where? he backs up the same exact points he made before...
matter a fact, this is an article about how people took what he said completely out of context and got butt hurt about it.. when he never said 99% of the things people are mad about
even brought up the fact that the twitter pic is a fake too
cliffnotes: "i never said the shyt was bad.. i never said i liked marvel.. i never said i hated zack.. i never said any other dc movies were bad, in fact i said they were great.. i never said it wouldn't make money.. i never backtracked... all i said was some people with money in this, said they were worried about it"
which is exactly what a lot of us having saying in here... and y'all still getting butthurt about it... like if a nikka don't suck this movie's dikk before even seeing it, we somehow hate dc and love marvel
y'all need to calm down with that shyt
I've spent the last week watching people get angry to a degree that is unhealthy, and for the most part, they've been angry about something that never ever happened.
I've written before about the phenomenon of the "fan-trum," and this has been a doozy this week.
I did not tell you Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice is a bad movie.
Okay? Is that clear? If you go watch the actual video, which (god help me) I have embedded at the top of this piece, then you'll see that the first thing I said is how exciting I think Batman looks in this film. You remember when I mentioned above how Batman is my favorite superhero comic book character? Still true. One of the things I love about Batman is how open to interpretation he's been, and how many of those interpretations have worked despite being very different. I'd gotten used to the idea that live-action feature film versions of Batman feature suits that restrict their movement as a simple problem with live-action. That trailer immediately excited me because of how physically dynamic Ben Affleck's take on Batman seems to be. I love the beginning of that trailer. I'm dying to see more of Batman in action.
I also reported that the people I spoke with have been very excited by Jesse Eisenberg's performance as Lex Luthor, and that's encouraging news. It's apparent from the trailers for the film that he's made some big choices about the character, and I love when actors do that. Does it always pay off? Nope. And there are plenty of performances I've seen where someone crashes and burns precisely because they took such a big chance. Hearing some enthusiastic early buzz for Eisenberg's work makes me even more excited to see what he's done.
So if those things are how we started the video, why is here a certain vocal percentage of the fanboy audience that is so angry that they have spent the last week furious at me?
One of the things that seems to have some of you very upset or indignant is that I didn't name the source of my observations. While I would never name a source unless they were speaking officially on-the-record, I will offer you this: what began as a single conversation led to two other conversations, and in the time since our video was published, there have been three more conversations. In each case, the people I've spoken with are people I know well, people who work in positions where they have direct access to the materials we've discussed, and (this is the important one) who have a direct stake in the success of the overall slate at DC Films. As in, these are people who want these films to perform well for professional reasons. These are people who have a direct financial interest in these films doing well. These are people who took no joy or pleasure in reporting these things to me. That was not the point of any of the conversations. No one was gloating. No one was gleeful.
There are two points people have repeatedly raised this week to "prove" that I have my reporting wrong. The first has to do with a report I wrote about Joseph Gordon-Levitt and him reprising his role as John Blake for a
Justice League film. People are pointing at the
Batman v Superman trailer as if that somehow proves I was wrong when I published that story. Simply put, the ending of
The Dark Knight Rises was no accident. When Will Beall was hired to write his drafts of
Justice League, he was put through his paces. My reporting was based on at least one draft of Beall's script, in which John Blake was Batman. At various points as Beall kept working, they reconfigured Batman several times. They tried it where they never said which Batman he was. They tried writing it in a way that would lure Christian Bale back for one more film. They even offered Ben Affleck the role at the same time that they asked him if he'd like to direct the film. Nothing they tried during that process worked, though, and they pulled the plug on Beall's draft altogether.
These stories develop, and one of the things we discussed in the video is how DC has had a less clear game plan than Marvel, something which evidently led some of you to believe that I am pro-Marvel or anti-DC. That's simply not true, though. When you look back at my reviews of DC films just since I came here to HitFix, it would be impossible for anyone to take those as a whole and make any case at all for an anti-DC bias.
I'll even make it easy for you. Here's a pretty exhaustive reading list.
Here's my review of The Dark Knight Rises.
Here's
part one of my second look at the film. And here's
part two.
Here's my Man Of Steel review, which was so positive that at the time, it was Marvel fanboys who suddenly suspected me of ulterior motives.
Here's my commentary from the Warner Bros. Comic-Con panel where they announced Batman v Superman.
Here's my Comic-Con commentary from
this year's presentation.
At the end of Comic-Con,
I wrote a piece about fandom in general, and I find the section on
Batman v Superman particularly ironic now in light of the way fandom's been behaving this last week.
It's also frustrating to me to hear people accuse of me trying to hurt this film in some way because I've been a big supporter of Zack Snyder as a filmmaker since I first met him during the post-production of 300. I spent an afternoon with him in a Burbank office as he showed me footage and talked to me about his approach to adapting Frank Miller's graphic novel, and right away, I was fascinated by the way he talked about bringing comic books to life. As I was on my way out of the office that day, there was a copy of Watchmen on his desk, and knowing how many people had already taken a shot at that particular title, I asked him if he was thinking about it. "I don't know," he said, smiling. "Think I should?"
Over the years, I've been friendly with him and with his producer and wife Deb Snyder as well. I think they're an unstoppable team, and they care deeply about the films they make.
When I talked to Snyder about Man Of Steel, I was still buzzed from seeing the film, and very excited about what kind of groundwork it laid for the future.
I discussed that in this piece with Greg Ellwood and Kris Tapley, and then
we had a similar conversation in this piece.
Time after time, you see me excited about the notion of DC Films and their potential, and about this filmmaker. In the entire build-up to this film,
perhaps the most critical piece I've written was this one, and it's the second thing you guys have been throwing at me this week while saying over and over that it's been "debunked."
I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.
The piece I ran was an opinion piece, but it was sourced from several different places. In the piece, if you'll actually take the time to read the whole thing again, you'll see that I was having trouble believing any studio would say that about an entire slate of films. I was reporting what I had heard, and I was questioning it at the same time. Somehow, in the blindered way that fandom processes things, that second part of the thought process has been forgotten completely, and it points out just how hard it is to do anything like nuanced reportage for this audience.
Would you like to know the main reason I left Ain't It Cool to write for HitFix? It goes far deeper than money, although HitFix definitely made it hard for me to resist their offer. It came down to me getting tired of the audience and the way the audience never aged emotionally. When I started submitting reports to the site, I was a single guy living with buddies in my mid-20s. By the time I left, I was a father of two, a homeowner, staring down the barrel of my 40th birthday. I love movies, and I love that I get to write about them, but there is way more to movies than just men in rubber suits pretending to punch each other, and more and more often, it scares me how some people don't seem to understand that.
Here's an important quote from that article:
"I'm going to put the question out there, and as we all talk to Zack Snyder or David Goyer or any of the actors working on these characters, I'd love to hear an answer, a firm denial. Is it true?"
Does that sound like I'm adamant that something is 100% true? Does that sound like I'm insisting on something as a fact that can never change?
I'm sorry if you did not like it when I said that several people I spoke to had mixed reactions to a film that you're looking forward to seeing. I'm sorry not because I did anything wrong, but because it kicked off a fan-trum of epic proportions, and when I look at the last week, I see Marty and I see Scott and I see myself, and I see that you are deeply invested in wanting to see this film work. You want to see Justice League. You want to see the individual movies. You are filled with hope and you don't want anything to deflate that right now.
My job isn't to be a cheerleader, though. It is to honestly report about the things that I hear and see and read, and to speculate about what those things mean, and to offer analysis based on my 25 years of working in this town. I've been in Los Angeles now long enough to have made friends who work at every level of every studio, and just because someone works for a studio, it doesn't mean they lose the ability to look at something and have a complex reaction to it. I'll tell you that one person I spoke to about the movie was far more excited than anyone else, and even he felt it was simply too overstuffed. He enjoyed everything in it. He just wanted more breathing room for some of the characters and ideas.
But even if I heard from 100 people that it was terrible, that still doesn't mean you will feel the same way. There was very mixed buzz on Mad Max: Fury Road from inside Warner Bros, right up until the moment it was released. And none of that meant a thing to me or to audiences around the world. There are certainly people who didn't like the film or who have complaints about it, and there are people who are passionately in love with it. Buzz is just conversation, and conversation should never be enough to make you so angry that you have to lash out.
At this point, people are fabricating quotes of mine to try to damage me in some way, and sure enough, there are people on Twitter and Facebook who seem to believe the lie. I can't control that. If you see someone circulating the following image…
image:
… you should feel free to look at my original Twitter timeline, where you can see
the original unaltered Tweet I sent to @FrontierToyota. Nothing's been deleted, and since I can't edit a Tweet, there's no way I covered any tracks. It's easy to believe something you see on social media, but it's just as easy to check to see if you should believe it or if you're being misled by someone who is simply malicious to be malicious.
I remain enthusiastic about Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice, and I hope I love it the same way I loved Man Of Steel. I also remain convinced that if the film fails to be the tentpole hit that Warner Bros. needs it to be, the studio will have to make some fairly major changes to their overall game plan. This property is much too important to them. They have two things right now that they are leaning on heavily; superhero titles and Harry Potter spin-offs. I guarantee they're just as anxious about Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them as they are about Batman v Superman, and saying so doesn't mean I wish either film any ill will. I'm just acknowledging that these are hugely important to the studio on a financial level, the very definition of tentpoles.
I read his whole article and he's on point. And its not just with that movie, it's with anything that people really want to like. The first moment someone says they've heard it's just okay or people are worried or that it's good but doesn't cure cancer, people bring out the pitchforks and torches and it sucks. He even mentioned the fact that he still loves man of steel AND cites the fact that Warners are uncertain about Mad Max also. They had little to no faith in it because they weren't sure what they had or how it would be received. It's the same exact fukkin situation.
that Warner Bros. decided to do a Batman Vs. Superman movie which is really just set-up/Tie-in movie for the JL movie instead of doing a real "Man of Steel" sequel.
