The trailer for Space Jam: A New Legacy underlines the dark horror that currently gives too much of Hollywood animation – and frankly too much of capitalism at the moment.
The upcoming film, a sequel to the mediocre “Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes characters play basketball” from 1996, is much loved by some (for some reason), and LeBron James in the Looney Tune world, where he becomes a cartoon. To save his son, who has been kidnapped by the ruler of something called ‘the Server Verses’, the superstar must win a basketball game against the ‘Goon Squad’. James’ teammates are, of course, the Looney Tunes.
But what is it important about? Space Jam 2 is not the attempt to look at the premise of the first film. No, what matters is what exists within the Server verses. Early in the trailer, as James flies through Serververse, he passes two planets marked with visual iconography to clearly represent Game of Thrones and The Wizard of Oz, two properties owned by WarnerMedia, the parent company of Warner Bros., which manufactures Space Jam: A New Legacy. The Game of Thrones planet is even helpfully labeled as “Game of Thrones.”
But at the moment, there is nothing that is likely to bother the film’s highlight, when various representatives of WarnerMedia’s numerous corporate subsidiaries show up. The Iron Giant, King Kong and Fred Flintstone all appear, and viewers watching with eagle eyes all have some of the cut Dry of A watch orange to Danny DeVito and Burgess Meredith’s the Batman villain The Penguin among the spectators of the match. (There is far, many more Easter eggs which adopted the trailers, but the ones I have listed here are a representative example.)
Such a large and random piece of character that you may already know may feel as if a giant corporation is simply throwing up every piece of intellectual property it has ever devoured. But if we look at other great movies that have done something similar in the last few years – especially Warner Bros. ‘own Ready player one and Disney’s Ralph breaks the internet – what it turns out to be Space Jam 2 it becomes much more difficult to separate from the tendency that the richest of the rich should boast of all their toys in the hope that the spectators will be impressed.
If you grew up in a town or neighborhood like the one I grew up in – small and monastic – you probably knew one or two people who were wealthy and showed it off by raising something. In my city, flaunting usually took the form of guns or cars, but it’s easy to think of rich people buying, for example, a lot of art. The impulse to collect can start as appreciation, a love of antique rifles or cool cars or avant-garde sculpture. But it’s so, so easy for the impulse to own everything about something no one else can.
I do not allow myself to be put off in this regard. I spent a large part of my adulthood collecting a BluRay collection that is perhaps a little thorough and increasingly filled with movies I have not seen but want on my shelf for vague status reasons. It’s a human impulse on a deep level to show beautiful things.
But forgiving giant corporations for behaviors that can excuse us in a single person is seldom a good idea. Movies like Space Jam: A New Legacy It seems to exist solely to show all the movies and TV shows produced by the corporation, and to regularly make the story cheaper in the name of turning in more comos.
From a marketing standpoint, it makes sense Space Jam: A New Legacy can contain every WarnerMedia character known to mankind. After all, the film will debut in cinemas and on the HBO Max’s flagship service at the same time, and if you get really excited to watch Game of Thrones after seeing his logo float past on a planet Space Jam 2, it will just wait there for you to stream. The film would not always debut on HBO Max, but it would always arrive at a time when the studio that made it is trying to attract new subscribers to its streaming service. What better way to do that than to advertise all of its many properties in a single movie?
After all, so many streaming services owned by conglomerates have advertised themselves based on their hefty catalogs of titles and characters you may already know, such as when HBO Max announced its launch with the slogan “Where Bada Meets Bing Meets Bang”, below photos of The Sopranos‘Tony Soprano, Friends‘Chandler Bing, and The big bang theorysee Sheldon Cooper. Meanwhile, NBCUniversal’s service Peacock has largely set up its ads as an argument to subscribe to Peacock, just so you can watch The office, because that series is so beloved.
But when is this impulse to show off all the properties a company owns, shifting from nostalgia-driven mashup to gross capitalist bust? The answer is probably ‘It’s been a gross capitalist chest pressure all along’, but even if we’re going to make these companies a little sluggish, there’s something wrong with creating new stories that mainly consist of bragging about how many older stories you own. .
And sometimes these companies do not even own the old stories! The Wizard of Ozfor example in the public domain. Anyone who wants to write stories about Dorothy, Scarecrow and everyone else can do as they please. But WarnerMedia owns the most famous movie version of The Wizard of Oz and as such, she does her best to act as if Oz’s version is the only one that can exist.
“Wow, everything is probably built around nostalgia, right?” is not exactly a new observation to make in 2021, if everything is certainly built around nostalgia. Space jam it was a blatant play to make the Looney Tunes gang relevant to a new generation, all the better to sell merchandise, and so it’s not like a classic person. And even if the 1996 film was not the very first attempt by a studio to squeeze money out of beloved characters by forcing them into new contexts – what is Mickey Mouse, but a sponge that Disney casts every now and then wring? – it was certainly not a great harbinger of the things to come, as my colleague Alissa Wilkinson wrote in 2020:
That Space jam is a bare commercial grip (and I do not mean it pejoratively) based on existing entertainment features – the Looney Tunes, the NBA, Michael Jordan himself – also feels almost visionary. The film is self-aware of this. His characters constantly scratch jokes about endorsements; At one point, Daffy Duck literally kissed a Warner Bros. logo on his own butt.
I am not illustrating that there is a good way to stop the gradual transformation of each studio’s back catalog into the equivalent of the video game. Super Smash Bros., where all your Nintendo favorites from different franchises take on each other. But there’s something ugly about the person who just wants to show off all their toys, right?
WarnerMedia is not the only company offering this type of wholesale proselytizing. What does a scene like this do from Disney’s 2018 movie Ralph breaks the internet, add to the film’s story or themes or character arcs? These are just a bunch of cameos that seem to function as an advertisement for Disney itself. Some of the buttons are amusing enough, but the whole scene eventually feels more than a little whimsical in its rudeness.
I’m not really shaking with anticipation of a new one Space jam film, but the filmmakers of it (which includes the very talented director Malcolm D. Lee, who made some hugely acclaimed small-scale comedies, such as Strooijonker and Girls Trip; producer Ryan Coogler van Black panther and Confession of Faith fame; and co-author Terence Nance, whose TV series Random acts of flightiness was a pleasure) deserved to make their film function as something other than a gimmick or a museum. As it is, it is easy to Space Jam 2 trailer and feel like you’re walking through a long gallery hall, with Bugs Bunny as your lecturer, while regularly stopping to say, ‘Look at all this stuff. We own it, and you do not. ”
Then he chopped up a carrot and said, ‘What’s up there, Doc’, because he’s also a corporate property and his owners have reduced his character to a slogan. What a time to live.