Tag: Batman

RIP Val Kilmer, Our Batman, Huckleberry, and Plenty More

Posted on by faz_business


Val Kilmer, beloved actor who starred in 80s and 90s blockbusters like Batman Forever and Top Gun, has died at 65 years old. His daughter Mercedes told the New York Times he’d passed from pnuemonia.

Born New Years Eve 1959, Kilmer had been battling throat cancer for nearly a decade. Over the years, it affected him so much he underwent chemotherapy and two tracheotomies, which later left him unable to speak. Before his diagnosis, he was one of the heartthrobs of the aforementioned decades; along with the two films above, he’s best known for Tombstone, Heat, and The Saint. He had a steady film presence throughout the 2010s and 2020s before his cancer and prior to his tracheotomies, including MacGruber, Planes, and Top Gun: Maverick. And in 2021, he was the subject of the documentary film Val, which chronicled his life up to that point.

Along with film, Val Kilmer had a steady career in TV, typically playing a guest star on a show like Psych or Entourage, or lending his voice to KITT in the Knight Rider reboot. More recently, he “reprised” his role as Madmartigan in Disney+’s Willow sequel series through archive footage of the 1988 film. That cameo was achieved with the help of his son Jack, who series creator Jake Kasdan said had an “uncanny resemblance” to his father’s voice, which was used in conjunction with AI to recreate Kilmer’s 1988 performance.

After news of Kilmer’s passing, Hollywood actors began posting eulogies for the late star. Josh Brolin remembered him as “a smart, challenging, brave, uber-creative firecracker. I hope to see you up there in the heavens when I eventually get there. Until then, amazing memories, lovely thoughts.” Similarly, Josh Gad thanked Kilmer “for defining so many of the movies of my childhood. You truly were an icon.”

“We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of our friend and colleague, Val Kilmer,” added Industrial Light and Magic. “From his memorable roles as Madmartigan, Iceman, Doc Holliday, and Jim Morrison, Val cemented himself as one of the greats. He will be deeply missed and our thoughts are with his family at this time.”

Kilmer is survived by his two children and ex-wife Joanne Whalley, and our thoughts go out to them at this time.

Update: 1:14 AM ET: This story has been updated with eulogies about Kilmer posted on social media.

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Kill the Justice League Undid the Part About Killing the Justice League

Posted on by faz_business


One of the boldest moves Rocksteady made when it unveiled its Suicide Squad game after years of rumors was its subtitle: this was going to be a game about you, as players, fighting and being forced to slaughter DC’s finest heroes, before Braniac could puppet them into being his own deadly occupation force. Then Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League actually came out, and pretty much no one was happy. Now, weeks before its first anniversary, the live-service game is going out with… well, not really a bang, and barely even a whimper.

The base version of Kill the Justice League climaxed with the death of Superman and Wonder Woman alike, as the titular team braced themselves for Brainiac’s defeat and the realization that there were dozens upon dozens of alternate realities with their own Braniacs under threat for them to save, setting up the game’s live-service structure for months to come. But then Kill the Justice League faced a critical drubbing and dire sales, leaving Rocksteady scrambling to offer fixes alongside its planned rollout of future content—content that came to an end this week with the game’s eighth and final major update, just two weeks before the game would celebrate its first anniversary. That would already be not-great if Kill the Justice League stuck any kind of landing, but instead, its final story content revealed that the whole thing had been kind of a pointless hoodwink.

The story content of this week’s eighth episode ends with the defeat of the final Braniac variant in the multiverse at Taskforce X’s hands… with a little extra help from Superman and Batman, who it turned out hadn’t been killed during the events of the main game. Instead, those deaths—which sparked a sea of controversy at the time, when it was believed that Kevin Conroy’s portrayal of Batman in Kill the Justice League would be his final posthumously released performance as the Dark Knight—were that of clones.

On the one hand, players who actually stuck around shouldn’t be surprised—previous updates had seen Harley, Captain Boomerang, King Shark, and Deadshot already liberate Green Lantern and Flash from Braniac’s clutches after their own apparent deaths, traveling to alternate worlds and putting them in stasis, so the revelation that Batman and Superman were also clones is not that surprising. And yet, it means that players who’ve stood by Kill the Justice League at its lowest points have been rewarded with the realization that they never actually got to, well, kill the Justice League. The only casualty by the end of all this is actually Wonder Woman, who had avoided Braniac’s mind control in the initial game, only to be killed by (the newly revealed as a clone) Superman.

And so, Suicide Squad ends with Taskforce X and the Justice League going their separate ways: the League staying behind to atone for “their” crimes by monitoring the multiverse to finish off any lingering Braniac threats, and the Suicide Squad, freed from Amanda Waller’s embedded explosives, finding their own tiny pocket of the multiverse to go celebrate and hang out in. But to end it all this way—an animated slideshow cutscene and a casual, flippant explanation from Harley Quinn via voice over that covers the clone reveal in half a line—speaks to just what a miserable conclusion this all turned out to be, for what was meant to be the long-awaited future of the Batman Arkham universe.

At least there’s some heroes alive now that they can all carry on with, if that future ever arrives?

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Todd Phillips Thinks His Joker Would Be a Batman Fanboy

Posted on by faz_business


The big promise of Todd Phillips’ Joker was stripping out the titular character’s comic book elements and showing what would happen if a regular guy in 1980s Gotham decided to put on clown makeup. (Turns out, things didn’t go well, mainly for everyone else around him.) A young Bruce Wayne is in the original movie, and you may be wondering what would happen if an adult Batman met this version of his nemesis. According to director/writer Todd Phillips, he thinks Arthur Fleck would just think Batman’s neat. (You’re shocked, I’m sure.)

In a recent IGN interview, Phillips explained how Arthur would “be in awe of the alpha male that is Batman. I think [he’d] look up and appreciate it.” In his read, Arthur is “fascinated by men at ease,” such as his own coworkers and Robert De Niro’s talk show host Murray Franklin from the first movie. Those men are everything he’s not, and why wouldn’t that extend to Batman? Presumably, this Batman knows Arthur’s responsible for his parents’ murder, but maybe they can move past that.

The original Joker ended with Arthur eventually losing his cool so bad he shot Murray in the face on live TV, so that fascination clearly has a limit. Still, Phillips’ comments get at something, namely how Arthur has been very quick to fall in love, either romantically or platonically. But Warner Bros. is probably not interested in making the decades of subtext between Bats and Jokes into actual text, or at least no more than what Lego Batman already did back in 2017. Considering Arthur’s luck with people he crushes on, anything between this Clown Prince and a Dark Knight old enough to punch his face in would likely end in a bad romance.

Joker: Folie à Deux hits theaters on October 4.

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