Yesterday I reported that David Zaslav, CEO of Discovery Warner, had fired female CEO Ann Sarnov and had replaced her not with a White Man but with… nobody. He just fired her, and replaced her with no one, deciding that what she had been doing simply did not need to be done by anyone.
And what was she doing? Well, Andrej says she was pushing Feminist Agenda into movies.
Specifically, he says she was the motivating force behind the master plan to eliminate the “problematic” figures of the troublesome, toxically-masculine figures of Superman and Batman from the DC Extended Universe, and replace them with… Supergirl and Batgirl.
Note that the Robert Pattison Batman movie exists in its own separate Batman universe where there are no other superheroes or real superpowers so that isn’t affected. This refers to the crossover universe, the “Justice League” universe.
And in that universe, Batman was going to be replaced by Batgirl, and Superman by Supergirl.
Now, I don’t think this is only about agenda: Ben Affleck simply does not want to play Batman ever again, and is only playing him in short appearances to finish up his contract, and DC cannot come to terms with fan favorite Henry Cavill, who wants a multipicture deal and a firm commitment to make standalone Superman movies.
Maybe it’s a mix of both Feminist Agenda and the brilliant idea of “Let’s just replace the male actors with female ones, who work for 70% of the male actors’ salaries!”
The plan goes like this: In the Flash movie, due to time-travel and multiverse-crossing nonsense, the Michael Keaton Batman enters the Justice League Universe and gets to share screen time with the Ben Affleck Batman. But the Ben Affleck Batman dies, making the older, retired Michael Keaton Batman the official, and only, Batman of the Justice League universe.
Being older and retired, his main role will be to serve as a Mr. Miyagi like mentor to his replacement, the race-swapped Batgirl.
Meanwhile, the Flash movie also introduced Supergirl (also race-swapped, if you can believe that!). She will be replacing Superman.
Henry Cavill isn’t coming back to film a death scene, so they’ll just have to claim he went back to Krypton but died on the way back to his home planet.
When Zaslav — or whoever the source for this story — says that the Batgirl movie will irreparably damage the DC brand, he’s almost certainly not just talking about the film’s quality, which is, of course, almost certainly down to the low level we’ve come to expect from DC.
He’s also talking about this movie establishing that Batman — the real one, the active one — and Superman are dead in this universe and have been replaced by Younger, More Diverse Female Replacements Who Are Superior In Every Way, Bigot.
Which he suspects won’t play as well with the mostly-male comic book movie audience as Girlboss feminist CEOs might. Activist Twitter lunatics demand that Hollywood make movies for them… and then never actually see these movies.
And speaking of franchises with an agenda: Actress in new Star Wars Andor series says it’s a ‘scurrilous’ take on the ‘Trumpian world’ and people losing their rights.
To be fair, Star Wars: Rogue One, from which Andor derives its characters and backstory, and which was released in December 2016, had a bit of an anti-American theme hidden in its subtext. However, it was more obsessed with American Original Sin, since the filmmakers couldn’t have known who was going to win the next election, when production began in the summer of 2015. But like the earlier, funnier Saturday Night Live still doing Nixon jokes six years after he resigned, they just can’t quit the Bad Orange Man.