extensive re-writes from Bill & Ted co-creator Ed Solomon. According to Brancato, “They’d been through so many writers and versions. There was exhaustion at the studio. You get punch-drunk. We’d come up with ideas, and they’d say, ‘No, we tried that in drafts 7 and 11.’ Well, what can we do? It was an odd process. Trying to make something that had some integrity that made sense finally seemed impossible, given the realities of what this became. It was a strange, out-of-control machine.”
As the piece continues, Di Novi goes on to discuss Berry’s controversial Catwoman costume, suggesting most of the film’s backlash came from its… minimalist design. “A a catsuit, by definition, everything is covered up,” she said. “We thought it’d be cool to be more rock n’ roll and bare. Halle was famous for wearing a bikini in her Bond movie, and we were like, why not?” Berry confirms she was also positive about the costume, adding, “It was something different, but in our minds, why keep remaking Catwoman if you’re not going to take risks and bring something different to it?”
Why indeed? Is it time Catwoman finally got its due, or do you believe it was truly deserving of its damning Razzie award win, which as the article details, was accepted by Berry in person? Not matter your belief on the matter, Berry concluded, “You can never take away my Oscar, no matter how bad you bash me! If you say I earned it, I’ll take this, too.” They do say cats always land on their feet.
Bad Fairies is flying toward a 2027 release from Warner Bros.
The studio announced Tuesday that the animated feature hailing from Warner Bros. Pictures Animation and Locksmith Animation is set to hit theaters July 23, 2027. The movie from director Megan Nicole Dong, known for creating and directing the Netflix animated musical series Centaurworld, is currently in production in London.
Warner Bros. Pictures Animation and Locksmith Animation also announced that Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss — who co-created the Tony-winning musical Six and the new musical Why Am I So Single, premiering on London’s West End next month — will write the songs for Bad Fairies. Additionally, Grammy-nominated musician Isabella Summers (Florence and the Machine) will compose the score and produce the songs.
Bad Fairies is billed as a subversive musical comedy set in present-day London and focusing on a rule-breaking group of badass fairies. Dong directs the feature from a script by Deborah Frances-White, host of podcast The Guilty Feminist. DNEG Animation serves as digital partners for Bad Fairies. A voice cast has not been announced.
“Warner Bros. Pictures Animation and Locksmith Animation are excited to welcome this extraordinary dream team of musical talents, Toby Marlow, Lucy Moss and Isabella Summers into our Bad Fairies family,” said Warner Bros. Pictures Animation president Bill Damaschke and Locksmith Animation CCO Mary Coleman said in a joint statement. “Together they will bring vibrant and unforgettable dimension to the story, and we cannot wait to share it with audiences around the world in 2027.”
Carolyn Soper produces the film, while Rikke Asbjoern and Chris Garbutt serve as heads of story. Sim Evan-Jones is editor on the project, with Uwe Heidschötter serving as cinematographer and Uwe Heidschötter handling character design.
Last month, WB revealed a sequel to its 2018 movie Batman Ninja was in the works. With the intriguing title of Batman Ninja vs. the Yakuza League, you had to wonder what the Dark Knight would be up to next–and the answer is, fight the Justice League.
Yep, our premise this time is that Batman and Robin (his son Damian) are going up against period-specific villainous counterparts of his superpowered friends. Interestingly, it looks like the Dynamic Duo are in an alternate version of present day Japan rather than feudal Japan in the original film, and the characters’ designs reflect that. Aquaman is a fisherman, Wonder Woman a formidable warrior, Flash appears to be a ronin, and Green Lantern Jessica Cruz wielding an actual lantern to channel her power. Why have they gone evil? That’s a big question mark, but it’ll fall to Batman and Robin to take them down and possibly revert them back to their old selves.
Also notably missing from the lineup here is Superman. Other stories of Batman fighting the League make sure to have the Man of Steel somewhere in the mix, typically as the big bad of the whole affair. Maybe WB is keeping him out of marketing to avoid him overshadowing the other Yakuza members and this being boiled down to yet another “Batman vs. Superman” story. This looks pretty promising regardless; that first movie had its fans for being pretty ridiculous, and bringing in Bruce’s coworkers looks like a fun elevation from that. Hopefully we see more of Batman Ninja vs. Yakuza League sometime soon, and that its release on digital and physical formats isn’t too far behind.
Warner Bros. was designating DC shows as “Max Originals” rather than “HBO Originals” as late as last week, when the latest trailer for The Penguin dropped. But there’s been a shift in the branding, according to a report in Variety that HBO and Max content CEO Casey Bloys is “moving most of Max’s upcoming big-budget, tentpole Warner Bros. IP projects to under the HBO umbrella.”
This shift covers shows releasing in 2025 and beyond—so 2024 releases The Penguin and Dune: Prophecy are both expected to still be labeled as Max shows; “the process of licensing [The Penguin] internationally has already started,” Bloys explained. But once the calendar turns over, look for Lanterns, Stephen King-inspired It prequel series Welcome to Derry, and the Harry Potter series that WB is insistent upon making to fall under that HBO Originals banner.
This switch undoes the previous intention to keep all shows based on WB properties under the Max Originals label, and it came about when Bloys and other execs realized the WB shows weren’t all that different from HBO’s own creations. “As we started producing those shows, we were using the same methods, the same kind of thinking, as how we would approach HBO shows,” he told Variety, noting that there’s even crossover between talent, such as Watchmen’s Damon Lindelof now working on Lanterns. “The idea of the delineation kind of started to feel unnecessary … Let’s just call them what they are: HBO shows.”
What does that mean for viewers? Not a lot. It means that if you see an HBO Original being marketed, it will get the perceived prestige of being on the HBO linear channel; all HBO shows will still stream on Max. Max-only series will still exist, but they’ll be “more in the broadcast/traditional TV vein” and will have more scaled-down budgets compared to the HBO shows. When asked why the company doesn’t just make every show an HBO show, which would be the least confusing way forward, Bloys said, “I do think it is helpful to have a brand that doesn’t put the expectations or the intention of an HBO show. If it’s not designed to do that, it shouldn’t have to.”
Make of that what you will. The Penguin, perhaps the last of the DC Max Originals, arrives September 8.
Multiversus, the Warner Bros. crossover platform fighter starring Batman, Shaggy, Arya Stark and more, is out for real this time after going into a year-long hibernation. Now that it’s back and out of beta, the fighting game community is assessing if it could have the longevity of fighting games like Super Smash Bros. And some have already realized that smaller local tournaments, which often keep the game’s scene alive, could have trouble running Multiversus. That’s because, one significant change to the free-to-play model may make it prohibitively expensive to host Multiversus tournaments. – Kenneth Shepard Read More
Turns out the Elvira-inspired intro to the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice trailer is rooted in a new character development for the grown-up Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder).
Evil’s Michael Emerson on Working Opposite a Giant, Hairy, Five-Eyed Demon
In a new interview with Ryder in Empire, we learn that after the events of 1988’s Beetlejuice, the goth teen icon known for her deadpan delivery and penchant for ghost photography leaned into her relationship with the dead to “host her own TV series: Ghost House With Lydia Deetz.” We cannot wait to see what that entails, and if it will be a way to explore how the Maitlands might have moved on once they resolved their unfinished business—when alive, they’d longed to be parents; at the end of Beetlejuice, they’re shown to be helping raise Lydia—and crossed over. Original film stars Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin are notably absent from the announced cast list of Warner Bros. upcoming sequel to Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice.
Ryder talked about returning as an older Lydia and reuniting with director Burton along with co-stars Michael Keaton and Catherine O’Hara. “I struggle to find the words,” Ryder told the magazine. “It’s just one of the most special experiences that I’ve ever had. The fact that we’re coming back to it, it’s… It’s beyond.” She also added, “This is a first for me. I’ve never revisited a character, ever.”
From the looks of it, Lydia is that Gen X goth adult whose look may have shifted slightly but remains curated in black with her iconic spiked bangs and smudgy charcoal eyeliner. In the clip of her with the Elvira dress homage, it’s clear Burton is once again paying tribute to how horror hosts evoke that effortless dark demeanor with a bit of camp that younger generations might not get. And it makes sense, because one of the things Burton wants to tackle with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is what happens when the weird goth kid grows up. He put a lot of his personal experience in Lydia’s new story, he told Empire. “The new film became very personal to me, through the Lydia character,” he said. “What happened to Lydia? You know, what happens to people? What happens to all of us? What’s your journey from a gothic kind of weird teenager to what happens to you 35 years later?”
This was key to Ryder’s journey of finding Lydia for the film. “I went through so many stages of, ‘Who is she now?’, but I always wanted to have it be Lydia. She can’t lose who she was,” she said. For one thing, she’s now mom to Astrid (played by Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega) who becomes involved with the summoning of Beetlejuice, bringing back Lydia’s memories of the past but also causing her to reflect who she’s become in the time since: “She can’t be the same person, she can’t be just completely deadpan, she has to have evolved, but she also has to have kept that thing she had when we first met her. So that was the big challenge for me.”
BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE | Official Trailer
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opens September 6 in theaters.
Evil’s Michael Emerson on Working Opposite a Giant, Hairy, Five-Eyed Demon
According to Deadline, Skarsgård will also executive produce the show along with his fellow It film franchise creative team at Warner Bros. The show was inspired by the Stephen King novel It and was developed by the franchise’s director Andy Muschietti with producer Barbara Muschietti. They’re also joined by Chapter Two co-producer Jason Fuchs with the films’ other producers, Roy Lee and Dan Lin. Now with Skarsgård in the mix, we’re excited for more horror in the prequel series. Muschietti is set to direct four episodes out of the nine in the series order.
Recently, Bill Skarsgård starred in Boy Kills World and will be featured as Eric Draven in the upcoming The Crow reboot, while Andy Muschietti remained in the Warner Bros. family with The Flash. Needless to say, we are excited to see them team up again with more world-building and creepy killer clownery in the Stephen King universe. Their take on It has become the quintessential one garnering $1.17 billion worldwide. And in an age with ever-expanding mythologies, characters like Pennywise can keep floating on in horror infamy as long as he wants.
The newly released Furiosahas the world blazing with Mad Max fever. Some are celebrating the occasion by rewatching 2015’s Fury Road, if not all four movies. Others are thinking about what could’ve been, particularly as it pertains to the 2015 Mad Max game from Just Cause creator Avalanche Studios.
Spoilers of the Week: August 12th
During a recent interview with Gaming Bible at Cannes, franchise director George Miller talked about the game, which he isn’t too hot on. He was candid in calling it “not as good as I wanted it to be.” To him, it failed because the team had to “give all our material” to Avalanche instead of being involved directly, and “I’m one of those people that i’d rather not do something unless you can do it at the highest level, or at least try to make it at the highest level.”
If he had his way, another Mad Max game would happen, but one with Hideo Kojima at the helm. The Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding creator has openly been a fan of Fury Road since it came out, and Miller called him the perfect guy to take on that endeavor. “I’ve just been speaking to him,” the director added. “[But] he’s got so much fantastic stuff in his own head that I would never ask him.” (Kojima, for what it’s worth, saw Furiosa at Cannes and called it a “masterpiece.”)
Avalanche’s Mad Max game launched months after the release of Fury Road, and is in fact set in between that and Beyond Thunderdome. The game got solid reviews when it launched, but the big thing that did it in was releasing on September 1, 2015… aka, the same day as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. When two fairly big games go up against one another on the same day, there’s typically a loser, and in this case, it was ol’ Max Rockatansky.
Here’s where things get a little murky, though: putting Mad Max out on that date was apparently out of Avalanche’s hands. Christofer Sundberg, who co-founded the studio in 2003, revealed on X that Warner Bros. wouldn’t budge when he suggested the game shift from its September 1 release. As a result, “they blamed us for the bad sales and cancelled a bunch of awesome DLC that was just sitting there waiting to be released.” To this day, he admits that he doesn’t know why WB was so adamant about it.
Sundberg also took Miller’s thoughts on his game to task, alleging that WB tried to force Mad Max into a linear game when Avalanche’s bread and butter is big, open-world titles. A year into development, the studio was told to convert it into a non-linear game, and he chalked up Miller’s comments to “complete nonsense and [it] just shows complete arrogance. […] Mad Max was a hell of a great game, the potential was missed due to political nonsense.” And if Kojima did try a stab at making a Max game, he thinks it’d be a “completely different experience.”
In the years since its release, Mad Max has been looked back on fondly and achieved a bit of cult classic status. To date, it’s playable on both PC and consoles via backwards compatibility. Maybe with the franchise being the hot topic of the weekend, the game will see a little more love over the next few days.
Warner Bros. Animation, Cartoon Network Studios and Hanna-Barbera Studios Europe shared their plans Monday for the annual animation fest held June 9-15 in Annecy, France.
Among the planned events include Andy Serkis hosting a filmmaker conversation and extended look at The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, the anime feature that hails from New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. Animation. Director Kenji Kamiyama and producers Philippa Boyens, Joseph Chou and Jason DeMarco will take part in the discussion and present the first footage from the movie that Warner Bros. is set to release theatrically on Dec. 13.
The animation process is currently underway for The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which centers on the fortress of Helm’s Deep and its founder, Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan. (Images from the project can be seen above and below.) Last week, Warner Bros. announced that a live-action Lord of the Rings film from director Serkis is in early development and eyeing a 2026 release.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Other programming highlights at Annecy from the studio include a making-of session for Creature Commandos, which marks the first DC Studios project from bosses Gunn and Peter Safran. Gunn serves as executive producer and writer for the Max animated series that hails from DC Studios and Warner Bros. Animation and does not yet have a premiere date.
At the Annecy presentation, Creature Commandos supervising producer Rick Morales and supervising director Balak Yves will share an in-depth look at the artistic process behind the series that focuses on Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) forming a military group comprised of monstrous villains.
Also set for Annecy is a panel sharing an inside look at the return of the Cartoon Network series The Amazing World of Gumball, in addition to a world-premiere screening of the forthcoming animated feature The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie.
Nintendo’s Pokémonseries has had a powerful grip on pop culture for decades, and it’s doubtful to change anytime soon. The bulk of that power comes from the video and trading card games, along with the eternally ongoing anime and the movies and shows that’ve spun out of that. So how do you make one of the biggest video game properties even bigger? You take the big, bold jump to Hollywood.
Will the Fallout TV Series Radiate the Tone of the Video Games?
First released in Japan on May 3, 2019 and then the following week in the US, Detective Pikachuwas the first ever live-action Pokémon movie, and also Nintendo’s first video game movie since Super Mario Bros. If anyone ever thought Pokémon would get a big budget flick, they probably didn’t think it’d come courtesy of Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures, let alone based off a 2016 spinoff game where brand mascot Pikachu is a private eye with the voice of Ryan Reynolds. Yeah, the monsters all looked impressively real and tangible in ways fans had always dreamed, but having Deadpool as the leading ‘mon could’ve undercut everything. Was this going to work?
Image: Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures/The Pokémon Company
The answer turned out to be “yes”: Detective Pikachu netted fairly positive reviews and made $450.1 million worldwide. Back then, it’d been the highest-grossing video game movie of its time, at least until the Super Mario movie knocked it off its pedestal last year. If the world hadn’t been hit with the pandemic and Hollywood strikes in the 2020s so far, we’d likely have a sequel by now; Portlandia co-creator Jonathan Krisel was tapped to direct it last year working off a script by Chris Galetta, but it seems at least two years off, minimum. (Coming out as Avengers: Endgamewas still in theaters probably wasn’t right move, either.) As is, it’s a well-regarded movie that made a decent impression in the video game movie space whose future got buried underneath some bad luck.
At the same time, it appears to have made a decent impact when it comes to Pokémon’s transmedia output. The anime was always going to persist whether it did well or not, but the film’s success has certainly helped open Nintendo’s mind to the possibilities of what this franchise could be. Without it, we likely wouldn’t have Pokémon Conciergeor the original drama series Pocket ni Bōken wo Tsumekonde, which is about the reach and impact of Pokémon rather than being set in its world. And this is just what we know about—a Pokémon Direct or two from now, we may learn that Nintendo’s got plans of doing up a movie universe in the vein of what Paramount’s doing with Sonic the Hedgehog.
Image: Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures/The Pokémon Company
Compared to other video game adaptations like Falloutand The Last of Us, or even Arcane, it wouldn’t be wrong to feel like Detective Pikachu has gotten overlooked. Its time in the sun will surely come whenever that sequel rolls around. In that way, it’s like the anime: whatever comes next will hopefully be an evolution that buils upon the winning formula of its predecessor. And if not, well, at least we’ve got a video of Pikachu dancing to brighten the day.
This news comes from Deadline, which doesn’t add many details beyond it’s a “reimagining” and landed at the streamer after “a competitive situation;” it’ll be written by Josh Appelbaum and Scott Rosenberg, who likewise have a credit that dovetails here: the anime-turned-live-action Netflix series Cowboy Bebop. They’re also both executive producers on current series Citadel at Prime Video, and From at MGM+.
If Greg Berlanti’s name sounds familiar, he’s also the guy who was behind the CW’s Arrowverse for many years, as well as the delightfully bonkers Riverdale.
The Scooby-Doo gang has been around since 1969; their most high-profile foray into live-action was the 2002 feature film and its sequel, and there have been numerous animated reboots since its original run. Max, which you would think would be the home of any Scooby-Doo project, is where Mindy Kaling’s animated spin-off Velma just premiered its second season.
And jinkies, yes! Your Scooby-Doo dream cast speculation is welcomed in the comments.
There’s a lot of video games set to get TV or film adaptations in the next few years, and even more that seem like they’d be ripe for the picking. Bungie’s Destiny franchise seemed like a viable candidate, especially after the studio was acquired by PlayStation in 2022, but it sounds like any plans to bring the games to a new medium are have currently been dashed.
Will the Fallout TV Series Radiate the Tone of the Video Games?
According to Forbes’ Paul Tassi earlier in the week, Bungie was reportedly “tossing around” ideas for an animated Destiny series on Netflix before things fell apart.. Allegedly, this was in development prior to the aforementioned PlayStation acquisition, during which Sony said it would help Bungie “nurture the IP they have in a multi-dimensional manner.” (For extra context, this statement was made a few weeks before the Uncharted movie released and became a decent box-office success.) In regards to why it didn’t go forward, Tassi wasn’t sure, though he did say it just may not have gone farther than the scripting phase.
Destiny 2: Is There Any Way A Destiny Show Is Still Happening At This Point?
Before Sony bought Bungie, the developer brought on Derrick Tsai as its transmedia head. Tsai was a producer and director at Riot who helped pave the way for Arcane to get made and become a hit over at Netflix. He departed around this time last year, after which the studio hired Warner Bros. alum Gabriel VanHuss to serve as the Destiny’s head of linear media. VanHuss holds that position to this day, and his duties involve expanding the franchise in TV, comics (which it’s previously done), movies, and so on. It’s hard to know where this hypothetical show currently stands: Bungie’s currently focused on the Final Shape expansion dropping in June, its new Marathon game, and still reeling from its highly publicized layoffs (to say nothing of possibly working on Destiny 3). According to Tassi, if the hypothetical show isn’t fully dead, it’s not coming “anytime remotely soon.”
The idea of Destiny getting a TV show seemed like a cool idea two years ago, but it’s a little more dicey now. Bungie’s hoping to turn things around for both Destiny 2 and the company at large with Final Shape, and revealing a TV show weeks after the expansion drops could easily take things from “we’re so back” to “oh, it’s over” in a heartbeat. The series certainly has the potential to thrive in other mediums, but it’ll unfortunately have to be a waiting game until the smoke clears around The Final Shape.
Do you still think Sucker Punchwas just shy of being a truly great work? If so, Zack Snyder agrees with you—and he’s ready to make its Snyder Cut a reality.
Spoilers of the Week April 11-15
Talking to Empire earlier in the week, the director was asked about what he’d change from any of his movies. (Other than the one he already did that with, of couse.) He picked his 2011 action flick, which he says “never really got finished correctly. […] If I had the chance, I would fix that movie.” What’s stopping him from whipping up those changes is, accoring to him, both the resources and explicit permission to do it.
“They have to let me put it together,” he explained, presumably referring to Warner Bros. or Legendary Pictures. “I have the footage already shot. […] We ask every now and then, [and] we have to ask again. I think there has to be a window when no one’s got the movie.” He further implied that fans could help get the ball rolling faster, saying “if they want to start a campaign, that’s alright.”
Sucker Punch originally released in 2011 and starred Emily Browing as Babydoll, who gets sent to a mental hospital after accidentally shooting her sister while trying to fight off her abusive stepfather. Upon learning she’ll be lobotomized, Babydoll and her fellow patients—played by Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Abbie Cornish, and Jamie Chung—enter a number of fantasy worlds to find items that’ll help them escape in the real world. With negative reviews and an $89.8 million box office (on an $82M budget), it wasn’t really well-liked at the time, not helped by the flak it caught for its elevator pitch of girls fantasizing about killing monsters with swords and guns as they do erotic dances IRL.
Times have changed, though, and it’s possible the film would be better (or just more interesting?) if it’s been retooled. But would fans want to will that one into existence like they did with Justice League? That may be a little harder to determmine, since it’s yet to receive a widespread reappraisal like other movies lately.
Tim Burton’sBeetlejuice introduced the blueprint for cinematic meta agents of chaos into pop culture long before Disney’s Genie from Aladdin or the MCU’s Deadpool and Loki. Without much of a mythology, save for some comparisons to trickster entities of folklore and classic lit like Puck from Shakespeare’s AMidsummer Night’s Dream, Betelgeuse—as his name is spelled in the film’s flashy neon sign—can be anything not beholden to a history.
First Fandoms: Emma McDonald
Michael Keaton’s original summoning of the character introduced Beetlejuice as an unreliable narrator, which is followed in every variant of him we’ve seen in television and on stage; he has powers we don’t quite understand and no one can control outside of saying his name three times before he can stop them. Keaton’s version of the character will seen again in this September’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—and though there’s always some trepidation awaiting a long-in-the-making sequel, here’s why we’re too not worried about what to expect from this one.
In the 1988 dark comedy about life as ghosts for the recently departed, Keaton shone as the larger-than-life poltergeist in a performance that helped make Burton’s wacky creation iconic. With stand-up gags and stop-motion buffoonery (some of which might not be so PC nowadays), the villain of his own movie almost stole the show from Winona Ryder’s teen goth dream Lydia and her ghostly found family after nearly getting rid of her living family (who may have deserved it). The film grossed $74,664,632 in North America, garnering its success in theaters and being embraced as a hit family film about death. It also primed Keaton to reunite with Burton for Batman.
Image: WB Entertainment
Beetlejuice’s jump in the line from the films into becoming a cultural staple was propelled by Beetlejuice, the animated series. The cartoon had a more family-friendly, looser interpretation of the plot introduced in the film. It got rid of the Maitlands and the questionable child-bride thread, and instead made Beetlejuice a lovable manic sidekick Lydia rehabilitates into more of an anti-hero. Their spooky cartoon adventures ran from 1989 to 1991 and it became a popular movie-to-show experiment, solidifying Beetlejuice’s place as a spooky pop-culture star.
His inclusion in the real world through his presence at Universal Studios theme parks continued to keep the Ghost with the Most in the zeitgeist through the ‘90s. Beetlejuice Graveyard Revue was my first introduction to the character before watching the film, which came out before I was born. The live theme park stage show was a monster mash of pop-rock music covers performed by the Universal Monsters and hosted by Beetlejuice; it debuted in the ‘90s but had updated iterations throughout the years. It was a genius move by Universal, crafting a formative theme park-experience that made such an impact on monster kids, goths, and normies—reframing Beetlejuice as the crypt keeper for a new generation but for silly spooky nonsense.
Full Final Performance of Beetlejuice Graveyard Revue at Universal Studios Florida
Because… why is he hosting a graveyard jukebox musical? What does it have to do with the movie? Why are the Universal Monsters there? Wait—no, they make sense, why is he (a Warner Bros. property) there? By the time he jumped out of the grave none of those questions mattered; he was back and badder than ever. Beetlejuice has been a Universal Studios character meet and greet staple ever since—even past the closing of his revue back in 2015. Most recently in 2021, Beetlejuice got a Halloween Horror Nights house at Universal Studios Orlando; it proved to be one of the annual event’s most popular attractions and showed that fans were still clamoring for more, even before Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was greenlit.
Image: Universal Studios Products and Experiences
Still another iteration of Beetlejuice came to life shortly before the pandemic. In 2019 a Broadway musical adaptation of the property hit the stage for a stint before returning in 2021 and heading out on a national tour. The show, starring Alex Brightman (who recently was featured as Richard Dreyfuss in the Jaws behind-the-scenes play The Shark is Broken), may appear at first to be merely a musical version of the film—however, if you’ve seen it, you know it’s much more than that. The book for the musical, written by Scott Brown and Anthony King, departs greatly from the film with a more cohesive storyline, centering Lydia’s journey through the grief of losing her mother (while her dad quickly remarries Delia), and the Maitlands’ grief at not being able to live long enough to have a family. Both give the story more to explore at depth—all while retaining the funhouse comedy romp that comes from dealing with death by means of Beetlejuice’s comedic chaos counseling. By the time the second act hits, it feels like such a completely different story from the movie in a good way, and if it happens to stop in your town on tour, don’t miss it.
Image: Matthew Murphy
Each variant of the Beetlejuice story down to its core is about the character’s freedom to fit into any medium with meta commentary about death—perhaps because since he’s dead, he exists outside reality. His presence makes sense of the unexplainable not by giving answers but by exploring the questions people have about life and death through a movie, cartoon, haunted house, and musical. Beetlejuice’s modus operandi is to not entirely change others, but to be changed by the situations he’s in—all while being his best hedonistic self and at most encouraging the living to live a little through the horrors of humanity. It’s why he and Lydia have become goth legends for the Hot Topic and Spirit Halloween crowds. Beetlejuice isn’t high-brow “cinema,” it’s about a guy who’s the executioner of gallows humor. And that is why we shouldn’t be too worried about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: it’s not a legacy sequel that has a bar to reach, and I honestly think it might make fun of that concept in the best way. I’m just hoping for another good time, a new reason to laugh and not be afraid of death while seeing that Beetlejuice fella be up to no good again before getting exorcised back to his resting place… we know it’s not final.
After a few legal setbacks from Warner Bros., The People’s Joker has made its way to theaters this weekend in New York. The parody film sees director/writer Vera Drew as the Harlequin, a trans woman trying to make it in comedy after recently moving into a small town. With a number of other Batman villains also getting the parody treatment in the film, you can guess why WB would try to stomp it out—and why folks wanted it to get a fair shot at life.
Spoilers of the Week | June 17th
For Drew, the film is deeply personal and practically autobiographical. As a trans woman, she felt a connection to the actual Jokermovie in 2019. Along with Joaquin Phoenix’s outcast-turned-criminal Arthur Fleck, she found something relatable in the film being about “city structures and government systems [that] are completely failing. My family system failed me,” she told Variety. “My government is still failing me constantly, and for some reason, I still have to pay them taxes next month. I related to that core element of just wanting to make art and put myself out there. How can I do that in a system that is so rigidly gatekept and so much of it is just an arm of propaganda?”
Superheroes are “big, grand, bold, colorful archetypes,” and people already reflect themselves onto them. As a lifelong Batman fan, People’s Joker allowed Drew to tell her trans story, something she herself only really processed in 2019. In using comedy to explore some “false ideas” about herself, she eventually realized she “needed to process not only coming out as a trans woman in alternative comedy, but how this informed my identity.”
Drew was equally candid about the criticism that’s come her way over the last two years. There’ve been critiques—mainly from “well-intentioned allies”—asking if it’s a good time to have a queer villain headline a movie. As far as she’s concerned, she’s a villain already, so may as well accept it. “I’m villainized and politicized, and I’m turned into a symbol, just because of my identity,” she said. “Some people think that just because I was assigned a gender at birth that doesn’t match me, and then embraced that, I’m somehow a political activist or a symbol of their oppression. To me, I could only make a movie about a queer villain at this point in my life, because I’m completely villainized and my community is completely villainized. So it was important to me to do that.”
The People’s Joker is now in theaters, with more screenings opening up around the US in the coming weeks.
This past January, HBO canceledOur Flag Means Death after the show’s second season premiered (and wrapped) in October. As with most cancled shows, a fan campaign emerged to try and get HBO to renew the show, while creator David Jenkins said he’d try his best to shop the show around somewhere else that’d be open to a comedy about gay pirates.
Andrew Callaghan Talks ‘This Place Rules’
But those dreams are now over, as Jenkins revealed on Instagram the show wouldn’t be picked up at another network or streamer. “We’ve reached the end of the road, at least as far as this sweet show is concerned,” he wrote. “After many complimentary meetings, conversations, etc., it seems there is no alternate home for our crew.” Jenkins went on to thank their fans for their efforts, which were “noticed across the industry”—they’d fundraised enough money for billboards in New York and London, which he says went a ways in helping the cast and crew “deal with the loss.”
“A love like ours can’t disappear in an instant,” he concluded. “When we see each other off in mystic, say hello. We won’t say goodbye, because we’re not leaving. We’re just taking a breather until next time we can share something together.”
Our Flag Means Death was just the latest cancellation in a decent-sized streak from HBO. Along with the likes of Rap Sh!t and The Flight Attendant, the network binned Westworldafter four seasons, in a move that came a surprise to that show’s cast and crew, given it was ready to close things out with season five. Its parent company Warner Bros. Discovery has been on a tear this week—media company Rooster Teeth is being shut down, while it’s preparing to delist titles published by Adult Swim Games, and reportedly refusing to just transfer Steam publishing rights over to those individuals.
It’s March, and we’ve got our first big movie for 2024 in Warner Bros. and Legendary’s Dune: Part Two. Even as its release date shifted around a few times, there’s been a palpable excitement in the air for the second half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, and that was before it was getting high marks from nearly everyone. Financially, it’s starting off on the right foot and doing better than originally projected.
Spoilers of the Week April 24-29
Per the Hollywood Reporter, Dune has shored up $178.5 million in its starting weekend. $97 million of this came internationally; in regions like France and South Korea, it released a few days ahead of its March 1 date in North America. For North America, it netted $81.5 million, double the opening take of Dune: Part One back in 2021 and also the highest-grossing movie of 2024 to date. The film was initially tracked to be in the $150-$175 million range, but its small surpassing of that suggests it may have a long tail ahead of it.
Beyond its collective star power and heavy marketing, folks seemed to groove with Part One in the years since its release, if they weren’t already into it. It also helps that there’s nothing else quite on this level in terms of blockbuster scale, and it looks like something worth going out to see in the theaters: per Deadline, $32.2 million of its global take came from IMAX screenings, and it’s now the second-biggest global weekend for an IMAX film behind Batman v Superman in 2016.
Tentpole-wise, the month of March has some other big films on the horizon: Kung Fu Panda 4 drops next week for the kids, along with Blumhouse’s Imaginary. Then we’ve got Ghostbusters: Frozen Empiretowards the end of the month on March 22, concluding with WB and Legendary’s own Godzilla x Kong: The New Empireon the 29th. At the moment, Dune has word of mouth on its side, ditto a desire to see this all come to a close with an eventual adaptation of Dune Messiah and those popcorn buckets, so time will tell how those movies fare against it.
