One of the rituals of Thanksgiving weekend is heading out to see a movie. And so, with that in mind, let me do you a mitzvah: Do not see Justice League. Under any circumstances do not go to see Justice League.
Justice League is the movie I’ve been waiting for since I was a kid. It’s the comic book series I loved the most and the team I always wanted to see on the big screen. I say this so that you’ll know my priors. But I also want you to understand that I’ve reached the point in life where even the prospect of a cherished childhood comic book being turned into a movie no longer gives me any great excitement. It’s not cynicism, exactly. It’s just that I understand what I like and I understand the economics of the movie business and so I understand that movies like Justice League aren’t made for people like me. And I accept these basic economic facts.
So even with my expectations essentially non-existent, Justice League is not a good movie. It is a bad movie. A terrible movie. A movie so awful that I have spent the last three days trying to understand how it was ever released.
Look, I’m not a Pollyanna. Making good movies is hard. Making a good blockbuster franchise movie is really hard. If it was easy, then every studio would make 12 of them a year and Hollywood would be printing money like Silicon Valley.
And usually, when you see a movie that bombs, you can identify the point of failure pretty quickly. It was a weak concept based on the desire to exploit pre-existing intellectual property, maybe. Or the script was unfinished. Or the director didn’t know what she was doing. Or the economics of the star created an imbalanced project. Whatever. There are a hundred ways a movie can fail and most of them are pretty easy to see. Hollywood forensics isn’t rocket science.
But what shocked me about Justice League was that everything was wrong about it. At the concept level, it was overly ambitious. At the script level, it was underdeveloped. The plotting is meandering and wasteful. The editing is incompetent—like you asked a first-year film student to cut it together. Many of the actors are miscast. Many of the other actors deliver bizarrely weak performances. (Have you ever seen Jeremy Irons stink? Well he does here.) The effects work isn’t just bad—it’s laughably, incredibly awful. Which I wouldn’t criticize except that this movie cost $300 million and you can only see about $75 million of it on the screen. Even the score is aggressively bad.
Who screwed up this movie? It’s like The Murder on the Orient Express: They all did it.
When people talk about Hollywood disasters, they always fixate on movies like Ishtar or Waterworld or John Carter—films that cost a lot to make and then earn a fraction of the money back. By that metric, Justice League looks like a mere disappointment. Sure, it cost $300 million, and Warner Bros. was hoping to make upward of $1 billion on it—but it’s still likely to take home something like $225 million domestically and then several hundred million more overseas.
But look at this question through a different lens: Those other legendary disasters I mentioned were all one-off productions. Maybe the studio hoped for a Waterworld 2, but they certainly weren’t planning for it. Their downsides were limited to cash losses.
Justice League is different. This movie was supposed to be the keystone on the most valuable pyramid of intellectual property Warner Bros. owns. It is not an exaggeration to say that Warner’s entire economic future for the next decade has been planned around the success of its superhero franchise. And Justice League was supposed to be the movie that took those existing properties and pushed them to the next level of potential income.
That’s not going to happen. Instead, Justice League is so bad that it’s not just going to destroy the value of movies going forward—start planning the write-offs for Aquaman; push back production on The Flash for another couple years; and forget ever seeing a Cyborg movie—but it’s reaching backward in time to diminish the value of existing properties. Superman 3? A standalone Ben Affleck Batman? Forget about it. Justice League is crashing and burning and only Wonder Woman is going to walk away from it as a live, viable property.
As my pal Richard Rushfield put it in his Ankler newsletter this past week:
Which is why, when you look at it this way, it might be the biggest disaster in movie history. So stay far, far away.
