DICK TRACY ZOOMS IN (2023)

In 1990, Warren Beatty made a movie based on the comic strip of Dick Tracy. In general, fans of the comic strip love the film. There are so many ways one could make a live action film based on a newspaper strip but with so many colorful villains, it was difficult to get all of the popular villains into one movie. The 1990 movie was spectacular on many levels. (If anything, the film’s publicity was overshadowed by the fact that singer Madonna was playing a role.) The movie also accomplished something of a grand feat – it reintroduced the newspaper strip, 1960s cartoons and 1940s movies to a generation that never grew up with the character and became lifelong fans afterwards. (Full disclosure: I was one of them.)

Sadly, the studio heads and copyright holder would not let Warren Beatty make a sequel, and the copyright holders even tried to do create a television show without him. Beatty took this personal and with the assistance of his lawyers, found a loophole in his contract by locking up the screen rights so the rights holder cannot produce additional movies. 

Under the contractual stipulation, every couple of decades, Beatty makes a no-budget 20+ minute television special where he plays the role of Tracy, in costume. The terms of the contract is that if he did not produce another film with himself as Dick Tracy (in costume), the rights would revert back to the Chicago Tribune. So, once again, Beatty made another television special where he complains to Leonard Maltin about making movies today, the new tastes of youngsters watching movies on their smart phones… and criticizes his 1990 movie. 

Last week, at 85 years old, Beatty premiered his new one, called Dick Tracy Zooms In. Beatty had himself filmed from his office and the editors assembled all the footage. And, yes, these productions were ruled in a court of law as sequels. Beatty does this solely so that no other studio can use the character for another movie.

As someone on Facebook remarked: “This is art. This is some A+ Andy Kaufman-level trolling. I will never watch either of these specials, because the whole point is that they are unwatchable, low effort, and awful enough to be a middle finger to some bean-counting whipper snapper who made Warren Beatty mad in the 90s. But I am so happy they exist. I'd rather know these bird flips by an old man taking a grudge to the grave are in the world [compared to] a Dick Tracy Disney+ show starring Chris Pratt.”

 

I am providing a link for this new 25-minute television special for you to view and judge for yourself. Take it for what it is worth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwKncYwtec4&t=477s

And if you want to see the prior television special, the link for that one is below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFbiRK-UaY