When you’ve produced a brilliant, original project like Rebel Moon: Battle for Endor: Phase I, Part VI, a movie that many are saying—everybody is saying—has had more people see it (for free on streaming) than the most successful movie of the last year (in theaters, for a paid ticket), people inevitably ask you about future projects. Well, as always with a Snyder Production: the past IS the future, so I’d like to talk a bit more about my life’s inspiration: The Dark Knight Returns.
You see, my movie Rebel Moon: Yavin IV Falls, Chapter 6, Episode X was heavily influenced, like all things in my life, by The Dark Knight Returns, the only Batman book a True Fan needs to read as it contains all his best moments. As well as several more moments I’ve chosen to selectively ignore because they absolutely contradict my contention that Batman should be a gun-toting mass-murderer!
Have I heard of the Puni-who?! I don’t read shallow Marvel trash. I’m talking about gritty, mature storytelling here with guns and killing, the two things all mature stories contain. Did you know that there’s a single scene in DKR where Batman, in a moment’s desperation and because he has no other options, kills a random member of the Mutant Gang with a gun in order to save a precious, beautiful, Caucasian child?
Yes, he later breaks a gun in half and declares to his newly formed army, literally on-panel in a splash page, “This is the weapon of the ENEMY. We do not NEED it. We will not USE it.” But I don’t like that part as much as when the strong man decides one kid’s life is worth more than another’s, so I just pretend it doesn’t exist and never happened. And because nobody in my circles reads the comics I purport to love yet constantly trash, nobody asks follow-ups! So, when I say the character, who had tremendous cultural relevance for the past 60 years, is now sliding into irrelevance because the studio won’t let me base him on the one story out of thousands I’ve actually read, nobody questions it to my face! If they did, they might point out that Batman specifically calls out his use of rubber bullets in the Batmobile to non-lethally pacify the Mutant Gang, but again: that doesn’t satiate my bottomless lust for blood, so I just pretend it didn’t happen!
Yes, I was the last one to be in charge of the character before his supposed “slide into irrelevance,” but much like the scenes in DKR where the Joker is a camp, effete, gay panic caricature instead of a brooding, edgy, heavily tattooed mastermind: I ignore that and blame the downturn on movies that haven’t even come out yet and the very audience I should be trying to appeal to, as that’s my job at the end of the day!
If Batman doesn’t have guns, disregard the allies who support and help him, and never smiles a single instance in his homicidal existence, then just who is he?
The what? The Shadow??? Never heard of him. He sounds culturally irrelevant and unprofitable.
