This Week in Gossip #12

AI sucks, Suits rules, the Billboard 100 is fake, and that rap diss reply is terrible.

Apologies for this delayed issue. The Oscar nominations ended up taking up most of last week, as well as the column inches for entertainment news, so I thought it’d be fine to roll it over a week for a mega-issue of TWIG! After this, things will return to normal, unless awards season continues to ruin my life!

1. Christopher Reeve’s Family Did Not Approve That Ghoulish Cameo in The Flash

I feel like I have to talk about AI bullsh*t at least once a week in this newsletter because this is just where the industry is going, whether the rest of the planet wants it or not. SAG-AFTRA and the WGA spent much of last year on strike because of Hollywood’s eagerness to replace humans with bots (and SAG-AFTRA’s deal seems to have thrown a lot of workers under the bus.) As a pop culture writer in a business where websites are regularly gutted and turned into AI clickbait farms, I take this matter very seriously. Whatever state AI is in right now, and whatever so-called good it can be used for, it’s clear as things currently stand that the powers that be have no altruistic hunger in their agenda.

Still, it’s always a surprise to see just how ghoulish they’re willing to be. Will, Matthew and Alexandra Reeve, the children of the late actor Christopher Reeve, are currently at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival promoting Super/Man, a documentary about his life and work. They were asked by Variety about their father's CGI cameo in The Flash and what they thought of it. They did not approve it, nor did they watch the terrible movie itself. Oof.

This is, alas, not all that shocking. The way that the film was sold was a total nightmare thanks to the Ezra Miller of it all, and the cameo fest of past DC heroes was clearly pushed out to get people to cling to nostalgia in a film that was otherwise a mess. This strategy is usually successful for this genre. Spider-Man: No Way Home revelled in its multiverse cameos. But all of those actors were alive and got paid to turn up on-set and do their thing. Reeve passed away years ago, and spent many years in a wheelchair following the accident that left him paralyzed. CGI-ing his young face onto an able-bodied faceless model for a “hey, look at that” scene feels, at best, tacky. Even if the family were involved, I think a lot of fans would have felt weird about it. Without the Reeve children’s consent, it’s just gross.

The reducing of a man’s work and legacy to franchise padding is one of the things that drives the opposition to AI in the industry. We saw how the AMPTP wanted to own actors’ images in perpetuity, regardless of their consent. They didn’t want to use them to build upon a legend’s legacy: they wanted to exploit them and not pay for the embarrassment. George Reeve, the first on-screen Superman, also made a CGI cameo in The Flash. He has no surviving family members, and in life, he desperately tried to get away from being known only as Superman. I doubt he would have wanted this indignity either (there’s a really good film on Reeve called Hollywoodland that you should watch, and it features a career-best Ben Affleck in the lead role.)

Christopher Reeve left behind a mighty legacy, not just as Clark Kent but as a sinfully underrated character actor turned activist who lobbied for human rights and environmental causes before lobbying for stem cell and spinal injury research. This new documentary seems to offer a fuller vision into his life than any shoddy AI cameo ever could.