And I want monkey butlers and a swimming pool filled with vodka

There are endless examples of headlines that should not pass for headlines in 2020 as journalism continues to die a slow and painful death. But that doesn't mean they are all without value, or that we really even need to count them as journalism. Sometimes a headline is just a headline.

There's enough of the old school in me, though, that I feel like the existence of a headline itself confers additional importance, not to mention parts of the story beyond what is conveyed in the headline. You should not be able to read the headline and know the whole story.

And so it is that the website MovieWeb provides a considerable challenge for me.

On the one hand, I like movie news (though don't consume as much as I once did) and I like the way MovieWeb presents its information. I get an email from them a couple times a week that contains about eight headlines, probably one or two of which I will actually click into. These are unabashedly geek oriented, with minor cast announcements in upcoming superhero films and sometimes speculations about remakes or adaptations being in the works. I've got my complaints about these and I feel like I've made them before on this blog, though I can't remember exactly when. But at least these things qualify as news in the broadest definition of that word.

What I'm about to discuss does not, I think, qualify as news in any sense.

Here was a headline from this week's email:

Where to start with this?

Let's start small with my journalistic hangups and click maximization concerns. The headline tells the whole "story," such as it is, and the subhead provides additional context. There's really no reason to click into this "story." If I were one of the advertisers on the subsequent page, I'd be pissed.

But I wouldn't have written the post just for that. No, it's the utter non-newsworthiness of the story that has inspired me to put fingers to keyboard today.

Why do I care if Finn Wolfhard wants to play a part that, as far as I know, does not exist, in a movie that, as far as I know, does not exist?

Sure, making a movie about a young Ben Solo is certainly one way Disney could take their property, but I haven't heard anything about it. And if it's not even at the script stage, it doesn't seem particularly likely that Wolfhard would be the right age to play the character when a movie actually went into production. He's already 17 now, though he did just turn 17 in December. I guess it depends how young they want this young Kylo Ren to be.

But what galls me about the story is not that Wolfhard said he was interested, but that MovieWeb picked it up as a story. Wolfhard can say whatever he wants on Twitter, which is, indeed, where he said it. I don't need 1/8th of my twice-weekly MovieWeb email devoted to it, though.

Because I like to cover my bases, I did indeed click into the story, which gives me a bit more context for it. Wolfhard was replying to fans suggesting he would make a good younger version of Adam Driver, and in fact, there have been memes out there that imagine him as a young Ben/Kylo (before morphing into Alan Rickman's Severus Snape, or so I'm told). Almost as though he felt like he were forced to comment, Wolfhard suggests he would love to play the role.

The article does, then, dutifully acknowledge that no such project exists, several times. So it's not the actual writer of the story who is hyping something he knows does not exist. If anything he seems to gently chide Wolfhard for forcing him to write a story about him, which I suppose would also be a shot at his own editors who demanded such a story. However, he does also mention that Marvel is producing a comic book series about young Ben Solo, which, nowadays, is as sure a path to the cinema as any.

What I guess I'm saying is that this whole thing is not totally off base and no individual person deserves scorn for ushering it into my eyeballs. I guess I'm really criticizing the age we live in, in which random Twitter comments provide the basis for entire "news" stories, and where someone's idle thinking out loud about their wants and needs is considered "newsworthy" in some broad definition of the word. Especially when those thoughts are so obvious. I mean, who wouldn't want the fame that went along with joining the Star Wars universe? I'm sure Anthony Hopkins would want to play a young Kylo Ren if you asked him to.

The reason I wrote this piece is also due to the accumulation of such stories over the years at MovieWeb. Since I don't delete my emails and can easily filter my inbox by searching the word "MovieWeb," I've gathered together a number of other egregious examples of this phenomenon that got me to this point:

There are other examples that are more egregious, but I got tired of looking and besides, you get the idea.

Maybe it just bothers me that MovieWeb is trying to do the work that these actors' agents should be doing. Actually, if I were someone in the position to cast these people, I'd be annoyed that they "went to the media" about these things instead of directly to the studio. It would almost specifically make me not want to cast them. You do cast them, and you seem too predictable by half.

I suppose instead of isolating this phenomenon, I should lump it in with other things MovieWeb does that bother me, like writing stories about fan art that puts a familiar face on an iconic character, or advertising the existence of new Funko Pop action figures for famous movie characters. (Or, in one case, for Guy Fieri.) In my research for this post I was also reminded of the time they told us about a particular movie chain switching from Coke to Pepsi.

Then again, this is a collection of ephemera by geeks for geeks, and if I'm reading it, I guess it's an admission that I'm just the kind of geek they are writing for.