Guillermo del Toro

Geek Punditry #150: The Year-End Cinema Scramble

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Towards the end of last year, as my most stalwart of followers certainly remember, I wrote a column about all of the movies that had come out in 2024 that I hadn’t gotten around to seeing yet. To no one’s surprise, I still haven’t gotten to see most of them. There are just so many things to watch, so many movies and shows that are pulling at my attention, and I’ve got a kid running around that not only limits what I can watch while he’s awake and paying attention, but also means that there are a LOT of sports on TV in our house. Not to mention the fact that I’ve been doing my “Year of Superman” thing since January, so a not-inconsiderable amount of my viewing time has been devoted to that in one way or another.

To date, I have seen 50 percent of these films.

2025 has not been different from 2024: there are dozens of movies that hit the box office (or streaming services) this year that I sincerely intend to watch, but simply haven’t gotten around to yet. Before I delve into those, though, let’s do a quick list of those movies I DID watch from last year’s list and, ultimately, what I thought of them:

  • Venom: The Last Dance-Not bad, but probably the least impressive of the trilogy.
  • Deadpool and Wolverine-Funny and full of the kind of delicious meta-commentary that only Deadpool can make work. 
  • Red One-Cute, unremarkable, but not deserving of some of the hate it gets on the internet.
  • Despicable Me 4-Better than 3, but I still probably wouldn’t bother with these movies if my son didn’t like them.
  • Flow-Technologically and visually, a masterpiece, although I thought the story was weak.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 3-Make it make sense that this series keeps being entertaining.
  • MoviePass, MovieCrash-Intriguing look at how a system that was always doomed to failure wound up failing.
  • Music By John Williams-Nothing particularly revelatory in this documentary, but still a lovely watch.
  • Godzilla/Kong: The New Empire-Much as I love giant monster movies, this one felt like more of the same.
  • Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!-Not as good as the original, but as far as legacy sequels go, it’s a pretty good one.
  • A Quiet Place Day One-Probably the most character-driven film in this series so far, and that’s a plus.
  • The Substance-Incredible and absolutely worth every bit of praise it’s gotten.
  • The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare-Made me want to read the book, which you can imagine, is high praise.
  • Alien: Romulus-If you’re going to keep making Alien movies you gotta find something new to do with them. I haven’t watched the new Hulu series, but I suspect that it was better than this film.
  • The 4:30 Movie-Tender, sweet, without being saccharine. When Kevin Smith really speaks from the heart, there are few that do it better.
  • Madame Web-The internet told me this was the worst movie ever made. They were wrong. It’s really more bland and generic than actively bad. 
  • Joker: Folie a Deux-This was a thing that happened.

You know, looking back, I actually got around to more of last year’s list than I would have expected, which is a nice feeling. Of course, while I was busy watching the movies that came out LAST year, movies from THIS year just started piling up on me. Most of the reasons I don’t go to the movies as much as I used to haven’t changed: price, time, availability, and so forth. One thing, however, HAS changed. My son is eight years old now, and he’s gotten better about making it through a movie, especially a movie he’s excited about. This year my wife and I managed to take him to both Superman (naturally) and Fantastic Four: First Steps, in addition to the usual assortment of kids’ animated movies. 

I consider it a legitimate moral failure that I haven’t seen this movie yet.

One such movie we did NOT get around to, though, was The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. Much as I wanted to support it in theaters, time was not on my side, and it’s still on my list of end-of-year films I haven’t gotten to yet. As is Pixar’s newest, Elio, a movie that seemed to come and go with no notice whatsoever. But I’ve heard from a few people who actually saw it that they liked it, and I’m hoping I can get Eddie to join me for a viewing before the year runs out. He’s also excited about Zootopia 2, so we may make a movie date out of that one. I would also like to show him director Steve Hudson’s Stitch Head, which looks to be kind of a kids’ take on Frankenstein. And although it doesn’t really seem like my kind of movie, everybody on the planet except for me seems to have gone wild over K-Pop Demon Hunters on Netflix, and I feel almost obligated to watch it out of curiosity, if nothing else. 

Stop trying to tell me this was a bad movie. You didn’t see this movie. NOBODY saw this movie.

This year also brought – as years tend to do – a bunch of sequels. And if it’s a sequel to a movie I actually like, I’ll watch it. But I’m also the kind of nerd who prefers to re-watch the previous film (or films) in a series BEFORE watching the sequel, especially if it’s been a long time. So that, in addition to the usual problems of availability and time, are the reason I have yet to get to the “requel” of I Know What You Did Last Summer or the more direct sequels like 28 Years Later, Black Phone 2, Nobody 2, the Disney hit Freakier Friday, or the Disney flop Tron: Ares. A brief note about Tron: I love the original and I greatly enjoyed Tron: Legacy. I know Ares crashed and burned at the box office, but this has absolutely no impact on my desire to watch it. I don’t despise Jared Leto just because the Internet tells me to and, once this movie lands on Disney+, I fully intend to watch and evaluate it on its own merits. And you can’t stop me. Nyeah. 

There’s also Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Movie, which hasn’t dropped on Netflix yet, but is on my list. The first Knives Out was absolutely astounding, one of the best mysteries I’ve seen in ages (and perhaps THE best mystery/comedy I’ve ever seen). Glass Onion, the second Benoit Blanc mystery, still entertained me, but I didn’t quite find it up to the level of the original. I’m hoping that Rian Johnson and Daniel Craig bounce back with this third installment. 

Netflix, as a studio, has absolutely loaded me with mystery movies this year that I just haven’t gotten to yet. In addition to Wake Up Dead Man, I’ve also got my eye on The Woman in Cabin 10. This one stars Keira Knightley as a journalist who sees a passenger go overboard on a cruise ship, then gets caught up in the question of what’s going on. Chris Columbus directed The Thursday Murder Club, a crime comedy about a group of senior mystery enthusiasts who get swept into a real life murder. The cast is incredible – Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie, David Tennant, Naomi Ackie – why the hell haven’t I watched this yet?

It’s Netflix’s fault I haven’t watched this yet, not mine.

I can tell you exactly why I haven’t watched Netflix’s Frankenstein yet: because they dropped it in NOVEMBER. What a dumb move. I couldn’t be more excited to watch Guillermo del Toro’s take on my favorite monster of all time, but I’ve had my hands full the last few weeks. Why on Earth wouldn’t they put this out in October and play up the Halloween angle? Granted, they’re the ones running a billion-dollar streaming service and I’m the guy writing blogs about it for free, but I think we can all agree that I am far wiser than they are.

Speaking of horror, Frankenstein isn’t the only movie that slipped past me this year. Good Boy, the horror film told from the point of view of a loyal dog, has been on my radar for a few years now, ever since I heard the premise. It’s gotten rave reviews, and with a runtime of only 73 minutes, I’ll be kind of mad with myself if I don’t sneak it in before the end of the year. Similarly, I’m interested in the slasher throwback Marshmallow, the Shudder film Night of the Reaper, and the survival horror video game adaptation Until Dawn. 

I’m saving this one for a day where I want to reduce myself to a mewling infant.

And the documentaries! I haven’t even GOTTEN to the documentaries yet! Prime Video has given us John Candy: I Like Me, a movie that seems to have left everybody who has watched it so far in tears. I’m probably going to wait until school lets out for Thanksgiving and then do a double feature of this one with the movie that gave us the title quote, the brilliant Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. 

I’ve got no such excuse, though, for sleeping on Jaws at 50, a documentary about one of the greatest movies ever made, or George A. Romero’s Resident Evil, which is a documentary about a movie that was NEVER made. That’s a relatively small subgenre of entertainment documentaries, but it’s one I’ve always enjoyed. Prime Video has also given us When We Went MAD!, a documentary about the history of the magazine that we all thought was hilarious when we were nine years old. I’ll be honest, I fell out of love with Mad Magazine ages ago (and re-reading some of their stories this summer during my Year of Superman did not reignite the love affair), but a documentary about comics is always going to get a view from me.

Saying that this one “aged like milk” may actually be considered a compliment.

Speaking of comics, I did a lot better this year at watching the superhero movies that came out…well, either that or there just weren’t as many of them. But looking at my list of movies that I missed this year, there are only three superhero movies I didn’t get around too, two of which are animated Batman movies. Batman Ninja Vs. Yakuza League and Aztec Batman: Clash of Empires are both “Elseworlds”-style takes on the character, plucking him out of Gotham City and putting him into feudal Japan and the time of the Spanish conquistadors, respectively. The concept of Batman, in and of itself, is flexible enough that these things are usually at least interesting. Then there’s the long-awaited remake of The Toxic Avenger, which has finally been taken off the shelf and released after two or three years of languishing. I’m very curious to see if the legendarily cheesy Troma Studios hero will hold up to a larger budget.

OOOOH, because if you take the “e” out of the parentheses the title is — NOW I get it!

As for low budgets, there are several indie movies that got my attention this year, movies I read about online or heard discussed in podcasts, that I haven’t watched. Jonathan L. Bowen’s The Comic Shop, for example, or the British comedy Bad Apples about a teacher who accidentally abducts her worst student and then finds that suddenly her class is more manageable. Dropout comedian Isabella Roland wrote and starred in the comedy D(e)AD, about a woman whose family is haunted by her father’s ghost – everyone except for her. There’s also Hamnet, a drama about the tragedy BEHIND William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and John-Michael Powell’s crime drama Violent Ends. I can’t tell you too much about any of these because I don’t KNOW much, except that I heard enough about them to have my curiosity piqued and put them on my watchlist. 

Whatever bastard designed this did the human equivalent of putting a dog on the poster. You know what you’re in for.

Finally, in case you didn’t know, I’m kind of a fan of Stephen King. And this year has been awash in King content, with the new It TV prequel Welcome to Derry now running on HBO Max and no less than FOUR big-screen adaptations of his work, of which I have seen exactly one. The Monkey. Which I liked, but which was VERY different from the short story it’s based on. That means I still need to get to The Life of Chuck, based on a novella that I thought was pretty good, but the film is directed by Mike Flanagan, which means it’s probably brilliant. Francis Lawrence directed The Long Walk, an adaptation of one of King’s bleakest stories (originally published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym), and I look forward to seeing Mark Hamill playing the bad guy again – because despite most people thinking of him as Luke Skywalker, real ones know he’s actually the best Joker. And lest I forget Edgar Wright directed a remake of another Bachman book, The Running Man, a sci-fi action film rather than horror, but with trailers that look like an awful lot of fun.

The point is, I DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO WATCH ALL OF THE MOVIES.

As always, I’m going to do my best to get through as many of these (and the two dozen or so other movies that are on my list that I didn’t mention) between now and the time my Christmas vacation ends in early January, but who knows how many I’ll actually get to? In the meantime, if there are any particularly good movies that came out this year that I didn’t mention that you think I haven’t seen yet, let me know. What’s adding a few more films to a list I’m never going to reach the end of anyway?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He needs to go to the opposite of that planet from Interstellar, some place where he can be there for five minutes and have time to watch 12 month’s worth of movies. He hears Detroit feels like that sometimes. 

Geek Punditry #109: Fanufactured Outrage

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Allow me to preface this by saying this column is NOT about Superman. I’m gonna do my best to restrict that to the Wednesday blogs during this Year of Superman, which you all of course should be reading and sharing with your friends and joining the Facebook group. But the thing that triggered this week’s column came from the new “Icons” trailer for James Gunn’s upcoming Superman movie, so I gotta start there.

A few days ago, DC Studios released a new 30-second spot for the movie. There wasn’t a lot of new stuff in this one – most of it was footage that appeared in the first trailer, with a few new seconds of Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor and a final shot of David Corenswet as Superman flying directly at the camera, his full face clearly in view. I thought it was a great shot, and a lot of the Superman fans and groups I’m associated with started passing it around social media. Some people even used it as cover photos on Facebook and that sort of thing. But as is always the case there was a contingent of people – I hesitate to call them “fans” for reasons that will soon become abundantly clear – who started whining and complaining that the face had been altered via CGI. 

How could anyone hate this face?

First of all, I didn’t for a second think that it had. It looked perfectly natural to me. Second, the idea of complaining that CGI is being used in a movie where the main character is a flying alien, a woman with bird wings fights a kaiju, and there’s a character who can magically create anything he imagines with his glowing green ring is abundantly stupid. Of course there will be CGI. It’s only worth complaining if the CGI is bad, and nothing I’ve seen so far fits that pedigree. But the whining reached the point where Gunn himself on social media stated that there was no CGI altering done to Corenswet’s face, and pointed out something that anybody with a brain probably already knew – that pointing a camera directly in a person’s face might sometimes look slightly different than an angle captured from the side. 

But I have no doubt that the people who complained in the first place aren’t satisfied. Such people never are. These non-fans exist only to find things to get outraged about. These are the people who get up in arms over every casting announcement, declare a move a failure before a foot of film has been shot, and harass actors until they quit social media altogether. The word “fan” is short for “fanatic,” and these are the people who take the literal definition of the word to the extreme. They are not fans, but they are responsible for what I like to call Fanufactured Outrage.

Fanufactured Outrage is the phenomenon where people – usually, but not exclusively on social media – get angry over a problem that does not exist until they invent it in their heads. They’re the ones who hate a superhero costume that they haven’t even seen an official image of, the ones who despise any casting decision that doesn’t perfectly mirror the image they have of a character in their mind, and the ones who have decided that popular culture reached its zenith when they were approximately 13 years old and everything has been downhill ever since. 

A few days ago, for example, someone in a Svengoolie group brought up the Guillermo Del Toro Frankenstein movie that’s coming out later this year. I am on record as being very excited for this movie (not as much as Superman, but it’s probably #3 on my 2025 most-anticipated list, with Fantastic Four: First Steps coming in second). Del Toro is a phenomenal director, and I cannot think of a better choice to do a new version of Frankenstein. This is the man, remember, who won Best Picture and Best Director for what was essentially a reboot of Creature From the Black Lagoon. And while most of the fans were, indeed, excited, there were the naysayers. My favorite was the one who just whined “No more remakes, they’re never any good.”

Yeah, nothing interesting in this image at all.

So many problems with this, of course. First of all, the idea that there’s never been a good remake is patently false, and we can go back at least as far as The Maltese Falcon to prove that. Second, I don’t really consider Del Toro’s Frankenstein a remake any more than any of the 30,000 versions of A Christmas Carol are remakes of each other – it’s a new movie that draws on the same original source material, but not necessarily a remake of the Boris Karloff film or of any of the other hundreds of versions of Frankenstein that have been made. And finally, even if you do consider every version of Frankenstein since the first one a remake, this person disproved their own assertion, as the Karloff version was NOT the first film version of Frankenstein any more than the Judy Garland Wizard of Oz was the first version of that story, or the smash hit Dune films were the first adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel. 

When that last bit was pointed out to the original complainer, though, his response was something along the lines of, “I mean nothing since 1970. It all sucks”

Write that down, folks. There hasn’t been any good movie made in the past 55 years. The only thing this guy has proven is that he’s built a little box for himself that he refuses to peek out of, and while I suppose he has the right to do so, none of the rest of us should feel any obligation to give a damn what he’s whining about from behind the cardboard flap.

Perpetrators of Fanufactured Outrage exist in every fandom and every medium, and while I do believe they are a minority group, they are also often the loudest such group, which can make them difficult to ignore no matter how hard we try. The “mute” button on most social media makes it a little easier, but it’s kind of like fighting the Hydra – you cut off one Fanatic and two more will sprout to take his place.

Their zeal to pick things apart isn’t helped by the news cycle, which runs with everything that is even remotely clickbaitable, regardless of whether they should or not. When the movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine was in post-production, for instance, a full-length cut of the movie was somehow leaked and began making its rounds on the internet. The problem was it was an unfinished work cut: rough, with no music, and without even any special effects. Of course, the fans hated it. But what did they expect? It wasn’t finished. It was still missing essential elements. It wasn’t even like reading the first draft of a book before it gets a polish, it’s like reading a book that hasn’t had any of the adjectives implanted yet, as we writers do at the Adjective Implantation Plant down on 45th and Broad. The film was excoriated before it was even given a chance. 

Somehow they didn’t see the GENIUS in this.

To be fair, the finished movie wasn’t exactly good either, but that doesn’t mean it deserved the treatment it got. 

Perhaps the worst is when they Fanufacture Outrage over something that doesn’t even exist, like the rumors that fly through the air of Hollywood at any given day. They’re impossible to escape, predicated on overheard snippets of conversation, someone wistfully explaining what they would do with a franchise, or leaked information that may have been under consideration at one point but has since been abandoned. The smog in Los Angeles, according to a recent Environmental Protection Agency survey, is estimated to be at least 76 percent Hollywood rumors, and the Fanatics will latch on to every one of them and get pissed about them.

It doesn’t help when the “news” sites run with this kind of information as if it has any weight. I find this is particularly true in terms of casting news. Sonic the Hedgehog star Ben Schwartz, for instance, recently made news when he said that he would like to play Plastic Man in a DC movie. Let me make something clear at the outset: this is an A+ casting idea. Schwartz would be absolutely perfect as Eel O’Brian. It would basically be someone with the heart of his Sonic character and the attitude of his Parks and Recreation character, plus he’s got the look.

Yeah, I can’t see this at ALL.

The only problem here is that neither James Gunn nor anybody else at DC has said anything about a Plastic Man movie, nor have they given any indication that the character is slated to appear in any of the other movies or TV shows that are in the works. This was just a case of someone asking Schwartz who he would want to play, if given the chance, and the sites running with it, and lots of stupid people getting angry about it. You see this sort of thing all the time. Just a few days after the Schwartz “news” we went through the same cycle again when Cynthia Erivo from Wicked said she would love to play Storm in the MCU X-Men reboot. Again, it would be a solid casting choice and it would sure as hell bring in a lot of fans who may otherwise not see the movie, but it’s still just her saying “I would like…” which isn’t news to me. 

If you need a third example, pick any Hollywood actor between the ages 20 and 50 and, odds are, you can find an article where they’ve said they want to play Batman. They’re everywhere.

And since these things aren’t even really news, it’s even stupider when the fanatics Fanufacture their Outrage over these. You’re getting mad over something that isn’t even happening. 

We can’t stop the fanatics from doing what fanatics do, sadly, but there are some things that we can do to mitigate the damage. First of all, the news sites need to actually report on news and not rumors. I know, I may as well be asking for a winning lottery ticket and a faucet in my house that dispenses hot and cold running root beer, but if it DID happen, it would keep things to a minimum. Ben Schwartz – or anybody else – wanting to play a character isn’t news unless they’ve actually had a conversation with James Gunn or somebody else associated with the studio. Stop telling us about it.

Second, we need to ignore anybody who has made up their mind about a film, TV show, book, video game, or anything else that they haven’t even seen yet. We especially need to ignore them if the content in question isn’t even finished being made. 

And finally, and most importantly friends, I implore you…don’t engage with these idiots. Don’t feed their Fanaticism. Use that mute button.

It’s there for a reason.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He’s still ticked about that leaked work print of Sausage Party that ruined the movie by being a completed and accurate depiction of the final film.

Geek Punditry #66: The Frankenssance

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Earlier this week, the internet was abuzz with an image released from the upcoming film The Bride! (The exclamation point is part of the title – I’m interested, but not so excited as to declare it via punctuation.) Written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, this movie seems to be an updated version of the Frankenstein story, moved to the 1930s and starring Bale as the monster and Jessie Buckly as the titular bride. Director James Whale’s original Bride of Frankenstein is probably the best of the old Universal Monster movies from the 30s and 40s, and ol’ Vic’s creation is hands-down my favorite classic monster, so news of this film intrigues me. But I think it intrigues me even more than it ordinarily would  because with this movie, at least the fifth Frankenstein-derived film released or announced in recent years, it seems that we are in the midst of a full-scale Frankenssance.

Of course, all anybody wants to talk about is the tattoo.

Let’s do a quick bit of literary spelunking for anyone who doesn’t know the story (both of you). In 1816, Mary Godwin was vacationing at the home of her friend Lord Byron with her soon-to-be husband Percy Shelley. This was in the era when visiting a friend could be an extended stay that lasted weeks or months at a time, as opposed to modern times when it lasts until the owner of the home claps his knees and says, “Well, I don’t let me keep you any longer” because the Pelicans game starts in a half-hour and he doesn’t want to watch it with a dirty Celtics fan like you. It was an exceptionally rainy and dreary summer, and to pass the time trapped inside, Byron proposed that they each write a “ghost story” to entertain one another. If you ever wonder which of them won that little competition, remember that it’s 200 years later and the only one that we’re still reading is the one that was written by the 19-year-old girl.

By the way, I really want to stress how amazing that is to me. Whenever somebody talks about the creation of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, they focus on how shocking it was that it was written by a woman. That shouldn’t be what surprises you. I’m a high school English teacher and I’m not shocked at all that a masterpiece of literature was written by a woman. I’m shocked that it was written by somebody the same age as a student that I had to ask to stop from pouring Pop Rocks into a bottle of Coke in the back of my classroom last week while I was trying to review gerunds. 

But I digress. The story follows Victor Frankenstein, a college dropout (nope, he’s not a doctor) who is so obsessed with conquering death following the loss of his mother that he finds a way to reanimate dead tissue. But when he does so, he’s so horrified by the hideousness of his creation that he flees in terror, leaving it to fend for itself. I always interpret his fear as being an expression of the Uncanny Valley problem, where something is so CLOSE to looking authentically human that even the smallest deviation is unacceptable to the eye, which is one of the many ways that the story of Frankenstein is a great metaphor for modern AI.

The Gold Standard. Okay, the GREEN standard.

Most people, of course, think of Boris Karloff’s version of the creature when they think of Frankenstein’s monster: the monosyllabic, hulking brute with the flattop, green skin, and bolts on his neck, whereas none of that really applies to the vision in Shelley’s novel. But that’s okay. I think that one of the things that really makes a character – any character – into a timeless one is its potential for reinvention. Compare the original Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories to the Basil Rathbone movies, the Robert Downey Jr. version, or the Benedict Cumberbatch series. All are perfectly valid, but very different from one another. Think of all the different depictions there have been of Batman, Superman, Tarzan, Dorothy of Oz, Cinderella…if a character is unable to be adapted, it’s not a character likely to achieve immortality. Victor Frankenstein may not have lived forever himself, but the versatility of his creation ensures that his name will last forever.

Like I said, we all know Boris Karloff, but he wasn’t the first cinematic Frankenstein. That honor belongs to Augustus Phillips, who played the creature in a 14-minute film produced by Thomas Edison in 1910. After Karloff played the creature, the role was passed to Lon Chaney Jr., then Bela Lugosi, then Glenn Strange, who rounded out Universal’s original version of the creature in one of my favorite films of all time, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. 

I’m not kidding. This is maybe my favorite movie of all time. I will never get tired of it.

Since then the list of actors who have played the creature is staggering: Robert De Niro in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), Christopher Lee in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Aaron Eckhart in I, Frankenstein (2014), Clancy Brown in The Bride (1985), and Tom Noonan in The Monster Squad (1987), and that just scratches the surface. There was a stage version in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller EACH played the Creature and Victor Frankenstein, alternating nights. As of this writing, IMDB credits Mary Shelley as the writer on 115 different projects, and frankly, I think that number is low. I mentioned last week that I’ve got a little obsession with creating lists. On Letterboxd, I’ve logged 55 different movies that I tagged as adapting or being inspired by Mary Shelley’s creation, including Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Hotel Transylvania series, all of the Universal films that featured the creature and several – but not all – of the Hammer Horror films that did the same. I’ve got a list of nearly 50 other Frankenstein movies that I haven’t seen yet, but I hope to get around to eventually. 

Whole lotta Frankie goin’ on.

There’s a LOT of Frankenstein out there, is what I’m getting at. And while they haven’t all been great, there have been a lot of very interesting ones. We seem to have reached one of those moments in the cultural zeitgeist (there’s another English teacher word for you, folks) where the Creature is in ascendance. In addition to Gyllenaal’s The Bride!, Guillermo del Toro is working on his own version of the story for Netflix starring Oscar Isaac as Victor, Jacob Eldori as the creature, and current horror It Girl Mia Goth in a role that doesn’t seem to have been specified yet. A lot of sources seem to be reporting that she’s playing the Bride, but those same sources also reported that Isaac was playing the creature and Andrew Garfield was playing Victor Frankenstein, and those reports seem to have been wrong. It likely depends on how faithful del Toro intends to be to the original novel. (The bride existed in the original novel, by the way, but was destroyed by Victor before he could bring her to life.) It’s hard to say which of these two movies I’m more interested in. The images of Christian Bale are intriguing, but I don’t think I’ve ever been disappointed by a Guillermo del Toro film. The man won best picture for what was essentially a remake of The Creature From the Black Lagoon, and let’s hear it for the Universal executive who passed on that movie. 

The man made us root for THIS, he can make any movie he wants.

Of course, two upcoming films would not, in and of themselves, qualify as a Frankenssance. But those aren’t the only ones. In the last two years there have been at least three significant films based at least in part on the Frankenstein legend, all of which I’ve watched during my spring break, because that’s what spring break is for. First up, let’s talk about Poor Things, the movie that scored Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director and a Best Actress win for Emma Stone. Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, this film tells of a dead young woman (Stone) whose body is reanimated by a scientist (Willem Dafoe). The woman, dubbed Bella, starts with a blank slate of a mind, an infant mentality, and as she grows to learn about the world around her, finds herself rejecting many of the Victorian standards of morality and the world’s treatment of women. I haven’t read the book, but the film was an interesting statement about gender roles of the time period. I was a little disappointed that they didn’t spend as much time with Willem Dafoe’s character, though, a malformed scientist who seems to have an unusual kind of kinship with Bella. The film never quite makes it plain, but the interpretation I came away with is that Dafoe’s Godwin Baxter was actually the original Frankenstein monster, carrying on his father’s work. I don’t know if that was the intention of the film or the original novel. I suppose I could look it up, but where would the fun be in that?

Frankenstein, Frankensteiner, Frankensteinest.

Earlier this year we saw the release of the Zelda Williams-directed Lisa Frankenstein. In this film, set in 1989, Kathryn Newton (the actress getting all of the horror movie roles that aren’t going to Mia Goth) plays a teenage girl trying to begin a new life in a new town after her father remarries only six months after her mother’s violent death. Lisa doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere, not with her brutally abusive stepmother (Carla Guigno) or her well-meaning but vapid new stepsister (Liza Soberano). The closest thing she has to a friend is a bust on a tombstone she finds in an old, abandoned cemetery. A bolt of lightning reanimates the corpse underneath (Cole Sprouse) and they embark on a vendetta of revenge. The film is a horror comedy, although it’s got a darker, even meaner tone than I expected, but it’s made very well. The movie is the directorial debut for Williams (daughter of the late Robin) and I’m very interested to see what she can do next.

But the best neo-Frankenstein I’ve watched lately is probably the one you’re least likely to have heard of: The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, written and directed by Bomani J. Story. Originally released via Shudder and now on Hulu, if you’re a Frankenstein fan, you’ve gotta check it out. Laya DeLeon Hayes plays Vicaria, a teenage girl who (like the original Victor) has been obsessed with conquering death since the early loss of her mother. Her rage is compounded when she loses her brother to violence, and she sets out to prove that death is a disease and she can cure it. The movie is set in the present-day, and Story wears his influences on his sleeve. It’s the furthest removed film from Mary Shelly’s original time, and yet, it also seems to be the one most devoted to her original vision. The idea of treating death as a disease is very much reflective of what Shelley wrote about 200 years ago, and while Story applies a contemporary lens and modern social issues to his tale, it still feels very authentically Frankenstein.

As I always say, if there’s one thing that a geek always wants, it’s more. For a fan of Shelley and Karloff and Strange like myself, this new influx of Frankenstein material can only be a good thing. I’m always anxious to see another twist or another take on the story. Keep them coming, Hollywood, and I’ll keep watching.

And once this wave passes, we’ll talk about giving the Wolfman his turn.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. If you didn’t know he was a devoted fan of Frankenstein, he can only imagine that you didn’t pay attention last Christmas when he was re-presenting all of his old short stories, like “Warmth.”

Geek Punditry #47: The Gift of Physical

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Here we are, my friends, the most chaotic, volatile, and lucrative date on the American calendar: Black Friday. Of course, Black Friday isn’t quite what it was just a few years ago. In the not-too-distant past, it wasn’t unusual to watch footage of mobs at Target trying to murder each other with croquet mallets in the attempt to get a cheap widescreen television set. That was last month in San Francisco, of course, but that sort of behavior USED to be restricted to the day after Thanksgiving. These days, though, with people having less money to spend, prices rising, and online shopping becoming easier and more tempting than ever, it’s becoming far less likely to see someone get a shiv in the kitchen section of Home Goods. We’re still planning to shop, of course, we’re still all trying to find just the right gift for the people we care about, and as far as the geeks in your life are concerned, we’ve learned something important this year. When it comes to sharing your favorite movies, music, books, or games…the truth is, physical media needs to come back.

Because no matter how hard you try, you can’t club somebody over the head with Netflix.

A few days ago Christopher Nolan, discussing the Blu-Ray release of his movie Oppenheimer, encouraged people to purchase the disc “So no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.” The joke, of course, is that over the course of 2023 it has become horribly fashionable for streaming services to quietly (or sometimes not-so-quietly) remove content from their platforms in a cost-saving measure. There are various ways this can theoretically work – by writing it off as a loss on their taxes, by licensing it off to some other service and getting money from them, and so forth, but whatever the reason the end result is the same. It becomes difficult and confusing for fans to find what they want, and in the case of the writers, directors, performers, and other people who actually made the content in question, all their work is reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet, without giving anyone the opportunity to actually experience it in the way intended.

Warner Bros.’ Max service has become the most notorious for this practice, canning numerous films that were close to completion (including a Batgirl movie, a holiday-themed sequel to Scoob!, and most recently the John Cena/Wile E. Coyote legal drama Coyote Vs. Acme), but they are by no means the only culprit. After a few weeks on their streamer, Disney+ pulled the kids’ sci-fi film Crater, later putting it out for sale or rent on digital media, but it’s no longer available as part of the prepaid package that director Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s mom can tell her friends to watch the next time they ask what her son is up to. But perhaps the strangest instance of this phenomenon came from Paramount+, the streaming service that built its audience as the online home of Star Trek, when they made the decision to not only cancel the nearly-finished second season of Star Trek: Prodigy, but to yank season one from the service as well. Since then, the show has been conspicuous by its absence. This summer they even launched a celebration of animated Star Trek to mark the 50th anniversary of Star Trek: The Animated Series, and while they spent a lot of time hyping that original series, Lower Decks, and the animated webseries Very Short Treks, they did the best they could to pretend that Prodigy didn’t exist. 

But come on, who could ever forget this face?

But the fans refused to play along. A strange thing happened when it became public that Prodigy was being taken down from Paramount+. Within a day or two, the Blu-Rays and DVDs for the first half of season one were completely sold out. (The second half had not been released yet.) You couldn’t find a copy in brick and mortar stores, and online retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart all cleared out their warehouses before you could blink. It was as if fandom all, simultaneously, realized that media that only exists on a streaming platform can be removed at any time, capriciously, and without warning, and that the only sure way to have access to the content you want is to actually own a physical copy.

What a concept.

I’m not here to decry streaming or to say I’m gonna cancel Netflix. For one thing, that would be REALLY dumb, since they’re the service that wound up saving Prodigy, and I ‘m greatly looking forward to season two. But streaming services are proving themselves to be increasingly problematic for the companies that own them. They’ve become such a huge part of our lives that it’s easy to forget they’re still a relatively new business model, and what we’ve learned this year is that even the big boys like Disney and Warner Bros. haven’t actually figured out how to make money off of them yet. And sure, some of you may be thinking, “Well Disney has enough money, why should I care if Disney+ isn’t turning a profit?” That’s very progressive of you, make sure you put that on a t-shirt. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Walt Disney Global Media Conglomerate and Shadow Government and Pottery Export Business is still, in fact, a business, and if they can’t make money off a project they’re not going to keep making it. 

The “Plus” stands for “Plus all of your money.”

In the early days of broadcast TV, the burden of monetization was put on sponsors. Phillip Morris Cigarettes gave Desilu money to make I Love Lucy in exchange for the show promoting their product, everybody was happy, and lots of people got lung cancer.

Okay, maybe I was wrong — smoking DOES make you look cool.

Then came cable, and the model changed somewhat. While sponsors still existed, cable channels made the bulk of their money by selling their content to a cable provider like Cox or DirecTV, which made ITS money by charging consumers for packages of channels from those various sources. These days media companies are attempting to cut out the middleman with their own streaming services, making the content AND controlling the distribution themselves…only to discover that the middleman actually turned out to be kind of necessary in this particular equation. And since they haven’t yet worked out the new equation, they’re starting to cut corners – raising rates for the service, putting ads on streamers that didn’t have ads in the past, and of course, chopping content that they think they can make more money with some other way.

Physical media protects you from losing content, but it’s also becoming a way to show your support for a project. With streaming numbers being a closely-held secret, it can be almost impossible to tell how successful any series is. Fans were blindsided this week, for instance, when Disney+ announced that they won’t be doing a second season of the beloved Muppets Mayhem. (This has been a BAD year for shows that I loved enough to devote an entire Geek Punditry column to.) It was acclaimed by fans, but there was no physical release for us to attach our support to. I can’t say fit certain that it would have made a difference, but it certainly wouldn’t have hurt, because those numbers DO matter. When Star Trek: Picard wrapped up its third and final season, fans asked showrunner Terry Matalas what they could do to encourage Paramount to support his proposed Star Trek: Legacy spinoff series. His answer was telling: keep steaming Picard, yes, but also buy the Blu-Ray of Season Three so Paramount knows you will support it.

I’m not saying you need to rush out and buy everything that’s made, but if you want to send a message about what shows and movies you enjoy, buying the physical media helps accomplish that, and that will give support to similar projects in the future. Sure, I watched Fuller House on Netflix, but I don’t feel any particular need to get it on disc. But when Stranger Things drops its final season next year, you can bet I’ll be first in line for that complete series boxed set.

Available on twelve discs or 97 VHS tapes.

After Nolan made his comments, Guillermo del Toro added his own two cents to the discussion, saying, “Physical media is almost a Fahrenheit 451 (where people memorized entire books and thus became the book they loved) level of responsibility.” In other words, you’re not just clinging to that DVD set of the complete series of Mama’s Family for kicks, it is your civic duty. These things aren’t being preserved anymore, not by the people who actually own and control the IP, so it’s becoming incumbent upon the fans to do it themselves. This is especially true in a world where retailers like Best Buy have announced that they’re abandoning physical media sales entirely. Back before I had a kid and there was such a thing as free time, I could spent hours wandering around the Best Buy DVD section. Over the years I got sadder every time I stepped into the store, watching my favorite section get smaller and smaller. As of now, I honestly don’t remember the last time I walked into a Best Buy store, and that’s on them.

Movies and TV are not, of course, the only kinds of content affected by streaming. Music was hit a long time ago, and eBooks have been around for quite some time. In both of those arenas, though, something odd has happened. The importance of the physical media has grown in the digital age. Despite the obvious convenience of eBooks, a survey showed that in 2022 print books outsold them nearly four-to-one. And in the area of music, while lots of people use Spotify or Amazon Music to get their pop fix, die-hard fans have actually gone back in time and resurrected the vinyl album as their physical format of choice. Spotify is fine for a casual listener, but the hardcore fans want something they can see, touch, hold, display, and screech in terror when their kids hit the arm on the record player and scratch it up. I think, in the next few years, movie and TV fans will experience a similar renaissance. Casual fans will settle for Netflix and Hulu, but the collectors (a faction that will increase in both number and intensity) will thirst for that physical release with pristine picture and sound and loaded with extra features. 

So be a Chris Nolan, guys. Get your Barbenheimer fix on a disc. And try not to beat anybody up in the electronics aisle. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He hopes you all have a great Christmas season, and he promises loads of holiday content right here, because that’s the kind of nerd he is.

BONUS ANNOUNCEMENT!

In October I introduced a new feature to Geek Punditry, Playing Favorites, in which I give you a topic and ask you for suggestions of categories to share some of my favorite things. For example, the category for Halloween was “Horror Movies,” and suggestions included things like sci-fi/horror movies, comedy/horror hybrids, horror movie performances that I felt deserved Oscar recognition, and lots of other cool choices. It wound up filling up two full columns! (Part One, Part Two)

Well, never let it be said that I don’t know how to milk an idea to death use a good idea when it’s available. With Christmas coming up, I’m announcing the next round of Playing Favorites, in which I’m asking you guys for categories of Christmas content! Movies, books, TV shows, comics – what are the categories I can play favorites with this time? Give me your suggestions in the comments below or on whatever social media you used to find this link!