Disappearing act
By Joseph Lavers
Good morning 🐣
Now I’m no expert, so please correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe that a general rule of thumb when making movies is that you actually release those movies to the public when you’re done making them.
But I’m a big ol’ clown, so don’t listen to me.
If you haven’t heard, Warner Bros, the legendary, nearly century-old movie studio that’s also home to the prestigious HBO brand, recently merged with the Discovery family of companies — you know: Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, Food Network, HGTV, etc. — to be called Warner Bros Discovery and to be run by the Discovery CEO, David Zaslav. (God I hope I never have to say the word Discovery again.)
One of his first moves was killing the new CNN+ streaming service less than a month after it launched. At the time we all thought, hehe wow that’s kinda wild. Little did we know, the corporate bloodbath had only just begun. In an effort to save a few billion dollars, lots of movies and shows have been canceled, with perhaps the craziest move being canceling films that were virtually finished:
With a $90 million budget, “Batgirl” featured the return of Michael Keaton as the Tim Burton-era Batman alongside a villain played by Brendan Fraser in his career renaissance. Fun fact: One of the co-directors found out it was being canceled while at his own wedding!
“Scoob! Holiday Haunt” is a $40 million sequel to the 2020 animated “Scooby-Doo” reboot written by Paul Dini, a comic-book legend. (But the producers said screw it and are going ahead with recording the movie’s score anyway.)
Again, these movies are practically finished, costing well over a hundred million dollars, and Warner Bros Discovery is shelving them forever, never to see the light of day, deciding that they’ll save more money using them as tax write-offs than any money they’d make selling them.
But it’s not entirely unprecedented. There is a history of finished movies being locked away in vaults, never or rarely to be seen:
Marvel’s First Family, the Fantastic Four, first appeared on film in 1994, but you’d never know it. It was a low budget affair mostly meant to help the producer retain his rights before they could revert back to Marvel. He hired B-movie extraordinaire Roger Corman and a campy, underground legend was born. Trailers were released, the cast promoted it at festivals and Comic-Con, and then it disappeared into the ether.
Now imagine a science-fiction comedy-drama from 1984 starring Zach Galligan from “Gremlins” in a dystopian world where the NYC Port Authority actually controls New York, a vast underground network of homeless people rule the world, and Bill Murray is a bus driver to the moon. Oh and Dan Aykroyd is in it too. Produced by Saturday Night Live’s Lorne Michaels. It exists and it’s called “Nothing Lasts Forever,” but you’ll never see it unless you do some serious digging on the Internet.
If you ever rode Splash Mountain at Disneyland, then you’ve been exposed to “Song of the South.” This one’s a bit of a cheat considering it actually was released in theaters back in 1946 and its infinitely catchy song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. But its infamously racist characterizations have sequestered it to the Disney Vault for all eternity. Even Splash Mountain is due to be rethemed to “The Princess and the Frog” in the next few years.
Then there’s “The Day the Clown Cried,” the sort of granddaddy of ’em all. Directed by and starring legendary comedian Jerry Lewis all the way back in 1972, it’s a drama about a clown imprisoned in a German concentration camp who ends up leading Jewish children to their deaths in the gas chamber. He vowed never to release it for various legal and personal reasons, but an incomplete copy of the film was apparently donated to the U.S. Library of Congress with the stipulation that it not be screened until June 2024. Start that countdown!
Now watch this 👀
In “Dual” (2022 • AMC+ and on demand • watch the trailer), Sarah is bored and unhappy with her life. Her boyfriend is perpetually out of town on business and her mom generally irritates her. Played by Karen Gillan from “Guardians of the Galaxy” and the “Jumanji” reboot, she whiles away the days with fast food and booze. When she discovers she has a terminal illness, she gets herself cloned so that her loved ones won’t have to grieve her death. Maybe even this version of her will be better!
But when Sarah’s disease goes into remission, the “28th Amendment” kicks in: only one version of a person is allowed to exist. Since Sarah is no longer dying, and since Sarah’s Double (as she is affectionately named) wants to keep on living, they must fight to the death on live television to determine who the one true Sarah will be.
The premise sounds ripe for a generic action-packed science-fiction thriller, which this most certainly is not. Without spoiling too much, “Dual” focuses more on the events before and after the duel. It also has a very retro vibe, with her trainer (played by a very deadpan Aaron Paul from “Breaking Bad”) using overhead projectors and other less-than-futuristic technology in her rather absurd combat training lessons. It could very easily take place today. Or twenty years ago.
All of the dialogue is very monotone and matter-of-fact, which can potentially be hard to get into at first, but it allows the characters to speak freely and openly, addressing subjects that are sometimes taboo or off-putting; not to mention it can be pretty funny at times. The movie is so matter-of-fact that ridiculous little moments can fly right by without batting an eye, like when Sarah’s watching a porno that takes place in a haunted house.
Riley Stearns wrote and directed this bleak satire. While doing some research on the film, I learned that he was previously married to Mary Elizabeth Winstead (“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” and “10 Cloverfield Lane”). They met on a cruise ship when they were teenagers. Then in 2017, a few months after their divorce, she started dating Ewan McGregor, to whom she’s now married with child. Not saying it played any part in this, but I know I’d probably write “Dual” if my high school sweetheart left me for Ewan McGregor too. Just saying.
It’s a quick, fun little movie about grappling with our own shortcomings, expectations, death, and grieving (I said it was fun, right?), that kind of just does its own thing in its own unique way.
