*Please note that I will be using the term “SSU” consistently throughout this article, even though the universe itself had undergone many names since its inception. I will also divide the SSU into two distinct “eras,” separated from one another by the main actors playing Spider-Man: Andrew Garfield (2012-2014) and Tom Holland (2015-present).

Contents

1. Sinister Six Was Never About Fighting Spider-Man

   1. The Garfield Era

   2. The Arad/Tolmach Interview

   3. The Sinister Six Featurette

   4. Drew Goddard Interviews

   5. The Leaks

   6. The Setups of TASM-2

2. The Evolution of Sinister Six

   1. Shifts After TASM-2 Came Out

   2. Shifts After the Sony Hacking

3. Conclusion

Sinister Six Was Never About Fighting Spider-Man

The Garfield Era

Sinister Six was initially developed as an installment of The Amazing Spider-Man (TASM) franchise. When Sony released the first TASM (dir. Marc Webb) in 2012, it was clearly intending it to be the beginning of a larger, multi-part story, but it had not approached it as a launchpad for a cinematic universe. Following the success of Disney’s Avengers that same year, however, Sony changed gears and decided to expand upon the TASM franchise to realize a Spider-Man Cinematic Universe.

Initially, the topic was first brought up by Sony producer and executive Amy Pascal during an investor call on November 21 2013, where she stated:

“We are going to access Marvel’s full world of Spider-Man characters, so be on the lookout for new heroes and villains.”

Subsequently, on December 12, Sony announced that it had assembled a writer’s room consisting of Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Jeff Pinkner, Ed Solomon and Drew Goddard “to work on a large-scale story that will encompass several films.”

And with that, what I like to call The Garfield Era of the SSU had officially begun. The plan was to use the upcoming TASM-2 as a launchpad for the larger universe, which in addition to two more previously announced mainline sequels would include the ancillary spinoffs Venom and Sinister Six, all of which would work together as parts of a larger overarching narrative whole.

Here is an excerpt from the press release originally featured on Electro Arrives:

“The five writers, along with the two producers and Marc Webb, have formed a franchise brain trust to expand the universe for the brand and to develop a continuous tone and thread throughout the films. Under the deals, the studio announced that Kurtzman & Orci & Pinkner are writing the screenplay for The Amazing Spider-Man 3, which the studio hopes Webb will return to direct; the film will go into production next fall for release on June 10, 2016. In addition, the team will build on the cinematic foundation laid by Webb, Arad, and Tolmach in the first two movies.

They will expand the franchise as Kurtzman & Orci & Solomon will write the screenplay for Venom, which Kurtzman will direct; also, Goddard will write, with an eye to direct, The Sinister Six, focusing on the villains in the franchise…. Until now, we have approached each film as a separate, self-contained entity, but with this move, we have the opportunity to grow the franchise by looking to the future as we develop a continuous arc for the story….””

While the article established that the film would focus on the villains of the TASM franchise and was part of a larger interconnected multi-film story arc, it didn’t really provide any specifics about the film is actually about.

If you know the comics, odds are you assumed that the Sinister Six movie centered on a group of six supervillains teaming up to take out Spider-Man. After all, that’s pretty much why the team came to exist in the comic books in the first place and non-cinematic adaptations of Spider-Man have tended to depict it as such.

The Arad/Tolmach Interview

One of the earliest indications of this came in April 2014 in an article by IGN. Quoting producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach, the article by Daniel Krupa opens with the claim that the Sinister Six film “is going to be a tale of redemption, where the villains aren’t necessarily portrayed as villains.”

The way Tolmach describes the spinoff, a key idea of the film seems to be to push back against the traditional moral binary between heroes and villains by depicting the S6 as real three-dimensional characters who have relatable motives and goals.

“There’s no such thing as just a villain,” says Tolmach. “There are villains by virtue of choices that people make but they always begin as humans, as characters. As flawed people; as tragic people. You know great movies have been made about a bunch of “bad guys” who get together to do something…. There’s a huge tradition of it. Those are sometimes the greatest characters to watch, a bunch of broken people coming together for whatever reason.”

Echoing this, Arad adds that at least one of the S6 characters in the film is meant to have a redemption arc, something that audiences love.

“...and that’s what’s so beautiful about the Spider-Man universe. They have amazing stories if you look at it. And everybody’s looking for redemption; they’re unforgiven. Would you see one of the Sinister Six starting to feel like that? Yes. And people love it, by the way. They love when a villain finds his way back because we’re all very forgiving.”

Tellingly, the producers NEVER specify why exactly the S6 get together in the film. Tolmach in particular keeps the reasons behind them getting together ambiguous.

Furthermore, in the very beginning, he explicitly states that they will NOT confirm what role Spider-Man has in the film or if he will even appear in it.

“We’re definitely not going to say what we’re doing in terms of Spider-Man there.”

In fact, the most information that we get regarding Spider-Man is the idea that all the members of the S6 are united by their hatred of Spider-Man. Evidently, the producers were implying that fighting Spider-Man is NOT the reason why the S6 get together, which would mean they’d have to team up for some other reason.

The Sinister Six Featurette

These conclusions are directly supported by the behind-the-scenes featurette Something Sinister This Way Comes by Charles de Lauzirika, which was included on the TASM-2 home video release in August 2014 and has recently been officially released on YouTube. The first half of the 20-minute featurette mostly discusses the Spider-Man Rogues Gallery and the history of the Sinister Six team formations throughout the comics, which is mostly provided via an interview with Spider-Man historian Stephen Saffel, famous for the 2007 book Spider-Man the Icon.

Around the halfway mark, the featurette switches to a discussion of the TASM fran-chise, particularly when it comes to the ending setups of TASM-2, and the difficulties of adapting Sinister Six comics for the big screen. It starts with Saffel’s comments:

“Doing Sinister Six films is going to be a huge challenge. Part of the problem is that your main characters are not characters you can root for.”

The documentary then cuts to Marc Webb, director of TASM 1&2, as well as a key member of the braintrust. As though speaking in response to Saffel’s comment about the inherent challenge with a potential Sinister Six movie, he states:

“If there’s a way that the Sinister Six can become heroes, where you’re rooting for them, where the six bad guys have to fight something that’s even worse than they are and they are… by coincidence, their agenda is aligned with, uh, the forces of good, I think that would be kind of an interesting avenue to that.”

Webb hints that the planned Sinister Six movie is indeed one where audiences can root for what are traditionally ‘bad guys,’ as in this context they become heroes fighting the real villain so unwittingly align with someone representing the forces of good.

Drew Goddard Interviews

In 2015, Goddard began to open up about the unmade Sinister Six Project, explicitly confirming that Spider-Man was indeed slated to be in Sinister Six, which means that the movie was never going to be just about the ‘villains.’ Here are some quotes:

“I’ve always wanted to do a Spider-Man project and to come at it slightly different just felt right for me. I was really excited about that one, but who knows what the future holds. The allure of Peter Parker is strong…”

• Source: Drew Goddard, IGN interview Sept 29 2015

““Well, you know the truth is, it’s been… we’re a few years out from any Sinister Six happening, so a lot can change between now and then. But my idea for it was always to make it a big epic Spider-Man movie. ””

• Source: Drew Goddard, HeyUGuys interview, Sept 30 2015

Goddard’s description of the film as an “epic” Spider-Man movie fits with Joanna Robinson’s reveal in the book MCU: Reign of Marvel Studios that at least one draft of the film “took Spider-Man and his villains to the Savage Land (in the Marvel comic books, a prehistoric pocket of jungle life hidden in Antarctica), where Spider-Man would ride a T-Rex.” (301) This indicates the movie featured Spider-Man participate directly in high-scale action and adventure sequences, suggesting he had a much bigger role in the film than has been commonly assumed.*

*That Spider-Man appeared in the Sinister Six movie at all was a closely guarded secret at Sony, who refused to clarify this within press releases and statements in 2013-2014. The November 2014 Sony Hacking, which leaked numerous emails, revealed that the character was indeed in the movie, though the exact nature of his role remains largely undisclosed.

Out of all the interviews I’ve found with Goddard, the one by IGN has been the most informative. The writer-director gets candid about his cinematic inspirations and how he approached the challenge of making a Spider-Man film work with six villains:

“When you’re doing just a straightforward superhero movie, you don’t need a lot of villains. The focus is on one guy. I think with Sinister, it’s different. To me it’s less about too many villains and more about too many antagonists and there’s a distinction. You never say, like, The Dirty Dozen has too many characters. They’re all villains, or you could argue that. But they’re protagonists. The trick with Sinister, is that I was making everyone the protagonist and less about six-on-one and more about coming at it a little differently…. You can still have protagonists be evil. That’s the secret.”

What Goddard makes clear is that for him the key was to depict the S6 ‘villains’ as protagonists, rather than tell a conventional superhero story, wherein the lone hero has to face off against one or more villains. Thus, he indirectly corroborates that his movie was not about Spider-Man facing off against multiple villains, but rather a movie where the S6 themselves are the heroes of their own story.

Perhaps the more revealing detail that Goddard shares here is the comparison he draws with The Dirty Dozen, a classic 1967 war movie directed by Robert Aldrich.

Set in 1944, the plot follows Major John Reisman (Lee Marvin), who is tasked with gathering together a team of 12 soldiers recruited from murderers, rapists and criminals (some with long sentences, some on death row) to assassinate a group of German Nazis that have taken over a French chateau.

The comparison thus clearly implies that the plot of Goddard’s movie would have a similar setup, meaning somebody (perhaps the US government) would forcibly recruit six incarcerated Spider-Man villains to take out out the film’s actual villain - someone far more evil than they are, someone requiring multiple superpowered individuals to defeat, someone who could potentially threaten the world itself.

The Leaks

In a leaked email to Tom Hardy, Amy Pascal likewise compared Sinister Six to 1960s men-on-a-mission films, where teams of villainous or morally ambiguous characters fight on the side of good. In addition to The Dirty Dozen, she also references the Westerns The Professionals (1966, dir. Richard Brooks) and The Wild Bunch (1967, dir. Sam Peckinpah). Moreover, she describes it as the “Sex Pistols of superheroes movies,” suggesting the film would have a punk rock aesthetic, and celebrate what some might consider reprehensible or destructive behavior.

“We are going to make the sex pistols of superheroes movies ....where all the characters are the “bad guys”

> Its a sort of celebration of these guys in the vein of the dirty dozen and the professionals and the wild bunch...”

• Source: Leaked Email from Pascal to Hardy (June 7 2014):

That Spider-Man would fight alongside them is also confirmed in a thread between Michael Deluca and Pascal, which indicates that Goddard took inspiration from a story of the Ultimate Spider-Man comics, where Norman Osborn blackmailed the hero into joining his team, a variant of the Sinister Six known as the “Ultimate Six” or “Norman Osborn’s Six.” This suggests that in the film Spider-Man was not going to work with the S6 of his own free will but would also be forcibly recruited.*

* The email the thread does not reveal who blackmails him or why, which means that Osborn was not necessarily the recruiter/blackmailer. Additional leaked Sony emails I’ve found since the initial publication of this article suggest Goddard’s final roster as of September 2014 consisted of Dr. Octopus, Sandman, Black Cat, Vulture, Mysterio and Spider-Man himself. Green Goblin was almost certainly not going to be in the movie at that point as Sony wanted to avoid rehashing the villain. Given all this, I think the US government or some agency creating the Sinister Six team is what makes the most sense.

Finally, some insider info was provided to the pop culture blog Badassdigest, a site with a good track record of providing verified leaked behind-the-scenes info on movies. Here is what Devin Faraci wrote about the potential plan Sony had on October 7 2014 when info started trickling out about Sony’s negotiations with Disney to have Spider-Man appear in the MCU:

“Spider-Man coming into the Marvel Cinematic Universe? That’s a big deal. But get this: it’s the THIRD DIFFERENT Spider-Man plan I’ve heard in the last week. Other things I’ve heard from insiders:

- Sony is going to soft reboot Spider-Man with The Sinister Six, having a new actor playing a Spidey who works with the villains The Dirty Dozen style to take down a larger threat.”

Everything Faraci reports here, including the film performing a “soft reboot” of Spider-Man with a new actor (more on this later) lines up with the other leaks and publicly available information.

From all this, we can extrapolate that Sinister Six was going to challenge the traditional moral binaries of the previous TASM films by having Spider-Man join forces, perhaps unwillingly, with a cadre of villains, presenting this as a necessary “evil” in the face of what was likely a world-ending threat. Had the film been made and released in 2016, as planned, it would’ve certainly drawn comparisons to Warner’s Suicide Squad (2016, dir. David Ayer), a movie with a chaotic, punk-rock aesthetic about a bunch of DC Comics supervillains forced to fight on the side of good by the US government.

The Setups of TASM-2

Now that we’ve established what Sinister Six was really going to be about, let’s talk about its relation to TASM-2. It is commonly thought that the ending of this film, which teases the formation of a team of villains meant to hunt down Spider-Man, was directly setting up the events of Goddard’s Sinister Six movie.

But that’s not entirely true.

Its first priority was to set up the plot of TASM-3, which was initially going to be the next SSU movie and had been conceived as the concluding chapter of the TASM trilogy prior to Sony’s decision to make a full-blown expansion into a Spider-Man universe. Its script had already been in development for several months by the time the Sinister Six project was announced at the end of 2013.

While Sony didn’t announce a release date for Sinister Six in the original press reveal, later interviews and articles would establish that the film was intended to come out after the release of TASM-3 in Summer 2016 but before that of TASM-4 in 2018.*

*Leaked emails clarify that Sony originally planned on giving Goddard’s film a third quarter 2016 date, preferably November, so TASM-3 and Sinister Six would be released in the same year. Venom would then follow in 2017, likely August.

Thus, the sequence of the Gentleman walking through the Oscorp Special Projects division alongside the end credits, which provide viewers with visual schematic teases of the Oscorp technology that could be used by a villain, was meant to foreshadow the formation of the S6 in the third TASM movie, rather than Goddard’s movie.

“In Oscorp’s Special Projects, we see, we get hints at… there are glimpses of, there are implications of the accoutrements of villains that will either be in the Sinister Six’ first iteration or will eventually move through the Sinister Six.”

• Source: Jeff Pinkner, Something Sinister, Aug 2014

Despite all the teases, however, the actual roster of villains meant to appear in the group had not been settled upon when TASM-2 came out in theaters. Webb stated that he believed that some characters, such as Dr. Octopus and Vulture, were essential members of the S6, while others remained open questions.

“It’s tricky because we’re not exactly sure if all those people are gonna be in The Sinister Six, or even in the next movie,” says Webb. “Like the Mysterio mask, I just think looks really cool. And I love Mysterio, but we haven’t all agreed on it, but I just forced it in because I thought it looked cool.”

• Marc Webb, Something Sinister, Aug 2014

“Well, I think that we’re still hammering out the details of what the Sinister Six are going to be but… there are certain, fundamental, almost iconic characters within the Sinister Six that you can’t mess around with, Ock being one of them, Vulture being one of them, Goblin being one of them.”

• Marc Webb, IGN interview, May 5 2014

One member certain to be included was Green Goblin.

A scene excised from the final cut of TASM-2 revealed that the head of Norman Osborn (Chris Cooper), who died in the beginning of TASM-2, was preserved in a jar within the Special Projects division. According to Webb, the intent was to resurrect Norman and have him return as a new Green Goblin, who would be both the main villain of the third TASM movie, as well as the leader of the Sinister Six.

“Yeah, we were talking about the Sinister Six…. Chris Cooper was going to come back and play the Goblin. We were going to freeze his head, and then he was going to be brought back to life…. Well, that was going to be the main villain. He was going to come out and lead the Sinister Six. We had talked about Vulture a little bit too....”

• Source: Marc Webb, Den of Geek interview, Aug 17 2017

Meanwhile, Jeff Pinkner’s comments indicate that the S6 founded by Norman would only be the first iteration of the group, meaning a different incarnation would arise in the future. In line with this, Goddard has stated to IGN that the roster for his Sinister Six movie would not necessarily be the same one previously teased in TASM-2.

Nonetheless, there were definitely discussions between Webb and Goddard about character setups in the TASM films that would also play out in his film.

““I had to talk to Drew Goddard and make sure these things were going to be played out in the future universe,” he says. “There are some very specific plans, for example, for [Doc] Ock and for Vulture. Or the man in the hat at the end of the first movie. All those things emerge with varying degrees of emphasis.””

• Source: Marc Webb, Grantland, May 5 2014

This means the third TASM was going to introduce the more traditional version of the S6, which would try and fail to destroy Spider-Man. Building on this, Goddard would then depict another incarnation of the group – likely consisting of several returning members and new faces – being forced to work with Spider-Man.

Many of these long-term plans, however, would ultimately remain unrealized.

The Evolution of Sinister Six

Shifts After TASM-2 Came Out

Hollywood franchise filmmaking is highly reactive.

One installment’s critical and commercial performance directly informs the creative decisions and choices a studio makes on what comes after in order to address and improve on the perceived “issues” of the work that preceded it. And this can create considerable problems for telling longform stories across multiple films.

Sony’s plan was to use TASM-2 as launchpad or foundation for the expanded universe and have the subsequent three films - TASM-3, Sinister Six, and Venom - all connect as part of a larger cohesive serialized story arc. So, when TASM-2 grossed less than expected in theaters and scored a polarizing “51%” score on Rotten Tomatoes in May 2014, Sony began re-evaluating its plans and analyzing what went wrong.

“...I think we all said: “let’s build a universe correctly and… let’s let the story keep evolving , and let’s make sure each movie is a big emotional step for Peter and that the bad guys have a reason to find each other and build this group of the Sinister Six over the course of two or three movies.””

• Source: Alex Kurtzman, Something Sinister, Aug 2014

Based on the various leaked emails and industry reports, some of the Sony execs’ take-aways were that the TASM movies were too dark and brooding, that their storylines and villains felt redundant or rehashed, that the franchise needed to recapture the “fun” of Spider-Man and with that, its appeal to family audiences. A recurring thought was that Sony now could not really continue the SSU with another TASM movie, that something new and different was needed that could perhaps rehabilitate both the Spider-Man brand and character. The proposition of making Sinister Six the next SSU release thus began to look more and more attractive.

What may have been a deciding factor is an incident around July 12-13, when star Andrew Garfield decided to skip a Sony gala event in Rio de Janeiro, snubbing Sony Entertainment chairman and CEO Kaz Hirai. It’s been widely speculated, though never fully confirmed, that this event led to him being fired from Spider-Man.

Reportedly, Hirai had a preplanned speech, where he would’ve formally announced Garfield’s TASM-3 return in May 2016 (a month earlier than the previous date of June 10). Less than two weeks later, on July 23, 2014, Sony instead announced that Goddard’s ‘supervillain team-up,’ which previously had not had a release date, would now come out on November 11, 2016, while TASM-3 was being pushed back to May 4, 2018, with the fourth installment’s status now being unknown.

Sinister Six was thus anointed as the next SSU movie, meaning its script would now have to be informed by and so react to the reception of TASM-2.* Whether or not Garfield had been fired at this point, Sony had essentially cancelled TASM-3 or, at least, the version Webb planned to conclude his trilogy. Keep in mind, TASM-3 was intended to be closely linked in terms of story to both TASM-2 and Sinister Six. Its removal from the sequence meant that the planned storyline about a resurrected Norman Osborn creating the first incarnation of the S6 with the intent of killing Spider-Man would now be completely dropped.

*Goddard presumably wasn’t able to do much writing on the picture prior to the end of May 2014 due to his pre-existing commitments to the Netflix series Daredevil. Once his exit as showrunner was finalized, he was able to fully focus on the Sony project. So any changes from any plans or outlines made prior to the TASM-2 release could be easily incorporated.

In turn, rather than build off narrative links and character setups established in the previous chapter, Sinister Six would now have to introduce most, if not all, team members of the S6 and still tell a complete story. All this could explain why, despite the heavy emphasis the SSU brain trust initially placed on serialized storytelling (in fact, one of the main reasons Sony hired the brain trust was because its members had extensive experience in serial television), Goddard would claim in 2015 that he actually designed Sinister Six as a standalone, self-contained picture that could work under different schemas and was not reliant on any pre-existing setup or continuity.

““My vision of that movie was a summer annual… you didn’t have to worry about continuity. It was just, ‘We take Peter, put him on an adventure, we put him back in his life.’ I intentionally wanted a movie that didn’t have to worry about mythology and continuity. It was important to me to make a movie that could stand on its own. So the good news is, you know, [laughs], it slots in very well to any plan anybody ever wants. We just need to let a couple years go by, I think.””

• Source: Drew Goddard, IO9 interview, Sept 22 2015

One cannot discount the possibility that Sinister Six was always planned to be self-contained enough to work both within the larger TASM story arc and as its own movie. But all available evidence suggests that, following the negative reception of TASM-2, Sony wanted to decouple Goddard’s movie, which it was quite bullish on, from what came before though without completely abandoning the TASM continuity.

This would certainly align with the leaked information provided to Badassdigest about Sinister Six performing a soft reboot of Spider-Man with a new actor, which would have to happen if Garfield had indeed been fired in July 2014. In any case, by the time Goddard delivered a finished draft of the script (approximately in December 2014), the film had evolved from Chapter 3.5 of TASM into a largely independent work.*

*Tellingly, the September 2014 leaked roster featured none of the villains introduced previously in the TASM films. It did include Black Cat, however, meaning Sony was looking to tie Sinister Six into the Black Cat and Silver Sable film. Canceling the original TASM-3 basically gave Goddard more freedom to make the movie he wanted. The new TASM-3, were it to be made, would then likely have to build on and follow the events of Sinister Six.

The general impression seems to be that Sony (or at least Amy Pascal) was quite gung-ho on the script. The problem was that, by that point, Sony had suffered a massive hack that compelled it to radically change the direction of the Spider-Man franchise.

Shifts after the Sony Hacking

The November 2014 Sony Hack is considered a key reason why the company ended up cutting a deal with Disney in February 2015 to license Spider-Man to the MCU.

Discussions about such a deal, in fact, had begun sometime in the latter half of 2014 prior to the hacking. Without going into a lot of details, per the leaked emails, if a deal were made, Spider-Man would make a debut appearance in the upcoming MCU film Captain America: Civil War, at the time only known as Captain America 3.

Sony was uncertain, as to what effect or relation it would have on Sinister Six. Could Spidey’s appearance set up Sinister Six? Or would it not fit with it in terms of continu-ity and so preclude Sony from being able to make the film? Should they then maybe contractually require another solo Spider-Man movie to be made for a 2017 release to make up for the loss of a 2016 release? Will they be able to continue to build on Sinister Six to expand their universe, as previously planned? A lot of things were still undetermined, as Goddard would be working on his script up until December.

The talks fell apart in late October-early November, only to resume after the public got wind of the fact that the possibility existed due to the leaks that followed the hacking. Fan interest in seeing Spidey in the MCU helped convince Sony to indeed make the deal happen, which led to Spider-Man/Peter Parker appearing in Civil War.

Only now, he would be played by Tom Holland. And rather than set up Sinister Six, his appearance signified the beginning of a new era of the SSU.

While development of the mainline TASM films was now fully cancelled, that of the ancillary ones transitioned over into the Holland era. By this point, there were three such carryover projects: Sinister Six, Venom, and Black Cat and Silver Sable.

Each would now have to be re-evaluated and revised to no longer bear any connection to the TASM world and continuity. Only Venom (2018, dir. Ruben Fleischer) would eventually reach the big screen. Black Cat and Silver Sable remained in active development until around 2018, when it was scrapped in favor of two standalone solo films, neither of which ended up getting made.

“Sony will no longer release its Spider-Man villain movie ‘The Sinister Six’ in November of 2016 as previously planned, said a person involved in its production. The studio will rethink its approach to the film, which remains in development, in light of the new agreement with Marvel.”

• Source: Ben Fritz, Wall Street Journal, Feb 10 2015

Meanwhile, Sinister Six essentially transformed into a continuously deferred long-term milestone project, one that Sony has unfortunately to this day still not been able to realize. To explain what I mean, I need to discuss how Sony’s general approach to the cinematic universe had changed from the early days of the Garfield era, which structurally resembled that of the early Warner/DCEU model.

The initial plan called for a big sequel movie (Batman v. Superman for Warner, TASM-2 for Sony) to act as the fulcrum of the larger cinematic universe and lead into multiple spinoff or sequel projects that were closely tied to it in terms of narrative continuity.

Sony had already begun scaling back on seriality and continuity in the aftermath of TASM-2’s reception. In the Holland era, it would lean further into this direction, essentially shifting to the Disney/MCU model, which entailed making several self-contained solo superhero films that would ideally launch their own respective franchises, while simultaneously setting the stage for a mega-crossover franchise.

“Right now, it’s sort of like Iron Man when you did the first Iron Man. Right now, these first movies are establishing these characters.”

• Source: Amy Pascal on the ancillary films after the release of Spiderman: Homecoming, Collider, July 18, 2017

Sony’s “pilot episode” for the ancillary SSU titles and, in that sense, its equivalent of the MCU’s Iron Man (2008), was the aforementioned Venom, a horror comedy focused on a monstrous antihero with a penchant for eating bad guys’ brains. Despite getting bad reviews, Venom proved to be a huge commercial success, grossing over $800 million worldwide. This led Sony to greenlight more solo superhero origin story films, such as Morbius (2022), Madame Web (2023), and Kraven the Hunter (2024).

Though not bereft of world-building elements, each had its own self-enclosed narrative and tone. Key to this was Sony’s decision to establish the main characters as having no history with or ties to Spider-Man, despite them originating in subordinate roles to the webslinger in the comics. Including examples from unmade projects, these roles can be broken down into four categories:

1. supporting heroes (Madame Web, Silk, Jackpot)

2. antiheroes (Black Cat, Silver Sable, El Muerto)

3. villains that later became antiheroes (Venom, Morbius)

4. true villains (Kraven)

Such a deviation from the source material has proven controversial among comic book purists, especially when it comes to the adaptation of the webslinger’s rogues gallery. Sony’s apparent policy in the Holland era is to never actually have genuine villains as protagonists. When it comes to Venom and Morbius, for instance, the studio bypassed the characters’ time as bonafide Spider-Man bad guys and presented them as antiheroes in the adaptations right off the bat.

Meanwhile, Kraven - the sole (at the moment) representative of category d - was reimagined as an antihero who hunts criminals and murderers, while protecting nature and wildlife. With the exception of Madame Web then, all the leads of the ancillary live-action SSU movies have been morally ambiguous protagonists, who don’t mind brutally murdering bad guys yet adhere to their own moral codes and remain (mostly) committed to safeguarding the lives of the innocent.

The ultimate, though never openly acknowledged, goal of establishing all these superheroes was to eventually bring them together in a mega-crossover movie that would constitute Sony’s response to Avengers. And this movie, in case you haven’t guessed it yet, was meant to be Sinister Six.

““All of these villains that we now have in our universe happen to be characters that are in the Sinister Six. There may be something that happens with that.””

• Source: Amy Pascal, from the end of Worldwide Web-Slinger featurette for Spider-Man: Far From Home, Oct 7 2019

Despite Goddard’s claims, the film as envisioned back in December 2014 could not really work within the context of the SSU after the MCU deal. Rather than team up Spider-Man with his sworn enemies, the film would bring him together with a bunch of other Sony heroes and anti-heroes, whom he wasn’t met.*

*To be clear, Sony wanted to potentially include villains introduced by the mainline Holland Spider-Man films in the new S6 roster. This is why a reformed Vulture (Michael Keaton) appeared in the credit scene of Morbius, where he stated that he wants to “do some good.” Despite what others may claim, he has never said that he wants to fight Spider-Man.

And where the former incarnation was written as a spinoff/reboot of the TASM films, the latter is intended to be a franchise movie that works specifically within the continuity established within the SSU following the MCU deal.

What I would argue has remained consistent across the two eras though is the central concept of Sinister Six, which is that of Spider-Man teaming up with the S6 to stop a larger, possibly world-ending threat.* In the same vein, the new incarnation of the movie was also never going to be about the S6 teaming up to fight Spider-Man. (That premise, when you think about it, wouldn’t make any logical sense, given that most of the SSU leads are neither villains, nor have any history with Spider-Man at all.)

* Imagine, for instance, Spider-Man teaming up with Venom, Morbius, Vulture, Kraven, and Madame Web to battle an invasion of symbiotes led by their evil god Knull. Were the movie to happen now, it could potentially introduce yet another incarnation of Spider-Man, one that is specific to the SSU, due to Holland’s remaining exclusive to the MCU.

Conclusion

That Sony has never stopped wanting to make Sinister Six is obvious, given the repeated teases throughout interviews over the years and the setups that have appeared in the SSU movies themselves. So, why has it still not happened?

For one thing, outside of Venom, the SSU pictures have, sadly, not been successful, in part due to the efforts of antifans and “critics” that reject them on general principle. For another, Sony’s long-term plans for the Holland era experienced some rather significant changes and revisions due to unforeseen external factors.*

* I intend to write a whole other article to explain the shifts that happened to the SSU during the Holland era. For the moment, I will say that, had things gone according to plan, Holland’s Spider-Man would have crossed paths with Tom Hardy’s Venom years ago.

As someone that actually likes the heroes the SSU has established so far and believes most of the ancillary Spider-Man movies to be underrated, I sincerely hope that one day Sony will indeed make a legitimately good Sinister Six movie that delivers on the various setups and teases of the preceding installments. At this point, it doesn’t seem likely, but then again, forgotten superheroes have a tendency to unexpectedly return.

And the SSU is still alive, despite many having proclaimed it dead.

So, in this scrapbook, I’m going to talk about all of that alongside some other stuff, including interesting things I’ve discovered about the “lost chapter” short film Yuki’s Revenge, which was released on YouTube before appearing after TWBA in theaters.

Table of Contents

1. Kill Bill TWBA Impressions

2. On Yuki’s Revenge

3. Why Aren’t There More Supercuts?

4. Revisio-News

   1. Nightmare Alley Director’s Cut

   2. An Extended Avatar: Fire and Ash?

5. FTNC Updates

6. Final Notes

Kill Bill TWBA Impressions

The final cut of Kill Bill has left me with somewhat mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I really enjoyed seeing the film as a whole. Kill Bill really is more than the sum of its parts and works better as a singular experience. By far, the biggest and most significant difference between this and the split two-volume version is the lack of the Volume 1 bookend sequences, which gave away the fact that The Bride’s daughter is still alive. It’s such a great twist at the end of the movie, one that the preceding 3+ hours are building to. I’d say it was worth the price of admission.

Still, there were things that bothered me.

I couldn’t find a quality screening venue

The ideal format to see this cut would be 70mm. Unfortunately, there weren’t any theaters equipped for 70mm and so I had to settle for the regular local mall theater showing. And, if you’ve been paying attention my writing about the decline of movie theaters, you might guess that the quality of the screening was really low.

The digital projection had muddled colors and repeated instances of bitrot showing up all throughout, as though the film was damaged in the course of transmission.

And this, once again, makes me feel worried about the future of theatrical exhibition. Because I doubt audiences will feel incentivized to see films in theaters, when the standard quality of the presentation keeps falling.

The new anime sequence

I was really hyped to see the new 7-minute O-Ren Ishii anime segment, which I’ve written about previously. Unfortunately, the end result was somewhat disappointing. Rather than an elaborate, over-the-top action sequence, it’s more of a low-key if bloody coda, one that the movie works fine without.

I’m curious how I will feel about it upon rewatch, assuming that TWBA indeed makes it to home video. One issue was that the new material just looked poorly framed and calibrated due to the exhibition issues I mentioned above, so maybe I just couldn’t enjoy it as much as I should have due to the break in immersion.

Redundancies

By far, what most surprised me is that Tarantino still kept the black-and-white driving scenes in TWBA, with the first one functioning as an opening and the second popping up as an additional credits sequence right after the initial Malagueña Salerosa credit scene. My going theory was that this was always a side effect of the film being split in two. That is, I assumed the opening driving scene and the driving credits sequence were made so Volume 2 could work better as a standalone film, while Malagueña Salerosa was the original credit sequence meant for the film as a whole.*

*Admittedly, the first driving scene no longer recaps the events of Volume 1, but still…

In the context of TWBA, I just don’t really see the point of both keeping in the Driving Scenes and the Malagueña Salerosa Credit Sequence. If the former were fully cut, while the latter remained, or vice versa, that would be to the film’s benefit.

On Yuki’s Revenge

With all that out of the way, let’s talk about “Yuki’s Revenge,” the weird little animated Fortnite short that functions as a kind-of post-credits scene to TWBA (and is likely the reason why its running time was reported as 4 hours 41 minutes).*

*A few days prior to the release of TWBA, the short appeared on YouTube for free and can be seen here.

This ‘lost chapter’ of Kill Bill, is a fun and entertaining, if completely unnecessary, romp.* The Bride’s showdown with Yuki Yubari, the sister of the psychopathic Gogo, is an extended action sequence and one that is quite different from any other battle in Kill Bill. Whereas the movie proper features a lot of sword-fighting and martial arts, Yuki’s Revenge has a full-on gun battle. I like how it embraces the outlandish and cartoonish aspects of the format it’s made in: bullet wounds result in what look like bits or cubes of data getting shot out rather than blood and Yuki keeps drinking a drug made by Bill, the effects of which are visualized with hand-drawn animation.

*Honestly, my biggest issue with it is the fact that Tarantino performs a really poor imitation of David Carradine’s voice in the opening scene.

Interestingly enough, the short was adapted almost verbatim from an early, unused draft of the Kill Bill script (which is why, as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t fit into the continuity of the final film). In this iteration of the story, Yuki Yubari is introduced in Chapter 4 as Gogo’s 16-year-old sister, who leaves the House of Blue Leaves early due to having caught a cold. After The Bride takes out O-Ren, a devastated Yuki then pursues her to California in Chapter 5, catching up with her shortly after she has assassinated Vernita Green, as seen in the film’s opening sequence.

A few minor tweaks notwithstanding - like cameos by what I assume are Fortnite characters, eg. the banana guy - this short is pretty much a one-to-one translation of the “Yuki’s Revenge” chapter, which was completely cut from the final shooting draft.

What I discovered is that Yuki wasn’t entirely erased in the course of revisions though.

In the early draft, Gogo is a silent killer, who has no dialogue, nor any real scenes of character development. She duels The Bride with her Meteor Hammer weapon as per the final film, but has no interactions with her otherwise. By contrast, Yuki gets multiple scenes and interactions that establish her as a bonafide psychopath.

When the Bride interrogates Sofie Fatale, she asks what Yuki will do once she finds out about Gogo’s death. The film then cuts to show Yuki getting excessively drunk while grieving her sister and then disemboweling a Japanese Businessman.

Along with Yuki’s characterization, that sequence would be repurposed for Gogo in the final film as a cutaway when she is first introduced as a member of O-Ren’s entourage. Some of Yuki’s dialogue from her first scene with The Bride would also be given to Gogo, who now has a short conversation with The Bride before attacking her.

In the earlier script, the Bride tells Yuki that she begs her to walk away, even as she wants to avenge her sister. In the final film, she tells Gogo that she begs her to walk away, even though she wants to protect her mistress.

In both instances, she gets the response:

Basically then, Yuki and Gogo were merged into one character, with the final version of Gogo receiving Yuki’s characterization and key dialogue, while retaining her earlier iteration’s big martial arts fight scene in the House of Blue Leaves.*

*On a side note, O-Ren had another bodyguard in the early draft named Mr. Barrel, whom the Bride convinces to simply quit and walk away. His lines of dialogue about knowing The Bride as ‘black mamba’ and how ‘reputations precede us’ would also be reused for Gogo in the final film. Barrel would be replaced in the later drafts with Johnny Mo (Gordon Liu).

Combining the two Yubari sisters was a good choice from the standpoint of narrative economy. It helped Tarantino narrow down the script, as well as turn Gogo into a more interesting antagonist with a larger role… which makes it all the more baffling that Tarantino decided to revive Yuki over 20 years later for a short film and didn’t bother to make any changes to avoid redundancy with the main feature.

The Fortnite Yuki is basically the same character as the film’s Gogo, and the ‘begging’ exchange is still there, even though it’s already been used in the movie!

I like to thus view “Yuki’s Revenge” as a standalone, non-canon ‘what-if’ side story, one that shows how Kill Bill evolved and became a better, stronger film over time.

And who knows? Its existence could potentially signify more Kill Bill content in the future. Tarantino had a lot of unrealized plans for this film and its universe, after all.

Why Aren’t There More Supercuts?

The release of TWBA has made me more interested in checking out more single film supercuts of two-part movies. Given the recently developed tendency of Hollywood studios to produce two-part films, especially adaptations of popular novels, one would expect there to be a bunch of supercuts available on streaming and video platforms.

Surprisingly though, that hasn’t been the case.

In fact, I’ve come to realize that supercuts are actually quite rare.

For instance, there was a version of The Godfather that combined Part 1 and Part 2 into an extended 7-hour long film that aired on HBO about 10 years ago but isn’t available anymore in any single format, unless you count the VHS versions of the 70s television version that you might be able to find on Amazon and Ebay.

More recently, there was the 225-minute Baahubali: The Epic (dir. S.S. Rajamouli), an Indian action film that combined Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) and Baahubali: The Conclusion (2017). I hadn’t seen either of the two parts, but was intrigued by the idea of seeing the shortened supercut, which received a theatrical release here in the US back in November. At the time, I couldn’t find any local theater that played it but fortunately, the remastered, recut version has been released on Netflix this Christmas, so I’m going to check it out if I have the time and maybe share my impressions later.

Other than this, I’ve only found discussions of supercuts that have yet to be made.

Back in 2019, director Andy Muschietti spoke of his interest in creating an extended 390-minute supercut that combines the horror opus It (2017) and its sequel It Part 2 (2019) with additional footage cut from the films and new material that hadn’t yet been shot. To date, this still hasn’t happened, though during a recent Reddit Q&A, the director has reiterated the desire to make it, claiming he hadn’t had the time due to his involvement with It prequel series Welcome to Derry.

““We call it the supercut,” Muschietti explains. “It’s very early stage, you know, and we’re still discussing the format. It won’t be intertwined or anything like the way it’s in the book. But it will contain all the scenes that were deleted from both movies for pacing reasons, and we’ll hopefully have new material, which is stuff that I haven’t shot yet.””

• Source: Consequence of Sound

More recently, director John Chu revealed plans to potentially make a single 5-hour supercut of the hit musical Wicked (2024) and its sequel Wicked For Good (2025).

Unlike the It films, these two were shot back-to-back as part of a singular production before being divided into two parts for theatrical release, which suggests it might be much easier to re-edit them into a single feature.

“Do you want, one day, to have both films released as a five-hour movie with a 15-minute intermission where people can watch them in a movie theater together? Is that something that interests you?

CHU: Absolutely. I’m maybe one of the very few people, including the studio — I don’t think the studio’s done it, but I’ve done it — both my editor and I, we’ve watched both back to back, and it is a whole new experience. It’s great. It is wonderful.”

• Source: Collider

All in all, I’d say supercuts are something of an untapped market. They have the potential to provide a whole new experience, a new way of watching.

Which makes one wonder: why aren’t there more of them?

What do you think?

Why aren’t there more supercuts out there? Is it too expensive or time-consuming to put them together? Are there any two-part movies you think could be successfully recut into a single feature? Is there a market for more such recuts? Please,

Leave a comment

Revisio-News

Nightmare Alley director’s cut

Nightmare Alley (2021) is, in my mind, one of Guillermo del Toro’s best movies. After the disappointing Crimson Peak (2015) and really overrated Shape of Water (2017), this was a return to form. If you ask me, del Toro is a great visualist but his works tend to falter at the script level. That, however, is not the case with Alley, which couples del Toro’s breathtaking style with a really strong screenplay.*

*The ending of the film in particular feels like a pitch perfect final note for its story.

Though it garnered plenty of accolades, Alley was released at a time when circumstances made it impossible for a film like this to make any real money at the box office. After Covid, audiences were very selective about what they were willing to see in theaters in December 2021, and it didn’t help that the film opened against the behemoth that was Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Nonetheless, it seems primed for a strong shelf life. In January 2022, a longer black-and-white director’s cut called Vision in Darkness and Light, which was about 10 minutes longer than the theatrical, was released in select theaters.

This past October, the film had a swanky Criterion Collection release that combined the two versions in one package, while around the same time, the director’s cut made its way to streaming via Disney Plus and/or Hulu.

I haven’t seen the director’s cut myself yet, but I think a b/w version is apropos, given that the picture is a kind-of throwback to film noir.

So, I’d recommend checking it out if you haven’t already.

An extended Avatar 3?

You don’t bet against James Cameron.

This is the fourth time in a row that he’s released one of the most expensive movies ever made (not adjusted for inflation), only to blow past industrial and critical expectations. I don’t know if Fire and Ash will gross over two billion dollars, but I think it’s pretty much guaranteed to pass 1.2 billion and generate a profit, which could very well happen by the time this post is published.

With its release, James Cameron has finally completed his own trilogy. That’s an achievement in and of itself. I mean, it’s kinda rare for the same director to make all three installments of a mega-budget blockbuster franchise.

Avatar, in that sense, is Cameron’s answer to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

Oh, sure, some will continue to argue that this franchise has “no cultural impact,” even though two of its films thus far have won Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects and its influence can be seen all across the film industry.*

*Avatar was key to selling exhibitors and audiences on the transition to digital pro-jection as well as standardizing 3D and IMAX 3D as regular viewing formats.

I personally thought the first film was the weakest in this burgeoning saga, but never thought it was bad by any measure. Way of Water, meanwhile, was among the top tier of Cameron’s oeuvre, a sequel that surpassed the original in pretty much every way.*

* It helped that, instead of writing the sequels all by himself, Big Jim got a bunch of screenwriters together in a room, then spent years translating his ideas into scripts before shooting a single frame. Cause, let’s face it: Cameron is a better director than he is a writer. I personally really hope the fourth installment at least gets made, because its main screenwriter was Josh Friedman, who’s a favorite of mine.

Fire and Ash doesn’t quite reach the consistent greatness of Water. Some parts of it feel like a rehash of its immediate predecessor, and one gets the overall feeling that it’s holding back or running in place rather than pushing things forward in terms of story.*

But in other respects, Fire and Ash goes deeper and swings harder, muddling the moral lines that separated its heroes from the villains. It’s also the artsiest and most formally experimental movie Cameron has made since Terminator 2. This movie isn’t afraid to get weird and I’m hoping the next entry, assuming it’s completed, is even bolder.

*I strongly suspect that the repetition is attributable to the fact that Water and Ash were originally written as a single film, before Cameron decided to split them up into two movies during development as there was way too much going on. I am quite curious as to what exactly changed in the process - my theory is that Neteyam’s death was probably the biggest alteration and one that allowed Water to stand alone.

Naturally, every time a Cameron movie comes out, there’s a good chance it’ll get an extended special edition. Surprisingly, this hasn’t been the case for Way of Water, even though the first Avatar got something like 3 alternate cuts. But a special edition of Fire and Ash seems to be a bit more likely. In a recent interview with Collider, Cameron claimed to be “thinking” about a longer version and has mentioned there’s about 25-30 minutes of material that could be reincorporated into the picture.

If released, it would push the length of Avatar 3 to 220-225 minutes, which sounds rather close to the reported length of the picture’s assembly cut, which was around 4 hours. Cameron cut the film down by 45 minutes following test screenings but it sounds like he really likes a lot of the footage that was left on the cutting room floor.

“The film’s first assembly cut approached four hours. Viewers at an early test screening were enthusiastic (when asked if they would see the film again, Cameron says the entire audience raised their hands). But some griped about the film’s length.”

• Source: Hollywood Reporter

Personally, I’m not sure what exactly could be added to the movie, in that it felt pretty complete. Cameron himself suggests that any additional material would be mostly character development rather than anything that advances the plot. I also think that, if a longer cut is made, it probably wouldn’t be that much longer simply due to the fact that restoring nearly 30 minutes to a super-expensive, VFX-heavy film like this today is commercially unfeasible. But in any case, I am eager to see what we get.

And who knows? Maybe the extended Fire and Ash will break the rule that the best Cameron Cut is always the theatrical one.

FTNC Updates

I’ve updated the Film and Television Newsletter Catalogs with three new entries. Substack has finally introduced a “Film and TV” category towards the end of last year, so the directory perhaps isn’t as viable as it used to be but I still hope it helps writers with discovery and will continue to update it gradually.

Culture House Newsletter

A weekly newsletter from Culture House Media, a women owned film, TV and immersive experiences company making narrative work at the intersection of pop culture and politics 🙋🏽‍♀️🙋🏻‍♀️🙋‍♀️

Vintertainment: Wine and Movies

Bringing people together with Wine and Movie Pairings. Sometimes recorded on the podcast, sometimes written on the Substack, sometimes gathering in person throughout the Los Angeles area...and maybe beyond?

By Dave Baxter

Final Notes

This will be the last post until the Spring, when T.V. will return with an extensive deep-dive article about what really happened to Sony’s underrated Morbius.

I’ve been working on this one on and off over the past couple of years and am very happy to be bringing it to completion. Currently aiming for March-April.

So, the gap will be long, but the wait will be worth it!

Subtitled The Whole Bloody Affair (TWBA), the 281-minute cut will premiere on December 5 in US theaters. In this article, I’m going to talk about the history of TWBA, its connection to the earlier Cannes Cut, as well as reveal what exactly happens in its new “never-before-seen 7.5-minute anime sequence,” which impacts the story of O-Ren Ishii, while debunking a (popular?) fan theory about Bill.

Contents

1. The Young Bill Theory

2. The Extended TWBA Anime Sequence

3. The Evolution and Revision of ‘Kill Bill’

4. On the Cannes Cut

The Young Bill Theory

When Kill Bill Volume 1 came out, one of its most fascinating sequences was in “Chapter 3: The Origin of O-Ren,” where the live-action film switches to Japanese animation for an extended 8-minute flashback that depicts the childhood tragedy that came to define Lucy Liu’s character, leading to her rise as an assassin.

The first scene shows a child O-Ren witnessing her parents’ murders at the hands of the Yakuza. We see her father fight and kill two Yakuza before getting impaled with a Katana through the back by a tall, long-haired assassin in a white suit. After her father falls to the ground, the assassin delivers another stab to finish him off.

This character is never identified in the film, but online he seems to be commonly referred to as Pretty Riki, so let’s go with that.

There are several interesting things about Riki.

For starters, he has a distinctive design that draws attention to itself. Unlike the other Yakuza, he is rather tall, wears a nearly all-white suit and is clearly the most capable and intimidating fighter. Not only is he the one who actually kills O-Ren’s father, but the film draws attention to this character by using an elaborate pan-up shot that tracks the Katana sword, showing us Riki’s rings. We even get a shot of O-Ren staring at Riki with hate in her eyes. And then, at the end, Riki even gets a cool mike drop move, where he kicks a burning cigarette butt that sets fire to the room.

All this makes Riki something more than just an anonymous Yakuza henchman. He stands out as a soldier villain and is set up as a kind-of ‘boss fight’ type character for O-Ren. But despite this, Riki then completely vanishes from the movie.

The next scene depicts O-Ren murdering Riki’s boss Matsumoto two years later, and so avenging the deaths of her parents before the last minute speedruns through her rise as an assassin up to the moment she participated in the massacre that left The Bride comatose. Riki’s absence from the rest of the flashbacks thus raises some interesting questions, such as: “Did Riki survive? And if so, why didn’t O-Ren ever go after him? Was killing Matsumoto enough for her?”

The lack of resolution to his character thus opened the door to the theory that Riki is actually a younger version of Bill (David Carradine), who would later recruit O-Ren into the DiVAS organization. If you’re a fan and you’ve attentively watched Volume 1 several times, then the thought might’ve very well crossed your mind, like it did mine.

Consider the evidence:

• Bill could be Riki, because we never see Riki die, and movies regularly apply the law of conservation of character/detail.

• Present-day Bill is certainly old enough to have worked for the Yakuza when O-Ren was a child.

• Both are depicted as long-haired assassins, and there does seem to be some visual resemblance between them.

• There are similar shots of them with their hands over a Katana.

• Both wear distinctive rings - though not the same rings - in these shots, with the film’s cinematography arguably drawing a visual parallel between them.

• There’s also the fact that Tarantino had plans for a Young Bill anime prequel.

Having done some digging, I even found a forum page that cites an old imdb message board post from May 2004, according to which actor David Carradine ostensibly confirmed that the two were one and the same in an interview or at an event.

“He said that QT told him that the killer of O-Ren’s parents in the cartoon was indeed BILL. Apparently QT specifically requested this from the animators.

So the story would go, that O-Ren, becoming professional herself, forgives Bill as she understands that it was simply “business” and accepts his offer to work with him.”

Though the summary of Carradine’s interview does list a number of details that were accurate, such as the fact that a scene had been shot and cut with Michael Jai White and that Tarantino had plans for an animated prequel about a young Bill*, I was never able to find where exactly this supposed interview actually came from, nor to corroborate this via other interviews.

*That prequel would’ve focused on a young Bill’s relationship with three mentors: Esteban Vihaio, Hattori Hanzo, and Pai Mei. Like many other projects Tarantino had spoken off over the years, it would never come to fruition.

Following the release of Volume II, the question of whether or not Riki was a young Bill remained unresolved. The possibility was there, but there was no definitive proof to say one way or the other. As it turns out, the matter was to be settled in TWBA.

The Extended TWBA Anime Sequence

Why exactly did it take over 20 years for the full version of Kill Bill to get released?

It is difficult to say for certain. Tarantino often seemed to put it off to focus on other projects. Moreover, it seems that there were rights issues plaguing Volume 1 and Volume 2 and their various versions (eg. the ‘integral’ or Japanese Cut of Volume I) with the distribution getting a little messy or dispersed across different entities.

In practice though, the final cut was more or less ready 15-16 years ago.

Back in 2008, Uma Thurman stated in an interview about the Kill Bill anime projects:

“Right now he’s putting the two films together with an intermission with an added anime sequence he had already written,” she said of the ongoing saga of Beatrix Kiddo.

• Source: Shawn Adler, MTV Movies Blog, April 22, 2008

In January 2009, Tarantino confirmed to the Quentin Tarantino Archives, a fan website, that a release of TWBA was indeed in the works and that it would feature a new 7-minute sequence in the O-Ren chapter, one that was apparently already scripted but had to be nixed due to the ballooning length of the movie.

““We’ve actually added some things to it. We did a whole little chapter that I wrote and designed for the animated sequence, that we never did, because we figured, back when it was gonna be one big movie, it was going to be too long, so we didn’t do it. So when we were talking about re-releasing it, they asked is there anything you can put in, and I said no I put everything in there, but… there’s one sequence that we wouldn’t even have to shoot! So we got together with Production IG and did it, and it’s really cool. So it’s this little seven minute sequence, it’s really cool, it’s in the O-Ren chapter.””

In August 2009, Tarantino claimed that he would finish up TWBA following the release of the upcoming Inglorious Basterds, adding that he still needed to do some work to finalize the new anime sequence by Production IG for the release.

“When I’m through with this, I can actually finish the final Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair,” Tarantino told reporters Sunday in a group interview in Beverly Hills, Calif.

“I need to do one thing with it, though,” Tarantino said. “I’m not going to monkey around with the movie itself, but we’ve actually done a whole new section for the anime as the last thing [we added].”

Moreover, the director went on to specify that the extended anime sequence would actually depict an elaborate duel between O-Ren and Pretty Riki:

““I actually wrote a much longer script for the anime section during O-Ren’s revenge chapter. Remember the guy with the long hair that kills her father? It’s like, what happened to that dude? Well, I wrote it and it was the biggest, most elaborate thing I wrote—her taking him down.””

• From the ScifiWire article by Todd Gilchrist, August 10 2009

Though he didn’t directly state it, Tarantino here more or less confirmed that Riki and Bill were separate characters. He would reiterate this about 5 years later in an interview with Collider, where he also discussed plans to release TWBA in 2015:

So you see in the movie [O-Ren] kill her boss but then there was that long hair guy... The big sequence was her fighting that guy. I.G. [The Japanese Anime Studio] who did Ghost in the Shell said we can’t do that and finish it in time for your thing… So we dropped it and then later when I.G. heard we were talking about doing Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair -- they still had the script so without even being commissioned, they just did it and paid for it themselves…. The Weinstein Company and myself were talking about actually coming out with it sometime, not before the year is out, but within the next year with limited theatrical engagement as well.

One can infer that the new anime sequence was by this point fully finished, which is why Tarantino was now planning a theatrical release for TWBA. However, 2015 came and went, and nothing happened. News about TWBA then pretty much died.

I’m quite certain that the Weinstein Company announcing bankruptcy in 2018 and Tarantino filing a lawsuit against it further delayed the release. At some point between 2018 and 2023, Tarantino regained copyright to the film, allowing him to sign a new distribution deal for some of his movies with Lionsgate in May 2023.

This initially led to the remasters of Volume 1 and Volume 2, and is without a doubt why TWBA is now finally getting an unrated theatrical release on December 5.

The initial announcements all proudly proclaimed that the new version will finally feature a “never-before-seen 7.5-minute anime sequence,” with the recently released trailer explicitly confirming that this new footage is the lost O-Ren/Riki duel.

Now we have definitive proof that Bill and Riki are not one and the same. This means Bill did not kill O-Ren’s father before later recruiting her into his gang and that O-Ren really did get to complete her revenge, at least in the TWBA version of her story.

If Tarantino is to be believed, then the majority of the new 7.5 minutes will be entirely devoted to O-Ren dueling Pretty Riki. So, one can imagine a gloriously over-the-top action set piece that can only be made in anime.

But what about you?

Did you ever think the young, long-haired killer in the anime was a young Bill? If so, what was your headcanon explanation for his relationship with O-Ren? Are you looking forward to the new anime sequence? Will you catch TWBA in theaters?

Leave a comment

The Evolution and Revision of ‘Kill Bill’

“There is a lot of introspection, a lot of character development in VOLUME 2. Tarantino has always described Bill as a pimp of death. But there seems to be more to the man.

Yeah, quite a bit. As a professional, that’s what he does. He finds these young girls and turns them into assassins, controls them, and he likes to do it with beautiful women. And of course he gives his little brother a job. ”

• Source: Interview with David Carradine for Phase 9 by Phase 9 Editorial, 16 April 2004.

To be honest, I am a little sad to finally have that enigma resolved, for even though it is a little farfetched that O-Ren would work for her father’s murderer, it would make sense with who Bill is as a person and would be a devilish twist to his relationship with O-Ren. I also wonder if perhaps at one point Riki and Bill were supposed to be the same character but Tarantino later changed his mind.

This certainly seems possible when you consider how fluid and subject to change the film was all throughout development, production and post-production. Tarantino kept adding, modifying and rewriting scenes during the shoot. For instance, the film was to end with a swordfight between the Bride and Bill on a beach before getting pared down to her quickly besting him with the five-point-palm technique in his home.*

*Though I can’t find it right now, I do recall reading a draft where this was described as an elaborate battle, with the Bride using the Hanzo style and the Pai Mei styles of martial arts.

The decision to split the film up into two parts for distribution purposes also required creating a cliffhanger ending for Volume I as well as a new opening sequence for Volume II, so that each could work better as a standalone unit of storytelling.

Initially, the first volume was going to end with a reveal of Bill’s face. But Tarantino ultimately decided to hold off on this until the beginning of Volume II. Ironically enough, the original teaser trailer had already spoiled what Bill looked like!

...I had heard there was enough footage shot that there could have been a third film.

DC: The original idea was for two 90-minute movies, which ended up with the first film over 90- Minutes and the second over 2 hours and twenty minutes. There was always the plan to shoot extra scenes. For example, I do not have a scene with Daryl Hannah and we wanted to have something that would show how our relationship happened.

• Source: Interview with David Carradine for Skewed and Reviewed, by simeon, June 21, 2008.

“According to Carradine… the set of Kill Bill was a testing ground for tinkering, revising, and experimenting. “Most of the time (during filmmaking),” Carradine laments, extending his cigarette with jade-ringed fingers, “the director has a preconceived notion of what he’s gonna do.… But Quentin is open to changing with the wind, and he did it with his writing right up until the very end. That whole final monologue changed, like five times. The last time it changed was the day that I came in to do it!… There was one point, where there was a close-up of me at the end of the first movie. Then, (Tarantino) took that back out and thought, “I’m gonna keep this a complete mystery (until the second film).

• Source: Interview with David Carradine by KJ Doughton for NitrateOnline.com , 16 April 2003.

Then, he ended up producing multiple cuts of each volume for different markets.

Did you know, for example, that there is a longer, bloodier and gorier Japanese Cut of Volume I? It opens with a dedication to filmmaker Kinji Fukasaku, replacing the “old Klingon proverb” title card and presents the House of Blue Leaves fight sequence, where the Bride faces off against the Crazy 88, completely in color and uncensored. Tarantino, as it turns out, cut many bits out and transitioned part of it into black-and-white to help Volume I avoid an NC-17 rating for the US theatrical release.*

*On a side note, I remember hacking and modifying my computer’s DVD drive about 20 years ago just so I could play the Region 2 DVD of Kill Bill Volume 1 and watch the extended cut.

The Japanese Cut of Volume II similarly contains some differences from the US theatrical version, though these are very minor. Moreover, Tarantino has indicated that there are differences between the European and American cuts of the films as well though I don’t believe these have ever been reported.

Is it true that there are different versions of Kill Bill?

QT: That’s the most interesting thing about making this movie. There is no definitive version. There are different versions. Each one plays differently. I’ll give you an example. There is a Japanese version and an American and European version. If you put the two movies together, that’s a different movie. If I were able to put one chapter from the Kill Bill series in the theatres, say on a weekly basis, by the time you got to the end of the last chapter, you would have seen Kill Bill and it would not have been compromised. I cannot think of another film that I have made or will ever make that will be so malleable.

• Source: Interview with Quentin Tarantino by Alberlynne “Abby” Harris for BlackFilm.com, April 2004.

Given that the anticipation of the ultimate showdown is so high, is there any way to avoid somewhat of an anti-climax?

I don’t think it is an anti-climax, but Quentin wanted to surprise, and he certainly did. The way that we do it, and I don’t want to reveal it, but in the original script that I read there’s a totally different kind of battle, let’s say, at the end than what we did. And I came on to the set and all of sudden everything was changed and I had twenty minutes to learn the battle, and it was the funniest damn idea I have ever heard of, what Quentin decided to do – and that’s Quentin.

• Source: Interview with David Carradine for Phase 9 by Phase 9 Editorial, 16 April 2004.

When you take all this into consideration, it becomes obvious that all the stuff about how the 281-minute TWBA was always how Kill Bill was “intended” to be seen is just marketing hyperbole. TWBA may be the final cut, but it’s not really definitive. Regard-less, I’m looking forward to seeing it on the big screen next month and then getting the Blu-Ray (assuming it’s released on video), especially as this is likely the last project we’ll ever see in the Kill Bill universe.* Though I also hope that it’s so successful that it motivates Tarantino to finally finish the Django Unchained director’s cut.

* I highly doubt that at this point any of the planned anime prequels or sequels are likely to ever materialize.

On The Cannes Cut

Contrary to popular belief (and advertising), Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair has never actually been shown before to the general public. What has been shown (most notably at Tarantino’s own New Beverly Cinema) over the past 21 years, yet erroneously advertised as “The Whole Bloody Affair,” is the Cannes Cut, which was first screened for critics at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004.*

*Some say it was 2006, but 2004 seems to be the correct year based on my research.

Combining the two volumes into a single film, it included many differences from the two US theatrical cuts of Volumes I and II respectively. These include:

• Alternate and additional footage from the extended Japanese Cut of Volume I

• The lack of the ‘bookend’ sequence that closes Volume I while previewing Volume II. Consequently, the audience thus does not become aware that the Bride’s daughter is alive until the very end of Volume 2, making it a surprise twist.

• While I can’t confirm it, I strongly suspect that the opening b/w car driving scene of Volume II, where the Bride breaks the fourth wall and talks about how the previous movie was described as a ‘roaring rampage of revenge,’ was also cut. It simply doesn’t make sense to include it unless Volume II is presented by itself.

• Ditto for the car driving credits of Volume II, which were already redundant given the presence of the complete credit sequence for both parts.

• A musical intermission between the two volumes

• French subtitles

Based on all the available info released thus far, it seems that Tarantino had long intended to use the Cannes Cut as the base for TWBA, with the only difference between the two being the addition of the animated O-Ren duel sequence.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if the director had made some more little tweaks here and there, given the 21-year gap between the Cannes Cut and the “final” cut.

But what about you?

What do you think of Kill Bill? How do you rank it against Tarantino’s other films? Have you ever seen the Cannes Cut? Do you like it more or less than the two-volume release? Do you think Kill Bill should really count as one movie or two different films?

Leave a comment

This is the 23rd issue of what used to be an ongoing monthly-ish series that I like to call Mikhail’s Textual Variations Digest, aka MTVD, for short. It includes links to my recent posts, as well as some additional related thoughts and notes. In this particular issue, I’m also including some publication updates and information about the new paid tier.

If you’re a new subscriber, please check some of these out to get a better sense of what this newsletter offers or catch up on previously unread or missed emails. If you are a more casual subscriber, you can change your settings to receive just the digest section in your inbox.

Table of Contents

1. The News

2. What’s going on with the Schedule

3. FTNC Update

4. The Digest

5. Paywalled Archive

The News

I’ve enabled payments on Textual Variations!

Starting now, you can sign up for a paid subscription at $2.99/month or $29.99/year.

In connection with this, I have moved some older articles in the archives behind the paywall. You can browse them in the new category menu here but I’m also including a quick index at the end of this post for the sake of convenience.

So, signing up for or upgrading to a paid tier will give you full access to the archive.

Note that every new article published will initially still be free. So, if you sign up now without a paid tier, you won’t miss out on any new content.

Could this approach change in the future? Perhaps.

But right now I like to think of the paid subscriptions primarily as tips or donations that will support my writing, rather than the cost of new premium articles. So, if you could subscribe or upgrade to a paid tier, I’d really appreciate it.

Subscribe now

What’s Going on with the Schedule

If you’ve been following this publication for a while, you probably know that I strug-gle with sticking to a regular publication schedule. I’ve been meaning to get to a point where I can release a new post every week. But I’ve finally come to realize that this is simply not going to work, at least for the foreseeable future.

My best essays often take a considerable amount of time to research and put together. And there are often external factors that interfere with my plans. So, I’ve decided I’m just going to publish whenever I have the time and inspiration, thereby freeing myself of the stress and pressure inherent to the pace of regular Substacking.*

*Honestly, I look at some of my peers with envy. Like, how do you guys churn out so much content so quickly? Where do you get the energy?

Going forward then, my publication schedule is going to remain inconsistent. But I hope to make up for potentially long gaps between posts with high quality work.

FTNC Updates

I am still adding newsletters to the Film and Television Newsletter directory.

Here are the most recent additions:

The Digest

June 3

I don’t write a lot about games, but with Alan Wake 2, I had to make an exception.

A surreal, artful survival horror game that features the most seamless integration of live action and gameplay I’ve ever seen, it is easily one of the best things currently available on the PS5. But more than that, it is also part of a larger shared universe created by the independent Finnish company Remedy Entertainment.

Putting together a bunch of clues and breadcrumbs left by Remedy across multiple games, webpages and official investor reports, I wrote about why I believe the company’s recently announced mystery game is actually an Alan Wake spinoff called Doors, which focuses heavily on several supporting characters from Wake 2.

I was admittedly hoping for this post to have a bit more traction than it has gotten so far. But it’s still pretty early - Doors isn’t coming out for at least 3 years. So, I’m hoping when they do reveal the 4th game I will have been proven right.

August 1

This was originally part of a longer post I was gonna make, which would’ve included my thoughts on Batman v Superman and the Superman Animated Series. But ultimately, I decided to just focus on critiquing the new movie, which I found to be overrated and very problematic in certain areas.

It seems I’m not the only one who had a really big issue with how this film chose to portray Superman’s parents, to the point that James Gunn now seems to be backtracking from his original claim that the video was unaltered (within the story), at least judging by what some have discovered in the recent video release.

August 2

Back when Servant was airing on Apple TV, I was hoping to recap every episode. That didn’t quite turn out as planned, but I managed to review pretty much every episode of the second season, with the exception of 2.09. Since Substack changed its formatting, my original images for the episodic reviews started to get cut off in the regular menus and interfaces, so I decided to make a custom navigation menu, much as I did for Sarah Connor, making the recaps more visually attractive and easier to navigate.

I hope to complete the S2 reviews sooner or later, but I sadly don’t have time at the moment. Honestly, recaps are tough to keep up with. They take effort to make but they don’t really get a lot of views or drive the conversation. Still, I’d love to one day have reviewed all episodes of Servant, if I can make it worth the time investment.

It wasn’t perfect. I think its best and most consistent season was its third, and even there the first few episodes were a little wobbly. The final season stumbled towards the finish line, particularly with 4.07 and the rushed series finale.

But even with its creative missteps and low points, the M. Night Shyamalan series was always a pleasure to watch and arguably THE best series about the Covid era that wasn’t literally about the Covid era.

August 8

I really missed the good old discussion threads and Substack Chat just wasn’t really working for me, so I decided to try an old-fashioned open question post following a viewing of Zach Cregger’s Weapons, a good film that I think got a little overhyped.

One thing I noticed during my screening is how I couldn’t really keep my eyes on the screen during the really gory sequences, especially at the end. This was strange, as I remember being able to watch much more violent and gory films (eg. Day of the Dead) without looking away or flinching when I was younger.

All this led to the question above. I wish a few more people had responded and shared their experiences, but I’m grateful for the comments I got.

Paywalled Archive

These currently are all the archived posts that are now paywalled and require a paid subscription to access. I plan to add more posts to the paywall over time.

I recently tried to do the Substack Chat thing and it didn’t quite work out, despite my best efforts. Honestly, I’ve never really liked Chat that much (except the dms) and think Substack made a mistake abolishing the good old-fashioned discussion thread post.

So, now I want to try to resurrect it. Here is hopefully the first of several posts meant to mostly just generate some discussion via the use of the Comments.

I went to see Weapons last night. I really liked it though I don’t think the movie quite lives up to the hype. It really reminded me of Longlegs, a movie that was marketed as a really dark super-serious horror movie that turned out to be more of a satire/black comedy and somewhat less than the knockout early buzz had proclaimed it to be.

What really struck me was how much difficulty I had watching the scenes of violence and gore. Weapons has relatively little of it compared to other horror movies.* But my capacity to stomach it and not get squeamish is clearly not what it used to be.

*Though admittedly some scenes go really over-the-top, to the point where I wondered if it had to be cut back due to an NC-17 rating.

I’ve been noticing it more and more over the last few years. I simply can’t watch uber-violent sequences like those in Only God Forgives (2013) or super gory splatter ones like in Evil Dead (1981) without at some point averting my eyes anymore.

Stuff that never bothered me 20 years ago now makes me really uncomfortable.

It’s as though I used be desensitized to that stuff. And now I’m not.

Which makes me wonder - do people normally get more sensitive to screen violence over time? Anybody else here find that violent films - especially horror films - you used to watch are no longer tolerable? If so, why do you think this is happening? Could all the real-life violence shown on-screen be impacting our ability to watch fiction? Do we generally get more sensitive to such imagery as we age? 

What do you think?

Leave a comment

This is a custom navigation page for my reviews of the Apple TV+ Original television series Servant (2019-2023). It was created in response to Substack changing its interface in a way that undermined my use of graded images for episodic reviews.

The page will be updated as new reviews are published, until all episodes are hopefully covered. At the moment, only Season 2 reviews are available.

Click on the image of an episode entry to read its full review.

I didn’t think it was a bad film, exactly, but I definitely found that it was overrated. In my mind, it is a very mid film, one that has good qualities but also a LOT of flaws.

Table of Contents

1. The Pros

2. Misogyny and Xenophobia

3. ‘Man of Steel’ Reaction

4. Moral Incoherence

The Pros

First, I’ll talk about what I liked.

The casting is good. Korenswet and Brosnahan don’t actually have that much to work with, but they make for a likeable central couple as Clark and Lois respectively. Really though, the MVPs of this film are actually Edi Gathergi’s Mr. Terrific and Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor, both of whom are scene stealers and arguably have the most confident narrative material at their hands. Lex especially is the kind of Luthor you want to see more of, as opposed to Kevin Spacey or Jesse Eisenberg.

I also admire the film’s visual variety. There is a lot of COLOR here, a lot of places and sequences that just pop off the screen, especially when you get inside the pocket dimension that Lex created to imprison anyone that stands against him. 

I think the action here is largely nice if not exactly outstanding, the only exception being the sequence where Mr. Terrific really cuts loose with his spheres. 

And I admire the overall ambition of the movie, which plunges the viewer into the middle of a different universe teaming with superheroes and all sorts of comic book weirdness. There is no origin story, either for Superman or the new DCU. 

But for all that, there’s a lot that just didn’t work for me.

Misogyny and Xenophobia

For one thing, I think this movie is overstuffed. It seldom has any breathing room, and while it has plenty of emotional beats that land, it really seems to prioritize just moving from one point to the next, while trying to distract the viewer from the fact that it doesn’t really examine almost any of the ideas it tackles in any substantial way. 

For another, I find Superman to be a weirdly misogynistic film.

This isn’t to say the film doesn’t have any well-drawn or likable female characters (eg. Lois Lane) but to highlight that it presents Eve Tessmacher as little more than a clueless bimbo, reduces Kat Grant to busty, walking eye-candy and makes Jimmy Olsen into an asshole that treats women like garbage (think Starlord without the redeeming qualities) without ever calling him out on his behavior.

More than that, I really, really don’t like how the movie depicts Superman’s parents. A key issue is that it never once bothers to really give audiences an actual understanding of what Krypton is, only suggesting that its inhabitants apparently view humans as an inferior species to rule and consider human women as potential sex slaves. 

In theory, there is nothing wrong with this take on Superman’s parents. The problem is that their depiction - and thus the characterization of Kryptonians in general - is essentially rooted in xenophobic beliefs about Middle Eastern and Asian cultures.*

*Despite all the jokes, it is evident that the movie wants us to take the ‘secret harem’ thing at least on some level as a serious threat to the sanctity of human (that is, Western) society.

This, in turn, plays into the portrayal of the Kents as saintly, archetypal farmers that represent everything good and pure about the US. I’m quite certain for many viewers, this stuff would fly over their heads. But for an immigrant like myself, it stands out, especially as the film, for all its silliness and whimsy, does attempt to tackle topical issues like the immigrant experience.

Yet, in effect, what it ends up saying is that Superman is good in large part because he chooses to reject the backwards foreign upbringing of his biological parents and instead embraces the white, traditionalist American mentality of his adoptive ones. 

To be a good immigrant then, you have to assimilate and give up that which is ‘bad.’

‘Man of Steel’ Reaction

By far the most interesting thing about Gunn’s Superman to me is how it feels like a conscious reaction to Zack Snyder’s take on Superman in Man of Steel (MOS, 2013), which itself was a reaction to Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns (2006).

You can see this in the bright, poppy, colorful look of the picture, the exaggerated and heightened “reality” of its setting or the comedic tone. But for me, this is most clearly visible in how the movie repeatedly underlines just how much this Superman aims to protect all forms of life, to the point where Gunn even includes a moment where Superman saves a freaking squirrel from being crushed by a Kaiju. 

This is the moment where the movie basically screams at the audience: “See how much he cares?! This Superman cares about collateral damage! This Superman doesn’t just save people, he even saves cute little rodents!”

I doubt anybody familiar with the controversies that erupted after MOS came out would not see this as a direct response to how that movie handled the depiction of collateral damage and the false perceptions that Snyder’s Superman “doesn’t save anybody” or “kills more people than he saves.” Both claims are honestly bullshit (and were, in fact, debunked years ago) yet continue to be reiterated by people that rejected Snyder’s more relatively grounded approach to the character on general principle.*

*Despite all the buildings leveled in the climax, MOS notably never confirmed that those buildings were filled with people. As nobody died on-screen, the idea was obviously nobody died at all from the destruction. But social media disagreed, and so Snyder and co. chose to lean into the ‘collateral damage’ perception in the sequel. Since then, Superman’s cinematic battles have been confined to areas that have been evacuated or are confirmed to be uninhabited. The new Superman continues the trend.

Regardless, the new movie’s Superman is positioned culturally by the filmmakers as the comparatively “better” one by virtue of the fact that he wants to save everyone and never actually kills anybody. (This is why I think a lot of people overpraise the movie - it largely corresponds to their idealized model image of Superman, of what they believe the character should be or always has been.)

There are, however, multiple problems with this attempted (meta-)dialogue with MOS.

Moral Incoherence

To begin with, Superman’s moral position is not coherently depicted.

Even as the movie goes out of its way to establish that Superman saves doesn’t kill, it also establishes that he has no compunctions about threatening to murder a foreign head of state unless he complies with his demands. We don’t know for a fact if Superman would’ve made good on his threats and have lots of reasons to believe he wouldn’t, but doesn’t it seem out of character that this squirrel-saving hero also resorts to dictatorial, might-makes-right strong-arming tactics to get his way? 

Or what about Superman’s attitude towards the film’s two main soldier villains, the Engineer and Ultraman? During the climactic action sequences, he appeals to the former, trying to convince her that she doesn’t have to follow Lex’s orders. But then he never tries to make any appeal to the latter. Even after discovering that his final foe is a mentally incapacitated clone of himself with not much in the way of free will, Superman never once tries to reason with nor show any compassion to Ultraman.

The way the movie dispatches the villain ultimately absolves Superman of direct culpability - Clark manages to get Ultraman hit by a building that flings him into a black hole - but provides no moment for him to reckon with this action, which leads to the presumed death of Ultraman, on an emotional level.

These problems also feed into the second major issue, which is that the movie itself seems to be at odds with the character’s alleged moral standing. 

Consider the role of the Justice Gang. 

Their presence early on expands our understanding of the world of the film, while also contrasting Superman’s ‘save everyone’ mentality with that of a more practical, down-to-Earth, and cynical group of heroes. That fight with the Kaiju, where the squirrel scene takes place, is very telling in that regard: where Superman wants to find a non-lethal way to stop the Kaiju, Green Lantern and company just want to kill it and be done. Moreover, while Superman just wants to ‘save lives,’ regardless of the geopolitical situation, the Justice Gang members are well aware of how bad it would look if they intervened in the Jarhanpur/Boravia conflict.

The ‘arc’ of the Justice Gang is ultimately to come around to Superman’s side when it comes to humanitarian interventionism. At the end of the movie, he calls upon them for help and they answer by going up against the Boravian army. And in the course of this, Hawkgirl directly attacks the Boravian government, taking its leader Ghurkos out into the sky. Ghurkos tells Hawkgirl something to the extent of: “I know you’re like Superman, so you won’t kill me.” And Hawkgirl replies that she’s not like Superman before proving her point by dropping Ghurkos to his death.

On the one hand, this underlines the distinction between Superman and the Justice Gang. Despite coming around to his way of thinking, Hawkgirl remains a more morally gray and cynical hero willing to go to lengths Superman wouldn’t. On the other hand, Hawkgirl’s actions conveniently dispatch the film’s villain without requiring Superman to get his hands dirty. 

Superman is responsible for this death insofar as he spurred the Justice Gang to intervene. But the situation is contrived in such a way that he is again personally absolved of direct culpability and so never has to wrestle with the morality of his choices or the consequences of his actions.

All this effectively throws any claim the film has towards possessing a coherent moral framework out the window and so undermines the metatextual claim the film makes about the superiority of this take on Superman over that of Zack Snyder’s.

Sure, unlike his predecessor, Gunn’s Superman doesn’t directly kill anyone. Yet his actions do ultimately bring about death and promote a fascist-like authoritarianism.

I’m certain some people would defend the film against such criticisms by claiming that the inevitable sequel will interrogate the contradictions we see here or point to Flagg’s scene towards the end as evidence that the movie is deliberately avoiding a clear ideological or moral stance. 

But I believe it’s crucial to analyze what the film is trying to say in and of itself. And from this perspective, the Flagg scene is another sign of incoherence. If there is a takeaway from all this, it’s that killing villains to protect the innocent is justified, so long as it’s not the pure and idealized good guys that carry out the killing.

But what about you? 

Do you agree with my take on the new Superman? Vehemently disagree? Am I wrong to read it as highly conservative, misogynistic and at times xenophobic?

Please let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Similar or Related Posts

Superman represents an example of what I like to call a “faux-lo” movie, which is a crossover film that is billed as a solo superhero movie for marketing purposes. I discuss Warner’s strategy of such crossover-first, spinoff-second movies here:

This mystery title was also listed on Remedy’s updated ‘game projects’ page alongside the upcoming titles FBC: Firebreak, Control 2 and Max Payne 1&2 Remake. Though little information has been officially released about the Fourth Game, I argue that this project is actually an Alan Wake spinoff called Doors, and that Remedy had first hinted at plans for it back in 2019 when it released Control.

A Short video that summarizes my ideas. Source images courtesy of Remedy Entertainment.

Table of Contents

1. Quantum Break and IP Ownership

2. Control and the RCU

   1. The Oceanview Motel Doors and Symbols

3. Deciphering Doors

   1. How ‘Alan Wake II’ Set Up a ‘Doors’ Spinoff

   2. Doors to the Multiverse

4. Conclusion

Quantum Break and IP Ownership

To understand the origin of Doors, we need to talk about Quantum Break (QB).

Though it has its fans, it’s often looked down upon as a lesser Remedy game and many have called it a ‘failed experiment’ due to its attempt to intersperse episodes of a live-action television series with more traditional sections of action-adventure gameplay.

Far less discussed though is how the reception of QB radically changed Remedy’s overall approach to the ownership and exploitation of intellectual property (IP) as well as its relationship with the business side of making games.

Typically, the story goes that Remedy wanted to develop Alan Wake 2 (AW2) shortly after the 2010 release of the original, but the first game’s publisher Microsoft wasn’t interested, inspiring the developer to instead create an original IP that would be fully owned by Microsoft, leading to what would become QB. The new project reportedly appealed to Microsoft as it was intended to incorporate live-action TV episodes, which fit perfectly with the company’s desire for its upcoming XBOX One console to be an ‘all-in-one’ entertainment system that included original TV programming.

However, per other accounts of the project’s origin Microsoft was actually interested in AW2, or at least in the version Remedy pitched that would’ve included the live action television element. Apparently though, they would only agree to fund this iteration of the sequel in exchange for Remedy ceding ownership of the Wake IP.

From this perspective, Remedy developed the new QB IP for Microsoft as they wanted to get another project off the ground but without giving up ownership of Wake.

Whether or not QB was developed specifically so that Remedy could retain rights to and control over Wake though, it was essentially made in lieu of AW2 and in that sense can be seen as a byproduct of Remedy’s inability at the time to further develop and exploit the IP they owned.

None of this is to say that Remedy approached QB half-heartedly. Gambling on the chance that the first QB would prove successful enough for Microsoft to greenlight more installments, Remedy spent 5 years developing technology, iterating concepts and building an immersive world that could sustain multiple stories. The production was complicated and the game’s release was delayed from 2014 to 2016.

So, you can imagine how disappointed the Remedy crewmembers must've been when QB came out to a mixed reception, underperformed commercially and was then basically shelved by Microsoft, which by that point had largely lost interest in television/game integration and pivoted away from its initial vision for the XBOX One.

For the second time in a row, Remedy found itself unable to further build on a video-game title and IP they had spent years establishing. And in this case, as Microsoft owned all of QB, Remedy wouldn’t be able to develop a sequel with another publisher even if it wanted to. Taking stock of their experiences with AW and QB, Remedy realized that things had to change and decided on 5 new key strategies that would drive their approach to making games for the next several years.

1. Retain and leverage brand/IP

2. Adopt a multi-project model (producing multiple games at the same time)

3. Switch to multi-platform releases

4. Make and release each game faster

5. Create interlinked (shared universe) franchises using its own brands

To achieve their goals, Remedy needed to expand as a company, gain more financial independence and become less reliant on publishers. Thus, the company made an initial public offering in May 2017, raising approximately 12.3 Million Euro by selling shares on the Finnish stock market, and with that took back control. Literally.

Control and the RCU

Within just three years of QB’s release, Remedy made a surreal action-adventure game set inside a fictional government agency called the FBC, which is beset by an invasive extra-dimensional alien species. Fittingly, the game was called Control.

Published by 505 Games at the end of August 2019, Control was now the second major IP that Remedy wholly owned and the first AAA Remedy title in years to reach the Playstation. Though not a hit off the bat, its long tail sales across multiple platforms gradually made it into the developer’s most popular work since Max Payne. 

But though designed as a complete game in and of itself, Control also presented an opportunity to capitalize on the company’s other IP and, in the process lay the foundation for the Remedy Connected Universe (RCU). The titular character of the Alan Wake series made a cameo in the main game before getting a slightly larger focus in the 2020 DLC expansion AWE, which set up the future release of AW2 in 2023.

Now, it’s important to note here that the RCU’s existence was made possible specifically by the company’s ownership of multiple brands/IPs. In hindsight then, had Remedy traded ownership of the Wake franchise to Microsoft in exchange for making AW2, the crossover with Control would not have been legally possible.

Remedy gradually unveiled plans to expand the RCU by both creating more games within its existing franchises and launching new, original IPs. But while the games encompassing the shared universe would be officially announced and revealed over the course of several years, the developer had actually included an encoded roadmap to future RCU projects in Control. The player can find the roadmap by visiting a mysterious, apparently inter-dimensional location called The Oceanview Motel.

The Oceanview Motel Doors and Symbols

“For over 10 years, we’ve had a crazy dream. The idea that the tales told in some of our games would be connected to each other, a connected world of stories and events with shared characters and lore. Each game is a stand-alone experience, but each game is also a doorway into a larger universe with exciting opportunities for crossover events.

• Source: Sam Lake, AWE: The First Remedy Connected Universe Crossover Event”

Player character Jesse Faden is first transported there after pulling a light cord three times. She finds herself in a hallway with six different doors covered in mysterious symbols. Initially, the only door out of the six that can be opened is the one with the Inverted Black Pyramid. Doors with this symbol recur throughout the Oldest House - the central location of the FBC and thus the game itself - and when Jesse leaves the Motel, she does so specifically through the Black Pyramid Door.

The others remain closed and their significance is left unexplained in the main game. Over the next 5 years or so, enough evidence emerged to decipher the meaning of the symbols. As I will argue, every single symbol-adorned door corresponds to a specific videogame title in the RCU. In effect then, Remedy laid out an ambitious plan to release at least six interconnected titles, of which Control was but the first.

To summarize my findings and better illustrate what I’m talking about, I’ve created the following chart, which matches each symbol with its corresponding RCU game.

Early on, the biggest clue that the symbols represented specific RCU games was the Spiral Door. In-game, Jesse can locate a manuscript page that is said to have been written by Alan Wake and discovered in the Oceanview Motel corridor, having been pushed into it from “under the door with the symbol of a Spiral.”

Finding the page also leads to a vision of Wake describing his experience over 10 years of trying to write his way out of the Dark Place, where he was trapped at the end of AW1, marking the first explicit crossover of the character into Control. 

About a year or so later, a player of the PC version of Control discovered that the sym-bols actually have names within the game files: ‘alanwake,’ ‘control_2,’ ‘vanguard,’  ‘pyramid_black,’ ‘pyramid_white,’ and ‘doors.’

Not counting Control, three of these file names directly corresponded to projects Remedy would develop in 2020-2024. And all of them were wholly-owned by Remedy, meaning that they could have cross-overs and so constitute parts of the RCU. This evinces that every symbol designated a specific RCU videogame, and with the exception of the Black Pyramid, each foreshadowed an unreleased future project. 

Unsurprisingly, the Spiral Symbol Filename “alanwake” corresponded to AW2, which began early stages of development in late 2017 and came out in 2023. Accordingly, in AW2, Spiral Doors appear several times, allowing Wake to enter his Writing Room. 

The Filename “vanguard” corresponded to Project Vanguard, a multi-player game that had been in development since at least 2018 but was cancelled in May 2024.

While Remedy (to my knowledge) never directly stated that the game was meant to be part of the RCU, this fact can be deduced from what CEO Tero Virtala stated in the Remedy 2021 Annual Report about Codename Vanguard being the beginning of a ‘third major franchise’ owned by the developer. This means it was planned to be a major new IP that could cross over with those of Wake and Control:

“For Vanguard, we signed a global development, license and distribution agreement signed with Tencent. This gives us a major partner and support to create an excellent game and grow a third strong franchise. Overall, we advanced our long-term growth plans significantly during 2021. We now have three Remedy-owned franchises that are expanding into new games with world-class Partners.” (6)

This was given further credence by the Report’s “Strategy” page, which establishes that the company aimed to achieve to own no less than three successful game brands by 2025 and states that each Remedy “brand and game stands on its own, while still connecting to a wider, underlying Remedy universe.” (8)

Finally, the Filename “control2” obviously suggested a full-on sequel to Control, which would enter the early concept stages of development in 2021. The symbol association was explicitly confirmed onscreen in the 2024 Alan Wake 2 DLC Expansion Chapter “The Lake House.” Here, FBC Agent Kira Estevez is transported to the Oceanview Motel and goes through an opened door with the Control 2 Symbol, leading to a teaser cinematic of the events that will take place in the Control 2 game.

The specific titling of the file also indicated that multiple doors and symbols could refer to projects in the same franchise. Given this and that the Black Pyramid corresponded to the first Control, it logically followed that the White Pyramid symbol designated a Control-related title, which fits to a tee Remedy’s wholly-owned multi-player spinoff FBC: Firebreak, which is slated to come out later this month.

As of this time of writing then, we know the meanings of five out of six symbols, each of which designates a specific RCU game. Two of them have been released, two will come out soon and one has been canceled. Therefore, the remaining symbol must also designate another future RCU title. And going by its filename, we can assume that this game is either named or codenamed Doors.*

*For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to it as such from this point forward.

Deciphering “Doors”

Naturally, one might be inclined to ask: “What evidence is there that Doors is, in fact, the Unannounced Fourth Game recently teased by Remedy?”

First, let’s consider what we know so far about the mysterious new project.

The updated ‘Game Projects’ page lists the 4th Project as a Remedy title, rather than a work associated with another publisher like Max Payne. This means the game represents a brand wholly owned by Remedy, guaranteeing that it’s set in the RCU.

Additional info can be gleaned from the 2024 Annual Report, according to which Remedy at the beginning of 2025 was working on four games at the same time and aimed to release on average one new game annually for the 2025-2030 period.

“As per our strategy 2025-2030, we will launch on average one new game per year and currently focus on four game projects simultaneously.” (5)

The report doesn’t mention the Unannounced Fourth Game directly, but it does list the three upcoming announced titles: FBC, Max Payne 1&2 Remake and Control 2. If the games are to be released annually, with FBC slated for 2025, then the earliest the Fourth Game could be released is 2028.* This is in line with Tero Virtala’s claim at the April Business Review that the new game is only in its ‘early phases.’

* I personally think a more realistic date is 2029, given how long game development for such a title can take. It’s possible DLCs could also count as part of the annual release strategy. If so, even if the 4th Game comes out after 2028, it will have still fallen within Remedy’s plans.

Finally, Remedy’s revised 2025-2030 business strategy provides some additional hints:

“Our own Franchises, Control and Alan Wake both have their own worlds and expansion opportunities but are connected by a Remedy Connected Universe (RCU). This provides fans with an additional layer, and for us an additional creative and commercial opportunity. By 2030 we will grow Control and Alan Wake from great games into world-class franchises with more regular sequels.”

This tells us two things.

First, Remedy currently has no plans to expand into a third IP for the next 5 years, indicating that it has narrowed the RCU’s scope and is now focused on building it out via the creation of new installments in its established franchises.* Second, it must release a new game in the Alan Wake series by 2030 so as to fulfill its new strategic objective of transforming it into a ‘world-class franchise with more regular sequels.’

*This in line with the fact that the Remedy openly announced that the May 2024 cancellation of Codename Vanguard (at that point technically known as ‘Codename Kestrel’) was intended to help the developer focus on its existing franchises.

This aligns quite well with what we know about the 4th Project’s release window, meaning it is pretty much confirmed to be a game from the Alan Wake franchise.

How ‘Alan Wake II’ Set Up a ‘Doors’ Spinoff

“I was in a dark place, and there was a dark man there. His name was Mr. Door, and he told me that there are many worlds - side-by-side, on top of each other, some inside of others. In one world, there was a writer who wrote a story about a cop. In another world, the cop was real. Door said he himself was in all of them at the same time, endlessly shifting between them.”

• Dylan Faden describes a dream he had in Control (2019)

So far then, everything we know about the Unannounced Fourth Game fits with what we know about Doors. But the biggest evidence that the two are one and the same can be found in the narrative setups of Remedy’s most recent release: AW2.

Though the belated sequel tells a standalone story that continues and resolves the plotlines of its predecessor, it also introduces new characters, narrative enigmas and setups that are clearly meant to be expanded on or tied up in another title.

Without a doubt, the biggest mysteries following the end of the game surround the character of Warlin Door, aka Mr. Door. Initially, Door is presented as a late-night talk show host who interviews Alan Wake in the Dark Place’s manifestation of New York City, implying that he is similarly trapped there and forced to play a role.

But as the game progresses, it becomes evident that Door is actually a God-like being that can enter and leave the Dark Place of his own free will whenever he chooses and is participating in Alan’s story so as to advance some larger personal agenda. The audience, however, never learns what that agenda is. And at the end, numerous questions remain unanswered about Door’s motives, goals, and powers.

These include:

• How and why does Door pluck Sheriff Tim Breaker out of the real world and teleport him to Dark NYC? Did he do this so Tim could deliver a crucial piece of information to Saga Anderson at the end of the game so as to help her escape?

• Did Door aid Saga because it furthers his master plan or because he is, in fact, her long-lost father, as the game repeatedly implies?

• What does he want with Breaker and the Anderson brothers Tor and Odin, all of whom seem to join him in and disappear from the Dark Place?

• And what does he mean when he tells Alan in their final scene that the next time they meet, Alan should ‘play his part’ or stay out of his way?

Their presence is clearly intended to set up another installment of the Wake franchise that will include a larger role for Warlin Door as well as the characters linked to his subplot - Saga Anderson, Tim Breaker, and the Anderson Brothers - in AW2. It can be surmised the new game will revolve around interdimensional travel and parallel universes, for both concepts are directly tied to and so define Warlin Door himself.

“A door that stands between two rooms is in both. A door that can lead anywhere is everywhere. That door is the center. He governs the currents of reality.”

• Mr. Door describes himself in a vision to Saga Anderson in Alan Wake II (2023)

Doors to the Multiverse

I mean, the guy’s last name is Door, for crying out loud!

If we’re being honest, it’s ridiculous and implausible. But it fits the literary concept of a speaking surname, underlining the fact that this character somehow has the ability to travel anywhere and essentially constitutes a living door that stands between all worlds in a larger, potentially infinite, multiverse. His power is implied to have an intrinsic link to The Dark Place, which Warlin describes in one of Saga Anderson’s visions as a “mirror reflecting all possible realities.” Furthermore, Door cryptically claims that his power is not limited to him but apparently runs in his family, adding:

“The family of Doors have the power to shift between these realities. Here, and elsewhere.”

Does this mean that all of his blood relatives are naturally capable of interdimensional shifting via the Dark Place? Or does it mean that this power is limited to his own descendants specifically? And what could this signify for extended family members, such as in-laws? None of this is made clear. But if what Door says is true, then Saga Anderson should also possess Door’s ability, as should her daughter Logan.*

* Even if AW2 doesn’t outright confirm it, all the details it presents point to Saga being Warlin’s daughter and thus a member of the family of Doors.

It is very likely then that Saga will return as a main character in Doors and revisit the Dark Place, with players becoming able to shift between various alternate universes. Perhaps the plot will focus on Saga traveling across the multiverse to find her long-lost father Warlin and reunite with her grandfather Tor and grand-uncle Odin, who promised in their last appearance that they’d see her again. Or maybe it will follow Sheriff Tim Breaker, as he pursues Door across many worlds in an effort to find answers and make his way back home. Maybe it will be a bit of both.

Whatever the case is, I’m certain that Saga, Tim, and Mr. Door will be crucial to the events of the spinoff, while Alan Wake will likely take on more of a supporting role. The title, after all, is Doors. Even if it’s only a codename, that signifies the focus of the new game won’t be on Alan Wake, and thus it won’t be a direct sequel to AW2.*

*The title thus could be simultaneously referring to both the concept of opening doors to other universes and to the central role of the family of Doors. This is given credence by the associated Oceanview Motel symbol, which shows rectangles within rectangles, visually suggesting an infinite number of doors within doors and thus universes within universes.

And if the game’s story indeed revolves around exploring the multiverse, then in terms of gameplay, Doors should accordingly use dimensional shifting as a central concept and mechanic, perhaps in a manner analogous to QB’s use of time manipulation.*

* Imagine controlling a character that gains abilities like warping space, jumping through portals to teleport behind enemies, or reflecting enemy attacks via spatial distortion fields.

This direction only seems natural to me, given that with AW2 Remedy has begun actively remaking QB - or at least select elements of it - within the Wake franchise and thus inside the legal contours of the RCU.2 Doors then could very well be a means for Remedy to create an alternate universe version of the QB sequel that was never made, to reuse its concepts, plot points, plans and ideas in a new form, and so symbolically regain ownership of and control over the QB IP in the process.

“Parallel Universes? Multiverse?... We are connected because of something that happened to us somewhere else. Shockwaves echo across worlds?”

• Sheriff Tim Breaker’s whiteboard at the end of AW2 (2023).

Conclusion

Let’s sum things up. Remedy hints at a future RCU game called Doors via Control in 2019. Then, four years later, Alan Wake 2 ends with some pretty big unresolved mysteries surrounding Warlin Door and introduces the idea that there is a whole family of Doors, interdimensional shifters that can access the multiverse via the Dark Place. And less than two years later, Remedy announces plans to expand the Wake franchise by 2030 and to release a new fourth game that is part of the RCU.

Altogether, these pieces of evidence point to the conclusion that Doors and the new fourth game must be one and the same. Should it be released, it will represent the last of six RCU titles that had been planned at the time Control was published in 2019. Rather than a direct sequel to AW2 though, Doors is (very likely) going to be a multi-verse spinoff focusing on secondary characters like Warlin Door and Saga Anderson, with dimensional shifting being crucial to the gameplay and narrative.

At the moment the game is in the early stages of development and is planned to come out approximately in 2028-2029. Of course, there’s always a chance that it won’t make that date. After all, videogame production is notoriously fickle. The project could very well fall apart during development, as happened with Vanguard, or become extensively delayed due to production difficulties. Or it could undergo radical changes and become a distinct yet still related RCU project in the course of development.

Whatever happens, I sincerely hope Doors makes it to the finish line as I love Reme-dy’s games and want their long-term vision for a connected universe to succeed. We need more works like Control and Alan Wake 2, more big budget AAA titles that seek to mix different media, experiment with storytelling and challenge our expectations.

But what about you?

Do you think the new project will indeed be Doors? Or is Remedy cooking up something else, eg. Alan Wake 3: Master of Many Worlds? Do you like the prospect of exploring the multiverse in a future title? Is the developer indeed attempting to symbolically reclaim Quantum Break? Any other thoughts on Remedy or their games? Please,

Leave a comment

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Sadly, despite my best efforts, I am going to have to take a publication break to catch up with other things that take precedence.

I’m not entirely sure just how the schedule will ultimately pan out. Right now, for instance, I’m mulling over whether or not to do a belated digest post next week, or later in the month. Or maybe to turn the MTVD into an email-only feature.

One approach I might take is just to focus on the most important posts I need to get out there and just upload them when they’re ready. I’ve had to delay some big articles I’ve wanted to get out there a few times already and I feel that I don’t want to hold them over anymore.

In any case, the schedule will have some gaps this Spring.

Sorry about that. That’s just how the Spring period is for me. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get things back into a consistent weekly schedule by May.

Also, I have enabled pledges.

This should help me get a sense of how many subscribers might support this newslet-ter financially when I turn on the payment option later this year. So, if you like this site and wish to help it keep going, please consider pledging your support!*

*Really, some of the articles I write require a lot of research and work to complete, so having paying subscribers will help me keep making them.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s get to some bits of news I want to share.

Revisio-News: Nosferatu/In The Mood for Love

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, which has, to my surprise, already come out on digital home video platforms like Itunes, now has an extended cut, which was teased by Eggers at the beginning of January. Presumably, it includes a shot of the vampire in silhouette, which was seen in the trailer but not in the theatrical cut:

From an interview with Esquire UK, cited in Fangoria:

“The first shot is a funny one because it's one of those annoying things for film dorks because it's not in the movie. It's a really cool shot, we really like the shot but where it was intended it was actually ruining some tension to know that Bill was around when we needed to keep him more mysterious. But if you wish to purchase the Blu-ray, it is in the extended version of the film.”

The released extended cut is only 4 minutes longer than the theatrical, meaning it now runs 2 hours 16 minutes. 

More interesting, in my opinion, is the news that the Wong Kar Wai classic In the Mood for Love (2000) is being reissued in China this Valentine’s Day in a longer anniversary cut, with an additional 9 minutes of previously unseen footage.

You can watch the trailer below:

To me, this is unsurprising. Wong tends to overshoot his movies and tinker with them extensively in the editing room, sometimes long after the theatrical release. (I believe the joke was that his semi-sequel 2046 would need until 2046 to be finished.)

Several of his films now have multiple cuts, some made for different markets and others due to his desire to revisit and revise his vision. 

I am thus quite curious, as to what changes exactly he will make to Love, and whether or not any of the footage will actually prove to be genuinely new.* With the amount of material he has, he could arguably cut together a different movie entirely.

*As I recall, the film had a very good DVD special edition back in the 2000s, which featured a selection of deleted scenes and an alternate ending.

I also wonder how it will look. Back in late 2020, Wong released controversial restorations of his films that included several (mostly technical) revisions.

In the Mood for Love was one of them, with the new version featuring a revised color grade, as tends to happen with older titles when they get transferred to HD and thus digitally modernized. Given the backlash, I wouldn’t be surprised if the “special anniversary edition” dials back on the more cyan-like palette.

Also, did you know Wong released a 30-episode TV series called Blossoms Shanghai?*

It’s apparently been out in China since late 2023, but there’s still no info about a US release. Part of that might be attributable to the series reportedly getting a new color grade for international distribution, as Wong was apparently not quite happy with the look of the first run in China. 

*Per some reports he only directed 19 of the 30 episodes, but that’s still a huge amount of work.

I hope the show will make its way over here eventually. Interestingly, an AVClub article from 2022 states that the series was to be shown on WeTV and the Tencent Video apps in the US. But, to date, this still has not happened.

A theatrical film re-cut of the series was also reported a while ago but I have found no information about whether or not it will actually be made.

It’s also interesting to ponder what the future of Wong Kar Wai films will be here in general, given the current state of US-China relations.

FTNC Updates

I have more or less made it through my backlog, but as usual, I'm continuously adding newsletters to the Film and Television Newsletter directory.

Here are the most recent additions:

• // David Perlmutter

• // Brandon Streussnig

• // Dan Pal

What I’m Reading/Responding to: Invincible Fight Girl

has a pretty nice series of articles on the Top movies, TV shows, and Comics of 2024 over at his newsletter, and I was particularly thrilled when he listed the new Max series Invincible Fight Girl, a show I kept meaning to bring up here at some point but could never find the proper space or opportunity for.

Do You Know What I Love The Most?

Top Television of 2024 (Part 1)

It’s January here at Do You Know What I Love The Most?, and that means it’s time to sum up the last 12 months with Year End Lists! I’ll be devoting the rest of this month to rounding up and discussing the various media released in 2024 that meant the most to me — just like every other website on the internet! Isn’t that special…

Read more

a year ago · 1 like · Spencer Irwin

I love Invincible Fight Girl. This the type of show where you can see the potential for greatness from the very beginning and every episode makes it clear that this a bold and confident work that makes you want it to succeed more and more.

It is also perhaps the only example of what I’d call a “true American Shonen anime.”

See, there are lots of good-to-great animated series that have come out in the States in the past 20 years or so that are anime-inspired or anime-influenced. The Boondocks, OK KO, Steven Universe and Avatar The Last Airbender are but some examples.

But none of these shows have felt as authentically anime and true to the conventions of action-heavy shonen works especially (eg. Dragonball Z) like Invincible Fight Girl.

It is willing to go to some dark places, to do stuff that would be way too much for a traditional US animated series, while fully embracing the subgenre’s sheer weirdness and madcap narrative ambition. It has, after all, an absurdist, over-top-world, where somehow professional wrestling (MMA really) is like the most important thing ever, and an expanded cast roster that includes a family of butchers called the Beefpunchas, who, if you haven’t guessed it, are defined by their propensity for punching beef.*

*Seriously, Akira Toriyama would’ve been proud.

I hope it becomes a big enough hit for Cartoon Network to get a few more seasons. It had a long road to the screen, and was reportedly almost canceled several times due to the behind-the-scenes regime changes at Warner.

Anyway, both the show and the article linked above are recommended.

But What about you?

Anyone here excited for the new version of In The Mood for Love or have thoughts about Wong Kar Wai’s propensity for revisionism? Any cool recent animated series, anime or otherwise, you’ve seen and want to gush about? Any tips on how to publish consistently for a year in a row? Please,

Leave a comment

Table of Contents

1. Narrative and the ‘In-Trouble’ Trilogy

2. Frame of Television

3. The Eyes of the Lost Girl

4. Flow and Consciousness

5. The Real Woman in Trouble

Narrative and the ‘In-Trouble’ Trilogy

David Lynch has an interesting relationship with narrative.

Though his debut feature Eraserhead was an experimental, absurdist picture that had little interest in traditional storytelling, his work over the next 20 years was far more bound to convention, offering what were for the most part legible and literal, if highly weird and surreal, stories. It was not until Lost Highway (1997) that the director returned to making movies, where the story was entirely open to interpretation, and literal meaning was largely eschewed in favor of symbolism and subjective depiction.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lost Highway constitutes a prime example of what Warren Buckland defines as the ‘puzzle film,’ a designation that has also been applied to both Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006), which I personally like to refer to alongside Highway as installments of Lynch’s “in-trouble trilogy.”*

*Each picture follows a ‘person in trouble’ and at least the first and third installments have been described as such by Lynch in interviews and promotional materials. 

The author summarizes the conventions of the puzzle film in his introduction to the book Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, stating that

“...puzzle films embrace non-linearity, time loops, and fragmented spatio-temporal reality. These films blur the boundaries between different levels of reality, are riddled with gaps, deception, labyrinthine structures, ambiguity, and overt coincidences…. In the end, the complexity of puzzle films operates on two levels: narrative and narration. It emphasizes the complex telling (plot, narration) of a simple or complex story (narrative).” (6)”

Though there are those who would scoff at they idea of trying to ‘decode’ Empire or claim that imposing a narrative upon it is to do it a disservice, I believe that the picture indeed lends itself towards a literal interpretation.

In crafting it, Lynch did not completely reject an explanation for the film’s narrative but left enough elements or clues that openly invite and encourage the viewer to uncover it, much as he did in the preceding installments of the in-trouble trilogy.

Both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive early on establish a narrative framing device that obliquely guides spectators towards a coherent narrative interpretation by allowing them to easily distinguish between the real or objective events that compose the film’s story and those that take place in the ‘subjective reality’’ of the main character, from the perspective of whom the story is told.

Early into Lost Highway, Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) has a meeting with two detectives, who are investigating the mysterious videotapes he and his wife have received of their own home. In the course of the conversation, he admits that he doesn’t like video cameras, preferring to remember things in “his own way” and “not necessarily the way they happened.” This essentially positions video camera recordings in the movie as the only record of objective truth, while framing everything we see otherwise as a manifestation of Fred’s unreliable mind.

Similarly, at the beginning of Mulholland Drive, we witness a first-person POV scene of someone going to sleep on a bed with red sheets. About 90 minutes later, Diane (Naomi Watts) wakes up from the same bed, framing everything that came in-between these two scenes as her dream, something I discuss more in-depth here.

Frame of Television

Inland Empire likewise presents clues that establish or at least strongly imply a clear delineation between real and imaginary/fictional events in its second scene, where The Lost Girl, who we learn is a prostitute, enters a hotel room and has sex with a male client. In the morning, she wakes up and cries, then begins watching television.

Initially, the screen is static, full of snow.

The film cuts to the Lost Girl.

But when it cuts back to the screen, we suddenly see clear images of the Rabbits live-action sitcom on the screen.

Cut back to the Lost Girl’s eyes.

Then, we see Grace Zabriskie’s Neighbor character moving in a disjointed, blurry version of the full scene that will be shown about 5 minutes later.

The next shot shows some of the television images enveloping the walls of the room. 

Cut back to the Lost Girl.

Now the camera begins to push in closer and closer to the Girl's eyes - when it cuts back to the TV, which is now closer than before, we again see STATIC.

Cut back to the Lost Girl. The camera zooms in even closer. We then cut back to the static screen, which becomes the frame of our CAMERA as well, meaning there is no further delineation between our screen and the TV screen in the film.

This heavily implies that we - the audience - are now seeing the television screen through the Lost Girl's eyes, and that what she sees - and thus we see - is not real, for television shows a fictional reality. This is corroborated by the fact that the static then DISSOLVES to a scene from Rabbits, Lynch’s absurdist web sitcom series. (Sitcoms, after all, are among the most common and recognizable staples of scripted TV. )

After a few seconds, the film cuts back to the Lost Girl Watching from her hotel room. A few more seconds pass, the film cuts back to her eyes again. This repeats a couple of more times. The intercutting serves as a reminder that the sequences we see when the Lost Girl is not onscreen is actually what the Lost Girl is watching on TV. 

By the time we get about 6.5 minutes into the movie, the intercutting between The Rabbits scene and the Hotel Room STOPS and the film continues to follow the Rabbits sequence. At this point, the film has completely transitioned us into the world of the television screen that the Lost Girl sees.

Hence, we enter the fictional reality of TV and thus the Lost Girl’s subjectivity. We don’t know if what she sees on the screen is what’s actually being shown on screen or what she imagines herself to be watching. But either way, it is NOT real.

Consider how the scenes that follow seem to break apart any semblance of coherence. About 7 minutes 20 seconds in, the male Rabbit fades out of the Room he walked into. The next thing we know, the film fades a couple of new characters into the same room. And they have a vague conversation in Polish.

At the end of it, we again see the Male Rabbit in the room, only for the film to FADE OUT.  When it FADES IN again, we seem to be in a different movie altogether.

The Eyes of the Lost Girl

We now see a repeat of the sequence with the Neighbor Character we saw earlier when it was shown on the Lost Girl’s Television Screen but it is now no longer distorted and appears uncut. This then leads into the next scene, which introduces actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), whom the film is ostensibly about.

Notably, however, the plotline about Nikki and her role in a new film is interspersed with a lot of seemingly unrelated sequences that seem to come from different genres or movies altogether. There seem to be elements of a sitcom, a murder mystery, a soap opera, a crime thriller about Eastern European prostitution, etc.

The order of the sequences seems random and confusing, especially since there is no clear or direct causal link between them. But the structure starts to make more sense when you keep in mind that everything we see is what the Lost Girl sees on TV.

Recall: what used to be one of the most common activities that TV watchers would perform following the introduction of cable and the remote control?

The answer: channel surfing.

By changing channels quickly, viewers avoid spending too much time on any one specific program and to sample a large variety of distinct texts. When you watch Inland Empire from this perspective, its disjointed nature comes across as intentional.

That is, we could say that the seemingly random order of the scenes is the result of the Lost Girl channel surfing and so sampling different shows and movies. The initial use of “fade in/fade out” transitions between the various sequences supports this view, arguably signifying the shift from one program or channel to another.

Over time, however, the boundaries between all these discrete televisual segments and their respective realities begin to break down, with characters and elements from one sequence beginning to pop up in another, disrupting any sense of spatio-temporal coherence.* In effect, the many fictional programs the Lost Girl is watching merge into a singular stream or “flow” of audiovisual programming.

*For instance, I like to think that the first time we see Julia Ormond on-screen, she is playing a daytime soap opera character in a TV show that is completely separate from the reality of the movie about Nikki Grace. But the next time she appears, her character in the Nikki Grace movie reality begins to inexplicably recall the character from the soap opera.

Flow and Consciousness

Now, I specifically use the term ‘flow‘ here, as it is a key concept in television studies. And Inland Empire is a movie that perfectly expresses it in a visual medium.

To clarify, flow is perceived to be a fundamental characteristic of television. Initially, it was theorized by scholar Raymond Williams in the book Television: Technology and Cultural Form. The author posited that all news programs, series, commercials, short and feature films, etc. appearing on TV function as components of planned sequences that join together into a singular continuous whole or “flow” of audio-visual material.

“In all developed broadcasting systems the characteristic organisation, and therefore the characteristic experience, is one of sequence or flow. This phenomenon, of planned flow, is then perhaps the defining characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form.” (86)

On TV then, boundaries between different media texts break down. Williams in parti-cular notes how differently feature films play on TV. Rather than wholesome, singular works, they are often interrupted and joined to other segments, such as commercials.

I highly doubt Lynch read Williams’ theory.

But everything Williams states in the following passage, in my opinion, perfectly captures the structure, progression, and experience of watching Inland Empire.

“...I began watching a film and at first had some difficulty in adjusting to a much greater frequency of commercial ‘breaks’. Yet this was a minor problem compared to what eventually happened. Two other films, which were due to be shown on the same channel on other nights, began to be inserted as trailers. A crime in San Francisco (the subject of the original film) began to operate in an extraordinary counterpoint not only with the deodorant and cereal commercials but with a romance in Paris and the eruption of a prehistoric monster who laid waste New York. Moreover, this was sequence in a new sense… since the transitions from film to commercial and from film A to films B and C were in effect unmarked… I believe I registered some incidents as happening in the wrong film, and some characters in the commercials as involved in the film episodes, in what came to seem – for all the occasional bizarre disparities – a single irresponsible flow of images and feelings.” (92)

Building on what Williams describes here, I’d say that Inland Empire too ultimately seems to become a single, irresponsible flow of images and feelings. What’s important to note here is that this flow also reflects the subjective experience of the Lost Girl.

It’s no coincidence that about an hour into the film, Nikki Grace - a fictional charac-ter the Lost Girl arguably identifies and empathizes with - begins to lose her sense of self and, among other things, inexplicably finds herself transported to Poland, where she experiences a life that is not her own but similar to that of the character she’s supposed to be playing in her ‘cursed’ film. It is as though elements of the Lost Girl’s own past, her life start to bleed into and alter the fictional reality of Nikki.

Despite all this, the distinction between real/objective events and fictional/subjective events is occasionally reinforced. About 80 minutes into the runtime, for instance, the film reminds us that Dern and the other characters we see are fictional constructs by cutting back to the Lost Girl watching them on TV from her hotel room.

We can conclude from all this that the opening 6-7 minutes provide a way for us to clearly tell apart scenes taking place in the real world (the Lost Girl in the hotel) from those set in the imaginary/fictional one (Nikki Grace et al.).

Whatever we see on the TV screen is not real. Laura Dern’s character(s) and every-thing that happens to her is not real. The Rabbits are not real.

Only the Lost Girl is real.

And much of what we see is her stream of consciousness, which intertwines with and becomes indistinguishable from the flow of various shows and movies shown on TV.

The Real Woman in Trouble

What all this means is that The Lost Girl is the true “Woman in Trouble” that the film is about. She is the actual main character, the individual whose mind the film is exploring, and whose story it is actually telling. Naturally, one might ask: “What is the Lost Girl’s story? What can be deduced from what we see in Inland Empire?”

I cannot offer a comprehensive response to these questions yet, but I am convinced that one can infer a coherent story by thoroughly rewatching the film and piecing together the different pieces of information scattered throughout and encoded in the fictional realities.* Perhaps I’ll do that in the future.

But for now, I want to provide a general idea of how to decipher the film. And to that end, I need to discuss why the Lost Girl is watching television.

Inland Empire never explains this. In fact, it never explicitly establishes almost anything about the Lost Girl beyond the fact that she is a prostitute with a husband and child. But the simplest answer is that, much like the other protagonists of the in-trouble trilogy, she wants to essentially escape her reality.

And what are some the primary sources of escapism today? Television and film.

It’s really that simple. We watch movies and shows all the time to immerse ourselves in fictional realities, as they help us, to quote some old texts I used to study in grade school, to “escape the problems and troubles of our everyday life.”

I’d say that is precisely what the Lost Girl is doing. Needless to say, her life must be quite unhappy. And if what we see happen to Nikki (in the fictional reality) indeed reflects the Lost Girl’s real-life past, it is likely that she has suffered from an abusive marriage and possibly the murder of a lover at the hands of a monstrous client.

Similar to what we saw in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, the better imaginary worlds the main character immerses herself in don’t last, as aspects of her life start to intrude into and corrode them. In contrast to what happened in those films, however, the Lost Girl seems to survive her internal ordeal and gets a ‘happy ending.’

In my opinion, Laura Dern’s character ultimately comes to embody the Lost Girl’s sense of self. Thus, in the ending, when they meet, the Lost Girl and Nikki reintegrate into a whole person, which is why Dern/Nikki/Susan vanishes. In effect, the Lost Girl has finally “found” herself. She is lost no more, which is why she stops crying and happily greets her family. The use of the dissolve from the Lost Girl’s head in those final scenes further evinces that much of what we saw took place in her mind.

Rather than allowing her to completely escape from reality, watching television seems to have helped her heal and overcome her real-life troubles. From all this, it follows that Inland Empire is about the healing power of watching television and how its flow can impact and in turn be impacted by the subjective experience of the viewer.*

* Now, none of this is to say that this is the “correct” or “best” way of reading the film. After all, Inland Empire opens with what one could argue is another framing device of a record player that describes a radio play called Axxon N., implying that the Lost Girl’s story could very well itself be a work of fiction, which gives things a whole other layer of potential significance. Nonetheless, I do think the clues presented in the movie position the Lost Girl as the film’s true main character and the real ‘woman in trouble.’

But what about you?

Do you agree with this interpretation of the film? Did this analysis change the way you look at it? Or am I completely off-base? What is your take on Inland Empire?

Does it make any sense? Is it a good David Lynch movie? Please,

Leave a comment

If you like this article and are a fan of David Lynch, please consider reading:

Table of Contents

1. Automation Creep in Movie Theaters

2. Help Save Lynchland!

3. Revisio-News: Demolition Man Pizza Hut Version

4. FTNC Updates

5. Saw X response and reading recommendation

Automation Creep in Movie Theaters

Last August, I went to the cinema to see Cuckoo (2024, dir. Tilman Singer), a movie that I would later find out, per my colleague Akos Peterbencze, is an example of a subgenre called ‘bird horror.’ I wasn’t all that impressed by the picture.

It was initially quite promising and well executed, but began to drag as it went on, leading to a needlessly overlong and overdone finale. Not only that, the film seemed to be hinting at time travel elements that were ultimately left without payoff or elaboration, and I suspect, might’ve been cut from the picture during post-production. 

But what really stood out to me, what lingered in my memory after the credits rolled, wasn’t the quality of the movie but that of the movie theater. See, this was a Regal Theater, and a pretty big one at that. I had visited it multiple times over the past 20 years and though I know memory isn’t always reliable, I recall it once looking opulent and thriving, of truly living up to the name ‘Regal.’

Its grand interior used to resemble something you’d expect to see in an upscale traditional theater that staged elaborate plays or big-budget musicals. When I entered it this time though, I was struck by how barren it looked, how desolate. 

Walking around, I could find old, unlit concession stands that had clearly not been operated in years sitting in the corners of the hallways. One main snack booth was still there, and I think there were 2-3 people handing out food and drinks to the few customers who were attending at the time. I don’t recall whether the ticket booths were inside or outside or both, but I recall for sure that there were no staff members behind the counters. Instead, there seemed to only be desktop-computer-like self-service kiosks, where I had to buy the tickets myself. 

Sadly, I didn’t really take any photos of the place except for that of the self-service computer. Next time I went to watch something theatrically, it was at an AMC.

Here, I got a strong sense of deja vu: empty counters, abandoned concession stands, swathes of empty space in a location clearly designed to be operated by and so filled with people, the monotony broken up by the occasional automated self-service kiosk and the customer going to or from a screening. This time I took more pictures. 

Yes, there were some staff members, of course, like the usher that checked my ticket before letting me pass to the theater. But they were few and far between.

And their absence drew my attention to something that’s really happening almost everywhere I go nowadays: automation creep, by which I refer to the gradual replacement of human beings by automated systems. 

I started to recall all the recent times I’d seen the same thing in pharmacies, grocery stores, even airports.* I began to take stock of how many self-checkout machines there were in those places versus the number of people manning the registers. And I gotta tell you: I started to get a little creeped out (pun intended).

*New regulations require customers to check-in, label and drop off their baggage by themselves or use automated self-check-in and passport verification kiosks prior to boarding the planes. The staff that does still work there has little choice than to direct you towards the machines that are likely to soon replace them.

Quite simply, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the human element is being increasingly removed from the service industry.

And as this occurs, movie theaters - at least, the big, chain-owned multiplexes - seem to look more and more like husks of their former selves. Maybe I’ve just seen too many sci-fi flicks, but I find it difficult to not be reminded of a dystopian future where everything looks old and dilapidated yet still seems to just barely function thanks to the presence of some device that either does the work for you or, rather, makes you do all the work, thereby minimizing your ability to interact with another person.

What does it say about our society as a whole and film exhibition in particular when it is cheaper and presumably more ‘efficient’ for huge companies to replace human retail workers with self-service devices? Never mind the lost job opportunities and their impact on the economy. What if the machines break down or stop working? Who will help you make your movie or your flight then? What if you buy the wrong item and want to return it, but nobody is on hand to help you?

When I went to that Regal theater, I was actually about 5-10 minutes late to the start of the screening. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t miss anything due to the fact that trailers nowadays delay the real start of the film by about 20 minutes or so. But the kiosks would no longer list the time slot that I wanted to get my ticket for.

Fortunately, I managed to find one living, human staff member working at a different area (maybe a help desk?), and asked her if she could get me a ticket into the screening that had already begun. She worked on her computer, performed a manual override of some kind, and I got in, missing maybe the first two minutes. I was immensely grateful to her for her help. It’s a small, yet crucial thing in such circumstances.

What would’ve happened if the theater were completely devoid of human staff? I don’t know. But I doubt I would’ve bothered to see a film at all. And so, I wouldn’t be surprised if audiences stop going to theaters altogether if the automation continues.

Help Save Lynchland!

David Lynch died on January 15, 2025, just five days before his 79th Birthday.

He was my favorite filmmaker, a director whose work seems to have much in common with European art cinema yet remains quintessentially American. The impression I’ve gotten is that for many budding cinephiles, including myself, he was an inspiration, an auteur that convinced us that movies could be more than just entertainment.

I have seen a lot of responses come up in the aftermath, a lot of thoughts on Lynch and his legacy. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I should say but I really don’t have much to add to the discourse, at least not yet. What I do want is to draw attention to an amazing David Lynch Facebook Page called Lynchland, which was inexplicably taken down two years by Facebook and remains unrestored, despite the best efforts of its creator, Roland Kermarec, and its various managers. 

There is still an active FB Group linked to the site called Lynchland Gang, but the pro-per page, an archive of around 8,000 “photo posts” has been inaccessible since 2023.

You can read up on the story of what happened to Lynchland here but the gist of it is that either due to some technical error following an update to Facebook ‘pages’ system or perhaps the efforts of a bad actor, the page was taken down by Meta.

The problem is that it has been virtually impossible for anybody at Lynchland to reach actual FB/Meta representatives and get them to look into the matter. Roland reques-ted a ‘review’ of the situation but hadn’t gotten any responses and though someone working at Meta at the time tried to help him get someone to look into the matter, the page was republished only to get unpublished again about 4 hours later.

The individual working at Meta has since quit and Lynchland remains in limbo.

“After June 2023, many attempts have been realized to try to find a “real human being” working at Meta, without success. Via Lynchland’s group on FB, at www.facebook.com/groups/lynchland, many members have also tried to do the same, tried to report the problem to Meta, without success either.”

Here, we have arguably another instance of the problem with automation. Companies like Meta are increasingly relying on automated processes and procedures, while isolating themselves from human interaction and making it impossible for users or clients to get help in resolving issues. Without going into details, I myself have had similar problems with FB, which, btw, no longer even has a customer service contact number that would allow you get any assistance with your account.

I don’t have that much reach on this newsletter but I’m hoping to nonetheless help spread the word and bring more attention to the site’s plight. Maybe somebody on Substack with a big audience could even turn this into a whole story?

Lynchland would certainly welcome this.

If you’re a journalist (or if you know one) specializing in social media or anything related to this campaign, and might be interested in this case or in writing an in-depth article (the scarcity of the human factor, the growing blind powers of algorithms at Meta, etc.), please contact us!

• Team Administrator: SaveLynchland@gmail.com

• The Whole Team: SaveLynchland@googlegroups.com

Revisio-News: “Demolition Man” Pizza Hut Version

Part sci-fi action film, part social satire, Demolition Man (dir. Marco Brambilla) didn’t seem like anything particularly outstanding upon its release back in 1993. But over time, it has become something of a modern (cult?) classic, in part because its vision of the future in hindsight seems ahead of its time* and its satirical gags (eg. the three sea-shells and Taco Bell) have grown into recognizable pop culture memes. 

*Who would’ve thought Schwarzennegger really would get into politics in real life?

One of the more interesting things I’ve discovered recently is that there is actually an alternate European Cut of the film, where the movie’s references to Taco Bell - story goes that there were some sort of “franchise wars” in the 21st century, at the end of which only Taco Bell was left standing - were replaced with references to Pizza Hut.

Dialogue mentioning Taco Bell was redubbed (at times quite poorly imo) while CGI was accordingly utilized to remove the Taco Bell logos and replace them with those of the new chain restaurant. The reasoning was simple: product placement. 

Taco Bell, which had 4600 locations in the US, originally helped promote the film to American audiences. In addition to being prominently featured in the movie, Taco Bell at the time offered tie-in Demolition Man cups and meal deals. But in Europe, Taco Bell didn’t have much of a presence, while its sister company Pizza Hut did, with a reported 3,300 international locations dispersed across 58 (some say 78) countries. 

So, a new deal was struck to create Pizza Hut tie-ins for the film’s international release, such as Demolition Man pizza combos that would “…coincide with the movie’s opening.” Supposedly, this was the first instance of a movie being edited after release specifically for ‘promotional reasons.’*

*Source: Arizona Daily Star, 06 Dec 1993, 14.

I would debate that last part, given that movies are constantly re-cut for distribution purposes, but in any case this led to the film having an alternate Pizza Hut version in Europe. For years, US audiences were not privy to it, but reports indicate that it somehow made its way to some TV airings in the States not too long ago.

More recently, on December 27, Arrow Video released a new limited edition of the film on BluRay and 4K, including the “Pizza Hut version” alongside the US theatrical version via seamless branching. I’m not sure if I’ll order the BluRay but I might, as I don’t have the film on disc and it sounds like Arrow has a nice Special Edition here.

FTNC Updates

I have more or less made it through my backlog, but as usual, I'm continuously adding newsletters to the Film and Television Newsletter directory.

Here are the most recent additions:

• [Check Book] // Blank Check

• // Tom Barrie

• // Jim Fields

What I’m Reading/Responding to: “Saw X”

I have finally seen Saw X (2023, dir. Kevin Greutert), the belated third sequel to the Saw: The Final Chapter (2010, ibid.). The film lives up to the hype. From the opening moments, I had the impression that this was the best Saw movie, one that truly should’ve been called Jigsaw in lieu of the 8th film, given that it’s the first time John Kramer is truly the lead rather than a supporting player in other peoples’ stories.*

* Naturally, this means that Jigsaw is no longer a mysterious villain, whose story is slowly revealed via flashback. No, by virtue of being thrust into the role of the protagonist, Jigsaw becomes the de facto good guy or antihero, and so the film has to introduce a true villain in the form of the grifter Cecilia Pederson.

If its predecessors can be considered pulpy genre mashups of the slasher film and the police procedural, Saw X functions as something more of a prestige drama take on the material. It is calmer in its editing, more confident in its storytelling, more focused on characterization rather than pulp thrills. 

Saw X is also interesting in that it needs to function as a truly standalone movie, yet one that also fits into the larger continuity established by its predecessors.* Really, that’s a subtle yet crucial difference: the first seven Saw movies were very much serialized chapters that routinely avoided closure and set up various mysterious and loose ends for future movies to resolve.

*The returning actors obviously look 20 years older than they should at this point, but that isn’t a dealbreaker. In fact, Tobin Bell’s age really helps sell the cancer-stricken John Kramer’s frail condition and so render him a more sympathetic character.

Saw X, in that regard, is a considerably more conventional film, but after so many serialized installments, it really feels like a breath of fresh air. 

Anyway, I recommend Skylar Singer’s article on the film, as it really gets why Saw X is awesome and how it breaks with the established conventions of the previous nine movies while also working within their framework. 

Acquired Tastes

Review: Saw X (2023)

The One About Grifters Selling False Hope…

Read more

3 years ago · 5 likes · Skylar Singer

But What about you?

Have you yourself ever encountered automation creep? What do you think this will do to our movie theaters? Any perspective on the Pizza Hut version of ‘Demolition Man’?

Want to share any thoughts on David Lynch or the impossibility of getting in contact with anyone at companies like Meta? Please,

Leave a comment

Table of Contents

1. New Year and Y2K Thoughts

2. A Crappy Year of Substacking

3. Revisio-News: Albert Pyun’s “Captain America”

4. FTNC Updates

5. Does Robert Eggers Have a Sense of Humor?

New Year and Y2K Thoughts

New Year has come and gone.

It’s strange. 2025 is a quarter century after the Y2K. Anyone remember Y2K? There was this idea in the air that, for some reason, all the computers on Earth would fail because they’re not supposed to have “00” as the year in their code or something. 

And that meant: Boom! The end! The apocalypse! The banks would go down, the electric grid was going to malfunction, planes were to fall out of the sky.

I remember how that New Year’s Eve, my entire family was visiting my aunt and uncle in the US. None of us were taking Y2K seriously at first. And then, we went on a trip to a supermarket and the adults got just a bit worried as it seemed almost sold out on essential supplies like water.

People were stocking up, man, and the thought became: maybe we should too, you know, just in case? I do believe I was mostly worried that I wouldn’t get to see the long-awaited hour-long Dexter’s Laboratory special called “Ego Trip,” which I think was going to premiere right at midnight on Cartoon Network. So, when it aired without any problems, it was obvious we were in the clear.*

*Given that none of the predicted mass disasters wound up happening and how untrustworthy mass media sources have proven to be, I ascribe to the opinion that the disasters were a hoax meant to generate money and/or popularity for certain individuals.

Honestly, for a Russian family like ours, the bigger, more Earth-shattering event that happened that day was the unexpected resignation of president Boris Yeltsin, who announced in his New Year’s Eve address that he was leaving six months before his term was up and that Vladimir Putin would become interim head of state until elections would be held 3 months later. That truly felt like the end of an era!

And it was a surreal experience, since we were learning about it from the United States via television broadcast. So many questions at the time. Like, why? Was there a soft coup? Was Boris’ health really that bad? Who is this Putin guy?!

Why am I talking about all this? I don’t know.

Might be because January 14 is what we call ‘Old New Year,’ plus I saw the trailer for the sci-fi movie Y2K, which looked good and brought back memories of that time period, of how weird it was. Just take a look at this hilarious Cartoon Network promo, which perfectly captured the insanity of the context:

Ah, Cartoon Network. It really was amazing back then, wasn’t it?

Honestly, I can’t think of that many movies set on or around New Year. The one that immediately comes to mind is Ghostbusters 2 (1989), where the Statue of Liberty is brought to life to battle an evil ghost painting that is powered by a river full of negative energy generated by the people of NYC being crappy to each other.

It’s a messy movie, with some ideas that are only loosely connected, though it has various inspired sequences, and a truly touching finale where New Year brings people together, generating so much combined joy and positivity that it weakens the bad guy enough for the Ghostbusters to defeat him.

The standout ‘river of sentient slime’ sequences, I’m pretty sure, inspired one of my favorite action-horror games, Parasite Eve (1998). Also, this movie had some weird sexual humor that completely went over my head when I was a kid.  

Another title that comes to mind is End of Days, an action-horror film that promised viewers Arnold Schwarzennegger fighting Satan himself, who supposedly is able to escape hell around the year 2000 because “666” was really “999” inverted or something. I remember thinking it was pretty disappointing at the time, though in hindsight Gabriel Byrne’s performance as the Devil was nice. 

And then, of course, there is the horror series Chris Carter had launched back in 1996 called Millennium. Its central premise was that the apocalypse was nigh and could be either religious or secular. I remember loving that show’s second season, which developed an actual story arc and mythology before literally ending the world via global pandemic in a bleak nihilistic finale that S3 would immediately undo.*

* The show was ironically canceled a few months before it got to the actual year 2000!

A Crappy Year

So, how was my 2024 as a Substack writer? My response as delivered by Pete Campbell from Mad Men:

2023 was a breakout year for me. I greatly increased my subscriber numbers and published some rather long and ambitious ‘tentpole’ articles, such as:

2024, in many ways, was the opposite of 2023. It just kept throwing curveballs at me, and life as a whole became akin to a rushed final season of many great or once-great serialized shows: stuff just keeps blowing up almost every episode but there is no breathing room whatsoever, and the quality just goes downhill.

I didn’t grow my audience nearly as much as I wanted to and while I managed to put out some good work, especially my article about the Fury Road Practical FX Myth, my consistency went out the window. It didn’t help that I started to really worry about my ‘open rate,’ which visibly diminished as my subscriber count grew.

That led me to both turn on double opt-in and try to significantly prune my email list of “inactive” subscribers, a decision I now regret. Double opt-in can be a good way to prevent bot sign-ups and fake sign-ups (when some bad actor signs someone else’s email to your newsletter without consent) but it can really slow one’s growth.

And I should’ve been more careful and strategic when pruning, as I feel I left some potential readers off the list for the wrong reasons.*

*I have discovered that there is, in fact, a way to increase your open rate without removing inactive subscribers, but that’s a whole other topic that I hope to expand on later.

Anyway, I’m hoping 2025 will be the rebound season.

If anything, I’ve learned from the mistakes I’ve made as a Substacker and hope to improve considerably. And 2025 is definitely the year I’m going paid.

I don’t know when precisely. Possibly not until the end of the Spring or beginning of Summer, as I still need to figure some things out. But it’s finally happening.

Revisio-News: Albert Pyun’s “Captain America”

Did you know that prior to Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), there was another live-action Captain America movie released in 1990? I recall hearing about it here and there, with word being that it was a very bad low-budget effort that was best forgotten to time, much like the unreleased Roger Corman adaptation of the Fantastic Four. 

What I hadn’t registered until recently was that the film was directed by Albert Pyun, a low-budget cult filmmaker that some have unfairly compared to Ed Wood. Growing up in the early 90s, I’d encountered a whole bunch of Pyun movies on cable and video, and although I never quite became a full-blown fan, I never forgot the ones I liked. 

The dystopian sci-fi b-movie Cyborg (1989) was an early video favorite of mine and arguably remains one of the best JCVD vehicles.* Brain Smasher: A Love Story (1993) was a weird, fun, martial-arts romantic comedy where a bouncer tries to save a wo-man pursued by a gang of Chinese monks(?) that are hilariously mistaken for ninjas.

* It also somehow spawned a lesser though inventive sequel starring Angelina Jolie.

In my mind, Pyun’s masterpiece was Mean Guns (1997), essentially a pure action movie where a bunch of badass killers, played by the likes Christopher Lambert, face off against one another in a sealed building for a suitcase filled with money. Like his other works, it is cheap, yet stylish and AMAZING in a way that’s difficult to describe.

Pyun, sadly, almost never got true creative freedom over his films. Back in the 2010s, he sold director’s cuts of a lot of his titles on DVD and Bluray from his now defunct personal website. I unfortunately never got any of them before the sales stopped due to Pyun’s declining health.

All of this is a preamble to the fact that I’m quite excited to hear that Pyun’s director’s cut of the much maligned Captain America (1990) has now been seen and could become available to the public in a new, digitally transferred edition.

The news comes courtesy of Pyun super-fan and author Justin DeCloux, who had recently seen the director’s cut and released an amazing video about it. I highly recommend watching the whole thing: it tells you how different the director’s cut is from the theatrical, the story behind it, and why he thinks it is better. 

Justin also made an extensive post about it on Letterboxd. Here’s a quote:

“For decades, Albert Pyun lugged around five 35 mm film cannisters everywhere he went. His wife Cynthia hated having them around, but Albert wouldn't let them go. If they moved, it was the first thing he grabbed. If they were living out of a tent, the cans would come with them. If they took a long road trip, the cans would be tossed in the trunk. 

So, what was so important in those heavy cans? 

It was Albert's original cut of CAPTAIN AMERICA. Yep, the film that negatively defined his career, the huge box office bomb, the long-standing joke as the worst superhero film of all time, and the project that led Albert's career to slide into the land of smaller and smaller budgets... He kept that thing by his side until his dying day. 

Why? Because the public had never seen the version he had in those canisters. Until now. ”

I’ll be honest that I’m not entirely sure if it’s accurate that the cut hasn’t been seen until now, given that Pyun apparently held a screening of it in Las Vegas in 2011, around the time The First Avenger came out in theaters.

I have read indications that there might actually be more than one director’s cut version available though, so perhaps it wasn’t the exact same version.

In any case, I do hope that the cut DeCloux saw indeed comes out because I want to check out the early low-budget Cap movie the way Pyun intended.

FTNC Updates

As mentioned before, I have been going through a backlog and adding newsletters to the Film and Television Newsletter directory. Here are the most recent additions:

• // Mat Bradley-Tschirgi

• // Rinzy Reviews

• // // Estelle Artus

What I’m Reading/Responding to

I’ve been thinking a lot about Eggers’ Nosferatu after seeing it recently. The film was technically very impressive and Lily Rose Depp gives an amazing performance. And yet… I somehow found the film somewhat unfulfilling, even as I thought it superior to both The Northman and (especially) the overrated Lighthouse. 

What really lingered in my mind long after the credits rolled though is the film’s tone, in the sense that I can’t really tell if Eggers ever intends for the movie to at any point elicit laughter. This is a very operatic, over-the-top picture, one that seems wholly committed to full-blown theatricality. And yet… there are sometimes these moments, where I wonder if it’s way too serious, way too theatrical to not be taken ironically. 

The ending in particular is a bit of a puzzle for me, especially considering that it reveals Orloc in his full glory and kinda-sorta tries to present him as sexy and desirable, while at the same time emphasizing how decayed and grotesque his physical body is. All of this leads me to believe that Nosferatu may very well be an example of post-irony: a kind-of movie that can evoke emotional sincerity that is nonetheless tinged with a sense of ironic self-consciousness.*

* Though this perhaps stems from other elements than the performances – like the obvious visual references the film makes towards past and present films.

One reason I’m becoming increasingly inclined to think this way is because I’ve found more than one article arguing that Eggers’ movies are actually replete with humor, though the kind that doesn’t really call attention to itself. 

Here, for example, is a quote from Joe Hoeffner’s piece in Collider from 2022:

“All three of Eggers’ movies are engaging, thrilling, and just plain fun, so long as the viewer can get on their particular wavelengths…. But in addition to atmosphere and authenticity, Eggers’ films have a secret weapon: a subtle sense of surreal humor, a taste for the absurd and unexpected that’s all the funnier for never winking at itself.”

Here is another quote from Adam Nayman’s article in the Ringer, which refers to The Witch as a ‘comedy’ and talks about The Northman leading to “belly-laughs”:

“Still, the biggest surprise in this lavish vampire drama has to do with the mysterious and reclusive Count Orlok’s facial hair, which is, as they say, a Choice—one that speaks to Eggers’s already much-ballyhooed sense of specificity, and also, perhaps, his more inscrutable sense of humor. ” 

For a counter-point, here is a quote from a really well-written review of the film by my colleague Jeremy Beck, where he states:

““And there are certainly times when Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’ sumptuous remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 touchstone, dances up to the cliff’s edge of parody. But what rescues it—what turns your stifled laughter into shrieks of horror and gapes of wonder—is that it approaches its material with absolute sincerity, and without a shred of irony or detachment.””

Indeed, I’m thinking I should at some point rewatch the first three Eggers movies with all this in mind. All three texts cited here are recommended readings.

But What about you?

What were you doing around Y2K? Did you think the world would end? If you saw the Y2K movie, what did you think? Any interest in the Pyun director’s cut? And does Eggers have a sense of humor? Any other thoughts? Happy Old New Year! And please,

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The Digest

December 12

This was the first installment of what I like to call the “Scrapbook” series, which I’m positioning as a subcategory of the VARIATIONS newsletter. For me, it was an opportunity to start writing and publishing a little faster by making the goals I set for myself a tad easier.  In such posts, I hope to gather all the stuff that doesn’t normally fit into other newsletters, like film/TV reviews, brief thoughts I’ve had about this or that topic, a link to nice article I’d read recently, cut material from larger essays, comments on recent developments in media or film revision, etc.

For instance, I knew I wanted to talk about Venom 3, but then I also simply had to respond to the noise that was being stirred up by the El Mayimbe article about the so-called “death” of the Sony-verse, and here I felt I had the freedom to do that, without needing to worry about how it was going to fit in with everything else. Making these has creatively re-energized me and so I plan on publishing a lot more of them on T.V. going forward. Hopefully, this year I’ll be able to make that 52-week undisrupted run.

December 19

For a little while now, I’ve wanted to talk about the sexual undertones of Alien Resurrection, a movie that I started out liking, then wrote off, then came back around to loving following a recent rewatch. I don’t think that would’ve been quite enough to make for a satisfying essay in and of tiself, especially as the subject already had been tackled. But it made perfect sense to include it in a scrapbook article, along with my thoughts on poor Kraven. (I’ve been encouraged to write a defense article of this movie, which is actually great, so I hope to do indeed make it at some point soon.)

I’m still figuring out a proper format for this series, as you can tell from the title and image. In this case, I thought of having a picture with an issue number but I might not stick to that in the future. I’m really into using .gifs these days.

December 24

X-Men to this day remains one of my favorite superhero movies.

I’d been thinking about writing about the canceled alternate “1.5 Cut” of the film (which I’d known about as I was an avid reader of DVDFile.com before it went downhill) for some time but never really got around to it until now.

Initially, I didn’t think there was going to be enough material for a standalone post, so I designed it as a section of a larger Scrapbook article. However, as I found more and more material to draw on in the course of research, the section grew until I realized it was substantial enough to indeed work as an article all by itself. I’m really happy with how it turned out and the response to it has gone beyond my expectations.

December 31

So, I was going to do a relatively brief Revisio-News article about the controversy surrounding It’s A Wonderful Life, which erupted on Twitter after writer Germain Lussier posted a now viral tweet about the missing Pottersville sequence. Many people were understandably upset that such a beloved film was being presented in this way, with the loss of the Pottersville sequence ruining what it was about.

Unfortunately, as tends to happen, folks started jumping to conclusions and the media picked it up, distorting reality even further. Before long, the internet was filled with half-baked takes about how “Amazon butchered a classic” to make it ‘less dark,’ apparently going by the synopsis of the abridged edition.

All one had to do though was look at the ‘studio’ listed on the Amazon page for the abridged edition or check the end credits to see that Amazon was not responsible for making it. Rather, a colorization company called Legend Films was. 

My research led me to discover that the edit was really made in order to circumvent whatever secondary copyright restrictions existed after the movie fell into public domain in 1974, and that it wasn’t the first or the last time someone tried to exploit the original version’s copyright situation. Of course, this also meant the article kept growing until it unexpectedly turned into a tentpole piece!

I’m hoping this becomes a go-to article for people confused about why the abridged edition exists and clears up any misinformation currently perpetuated on the web.

But what do you think?

Please let me know in the comments what your favorite article is of this December round-up. What really appealed to you? Do you think I should do more modest length, yet informative posts like the X-Men article, for instance?

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Film purists and cinephiles were aghast at the notion that Amazon had performed such a sacrilegious, disgusting act of mutilation upon a classic of American cinema. As I discovered though, Amazon didn’t make it. Rather, the abridged edition turned out to be one of several ‘legally gray versions’ of the film that were made possible by its strange and confusing relationship with copyrights and the public domain.

In this article, I will delve into the history of these legally gray versions. And in the process, I will debunk a number of popular myths and misconceptions about both the abridged edition and the original that are now spreading over the internet.

Table of Contents

1. Quick Links to Watch Different Versions

2. Public Domain and Mockdubs

3. Copyright Issues of It’s A Wonderful Life 

4. The Logic Behind Legally Gray Versions

5. The Escape Remix (1996)

6. The Rifftrax Version (2020)

7. The “Legend” or “Abridged” Edition (2020)

8. The “Rescored” or “Charles Dickens” Edition (2022)

9. Conclusion

Quick Links to Watch Different Versions

There are many versions of It’s a Wonderful Life that come up in this article. Here is a quick guide with links to where they can be seen:

• Original (Amazon, 131 min., black-and-white)

• Colorized (Amazon, 131 min., color)

• Re-Scored “Dickens” Edition (Roku, 131 min., alternate Raijman score)

• Rifftrax (Tubi, 106 min.)

• Legend/Abridged (Amazon, 106 min.)

• Escape (Archived Site, 45 min.)

Public Domain and Parodic Mockdubs

One very simple fact about It’s A Wonderful Life that arguably eludes the general populace is that it is today, to some extent at least, a public domain film. What does that actually mean? Well, the term ‘public domain’ commonly refers to:

“... content that isn't protected by copyright law. Works that are in the public domain may be used freely, without obtaining permission from or compensating the copyright owner.”

• Source: What is the Public Domain?, CopyrightLaws.com, 7 March 2023

Basically, any movie in public domain is essentially owned by the public, meaning that one should be able to download, alter, revise, re-edit, remix, reissue and even resell, without fear of violating copyright and getting into legal trouble.* Because of this, it is common for public domain titles to become source material for ‘mockdubs,’ which are parodic versions of the original work that have an alternate soundtrack, voiceover and/or dubbing, the purpose of which is to make fun of the source material.

*Now, of course, there can be caveats with this, as individual elements you might add to the remix (such as a pop song) could also be subject to copyright, but in general, you are allowed to do with a public domain film whatever you wish.

Consider, for instance, the case of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, a very popular, well-known film that ended up in public domain upon its initial release in 1968 as a result of a copyright error. As it could be revised and distributed by pretty much anyone with a copy, hundreds of different editions and derivatives appeared across home video formats over the years.

In 1991, indie filmmaker James Riffel released on VHS a parodic mockdub of Night featuring new footage that is known under the abbreviated title of NOTDOT, which has since become something of a cult movie in and of itself.

Riffel’s work bore similarity to the TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K), wherein people would make funny, derisive comments while watching old, usually low-quality films. In addition to licensing movies, MST3K regularly used public domain titles as the basis of its episodes.

Here is a passage from an article on the series by Steven L. O’Donnell:

“The show is mostly silhouettes of a person and a couple of robots in front of a movie screen playing a bad movie. So, obviously, the critical step in producing such a show is to secure the proper rights to not only rebroadcast a movie, but to recut it, and completely reframe it…. An obvious way around the licensing issue is to simply use a movie in the public domain. At least, one might think so. The problem is public domain isn’t necessarily absolute. A movie itself might fall into the public domain but still have other copyright issues. ”

• Source: In the not-too-distant future, Mystery Science Theater 3000 and copyright licensing, January 3, 2024

The Copyright Issues of It’s A Wonderful Life 

This brings us to It’s A Wonderful Life, a film that’s technically been in public domain since 1974, when its then owner Republic Pictures failed to renew its copyright. 

Now, there are many different, often conflicting accounts of the film’s history with copyright and the public domain. The two most accurate ones, as far as I can tell, can be found in a 2024 article by playwright Jason T. Leblanc, who made a dramatic stage adaptation of It’s a Wonderful Life, and a 2023 article from The Nation by journalists Ray Novosielski and David Cassidy, who had created a 10-part documentary podcast about the film called George Bailey was Never Born for I-Heart Radio. Thus, I will mostly be drawing on these accounts for this section.

It’s a Wonderful Life was based on a short story called The Greatest Gift by writer Philip Van Doren Stern. Stern had copyrighted the story in 1943, prior to its adaptation by Frank Capra, and renewed the copyright in 1971. So, when the film fell into public domain in 1974, the story still remained copyrighted. And notably, the underlying rights to the story remained with Stern, who had only ever sold the rights to create film (and perhaps other media like TV and radio) adaptations of the story to RKO in 1944. A series of transfers would then move the rights to Republic Pictures years later. 

The film was famously a critical and commercial flop upon its initial release in December 1946. Once it became public domain, however, networks and stations en masse began to regularly broadcast it on television, especially around Christmas, and the picture received video releases. This post-theatrical life (hah!) introduced the film to a new audience and allowed it to attain the status of a beloved classic. Of course, the popular assumption was that the film could now be shown legally by anyone for free. This, however, was not entirely correct. Per Leblanc: 

“Notably, while the film's ownership was legally in the public domain, the rights of the underlying story were still held by Stern, and thus he would have been owed some royalties from these thousands of airings. In an interview with Sarah Robinson, Stern's granddaughter, she states that, for reasons she did not share, Stern and his estate decided not to pursue action against the TV stations at this time.”

Unlike Stern, Republic Pictures was arguably not owed any royalties due to the film’s copyright lapse. But in 1993, the studio regained a measure of control over the picture’s exploitation by stopping the royalty-free airings and entering into an exclusive licensing agreement with NBC. 

How did it accomplish this? First, Republic purchased music rights. Accounts vary, however, as to whether they purchased the rights to the entire music of the film, including the whole Tiomkin score, or just to specific songs used in the film.

For instance, Leblanc states:

“In 1993 they purchased the ownership rights to the film score and music used in the film from composer Dimitri Tiomkin, who had renewed the music copyrights correctly. ”

By contrast, here is the account by Nowosielski and Cassidy:

“When the movie fell into the public domain, it’s generally understood that all the screenplay drafts and the musical score written for the production fell too, part and parcel of the broader movie’s copyright. In a rather clever move, however, Goldsmith and Tierney went to four music publishers to purchase rights to songs created before the movie was made but used within the soundtrack.”

So, it is not entirely clear to me, as to whether Republic had the copyright to Tiomkin’s entire score or if the score went to public domain.* But based on other evidence I’ve found, including additional information from Nowosielski and Cassidy’s podcast, I believe that theirs is the more precise account.

Putting aside the exact status of the Tiomkin score then, there were several songs (or musical compositions) used in the film that had been copyrighted separately and Republic had purchased the exclusive right to copy and use said music in the film.

*Indeed, some claim that Tiomkin did not write all of the music for the film, but was only ‘credited’ as the sole composer for the film.

Next, Republic had its attorney send letters to TV stations and home video companies that had been exhibiting It’s a Wonderful Life, where he argued that any exploitation of the picture constituted a violation of Republic’s copyright on the grounds that: 

a) Republic had exclusive rights to use the previously copyrighted songs in the film

b) Republic still owned the ‘the exclusive rights to exploit’ (aka adapt) the original story, which had been copyrighted separately by its author, Stern.

According to this logic, because the songs were copyrighted and the original story was copyrighted, showing the film without paying royalties to Republic was illegal. In effect, the studio claimed to have copyrights by proxy.

It didn’t have to actually sue anyone, as It’s A Wonderful Life was quickly removed from television and video. The company then signed an exclusive deal to show the film on NBC, allowing it to receive financial compensation for years.

But contrary to popular belief, Republic did NOT change the status of the film itself, which technically was and still is a public domain film. And this strange, paradoxical situation opened the door towards the proliferation of alternate versions of the film that are defined by their attempt to excise all copyrighted content and so leave behind only the public domain parts. This is why I termed them “legally gray versions.”

The Logic Behind Legally Gray Versions

How could one possibly derive a true public domain version of the film that avoids infringement under the given circumstances?

According to Nowosielski and Cassidy, if the music rights were the only obstacle, it would simply be necessary to remove and replace the copyrighted music. 

“Though the visual images and performances and much of the story heard in the movie now belonged to the public, unless television stations wanted to find a way to strip these songs from the soundtrack and replace them, they suddenly had to deal with Republic. And no such deal was being offered… Thanks to advances in digital technology, it’s now quite possible for any enterprising company or individual to create and release “the people’s version” of this holiday classic with those particular songs replaced.”

The bigger issue would be circumventing the underlying story copyright owned by Philip Van Doren Stern, which following his death in 1984 passed to his relatives: his daughter Marguerite Stern Robinson and three granddaughters. Just one year after Republic signed the NBC deal, the four of them “created The Greatest Gift Corporation on March 1st, 1994 in order to manage the many literary works Stern had created” (Leblanc) and help enforce their rights.

As long as the underlying story copyright is maintained by The Greatest Gift Corpo-ration (GGC), there really can’t be a definitive answer to the question posed earlier, simply because there is no consensus over precisely which parts or elements of It’s A Wonderful Life are protected by the underlying story rights and which are not.

Much like in the case of a “fan edit” or “remix,” the legality of an individual case would be up for courts to decide. One could argue, for instance, that the underlying story copyright should apply to the entire film, as it is an adaptation of that short story, while a counter-argument would be that much of the on-screen visual material is original to the film, which greatly expands on the source material.

Unsurprisingly, all subsequent legally gray versions would present their own inter-pretation of what qualifies as copyrighted story content in the film and what doesn’t.

The ‘Escape’ Remix (1996)

Just a mere three years after the Republic deal with NBC, basic cable channel Comedy Central was preparing to air Escape From It’s a Wonderful Life.

Created by a group called the “Upright Citizens Brigade,” Escape was a 45-minute parodic mockdub consisting of footage from the original film with new dialogue, sound and music, resulting in a new storyline. 

As explained in a 2014 article by Nathan Mattisse:

“As Comedy Central President Kent Alterman tells it, Republic’s newly rekindled copyright only applied to the underlying story and soundtrack---not the visuals. So while other networks gave up their annual broadcast in light of the NBC agreement, the early Comedy Central team had an idea: what if they recut the film and added a new soundtrack?”

• Source: Wired Magazine, Dec 25 2014

In ths remix, George Bailey is tired of acting in the same movie over and over for 50 years and wants to do something different. Thus, the story becomes about him ultimately recognizing what a bad idea it is to get out of It’s A Wonderful Life, with the Pottersville segment of the picture becoming a reality where George has annulled his contract only to realize that he’s unemployable.

I have to say the mockdub overall is very creative, funny, and quite reminiscent of contemporary fan parodies. I also believe that it would have the biggest chance of being considered non-infringing due to its transformative nature, in that it doesn’t really retain the ‘underlying story’ of the original version, nor the music. Indeed, I believe it could very potentially qualify for the ‘fair use’ defense. 

Per Wired, Republic “disagreed with Comedy Central’s copyright interpretation” but they never took the creators of Escape to court, with one reason being that both Republic and Comedy Central were subsidiaries of the same company - Viacom.

Nonetheless, Escape from It’s A Wonderful Life was canceled shortly before its planned December 18, 1996 broadcast. Consequently, it could only be seen for free on the internet, again calling to mind the circulation of fan remixes.*

*I’ve found only two parts of the special on YouTube but it’s possible to download all three in ‘real media’ format from the archived Upright Citizens Brigade Official website.

Note

Over the next few years, the adaptation and music rights held by Republic kept passing to its successor companies, leading to It’s A Wonderful Life ending up at Paramount. I don’t know what the relationship between GGC and these various companies was but in 2000, GGC revoked the adaptation rights, leaving Paramount only with the music rights as the sole means of enforcing control over the exploitation of It’s A Wonderful Life.

This suggests that, from this point forward, Paramount would not really have cause to sue anyone for making new versions of the film unless they used the copyrighted songs without permission. GGC, however, could still sue due to possessing the underlying story rights.

The RiffTrax Version (2020)

“Copyright by Rifftrax, all rights reserved.”

• End credits of It’s A Wonderful Life

22 years later, another company would similarly remix the movie in a parodic way: RiffTrax, a spiritual successor to MST3K that was founded by some its former stars.  

On December 18, 2020, RiffTrax released its own mockdub version of It’s A Wonderful Life, which at the time of writing is available to stream for free on Tubi. In addition to adding a mocking voiceover commentary track to the film, RiffTrax cut it down to 106 minutes, making it 25 minutes shorter than the original version.

Here’s how they explained the process:

“As some of you know, It’s a Wonderful Life was in the public domain for decades, then back out again — it’s a complicated history. The main copyrighted stuff comes down to 1) material from the short story "The Greatest Gift" that part of the film was based on, and 2) some musical rights for background songs.

Well, since we wanted to offer this Christmas treat to you as a video on demand, we have meticulously excised all such parts. Which leaves... quite a bit, as it turns out!  One hour and forty-six minutes worth, in fact. You may not even notice any difference at all — unless you’re a big fan of depressing Pottersville.”

Though I don’t have a full list of cuts available, the most notable change was made to the film’s third act: the new version now cuts from the moment George Bailey asks the angel Clarence if he has $8,000 to the shot of him running happily back to Bedford Falls. This completely skips over the extended “Pottersville” alternate reality segment, where George sees what life would’ve been like had he never been born. 

Removing it is meant to both circumvent the underlying story copyright - this segment of the adaptation is by all accounts the one that most corresponds to the source material - and to elicit audience laughter by creating the implication that Clarence really did give George $8,000!* 

*Despite all this, the original ending of the picture, where everyone in town comes out to support George in his time of need is pretty much all intact.

RiffTrax’s claim to legality is thus primarily based on the notion that the literary source material can be limited to specific parts of the adaptation. By cutting them out, RiffTrax positions its version as a transformative remix that can be commercially exploited due to the basis of its source footage in the public domain.

I’d say that, if sued by GGC for infringement, the RiffTrax version has a good chance of passing as a distinct and transformative work. That could explain how it has managed to remain in circulation for four years now without reported issues.

The “Legend” or “Abridged” Edition (2020)

All this finally brings us to Amazon. You see, the much maligned “abridged edition” now streaming on Prime Video is basically an undubbed variant of the 106-minute RiffTrax Cut. I have not performed a frame-by-frame comparison, but the durations of the two cuts are about the same and the removal of the Pottersville sequence is identical. It is safe to assume some of the original version’s songs are also gone.*

*To be clear, like the RiffTrax Cut, at least some of the Tiomkin score is clearly still in there, as evinced by the opening and closing credit sequences. This arguably supports the idea that a part of the music score indeed fell into public domain as well but it’s hard to be absolutely sure.

The key difference between the two is the lack of the mocking voiceover commentary that qualified the RiffTrax cut as parody. Thus, the Abridged edition is positioned as a straight-up recut of the original version, rather than a distinct transformative work.

This is made evident by the description of the edit:

“This Abridged Edition is a shorter version of the Jimmy Stewart Christmas classic with a condensed ending but still contains all the sweetness and Christmas wonder. A series of setbacks causes a man to reflect on his life. With the help of his guardian angel, he finds the true meaning of Christmas.”

Now, I want to be clear that, as far as I can tell, this version was not made by RiffTrax, but rather by a company called Legend Films, which is listed as the “Copyright holder” of the Abridged Cut in the final frames of the end credits. A restoration, colorization, and home video distribution company that specializes in making classic movies available on modern formats like DVD, Blu-Ray, and HDTV, Legend Films has created colorized editions of various classic studio films.*

*In fact, it produced the latest (and, by all accounts, best) Colorized Version of It’s A Wonderful Life for Paramount back in 2007.

Legend has an interesting relationship with Rifftrax. Apparently, Rifftrax began as a Legend subsidiary before spinning off in 2012 into a separate company. And multiple Legend Film ‘titles’ have Rifftrax editions, which are listed and linked on the site’s official page. All this leads me to believe that Legend Films saw what Rifftrax was doing and decided to emulate it, thinking it could be a good way to generate some licensing revenue from FAST (free, advertising-supported television) streamers.

Currently on Amazon’s Freevee service, the Abridged edition initially appeared as early as December 2021 on Tubi, though at the time it was subtitled as the “Legend Edition.” Even the poster artwork is the same.

Like its predecessor then, this edition rests on the presumption that the GGC’s underlying story copyright encompasses only specific parts of the adaptation, rather than the whole, and so that excising them (in addition to the songs) maintains its legal status. Unlike RiffTrax though, this version would likely lose a copyright infringement suit if GGC were to begin one against it, as it would not even have any claim to a parody defense. Not to mention, this version was clearly made in order to profit off the original version’s popularity without paying any royalties.*

*I’d be surprised if GGC hasn’t already begun some form of legal action but have not found any reports of this.  

I thus agree with the assessment of Ryan W. Mead, whose twitter thread on the abridged edition led me to find key sources in this article:

“The stuff before and after the attempted suicide and revelation… were wholly original to the film and, thus, presumably in the public domain. What Legend Films has done, then, is exhume which parts of “It’s a Wonderful Life” are taken directly from “The Greatest Gift” to avoid paying royalties on the original short story - something that is theoretically legally plausible, but, as established, ruins the point of the entire film, for the copyrightable portion - a man talked out of suicide by being reminded that he means so much to so many in his community - is, indeed, the heart of the film.”

The “Rescored” or “Charles Dickens” Edition (2022)

“It is important to note that correctly licensed and authorized derivative works will always credit Philip Van Doren Stern as the author of The Greatest Gift and note that it is the basis for the work. Typically credit is listed as: "Based on the short story The Greatest Gift by Philip Van Doren Stern." Any works not providing this credit are unauthorized.”

• Source: Jason T. Leblanc, https://itsawonderfullifeplay.com/copyright, 2024.

The Abridged edition is not the only legally gray version of the film created for streaming. In 2022, a version that has no official label but one that I like to call the “Rescored Edition” and the “Charles Dickens Edition” began to pop up on FAST services, such as The ROKU Channel, where it remains available to this day. 

Despite having a nearly identical runtime to the original, this version carries alternate opening credits and completely replaces the entire music score of the film (credited to Dimtri Timokin) plus individual songs with that of a contemporary composer named Daniel Raijman. So, while it retains the editing of the original, it has a very different feel, to the extent that Chris Bumbray, who saw it on Roku, referred to it as an ‘abomination’ in a recent article on JoBlo, adding that:

“...Dimitri Tiomkin’s classic score has been replaced by a new score that sounds like it was lifted out of a Hallmark holiday movie. No, scratch that. That’s not fair to Hallmark movies. It sounds like the kind of score you’d hear in a Canadian Hallmark rip-off or something on the Great American Family Network…”

The credit differences, meanwhile, are fascinating, though I’m not quite sure of what to make of them. In addition to a new page that replaces Dimitri Tiomkin’s credit, the opening renames the film to “A Wonderful Life” and claims that it’s “based on a story by Charles Dickens,” rather than the actual author Philip Van Doren Stern. Is this an attempt to avoid associations with the underlying short story or with Paramount’s presumed trademark over the film title? Or does the fact that the music change is the main difference between the versions mean the producers have not taken the underlying story rights into consideration at all? Why change the credits that much unless you know you’re doing something shady and potentially illegal here? 

By checking the final frame of the end credits, I discovered that there are two companies behind this version. The first, which is called “The Last Picture Show”, presumably produced the Charles Dickens edition. It specializes in using AI to restore classic movies, especially public domain titles such as Dementia 13 (1963) and The Doomsday Machine (1972). Recently, it launched its own streaming service called ClassicFlixTV with “over 150 classic movies to watch” with AI-enhanced images, but notably A Wonderful Life is not among them.

The second is the copyright holder and distributor, “Tricoast Worldwide,” which describes itself as “a full service media company that creates, produces, manages, and distributes entertainment content.” Again, I cannot find any listings of A Wonderful Life in their available online catalogs, which is weird because it is a relatively recent (2022) title and appeared on Roku as early as November 2023, going by this Roku community forum thread.

Of all the versions covered in this article then, I’d say this one has the weakest claim to not infringing on the GGC copyright. One can infer that, perhaps inspired by the Legend and RiffTrax editions, Tricoast licensed the Charles Dickens edition to Roku in order to make some easy money but wishes to keep it under the radar to avoid potential legal entanglements. 

Conclusion

In the end, all of these editions stem from the fact that It’s A Wonderful Life is a public domain film that is nonetheless partially copyrighted. Given its popularity and cultural status, it’s not surprising that there are many individuals that would want to exploit it commercially in some way.

Unless GGC shuts down the currently streaming legally gray versions with the threat of a lawsuit or manages to get their distributors to pay royalties by proving infringe-ment in court, we can expect more such editions to materialize in the future.

In the end then, It’s A Wonderful Life illustrates how public domain status can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it helped elevate the film to the status of a beloved classic and one of the greatest American pictures. On the other, it has led to its exploitation across multiple legally gray versions that now arguably diminish it.    

But what do you think?

Any questions about the copyright situation of It’s A Wonderful Life? Is it bad that it fell into public domain? What do you think of the Abridged, RiffTrax and other editions? Was this article informative? Did it help clarify any confusion? Any other thoughts? Please,

Leave a comment

Want to learn more about alternate versions?

Then consider reading:

Table of Contents

1. The Lost Version

2. From the Script

3. Inferences

4. Reused Concepts

5. Additional Thoughts on the Film

The Lost Version

When X-Men first premiered on DVD in November 2000, home video enthusiasts were somewhat disappointed that the film did not receive an elaborate special edition loaded with bonus materials. For sure, the initial release did feature some special features, including an “extended branching version”* that allowed one to watch the film with six reincorporated deleted scenes, but it was a far cry from the sorts of elaborate sets that the DVD format was becoming popular for.

*This worked in the style of the “Follow the White Rabbit” feature on The Matrix DVD: the user clicks on an emblem that pops up during the movie, taking one to the extra scene.

In February 2003, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released a new 2-disc edition DVD loaded with new supplements called X-Men 1.5 to help promote the release of the sequel X2: X-Men United, which would come out later that Summer.

Between conception and release, however, X-Men 1.5 underwent a slight downgrade. Originally, the title of the release was meant to designate a new cut of the film that would’ve featured two new scenes shot during the production of the sequel.*

*This is reminiscent of how John Carpenter shot about 10-11 minutes of additional footage for his film Halloween (1978) during production of the sequel Halloween 2 (1981, dir. Rick Rosenthal) in order to extend the original film’s upcoming broadcast version, which became too short to fit into a two-hour time slot due to network censorship.

Director Bryan Singer first discussed the new cut in an interview for DVDFile.com linked to the April 2, 2002 release of The Usual Suspects special edition DVD. He at-tributed the initially light-on-features release of X-Men to a tight production schedule before revealing that an alternate cut was being prepared that would feature newly filmed footage, though he stressed that this would not really be a “director’s cut.”

DF: While I may be in the minority opinion, I'm not too sure how I feel about all these new extended or "Director's Cuts" coming about, largely helped by the success of DVD. Is that something you would consider doing for X-MEN?

BS: You might find something similar happening in this arena. There's room for changes. (smiles) I'm sure that will be another interview we'll have, and you can see all the artwork (points around room) for the new scenes we're shooting. But I hesitate calling it a "Director's Cut" because that term is a bit misused. They're very often not what the director originally intended, but I do agree if they are recuts supervised by the director, they should be called "Director's Cuts." If anyone else supervises them, they should be shot. And you can quote me on that.

• Source: In the Director’s Chair - Bryan Singer, DVDFile.com; highlights in Singer’s response my own.

When the new DVD premiered, however, the alternate cut was absent, despite the title remaining X-Men 1.5. DVDFile.com editor Peter M. Bracke then interviewed produ-cer Rob Meyer Burnett, who revealed that the plan to shoot the new scenes, which would’ve been origin stories for the characters of Cyclops/Scott (James Marsden) and Storm/Ororo (Halle Berry), was apparently scrapped due to budget issues.

Alrighty, the big question first. It's supposed to be X-Men 1.5...but where's the .5? When I interviewed Bryan Singer early last year, there were apparently new scenes and a new cut of the film planned?

It was going to be called X-Men 1.5 at one time when they were going to do a new cut of the film. Frankly, I don't want to speak for Bryan, but I think he was pretty happy with the way the released film came out, and it made a huge amount of money.

What were the new scenes supposed to be?

The original plan was to shoot two extra scenes during the making of X2, which were going to be the origin of Storm and Cyclops, with them as children discovering their powers. But as I understand it, it was eventually decided that the money would be better spent on the production of X2. And if you look at the way the film is structured, with Wolverine and Rogue introduced at the beginning and both coming full circle within the film, it wouldn't really have made sense to focus on Storm and Cyclops as well. So while personally I thought it was a neat idea, I didn't think it would have added anything to the film.

• Source: (Re)making X-Men 1.5 with producer Rob Meyer Burnett, February 10, 2003 by Peter M. Bracke, DVDFile.com]; highlights in response are my own.

Bracke additionally asked if Singer was unhappy about the absence of the new cut. Burnett responded:

“I don't want to speak for him, but I think Bryan wished that there could have been more money put into the DVD, including the added scenes shot for a 1.5 version. I think if Bryan had more time to work the film during its original post production process, it would be a different film. As it is, X-MEN is clearly one of the most successful comic book adaptations. But I do know he's happy with the amount of material that is on the disc.”

Budget issues, from what I understand, were pretty common for the X-movies. The budget of X-Men was slashed shortly before production, so it’s not hard to see something similar happening to the 1.5 Cut. I wouldn’t be surprised if Singer was informed by an exec that ultimately any money spent on the new material for X-Men would have to be removed from the actual production budget of X2.

It’s safe to say that, due to the depiction of mutant powers, the Storm and Cyclops origin scenes would require extensive FX work and so could be costly to produce.

But what would the scenes themselves have actually entailed?

From the Script

The only truly detailed source of information I’ve been able to find on the subject is a script draft for X-Men dated Feb 15, 1999, about 7 months before it would commence filming. The opening sequence is similar to, yet different from the final film in some details, showing Magneto’s origin in 1943 Nazi-occupied Poland.

However, rather than jump to the present-day (aka the ‘not too distant future’), the script instead cuts to a savannah in “KENYA - 1972,” where a group of kids play tag.

The scene comes to focuses on:

“One girl in particular. A PRETTY GIRL OF 12, is tagged and immediately shunned.” (4)

Though not named in these pages, which are completely bereft of dialogue, the girl is clearly a young Storm. As the game progresses, the other kids begin to cruelly taunt and bully Storm, with her ending up surrounded in a circle. They start throwing stones at her, with the scene suggesting a horror similar to the Magneto origin.

Storm’s powers activate but she is unable to control them.

The children don’t immediately notice that it inexplicably starts snowing out of the cloudless sky. Soon, adults arrive from a village and everyone is amazed at the snow. But then, the snow is replaced by HAIL and the hail increases in size, to the point that the pellets become like bricks. Here’s an excerpt of how the scene ends:

"The girl drops to the ground and covers her head as hailstones the size of coffee cans plow into the Earth as well as the weaker shacks of grass and mud. Before long, they hew a path of destruction that devastates the village. And all along the girl sits huddled in the dust, crying. 

As hailstones fall in a circle around her, never coming closer than ten feet or so." (5)

Where this sequence seemed like an ambitious silent film, the next one is much more traditional. We cut to a school gymnasium on prom night in “SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA - 1986.” The camera leads us to a Boys’ Bathroom, where we find a teenager sitting in pain on a toilet with his head in his hands.

The script explicitly identifies him as “SCOTT SUMMERS - AGE 17.” (6) He talks to his friend, a Freckled Kid about how his eyes hurt. From outside in the gymnasium, we see a bright flash of light. Back in the bathroom, it’s revealed that Scott has made:

“A SMOKING, MOLTEN HOLE in the stall door, framing Scott's face perfectly.” (6)

It is only after this scene with the teenage Cyclops that we go into the Senate Hearing scene set in the present day, with Jean Grey and Senator Kelly.

Inferences

We can infer from all this that these scenes were planned before the original production of X-Men but were cut at the script level due to budget or scheduling issues. Singer apparently saw the X2 production as an opportunity to go back and reinstate these scenes into the first movie, implying he really wanted them in the original film from the outset. But again, the plan for them fell apart.

Now, it is likely that these were not going to be the exact sequences that would’ve been filmed during the making of X2. The script pages I’ve cited are not from the final shooting draft and it is almost certain that they would’ve been at least slightly revised following the release of the first movie due to the time gap between the productions of X-Men and X2.* However, I doubt that they would have been considerably different.

*I’m also curious as to where exactly Singer wanted to place them. It would make sense to have them appear chronologically prior to the Senate Hearing scene, but 1999 draft doesn’t include Rogue’s introduction scene. With the new sequences, this would make for 4 origin scenes in a row, which would be a bit too much upfront. Hence, I wonder if the Storm and Cyclops origins would’ve been positioned as flashbacks later in the extended cut.

I recall Singer discussing at one point, perhaps on the commentary track for either X-Men or X2, that Cyclops’ powers would’ve manifested in a bathroom and the set for it had been constructed but then reused for a different sequence (possibly the Mystique/Lorio scene in X2, but I don’t remember for certain).

This means the final Scott sequence would’ve been very close to what is described in the Feb 1999 draft, which in turns suggests the Storm sequence would’ve been as well.

In my opinion, though the sequences aren’t absolutely necessary to the movie, they certainly give a better idea of the traumas that shaped both Cyclops and Storm. Additionally, they provide a more clearly defined timeline for the events of X-Men. And, just going by the script, the Storm sequence could’ve been a visual standout on par with the Magneto opening. So, it’s a shame that they - and the 1.5 extended cut - were scrapped. At the very least, they would’ve made for an excellent bonus feature.

Reused Concepts

Interestingly, later X-Men movies would revisit both of these unused concepts.

The prequel X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) incorporated both characters retroactively into Wolverine’s backstory. Kid Storm had a cameo during the 1979 sequence in Africa though her scene was (thankfully) excised from the theatrical release.

Meanwhile, the second half of the movie includes a whole subplot (which felt completely out of place) about a teenage Cyclops, who had already developed his power, being kidnapped from high school by the film’s villain Sabretooth.

X-Men Apocalypse (2016), set in an alternate 1983, would present a take similar to both the cut Cyclops origin from X-Men and his first appearance in X-Men Origins. While in class, the teenage Scott asks to go to the bathroom as his eyes hurt. As he sits in a stall, he unleashes a beam of energy from his eyes for the first time, blowing away the door and another student who had hoped to beat him up.

As Apocalypse was also directed by Bryan Singer, one can infer that he had long intended to do the Cyclops origin scene and got his chance over 15 years later.

Additional Thoughts on the film

• I love the tone of this movie. Very consistent and barely a hint of the 'wink-wink, hah-hah' stuff that is emblematic of Marvel. I mean, sure, there is that line about 'yellow spandex' later on, but it's the rare exception. In hindsight, I’m happy Joss Whedon’s contributions to the script were minimized.

• I really like in hindsight how they take their time building to the reveal of Wolverine. He's not supposed to be THE main character of this movie. Like, it's a team-effort picture and he's introduced as maybe the fifth regular in an ensemble. Watching this though, you can tell Jackman was destined to become a star. Like, he dominates every scene he's in, for better or for worse. His Logan really feels like an animal that gradually becomes humanized.

• So, why does Magneto do that metronome-like thing with the iron balls swinging back and forth sans string in his office? I don't know but I always loved the detail of them falling off the moment he leaves.

• I wonder why all the Brotherhood members aside from Magneto were basically strong but silent background heavies. Like, each of them has maybe one line of dialogue. Did this help cut down on the budget - so they wouldn't have to hire A-list stars for these roles?

• It’s sad that we never got more deleted footage on DVD. In 2021, Hugh Jackman claimed that the film lost 47 minutes shortly before release, which aligns with early reports that there was over half-an-hour cut from it.

• I remember seeing a deleted scene in the bts docs, where Kelly tells Magneto about his having the best intentions and Magneto gets furious and retorts that it's only a matter of time before mutants are taken to camps and studied for weaknesses. I kinda wish that scene had remained in the movie, because it was a great showcase for McKellen, and it made it pretty clear that Magneto sees the mutant registration act as a precursor to mutants becoming treated as the Jews were in WW2.

• I appreciate how small scale this movie is, how quiet it is, how it has a tight economical plot with scenes that are allowed to breathe. Even the first sequel would overload itself with incident and jokes, leading to some pretty weird tonal whiplash. In part, I suspect this is attributable to the fact that this was more of a mid-budget movie. Consider how small-scale Magneto's threat is. He doesn't even want to kill any humans in this case, but to convert them to his cause. Even if you consider that his act could possibly kill everyone in NYC, it's still not a world-ending attack.

• There’s setup at the end here that doesn’t call attention to itself: Jean’s reaction to Magneto’s radiation was clearly meant to be setup for her transformation into Phoenix later in the series, the idea being that it’s a secondary mutation. I was really sad when it got retconned in X3.

• I used to think poorly of Halle Berry’s initial decision to not come back to X3. But given all the stuff that came out later about Singer’s abusive and unprofessional behavior on the X-Men and X2 sets, it made a LOT of sense why she’d come back only after he dropped out and was replaced by Brett Rattner.

But what about you? 

Would you like to have seen the extended 1.5 cut of X-Men? Or was it a good idea to leave the Storm and Cyclops origins scenes on the cutting room floor? Is there a deleted scene you wish the film had kept in? Any other thoughts on the film?

Leave a comment

Also, Merry Christmas to you and thanks for reading! 

In the 27 years since I first saw it in theaters, I’ve gone from liking to hating to loving Alien Resurrection (1997, dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet). I’m not sure if it was subbed or dubbed the first time I saw it in a Moscow movie theater, but I remember thinking it was really good, especially coming on the heels of the disappointing Alien 3.

But about 6 or so years later, after getting it on video, I started to see Resurrection in a rather negative light. Part of this, I think, was due to my realization that there were a lot of people out there who outright hated the movie, including its writer Joss Whedon, who reportedly described it as poorly executed and unwatchable.

“"It wasn't a question of doing everything differently...it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong...They did everything wrong that they could possibly do...it wasn't so much that they'd changed the script; it's that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable."”

• Source: Interview for Bullz-Eye.com by , 2005. (I suggest checking out Will’s Substack - he has lots of really cool interviews!)

I also read a lot of critical reviews.

Josh Miller’s entry on this installment of the franchise in particular made what I thought was a cogent argument for why the film largely didn’t work.

So when I tried to watch it on the new DVD from the Alien Quadrilogy box set, I couldn’t get past the opening 10 minutes without being disappointed, without seeing what the detractors had described. For the next two decades, I held on to the idea that Resurrection was a bad film that similarly to Alien 3 should’ve never existed.

And then something funny happened: I started to think about it more and recall elements that stood out to me. The strange, surreal images, like the opening, dreamy birth of the new Ripley. The feel conjured by the score. The basketball scene.

There was also the fact that I’d learned over the past decade to be less trusting of the critical consensus, and to revisit titles that I had previously written off, such as the work of M. Night Shyamalan. So, I decided to revisit Resurrection via streaming.

And I came away with the conclusion that I was so, so wrong to write it off.

Because Alien Resurrection wasn’t just a good movie and the third best installment of the (now 7-film) franchise. It was also the most surreal, erotic and weird Alien movie hands down, a sequel with amazing visual flair that did not play it safe.

What really stood out to me is the way the movie emphasizes its formal elements over the storytelling, such as the images, the editing, and the music, and in the process creates the sense or, more accurately, the feeling that one is watching not so much an objective telling of narrative events, but rather a dream that borders on becoming a full-blown nightmare. A strange and scary yet beautiful and erotic dream.

And I do mean erotic.

The xenomorphs have always been sexy beasts, but Resurrection turns the implications of their design and lifecycle into full-blown text with the introduction of the alien-human hybrid that is Ripley-8 (Sigourney Weaver), a clone of the original protagonist.

From the way she carries herself to the way she talks, this Ripley seems like an animal in human form that wants to both f**k and kill anyone she comes across.

Seriously, just watch the first scene between Ripley and Call (Wynona Ryder), and notice how Ripley alternates between seductive and threatening. If the homoerotic undertone of the scene wasn’t evident, a later sequence has Ripley literally reach her hand inside a gaping hole in Call’s chest that is dripping with white ooze.*

*Sure, the hole is a bullet hole and the ooze is synthetic blood, which reveals Call to be a robot, but the metaphor is in hindsight blatantly obvious.

Shortly thereafter, Ripley-8 falls into a ‘viper pit’ full of pulsating xenomorph-like fleshy growths (but apparently no actual drones) only to get swallowed by a large alien orifice. What exactly is happening here? What is this place? Are these all extensions of the Queen? Or is the hive having some kind of orgy?

None of these questions are answered.

The next time we see her (see image at the top of the page), she is ostensibly being carried away by a drone to the Queen. But the way the scene is presented (slow-motion, moody lighting and dissolves) in conjunction with the blocking and Weaver’s performance makes it look like she’s having intercourse with the xenomorph.

Perhaps Ripley-8 is just dreaming it. Even so, the eroticism is palpable. Heck, the music even suggests a sense of progression from beginning to climax!

And then there is also the way Ripley ultimately dispatches the “Newborn” at the film’s end by distracting it with a protracted hugging session before using her acidic blood to send it out into space. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet even confirmed exactly what the scene was meant to suggest.

““I think it’s kind of sexy and weird,” says Jeunet. “They almost make love. It was very disturbing to American people. You know how they are puritan.””

• Source: Interview by Tom Fordy, The Independent, 2022

‘Sexy’ and ‘weird’, alongside ‘surreal,' describes the film in a nutshell.* This not at all a movie that could be made today, especially after Disney bought Fox.

*My thoughts overlap with those of KeN-K, who wrote “In Defense of Alien Resurrection, The Most Distressingly Horny Entry in the Franchise” on MEDIUM.

That’s not to say Resurrection is perfect. It definitely has script issues and a tone that is all over the place, likely due to the actors, director and writer not always being on the same page in regard to the movie they were making. But it is coherent enough narra-tively and thematically to work. And even those instances where plot elements are seemingly forgotten or not explored enough arguably contribute to its surrealism.

For all these reasons, I’d argue Resurrection is underrated and constitutes the third best Alien movie. And though I’m not sure it qualifies as what has been termed the ‘arthouse blockbuster,’ I’d say it definitely comes close.

Notes on Alien Romulus

• I didn't hate Alien Romulus. But my God, this movie just can't get out of its own way. For almost every moment that is impressively executed or narrative beat that feels well done, you have a distracting, immersion-breaking reference or callback to a previous movie. The one to the famous line from Aliens made me groan.

• Just a thought: there's a moment in Alien where it cuts from the fake Ash head prop to Ian Holm in makeup that is glaringly obvious. It distracts me every time I rewatch the film. But I wasn't nearly as distracted as when I saw Digital Replica Ian Holm in Romulus.

• Other than fan service, I was like: why Ian Holm? Don't know if he was AI but the FX were just cartoonish and distracting. Which is ironic, given that Alvarez keeps propping up Romulus as a 'Virtually NO CGI' movie. 

• Really, that ‘No CGI’ stuff is almost certainly a marketing tactic.

• I really wish Romulus had further explored the additions it makes to the Alien lore. Because the film does indeed reveal more about the Xenomorphs. We finally, finally get an idea of how the heck a tiny chestburster quickly grows into an adult via cocoon, which was a missed opportunity for Resurrection.

• Plus, it turns out the Facehuggers basically have infrared scanning and are attracted to body heat? Kinda like the Shriekers in Tremors 2. Which are cool ideas. But the movie doesn't really delve into them enough, imo.

• The much touted ‘third act’ of this film is really a ‘fourth act,’ which is an Alien movie convention that already got old by the time of Covenant. And really, it feels very extraneous here. As in, there is nothing in it that feels truly indispensable or necessary for the story being told and it does absolutely nothing to advance the character arcs. It’s overrated, like the film itself.

• That said, if the film does help revive the franchise and allow more experimental entries to be made in the future, I’d say it’s a good thing.

Revisio-News: The New Blair Witch Edition

Though this might be a little past Spooky Season, I feel the need to inform folks that The Blair Witch Project has received a new special edition video release from UK company Second Sight Films in November.

Among other things, the set includes over 90 minutes of previously unseen deleted scenes and a new 2.5-hour making-of documentary. Its key selling point though is that it has three different versions of the film: the original 35mm theatrical version plus new remastered versions of the theatrical cut and the initial ‘festival cut.’ 

Producer Mike Moniello reveals on Twitter here and here that until now the film has never been properly transferred to video from the original source materials. Rather, the previous video transfers were derived from a 35mm film negative, which had been initially transferred from a DigiBeta video master, meaning the movie subsequently got re-transferred to video and so picked up multiple unintended artefacts. 

Thus, the new version is supposedly the best and ‘most correct’ one. (Probably until the next edition a decade later, who knows?) Honestly, I don’t know if the new transfer would really be all that appealing. After all, the film’s grainy, low-res look has arguably been part of its appeal for a long time now, so if the new version looks more high-quality, then that might actually in a way make it look worse.

You can judge for yourself by checking out the trailer:

Personally, I’m far more intrigued by the special features, even though the release is apparently Region B only. Sadly, even the standard edition seems to be out of stock now, but it looks like it’ll be back at some point.

Kraven discourse

So, the day after I posted my ‘rebuttal’ of the claim that the Sony Spider-Man Universe (SSU) was dead, Adam Vary published an article in Variety that basically said the exact same thing and used the exact same reasoning.

Now, of course, there was a lot more in Vary’s article that I didn’t talk about in mine, but I was nonetheless happy to see that I was ahead of the curve when it came to parsing what actually was transpiring with the SSU versus what the ‘jumping to conclusions’ headlines were leading people to believe. 

The article, unfortunately, includes the odd and now widely cited claim that Sony’s Universe technically never even existed. I believe the author meant that the films comprising the universe were never part of or building towards a larger serialized narrative continuity. Even if this is the case, however, I’d argue this claim is incorrect.

“For one thing, technically speaking, there never really was a Sony Marvel Universe, or a Sony Spider-Man Universe, or any other official designation akin to the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the newly relaunched DC Universe. Sony has never approached its comic book adaptations with that level of intentional narrative cohesion…”

Sony, as I hope to show in the future, did have bigger plans and narrative ambitions. But those plans ended up changing behind the scenes. I have a lot more to say later but for now, I‘d point to J. Kim Murphy’s own Variety article from the beginning of the year, which directly talks about Sony minimizing the interconnectivity between its movies, possibly in response to the negative reception of their attempts at doing so with Morbius (and the decline of shared universe storytelling in general).

But unlike Disney and Warner Bros., the studio isn’t presenting its films as installments in a years-spanning narrative architecture…. So far, post-credits teasers bridging Sony’s spin-offs to Disney’s own continuity via interdimensional travel have been seen as half-hearted and, ultimately, unsuccessful. Those appendages aside, Sony has largely minimized the interconnected nature of its superhero films, even as the studio taps more heavily from the well of Spidey-based characters that it licenses.

In any case, the Variety article seems to have only added to the rampant controversy in the press and on social media surrounding Sony’s handling of its universe, which in turn seems to be feeding into the negativity surrounding Kraven The Hunter (dir. J.C. Chandor), which, in addition to having the lowest opening weekend box office of the SSU’s Venom-verse branch, also received its lowest RT score.

Critics and longtime Sony detractors were predisposed to hate it for merely existing and continuing Sony’s ‘misguided experiment’ or ‘fundamentally wrong approach’ to adapting Spider-Man characters, and that hate was on full display over the weekend.

Putting aside all the instances of what a colleague of mine referred to as the ‘social media brainrot’ that has affected our pop culture discourse, the fact that the movie is a critical and commercial flop makes me personally quite sad, as I’ve seen Kraven last week and I can tell you unironically that I think it’s actually kinda great.

There are a lot of reasons why I think this is the case, to the extent that I’m tempted to write a full-blown ‘in defense of’ article, akin to what I did for Glass, which some have even encouraged me to do on Notes.*

*If you are interested in reading an extensive defense of the movie, please let me know in the comments. You can also check out my 2.5-hour conversation about the picture with my friends Elvis Dutan and Roliver Queen on the Unsourced Wall Radio Podcast.

Briefly though, I will say that this picture knows what story it wants to tell, and unlike its predecessors, feels truly wholesome and unified, without evident compromises made for world-building, a PG-13 rating, a short running time, or budget cuts. 

It is a film with a solid script, a strong emotional core, and a sense of style that allows it to stand out visually from the typically bland superhero blockbuster. Yes, I could complain about occasionally obvious uses of ADR and the quality of some CG effects. Yet none of that prevents the film from being its best self and providing a complete cinematic experience. I hope that in a few years, this film will get positive re-evaluations, and Sony will bring its characters back for a new movie in some capacity.

FTNC Updates

As mentioned before, I have been going through a backlog and adding newsletters to the Film and Television Newsletter directory. Here are the most recent additions:

• // Alex Rollins Berg

• // Sophie

• // Kristen Tepper

What I’m Reading/Responding to

The excellent AVPGalaxy website has published a really cool article called “The (Almost) Resurrection of Rebecca “Newt” Jorden.” This is my favorite kind of post, one where the author cites a series of disparate sources to paint a full overall picture of something that is not widely known.

Resurrection, as it turns out, could’ve very well been focused around the return-via-cloning not of Ellen Ripley but rather another character that was taken from us: Newt, Ripley’s foster daughter, who was unceremoniously killed off in the opening scenes of Alien 3. Don’t get me wrong, I love the current form of Resurrection but this could’ve been a potentially more interesting direction for the franchise, had it happened.

Click on the image below to check it out:

Here is a quote:

But there was a time in the mid-1990s when Newt’s untimely demise was about to be undone. I would wager that most Alien fans are unaware of this footnote in the development of Alien Resurrection where we would have seen a cloned Newt, rather than Ripley, resurrected to combat our favorite acid-blooded extraterrestrial Xenomorph XX121.

I think it’d be a safe bet, not just because the film’s lack of popularity within the fandom leading to less exploration of it, but because until relatively recently there was just so little known about this direction that Alien Resurrection could have taken.

But What about you?

Do you agree/disagree about Alien Resurrection or Romulus? Any thoughts on the Blair Witch, Kraven or the controversies surrounding Sony and Spider-Man? Should I indeed go and make an extensive defense article of Kraven? Please,

Leave a comment

This is the inaugural issue of what I like to call “Scrapbook,” where I collect a bunch of random things I find interesting and attempt a looser, more traditional-style newsletter that hopefully will help me publish more and faster (I kinda wanted Variations to be that, but it ended up becoming more essayistic over time.)

So, here, you will find cut passages from my essays, collected short thoughts I have about film and pop culture, links and comments about what I’m reading, etc.

On Venom 3 and Livestream Podcasting

Last month, I saw Venom: The Last Dance (2024, dir. Kelly Marcel). My general impression is that, while it doesn’t live up to the first movie, it is nonetheless a considerable improvement over the mangled Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021, dir. Andy Serkis), which I thought was borderline unwatchable due to its bad editing. 

The first half-hour of the new sequel similarly suffers from evident budget cuts, with some rushed sequences (eg. the plane escape) and a plot development that blatantly serves as a cost-saving measure, but thankfully after that it settles into a nice groove and pulls off some really cool stuff, especially in the end. The climax here, with multiple symbiotes battling the giant hungry xenophage creatures, is really well-done and that’s clearly where the money went. 

The Eddy/Venom relationship is again the best part of the movie, which doesn’t skimp this time around on the emotion. I offer a LOT more in-depth thoughts about the movie in my conversation with my colleague Elvis Dutan on the Unsourced Wall Radio Podcast, which you can check out below: 

BTW, I think this is probably my best instance of actually speaking in a podcast. Earlier, I found myself talking too quickly while saying a lot of unnecessary words and sometimes not being able to put my thoughts into coherent sentences. These are the sorts of things you can probably cut out or mitigate by editing a podcast before uploading it but you can’t remove it during a livestream. 

So, prior to this session, I wanted to make a concerted effort to slow down, pick my words more carefully and provide some thought-out critiques. And it worked!

I don’t feel at all mortified or embarrassed to hear myself talk here. And now I am more confident about doing more podcasts in the future. Not sure I want to make them myself - I don’t have the technical skill to pull that off (at least right now) but I do feel that I want to do more guest spots and provide my thoughts on movies. 

So, give this one a listen. And really, listen to some of Elvis’ other recordings. 

He knows his stuff really well.

Short Thoughts on the film

• I really wish they didn’t have that opening prologue sequence with Knull, which is honestly a boring, completely unnecessary scene that only exists for the benefit of the audience. 

• As expected, folks online made a big deal out of the differences between Eddie’s opening scene in this film and the post-credit sequence of NWH. I myself think it doesn’t mean anything significant, other than the fact that this is a different movie made at a different time. I’m more interested in knowing how they made this scene. As in, was it reshot? Or did they use alternate takes from the post-credit sequence? Or a bit of both?

• What really fascinates me also is the difference in attitude. In the NWH version, Venom seems really disappointed at being sent back before actually having a chance to do anything. In the TLD version, his line of dialogue before he’s sent back is cut, but right after he returns home, he yells: “I am so done with this multiverse shit!” That is a funny line, but it’s one that also encapsulates how audience perception of the Multiverse saga changed over time.

• I'm increasingly convinced that editing issues are largely due to studios trying to save money on expensive VFX-heavy sequences in the aftermath of Covid and inflation. Plus, the film had to contend with a shut down due to the SAG strike.

• Can't help but imagine the titular ‘last dance’ scene between Venom and Mrs. Cheng being set to 'Under Pressure' akin to what we saw in Aftersun. 

• Was really confused by Juno Temple’s and Clark Backo’s characters. Never quite got their motives and what their exact arcs in the movie were supposed to be. 

• The second half was really stronger than the first.

• Stephen Graham’s new green symbiote was pretty cool but the character of Detective Mulligan felt a little wasted. Interestingly, they never resolve what actually happened to the original or true ‘Toxin,’ which supposedly just left Mulligan for unexplained reasons.

• I suspect they had to do this because Graham's schedule allowed him to film only one or two scenes (which is why he's basically in that one room the whole time). So, they knew they couldn't do justice to a big character like Toxin and gave him a new symbiote. 

• Honestly, I'm still super confused about symbiote reproduction in these movies cause they never really explained in Carnage how it works.

• I really hope Kraven is a hit so we can get more R-rated Venom-verse movies in the future and hopefully R-rated extended cuts of the Venom trilogy.

Rumors of the Sony-Verse’s Death are Greatly Exagerrated

Speaking of Venom and Sony, you’ve probably heard some variation of the claim that “Sony’s Spider-Man Universe is dead.” The truth, of course, is that this is a typical case of broken media telephony and misleading if not outright deceptive headline-making. See, two days ago, Umberto Gonzalez of The Wrap published a new article about behind-the-scenes changes to Sony’s approach to its Marvel universe. 

I admittedly haven’t read the original post, as it’s behind an expensive paywall, but the gist (based on all the synopses available) is that Sony has put on “pause” its film plans for the ancillary Spider-Man characters. Thus, if there were still plans to possibly make standalone movies or shows about characters like the superhero Silk or the antiheroine Black Cat, they’ve been shelved following the critical and commercial failures of Morbius and Madame Web.

That, combined with the title of the article, surely means that Sony’s failed completely at its Cinematic Universe and is closing it down, right? 

Except, as it turns out, the post also reports that Sony is working still on Spider-Man titles - the next live-action Spider-Man movie starring Tom Holland (who is also up for Disney’s Avengers Doomsday), the animated sequel Beyond the Spider-verse, and the live-action spinoff series of the Spider-verse movies called Spider-Noir. 

Now, I don’t know whether article actually gets into this, but the simple fact is that all three of these properties are constituent parts of what Sony currently terms as the “SSU” (Sony’s Spider-Man Universe). They have been that way since at least March 2019. The SSU essentially has three branches anchored by three main characters - the MCU Crossovers (Peter Parker), the Spider-Verse (Miles Morales), and the Venom-Verse (Eddie Brock).* It is really only the Venom-verse branch that is apparently being put on hold ‘for now,’ with no new installments planned beyond Kraven The Hunter.

*Please note that this is my own terminology and not Sony’s.

Thus, contrary to what the headline leads viewers to believe, the SSU in actuality isn’t ending at all. Rather, having taken stock of what’s worked and what didn’t, Sony is changing direction and seeking to build on the stuff that’s most likely to be well received and make the most money. 

The studio’s evaluation of what to do further with the Venom-verse branch will certainly depend on the performance of Kraven, which is just now opening in theaters. Now, I’m not going to deny that things don’t look good. The film is only coming to about 3000 screens and initial box office projections are pretty low. Nonetheless, even if Kraven bombs, it is not a guarantee that nothing will be done with the Venom-verse branch going forward. Odds are high that Venom, the branch’s most successful franchise, will be part of whatever future plan Sony has in mind for the SSU now. 

And the company has indeed established multiple characters in this branch that it could bring into the other branches at some point in the future (past the point we thought we’d ever see them again) for a big crossover event in the style of Avengers, much as they have done with Raimi-verse and Webb-verse Spider-Man characters.

My guess is that, given how closely the Tom Holland Spider-Man is tied to the MCU, Sony will now try to reorient the SSU as a whole around the Spider-verse branch, creating new spinoffs around characters introduced in its mainline titles. The Spider-Noir series could very well be a proof of concept in that regard. If it succeeds, more Spider-verse shows and movies will likely follow. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we indeed see a live-action Miles Morales sequel to the animated films. 

To anyone that’s a fan of the Venom-verse branch of the SSU, of course, the news is still disappointing. I personally don’t think any of the Venom-verse pictures thus far have gotten a fair shake from critics.

Many of them seemed offended by the very idea that Sony could make standalone Spider-Man-related characters without Spider-Man (even though a good deal of them have already anchored their own individual series in the comics) and sometimes trumped up controversies just to have something to complain about (like the myth that Vulture claimed he wanted to fight Spider-Man in the Morbius credit scenes.)*

*I’m a staunch defender of Morbius and think Madame Web, even with all of its blatant ADR, isn’t anywhere near as bad as some make it out to be. It’s certainly better than Carnage. 

On Alan Wake 2 

So, I recently finished playing Finnish game company Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake 2 (haven’t gotten through all the DLC yet though) on the PS5. Really, if you like survival horror, David Lynch, or True Detective, I recommend you give this a shot. 

This is a bold, beautiful, surreal meta horror game about the power of narrative and the connection between art and reality. It can be funny and terrifying in equal measure. And though I could complain about the occasional bug or the slightly penultimate chapter, I think this is a true masterpiece and a work that Remedy had been building to for years. I admit I haven’t played all of their works, but the general sense I’m getting is that this title is the culmination of years of trial-and-error, iteration-and-improvement, a grand summary of the studio’s creative ambition to blend together live action filmmaking with gameplay.  

I mean, my God, at one point, you get to play through an elaborate musical number:

What’s sad is that, despite all the accolades it’s received, Wake 2 hasn’t really sold that many copies. I mean, sales aren’t bad exactly, but the game hasn’t become a breakout success and after a year still hasn’t reached the level at which it’s recouped its costs and generated a profit. And this is sad, because we absolutely need more weird and experimental AAA titles like this.

Btw, my colleague wrote an amazing poetic review of the game last year that encapsulate her thoughts on the title. 

I couldn’t help but add a little bit of my own text to the end in a comment:

FTNC Updates

As mentioned before, I have been going through a backlog and adding newsletters to the Film and Television Newsletter directory. Here are the most recent additions:

What I’m Reading/Responding to

A really cool post by on a sequel, half of which was composed of footage from its predecessor. It could’ve been worse, cause the producer didn’t want to initially have new footage in it at all!

Dust On The VCR

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987) is an Egregious Misuse of Recycled Footage

Happy Holidays, reader! Today’s newsletter contains some major spoilers for both of the first two Silent Night, Deadly Night films. I don’t think that knowing what happens in a movie like this will affect your enjoyment of it, but nonetheless, you’ve been properly cautioned…

Read more

2 years ago · 8 likes · 8 comments · Jeremy Burgess

My comment:

Never heard of this before! SNDN 2 sounds like a TV clip show episode! Footage recycling is a fascinating thing - that's partially how they made a Bruce Lee movie after his death with Game of Death (1978). But to not even shoot anything new at all?! How the hell did that guy think this plan would work?

But What about you?

Any thoughts on the Sony-verse situation? What will the future of Spider-Man be? Will Venom et al. ever fight Knull? Please,

Leave a comment

The Digest

November 12

I’d been working for a while to figure out how to fix the FTNC page and make it work without the mention feature. At the same time, I was trying to write a proper essay.

As the Revised FTNC page was finished first, I decided to write this status update post in turn to announce it. I’m still working through a backlog of newsletters to add to the page. An update regarding the ones I’ve added so far is forthcoming.

November 19

The aforementioned proper essay post became this article on the 2021 blockbuster Venom: Let There Be Carnage. I had written about half of it almost a year ago, but for one reason or another never finished it. After seeing the third Venom movie, I felt inspired to try again, though to be honest, this turned out to be a much tougher nut to crack than I’d anticipated. The big problem was that there really aren’t any posts out there about the general effects of Covid on post-production budgets and costs.

So in order to get a better grasp of my subject, I started to delve deeply into the VFX industry, but I ended up over-researching it and spent a lot of time going into details that I ultimately didn’t need to make my case. What I will say though is that I’ve come away with the realization that VFX studios have been mistreated and exploited for almost 20 years now. Articles about impossible deadlines and super-rushed post-production schedules date back to the mid-2000s.

Some point to Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) as a turning point, in that it convinced studios to demand a huge number of FX to be completed in record time.

This has to change if the American film industry is to survive.

November 26

This was a post that came to me on the spot while I was browsing Amazon Prime Video. One thing I’ve learned over time is to not trust the runtimes listed by streaming services and check the cut itself for verification. So, once I recognized that Freevee was indeed showing the theatrical cuts, it made sense to discuss them. It also gave me an opportunity to bring in my original review of the first Halloween from 2007.

December 1

I definitely wanted to write something about the VHS release of Alien: Romulus ahead of the Tuesday, December 3 release date. The very idea of creating a low-resolution, 4:3 retro-VHS version of a big budget studio film in the age of 4k digital remasters and widescreen high-definition television screens is, in and of itself, fascinating. I appreciated the effort to support the format and its aesthetic, even if I didn’t like the movie or the price tag. (Imo, the VHS should’ve been no more than $30 per copy.)

My original plan was to: a) talk about how this edition came about thanks to director Fede Alvarez and the release of one of the film’s trailers via VHS tape; b) share my impressions of both Romulus and the superior Alien Resurrection. But when I discovered that the VHS edition was being exploited by scalpers, I knew I had to focus on this instead, and so removed all the supplemental material (pun intended).

As I state in the article, I expected more issues to crop up with the release. Well, lo and behold, it turned out that, contrary to the early announcements, this version of the movie is NOT 4:3 full-frame after all but is presented in cropped widescreen. That's good if you don't like pan and scan but not good if you're looking for the authentic VHS aesthetic. Also, there are reports that the sound quality is pretty bad.

BONUS FEATURES

The Kraven Opening Sequence

Sony has put the first 8 minutes of Kraven The Hunter online. I like it.

Putting aside Aaron Taylor Johnson's gibberish Russian, this is a really good opening sequence. Why?

• The narrative action is fluid, well edited, easy to follow.

• It immediately introduces the main character. There's no unnecessary prologue or teaser sequence that only serves to prematurely give away key info to audiences.

• It perfectly sets the tone, showing that this is a bloody, R-rated action movie with some black comedy elements. There’s confidence onscreen.

If the whole movie is like this, Kraven could end up being the best Sony Venom-Verse movie. Anybody else planning to see this one? I am of the opinion all the “MCU-adjacent“ movies has made thus far are actually underrated, even Madame Web.

But what do you think?

Leave a comment

Bullet Points

• Read a really nice critique by of the tendency to reduce cinema to single frames or shots in this essay here. A quote:

• I find it amazing how often Zack Snyder's maligned take on Superman gets refe-renced and/or ripped off by other more 'fan-friendly' Superman media. The just-aired Superman and Lois finale had a slow-mo dodge a la Justice League.

• Even if you don’t play it (I haven’t), read this fascinating essay on the videogame Slitterhead and its relation to the Walled City of Kowloon.

• Finally: a shout-out to for sharing and promoting my post on Romulus and my newsletter directory, the FTNC! Thank you so much!

Okay, that’s all for now, folks. Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving!

I’m planning to do a really big post in the second half of December and hope to keep a good pace of posts, though I’m probably shifting to a Thursday schedule for a bit.

Gonna try doing more simple stuff like bullet points, collected thoughts, etc., to boost my productivity. We’ll see how it goes.

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The Romulus VHS Edition

Imagine you want to get a copy of the Alien Romulus limited VHS edition. Maybe you read an interview with director Fede Alvarez, where he talks about his love for the format and how he convinced the studio to do something special for the film’s home video release. Maybe you’re just excited by the prospect of seeing a new movie via a media delivery technology that you continued to use long after the majority of media consumers declared it obsolete. In any case, you’re interested.

So, you go to the official Walmart Pre-Order page for it and discover that the limited VHS edition had very quickly sold out. You do some digging and you discover that there are copies, still brand new and unopened, somehow available for order on a different site - eBay. Only there it costs about twice as much and will arrive a few weeks to a few months after the official December 3 release date. 

And then you start wondering if maybe the reason it went out of stock that fast is because the people who sell on eBay bought up a huge number of those limited copies, if not all of them, just to resell them later and profit off people like you.

Now, I want to clarify that this is not exactly my story.

I personally didn’t like Alien Romulus all that much and while I was interested in possibly getting the VHS version as I am a collector, I was turned off by the already-exorbitant official price tag of $60 per copy. And I know I wasn’t the only one.*

* If you ask me, for a VHS release of a new movie, this price is simply ridiculous, especially considering that virtually every other physical edition is actually cheaper. Compare this to how a company like Witter Entertainment offers multiple variants and pricing tiers of their limited VHS editions for recent titles like Terrifier or The Void. A ‘standard’ release typically comes with some exclusive bonuses like director introductions and costs about $25. Higher price tiers will get you additional extras, such as special artwork or packaging.  

But I was legitimately shocked by what I saw on eBay: a whopping 56 listings for the Romulus VHS preorder. Across them, I found 278 copies* of the VHS edition listed as either available for purchase or already sold at $100-140 per copy.

*The actual number should be higher. Multiple sellers did not provide exact numbers, but listed “more than 10” copies as available. Moreover, in the month since they first began to show up, some listings might have been taken down as the sellers sold off their stock.

Many of these vendors had about 1-3 copies in stock. However, several had up to 10 or over. One seller had a record of 22 copies and had sold 19 of them at $110, which suggests he made (or, more accurately, stands to make) about $1000 in profit. 

There’s absolutely no way that these VHS copies did not come from the Walmart online pre-order page. They are all brand new, factory-sealed.

And the delivery date is typically a few weeks after the official December 3 release date, meaning the sellers are first going to need to wait for Walmart to actually deliver their pre-order copies before they ship them out to the new buyers.

Heck, one listing even provides an image of a Walmart delivery tracking page to confirm that the seller will be getting a copy soon.

What percent of the preorder stock did the scalpers get?

At the moment, we don’t know for certain.

Neither Disney, nor Walmart have disclosed how many copies the Romulus VHS was actually limited to, so it is not known how many copies were available for pre-order, nor how many will be made available for physical retail on December 3.* But there are multiple signs that most of the preorders were bought up by the scalpers.

*In fact, Disney’s press releases have not made it clear even if the Romulus VHS would be available in physical retail, but a Walmart customer representative confirmed to me that yes, there will be copies coming to physical Walmart stores.

It’s important to note that, even by the standard of physical media limited editions, retro-VHS versions nowadays are issued in super-small quantities. Though the numbers can vary, depending on the title and distributor, it’s very common for titles to not receive more than a few hundred copies per edition. VHS, after all, is today a super-niche market, one unlikely to grow unless new VCRs are produced.*

Vice Press, for instance, limited the standard VHS editions of Evil Dead 2 (1987, dir. Sam Raimi) and Suspiria (1977, dir. Dario Argento) to 500 copies. Vinegar Syndrome appears to cap its ‘Degausser Video’ label’s limited VHS releases at 300.*

Witter Entertainment nowadays seems to offer standard VHS editions for as long ‘as supplies last’ and restocks them depending on demand. But it used to be common for it to print only 150 copies of a given title and/or edition.*

*All 150 copies of the Psycho Goreman (2020, dir. Steve Kostanski) limited run VHS sold out very quickly in 2021, leading to the title being restocked.

It is safe to assume that Disney, in the course of their marketing research, looked at other companies’ numbers to help determine the supply and demand for retro-VHS editions before deciding to release their first real VHS in years.

Based on this, the fact that the pre-order copies were gone in 3 days and that Disney would also be saving copies for physical retail, I’d estimate the Romulus VHS preorder stock did not exceed 500 copies. This is supported by November 28 reports from multiple fans that ordered early that their pre-orders were cancelled, indicating that Walmart actually oversold the Romulus VHS edition.

So, it’s almost certain that the 278 copies currently offered on Ebay constitute the majority of the pre-orders Walmart had available.

How could this have happened? 

Well, for one thing, Disney and Walmart offered no advance notices to prospective customers about the fact that the limited edition would actually become available for pre-order. Rather, the pre-order option just suddenly popped up on Walmart’s website a mere 10 days after being announced for release in December.*

*I suspect the VHS version was a last-minute addition to the other December 3 physical releases - DVD, BluRay and 4K UHD - announced back at the end of September. 

Thus, the target audience consisting of VHS collectors and Alien franchise fans had no time to actually prepare for the release, essentially guaranteeing that a good number of them would miss the pre-order window.

On top of that, Walmart clearly didn’t take any measures to ensure that a single customer couldn’t purchase and hoard multiple units.* Of course, few VHS fans would have the budget or need to purchase up to 10 copies of the release or more.

But for scalpers, this created the perfect opportunity to snatch up as many early copies as they could afford (about 5 copies on average) and then profit from the resulting lack of availability at the original store.  

*For comparison, both Vinegar Syndrome and Witte Entertainment usually limit one unit of a limited edition VHS per customer, with the latter specifying that they delete duplicate orders.

Unsurprisingly, some collectors and fans feel unhappy or screwed over.

Still, some have apparently chosen to indeed purchase the VHS version from eBay. I personally think folks that really want this edition should wait until the Walmart stores actually get their copies in or until bootlegs inevitably start spreading.*

*That, after all, was one of the appeals of VHS - bootleg circulation, easy reproduction and ‘aesthetics of access,’ as Lucas Hilderbrand would describe it.

Buying them at outrageous prices from scalpers is only going to embolden them to pull more shit like this in the future.

Expect More Issues

As a whole, this situation does not bode well for the future of Disney’s foray into VHS releases. The company has simply failed to clearly communicate with its intended audience and so paved the way for them to be exploited by unethical opportunists. 

Why not provide at the outset a clear and detailed press release or page that specifies how many copies of the limited edition are available, as well as when and where it will be sold? I wonder if perhaps the lack of disclosure stems from a desire to test the waters for interest. That is, based on the preorder demand, Disney could adjust the (unreported) limited number of available copies appropriately over time.

One thing is clear though: at the very least, Disney and Walmart need to adopt safeguards to prevent scalpers from being able to exploit fans in the future.

The physical retail rollout will hopefully help mitigate the situation. 

But honestly, given the way this pre-order fiasco has unfolded, I expect even more issues to crop up with the Romulus VHS edition once we get to the release date.

But what do you think?

Were most of the VHS pre-order copies purchased by the fans? Was the edition already overpriced? Will Romulus help revive the VHS market for movies in general? Can VHS really come back if the intended audience continues to be treated like this? Please,

Leave a comment

If you’re interested in the Alien film series, please consider reading the following:

Also, check out some thoughts on the Alien 3 Workprint Cut and the similarities of its climax to that of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Among other things, I want to share my impressions of both Halloween (H1, 2007) and Halloween 2 (H2, 2009), my original review of H1, and discuss the differences between the various versions, including the first one’s leaked workprint.

Table of Contents

1. Thoughts on H1 and H2

2. The theatrical cuts on Freevee

3. BONUS FEATURES

Thoughts on H1 and H2

I remember being really excited when news broke that Rob Zombie would be making a remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween.1

Things, however, would not go all that well for him. 

Working under the Weinstein brothers made him miserable, the film’s script got leaked or spoiled online and then, of course, there were all the fans who rejected the new film due to its apparent irreverence for the original.

While interning at an indie film company at the time, I witnessed my supervisor come into the office, apparently having either seen a test screening of the picture or received word from somebody that had, and express outrage at the fact that Michael Myers was a man, rather than ‘The Shape’ of evil, as in the 1978 picture.

That, of course, actually made me all the more excited to see Zombie’s take. Because Myers being an evil faceless boogeyman had been done to death at that point.

Once I’d actually caught it in theaters, my feelings were decidedly mixed. It seemed pretty obvious that H1 was at war with itself, a compromise between Zombie’s own personal vision and that of John Carpenter.

The DVD’s Director’s Cut improved things somewhat by extending the first half and putting back some of the kid Michael scenes from the sanitarium but it could not completely rewrite the lesser, more derivative second half.*  

*The most visible difference is arguably in the asylum escape sequence. In fact, I recall how somebody else working at my internship company got a phone call and then shared with us that after the test screening, the studio was def-ly changing the asylum escape along with the ending. In the theatrical cut, Michael busts out by killing multiple armed guards during a transfer to another institution. In the director’s cut, Michael is prompted to escape by a couple of abusive orderlies that rape another inmate.

Zombie seemed done with the franchise, but then, despite the experience he had the first time, wound up coming back to make H2 (apparently in part to ensure he would never have to work with the Weinsteins again). He clearly had more creative control on the second go-around and though I didn’t think H2 was great, it was a clear improvement on its predecessor and felt much truer to Zombie as a filmmaker.

I particularly appreciated the director’s newfound interest in simply luxuriating in surreal and weird-as-hell dream imagery, like the one displayed in the Halloween dinner vision Michael experiences about 40 minutes into the movie, which foreshadows the more aesthetically ambitious approach Zombie would take with the underrated Lords of Salem (2012). 

Apparently though, Zombie once again had a terrible experience behind the scenes and never really felt he had enough time to finish the film, especially as the release date of H2 got moved up two months from October to August (unless I misunderstood his comments), cutting down his post-production schedule. 

“ I will not make another movie under these circumstances. When you lock a movie's release date and then move it two months, it's just not good. It's good for everything but the cast, crew, and people who are creatively trying to make a film. Post is the part that can make or break a film. With Devil's Rejects, we didn't have reshoots [it had a low budget], but we had the time to craft it. Luckily, I always use the same editor, and he immediately gravitates toward the takes that I like. The problem is that nobody makes movies anymore - they make schedules and they make budgets.”

• Source: Collider interview with Rob Zombie by David Gralnik, Aug 29 2005

That might explain why the theatrical cut wound up with a baffling and unsatisfying ending. Regretting that he had second-guessed himself, Zombie would later restore the film’s original tragic denouement for the director’s cut on DVD. In effect, he repurposed the original ending of H1, where Michael regained some measure of his humanity and let Laurie go, only to get gunned down by the police anyway.

Zombie was always more interested in Michael the Man than Michael the Shape, and that point comes across clearly here when the finale, following an entire film of Michael speaking via a child avatar version of himself, has Hobo Michael actually take his mask off and tell Loomis to die before stabbing him in a rage.

It’s only after he has been demystified and regained his humanity that the police are able to actually kill him. In this version, though, there is no salvation for Laurie, who gives into her family’s demons and, seemingly driven by the same force as Michael was, moves in to finish Loomis off before getting promptly shot herself.  

It is a bold and audacious conclusion that illustrates how, though very similar on the surface, the director’s cut is a really different picture and clearly the superior iteration. Watching it, one gets the sense it was made by someone who no longer gave a shit about satisfying audience expectations or having a likable main character.

Without it, I don’t think there would be quite as many voices today that hail H2 as a misunderstood masterpiece.* 

*I personally don’t quite agree with that sentiment, as both cuts in my mind are a little too long and don’t explore some of their narrative details to their full potential. I definitely think the hospital nightmare sequence should’ve been completely cut from the film.

The theatrical cuts on Freevee 

Though they may not be the best iterations of Zombie’s vision, the theatrical versions are still worth seeing. Each provides insight into the compromises the director had to make for theatrical distribution and so enriches the experience of the director’s cuts.* Moreover, they both feature exclusive footage that can’t be found in the others.

*Revisiting the theatrical H2, for instance, made me appreciate Scout Taylor-Compton’s performance all the more, as in the theatrical cut she plays a considerably different, more well-put together incarnation of Laurie that has largely gotten over her trauma by the film’s beginning. The director’s cut, meanwhile, takes the opposite route and makes Laurie’s trauma ever-present, depicting her as permanently damaged by her ordeal.

The problem is that, since their initial releases back in 2007 and 2009, the theatrical cuts have been largely unavailable for mass circulation. DVD releases tended to prioritize the director’s cuts and though the theatrical editions did get some distribution (such as a Canadian DVD release by Alliance that featured both H1 and H2 on one disc), they were typically barebones in terms of special features.*

*I wonder if the exclusion of the theatrical cuts from the US market was a deliberate attempt on Zombie’s part to gradually phase them out of distribution/existence/memory and so leave only his preferred versions available. That these releases were not even afforded special features when available seems to support this possibility, though I have no idea how much control Zombie would actually have over the releases.

On Blu-Ray, the theatrical editions have been essentially excluded until the June 2023 “Ultimate Edition” release by the Australian boutique distributor ViaVision, which collected both cuts of H1 and H2 into a single release, combining them with pretty much all previously released bonus materials including a making-of doc for H1.2

While I have no idea when exactly Zombie’s H1 and H2 first arrived on streaming and VOD platforms, I was pleasantly surprised to discover earlier this month that Prime Video is indeed showing the theatrical cuts of them both via Freevee. This means you don’t even need to have an Amazon/Prime Video account to watch them.

The HD transfers are pretty good, so I suspect these were ported over by Lionsgate from the ViaVision release. I’d suggest checking out these ones sooner rather than later as there’s no telling when the Amazon license will expire. 

You can find H1 here and H2 here. 

You can find extended breakdowns of the differences between versions here and here.

BONUS FEATURES

1. H1 Workprint Cut

2. My Original 2007 review of H1

3. The Unreleased H2 documentary

H1 Workprint Cut

A piece of old news: some time before Zombie’s H1 came out in theaters, its Workprint Cut leaked onto the web. Now, if you google search it, you can in fact find it uploaded to a very good archival site and see it there. 

As is typical of workprints, this early cut is not finished: it has temp music and sound effects, but it is, imo, more watchable than workprints generally are. Running a full 2 hours with credits, this cut focuses much more on Michael’s perspective and offers a good idea of what Zombie’s vision for the film was before it went through the test screening process.

There’s lots of deleted and alternate footage here that has shown up elsewhere. Zombie, for instance, would restore part of the original asylum escape sequence to the director’s cut, while the alternate ending was released as a deleted scene on the DVD.

But there are also instances that aren’t present in any other release, such as a scene between the incarcerated kid Michael and Loomis, where Michael tells his therapist that he has nothing left to say, marking the exact moment he decides to stop talking. 

Another notable distinction is, again, during the asylum escape. Watching the work-print makes clear that the director’s cut found a middle-ground between the work-print escape sequence and the reshoots done for the theatrical release. 

In this version, Michael is prompted to escape by the abusive orderlies. However, the janitor played by Danny Trejo does not reappear and so does not die at Michael’s hands. Zombie admitted in interviews that he only later recognized that he had to resolve that character and the reshoots allowed him to film a new death scene.

Thus, the director’s cut would combine the original escape sequence footage with the new footage of the Janitor’s death.

Finally, you can see the original ending in its intended context. I haven’t found the famous instance where Michael actually speaks after unmasking himself in this version though, so I think - if indeed filmed - it must’ve been removed very early.

I do think any fan of Zombie or the Halloween movies should check it out.

My Original Review of H1 

Initially published on Livejournal in September 2007

Poor Rob Zombie.

The guy has taken so much flak lately for remaking a beloved horror classic. And he doesn't deserve it. The original film isn't going anywhere, and Michael Myers continues to exist in one form or another, be it the subtle, evil incarnate Shape of the original or the new, human, motivated, unstoppable juaggernaut of the remake.

It's weird, however, just how difficult people are to please when it comes to the issue of The Shape/Michael.

As much as nobody wants merely a "remake" of the original film a la Gus Van Sant's "Psycho", people tend to be just as reticent towards any fiddling with the formula of "evil embodiment Michael vs. Dr. Loomis and survivor girls".

Just the mere concept of Zombie's remake - to show a different Michael Myers, before he turned into an inhuman, faceless entity - seems to ignite more rage in film fans and critics than the idea of The Shape getting Karate-chopped by Busta Rhymes or Laurie Strode kissing Michael before plummeting to her death.

Or the story with the thorn cultists.

Does the film deserve the venom it gets from half or more of the audience for bringing a "human" Michael? I remember how my own internship supervisor voiced displeasure at how the Zombie Michael sucks, because he's not pure evil anymore.

Well, the fact is, this IS Zombie's Michael.

Carpenter's initial iteration isn't desecrated by Zombie's reality-grounded interpretation of the character. This new version purportedly TALKED in the mask - a single line of dialogue subsequently edited out. Personally, as it would've been cool to hear the Shape after all those years of mute remorseless murder.

But oh well... Whatever complaints purists might have, I think the film is okay.

I liked Michael's backstory, as it's something which was never really explored in the original film - Rob Zombie does have a thing for all that crazy redneck stuff. All the cameos in the film are cool, and Michael's attacks are perhaps the most brutal ones to date. Zombie definitely knows how to make violence disturbing, and although his approach never has the subtlety of Carpenter, his Shape is still quite vicious.

I feel "Halloween" also showcases Zombie's evolution as a filmmaker. Although that is not too apparent, the director has learned that restraint can have its advantages. The camera no longer moves about the screen in every frame, which was the case in his previous endeaours. This is especially noticeable in the Sanitarium scenes, where Zombie employs still shots and more extensive takes, perhaps deliberately homaging Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange."

It's only when Michael does what he does that the chaos of his psyche moves into the outside world, and the handcam shots take prevalence once more.

Overall, it's a good film. Not great, but good.

7 out of 10.

The Unreleased Halloween 2 Documentary 

If you’ve ever bought a Rob Zombie movie on DVD, you might occasionally notice the presence of a feature-length making-of documentary, such as 30 Days in Hell for The Devil’s Rejects or In Hell Everybody Loves Popcorn for 31. 

Surprisingly, however, there was never such a doc for H2, despite its predecessor getting the excellent 4-hour documentary Michael Lives when the picture was reissued in a special edition about a year or two after the initial one-disc release.

And yet, I recalled Zombie mentioning over the years that he had, in fact, made a documentary about the making of H2, which was a whopping 8 hours long! 

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any places Zombie actually talked about this online but I did manage to locate this 10-minute video by Nick of The Lost River Drive-In, who explains why apparently the 8-hour doc will never be released. I hope one day it makes its way out of the vault and reveals the hell the Weinsteins put him through.

But what do you think?

Do you have a favorite cut of H1 or H2? Have you ever seen the theatrical versions? Did you like them? Why or why not? What’s your take on Rob Zombie in general?

Can you think of any other movies, where the theatrical cut has been kept from circulation?

What’s you favorite Halloween film?

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