ScreenCrush: The Podcast! - Why VS Movies Suck: Alien vs Predator, Batman v. Superman, and Freddy vs Jason

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

ScreenCrush The Podcast tackles all the movie and TV hot topics, offering reviews and analysis of Marvel, Star Wars, and everything you care about right now. Hosted by Ryan Arey, and featuring a panel of industry professionals.

So here's the thing about versus movies. They're fun, but they also kind of suck. Freddy versus Jason, Alien versus Predator, Batman v. Superman, we're going to take a look at all of them, including the very first versus movie that started at all. And we'll explain why none of these really worked and what can be done to make future versus movies actually worth watching. Hey, welcome back to Screen Crush. I'm Colton Ogburn, and the idea of the Verses movie on paper sounds like a slam dunk. Take two iconic characters with massive fan bases, pit them against each other in a warring brawl and let the masses hand over their money to see who wins. It's a simple pitch, easy to market, and for the studios behind it, an easy box office win.

But time and time again, these films have failed to live up to the promise. Despite the potential for massive box office returns and decades of built-in fandom, versus movies tend to collapse under the weight of studio interference, conflicting tones and story, and prioritizing the business side of filmmaking over the artistic side. You see, a movie should be made because you have a good idea for a story and the good idea should always come first. But with Versus movies, they work backwards. First, the corporate execs of the studio decide which of their mini IPs they want to cram

into a single movie, and then they turn it over to the writers with the demand of them crafting a story for the product that the executives have already decided to make. Making writers essentially act as marketers instead of the idea originators. The product is there and they already know how they're gonna sell it. Blank versus Blank, Battle of the Century, and the creative process, and the story process, they always end up coming last and it shows. Now, this isn't always the case. Crossovers of big IPs can be great.

I mean, that's really what the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe is, taking heroes that are major IP in their own right and having them team up or in some cases fight each other. But in the case of Marvel, it makes sense because the story in itself is actually calling for that crossover. The problem is that studios approach it from the boardroom. not the writer's room. What could be a creative collision of worlds becomes a shallow brand exercise. A hollow spectacle engineered to cash in on name recognition rather than delivering a genuine narrative value that the audience and the story itself is actually asking for.

So the versus concept goes back to the early days of Hollywood, long before franchises were a currency. In 1943, Universal crossed over its famous monster characters, Frankenstein and the Wolfman, and Frankenstein meets the Wolfman. And even then, these crossover films, these Versus films, they were gimmicks. They were designed to extend the life of agent IP through novelty rather than necessity. And the crossovers were never as good or beloved or as remembered as the original films that made the IP so successful in the first place. But it wasn't until the rise of the fanboy era, aka us, when geek culture began dominating

the box office. And the versus concept was revived as a major Hollywood strategy. The idea wasn't born from storytelling, ambition, but from intellectual property ownership. Once studios realized how valuable their brands were, they started asking themselves not what story should we tell, but what IP we have that we can smash together with another one. So let's start with Alien versus Predator. When Alien vs. Predator hit theaters in 2004, it should have been a sci-fi horror

fan's dream come true. Both franchises had their own iconic history that the fans had been clamoring to see crossover for decades. I mean, think about it, two of Hollywood's greatest extraterrestrial monsters, both both of which are known for stalking their prey and murdering them brutally, now going head to head in a blood-soaked all-out war? That sounds fucking awesome! Sign me up! But instead of staying true to the tone or the complexity of both IPs,

or even one of the IPs, AVP settled for the lowest common denominator that would allow them to get the most asses in seats. They made it PG-13. That's right, they took two R-rated franchises defined by their gore and adult themes and psychological dread, and they reduced them to pop delivering slop. The movie turned two horror icons into action figures that the studio

executives were just chunking at one another from across the boardroom. And don't get me wrong, the fights themselves in AVP and in the other movies that we're going to discuss, they are all unarguably entertaining and they're super fun to watch on YouTube. But a YouTube video does not a good movie make. You have to have something to fill the other hour or so of runtime. Not only did AVP reduce both of these series down to a story about whose junk is bigger, let's find out. Even worse, it completely disregarded and spat on the mythology of both series in order to make the crossover even work. The xenomorphs intricate life cycle and the predator's ritualistic hunting culture were both ignored and reshaped to make this dumpster fire

work. This movie could have been great if actually given the time and attention it deserved to develop a story and figure out why the story needed to be told in the first place beyond, oh, this will make a lot of money. And then they did it again and somehow, made it even worse than the first time around. Now, it looks like 20th Century may have finally learned their lesson and that they are actually planning to take another crack at an Alien versus Predator movie in the future. And that is fine by me because they have proven with prey,

Alien Romulus, Alien Earth, and Predator Badlands that they seem to have regained respect for these franchises and the audience who pays to come watch them in theaters. And I hope the same will be true for these next two movies I want to talk about. Let's move on to Freddy versus Jason. Freddy versus Jason was a project that spent over a decade in development help. Since the late 80s, New Line Cinema, had toyed with the idea of pitting Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise against Jason Vorhees from the Friday the 13th franchise,

and horror fans had been speculating for years on who would win in a fight between the genre's biggest, baddest slasher's. Now, this movie was far less offensive than AVP, in my own personal opinion. For starters, they kept it rated R, very R, staying true to both sets of films that had come before it. But what could have and should have been a return to form for these two horror icons was unfortunately just a corny continuation of the more cartoonish direction both franchises had taken with their most recent films, a direction that drove both IPs into the ground to the point of seemingly no return. And that all made the concept of a Freddie versus Jason movie

look even more desperate. This movie really shined a spotlight on just how goofy and meta both franchises had become. You're not even scary. Now, as of the making of this video, we haven't had a Freddy or Jason movie in years. Both franchises had lackluster temporary reboots, and right now both of their IPs are kind of just dead in the water, pun fully intended. And look, to be clear, Freddy versus Jason, as well as AVP could both be considered box office successes simply for the fact that they made a profit. But neither film hit 200 million, so they weren't the juggernauts, I think that their respective studios were hoping for.

And the films they could have made way more money had the movies themselves actually been good. But when you rush it and make it for the sake of making it, instead of delivering something that people actually want to see and see again and then buy on home video, when you don't do that, you ruin any and all potential of that versus idea ever having been able to flourish. And that brings me to Batman v. Superman Dawn of Justice, a movie that cost a lot of money to make, but made a lot of money too. Granted, not nearly what the studio was hoping for. And not nearly what a movie called Batman versus Superman should have made. This movie started the two most popular superheroes of all time in what could have been a clash of the Titans level event.

This movie came out in an era where comic book films were flourishing and making a lot of money at the box office. Hell, movies in general were making a lot of money at the box office. It really was a golden age for Blockbuster films. And the fact that this film failed to cross the billion dollar mark brings me right back to what we've been talking about this entire video. Batman v. Superman wasn't made because anyone was asking for it. It wasn't made because the studio actually had an interest in making the best comic book movie of all time. It wasn't made because the executives who greenlit and pushed the thing on Zach Snyder had some brilliant idea for a story that just had to be done.

No, this movie was made because Warner Brothers wanted to catch up with Marvel and replicate their success with the MCU and the Avengers, but WB, they didn't want to put in the work to get there. They didn't want to put in the time and the effort of creating a world and a story that built toward a natural confrontation between these two, heroes. And because of that, because of their impatience, poor management, and lack of vision, they robbed themselves of what could have been a multi-billion dollar franchise with the DCEU. But instead, they ran the thing into the fucking ground because they just wanted to rush it.

BVS wasn't a movie. It was a marketing scheme masquerading as one. The entire movie was just an excuse to put two giant IPs on one poster. There was no true and nuanced exploration of the philosophical divide between these two heroes. It was also surface-level nonsense that just had you wondering the entire movie, why are these guys fighting? Why don't they just stop for like two seconds and think about what they're doing or talk to each other and stop being so uncharacteristically dickish and dense? And really, at its core, the whole movie was just a trailer for a Justice League movie that no one cared about seeing and would do horrendous at the box office just a few years later.

And this was all because they didn't want to put in the work. And that's the theme of all of these movies. None of them stayed true to the IP itself and the story behind the reason that fans would even want to see a Versus movie in the first place. The common thread across all of these Versus movies is that they confuse conflict for story. Studios believe that pitting two icons against each other is inherently interesting, but without emotional stakes and thematic depth or narrative purpose, the conflict, it just becomes meaningless spectacle. And think about it. It shouldn't be that fucking hard. Almost every movie has two characters who are warring again.

against each other. It's a tale as old as time. Sure, we're usually giving good guy versus bad guy, whereas the versus movies typically are bad guy versus bad guy or hero versus hero. But really, all of the most interesting character rivalries in cinema history consist of a battle that isn't so black and white, a hero realizing the flaw of their argument and the villain having a decent point about their worldview. It's about two billion people all over the world that looks like us, but their lives are a lot harder. Wakanda has the tools to liberate them all. Villains who don't view themselves as the villain are the best villains, and that's the same

approach that should be taken when you do a Versus movie. Take the Dark Knight, for example, Batman and the Joker represent two opposing philosophies of order and chaos. And we see Batman do some totally immoral things for what he considers to be the greater good. While the Joker also does some totally heinous things, but when he explains why he does them, he actually makes you pause for a second and think to yourself, huh? He's crazy, but he's kind of got a point. Don't talk like one of them. You're not.

To them, you're just a freak. Like me. Family as good as the world allows them to be. And then it makes you ask, what is the real difference between these two characters? And are they really as black and white right and wrong as we think they are? Captain America's Civil War did this really well. Tony Stark and Steve Rogers' ideological split is deeply personal and earned through years of storytelling and buildup that actually warranted a story where these two would finally fight.

In fact, it got to the point where it would be weird if they didn't fight. And that's what you want. You want it to feel like this movie needs to be made. But when Versus movies just start with the idea of a fight, not the reason for the fight, that's building a house on a weak foundation. Like I said at the top, versus movies are built backwards. The studios begin with the idea for the poster, Alien versus Predator, Batman versus Superman. And only after that do they ask writers to figure out why these characters would even be in the same

room. From a business perspective, versus movies, they do make sense. Why take the risk of a new idea when you can merge to existing winners? Why spend years developing an original screenplay when you already own the rights to multiple fully developed IPs? So I get why the suits think that this is the way to do it. But this logic exposes the fundamental flaw of corporate Hollywood. It exposes the assumption that brands and spectacle can replace good storytelling. Good storytelling being what created these brands in the first place. Executives see characters like Batman and Freddie Kruger and the Xenomorph, not as an artistic creation that means something to each of us,

but really just as assets and their arsenal of content. And I think these versus films also reveal a lack of respect for the audience and their intelligence. The assumption is that fans will show up no matter what, simply because of brand recognition, and they assume that we'll just eat the slop they feed us. But audiences, they crave authenticity, and that's really started to show with movie attendance getting lower and lower. Mass audiences are not interested in marketing gimmicks.

And sure, if you've put in the work to build up a beloved franchise and then cram it together with another beloved franchise, people will likely come out to see it in pretty big numbers. But they won't come see the next one, and the first one damn sure won't perform as well as it would have had you made it good in the first place. And it's worth noting that a versus movie can work. We've seen them work.

The concept itself is not a bad one. A creative filmmaker, could turn a crossover into something brilliant and fun. And Marvel has proven that was Civil War and their MCU. But Marvel isn't the only success story here. If you're going for something that's just like dumb fun, like Godzilla versus Kong, then do something that actually calls for dumb fun. Let the audience know what they're getting into.

I don't know about you guys, but I knew exactly what I was signing up for when I went to see Godzilla versus Kong. And I wasn't disappointed because that's what I was going there for. Two giant ass monsters fighting each other. And you know why it works? Because it's an actual proven genre of film. Big Monsters Fighting, Big Monsters! It's a classic, and that movie stayed true to what we had come to expect from that franchise

and the subsequent films that had been building up to that moment. And I love Dumb Fun. I love how ridiculous Freddy versus Jason is, but a film like that or a film like Batman v. Superman, it isn't something that pairs well with Dumb Fun. Alien versus Predator. I guess it could, it can, but that's not what the fan-based loves about those two franchises. No one goes into an alien movie or a predator movie expecting dumb fun. They go in there expecting horror and action and dread. That's what they're looking for

in those movies. So when you make the crossover movie and it doesn't match the genre at all, then it's a total turnoff. And I think the same is true for Freddie versus Jason, the one that I have the least contempt for out of all these versus movies. But even that one, I think, relied too much on just having them punch each other. And that's never what those movies were meant to be about either. The Jason movies were horror movies. They were suspenseful movies. The same thing for the Freddie movies, which were even more like psychological horror and, you know, making you sit on the edge of your seat. And that theme and that tone did not translate over to Freddy versus Jason.

You see, at their core, versus movies represent the triumph of marketing over meaning. They're born not from passion, but from PowerPoint decks and ideas conceived in shareholder meetings rather than story sessions. What makes them fail isn't the concept of a crossover itself, but the mindset. behind it. When executives view storytelling as a corporate merger rather than an artistic endeavor, the result is always going to be hollow. And the tragedy really is that these films waste so much incredible potential. They take characters that are beloved and then they peel back the curtain and show them for what they truly are, intellectual property. But hey, those are just my thoughts. I would love to hear yours down in the comments below. And if you're new here,

be sure to subscribe and hit the bell so you get notified every time we upload a new video. For I'm Colton Ogburn.