Reading comprehension

A couple of weeks ago, word broke that Vox Media sold its gaming site Polygon to Valnet, which troubled me because Valnet and its outlets have a reputation for churning out an endless stream of stories about the most minute bits and pieces of information about upcoming films and shows, and the potential that that environment has for giving readers a warped sense of what the state of the stories we consume really is.

I came across an interesting example in RSS reader the other day that provided a neat way to look at this: a fairly routine, non-update about the future of Zack Snyder's space opera Rebel Moon Netflix franchise from screenwriter Kurt Johnstad on the I Minutemen podcast:

We outlined movies, 3, 4, 5, and 6. I don't know – you know, those decisions are way above me, like how how those things are made and where the money is going to come from. I hope that we get a chance to tell that story to its very end because it's it's an amazing world and and I loved writing those characters...We know where we can go and we've written we have very detailed outlines. Zack has literally plotted out the whole world. So maybe with some luck and an act of God, we'll get to go back to that world.

I noticed this story pop up in a couple of places on social media, and found that it was being interpreted in a couple of ways, and after dropping some links in the TO slack channel, I realized that it was a good example of just how annoying the nerd media world has become in the pursuit of SEO traffic, and it got me thinking about how we consume news as fans.

To rewind a little: Snyder had been thinking about a Star Wars-esque space opera universe and ended up pitching it to Lucasfilm at some point when they were considering standalone films. They didn't take it, and he ended up going to Netflix, and somehow convinced them to fund not only a film, but to split it into two installments when it turned out to be really, really long. Not only that, but he also convinced them to also release an extended directors cut for each installment. They've also quickly expanded this world into other mediums as well: there are comics, companion books, novelizations, a narrative podcast, and a video game.

(Tansy Gardam has a great pair of episodes of her podcast Going Rogue that delves into the production.)

Where we've seen big franchises grow organically with all of these things, Netflix has loaded up everything into a franchise cannon and is blasting it in our direction, whether we asked for it or not. Netflix has done this before: remember Jupiter's Legacy, based on Mark Miller's comics? They had some extensive plans for an interconnected comic book universe, only for the show to be canceled after a season and the rest sort of wilted on the vine. When it comes to Rebel Moon, it remains to be seen if it'll keep going.

I have my doubts, because ... neither film is particularly good. I found them to be overly self-indulgent, loud, and pretty dumb, but ultimately watchable action films with lots of Snyder's visual flair. It's pretty clear that these were positioned as Netflix's exclusive equivalent of Star Wars for its dedicated subscribers and Snyder aficionados who spend their time on Twitter complaining about James Gunn's coming Superman and how woke Disney made Star Wars.

I have a feeling that this is a situation where Netflix's executives and data folks pulled Star Wars apart and found in Snyder's pitch all of the right story beats, characters, design elements, and visuals, and hoped that they'd get a hit film right out of the box. And to be fair, it does seem as though these two films did pretty well for the streaming service: Child of Fire attracted 23.9 million views in its first week in December 2023, while The Scargiver pulled in 21.4 million in its first week in April 2024, prompting Snyder to make some interesting claims about how big it was, and there's been some chatter about how they've got anywhere from four to six films planned.

Now. Franchises and cinematic universes are big, unwieldy things, and films such as this take a long time to develop and put into production. Snyder ended up splitting the film into two parts, which is why they came out within months of one another, but any additional films would take the better part of a year to film. At the present, it looks as though they've gotten some way into the pre-production process that you'd expect after the film was out in the world.

In the meantime, Snyder was pulled into an animated series for Netflix called Twilight of the Gods and in November 2024, was beginning work on an film about the LAPD for the streamer. In March, word broke that he's also writing and directing a film about the UFC, Brawler.

All of this leads down to: if Netflix deems Rebel Moon successful enough to continue, it could be a little while, but we don't have an official word on that yet. That's led fans and entertainment writers to use tea leaves to speculate about whether or not it was a flop or not.

When I scan around for news headlines – first at sites like io9, The Verge, or Tor.com, there's a certain bar that I'd pick for reputable news, sites like Deadline, , The Hollywood Reporter, Variety or The Wrap, because their staff are generally well-sourced with either publicists or employees in studios. There's also writers that I'll specifically look for stories from: Anthony Breznican of Vanity Fair, for example, because he's usually the guy who gets invited to conduct the curtain-raiser interviews that studios like to use to introduce their projects.

The rise of the dedicated fandoms around the mega franchises means that there's a lot of incentive for people to gather information about them. Lucasfilm's employees have noted that they're constantly under a spotlight when it comes to new projects, and you don't have to look far for people trying to connect every morsel of information that you can glean from casting news, leaked set photos, podcast appearances or interviews, and behind-the-scenes developments from influencers to learn everything they can about said upcoming project.

Most of that information filters its way over to sites like Cosmic Book News, Screenrant, Comic Book Review, Bleeding Cool, ComicBook.com, Collider, and so forth. There are some good writers at those sites: Maggie Lovitt of Collider is a good interviewer, as is Germain Lussier of io9. But for the most part, these are sites that exist to provide a flood of content to attract traffic and advertising revenue for their parent companies. It's not particularly in depth or thoughtful, and I don't find this type of reporting to be terribly useful in the greater scheme of entertainment reporting.

All of this brings me to the lead that I've buried pretty far down this post: Johnstad's statement about his work on the next couple of Rebel Moon films prompted three different websites to come up with three differing, dramatic conclusions, and in doing so, shows just how easy it is to get a warped view of what a story really is.

CBR led with the news that the films have been "mapped out" and that while Johnstad isn't sure if the films will end up on Netflix, he's optimistic.

ComicBook.com's take is a little grimmer, and offers up a possible suggestion: "For a franchise envisioned as a sprawling multi-part epic, these new statements strongly imply that, from a conventional studio perspective, Rebel Moon is dead in the water, and its only path forward might echo one of the most unexpected fan-driven revivals in recent memory: Zack Snyder’s Justice League." (The URL also includes the words film-franchise-dead.)

And finally, Cosmic Book News went with "the writer of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon confirms the movies are dead at Netflix and there will be no more sequels."

Of the three, Cosmic's report is just inaccurate. Pedantically, this isn't an official cancellation of the franchise or films. All Johnstad said was that they've outlined them and that they're hoping that they'll get to make them. The likelihood of these films getting made feels to me to be pretty low, given their reception, but an "official" cancellation would be Snyder, his studio, or Netflix coming out and saying "We're done with these films." At best, this is just a bad, cynical analysis, and at worst, it was tossed out there to grab eyeballs.

CBR's piece isn't much better. Ask anyone involved in the film or entertainment industry about the work they're doing, and of course they're going to say that they've built out contingencies to continue a story if it's a mega hit, and even if it isn't, they'll be hopeful that a studio will pick it up and continue it.

ComicBook.com's assessment is probably the most level-headed: this is a film franchise that appears to be stalling, and if it's going to continue, you'd need a lot of fans to really demonstrate that it's got an audience that'll justify the expense.

At the end of the day, all that we know about this particular story is that the writer of Rebel Moon was on a podcast, that he and Snyder have written up detailed outlines for four additional films, but he's not the person who gets to decide whether or not they're made and that he hopes that at some point, whoever does make that decision will allow them to make it.

It's worth looking at each of the pieces to see how they presented the story, and what work they put into contextualizing it.

None of these writers say anything about pinging Netflix PR for comment^[1], which is a pretty basic thing a writer can do to see if their assertions are correct. Even if you don't get a response, it's a good indication that they're making an effort to check what's being said, because again, the writer in this situation can just be saying stuff because he's got an incentive to spin news in a favorable way.

Snyder's studio is hard to get contact information for from just googling around, but an entertainment site could do something like sign up for an IMDBpro account ($150 annually for an individual or $80 a month for a site), which would put some contact information in your hands.

You don't generally see this effort made for a range of stories: all these writers are doing are reporting "this person said this thing", putting a bit of an angle or spin on it, and provide a bunch of context and back-links to their prior coverage. None of it really adds any real understanding of the content in question, and that's what generally bothers me about this type of reporting: it essentially exists only to pop up on Google when someone at some point types in "what's the deal with Rebel Moon part 3?

I don't place a lot of value in these iterative updates. (I'm certainly not immune to this type of reporting just look through the News tag) But, when I do write news pieces, I like to provide some context with the story, because a news piece might be the first time someone encounters your writing. You want to ensure that they come away with an understanding of why this particular update is important in the bigger story, but going back through the entire chain of updates can just be an exercise in tedium.^[2]

That all said, context is important, and the level of detail and background knowledge that a writer provides to connect the dots about the world and environment that surrounds a story can greatly enhance one's understanding of the situation.

The biggest pieces of context that all of these pieces don't mention is that filmmaking is hard and it takes a lot of luck and work to get them across the finish line. There's never a guarentee that a film will get made, and there are so many factors that go into the production of a sequel, from the reviews and box office returns, the production, the quality of the proposed next projects, and so forth, all factors that you can't always control or account for. Maybe an audience just doesn't turn out for a film because of something one of the stars said on Twitter. Or maybe the film just isn't something that audiences are clamoring to see, or there was another film that came out just before that's too similar to it. Or the weather was bad. Or, or, or. You can have all the right factors, the right actors, story, effects, and so forth, and you can still have something that ends up not capturing the attention of audiences.

A studio can say that they want to set up a big, money-making franchise, but until money is put into a project to pay people to work on it, it's all vaporware. Just look at how many times we've seen back and forths on all of the various Star Wars projects that are in development. We know any film will likely do pretty well at the box office, but it's just a difficult and almost impossible process to go from an idea to sitting in a theater with your bucket of popcorn.

A big part of this reporting environment exists because of the frantic pace of social media: I've been in newsrooms where there was a lot of push to get a story up onto the site because if you're early to a story, you'll get rewarded with attention and traffic. Even outside of the front pages and social media channels for places like CBR, Cosmic Book News, ComicBook.com, there's a whole network of social media accounts like @DiscussingFilm that further these types of posts.

On Twitter, reporter/newsletter writer Jeff Sneider pointed out that "all of these terrible comic book sites/accounts take things one step too far in an effort to advance the story", a sort of game of telephone where rumors get mixed up in hype and facts. He followed up by neatly defining what I really don't like about this type of reporting: "If you want Just the Facts Ma'am, read the trades when deals are done or close to done. Imagine THAT universe, where there are NO comic book movie rumors. The MCU/DCU need folks like me to keep people talking. Otherwise, we'll be waiting forever for "official updates" from the studios."

The problem with this – professional leakers, franchise outlets, and the entire online environment – is that this leads to an echo-y bubble of discourse that can quickly depart from reality. A core element of this problem is our collective ability (or inability) to parse the information that we're getting. Social media can allow information to spread like wildfire, and if readers look only to an influencer's follower count for their credibility rather than their track record, it's incredibly easy for bad information, misinformation, or disinformation to make its way into the larger discourse, where it can tilt perceptions in any number of directions.

Back in 2022, writer Richard Newby penned an excellent overview of the effects of this: Marvel Disappointed the Rumor Mill at D23, in which he outlined that fans often speculate or look for information, find validation in rumors or leaks, and then get upset when what they were hoping for didn't happen. When these situations blow up, they can have a real role in shaping the public perception of a film or project.

"Unreliable scoopers have thrived off the attention that comes from putting out shaky information, and backing it with their likely nonexistent 'trusted source,'" he wrote. "Entire websites and accounts had dedicated themselves to this misinformation."

This brings me back to our case study of Johnstad's appearance on the I Minutemen podcast: three of these high-volume sites came up with three different interpretations on what was actually said. One was flat-out incorrect, and the others recounted what was said with a bit of light analysis. On any given day, you'll probably find similar things happening as these sites weed through various sources to come up with a nugget of news to report and speculate on. In their pursuit of traffic, we're presented with information that feels increasingly uncoupled from reality, and the readers who come across these articles likely won't take the time to think about the validity of what they're reading.

When I taught journalism at a local college, one of the things that I emphasized for my students was that you have a duty to provide an accurate view of the world, and that the work you put into capturing that reality – getting good information by talking to the people with first-hand knowledge, talking to experts, going to the scene of the crime, etc. – ensures that your readers can trust what you're telling them. That's not something that I see on these sites.

As readers, it's useful to consume news carefully: think about who's providing the information that you're reading, but also who's being interviewed or cited, what level of context is provided, and what assertions is a writer making? Is a project "officially" dead because a writer made that assumption, or was it someone who is in a position to make that statement? Did the writer take the time to check their work when dealing with a source that might not be credible? Did the writer provide the reader with a better understanding of where this news – like a writer jawing on a podcast – fits in the larger structure of a narrative?

One thing that I recommend to people is when you're drawn into a story like this, it's worth scanning the article for a source link, and trace it back to the source to read what was said first-hand. What level of research and context did the writer provide, and do they make the argument to connect the dots?

We can infer a bit from the bits of context that's also out there: Snyder's got some other films in the works, and the ratings and reviews for the first two films were ... eh. But that's just us inferring: absent hard numbers, leaked memos, or on-the-record statements from studio executives, we don't actually know the status of the future of this particular franchise.

This isn't limited to just Rebel Moon or the broader entertainment world: this applies to our news intake writ large, and I think our inability to understand and think about the news and information that we get isn't a great thing for us. We make decisions about our lives based on our assumptions and perceptions of the real world: we should ensure that we're seeking out a view of the world that's accurately portraying it, whether it's deciding whether or not to see the latest film that's hit theaters or show that's begun streaming, to how things like crime and homelessness to the state of your town's budget are portrayed.