The Screengrab

Despite the fact that The Dark Knight has made roughly eighty-five kerjillion dollars on its way to breaking nearly every box office record since the dawn of motion photography, DC Comics -- and, by extention, their parent company Warner Brothers -- is widely perceived as the big loser in the battle of superhero movies.  Much as Marvel Comics did in the early '60s, Marvel Films -- the people responsible for Iron Man, Spider-Man and the X-Men franchise -- has largely trounced what it used to call its "Distinguished Competition".  Although both companies have turned their franchise characters into successful movies, Marvel's have generally been seen as more successful, more entertaining, more true to their comic book origins, and most of all, easier to get made.  While DC continues to farm its characters out to various studios, Marvel has consolidated its filmmaking power into its studio arm, ensuring a production continuity that provides another curious parallel to the '60s, when the more coherent continuity of Marvel's comics appealed to readers. 

This is a situation that Warner Brothers, who's been making movies even longer than DC has been making comics, is eager to change.  In an article in the latest Variety, Warner execs and DC bigwigs alike discuss what's being done to avoid the sort of missteps that have led to their being thought of as the second-tier player in superhero films.  From greenlighting unprofitable tripe like Catwoman to dragging its feet on potential blockbusters like Wonder Woman and Justice League, DC's film development players have made a number of high-profile mistakes (let's not even speak of the botch-job that was the making and marketing of Superman Returns) that have led them to be seen as failures despite having put out the biggest blockbuster in four decades.  

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You'd think that Hollywood would have learned its lesson by now, but no:  another major release starring Edward Norton, another script controversy.  

As Anne Thompson reports in Variety, during the pre-production stages of the new Incredible Hulk movie, the fledgling Marvel Studios made the mistake of letting time slip away from them until they were put in the position of offering Norton a screenwriting credit (as well as an unbilled producer's role) in order to get him on board.  Unfortunately for everyone within a gamma bomb blast radius of the film, the movie already had a screenwriter (Zak Penn) and a producer/director (Louis Leterrier) with ideas of their own, and by the time the movie finally opened, we were treated to the hauntingly familiar sight of Norton appearing on talk shows to complain about how his vision for the movie was bastardized by studio hacks.

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As you probably know from the last hundred or so articles about the very big business of video games, they're no longer a niche market.  The biggest titles routinely outgross Hollywood movies, and major motion picture studios are beginning to tailor their releases so as not to conflict with the street dates of huge video game titles like Halo and Guitar Hero.  More and more, video games are being treated like movies:  the scripts get more complex, the special effects get more elaborate, the money gets bigger, and release dates become more important.  There's one way in which the two industries aren't exactly the same, though, and that's in the way they pay their actors.

The bigger video games get, the more they begin to attract brand-name Hollywood actors to do voice work.  Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto franchise pioneered this, getting big stars like Samuel L. Jackson, Peter Fonda and Ray Liotta to provide the voices of characters in previous installments.  This time around, with the critically acclaimed and best-selling Grand Theft Auto IV, they went the opposite direction, hiring a cast of relative unknowns to play Eastern European immigrant Niko  Bellic and his rotating cast of friends and enemies.  But one thing has held true, as the New York Timesrecently reported:  unlike with television, film, and all other media, actors in digital media receive no royalties or residuals for their work.  As a result, Michael Hollick (who plays Niko Bellic, and received $100,000 for a little more than a year's work) finds himself starring in the most popular entertainment product in America -- and isn't getting a single dime more than he was originally paid.    It's an unusual situation without an easy solution, and Hollick doesn't blame Rockstar -- he blames the Screen Actor's Guild, which hasn't been especially forward-looking in its negotiations over digital media.  Indeed, if predictions of an actor's strike this summer come to fruition, it's likely that, just as with the writer's strike earlier this year, digital media royalties and pay rates will be the central issue.  Meanwhile, Hollick and thousands of actors like him will have to suffer through getting no royalties for their video game work, regardless of the product's success.

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You probably haven't heard of Marc Toberoff. But to the families, heirs and representatives of some of our culture's best-known characters and creations, he's Superman — and to the corporate entities that own those creations, he's Lex Luthor.

Toberoff is an intellectual properties attorney who specializes in representing claims by creators and their heirs against big studios, publishers and other media conglomerates who have made mega-millions off of their creations — often without paying more than a pittance to the people responsible. In his latest case, he's won a federal ruling that gives the family of Superman's co-creator, Jerry Siegel, a financial stake in films made about the Man of Steel. It's a huge victory, and one that's likely to set a precedent that will also benefit the family of Superman's other creator, Joe Shuster. DC Comics, who owns the character, famously paid a pittance for the rights to Superman, and both Siegel and Shuster's families were nearly destitute for decades while DC (and its parent company, Warner Brothers) turned the character into one of the most recognizable — and marketable — icons in the world.

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In what is surely a preview of much, much more to come as the Wood-man becomes older, crankier, and more obviously lacking in genius, Variety reports that Woody Allen is suing American Apparel for $10 million as a result of their having used an image from Annie Hall without his permission on one of their billboards.

We're no fans of American Apparel or their borderline creepy advertising, and we suspect that a booze-fueled conversation between Woody and AA founder Dov Charney would find that they share a lot of interests that no one else would be particularly interested in hearing about.  What's particularly ludicrous about the suit is how neatly it encapsulates some of Allen's prior, er, indiscretions while seeking monetary damages from a big, successful company which the lawsuit impugns for doing essentially the same thing.

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A little break from bringing you news about the latest Marvel/DC adaptations or Watchmen set reports on the comics front today, Screengrabbers. Variety brings word that Columbia pictures has picked up the rights to Garth Ennis and Derrick Robertson’s The Boys.

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While discussing this article, Vanity Fair’s first ever feature piece on a videogame, my friend lamented the game’s setting. “If it weren’t Star Wars, I might actually get it. I mean, Star Wars is just… so lame.” He’s not wrong. We are close to a decade on from the lame-ification of what was once a universally loved franchise, but there still seems to be quite a hunger for it. Just look at the mainstream interest in a new game and the new animated movie that was announced yesterday. Will Star Wars ever be cool again?

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Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

Just a few minutes into Ballast, Lance Hammer's methodically withholding feature debut, I already felt confident of two things. One, I wasn't going to like this movie. Two, everybody else would, for reasons having little to do with Hammer's artistry and a great deal to do with his sensibility. Sure enough, shortly after I bailed at the end of reel two, weary of the film's mannered silences and artless shakycam, I found Robert Koehler's Variety rave, which predictably declared Hammer "a humanist artist" and praised his film for "engag[ing] audiences' best human responses." (As opposed to, say, their arachnoid responses.)

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The writers' strike may still be in full swing, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is operating like it's business as usual. The shortlist for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar was unveiled last week, the nominations are set to announce tomorrow, and even now the Academy powers that be are making disqualifications on questionable grounds.

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Rumors confirmed: Ellen Page will star in Drew Barrymore's directorial debut, Whip It!. According to Variety, the film "follows the exploits of alterna-teen Bliss. . . [who finds] herself after joining a female roller derby team." Story by one "Maggie Mayhem." Yup, this sounds like an Ellen Page project all right. Ellen Page: the Winona Ryder of the '00s? Discuss.

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Since we here at the Screengrab are determined to absolutely flood you with news about big-screen superhero comic adaptations until you get so annoyed that you personally come to our offices and spill Diet Coke all over our mint-condition issue of X-Men #137, we feel it's our duty to bring you the bad news as well as the good.  No, we're not talking about the bad news that most of these movies are going to kind of suck; that you can take as a given.  We're talking about the bad news that as shocking as it may seem, Hollywood may be running out of superheroes.

As reported in Variety, the big studios have already strip-mined almost every first- and second-tier superhero title that Marvel, DC and the independents have to offer (and some third-tier ones as well — we're lookin' at you, Ghost Rider).  This fact, combined with less than stellar box office reception for a handful of recent superhero movies (we are, once again, lookin' right at you, Ghost Rider) and the surprising popular and critical reception given to non-mainstream comic book adaptations of non-superhero material, may mean that producers will start increasingly looking for the next Sin City, American Splendor or A History of Violence. 

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The WGA strike is entering its seventh dreary week, and as anyone who's been forced to sit through an episode of Make Me a Supermodel would agree, we've all suffered enough.  Still, with no end in sight, even upstanding joes like Jon Stewart are scabbing it up, and the, erm, highly prestigious Golden Globe Awards are the first major casualty, with the Oscars possibly next to fall. 

But the thing about the Writer's Guild of America is that they're the Writer's Guild...of America.  Their beef is is with stateside producers and studios, which means that when the BAFTA Awards are held in London on February 10th, writers, actors, and directors will all be able to hobnob together just as if they aren't going to start screaming at each other once they get back across the pond. While not everyone in the UK is happy about it (the Sky One network had the bad luck to buy the rights to broadcast the Golden Globes starting this year), most industry insiders are predicting a bigger-than-usual Hollywood contingent at the BAFTAs.

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Juno continues overwriting its way into America's heart — it made as much as I Am Legend this weekend, weirdly enough. To quote Variety, "I liked the movie, but it seemed to me Juno talked [less like a pregnant teenager, and] more like a 30-year-old ex-stripper trying to make a name for herself as a screenwriter." Hey, that's just how the Facebook generation talks, homeskillet!

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With every entertainment section, film magazine, and industry website racing to fill up their top tens and year-in-review articles, Variety takes a somewhat different and altogether refreshing tack:  Timothy Gray and a number of staffers combine resources and give us an equally informative recap of what didn't happen in 2007. Among the more important non-stories of the year:  familiar movie franchises that were expected to bomb over the summer didn't; the Writer's Guild of America defied industry expectations that they would wait until after the holidays to strike; a number of predicted mergers and acquisitions (including GE divesting its entertainment division, Time Warner spinning off America OnLine, and the proposed sale of Yahoo!) didn't take place; and the high-definition DVD war never reached a satisfactory conclusion and looks to drag on for at least another year.  One Variety non-story -- the delay in releasing Grand Theft Auto IV -- seems like a bit of a stretch; while the game was expected to drop this year, delays were always possible, and other huge sellers like Halo 3, Call of Duty 4 and Rock Band more than compensated for the lost holiday revenue the latest GTA iteration was supposed to produce, and all in all, 2007 was the most profitable year for the video game industry in history, with over $10 billion in profits (outperforming movie industry growth by a staggering 44%).  Which, we suppose, makes it a non-non-story.

By the time you read this, the Writer's Guild of America strike will be in its seventh week, with no end in sight.  Television hosts are beginning to lose their patience (or, at least, their pockets are beginning to lose their depth), and with awards season already in jeopardy, the threat of scab writers begins to rear its ugly head.  David Letterman's production company, showing its clout in defiance of AMPTP management solidarity, struck its own deal with the WGA in what may be a hopeful sign for the union, but the producers continue their offensive, posting recently on their own website that the strike has cost the union $151 million so far -- a figure, they claim, in excess of the revenue the strikers hoped to gain from their own proposed compensation package.  Of course, since the producers and studios have continually claimed that there's no way to predict the real value of internet content, how they arrived at that figure is somewhat mysterious, not to mention the source, as Dana Harris of Variety is quick to point out.  Meanwhile, Ron Galloway sides with Alec Baldwin in blaming the whole mess on the "inept" management of the WGA and predicts an end to the strike as early as mid-January as desperation sets in, while out on the picket lines, spirits seem to be pretty high despite the rock-star attitude Baldwin attributes to the WGA's Patric Verrone, even if a lot of it's attributable to the vodka-spiked Gatorade.

Rumor has it Die Hard director John McTiernan might direct the new Conan. Funny, I thought he was in jail.

Meanwhile, John Singleton will direct the A-Team movie. Of all the franchises to milk.

The Writers' Guild strike has now killed forty-seven of the fifty-two active scripted TV shows, according to Variety. Just give 'em the money, for Christ's sake. We need our fix!

— Peter Smith

With wildfires raging out of control throughout southern California, the film industry is bound to feel the heat. Variety brings us a wide-ranging and surprisingly fascinating look at how the tragedy is affecting the biz: some people behave predictably (the Four Seasons is all booked up), others nobly (David Geffen's making his hotel available for free to firefighters and their families), but the whole thing is filtered through Hollywood’s always inward-turning eye. Of particular interest is the latter part of the article, dealing with the weird blend of public service and intense competition with which the local news in L.A. is covering the fires. — Leonard Pierce

With interest in the new wave of Korean horror films at an all-time high in the motion picture industry, Variety is all over the previous neglected Pusan International Film Festival. In the latest issue, Mark Schilling covers the debut of the Co-Production PRO event, an insider’s networking event for Asian production companies from every point of the spectrum; Richard Kuipers discusses the difficult start of the festival during a rain-soaked storm season; and Darcy Paquet discusses the horror revival that’s fueling the Korean film industry’s burgeoning growth. Meanwhile, Derek Elley reviews Crows: Year 0, the latest from the incredibly prolific Takashi Miike, which debuted this week at PIFF. — Leonard Pierce