Tag: film

The Book is Always Better

ScreenRant agrees with my contention that for the next Levon Cade film, the filmmakers should just trust the Legend’s storytelling instead of attempting to “improve” upon it. Warning: contains spoilers.

A Working Man adapted the thriller novel Levon’s Trade, and almost every change it made was for the worse. The movie reunites Jason Statham with director David Ayer, fresh off their $162 million success with The Beekeeper. A Working Man cast Statham as Levon Cade, a retired Royal Marines Commando tasked with rescuing his boss’ kidnapped daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas) from human traffickers. The film is broadly faithful to Chuck Dixon’s Levon’s Trade, with many of the same characters and story beats appearing.

Still, it also makes some sweeping changes to the source material that make it feel very different. A Working Man’s ending leaves the door open a crack for a potential sequel (there are currently 11 sequel novels to Levon’s Trade), but time will tell if a follow-up actually happens. The adaptation has earned mixed reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but its box office suggests it could be the start of another Jason Statham franchise.

Levon’s Trade is a much darker story

If there was a key difference between A Working Man and Levon’s Trade, it would be tonal. Dixon’s book reads like a gritty 1970s pulp thriller and is considerably meaner than the Statham film. This includes the ending, where Levon confronts Dimi, the Russian gangster who kidnapped Jenny. In the movie, Jenny is confirmed to be alive from an early point, and her kidnappers plan to sell her to a rich client. In the novel, Levon learns that Jenna (her name in the book) died the night Dimi took, having choked on her own vomit after he drugged her.

This casts a tragic pall over the whole story, and the only comfort Levon can take from completing his mission is that her father will know what happened.

This has always been, and will probably always be, a pet peeve of mine. Being experienced in multiple media myself, I understand the necessity of transforming a story when it is translated from one language or one medium to another. But the observable fact is that most transformations that are made are not actually necessary, and are only implemented because the director wants to tell his version of the story rather than the original storyteller’s version of it.

And since few directors are writers or storytellers, their changes are reliably for the worse. In fact, due to their limited knowledge bases, their changes are almost always cliched repetitions of something another director already did, and did better.

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A WORKING MAN Review

Fandom Pulse reviews the film based on Chuck Dixon’s first Levon Cade novel.

A Working Man with Jason Statham is out in theatres this week and is beating Snow White for the top of the box office. The movie is a lot of fun with Jason Statham’s action delivering with a great character in Levon Cade and a cool supporting cast. There are some problems with the film, however, which stem from caricature villains as well as a couple of moments where the kidnapped young girl Jenny Garcia gets a little too “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” as a strong female lead in moments. These elements were not in the book Levon’s Trade, which was a much darker, more serious action thriller, and it’s a shame they didn’t follow the tone of that book more closely.

There are always going to be changes and compromises when translating a story from one medium into another. What works in a novel, or in a comic book, simply doesn’t work on film. And, of course, different media have different tropes and cliches toward which those who are operating in that medium tend to gravitate; given that David Ayers directed both THE BEEKEEPER and A WORKING MAN, the chances that the villains weren’t going to be colorful cartoons was zero.

However, the rising profile of The Legend suggests the possibility that the next movie in the Levon Cade series will be more true to the books, especially considering that nearly all of the criticism of what has thus far been a very successful film has been focused on various elements that were never in the novel. Chuck was not involved in writing the script, but we can hope that he will be in the next one.

And there will be no Hollywood influence at all in the films on which we are presently working; I’m very pleased to be able to say that not only has The Legend’s BLACK WARRANT already been optioned by a film production company, but there is a significant level of interest in what we’re tentatively calling the Silververse, a century-long shared Arkhaven comics universe that includes traditional heroes created by The Legend, Razorfist, JDA, and myself.

RED HORNET is a 1980s superhero.

The Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equality initiatives imposed by Marvel and DC Comics has utterly destroyed traditional superheroes such as The Punisher, Spiderman, Batman, and The Phantom, but when the old heroes fall, new heroes rise.

On a side note, those who have been around for a long time will recall the eerie coincidence when, two days after I published a short story called THE DEPORTED here on this site, the small Italian town in which it was set was completely destroyed by a landslide and had to be evacuated. So, you can probably imagine the thought that crossed my mind when two days after completing a climactic scene set in an abandoned skyscraper in certain city in Asia, I was greeted with headlines that read “Massive Earthquake in Bangkok; Tower Collapses”.

Fortunately, it turned out to be a different tower. And honestly, I don’t think I can be held responsible for the fates of all the towers in Bangkok. Although if a natural disaster takes place in Stockholm this week, I will have to give serious consideration to laying down my creative pen.

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A WORKING MAN Wins

The Legend Chuck Dixon is having a good weekend, according to Fandom Pulse:

A Working Man edged out Snow White on Friday with $5.6 million at the box office, which analysts are predicting will result in a $15.6 million opening. Box Office Theory predicted the movie would have a projected domestic box office total of $13.4 million, meaning the current tracking with Friday’s actual numbers has the film overperforming expectations by more than 16%.

Snow White was predicted to win the weekend with a predicted $17 million box office, but the film is currently underperforming on Friday with a $3.7 million opening for the day, with new predicted totals dropping to $13.7 million on the weekend. At a drop of 68%, The second weekend drop-off is steeper than what was seen with Dumbo, which had a 60% for the second weekend total. Apparently, audiences are not thrilled, and word of mouth has failed to generate any momentum for the film.

Quite the opposite is true with A Working Man, which is sitting only slightly lower than Jason Statham’s The Beekeeper from 2024, which opened at $16.3 million. The numbers for the new film are within the margin of error, meaning there’s a comparable audience for what was considered quite a financial success for the $40M budgeted film. The total box office haul for The Beekeeper sat at $162.6 million, and if A Working Man does similar numbers, it appears as if Amazon will have quite the franchise success on its hands.

This is also good news for some of the Legend’s other projects, as his success is definitely stirring up interest from other film production companies around the world, who are very interest in a number of Arkhaven properties.

Speaking of Arkhaven and movies, we’re still waiting for the thrice-delayed trial of the accused Rebel’s Run scammer to begin, which is presently scheduled for May.

Not a good weekend for the denizens of the Hellmouth, given the toxic masculinity and Christianity on display.

A Working Man $5,604,992
The Chosen: Last Supper $5,095,027
Snow White $3,700,000
The Woman in the Yard $3,650,000
Death of a Unicorn $2,272,250

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The Evil of the Devil Mouse

Just in case you didn’t fully comprehend the complete extent of Disney’s inversion and devotion to pure Satanic wickedness, note that they not only race-mixed the bird, but they even got rid of the bluebird, the innocent symbol of spring and hope, and replaced it with a carrion-eating black vulture, an ugly symbol of evil and death.

Fortunately, most Americans are onto them now. The live-action inversion of the animated Snow White appears to be bombing harder than even the most negative projections had anticipated. If the reports of a $16 million Friday box office are correct, and assuming past patterns hold, the film’s opening three-day weekend should be around $34 million, which is way below the disastrous $50 million industry projections of a bomb and even worse than the $37.5 million worst-case estimate by Box Office Theory.

This would point to a domestic total of $85 million, which would be an absolutely brutal catastrophe for the Devil Mouse, particularly in light of the fact that the flow of government funds to it are being actively disrupted.

I would go so far as to say that the Devil Mouse may not survive four years of a second Trump administration.

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The Legend at Work

A WORKING MAN, starring Jason Statham, will be coming out March 25th. It’s based on The Legend Chuck Dixon’s first Levon Cade novel, Levon’s Trade, was adapted for film by Sylvester Stallone himself, and based on the trailer, appears to be pretty faithful to the novel.

Dixon. Statham. Stallone.

That’s a lot of testosterone right there.

It’s got at least one killer line in it too.

“You a cop?”

It looks like a quality action flick of the sort that Schwarzenegger and company used to make, with the trademark Dixonian working man hero. Should be fun!

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Up Your Game or Else

A new episode of the late Osamu Tezuka’s Give My Regards to Black Jack has been created by a Japanese team with significant AI assistance:

A new episode of Osamu Tezuka’s famous “Black Jack” manga made with the help of artificial intelligence was unveiled Monday, with the creators saying that while the work reflected the spirit of the late legendary manga artist, its ability to depict human feelings remains an issue.

“We are happy that a very Tezuka Osamu-like work has been created,” said Makoto Tezuka, son of the late artist and director at Tezuka Productions Co, one of the organizers of the project, which was launched to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the medical drama about an unlicensed genius surgeon.

The latest 32-page episode will be published Wednesday in the weekly comic magazine Shukan Shonen Champion and will feature a female patient who has had a transplant for what was supposed to have been a “perfect” AI-made artificial heart. The magazine ran the original Black Jack series from 1973 and 1983.

“The new episode contains the sanctity of life as a theme, and raises issues posed by advanced medical technology in modern society,” Makoto Tezuka told a joint press conference alongside project team members in Tokyo.

The team used generative AI models that learned from some 200 episodes of “Black Jack,” another 200 short-form manga works by Osamu Tezuka who died in 1989, and 20,000 pages of his manga characters’ facial image data.

Under the project, which was officially launched in May, the team input plot ideas into the AI and requested it to come up with a full story for a new Black Jack episode. Interacting with the AI model enhanced creativity, and generated text was adjusted to better reflect the team’s vision of the story in a way readers could easily understand, the team said. The AI models used in the project were ChatGPT’s advanced GPT-4, and Stable Diffusion, an image generator.

New Tezuka ‘Black Jack’ manga episode created using AI unveiled, JAPAN TODAY, 16 November 2023

Once it becomes possible to create stable and reliable characters, AI will revolutionize the industry. It’s going to supercharge the abilities of prolific authors like Chuck Dixon and John C. Wright, and give a significant boost to genuinely creative writers like Gene Wolfe and Roger Zelazny. And it’s going to seriously harm the industry gatekeepers, the unoriginal hacks, and the expensive artists.

Most of all, it’s going to reduce the influence of Hollywood, which has utilized its monopoly on distribution and expensive art production, by reducing the cost of what has always been the most expensive part of video production. So, I see it as a very good and literally pro-creative technological development.

Needless to say, Arkhaven is actively embracing the use of AI on Arktoons, although almost entirely on the visual side instead of the written side.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND, Arktoons

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Star Wars is Dead

The Dark Herald checks his watch and calls it.

The second episode of The Mandalorian aired last Wednesday and I have yet to hear a peep out of Fort Mickey. Whenever the streamer studios have one of their exceedingly rare wins they screech it from the rooftops… Today Samba.TV released its numbers for the opening episode of The Mandalorian and they are b-a-a-a-a-d.

Disney+ ate its own seed corn when the Book of Boba Fett was bombing. Tearing off Mando’s admittedly good third-season starter and stuffing it into the Book of Boba Fett was like pouring an entire bottle of expensive perfume on a pile of shit. It wastes the perfume without making the pile smell any better. Favreau had to slap together a replacement season opener out of spare parts and abandoned scripts. It was a weak start when it needed to come out strong.

Obi-Wan Kenobi’s premier was 2.14 million unique views.

The Mandalorian third season opener was 1.5 million unique views.

This is truly dire for Disney because The Mandalorian has lost half of its audience. It only edged The Book of Boba Fett by 2%.

And apparently the Marvel Cinematic Universe is rapidly going the way of the Star Wars Universe.

The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger signaled that the company plans on cutting back on Marvel franchise films in the wake of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania performing abysmally in the box office.

During an appearance at a Morgan Stanley conference, The Hollywood Reporter’s Alex Weprin reported Iger signaled the company plans on cutting back on how many films they make around certain characters.

Iger said, “What we have to look at at Marvel is not necessarily the volume of Marvel storytelling, but how many times we go back to the well on certain characters.”

He elaborated, “Sequels typically work well for us, but do you need a third or a fourth, for instance? Or is it time to turn to other characters? There’s nothing in any way inherently off in terms of the Marvel brand. I think we just have to look at what characters and stories we are mining.”

Convergence kills. There is no way back for any of these franchises. They’re not necessarily going to go straight downhill, as there will be overperformances and underperformances, there always are, but the general trend is perfectly clear. And as AI improves, the cost of producing alternative entertainment is going to decline as well, thereby creating new opportunities for Arkhaven and other independents.

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The Five Reasons for Failed Fantasy

The Dark Herald reviews the year in fantasy for 2022 and provides an explanation for why it was so disastrous.

First, everyone wanted their own Game of Thrones, (it wasn’t just Jeff Bezos).

Second, none of these producers knew anything about fantasy and they didn’t want to learn. They just wanted to glom on to something and tell their own version of THE MESSAGE.

Third, neither did the people who ran the studios. They were green-lighting anything that could be accused of being a fantasy franchise with an existing fanbase. And they also wanted to use it to spread THE MESSAGE.

Fourth, Woke. All of these shows were much more interested in contemporary politics than they were ancient worlds, eerie wonders, and glories beyond imagining. They cared more about scoring points in Hollywood than they ever could about fantasy.

Fifth, all of these shows were the result of globalism. Oh, it was Hollywood globalism to be sure, so on top of all of their other failings, they were shallow as a mud puddle. But it was all globalist fantasy. It was something too hopelessly bland to be at all interesting.

“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures.”

I can’t help but find it amusing that all of these producers are casting desperately around for the next A GAME OF THRONES and it will never, ever, occur to them to go to the one epic fantasy series that is fully capable of providing them what they are looking for and more.

But it’s just as well. I have zero desire to see ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT utterly demolished the way that everything from WHEEL OF TIME to SANDMAN have been destroyed.

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The Null Factory

The Dark Herald explains why Dem Rangz was always going to be a creative catastrophe:

Amazon just released a making of documentary about Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power like they were proud of it and everything.

I steadfastly maintain that without Tolkien doing the acutal writing, it was never going to be anything other than second rate pastiche. It just isn’t possible to produce anything of similiar quality to the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. If nothing else the modern education system isn’t remotely up to producing a writer with the erudition of the creator of Middle-Earth.

While it was never going to measure up, it didn’t have to be the incompetent parody of Lord of the Rings. It comes across as a TV show that was trying to play Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of Rings straight.

How did it get so bad is the question everyone who isn’t lying about how good it is, keeps asking.

This show was the end product of a process dedicated to failure.

You know they’ve failed when all of the Tolkien fans are not only refusing to watch the television series, but ignoring it to the point that they’re pretending it simply doesn’t exist.

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Tolkien Knew

It’s easy to understand why the Prometheans hate Tolkien so much and why they want to destroy his legacy. He knew. He absolutely knew. He knew about them, their evil, and the source of that evil, as evidenced by the Dark Herald’s review of the third episode of The Rangz:

The Men who sided with the Valar during the War of Wrath got a nice off-the-cuffo from the gods. An island kingdom flowing with bounty and whatnot. And the Men were happy. For a while. However, a division rose up; there were those who remained loyal to the Valar and excepted Iluvater’s gift of death, they thought Elves were super cool too. But the vast majority of the Númenorians resented the Elves’ immortality and wanted to be immortal themselves.

Sauron was captured by the Númenororians and was imprisoned but then like an evil Joseph worked his way up to becoming the high advisor to the king. A cult of Morgoth was established complete with human sacrifice of the Elf Faithful humans with the goal of achieving immortality. Finally, the last king of Númenor launched an invasion of Valinor to steal immortality. Iluvatar Himself intervened and destroyed the entire fleet of Men by opening a chasm in the sea. Then Númenor itself was sunk beneath the waves during a night of fire and whatever that will cost a lot to CG. The Elf Faithful escaped under the leadership of Elendil, who became their king and founded Gondor.

Read this sentence again: A cult of Morgoth was established complete with human sacrifice of the Elf Faithful humans with the goal of achieving immortality.

Fascinating, is it not, that a high fantasy writer could foresee today’s transhuman global technocrats in the 1940s? It’s because their goals are no different than they were back before the dawn of recorded human history: to be like God.

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