The Big Picture · Discussion · Interview
October 29, 2024/ 103 min/ Sean Fennessey · Mallory Rubin · Charles Holmes
Sean, Mallory, and Charles take apart Venom: The Last Dance and argue over whether 2024 is the worst year comic book movies have ever had, then turn to The Wild Robot as the antidote. Then Sean's post-screening conversation with director Chris Sanders.
47 films across 3 segments.
AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.
‘Venom: The Last Dance’ and the comic book movie nadir
The third and final Tom Hardy Venom, written and directed by his best friend Kelly Marcel. Charles had a blast; Mallory admires how unapologetically itself it is; Sean dissents, calling it a genuinely bad movie hacked together from studio notes (Knull, the Imperium, the codex MacGuffin) fighting against Hardy and Marcel's dive into the absurd. The Xenophage design, the ABBA dance number, and the family sing-along are the parts that land.
The one Sean genuinely likes; he made a YouTube explainer about how it became a hit before The Ringer had a movies channel.
Andy Serkis's 90-minute Grand Guignol slasher with Carnage. Short by design, and the better for it.
Sean puts it among the worst movies he's seen in two years; he'd hoped it would be even worse than the pre-release hype and felt betrayed when it was competent for 40 minutes.
The Jared Leto fiasco with the ADR-from-behind Michael Keaton cameo, the running joke of a stinger that never pays off.
Still to come in December, and the puzzle of the segment: it's directed by J.C. Chandor, whom Sean rates four for four. He expects dullness anyway.
Grouped with Deadpool and Venom as this year's superhero movies straining to be lofty love stories or incel parables their characters can't support.
Still the biggest movie of the year and the one exception; at bottom it's boner jokes and nostalgia, which work, though the fourth-wall multiverse mockery comes from inside the thing it's mocking.
One of the year's widely unseen comic book releases, in Sean's roll call of the eight-movie slate.
How they approximated the Sinister Six without doing it, a room full of five villains; maybe a beat is needed before trying it for real.
The Sony movies everyone agrees are exceptional and should not be tainted by the rest.
Sean's example of a spin he still likes; he's behind on The Penguin but will watch it.
The James Gunn DCU launch, Sean's most anticipated superhero movie of next year. The group thinks a lot is riding on it, and expects Gunn to lean into how weird an alien integrating into our culture actually is rather than the shirt-rip.
Charles's pick to be the surest thing: Marvel introducing the family ahead of Secret Wars, with a cast (Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn) they're sold on.
Part of a stacked July 2025 tentpole run with Superman and Fantastic Four; Sean's sick of Jurassic movies but intrigued by the Scarlett Johansson / Mahershala Ali cast.
Sean isn't totally against Bryan Singer's version; he thinks it holds some of what makes Superman classically interesting.
‘The Wild Robot’ and the animation race
Chris Sanders's DreamWorks adaptation of Peter Brown's book: Roz (Lupita Nyong'o), a robot shipwrecked on an island, raises a gosling named Bright Bill. All three were wrecked by it, Bright Bill's migration especially. Sean's front-runner for Best Animated Feature; they praise the painterly break from samey CG, Kris Bowers's score, and how the tears accumulate instead of being cued the Pixar way.
The billion-dollar Pixar sequel and the movie The Wild Robot is likely competing with; Sean and Charles both call it a weaker follow-up to a movie they love.
Last year's winner, a reminder that a non-Pixar film can gather late awards momentum.
Charles calls it a modern masterpiece; a tough first 30 minutes of Cybertron lore gives way to a dark, intense final act as Optimus banishes Megatron. Jon Hamm as an art shitheel; the hosts doubt it makes the race.
The Latvian film about a cat, which Charles says has dark-horse energy in the animation race.
The Pharrell Lego biopic; Charles resisted seeing it but is told half of it, the beat-making in Lego, is crack.
The Daffy-and-Porky feature that WB passed on, released instead by Ketchup Entertainment.
Charles's foundational hand-drawn memory; realizing The Wild Robot's director made it turned the screening into something personal for him.
The Pixar model of the exact engineered cry, which The Wild Robot pointedly avoids.
The 1995 mind-blower that set the CG look now gone samey.
Chris Sanders on ‘The Wild Robot’recorded after a Vidiots screening
Two load-bearing themes from Peter Brown, one not obvious in the book: that kindness can be a survival skill, and that they may all need to change their programming to survive. Lupita Nyong'o built Roz's engineered-optimism first voice, then dropped it; DreamWorks had sat on the novel for four years developing the painterly look that let them freehand the environments.
One of the interrupted-life-by-an-unlikely-visitor stories Sanders keeps returning to; now among his films being converted to live action.
His hybrid live-action/animation film; the dogs were scanned rather than built, and the shelter dog they cast as Buck now lives with Sanders.
A fairy tale he loves and worked on, but the kind of project he now veers away from when taking the lead.
Tyrus Wong's stylized forest was the imagery in Sanders's head reading Brown's book, and the reference point for the movie's look.
One of the two DreamWorks films whose illustrated style let The Wild Robot escape the CG gravitational pull.
The other DreamWorks film that pointed the way to the painterly look.
Sanders's last great thing, and a horror fan's favorite of the year; he loved how it tapped the vibe of the original's era.
Also mentioned raised along the way
Sony's non-comic hits Anyone But YouIt Ends with Us
J.C. Chandor, now directing Kraven Margin CallAll Is LostA Most Violent YearTriple Frontier
Cast and tangents, in passing Gladiator IIA Quiet Place: Day OneBeetlejuice BeetlejuiceThe TerminatorTerminator 2: Judgment DayAlienAliens
Disney moms, or the lack of them AladdinDumbo
The Warner cartoon saga Coyote vs. Acme
Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads
TV The PenguinAgatha All AlongHeartstopperHis Dark MaterialsStranger ThingsGame of ThronesStation Eleven
Podcasts House of RThe Midnight BoysThe RewatchablesThe Town
Games Marvel's Spider-Man
Music Chromakopia
Ads The TownState FarmAmazon PrimeTremfayaWhite ClawMint Mobile