Cinema Issues: James Gunn The Man Who Should Have Stayed Cancelled

In this edition of Cinema Issues we are talking about James Gunn, why he’s a truly awful studio head and why God willing he’ll be fired soon.

Where to start, perhaps with the fact that he was too afraid to use the phrase truth, justice and the American way on the Superman poster but will use truth, justice, whatever, on the Supergirl poster.

Or perhaps we should think about how edgy he is, and how he needed to have Superman cancelled in his film, just like James was, or have him called a bitch by his cousin or have a photo of him pissed on by his dog. Just to remind you that no one cares about Superman least of all James Gunn. As why respect one of DC’s oldest and most beloved heroes?

Why not have Kal-El suggest Superman take a harem, why not force in the Justice Gang as it has then invokes his initials. It’s bad decision after bad decision.

In that same vein why not allow a guy who thinks the word Green in Green Lanterns is lame to make a Green Lanterns show in a true detective style. Or shoot a Clayface film without a Batman.

How about his new feminist side of showing how women can be just as messy as men, and how women aren’t perfect by having them be damaged drunk party girls who don’t grow. The same person who thinks telling little girls it’s okay to be a mess is a positive message.

Maybe we can get back to the fact that he likes to get into spats online, or the fact he revealed a whole slate of projects most of which haven’t been seen or heard from again. Remember the Authority?

All of this comes without all the creepy jokes he made about kids or SA and thing of that nature that got him canned from Marvel.

Honestly his tenure as studio head, opening with a cartoon no one watched, following it with a Superman film that was a financial disappointment and then following that with a Supergirl film with zero hype, suggests that he really was the wrong man for the job.

It’s time for WBD or Paramount to just fire him.

Cinema Issues: Putting Star Trek Out To Pasture

What show has a large woman who eats her own comms badge, a black guy who has two dads that left him, and also a ship captain who seems unable to sit in a chair. That’s right it’s Starfleet Academy.

One’s mind may go back to the instantly memeable moment from the Simpsons wherein the kid goes stop it it’s already dead. The numbers have been bad for a lot of Kurtzman Trek over time but this one just couldn’t seem to connect with much of anyone as such it was cancelled before it’s second season even airs. This is due to the fact that the second season is already paid for and shot so it will be released likely all at once and then the show will be canned.

The reason why the show has been cancelled is because no one was watching it and the ratings were bad. It is that simple. However if you wanted to talk about why the ratings were bad then let’s go, they chased away the male audience calling them bad and toxic, and aimed primarily at women and the LGBTQ+ crowd, this is not enough to hold up a majority male brand who knew. Whilst other shows had the bare amount of testosterone needed to get men to watch it, Academy seemed to be against that from the beginning deciding to lean even harder into it’s small Blue Sky niche audience. Spitting on your fans also doesn’t help with this.

Before we hear the trite Star Trek has always been woke reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee comments, there is a difference between a show exploring political ideas of both the left and the right and having a nuanced debate and letting you make up your own mind, as the Original Series and The Next Generation did. As opposed to telling you what to think and saying if you don’t think this your a Nazi as modern trek loves to do.

The narratives online is already that this is because the family that runs Paramount are Trump supporters, if this was the case why wasn’t it cancelled earlier why now, and is based out of the fact that these people cannot understand that they are the minority and that no one watched. It’s sad.

Cinema Issues: The Killing Fields

In this edition of Cinema Issue we are talking about release strategy and how Hollywood cannot seem to get out of its own way. Back a few decades ago films would come out on the same weekend and compete, this became less and less done and studio executives became more and more skittish.

Now you have things like films with very similar premises such as Ready or Not and They Will Kill You coming out a week apart. This is not a return to direct facing off, in that they are coming out on the same weekend, which at least has free market merit, this is release date stupidly. By spacing out the films by a week the latter will suffer at the box office as people are not going to want to see a film very similar to Ready or Not a week later. Ultimately it should have either come out alongside it at the same time, if they have confidence in it, or moved to a different release date.

This is but one example of this trend you can see studios doing things like this all the time sometimes cannibalising their own films. For example next spring/summer Disney are going to release the live action remake of Lilo and Stitch 2 at the end of May and then the third Incredibles film in the middle of June. This gives their own Lilo and Stitch about 2 weeks before it will have its marketshare eaten into by Incredibles 3 and is just stupid. If rival studios want to challenge each other that’s business but if studios are committing acts of self harm to their own release slates that stupidity.

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Cinema Issues: The Oscar Fate Of Sinners

The film got 4/16 nominations, many of which were undeserved. Cinematography, original screenplay and best actor should not have been given to it. After the smear campaign against Timothy Chalamet the ground was being set for the upset and for Jordan’s win but he didn’t deserve it. Playing two characters which are the same as the character he plays in everything else doesn’t mean he deserves the award over people like Ethan Hawke. It was tokenism. They knew Sinners wouldn’t get best director or best picture so they needed to give it something big and so they did. It was an effort to stop the inevitable calls of racism. Too late.

People have already screamed racism as it didn’t win all the awards it was nominated for, no film has ever won that many, they are also calls for black people to boycott the Oscars now and only care about the NAACP awards, therefore creating segregation in the awards circuit. Also the NAACP awards literally gives away awards based on race, so it does away with even the slightest whiff of merit. Screaming racism as a film doesn’t win 16 Oscars just devalues what racism is and makes you look like a baby having a tantrum, racism is people being treated as lesser based on race, suffering violence based on race, have freedoms revoked based on race, not a film only winning 4 Oscars.

To return to awards that this film didn’t deserve let’s talk about best original screenplay. There was so little original about Sinners that as we said, the award should be given to Robert Rodriguez, the film in so many ways is a rip off of From Dusk Till Dawn, that to call it original is baffling. This sets a new low bar for original at the Oscars and has devalued it in the process.

The phrase give someone an inch and they take a mile comes to our writers minds, the Oscars tried to pander and tried to give into tokenism to avoid being called racist and avoid these calls for boycotts and yet despite doing this and damaging their credibility it happened anyway.

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Cinema Issues: Paramount Wins

In today’s edition of cinema issues we talk about the fact that at the moment of writing it seems as though Paramount is going to win in it’s bid for WBD.

Ultimately there was always a chance of this as the current American administration favours them, and could have made things very difficult for Netflix at the regulatory stage.

There are some people who are saying that this is a win for cinemas, as Netflix would have led to them closing down, however, this is not the win they think it is. Two major studios merging means there will be mass layoffs, which will further contract the industry and also likely lead to less things coming out in cinemas overall.

So far Paramount has confirmed they intended to keep a large theatrical output going forward, much higher than what they are currently doing however , the numbers that have been floated likely aren’t realistic.

Moreover, this move seems threatening to other studios, you have to think now that players like Sony and Universal will be thinking about expansion and to buy up independent studios and production companies in order to compete. Really a lot of this started during Disney’s era of expansion, in that sense the Paramount WBD merger appears similar to Disney buying 21st Century Fox.

There is also the Netflix question of it all, and what their next move may be, they had other studios on their list, will they move on to one of those or reflect over the strategy. Could Netflix make a bid for Universal or the film parts of Sony.

One thing is for sure we are in the era of monopolies.

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Cinema Issues: The Death Of Film Criticism

Once upon a time film criticism was respectable, you had your Eberts and later Kermodes. However, then came the internet wherein the access critic really began to flourish.

These people are often flown out to movie premieres given goodie bags and nice meals in exchange for saying a film is the best thing ever. They shill for films and studios on their social media channels, sometimes even taking sponsorships from them. Needless to say this shows the perverting of film criticism you cannot be objective and be in the pocket of a studio’s marketing department.

Then again you see that’s the gig, these “reviewers” need early access in order to stand out, as their actual analysis is weak. As such they are indebted to the studios. They want to rub elbows with celebrities and feel like a somebody when that was never supposed to be the role of the reviewer. The reviewer was either an art appreciator giving their opinion on the art they saw, or a man of the people telling you whether a film was worth the price or not. The issue was these people wanted to try and turn themselves into celebrities, they wanted to chase fame through film criticism usually after other failed careers, see Grace Randolph, or John Campea for that. This made them lose sight of what they were doing.

Much like independent coverage and citizen journalism is bringing balance back to news coverage we need that here. We need film opinions that don’t chase fame, we need honest conversations that don’t worry about upsetting left wing or right wing, we need to look at the films we see through the prism of was that an enjoyable film or not. If we don’t then more and more critics will just become irrelevant, increasingly they already are.

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Cinema Issues: The Failure of the Scream 7 Boycott

In this Cinema Issues article we are talking about the backlash to Scream 7.

At first we were not going to cover this as it gives bad faith actors too much attention however as the weekend drew on and they escalated and escalated we decided to jump in.

If you don’t know Melissa Barrera was fired from the Scream franchise, or chose to leave if you believe her, as she said some abhorrent things about Israel. The idiotic Pro Palestine crowd got very upset about this and had big feelings, and decided they were going to boycott Scream 7 to teach Paramount a lesson.

Then came the second wave, just before the film released a number of “critics” gave the film terrible reviews most having not watched it, or judging the film not based on its own merits but with the politics around it. People like John Campea got so upset that he said the film needed to “Rot In Hell”, yes this is the same John Campea who has casually said the N word despite being very white before now. As you could see they decided to put any sense of professionalism to one side to try and attack the film and punish the people that did the thing they didn’t like politically.

Then came the final wave, the “fans” who all came out of the woodwork to say how this was the worst Scream ever, they didn’t understand fundamental parts of the film such as why the new killers use AI to try and remind Sidney of her past killer status. Or they harp on about how it mentions New York a few times, a reference to Neve Campbell’s absence from the last film, not to the Carpenter Sisters but hey. These “fans” would have lapped it up if Melissa had still been the main character.

The best thing about all of this is that not only did these people destroy their credibility and reveal themselves for being bad faith actors, but also that they failed. The film had a bigger box office opening weekend than any of the films in the series even when you adjust all the others for inflation. Scream 8 is already in pre-production, and the franchise has never looked healthier. Much like with how they tried to boycott Hogwarts Legacy and then that failed this goes to show you just how little power these activists have and how irrelevant they are.

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Cinema Issues: The BAFTA Incident

In this edition of cinema issues we are talking about the incident at the BAFTAs wherein a man with Tourettes shouted a racial slur.

Firstly, Tourettes makes you say things you would not want to say, it is intrusive, it has been widely stigmatised, and is continuing to be so. Someone saying something does not mean they hold those opinions or beliefs really quite the opposite.

Secondly, the level of ignorance and ableism that has come out of parts of the film community about this incident shows that it is still widely misunderstood. For the people saying the man should apologise, the question becomes what apologise for a disability, apologise for having a condition that forces you to say things you do not want to say, no that’s wrong as it implies intent. There is no proof that the man is a racist.

Whilst the word is incredibly charged, a conversation is needed to be had around intent. If he had no condition that makes you say things you don’t want to say, then it would be racist and rightfully called out, but he does and that means that he isn’t in control of himself and shouldn’t be made to apologise for having a disability. One believes that this is a cooler heads moment and that after some reflection people will see the difference between the two things but maybe not. The internet is just a place of hatred after all.

One thing I will say is that this awards season has been one of the most toxic, and vitriolic on record. The tribalism and the race baiting and the us Vs them narratives are really quite sickening. You saw it when parts of the film community began attacking every single film that wasn’t Sinners online and calling anyone who didn’t think Sinners was the best film and should win every award racist. They then called the awards shows racist, and now a lot of the same people are being openly discriminatory towards a man who cannot control what he said and likely feels an incredible amount of shame and humiliation over what happened.

If this is what awards shows are coming to then maybe they should just go away

We would ask you to look up Tourettes syndrome before you go posting on social media.

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Cinema Issues: Anti Elitism

In this edition of cinema issues we are talking about the idea that critics are out of touch elites and that they don’t understand the common man.

So this discourse is of course out at the moment as the people who loved the necrophilia porn that is Wuthering Heights say that anyone who doesn’t like the film is a snob/elitist. They apply this to anyone who has read the book and don’t like how this is an adaption in name only, but they scream it about the critics who gave it a bad score, asking why are they being critical of art why can’t they just enjoy things.

Therein is the central stumbling block of their argument, critics judge art to see if it is good or bad and give you an assessment, whereas you are asking for mindless consumption, mindless consumption is not what critics do. As at the end of the day you cannot recommend or tell people to avoid a film if you have watched it mindlessly.

There are a lot of reasons to dislike critics, the bought and paid for nature of them a lot of the time, the left wing group think, the virtue signalling. However calling them elites is just a bit ridiculous.

It speaks to your own inferiority, and you need to defend yourself liking something other people don’t, you go well I am a true fan, or oh they are just pretentious or a snob and they cannot have fun. In that not only do you show that you’re so fragile you can’t just accept another opinion but need to go on the attack but also show you don’t understand what critics do. They aren’t there to just have mindless fun they are there to assess the film. It isn’t the same thing.

If there is a choice between being a snob and being a mindless consumer I think the majority of people would rather be the intellectual snob than the mindless consumer. As one has connotations of intelligence the other has one of being low class and a bit gormless.

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Cinema Issues: The Power Of Voting With Your Wallet

The news that Snow White (2025) starring Rachel Zegler cost Disney 100+ million dollars.

As the news emerged yesterday I was met with a notion that despite what many media types tell us about how we are a minority or we are haters, and that we don’t matter we do have the power to change things.

Rachel Zegler was horrifically anti Semitic, she wished ill on those who politically disagreed with her and she disrespected the original Snow White film and for it seems that those combination of factors managed to unify those of us who can see what’s going on together. We stood up to the cultural vandalism and look they lost, they lost large amounts of money.

When I reviewed the film I told people not to watch as it was just modern day slop and it heartens me to see that many people beyond my readership could see this as well. People are rejecting this sort of filmmaking in large numbers.

Remember this when they call you a minority or a hater, or they wrongly call you vile names you can make a difference when you vote with your wallet and you can effect real change. Let’s make Snow White the first large scale example of the pushback.