The Watch - Reviewing ‘Maniac’ and ‘Forever,’ Plus Is the DC Extended Universe Cool Again? | The Watch (Ep. 292)

Episode Date: September 25, 2018

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan talks with Alison Herman about Netflix’s ‘Maniac’ (5:09) and Amazon’s ‘Forever’ (23:20). Then he is joined by Jason Concepcion to talk about the expanding DC cinematic universe, including ‘Joker’ (33:58) and the new Harley Quinn movie ‘Birds of Prey’ (46:16). Read Alison Herman on 'Maniac' here. Read Alison Herman on 'Forever' here. Read the Ringer Staff on 'Joker' here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Stand up and walk now. Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am editor at Thebringer.com. And today on the pod, Alison Herman joined me to talk a little bit about the first four episodes of Maniac and about Maniac in general. Now, Zach Barron was on last week, and we talked about Carrie Fukenaga, him taking over the Bond franchise. And we talked a little bit about Maniac, but I actually had only just seen the first episode. And I wanted to get a little bit more deeply into it because by four episodes, you kind of have a sense of the rhythm of this show.

And, you know, it's interesting. Just as Allison was walking out of the office, we were talking about how many divisive shows there are, there have been this year. And, you know, they've got people who love Maniac, people who dislike Maniac, people who love forever and dislike forever. you've got people who are in or out on the first. So there's a lot of stuff out there that I think different people are having these really widely different reactions to, which is somewhat different from where we kind of started maybe five or six years ago, at least when we started this podcast back at Grantland, where there was this kind of like almost monoculture with television.

And you had five or six shows that even if you didn't like it, you acknowledge, oh, Mad Men Breaking Bad, The Wire, Down Abbey, all these shows were very good. And it's interesting now to be at a place where, I don't know, maybe you can even say that technically I think television is as good as it's ever been, but now you're getting this widely divergent reactions on a sort of aesthetic or personal taste basis. It makes talking about television that much more interesting because you can have two people in a room that just feel completely different about something. It's like as if everything was Thor Ragnarok and it was me and Andy, but now it's about all television. It's a little throwback in case you're a long time, listener. So Allison talked to me about the first four episodes of Maniac, and then we talked about the entire, either first season or run of forever, depending on whether or not forever comes back. That's a show on Amazon starring Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen, which I had mixed feelings about, but for the most part, really liked. And then after Allison, I talked to Jason Concepcion because there has been such a deluge of pictures and camera tests and leaked footage from

Todd Phillips's The Joker set that I thought I would. start reading a little bit about where the DC Comics Cinematic Universe was. And I thought it was really interesting what I found. I didn't do like any kind of deep Bob Woodward reporting here. I just read blogs. But it was really interesting to see how DC is kind of throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks right now

in a time when Marvel is obviously got this 5, 10, 20 year plan. And even though that Marvel is probably going to go through a lot of change with Downey and likely Evans stepping away from Captain American Iron Man, and those were kind of like the, that was the spine of the MCU for a while. I do think that they have a very controlled slate. Everything kind of fits together. There's a sort of uniform look, no matter whether Ryan Coogler or Joe and Anthony Russo are directing it, you're going to get a kind of house style with Marvel. And with DC, it's pretty much the opposite. DC has not only broken the conventions of cinematic universe totally, where they're

having multiple actors play multiple iterations of characters. But they're also hiring these pretty interesting filmmakers to give their takes on it. And after kind of going through what they went through with the Zach Snyder situation and with the first few DC movies with Justice League and with Batman versus Superman, they have now turned over their properties and their intellectual property to these, like a big variety of filmmakers from everybody from Todd Phillips who's directed the Hangover trilogy to Kathy Yan who's only directed a short called Dead Pigs

and now just doing Birds of Prey, which is a Harley Quinn based movie. So really interesting stuff happening with DC. I kind of ran through this slate of upcoming DC movies with Jason and asked him a little bit about where they're coming from. So Maniac Forever and DC movies today with Allison Herman and Jason Concepcion,

I really, really, really want to get to better call Saul on Thursday. So I am going to find somebody to talk to me about Better Call Saul on Thursday because I think it's the best show on television. Until then, here's Allison and we'll be on later with Jason Concepcion. Thanks for listening. Allison, I wanted to have you on to talk about Maniac. I watched the first four episodes over the last couple of days. I assume you've watched the entire thing. I have. And I wanted to have you on mostly because you wrote this really awesome kind of half critical essay, half profile of Patrick Somerville, who is the main writer on the show and co-creator, I think, with Carrie Fukunaga.

Yes. And the other reason was, is that I feel like, I need to unpack like how I feel about this show after a few episodes because I don't know why. I think that I have sort of a sort of preexisting condition of my own where I kind of tend to dislike shows that are lodged inside of people's heads. I think that there's something about like having a kind of a reality and a consequences that also affects other people in real ways is the thing that I kind of particularly like from drama rather than something where it's like you learn a lot about a character

and the character learns a lot about themselves, but it's all happening inside of their heads. Would the primary example of this be like Westworld where there are no stakes or... It would be Westworld. I think that's an issue I've had with Legion. I think there were parts of... And I really, really like leftovers, but there were parts of leftovers

where I felt like the amount of internalization that was happening started to make me lose true north as to what the show was trying to do. And I think, think that that changed over the course of time with leftovers, but with Maniac, I kind of had like a little bit of a chip on my shoulder going into it. And I was, I don't know if I would say pleasantly surprised as much as I was blown away by the overall product that I saw, right?

Interesting. Yeah. I think I'm a little cooler on this than you are. Part of the reason why, instead of publishing a full review, we went with this interview with Patrick Somerville, is I almost find the creative origin story and development process of the show more interesting and unique in the context of overall culture than the content of the show itself, which is actually not necessarily a diss. And you brought up Legion, and Legion is in many ways the most logical comparison in the show. The production design looks very similar. The concept of exploring mental illness and addiction through the context of a psychiatric medical setting is also shared. But conceptually or critically, You know, no matter how many self-important letters, Noah Hawley writes to the TV critic community, I think one of the things I actually really like about Legion is that, at least in the first season, it kind of compensated for a lot of visual ambition by keeping its narrative ambition very straightforward and not lower. But I liked that it offset the fact that the visuals were so showy with the fact that the narrative was a very simple, like, boy meets girl, boy discovers superpowers at the same time as girl does. And Maniac almost surprised me in the sense that this was marketed as like, it's going to be so trippy and weird. You know, you hear you're averse to things inside people's heads.

I'm very averse to just causing the audience to question reality or not know what's going on just for the sake of it and getting credit for that as a proxy for profundity. And Maniac, I actually think it's very simple. Like Jonah Hill's character Owen, who along with Emiston's Annie is one of the two main focuses, He's schizophrenic, and one of the things I was kind of wary of when they introduced him as a character is like, oh, are we just going to get a whole show that's him questioning what's real, but also us questioning what's real? And I actually think it's pretty easy to say, okay, so this like version of his brother played by Billy Magnuson, who he sees everywhere is very clearly not the actual version of his brother. Who's fantastic on the show, yeah. And who is so great, yes, we should talk about the supporting cast later.

Like, you can tell what is a delusion for Owen and what is real, and then once they go into the context of, this experiment, the setup, which I talked to Somerville about, is basically like, as a proxy for therapy, these people are given pills, and then they just enter into their subconscious and work out their issues that way in a clinical setting. Sure. And when you're a writer or director or a movie star, it's very clearly very exciting to be like, okay, we have this a sensible setting, but actually we can do literally whatever we want in any genre. Yeah. And once you start doing that, you know, you obviously know this is not the real world even in the context of the show.

you could follow it from there. Sure, absolutely. I think that it's not that I want every show to be the night of. It's just that there's a kind of limitation to the limitless sometimes. You know, there's like an emotional limitation to my investment in these hallucinatory kind of explorations of basically using genre as a kind of a skin to put on for a brief period of time to kind of explore trauma and explore these psychological wounds. that the characters have experienced.

And I think Maniac does some very interesting things with it. But for the most part, what my attachment to the show is, is that I think the writing is quite good. And I think the world building is phenomenal, given the fact that, you know, we're always talking about how long or how compressed people are, you know, using time in television now because you can do 10-hour episodes, you can do four one-hour episodes, you can be on seven years,

or you can start and come back in 18 months. There's all this variance going on with how we process and experience television and how we watch television. Some people watch maniac in one sitting over the weekend. I've watched four. But one thing that you can tell right away is that the level of detail that Fuganaga and Somerville and the rest of the people involved the creative process of the show is that they've thought through every single thing.

From the outfits to the background props to the way in which this sort of parallel universe in which technology has both developed past where we are in 2018, but also stopped somewhere in the late 90s, has kind of shaped who we are. And I thought that that combined with just the cinematic energy with which Fukenaga presents things, you know, even like a simple act of a woman walking down a street, smoking a cigarette, and putting missing dog flyers up on a light pole, he is able to shoot in, in a way that kind of as invigorating as Martin Scorsese shooting a gangster walking into a bar, you know? Yeah, I was talking about this with Kate Hallowell, an editorial assistant at the ringer.

We both almost felt that something was lost once it entered into the delusional space, just because the delusions in that context tend to be pretty straightforward genre amages, whether there's a kind of Cohen-esqueaper in Long Island involving a lemur, there's a little bit of a gangster thing, there's like a 1940s flashback thing. But when you're actually in the world of Maniac, that's really fun to spend time in and figure out the rules. You're in this world that's like if Blade Runner had happened, but we had stayed in the Paris Accords. Speaking of Blade Runner, I do need to say that when we saw the Jonah Hill's character's micro apartment where there's literally like a menacing neon advertising sign outside and also the conglomerate that administers this experiment is like a faceless, like Japanese-owned thing. I was a little like, okay, guys, we get it.

And then with stones like slurping noodles and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, I just, but the environmental stuff hasn't quite gotten to the apocalyptic levels of always night, always raining like it is in Blade Runner. I mean, the weather doesn't look great. No, you know, it doesn't look great now either, so that's true. I wanted to talk about, like, you know, you mentioned Blade Runner. We've talked about Cohen Brothers, Somerville, I think has mentioned Raising Arizona as an inspiration for the Lemur episode, which happens a couple of,

in, we're talking up through four here. One of the, the energy of the second one really reminded me of punch drunk love for some reason. Wow, high praise. Yeah, just the dock shop kind of had like a kind of almost a vibe of like the Philip Seymour Hoffman mattress salesman. And just her energy and the way in which she kind of was like barreling through her day had that kind of, it had a sort of PTA vibe to it.

It's hard to put my finger on, but it was really, really exciting to watch. I really loved Winmills, which is the second one. And I thought Julia Garner was great in her appearance as Annie's sister, Ellie. Yeah, I think one of the really interesting comparisons, I think besides Legion, the other show I was thinking of a lot when I was watching this was actually forever, which is this Amazon show that's very recent. And I mentioned the kind of origin story of maniac being really interesting. So Fukunaga Hill and Stone were signed on first, and Somerville actually came on later. And it's an adaption of a Danish. A Norwegian show. But like the Norwegian show is basically they just took the concept of being in a medical setting and having things that are not real that you could kind of slip in at any time. And then they basically reinvented the world outside of that. The characters, they changed it from an asylum to a drug trial, all of that. But the director and stars first, writer later, is kind of an inversion of how TV has historically worked. And Forever is also, that show started with Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen saying, we want to make a show.

together and we want us to star in it. And then they basically just like went to writers and were like, okay, what vehicle can you come up with that we would be in? And as such, the show is literally designed as a showcase for those two performers in a way that Maniac is also designed as a showcase for Jonah Hill and Emma Stone. And I think also in both cases, the critical response has very much been the female half of that duo has gotten a little more buzz or praise for what she does with that performance. And I think you're right. I think Emma Stone is so great in a similar way to how Maya Rudolph really walks away with forever. Yeah, and she actually gets to,

she actually gets to do a little bit more emotional gymnastics inside of the Annie character before she starts, like being projected into these sort of fantasy worlds, then I think Jonah does. Jonah kind of is like very locked down and buttoned up and kind of all, and he's internalizing a lot, and a lot of it is almost like this stunned character who's barely hanging on to the threat of reality,

in his real life anyway. So it's like she gets to definitely have material that is more of a trampoline, you know, and she gets to do stuff like her father in that void machine. The weird thing that looks like a toy car. It looks like a child's bed that's shaped like a race car, but with a ventilation attached. Yeah, it's unclear as to whether that's, I mean, it's called a void. And it's like a void. And I obviously, it's some sort of like trauma or loneliness device where he doesn't have to like

experience the outside world, but it's like hooked up with hoses in his backyard. And I don't know. I mean, there's all these little embellishments like that that I thought were really interesting. But part of the joy of this show isn't just Jonah and Emma, but it's like everybody around them and all these sort of wild characters that they come into contact with. It is funny how the actor first mentality really does trickle down. As much as it is about Jonah and Emma's characters, it very much widens the circle. So actually one of the things I really liked about the season is the way it paces itself out, not slowly, again, similar to forever.

Forever doesn't have its premise at all in place until episode three. Right. This also, you know, episode one is for Jodda, episode two is for Emma. Episode three is like they start the trial. And then, you know, certain pretty important characters, I don't believe we've gotten to the point where Justin Throw and Sally Field joined the main cast, right? Yeah, Justin joins in the beginning of four and I think Sally Field comes in in five. But those are two huge names, and I'm sure they are names that felt empowered to sign on because the top of the cast was already of such a high caliber. But those are already big stars. And then you get figures like Billy Magnuson, who I think is maybe in the process of crossing over from that guy to, oh, that guy.

So where would people have recognized him from? Oh, God. He was an Ingrid Goes West. I believe it was the Vulture Review that described him as a douche of many colors. He loves to, or I don't know if he loves to play them, but he tends to play. like douchebags. So that is a very memorable douchebag. He plays the brother of Elizabeth Olson's character.

And then the other, I think, emerging performer who's going to get a really big lift from this is Sinoyamizuno, who plays the technician. And she's very emblematic of the show's very comic book styling. She has this triangle wig and big glasses and constantly is a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. She kind of looks like a live-action anime character. Yeah.

And weirdly, people might actually most recognize her from Annihilation where she was not playing herself, but she was a sort of cybernetic alien double, I don't know, spoilers for annihilation. Yes. But yeah, she's a dancer. She was in Crazy Rich Asians. She was in Ex Machina, Alex Garland's first movie.

And this is kind of the first big role where she is recognizable but displaying range, but really, like, crucial to the action. And she's going to be in Alex Garland's show for FX, correct? Right. I'd forgotten about that. Now I'm very much looking forward to that. I mean, it's just, there's a lot of people who I think were attracted to this show because they realized what a fun template it is.

And you can tell, I mean, Julia Garner is like one of the, I guess, hotter would be the term, but like more. Yeah, Ozark Americans. Yeah, right. And whenever she is in anything, there's always that like, oh, Julia Garner's here. Like, she's really popping off the screen. Let me ask you this. Do you ever get frustrated or do you find it delightful the accumulation of, you? both visual and like comic bits.

Like as if it's almost being like written as memes throughout the show. Like everything from like the fucklanus program that Justin Theroux is caught in when when Sonia Mizzu comes and finds out. It was incredible. But there's that. There's, um, I mean, even just like the way that they show Jonah Hill in the Warren Moon jersey with a mullet living on Long Island. And his name is Bruce Marino, so we've got a couple of different quarterbacks going on in there. But I did not get that reference.

Thank you for explaining it to me. And it's like this pastiche of wouldn't this be funny? Wouldn't this be amazing? Wouldn't this be cool? Do you feel like it all comes together? I don't think tired would be quite the word so much as it was very clearly almost the cart leading the horse. Like you could tell it was them being like, we want to try this. And I don't want to imply that they weren't really.

thoughtful about this. I mean... No, no. I mean, if anything, I feel like you can... I actually watch some of it with subtitles on, and you could hear bits of background dialogue or read it, rather, that actually does inform stuff about, like, the world that they're living especially in the first few episodes. And I don't know if I am personally empowered to call him a friend of the show, since this is not my show, but Zach Barron wrote a great profile of Carrie Fukunagra for GQ that included this really fascinating detail that he in Somerville, with like just a few months to go to production,

decided to junk half the scripts, which is incredibly stressful and terrifying and somewhat admirable. But I asked Somerville about that. He basically said that was the part of the show that corresponded with them being inside the experiment and inside the delusion. So clearly a lot of consideration went into,

you know, what kinds of these scenarios would best fit the inner life of these characters. But, you know, I think there's very clearly an element of wouldn't it be fun to do this? that I guess the way I would phrase it is it's unpredictable in terms of what's coming up next but they were all such straightforward homagees that I didn't it's not going to expand your boundaries of what television can be

so much as it's just going to be oh TV can be like a ton of things at once and that's really fun and exciting. I think that I think it was in your piece. There was you guys discussed a little bit this tension between Carrie wanting to make it as much as possible a 10-hour movie and Somerville kind of wanting to add. elements of episodic television to it. It may have been an A. Briseman's piece.

Yeah, that was also in my piece. Oh, yeah, right. Maybe they talked about it in both pieces, but. But that, I felt like that tension is evident. I feel like, you know, the reset that happens into where it starts at the beginning of Emma Stone's day that you kind of see Jonah Hill's version of it as they both arrive at the reception area for Nebel Dean or whatever the biotech company is where they're going to do this trial.

That felt like very TV. That felt like, you know, you saw it from one perspective. We're going to go all the way back and show it to the other perspective, meet in the middle and then have like 15 minutes ahead. But there is something to it that has Fuganaga's kind of more cinematic instincts and stimatic storytelling. And I was kind of wondering about this too because I think anybody who watches a lot of television now hits that two-thirds into a season and is just like, this really could have been two hours shorter or this could have been two episodes shorter. Did you ever have that feeling with Maniac that you wished it was a six or an eight

episode season rather than a 10? I honestly did it, which is totally to its credit. I also think like the organization of the season is not as modular as you would think. Like there wasn't, it's not like one episode is this dream sequence. The other episode is this dream sequence, which I almost think is to its credit. I also think the length of the episodes is really good. It tends to hover around 40 minutes, which I think someone characterizes like a bloated streaming half hour. But as I was watching it, I was like, oh, this is the same length as like a network hour, like a 42 or a 47 minute. It never really drags.

There's a couple of times where I felt like there's like an anecdote being told and I'm like this doesn't need to be like two and a half minutes long. I think it mostly manifested in what I mentioned earlier, which is the pacing, which is that it feels liberated to not introduce a character or an actor as major as Justin Thruh slash Sally Field, who is, I think, one of the bigger names on this past. And they're okay with waiting a little bit to introduce her because they don't feel like they need to grab everyone's attentions right away. I think I hate to keep bringing in forever, but like you get the same feeling of this is what

monkeying with structure in a streaming context looks like in a pretty good way because it's done by people who also have experience in episodic television, whether that's Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard or Patrick Somerville, who obviously came out of the leftovers. Do you want to talk a little bit about forever? Sure. It's clearly on my mind. Yeah, well, I wanted to talk about it too because I've seen, that is, I watched the whole season of that.

And we can say for now, obviously, if you haven't listened for, if you haven't seen forever, you should probably stop. Because it's a show in which as soon as you start the season, you are pretty much on a timer of when you're going to hit a massive spoiler. That spoiler is going to determine how you think about the show and the character. So if you haven't watched Forever, Allison and I both highly recommend that you do, but we're going to talk a little bit about it now. Okay, so you are on the pro Forever team. I am I am pro Forever. I did not care for the last two episodes. Interesting.

And I, every once in a while, I don't get, not, I'm not offended, but I don't sort of get annoyed easily by television. I mean, I'm either in or I'm out, but it's not like I watch something and that I'm, and I feel sort of that it, it offends my sensibilities. But there is something that happens at the end of this show, which is, and I think this might be specifically my read of it, so I kind of wanted to hear what you thought of the end, that dovetails too closely to what I think a lot of, from the mid-auts to. to now dromedes do, which is they really dabble with breaking these characters down and saying some pretty interesting things about love and about what it means to be a human being. And then at the end, fall back on the safety net of like, but it was really all about the nuclear family at the end. And it was all about like this one person that you've always needed and always will need. And I felt like that kind of plagued a lot of Aptown movies. And I thought at the end of the

of this in a movie in a show where essentially what the premise is is that what if you got to the afterlife and your life partner was not who you wanted to spend it with. Well, Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph play a married couple named Oscar in June. They're kind of a stereotypical suburban more in a rut. It's sexless. Or I don't know, they don't make it canonical that it's sexless, but that's definitely implied. And then Fred Armisen passes away.

Maya Rudolph goes through the entire grieving process. And just as she starts to recalibrate, she gets yanked back to his side. because she also passes away and finds it they're in the afterlife together. Where their afterlife looks disturbingly similar to their suburban, boring life. Yes, absolutely. And I think the way people felt about the ending, which is, you know, spoiler alert, they go through some trials and then they eventually reconcile and decide that they really do want to spend their afterlife together,

really depends on how you felt, how convincing the chemistry between Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph was. I was so taken away by it and so. I enjoyed their rapport. I think one of the things I actually liked about the show is that it's not as simple as Maya Rudolph falling out of love with Fred Armisen. You can feel that she still admires and loves and respects and enjoy spending time with him. It's just that she has this other growing emotional need that he can't quite fulfill. And I honestly do agree that they resolve it a little too hastily. They essentially have like one single honest conversation and then recommit to each other.

And I'm definitely sympathetic to that. But again, we just talked about how we're always upset the shows are dragging. So, you know, a quick eight-episode turnaround is kind of nice to me. So that she's essentially in about two-thirds into the show, she meets Catherine Keener, who's their next-door neighbor, and it initially is pretty touchy with her. But then they kind of developed this deep bond. And the bond is largely built over the idea that they were deeply dissatisfied in their past life, in their real life, and that they want something new in this afterlife.

And they go off and they figure out a way to travel beyond the typical boundaries of the sort of town that they're living in and the afterlife. And one of the things I also liked about forever is how deliberately sparse and airy and allegorical the world building is. Like their main community is something called Riverside. They make their way to this weird castle by the ocean called Oceanside very creatively. And it's the physics of it and the rules and bylaws of it are left deliberately fuzzy so that it can all be a metaphor for their kind of space. And all the Riverside stuff I really enjoyed, I love the fact that they had this, like, teenager from the 70s because when you die, you're sort of trapped in the person as the person you were when you died. So this teenager from the 70s is trying, is essentially their guide through this world. But he's a teenager from the 70s, so he's not necessarily the most articulate or sensitive person.

And there's that line that like dying young is like getting famous when you're young and all the dead kids are like really arrogant celebrities. Right. Right. So essentially, you know, Maya Rudolph and Catherine Kiener go on this adventure. They find this other place. And in this other place, I think if I, this is a sort of, this is a synopsis. So I'm not like getting too deep into it. But essentially it's a place where memory starts to fade. So if in Riverside, you're kind of stuck or blessed to be the same person you were when

you were. Yeah, Riverside is safety and repetition. And Oceanside is like, we're going to embrace what's different about being dead. Julia Ormond is there. And everybody is forgetting what they did when they were alive. they're forgetting, you know, they're constantly pushing the boundaries, they're like letting trucks run over them. They're climbing on the bottom of the ocean, which I thought was a really beautiful visual.

And it is a more typical idea of, you know, in the afterlife, what if you could do anything and be anything? And essentially, I mean, it has, what's the retreat that Don Draper goes to at the end of Madman? Eslin. Eslin. It has a kind of esplan quality to it. But I thought it was a really interesting thing. And the idea is essentially that, you know, right up until almost the very end of the series,

it seems like Maya Rudolph is like, I did love you, but this is what I need now. And this is what I want to do for eternity. And in eternity, I almost want to annihilate this memory of myself. I mean, I also was very, part of the reason why the ending worked for me was I was sold that she wanted something different. And then she gets to Oceanside as like, I'm not fully comfortable with this either. Like, I don't think she wants to fully leave behind everything about herself because, you know, she had a crappy dead-end white-collar job.

But she also, again, like really loves Fred Armisen's character. character. And I can see getting to that place where everyone, you know, celebrates the newness and blank slatedness of everything. And she, you know, Maya Rudolph's character is a great time singing, this is how we do it. It's just a wonderful scene. But I also get being like, okay, what I actually want is something different from my old life, but also from this. And I still want it with Fred Armisen. And we can negotiate this new frontier together. So we are undergoing change, but we're doing it as a unit. Yeah. Which was really moving to me. I don't know. Yeah, maybe I think that you identify what it was, which was that there wasn't enough time spent with the reconciliation, I guess.

Yeah, and I do think it is rushed, but the one conversation they do have felt very honest where Maya Rudolph's character basically says, like, yes, we had this frustration, but in part I used you as an excuse to not change. And he says, you know, I'm passive aggressive and I never wanted to talk about this because I thought if we did, then the relationship would crumble. It just felt like a very real thing to say. and that resonated as truthful enough that I could see them getting out of it eventually so I was okay with them getting out of it sooner rather than later. Do you think there's going to be a second season of this?

I was under the impression that it was going to be an open-ended series, but it seems to the people who were involved in it, Alan Yang, Matt Hubbard, my Rudolph, Fred Armisen, seemed to be talking about it as more of a closed-ended thing, which I would also be okay with, but that's because I'm okay with basically anything ending.

Yeah, and then this was also, you know, watching Forever was that, that feeling of you're just mainlining it when you get into that world and you start watching it you just kind of like run through it

because the episodes are pretty compact I watch it in two four episode chunks and that felt like the right way to do it Yeah so obviously if you've listened to this part you've probably seen forever but by chance if you just don't care about spoilers at all we really recommend forever and I'd be curious to know what people think

about the ending thank you so much for joining me today Thank you for having me All right talk to you soon Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Amazon Prime channels. When you join Amazon Prime in addition to fast-free shipping, you can also have great entertainment delivered to you instantly through Prime Video Channels. With Prime Video Channels, you can add and watch over 100 channels all on Amazon. No cable required. And you only pay for the channels you want. Create a TV lineup you love from premium and specialty channels like Showtime, Stars, HBO, CBS All Access, Noggin, PBS Kids, PBS Masterpiece, Acorn TV and Britbox. access tons of fall content, like the latest season of Ballers on HBO,

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Don't worry about installing and configuring your system. ADT will DIY do it for you. Just visit ADT.com slash smart to learn more about how ADT can design and install a secure smart home just for you. All right, now I'm joined by my brother, Jason Concepcion. It's actually been a while since we've done this.

It's been a little bit. It's been a minute. You've been off binging. It's right. You've been off desktopping. That's right. But I wanted to have you on because I got this weird feeling over the weekend,

which is essentially, is it possible that DC Cinematic Universe is cool again. When was it first cool? Dark night? Dark night. Okay. Dark night. And then you know what it stopped?

When? Dark night. Right after that. Probably right after that. There's this whole extracurricular life that people who follow these movies live, which is essentially there's like the on-screen stuff that you can follow and that you can be into Black Panther and you can be into Dr. Strange. You can be into whatever the movies are that you see. But then there's this obviously very full life you can live online, reading theories about finished movies and reading gossip and news updates about.

movies that are in the process of being made, that are being casted, that are hiring directors and hiring writers. And that's where I kind of arrived at with this DC stuff. Now, they've had some shuffling of the deck at the top. Yes. And obviously, they've gone through some changes in terms of the focus of these movies, which I think everybody initially thought over the last few years was going to be Henry Cavill is Superman, Ben Affleck is Batman.

Let's just bang these out. And then let's slowly expand out from the center, but always have the center. And then I think Wonder Woman kind of changed that because Wonder Woman showed them that they don't need to be overly reliant on these known quantities. You can go somewhere new. You can have a different energy. And now they seem to be leaning into that idea, whole hog.

So I want to kind of like run down this slate and we could just kind of talk about both how we're feeling about these movies, but also if you have any insight into what these movies are based on, because you obviously read a Tom More Comics than I do. So the first thing we're obviously going to talk about is the Joker movie. This is coming out next October. It's directed

by Todd Phillips. Which is a wild sentence to say. Todd Phillips. I don't know if I can properly do this justice. And this says a lot about where I'm at in my life. But I was watching Bradley Cooper introducing a Stars Board at Toronto. Like the full

40-minute video. I skipped around a little bit, but I spent a lot of time watching Sam Elliot cry because he hadn't seen the movie yet. And he was just like, I don't know about you, but these people start singing and just bring something out of me. Damn.

So we've got this situation where Bradley Cooper's introducing this movie and he's just like, you know, thank you so much to everybody believe to me. And it's like there's the real reason that I'm up here today

and that I directed this film is because a few years ago, Todd Phillips, who's here tonight, gave me a note. And that note said, I wish you started believing in yourself. Damn. Because you can do anything.

You gave me a note similar to that when we were at Grantland. Yeah, but you didn't win like an Oscar. Like, you know what I mean? It's like, did Bradley Cooper really need that Pick me up? I think he might have. You know, it's been tough for Bradley Cooper being an international movie star starring on Broadway

and The Elephant Man. Getting great Wimbledon tickets. Getting incredible Wimbledon tickets, like flexing by making the fourth remake of A Star is Born, getting that greenlit. It's been very tough for his, you know, just for his ego. And now he's a meme lord. He is a meme lord. We are making Brad into social content every day.

So anyway, Todd Phillips, inspiration. for a Starsboard is directing this new iteration of the Joker. Are they using Jared? Let them know. They cast the homie Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker. The script comes from Scott Silver, who wrote The Fighter in Eight Mile. And it has

this cast, Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Mark Maren, Bill Camp, Francis Conroy, and Zosu Beetz from Atlanta. And, you know, like, unlike most of these big comic movies, especially, these Marvel movies, which are under such tight locking key,

we've already gotten footage of Joaquin Phoenix screen testing or camera testing for the Joker so we've seen him in the makeup and then some like random YouTube site like Hollywood blog had footage from the Joker's set of basically a bunch of people rushing out of a dilapidated subway aka the subway the subway now and then Joaquin Phoenix and full regalia comes out walks towards the camera and there's like a brawl behind him to your knowledge. This isn't really drawing from any specific era of DC comics. It feels like, now, the Joker has had, there have been various hints about his background, where he comes from, his origin story, in the comics, but none of them are really canonical. It seems like this comes from The Killing Joke, which kind of put forth the idea that the Joker was this failed stand-up comic, which it seems like Todd Phillips's The Joker is somewhat based on that. from what they're saying with Robert De Niro kind of rehashing his king of comedy character, but from the Jerry Lewis side.

Yeah. So it seems to be based on that. That said, even the killing joke was like the Joker was an unreliable narrator, so you didn't know if that was really what you're getting. And I think that's, that is my one kind of fear about this, is the Joker, over the 70 years of the character's history, has never had this established background, and that's kind of made him cool.

Part of what was great about Keith Ledger's performance and the characterization of the Joker was that he kept telling these stories, and they were always different. Like, how did I get my smile? How did it? My dad did it, and then I did it this way, and he's just, like, changing the stories all the time.

And that was really cool. Do you lose some of that mystique if you really nail down the Joker's origin? I don't know. We've never really done it. So that has me slightly concerned in terms of the character. Because this is just a thing that's never been done, even in the comics. And now we're going to do it on the big screen.

And I think that seems to be based on the killing joke, which is kind of this legendary Batman one-off story about the background of the Joker, what drives him, his kind of like the psychological battle with Batman, and it also contains an extremely trouble. scene in which the Joker tortures Barbara Gordon Oh right. The daughter of...

So we don't know if that's exactly what it is, but with... You mentioned the camp comedy. It seems like Phillips is actually drawing on this late 70s, early 80s, New York, May of like after hours, taxi driver, cave comedy with...

And the cave comedy is being inverted with De Niro, who initially played Rupert Pupkin, who captured... You know, takes hostage Jerry Lewis and King Comedy. But one of the most interesting things about this is this lack of connectivity. You're talking about canon.

You're talking about its connectivity. The whole thing that MCU built itself on was that these movies created anticipation and almost a dependency on one another because they were going to, each movie would set up the next one. And each movie would, you know, illuminate something about the ones past. And DC, after all these years of zigzagging with Zach Snyder and Joss Whedon and trying to get something going with, Justice League and trying to have that kind of connectivity, but making it dark because they wanted to have an alternative to MCU has basically been like, fuck that. We're just going to hire interesting people to do interesting stories. And yeah, there's going to be two.

Sometimes maybe there will be three jokers at once at any given cinematic time. There will be a bunch of different actors playing these parts. Now, obviously, you're probably different because you have so much familiarity with these characters through comics that you're like, I don't really care one way or the other if Ben Affleck is the only Batman or Jared Leto is the only Joker. Do you think Normies will care? I think Normies will slightly care. Although, you know, DC Comics is kind of renowned for its extremely naughty continuity.

Like, they've had to reset the entire universe several times. Is that because of, like, behind the scenes turmoil or just because of, like, a weird storytelling style? It's just because, like, the way, the kind of, like, organic way the company evolved over time. Like, they just had multiple titles. Nothing was really synced up. So they had characters that have been working together that all of a sudden when you looked at the backstory, like one is 40 years older than the other one. You know, just weird shit happened and there's a lot of time travel.

So, you know, there have been a lot of crossover events that DC has put forth in its kind of like constant attempt to reset the universe so that everything lines up. So in that sense, the fact that we don't know where this Joker movie takes place in quote unquote DC continuity, DC continuity. DC movie continuity is not that out of sync with what actually goes on in the comic books. But I do kind of think that, you know, and I hate to compare the two companies, but it feels like Marvel has set the pace of what is kind of like the baseline expectation. You know, what do people want? They want to know that these characters exist and what the world is, the wider world that they exist in.

So I think chopping it up in this kind of way where it's like there's five Batman's and maybe this, maybe the Joker movie takes place. and a place where the dark night happened, but maybe it didn't. I think that is slightly weird considering how we perceive these movies now. Yeah, absolutely. And I think also pace-wise, they've set the pace. I mean, tempo-wise, in terms of the amount of movies that are being put out,

I think there's been what there's been three this year, right? There was Black Panther, Infinity War, and Ant-Man. And Ant-Man. And The Wasp. And Man of the Wasp. Right. So, and then Captain Marvel comes next year. the end of Infinity War comes next year

and I'm sure I'm forgetting some. You know, it was interesting to see Bob Iiger made some comments over this, I think, the last week in a Hollywood Reporter article where he was basically like, we need to chill a little bit on Star Wars movies. Right. That's Star Wars.

I mean, I'm reading between the lines, but essentially Star Wars can't function at the tempo that Marvel goes at. But when you think about it, it took Marvel like almost a decade to get all that stuff right, right, to find the voices of all those characters and to realize that,

that Thor was funny. I mean, they put out, you know, two middling Thor movie before they get to Thor Ragnarok. They were middling. They were bad. And the first one was okay. But Dark World sucks, right?

The second one is bad. Mallory Rubin loves that one. Dark Lord is not, the Dark World is not great. I like parts of it. But Thor Ragnarok is up there. It's maybe the best Marvel movie. It could be, like, arguably the best one. You can make the argument.

And they're all like these chatty, funny, like snarky, self-knowing, like Iron Man 3, Ragnarok. Like, they have like a vibe now. Something happened around phase two where they realized, okay, you know, we're going to have three action set pieces per movie. And our special effects department has basically has that on rails. So when we bring in a director, it's just like the character shots, the scenes, the smaller interstitial stuff. And then we're not even going to worry about the set pieces because we've got that covered.

And it allowed them to kind of, to have a situation like Thor Ragnarok where now two movies in, you can just essentially be like, okay, let's import the stuff that's working from the rest of the MCU and put it in Thor Ragnarok and it works. And the other thing about that is we understand what role Thor plays in the universe. With the Joker, with Birds of Prey, which feels like it would, it feels like the Joker, if they're using DC continuity, it feels like, and they're basing it off killing joke, It feels like the Joker would lead into Birds of Pray, which already has a release date, I believe, 2020 sometime.

Because the Joker shooting Barbara Gordon is basically what, is part of what leads to the formation of that group. So that's just reading between the lines. Maybe that's what's happening. But it would appear to be that this is kind of like this Batman-Gotham-centric offshoot universe. Is there any interplay with Wonder Woman, with the Flash, with Aquaman, No idea. Probably for the Todd Phillips movie, no.

But you mentioned Birds of Prey. So let's talk a little bit about these Harley Quine movies because everybody saw Suicide Squad after, you know, it felt like 18 months of nine-minute trailers. That movie finally came out. And while I think it did make $700 million, no one came out of it.

Everybody came out of it feeling like they needed to have like a stiff drink and like a long walk around the block. And wash their eyeballs out a little bit. But everybody, 100% of approval reading from Margo Robbie. Right? And everybody loved the Harley Quinn character. and over the last nine months or so, like, I think five different Harley Quinn movies have been kicked around.

And one of them is Birds of Prey, which features Harley Quinn, but also features characters like Black Canary, Huntress, and Renee Montoya, and has basically half the actresses in Hollywood have been trying out for these roles, auditioning for these roles. The crazy story behind Birds of Prey is that it's going to be directed by someone named Kathy Jan, who's a former journalist who made something of a splash with this short she made called Dead Pigs, which is a co-production, China and American co-production. It's this black comedy that I would compare to,

I think the Cohen brothers would be the easiest comparison point where it's this, you have to see it. I mean, there's a trailer on YouTube, but she's directing Birds of Prey, and it's written by Christine Hodson, Christina Hodson, who wrote Bumblebee, which is coming out seeing this Transformers movies with Hilly Steinfeld. And this is the kind of thing with that.

You're just like, oh, you're just, Kathy Yon's going to make a $100 million. Hollywood movie with half the actresses in Hollywood, and it sounds like it could be a superhero version of Oceans 8. And that's not something that I think we would have anticipated happening three, four years ago with DC. Yes. I think some of this is, you know, Wonder Woman was the best thing to happen in the DC universe,

cinematic universe in forever. And carrying that energy forward, I think, shows that DC is at least not completely like tone deaf to the way they're being perceived outside of their cocoon. In that sense, it is a little strange to make a Joker movie like 10 years after the most lauded, like, Joker performance, like, of all time. And then that being said, very interested to see, like, how birds of prey shakes out. And as we said, whether it connects with the rest of the DC universe.

And it also feels like a – this is a little bit of what Marvel does, is take smaller directors who've done smaller properties and plug them into their kind of like on the rails production structure. Yeah, not to be out done. They just hired Chloe's out to direct the Eternals, and she just directed this like very sort of, I guess like Terrence Maliki, but like very like pastoral movie called The Rider about a rodeo rider from this past year, and she's directing the Eternals.

Yeah, let's do like immortal gods who like started the universe. You ready? Yeah, the other Harley Quinn movie is a Harley Quinn and Joker movie that's Leto and Robbie. And I just have to mention this because we like to keep up with director bullshit on this. Serious director bullshit. And this is screenwriter bullshit. This is Glenn Frikerra and John Raqua who are writing the Harley Quinn and Joker movie. And have compared their script to this movie as a combination of This Is Us and Bad Santa.

Most things that they worked on. To their credit, they did write those shit. They work on This Is Us. They wrote Bad Santa. So, like, they're allowed to reference in-director bullshit. You are allowed to reference your own work without us casting a light on you.

But the idea of this is us and Bad Santa as two things that would happen in a pitch meeting is fucking hilarious to me. Several things to say about this. First of all, if you read their original interview in Metro, in the Metro, this is like, this script may never come out. It was basically like, yeah,

People really, we, you know, we turned it in. People really love it. But we got to wait for Birds of Prey and Joker to come out first. And then we're somewhere after that. And who knows, blah, blah, blah, blah. It also contains a scene apparently where Dr. Phil is kidnapped by Harley Quinn in order to repair her relationship with the Joker. That's funny on one level. There's another level where I think it's not controversial at all to say that

the Joker and Harley Quinn's relationship is like abusive. It's like an abusive relationship. So handling that in a comedic way, I guess I need to see it. But it's also one of those like, okay, I hope this works out in a way that is not troubling. That feels like you get some notes. Yeah, get some notes and we'll see. But like it is, I'm wishing them the best. But this is us combined with Bad Santa and it's Harley Quinn and the Joker is like, wow, okay.

The other ones that I wanted to mention were, you need you to explain New Gods to me. Okay, New Gods is... So it's being directed by Ava DuVorne, which, you know, she has her follow-up to Rinkle in time. But I tried understanding, I tried reading about it, and I need a translation. Okay, so New, Jack Kirby had like a falling out, whatever you want to call it with Marvel. Went to D.C. in the late 60s, early 70s, and created this kind of sprawling, arc called New Gods, which is, I

guess it's kind of like Marvel's Eternals, but it's these extremely powerful, celestial beings, including Doomsday is one of them. It's the bad guy from was the bad guy from Justice League. Darkseid?

Was it Darkside? Who was the bad guy in the last? I think it's Darkside, man. I think I got you. Anyway, Darkside is part of them. So like some of these properties have been introduced into the DC universe proper, DC cinematic universe proper. But that's essentially what it is.

It's Jack Kirby's early 70s creation that is kind of like this sprawling space opera with these super powerful aliens. So I guess if you were going to do a corollary and this doesn't match up at all, but if you're going to do a corollary, like an elevator pitch to someone who had no idea what this is, you'd say,

it's kind of DC's Guardians of the Galaxy Universe. Yeah. It's the TILD. out to the celestial part, the galaxy so that you can get off of Earth, change all the rules, change all the sort of parameters and physics of the series.

Correct. Now, would dark side the dark side we've seen, would he somehow be connected to DeVernay's Eternals? No idea. But it's interesting to wonder if that could be the case.

Okay. So, let me ask you this. Is somebody who's into these movies, and there's a couple more we can mention, like, there's Wonder Woman 84, which comes out a month after, or is scheduled to come after a month after Todd Phillips's Joker. So they're going to go October, November next year. And Wonder Woman 84, to be, like, incredibly, like, superficial about it. It looks like stranger DC things. Right. It's set in the 80s. There's apparently an action scene that happens at a mall. Kristen Whig is the villain. Chris Pine is somehow back. And it just looks, it looks dope. I mean, it looks like every, you know, like they're doing like Jane Fonda, let's get. physical workouts and kicking ass, and I'm sure it's going to be phenomenally entertaining. There's this pendulum, though, with these movies, right?

Like, we had a certain grounded, I know it seems weird to say any of these movies are grounded in realism, but there was a certain logic and physical reality to Dark Night. Right, right? And then I think over the years, even though, it was 2008 when Dark Night and Iron Man came out, and then you get these two trees, and D.C. has had a much more stunted growth. pattern. But over the years, I think we've been going further and further towards it essentially

almost being science fiction. So you get Guardians of the Galaxy and you've got Infinity War taking place on all these different planets at various times. And DC, if they do new gods and it goes out into outer space. As a fan of these movies, as a fan of comics in general, do you tend to like the stuff that's more grounded

and urban like the Joker? Or do you like exploring the outer frontiers of your consciousness with the more psychedelic stuff. It's interesting. In the Marvel realm, I love the celestial stuff because it's disconnected from continuity and they can kind of be crazier. In D.C., I've always loved the Batman-centric stuff, the real gritty stuff.

Like Dark Knight, Frank Miller's Dark Knight, took place out of continuity. That was a story that didn't, that was just like a kind of dystopian future story about Batman. He's an old man now and broken down and what if he comes out of retirement? That's the stuff that I like through the DC lens. What I think is interesting in terms of the way the two companies have approached their movie properties is like Marvel has, and this is like extremely simplified, but Marvel has more wholeheartedly embraced the fact that these are comic books with colorful costumes. You can criticize them for the tonal color palette of the way they present their movies, but it's very bright and you can see the costumes and they're not afraid to make them look like the costumes from the comic books. Whereas DC, it's like, you know, because Batman is such an entry point for people entering the DC Cinematic Universe, it's like dark, dark, dark, suicide.

Everything is vengeance. It's extremely dark. Yeah. Gritty. You can't really see the costumes. And it feels almost like, I don't want to say they're ashamed of the costumes, but they don't really want to show them off in the same way that Marvel is, like, unafraid to show you the costumes. DC costumes are like armor. Yes.

And Marvel costumes are costumes. They're the kind of things that you would wear as a Halloween outfit, you know? I'm hopeful that DC will find a way to kind of like break the hegemony of like this Batman lens, which I understand. But I do feel like it holds them back in terms of like the kind of breath and vibrancy of translating the breadth and vibrancy of their comics universe to the big screen. Whereas Marvel, it's like they focus. on these kind of second tier and third tier characters, and therefore they could kind of spread the color palette around. In a sense, like, Marvel movies are probably the first movies that kids see

outside of quote-unquote kids movies, right? Like, if you have a kid and you take him and he gets to see some Pixar movies or some animated stuff and maybe some canonical classic Mary Poppins type stuff, if I had a kid, I think the first thing, I mean, I'd probably be like one of those parents who'd be like, you want to watch Jaws? Yeah. I'd be Bill. Right. You want to watch aliens? But if I had a kid

I think the first thing I'd be like okay with him seeing is something like Guardians Right? Whereas DC You're probably even though there's nothing like I mean outrageous in it It's still thematically a little bit darker And visually darker The kid's gonna come back and be like

Why is David Thuleus on fire? Right it's like well I mean you know Batman's parents get murdered in like 30% of the DC movies You know like on screen which could ostensibly be troubling to young minds.

But here's what I'm kind of interested in. Let's say they've got they do new gods. They have Matt Reeves, Batman, which may or may not happen based on Ben Affleck's personal health. Flashpoint, directed by John Francis Daly and Jonathan.

Excited for that one. Very excited. Let's let the guys who made Game Night make a Flash movie. Super excited for that one. Don't overthink this. New Gods of Pray, all the movies that we've talked about

and it's also like Suicide Squad 2 and I'm sure tons of stuff that we don't know about, Batgirl, supergirl, they'll probably recast Superman at some point. They're having, for lack of a better term,

they seem to be having phone with it. They seem to be saying, we own this intellectual property, let's let people have actual ideas about how to execute it. Marvel's in an interesting spot where, especially with the introduction

of what had been traditionally Fox's stuff, which is essentially X-Men, if you introduce X-Men into this whole thing, and like you really, Recast X-Men and you introduce them into the Marvel universe. Now, as you and I are probably those are our... Those are our... X-Men are our people.

I am okay if they just want to start over with X-Men. That's exactly what they should do. If they just want to start over and slowly integrate X-Men in. Now, one other option they have is, yes, you recast, but you basically add X-Men in as if it's all already been happening. and then all of a sudden you start working X-Men storylines into the MCU, which could actually be the infusion that the MCU would need if, in fact, Downey and Evans are retiring.

Yeah, the way I would, I mean, this is, we're off the rails now, but the way I would love to see it is with mutants kind of always existing, but very, very, very underground. They're, you know, they're threatened. There's very few of them, and they're extremely powerful. So, of course, they would be viewed as a threat. by various powers out there. So they want to keep quiet.

And I think it would be really cool, like you said, if you slowly revealed them as existing in the world, you know, Charles Xavier has this school that's pretending to be a boarding school for gifted kids, gifted and troubled kids, when in reality it's a training ground for these extremely powerful, like, young people. And I think that there is a template for this.

When Marvel created the ultimate universe in the early 2000s, it was a way to kind of reboot their, properties and bring them up to date. So, Ultimate Spider-Man, you know, he's got a cell phone. He's like, he's, you know, a cool kid. The Ultimates, which is kind of like their version of the Avengers, which is very influential on the MCU, whereas had Captain America frozen in ice but comes back and he's like fighting terrorism.

And then Thor was still a god, but people weren't sure if he was like schizophrenopherson. or not. Like, so there was these, and a lot of those plot lines came and were translated to the big screen in a certain way. And I think the Ultimate X-Men was really great and really leaned into like, this is a threatened group of people. That's the one that Whedon did, right? No, that was astonishing X-Men, which is awesome, which they kind of already did.

Astonishing X-Men was basically X-Men 3, which was a Travis. Okay. But that kind of gave you the template of how do you. you reboot the X-Men from scratch, keeping everything, all the basic ingredients there, but allowing a new generation to kind of find it within the context of the modern world and not have to look back at X-Men 1, which took place in like 1967. How do we do this now? So that kind of roadmap exists, and it would be cool if they use that to kind of inform

what they're going to do going forward. The temptation is going to be there to do the perfect, platonic version of Dark Phoenix to do the even though Dark Phoenix I think is coming out and even though they've made Apocalypse and it was a

absolute clown show I still think that there's a real desire on the part of people out there to have seen those stories rendered the way that they know that there is potential to do you know and the question really is does X-Men go into the same

pipeline that the entire other MCU is which is essentially Black Panther 2 will come out a little faster because people obviously adore that character and the time is right to strike. But, you know, for the most part, there's like a long rotation.

You have to like wait for your start for a while there. Or do they turn into a more traditional movie studio where it's like, yeah, we're going to do stuff like Logan and Deadpool and these movies here and there around an MCU and not everything is going to have to adhere

to the Kevin Feigey vision of the world. My sense is they would, I mean, Fagy has not steered them wrong yet, right? Like, you know, the strength of the Marvel structure is that it's just that the star is the brand, right? So you can have Ant Man in the Wasp and not worry. You can have Thor Ragnarok be the best movie out of the trilogy and the two first movies sucked, and it wasn't like this existential crisis. What's going to have? Oh my God, Thor, people hate him.

Like, what are we going to do? You don't have to worry about that because Marvel, the moment. brand is so strong. They've built it into this kind of like powerhouse thing where every entry point, whether it be Thor or Guardians, what have you, leads to another part of the universe. That's the strength of it. It's like it's this incredible brand synergy. So I would imagine they would stick with the Feigy Vision.

Like why would you change it unless there's something contractually where they have to like get seed some kind of agency to to Fox? But like, why would you change it? Everything's going so well. And homecoming, Spider-Rind homecoming was great. And that's kind of the roadmap of how you can kind of merge these properties that are owned by another studio. It's quality. Quality control is like the thing that they have going for them.

Lack of deviation from a house style is what is going against them. And you can bring in a Chloe Zau. You can have a James Gunn. You can have people working on these movies that have these unique individual voices, but more often than not, they wind up kind of adhering to a Russo's, overall a Russo's kind of vibe. So I'll be fascinated to see it. I mean, it's such a crucial time because there is a possibility that we don't get a Guardians 3. We probably won't get another Iron Man movie.

We're probably done with Captain America. All these guys are probably done after the next movies. I can't imagine now Ruffalo is going to make a Hulk movie. So a lot of the movies that are these people, if you started watching Marvel movies when you were 13, and you're in your early 20s now, what you know of that, that universe is gone. It's going to be gone.

You need to be growing the bench at this point. And now you're going to have Black Panther and Captain Marvel and we'll see what else. We'll see what happens with the introduction of the Fox Marvel characters. I can't wait.

All right. Thanks for joining you, man. Thank you for having me. Today's episode of The Watch was sponsored by ADT. ADT can design and install a smart home just for you backed by 24-7 protection,

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