GoodGrief741
Smash Legend
- Joined
- Sep 22, 2012
- Messages
- 10,169
"All he ever wanted out of life... was love. That's the tragedy of Charles Foster Kane. You see, he just didn't have any to give."
Chance: 23%
Charlie Kane is an interesting character to consider. The title character of the oft-called greatest movie of all time, portrayed by one of cinema's all-time visionaries Orson Welles, Kane should be a character anyone would want to parade around. The story is well known: Welles was an outsider to Hollywood, breaking rules he didn't even know existed; Kane was a brutal commentary on William Randolph Hearst, the media mogul of the time, who took it personally and made it his mission to stop the movie from succeeding by all means necessary; it infamously lost Best Picture, with its trophy going to How Green Was My Valley (a film that, might I add, is frankly quite bad, irrespective of comparison's to Welles' opus). The legend is likely better known than the plot of the film itself, and, like most classics, it's likely discussed more than seen nowadays.
I don't know, taking that into account, if I were WB I'd go around life doing the corporate equivalent of wearing a Citizen Kane t-shirt everywhere. Yet Warner's has historically been more reserved. Sure, there aren't many ways to prop it up nowadays; it's not like you can suddenly turn it into a franchise. Still, in today's IP dominated era, studios are doing everything they can to leverage everything they own, no matter how big, old, or prestigious it is (see how Paramount is "bringing back" The Godfather through their show The Offer, an apocryphal fictionalization of its making-of).
Citizen Kane doesn't need to be popular with today's audiences to be a big deal; everyone knows it. Kane getting added would be a huge deal for the game (picture the headlines: "MultiVersus is now the Citizen Kane of platform fighters - literally!" It sells itself) and it would also serve as a reminder to cinephiles everywhere that to watch Citizen Kane - along with the entire RKO Pictures and Turner Classic Media libraries - you need only subscribe to HBO Max. To anyone who's left Netflix because of the lack of legacy content, that's a big deal.
So, that's why it would happen. But will it? Ehhh, there are some reasons against it. There would probably be likeness agreements to sort out, and Welles' family might not be too fond of the idea of their ancestor fighting Rick Sanchez. He is also a regular man, although I love the concept
ᑐᑌᑎᑕ
proposed. It's worth pointing out that Space Jam 2 contained no references to Citizen Kane, despite some deep cuts from the library, and its black-and-white world was based on Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, two hardboiled Bogie flicks that might translate smoother to the fighter genre. But the most important point against his inclusion is the one that turns all the positives into negatives: that Citizen Kane is simply too prestigious, and including it in the funny fighter with UI Shaggy and cosmetic microtransactions would be disrespectful to one of cinema's masterpieces.
... I'm not sure I even disagree with that last one. But I'm erring on the side of optimism right now and feeling like he has a solid shot. After all, in his own words: "There's only one person in the world who decides what I'm going to do, and that's me." If Kane wants to run a newspaper, or run for governor, or run down Tom & Jerry with his sled, then run he will, dammit.
Want: 95%
What is there to say about the man who had everything and nothing, about the movie called the greatest ever? Well, for one, that I agree. But really, it's all been said: Welles, Mank, Toland, Rosebud, Xanadu, deep focus, the enigmatic and unreliable narrative, the incisive (condemning?) view of the American Dream, politics, wealth, the media, love, friendship, death and loss... It's all there, you've either seen Citizen Kane or you'll put it off until, like Kane himself, you're old and regretful and too late to make amends.
This section is moreso me grappling with whether I would want Kane in MultiVersus to happen. I do the writeups before the scores (and have been known to forget them altogether), so this is an exercise in convincing myself as much as you. And frankly... I would like for WB to promote Kane more (and classic films in general). I find it to be at the crossroads of many issues. Of course it's cliche (yet true) to say Kane is still relevant and that its themes resonate with modernity's own issues; that's what makes it a classic. Still, when a former president admits to identifying with Kane, it's worth putting the film in front of people's eyes so they can see what that means. We're also seeing a trend towards the internationalization of movies, with subbed works becoming more and more mainstream (see: Parasite, Squid Game); why not normalize black-and-white in the same manner? Many complain about the death of the adult movie in the face of superheroes and other franchises; why not fight back by propping up classic films that young people today would enjoy?
At the end of the day, if you put something on a pedestal, it'll be too high up for people to appreciate it; you can put Citizen Kane on display in a museum, where people can't lay a hand on it — or you can bring it down to Earth, so that people actually keep engaging with it. Its reputation will outlive us all, it can withstand people actually seeing the movie and talking about it in a modern context (if anything, it might be enriched by it). So I guess what I'm saying is, it's on Warner to make Citizen Kane cool, and everyone - the movie, its owners, and the people who are introduced to it - would benefit. People today are spoiled for choice, constantly bombarded with content new and old and in between. Things just don't stand out on their own, they need relevance, and MultiVersus is relevance. If MultiVersus gets people to watch the greatest movie of all time, I think we can all take the embarrassment of watching good ol' Charlie Kane tank a pie in the face.
Plus it'd be funny.
Noms: Bilbo
It's interesting. Bilbo actually predates Kane by 4 years, yet feels way likelier. Goes to show how franchise potential, not age, makes all the difference for studios.
Chance: 23%
Charlie Kane is an interesting character to consider. The title character of the oft-called greatest movie of all time, portrayed by one of cinema's all-time visionaries Orson Welles, Kane should be a character anyone would want to parade around. The story is well known: Welles was an outsider to Hollywood, breaking rules he didn't even know existed; Kane was a brutal commentary on William Randolph Hearst, the media mogul of the time, who took it personally and made it his mission to stop the movie from succeeding by all means necessary; it infamously lost Best Picture, with its trophy going to How Green Was My Valley (a film that, might I add, is frankly quite bad, irrespective of comparison's to Welles' opus). The legend is likely better known than the plot of the film itself, and, like most classics, it's likely discussed more than seen nowadays.
I don't know, taking that into account, if I were WB I'd go around life doing the corporate equivalent of wearing a Citizen Kane t-shirt everywhere. Yet Warner's has historically been more reserved. Sure, there aren't many ways to prop it up nowadays; it's not like you can suddenly turn it into a franchise. Still, in today's IP dominated era, studios are doing everything they can to leverage everything they own, no matter how big, old, or prestigious it is (see how Paramount is "bringing back" The Godfather through their show The Offer, an apocryphal fictionalization of its making-of).
Citizen Kane doesn't need to be popular with today's audiences to be a big deal; everyone knows it. Kane getting added would be a huge deal for the game (picture the headlines: "MultiVersus is now the Citizen Kane of platform fighters - literally!" It sells itself) and it would also serve as a reminder to cinephiles everywhere that to watch Citizen Kane - along with the entire RKO Pictures and Turner Classic Media libraries - you need only subscribe to HBO Max. To anyone who's left Netflix because of the lack of legacy content, that's a big deal.
So, that's why it would happen. But will it? Ehhh, there are some reasons against it. There would probably be likeness agreements to sort out, and Welles' family might not be too fond of the idea of their ancestor fighting Rick Sanchez. He is also a regular man, although I love the concept
ᑐᑌᑎᑕ
proposed. It's worth pointing out that Space Jam 2 contained no references to Citizen Kane, despite some deep cuts from the library, and its black-and-white world was based on Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, two hardboiled Bogie flicks that might translate smoother to the fighter genre. But the most important point against his inclusion is the one that turns all the positives into negatives: that Citizen Kane is simply too prestigious, and including it in the funny fighter with UI Shaggy and cosmetic microtransactions would be disrespectful to one of cinema's masterpieces.... I'm not sure I even disagree with that last one. But I'm erring on the side of optimism right now and feeling like he has a solid shot. After all, in his own words: "There's only one person in the world who decides what I'm going to do, and that's me." If Kane wants to run a newspaper, or run for governor, or run down Tom & Jerry with his sled, then run he will, dammit.
Want: 95%
What is there to say about the man who had everything and nothing, about the movie called the greatest ever? Well, for one, that I agree. But really, it's all been said: Welles, Mank, Toland, Rosebud, Xanadu, deep focus, the enigmatic and unreliable narrative, the incisive (condemning?) view of the American Dream, politics, wealth, the media, love, friendship, death and loss... It's all there, you've either seen Citizen Kane or you'll put it off until, like Kane himself, you're old and regretful and too late to make amends.
This section is moreso me grappling with whether I would want Kane in MultiVersus to happen. I do the writeups before the scores (and have been known to forget them altogether), so this is an exercise in convincing myself as much as you. And frankly... I would like for WB to promote Kane more (and classic films in general). I find it to be at the crossroads of many issues. Of course it's cliche (yet true) to say Kane is still relevant and that its themes resonate with modernity's own issues; that's what makes it a classic. Still, when a former president admits to identifying with Kane, it's worth putting the film in front of people's eyes so they can see what that means. We're also seeing a trend towards the internationalization of movies, with subbed works becoming more and more mainstream (see: Parasite, Squid Game); why not normalize black-and-white in the same manner? Many complain about the death of the adult movie in the face of superheroes and other franchises; why not fight back by propping up classic films that young people today would enjoy?
At the end of the day, if you put something on a pedestal, it'll be too high up for people to appreciate it; you can put Citizen Kane on display in a museum, where people can't lay a hand on it — or you can bring it down to Earth, so that people actually keep engaging with it. Its reputation will outlive us all, it can withstand people actually seeing the movie and talking about it in a modern context (if anything, it might be enriched by it). So I guess what I'm saying is, it's on Warner to make Citizen Kane cool, and everyone - the movie, its owners, and the people who are introduced to it - would benefit. People today are spoiled for choice, constantly bombarded with content new and old and in between. Things just don't stand out on their own, they need relevance, and MultiVersus is relevance. If MultiVersus gets people to watch the greatest movie of all time, I think we can all take the embarrassment of watching good ol' Charlie Kane tank a pie in the face.
Plus it'd be funny.
Noms: Bilbo
It's interesting. Bilbo actually predates Kane by 4 years, yet feels way likelier. Goes to show how franchise potential, not age, makes all the difference for studios.
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). Beyond that, he appears in, well, most serialized Superman media eventually: he was a big bad in Smallville, in the 2000s Justice League series and its sequel, in a variety of direct-to-DVD animated projects, in the Injustice video game series, in the LEGO Batman video game series, etc etc etc.
