Bleeding Fool |
- Owen Wilson’s Superhero Film Shifts to a Paramount+ Release
- As Masculine & Patriotic Top Gun: Maverick Overperforms, Media Whines
- Is Warner Bros. Scrapping their Black Superman Projects?
- Depp-Heard Verdict Reveals ‘Gamergate’ Smear was just ‘Cancel Culture’ in 2014
- Superman Films Ranked: #4 ‘Man of Steel’ (2013)
- Family-Friendly Angel Studios Announces $100M in Original Content
| Owen Wilson’s Superhero Film Shifts to a Paramount+ Release Posted: 06 Jun 2022 10:55 AM PDT
This August, Owen Wilson’s new comedy Secret Headquarters will be available exclusively on Paramount+. Wilson will head an incredible cast in a narrative of heroes, villains, and a quest to rescue the world, which will be produced by Jerry Bruckheimer Films in collaboration with Paramount. Wilson should feel perfectly at home in the superhero genre, having previously been in Marvel’s Loki, and the picture looks like a great ride based on the plot.
The summary for Secret Headquarters reads as follows: "While hanging out after school, Charlie and his friends discover the headquarters of the world's most powerful superhero hidden beneath his home. When villains attack, they must team up to defend the headquarters and save the world.”
The film also features Walker Scobell, Jesse Williams, Keith L. Williams, Momona Tamada, Abby James Witherspoon, and Michael Peña. Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman from a screen play they co-wrote with Thor: Ragnarok scribe Christopher Yost and Orange is the New Black's Josh Koenigsberg.
Paramount Streaming's chief programming officer Tanya Giles said of the release. She said: "Secret Headquarters is the perfect action-packed summer film for the whole family, making it a perfect fit for Paramount+ and our mountain of entertainment geared toward the whole household." The post Owen Wilson’s Superhero Film Shifts to a Paramount+ Release appeared first on Bleeding Fool. |
| As Masculine & Patriotic Top Gun: Maverick Overperforms, Media Whines Posted: 06 Jun 2022 08:25 AM PDT
Paramount’s smash hit legacy sequel Top Gun: Maverick, continues to obliterate the competition at the box office. Following an incredible launch in theaters last weekend, when the film grossed a whopping $124 million, Maverick is back at No. 1 for a second weekend, earning another $86 million in North American theaters. Given all of the blockbusters the A-lister has starred in, the picture has become Tom Cruise’s highest-grossing domestic release ever.
The competition was no match for Cruise, as the next nearest performer, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness stayed in second place, earning $9.2 million in the United States and Canada. There weren't any major studio wide openers this weekend to slow down Top Gun 2. NEON is going wide with their Cannes premiere Crimes of the Future from David Cronenberg; that movie garnering 80% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
Some leftist publications have started smearing the film as too patriotic and anti-woke. Vanity Fair went hard in the paint against conservative news site Breitbart over John Nolte’s effusive praise of the film.
What’s not to like? Nolte seemed to relish in their displeasure with his take on the blockbuster film:
Themes drive good movies. "Inclusion" and "diversity" are not themes. Instead, they're buzzwords spouted by smug, over-educated, shallow bullies whose self-esteem is based on everything but character and integrity.
It's clear summer moviegoing is in full effect, and with 46% K-12 schools out and another 88% colleges on break according to Comscore. While it's clear Top Gun: Maverick has pulled in those older audiences who were reluctant during the pandemic, according to Deadline, Paramount is jazzed by the sequel's younger draw given that the 18-24 quad was the pic's largest audience segment over the weekend at 21%.
God bless the free market indeed. The post As Masculine & Patriotic Top Gun: Maverick Overperforms, Media Whines appeared first on Bleeding Fool. |
| Is Warner Bros. Scrapping their Black Superman Projects? Posted: 06 Jun 2022 06:15 AM PDT
According to the Superman Homepage (and our previous report), it looks like Warner Bros may be rethinking the notion of greenlighting a woke film adaptation of Superman written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and bring back Henry Cavill in the role from 2013, if this does turn out to be more than simply a rumor, as they put it:
Presumably, the WB management’s been paying attention to how things are going for Disney, now that they’ve mired themselves in a whole controversy over pandering to LGBT ideology and campaigning for the approval of grooming children through indoctrination, with the most absurd part being that some of the products they’re developing for their campaign are manufactured in China, which opposes the same agenda they’re favoring. But, if it turns out they’re reconsidering their previously reported directions, surely it’d be a good idea they see to it DC Comics proper stops with their own agenda pandering too? Point: if they allow even a seemingly lesser outfit they own continue to take paths that’re embarrassing from a PR viewpoint, that too can hurt their business. So they may want to consider seeing to it that DC stop with their own SJW directions, and remove Marie Javins from the EIC role after how she perpetuated the damage to their brands. They’d also do well not to work with Coates again, considering what a bad political lot he really is. And if WB does move forward with plans for a new Cavill-starring Superman vehicle, that’s certainly surprising, considering it’s been nearly a decade since the 2013 movie, and will probably be more than that by the time a sequel’s finally released. And then, would they continue the exceedingly dark path they took with Zack Snyder’s movie? I’m afraid that angle’s gone much too far already, so even if Cavill’s brought back after all these years, it still wouldn’t be reason for enthusiasm, if they can’t make audience feel inspired, and won’t offer a sense of humor to counter the darker angle of their previous movie. That’s something everybody would do well to consider.
Originally published here.
The post Is Warner Bros. Scrapping their Black Superman Projects? appeared first on Bleeding Fool. |
| Depp-Heard Verdict Reveals ‘Gamergate’ Smear was just ‘Cancel Culture’ in 2014 Posted: 06 Jun 2022 04:45 AM PDT
The outcome of the widely famous Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard defamation trial, in which a Virginia judge ruled that Depp was the more aggrieved party, sent leftist journalists into a spiral on Twitter, with some searching for solutions in the distant past of millennial feminism critique.
Depp filed defamation accusations against Heard following a 2018 Washington Post op-ed in which the actress accused her estranged husband of many wrongdoings, including domestic abuse, without naming him. The ACLU ghostwrote the op-ed, which was published at the height of the #MeToo movement, as shown in the trial.
Depp was found not guilty and was granted compensatory damages of $10 million and punitive penalties of $5 million. It also found in favor of Heard on one of her two counter-defamation claims, giving her compensatory damages of $2 million.
Following the ruling, lefty journalists on social media, who predominantly supported Heard, promptly cast blame on a slew of traditional boogeymen: misogyny, misinformation, the far-right, and “gamergate.”
Gamergate was a 2014 consumer movement that was fed up with low professional standards and extreme ideological bias from technology and video game reporters, who had become preoccupied with feminist narratives in the years leading up to the movement, which liberal journalists and SJWs have since linked to everything from misogyny, racism, and even Donald Trump’s election.
Gamergate was the first major backlash against what is now known as wokeness, as well as media-driven cancel culture. This is likely why the nearly ten-year-old consumer movement continues to terrify liberal journalists.
Both Depp and Heard hurled wild and shocking allegations against one another on the witness stand, but one of the most memorable accusations was perhaps Depp's claim that Heard had once defecated in his bed after an argument. Trial viewers quickly took to social media to dub the actress "Amber Turd," and trended the hashtag #MePoo following Heard's stunning loss in the defamation trial.
Johnny Depp Warns "No One is Safe" from Cancel Culture
The #MePoo hashtag is a play on the #MeToo movement, for which many say Heard has hindered, given that a jury found on Wednesday that the actress had defamed Depp, awarding the Pirates of the Caribbean star $10 million in compensatory damages, and $5 million in punitive damages.
the fine folks over at Clownfish TV surmise this is Amber Heard’s publicity team pushing this campaign. Here’s what they had to say:
Meanwhile the petition calling for Amber Heard to be removed from Aquaman 2 recently passed 4.5 million signatures The post Depp-Heard Verdict Reveals 'Gamergate’ Smear was just ‘Cancel Culture’ in 2014 appeared first on Bleeding Fool. |
| Superman Films Ranked: #4 ‘Man of Steel’ (2013) Posted: 05 Jun 2022 03:25 PM PDT
#4 in my ranking of the theatrically released Superman films. #3 in my ranking of the DCEU franchise.
There's something big and ambitious and earnest about Zack Snyder's take on Superman that I find really admirable. Not everything in this movie works, but the mythic scope and embrace of the idea of gods coming to fight it out on Earth is handled with such weight and energy that I get swept up in the spectacle every time.
Snyder took the well-worn story of Superman's origins and recast it rather dramatically in a couple of different directions. The first is aesthetics. Krypton looks browner and weirder than we'd seen it in film before. There are giant monsters and an embrace of weird science fiction visuals in how Krypton's technology works. There's also an embrace of a handheld camera that evokes independent filmmaking, especially in smaller moments. I remember when the first trailer dropped and people were saying that it almost looked like a Terrence Malick movie. Sort of (there's too much of an embrace of lens flares), but it certainly provides an interesting contrast with the epic visuals, giving it an inherently grounded feel while dealing with a rather zany story of supermen and terraforming machines.
The second different direction largely focuses on John Kent, Superman's adoptive father from Kansas. The movie decides that it wants to explain Clark Kent's hiding of his power out of fear and a question of trust. The closest this movie comes to a strong theme is this idea of building trust in the face of something new. It pops up from time to time and gets mildly explored, but the film is much more of a character driven exercise in its first half and a plot driven one in its second. The first half is about Clark Kent's lifelong quest to find a way to belong while having incredible powers no one else has and protecting himself from what he imagines to be a paranoid and violent reaction to his presence should it become widely known. Still, he can't help but try and make the world better around him, so he saves kids from a bus crash despite his father's insistence that it might have been better to let them die rather than risk revealing himself, and he rescues some oil rig workers despite coming away with nothing and needing to move on to another life again.
The irony is, of course, that he's so strong that mankind could probably never hurt him, so the fear is less about his personal safety and more about the unpredictable results of his reveal. What happens after he finally figures out who he is and where he's from when he finds a long lost Kryptonian ship? It's his announcement to the universe that he is there, and Zod shows up. Zod, Krypton's general who tried to lead a coup in the planet's final decadent and collapsing moments and was punished in the Phantom Zone, comes back with the objective of rebuilding Krypton. Superman's actions on Earth bring Zod there. Driven to insanity, he wants to terraform Earth into a new Krypton, no matter the living denizens, and exact his revenge on Superman's father at the same time (with some extra stuff about a genetic codex imbued in Superman's genetics put there by his father). This plot doesn't really develop until the second half of the film, which I have no problem with.
The problem is really with Zod himself. I like the idea of Zod more than the execution. Michael Shannon is stilted as the dedicated antagonist, and his dialogue is often the most unnatural sounding of any of the principals. This is probably be design, giving him a different cadence from the rest of the characters to imply a different culture, but it comes off as stilted rather than elegantly natural. Part of that is the dialogue as written, and part of that is Shannon himself who haltingly moves through every line. Still, I love his plan and the epic fight that breaks out.
The terraforming of Earth as a threat provides room for some incredible destruction. I know some people have problems with the scale of destruction throughout the movie, but I love it. This is a fight between gods. On the one side are a group of malevolent warriors who think of nothing of the lives they endanger. On the other is a greenhorn hero who is suddenly faced with a fight he can't handle on his own.
The fight that erupts in Smallville is a favorite. It starts with Superman attacking Zod directly after they threaten his mother in order to find the craft that Superman came to Earth in. It turns into a two on one beat down as Superman tries to fight off two Kryptonians. The US military gets involved and starts firing at both sides, and Superman ends up gaining the first trust from the official governing bodies on the planet through his actions. It's the fight over the terraforming machines that really stands out, though. The leveling of Metropolis has a scale and terrifying feel to it that I love. The gravity field that pushes down on the buildings, leveling them to dust, while Zod crashes the Kryptonian ship into buildings, toppling them over, is quite a sight. The fist fight that breaks out between Zod and Superman in the sky is less impressive, and the final moment where Zod is going to kill a random little family is poorly set up, though the idea of Superman having to take the solution to an extreme to ensure Earth's safety is an interesting one in general.
I love the ambition of the film. It's desire to reach beyond mere spectacle and enter into something of mythic scale is quite well handled. I also like Superman's challenge in finding how to make himself known to the world, and it ultimately comes out of necessity and to make up for his own contribution to the violence being visited upon Earth. It's rough, though. Zod is poorly written and delivered. I think the stuff from Clark Kent's childhood in Smallville might have worked better as a sustained sequence instead of snippets going back and forth. Overall, the movie feels like the product from a promising first draft screenplay that needed another couple of passes, but I still really like what I got.
Rating: 3/4
Originally published here. The post Superman Films Ranked: #4 'Man of Steel' (2013) appeared first on Bleeding Fool. |
| Family-Friendly Angel Studios Announces $100M in Original Content Posted: 05 Jun 2022 01:15 PM PDT
Netflix may be tightening its belt in the wake of a slide in their stock value and subscriber count, but Angel Studios is investing heavily on its content pipeline. The streaming platform behind the most successful crowdfunded shows of all time, has raised $47 million to bring control of the entertainment industry back to consumers and creators. The round caps off a major comeback year for cofounders Neal and Jeffrey Harmon, who led Angel Studios to over $100 million in annual revenue just one year after Disney and Warner Bros. tried to shut the studio down in court.
The financing was led by Gigafund, a venture capital firm backing the world’s most ambitious and transformative entrepreneurs, and Bain-backed Uncorrelated Ventures, which invests in infrastructure software. Gigafund is known for being one of the largest investors in SpaceX, as well as other game-changing companies in industries ranging from education and energy to healthcare and housing. Original seed investors Alta Ventures and Kickstart Fund also participated. In addition to the venture backing, five million of the investment round was crowdsourced directly from Angel Studios fans.
“Angel Studios helps creators build a direct relationship with their fans and produce meaningful and compelling content for hundreds of millions of people who have been underserved by the entertainment industry,” said Stephen Oskoui, Managing Partner of Gigafund. “We believe that Angel is on track to rewrite the rules of the media business and have a significant impact on culture.”
Today’s movie business is a $280-billion industry almost totally controlled by five major Hollywood studios. Studio executives decide what content to produce in boardrooms behind closed doors, with little to no input from consumers. As a result, almost 80% of the films that Hollywood thinks audiences want to see fail to break even every year, while real audiences rarely get the chance to enjoy the stories that matter most to them. Studios rely on a few major hits to maintain the status quo.
Angel Studios is a community-driven movie studio that empowers audiences to decide what content gets produced and distributed, while creating communities around each project. Creators pitch projects on the Angel platform, and “Angel investors” fund the ones they’re most excited to see (via the Angel Funding Portal). Post-production, content is delivered directly to viewers and goes viral as fans share it with others.
“On Angel’s community and streaming platform, artists answer to audiences, not to a Hollywood studio,” said Angel Cofounder and CEO Neal Harmon, “As our creators invert Hollywood’s abysmal 80 percent failure rate, audiences will win.”
The Angel model has already produced three of the most successful crowdfunded shows of all time, including:
With this latest funding round, Angel plans to continue improving its streaming platform, market to new audiences, and develop its content pipeline for 2022 and beyond.
“This raise gives us more than funding; it gives us key strategic partners,” said Harmon. “Gigafund and Uncorrelated will help us realize our long-term mission of remaking the entertainment industry and freeing both creators and their fans to enjoy the content that they find most important.” The post Family-Friendly Angel Studios Announces $100M in Original Content appeared first on Bleeding Fool. |
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