Fantastic Four was good. Not the best thing I saw last night.
Last night I went to the premiere of Fantastic Four: The First Steps at the Sydney IMAX. If you are so inclined, you can find reviews for the film elsewhere, so I won’t go too much into the details on it right now. I’ll have a few deeper thoughts on it tomorrow once some people have seen it.
My very quick and broad thoughts.
It is rather good. It is easily one of the best Marvel films. I’d even be inclined to make an argument for it being the best of them.
While the film is computer effects heavy, it never felt especially fake-looking in the way most of Marvel’s SFX feels weightless and trashy.
It feels more like an actual movie than most of these films do. It has a start and a finish with no open-ended nonsense (except for a mid-credits sequence).
If you are a FF fan with thoughts on Galactus, the film does exactly what you hope it will.
I was talking with a guy after seeing the film. He made a very-fair complaint that the film loses its fun, 60s vibe as soon as the FF meet up with the film’s villain. While there’s an element of necessity to that, it is a fair complaint. After all, the film is being sold on the idea of it being a fun 60s romp. And it is that - just not for all of the film.
But, real talk… the most fun thing I saw on the cinema screen last night was the trailer for Avatar: Fire and Ash. The trailer will be playing before prints of Fantastic Four and I’m sure it’ll be released online soon enough. Again, I’ll add some deeper thoughts once people have seen the trailer, but my big thought…
The release of the second film was well after a decade since the release of the first film. By necessity, the second film rehashes a lot of material from the first as it re-established the world of the films. It really seems from the trailer here that, with two films of mythology building, this is a film franchise that is willing to be true to itself and build out Avatar in a really complicated, substantial way. I’m really looking forward to seeing all seven hours of it when it debuts in cinema.
Podcasts are YouTube. YouTube is television.
In a trend piece for the New York Times, Joseph Bernstein notes that people sure are watching a whole lot of podcasts as video shows on YouTube. A lot of the piece is framed around the idea of “But wait… aren’t these audio products? Who is watching Theo Von for three hours?” As if this isn’t already a pretty dated conversation.
“I think podcasts could become kind of the new basic cable television,” said Marshall Lewy, the chief content officer of Wondery, a podcast network owned by Amazon. Think: shows that are cheaper to produce than so-called premium streaming content, consumed by audiences used to half-watching television while scrolling their smartphones, in a wide variety of genres. Indeed, while talk dominates among video podcasts, Mr. Lewy said he thought the trend for video would lead to more shows about food and travel — categories beloved by advertisers — that weren’t ideal when podcasts were audio only.
All of which calls into question the basic nature of the term “podcast.” Mr. Riismandel, who runs the research firm Signal Hill, said he thought the category applied to any programming that could be listened to without video and still understood. According to Mr. Katz, the YouTube executive, the nature of the podcaster is undergoing a redefinition. It includes both audio-only podcasters moving to video, as well as social media content creators who have realized that podcasts present another opportunity to build their audiences.
Where the conversation gets more interesting to me is when we start to have more active conversations about the form and function of a lot of the TV we watch being upended by what is currently being discussed as video podcasts.
The above quote from Marshall Lewy about podcasts embracing food and travel now that there’s a video component is interesting to me. Isn’t that just a YouTube video? Or are we now thinking of podcasts as topic-area focused programs hosted by a subject matter expert/enthusiast. At a certain point, this really just falls into the idea that we have just invented television.
But that’s where all of this is headed. It isn’t that podcasts are becoming YouTube shows and finding the definitions that exist within that. It is more that distribution barriers are breaking down and the ubiquity of YouTube distribution is turning it into the default platform for video publishing.
Don’t get me started on the conversation about how “YouTube isn’t television.” YouTube will be seen as television as soon as people just start seeing it that way.
A decade ago Netflix wasn’t “television.”
From the Colbert beat
If you strike him down, Stephen Colbert only gets stronger. Thursday’s episode where he announced his cancellation drew 3,079,000 viewers on CBS - the show’s highest-rated episode this calendar year. Read: Late Nighter
Jon Stewart attacked Comedy Central’s parent company Paramount for the firing of Stephen Colbert and the cancellation of The Late Show. For what was a fairly brutal takedown, does anyone else feel like Stewart was also playing it a bit safe?
Also, it feels slightly disingenuous for Stewart to frame it as a situation happening to his friend when Stewart himself has a financial stake in the cancellation. His company Busboy Productions makes the show in conjunction with Colbert’s Spartina Productions and CBS Broadcasting Inc.
Mind you, Stewart was not incorrect in anything that he said.
David Letterman’s YouTube channel posted an epic supercut of him trashing those pinheads at CBS over the years.
News Desk
Trey Parker & Matt Stone seem to have struck a deal with Paramount for another five years of South Park. The guys had been seeking a ten-year deal. Regardless, they’re set to make around $1.5 billion from the deal. In the coming hours the show will leave HBO Max in the US and move to Paramount+. No word just yet about international territories. Read: Deadline
RIP Ozzy Osbourne - the former Black Sabbath frontman will forever have a complicated legacy with most obits focused on 2002 reality show The Osbournes. Read: THR
Starz has greenlit production on the fourth Power spinoff, Power: Origins. That is the fifth Power series overall. Read: THR
NBC has greenlit cheerleader comedy Stumble to series. Read: Variety
Great news citizens of Albania, Armenia, Cyprus, Estonia, Georgia, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, and Tajikistan - you now have access to HBO Max. The service is now in over 90 markets. Read: C21
Paramount Global execs in Africa have told employees that the company’s local offices and channels might be closed down - around 100 employees across offices in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Lagos may be impacted. Read: C21
Netflix reportedly has around 40 production companies being pitted against each other in an effort to make their Monopoly reality game show. There’s a message in all of this about capitalism… I played a board game with a similar message once. Read: Deadline
Trailer Park
Fatal Seduction returns to Netflix for season 2 August 15.
Rivers of Fate debuts August 20 on Netflix.
When a teen is kidnapped by a sex trafficking ring, a river pirate and a fierce mother embark on separate quests to find her - until their paths cross.
That’s the newsletter for today.
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