2012's Dredd, despite what our review claims, is an excellent action movie—a solid way to bring a comic book character to film whose previous cinematic outing was a troubled mid ‘90s Sylvester Stallone vehicle. It also didn’t make much money, which means that, as much as we’d like to see Karl Urban and Olive Thirlby team up to fight for their lives against evil Game Of Thrones’ alumni again, a sequel isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
Still, that didn’t stop director Duncan Jones from doing a bit of fantasy casting for another Judge Dredd movie with a tweet that shows a picture of Josh Brolin captioned, “Judge Dredd. Fight me.”
Apparently taking that invitation to “fight me” personally, Karl Urban, Judge Dredd himself, soon replied with another picture: A wordless screenshot of Jones’ Warcraft movie’s 28% Rotten Tomatoes rating.
The simplicity of Urban’s response is far more brutal than anything the gun-toting supercop gets mixed up in Dredd itself, and it led Jones, in a since-deleted tweet, to play the same card by shooting back with a reminder that the 2005 Doom movie Urban starred in was received even more poorly than Warcraft.
There are no winners in this battle, which escalated quickly from “fun casting ideas” to total war in the space of a single tweet. Probably because of this, Jones has been spending today making clear that he likes Urban’s Dredd and he was just goofing around. Even so, when @iainl7 pointed out that “you did quite literally ask for [the response] with the words ‘fight me,’” Jones tweeted out the only appropriate reply.
Let this be a lesson. Don’t fuck around with Judge Dredd. Even if he is a fictional character, it doesn’t end well.
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