Welcome to Media Events by Drew Millard. This post is free if you are reading it in your email. If you are reading it in a browser, then at some point while reading, a paywall will pop up. You will need to pledge a dollar to create a “tab,” and in exchange, you will be able to read this blog, as well as all the other posts on Media Events, for the next 24 hours. Once your tab reaches $5, you will need to pay it. It’s a bargain, I promise. 

Today, we will be talking about movies and TV shows that are based on underlying franchises that are for children, but that have aspirations of being for discerning adults who might have a subscription to the Criterion Collection. It contains exactly one joke comparing The Joker, i.e., the one with Joaquin Phoenix, to Machine Gun Kelly (full MGK post, for better or worse, coming soon). Make sure you read all the way to the end for a brand-new Media Events Content Module called A Song Recommendation So Good It’s Worth a Dollar.

Please note that I will be donating all proceeds from Media Events towards Helene relief efforts in western North Carolina until further notice. If you would like to directly donate, I recommend the following organizations:

Beloved Asheville
Asheville Survival 
Rural Organizing and Resilience (ROAR)
High Country Mutual Aid
Pansy Collective
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief

Every Sunday, Emilie and I have been watching the HBO original series The Penguin. We did not plan on watching it, but our friend who’s a film/TV critic got a screener of the whole series and said it was really good, so we gave it a shot. I enjoy it, but also, it’s giving me an existential crisis. 

Just so we’re all on the same page here: The Penguin is set in the diegetic world of the Batman movies, and is apparently a sorta-sequel to the new Batman movie that I did not watch, whose events will lead into the next Batman movie that I will also not watch. The Penguin, aka Colin Farrell, is a mobster guy who is trying to take over the criminal underworld of Gotham City, which was just semi-destroyed by a flood. He has some sort of metal contraption on his foot and has taken a local rapscallion named Victor under his wing; Cristin Milioti plays Sofia Falcone, who is Colin Farrell’s main ally, but also at times his main nemesis. 

That’s not the main point of the show, though. The main point of the show is that it’s just The Sopranos, but set in Batman-land. If you liked the vibe of The Sopranos, then you’ll like The Penguin. Both Farrell and Milioti excel in their roles. That’s really all there is to it. 

If you’re into Batman stuff, though, there’s a whole different thing going on here: The Penguin is a piece of what Matt Reeves, the guy who runs the current iteration of the Batman franchise aka the Robert Pattinson Batman Universe (RPBU), has dubbed “The Batman Epic Crime Saga.” Presumably, he’s trying to double down on the idea, established by Christopher Nolan, that Batman movies are Superhero Movies For Adults, I guess as a way to differentiate the franchise from the more cartoonish Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as the family-friendly world of Star Wars. Now, before I talk about how silly this is, I do want to acknowledge that Batman was conceived of as not a superhero but a masked, crime-fighting pulp comic vigilante in line with The Shadow/The Phantom Detective/Domino Lady. Early Batman wore a costume, but he had more So on one level, there’s some precedent here. But also, come on.

When I was a kid, I would watch the old Adam West Batman show every day before school. And to a certain degree, that’s the version of Batman that is still the default in my brain: This incredibly goofy world filled with IRL cartoon characters throwing catchphrases at each other, occasionally with white makeup caked over their mustaches, onomatopoeic WHAMs popping up onscreen at the drop of an anvil. This is also why I liked the Val Kilmer and George Clooney Batman movies: because they’re campy as hell and not trying to be anything else. (Tim Burton’s take on the character, strikes the balance of being an IRL cartoon, but for adults, which is to say they’re Tim Burton movies.)

According to its Wikipedia page*, The Batman, the first entry into the Robert Pattinson Batman Universe, draws inspiration from stuff like Chinatown and Alan Pakula’s Paranoia Trilogy, and the film cribs elements of Robert Pattinson Batman as a character from Michael Corleone and Kurt Cobain. That’s all very For Adults! And yet, Warner Brothers required that The Batman receive a PG-13 rating, because ultimately, The Batman is also for children. On the other hand, The Penguin is For Adults to an almost comical degree. Colin “The Penguin” Farrell violently murders people, he says “fuck” like a billion times, and his big plan for career advancement involves moving massive amounts of drugs into Gotham City. Beyond that, the very fact that they got Farrell, One of Our Finest Actors, to buy into the character enough to willingly undergo hours of face and body prosthetics each day of shooting, transforming his voice and affect and gait well beyond the point of recognizability, and likely into Emmy nomination territory, speaks to the fact that the show aspires to something larger than simply getting its audience to buy into the world of its pre-established IP. This isn’t some middle-of-the-mall-ass IP. The Penguin is Premium IP.

Premium IP is what you get when the people behind a well-known franchise decide to devote some of that franchise’s cultural capital, aka “pre-visibility,” towards creating a work within that world that could appeal to snobs, or at least takes creative risks with the material that aren’t normally associated with the franchise, often with the goal of transcending the source material. Wandavision, a meta TV show set in the Marvel universe, is Premium IP. So is the Star Wars series Andor, which counted certified Guggenheim Fellow Tom Bissell as a member of its writing staff and was mostly enjoyable even if you’re not into Star Wars. The most recent Watchmen adaptation for HBO is turbo-Premium IP, in that it took an arty comic for discerning adults and made a super arty show that came with an official podcast you could listen to in order to figure out what the hell you just watched. You can bet your ass that Joker, which is to Taxi Driver and King of Comedy what Machine Gun Kelly’s “Jawbreaker” is to the actual band Jawbreaker, is Premium IP.

I would argue that Barbie, a movie I did not enjoy, is a historically significant film, because it is a piece of Premium IP which, along with its marketing campaign, inadvertently expresses the contradictions of the post-COVID era. The fact that Mattel, the toymaker, was handing the keys to a film adaptation of its flagship property to Greta Gerwig, a director whose name is synonymous with “feminist indie filmmaker,” became central to how Barbie was advertised to adults. Its marketing story for the New Yorker crowd was basically, “Will the inherent tension between Barbie the toy and Greta Gerwig’s subversive sensibilities make this movie really interesting or a complete disaster?” Of course the movie wasn’t going to be a disaster, of course its subversions and provocations stopped well before the point of meaningful critique, and of course it was nominated for a bunch of Oscars but only won for Best Original Song, because these are all things that Premium IP is supposed to do. 

Gripes aside, there’s one level on which the Premium IP phenomenon is good. Such projects serve as ways for talented filmmakers, actors, writers, artists, etc. to get paid fees well beyond their usual rates, which allows them both to live comfortably and subsidize their more experimental projects, as well as be given the resources to bring their creative visions to life at a scale not otherwise available to them. The best-case scenario here is David Lynch’s Dune: Some studio people thought it would be a good idea to give the guy who made Eraserhead and The Elephant Man a ginormous budget to adapt a beloved novel so unwieldy and complicated that trying to turn it into a movie had just driven Jodorowsky to madness, and then the thing that obviously was going to happen — that the film Lynch turned in would be confusing and insane, causing the studio people to panic and make a bunch of changes in post that caused Lynch to hate his own movie, only for Dune to bomb at the box office and ultimately become a cult favorite — happened. 

However, with the rare exception of stuff like Lynch’s Dune or, quite frankly, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, a piece of Premium IP rarely succeeds as an art object unto itself. Instead, it simply uses the trappings of others’ art as part of its cinematic language on its way towards advancing a larger story, providing lore around characters in ways that advance the viewer’s understanding of the flagship entertainment product, or if nothing else, is discussed in the context of the larger IP it’s a part of. 

Because that’s the thing: Premium IP is constrained by the guardrails of its underlying source material, limited by the logic of the tie-in. Think again to The Penguin, and the so-called Batman Epic Crime Saga it’s a part of. Part of a non-IP-derived epic crime saga is that it uses the strictures of the criminal underworld as a lens through which to examine the darkest elements of human impulses/capitalism/society etc. They work because they show us the parts of life we’d rather not think about, and offer that these things are, nevertheless, embedded within our quotidian existence. It’s also worth noting that their power is often derived from some sense of authenticity. King of New York? Based on a real guy. Goodfellas? Based on a real guy. Carlito’s Way? Based on a book by a judge who based his characters on real guys. The Godfather? Lotta characters in that based on real guys. Gomorrah? Based on so many real guys in Naples that Roberto Saviano, who wrote the book it’s based on, had to go into hiding after he wrote it. Batman, meanwhile, lives in a made-up city where all the criminals have pro wrestler gimmicks and people get high off of squirting drops into their eyes and sucking on golden goop. Again, I actually enjoy The Penguin, but it’s kinda silly that its setting has more in common with that of Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy than that of any of the films and shows its attempts to emulate. 

The notion that everything produced by Hollywood must have pre-visibility in order to succeed is a conservatism birthed from changes both technological — streaming video platforms are happy to buy up original films and premiere them there, bringing a new prestige to the straight-to-video model — and social — COVID just straight-up got us out of the habit of going to the movies. On top of that, actual movie theaters, the major chains that still define strip malls across America, have gotten worse and more expensive. As soon as AMC, the largest movie theater chain in America, became a meme stock, its CEO Adam Aron started leaning into the bit, and hasn’t let up. At this point, it feels like the theaters themselves are an unloved afterthought, existing merely as a theoretical underlying asset to prop up the stock during the times when Aron isn’t buying a gold mine or whatever. Seriously, check the Google reviews of your local AMC theater — AMCs are the rare physical businesses which don’t get uncritical four-stars-and-above ratings from your local guides. So they spend less, charge more, and hope that the degens keep HODLing. 

Conversely, attempts by theaters themselves to bolster their amenities in ways that entice potential audiences, like serving beer and meal-esque food, or renovating their showrooms with half-working fancy recliners, Dolby-branded sound systems, and IMAX-branded picture systems, all cost money, and those costs get passed onto the consumer. The only reason that going to the movies doesn’t now cost as much as going to an indie rock concert is that the price of going to a show has gone up too. 

So, the supply-side logic goes, movies have to be Events to be seen, planned for, not something to be gone to on a whim like you probably did back when you were in high school or college. The desire to watch them must be strong enough that viewers are willing to withstand the highest of prices, the weirdest of smells, and sometimes both, in order to watch them. And oh, how the gimmicks have flowed: Barbenheimer, the sexual Dune popcorn bucket, the phenomenon of Killers of the Flower Moon’s most solemn scenes being interrupted by sounds from the Taylor Swift bleeding in from the next showroom over at rates that I refuse to believe it’s a coincidence. 

When considering whether or not you should sit down, pour yourself a generous glass of wine, and take in some high-quality Premium IP-style televisual content that is part of a franchise that you have no fandom-related interest in, a good rule of thumb is to ask yourself: Would I enjoy this if it didn’t take place in this pre-existing world? If not, ehhhh. There’s a lot of other bullshit out there to watch.

I still do kinda like The Penguin though.

A Song Recommendation So Good It’s Worth a Dollar

Roy Orbison — “Heartbreak Radio”

Roy Orbison’s final two albums, both released posthumously, have got a bunch of bangers on them. Roy kinda found his mojo again after the Travelling Wilburys became a thing, settling into a late-career mode of doing old-timey rock rhythms over some extremely eighties production. The vibe of the instrumentation is kinda “lost Dwight Yoakam song,” but that’s got more to do with how influential Roy was. And my god, the dude could sing. This song exists at the non-corny nexus of 1957 and 1985.