At Freaksugar, we haven’t done much – well, any – reporting on the news that Zack Snyder would be handling directing duties on Justice League following 2016’s Superman vs. Batman.
We’re going to get to that in a second, but first, I’d live to give you a somewhat overdue mission statement for our site as we near the end of our first month since the site launched in beta. Those of us who started this site were refugees from larger corporate sites, which approached so-called “geek culture” with a broad brush. Basically, the approach there was to cover the big names, and the largest events in pop culture, leaving room in the cracks for smaller, weirder things to get through.
The promise of FreakSugar, at its inception, was to take the time to focus on the cracks, on the weird. Whether that’s sharing a collection of superhero wedding rings with you, or taking a look at fan-zines, or reviewing an idiosyncratic revenge movie like Blue Ruin (seriously, go see that). Our goal was to cast a wider net than we’ve had the chance to in a past, bringing some of the strange, shiny things that might have been missed in some of our more mainstream reporting and criticism.
Now I serve as the Managing Editor for Entertainment, meaning what we cover in the realm of film and television is generally at my discretion. And when the news about the Justice League movie broke, when nearly every site you can think of had written something about it by midday Monday, I couldn’t muster a single, interesting piece of commentary on a story that was, to my mind, pretty cut and dry, and frankly I’m kind of sick and tired of talking about the fledgling DC Cinematic universe.
This was a dumb call for any number of reasons.
You see, a Justice League movie – in whatever shape it takes, whoever is at the helm – is the kind of thing that should get caught in that big net. It’s not just a big story, it speaks to decades of fandom and the shape of superhero movies for years to come. With Zack Snyder at the helm (joined by writer David Goyer), we’re seeing DC doubling down on the vision of Man of Steel as well as some of the aesthetic and tonal choices being made at DC Comics. That is the story, and that is what I should have taken the time to talk about here at FreakSugar.
Whether from fatigue or a very well-documented hate-on for Man of Steel (get some drinks in me and I’ll tell you why I think it’s one of the most culturally toxic movies of the last decade), I forgot our mission statement here at FreakSugar and made a distinction between “good” and “bad” geek news stories, while neglecting the more crucial question of what’s an important or culturally relevant story. In the future, I’ll do my best to make that distinction and join my colleagues in bringing you not only great reporting and criticism, but the kind that’s important to you.