Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Is The Latest Project To Skewer Pathetic, Attention-Seeking Billionaires
This post contains spoilers for "Scott Pilgrim Takes Off."
"Scott Pilgrim Takes Off" is full of surprises. The new Netflix anime "reboot" of the familiar franchise, which features characters from Bryan Lee O'Malley's comics (O'Malley co-created the show) and voice actors from Edgar Wright's movies, takes a narrative left turn right out of the gate. Instead of winning his fight against Ramona's first evil ex Matthew Patel (Satya Bhabha), Scott (Michael Cera) loses, seemingly dying and staying dead for the majority of the season.
That isn't the only major twist in the increasingly meta series, though. Fans also get a time-traveling older Scott (Will Forte), several unlikely romantic couplings, an arc featuring a filmmaker named Edgar Wrong, and redemption stories for several major villains. In general, "Scott Pilgrim Takes Off" seems to take the road less traveled by O'Malley's first version of the story, reimagining its bad guys as complex characters who haven't reckoned with their faults and questioning the goodness of its heroes. Somewhere along the way, it even turns supervillain Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman) into Gordon Goose, who for a while is kind of just a normal guy.
Gideon Graves is out, Matthew Patel is in
The catalyst for Gideon's de-throning as head of the League of Evil Exes comes when Matthew wins a fight against him and, as a result, takes over ownership of all his assets. This quickly turns Patel into the billionaire a-hole, while Gideon ends up becoming besties with Lucas Lee (Chris Evans) and spends his time playing Twister and paintball while a Vampire Weekend song plays. Matthew, meanwhile, turns into a narcissistic jerk who ends up playing Scott in a musical about his life — one that becomes the setting for a final showdown involving the evil exes and an even older version of Scott. Unlike real rich guys' attempts to make art, though, the play actually goes well, and the crowd ends up carrying Matthew out of the theater and dubbing him "The Bad Boy of Broadway."
The billionaire-ification and resulting fragile ego of Matthew Patel are part of a much larger trend in TV and film that takes more than a little inspiration from real-life tease-worthy rich guys like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. "Succession" skewered Musk and famously eccentric billionaires like Daniel Ek with season 4's Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård), while last year's "Glass Onion" put a Musk-like entrepreneur in the center of a murder mystery that played on his many character weaknesses. In the sweet and surprisingly self-reflective world of "Scott Pilgrim Takes Off," though, power changes hands quickly and even the villains are more fun than evil. When Gideon admits he wants his power back, Matthew gives it to him, and the pair hold hands and share a joyful laugh that turns hilariously sinister.
'You think I enjoy being a CEO?'
There's a self-awareness to Matthew and Gideon that real-life wealthy public figures just don't seem to have, but their final exchange sounds like something we wish Musk would say. "You think I enjoy being a CEO? I've lost billions!" Matthew admits to Gideon. "Is there any way you would take the empire back? Just let me keep my show, and the rest of it is yours." The Twitter (now X) CEO has lost billions on his social media takeover, and reports indicate that he's clearly miserable about his bad reputation at least some of the time, but he just can't seem to let the Elon show stop going. In the fantastical world of Scott Pilgrim, Matthew's random attempt to make everyone love him works ("I like Matthew now!" one audience member declares, hilariously on-the-nose), because cool fights are the true currency of this universe.
"Scott Pilgrim Takes Off" might have a silly, lighthearted take on wealth and villainy, but it also packs a whole lot of subtle sincerity into its short runtime. By season's end, both Scott and Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winestead) have fought off their worst fears about their future selves, instead choosing a present-day relationship that's healthy and happy. Of course, the show ends with one last threatening postscript from Gideon, so it's not a complete happy ever after. Freaking billionaires!
"Scott Pilgrim Takes Off" is now streaming on Netflix.