Friday Night Open Thread

Post what you like so long as it is pop culture-related.

All others will be deleted.

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Legendary Films has had enough of Warner Brothers BS. The new Godzilla series is NOT going to be streamed on HBOmax. It is going to be Apple TV+.

Considering how badly Warner wanted this for HBOmax it is a fairly gigantic middle finger to the house that Bugs built. The sad truth of Warner Brothers is that if it weren’t for Paramount, they would be the most dysfunctional studio in Hollywood.

Ever since the WB was acquired by AT&T the executive leadership has been massively broken for the simple reason that redundancies and surpluses appear to have been decided by a blindfolded gorilla wielding a pair of sledgehammers. There were so many executions of senior management that a special sprinkler system was installed in the executive offices to clean the blood off the floor between purges. And thanks to the Discovery merger there is yet another round of “who dies next” coming for Warner’s newest batch of big bosses.

Also, the money is suddenly pretty tight at Warner. Ma Bell has kicked her brainless kid out the door and cut him off. There is no longer a corporate overlord with deep pockets backing their plays.

Apple on the other hand is swimming in money. Truth be said they are in the market for a studio. They were in serious talks with Sony for Columbia until Tom Rothman turned that studio around. They were also serious about MGM but Apple got up and left the table when they found out how screwed up the rights are for most of MGM’s franchises. Paramount is a possibility but they seem to think they can make a success of streaming on the basis of South Park After Covid and Spongebob reruns.

So for now Apple will settle for swiping away the Monsterverse from Warner Brothers.

UPDATE:

Midnight’s Edge took a deep dive into He-Man’s rise and fall in the 1980s.

There are two kinds of Generation X out there, they are divided by age, I call them the Prince Gen-Xers and Michael Jackson Gen Xer. If you don’t understand what this means then you are retarded.

Like Kevin Smith, I am a Prince Gen-Xer, I was way too old to enjoy He-Man when that show came along. It was kid stuff for Michael Jackson Gen-Xers.

I was never into it and neither was Kevin Smith until he was paid to grant it nerd-cred by people who don’t know that he had blown that when the Last Jedi came out. While I am not a part of He-Man fandom, I can certainly understand the rage from seeing your childhood fictional friend dragged through the Woke mud.

I will grant Kevin Smith one thing, all of the worst decisions about Netflix He-Man had been made and were set in stone long before he was hired to attach his name to the project. The only thing he did was put in Pig-Boy because Red Letter Media made a big deal about that kid when they roasted the Dolph Lungren movie.

But that is neither here nor there regarding the epic rise and legendary fall of the biggest toy line in the 1980s.