Joshua Grover-David Patterson

In conclusion: In theaters, it's another Hocus Pocus: The audience would have come on video/streaming, and it probably would have taken years to build a fan base.

Dropped to streaming at the height of summer? Absolute win.

On streaming, in the summer, kids bored out of their minds looking for ANYTHING to do with their days? Perfect place for them to discover a fun family film with some highly danceable songs.

At least then stay-at-home parents can pretend their kids got some movement learning choreo.

Dropped into theaters, K-Pop Demon Hunters would have cost twice as much when Sony/Netflix threw marketing into the mix, and been in roughly three theaters if and when the soundtrack suddenly got some leverage.

Then it would have hit Netflix with a stink o' shame.

And that's not taking into account the movies that came out and either underperformed or tanked. I'm looking here at Elio.

And K-Pop Demon Hunters has... one star, who currently judges celebrity singers on Fox.

Yeah.

The movie doesn't have anything else to sell it. Had it come out in theaters, it would have been up against twin juggernauts Minecraft and Lilo and Stitch.

Not to mention How to Train Your Dragon.

You may like, or may hate those movies, and that's fine. But feel free to look up what those movies made. At least in the short term, they lost money. Maybe even big money.

And...

They had an expensive animated film with virtually nothing to sell it. However you feel about the title essentially tells you everything you need to know about it.

Much like, I don't know... Snakes on a Plane. Or Cocaine Bear.

I keep seeing people say "Netflix didn't know what they had!" when talking about K-Pop Demon Hunters.

Rest assured: They did.

As did Sony.

Granted: Almost no second acts are as good as the first. So, there's that, as well.

But, yeah. The second act doesn't really add anything and the "twists" are just there to try to keep plates spinning.

That's why it isn't as good.

As a story by itself, I think it's fine. But in the context it's supposed to be context-ing, it doesn't actually work.

Clearly, the story has brought happiness to millions, and millions of dollars as well.

I should be so lucky to do something like this.

If you've read the original Oz novels, you know the story of Dorothy's companions, and they don't match up with the ones in the show.

Moreover, while the story tries mightily to give some kind of happiness or at least a bittersweet ending, and it... doesn't really work in context.

The truth is, there's nothing for the second act to do.

There are twists, yes, but at the end of the first act we've established that the Wizard (spoilers, I guess?) is the bad guy and the Witch is the good guy.

Everything else is irrelevant or flat-out breaks the canon of the story.

Apparently, to the point where audience members sometimes leave after the first act.

Which is crazy, given the cost of theater tickets.

But I get it.

I thought it was weird that some people were thinking the movie would fix the problem -- because it isn't fixable.

I'm sort of amused every time I hear people talk about the fact that the second Wicked movie isn't as good as the first.

This despite the fact that it's more or less universally accepted that the second act of Wicked is a major step down from act one.

I can relate, though at this point I want to go a hotel room and not talk to anyone for like a year.

My only real concern is: Can the author keep it up?

He says he's got three books to go, so... fingers crossed.

And that's the third thing, really. The book works because it does a lot of things, and does them all pretty darn well. It's fun for gamers to suss out the rules. It's fun for Game of Thrones fans to follow all the politics. It's fun for people who just like good twists.

It's going to sound odd, but it reminds me of my favorite college game, asking someone to try to explain Pulp Fiction.

Inevitably, they would say, "Well, the story is told out of order," and then just stare at the wall, trying to tease out the threads of the story.

But there are just too many.

Second, the plot can't really be spoiled.

Unlike, say, Harry Potter, where you can spoil all the twists in about five sentences, so much happens in every DCC book that it would sound like utter nonsense to anyone who hasn't read it.

Dungeon Crawler Carl has absolutely taken over TikTok and, having read the first four books, I totally understand.

First, the author really gets the "do not bore me" clause. He seems to have a thing where, every seven pages or so, he says, "What's the worst thing that could happen?"

Then it does.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.

Either way, I hope these next two books knock it out of the park.

And if there's more after that, I'll try to savor every one of them.

But it's hard to envision a world where King isn't out there, somewhere, with another one in the pipeline.

Apparently his son, Joe Hill, has decided to take his 50s and put out a novel a year.

It feels, in some way, like he's trying to ease us all through the loss of his iconic father.

And the fact that his most recent novel had to be massively rewritten.

And... he only has two novels in the pipeline. The third Talisman book, and one more Holly novel.

I understand, of course, that King owes us nothing. He's written 80-something books, if my math is right.

But I really do think we're short on time, now. And I think Stephen knows it.

He sold his radio stations, of course.

But then, there's all the talk of his hip surgery. And how he's walking with a cane pretty much all the time, now.

I feel like I'm watching the final year or two of Stephen King's life play out, and I do not like it.

I suspect I like it even less because we've been here before. There was the van accident, yes, and then the announcement that he had a genetic eye disease that could one day make him blind.

I suspect most people already watched their Keaton faves when the news broke, but the next time you're looking for a movie that's basically a warm hug... this one is for you.

Bonus: Eugene Levy absolutely kills it, and Josh Peck has a great moment.

Put bluntly, it's a real standard script -- old friends meet up at a summer camp reunion decades later. It's been done. It's been done quite a bit.

But the cast, which is stellar, makes it work. It's a film funning on 98% charm.

I'm not going to claim it's brilliant -- but I will claim that it's the kind of movie they don't make very much these days. It's a movie for adults.

Shove it back three decades and it probably would have done Grumpy Old Men numbers.

Keaton's current last film, Summer Camp, came and went in 2024. My kid and I happened to catch it as a "blind" movie at our local theater -- you pay your $5 and you takes your chances.