"Batkid Begins" Topic

"In late October 2013, an innocuous Facebook post about a Make-A-Wish Foundation project in the works in San Francisco went online. At the time it was just a document of a cool event. Nobody could have predicted that it would catch fire on social media in the way that it did. Maybe it was just the fact that it was centered on a kid becoming Batman and fighting classic rogue's gallery villains like Penguin and The Riddler at a time when superhero movies were the dominant summer blockbuster genre. But it felt like something more. When the Make-A-Wish call for volunteers got picked up, it went everywhere, and what was envisioned as a fun, small event began to balloon to uncontrollable proportions.

As someone who grew up in the Bay Area, seeing the "Batkid" story explode all over Twitter was thrilling, as was the possibility of San Francisco turning into Gotham for a day at the height of Batman's resurgent popularity, all in an effort to make a five-year-old leukemia patient's wish come true. But in the aftermath of that crazy day, as other news stories piled up about the cost of the event to the city, the production of a documentary, and a narrative feature film adaptation produced by and starring Julia Roberts, things got a bit hazier, emotionally speaking. Some of the undiluted warmth and fuzziness of the story started to dissipate. Would that documentary, Batkid Begins, be nothing more than a piece of charity agitprop? Or would it soothe the cynics with a salve of easy explanations and positive outcomes?…"
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