CONTENT WARNING: Culture is fucked; COVID and death; cocaine and deceased hookers. You know, the usual.



So, before COVID rocked up and basically fucked everything, 2020 looked like it might be the year that legitimately saved cinematic (and potentially televisual) culture. For years- and I mean insufferable fucking years- big genre-oriented studios (both cinematic and televised) ignored long-time fans and established fan-bases in order to cater to a more mainstream audience with less abtruse, specific tastes. Ghostbusters 2016 thought that it could get away with sucking the wit and surprisingly downbeat verbal, character-driven humour out of the franchise, leaving only the slapstick shell with a lazy, gender-flipped gimmick to draw dipshits in like the dangling light on a deep sea angler fish. Star Trek: Discovery moved in the opposite direction, taking an earnest, hopeful series with a vast ensemble cast and tightening the focus around one bell-end while everyone bickered like fuckwits in the background in a bid to create a more pointlessly fraught mood that low-brow angst-havers could relate to. Hellboy 2019 traded touching, likeable characters and a world that balanced Lovecraftian darkness with off-the-cuff whimsy for overblown spectacle and flat characters (made worse by the fact the film purported to be truer to the original comics but had clearly missed the point). And you know what, I’m still in the camp that says the Disney-era Star Wars films were a pretentious waste of time that shat on the legacy of the original just as badly as the fucking awful prequels.



However, perhaps the saddest on-screen failure of the last few years was Justice League. Fuck. Justice League should have been great. A lot of people hated the darker, grimier take of the Snyder-helmed Man of Steel/ Batman v Superman/ etc early DCEU, but I- and a large, loyal fanbase besides- absolutely loved it. It was great to see a version of the superhero genre that played so confidently with the real-world consequences of superpowers and the concept of modern mythology. And then poor old Snyder couldn’t finish Justice League, because he suffered a bereavement and the studio took the opportunity to rope Joss Whedon into the project because he’s a more accessible, mainstream director (no offence to Whedon, incidentally- I actually love his work on his own fucking projects: he just shouldn’t have been near this one). The studio’s thinking seemed to be that getting A LOT OF MONEY from a loyal fanbase of die-hard supporters wasn’t sufficient and they’d rather have ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD, courtesy of a vast sea of mainstream consumers. Predictably, the film was a tonally-inconsistent mess and didn’t even make a lot of money, because (unlike die-hard fans) mainstream film-goers are flighty culture-hussies with no staying power who are easily distracted by every shiny object to bounce through their peripheral vision. The whole DCEU was forced to re-tool its direction and we got some good films out of it (most notably Shazam!, which just kicked a million times more arse than it had any right to), but the dream of an actual mature, nuanced, mythically-resonant superhero project with big cinema bucks behind it died on the vine.

Bascially, between the shitty virtue-signalling of gender-flipped sci-fi reboots, the over-the-top edgelord grimwashing of niche, charming little fantasies and the neutering of genuinely dark and complex budding superhero universes, the genre landscape at the end of 2019 was a fucking wasteland populated by horrible, poorly-conceived mutant franchises with terminally damaged DNA and no real sense of unique identity. Even the Terminator series finally seemed to be dying, and after so many bad movies and comebacks, I think we’d all just assumed that one was unkillable. Culturally, us nerds were in the shit. It was the eleventh hour and the cavalry weren’t coming.

Then something remarkable and quite possibly unprecedented happened. The big money folks behind the major studios stopped acting like the arrogant, charmless, talentless fuckwads that they are and instead (let jaws drop across the world) actually listened to fans! Not ‘audiences’, in that horribly amorphous and meaningless sense of the word, but the actual fucking fans. The studio bosses actually stopped snorting cocaine off of dead hookers for a minute and took the time to make a good decision. It started, rather grandly, with a sequel to a new Ghostbusters film… except this one wasn’t going to be a reboot or a retelling with a more air-headed script and a cast more palatable to modern audiences. Instead, it was to be a sequel to the original 80s films that specifically erased the 2016 reboot and refocused on characters who- while updated for the modern world- could still be more closely identified with the fans who loved the originals than whatever insane what-stupid-people-want checklist the 2016 berks were working from.

Other smaller things were happening at around the same time. Notably, towards the end of 2019, a truly lovely ten-year-old zombie comedy called Zombieland got a long overdue sequel that was entirely in the spirit of the original with no ridiculous attempt to bring it up-to-date, while adverts for the next installment of the semi-dormant Kingsman series started cropping up at the beginning of 2020. As isolated incidents, these things were just flashes in the pan: little positives in a cultural landscape of mind-squanching negativity. Contextualised by the arrival of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, they pointed towards a genre film industry that realised (at least on some level) something had gone terribly, terribly wrong and was edging its way back to a previous era of film-making from before everything when terribly, terribly wrong.



Then, the icing on the cake: the release of the Justice League Snyder Cut was finally announced. Zacky-boy was going to be allowed to finish his own fucking film (albeit, probably, in the form of a six-part miniseries) and the superhero genre was going to gain, at the very least, a last hoorah for the abortive darker-mythic project started in Man of Steel and, at the very most, a whole new timeline to keep that dream alive. I can’t really express my feelings on The Snyder Cut in a single paragraph- I’m gonna need to take a whole blog entry for that one, which I will do, soon. Suffice it to say, I was a very happy bunny.

Then COVID happened. 2020 was supposed to be the year to fix everything- or at least, all the things that could be fixed (Doctor Who was still broken beyond repair and, outside of the cultural sphere, the world was still fucked, with an upper class twit in 10 Downing Street and an evil cheesy whatsit in the Whitehouse). But, with cinemas closing and the production of new cultural artefacts getting bottlenecked by the sudden demobilisation of content creators, the high hopes that 2020 brought with it started to evaporate.

Britain is just now coming out of Lockdown (too early to be safe, by the way- did I mention we have a twit for a Prime Minister?) and that could be… interesting. You see, while coming out of Lockdown midway through the year before a vaccine is ready might be a very bad thing for humans, it could be a pretty good thing for culture, because it gives us time to play catch-up. There’s still time to release the films and miniseries that we need to start healing the liminal dustbowl that genre fiction has become. Here’s hoping that we can still salvage that at least. I mean, it’s no substitute for saveing actual humans from the crisis, but the situation we have is the situation we have and we might as well make the best of it. Roll on the fucking Snyder Cut.

