Hollywood Babble On & On #1247: Friday The 13th The Series?

Flush with success from DC superheroes, magicians, and a pregnant virgin, the CW Network now thinks it can work miracles by raising the dead. The stinking foetid corpse in question is the Friday The 13th franchise which they hope to adapt into a TV series about the people of Crystal Lake facing the return of a more "grounded" version of the unstoppable killer.

Now I've never been a fan of the franchise, it came to embody the worst of the 1980s slasher-horror boom, coming up with lamer and lamer excuses to ramp up the gore and keep Jason coming back no matter what happened to him. It got very silly and very boring, and it showed in the diminishing returns at the box office.

Even a big budget remake failed to revive interest in a franchise that was deader than a Voorheez victim.

The funny thing is that the franchise had already branched into TV back in the 1980s.

Sort of.

Back in 1987 the producers of the Friday the 13th movies were branching into television with a Canadian-USA syndicated late night horror series that was originally going to be called The 13th Hour.

They decided that title was too obscure and went with the more famous "brand" even though the show had nothing to do with Jason Voorhees.

The premise of the show was pretty straightforward. An antiques dealer named Louis Vendredi made a pact with the devil for wealth and immortality. To cash in the stock in his store had been cursed to lead those who buy them into madness and murder by bombarding them powerful temptations.

But in the pilot Louis had an attack of guilt and broke the pact, and ended up dead and in hell.

Two distant relatives then inherited the store, which they then cleaned out in a huge sale. Shortly afterward, with the help of their uncle's ex-partner, they discover the curses and spend the rest of the series trying to get the stuff back and locked up safely in a supernaturally fortified vault.

Now I was just a kid when I saw it, and it ended 25 years ago, but I remember that it was one of the scariest things I had ever seen made for TV, and that includes Dark Night of the Scarecrow.

As far as I can remember, it sure was scarier than anything the Friday the 13th movies dished out.

Which is why I'm not holding out much hope for the CW's idea.

They should stick to DC superheroes.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1245: Don't Let Your Dungeon Be Draggin'!

Warner Brothers has announced that they're going forward with a Dungeons and Dragons movie based on the long popular flagship role playing game. This comes after a long legal battle between Warner Brothers, Hasbro, and Universal pictures that I described as akin to two junkyard dogs fighting over a broken fan belt. A lot of noise, dust, and blood over something the winner wouldn't know what to do with when they got it.

That's because Dungeons and Dragons isn't really the story/characters combo that makes a successful film franchise, it's merely a set of tools to enable players to make up their own characters and stories. No adventure on the screen will ever match the millions of adventures that have played out in player's heads of the last four+ decades.

We know that's a fact since there's already been one unsuccessful big budget feature film, and two direct to video sequels that were forgotten even before they were dumped in the Wal-Mart $5 movie bin.

Now while it's likely that Warner Brothers will repeat history, I'm going to offer them a way out. A way to use the D&D game to make a movie that won't suck the balls of a beholder.

THE PREMISE:

The chief reason the last attempts at a D&D movie franchise failed was because they tried to be straight up fantasy adventures using elements from D&D which D&D cribbed from fantasy literature and mythology, so it came across as a bland mishmash rather than a vivid original world like Middle Earth.

So here's what you do, incorporate the game into the movie, and here's how:

It begins with a group of Dungeons and Dragons players who meet every week and have done so for years. They are:

JACK HARDCASTLE: Been a player since college, and his day job is as a police detective. He used to be the department's top ass-kicker, but for the last two years a knee injury has trapped him in a desk job. His D&D character is Hardrock, a dwarf barbarian-fighter.

CYNTHIA MACKY: She's a therapist and marriage counsellor, and the stress of her job, dealing with other people's misery, has left her with a raft of anxiety issues. Her D&D character is Illyria, an elven magic user.

BUCK WELLER: Used to be the proverbial 98 pound weakling, but got super-buff in college. Now he runs a chain of fitness clubs and shills the "BUCK THE SYSTEM FITNESS SYSTEM" on the shopping channel. Since his transformation he's become a bit of an egomaniac and a womanizer. His D&D character is Silverblade, a human paladin.

DENNIS CRANE: Is a chemist for a pharmaceutical company. He dropped out of the group a long time ago when he married his college sweetheart and had a family. He's rejoined the group recently after his divorce, but doesn't feel like he fits in anymore. His D&D character is Greymalkin, an elven rogue.

LINDA BAILEY: Civil lawyer, and is on the fast track to partner in her firm. She's career driven and treats the weekly game as a substitute for vacationing and socializing. Her D&D character is Redleaf, an elven ranger.

Every Wednesday night they meet in the back room of a comic/game store owned by their Dungeon Master SPENCE. 

To add some atmosphere to the game room, Spence has kept a strange looking orb he found in a junk shop in the middle of the table. One night while Spence is in the bathroom the orb starts to glow, then it unleashes a blinding flash and...

POOF!

Our players are in a strange magical fantasy realm. An aging sorcerer has been listening in on their games, through the orb, and thinks they're just recounting real adventures. He's brought them to his world to save it from a rival who wants to do the usual conquering and enslaving. He's even given them gear just like the ones in their games, but there are some problems.

JACK is not really a dwarf barbarian, so his armour doesn't fit.

CYNTHIA can now cast spells, but her aim is not exactly...exact.

BUCK is given the unbeatable Speaking Sword, but it will become literally harmless if he breaks a vow of celibacy, which Buck will find impossible to keep in a world with real life elf babes. Whenever he violates the vow he has to recharge the sword by doing a humiliating penance ritual, goaded by the increasingly sarcastic sword.

DENNIS is supposed to be a master thief, but he is not built for stealth, and pretending to steal in a game turns out to be a lot easier than stealing in real life.

LINDA is supposed to be an expert in living in the wilderness, but her idea of "roughing it" is settling for a hotel with only a four star rating, and she's scared of not only monsters, but animals in general.

Naturally what follows is a mix of comedy and adventure in a world full of monsters, magic, and mayhem, where the locals play a game called Spreadsheets & Supervisors about office workers. The lead characters have to learn to work as a team, beat the bad guys, save the world and return to Earth before Spence gets out of the can.

THE DAMN THING WRITES ITSELF!!

So call me Warner Brothers if you don't want another serving of turkey.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1219: Two Comic Related Thoughts...

I'll start with an update as to why my posting has been so erratic lately.

You know my mother had an accident, needed surgery, and she is still recovering, but her recovery's happening faster than anyone expected, and she's been moved to a hospital close to home.

The great irony is that while she's recovering, I caught a cold. Which was really inconvenient, but I'm recovering from that now, so hopefully everything is heading for sunshine and smiles.

So let's get to work with my usual snarking and griping…

SUPERGIRL'S SUPERSUIT

DC/Warner Bros. has revealed the look they'll be using for Melissa Benoist's upcoming turn as Supergirl on CBS.

I have to say that I'm shocked an appalled by this costume.

Where is the gross, sleazy, hyper-sexualized costume we've come to expect from the last 20 years of comics costume design?

This outfit looks almost as practical as you can get when it comes to a super heroine's outfit.

We can't allow that, some chick might see it and develop enough self-esteem to see a future for herself as something other than a sex object. 

(That's what you call satire)

VALIANT GETS INTO MOVIES

Valiant Entertainment was started by a group of comics creators and investors after their bid to take over Marvel was outbid. The company enjoyed some success during the boom times of the 1990s, and was bought out by video-game maker Acclaim. Acclaim went bankrupt and for a while everyone thought that was it for Valiant.

Not quite.

New owners came in and began rebuilding the company and its comics properties from the ground up. That work seems to be paying since Beijing based DMG Entertainment is ponying up a "nine figure" investment in the company to develop movie and TV franchises based on their characters.

Now some may poo-poo the idea since Valiant's roster doesn't have the same household-name status in the zeitgeist as Batman, Superman, or Spider-Man.

I say that's not as big a problem as you might think.

Iron Man was considered a "C-List" Marvel character and starred Robert Downey Jr., an actor that everyone considered washed up and quite possibly box office poison. No one thinks that anymore because Marvel's raked in BILLIONS thanks to the doors Iron Man opened for them.

Valiant seems to be watching and modelling themselves after Marvel. Which means that they'll be selling them not as familiar brands, but on the promise of delivering a quality entertaining story that's packed full of action and opens doors for even more quality entertaining stories.

It's a big promise, and Valiant is going to have to burn serious calories to deliver. However, if they do pull it off the rewards could be enormous, and could break the Marvel/DC duopoly that dominates big screen movies.

So I wish them good luck. The business needs competition to stay vibrant, so the more the merrier.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1217: Jupiter & Originality Descending?

Jupiter Ascending did more of a swift descent and crashed and burned very dramatically. The $173 million sci-fi epic was sunk by the continuing popularity of American Sniper, and SpongeBob Squarepants. 

Some are saying that its failure is the final nail in the coffin of "original" films not based on previously existing franchise style properties, like comic books, novels, and TV/Movie remakes.

If the fate of original storytelling hung on the shoulders of the Wachowskis it has been doomed for a long time. First, Jupiter Ascending isn't all that original, and on a surface level comes across as a rehash of The Matrix.

Think about it, a person who is way too good looking for their job (Mila Kuni/Janitor/Keanu Reeves/Office-Drone turned hacker) discovers all they know is a fraud, they are the chosen one and must save humanity from a wildly impractical and lethal form of exploitation. In the case of The Matrix its using humans as batteries by robots when the script says they already have nuclear fusion and in Jupiter Ascending its the harvesting of the human race by what can be summed up as an evil cosmetics/pharmaceutical company.

Personally if the fate of originality hung on Jupiter Ascending, then it shows just how weak originality is in Hollywood.

Allow me to explain.

Now Variety and the other doomsayers have a point. Some studio executives will look at Jupiter's failure and say: "See, audiences don't want to see something that doesn't have an already familiar title. So let's reboot that reboot of the remake we did last year."

There's a word for executives who think like that.

That word is "IDIOT."

That mindset comes from just looking at the surface of the issue, but what really sank Jupiter Ascending can be boiled down to one word: INDULGENCE.

Studio people won't see the indulgence, because they had a hand in it. You see, when the first Matrix came out of nowhere and became a monster hit that spawned hundreds of imitators Warner Brothers entered a very rare territory.

The Wachowski Siblings were being hailed as visionaries by critics, and were selling tickets like nobody's business. Thinking they had the perfect storm WB pretty much gave the Wachowskis an almost blank check.

There were limits. They first denied the Wachowskis their idea of doing one sequel, and a prequel about the rise of the machines and the creation of the titular Matrix, but allowed them almost unlimited resources to grind out the visual effects heavy mayhem they had become known for.

That led to the second film being stretched, and many say botched, to fit two films that tried to fill in the gaps in the ideas of truckloads of CGI.

This put the Wachowskis on a downward spiral of cinematic indulgence. The budgets got bigger, the on screen CGI got busier, but the stories and ideas became thinner and the box-office got weaker and weaker.

Warner Brothers kept the money tap going hoping for a return of some of that Matrix magic, and the Wachowskis learned how to play the studio game, pretty masterfully.

You may not remember what it took for the Wachowskis to get the green light for Jupiter. Back in 2011 they had already been cleared for Cloud Atlas, but the studio was getting leery of their relationship with the prickly siblings. Cloud Atlas was a risky bet, that Warner Bros. eventually lost, and they were looking to mitigate their losses on the next Wachowski project.

The Wachowskis played them like a fiddle. They gave them a choice, a "Hard-R" anti-Iraq war movie about gay lovers plotting to kill George W. Bush that would cost $100 million, or a much more expensive sci-fi epic called Jupiter Ascending.

Given a choice between a guaranteed money-loser with a big budget or a bigger budget project with a chance, they once again let the Wachowskis run wild.

Presented with a film that promised nothing but visual indulgence from filmmakers who have been disappointing them in terms of story and emotional connection since 2003 the audience just sighed and stayed home.

That's why Jupiter Ascending flopped.

It's not originality that killed it, it was overindulgence in ego and special effects.

Not that any studio bosses will see that.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1201: Villains, Super-villains, and Superstars

Lots of big villain news this week, so let's jump in headfirst…

BOND 24 HAS A TITLE & A VILLAIN

Here's a video revealing the title for the next Bond movie…

The film will be shot in London, Rome, Mexico City, Tangier, Erfoud and the Austrian Alps, but that's not the big news.

The big news is confirmation that 2 time Oscar winning German character actor Christoph Waltz will be playing "Franz Oberhauser," who turns out to be notorious Bond baddie Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

You may recall that the Bond franchise had to give up using Blofeld because of a legal fight with the mysterious Kevin McClory that had been recently settled.

Personally, I hope they follow the great story arc the Bond/Blofeld relationship followed in the Bond novels. Starting out as a standard hero vs villain and becoming more violent and way more personal as it goes along, leaving both men physical and emotional wrecks. Only a handful of actors can pull off Blofeld, and Waltz is on the top of the list.

SUICIDE SQUAD IS GO!

DC/Warner Brothers have announced the cast list for the Suicide Squad movie, and it only took them five years to pull it together. If you live in a cave and don't know who the Suicide Squad is, I'll give you a rough summary.

In the DC Comics Universe the Suicide Squad or Task Force X is where the government drafts super villains for certain death missions where at least one of them will not survive, in exchange for time off their sentences.

So, it's The Dirty Dozen in tights.

The cast is:

Tom Hardy as Rick Flagg the non-villain military man who leads the team.

Will Smith as Deadshot, a master sniper/assassin who has taken on Batman, the Green Arrow, and other DC heroes.

Jared Leto as The Joker.

Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Joker's former psychiatrist turned psychotic lover and partner in crime.

Cara Delevigne as The Enchantress, an artist turned sorceress who started out as a hero, but either a lust for power, or a split personality caused her turn to villainy.

Jai Courtney as Captain Boomerang, a Flash rogue and boomerang tossing hitman.

And they're looking for a middle-aged African-American woman to play Amanda Waller, the bureaucrat who sends the team on their missions. One rumour said Oprah was taking the part, but I doubt she'd want to play a character whose callousness creeps out even professional killers.

Now I have an iffy feeling about this cast or the movie making it all the way to the premier in the originally intended form.

That iffiness lies with Will Smith.

Remember Smith passed on Django Unchained because he didn't want to be upstaged by Christoph Waltz.

I don't see him willingly be upstaged by the heroics of Flagg, or the psychotic scene-stealing of Joker and Harley, unless…he's pulling a Janet Leigh.

That means he's signed on to get killed off and shock the audience into realizing that this franchise is unlike the others, and will kill off major characters with the mad glee of The Walking Dead.

But that's a slim chance for someone who passed on a hit movie with some of the best people in the business to make After Earth.

Then again, maybe he's learned his lesson and realized that in order to stay a viable movie star he'll have to learn to share the spotlight without having to upstage everyone.

We'll have to see where this ends up.

__________________________

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Hollywood Babble On & On #1198: 13 For Constantine

NBC's supernatural mystery/horror drama Constantine was ordered to stop production after 13 episodes, but the network hasn't officially cancelled it, at least, not yet.

The show, based on the DC Comics character, is about a working class Liverpudlian sorcerer who travels around America solving mysteries involving monsters, ghosts, demons, black magic, and dark deeds in the hope of saving his own soul, which was damned when his arrogance turned an exorcism into a disaster.

The show was put in the Friday night death slot, but managed in just a few episodes, to find and grow an audience based mostly on generally positive word of mouth.

I've watched the show, and while not knowing the comics very well, I found it well made, and reminiscent of the X-Files at its peak, and I would like to see it continue since it just now seems to be finding both its sea-legs and its audience.

Right now the show is in a precarious position.

If NBC just cancelled it outright, DC/Warner Bros. could just move the show to the CW Network, where Arrow and The Flash seem to be doing very well. Or they could sell it a cable channel like AMC.

But right now, it's in a bit of limbo. By not cancelling it, NBC can block DC/WB from shopping it around because it's still, technically, NBC's show, and in television timing is everything.

If NBC doesn't order new episodes without actually giving it a formal cancellation, then the producers will have no choice but to release the actors, writers, and other staff from their contracts so they can find new jobs. The longer the wait, the harder it gets to find a slot on another channel, and any momentum the show has fizzles out, and the show dies on the vine.

I hope that NBC renews the show, since they canned Community, Constantine and Hannibal are the only shows they run that I watch. So I hope DC/WB uses it weight to tell NBC to shit or get off the pot.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1194: Random Bits of Nonsense

AMAZON WON'T BURY THE HACHETTE

Mega-retailer Amazon and Mega-publisher Hachette have inked a multi-year deal, calling a truce on their war over e-book pricing.

To sum up the feud Amazon was racking up big losses in their quest to undercut and monopolize the book retailing business. They thought that they could use their bulk to get the big publishers to start eating some of Amazon's losses. Well, Hachette was the first one to say: "Ah hell no!" and thus the war began.

Now it's over. Probably because Amazon's shareholders took a look at the money they were haemorrhaging in the CEO's war of supremacy, and told Bezos, to make some kind of deal.

I still stand by my previous statement that if the big publishers don't want this to happen again, and again, and again, then they need a plan.

1. IMPROVE DISTRIBUTION: A few years ago I tried to order a book, a newly released novel from a popular author, through my local bookstore, which is now out of business. I had Amazon as an option, but I was willing to pay a little more to help support my local indie. They told me that the distributor took 6 to 8 weeks for those kinds of orders. Well that put the kibosh on that plan, since I was hoping to give it as a Xmas gift. There is no reason for that in this day and age. If Amazon can do it, the big publishers can do it for retailers. Or they can...

2. EXPLOIT PRINT ON DEMAND: The machinery to manufacture books on site exist, it's just not being used. There should be a machine in every bookstore in the world, right by the cashier, and under a sign that says: "If it's not on our shelves, it's in this machine." The customer gives the cashier their order, and they're told to feel free to browse the shelves while they wait the 10 minutes it takes to print and bind the books. You can also use this to screw Amazon by making their publishing arm's titles available via these machines. Thus they can't complain about being shut out, and the combine behind them will make a little off of every order.

Anyway, what else is in the news…

WONDER WOMAN BY A WOMAN

I'm not normally one to jump on rumours of who is doing what until things are signed, sealed, and delivered, but I just can't resist this one.

DC/Warner Bros. are reportedly interested in getting a female director for Wonder Woman, and at the time of this writing Canadian TV director/producer Michelle Maclaren is in the front of the pack.  Maclaren certainly has the right CV, starting her directing career on the X-Files and working on such big name and acclaimed shows as Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones. Also, as a female director the studio only has to pay her 77¢ for every dollar they would pay a male director. (Now that's good satire!) 

But seriously, her record shows an ability to do quality drama, action, and suspense, while working within the tightly controlled budgets and schedules inherent in TV production. Plus, TV is where all the interesting storytelling is being done these days, and she's in the thick of it. Which makes her more than qualified for the job regardless of gender.

All I ask is that they work in getting some colour on Wonder Woman's outfit. Brown is not a super-heroic  colour scheme.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1193: Foundation Lives Again?

Sometimes a Hollywood project has what just might be a Hollywood ending.

A few years ago it was announced that Roland Emmerich, whose specialty was smashing landmarks with CGI, was developing Isaac Asimov's Foundation saga as a feature film.

Naturally there was much wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments as the imaginations of science fiction fans were assailed with images of Will Smith as Hari Seldon, a laser-blaster in each hand, blasting robots and aliens while screaming "Ah hell naw!" as a CGI tidal wave of lava topped with surfing Nazis sweeps over the White House.

However, a ray of hope has just broken through the clouds of despair.

Emmerich must have given up because HBO has contracted Jonathan Nolan, one of the smarter writers working in Hollywood, to develop the Foundation saga as a TV series.

I like Nolan, especially with his work on the series Person of Interest, which tells a massive, multilayered, and complex saga of paranoia, artificial intelligence, redemption, revenge, power, and the relationship between governments, bureaucracies, and the citizens they are supposed to serve, all while in the guise of an action packed vigilante crime procedural.

If anyone can do Foundation justice, I think Jonathan Nolan can.

However, I do have one source of trepidation.

It's going to be an HBO show.

Now you're probably wondering why I would be concerned since HBO has put out so many great shows, but I do have a valid point, just give me a second.

If you're not familiar with Asimov's magnum opus the Foundation series begins in the far future. A mighty Galactic Empire rules what appears to be an eternally stable society.

However, not everyone sees it that way.

Scientist Hari Seldon has developed a new field he calls "psychohistory" which calculates the movements of vast societies. His calculations predict that the Galactic Empire is on the way out, and that an age of chaos and darkness that could last millennia is on its way.

Hoping to mitigate the damage done to humanity Seldon starts The Foundation. The Foundation is a community of scientists, artists, and other experts on the remote planet of Terminus, and its their job, and the job of their descendants to rebuild a new society from the ashes of the Empire.

Now the book series has an episodic structure that actually suits a series adaptation very well. However, the cast changes radically changes from episode to episode since there are literally centuries separating some of them, which might hinder the audience getting attached to any specific characters for very long.

But those are just structural and narrative challenges that I'm pretty sure Nolan & Co. can handle. What I worry about is HBO and its philosophy.

Since HBO is a pay cable channel, it is not restrained by the rules about sex and violence that regulate what goes on broadcast and some levels of basic cable.

That's a double edged sword.

Because there are times when HBO gets hung up on putting things in shows just because they can, without asking whether or not they should.

The Foundation saga features a cast mostly of scientists, and intellectuals, with the occasional soldier and space traveller. It also contains almost no sex, which HBO is going to see as a problem. I can see the story conference going like this:

NOLAN: Now this is the scene where Hari Seldon explains how and when the Galactic Empire will start to collapse.

HBO EXEC: It's brilliant but we need Seldon to be having sex with a woman while two hot lesbians scissor each other in the background during this scene.

NOLAN: It takes place in a University lecture hall? 

HBO EXEC: Change that to a brothel. Also, we need this Mule guy to rape some people. Gotta have more rapes. Plus we need the characters to say the word "Fuck" at least twenty times per episode.

NOLAN: Why? 

HBO EXEC: Because we can, that means we have to.

Can you see why I'm worried. It may work on some shows, but in the age of easy access adult content via the internet, it's literally unnecessary to sell a show. Especially one with a large built in audience who might be creeped out by seeing a "sexed up" Foundation saga.

So let's hope that HBO knows when to hold'em and knows when to fold'em.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1176: Killing Wolverine Killing Comics

Wolverine, Marvel Comics most popular character is going to die.

Not only that, Marvel says that he's going to stay dead, forever, full stop, period.

They even have a picture showing Wolverine being carted off by the Grim Reaper in the manner of Michelangelo's Pieta:

They dug up their old art-history textbook, so you know they must be serious.

Now here's what I think:

(To be sung to the tune of "MacArthur Park.")

I CALL BULLSHIT

I CALL BULLSHIT

I CALL STACKS AND STACKS OF BULLSHIT

(And scene)

Wolverine's death in the comics is meaningless. It will have zero effect on the movies, and that's what matters these days, and we all know that Marvel has no intention of letting their biggest earner moulder in an inky grave.

As soon as the publicity dies down, and the folks at Marvel realize that it won't make Fox relinquish the rights to the X-Men, they'll make a big announcement that Wolverine will be brought back to life.

Hell, DC couldn't even keep the unpopular character of Jason Todd (aka Robin 2/The Red Hood 2) dead, even though readers voted overwhelmingly to kill him off in a phone-in poll.

Do you really think Marvel is going to let Wolverine stay dead? Because if you do, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you for a song.

And the people in the industry wonder why it's so hard to get people into superhero comics while superhero movies and TV shows sell like hotcakes.

Well, let's recap some of the reasons:

1. HARD TO GET: When I was a kid we had to walk a little under half a mile to get to the convenience store that carried all kinds of comics, ranging from the Marvel/DC superheroes at 45¢ an issue, to bags of five to seven Gold Key reprints each for $1 a pop.

Today, I have to go about fifty miles to the nearest specialty retailer. I could order things online, but then you lose a lot of the ability to discover new titles and characters you get by browsing an old fashioned spinner rack.

But that's not all...

2. HARD TO GET INTO: Even if you do manage to get comics, if you are not intimately familiar with 75-80 years of continuity, including multiple retcons, you are NOT going to know what the hell is going on. Even DC's mega-retcon "The New 52" like its last mega-retcon "Crisis On Infinite Earths" isn't completely retconning everything since the artists and writers won't give up their favourite bits, and the companies don't want to lose any potential merchandising and movie money from making people wait a little while for a character to develop naturally over time instead of just dumping them fully formed in the middle of everything.

3. SEXY SELLS SKANKY DOESN'T: Hardly a month goes by without someone making a valid complaint against the often anatomically inaccurate and usually ridiculous hyper-sexualization of female characters. The most recent being putting Spider-Woman in an impossible position and changing her costume into a thin coat of paint. 

Comics need kids to read comics to keep the audience alive and growing. However, both kids and parents are repelled by comic art that is just a few millimetres of spandex from looking like full-on pornography, and story lines dwelling on the sex-lives of superheroes often add nothing new to the characters except get in the way of what is their purpose, to give people near-mythological stories of demigods and monsters battling over issues good and evil.

4. CONSTANT SHELL GAMING: Publishers love the publicity they can get by pulling of stunts like killing a major character, or switching their race or gender. They claim that these changes will be permanent, but you know they will never permanently change the mainstream continuity they have decades of stories and dedicated fandom invested in. The whole thing is to just get some attention in the mainstream press, get a 1-week uptick in sales from the curious, who will take a look inside, not understand a damn thing going on, and never buy another comic again.

It's starting to drive people, even comics fans, nuts. Which is why they're not buying comics, but instead go to the superhero movies, who, for the most part, stick with their job of telling fantastical stories of heroism & don't rely on killing off major characters for promotion.

The comics industry needs a major overhaul, not only in what it's selling, but in how the industry is run, and it should be done while there's still an industry to reform.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1171: Devil's TV & Executioner Update.

NBC must be listening to the voice of Satan himself, because they're developing a TV series based on The Devil's Advocate, a 1997 movie starring Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves.

If you don't remember the movie, and there's a good reason for that, it's about an ambitious young lawyer played by Keanu Reeves, who gets recruited to work for the most powerful law firm in the country, and the man who runs it, played by Al Pacino, just happens to be Lucifer himself.

Now I might understand wanting to do a series based on a movie that was a monster hit adored by audiences that opened doors to wider storytelling, and had left the audience demanding more.

Devil's Advocate is not that movie.

At the box office it was a mediocrity, earning $60 million domestically, and doing $90 million overseas, which combined probably meant that it barely broke even on its $57 million production budget.

Was it adored by those who saw it? Most view as a laughable bit of ill-cast camp where Al Pacino overacts and Keanu Reeves does his best impression of a piece of furniture. It gets rerun on cable a lot, but that may have more to do with it being available than by popular demand.

As for wider storytelling… Well, the main plot line, which the series will have to stretch out for the whole run, was probably more fitting for a half-hour Twilight Zone episode rather than a feature film, let alone a TV series. It would probably very quickly devolve into yet another legal procedural, but one that ends every goddamn episode with the head of the firm tenting his fingers and smiling evilly at how well his manipulations are going.

Now the reasoning behind this is probably because of the critical cult success NBC is having with Hannibal, which stars the villain from The Silence of the Lambs franchise.

However, Hannibal doesn't come from a single cinematic mediocrity, it comes from a whole series of books and movies, that have detailed and complex backstories that they're not only exploiting, they're taking them into strange new directions. It's also being made by a team of filmmakers who bring a level of quality in script and visuals that was unimaginable on TV just a few years ago.

Hannibal came about from desperation on NBC's part for viewers and respectability forcing them to accept a daring and compelling vision on the part of the show's creators.

With the Devil's Advocate, I only see the desperation.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe a miracle can happen.

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UPDATE: Warner Bros. has bought into Shane Salerno's Mack Bolan project, and Bradley Cooper's been signed on for the lead role.

As I predicted, the R-Rated book franchise will become a PG-13 action movie franchise. 

What I didn't predict was that it'll be directed by the director of The Hangover.