Hollywood’s Message Is Dead - Critical Drinker

Critical Drinker is a movie critic, an analyst of modern entertainment media and a YouTuber. Cinema is no longer just about entertainment, it's now a platform for social and cultural ideologies to be pushed through. If you don't like what Hollywood's execs tell you to like? Too bad, that's your prejudice showing, you bigot. Expect to learn why there are no more positive heroic role models in movies, the problem with Velma getting naked on a cartoon, why Rotten Tomatoes reviews are diverging more than ever before, why Matt Damon was always right, just how destroyed Rick & Morty is as a franchise and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Subscribe to Critical Drinker on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@TheCriticalDrinker Follow Critical Drinker on Twitter - https://twitter.com/TheCriticalDri2 Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #movies #hollywood #criticaldrinker - 00:00 Intro 00:30 Critical Drinker’s Background 03:04 The Gap Between Rotten Tomatoes Critic & Audience Reviews 10:16 How Marvel is Patronising Women 16:56 Why Does Hollywood Hate Men So Much? 22:28 The Current Trend of Movie Remakes 29:56 Why A Stoic Man Is a Toxic Man in Hollywood 35:24 Explaining ‘Fan-baiting’ 38:46 Will the Market Show Hollywood that People Want Better Movies Again? 44:42 Why Aren’t More Films Optimistic & Positive? 51:09 Is House of the Dragon Redeeming the Game of Thrones Franchise? 55:19 What Went Wrong with Jurassic World: Dominion 58:30 The Story of Superman’s Lips 1:06:45 Rick & Morty Co-Founder’s Downfall 1:09:09 What is Critical Drinker Looking Forward To? 1:14:28 Where to Find Critical Drinker - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I guess I just have to accept now that all white men are just awful at everything and they suck and myself included, I should just hang my head in shame for the rest of my life. It's a strange sort of offering that they're giving us now where we're going to actively hate you as an art form. We're going to make our business to make you feel awful about yourself. And if you dare to push back on that and reject the offering that we're giving you, then we just label you as a bigot or reactionary or whatever stupid term we label people with these days.

• 0:31Chris Williamson?

  What is your background? Tell me how you end up getting interested in critiquing movies.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Oh gosh, um, right. What's the short version here? Um, yeah, I mean, I guess like from being a young kid, like I was always just fascinated by movies and I was fascinated by like the, the way that the stories worked, you know, the way that they would introduce us to the different characters, the way that they were structured so that, you know, you had that, that well-defined like buildup of action and then the sort of catastrophe that leads you to the lowest point and then the big resolution at the end to give you that dramatic high that finishes it off. Like, I remember being, even as a kid, I started to recognize that pattern in movies and it was something that kind of interested me. And it led me into wanting to do storyteller of my own eventually. And so I got into writing

• 1:20Speaker 00

  novels, that sort of thing. And obviously YouTube came along and, um, you know, I was interested in the idea of starting to break that down and critique things a little bit. You know, my, my early videos were shockingly amateurish, but you know, it was just fun. It was a fun like experience to get used to it, get used to editing videos, all that sort of stuff. Um, yeah, obviously I took a break from that to actually focus on my writing career for a good long while. Uh, and then a few years ago, I decided to come back and start doing it again. And gosh, I just, uh, really got into character one time as the drunken critical drinker. Uh, I think it was after a few glasses of Jack and I noticed I was slurring my words and I just thought, what the hell, I'm just gonna,

• 2:02Speaker 00

  I'm gonna embrace it and lean into it. And that video just went viral, man. Like within a few days, it had like a million views and suddenly my channel exploded and that's, that's what got me started on the path I'm on now, I suppose. So it worked out well.

• 2:16Chris Williamson?

  What was the first video that, uh, that kicked off?

• 2:20Speaker 00

  I think it was about Captain Marvel, so that would have been about three years ago now.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  It was, yeah, I think because there was such a media circus around that movie. You know, all the talk about, oh, finally, we're getting a female superhero and all that nonsense. And I just thought, gosh, this is all a bit silly. And it kind of really just conveniently forgets all the great characters that we'd had up until then. And I thought, I'll just do a sarcastic video saying, I totally agree with this while showing, you know, all these awesome female characters through all the different decades. And for whatever reason, that just absolutely blew up. So that was my, that was my first taste of YouTube success, I suppose.

• 3:03Chris Williamson?

  I looked at an article earlier on that identified the divergence in Rotten Tomatoes, critics and audience scores, and they have never been further apart on average, according to the data science that was done by this. So as an example, critics loved and audiences loathed Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which was 49% divided, and audiences loved and critics loathed Venom, which was 51% divided. In 2022, the gap between audience and critic scores on Rotten Tomatoes has become bigger than ever. Audiences have given the top 10 movies on average score more than 19 points higher than critics. By far the biggest difference this century. The only two of this year's 10 movies where audiences and critics are even close

• 3:47Chris Williamson?

  was Top Gun Maverick and The Batman. What do you think that says about the state of modern movies?

• 3:54Speaker 00

  I think they're not making people happy. I think people are watching them and they're coming away fundamentally unsatisfied. And the critics that, I guess they used to kind of trust because they would generally agree on movies. Because I think the actual quality of films was better, but 10, 20 years ago. Now they're diverging because they're beginning to realize that these critics that they used to trust are basically just paid to give positive reviews. And, you know, it's in their interest to be positive because it allows them to keep getting access to film premieres, to get in all those little lovely goodie baskets and stuff that studios send you if you're a professional critic. And, you know, that's what they go on. And so there's now this realization of, wow, these people are really full of crap

• 4:38Speaker 00

  and I can't trust their opinions on anything. And so, yeah, I'm glad that it's finally happened. I'm glad people have woken up to like. Really how rotten that entire industry is. I think rotten dramat was is a good term for it.

• 4:50Chris Williamson?

  That is a situation, though, when critics are poorly reviewing films and the audience is reviewing a film well. So this isn't a case of the critics cozying up to some studio. What's going on there?

• 5:04Speaker 00

  I think in those cases, it may be a case of ideological persuasion in that generally when that happens.

• 5:12Chris Williamson?

  In the movie world, surely not.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  Who would have thought? I think generally when that happens, it's a case of a movie which doesn't align with the current ideology of Hollywood. And audiences generally lap that up because, man, most people are just, they're not left wing, they're not right wing, they're just in the middle. And when they go to the movies, they just want to be entertained. That's all they want. And when they get a movie that gives them that, they generally love it. But then the critics, they don't love it because it's not, it's not spouting the ideology that they've been taught, that they have to, that they have to agree with. And then they have to promote at any cost. And so, yeah, that's generally when that happens.

• 5:55Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting, right? Because movies for a long time were a good vehicle that could be used to put forward an important social movement narrative. It was a way of communicating to the masses in an entertaining and subtle way that this is something that you might have to think about. But it does seem more and more flagrant, more and more mask off, less subtle and more, almost like being flagellated, like being whipped by the film.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  I, yeah, I don't get it. In a lot of cases, I don't get why people would want to watch them. You know, it's, what can I liken it to? Yeah, I mean, I suppose the classic example is something like The Last Jedi from Star Wars. If you go watch that, it's like, you know, I guess I just have to accept now that all white men are just awful at everything and they suck. And that's just that, myself included, you know, so I should just hang my head in shame for the rest of my life. Yeah, it's, it's a strange, it's a strange sort of.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Offering that they're giving us now where we're going to actively hate you as a as a art form. You know, we're going to make our business to make you feel awful about yourself. And if you dare to push back on that and and reject the offering that we're giving you. Then we guess we label you as a bigot or reactionary or whatever, you know, stupid term we label people with these days. There's no actual engagement with criticism anymore and it's it's a frustrating thing. But then again, I feel like more and more people are just kind of seeing through that now. They've they've, like you say, the mask is off and it's becoming very obvious how biased and, you know,

• 7:45Speaker 00

  tilted in one direction is. I think, you know, that that TV show that the kit that came out recently, Velma, I don't know if you've heard about that, but it's it's like this weird attempt to reboot the whole Scooby Doo thing that we watched when we were kids, you know, the kids cartoon. Now it's told from the point of view of Velma and it's all about like every character has been race swapped. Everyone's gay now. The the only character that's been kept as a white guy is Fred, who's now the butt of every single joke. He's an idiot. He can't do anything for himself, all that stuff. And it's like, it's like a parody of of the kind of messages that they were putting out, you know, a few years ago.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  But it's so over the top and ridiculous that it's like every people, every person from every side of the argument is hating on it. I think it's really funny.

• 8:36Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, if you were a well meaning, moderate, left liberal person and this was the popular media that was supposed to represent your side, I would be so ridiculously embarrassed. I I. It's worse to have your point of view or your side of the aisle be misrepresented by this like woke, it's like a parasite that's just embodied what used to be quite a loved institution. Scooby Doo was legendary, right? When we were kids, Scooby Doo was.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  I think it was just, it was, it was just innocent fun, you know? And I think that's, that's what people took it as. And now it's like, God, from what I've heard, because I only watched the first couple of episodes and I was done. But even then, it's like, it's got 15 year old girls in the shower room, you know, like full on nude. And it's got like Velma, who's like, again, the same age in a strip club. It's like, what are you, what are you showing us? What are you doing with this? And it's like, I have to question the mindset of the people who have written this and created it and the executives that signed off on it. This has got to be borderline, you know, this is really distasteful stuff now. And it's like, this all came from a goofy kids TV show from the 1970s about

• 9:55Speaker 00

  like, bunch of, bunch of college students that went around solving mysteries. Like, why, why are you doing this?

• 10:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, we've seen the same thing with She-Hulk, right? That was sort of pretty mask off in terms of how that got repurposed. And the worst one that I've seen recently was Doctor Strange 2. I watched that on a plane before anybody on YouTube had had chance to do a summary explaining why I shouldn't watch it even on a plane. And I got sideswiped by, uh, yeah, I watched a little bit of She-Hulk and then bailed out, but I watched all of Doctor Strange 2 because I was literally trapped in a tin box flying at 35,000 feet.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  But yeah, you watch pretty much anything when you're on a long haul flight, won't you?

• 10:37Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Um, but I mean, it was, it's the same tenor with that, right? It's, I don't know, it's just not, it doesn't feel subtle anymore. There's no progression to the characters, especially if they're female or from a minority. And this is something that I really enjoyed talking to baggage claim about, which is that it patronizes women because it basically makes them out to be incapable of ever dealing with any challenge. They can't overcome anything. They are perfect as they are. There's a moment in Doctor Strange 2 where zombie Benedict Cumberbatch goes back in time to tell America Chavez. The South American daughter of two women that she just needed to believe in herself all along.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  That is the running theme when it comes to these female characters and it's such an unhealthy message to send to people. You know, even like taking our personal opinions out of the equation that it's like, you know, trying to make out that women are just perfect at everything, which, you know, we're all human. None of us are perfect. It's teaching people that you shouldn't need to strive to improve yourself. You shouldn't need to struggle. And when you come across challenges or adversity, the rest of the world just needs to accept that you're amazing the way you are. Imagine if people took that to heart and tried to take that lesson out into the world and apply it to their lives. It would be disastrous for them. They would just get hit with like failure after failure.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  You know, it it it's it used to be such a much more inspiring message that movies gave you about the the power of self-improvement, of of rising to challenges and struggling. And, you know, maybe failing and making mistakes, but learning from them and becoming better as a result. That was a great thing to teach people because that's how you progress in life, you know. So, yeah, to to try and do that, it's not only is it patronizing, but it's really counterproductive for people.

• 12:40Chris Williamson?

  Especially given that a lot of the lessons that people learn about how to exist in the world come from popular media. You know, especially given that these are movies that ostensibly are supposed to help people who perhaps don't come from the perfect sort of background. Maybe they haven't had an amazing parental household, giving them all of the worldly wisdom that they should do to be able to navigate through. Okay, so you are going to, in some regard, like as a movie studio, be a surrogate parent almost, or like a sage or a grandparent in some regard to pass down. These are some kind of timeless truths that you can hold on to. And the timeless truth is if you're a 15 year old mixed race investigator

• 13:23Chris Williamson?

  coming out of high school with a talking dog for a friend. Get naked in the shower and go to a strip club.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  That seems to be the lesson. And yeah, like it's again, to talk about messaging in movies, you know, as you said there, there used to be this acknowledgement that the the older generation had wisdom to impart to the younger generation who were just coming up, you know, they can teach them the lessons that they learned in their lives and, you know, give them something to to prepare them for the challenges that they were going to face. That was a timeless kind of universal concept because that's how people generally get by in life. You can learn things from your elders. But again, there seems to be this movement now in modern movies to do away with that and say that the older generation have nothing to teach you. There's nothing useful you can learn from them. You're just, like I say,

• 14:14Speaker 00

  you're great the way you are. People just need to acknowledge your awesomeness. And, you know, particularly if that older mentor type figure happens to be a man, yeah, there's no way he's not allowed to teach you anything. And you you touched upon this with multiverse of madness like Doctor Strange 2. There was a bit in the TV show WandaVision, which is the one that just leads into Doctor Strange. And people were asking, well, why is he not there? Surely that's exactly the kind of situation he should be involved in because he's he's a magic guy. And Kevin Feige, the guy who runs Marvel, said, well, it would look bad if we had a white man coming in to show Wanda how to use her powers. That's

• 14:56Speaker 00

  the mentality. He's not allowed to do that because he's the wrong sex and he's the wrong ethnicity. That's the we're basically living with like this this weird new age like segregationism in in movies. There's like a set of rules and laws that these movies have to adhere to now when it comes to their storytelling. And this is just one of the rules. Can't have a guy, especially a white guy, teaching a female character anything valuable. He has to be dumb and he has to be useless and she has to be better than him at everything. Fair enough, but like that's it's like trying to tell a story with with an arm with one arm tied behind your back.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  You know, you're crippling the the writer's ability to tell a good story because you're putting so many rules on them. To to try and appease all the ridiculous demands of all the people on social media now who get offended by everything. That you cripple your ability to tell a story. So.

• 15:53Chris Williamson?

  It's also the same when it when it comes to getting awards. Didn't I hear you talk about the fact that you're only eligible for certain awards if you have the right kind of representation, both in front of the camera, behind the camera, in terms of the studio and stuff.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Academy, like for the Oscars, straight up published their guidelines, basically saying you your movie isn't even eligible to be considered for an Oscar unless it's got X percentage of of ethnic minorities, X percentage of women, X percentage of LGBT people. All of that stuff, that is now the defining factors in whether or not your movie is even eligible for consideration for an award of any kind. And again, I just have to ask, like, why? Like, how does how does that improve the quality of a film by just demanding that certain people have to be involved in it? You know, God forbid you would just hire people based on how good they were in other jobs. You know, and that's not going to get any better.

• 16:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, what so I'm going back to the conversation, especially around men.

• 17:00Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think Hollywood hates men so much at the moment?

• 17:06Speaker 00

  Uh, probably a guy named Harvey, like that was definitely part of it, who who was obviously, you know, he he got caught, I obviously did a lot of terrible things and rightly got, you know, imprisoned for it. But the the result was this seismic, you know, shockwave that went through Hollywood and it just became from that point. We can't have, we can't have men in sort of positions of power. We can't have like traditional, strong masculine men in in lead roles anymore. And if if you ever get a character like that, they almost always become the butt of a joke. You know, it's always like, haha, look at this guy thinking he's like Macho Man or whatever, and then he fails at something. Uh, it's always the same.

• 17:50Chris Williamson?

  Like Thor?

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, like Thor, big muscly guy, just becomes an absolute goofy clown because isn't it funny to laugh at them? You know, how many times have you seen a man get kicked in the balls in a Disney movie? It's funny, isn't it? It's really funny when that happens. Not so funny when it happens to you, though. And again, you know, you reverse the genders there. Like, if you showed a woman getting kicked in the crotch, like, suddenly it's not funny anymore. You know, like, the, it would have been a thermonuclear explosion on social media if that was ever shown on a, in a, in a mainstream movie, particularly if it was shown for laughs. It's not gonna happen, but it's okay when it happens to men. You know, it's just this weird double standard. And I think

• 18:32Speaker 00

  it partly, you know, a big part of it is a result of like Harvey and all that crap. And a part of it is just a shift in the kind of culture in Hollywood that I think was perhaps happening anyway. Just trying to, this constant drive to like redefine masculinity, which, you know, often means like getting some skinny, you know, 14-year-old dude and putting him in a dress and like saying, this is masculinity now. Like, yeah, sure it is. Like, whatever. But yeah, that, that kind of dual, almost pincer movement of like, cultural change within Hollywood and

• 19:14Speaker 00

  reaction to, to things that have been exposed within their own ranks. It's just been, you know, men, masculine male heroes are not a viable commodity in movies at the moment. You know, but that's why you get like something, I was just gonna say, that's why when you get the occasional movie that does dare to show them, they usually do really well because people have been starved of this stuff for years.

• 19:39Chris Williamson?

  What would be some examples of that, like Top Gun?

• 19:42Speaker 00

  Probably, yeah. Yeah, it's a pretty good example. Um, yeah, it was like, it was a movie that's combined all of those things together, like we were talking about, you know, the, the aging mentor, who would normally be a subject of mockery. Uh, you know, a different director, a different writer would have portrayed Maverick as completely over the hill and, you know, getting outclassed by all these young people who are, who are faster and better than him. No, this movie dared to say, and it was probably partly because Tom Cruise and he's got an ego on him, saying, no, he's still good at what he does. And you know what? He's got way more experience than you. He's been there and done that and he can kick your ass if he wants to. He's still able to do that. Uh, and look what it did.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  1.5 billion dollars. It was the biggest movie of the year by far. And all these Marvel properties that used to dominate and, and, you know, absolutely wiped the floor with everything else. They were trailing far behind. And it was, I was very happy to see that. It pleased me.

• 20:42Chris Williamson?

  I, so I watched, I've flown a lot over the last year. So almost all of the movies that I've seen have been on planes and I really enjoyed Top Gun, but I didn't think it was ridic, I would have given it maybe a, like a seven point, probably an eight, probably an eight on the Tomato Meter. I think I would have given it. So still good, but kind of shows that the bar isn't exactly set superbly high.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  No, that's, you're, yeah, you're exactly right. Uh, we are just living in a world where the movies that we're getting are so terrible that anything that's just borderline okay is suddenly hailed as a masterpiece. You know, that, that's it. Like it's, it's lowered expectations. And so this is what you get. You know, movies that-

• 21:27Chris Williamson?

  Actually, maybe it's a really smart, it's maybe it's a really smart strategy from the movie studios to just get everybody's expectations so low that they can lowball us with something that's brilliant.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't think so because, well, it's not like they can't produce good movies. They were doing it for decades. But then if you look back to like your favorite movies of all time, I, I'm willing to bet that none of them are, um, newer than about 20 years old. You know, they're, they're probably all from the, the, the 2000s, the early 2000s, um, back through the 90s, the 80s, the 70s. Um, I don't think there'll be anything from the past 10, 15 years. Because the, the, you know, they've become lazy.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  They they've become lazy. They have started relying on big tempo movies, particularly remakes, particularly reboots of things, endless superhero movies. You know, that's been the moneymakers and it's just inspired this culture of laziness in them.

• 22:28Chris Williamson?

  What's going on with how many reboots and remakes are happening at the moment? Is it just that it's too much of a risk to try and start a new franchise?

• 22:39Speaker 00

  I think it's

• 22:43Speaker 00

  on paper, doing a reboot or a remake of something is, it should be a winning strategy because you should in theory have instant access to that devoted fanbase who just want to see their favorite property brought back. Excuse me. And so financially, it seems to make sense. The the problem is that you can't often capture lightning in a bottle. You know, something like Ghostbusters, classic movie, we all loved it back in the day. It worked because, you know, a bunch of really good creative talents all came together, had a great script, a great director, everything just worked perfectly. You know, they tried to do it for the second one back in the 90s. Yeah, it wasn't very good. And then you got

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Ghostbusters 2016. Well, we all know how that turned out. We're gonna, we're gonna reboot it for modern audiences, capitalizing on the Ghostbusters name and look what happened. It was a flop, you know, but it happens over and over again. But it's like they're always trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle from these these past successes because, well, movies are expensive to make now particularly. If you're dropping $200 million on a film, damn man, that's a lot of money to invest. You want a pretty solid guarantee that it's going to be successful. And it used to be that that was, you know, that was a pretty

• 24:08Speaker 00

  good way of doing it. You know, you can market it as we're gonna, we're gonna bring back this great franchise that we've got a huge fanbase for. Everyone will be happy.

• 24:18Chris Williamson?

  Did you see that clip of Matt Damon on First We Feast or Hot Hot Wings where he's talking about why modern movies seem to be less adventurous? Have you seen this clip? Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 24:31Speaker 00

  I I have. Yeah, I guess it's like he's he's crying while eating this stuff.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  I don't know if this is like.

• 24:38Chris Williamson?

  Environment.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know if this is almost like how you inject people with like, you know, truth serum and stuff like their mind is so fogged by the pain of the the hot wings that like they're just gonna spit out straight on truths. Um, I'm trying to remember what exactly he said during that scene.

• 24:55Chris Williamson?

  Says that the death of DVD sales has meant that movie studios can't be as venturous anymore. That you basically got a second bite at the apple of being able to make money. It might not win at the box office, but it can kind of be this ascending underground victory. Uh, and he uses this example of someone that said, it's gonna cost me uh, 25 million for this, half of it goes to this. I need to double the spend on that. So I need 100 million to make the money back. And the only way I'm gonna do that is through DVD sales. What's your thoughts on that?

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's very true. Um, there was very much the long tail of sales that would come after the theatrical release. And yeah, there's been plenty of movies that, um, you know, they didn't make their budget uh, when they were in movie theaters, but they ultimately became profitable years later, just through DVD sales and all that stuff. Um, so yeah, there's, there's absolutely something to be said for that. Um. Yeah, it's, it's, I guess it's just a different world, you know, um, with streaming, obviously that's radically altered the equation. Um, you know, the moment something gets released onto streaming, it's gonna be on, on the high seas and that's gonna take a huge chunk of your

• 26:05Speaker 00

  revenue as well. And people just getting it for free. Um, and yeah, I, I guess there, there's just this general climate of risk aversion, you know, what is the things that makes money at the moment? Um, the other thing I was gonna say is the, the death of this or mid-budget movie, they don't really exist anymore. You know, there used to be a time when you would get your big, you know, blockbusters that was like 100 million dollar budget. Uh, you would get your little indie movies that were done for practically nothing, but then you would get in between films that had like 20, 30 million allocated to them. Not a huge amount, but then they don't have to make a huge amount in order to become profitable. So I think that's been a big change as well.

• 26:49Chris Williamson?

  One thing that I definitely hadn't considered was that Harvey Weinstein might have been the gateway drug or the pebble at the top of the avalanche that caused downstream from this for a bunch of other problems to occur. I understood that it is not particularly popular at the moment to uphold men, particularly white men, as being competent in the media. I didn't realise that this would be this sort of pincer movement, two-pronged attack, both coming from the internal milieu that's happening inside of the studios in the production world generally, and then also being fed back up from what's happening in society as well. That's quite interesting.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  I think as well, like, we now are past the time when writers in Hollywood actually lived lives. You know, if you went back to the 70s and 80s in Hollywood, these writers, man, most of them had lived a life. Like, they might have fought in Vietnam or something. They probably came from rough upbringings. They had to fight their way to get into Hollywood and, you know, probably just had interesting life experience that they could bring forward to their writing on screen. The writers that you get now, they would go on to some, you know...

• 28:12Chris Williamson?

  So that is, that sound is, I'm currently in Austin, Texas, and there's been a freeze storm overnight, which means that every tree has got water on it, which then freezes, and then the trees snap. So I may go outside of here and find that there's a tree that's fallen, but the roof seems to be okay at the moment, so we will, we will continue.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  Damn. All right, we'll keep going. Well, as long as, as long as you're alive, we'll keep going. All right. Yeah, so the writers now, like, their career path is basically either mommy or daddy is already in the industry, and so I get straight in, or I go to some liberal arts college where I'm taught to hate, you know, white people and men and stuff for four years, then get into Hollywood. I say all the right things about down with the patriarchy and stuff, and I just get hired. And so I don't have any life experience. I've never faced adversity. I've never had to struggle for anything in my entire life, and I don't know how to bring that forward into my characters. And so...

• 29:17Speaker 00

  The the things I know how to write about are you're awesome the way you are because you've already succeeded because I've succeeded from from doing very little. Uh, and that's that's how they that's how they rationalize life. Um, and so again, you know, it it all feeds into this this culture, I guess, that we have now in Hollywood of narcissism, of selfishness, of, um, you know, I'm the most important thing in the world and I'm perfect. Uh, and you know, it's not about improving yourself anymore. It's not about taking on challenges. It's just about everyone else accepting you for what you are right now.

• 29:57Chris Williamson?

  I've also heard you talk about why it's unpopular for men to be seen as stoic anymore. What's your insight there?

• 30:06Speaker 00

  Well, again, yeah, um, a stoic man is a toxic man in the minds of Hollywood writers. Whereas I see it as like a necessary, um, survival skill, really, throughout most of human history, like you, you can't have everyone, uh, be high-strung emotional idiots who just go to pieces the moment like things start going wrong. There needs to be stoic people who can deal with problems, um, logically and don't complain all the time about things, you know, it's people used to live hard lives. I guess that's the the point I'm making. Previous generations would be shocked and appalled by how easy we have it now, but they they used to struggle and they used to have to put up with a lot of hardship and

• 30:51Speaker 00

  you develop stoicism as a result of that. That's what allowed you to deal with it because you couldn't sit and complain all the time because there was no one to complain to. You had to get on and do things. Um, we don't live in that world now. And so that idea of stoicism, the stoic man, um, who who gets things done and who doesn't complain about it, um. That is seen as a toxic relic of a different time. And I think particularly because of the the writers that you have, you've either got women now in Hollywood who don't, who are threatened by that, or you have effeminate men who've never endured hardship, uh, who are envious of that. And so either side wants to destroy it and get rid of it and mock it because they don't understand it.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  Um, and so that's, yeah, that's what you have now. You don't get stoic male characters. They have to be constantly joking. They have to be constantly like doing the goofy, um, self-conscious ironic humor about themselves. They usually have to mess things up. Like it's just, uh, I don't know about you. I just, that's not the kind of men that I've known in my entire life. Like they, they don't act like that. That's a caricature Hollywood bullshit version of what a man is meant to act like. But that's what they, that's what they come up with.

• 32:10Chris Williamson?

  It's not accurate the way that women act either. Most of the women that I know, especially the ones that I respect and admire, can deal with difficult things. They can go through hardship.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  And it's not a, it's not a unique, yeah, it's not a uniquely male trait, uh, in the slightest. And you know, it's not that, uh, women would be expected to, to be, you know, super feminine and, and, uh, you know, hyper emotional about everything. Not at all. Um, there, there's usually a little bit of granular sort of variation between them for sure. Um, but again, their idea of like writing a strong female character now is just someone who's a total asshole, who is like super aggressive, super domineering, wins every argument, never gets challenged on anything, um, doesn't have any compassion or anything for, for other people. Uh, again,

• 33:07Speaker 00

  that's, that's not really how I've known women to act.

• 33:11Chris Williamson?

  You use this really good example of the animated Mulan movie compared with the live action remake that they did. And in the original one, the girl that joins this fighting force is smaller and doesn't have experience and needs to work incredibly hard to overcome her physical limitations of being physically smaller than everybody else. And she has to use ingenuity and different tools and she has to be smarter and she has to work harder. And that invests you in the character. I care about her outcomes because an underdog story is one that you're always going to resonate with. And then it comes to the live action version, which is a girl pretends to be a guy because there

• 33:52Chris Williamson?

  aren't enough soldiers and then is simply better than everybody else because of some ineffable inherent embodied thing like super Chi, estrogen Chi or something. And because of the estrogen Chi, it means that she can win, beat people that have been doing it for much longer than her, that have worked harder than her. She doesn't have to go through any difficulty or any challenge, apart from people not believing in her primarily because of her gender. And then she can save the day. Like, that's not an empowering story. Any woman that thinks that that's an empowering story for your daughter to have doesn't have the same definition of empowerment that I do.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's it. It's the perfect example, really, of the kind of ridiculous thinking that you have now in movie making when it comes to writing characters like that. Like you say, the original gave you a great message, not just for little girls, but for anyone, really. Like, you might not always be the strongest, you might not be the fastest or whatever. But you can still prevail through, through working hard, through ingenuity, through creativity. All of those things can, can help you overcome limitations. But yeah, the, the modern movie is basically saying, you have no limitations. You're amazing. Just everyone else needs to accept how amazing you are. It's such a destructive message to give people because life is meant to be about improving yourself. It's meant to be

• 35:15Speaker 00

  about trying and failing and picking yourself up and doing better next time. That's, that's the point of it.

• 35:22Chris Williamson?

  I learned a new word a couple of weeks ago called fan baiting. Have you heard of this?

• 35:26Speaker 00

  Hmm. Made a video about it, in fact.

• 35:30Chris Williamson?

  Did you really? Explain to people who don't know what fan baiting is.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  So in broad terms, fan baiting is the idea of we're going to create a new TV show or whatever. It's probably going to be an adaptation or a remake of something that you love. What we're going to do, though, is we're going to race and or gender swap most of the characters. We're going to make a huge delight of the fact that we're doing that. And we're basically saying to the fans of this this franchise, hey, we're changing everything that you love. Doesn't it make you mad? Don't you want to? Don't you want to lash out? Don't you want to criticize us? Go on, do it. Do it. See what happens. And that's what happens, you know? People rise to the bait. They get mad about it.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Inevitably, some people will go too far and they will be genuine sexist or racist. They'll say things that are very inappropriate. And those people get, those comments that they make get caught, they get captured, they get spread out for everyone to see by the the actual company that's doing this, the studio. And they'll say, look, this fan base is toxic. The only people that hate this product are racist and sexist. You don't want to be like that, do you? You don't want to be one of those people. You want to be a good person. You want to support the thing that we're doing, don't you? Support it. Just just go along with it. And that's it. That's what it is. It shames people into supporting something which is fundamentally shit.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  It's fan baiting. It baits people into doing the thing that they want so that they can they can trumpet it as, well, we're just on the right side here. And everyone else who criticizes our product is on the wrong side. That's all it is.

• 37:16Chris Williamson?

  There is only so far that you can push people through guilt and shame to be able to do something. It's an interesting analogy with some of the issues that came up in the early 2010s. When Fifty Shades had done really, really well as a novel and the dark romance genre generally was taken off. Everything was great, but there were some concerns that the kind of erotica novels that women were buying were showing a very competent, very assertive, very dominant protagonist in the man. So what they did was they tried to replace those men on the front cover with much more kind, gentle, more agreeable, less dominant men. And guess what? They didn't sell well, right?

• 38:00Speaker 00

  The heart wants what the heart wants. What can I say?

• 38:03Chris Williamson?

  Dude, your, your money and your arousal are two things that you don't tend to give away without actually genuinely wanting to. And the fanbase thing is so fascinating. We saw this with, what was that, Bros? Boy, what was it? Bros?

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Bros, yeah, Bros.

• 38:19Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  I never watched it, but I know, yeah, yeah, I know the director basically was like, you know, if you don't watch this, you're a bigot. And it's like, that's just mask off, like, straight up. It's the equivalent of basically getting down on your knees and begging people to watch your, your show or your TV or your movie, you know? It's pathetic and it's sad and it's just, it really exposed how bad that stuff was.

• 38:44Chris Williamson?

  So I understand your rationale saying that movie studios are concerned about losing money, which means that they do something that they think is going to be both sociopolitically popular and they're rebooting and remaking existing franchises because that seems to be an easier way to go. But surely the type of turnout that we've been seeing at the cinema, especially post pandemic, right? Which is going to have had a bit of an impact, but more so because movies don't seem that compelling. And if the director is lambasting me for being too much of a homophobe to go and watch a gay rom com, that's, that's definitely going to put me off, no matter my predilection around that sort of a movie.

• 39:27Chris Williamson?

  Surely studios are eventually going to have to create things that people want to actually watch, or else they're going to go broke. Like, is there not hope in the future that the market is going to reform these production studios into making things that we actually want to see?

• 39:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, there absolutely is. Um, the thing you have to keep in mind is that like all of this stuff has like a three year lead time. So like you're you're watching movies now that are coming out in movie theaters. They were commissioned in like 2019. Because, you know, it takes a long time to make a film, obviously. Like, you know, you've got a script, you've got a cast people, you've got to direct the thing, you've got to shoot the thing, uh, then do all your post-production, then get it on its slate, then get it marketed. So, um, in a sense, what you're seeing in cinemas right now are ideas from like three years ago. And that's why we're still getting shit movies that that do all this stuff. Because probably Hollywood has now recognized

• 40:25Speaker 00

  the the mistakes that they made, or they're starting to recognize it. Uh, and so that they're starting to make those changes to their productions, but that's not going to come out for a couple more years. You know, it takes time. And this is why you you often hear from people saying it's going to get worse before it gets better, because it probably will. You know, Warner Brothers is a great example of that. They had been losing money for years on their their DC movies and stuff. Um, they brought in a guy called Walter Hamada, who was wanting to take it in the the super woke direction where you were gonna do away with Superman, do away with Batman, they were gonna get replaced by Supergirl and Batgirl. Um, and it was gonna be them and Wonder Woman, like it was gonna be all female. Um, that I think their race swapped a couple of them as

• 41:09Speaker 00

  well. You know, all of that woke stuff just distilled into one perfect triumvirate of nonsense. Um, he's been fired. He he he's gone now. They brought in a guy called David Zaslove. He looked at all this stuff that was coming up, and he was like, fucking no, and canceled a whole bunch of it. Um, canceled Batgirl when it was made. It was ready to go. They spent a hundred million dollars on this thing. And he's like, no, it's so shit, it's not even gonna get shown ever. It's gonna go in a vault. Nobody can ever see it ever. You know, Case it in lead and drop it to the bottom of the Atlantic. Exactly. Yeah, like burn it and salt the ground and stuff. But that's, you know, that was that change of direction, because they could no longer afford to indulge this nonsense,

• 41:54Speaker 00

  because they were running out of money. They had to bring in a guy who was hard-nosed, a businessman who just, uh, hopefully had an eye for making good quality films. And it's happened to them, it's gonna happen to other studios as well. It just takes time.

• 42:09Chris Williamson?

  That lead time thing is so interesting and I didn't think about it at all. I also know how long it takes to make video games and that there is a maybe a concern. You're talking maybe seven years, between five and seven years to make a, you know, a pretty good game. I wonder whether computer games are going to go that way as well. I would guess that the studios that make games are a little bit more in touch with what their core audience is after. But, you know, there was a news story partway through last year saying that the new GTA was going to feature lower rates of violence and it was going to restrict some of the things that you could do, which was going to be commensurate with more progressive understandings

• 42:52Chris Williamson?

  of social policy and a blah, blah, blah.

• 42:57Chris Williamson?

  They are going to get much more immediate feedback from their fans saying, fuck no, than you can from a cinema, I think.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, know your audience, guys, come on. You don't play a GTA game to be politically correct. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, they've spent 20 years allowing people to like shoot up entire streets worth of people, run folk over with cars, you know, murder prostitutes, whatever, all the like, whatever depraved stuff people can come up with, you could probably do it in those games. But that was just part of the anarchic fun of them. And so to try and suddenly develop a social conscience now, it's like, oof, no, that's not why people play GTA.

• 43:38Chris Williamson?

  That ship has sailed.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can't, you can't, you can't suddenly rebrand yourself as a responsible company, like, you know, restricting all this stuff. But yeah, I think the reaction was pretty severe.

• 43:53Speaker 00

  And I think with gaming, I'm trying to think what I can equate it to. There was something, there was like the Battlefield games, you know, first person shooters, and they tried to release one called Battlefield 5 a couple of years ago. Set here in World War Two, but it had women fighting on the front lines with cybernetic arms and stuff, Asian men fighting in the, you know, in the European battlefield against Germans. Just, you know, ridiculous, but it's like they tried, they put that in the trailer, they showed that stuff and the reaction was apocalyptic, like fans absolutely and blasted the game as ridiculous and it sold terribly as a result, you know, so

• 44:36Speaker 00

  that these things can happen, the backlash works in some cases.

• 44:41Chris Williamson?

  What, so going beyond the interjection of race and gender and sexuality, it does also seem like there's a kind of a negative, very pessimistic tenor to a lot of movies as well, that they don't seem to put across a lot of genuine hope. What do you think's going on there? Is that reflecting what our culture is like now? Is that impacting on culture? Is it just the fact that we're coming out of the back end of, I don't know, a period where people aren't feeling too happy?

• 45:13Speaker 00

  I, I think so. I think it ties into this idea of there's fewer just like heroic heroes, I suppose. And there's, there's not the kind of patriotic movies that I think you used to get. You know, if you, if you look back to the 2000s particularly, you know, for rather obvious reasons, you know, America was fighting the war on terror. And so there was a need and a desire for heroism, for, for pro-American movies, for, you know, for just patriotism. And that doesn't really exist now. And again, I don't know if it

• 45:56Speaker 00

  reflects a kind of lack of confidence. I don't know if it reflects Hollywood's attitude to all things sort of American. I don't know if there's weird associations there where it's like they, they feel like it's dangerous to be, be too, you know, pro your own country. I'm not sure what the, this, the idea behind it is, but yeah, I get. What you're saying in that there just doesn't seem to be that optimistic view of like the whole west, the whole idea of western culture, I suppose, in movies.

• 46:28Chris Williamson?

  But they'll repurpose Fast and Furious nine and Dumbledore Secrets of Albus, or whatever it's called, to make it appropriate for a Chinese audience.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's interesting that, isn't it? When money's involved.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, man, I mean, I've, we've seen it in ridiculous ways, like they, they tried to market Black Panther to the Chinese who aren't very keen on the subject matter. And so they, they, they took Chadwick Boseman's face from the poster and put the, the Black Panther mask on him. So you couldn't see what was underneath.

• 47:03Chris Williamson?

  You're kidding.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  To make it, no, that they straight up did that. They erased him from his own movie to try and make it more acceptable to Chinese audiences. And I thought the days of kowtowing to China were done because it, it seemed for a while, basically all Disney movies were getting banned there. They just couldn't get a release. And so you kind of thought, well, okay, maybe they'll just think, fuck it. If the Chinese won't accept us anyway, there's no point trying to pander to them. Let's do something really crazy, like be pro America. You know, it, it's almost like we're an American company and like our whole, like Walt Disney's entire outlook

• 47:46Speaker 00

  on life was like a fondness for all things Americana. You know, he was a patriotic guy. He loved America. It'd be nice if they could live up to that. But no, they seem to have struck some kind of deal. I think now that Bob Iger is now back in charge, they seem to have smoothed things out with the Chinese government. And I've heard, I could be wrong, but these are the rumors that all the Marvel cast, all the Marvel actors are now being sent on little training programs to teach them what's acceptable to say about China so that they don't say anything offensive. You know, they don't mention Taiwan or anything like that.

• 48:23Chris Williamson?

  So no one does a John Cena again?

• 48:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:26Chris Williamson?

  And it's just John at the front. You walk in and you've got Chris Hemsworth and you've got Robert Downey Jr. And then stood at the front in a teacher's outfit, you've just got

• 48:35Speaker 00

  John Cena. Don't end up like me.

• 48:37Chris Williamson?

  John Cena. And he comes up with his entrance music. That's what I'm about.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  I, I, but that speech that he had to give, and fair play for him, you know, to be able to speak Mandarin, but to have to basically grovel and plead forgiveness because he dared to suggest that Taiwan was a country. My God, it was one of the most humiliating things I think I've ever seen. And I just think, imagine if that had happened back in the 80s or 90s. You know what I mean? Like, that would never have happened. But now this is the world that we live in. So.

• 49:16Chris Williamson?

  I mean, so I, it's hilarious and I've spoken about it a ton and it is embarrassing and cringe worthy and evidently just straight up capitalism in its worst form. However, if there was the risk of the entire studio that you were with and all of your cast members and all of the people that you'd worked with and every single person basically having 50% or 30% or something of their revenue hanging on whether or not you're prepared to say something in Mandarin for 90 seconds, the pressure is absolutely astronomical. I, I still think it's a super cringe worthy thing to do, but the situation in which you wake

• 50:00Chris Williamson?

  up that morning and get the message from your manager or the studio saying, hi, mate, you shouldn't have said that about Taiwan. We need you to fix this. There is a lot of pressure.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  I think in that specific instance, because the movie was made with the idea that it was going to get released in China. And so like, it would have been budgeted for that and so on. Okay, there's not much you can do. Like, if you've screwed up, you're going to have to try and fix it, whatever way. But you have to ask yourself, you know, if you're actually planning your movie in the first place, what's your better strategy here? Is it? You know, we, we uh forgo any kind of American patriotism and we kind of like incorporate weird uh sort of pseudo communist like messaging into our movie to make it acceptable to China. So we get like an extra 20% revenue.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  Or do we go super patriotic for America and for like pro western culture? And get like an extra 30 or 40% because people actually love uh what we've done over here. I know which way I'd rather go. You know, I mean, like, I know which would be my preference, but that's just me.

• 51:08Chris Williamson?

  Game of Thrones finished, the main series finished and pretty much everybody was disappointed with it, which is a shame because your availability bias is always going to cause you to remember the most recent part of it. You know, if it, if it had a shit season five and had then come back and smashed everything after that, then we might have more fond memories of it.

• 51:29Chris Williamson?

  How many seasons of House of the Dragon? Do you think it's going to take for people to feel fondly again about the Game of Thrones franchise? Because I certainly know as a huge Game of Thrones fan that after the first season of House of the Dragon being really, really enjoyable. I thought it was really cool. Uh it, it has dampened at least probably 50% of my bad feelings toward that entire sort of organization. What's your thoughts?

• 52:00Speaker 00

  I think we're almost there, actually. Yeah, I think uh season one of House of the Dragon was really good. It surprised a lot of people. It surprised me. I, I predicted it was going to be pretty shit. Uh but it turned out to be really good, really smart, really well done. Uh I think a good season two will cement it. And I think people will be back invested in the world of Game of Thrones. It's not like people aren't going to suddenly think that uh season eight was great all of a sudden. And that's still a terrible thing, but they will at least be invested in the world of Westeros again. Um so I think as long as they don't screw up season two, uh they're, they're laughing. And yeah, I must admit it's a great comeback story. Nobody expected this.

• 52:43Chris Williamson?

  I agree, man. I it's the steaming pile of turd that was season eight can't be extinguished this late. That's already been burned to a crisp and like you say, salted the earth afterward. But yeah, I mean, that's good. I listened. I've actually just finished. I think it's called A World of Ice and Fire, or whatever, whatever the prequel book is that this series of House of the Dragon is based on. So I got super into it and I said, oh, I'm gonna get the book and listen to it. One bad thing has been that I now know everything that happens in season two, three and four, because obviously I've read the book. But I'm also super excited because season two is way more exciting than season one, which is pretty cool. Another thing, which I

• 53:24Chris Williamson?

  thought was a real surprise victory, another airplane watch was Bullet Train.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I like that.

• 53:33Chris Williamson?

  I thought was absolutely phenomenal.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  Just a good, good fun action comedy, you know, didn't take itself too seriously. Didn't demand too much. And I've, you know, I've said this many times on my channel, there's a lot to be said for a simple concept well executed. And I think Bullet Train just does that perfectly. Nice, easy movie to watch. Does have some smart like moments in it with like how things are set up in the early parts of the movie and then they get you payoff later on. I thought the characters were really good, really good fun. I loved Orin, Tangerine. Yeah, everyone loves Tangerine in that movie.

• 54:12Chris Williamson?

  It had that, um, had that kind of snatch slash lock, stock slash.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  Yes, very much. Yeah.

• 54:20Chris Williamson?

  Style to it.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, very much did. It was kind of, yeah, I want more movies like that. I want Guy Ritchie to start making good movies again. But yeah, I think it was just, yeah, a well executed movie. Didn't demand too much from anyone. And yeah, I enjoyed it. It was nice. It had no messaging in it either. So that was nice.

• 54:43Chris Williamson?

  Steady way. And also, I mean, it's racially representative. There was a big black guy that liked Thomas the Tank Engine. There was a bunch of Asian people in there. There was a bunch of.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  I have now, I kid you not, I have now started to perceive the world in terms of Thomas the Tank Engine. Yeah, like someone, someone who's been a total asshole. It's like, you're a diesel.

• 55:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay. I don't think I know my Thomas the Tank Engine lore isn't sufficiently deep for me to actually be able to use that effectively, but maybe it's a secret philosophy that I need to work out. So something that I was disappointed by, again, from a plane journey, was Jurassic World Dominion. What went wrong there?

• 55:27Speaker 00

  Everything. I mean, all of these Jurassic World movies are terrible as far as I'm concerned. They're all dumb. They're all derivative. They're just recycling the same ideas that we had in the very first movie in 1993. I remember being a little kid and going to see Jurassic Park and thought it was amazing. And it still is amazing. But yeah, it's just a peak example of our lack of ideas, or Hollywood's lack of creativity. We're just going to recycle the same stuff over and over again. So yeah, the whole concept of like the dinosaurs and stuff is played out. Bringing back the original cast was just a desperation move because they

• 56:11Speaker 00

  knew no one was going to care about this movie. But the moment you say, well, you know, Alan Grant and Ellie and Ian Malcolm, they're all going to be together again on screen. You know, there's a little bit of interest there, but they were so underused. It was really clear that the script had no idea what to do with them. They're just wandering around looking confused most of the time. So yeah, man, it was just, it was a desperation move to try and milk a bit more money out of the Jurassic Park franchise. There was not an ounce of creativity behind it. And just monumentally dumb. Even now, I think back to like the stupid locust

• 56:55Speaker 00

  plague and everything. I just think that that didn't get an ounce of development. It was just a random idea that someone threw in. Awful.

• 57:03Chris Williamson?

  Yes, it does seem really lazy. I mean, I have Driven an ATV, a four-wheel ATV through the valley that the first ever helicopter shot coming into

• 57:20Chris Williamson?

  I've driven an ATV through that valley in Hawaii and it was sick. It was me on my own, travelling on my own and a ton of Chinese tourists. And I was screaming that theme tune to myself.

• 57:31Chris Williamson?

  And so I have very fond memories of the Jurassic Park franchise. You get to go through, what was the genetically engineered dinosaur from the first new one?

• 57:43Speaker 00

  Oh, Indominus Rex.

• 57:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yes. So, you know, it's got the scratch marks on the inside of the wall where it tried to get out. You can drive your little ATV through the door that's open and you go through. And I'm like, this is like, this is really cool. And I do have fond memories of that first one, but it's gone very quickly downhill. They're kind of force fed this random extra mother of the daughter that the daughter's not her daughter, it's a clone of her back into the film, even though nobody mentioned her for the entirety of the first thing.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  And of course, she was secretly the one who developed everything, all the technology behind Jurassic Park. It's just no one thought to mention her back in the day. And it's like, yeah, classic retcon example. It's like, how dumb do you think we are?

• 58:28Chris Williamson?

  What can you tell people the story of what happened with Superman's lip when he was filming the most recent?

• 58:41Chris Williamson?

  Because I learned this, I learned this from you. I learned this from you.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  And to this day, I kid you not, I can look at pictures of Henry Cavill with that fake lip and it makes me laugh. But, um, okay, the, the short version is they had done the original version of Justice League. Zack Snyder was directing it. The studio were unhappy because his previous movies hadn't done well. They wanted to lighten the tone and they wanted to make it funnier, all that stuff. He couldn't do it. And then he was forced to drop out of the project because of a family tragedy. So they brought in Joss Whedon to lighten the tone and he was basically told fix this movie, turn it into the Avengers. And so that was going to require extensive reshoots. You know, they were going to have to bring it back. All the actors shoot like, you know,

• 59:28Speaker 00

  loads of new footage to try and fix this movie and make it fun and upbeat and all that. So they brought back Ben Affleck, who was in the middle of a divorce and he was alcoholic at the time. He hadn't trained in months and so he was about 30 pounds heavier, looked like a completely different person. So he was brought back in. He literally, his face changes from scene to scene, like it's weird. And they also brought back Henry Cavill, who was in the middle of shooting Mission Impossible Fallout. And he'd grown a sweet, sweet tash for that one, which was great. But the, I think it was Paramount who did it. They wouldn't give him permission to shave off his moustache so that he could wear a fake one. So they could

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  do these reshoots. So the only option was get him in Superman costume with his moustache and everything, and then we'll just digitally remove it later. But again, because everything was done to these insanely tight time scales, they didn't have time to do it properly. And so you've just got this ridiculous mismatched mouth with like lips that don't line up and oh, it's, it's one of the saddest things I think I've ever seen, but it's also hilarious.

• 1:00:42Chris Williamson?

  I can't wait until the day when I have a job where I've got a contractually obliged moustache. I feel like that's when you know they've made it.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  I just love because he could so easily have worn a fake moustache and it would have looked 100% convincing, like actors do it all the time. But I honestly feel like the studio just wanted to be dicks and said, nah, you're not shaving it off.

• 1:01:05Chris Williamson?

  Stick the middle finger up to DCU. Absolutely.

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, Warner Brothers, nah, you're gonna have to spend millions of dollars removing that. And I always laugh about it. And I always laugh thinking like there's CGI artists that signed up for this movie thinking we're going to be rendering crazy like alien battles and landscapes and explosions and stuff. And instead they're told, no, you've got to work on Henry Cavill's lips.

• 1:01:29Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you're the Henry Cavill's lip department.

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Chris Williamson?

  Congratulations on working on your first DC Universe movie. You're going to take on a very, very important role here. You and Henry Cavill's upper lip are going to become intimately familiar with each other. And I need you to remove it frame by frame. Thank you.

• 1:01:48Speaker 00

  I mean, maybe, maybe they did a really shit job. And so like, you know, they did it on purpose. Almost it's like, we've been given the worst role in the entire movie. We're just going to absolutely screw it up. I don't know. But yeah, it's, it's a great piece of cinema lore.

• 1:02:03Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I also learned another piece of cinema lore from you that Nick Cage was going to be Superman. Briefly.

• 1:02:10Speaker 00

  He was, he was, yeah. Not so briefly for like three years. I think he was attached to it. Yeah, this was a piece of legendary failure on Hollywood's part. They wanted to do another Superman movie. They wanted to cast a new edgy, you know, cool actor. And Nick Cage was like super cool at the time. It's hard to believe now, but he was. And so, yeah, he was attached to the project. It was going to have Tim Burton directing it. Unfortunately, Tim Burton came in and decided he wanted to change the entire script. It dragged on for years and eventually the studio interfered too much. Tim Burton walked away, Nick Cage walked away. The whole project failed and I think they spent about $30 million

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  on a film that they didn't shoot a single frame of footage on. Incredible waste of money. But there it is.

• 1:03:01Chris Williamson?

  That is wild.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  What's even better is like, if this movie had gone into production, the plan was that they were going to have a tie in with the Joel Schumacher Batman movies at the time, which was the George Clooney one. So you were going to have Nick Cage, George Clooney, you know, fighting crime together and potentially even leading into a Justice League movie. And I just think that would have been fantastic. Goofy.

• 1:03:32Chris Williamson?

  That would have been a good competitor for whatever the the non Snyder Cut thing was that they ended up doing.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  I honestly, yeah, yeah. When I think about how safe and boring and bland movies are now, especially superhero ones, I think something like that would be so shit, but so amazing at the same time.

• 1:03:52Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes. I don't know, man. I mean, the the DCU generally is just, I've never got into it. I've never, ever, ever felt as compelled. And I mean, you know, like Marvel's, whatever, what is it now? Generation four for Marvel?

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  They they phase five, they're into now, yeah.

• 1:04:11Chris Williamson?

  Phase phase five. I mean, that that was bad. Endgame really was kind of the endgame of all of the stuff that was good about that. But I mean, that period that we had, we were so spoiled when you actually look back at that. Yeah, there was some kind of misses. But for the most part, that was a really great series of superhero movies, big budget, quite classic storylines, compelling protagonists, good enemies. You there's there's humor in there, but it's not stupid. There's role models in there, but they're not patronizing. It was great. And then, yeah, it feels like we blew our load very soon. It was like the premature parade for the early 2010s. And now we're left in this sort of wasteland, looking for scraps on the floor.

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I I think it may be that superhero movies are now moving into the parody phase, which is generally the last phase of a genre before it dies off. And I'm fine with that. We've had 20 years of this stuff now, kind of ready for something else to to, you know, take the center stage in Hollywood. But yeah, whatever, whatever Marvel became, you know, however much they they were probably victims of their own success, and they've eventually gone off the rails. We'll see if they maybe pick up in phase five, but they at least flew before they crashed and burned. Like, whereas it feels like DC never got off the ground. And it's frustrating because they had, without doubt, the best characters. You know, before

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  all of this, before Marvel took off, who the hell had ever heard of Iron Man or the Guardians of the Galaxy? Outside of the like, comic book industry, outside of like, people who are really into that stuff, who had ever heard of any of those characters? Who had heard of, you know, Captain America or anything? But everyone had heard of Superman, everyone heard of Batman, everyone heard of Wonder Woman. DC had those characters, they had them ready to go, they could have been a genuine alternative to Marvel, you know, just some, something on the same level, if not even bigger. Uh, if they'd been properly managed, but they left it too late, they tried to play catch up, they rushed everything, they screwed it up, turn up time after time.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  Um, and were constantly trying to fix their mistakes without understanding what the mistakes were. I think the, the DC on film over the past 10 years, that's going to go down as one of the biggest wastes of talent and time and money and potential in all of cinema history.

• 1:06:41Chris Williamson?

  What about this fallout from Justin Roiland recently? So for the people that don't know, one of the two writers, creators from Rick and Morty has been popped for some pretty incriminating text messages to both women and girls. It seems like he's got an alcohol problem and this has been going on for quite a long time and it seems to be pretty widespread. He's kind of part of this, I've called, I've been calling it the, uh, the second me too, or the internet me too. With Andrew Callahan from Chan, Channel Five, uh, Crystalia with the Crystalia problem documentary that just came out. Uh, Justin Roiland, you've got this sort of new wave of, of guys that have kind of been popped by this.

• 1:07:26Chris Williamson?

  It seems like Rick and Morty had already started to lose some of its core fan base in any case. Some people felt it was falling off the wagon. I feel like this might be a final nail in the coffin.

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, man, I, I, I agree. Like I watched the first few seasons and I was entranced by it. It was super clever. Witty, edgy, you know, just great fun, great, um, great sort of sci-fi comedy. I think it, as it developed, it became more mainstream and so it started to preach the message, which is, you know, obviously I've talked about a lot on my channel. And it started to turn people off because it's like, it just became a sellout really.

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  And with Roiland, yeah, man, like not only have you lost 50% of your writing team, but you've also lost literally the voice for Rick and Morty. So I don't really understand how the show is meant to continue without him. You know, it's just.

• 1:08:25Chris Williamson?

  I forgot, I fucking forgot that he voices the two, the two characters.

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  How are you, how are you gonna? It's like, yeah, you're Rick and Morty. How can we, how can we have Rick and Morty without Rick and Morty like?

• 1:08:38Chris Williamson?

  Well, you're not going to be able to, uh, two and a half men your way through by just swapping out one of the protagonists with this one. He, he is the protagonist.

• 1:08:48Speaker 00

  That's it. Yeah. I mean, you, you probably get a voice actor who can approximate his, his voice, but like people are going to know it's not the same. And yeah, man, I just think this is the final nail in the coffin for Rick and Morty. I think it's just done.

• 1:09:02Chris Williamson?

  What a shame. What is coming out that you are most excited about over the next couple of years?

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  Uh, so absolutely nothing. Uh, I hate all of modern cinema and I want it to die.

• 1:09:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  I, I, no, I mean, I, I joke, um, probably Dune two. Um, I'll be interested to watch that because I very much enjoyed the first one. And, uh, yeah, I think that's, uh, that's hopefully going to be good. You know, I've read the book and, uh, and loved it like as a teenager. So it's, it's nice to see a good adaptation on screen. Uh, so something like that. God, I'm trying to think of anything else really that's exciting me. Nothing from Marvel I care about.

• 1:09:42Chris Williamson?

  Oh shit. Have you seen, uh, have you seen Severance?

• 1:09:47Speaker 00

  No, people have been recommending that to me though.

• 1:09:50Chris Williamson?

  So I've only one episode in. I'm only one episode in, uh, for the people that haven't heard about this, I don't even know what it is at the moment. It's I guess like a sort of science fiction-y drama. It's about, uh, people that go to work at a particular place and they can't take their memories from inside of work outside or from outside inside, uh, and they have to sign this contract. And, uh, I'm only one episode in. I, I was pretty enthralled by it to start with, because there's a lot of questions. Why have these people agreed to this job? All of the jobs that seem, uh, really kind of pointless. You don't really understand what's going on. So there's just a lot of questions. So that's, that's definitely that and The Last of Us.

• 1:10:32Chris Williamson?

  Uh, two things that I've been. Pretty impressed by recently, but looking forward, uh, the, the, the future sadly, I fear might be as bleak as you're saying. I don't know of anything really apart from watching, uh, Harry Potter Hogwarts legacy playthrough videos on YouTube. There isn't much that I've been ridiculously excited by.

• 1:10:55Speaker 00

  I mean, I'll, I'll be, I'll be happy to watch, uh, Cobra Kai, season six, because I think that's going to be the final season. Um, House of the Dragon, season two, I'll be, I'll be interested in the next Stranger Things. Cause that, that's a show that really redeemed itself as well. That really came back from the brink. Uh, so probably TV is going to be the more exciting thing for me, I guess.

• 1:11:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, um, that's been what's salvaged a lot of, uh, I mean, look at my watch time. Like if I go and, and you go into Netflix, I'm not going on to movies. If I'm struggling, you know, when you're deep in the Netflix hole, desperately trying to find something, I'm going into either documentaries or series. I'm just never going into movies. Cause I very, very rarely find a movie that just makes me feel satisfied. It gives a payoff at the end. But yeah, I'm, I have hope, uh, despite the incredibly despondent, uh, way to look to the future. I do have hope with this, whatever you want to say, like the drinkers lagging hypothesis or the production lagging hypothesis that you've come up with, which is in three years' time.

• 1:11:56Chris Williamson?

  One, one thing I do want to know actually is you said that parody is the final stage of a, a cycle of a genre. Is this a, a well-understood journey?

• 1:12:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I, I think, uh, they're generally seen as, I can't remember who wrote it originally, but it's the genre theory that I think there's four stages to it. So the first stage is like the, the early kind of, you know, prototype stage of a genre, like the, the ones that become breakthrough movies and clue people into the idea that, uh, it can be a viable thing. Uh, then you've got like the, um, maturity stage where, um, it's, uh,

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  It kind of reaches its golden e- golden age, like where like ideas start to mature. They get really good at producing the movies. Then you've got the deconstruction phase where they start to explore. You know, different ideas like they're they're always looking for new angles on this genre. And then last of all, you got the parody phase. So it's kind of like we we pioneer it. We perfect it. We tinker with it and take it apart and then we just have a laugh at it and mock it. And then we're done. That's that's the four stages of.

• 1:13:13Chris Williamson?

  Iron Man into the most of the MCU from the 2010s into Endgame into Thor: Love and Thunder.

• 1:13:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say that would probably be your, yeah. Your your best way of looking at it. You can you can kind of apply it to the Western genre. That's what is your good example. You know, your early ones would be your John Wayne movies. Then you get your, you know, your your sort of classic ones with him. And then you get your sort of Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western ones, which is like the Deconstructed Hero. And then you get your parody ones like Blazing Saddles and stuff like that. And then it's just done, you know. So, yeah, we're we're at the parody phase now. I feel like with superhero movies, like whether it's intentional or not, like most Marvel movies are just parodies now of of what they once were.

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  And so I'm more than happy for that genre to to wind up now and just we can move on to something else. Because I get really tired of reviewing superhero movies.

• 1:14:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I imagine I imagine that you can be, yeah. Taking it out back and putting a bolt in its head might be a good idea. Look, drink it, dude. I really appreciate you. Where should people go if they want to check out more of your stuff? Your YouTube's absolutely fascinating, so everyone should go and look at that.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, so obviously I'm producing new YouTube videos on both my channels like every couple of days. I do live streams every Thursday night on Open Bar. You can find me on Twitter as well. And I've also got a bunch of stuff that I'm working on at the moment. I've got a whole bunch of novels that I've written called the Ryan Drake series. And I've got a comic that's recently come out and it's through Indiegogo that you can order that. So that's called A New Kind of War. So those are all the things I'm working on right now. And also a short movie that I'm producing. So that's been fun as well.

• 1:15:04Chris Williamson?

  Busy guy.

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:07Chris Williamson?

  Excited for you.

• 1:15:08Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:15:09Chris Williamson?

  Alright, man. Thank you for your time today.

• 1:15:12Speaker 00

  Cheers.