Xuenou > Movies > Sony adds content to its “content” — “Spider-Man: No Way Home — The More Fun StuffVersion”
Sony adds content to its “content” — “Spider-Man: No Way Home — The More Fun StuffVersion”
This will help struggling multiplexes in the cinema's late summer graveyard weeks, so it's not all bad. But the cynicism of Sony releasing a longer cut of this just-left-theaters release so soon underscores what some movies -- the comic book ones -- actually are. They're just content to be tinkered with to add a little…

Sony adds content to its “content” — “Spider-Man: No Way Home — The More Fun StuffVersion”

This will help struggling multiplexes in the cinema’s late summer graveyard weeks, so it’s not all bad.

But the cynicism of Sony releasing a longer cut of this just-left-theaters release so soon underscores what some movies — the comic book ones — actually are. They’re just content to be tinkered with to add a little to the bottom line.

Ever since the “Close Encounters,” “Star Wars” and “Blade Runner” “director’s cut” tinkering, the cinema has drifted further and further away from the literary concept of a “copy text,” the artist and her or his editor/publisher/releasing studio’s definitive version of this piece of art, the one that goes to the printers or shows up in theaters or video.

What makes a work of art great isn’t a focus group’s input or endless waffling over what “little darlings,” as Hemingway called his bitterest but necessary edits, one had to kill.

Your movie, based on your best instincts, didn’t play or underperformed? No worries, Zach Snyder. Have another go. The fans will eat that up. Again.

Yeah, you’re devalued as an “artist,” your reputation takes another hit, even if the picture is “improved ”

But this? This is just Sony not wanting to waste effort and risk cash on original “content.” Let’s just give fans Blu-ray features inserted into the movie for another $11-16 ticket.

It’s hard to take comic book movies as anything other than “content” when Sony agrees with me, and not the ComicCon crowd.