Let’s give a hand to the people at Universal Pictures … on a sleepy Wednesday with nary a silly controversy to be found, they dropped a not-very-Jem Jem and the Holograms preview for people to rant and rage about on the internet. There was so much anger we had to split the vitriol up into multiple articles.
Now Jem producer Jason Blum (also responsible for the Insidious, Sinister and Paranormal Activity movies) is responding to the outrage. During the press rounds for Insidious Chapter 3 (a real thing!) the folks at Topless Robot asked him what he thought of the backlash:
LYT: Can you reassure some of the fans right now who are a little upset at the way it looks and feel like it’s not true to the property from what they’ve seen?
JB: It is a hundred percent true to the spirit of Jem, like 100%, and I think that people will be very pleasantly surprised. So in that way it’s good — maybe lowering expectations is good. But I think people will be pleasantly surprised for sure.
…
I would just ask people to reserve judgment until they’ve seen the movie. I don’t judge a book by reading the book cover, and I just would ask people, don’t judge the movie by seeing the trailer. But if after they see the movie, they don’t like it? They can scream from the rooftops.
Fair enough. But to carry the book-by-its-cover metaphor a bit further, people were expecting a book called Jem and now they have a book called NOT REALLY JEM AT ALL. Blum says the movie is 100 percent true to the spirit of Jem, but what about the actual substance? Aside from some of the names and it being about a band, what other aspects of Jem were carried over?
It’s as if they made a Superman movie, but instead of Superman we get Clark Kent struggling to make it as a reporter at the Daily Planet. Sure, it might end up being a better movie than Superman Returns. But don’t be surprised when Superman fans call you out for the lack of, y’know, Superman.
(Via Topless Robot)
