Best of 2023: Hollywood Cancelled Max Landis So He's Making Weird Pitch Movie Hybrids on Youtube Where He Plays Many of the Roles That are Surreally Terrible
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You know that people hate you when your father’s arrogance resulted in the horrific deaths of two children and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s dad yet you are almost universally considered the worst member of your family.
Even before his sins and transgressions were exposed in the massive cultural reckoning of the #MeToo movement, Max Landis was hated on a level unusual even for a precociously successful, arrogant son of a celebrity.
Max Landis was too young. He was too successful. He was too cocky even for an industry that runs on narcissism.
It’s Max Landis! And he’s talking at you! VERY AGGRESSIVELY!
So when a lengthy 2019 article in The Daily Beast contained extensive allegations of all manner of abuse from eight women and Landis’ previously charmed existence cratered, there was widespread Schadenfreude over his swift downfall.
In the wake of the Daily Beast expose the Bright screenwriter was dropped by his manager and his management company and MGM shelved production of a Landis script it won a bidding war for.
Landis was removed as a producer from Shadow in the Cloud and had his screenplay re-written by Roseanne Liang following the allegations though Writer’s Guild rules gave Landis a writing credit on the film anyway.
Hollywood was excited to finally have an excuse to stop paying the accused sex criminal ungodly amounts of money for godawful screenplays like Bright. MeToo put an abrupt stop to the arrogant young wordsmith’s seemingly unstoppable rise.
The Chronicle screenwriter apparently decided that if studios weren’t going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on his second-hand ideas then dammit, he would bypass the corrupt Hollywood establishment entirely and bring his ideas to the people.
Instead of pitching blockbusters to studio executives Max Landis would pitch them to the masses, or at least users of the popular website Youtube.
This morning I learned from a much appreciated patron and reader named Zack Smith that, in a fit of coked-up ambition worthy of Heaven’s Gate-era Michael Cimino, Max Landis turned his ideas for a D.C superhero team-up movie into a two hour long video that falls somewhere between a pitch, a staged reading and a major motion picture.
Hollywood was understandably relieved when it no longer had to have anything to do with the disgraced second-generation filmmaker so, in violent defiance of the universe’s wishes, Landis decided that he’d give them a two hour extravaganza that was nothing BUT Max Landis.
I consequently would to like to publicly curse Zach for making me spend over two hours inside Max Landis’ mind and imagination and also to thank him for bringing this abomination to my attention.
It’s the kind of atrocity I took great pleasure eviscerating in my book The Joy of Trash because it embodies a combination I find inherently fascinating and fun to write about: crazed narcissism wedded to a complete lack of self-consciousness or self-awareness.
The whole world told Max Landis’ creepy ass to stand down and shut the fuck up. So he decided that it really wanted was to be dazzled by a Texas-sized dose of him at his most obnoxious.
That’s what we get in the two hour monstrosity Max Landis Presents The Society: Endangered Species. It’s Max Landis uncut, uncensored, unfiltered and insufferable.
It’s essentially a one-man show that the Bright screenwriter got a LOT of help on. The rancid core of Max Landis Presents The Society: Endangered Species is Max Landis facing the camera and telling us what he clearly sees as the ultimate superhero spectacular, a movie that would do for comic books what Bright did for mismatched cop movies involving Orcs.
The vibe is Alfred Molina ranting about Rick Springfield in Boogie Nights but druggier, creepier and more self-indulgent.
The opening credits admonish viewers to smoke weed to get into the right frame of mind and to watch his creation on the biggest screen possible.
I did not smoke weed during the first hour I watched Max Landis Presents The Society: Endangered Species because I had a therapist appointment coming up. After the appointment I smoked pot in a desperate attempt to improve the experience. It did not.
Ah, but Landis does not spend all ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY TWO MINUTES OF Max Landis Presents The Society: Endangered Species talking to us, his friends who are totally chill and non-judgmental about that whole “plethora of sexual, emotional and physical abuse allegations.”
He spends much of the time jabbing excitedly at the camera but he also plays many, if not most of the roles in the story. Playing that number of roles requires an Eddie Murphy/Alec Guinness/Peter Sellers level of versatility and talent but Landis isn’t even an actor, just an egotist.
Max Landis plays Clark Kent/Superman in what appears to be a “Nerd” Halloween costume from Party City. He also plays Lex Luthor with a distractingly terrible bald cap.
For reasons I cannot begin to understand, Landis plays Barry Allen, AKA the Flash as a variation on John Mulaney and Nick Kroll “Oh Hello” characters. I’m not sure why the writer thought The Flash should talk and act like a neurotic middle-aged Jewish man from Manhattan but it certainly is a choice.
A terrible choice! All of Max’s choices are terrible here but he has so much self-confidence that it’s easy to get swept away in his excitement except that he’s the fucking worst and EXTREMELY unlikable.
I will be the first to admit that Max Landis is VERY good at pitching. It’s easy to see how an executive could become infected by the writer’s child-like delight in discussing his ideas, his words and himself that they would be convinced to spend WAY too much money on dodgy scripts.
Landis had extraordinary success before everything came crashing down around him for the following reasons.
His dad directed Animal House
His dad directed Trading Places
His dad directed Coming to America
His dad directed The Blues Brothers
His dad directed An American Werewolf in London
He’s very good at selling his ideas
He’s very confident
He’s white and straight and famous and rich
He’s cocky even for a nepo baby
Cult leaders don’t have as much misplaced faith in their ideas as Landis does here. There is a comically vast gulf between the vulgar, standard-issue nonsense Max Landis has written and performed and the transcendent, revelatory, game-changing masterpiece he’s convinced he’s written and must share with the public at any costs, even if that means playing multiple roles himself.
Then again, you don’t need talent or experience to play a softball team of some of the most famous and iconic characters in all of pop culture; you just need enthusiasm and delusional belief in yourself and your genius.
Max Landis Presents The Society: Endangered Species is a juvenile conception of an “adult” superhero movie where superheroes swear and do Molly and have sexual intercourse outside of marriage and the Green Arrow and Superman play Fuck, Marry, Kill.
Amazingly, Max Landis isn’t actually bald but wore a cap to create the illusion that he is.
In a world where James Gunn and The Boys exist do we really need a self-consciously “edgy” superhero movie? Don’t we have enough of that gloomily revisionist crap already?
In Max Landis Presents The Society: Endangered Species Green Arrow is a surfer bro but also extremely adept at fisticuffs. How adept?
In the single most embarrassing moment in a video full of them, Landis faces us directly and gushes of a fight scene he wrote, “Green Arrow is in a hand to hand fight with a 100 guys and he lives. Fuck John Wick! Fuck Jason Bourne! This is that next level fusion action choreography from Jackie Chan you’ve ever seen. But you haven’t seen it like this! Fighting style of John Wick, shot like Succession, tone of James Bond, that’s Green Arrow.”
In moments like these Max Landis might as well be acting out his screenplay using action figures from his childhood and have Wonder Woman and Superman make out as well as fight.
Also, you can’t just say that a fight scene will be fucking amazeballs; you actually have to write what will happen and how.
You can’t just write “A car chase ensues that’s twice as good as the one in The French Connection and then there’s this awesome explosion followed by an amazing fight scene” in a screenplay and expect to be taken seriously.
To be fair, however, what follows is, objectively, that next level fusion action choreography from Jackie Chan by way of John Wick, Succession and James Bond.
Elsewhere, Landis makes motorcycle noises during a chase to help us get into the right frame of mind.
Landis gets so excited thinking about Superman fighting Killer Croc at a steakhouse that he seems like he’s on the verge of whipping out his dick and getting himself off to his own voice and his own artistry.
In a line gloriously devoid of self-awareness, Landis has Lex Luthor tell a totally edgy, extreme and in your face Jimmy Olson, “Do you know what nepotism usually gives the sons of billionaires? Fat bellies and Russian whores, piles of cocaine that they eventually drown in. I ask you something? Is that me.”
To give Landis credit, he does not have a fat belly. That’s as far as I can go in terms of praise.
Ice to see Landis stretching by playing Mr. Freeze. Hopefully his performance won’t get a CHILLY reception!
Landis seems to think that all he has to do is show the world his unassailably brilliant vision for yet another schlocky blockbuster chockablock with costumed crime fighters and his banishment from Hollywood will end in a fever of love, acceptance and forgiveness.
If I were D.C, however, I’d watch about five minutes of the video then threaten to sue him unless he took it down immediately because it contains all sorts of intellectual property that the cancelled sex criminal does not own or have permission to use legally.
I’ve never seen anything quite like Max Landis Presents The Society: Endangered Species. I hope I never see anything like it ever again. I’ve built a career out of masochistically enduring the torments of the damned but this was a lot, even for me.
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