Netflix’s Do Revenge looks like Heathers for 2022
Hell is a teenage girl
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Hell is a teenage girl
Netflix’s entry into the gaming market is off to a slow start. According to an analysis performed by Apptopia on behalf of CNBC, the streaming giant’s games have been downloaded a total of 23.3 million times and average about 1.7 million daily users. Put another way, less than one percent of Netflix’s 221 million customers are taking advantage of the games included in their subscriptions.
Netflix did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment. In the past, the company indicated it did not expect its gaming division to be profitable immediately. “We’re going to be experimental and try a bunch of things,” Netflix COO Greg Peters told investors during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings calls last year.
Still, the question that’s probably on everyone’s mind is how long Netflix is willing to wait to see if it made the right bet, especially after it lost nearly one million subscribers during its most recent quarter. Other lofty bets — like the company’s in-house fan blog, Tudum — were the subject of cutbacks after only a few months of spending.
The company has shared precious few details on how much it has spent expanding its portfolio beyond TV shows and movies, but most signs point to a significant investment. Earlier this year, the company paid $72 million to acquire Next Games, the studio behind Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales. More recently, it secured exclusive mobile rights to beloved indie titles like Spiritfarer and Into The Breach. The company is unlikely to make similar investments in the future if its current ones don’t pan out.
‘That was definitely something […] I had to work my way into’
How do you adapt an award-winning comic book series that’s considered unfilmable? If you’re the creative team behind Netflix’s The Sandman, you move some things around, but mostly you hew closely to the beloved source material.
The Netflix adaptation of The Sandman is remarkably faithful to Neil Gaiman’s comics, despite the considerable challenges posed by very nature of the story. Showrunner Allan Heinberg and executive producers David S. Goyer and Gaiman have adapted the first 16 issues of the comics into a 10 episode-long season that, while most certainly not perfect, clearly works hard to do justice to and maintain the spirit of the originals.
This Sandman still tells the story of Dream, played by Tom Sturridge, the lord of the dreaming realm who is imprisoned by magic-hungry humans at the beginning of the series. Upon his escape decades later, he must restore order to the Dreaming while contending with the chaos that ensued both in his world and the waking world while he was gone. One of the most noticeable changes the series makes early on is updating the date of Dream’s escape from the late 1980s to the present day, setting the rest of the story in 2021 — with some flashbacks, of course.
But that’s not the only way in which The Sandman diverges from its source material. Here are five more ways Netflix’s The Sandman is different from the comics.
Season 1 of The Sandman follows the comics’ first 16 issues, which includes arcs from both Preludes & Nocturnes andThe Doll’s House. It mostly takes a “one issue per episode” approach, but at only 10 episodes long, some storylines had to be moved around.
In some cases, this works better than others. Episode 4, titled “A Hope in Hell,” follows Dream’s journey to Hell to find his helm; to up the dramatic tension, this episode incorporates the storyline from Passengers, the issue of the comics following A Hope in Hell, wherein John Dee (David Thewlis) escapes from a mental institution to find Dream’s ruby. Having the stories play out simultaneously gives us a solid A plot and B plot as our protagonist and our antagonist hunt down Dream’s magical tools, teasing the inevitable showdown.
Episode 6, “The Sound of Her Wings,” is a less effective attempt at combining comic storylines. The first half of the episode is an extremely faithful adaptation of the comic issue of the same name, which sees Dream and Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) walking around and having a conversation about humanity. The second half of the episode is an extremely faithful adaptation of issue 13, Men of Good Fortune. There, we learn about Dream’s once-a-century meeting with the immortal human Hob Gadling (Ferdinand Kingsley).
The stories are both lovely and moving on their own, but when they’re awkwardly stitched together one right after the other, the result is one disjointed episode of TV. This episode is clumsily trying to give us a deeper understanding of Dream’s relationship to humans and to change, but at the end of the day, these are two comic issues that may have worked better by themselves.
In an interview with Den of Geek, Heinberg and Gaiman mentioned that one of the most exciting parts of the adaptation process was the fact that they could portray events from The Sandman that don’t happen on the page but which are still important. For example, in the comics, we never see Hal perform in drag due to the fact, Gaiman explains, that comics aren’t the best medium for musical performances. The show takes that opportunity for new material and runs with it, incorporating several of Hal’s numbers into the show and casting Hedwig and the Angry Inch writer/director/star John Cameron Mitchell as Rose Walker’s drag-performing landlord.
Another great new addition is the final discussion between John and his mother Ethel Cripps (Joely Richardson) in the show’s third episode. In the comics, Ethel dies off-page and bequeaths John her protective amulet. In the show, Ethel gives John the amulet directly and then dies onscreen as the protections fade away. Before that, we also get an illuminating conversation between her and John about Dream. This helps establish John’s motivations going forward, which is extremely useful because…
It might not be bursting at the brim with Justice League references, but The Sandman is still a DC comic. For example, John Dee is kept in Arkham Asylum alongside Batman villains like Scarecrow. He is also the supervillain known as Doctor Destiny, who gets up to a lot of evil shenanigans in other DC comics, and whose appearance is monstrous and scabby and all around frightening. The Sandman series forgoes this path, instead cementing John as a human and tweaking his backstory.
Two other DC comics characters appearing in The Sandman are Lyta (Razane Jammal) and Hector Hall (Lloyd Everitt). In the wider DC comics, they have superhero identities of their own, but in The Doll’s House arc of The Sandman, they serve a particular purpose. Hector is dead, but rogue nightmares Brute and Glob have trapped his consciousness. They prop him up as their own version of the Sandman in an attempt to create a new head of the Dreaming. Hector visits his pregnant wife Lyta in the dream realm so the two have more time together, and occasionally Lyta is visited by Jed Walker (Eddie Karanja), the little brother of Rose Walker (Kyo Ra). However, when Dream finds out about what Brute and Glob have done, he casts Hector back to the land of the dead and declares he will return for Lyta’s child — who, by virtue of its time spent gestating in the Dreaming, is now his.
Most of this storyline appears in Netflix’s The Sandman, but there are several tweaks. Now, Lyta is a close friend of Rose’s, traveling with her in search of Jed. Jed, trapped by a new nightmare named Gault, actually takes on the role of the fake Sandman. It’s a poignant choice that emphasizes his desire to escape from his abusive adoptive father. I also appreciated the connection between Lyta and Rose, as it pulls together characters from important early threads of The Sandman and gives us another chance to see the effects of Rose’s role as the dream vortex.
One of the biggest and best ways in which The Sandman diverges from its source material is how it introduces the nightmare known as the Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook) earlier in the story. The show makes the wise decision to embrace him as a villain right from the start. From his confrontation with Dream in the first episode to his manipulation of Rose and Jed at the serial killer convention, it’s clear he’s the season’s main antagonist. His role in the comics is contained to The Doll’s House arc, which is effective as we move from issue to issue. However, in a TV series that’s released all at once, it’s nice to have another throughline we can follow as we binge. Plus, the Corinthian’s encouragement of humans’ worst impulses makes him a great foil for Dream throughout. The Corinthian may be the stuff of nightmares, but his expanded role is what adaptation dreams are made of.
In a recent interview to promote Netflix‘s The Gray Man, Ryan Gosling boasted that the average action movie has “four to five big action moments.”
“This has nine,” he smiles.
Well, if it’s a competition, director Jung Byung-gil’s Carter only has the one action sequence. The thing is, it’s two hours and 14 minutes long.
Set in the aftermath of a pandemic that’s turning humans into violent killers, Carter follows the tattooed title character (Joo Won) after he awakens in a bloody hotel room with no memory and a voice in his ear feeding him some very vague survival instructions.
Apparently, Carter needs to find the kidnapped daughter of a doctor who’s discovered a cure for the virus, and transport her safely to facilities where a mass vaccine project is underway. The problem? Carter doesn’t know if he can trust her, there’s a bomb planted inside his tooth (seriously), and approximately three different government agencies and several hundred agents appear to want him dead.
The opening sequence of the Netflix film should give you a pretty clear idea about whether or not it’ll be your cup of tea. After being confronted by a group of CIA agents, Carter escapes through a sauna before being attacked by about 100 people (no exaggeration!), all while the camera swerves and rotates around him, getting increasingly blood spattered as he chops his way through his assailants.
The whole scene is dizzying, fantastically choreographed, ultra-violent, and impressively filmed. It leaves you feeling sea sick and a bit drained — David Leitch’s Bullet Train uses similarly acrobatic camera techniques. It sets the tone for what’s to come.
When I said earlier that the film feels like a two-hour action sequence, I wasn’t lying. There is very, very little downtime. Poor old Carter is catapulted from one intense set piece to the next, punching, slashing, and shooting his way through various motorbike chases, car chases, and mid-air gun fights that take place following airplane explosions and lead on to yet more car chases. At one point Carter shoots his way through various enemies while rolling around in the back of a truck filled with grunting pigs; in another scene he hangs from a disintegrating rope bridge, Indiana Jones-style, casually shooting zombies (yes, zombies) attacking from both sides. Through all this the camera follows him like a roving insect, occasionally buzzing round him in a 360-degree loop or zooming into the air for a birds-eye view. It’s technically brilliant and exhausting to watch.
The body count is almost certainly higher than the number of lines of dialogue spoken.
The screenplay, written by the director with Jung Byeongsik, is minimal. The body count is almost certainly higher than the number of lines of dialogue spoken. Scenes of conversation, when they do take place, typically see a new character appearing to feed Carter information, video game NPC-style, before they disappear, sometimes never to be seen again. The story feels like little more than a device to manoeuvre Carter from one shootout to the next.
The quantity and scale of this action is both Carter‘s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. It’s all very well done, but there’s just too much of it. It’s a sensory overload that makes that Chris Hemsworth movie Extraction look slow, and not in a good way. Pummelling the audience with constant, intense action makes us eventually numb to what we’re watching, and left me feeling that some more down time and dialogue would have helped me care about the characters and appreciate the fight scenes even more.
Instead, like the main character, we’re barely given time to draw breathe — and the film suffers for it.
Netflix’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s classic comic series The Sandman is finally upon us. After years in development hell, the dream lord Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) takes to the screen in a 10-episode run that covers the first 16 issues of the comic.
But as is often the case when a comic is adapted from page to screen, a number of changes have to be made to ensure that the story flows and works for the medium. We watched season 1 of The Sandman and compared it to the comic book to find the biggest differences between the original and the adaptation.
In their review of The Sandman, Mason Downey said “The road to get here has been long, with the project entering and exiting various stages of production with different creatives at the helm for almost as long as the comic series itself has existed. So to say expectations–and anxiety–around the final result of such a protracted effort are high would be putting it lightly.”
All episodes of The Sandman are now streaming on Netflix.
Let’s start with one of the biggest changes to The Sandman: the expanded role of the Corinthian.
In the comic series, the Corinthian is Morpheus’ masterpiece, “a black mirror made to reflect everything about itself that humanity will not confront.” Despite this grand-sounding description, the Corinthian only appears as an antagonist in the Dollhouse arc and makes his first appearance in issue #10 of the comic. In the show, he’s presented as the big bad of the whole series, a malignant presence working behind the scenes to get one over on Morpheus from the beginning. He visits every major character who interacts with Morpheus over the course of the season, including Ethel Cripps, John Dee, and even Roderick Burgess, carefully nudging them into Morpheus’ path and out of his.
Roderick Burgess, Lord Magus of the Order of the Ancient Mysteries, inadvertently captures Morpheus during a summoning ritual while attempting to capture Death. Over the course of the first episode of Netflix’s Sandman adaptation, Burgess (Charles Dance) reveals that he had a son named Randall who died at Gallipoli and that he tries to capture Death in order for Randall to be returned from the dead. In the comic, Roderick only has one son, Alex, and wishes to imprison Death merely so that he can live forever.
In the comic, Roderick dies naturally as a twisted, bitter old man. Very different to what happens in the show.
The show expands the role of Jessamy, Morpheus’ previous companion before Matthew the Raven fell into his service. Jessamy makes a brief appearance in issue #29 of Sandman, “Thermidor,” an issue set in the 1700s where Morpheus must ask Lady Johanna Constantine for help retrieving something precious to him. In the show, Jessamy is aware of Morpheus’ imprisonment in the basement of Fawney Rig and attempts to free him by setting a fire as a distraction.
There are a number of small changes made to the biblical brothers Cain and Abel. In the comic, the two are residents of the Dreaming, and Cain’s gargoyle, Gregory, finds a weakened Morpheus after he escapes Burgess’ clutches. Cain and Abel attempt to nurse Morpheus back to health, but he only regains a sliver of strength when he absorbs their letters of commission, which he initially made. Goldie is not a gift to the brothers from Morpheus but a gift from Cain to Abel.
In the show, Gregory the gargoyle is absorbed by the Dream Lord to help him rebuild the Dreaming.
There are also a few tweaks made to John Dee’s story and history. In the comic, he’s imprisoned at Arkham Asylum, after being arrested by the Justice League for using the Dreamstone. While his mother Ethel Cripps does visit him in jail, it’s brief and they don’t discuss his father or reconnect. He’s later informed of her death by a guard, Ethel’s haunting rapid aging doesn’t happen.
John Dee’s major motivation in the comic is to use the Dreamstone to make the world mad, so they’d have no choice but to accept him as king. In the show, after years of being lied to, he simply wants to use the stone to make people tell the truth. When he’s driven by Rosemary the taxi driver, he ends up killing her, but in the show, he sees the good in her, and gives her his amulet of protection.
In the comic, it’s John Constantine that helps Morpheus track down his missing sand pouch, but the show had to substitute him for Johanna. Author Neil Gaiman has previously stated that the rights situation with John Constantine is “certainly circumscribed right now,” and revealed back in 2021 that the plan was always to have Jenna Coleman play both Lady Johanna Constantine from the 1700s and modern day Johanna Constantine.
The Casanova Club sequence in the show is mentioned briefly in the comic (it’s from Hellblazer #11), and explains why Constantine suffers from nightmares. Johanna needing to exorcize a princess is not in The Sandman.
Choronzon, the demon who ends up with Morpheus’ helm and takes it to Hell, is originally the one who is challenged to play the oldest game by the Dream Lord. In the show, Choronzon chooses Lucifer Morningstar to be its champion.
In the Netflix series, Miranda Walker has died, and Rose is called to the UK to be interviewed by a mysterious foundation, whereas in the comic, Miranda and Rose travel together to meet Unity Kinkaid, later revealed to be Miranda’s mother.
Jed’s role plays out a little differently in the Netflix series. In his dreams, he is a superhero known as The Sandman, but in the comic, it is Lyta’s husband Hector who takes on the mantle after being tricked by two nightmares, Brute and Glob. Lyta and Hector live in the Dream Dimension, a pocket dimension of the Dreaming that Brute and Glob tried to turn into their own realm in Morpheus’ absence. In the show, Lyta’s pregnancy progresses at a rapid pace, but in the comic, she’s pregnant for years.
Gault is a shape-shifting nightmare that yearns to be a dream, offering Jed dreams of being The Sandman to escape the reality of living with his abusive foster parents. Gault is a new character for the Netflix series, but some aspects of the character are a mashup of the two other escaped nightmares, Brute and Glob.
The cereal convention, AKA the meet up of serial killers, plays out a little differently. First of all, the organizers do not imitate the Corinthian’s crimes to get him to attend: he calls them up and asks to come.
Rose and Gilbert attend the convention alone, and Gilbert tells her to call out for Morpheus if she is ever in trouble. In the show, it is Jed who is attacked by Fun Land, but in the comic, it’s Rose, and she calls upon Morpheus to save her, meeting him for the first time.
Jed and Rose do not walk around the convention together, he’s been kidnapped by the Corinthian, and Gilbert finds him later on in the story, returning him to Rose.
It’s the best adaptation we could ask for
What happens when the stars of Stranger Things and Riverdale meet up to “do revenge” in a movie called exactly that?
The upcoming Netflix film, Do Revenge stars Camila Mendes as Drea, the queen bee at her posh private school. Her boyfriend Max (Austin Abrams) is the main suspect for sharing a sex tape of Drea’s to the school without her consent — to be clear, this is the non-consensual distribution of intimate content, which is against the law in many U.S. states.
Meanwhile, new transfer student Eleanor (Maya Hawke) is now at school with her old bully, Carissa (Ava Capri).
When they meet at tennis camp, Drea and Eleanor decide to what? Do revenge, yeah, you got it.
Brush up on The Sandman before the Netflix series premieres