BY CAMERON HEFFERNAN
Our resident DC fan Cameron spent the day watching the marathon event that was DC FanDome, an interactive and online convention type experience. Here is his running diary of thoughts on the day’s festivities and announcements.
The great thing about cons is you have a choice to build a schedule and hit the panels and announcements you want to hear. In the meantime, while you wait for what you want, you can roam the showroom floor, buy various things you don’t need and collect autographs from stars of yesteryear. DC FanDome didn’t offer any of that, that was expected with these unprecedented times. There was no real con to attend so in between the vague announcements and people yammering on about how cool it was to film a movie you could wander around your home, let out a few farts and buy shit you definitely don’t need from the DC FanDome shop online. This was the stark reality of FanDome mere seconds in.
After they kicked it off with Wonder Woman 84 and Gotham Knights the show just dwindled into Jim Lee and various DC Executives gearing you up for how important the Multiverse is. It all seemed like nostalgia is going to be a big part of DC film and television going forward and you need to know the sinew that holds it all together. Better known as “The Bleed” if you’re privy to the Multiverse, monitors, and all that DC Mythology.
The following is just a running diary of my thoughts on the highlights of the DC FanDome. There weren’t many.
10:00AM: Like most things DC, this is a great concept but a piss poor execution. Having Aiyisha Tyler host is pretty cool. I am fully prepared for this to be a lot of hype that does not pay off whatsoever when they release. The video game stuff will probably be cool.
“We’re gonna get closer to the heroes,” they say. Who the hell knows how, since I’m watching this at 720p through a browser because they made this purely accessible through browser only. As I said, great idea, piss poor execution. (The picture quality got better, it did hit 1080p).
How this wasn’t on the DC Universe app, I have no idea. Browser only, baby! I mean you have an app where you house a lot of the things you’re promoting and you don’t have it on there. This just goes to show that they’re either going to tank the DC Universe app or it will solely be the cartoons and comics. No movies or original shows.
Kicking it off with Patty Jenkins and Wonder Woman 84. They really want you to know this is all for the fans.
No big surprise. For those of you hoping WW84 would’ve been a more singular character study, maybe focused in a single place, it will be a globe trotting blockbuster romp.
Oh great, vapid questions from fans. (This continues throughout and not a single question from a fan produces a single good answer. This is the problem with the panel format. You really don’t learn anything from them other than everyone had a great time on set and everything was great and it all went according to plan. Nothing human or real happened. We all laughed and had the greatest time.)
Fan questions are the worst. Especially when it’s a very plotted and forced tennis based question in regards to Wonder Woman and Cheetah solving their differences through tennis.
They definitely vetted the questions and I want to see the horrific cutting room floor filled with the disgusting questions that were probably sent to everyone involved with this.
This may be an all day thing (it was. It went from 10am to 6pm). Segments are way too long and they haven’t shown anything from the movie. (This continues this way throughout as you’ll hear later. They ended up showing the new WW84 trailer right after I wrote this so maybe sometimes I should shut up.)
I am so excited for WW 84, she rides lighting with the lasso of truth, Cheetah looks like a straight up cheetah-person and it’s incredible, Steve Trevor makes a joke about parachute pants and did I mention she rides lightning ? She rides the lightning. Like the Metallica album. It also seems that Max Lord is either recreating people through some weird gene experiment thing or cloning them. But it seems Cheetah and Trevor being alive will be involved with Lord and whatever he’s up to.
All of the fan interaction that is art submissions is really cool and reminiscent of wandering artist alley at Comic-Con.
I hate the people I’m having to watch before everything pretending to interact with a crowd. SO MUCH PANDERING all the time.
10:25AM: Gotham Knights (new game from WB Games Montreal): Bruce is dead. Batgirl, Red Hood, Nightwing, and Robin team up to be the new protectors of Gotham and find out who killed Bruce. In engine game footage too, which was surprising. Looks good, like and uprezed version of Arkham Knight. There are XP points, level building and levels to enemies. It’s got those delicious JRPG elements BABBBBBAAYYYYYY. Game looks incredible though. Shows what seems to be the Mr. Freeze level as Batgirl teaming up with teleportation Robin. Also, Alfred is alive. They got quips. You seemingly can switch character perspective at any time. Haven’t seen much stealth, seems to be a big time beat em up You can do sweet ass team up moves This is going to have the sickest skill tree for Batman related ass-kicker-moves. Court of Owls plays big into it, as it teased them at the end of the preview. Probably the culprits behind who supposedly killed Bruce Wayne. Which is a story from the comics where they just have Bruce hostage, the Court of Owls does, and he has to beat them from the inside. This really looks like the Bat-family version of the new Avengers game.
10:45AM: Get to know Sandman with Neil Gaiman and Yvette Nicole Brown: This is solely because DC needs to ramp up your knowledge on this product for the upcoming Netflix show, which from the way Gaiman said it, sounds like it wont be what most hardcore fans want from the series.
One takeaway from all the Sandman interviews: Michael Sheen, and British people as a whole, are a treasure. It’s odd that it would take this long for Sandman to finally come out of the shadows and get some mainstream recognition. The Netflix show will most likely be a disappointment. They haven’t discussed or made much mention of the show at all, this has all been an ad for the audible book. Which in all honesty seems pretty sweet. A lot of great voice actors come together on it. On another note: Neil Gaiman might be a vampire that can teleport.
Other observations from the Inbetweens that weren’t important: No, Mr President of DC films, we do want an elseworld story every year. Just give us that. No more connected universe. Just give us Red Son and Gotham by Gaslight. Give us a live action The Dark Knight Returns with Kevin Costner or Bruce Willis. Give me all the elseworlds. Give me Kingdom Come babbbabbbbbbyyyyyy.
DC Needs to realize that keeping the characters seperate is the best thing possible.
11:40AM: The Flash Panel: So the Flash preview was the director, writer, producer and star talking about how great the movie is going to be and how they don’t want to spoil anything. And then they shared concept art and that was it. Some poor concept art that probably won’t be in the movie. Because if it is, then it’s going to be Ryan Reynolds in that dumb ass digital Green Lantern costume all over again. I fear so much for the Flash movie. It’s taken way too long to make, and is the equivalent of Duke Nukem Forever in terms of production time to disappointment possibilities ratio.
11:50AM: Now we have Batman Beyond doing commentary on an old Batman 66 episode. It’s not funny. At least they got Kevin Conroy to do a Riff Traxx on Batman. Cesar Romero might be the best Joker. Put him in the Dark Knight and he wins two oscars
11:55AM: Suicide Squad has Polka Dot man, Ratcahtcher 2 and Peter Capaldi and King Shark. This is a mess too. There’s so many people at once. This movie will be awesome, though. The chaos they bring to a zoom call is definitely translatable to a movie like the Suicide Squad. Not much about the film just the cast reveal. Even though they didn’t show anything from the movie and just revealed the cast, you can tell this cast is going to be the heart of this movie unlike the David Ayer Suicide Squad. The chemistry Gunn brings to the sets with the actors he puts together is palpable through this Zoom call Hall H Panel. The move will be a huge success, if I can predict now. This is totally going to be Dirty Dozen with the fucking dregs of DC’s villain roster, this has potential to be the best DC movie ever made.
2:30PM: Fell Asleep for a few hours but now we’re where we want to be. Snyder Cut Bababbbbyyyyyy!!!
Justice League: The Snyder Cut Panel: Listening to Snyder answer fan questions read by the cast of JL is not what we’re here for. Sweet Jesus just get to the Snyder Cut footage god damn it!
This has been the biggest pitfall of the Fandome experience. There have been too many fan questions and interactions that mean nothing and are the same question over and over again. I now know every director and actor’s favorite character and it’s the one they play and always has been since the day they were born.
Why am I so excited for the Snyder Cut? Everything he’s done is terrible. Sucker Punch is the only thing he’s ever made that’s an original IP of his and it’s easily one of the worst movies ever made. So why is it that his cut of a film that was very bad to begin with is somehow going to be better?
It’s going to be very easy for him to just slap together some references and totally screw up Darkseid and all the New Gods mythos. One thing that did change my opinion of the fervor around The Snyder Cut is him doing an interview with the woman who started the online petition and website for the Snyder Cut. I always assumed it was started by a bunch of mouth breathing neckbeards somewhere, but to find out it was a random woman in China really exposed the international Snyder appeal, which I always forget is what has really carried him during his career.
Back to the Justice League: The Snyder Cut info: It’ll be four parts over four weeks at one hour each on HBO Max. Then it will be distributed to countries without HBO Max and US as a full movie. So it’s going to be the same movie but with the Darkseid stuff most likely stuffed in at the end. You’re getting the same Justice League movie we got and then there’s going to be a whole two extra hours of new footage or old footage that leads to Darkseid and they fight him to end it. It’s probably going to be a cool spectacle but will be nonsensical when it comes to the story. When this releases no one will want to admit it’s bad. The people willed this into existence and we only have ourselves to blame. Snyder isn’t the bad guy here. We opened Pandora’s box and we deserve to suffer for it.
3:10PM: Flash and Black Adam Concept art: All the concept art they’ve shown between the Flash and Black Adam, both of which have supposedly been in production for over four years now, and somehow both movies really have nothing to show for it other than concept art. SO…. either they’re going to be very rushed over the next year or two or we’ll eternally be waiting for these movies much like Black Adam waited 5000 years to get out of his wizard prison.
Somehow the Black Adam questions ended up being the best fan based questions allowing the Rock to talk more about the character and what they want to do with it in the movie and not how it’s been his favorite since he was a kid and whatever pandering most of the other fan questions have led to. Atom Smasher will be in Black Adam and it seems the JSA will be in it too. Which gets me all sorts of tuned in on this now. Hawkman, Dr. Fate, Cyclone and Atom Smasher. JSA is really making a huge impact in the DCU sphere.
3:50PM: Titans Panel is a clip show. Just a best-of from the show as the actors talk about how much they love each other. That’s been a lot of this FanDome experience is watching celebrities ball wash one another about how great the movie making experience has been.
4:40PM: Shazam Panel: You got the title and Sinbad (the comedian) with this “Shazoom”, as they called it. Shazam: Fury of the Gods. That’s it. No concept art or anything. “You guys we got the title!!!” screamed the moderator for the panel, trying so hard but failing to make it seem like a big deal. Who knows if Sinbad is really actually in it. If he isn’t I’m going to be pissed.
5:10PM: Suicide Squad from Rocksteady Games, coming 2022: Who knows what it’s going to be, but it’s gonna have Captain Boomerang, Harley Quinn, King Shark and Deadshot so that’s really all you need. Probably going to be a co-op game with online capabilities and you’re teaming up to kill the Justice League. It appears Brainiac has taken the JLA over and they’re wreaking havoc, as made apparent by Superman turning a soldier he apparently just saved, into ash with his heat vision. Only on PS5, XBox Series X. This is from the ones who made the good Batman games in Arkham Asylum, Arkham City and Arkham Knight. Apparently this is taking place in that universe.
5:30PM: The Batman Panel: None of this tickles my fancy. I’m just over edge-lord Batman. This time you’re thrust into “Year Two” of Batman’s history. All they talked about was Batman’s ties to noir and Chinatown being a huge influence and what they tried to do with their Batman. I will give it credit that it definitely seems noir, but it runs adjacent to Seven more than it does Chinatown. In the preview, Batman is investigating a series of murders where each victim has a riddle left with the body, specifically referencing Batman. I’m guessing the murders expose a greater conspiracy involving Penguin with ties to the mob and Gotham elite. Where they’ll probably tie-in the Wayne’s being mob affiliated and that’s why they were assassinated. Something of that nature makes sense with the apparent ultra-grit this one is going for. Batman is out for vengeance and unrelenting ass-whooping. For some reason an affluent white asshole who has made himself judge, jury and executioner of the poor and downtrodden who most likely had to turn to crime to survive as a henchman, because that was the only option, doesn’t excite me anymore like it used to.
The mystique of Batman really escapes you when you just see him as the billionaire elitist he is who forcefully implements what he views of justice through pain and destruction. Whether his idea of justice is archaic or not. Just give me back my Schumacher Batman. Give me Batman ‘66. Just give me like a few years of fun with Batman.
How did you feel about the DC FanDome? What are you most excited for? What did you wish they had shown? Let us know in the comments or follow us on Twitter to keep the conversation going.
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