Hollywood: Shit or Garbage?

If any of you are experiencing James Gunn Fatigue -- and I sure am, despite not even watching his crap any more -- this is good news.

Allegedly, supposedly, Warner Bros. has already decided to boot him and is just waiting for the right time to announce it. He wisely began filming Superman 2 soon after the debacle of Supergirl, so Warner Bros. can't fire him until after that movie is released.

When the time comes for James Gunn to exit DC, we're told the goodbye is already scripted: Man of Tomorrow framed as his farewell love letter to fans as he chooses to return to his true passion, writing and directing.

"The letters are already written," one of our insiders tells us.

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As Paramount's takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery grinds toward its day in court, we're told the changeover is already running quietly underneath, and it runs on paperwork.

"Contract not renewed," one of our insiders tells us. "Lots and lots of WB staff are in that position, including Gunn and Safran. They all know it's over."

How it plays out from there follows a script.

"Most will be allowed to quit in a dignified manner. If they don't, the contract runs out and they're out. So technically not fired," they said.

There's some light spoilers in this next section. Warner Bros. -- or James Gunn -- made some really fan-antagonizing decisions with their new "Lanterns" (as in Green Lanterns) TV show. Because you can't have a white hero any longer, the first episode kills off the Green Lantern everyone knows, Hal Jordan, so that his mantle can pass to a more deserving minority hero. Now, the replacement here, John Stewart, is also a long-serving Lantern, and was chosen to be the Lantern on the beloved Justice League cartoon, again for diversity reasons. But at least Hal wasn't dead in that universe and showed up briefly on the show.

This part is enraging: Warner Bros. -- or DC Studios, under James Gunn -- is issuing false copyright-claim notices on any YouTube or Twitter account that says that Hal Jordan is killed on the show. They're not showing clips from the show, just reporting the news.

But Warner Bros. -- or James Gunn, or both -- have decided that They Own the News and you are not allowed to say anything that casts a negative light on their latest corposlop product.

They claim they have a legal right to stop other people's free speech when they report spoilers -- and I don't even see how this is a "spoiler;" I immediately guessed they'd kill Hal Jordan -- or even just give a bad review to a Warner Bros. superhero movie.

Tuesday night's edition of What I'm Hearing, Matthew Belloni's Hollywood newsletter, handed its main feature to legal columnist Eriq Gardner, and Gardner spent all of it on Warner Bros. Discovery's copyright campaign against this site.

The piece runs under the headline "The War on Spoilers Goes Nuclear," in the same issue as Disney's new lawsuit against the FCC and Ari Emanuel's win in the Endeavor shareholder case.

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It was going after people talking about what happens in Episode 1. His assessment of the strategy: "Warners is playing with fire."

He also reports that WBD has no intention of ever bringing any of this into a courtroom.

The studio wouldn't comment, though a source familiar with its thinking told him that whether a project has been released yet is among the factors weighed before filing. Which is the point. This was about the calendar, not copyright.

What they're admitting there is that they had no legal right to issue a takedown notice under the DMCA. They just didn't want negative information coming out about the series, at least not until after it debuted and they got their views.

YouTuber Andrew Sosa is suing WBD, alleging the studio used the DMCA to bury his negative review of The Batman. We covered that, too, on June 10.

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A federal judge had just put WBD's takedown practices under a microscope, and WBD responded by swearing out a fresh round of notices over a rumor.

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Unequal Stakes.

Gardner is candid about why studios do this anyway.

Section 512(f), the DMCA's penalty for knowingly false notices, has produced few wins in its history; the good-faith standard is subjective, damages are hard to prove, and cases take years.

In other words, if a corposlop company demands your speech be squelched under a phony DMCA strike, the social media company complies immediately, because there are penalties if they don't.

But if you try to sue them later showing that their strike was made in bad faith and had nothing to do with legitimate copyright, it's impossible to prove.

This must be changed.

The studio, meanwhile, gets its result instantly, and by the time a counter-notice runs its course the premiere, the convention, or the entire leak cycle is over.

WBD's defense in the Sosa case, per Puck, boils down to this: even if it was wrong that spoilers infringe copyright, being wrong isn't the same as lying. That is the argument they would make about us, too.

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His point to lawmakers: before creating another lever, be sure it can't be repurposed the way this one was.

Gardner's column is about how the takedown system is being used; Cosmic Book News is the case study.

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Puck credits us with reading the tea leaves for months and calling the ending by March.

It was more than that. We first raised Hal Jordan's death in November 2024 and broke down the pulled teaser on March 5.

Then, on March 27, at WonderCon, our insiders told us flat-out that Hal Jordan dies, and we posted it. That's reporting.

The second X notice.

Puck covers the first notice, filed by a social strategist on HBO Max's brand team describing the infringement as "people discussing the spoilers."

It mentions the second only in passing. That one came from a senior analyst in WBD's Content Protection and Analytics division, the department whose entire job is copyright. Its fields: original work, a link to the show's IMDb page; reported content, "Text"; infringing material, "Lanterns Season 1 Episode 1 Spoiler."

The copyright department certified, on a form that spells out federal liability for misrepresentation, that a sentence about a story is Warner Bros. property.

Our post carried an image. They didn't claim the image. They claimed the sentence.

They're literally claiming that if you tell a friend "Darth Vader is really Luke's father," they have a copyright interest in that sentence and can legally compel social media companies to ban you for saying it.

Cocksuckers.

Oh, and the show is, get this, wokeslop.

The highlights tell the story.

The town's big secret is a militia operating from a ranch, because apparently that's what Hollywood thinks every small town in the Midwest is hiding.

The cowboy patriarch lectures Hal Jordan about "colonization."

Hal then interrogates a suspected alien using Harry Potter trivia, with a Nebraska trucker not knowing enough about Hogwarts treated like evidence that something isn't right.

When the alien finally confesses, his speech turns into a sneer at football itself: "pointless contests involving balls that somehow captivate more attention than the deteriorating atmosphere or the hunger of its least fortunate people."

John Stewart is also a vegan.

The episode makes sure to tell you twice.

Taken together, the message isn't exactly subtle. Lanterns uses Sheridan-style America as its backdrop while repeatedly taking shots at the culture and people who live there.

Here are some trailers. Note the first one is for Terminal List, Season 2, and is a Warner Bros. (HBO) production. So I may just skip it entirely, though I know a lot of people liked season one. (I did, but I'm really sick of HBO slop.)

Jim Caveziel, who's aging pretty well, plays a former special forces soldier who defends a town when a corporation attempts a land-grab.

It's called Ghost Soldier and they mean that a little literally. He's got some kind of cloak that makes him appear invisible, in that "cameras film what's behind him and project it on to the front of him" kind of way.

Another video game has been made into a movie -- well, an animated movie -- and I was definitely not expecting this particular 80s video game to get the movie treatment: Golden Axe. Elf needs food, badly. (WHOOPS! Mr. Ridiculously Circituous Plan tells me "Elf needs food, badly" is from Gauntlet, not Golden Axe. I've been confusing those two since they came out.)

Are you ready for a race-swapped remake of The Thomas Crowne Affair? I don't really mind this one, for this reason: I didn't like the Steve McQueen one (boring AF), I didn't like the Pierce Brosnan one (too "TV Movie of the Week," too "Remington Steele") and so I really do not care what they do with this dumb movie that somehow has become a 60 year old franchise.

Will they ever make a new movie not based on previous movie? And will all the million remakes always be race- and gender-swapped?

Answers: Doubtful and Most Assuredly.

And for proof of that: Here's another old franchise which just keeps getting remade and rebooted despite never having produced a movie that was actually good: Blade Runner 2099.

Seriously? Seriously? How many times...?

Speaking of, the novel that was directly inspired by the look and feel of Blade Runner, Neuromancer, is a series that will debut on Apple TV soon. I'm kind of interested but I don't have Apple and I'm not so interested I'll actually sign up to watch it.

But maybe some of you will. Let me know. But be careful, you might be banned from social media for spreading #Spoilers about the series.

It's weird that it's taken 40 years for anyone to make this into a movie (or limited series, as it is here). They've made movies out of stories that are part of the Neuromancer universe, like Johnny Mnemonic and the weirdo movie New Rose Hotel, but never the one big novel that everyone was talking about for ten years.

Oh, and the most obnoxiously unnecessary cash-grab subgenree of movie -- "the prequel backstory for a villain from a classic cartoon or story" -- continues with the Dark and Gritty origin story of A Christmas Carol, Ebeneezer starring Johnny Depp, and I know that sounds like a joke written by AI but it's all too real.

Didn't we already get Ebeneezer's backstory in A Christmas Carol? Ghost of Christmas Past kinda caught us up on that, right?

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:43 PM

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