Warner Bros. Circling David Ayer for DC Comics’ ‘Suicide Squad’
- Thread starter Enterprise is Great
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Actually, I'd just recommend watching the animated movie (Batman: Assault on Arkham) that came out relatively recently. It was surprisingly good, and proof that a team composed of villains can actually be pretty awesome.
That said, lawlz at WB panicking over BvS. (But it's okay guys, everyone actually loved it and critics are just jerkfaces. WB is totally happy with it earning as much as it has; haters gonna hate.)
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For the best, I suppose. Although, this does leave me uneasy about creators having their visions subverted in order to serve the audience for a pat on the head.
Grace from Beyond the Trailer did a video about critic reviews in relation to BvS, and how critics have great power they are wielding irresponsibly. The video is weird to me, because Grace said she didn't like MOS and has been critical of a lot of decisions DC has made since they announced their cinematic universe, but she liked BvS. Funny world.
Grace from Beyond the Trailer did a video about critic reviews in relation to BvS, and how critics have great power they are wielding irresponsibly. The video is weird to me, because Grace said she didn't like MOS and has been critical of a lot of decisions DC has made since they announced their cinematic universe, but she liked BvS. Funny world.
I can see what you're saying about subverting the creator's vision, but I would like to think that Ayer was OK with this. I was going to say I doubt they would do it without his OK, but then I remembered all of the times a movie have had reshoots by a new director after the first director was done.
Yuck, do reshoots ever sound like a good thing?
I dunno about that. I can certainly see the argument that filmmakers should be allowed to create their own vision, but on the other hand, if the trailer gave the impression of a fun movie and the movie itself had no humor beyond what was in the trailer, that's kind of false advertising, and the audience wouldn't react well if the film didn't live up to the trailer. Given how positively the trailer was received, I can see the logic here.
And really, there's precedent elsewhere. In theater, plays are often revised in response to audience reaction, rewritten or restructured for later performances. And prose authors generally get opinions from beta readers and revise their books or stories accordingly. It's not wrong to take audience reaction into account before you release a work, as long as you don't take it so far that you compromise the essence of the work.
Reshoots happen for a lot of movies and for a lot of reasons.
And that's really the only thing that we know is happening.
All the rest is speculation and rumor and because shitting on "no-fun" BvS and "gloomy" DC is popular right now that's how the story was framed.
Personally, because Ayer has always claimed that this will be a fun movie, I have a hard time believing that "all the jokes are in the trailer".
I guess we'll see and it's doesn't sound odd to say an author is going to write another draft or something but usually when I hear reshoots I think of doubt and losing faith in the final product and a last-minute save but I'm sure there are good reasons too. Hopefully it doesn't mean a Fantastic Four situation.
Reshoots are actually quite commonplace. I think they get more attention when films turn out badly, which skews our perception of them. But they happen all the time, to a greater or lesser extent. It's just part of the editing and tweaking that's a vital part of making a story work. I don't think laypeople understand that about the creative process. The final work doesn't just spring into being all at once. It's the end result of a lot of trial and error and editing and revising and "Oh, I forgot to include that" and "Naah, that didn't work like I hoped" and "Wow, why didn't I think of that before?" Revising a story between the draft stage and the release stage is not a sign that something's wrong, it's how the process is supposed to work. Because that revision is how you weed out the flaws and make the story as good as you can get it.
Heck, the ending of The Wrath of Khan was a reshoot, sort of. The scene of the intact casket on Genesis was added after test audiences found the original ending too depressing.
This sounds like complete BS to me.
"Every joke in the movie is in that trailer" - really? So despite the wacky hijinx and non-serious tone that dominate the trailer, for the rest of the movie characters like Harley and Boomerang are scowling and saying "We must fight".
Also, reshoots costing "tens of millions of dollars" suggests a massive problem with the movie as is, and there has been no suggestion that this is the case.
To sum up: ignore this stupid "news".
DC suck-up!
JK I agree with much of what she said. IMO, screw the critics. The audience opinions are what matter to me and BvS is still strong enough (71% on RT) to encourage me to go see it eventually.
As I've said elsewhere, I reject the cliched assertion that the divide is between "the critics" and everyone else. I've seen as many bad reviews from non-critics as from professional critics. And if you actually read the detailed reviews instead of just the aggregate numbers, you find that there's not that much disagreement between critics and laypeople about the specific strengths and weaknesses of the film; they're just weighing them differently. Both see a clumsily structured film with entertaining aspects, but critics give more weight to the former and laypeople to the latter.
And it doesn't help that Rotten Tomatoes uses two conflicting standards to rate pro and amateur reviews, with pro reviews being reduced to a binary up/down rating while user reviews are on a 5-star scale. There's just no meaningful way to compare the two. Most of the reviews for this film are highly ambivalent, so how do you really reduce that to a simple yes/no? I've seen "Fresh" reviews for BvS that were just as harsh as many of the "Rotten" reviews. I checked RT's site, and it gives no information for how it assigns a "positive" or "negative" value to each individual review. So how can we really say they're categorizing them fairly?
I mean, the "Tomatometer" says the film is at 29%, but if you look at the fine print below that, it says that the average critic rating for the film is 5/10. So doesn't that mean the Tomatometer should be at 50%? The Tomatometer score is supposed to represent the percentage of critics who have given a positive review instead of a negative one, but doesn't such a binary methodology simply break down when so many reviews are right in the middle? I don't think the Tomatometer score shows that the critics are being unduly harsh, I think it shows that aggregate ratings systems are unreliable.
And it doesn't help that Rotten Tomatoes uses two conflicting standards to rate pro and amateur reviews, with pro reviews being reduced to a binary up/down rating while user reviews are on a 5-star scale. There's just no meaningful way to compare the two. Most of the reviews for this film are highly ambivalent, so how do you really reduce that to a simple yes/no? I've seen "Fresh" reviews for BvS that were just as harsh as many of the "Rotten" reviews. I checked RT's site, and it gives no information for how it assigns a "positive" or "negative" value to each individual review. So how can we really say they're categorizing them fairly?
I mean, the "Tomatometer" says the film is at 29%, but if you look at the fine print below that, it says that the average critic rating for the film is 5/10. So doesn't that mean the Tomatometer should be at 50%? The Tomatometer score is supposed to represent the percentage of critics who have given a positive review instead of a negative one, but doesn't such a binary methodology simply break down when so many reviews are right in the middle? I don't think the Tomatometer score shows that the critics are being unduly harsh, I think it shows that aggregate ratings systems are unreliable.
I would take this with an extremely large grain of salt. Devin Faraci has the world's largest hateboner for Warner Bros. in general and Man of Steel / BvS in specific, to the point that about a month ago he wrote a giant piece saying that WB was worried that BvS was going to bomb, that Justice League was quietly being delayed and Snyder was going to be punted from the project.
At the time he posted that screed, BvS was already crushing advance ticket sale records, and it turned out that Justice League started filming early. (He also gave the Fantastic Four reboot a positive review because Josh Trank is a friend of his.)
Also, the makeup supervisor for Killer Croc's makeup basically said, "Uh, no, these are pickups that have been scheduled for months because Adewale's earliest availability was now." Also, Will Smith is in New York City shooting Collateral Beauty.
Basically, Faraci is full of shit.
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EXACTLY thank you. Do these jokers (hehe) really expect me to believe that this movie that features Harley Quinn & the Sweet Grill Gangsta Joker as protagonists is super serious?
Please.
Well there's the problem. A rat infestation.
I wasn't aware of the history here. I thought BirthDeathMovies was one of the more trustworthy sites, but you guys are starting to make it sound like that isn't the case.
That's why I use Metacrtic, they just give each review a 1-100 number score, and then use that to give it a positive/negative/mixed rating. I went to Rotten Tomatoes, but I didn't really like the Fresh/Rotten thing, and I had never heard of most of their the sources of their reviews. Metacritic gets theirs mostly from the big name magazines and websites.
Here's FiveThirtyEight's statistical analysis of ratings aggregator sites and their problems. It's particularly harsh on Fandango, which tends to skew its ratings disproportionately high -- which seems to be because it's owned by NBCUniversal and thus has a financial incentive to get people to buy movie tickets.
Apparently Fandango has bought Rotten Tomatoes, which may augur ill for RT's reliability in the future, at least according to Gizmodo. (Ooh, I got to use the phrase "augur ill!" I didn't expect that to happen today.)
FWIW, Fandango gives Batman v Superman a 44/100 rating from critics and a 4/5-star rating from fans. Metacritic also gives 44/100 for critics, and its fan rating is 7.4/10. Those aren't too far off from RT's 5/10 critic and 3.8/5 audience rating averages (ignoring the aggregate percentage rankings).
Oh, hey, RT's "Fresh/Rotten" rating for BvS has just jumped up from 29% to 30%. That's the first uptick I've seen in either aggregate percentage since the premiere date, although it's too small to be statistically significant.
Apparently Fandango has bought Rotten Tomatoes, which may augur ill for RT's reliability in the future, at least according to Gizmodo. (Ooh, I got to use the phrase "augur ill!" I didn't expect that to happen today.)
FWIW, Fandango gives Batman v Superman a 44/100 rating from critics and a 4/5-star rating from fans. Metacritic also gives 44/100 for critics, and its fan rating is 7.4/10. Those aren't too far off from RT's 5/10 critic and 3.8/5 audience rating averages (ignoring the aggregate percentage rankings).
Oh, hey, RT's "Fresh/Rotten" rating for BvS has just jumped up from 29% to 30%. That's the first uptick I've seen in either aggregate percentage since the premiere date, although it's too small to be statistically significant.