Welcome back toTheCollider Pop Culture Review, in which Collider’s weekend editor Vinnie Mancuso wakes up only slightly hungover on a Saturday to rate the week’s biggest stories in film and television on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is soul-crushingly bad, 10 is mind-blowingly incredible.) This week:The Lion Kingremake trailer is not “live-action” but it is gosh-dang gorgeous, the fullBirds of Preytitle is longer than most movies, Sony might have set dates forMorbiusand aVenomsequel, and the marketing for Damon Lindelof’sWatchmenseries continues to be mysterious and infuriating.
‘The Lion King’ Remake Gets a Trailer
Rating: 9, or “Long Live the King”
Thefirst trailerforJon Favreau’sThe Lion Kingis one of those very specifically 2018 things that you can both be in awe of and feel spectacularly gross about at the same time. Because it’s no secret that Disney currently has a stranglehold on the movie industry, just releasing smash after smash with one hand and making jerk-off motions toward Warner Bros. with the other. (In this scenario Disney has three hands and is using that third hand to lay off thousands of people so the X-Men can pal around with Thor and stuff). Getting excited at yetanotherDisney film that is guaranteed to make the national budget of several small countries combined can, on one hand, feel yucky.
On the other hand,look at baby CGI Simba’s paws they look so soft we stan a fuzzy-eared king.
The Lion Kingis going to make an inhuman amount of money. The amount of moneyThe Lion Kingwill make in 2019 is Lovecraftian. Knowing the exact number would crack your mind and transport you into another plane of consciousness. Someone whispered the exact amount of moneyThe Lion Kingis going to make into the ear of the frozen decapitated head of Walt Disney and that thing defied the laws of science and God by shitting its pants several miles away. This isn’t me rooting for Disney in either a positive or negative way, as I’ve seen some cynics point out on the Twitter-verse. It’s an objective fact. If I said “the sky is blue” would you be like “wow pretty fuckin' eager for the sky to be blue, huh?”
The marketing of this trailer is a work of an evil genius that will one day unite the seven kingdoms under one ruler, that clever monster. Millions of 90’s babies were pretending to watch football while they actually smoked a bowl and avoided their uncle Roger’s thoughts on transgender women serving in the army when suddenly a literal blast from the past was weaponized directly into their eyeballs, a hit of nostalgia heroin so potent Walter White could monopolize the Epcot Center drug trade with it. A song we recognized paired with visuals we knew only updated to look older and slicker and a little more mature, just like we all pretend to be. I blacked out and when I came to I was shoving fifty-dollar bills into an envelope that was just marked “Mickey Mouse’s House.”
Full ‘Birds of Prey’ Title Revealed
Rating: 5, or “Sure”
Honestly, sure. Sure! The full title ofBirds of Preyis, in fact,Birds of Prey(And The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), and sure, that’s completely fine, all these articles have to hit at least 300 words anyway and sometimes you take the help where you can get it.
I actually half-love this decision because I think with the glut of superhero movies these days, the best thing for any of them to do is get weird with it. All superheroes are constructed to be “fun”, but they often do feel like they’re actuallyhavingfun, if that makes sense. IfCathy Yan’s movie about a homicidal, mentally ill Commedia dell’arte enthusiast (Margot Robbie) and her badass friends repeatedly beating the shit out ofEwan McGregorwants to tack on an absurdly long subtitle, that’s cool! Make Comic Book Movies Weird Again 2020, I say.
The only reason for my hesitation is, frankly, Warner Bros. hasn’t done anything to earn the benefit of the doubt. All its most promising projects have, for the most part, taken a Bat-copter straight into the ground. I still have scars from how excited thatSuicide Squadtrailer made me. So I just want thisincrediblypromising slate of upcoming DC projects—Aquaman,Shazam!,Birds of Prey—to just be good before Warner Bros. is like “haha, we’re havin' fun!” Just get to the finish line, WB! Validate my excitement! It’s annoying to get hyped for aShazam!trailer but still subconsciously waiting for Zachary Levi to say something before premiere like, “Yeah, we thought it’d be a fun take on the character if Billy Batson was extremely racist.”
Sony Sets Dates for Spider-Man Spin-Offs
Rating: 6, or “So Many Snacks, So Little Time”
Venomis an objectively terrible movie starring a crazed Tom Hardy and a bunch of actors who are slightly terrified of Tom Hardy. It is also the most fun I had in a theater in 2018. It made so much goddamn money, so it’s a no-brainer that one of the two mysterious premiere datesthat Sony set aside in 2020 would be aVenomsequel. The other, most likely, is for the Morbius movie, a film that all but guarantees we’re going to get stories aboutJared Letotrying to suck his co-star’s blood and sleeping in old church crypts for at least six months.
I’m 100% in for moreVenom, especially if they lean into the fact that Eddie Brock and his slimy alien friend totally want to kiss. (They won’t, because Hollywood is filled withcowardswho don’t acceptunsolicitedandextremely graphicscreenplays.)Morbius, on the other hand, is the half-baked Jared Leto vehicle that not a single human on this Earth asked for. Dude is only a “pseudo-vampire”, a term so lame Edward Cullen’s sparkly ass is guffawing at the thought.
SinceMorbiusisn’t exactly confirmed and incredibly un-fun, here are five things Sony could also be setting aside a premiere date for, ranked in descending order of the joy it would bring to me, specifically:
‘Watchmen’ Yellow Cops Return
Rating: 7, or “Let It Mellow”
No upcoming project on the screen big or small has a more mystifying roll-out thanDamon Lindelof’sWatchmenadaptation for HBO. Because while we know definitively whatWatchmenis—an incredible, essential comic series that millions of assholes that post on r/theredpill read completely wrong—we have basically no idea what Lindelof’s Watchmen is going to be. The project technically wasn’t even announced, it just arrived in that letter where Lindelof was like “I apologize for existing. I also apologize forLost. I am fully aware thatAlan Mooreis a warlock living in the woods now who would definitely curse my family lineage if I made a badWatchmen. But this will be a goodWatchmen, and also notWatchmenat all. In conclusion, I would like to apologize again for my birth and forLost.”
Very much not helping is the fact that HBO created an Instagram solely for Watchmen teases, which has consisted entirely of images showing mysterious, mask-wearing police officers who look like Rorschach if he left a yellow sock in the wrong laundry machine. The latest images see one of these yellow buggers shining a flashlightenigmaticallyinto the darkness and the hallway of what appears to be a police station lined with even more yellow coppers.
These images offer nothing by way of details or explanation and holy wow they are working. I’m so confused, enraged, and intrigued by this damn adaptation. The only firm details we know are that noted star ofDungeons & Dragonsand nothing elseJeremy Ironsisplaying old-ass Ozymandiasand goddamn Buster Scruggs himself,Tim Blake Nelson,willplay a completely new characternamed Looking Glass. Beyond that? Just yellow cops shining flashlights willy-nilly all over the place. I just hope those dudes can see. I once tried to cosplay as Rorschach without eyeholes at New York Comic-Con and ended up walking up the down escalator at the Javits Centers for 3 hours. I was mocked endlessly by fans and professionals alike. True story.
