I fell among YouTube fragments and found Family Matters again. I grew up watching that show and, I admit, I liked Steve Urkel. Looking back, however, I had to ask myself. Why wasn’t he allowed to become his alternate ego, Stefan Urquelle, permanently?

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The series began as the story of the Winslows, a working-class Black family in Chicago. Steve Urkel entered in Season 1 as the next-door neighbor. Although he was conceived as a guest appearance, he conquered the show because the audience resonated with him. Steve’s look and manner are the whole gag that follows him throughout the series. The voice is squeaky, his glasses are thick, and his pants are high-water. He breaks the furniture and asks, “Did I do that?” And the audience roars with laughter.

He is also an inventor. Later seasons hang whole plots on his gadgets: the transformation chamber, shrinking, cloning, teleportation. The other constant is Laura Winslow. From the very beginning, he cannot help but express how much he loves her. She finds him grating and does not want him. Time and again he begs for her affection, even after she has been dating other men, and even after the room has long since placed Steve as the butt of the joke.

Enter Stefan Urquelle. He arrives in Season 5, episode 8, “Dr. Urkel and Mr. Cool.” Steve drinks a serum said to suppress “nerd genes” and raise “cool genes.” Then Steve achieves a brand-new bearing: better clothes, a normal voice, and far more ease in a room. Stefan has that rizz, and Laura is immediately taken with him. Other girls are too. People who never granted Steve his dignity now treat Stefan as a man worth addressing.

Yet even as Stefan receives the attention Steve never received, he is also written as vain. He speaks of his former incarnation as an annoying, clumsy nerd and the village idiot. Laura objects, and the show installs her objection as the moral of the story. Sure, Steve may be irritating, but he cares, dammit. Stefan may look like the man she wanted, but he acts as if everyone else exists to orbit him. So Laura commands him to change back. Reluctantly, Stefan takes the antidote and becomes Steve again. Laura is glad. That is the entire moral resolution.

But then they bring Stefan back in “Stefan Returns.” Steve builds a transformation chamber and lessens the arrogance. This Stefan is kinder and Laura falls for him again. Unfortunately, the formula expires while she is telling him she loves him. Here the show wants two contrary things at once: the cool man may be decent, but for some reason he still needs to disappear so that the “real” man can continue.

The Season 6 Disney World two-parter makes the preference naked. Steve shows the transformation chamber at a contest and steps out as Stefan. Secretly, Laura sabotages the machine so he cannot change back, leaving Steve trapped as Stefan for the rest of the trip.

They spend their time at Disney World as a couple, and after Stefan proposes in the park, Laura accepts.

Then Myra, Steve’s actual girlfriend, arrives from Chicago. Unlike Laura, she has been in a committed relationship with him as Steve. Her arrival exposes the situation for what it is: Laura has taken advantage of Steve’s inability to return to his normal form while building a romance around the version of him she prefers. Laura confesses. Stefan is furious, not only because she wrecked the machine, but because the engagement itself now feels like a trap built around one form of him. She asks him to repair the chamber and become Steve again. And so he does.

This is where the show’s little piece of magic begins interfering with whatever moral the story thinks it is telling. The transformation chamber is never allowed to settle on who Stefan actually is, existentially. Is he Steve’s authentic potential, a genuine aspect of his personality finally given a body and a voice? Is he an artificial persona, a handsome costume produced by technology? Or is he something darker, a dangerous alter ego whom Steve must periodically lock back inside himself before temptation leads him away from his proper life?

The episode wants all three answers when convenient. Stefan is real enough to fall in love, propose marriage, become furious at Laura’s manipulation, and demand recognition as someone with his own desires. Yet when the plot requires Steve Urkel to return, Stefan can be folded back into the machine as though the handsome man were merely a spell that needed to be broken. The science-fiction premise becomes a moral escape hatch. Nobody has to decide whether Laura loves a real person, whether Steve has genuinely changed, or whether Stefan represents a legitimate future for him. The chamber simply reverses the problem.

The most generous interpretation is that Laura is not allowed to keep the handsome man because she had to cheat in order to be with him. That would at least be a coherent lesson: she manipulated the circumstances, got caught, and lost the relationship built on the deception. But this begs the question: is it imperative that Steve be restored to the role the series requires?

Must he remain a man who wants Laura more than he wants to remain the person she actually said yes to?

The series never adequately decides who Stefan is. And Family Matters is hardly alone in this. A great many sitcoms of the era wanted the benefits of character growth without accepting the consequences of it. Characters could learn lessons, enter new relationships, change jobs, mature, fall apart, reinvent themselves, and briefly become someone new. By the next episode, the furniture of the series usually had to be put back where it belonged. The audience was invited to watch change happen while being quietly assured that nothing essential would actually change.

Season 7’s “Send in the Clone” is the show’s most revealing attempt to solve the problem it had spent years refusing to answer. Steve clones himself. And so, of course, Laura wants to place the clone in the transformation chamber and make Stefan a separate, permanent person. What is funny is that Laura’s logic, on its own terms, is perfectly sound. Divide the men between the women. Laura gets Stefan. Myra gets Steve. Everyone receives the version of Steve they actually want, and the immediate romantic conflict appears to disappear.

Yes, Steve Urkel was asked to participate in his own replacement while continuing to affirm that his rejected self is still authentic.

At this point, the story has gone well beyond whatever lesson it was originally trying to teach. The science-fiction machinery has turned morals about romance into a metaphysical problem about identity, personhood, and change. Laura’s solution also opens a series of questions that the writers seemingly had no interest in addressing. If Stefan can now exist independently as a permanent person, then what exactly was he before? Was he always a genuine part of Steve, or was he an artificial personality created by the machine? And if Laura can legitimately choose Stefan over Steve, what does that say about the years in which the show insisted that Steve’s persistence was a form of romantic virtue?

What makes this even more bizarre is that Steve consents to having his clone used this way. He even says he wants Laura to be happy, and the show presents this as generosity, perhaps even as maturity. But it is difficult to ignore what the arrangement actually means. There is something almost cuckold-like in the structure of it. Steve can keep his dignity, his identity, and his authenticity, so long as someone else gets to have the man Laura actually wants. More than that, the other man is himself, or at least everything Laura has told Steve she wishes he were. Meanwhile, the original Steve stands aside and watches the woman he loves receive the version of him she actually desires, while he settles for someone else. That is what makes the gesture even stranger: Steve is not surrendering Laura to some rival who defeated him. He is manufacturing his own rival and then endorsing the arrangement. The humiliation is metaphysical. This is “simp” rewritten as virtue.

A person is not a thing that remains identical. A person is one who answers and is changed by the answer. Family Matters increasingly writes Steve according to the opposite principle: a soul whose authenticity is certified by its refusal to change. The clone becomes the technical image of that refusal. One person might grow into someone new, but two distinct bodies solve the problem without requiring anyone to grow. The old man can remain frozen in place while the new possibility is separated from him and treated as another person altogether.

Even after Stefan exists on his own, the ranking does not entirely disappear. He dates Laura, builds a life of his own, and works as a model. By Season 9’s “Pop Goes the Question,” the show finally brings the two men to the same point. Both propose to Laura. Steve’s proposal is characteristically self-effacing. He tells her that she could have a grander life with Stefan and a more modest one with him. He even prepares to leave for Russia to join his parents, convinced that the loving thing to do is remove himself so Laura can choose what he believes is the better option.

Laura stops him. In the end, she chooses Steve.

The reason she gives takes the story all the way back to the beginning. Steve has been a gentleman since they were children. He has demonstrated that he will be there when times are difficult. Stefan, she argues, could eventually revert to the arrogant, uncaring man he once was in “Dr. Urkel and Mr. Cool,” take her for granted, and ultimately destroy the marriage.

There is something revealing in that reasoning. Why did the writers spend years complicating the distinction between Steve and Stefan, only to reach backward and treat his original transformation as evidence against his future? In other words, Stefan was allowed to change, but he was never completely allowed to escape the meaning of how he first changed. His later kindness and maturity did not erase the memory of the arrogant man who first emerged from the chamber. Steve, by contrast, wins precisely because his character is understood as continuous. The qualities Laura values in him have been demonstrated repeatedly over time. That constancy becomes the proof of his worth.

Steve wins because he never stopped being Steve. More specifically, he wins because the show has spent years rewarding his refusal to give up on Laura. He just kept asking and was kept waiting. He repeatedly put Laura’s happiness ahead of his own, even when she had given him very little reason to believe that his persistence would ever be rewarded. The show presents this as devotion. By the end, it starts to look remarkably like simp behavior being rewarded as moral virtue. Steve’s willingness to endure rejection is treated as evidence that he deserves the woman who rejected him. The moral becomes: you will eventually be rewarded if you never stop pleading for attention. That is perhaps the strangest irony of the entire story: While Steve’s persistence is treated as evidence of his nobility, the series never seriously considers whether that same persistence could become its own kind of pathology.

Two episodes later, the series itself is over. Steve and Laura are engaged. Steve returns from the space-mission finale, and they kiss. Stefan does not receive another transformation, another attempt, or another argument. Once Laura has chosen Steve, his part in the story is finished.

That may be the most revealing thing of all. Nothing in the plot required Steve to stop being Stefan. Nothing required Laura to stop loving Stefan. Nothing required the two possibilities to remain mutually exclusive forever. The series had already established that Stefan could exist independently. It had established that Laura could genuinely love him. It had even established that Steve and Stefan could coexist. The final choice therefore does not really resolve the contradiction. It just closes the door on it. Steve is rewarded for remaining the same rejected man who spent years pursuing Laura, and the alternative version of himself simply disappears from the story.

Myra is perhaps the clearest evidence that the show’s romantic logic does not quite hold together. She wants Steve as Steve. She does not need him to become Stefan before she can love him. She accepts Steve’s awkward nerdiness without requiring him to become someone else first. In that sense, she represents the alternative the show never fully explores: a woman who says yes to the man before the upgrade. Yet the machinery of the story kept pointing toward Laura.

Why was Laura ultimately given the authority to determine which version of Steve deserves to become permanent? That is where the show’s treatment of Steve’s simping becomes difficult to ignore. Stefan represents the possibility that Steve might receive Laura without having to spend years begging for her attention. So why contain that?

Why was the nerd the authentic core while Stefan was merely the mask? The more interesting possibility is that Steve was an unfinished version of the same man. What would have happened if Steve had been allowed to grow without needing a transformation chamber to turn him into someone else? What if he could have become more confident, more capable, and more self-assured while still remaining Steve Urkel? Would Laura’s eventual choice still feel like the triumph of genuine character, or would it reveal how much the series depended on Steve remaining the same rejected, endlessly persistent admirer?

Perhaps that is where we should leave the question.

Was Steve really rewarded for becoming a better man, or was he rewarded for never stopping his pursuit of Laura? And if the series had allowed Steve to grow into a more confident and capable version of himself without ever becoming Stefan, would we still recognize the ending as a happy one? Or did Family Matters ultimately need Steve to remain the nerd that he always was?

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NEXT: Deadpool, Spider-Man, and the Trap of “Feeling Like Itself”

Marvel Studios closed out D23 on August 14 by bringing seven actors onstage to reveal its X-Men reboot cast, and the internet had its verdict before Kevin Feige finished the sentence. Of the roster confirmed that night, four are women and two are men, and multiple users on X immediately started asking, “where are the men?”

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The reveal was staged for maximum drama. Director Jake Schreier walked out with Sadie Sink, who’d already debuted as a teenage Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. “It is so wonderful to be here and to finally be able to talk about this character after months of speculation,” Sink told the crowd. She and Schreier then brought out the rest of the cast one at a time: Kit Connor as Scott Summers, Christopher Abbott as Professor Charles Xavier, Samara Weaving as Emma Frost, Inde Navarrette as Rogue, and Maya Boyd as Storm. Adam Driver closed the segment with a video message from Pinewood Studios, revealing he’ll play a villain named Nathaniel Milbury, widely read by fans as a setup for a future Mister Sinister. Most of the cast met each other for the first time backstage that night.

Feige addressed the scale of the project in response to the backlash. “Having 85, almost 90 years of comic book history, there’s so many stories yet to tell,” he told the Disney Worldbuilders panel, according to GamesRadar+. “We announced a very young, new cast for a property called X-Men the other day.” He went further elsewhere in the panel, floating a future that could stretch to “100 more” X-Men movies and “sagas upon sagas” of mutant storytelling, positioning this cast as a foundation piece meant to carry the franchise for decades rather than a single trilogy.

On the casting-ratio complaint specifically, Feige was on record calling the group incomplete. He said onstage that this was the first wave of actors, with more names still to come, and Marvel put that same line in writing in its own official recap of the panel. Deadline had signaled the same thing before the show even started, reporting that Schreier and Marvel spent the summer auditioning through a final casting round after the Fourth of July, with the roster still being treated as a work in progress. Reported names still missing include Wolverine, Beast, Cyclops’s eventual X-Men teammate Gambit, and Magneto, the character most fans assumed Driver was about to reveal before the Milbury twist.

The math behind the complaint isn’t wrong on its face. Judging a seven-person cast that Feige himself called unfinished skips past the actual claim being made: this is wave one, and the characters still missing happen to be some of the franchise’s most prominent men. Whether Marvel closes that gap the way it says it will is the real open question, not whether Friday night’s group leaned female.

What gives the backlash its edge is the pattern it continues. The term “M-She-U” has been circulating since Captain Marvel in 2019 and picked up steam through The Marvels, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk, all shows and films that leaned into female-led storytelling and all of which underperformed with general audiences relative to expectations. Marvel has responded to the term in wildly different ways over the years, at one point having She-Hulk mock the criticism directly in a 2022 episode built around fictional hate-tweets aimed at its own heroine. That dismissive posture looks different now. In June, Cosmic Book News reported that a Marvel promotional event in Italy for Avengers: Doomsday displayed a cast board stacked heavily with male characters, sparking real-time speculation that the studio was deliberately signaling a course correction after years of the M-She-U label sticking. Whether that shift is a genuine strategic reset or just how this particular cast board happened to fill up, the fact that fans immediately read it as an apology tells you how loud the complaint has gotten.

Put the X-Men reveal next to that Doomsday promo and a pattern starts to look less like coincidence. A franchise that spent years brushing off “M-She-U” complaints as bad-faith noise is now fielding the same complaint about its splashiest new IP and pointing, this time, to an unfinished roster and a promise of more men to come, rather than mocking the people asking the question. That’s not nothing. It’s also not a finished answer, and Marvel won’t have to actually answer it until the next wave of names lands.

Is holding back the male-led half of a cast reveal really the correction fans are asking for, or is Marvel just hoping “wait and see” buys enough goodwill to get past the next round of headlines?

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NEXT: Grant Morrison Watches “Lanterns,” Delivers Mixed Verdict After Slamming Damon Lindelof

The last line of my Deadpool & Wolverine article drew a useful objection. I wrote that under the current system these properties were unlikely to become themselves again. A reader put it more precisely: the answer is actually yes. It is just a disappointing yes.

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Let us take the formulation seriously. A property can look like itself again. The condition is that the story be told the way a general audience already expects a “superhero movie” about that character to be told. “Doesn’t feel like a Spider-Man movie” remains one of the most common complaints aimed at the early Tom Holland films. The phrase does not usually mean the film failed as cinema. It means the film failed a cultural recognition test. Something in the tone, the supporting cast, the humor, the moral weather, or the density of franchise furniture did not match the picture the audience was already carrying of who “Spider-Man” was.

Sam Raimi’s first two Spider-Man films felt like Spider-Man movies to a generation because they assembled a then-dominant public image of the character: working-class blues, soap-opera sincerity, and a New York that still looked like a city rather than a rotating set of Marvel cameos. Later films were inevitably judged against that standard and against the comic-book image stacked on top of it. Departures from the expected picture were often received not as interpretation but as error.

Deadpool makes the same mechanism obvious by running it at full volume. Deadpool & Wolverine “felt like a Deadpool movie” because it was packed with references, fourth-wall rupture, and licensed refuse from the earlier Fox pictures. For a large part of the audience, the references are the character. Deadpool’s cultural identity is already the mechanism that undercuts seriousness. Fill the frame with that mechanism and the movie “is itself.” Strip any of it away and people will say it doesn’t feel like Deadpool, even if what remains is a tighter and more meaningful story. The real question is whether “good” and “recognizable” have been fused so tightly that they can no longer be separated.

Holland’s Spider-Man shows the same fusion from the other side. The earlier solo films were not widely treated as disasters of craft so much as insufficiently “Spider-Man.” Brand New Day has been received more warmly in part because it offered a more familiar weather system: a college-aged Peter still paying for earlier choices, a darker city, and a light scattering of Marvel figures around the edges of his suffering. The cameos do not have to dominate the plot. They only have to confirm that this Peter still lives in the house the audience has already bought.

Once the recognition tax is paid, the movie can do the older work of character drama.

That is the disappointing part of the yes. The path back to a franchise “being itself” does not recover the original source of the character’s significance. It restores the most commercially legible version of the archive. The burning building and the life saved in the earlier analogy stay forgotten. What returns is the brand image of the hero, tuned until the audience stops noticing the machinery.

This is why established icons are now so expensive to risk and why teams of relative nobodies still have room to move. *Thunderbolts** could be written with more freedom because the public had not yet finished the sentence “a Thunderbolts movie should feel like…” Yelena, Walker, Ghost, and Sentry arrived with some prior residue, but not with a sacred checklist. An icon arrives with the checklist already laminated. The more publicly fixed the identity, the smaller the acceptable range of writing becomes. A departure asks the audience to think about the character in a way they have not already agreed to think, and a mass audience trained on recognition will often recoil from that demand. Large producers are not mysterious for declining to spend a fortune on that recoil.

None of this means the older films were freer in some pure artistic sense. Raimi’s Spider-Man was also managing an image. It was simply managing an image that had not yet calcified into a compliance regime. Once a character has been filmed, merchandised, memed, and rebooted enough times, “identity” stops meaning the inner logic of the fictional world and starts meaning the set of traits the market will still accept as authentic. At that point the writer is no longer discovering the character through further iterations. The writer is administering a public memory to people who want exactly what they already expect.

These properties can become themselves again. Under present conditions, “themselves” usually means the version that most efficiently triggers prior recognition without asking the audience to renegotiate what the character is for. That is still a closed loop. It is simply a more comforting one. The franchise does not have to look like a junkyard of variants in order to be ruled by the archive. It can look sincere, grounded, even moving, and still be doing the same work: preserving the usability of a memory.

What do you think? Is “feeling like itself” enough, or have we reached the point where recognition has fully replaced worth as the standard by which these stories are judged?

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NEXT: “Off-Hour” Turns Strange New Worlds Into a Disaster Movie, With a Prequel Problem It Can’t Escape

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds delivered its long-teased disaster movie episode this week with “Off-Hour,” and the hour lands on strong character work weighed down by a structural problem the show cannot escape: everyone watching already knows how it ends.

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The episode opens on a smaller, personal thread before the crisis hits. Christine Chapel and Dr. M’Benga discuss Dr. Boyce, the CMO from “The Cage” who has returned to the Enterprise on second shift after his transfer to the USS Sunita didn’t work out. M’Benga brings up leaving Starfleet altogether, a plot thread that sets up Boyce’s eventual promotion back to full CMO, and by extension paves the way for a familiar face down the line: Dr. McCoy.

Strange New Worlds usually treats continuity questions as background noise, so the choice to address what happened to Boyce between “The Cage” and now stands out. Boyce appears on screen only briefly, roughly thirty seconds of runtime, but the scene advances the season’s ongoing succession arc. The casting itself is a point worth raising: this version of Boyce is bald and reads younger than the character audiences saw in the original 1965 pilot, a choice that doesn’t track well against established visual continuity for a character with an already-defined look.

From there, the ship gets caught in the slipstream of a wormhole en route to Starbase 7, and the Enterprise cannot break the warp threshold without tearing itself apart. A “Shipboard Chronometer” graphic counts down the minutes on screen throughout, a device that recalls the real-time thriller structure of shows like 24 more than it recalls classic Star Trek disaster episodes. Bill Wolkoff’s script leans into it hard: the clock returns every few minutes, whether or not the story needs the reminder.

The crew scatters across a ship in freefall. Corridors freeze over. Life support starts failing in sections. At one point the ship becomes electrified and nobody can touch a console without getting thrown, including Captain Pike himself, who takes a jolt and goes flying across the bridge. Spock ends up outside the ship entirely, climbing the hull while the Enterprise is still at warp, a sequence that owes a visible debt to the exterior-peril set pieces in films like Gravity and Sunshine. La’an goes out after him. The ship fries the data they need to retrieve, so Spock mind melds with her to hand off what Scotty needs to jury-rig a fix, and the ship breaks free before the clock hits zero.

Along the way, the episode stages a fake-out: the crew jettisons an escape pod they believe Spock is trapped inside, and it explodes the instant it clears the ship. Anyone watching knows this isn’t a real death. Spock serves under Kirk in a few years. The show cannot kill him here, and dressing up a foregone conclusion as a cliffhanger asks the audience to manufacture dread that the premise itself refuses to support.

None of that undercuts the character work, which carries the episode. The Chapel and M’Benga material lands, giving weight to their history together through the Klingon war rather than leaning on the ship’s peril alone. Boyce’s return and the succession question with M’Benga get room to breathe even inside a crisis structure that could have crowded them out. The technobabble driving the crisis stays on the vague, modern-Trek side, closer to a mood than a system a viewer could follow step by step the way older Star Trek allowed, but it does its job of moving the plot without derailing the episode.

That’s the larger issue running through the whole hour. The countdown to the ship’s destruction does little to build real tension in a prequel stacked with legendary, contractually immortal characters. The only stretch of the episode that carries actual risk is the M’Benga and Chapel material, where M’Benga is crushed and left in critical condition, and even that thread runs on borrowed urgency since Strange New Worlds has already shown its hand about which characters survive into the Original Series era. The disaster-movie plot and the medical crisis both suffer from the same trap: know the ending, and the machinery built to hide it becomes visible.

The specific homage behind the premise is the drawn-out wormhole sequence from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, stretched from a single scene into a full hour. That’s a fitting reference point for a season that’s been paying tribute to classic disaster movies, and the structure borrows from more than one source. The crew scattered into isolated compartments, each solving its own piece of a survival problem while cut off from everyone else, is the same shape used in The Poseidon Adventure and its ensemble-in-crisis descendants. The power-down urgency paired with an injured crew member worsening in the background is closer to Apollo 13. The ship threatening to break apart under structural strain rather than an outside attacker echoes Titanic and The Towering Inferno as much as it echoes The Motion Picture. “Off-Hour” pulls pieces from all of them rather than committing to one clean homage.

That blend also explains some of the visual choices, including the split-screen wipe transitions used a few times this season to cut between simultaneous scenes. The technique has real pedigree, tracing back to Brian De Palma’s work and The Thomas Crown Affair, and it was common in 1970s disaster films built around ensembles scattered across a single location. Reviving it here reads as a deliberate period quotation for the disaster-movie framing, but it lands as jarring rather than immersive, breaking the show’s usual visual grammar for a callback that draws attention to itself instead of disappearing into the story.

The bigger problem for the show is Captain Pike himself, and “Off-Hour” is a clear example of a pattern that has held for the past couple of seasons. Pike gets one moment, the electrified console jolt that sends him flying across the bridge, and then spends roughly half the episode unconscious while Spock, La’an, Chapel, M’Benga, and Scotty carry the crisis. A show built around Christopher Pike keeps writing him as a secondary character in his own series. That’s not new to this episode. It’s a season-over-season trend of sidelining the lead in favor of letting the rest of the ensemble shine, and it works against the entire premise Strange New Worlds was built on.

Underneath the effects and the countdown graphic, “Off-Hour” is a simple disaster plot built around a clock and a set of characters solving separate pieces of the same problem until Scotty delivers the fix. The plot holds together and the emotional beats land. The character work is some of the strongest the show has put out this season, even with a couple of moments along the way that don’t quite hold up to scrutiny. The prequel-stakes problem and the Pike-as-bystander problem keep it from reaching the top tier, but “Off-Hour” is a competently built hour of television that earns an 8 out of 10.

Does Strange New Worlds have a way around the prequel-stakes problem for the rest of this season, or is the show now content to keep Pike as a background player in his own series while the rest of the cast carries every crisis?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Dynamite’s Buffy And Angel Cancellations Expose A Publisher In Freefall

Ridley Scott’s new post-apocalyptic thriller The Dog Stars hits theaters August 28, and the first wave of reactions out of its London premiere shows a filmmaker once again leaning on visual polish to paper over a screenplay critics can’t defend. The film stars Jacob Elordi as Hig, a pilot surviving in a world gutted by pandemic, and Josh Brolin as Bangley, the ex-Marine who shares his homestead. Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, Allison Janney, and Benedict Wong round out the cast. It’s adapted from Peter Heller’s 2012 novel of the same name, with Mark L. Smith writing the screenplay.

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The reactions split down the middle, and the negative side is not gentle. Critic Adam Patla called it “a well-made but utterly soulless apocalyptic tale” built on a heavy-handed screenplay. The HoloFiles went further, describing it as “a painfully generic post-apocalyptic thriller indistinguishable from The Last of Us.” Next Best Picture’s Matt Neglia made the sharpest point of all: no matter how well Scott stages a shot or how much his cast delivers, a film is only as strong as the script underneath it, and this one doesn’t hold up its end.

That criticism lands harder because it’s not new. Scott hasn’t made anything close to universally loved since The Martian in 2015, which earned a Best Picture nomination and broad acclaim across the board. Everything since has been a mixed bag at best. Alien: Covenant underwhelmed both critics and the box office. Napoleon sits at a 6.3 average score, a costume epic that split historians and audiences alike. Gladiator II landed at 6.4, a legacy sequel nobody asked for and few defended with any conviction. House of Gucci scored a 6.6, remembered more as a meme than a film. The Last Duel fared better with critics at 7.3, but it bombed commercially so badly that Scott himself blamed younger audiences for not showing up. Ten years of near-misses is a pattern, not bad luck.

Compare that to Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, his first sci-fi film in eight years. It opened in June to a genuinely split reaction of its own: some outlets called it a return to form, while others flagged screenplay holes and pacing problems straight out of the Scott playbook. Collider noted the film’s thematic reach exceeds its grasp. The box office backed that up. Disclosure Day grossed just under $250 million worldwide against a $115 million budget, barely clearing its marketing costs and falling well short of Spielberg’s other sci-fi outings like War of the Worlds and Ready Player One.

Two of the biggest names in the history of the genre, both working from big swings, both landing somewhere between “fine” and “forgettable.” What connects them isn’t a shortage of talent. It’s a production pace that leaves no room to fix a script before the cameras roll. Scott told interviewers in 2024 that The Dog Stars, a Bee Gees biopic, and Gladiator III had him booked solid for three years straight. That’s not the schedule of a filmmaker chasing his best work. That’s a filmmaker chasing output. Spielberg’s situation is different on paper, since Disclosure Day was his first genre film in nearly a decade, but the result reads the same: a script that needed another pass and a director too committed to the production to demand one.

Unlike Scott’s last few releases, The Dog Stars isn’t even generating pre-release noise. There’s no viral marketing moment, no trailer everyone’s dissecting frame by frame, just a quiet stream of first reactions from a London press junket that mainstream audiences will likely never see. SlashFilm noted flatly that audiences aren’t turning out for Scott’s movies the way they used to, and the early box office projections back that up.

Both directors built their reputations on scripts that earned every frame they filmed. Alien didn’t need volume. Close Encounters didn’t need volume. Somewhere along the way, volume became the goal anyway.

Does Hollywood’s appetite for legacy directors cranking out one project after another explain why so many recent prestige releases feel undercooked, or is something else driving veteran filmmakers to keep signing onto scripts that clearly weren’t ready?

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NEXT: Lanterns Episode 2 Review: HBO Can’t Resist the Shock Value Even When the Mystery Works

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II got a season two renewal in March. He got an Emmy nomination in July. Sixteen days after that nomination was announced, Marvel and Disney+ un-renewed his show and never told him why.

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“I was told that it had something to do with the viewership numbers,” Abdul-Mateen told Vanity Fair. “I wasn’t told what those numbers were, but ultimately, for whatever reason it was, I think they decided that it didn’t make sense for business, and that’s the decision that we live with and we keep on marching forward.”

Wonder Man premiered in January, following Simon Williams (Abdul-Mateen), a struggling actor with hidden superpowers chasing a role in a movie based on his own comic-book alter ego. The show pulled 618 million minutes of viewing in its first week and landed in Nielsen’s top 10 original streaming shows, a mark only Loki and Daredevil: Born Again had also hit among Marvel’s Disney+ live-action library. It never charted again after that opening week. Marvel renewed it for season two on March 23, then reversed course on July 30. Variety reported the season two writers’ room never opened. The writers Marvel had hired were released to find other work.

Abdul-Mateen connected the decision to Marvel’s parallel handling of Blade, the Mahershala Ali vehicle that spent seven years in development hell before Ali told GQ he’d “moved on” from the role Marvel announced for him at Comic-Con in 2019. “I think the optics are obvious,” Abdul-Mateen said. “If I’m a big business, if I’m Disney, if I’m Marvel, I don’t want to be attached to these optics. So it should be a priority to change that narrative and to do what it takes to responsibly change that narrative with quality stories, with quality resources.”

The cancellation lands inside a Marvel live-action slate that has thinned to almost nothing on Disney+. With Wonder Man gone, VisionQuest in October and Daredevil: Born Again season three in March 2027 are the only two live-action Marvel series left with confirmed release dates, and both wrapped filming more than a year before their premieres. VisionQuest finished its UK shoot in July 2025. Marvel has zero brand-new original live-action Disney+ series announced beyond that pair. Every remaining title is a renewal or a direct continuation of something that already exists.

Marvel hasn’t issued a public statement on why Wonder Man’s numbers, whatever they were, outweighed a 91% Rotten Tomatoes score, an 87% audience score, and an Emmy nod for its lead. Simon Williams and Trevor Slattery may still turn up in future Marvel projects, according to sources cited by Consequence, which would make Wonder Man the rare cancellation where the studio kills the show but keeps the characters on the shelf.

What does Marvel’s silence tell you about how these calls actually get made?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Lanterns Episode 2 Review: HBO Can’t Resist the Shock Value Even When the Mystery Works

HBO’s “Lanterns” returned this week with episode two, “Trust Fall,” and the show still can’t decide whether it wants to be a grounded sci-fi detective mystery or another vehicle for the network’s addiction to gratuitous shock content.

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Episode one ended on a flash forward: Hal Jordan, ten years in the future, dead or frozen in the snow with a bullet wound over his eye. It was the kind of cliffhanger that should drive the next hour. Episode two ignores it completely. Not a mention, not a flashback, nothing. If a show is going to drop that kind of reveal in its premiere, it needs to actually build toward it instead of using it as a cheap hook and moving on. That’s a structural problem, not a nitpick. It signals a show more interested in shocking the audience for a week of headlines than in earning its story beats.

That instinct shows up again early in episode two. Hal breaks into the morgue to pull the bodies of the four aliens killed in the premiere, running them through Will Macon’s alien detection setup. In the process, the show puts a full frontal shot of one of the corpses on screen for no narrative reason. It adds nothing. It could have been cut entirely and the scene would have played exactly the same. This is the same playbook HBO ran with “House of the Dragon,” where gratuitous content got prioritized over storytelling and made large chunks of that show unwatchable. “Lanterns” is an optimistic premise about space cops who fight for order using magic rings. It didn’t need this.

The actual plot advances more than the premiere did. John Stewart gets abducted and brought before an alien named Antaan, who lays out the Manhunter mythology, ancient synthetic beings who predate the Green Lantern Corps and who apparently wiped out Antaan’s people under a Guardian’s direction. Antaan believes Hal has been shielding the Manhunter responsible ever since, and gives John 48 hours to expose it. Meanwhile Hal digs up the alien bodies, gets shot by one of Macon’s snipers for his trouble, and ends up flying to visit his old mentor Sinestro in a space prison, who all but confirms a Manhunter is still active and pivots the conversation straight to asking about John Stewart.

That’s a real mystery with real stakes building across two fronts, and it’s the strongest part of the episode. The show also finally gives Hal a scene in the suit, which the premiere almost entirely skipped. It’s a step in the right direction.

Where it falls apart again is the messaging. Sheriff Kerry Kane spends much of the episode lecturing Hal Jordan on his behavior, with Hal written as reckless and obnoxious specifically so she can correct him, an increasingly familiar streaming formula. There’s also a scene with the militia man’s wife that veers into a conversation about unorthodox relationships and then, bizarrely, white privilege, as if that has anything to do with infidelity. It reads as message first, character second, and it’s hard not to notice that the militia figure at the center of this storyline bears more than a passing resemblance to JD Vance, right down to a wife who looks the part too.

The dialogue is still overloaded with profanity, though episode two does cut it roughly in half from the 37 instances counted in the premiere down to around 15. Progress, but still excessive for a show that doesn’t need it to land its drama.

“Lanterns” has a mystery worth following. The Manhunter plot, the Sinestro tease, and John Stewart’s arc are doing real work. But the show keeps sabotaging itself with shock for its own sake and political messaging bolted onto scenes that don’t call for it. HBO had a genuinely interesting concept here. It just doesn’t have the confidence to let the story carry itself without the extra baggage.

Episode 2 rating: 6/10.

Does HBO know how to make a genre show without falling back on its “Game of Thrones” era instincts, or is this the new house style going forward?

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NEXT: Grant Morrison Watches “Lanterns,” Delivers Mixed Verdict After Slamming Damon Lindelof

There’s a part in Deadpool & Wolverine that keeps replaying in my head, and likely not for the reason the movie’s writers want.

Deadpool and Wolverine are mid-brawl in the Void when a cloaked figure interrupts them, warning that Cassandra Nova’s scavengers are already closing in. The figure lands, throws back his hood, and reveals Chris Evans, who Deadpool (and the audience) immediately register as Captain America. However, Evans later shouts “Flame on,” ignites, and the misdirection collapses: it’s Johnny Storm, the Human Torch. His role is played for a gag as he launches skyward in full flame only to have his powers drained from him mid-flight by the mutant Pyro.

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Johnny then plummets, clips a structure with his crotch on the way down, and smashes into the ground in pure slapstick. Not much later, the movie’s villain, Cassandra Nova, unmakes him with a thought. She kills him with telekinesis, peeling every inch of skin from Johnny’s body in one instantaneous motion. What’s left collapses into a wet heap of muscle, organs, and bones in a spreading pool of blood. He has just enough time for a final shocked blink before his body falls apart.

Whether it is the slapstick fall or being stripped of his flesh by the villain, both events are registered as “true” inside the movie’s logic. The first is true because the movie has already declared that physical consequence is optional when the joke requires it. The second is true because the movie needs a demonstration of the villain’s power. However, neither moment is about Johnny Storm as a character with history, body, or stakes. Instead, both are about the audience’s prior investment in The Human Torch as a piece of recognizable intellectual property.

The Existential Question

The movie summons its figures, plays upon the audience’s memory of them, and then discards them when the recognition has served its turn. Never once is the audience led to ask whether a thing that exists only to be recognized still possesses any substance, any dignity, or any claim upon one’s own moral imagination. If anything, the opposite is promoted. The movie’s central joke is that every question of existential value must be undercut before it can become serious. Whenever the story approaches questions about whether these characters possess any worth beyond their place in the franchise, the comedy arrives to deflate them. This has, more or less, become Deadpool’s entire character no matter where he shows up. He becomes the mechanism by which the work prevents itself from having to take its own existence seriously.

The joke is always there to remind us that none of this really matters, even as the plot insists that everything matters enormously.

The reason any character becomes popular is because he possessed some quality that made him worth remembering in the first place. His actions, loves, sacrifices, loyalties, and virtues give rise to his significance. Recognition is supposed to be the consequence of worth, not its source.

Consider a simple example: Imagine a man who becomes a hero because he runs into a burning building and saves someone. His heroism has an objective reference. He actually did something heroic. Now imagine that, years later, someone makes a movie about him. People remember the movie, admire the character, and call him a hero. But eventually everyone forgets why he was a hero. Nobody remembers the burning building. The rescue itself has disappeared from cultural memory, leaving only the image of “the hero.” At that point, something important has been inverted. The memory of the hero has survived, but the reason for remembering him has not.

This is analogous to the problem with the movie’s conception of its characters. It begins with recognition and then reasons backward toward value. Because audiences still recognize the old characters and properties, their continued existence becomes something worth fighting for. The conclusion is assumed at the beginning: these things are valuable because they are valuable enough to be remembered.

But that is circular. It never asks the prior question: what was there about these people that made them worth remembering in the first place? The movie replaces that question with something even more circular: these characters are only worth remembering because they are valuable intellectual properties, and they are valuable intellectual properties because people continue to remember them. The franchise becomes its own justification. The burning building is gone, and so is the heroic act that once gave the hero his meaning. What remains is the copyright, the brand, the market value, and the audience’s continued recognition of the property. The movie then asks us to treat the preservation of that property as though it were the preservation of something intrinsically worth saving.

Cultural Nihilism

Thematically, Deadpool & Wolverine is about a man confronting meaninglessness and choosing purpose. The movie contains an emotional architecture indicative of a classical dramatic arc.

But even in doing so, the well was poisoned by a substrate in which continuity, physical law, character history, and even death are provisional. In other words, even this movie is subject to franchise nostalgia, studio accounting, and the audience’s ability to recognize prior works. If we take as granted that this substrate is in place, then it won’t matter if the movie keeps gesturing toward “something,” because the writers have already told us everything is just ornamental anyway.

The actions of the heroes only matter because the story establishes that individual universes can be terminated or preserved according to corporate or metaphysical rules. The writers want us to believe that the characters are performing what are illustrated as genuinely existential acts: prevent a universe from dying, defeat someone capable of destroying timelines, and ultimately determine whether an entire reality continues to exist. Yet the writers also reduced that reality to something that can be administratively managed, licensed, and ultimately discarded by an external authority. What does this do other than make said heroism feel less metaphysically consequential?

Think about it: the characters are fighting to save a universe that the movie itself has taught us is ultimately somebody else’s intellectual property. Therefore, if the universe’s continued existence is ultimately contingent on a corporate decision about whether a property remains active, then Deadpool and Wolverine aren’t really defending existence itself. They’re defending the continued use of a franchise.

The Void is the franchise’s unconscious made literal: a dumping ground for discarded intellectual property that still carries residual cultural resonance. Spider-Man: No Way Home served the same purpose, thematically, by dredging up prior iterations of the titular character despite the fact that said iterations hold no existential value outside the meta.

Deadpool’s journey through the Void is less a hero’s quest than a guided tour of the archive, where every continuity is another reminder that these characters only continue to exist because the audience still recognizes them. The meta is not commentary on the story. Under the conditions the movie itself creates, the meta is the story. Sure, the writers wanted the emotional payoff of its titular characters’ resistance to erasure and the discovery that their lives have value because they save “the world.” But simultaneously, we are told that “the world” is the franchise itself and that its only value is commercial. Any classical dramatic gesture, whether “we need to stop them from destroying the world!” or “these people are worth saving,” becomes a kind of residual gesture, a fossil from an older kind of storytelling that still presumed these stories were about something other than their own conditions of production.

When the meta is all that remains, what exactly is left? The answer: copyright continuity. The characters persist not because the story has given us a reason to believe they matter, but because the property itself must continue to exist. In the end, what is being preserved?

Ownership. Can these properties ever become themselves again? Under the current system, that seems unlikely. The archive has become the meaning. Characters survive because keeping old stories alive keeps people recognizing and buying them. And “new” stories matter only when they connect back to the meta.

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NEXT: Spider-Man 2: When Superhero Movies Were Made With Love

Billie Piper got asked the question every Doctor Who fan wants answered, and she didn’t want to answer it. Speaking at the For the Love of Fantasy & Sci-Fi convention in London on August 22, Piper addressed her surprise appearance at the end of last year’s finale, “The Reality War,” where Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor regenerated into a figure who looked exactly like her.

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“I am not the next Doctor. I am Rose Tyler in hiatus,” Piper said. “Sorry, that’s a really cryptic answer, but because I’m not currently filming Doctor Who as the Doctor, I can’t lie and say otherwise. I’m sweating. I hate this.”

She followed with an appeal for patience. “I think you’ve all gotta be very patient,” Piper said. “It’ll be worth it when it comes. I think what we need to celebrate is the fact the show has been on air for 26 years, the new incarnation. It’s been around a very long time, it’s massively successful and it’s impacted so many people’s lives positively. It’s had a bit of a rough time lately, and I think everyone needs to chill out and wait for what comes from having this space and time.”

That “rough time” has a specific shape. Ratings fell steadily across Gatwa’s two seasons under the Disney+ co-production deal, from roughly 5 million UK viewers during Jodie Whittaker’s final run down to lows of 2 million and 2.25 million, the least-watched episodes in the show’s 60-plus-year history. Davies renamed the classic Sea Devils to “Homo Aqua” mid-run, calling the original name racist. Gatwa told critics frustrated with the show’s direction to “touch grass.” The Reality War ended his run with a regeneration cliffhanger that still has no confirmed answer more than a year later: is Piper playing a new Doctor, a returning Rose Tyler, or something else the show hasn’t explained.

The uncertainty around Piper’s answer traces directly back to a mess the BBC made for itself in June. The corporation had promised a 2026 Christmas special, written by Davies, as a bridge while it figured out the show’s future after Disney+ declined to renew. On June 10, the BBC scrapped that special entirely and announced Davies and production company Bad Wolf were both out, with the show going to competitive tender. Davies addressed it on Instagram, writing: “For the record: there was no script, I never wrote it, and no actor was ever approached to play the next Doctor.” That account doesn’t match what Fandom Pulse’s own sources reported at the time: that multiple versions of a script existed, and that both David Tennant and Piper had been approached and said they weren’t available to film.

Whatever version is accurate, the tender itself has not gone smoothly. Deadline reported in June that the split between the BBC and Bad Wolf was mutual, both sides recognizing the show “required a level of surgery that could not be masked by the sticking plaster of a festive episode.” IGN and GamesRadar followed with reporting that the show may not return until 2028 at the earliest, and could stay off air five years or more, based on industry insiders. Multiple respected UK production companies have already passed on bidding. One producer told Deadline it’s “a bit of a nightmare for any producer in this market with the shadow of the Disney fallout,” estimating that without a new international partner to replace Disney, per-episode budgets would struggle to clear £3 million. BBC Studios remains the only confirmed bidder so far, keeping distribution and licensing rights regardless of who wins production. Former Doctor Who writer Robert Shearman summed up the mood in Doctor Who Magazine, calling the current situation “probably as dead as we’ve ever known it,” worse in his view than the 16-year gap between 1989 and 2005 because this time the show doesn’t even have a Doctor established on screen.

That’s the backdrop Piper walked into on a convention stage, fielding a question with no clean answer available to give. A cryptic non-answer, a request for patience, and a reminder that the show has survived a long time. All of it delivered, by her own account, while sweating through it.

Does a defensive answer from the one actor holding the show’s biggest unresolved question reassure fans that a plan exists, or confirm that the wait for one is exactly as open-ended as the reporting suggests?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Chris Carter Wants His Own X-Files, And That’s A Problem For Coogler’s Reboot

There are superhero movies that are successful. There are superhero movies that are entertaining. And then there are superhero movies that remind you why you fell in love with superheroes in the first place.

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 is one of those movies.

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Released in 2004, Spider-Man 2 came from a Hollywood that still understood that making a superhero movie was supposed to be an exercise in imagination. It wasn’t embarrassed by its source material. It didn’t try to deconstruct the very idea of a superhero or convince audiences that superheroes were ridiculous.

It simply embraced the material, and Sam Raimi embraced it harder than almost anyone could have.

What makes Spider-Man 2 remarkable is how many different kinds of movies Raimi manages to put inside one superhero film. It can be funny one minute, romantic the next, genuinely moving after that, and then suddenly turn into a horror movie.

The Doc Ock hospital sequence is probably the best example.

Raimi takes roughly three minutes of a superhero movie and turns it into a miniature Evil Dead movie. The sterile operating room becomes a nightmare, with harsh surgical lighting and deep shadows making the room feel like a trap. The camera is constantly moving, using Dutch angles, frantic tracking shots, extreme close-ups and point-of-view shots from the mechanical arms to create a sense of breathless panic.

The music largely disappears, replaced by screaming, crashing metal, machinery and the unmistakable whine of a chainsaw.

And remarkably, the tentacles were brought to life through practical puppetry, giving Doc Ock’s mechanical arms a physical presence that CGI often struggles to replicate.

The result is one of the most unsettling sequences ever put into a superhero movie. It isn’t simply an action scene; it’s a monster movie.

Otto Octavius is unconscious while his mechanical arms essentially take over his body. The surgeons become trapped with something they don’t understand, and Raimi shoots their deaths with the gleeful nastiness of his Evil Dead days. The sequence ends with Otto waking amid the wreckage, screaming as he sees what has happened. It’s essentially the birth of a monster, and Raimi somehow manages to make it terrifying, exciting and completely appropriate for a Spider-Man movie.

And then there’s Alfred Molina. Molina could have played Doc Ock as another generic comic-book villain, but instead he gives Otto Octavius genuine humanity. Before he becomes the villain, Otto is a brilliant scientist, a husband and a man pursuing something he genuinely believes will benefit humanity. That makes his transformation tragic rather than merely functional. The movie understands that a great superhero villain shouldn’t simply be evil; he should be someone whose downfall matters.

But the greatest thing about Spider-Man 2 isn’t actually Doc Ock.

It’s Peter Parker.

This is a superhero movie that understands the contradiction at the heart of Spider-Man: Peter wants to be Spider-Man, but he also wants to have a life. He wants Mary Jane. He wants a career. He wants to help Aunt May. He wants to pay his bills. He wants to be normal. And he can’t have all of those things.

That’s why Peter’s decision to give up being Spider-Man actually matters. It’s not just a temporary plot device. The movie spends real time showing what happens when he puts the suit away. Crime increases, people suffer, Peter initially feels liberated, and yet he eventually realizes that the responsibility he was trying to escape is precisely what makes him who he is.

That’s where Rosemary Harris as Aunt May delivers one of the greatest speeches in superhero-movie history.

“Everybody loves a hero.” Aunt May explains why people need heroes—not because heroes are perfect, but because they give ordinary people something to believe in. They give people strength. They remind us that doing the right thing sometimes requires sacrifice. “I believe there’s a hero in all of us,” she tells Peter, before explaining that sometimes we have to give up the thing we want the most, “even our dreams.”

That’s not merely dialogue. That’s the movie’s thesis. Peter ultimately has to choose between the life he wants and the responsibility he has accepted. And unlike so many modern superhero stories, Spider-Man 2 doesn’t treat that responsibility as something embarrassing that Peter needs to overcome. It treats it as something noble. The movie believes that sacrifice can actually make a person better. It believes that power carries responsibility. It believes that heroism means something.

Raimi also never forgets that this is supposed to be a superhero movie. The train sequence alone is an extraordinary piece of blockbuster filmmaking. Spider-Man fights Doc Ock on top of a speeding train, gets dragged through the city, loses his mask, and ultimately uses every ounce of his strength to stop the train from killing everyone aboard.

Then comes one of the movie’s most beautiful moments. Peter collapses, and the passengers pick him up. They see the face beneath the mask, and instead of being afraid of him, they protect him. For a few moments, Spider-Man isn’t just a guy in a costume. He’s their hero.

This is still my favorite scene in any comic book movie. It brings chills, goosebumps and tears every time I see it.

That’s what Spider-Man 2 understood. The superhero isn’t interesting simply because he can climb walls, shoot webs or stop a speeding train. He’s interesting because he chooses to do it.

That’s why the movie still works. The effects may show their age in places. Some of the science is ridiculous. The melodrama is unapologetically melodramatic, and Raimi’s fingerprints are all over virtually every frame. But those aren’t weaknesses to me. They’re part of the movie’s personality.

Spider-Man 2 feels like a Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie.

It has horror, comedy, romance, tragedy, spectacular action, larger-than-life villains and a genuinely heroic hero. Most importantly, it has heart.

And that’s what I miss - superhero movies that weren’t afraid to be superhero movies. I miss filmmakers who could take four-color comic-book characters seriously without ruining them with THE MESSAGE.

Spider-Man 2 wasn’t perfect, and it didn’t need to be. It was sincere. It was imaginative. It was spectacular. And, most importantly, it actually believed in the idea of a hero.

Twenty-two years later, that’s why it still stands so tall.

Check out Byl Holte’s Substack for more great takes:

Byl Holte

Tracking the self-immolation of Hollywood, one WOKENESS at a time, and happily exposing THE FEMOCRATS at their own game.

Grant Morrison has weighed in on HBO’s “Lanterns” after months of feuding with showrunner Damon Lindelof over a dismissive joke about the color green, and the acclaimed “Green Lantern” writer’s verdict lands somewhere between grudging respect and continued skepticism.

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In the August 23 edition of his Xanaduum Substack newsletter, Morrison wrote that he “felt obliged to watch the first episode of Lanterns after criticising the glib dismissal of the colour green by writer and producer Damon Lindelof.” That single sentence carries the weight of a controversy that has followed the show since before its first trailer dropped.

The feud traces back to a 2024 appearance Lindelof made on the “Lovett or Leave It” podcast, where he quipped, “It’s called Lanterns, because we all agreed that the ‘Green’ was stupid, so now it’s just Lanterns.” The comment sat dormant for over a year until fans resurfaced it after the “Lanterns” trailer released with a washed-out color palette and no visible ring constructs. Morrison, who wrote a celebrated “Green Lantern” run for DC from 2018 to 2021, fired back on Substack with one of the sharper takedowns of the controversy: “TV writer/producer Damon Lindelof’s comments notwithstanding, the ‘Green’ in ‘Green Lantern(s)’ is not ‘stupid.’ Why does a writer attach himself to this kind of narrative if he thinks it’s fundamentally ‘stupid’? You don’t hand CSI scripts to patronising writers who condemn forensics experts and their haircuts as ‘stupid’, so why hire people who are ashamed and in denial about the comic book material they’ve been assigned to develop?”

Morrison did not stop there, adding, “The only people who give a f—k about the Lanterns TV series are Green Lantern fans. Why alienate them at the start? That feels more like ‘stupid.’”

Lindelof answered with an Instagram apology, posting a photo of himself in a Green Lantern shirt from his first Comic-Con and writing, “I have upset Grant Morrison, which means I have now pissed off MOST of the brilliant British/Scottish comics writers that I grew up idolizing.” He called the podcast joke “dumb” and “sloppy and careless,” and insisted green remained his “lifelong favorite color.”

Now that the show has premiered, Morrison’s newsletter shows a writer working through mixed feelings rather than holding a grudge. He praised Aaron Pierre’s performance as John Stewart and singled out Kyle Chandler’s turn as a version of Hal Jordan, though he added a pointed caveat: “he wasn’t any Hal Jordan I recognised. Willpower and booze don’t mix for a start.” Morrison said he would “stick with it for the engaging Chandler,” while criticizing the show for offering “way too much tell, not enough show” and for inviting “True Detective” comparisons that “only worked against Lanterns.”

The costume and effects question that started the whole fight resurfaced too. Morrison called “the lack of costumes and ring effects” glaring, though he chalked it up to budget constraints and a deliberate effort to distance the show from the failed 2011 Ryan Reynolds film. He also took issue with a specific line of dialogue, writing that Jordan’s comparison of ditching his uniform to not wearing a tie “as you get older” missed the point of what the ring and costume represent: “the Lantern uniform is not a superhero suit or personal fashion choice, it’s the uniform of the organisation Jordan works for.”

Morrison closed the section on a note that split the difference between the fight he picked with Lindelof and the show now airing on HBO. “Having said that, the approach seems to have worked, and mainstream reviews of the show are pretty positive, so fair dos,” he wrote, before asking a question that goes back to his original complaint: why build a low-budget, low-visual take on a franchise DC could be positioning against “Star Trek” or “Star Wars”?

Lindelof’s apology cooled the public feud, but Morrison’s newsletter makes clear the underlying disagreement over how “Lanterns” handles its source material never fully resolved. Does a partial thaw from one of Green Lantern’s most respected writers change how skeptical fans should approach the rest of the season?

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NEXT: Lanterns Outpaced Agatha All Along’s Viewership in Less Than Half the Time

Chris Carter created The X-Files in 1993 and ran it for nine seasons, two feature films, and a divisive 2016 revival. Now, with Ryan Coogler’s reboot in production and a director’s cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe hitting Disney Plus and Hulu, Carter is talking. And what he’s saying should make Fox executives nervous about which version of this franchise fans actually want.

Coogler’s reboot, which finished filming its pilot this summer, hands the lead roles to Danielle Deadwyler and Himesh Patel as new FBI agents investigating the paranormal. Not Mulder. Not Scully. A franchise built for three decades around one specific pair of investigators is being reintroduced with two entirely different leads, a now-familiar move in an industry that keeps replacing established characters rather than building new ones from scratch.

Carter, still credited as executive producer, told Polygon he expects the original stars to show up anyway. “At least Gillian, I think, is going to appear in the Coogler version,” he said, adding that he assumes David Duchovny will too. That’s a notable admission. If the new leads need the old leads to hand off legitimacy to the audience, the show isn’t standing on its own.

Carter has kept his distance from the production itself. He has said he won’t read the scripts and wants to experience the series as a viewer rather than a collaborator. “I’m waiting for his series to come out,” he said, before deciding what comes next for the franchise under his own control.

The media buried the lede when reporting on the reboot and interviewing the X-Files creator. Carter has unfinished business with The X-Files, and he’s not shy about saying so, saying, "I do have another X-Files story to tell." He has described wanting to tell another story in the mythology, whether as a series or another feature film. The Season 11 finale left major threads dangling, including a reveal about Scully’s storyline that split the fanbase. Carter has defended that ending publicly, arguing that giving fans exactly what they expect isn’t the job of X-Files storytelling, "But is that the job of X-Files storytellers? No.” He also added, "You just have to make them appreciate what they objected to."

Carter has also said he doesn’t know yet whether his plans and Coogler’s reboot will end up complementary or in direct competition. That’s a diplomatic way of saying two different visions for the same franchise are currently in motion, one led by the man who created Mulder and Scully, and one led by a director who cast around them.

The director’s cut of I Want to Believe, retitled Vrach Frankenshteyn, restores material Fox cut from the 2008 theatrical release, including horror elements Carter originally intended and story beats involving Mulder’s sister Samantha and Scully’s son William that were stripped out. It’s a small but telling data point: Carter is actively reclaiming his original vision for this franchise on a project decades old, while a new set of decision-makers reshapes its future without him in the room.

Coogler has reportedly consulted X-Files alumni, including former staff writer Vince Gilligan, and handed showrunning duties to Jennifer Yale now that his own directing work on the pilot is done. That’s a lot of hands on a franchise whose creator is publicly saying he still has a story to tell and isn’t sure the new version will leave room for it.

If Carter moves forward with his own X-Files project while Coogler’s reboot is airing, Fox will have two competing claims on the same IP, one from the creator, one from the studio’s chosen successor. That’s not a hypothetical. Carter has said it himself. The only question left is which version audiences decide is the real X-Files.

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Avengers: Secret Wars Crew Sent Home for Five Weeks Right After Production Started

Avengers: Secret Wars has barely begun filming at Pinewood Studios, and the entire crew is already on a five-week break. The report comes from Filmbase, a UK industry site that tracks crew alerts and job listings for freelancers working in British film and television. Its August 12 industry update lists the Russo brothers’ next Avengers film under productions already in prep, noting a five-week hiatus for all crew with work resuming at the end of September.

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Filmbase builds its updates from conversations with working crew rather than official studio statements, so the report counts as a well-sourced industry account rather than a confirmed announcement from Marvel. No studio has commented on the pause or its cause.

Secret Wars closes out Marvel’s Multiverse Saga alongside its direct predecessor, Avengers: Doomsday, arriving in theaters December 18, 2026. Both films reunite Joe and Anthony Russo, the directing team behind Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, working from a script by longtime collaborator Stephen McFeely. Robert Downey Jr. anchors both films as Victor von Doom, a role Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige has described as Downey’s version of Thanos for this saga, a shift from his original run as Tony Stark and Iron Man that ended in Endgame. The ensemble draws from across Marvel’s recent output: Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, Anthony Mackie’s Captain America, the Fantastic Four cast from this year’s First Steps, and the X-Men lineup assembled from the 2000s Fox films, including Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, and Rebecca Romijn reprising their original roles. Secret Wars follows on December 17, 2027.

The hiatus lands during an unusually compressed production window for the studio. The Russos have spent 2026 finishing post-production on Doomsday while simultaneously prepping Secret Wars, a workload Anthony Russo described to Collider after this year’s Comic-Con panel as complicated but thrilling. That overlap is part of why the pause reads as notable rather than routine: it’s not a gap between two separate productions, but a stop inside a project that had reportedly already started shooting scenes, including what one insider called one of the “craziest” sequences of the production so far.

Whether the five-week break reflects a scheduling accommodation for the Doomsday release push, a scripting gap, or something else entirely is not addressed in the Filmbase report. Marvel has not moved either film’s release date, and nothing in the crew alert suggests a change to the December 2026 or December 2027 windows.

Secret Wars carries outsized stakes for Marvel regardless of a five-week pause. It’s the final chapter the studio has spent nearly a decade building toward since Downey first left the franchise, with a cast list that now includes actors from three separate eras of Marvel’s screen history sharing scenes together for the first time.

Is a hiatus this early in filming a sign of a production still finding its footing, or standard breathing room for two of the most complicated blockbusters Marvel has ever attempted back to back?

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NEXT: Lanterns Outpaced Agatha All Along’s Viewership in Less Than Half the Time

Orson Scott Card’s post-apocalyptic series Extinct has landed in the top ten on Prime Video, nearly nine years after BYUtv killed it after one season, and Card used the moment to announce a new novel set in the same world.

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Extinct premiered on BYUtv on October 1, 2017, as the network’s second scripted original series. Card wrote it with his longtime collaborator Aaron Johnston, who co-wrote the First Formic War trilogy and two additional Ender’s Game novels with Card and scripted several Ender’s Game comics. Ryan Little directed. The show started life as a planned film before Adam Abel, a producer at the family-friendly streaming network, pushed to develop it as a television series through production companies Taleswapper and GoFilms.

The premise is set 400 years after aliens exterminate the human race. A mysterious obelisk and its drones revive a group of humans, using brain states captured before their deaths in the invasion, and task them with rebuilding civilization in a hostile world. Ezra (Chad Michael Collins), Feena (Victoria Atkin), and Abram (Yorke Fryer) anchor the cast, joined by Jaclyn Hales, Jack Depew, Matthew Bellows, Jake Stormoen, Kirby Heyborne, and Anna Vocino. All ten episodes aired by November 19, 2017.

The show never drew enough critic reviews to register a Rotten Tomatoes score, but it landed an 83% audience score. Post Apocalyptic Media’s Derek Dwilson wrote at the time that the series “deserves to be renewed” following what he called its “impressive” Season 1 finale.

BYUtv announced on January 5, 2018, that it would not bring the show back. Johnston had spent the preceding fall urging fans to contact the network directly and lobby for a second season, a campaign that generated buzz within the sci-fi community but not enough volume to move the network. BYUtv’s cancellation statement did not cite ratings. The network said it does not make renewal decisions solely on audience size and the resulting financial impact, and that it instead weighs a show’s content and message, its resonance with fans, its uniqueness in the television landscape, and its fit with the network’s strategic aims as a source of family content.

Card offered a different account of what happened behind the scenes. In a 2020 interview with Ben Shapiro, he said a change in BYUtv’s management was the real reason the show ended, since it was, in his words, “getting really good responses.” He continued: “It’s one of those things where if it didn’t grow in their garden, they’re not interested.”

The full first season stayed available to stream free on the BYUtv site and app, and later spread to The CW app and PLEX. It sat there quietly for years, the kind of show fans occasionally circulated on message boards and canceled-show retrospectives, until Amazon added it to Prime Video. According to FlixPatrol, Extinct sat at No. 7 on Prime Video as of August 18, nearly nine years after its cancellation. It joins a run of shows finding new audiences through streaming distribution long after their original networks gave up on them, following the recent climb of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse on the Apple TV Store almost 16 years after Fox canceled it.

Johnston had said in the years following cancellation that the plan was to continue the story in novel form, though nothing materialized for years. Card’s announcement this week appears to make good on that plan. He wrote on X: “Fun to see our axed-too-soon show EXTINCT suddenly landing in the top 10 on Prime Video. Now might be a good time to announce the first book in a new series of Extinct novels, titled Burning Water, will be published by TOR in May 2027.”

Burning Water will launch a new Extinct novel series through Tor, taking the world Card and Johnston built for a small non-profit network back in 2017 and putting it in print for the first time. The timing lines up directly with the show’s unplanned second life on Prime Video, giving a series BYUtv walked away from after ten episodes a real shot at reaching the audience it never got the first time around.

Extinct‘s complete first season is streaming now on Prime Video. How many other faith-based and small-network originals are sitting on streaming libraries right now, waiting for the algorithm to finally find them?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Doctor Who Writer Mark Gatiss Says the BBC’s Tender Will ‘Quietly’ Fail Like It Did in 1989

Mark Gatiss has spent three decades inside Doctor Who from every possible angle. He wrote nine episodes of the modern series, appeared on screen five times, and wrote An Adventure in Space and Time, the BBC’s own dramatization of the show’s 1963 creation. Before any of that, he was a working actor and comedy writer with The League of Gentlemen, the sketch troupe he built alongside Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith, and Jeremy Dyson. In 2010 he co-created Sherlock with Steven Moffat and played Mycroft Holmes across its run. Few people alive have a longer relationship with this franchise.

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Jason Statham’s new action thriller Mutiny showed up free on Prime Video this week, days before Lionsgate ever intended anyone to see it. Deadline reports Amazon mistakenly posted the full film to the movie’s Prime Video product page, the spot normally reserved for trailers. Subscribers who clicked in watched the entire 95-minute film before the error got caught. One viewer posted on X: “This has to be a huge mistake, right?”

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Lionsgate opens Mutiny in US theaters Friday, August 21. The film stars Statham as Cole Reed, a former Special Forces soldier and private security operative who gets framed for murdering his billionaire boss aboard a cargo ship, then uncovers an international conspiracy while fighting his way through the crew. Annabelle Wallis, Roland Møller, and Adrian Lester round out the cast. Jean-François Richet directs, following his 2023 hit Plane, also a Statham vehicle. Statham produces through his own Punch Palace Productions alongside MadRiver Pictures, working from an original script by Lindsay Michel and J.P. Davis.

The mistake carries real financial weight. Mutiny cost more than $50 million to produce, and Lionsgate paid eight figures to distribute it, with international partners spending millions more marketing it in their own territories. Deadline reports the leaked copy is already spreading through pirate networks across multiple countries, the kind of exposure a mid-budget theatrical release can’t easily absorb. Early reviews have been mixed. Rotten Tomatoes shows critics calling it competent, unremarkable genre filmmaking, the type of movie built to earn back its budget over a theatrical run rather than a single free stream.

The timing lands during a rough stretch for Lionsgate’s business more broadly. Activist investor Anson Funds sent a letter to the studio’s board in July arguing Lionsgate risks becoming what it called an “AI casualty” unless it moves faster on artificial intelligence or explores a sale. The firm pointed to Lionsgate’s stock dropping sharply on days AI video models like Sora and Seedance make headlines, a sign the market views the studio’s 20,000-title film library as more vulnerable than valuable in an AI-driven content landscape. Lionsgate shares fell to a four-month low after the letter became public, even after the company posted Q1 earnings that beat analyst estimates, with revenue up 48% year over year. Vice Chairman Michael Burns has pushed back publicly, calling AI “a real opportunity” for revenue growth and cost savings rather than a threat, and the studio hired former YouTube executive Kathleen Grace as its first Chief AI Officer earlier this year.

Statham has built two decades of his career on Lionsgate’s action slate: The Transporter, The Expendables, Crank, and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre all carry the studio’s name. Mutiny marks his second major release of 2026 after January’s Shelter. A studio managing investor pressure over its long-term strategy now also has to manage a specific, quantifiable leak of one of its own tentpole action releases, days before that release even opens.

Neither Amazon nor Lionsgate has issued a public statement on how the upload happened or what, if anything, changes for Mutiny’s opening weekend numbers as a result.

Does a free early stream this size meaningfully dent a theatrical opening, or does the resulting news cycle end up working in the film’s favor?

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NEXT: J. Michael Straczynski’s AI Meltdown Proves He Doesn’t Understand The Technology He’s Attacking

Lanterns pulled 9.3 million global viewers in its first three days on HBO and HBO Max, according to Warner Bros. Discovery. Marvel’s Agatha All Along posted the same 9.3 million figure on Disney+, but that number covered seven days, not three.

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The gap in reporting windows makes a clean comparison hard to pin down. Disney has not released a three-day count for Agatha All Along, and Warner Bros. Discovery has not released a seven-day count for Lanterns. What the public record shows is that Lanterns reached the same viewer total in fewer than half the days it took Agatha All Along.

Streaming view totals accumulate over time. They never fall retroactively, so any three-day slice of a seven-day number sits below that final total. There is no way to calculate Agatha All Along’s exact three-day count from the public data, but the seven-day ceiling means Lanterns closed the same distance faster, whatever the true smaller number turns out to be.

The platforms have also converged in scale since Agatha All Along’s September 2024 premiere. Warner Bros. Discovery told investors in its first-quarter 2026 earnings call that HBO Max passed 140 million global subscribers and is on pace to hit 150 million by year’s end. Disney stopped reporting exact Disney+ subscriber figures in its own quarterly filings. Deadline’s read on the current numbers places the two companies “in the same realm.” Two years ago, when Agatha All Along launched, Disney+ carried a larger subscriber base than Max by most published counts. That gap has closed.

Lanterns’ three-day figure also outpaced The Penguin (5.3 million over four days), IT: Welcome to Derry (5.7 million in three days), and True Detective: Night Country (2 million on night one), and landed just behind A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ 6.7 million three-day debut. It is DC Studios’ largest series premiere on HBO Max to date.

James Gunn’s role in the show’s development has become part of the story. Showrunner Chris Mundy told The Hollywood Reporter that Gunn was “off doing Superman” while Lanterns came together and left the writers’ room largely alone. Season 2 has not been greenlit. Mundy said he is six weeks into breaking a potential second season with Halt and Catch Fire co-creator Christopher Cantwell, with a pitch to HBO expected soon.

Whether the 9.3 million holds through the rest of the season, or fades the way Peacemaker Season 2 did after its own strong debut, will show up in Nielsen’s numbers next month.

Does a faster climb to the same number settle anything, or does the real test start with episode two?

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Star Trek: The quintessential American science fiction franchise! It was also THE pole bearer for human exceptionalism. What was, at first, a silly, goofy, far-flung exploration of the galaxy became a profound look inwards at what it means to be human. Like most television, Star Trek often missed the mark, whether through bumbling characters, a failing plot, a bungling setting, or an arresting performance, but its objective always remained the same: present a united, mature Mankind (able to overcome its own shortcomings) as finally able to survey the far reaches of space. In doing so, these explorers discovered themselves and what it means to be human.

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Enter Woke Hollywood and the Kurtzman Era of Star Trek: helmed by a man who doesn’t care for the franchise (Alex Kurtzman), we’ve seen a beloved American cultural touchstone become a loudspeaker for a partisan agenda. What’s worse is that this fact is difficult to catch! While it’s true that Star Trek has always had a political dimension, that exploration remained part of a complex storytelling that was thoughtful, impartial, mature, and deeply science fiction. Those varied aspects have now faded away, leaving only a daytime soap for women in Kurtzman’s final production, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds!

Kurtzman began his tenure by subverting the Trek universe: in Star Trek: Discovery, he destroyed warp drive, killing off all the Federation’s captains and utterly neutralizing the premise of Trek! He did this so he could shove a minority female protagonist into the franchise as a lead, IN ORDER to spotlight current-day feminism, activism & partisan politics. Suddenly, there was no Sci-Fi exploration. The agenda became one of vengeance against Masculinity, the White race, and Western culture. This kind of dismantling of a franchise from within is called counterculture. The appropriation of art and entertainment to sell politics is a Marxist tactic called Socialist realism.

Please skip ahead in the above “Star Trek Universe Virtual Panel” video to 4 minutes and 48 seconds in, where Alex Kurtzman makes it CRYSTAL clear that his intention ISN’T to honor Star Trek’s legacy BUT to INSTEAD highlight left-wing activist political causes.

In doing so, Kurtzman was able to proceed under the premise that this is “real” Star Trek! Proponents will often cite Trek’s progressive nature, and its fight to present a united Mankind that can look past its differences AND BEGIN to explore existence instead of squabble over skin color, gender, race, or culture…

ChatGPT looks into the effect of the first interracial kiss on television!

Except that Kurtzman’s agenda is hollow: it doesn’t represent the real people Woke activism claims to support. It’s a corporate public relations stunt! Hollywood had a real, existential crisis during the #MeToo movement, one which threatened to dismantle the entire industry if it didn’t comply with Feminist wishes. The result has been a decade of pandering to partisan causes, no matter the issue or its sincerity.

That’s what Kurtzman was hired to do: NOT represent mankind, NOT present science fiction, and NOT honor the franchise or its fandom. He was hired to sell you a partisan political agenda which would leave the studio in the good graces of the empowered activists!

Woke rhetoric & design in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (Paramount / CBS, 2026)

An Actor Explains

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Jan 29

(Click the link to see how Woke deceives, subtly presenting partisan politics in every moment of a production!)

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Kurtzman Trek continues under the premise that there ARE differences between us. The casting & hiring practices reflect that: DEI, also known as Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, forces studios to choose actors, directors, cast & crew based on race & gender. THAT’S PREJUDICE galivanting around as Justice! People should never be judged by the color of their skin or sexuality, and yet, here, under the premise of Equity, many of my colleagues are immediately sidelined.

The premise of DEI has always been prejudiced. It’s immoral because White and Male people are mostly innocent. They don’t deserve to be judged based on the color of their skin or their gender. Woke isn’t progressive; it’s vengeful.

Roddenberry’s vision argues those differences shouldn’t exist; mankind is beyond them, and the themes & subjects addressed in his series are universal. Not selfish or vindictive, they’re Egalitarian.

Where there once was depth of meaning and moving drama, a nonsensical immaturity has taken center stage. THAT is why the fandom is pissed!

Returning to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Kurtzman has devolved Star Trek to the point of making it a Feminist fancy! The niche demographic is now the CW Legends of Tomorrow crowd, but even that show was full of heart and intrigue, compared to Strange New Worlds’ bland reproduction and pretense. There is no science fiction, no exploration, and the theme at hand is contemporary Woke prejudice. The plot has no direction, the characters are unrecognizable, and the subject matter is almost always activist in nature.

So! In a final attempt to explain definitely and clearly, I present to you:

🎬The definition of a Movie.

Film is arguably the most moving of all the media. A movie is a highly immersive and carefully crafted audiovisual experience designed to create catharsis through empathy & emotional stimulation. Film is a lot like its predecessor, theatre, which the ancient Greeks used to heal the psychological wounds of soldiers returning from war. As a tool of Art, movies can be used to great ends, such as enlightenment, relief & inspiration for their audience! Sadly, its effectiveness also makes it the target of unscrupulous minds for nefarious ends.

📜What is Propaganda?

Motion pictures have always had a precarious relationship with politics. Vladimir Lenin famously called it the salvation of the Communist Party! That’s because the Marxist vision of a totalitarian government was best disseminated through an emotional experience. This application of media to political persuasion of the masses became known as propaganda. Movies quickly became an excellent way to seduce the hearts & minds of viewers, and a great example is the 1940 political satire The Great Dictator, in which Charlie Chaplin broke the fourth wall in order to deliver politics straight to the audience.

🚫Why say no to Propaganda in Movies?

Political advertising has its time & place as a commercial break, part of a campaign, or during an election. It most notably doesn’t belong in art & entertainment, especially when an unsuspecting consumer, like you, pays for it. You’ve had a long day at work, and now you want to relax! Coming home has you facing a new list of obligations! So, going to the movies shouldn’t be a sermon on civics; much less a criticism of you, the viewer, or worse, a means to indoctrinate children.

📢Why is Hollywood pushing politics?

From its inception, Hollywood has been about pride, vanity, and arrogance. Motion pictures glorify the onscreen persona. As a result, the power to captivate & seduce the public brings massive fame & fortune. As the Film Elite rose to power, they slowly divorced themselves from reality. Industry professionals quickly realized it was vital to kiss the boots of pompous & conceited Hollywood millionaires in order to stay employed! Since then, we’ve allowed an extremely self-absorbed minority to fester in the fantasy of an ideological paradise! A utopian bubble which demands submission to fads & trends as well as acceptance of elitist status quo, regardless of how outlandish it may get.

In our current age of social media, news travels fast; faster, even, than government or business can restrain it! In its great wealth, decadence & immorality, Hollywood quickly found its excesses being outed to the public. The #MeToo movement popularized digital activism! So, instead of trying to pointlessly oppose their demise, corporate America chose to jump on the bandwagon in order to survive (otherwise, activists might turn their eyes on their businesses).

This is why you see companies, from every market, bow to identity politics: everyone from Target pushing transgender clothes for kids, to Bud Light advertising a transgender woman, to Cracker Barrel removing a White man from its logo. Hollywood inserts propaganda into almost every film production because it must feign interest in the status quo. Everyone, from producers to directors to actors, must pretend they agree with the activists! To oppose the agenda is to lose standing with the in-crowd, get passed up for a hire, or worse, lose your chance at fame & fortune.

👁‍🗨The definition of Woke.

In its current state, the definition of Woke is: “The weaponization of citizen outrage FOR the destruction of the Western world THRU the advancement of activism, insurrection, and counterculture.” Political warfare is never limited to a physical battlefield. In an effort to undermine Democratic America, Marxist scholars devised a plan to mislead the vulnerable minds of our country’s next generation through academia. They succeeded. Decades of Ivy League students have been brainwashed into despising Capitalism for its many failures; most notably its “subjugation” of women & black people as well as other minorities. Those affluent sons & daughters of America eventually came to power.

Woke activism searches for social dissent and appropriates it. It began as a fight for Black American culture, then added contemporary feminism, procured climate politics, and now encompasses gender rights as well as the Palestinian cause.

📋What are some effects of Woke?

Woke America has claimed many victories: Under the excuse of past racism, the California Reparations Task Force has been assembled to reimburse African Americans for historic transgressions. The death of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians at the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli regime has led to the rise of a Muslim mayor of New York City in Zohran Mamdani. Support for transgender ideals has led to the mature minor doctrine being passed in the state of Washington.

Despite the contradictory nature of many of its causes, Woke is able to exploit citizen sentiment to the detriment of public order, success & safety. The activist nature of Woke undermines American Democracy by supporting riots, delinquency, insurgency & a generalized prejudice against an innocent majority of America along racial & sexual lines (hatred for White people & masculinity).

💣Why does Woke work?

There are many reasons for Woke’s success, but the foremost are:

1. The corruption of Western institutions

2. The rise of Feminist activism

Whether it’s golden parachutes, unnecessary price hikes, low wages, or corporate shenanigans, large businesses try to get away with greed! Couple this with immoral governments that profit from their tenure while ignoring voter interests & harming free markets, and you get a recipe for civilian discontent. People who can’t afford an occasional luxury, much less rent, will soon be disgruntled. This is now the case for many across our nation.

The age of communication has led to heightened politics. It’s a lot easier to denounce corruption & abuse now, leading to a revolution in female discourse. Women are more sensitive to emotion, and Nature has trained them to attend to the vulnerable. That’s because raising & nurturing children has historically been a woman’s obligation! This is why you see activism flourishing. Sadly, the greedy & deceptive are now trying to bank on this feminine aspect by feigning victimhood or pretending to champion it. This is why Woke claims to fight sexism & racism when what it’s actually doing is dismantling society: there are snakes that pass for victims, and they’re weaponizing outrage.

🔎What is Woke Lite?

If we lived under a regime, support for Marxist propaganda would be mandatory, but we don’t. In the managed market we live in, people can choose not to purchase a poor product. The film industry is now facing the consequences of neutering creativity in lieu of social programming. People notice the agenda, either consciously or not, and reject it. Hollywood’s response is to make the message barely perceivable; that way they can virtue signal to the in-crowd while receiving the praise of the ignorant masses! Unless you’re steeped in film & streaming, you usually won’t *overtly* notice the subtle repeating themes and antipathy you’re getting.

Remember that in the film industry, we pride ourselves in detail: each frame is meticulously prepared. Each line of text and each recorded scene are carefully crafted to represent specific tenets of the Neo-Marxist Woke faith. You will notice this in brief statements or references that aren’t obvious. Hollywood can’t afford to blatantly spell the point out any longer. It’s time for subconscious seeding of unaware minds.

One final point before the breakdown of the film:

✊🏼If I want to, how can I oppose Woke?

You can do three things to curtail this era of virtue signaling, self-serving “civic duty” and psycho-emotional manipulation:

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1. Speak your truth. Nothing stops Totalitarianism faster than a brave person willing to state the facts.

2. Close your wallet! Don’t purchase Woke products. Don’t support the movement.

3. Offer society solutions that aren’t contaminated by agendas.

Thank you.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds aired its long-teased puppet episode on Paramount+ this week, and “Level-Five Transporter Accident” earns the title of the worst hour Star Trek has ever put on screen, including the notoriously bad Starfleet Academy. Written by Henry Alonso Myers and Dana Horgan, directed by Jordan Canning, and built in collaboration with the Jim Henson Company using fourteen puppeteers and months of prep work, the Season 4, Episode 5 installment turns the entire Enterprise crew into puppets and never bothers to make a single piece of it make sense. Worse, the whole thing turns out to be a dream, which means none of it mattered in the first place. This episdoe literally never needed to exist.

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The premise: a transporter malfunction during Scotty’s long-range transport experiment with his puppet creation Little Ricky floods the ship with a “Level-Five Transporter Accident” that turns everyone but Spock into a puppet. Orion pirates, led by guest stars Rachael Harris and Joe Lo Truglio, show up to hijack the now-defenseless Enterprise. Spock is the only crew member left standing, so the entire hour rests on him.

Before any of that kicks off, the episode wastes time on Spock’s relationship drama. La’an Noonien-Singh breaks up with him, and he responds by calling his ex, T’Pring, to help him “recenter” on logic. T’Pring agrees to come aboard on the condition that no hijinks occur while she’s there. This is a hallmark of what the Kurtzman-era writers’ room has done to these characters for years now: turning Spock into someone who processes heartbreak through therapy language and emotional neediness instead of the disciplined, controlled figure Leonard Nimoy built. It doesn’t track with who Spock or T’Pring are supposed to be, and the show has leaned on this well so often that it no longer even pretends to justify it.

Once the crew turns to puppets, nobody can operate the ship because every station is locked to individual fingerprints. That breaks with decades of Star Trek precedent. The original series had crew members swap stations constantly, and multiple episodes across the franchise hinge on someone other than the assigned operator taking the conn or working a console. Nothing in Star Trek has ever been locked to a single crewman’s print before, and the show never explains why it suddenly is here. Pike also gets a new captain’s chair this episode, one that the writers mention more than once has voice command functionality built in. Somehow, not a single voice command responds to Pike for the entire hour. The show never explains that either. It’s a convenient plot device that exists only to keep the crew helpless, and it collapses the moment you think about it for five seconds.

The transporter accident itself gets the same treatment. Nothing about the science behind turning organic crew members into puppets gets explained, not when it happens and not when it reverses at the end. Solving problems through actual reasoning used to be the foundation of what Star Trek was supposed to be about. Here, the writers wave a hand at both ends of the crisis because the real goal is an emotional hour for Spock to process his anxiety, not a story that holds together.

Then comes the twist that undercuts everything: it was all a dream. None of it happened. Spock imagined the whole ordeal, puppets and Orion pirates included, which means an hour of television resolves into nothing. That’s the laziest device available to a writer, and using it here means every unexplained plot hole in the episode was never actually a plot hole to be solved. It was just a dream, so nothing needed to make sense, and nothing did.

The characters spend the whole hour acting stupid so the plot can function. Nobody tries the chair’s voice commands seriously. Nobody thinks to have Spock just disable the fingerprint lock system rather than run the ship solo. Nobody asks what happens with a species that doesn’t have fingerprints in the first place, like the Horta from the original series. The competence Spock is supposed to embody, the single defining trait of the character, gets thrown out so the plot can stall for forty-some minutes.

The Orion pirates make it worse. When the puppets first try to fight back, their punches carry no force at all. Later in the same episode, those same puppets are kicking and knocking Orion pirates clean over. The episode can’t stay consistent with its own internal rules from one act to the next. The pirates themselves come across like kids caught playing pretend rather than the intimidating Orion raiders established in the original series, and the female Orion captain is yet another retcon of what that species and culture used to represent on screen. One of her henchmen sits down mid-episode to have a therapy-speak conversation with Spock about relationships, then explains it away as a distraction tactic, except Spock is already captured at that point. There’s no reason left to distract him from anything.

Pike gets ejected out an airlock at one point and presses his puppet hand to the glass for a line lifted straight from Wrath of Khan, “the needs of the many.” It’s a shallow nod meant to satisfy longtime fans, and it lands with the opposite effect: it kills the emotional weight of the scene instead of earning it. That’s the pattern across the whole hour. The episode plays every beat completely straight, like it wants to be taken seriously, while also being packed with gags that are supposed to be funny. It never lands in either place. It’s not funny, and it’s not dramatically effective, so there’s no version of this episode a viewer is meant to actually enjoy.

By the end, Spock has a full anxiety attack, and the resolution leans right back into therapy-speak framing once T’Pring reveals the dream twist. These are Vulcans. The species is built around the total suppression of emotion in favor of logic, and the show keeps forcing both Spock and T’Pring through modern therapy dialogue that has nothing to do with who these characters are supposed to be. It’s insulting to watch, and it’s been a recurring problem with this iteration of Star Trek for years.

“Level-Five Transporter Accident” is the worst episode Star Trek has ever aired, worse than Starfleet Academy, because at least that show’s failures were failures of execution on a story that was trying to be a story. This one invalidates itself in its own final scene. None of it happened. None of it mattered. And the show expects the audience to be fine with that.

None of this is even original. Angel did the puppet transformation gimmick back in 2004 with “Smile Time,” where the title character gets turned into a Henson-style puppet and has to fight his way through a case while stuck that way, using Jim Henson Company puppeteers of its own. Strange New Worlds already pulled this same move once before. Its Season 2 musical episode, “Subspace Rhapsody,” followed the same playbook Buffy the Vampire Slayer set with “Once More, with Feeling” decades earlier. This is a writers’ room that keeps reaching for other shows’ gimmick episodes instead of generating anything of its own.

Star Trek has hung a genre gimmick on nearly every episode of this final season, from a ghost story to a noir mystery to now a puppet show built around a dream sequence. At what point does a franchise built on problem-solving and exploration stop getting credit for “genre-bending” and start getting called out for recycling other shows’ ideas because it has nothing left to say?

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First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: VIDEO: Paramount Exec Confirms Kurtzman Out At Star Trek

The 1981 Clash of the Titans is not a great film. Its acting is wooden, its script is thin, and its special effects, while charming, have aged like milk left in the Mediterranean sun. But it is an honest film. It presents its world with a straight face and a sense of wonder. The gods are capricious, but they are also generous. Perseus accepts their help. Love drives the story. And when the hero wins, he does so with divine assistance and returns to a world that makes sense. And while it does not follow the Greek myth exactly, it retains the spirit of ancient Greek myths.

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The 2010 remake is also not a great film, but for entirely different reasons. It is loud, grey, and humorless. Sam Worthington broods through the role of Perseus as though he wandered in from a different, worse movie. The action is competent but hollow. And buried beneath the CGI spectacle is a worldview that is, whether by design or osmosis, aggressively anti-Christian. It elevates pride and hubris and could be considered an anti-myth.

The 1981 film operates within an enchanted universe. The gods exist, they are powerful, and they involve themselves in human affairs for both good and ill. Zeus gives Perseus a sword, a shield, the helmet of invisibility, and a mechanical owl. These are gifts, freely given. Perseus does not earn them through suffering or prove himself worthy through angst. He receives them because he is the son of Zeus and because the story requires him to have them.

The 2010 remake is different. The gods also exist, but they are not generous. They are parasitic. Zeus explicitly states that human prayer sustains the gods, that without worship they weaken and die. This is a remarkable theological claim. The Christian God is self-sufficient, lacking nothing, needing nothing from His creation. “If I were hungry, I would not tell you,” says the Psalmist, “for the world and its fullness are mine.” The gods of 2010 are needy. They demand worship not because they deserve it, but because they require it to survive. This is not paganism. This is a slander against divinity itself.

The most revealing moment in the remake comes when Zeus speaks of humanity. “I want them to love me,” he tells Perseus, “but I don’t want to lose my son.”

Consider that line carefully. It is a direct inversion of the Gospel of John. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” The Christian God loves humanity so much that He is willing to lose His Son for their sake. The Zeus of 2010 loves humanity only so long as it does not cost him anything. He wants affection without sacrifice. He wants adoration without vulnerability.

This is not Zeus. This is modern man’s caricature of the Christian God, filtered through resentment and projected onto pagan myth. This is a view of divine authority as inherently oppressive. The result is a film in which the highest moral act is to reject the gods entirely and to rebel against authority, heroism, and destiny. It is a nihilist view of the supernatural.

The 1981 Perseus is comfortable with his dual nature. He is half divine and half mortal, and he does not spend the film agonizing over it. He does have anxiety over his heritage, he is determined to find and fulfill his destiny, and he does not have contempt for the gods.

The 2010 Perseus will not stop reminding everyone that he is a man. “I am a man,” he says, over and over, as though saying it enough times will make it true. He rejects his divine father. He refuses the gods’ gifts. He insists on doing everything himself, through sheer human will and determination. When he finally accepts the sword Zeus offers, it is framed as a concession, not a gift.

This is the secular humanist creed given cinematic form. Man needs no help from above. Man is sufficient unto himself. Man can slay monsters, defy the gods, and save the world through his own strength and courage. It is the oldest lie in the book. “You will be like God.” The serpent whispered it in Eden, and Hollywood repeats it in multiplexes.

The tragedy is that the 2010 film does not even believe its own message. Perseus cannot actually defeat the Kraken without the sword Zeus gives him. He cannot find Medusa without guidance. He succeeds only because divine aid is forced upon him despite his protests. The film wants to have it both ways: it wants the hero to be self-sufficient while relying on the very divine power he claims to reject. This is not heroism. This is ingratitude.

The 1981 film is also driven by love. Perseus sees Andromeda, falls in love with her, and risks everything to save her. The romance is simple and naive, but it is present. It gives the story emotional weight.

The 2010 film replaces this with a romance between Perseus and Io, a demigoddess who acts as his guide and protector. Andromeda is reduced to a political symbol, a princess who must be saved not because Perseus loves her, but because it is the right thing to do. There is no romance between them. The film ends with Perseus rejecting both Andromeda and Olympus, choosing instead to live as a simple fisherman. He rejects the responsibilities of his heritage for an idyllic life. He retires rather than rises.

The Kraken in the 2010 film is not just a monster. It is a symbol of divine tyranny, a weapon used by Hades to terrorize humanity into submission. Andromeda is to be sacrificed to it, an innocent victim offered to appease an angry god.

Contrast it with the 1981 film, where the Kraken is used for divine punishment, not submission. It is used for those who openly blaspheme the gods, not as a means to ensure the gods are satiated by the prayers of humanity.

There is no grace in the 2010 film. There is no redemption. There is only man, standing alone against the darkness, defiant and empty. The 1981 film ends on an uplifting note, with Perseus marrying the princess and secure in his place amongst the gods.

The 1981 film understood something that the 2010 film does not. Man is not sufficient. Man needs help. Man needs gifts he did not earn and cannot deserve. The old film is not particularly Christian in its theology, but it is Christian in its structure. The hero receives grace. He accepts it. He is grateful for it. And he uses it to accomplish what he could not accomplish alone.

The 2010 film is Christian in its structure only as a negation. It is the gospel of autonomy, the “good news” that you do not need God. It is the story of a son who rejects his father and calls it freedom. It is a fable for an age that has declared its independence from Heaven and is slowly discovering that independence is just another word for orphanhood.

The 2010 Clash of the Titans is not a great movie. But it is an instructive one. It shows us what happens when a culture that has rejected Christianity tries to tell old stories. The myths become hollow. The heroes become petulant. The gods become tyrants. And the happy ending becomes a solitary fisherman on an empty beach, having saved a world he does not love from gods he does not trust.

The 1981 film is naive and simple. But it believed in something. The 2010 film is slick and modern. And it believes in nothing. I know which one I would rather watch. And I know which worldview is preparing my children for the world they will inherit.

Choose your myths carefully. They shape the souls of those who consume them.

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