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Say what you will about Space Jam: A New Legacy, but Don Cheadle really goes for it. He threatens, he cajoles, he chews the scenery with the enthusiasm of a rabid guinea pig. Just fully cannonballs into the role of a spurned genius exacting revenge. In the context of a movie that is, let's say, not on the Criterion short list, Cheadle imbues his character with the sort of fragile humanity you wouldn't expect in a movie that features Porky rapping. Which would be great, except that he's playing lines of code.

Here is a brief, not-nearly-complete list of Warner Bros. characters that appear in the movie Space Jam: A New Legacy: Harry Potter, Harley Quinn, Rick & Morty, Yogi Bear, Fred Flintstone, Space Ghost, the Matrix, Superman, Batman, King Kong, the Pink Panther, Pennywise the killer clown, the droogs from A Clockwork Orange, the Night King from Game of Thrones, and Rosey, the robot maid from The Jetsons. The complete roster runs to well over 100 entries, but this sampling should be enough to give you the flavor of what a random grab-bag of intellectual properties the movie presents. If the first Space Jam, released 25 years ago, was a brand summit between the Looney Tunes and the NBA, with Michael Jordan acting as the chief negotiator, its supercharged successor both literally and figuratively opens the vaults, zapping LeBron James into the "Warner 3000 Serververse," where all of the media conglomerate's holdings exist on the same plane. A New Legacy's villain and chief instigator is Don Cheadle's Al G. Rhythm, a Warner Bros. algorithm determined to get public recognition for his overlooked accomplishments. But what's noteworthy about the movie's garbage-dump of WB properties is just how arbitrary and non-algorithmic it feels. There's no apparent logic to what's included and what's left out, who makes the cut and who gets left to molder in some forgotten corner of the digital domain.

Warner Bros. made a point of releasing all its 2021 movies on HBO Max, and the service's next big movie is an appropriate nod to the digital world. The studio has released the first trailer for Space Jam: A New Legacy, and it's more of an ode to sci-fi than you might think. The movie has LeBron James whisked into a "Matrix hell" where he has to play basketball against a supervillain-like Goon Squad to rescue his son. That involves enlisting Bugs Bunny and friends for his squad, of course, but the references go further than that. James can count on help from The Iron Giant's namesake robot, for starters.