Hacker Cinema
Dick Tracy
1990 · Film · 105 min
Directed by Warren Beatty
The comic strip detective finds his life vastly complicated when Breathless Mahoney makes advances towards him while he is trying to battle Big Boy Caprice's united mob.
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8 comments on Hacker News
> So is Warren being an asshole here? I mean, we haven't seen a Dick Tracy movie since the 90s. I am out of the loop so trying to understand.
Well the rights were held by Disney from 1988 until 2005, and then they were tied up in court (between Beatty and Tribune) until 2011, when Beatty won the rights. The movie you're referring to was released in 1990.
So Beatty has held the rights for only 14 of those 35 years. Although the first special he made was released in 2010, during that legal battle.
So is Warren being an asshole here? I mean, we haven't seen a Dick Tracy movie since the 90s. I am out of the loop so trying to understand.
Sorta related since Disney held a share in it previously but Dick Tracy exclusive rights are still held by Warren Beatty who produced and starred in the role back in 1990. He had to fight off a challenge from Tribune Media in court decades ago but stipulation was he had to produce new Dick Tracy stuff every few years. It’s lead to a series of increasingly surreal late night specials on TCM where he appears in character and talks about random stuff and the 1990 movie, last time was in 2023: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKncYwtec4
Dick Tracy might have been the best comic book film of the 90s; I thought it was quite well done, and where it failed it mostly failed by being true to its source material.
What is its competition; Judge Dredd? Captain America(1990)? The 90s Batman sequels? Now that I wrote this, I realize Blade was also a comic originally, but I liked Tracy better.
God, I fucking hate the current color grading trend of killing every color except for two opposing ones (usually amber and blue) and then pushing almost everything else into a chiarscuro of inky shadows.
Watch a 90s movie sometime and it will make you weep for how beautiful today's movies could be.
For superhero movies in particular, I think a big part of this is a deliberate attempt to distance themselves from the stigma that comics are for kids. They want to sell to an adult audience but adults feel foolish if they consume something too clearly sanitized and kid friendly.
The last thing any Hollywood director wants to do is make their superhero movie look like 1990's "Dick Tracy", or something in the Spy Kids franchise because it will drive adult audiences away. So they slather the whole fucking thing in grimdark so it looks like serious grown-up stuff who are too insecure in their maturity to watch a silly movie about dudes in spandex doing magical acrobatics and punching each other.
(This is also why so much YA fiction which is heavily read by adults is dystopian. And it's why modern superhero movies so rarely have characters use their actual superhero titles, which sounds corny.)
It was even more exciting two lifetimes ago.
In short order people got electric light (magic! just flick a switch), phonographs (on hearing one, people apparently went looking for the soprano behind the curtain), moving pictures (there are stories of audiences being panicked by a film--black and white, 16 fps, grainy, silent, and all--of a train coming toward the camera), radio (plays, orchestras, and other entertainment from hundreds of miles away), and all sorts of wonderful houshold appliances like refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and electric heaters and stoves which saved tens of hours per week. And glow-in-the-dark radium watches, and telephones.
Having lived through these (in a rural area, things came a bit later than in the big cities) my mother-in-law was unimpressed by the movies about Buck Rogers rocketing around the solar system and Dick Tracy's video wristwatch, taking them as just things that hadn't made it to her town yet.
I watched Warren Beatty's "Dick Tracy" movie (from 1990?) last week and as part of the plot, one mobster (played by Al Pacino) mattert-of-factly sent thungs-dressed-as-cops to "arrest" and later kill a competing mobster.
I'm sure if you go take a stroll down the history of crime, both fictionalized and real, this has happened tens of times.
"The recent release of the big-budget Dick Tracy movie had been a disappointment"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Tracy_%281990_film%29
Budget $46 million[1] Box office $162,738,726 (worldwide) $60,611,000 (rentals)
disappointment?