What’s Going on With David Robert Mitchell’s ‘Heroes and Villains’?

Back in of May, in 2020, MGM announced they had picked up David Robert Mitchell’s "Heroes and Villains.” This was said to be a “genre-bending” take on superheroes that Mitchell would write and direct for the studio.

Since then, almost three years later, there’s been total radio silence on the film. A lot has changed since then, most notably MGM being bought by Amazon. Has the project been scrapped? I reached out to Amazon for comment, but no reply yet.

David Robert Mitchell, the filmmaker behind “Under the Silver Lake” and “It Follows”, jumping into the world of superheroes is an intriguing proposition. He’s one of the most promising young directors out there. “It Follows” was a Cannes-championed movie that was one of the best offerings of the horror genre in ages.

The Initial release for Mitchell's follow-up, "Under the Silver Lake," had been postponed by a year after the negative reviews greeted it at Cannes. Mitchell is a rule-breaking filmmaker, his work in that film shouldn’t have been shrugged off the way it did.

The main problem with ‘Silver Lake’ was that there was no there there, an L.A. odyssey about Sam (Andrew Garfield), a Peeping Tom-turned-amateur-detective who tries to crack the conspiracy case of a missing person which he believes may be hidden in pop-culture artifacts. The evidence he uncovers leads him to vanish into the L.A. underworld, where nothing is as it seems; girl gangs, tween vandalists, a dog killer, a missing millionaire among other distractions Mitchell lays out for us.

A passionate cult following has ensued for the film, with even the creation of a popular subreddit group still trying to figure out the film’s mysteries four years since its release. It was a fascinating exercise in atmosphere and tension, Mitchell is one of the few directors out there who can capture what dreams really feel like.