It is 6pm Pacific time on Sunday, May 1, as I am posting this. That means you have exactly SIX HOURS to get your first act in for my First Act Contest (11:59pm Pacific Time!). I’d love to see you enter so hurry up and finish!
Okay, it looks like my review of Everything Everywhere All At Once created a cosmic level of interest about the film as everybody rushed to the theater and, in a first since the pandemic began, a wide release film made MORE money than its previous weekend, taking in 5 million dollars. The film has now grossed 35 mil, which is HUUUUUGE for an indie film. Go out and see it if you haven’t already.
I don’t think “Everything” is going to pull off that feat two weekends in a row, unfortunately, as this Friday we get our first giant release of the summer, Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. I have to give it to Marvel. I was planning on skipping this one. Despite enjoying the first film, this one felt like small potatoes compared to the recently released Batman and Spider-Man movies.
But now there are supposed to be all these cameos and darn it if I’m not a sucker for superhero cameos! Marvel is so smart. This is exactly what they used to do in their comics and they’re bringing it to the movies and gosh golly I can’t lie. It’s working!
But let’s be honest. What pushed me over the edge was the Avatar 2 trailer. Smart on both Disney’s and Cameron’s part to keep the trailer a theaters-only experience. I know it’s going to piss off the Gen-Zs and the Gen-YYs because they’ve never had to go to a theater to see anything in their lives, especially movies. But this movie is going to be a mega-event so you want to treat it that way from the start: Avatar 2 is a THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE.
I’m surprised, however, to hear people throwing shade at Cameron. They say nobody cares about Avatar anymore. They say it’s become a joke. Let me educate you people really fast: NEVER EVER DOUBT JAMES CAMERON. Ever. You lose every time.
Cameron had the entire Hollywood trade industry and Los Angeles media doing everything in their power to sink his Titanic production. Every day they gleefully tapped away on their IBM typewriters, betting it wouldn’t just be a failed movie, but that it would actually take down 20th Century Fox, the studio itself!
The funny thing is that they weren’t just wrong. They were as wrong as you could possibly be. They predicted it would be the biggest bomb in history and it literally became the biggest hit in history.
Flash-forward to Avatar and the infamous footage-screening incident where journalists crowed that they’d just watched a live-action adaptation of The Smurfs. Yeah, um, didn’t turn out too well you guys either, huh, as I’m pretty sure Avatar is, currently, the biggest box office hit of all time. Not even a film with all the superheroes in the world could dethrone it.
Probably the biggest surprise about Avatar 2 is that it’s actually coming out THIS YEAR. December 16th. It’s happening. An actual Avatar 2 movie is going to be available. Wow.
That’s not to say I don’t have questions. I didn’t think any of the underwater scenes in Aquaman looked very good. To set an entire movie underwater… I’m curious how that’s going to look visually and if the viewer is going to tire of it. Because moving around in water is slower, right? So is everyone going to look like they’re moving in slow motion the whole movie?
Or is there going to be a Gungan-like underwater city that people and Na’vi can walk around in?
I guess I’m going to defer to myself here. NEVER EVER DOUBT JAMES CAMERON. We’ll leave it at that for now. But I’ll surely have more to report to you next Monday.
The other big news in the industry is what’s happening at Netflix. The honeymoon is definitely over. We saw the first tangible evidence of that last week when they cancelled one of their high-profile (and high budget) shows, Space Force.
From a screenwriting perspective, the tale of Space Force is a fascinating one. Because, if you remember, the White House announced its assembling of the real Space Force on a Monday. And then two days later, Greg Daniels announces a deal with Netflix for a Space Force show.
The rumor is that Greg and Steve Carrell bumped into each other in the Netflix lobby, talked about the Space Force news like everyone else was doing at the time, mentioned how it would be funny if that was a show, then decided to go up and pitch it to the Netflix execs right then and there. It was famously bought right away, with Carell getting a million an episode, and off they went to make it.
I fault both parties here but I fault Daniels and Carrell more because they’re the ones who know that writing is hard and that ideas need incubation periods. They need to be tested. They need to feel just as exciting in a month as they did on the first day. And they need to be more than just an idea.
Space Force is one of those classic bad ideas disguised as a good idea. For any idea to be good, it can’t just sound good. There has to be a plan of execution in place. You have to see if the story has legs beyond the smile you get after hearing it.
Another classic bad idea disguised as a good idea was Flatliners. It’s a great high-concept pitch. A group of medical students try to find out what lies beyond life by killing (flatlining) themselves. Unfortunately, there’s nothing beyond that pitch. You flatline yourself and… what? No matter what you come up with, it’s stupid.
Space Force never had legs. And that’s because they never thought about the legs when they pitched it. If you haven’t seen this show – I mean wow – it’s bad. I’m talking really really horrible. I’m talking aggressively unfunny. The biggest problem with it is that they had no idea what to do with Carrell’s character. It was unclear who he was or what was supposed to be funny about him.
The reason The Office was such a great show is because it was built on the perfect character – a boss who badly wanted to be liked by his employees. 90% of the jokes were built around that premise. Space Force didn’t have a clear comedic angle for its hero so there were no jokes to build around him. This left the writers languishing, looking for jokes inside every corner and behind every crevice they could find, which is why the humor felt so desperate.
On top of that, it’s not clear what the show even is. It’s supposed to be parodying the real Space Force, except nobody’s heard anything about the real Space Force since the week it was introduced, which means the show is just making up a fictional random version of Space Force based on nothing. It’s hard to imagine people who’ve had as much success as Daniels and Carrell making a mistake this big.
Luckily, there is a lesson for screenwriters everywhere to take from this: Don’t rush an idea. Don’t spend three months writing a screenplay for an idea you just came up with yesterday. You need time to see if you’re still excited about the idea a month from now. And you need time to flesh the idea out. See if there’s an actual story to tell.
The cancellation of Space Force is symbolic. For years now, Netflix has been flexing their might to everyone, saying, “We have so much more money than you, we don’t care if 100 million dollar investments don’t work out.” They even went a step further with the second season of Space Force and said, “We’re even going to renew a 100 million dollar show THAT NO ONE IS WATCHING! That’s how powerful we are!”
To finally put the kibosh on Space Force is Netflix finally admitting, “Our model does not work.” But I’d say its cancellation signifies something even worse. One of the big reasons everyone wanted to work at Netflix in the first place is that they let you do your thing without interference. There was no development. No notes. It was just: Go mad!
But what they didn’t realize by doing this was that they were establishing a reputation as a place you didn’t need to bring your quality ideas to. Once you establish that a place says yes to whatever you think up, regardless of quality, you get situations like two people in the lobby coming up with an idea on the spot and actually believing they can sell it to you ten minutes later.
Since they know nobody is going to check their shit later on during development, they know they can literally get away with pitching an idea that has zero legs, hoping they’ll be able to “figure it out” later. Which is exactly what Space Force feels like when you watch it. It feels like everyone, from the writers to the actors, is desperately trying to figure out what the show is. That always happens on some level. But it happens way less when a show has been through the development ringer and all the show’s worst qualities have been stripped away.
The industry is struggling to understand what all of this means. Agents, creators, and writers are not happy because the Netflix gravy train has been shifted over to a maintenance track. Just about everyone else, though, is cheering as loud as they can. Netflix is seen by rivals as pure evil and this giant hiccup confirms what many of them believed, which is that Netflix has zero IP and, so, sooner or later, that would catch up to them, and, in the process, confirm that the legacy studios aren’t the dinosaurs they were assumed to be.
I’m not sure what to make of this either. I mean, am I really all that thrilled that the side that gave us Sonic 2: Tails and Sonic Unite won a round? Am I really all that thrilled that Netflix has less money for writers? Not really.
But as a spectator, I’m definitely curious what happens next. We shall see!
