The Four Color Media Monitor

In an interview with the Atlantic, movie director Zack Snyder addressed the current situation where superhero fare's falling out of fashion, and even he seems to have lost interest in it himself:

If Snyder himself has some stereotypically dude-bro traits, he’s unapologetic about them. A set for Rebel Moon, which he directed and co-wrote, was decorated with a motivational sign that read feeling very zacktivated. When I met him this past summer, he was refurbishing a vintage Land Rover. Yet Snyder doesn’t see his movies as particularly ideological or political, and he’s mystified by how controversial he’s become. “Everyone’s like, You’re a polarizing figure,” he told me. “You know, Love him or hate him … I’m like, Love him or hate him? What did I do? How did I get hate him?”

One answer is that the movie business has changed considerably in recent years, as have moviegoers’ tastes. Disney’s Marvel unit is experiencing an identity crisis amid declining box-office numbers. DC movies such as The Flash and Black Adam—direct descendants of Snyder’s films, in both their aesthetic and their casting choices—have likewise flopped. Audiences seem burned out on the turbocharged adventures of comic-book crime fighters; the movies they left their homes to see this year told the stories of a Mattel doll and a nuclear physicist.

“I have the same fatigue,” Snyder told me. Comic-book adaptations, he said, are “a cul-de-sac now,” no longer interested in, or capable of, telling self-contained stories. “No one thinks they’re going to a one-off superhero movie.”

This may seem, then, like an inauspicious moment to give Zack Snyder a $166 million budget. Yet that’s what Netflix has done with Rebel Moon. It’s a bet that there is still a market for his bombastic style of storytelling. A big bet: The movie is sufficiently sprawling that it is being released in two parts. The first, subtitled A Child of Fire, will start streaming on December 21; the second, The Scargiver, is planned for next April.

Well at least he's moving on to different genres, science fiction or otherwise. But anybody who makes a movie on Netflix still isn't being very encouraging. Still, I guess it's relieving to know he's grown tired of making all these superhero adaptations that ultimate lead nowhere. But he doesn't consider his movies even remotely political? Not even after Batman vs. Superman contained troubling allusions to real life protests against illegal immigration, and even Justice League bore traces of PC, like a reference to the Asian Atom created after the offensive Identity Crisis miniseries as a forced replacement Ray Palmer? And it doesn't occur to Snyder that his apologia for Ezra Miller and Amber Heard could've made Snyder controversial either.

Snyder, for one, is confident that he can create a fan base. His professed franchise-fatigue notwithstanding, he is already thinking about a Rebel Moon sequel and preparing a video-game spin-off, along with, yes, a graphic novel. But does the world want more Zack Snyder?

I'm sorry to say, but I for one do not. Mainly because of the foremost vision he emphasizes is so obsessively dark, and again, this guy apparently considers Batman far better than Superman in every way, symbolically or otherwise. And on that note:

In 2009, Snyder made Watchmen, a superhero adventure adapted from the groundbreaking graphic novel set in a grimy, fallen world far less cartoonish than Metropolis or Gotham. Its inhabitants, even the superheroic ones, experience angst and impotence, they bleed and die, and in the end they largely fail to stop the machinations of the story’s villain. Released one year after the cheeky Iron Man kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Snyder’s Watchmen established him as a kind of antithesis to the Marvel sensibility: violent and unironic where Marvel was light on its feet and winkingly self-aware.

[...] For many viewers, Snyder’s faith in superheroes, and macho brutality, felt like an odd match for the cultural mood; that same year, Marvel’s sly, quippy Iron Man 3 ended its run in theaters as one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Some accused Snyder of forgetting the central pillar of the genre’s appeal: fun.

Depending how you view this, there's got to be some irony in how Marvel could go for a more optimistic vision in some of their movies, if you consider not all their comics were like that and went for darker directions (Hulk, Dr. Strange, Punisher, Daredevil, to name the most significant examples), though there most definitely are Marvel creations that did go for brighter visions and had a sense of humor to boot (Spider-Man and Fantastic Four), and if memory serves, the the 1989 volume of Guardians of the Galaxy followed a more optimistic narrative too. So why did WB/DC miss out on a golden opportunity to prove they weren't so lacking in confidence of the source material when they had the chance? The Atlantic continues:

The movie was harshly reviewed, and made about half as much as Iron Man 3. Still, the studio decided to push ahead with the Snyder aesthetic. A 2016 sequel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, featured Ben Affleck as a burned-out, vengeful Bruce Wayne. Even for audiences that had embraced the dour modernism of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, it was hard to stomach Snyder’s movie, in which the two title heroes spent much of the movie’s runtime disliking and punching each other. BvS reportedly fell short of Warner Bros.’ lofty box-office expectations.

Today, I'm not shocked WB would go all in for Snyder's darker visions, having witnesses the horrific viewpoint the comics fell victim to since the turn of the century under Dan DiDio. So it's no surprise they could force such a mandate on the movies as well. I seem to recall Snyder wanted to include Superman's red tights on the film's costume design, and WB refused to allow this. So ludicrous as Snyder's visions are, it does hint at a huge problem with WB: no creative freedom.

Snyder insists that he has moved on from making comic-book films. James Gunn, Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead collaborator, has since made the hit Guardians of the Galaxy movies for Marvel. He’s now writing and directing a new Superman movie for DC, planned for 2025, and helping to shape DC Studios’ overall strategy as a co-chief executive. “I’m not knocking on James Gunn’s door, going, like, ‘Bro, shoot me one of those sweet movies,’” Snyder said. “The holy grail is some original IP that you create, that has resonance and is cool.”

Well I'm not enthusiastic for what a filmmaker as pretentious as Gunn has planned for DC adaptations either, as he's already made clear he's relying on some of the wokest writers for his screenwriting committee. But whatever Snyder has in store for Netflix doesn't boost my confidence in where he's going either, if he continues to rely on the same dark direction, with little or no humor to pep things up. Snyder regrettably represents one of the biggest problems with modern pop culture production, which is following too many PC narratives. At least he's moving away from films based on comics. The well's been totally dried out as a result of such filmmakers.

Labels: dc comics, marvel comics, msm propaganda, sales