Welcome back to The Collider Pop Culture Review, in which Collider’s weekend editor Vinnie Mancuso wakes up only slightly hungover on a Saturday to rate the week’s biggest stories in film and television on a scale from 1 to 10. (1 is soul-crushingly bad, 10 is mind-blowingly incredible.) This week: Matt Reeves' The Batman will reportedly begin filming in November with no word yet on who is under the mask, Netflix revealed The Punisher season 2's premiere date with a dark trailer, Aquaman is officially the highest-grossing movie in the DCEU, and Todd McFarlane would like you to know well in advance that you will not enjoy his Spawn movie. 

'The Batman' Will Reportedly Start Production in November 2019

Rating: 7, or "I suppose you'll take up flying next, like that fellow in Metropolis.”

Matt Reeves, more than a year removed from dead-ass making me weep real human tears in public over a CGI monkey, has been on quite the journey to get The Batman up on the big screen. Back when the project was first announced in 2015, Reeves wasn't even in the picture; Ben Affleck himself was set to star, write the screenplay, and direct, which low-key meant that at several points throughout production Ben Affleck was going to have to tell a cinematographer where to place a camera while also wearing hilariously stubby bat ears. Long story short, this fell through for reasons both personal and professional. Affleck went off to commission an actual cave-dwelling bat to give him a back tattoo, and Reeves hopped aboard as producer and director in 2017. Assumedly because it's confusing that Bruce Wayne would give a three-page monologue about how fun the Samuel Adams Brewery tour is, the War for the Planet of the Apes filmmaker later announced the script, too, would be revised, and production was pushed back yet again to give Reeves the chance to churn out his "noir-driven", Hitchcock-inspired original story.

Well, it's 2019, the most popular DC movie ever features a Lovecraft monster voiced by the OG Mary Poppins, not a single person on this Earth knows if Ben Affleck is still down to play the Dark Knight anymore, and yet, and yet, The Batman will reportedly start production in November. Which means, fingers, crossed, sometime between now and then Warner Bros. will announce just who exactly will be donning the cape and cow. If it's still Affleck! Fine! That's fine. The movies he was in were largely two-and-a-half-hour sludge-dramas with the color palette of a Snack Pack pudding cup accidentally left out of the refrigerator, but Ben Affleck actually made for a killer Batman. No, that's not a joke about how Ben Affleck's Batman committed several murders in Batman vs. Superman. I was incredibly okay with that. You enter a career where a clown repeatedly breaks out of jail specifically to hit you in the dick with a comically oversized bowling ball pin and see how long you go without killing anyone.

If it's not Affleck? Plenty of options! Many have said Jon Hamm, but that's an extremely safe choice and possibly a bit too seasoned-looking for Reeves' Bruce Wayne, who is reportedly on the younger side. Armie Hammer is like 8 feet tall and seemingly stole Jon Hamm's exact voice through witchcraft. John Cena is the same height as Armie Hammer except sideways, what's he doing? The best way to describe Adam Driver's entire aesthetic is "he looks like someone who watched his parents die." Get him on board! What about Trevante Rhodes? Lord knows he's not going to be tied up in a Predator sequel.

All I ask is from this film—which truthfully I still won't believe is happening until Matt Reeves personally throws a DVD copy tied to a Batarang through my window—is that it has the world's greatest detective do a little detective-ing. A smidge of deducing. If this dude dusts for fingerprints one time it will be the best Batman movie since The Dark Knight. Somewhere between The Dark Knight Rises and Dawn of Justice, big-screen Batman's defining trait became the fact that he'd set the Lunk Alarm off at Planet Fitness. There's a brain under that mask.

'The Punisher' Sets Season 2 Release Date with Trailer

Rating: 6, or "Pay no attention to the cancellations behind the curtain" 

Imagine, if you will, you're sitting in your favorite restaurant waiting for your meal to arrive when you get the news that the last three people to eat at that restaurant just straight up died. They were cancelled from life for seemingly no reason. The third person actually just had the best season at his job ever, and yet now he's just dead. You'd probably be like, "Man, I don't know if I'm even looking forward to this meal anymore." Then the restaurant's like, "No, no, this one is fine, here are some images of the food." And you're like, "That food does admittedly look kind of hype but I'm extremely concerned about those three other people who di—" and then the restaurant interrupts all like, "No, look, life will go on after this meal, everything is fine, Disney is not involved in this."

That extremely specific scenario is how I feel about my excitement for The Punisher season 2, which will officially debut January 18th as revealed in a new teaser trailer. It looks great! I loved The Punisher's first season, and the promise of Jon Bernthal's stellar Frank Castle clashing again with a now-scarred-up Billy Russo (Ben Barnes) is electrifying. But Netflix's small-screen MCU is pretty obviously in implosion mode; when Iron Fist was cancelled it felt like, well, yeah, watching Finn Jones struggling to raise his leg above toddler height had run its course. Then Luke Cage went, and it was like, well, weird move, but there had been pacing problems in the storytelling and maybe Netflix just lost money on that movie where Chris Pine hangs dong and needs to shuffle funds a little. And then Netflix came for its superhero crown jewel, precious baby Daredevil, just a few weeks after the original streaming Defender premiered its third season to overwhelming critical acclaim. In what is surely a coincidence, the only two shows in this particular universe still hanging around—The Punisher and Jessica Jones—are the only two that have upcoming seasons already in the can.

So, yeah, getting hyped for The Punisher right now feels a little like getting excited while in line for a rollercoaster that you're 99% sure ends in a brick wall.

'Aquaman' Is King of the DCEU Box Office

Rating: 9, or "Permission to come abroad?"

One day, decades into the future, your horrifically radiation-mutated grandchild, Arthur, will ask when DC's fortunes finally turned and you will tell them of a film, a film where an octopus plays the drums and Jason Momoa never once stops looking directly into the camera. "That's not how acting works," the child may say, and you'll shush him and play that viral video where Jason Momoa does the warrior dance on the Aquaman premiere red carpet. "That's so endearing," the child will say, finally understanding.

What I'm trying to say: holy shit, Aquaman is making so much money. What a time to be alive. Aquaman. Aquaman. The one who talks to fish and wears the costume that's like if a sturgeon decided it wanted to be lower on the food chain. That Aquaman, that character, has now grossed more worldwide than Wonder Woman, Justice League, Batman vs. Superman, and Suicide Squad.

Opinion on the movie is...split. Let's say split. Personally, I loved it, but I walk out of all movies loudly explaining it needed more crab people doing battle with Willem Dafoe on a shark. Roma. First Reformed. Won't You Be My Neighbor? Happens all the time. I can recognize Aquaman's flawless, namely that A) The script is flimsier than Amber Heard's wig, and B) Somehow over 45 years of life and several notable horror films Patrick Wilson never learned to scream like a real human.

But it's almost like there's a lesson to be learned from the fact that Warner Bros.' two biggest superhero movies—Aquaman and Wonder Woman—are both maturely told stories that still come from a place of light and joy. Hopefully, Hollywood's comic book filmmakers are taking note...

 

 

Todd McFarlane's 'Spawn' Will Bring You No Joy

Rating: 3, or "Even the entire cast of E.R. couldn't put you back together again." 

Todd McFarlane has been trying to get his vision for Spawn—a character he did, in fairness, create—on to the big screen for a long time now, most of which has been spent reassuring both audiences and possible funders that his movie will not make you smile. Not even once. It's going to be a big boy movie for people who like violence and darkness and those wallets that attach to your jeans with a chain. That publicity tour continues with the comic book writer and artist stopping by Nerdist to say this:

“There’s no joy. There’s gonna be no fun lines in it, and it’s just gonna be this dark, ugly two hours worth of movie, which is essentially what a lot of supernatural/horror movies are anyway. There’s not a lot of funny in them. And that seems to be a weird hurdle for a lot of people in this city to get over because they sort of go into a superhero/Avengers default all the time.”

The thing here is that I think what McFarlane is trying to sell is getting muddled with the fact his brain is stuck in the x-treme 1990's comic book scene where everyone for some reason had a flaming sword and spines were drawn anatomically incorrect by law. Saying your superhero movie is different from an MCU film, rated R, more horror than action, and dark? Enticing! Deadpool already proved that there's an audience for R-rated comic book storytelling and there's a hole right now in the edgier parts of that world. But don't emphasize that you're not gonna' have a good time. Even Batman vs. Superman had Jesse Eisenberg doing Jared Leto Joker impression while wearing Nick Nolte's hair from Ang Lee's Hulk. Gotta' find the joy somewhere.