I just read that Superbad made more than $30 million on its opening weekend, and I was impressed. The television previews didn't look funny in the least, but I gather that was an inevitable consequence of the film's dialogue being more persistently vulgar than Goodfellas'. If I went to see movies, I would totally go see it now. But as we've discussed, I don't. Moving on.

Not so long ago -- back in the simpler, palindromic times of 2002 -- Joss Whedon and Judd Apatow's careers were in very similar ruts. Now one has had two films open at more than $30 million this summer and the other is writing comic books. What happened? Both built their names as writers and producers for 90's cult television successes, Whedon with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and Apatow with "The Larry Sanders Show." Both exhibited a knack for discovering previously unknown young talent (not just talents but multiple talents, like actress/director/novelist Amber Benson or actor/screenwriter/Canadian Seth Rogen) and being able to tell believable stories about young people to both the currently young and the once youthful. Both started the new millennium off rather unsteadily by having two shows apiece they created cancelled before their time -- Whedon, "Angel" and "Firefly;" Apatow, "Freaks and Geeks" and "Undeclared." (Well, nominally Paul Feig created "Freaks and Geeks," but if you have listened to any of the 97 commentaries on the "Freaks" DVDs then you know Apatow felt for the show as if it was his living, breathing offspring. So long as we're spotting camels here, Tim Minear co-created "Firefly" with Whedon, too. But all of these little Red Delicious-to-Granny Smith comparisons break down if you pick at them long enough.)

Since "Not Fade Away," the "Angel" series finale, Joss Whedon has written a whole bunch of comic books, including runs on "X-Men" and "Runaways" and a relaunch of the "Buffy" series billed as the direct canonical continuation of the television show. I haven't read a single one of these because, frankly, comic book stores skeeze me the heck out, and they should you too. As far as the medium that made him famous goes, Joss made a cameo appearance in a second-season episode of "Veronica Mars" and directed a single episode of "The Office." His only moving picture output since 2004 was the film Serenity, a good film that didn't have much of a shot of reaching anyone outside of the maniacal and kinda scary "Firefly" fanatics who call themselves Browncoats. Not to digress for too long, but there are few things in the pop subculture that mystify me more than the Browncoat phenomenon. How could a TV show that only aired for 14 episodes, maybe five of which were really good, generate such frothing passion? Like honestly, these people are crazy, monumentally crazy. Google "Browncoat" and tell me you don't see what I'm talking about. Maybe if these yahoos had dedicated all of their resources into getting more Whedon work made that might actually appeal to more than a core of cosplaying lunatics, their hero's career would be in better condition right now. I tease the "Firefly" people affectionately, but Whedon's biggest problem right now is his ego and having a ready-to-mobilize army of people who think anything he touches is axiomatically genius probably isn't helping things along very much in that area.

But hey, zip over to Judd Apatow's CV and in the same period of time it took Joss to make his one movie Apatow has made eight, five of which (Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and now Superbad) were big hits. What's the difference? Apatow doesn't have to be the big boss all of the damn time. After "Undeclared" bit the dust he happily collaborated with Will Ferrell and Adam McKay on Anchorman, scoring a bit part for Rogen and forging a valuable friendship with Steve Carell at the same time. Carell and Rogen went on with him to 40-Year-Old Virgin, also Apatow's cinematic directorial debut. In the same way as Whedon developed a recurring repertory cast across his three television series, Apatow has a whole platoon of very funny people following him from project to project. (Through random luck, or perhaps more likely creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas's admiration of both filmmakers, the CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother" has become a surreal nexus for Whedonites and Apatownians to meet and mingle. Alyson Hannigan and Jason Segel are regulars, obviously, but check the guest star list: Alexis Denisof, Samm Levine, Morena Baccarin, Amy Acker, Martin Starr, Marshall Manesh, Tom Lenk. It's a cavalcade of stars, for people of a certain persuasion. Too bad they haven't brought in more of Whedon and Apatow's writers.)

Whedon was attached for some time to a big-screen revival of Wonder Woman, but after a long, slow, not-so-hard-to-perceive death spiral, he and the big-money studio parted ways. It's not the first time Whedon has had a possibly career-defining franchise snatched from his hands. Almost every comic book movie of the last ten years seems to have been at least briefly connected to Joss, particularly Daredevil (while the film eventually made had no connection to Whedon, people who would know better than I have informed me that its style and plot were somewhat influenced by Whedon's earlier run as a writer on the comic book series) and X-Men. Inevitably, though, things drift away, and it's not too difficult to read between the lines to figure out why. Even though former mavericks like Sam Raimi and Christopher Nolan (or even the grandaddy of them all, Tim Burton) have made themselves fat loot and not tarnished their artistic cred one iota by getting involved with megamarketed megabudget megafranchises, Whedon seems unwilling to bend even the least little bit in the manner to which people being put in charge of billion-dollar business ventures are obligated.

In the case of Serenity, as Roger Ebert noted in his review, the contextually microscopic budget arguably made for a better film. But Whedon is squandering his talents (chief among them the ability to craft the most purely pleasurable spoken dialogue modern English has yet heard) limiting himself only to projects where the investors have enough confidence in him to give him free reign. The ugly irony is that the only words Whedon has written for the screen since wrapping Serenity are ones few will ever know he even wrote, as I assume he's still script-doctoring on the side as he has for years. Whedon's defenses are up so high partly because of the brutal way Fox mishandled "Firefly" but close observers know that Joss has never fully recovered from the hatchet job that was done by the directors of the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer feature film. Ever since he's insisted that no hands would point the cameras filming actors speaking his words other than his own and those of his approved acolytes. You know, Joss, it's been fifteen years. Might be time to bury that grudge.

Mostly, Whedon owes it to his fans and to himself to at least try doing the megamovie thing at least once before his star completely dims. Evil studio suits might make a complete hash of it, but then again, they might not. As entertaining as Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films have been, there is no writer in Hollywood who mixes hip and of-the-moment with the necessary comic book sense for the larger than life than Joss Whedon. If he made another movie, I would totally go see it in the theaters.