Forgotten Film Friday: Absolute Power

You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat it Too: How nerd culture ruined Hollywood. An editorial by Azzam Abdur-Rahman It’s strange to be writing this. I feel like I am letting you behind the veil of what it feels like to be someone who is a self-described nerd in 2019. This is a very personal view and if anyone ever sees this they will be very pissed. Rightfully so, because people like me ruined Hollywood. Our expectations, vitriolic responses to change, and disdain for change have become par for the course. Our anger and our unwilling nature has ceded power to the ugliest version of our society and it has propelled so many studios to invest more money then the GDP of some small nations into films that should have never been made. Let go back in time….. It all starts in 2004, Marvel ,having licensed so many of their massive properties to keep their head above water, decides to take a massive gamble. Let’s make movies like the comics they are based on. Superhero movies were doing well but they were not Hollywood’s bread and butter. They were still risky bets. Honestly, studios actually have fairly diverse slates and while their are franchises still rolling considered “solid bets” they are often modestly budgeted unless some wild auteur is behind the lense. But Marvel decides to gamble everything on Iron Man, a character that is not widely known being played by a washed up 80’s teenstar. This gamble pays off. For the first time nerds around the world are seeing what they talked about in comic shops watch with joy at it happening. Nick Fury is talking about the Avengers and it seems like a massive team-up movie may finally happen… Cut to today… Marvel and now by proxy Disney control the expectations of how well studios should be doing. Everyone wants their own cinematic universe and are clamoring to own other properties that can get that Comic-Con bump. Universal tries and fails to make a universe around the old monster movie characters they have. Trying hard to sell to an audience that has found a way to control the market. Warner Brothers, a studio that had transitioned into a house the supports auters, had switched focuses to making a slate of DC comics based films work. Lionsgate tried to make Power Rangers pop off. Paramount was trying to lean into Transformers even harder. Sony was ready to pillage Spider-Man’s rogues gallery for any kind of success but the scariest moment of all brings us back to the house of Mouse. They bought Lucasfilm. We know all of this, so you have to be wondering why am I repeating it. Well, I am repeating it to show you how much stuff we saw in Wizard Magazine in the 90’s that actually happened. We legit got all of our dreams. Were they all good? No. But they got made. Millions upon Millions of dollars were spent to make that kid in the comic shop happy and it isn’t stopping there. A Spawn adaptation from Todd McFarlane himself is coming down the pike. For whatever insane cocaine fueled reason, a Detective Pikachu movie exists and actually doesn’t look half bad. We have gotten everything we want. But we keep complaining… That is why I am mad. That is why I don’t care if I piss you off because at the end of the day there is no thankfulness for the fact that we even got these pictures let alone that they were made with any of the budgets we got. We never thought we would get any more Star Wars films. Did we need them? NO! But we got them and we were stupid excited about seeing those original characters come back to a universe we only got a glimpse of. Now, new talented filmmakers will get to play in that world. Y’all spent a straight decade complaining about George Lucas. I swear and I grew up hearing was about how trash this man was for editing these films as if they were scared documents unchangeable by time. I even believed that. Then The Last Jedi came out and I saw what we had become. The Last Jedi has flaws, no film is perfect, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t a new take on a film franchise that needed some expectations to be shattered. Rian Johnson didn’t make a bad movie. He just didn’t make the movie you wanted. I loathe Disney but making them gun shy isn’t the answer to getting good Star Wars movies. Getting them gun shy isn’t the answer to getting good movies in general. The Last Jedi should be lauded for the risks it took with characters, with story and with the choice to make a franchise about space wizards and space nazi’s actually say something about the cruelty of war and the importance of sacrifice. You cannot have your cake and eat it too people. The MCU has been lucky so far but their will be a time they make a mistake and the very population who championed you to success will turn on you. If Avengers:Endgame isn’t utterly perfect, if it falters in one way from Infinity War the claws will be out and you will be dead in the water. Look at Warner Brothers if you need a moment to see what we have done. Warner Brothers gave a dead franchise to an auteur director and what we got was three of the best films of the 2000’s, the Nolan Batman Trilogy. Now what do we have? A mess that is unfocused and unable to see the forest from the trees that is keeping your business from being profitable. Now you may be wondering “Why do you care?!” and “If you don’t like them don’t go see them!” First, I love that my wildest dreams are coming true but I hate that we can’t see how our actions have changed the landscape of hollywood and make seeing a film like Crazy Rich Asians an insane risk but Sony making Venom a safe bet. That human stories have been removed from the narrative for only being Oscar Bait or Indie Darlings. I care because I want the best versions of these films! I want men and women behind the camera with something to say. Every film should have the care that Black Panther had and that is why many people who were most excited about it had never read a comic in their life! We aren’t making the best films and we aren’t championing building the best ecosystem of films. We aren’t eating a healthy diet. We are just eating cake. So now that Solo bombed at the box office and this era of MCU films is coming to an end I hope that the Comic Con crowd can see that we have to take a step back and let someone else come forward and get their shot at getting all of their dreams met. Maybe Musicals can come back! What about westerns? But we need to let the capes and cowls, the giant robots and the anime characters breathe so that and industry lost can really find the best way to use them. And if we can’t do that we need to be thankful we got them at all. We don’t deserve what we have been given and we should be thankful we got it all. We need to eat some broccoli and say thank you for all the cake finally.