Well, I'm slowly getting back into the writing game, so let's have a good ol'fashioned RANT! Warner Bros had a merger with Discovery, after their previous one with AT&T had gone… not so well. The new executives in charge, most notably the new CEO David Zaslav promised some big things, and they delivered… the axe to a whole lot of stuff. Now a lot has been affected here, including stuff disappearing from HBO Max, but the most egregious things were the shelving of both the almost complete sequel to Scoob!, and the much anticipated Batgirl movie starring Leslie Grace for tax purposes. And not long afterward we got the news that the proposed new Supergirl movie, starring Sasha Calle who was to make her debut as the character in The Flash, was probably not going to move ahead. To sum up my feelings in short…
Let’s start paradoxically with something that does seem to be safe for now; The Flash movie. Yeah, that’s right, we need to talk about Ezra. (I have been wanting to use that line for ages.) At the time I am writing this, Miller is still technically on the run from the law for serious accusations of child grooming, there are so many stories of their bizarre assaults on people, and just a couple of days ago a new story broke that they might be putting together a full-scale cult in Iceland. And apparently, even though quite a few of the post-Flash DC projects look ready for the chop, the one starring Miller is still going ahead, such is apparently the power of the Sunk Cost Fallacy in this case.
Surely someone at Discovery/Warner must realize what a bad look this is. They shelved a film with a lead actress from the Dominican Republic, which was also going to introduce fan favourite transgender character Alysia Yeoh played by Asian trans actress Ivory Aquino, being directed by a pair of directors of Morrocan descent, who incidentally just had a big success with the Muslim lead Ms. Marvel, aren’t going ahead with another with a lead actress of Columbian descent, but not only are they going ahead with the film with a white lead who is accused of some truly vile stuff, Zaslav himself is saying he’s “excited” about the project. Oh, and also they announced a sequel to Joker, a deeply incel-ly film, and announced a new white actress as Harley Quinn. What in the living fuck? I know there’s a lot of this that probably is purely mercenary, like of course they’re going to make a sequel to the film that made them a billion dollars and got them Oscar nominations, but still, did no-one point out how bad the optics on this might look?
Now from some of us who have been following the behind-the-scenes of superhero cinema for a while, there a certain amount of "Here we go again" about this. Many of you probably haven't heard the name Ike Perlmutter before, but if you ever wondered with the Marvel films why it took so long for us to get a Black Widow film, he's kind of the reason why. A billionaire donor to the Trump campaign (BOOOOOO!!!), he was in charge of Marvel for a while, and was responsible for Black Panther and Black Widow films getting pushed back, as he thought they wouldn't be commerically viable. He's also responsible for Iron Man III not having a female main villain as planned, and for an astonishing quote about the recasting of Rhodie from Terence Howard to Don Cheadle saying "people won't notice, they all look the same". Yeah. Fucking yikes. Thankfully these days he has very little actual influence, Disney just going "here Ike, have another choccy biccy, and we'll be back later with your next payout, just leave it to Kevin". I bring all this up because my word, David Zaslav seems to be Perlmutter Two: Electric Boogaloo; Trump supporter, whose previous big success was Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, and with a string of alarming views on gender roles too.
This actually came to a head on Thursday with the Quarterly Earnings report, a big video presentation to shareholders about plans going forward and… just look at some of this shit! Look at it!
A lot of people have been calling out all of this, including points like the apparent ditching of a huge amount of scripted cont- no, no, sorry, I refuse to keep calling art “content”, not going to keep commodifying this stuff. Anyway, this move which is apparently going to involve ditching nearly 70% of the staff at HBO max (SEVENTY!!!!), and wrecking the film library has not gone down well with some. One point someone raised is that there’s a surprising absence of The Conjuring franchise from the presentation, which is arguably the most profitable thing WB have at the moment, horror is a good money maker and they’re ignoring it. Seriously both It films put together cost about half what the last Fantastic Beasts film did, and whilst that big family-friendly feature struggled to reach the key twice-the-budget cost to be in the black, the two-part Stephen King adaptation made a total of one and a quarter billion bucks! And stuff like that was nowhere to be seen in the presentation, yet Harry Potter, which has its own massive public relations elephant in the room, is.
Well, if the move with all this was to appease investors, mission utterly failed as straight after all this, the share price for the company dropped by almost ten percent! That’s almost enough to trigger emergency measures for a corporation. It looks like things are really grim for the new team in charge with a massive lack of shareholder respect like that… and you know what? GOOD! FUCK ‘EM!!!
So, whilst David Zaslav tries to work out who amongst the executives who probably told him his decisions were a bad idea is going to get the blame for those decisions, I’m just going to talk about the real reason I wanted to get into all of this. My overall feeling is one of sadness on behalf of all the creatives involved in this whole thing who have had the rug pulled out from under them as a result of all this. When it was announced the character of Supergirl was going to be in The Flash, this video was shared via director Andy Muschietti on his Instagram, the moment Sasha Calle found out she’d been cast as Kara Zor-El…
Now, wasn't that just the purest, most heartwarming thing? I remember watching that and being so happy for a young actress discovering she was getting one hell of a big break, and that a character that means a lot to so many people will be played by someone who seems so nice and deserving of it. But now I am sad that due to both the behaviour of a co-star, and the machinations of the higher ups, that might not being going ahead after all. As for Batgirl being canned, Leslie Grace has posting about it with dignity, you can tell the film and the role of Barbara Gordon meant something special for her, and that also goes for co-director Adil El Arbi and Ivory Aquino. A lot of people have also been looking forward to it as it was going to have Brendan Fraser as the main villain, a return to the big screen for someone who dropped out for truly sad and terrible reasons, and who really deserved a worthy comeback.
So, for all my anti-corporate ranting I’ve done above, I hope the main thing you take away from this is that I’m just sad and sympathetic on behalf of all those who have had their hard work taken away from them in such a cruel, heartless fashion. This has been an angry rant, but my anger comes ultimately from the people caught up in the whole thing. I hope that maybe things change, that maybe WB realises how badly they screwed up and somehow undoes the decision, that we get to see Leslie as Barbara, a big screen version of a character who deserves that spotlight. I hope that Sasha gets the chance to properly give us a Supergirl to inspire so many, and that her career goes places from this. I hope that this doesn’t affect the directing careers of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, who have apparently been getting some solidarity messages from directors who have been in similar situations like Edgar Wright and James Gunn, and from Kevin Feige over at Marvel too. I hope for the best for all of those who have lost out here, you have my solidarity.
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