CLEVELAND, Ohio — What if Ohio legalized iGaming, allowing Ohioans to bet on games like blackjack and poker on their phones?

We’re talking about the multi-billion-dollar possibility of expanding gambling on Today in Ohio.

Listen online here.

Editor Chris Quinn hosts our daily half-hour news podcast, with editorial board member Lisa Garvin, impact editor Leila Atassi and content director Laura Johnston.

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You can now join the conversation. Call 833-648-6329 (833-OHTODAY) if you’d like to leave a message we can play on the podcast.

Here’s what else we’re asking about today:

We have lotteries. We have casinos. We have sports betting. And they bring in billions. But is Ohio about to supercharge its gambling revenues with a foray into an entirely new area?

Ohio crime investigators have encountered controversy with their facial recognition efforts. With all the discussion of big brother these days, is there any sign that the use of facial recognition software will be reduced?

Congresswoman Joyce Beatty is making a statement with her guest at the State of the Union speech. Who is it?

The name Ohio Savings Bank is an iconic brand that has been around for more than a century. No more. What has happened to the name?

How does Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost propose to revamp training for police officers across the state?

What is going on out in Lake County. Mentor bought land in Painesville to preserve it. Painesville is unhappy. What do we know of this city to city feud?

People love talking about malls, as we can see from our website traffic whenever we write about them, and there are some big plans in the works for the Southpark Mall. What are they?

Remember when the Browns were perennial winners and dominated the league. Not if you were born after the 1960s. The Pro Football Hall of Fame wants you to know about the team’s glory days. What is it doing to spread the word?

Lastly, let’s talk about Superman. Born in Cleveland, he’s coming home, reporter Joey Morona tells us. When might we see him?

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Read the automated transcript below. Because it’s a computer-generated transcript, it contains many errors and misspellings.

Chris (00:00.921)

I think the Ohio constitution still has a ban on gambling except for lotteries, but man, the loopholes that have allowed gambling to flourish and we may have another big one coming. It’s today in Ohio, the news podcast discussion from cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer. I’m Chris Quinn. I’m here with Lisa Garvin, Laura Johnston and Leila Tassi on a Thursday. Thursdays are newsy days. Let’s start with gambling. We have lotteries, we have casinos, we have sports betting, and they bring in billions.

But is Ohio about to supercharge its gambling revenues again with a foray into an entirely new area?

laura (00:39.106)

Well, this is such massive money, it’s hard to fathom, but yes. So sports books in Ohio, we’ve talked about this a lot of time, took in more than $7.7 billion with the bets in the first year that we had legal sports betting. That made Ohio about $134 million in taxes. 97% of all that money was happening on apps. So it’s pretty clear that Ohioans like to use their phone to gamble. So the idea is…

What about iGaming? What if we could have Blackjack and other table games like Poker on Ohioans phones? Ohio’s take could be between 205 and 410 million dollars And that’s based on states that already have this some of them have had it sent for a decade already And in 2023 five states with these programs generated 1.2 billion dollars in tax revenue And consider how much they got from sports betting. It’s about four times that

I literally cannot comprehend how much money people are spending gambling on their phones.

Chris (01:39.621)

This would though, just supercharge it. I just want to remind people that to go back, what, 10 years, right? Ohio didn’t allow any kind of gambling and then lotteries were allowed, right? That was it, just lotteries. They kind of crammed in Keno by having the lottery commission run it, even though you could say, you know, that kind of violates the constitutional ban on gambling, but because it was the lottery, it was okay.

laura (01:57.282)

Mm-hmm.

Chris (02:05.413)

Then we got casinos because there was a constitutional amendment to create what? Four of them, right? And four different cities or something. No, no, no. Well, that wasn’t allowed. That was not it. The constitutional amendment only allowed casinos. Then John Kasich said, well, I’m going to create casinos and put them under the lottery commission. And, and, and I mean, we, we stretched the definition of lottery commission pretty far. Then sports betting was added. I don’t even think we pretended that was part of the lottery commission.

laura (02:11.798)

plus the racy nose, yeah. Oh, that was separate.

Chris (02:35.353)

And now this, but I think if you go back to the Ohio Constitution, gambling is still in there is something that we can’t have, but it clearly the people want it because they’re betting with abandon. And if we get this, it’ll just be the wild, wild west of betting.

laura (02:51.618)

So they’re calling this a natural step or an evolution of the gaming industry when they came to this committee hearing. But it is part of a bigger look at bedding across just what everything you said, all the things that we offer in Ohio. Is this the next step? Is it something that we want to look at? And this is coming, I’m sure there’s a lot of pressure on the legislature, but it’s the legislature that’s initiating this. This is not like a statute or an amendment that people are pushing.

right now. So at least they’re being proactive and they’re going to look at all of the different ways that Ohioans can gamble here, including like church bingo, because I’m sure there’s something in the law that talks about that.

Chris (03:29.601)

Oh, yeah, that’s right. Bingo. Bingo was allowed in the Constitution. You could do that. That was legal. But when and they could do things like, I thought charitable organizations could do Keno and the big switch was when we went to, to the lottery. It’s just astounding. And look, the people want it, right? And and the legislature is supposed to represent what the people want. And the people are showing what they want by the amount of money they’re betting. So okay, but it does seem like

laura (03:36.255)

Hehe

laura (03:47.95)

Mm-hmm.

Chris (03:59.193)

We haven’t really changed the founding document that says it’s okay other than for casinos. And maybe we should be looking at that at this point. I’m surprised some group hasn’t sued to stop at all because the lottery was a bit of a dodge to begin with. And now this would be just completely different. They have it in Michigan and it is hugely, hugely popular.

laura (04:19.682)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s Nevada has poker only, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Michigan and then Connecticut and Rhode Island, I think there’s two of those states that are recent so we don’t have numbers for them. But you can bet that places like MGM, DraftKings and Fanatics and FanDuel who are huge in the sports gambling market, they are all wanting this to happen. They have an alliance trying to get it to go in Ohio.

Lucrative Ohio was for sports betting in our first month. It was like a billion dollars bet in January of 2023. So you’ve got to believe that this is an interest in Ohio. I have to say the amount of money that you could generate for the state is interesting. And if you were thoughtful about it, rather than just saying, oh, well, we’ll cut taxes, what could you do with that money and, and put it into. Youth programs of some sort, or, you know,

Do something life changing to make life better for Ohioans if people are going to spend this money anyway.

Lisa (05:21.37)

like battering Ohio and people are gonna spend money.

Chris (05:24.397)

No, they want to get rid of the income tax. And look, they’ve proven this legislature in particular with its current leadership is completely for sale. Whoever comes in with deep pockets, whether it’s tobacco or first standards or whatever, they can get whatever they want. These guys are completely for sale. This is big money. So my bet is. Van Duel and company are going to get exactly what they want and it’ll generate huge, huge dollars. I, you just have to think though.

laura (05:32.075)

Yeah.

Chris (05:50.789)

with the ease with which people can then gamble on their phones apart from sports betting, if they can play roulette or whatever on their phones. What does that do to a problem gambler that’s fighting the urge to get back into it? And it’s just there all the time, ads coming at their face. I would hope that the legislature would at least have some sympathy for those folks and build in some funds to help them. You’re listening to Today in Ohio.

Ohio crime investigators have encountered controversy with their facial recognition efforts. With all the discussion of Big Brother these days, Lisa, is there any sign that the use of facial recognition software will be reduced?

Lisa (06:33.844)

Probably not here in Ohio. The Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation began using the Clearview AI facial recognition software back in 2022, but they currently renewed that contract for another two years through 2025 and at about triple the price.

Lisa (07:00.014)

billions of photos that they scrape from publicly available sources like social media, mugshots, news stories, and so on. Clearview has been named in multiple lawsuits claiming that it gets that information without permission. Yoast spokesman Dominic Binkley says, well, BCI did 556 searches in Clearview AI last year for homicides, missing persons, drug trafficking, and other cases. They say that access is

limited to staff with proper training and they do call it an important investigative tool. So I guess we’re going to keep using them for now.

Chris (07:40.433)

The only way I think that we would find out about any abuses in this system or errors in this system would come through discovery of criminal trials where the defendant takes the case to court. Because they keep this stuff so secret that you can’t really have accountability. You just have to trust them that they’re using it appropriately. And the only cracks in that facade are the legal cases that a defendant…

finds that they were unfairly treated. And we haven’t seen a lot of that, which may be evidence that it’s working.

Lisa (08:14.978)

No, and this new contract that we have with Clearview, it requires them to delete non-public images uploaded by BCI within 30 days of the contract’s end. And any images kept beyond that as needed for litigation or other things, they have to notify the state within 45 days. The ACLU is not happy about it. Lobbyist Gary Daniels says Ohio should stop using facial recognition, period.

They say it’s a risky and unprecedented method to gather biometric data, and there are no state laws to regulate it at this point, and we need common sense privacy laws.

Chris (08:50.981)

But the only way you’re going to persuade anybody to rein this in is to be able to demonstrate errors and abuses. And we just we’re not seeing that yet. Ultimately, I suspect we will. It’s a numbers game. There’ll be there’ll be something that goes wrong, which through discovery will get the window.

Lisa (08:58.899)

Mm-hmm, right.

Lisa (09:09.45)

And with the issue of permission, I think, you know, I don’t like people taking my stuff, which is why I don’t put photos of myself and other people on the internet. But I think you’re kind of giving your permission by posting in a publicly available forum.

Chris (09:23.681)

Right, then it becomes scannable. You’re listening to Today in Ohio. Congresswoman Joyce Beatty is making a statement with her guest at the State of the Union speech. Lela, who is it?

Leila (09:34.675)

Her guest will be Brittany Watts. Watts is a woman from Warren, Ohio, who faced felony charges after she had a miscarriage in her home and flushed the fetal tissue down the toilet. A prosecutor at the time said that he was duty bound to seek charges against her for abuse of a corpse. And fortunately, a grand jury decided against that indictment in January. Beatty…

led a group of more than 150 Democrats in the US House in a letter earlier this month, urging President Biden to look at ways to protect people from pregnancy criminalization, basically being subject to civil or criminal penalties because of the outcome of a pregnancy. And Watts’s story had gained national attention, is obviously very powerful example of the kind of undue criminalization that Beatty is speaking out against.

Chris (10:26.445)

Yeah, this caught a lot of national attention. This was a big national story as it was proceeding through the courts because a lot of people worried that the court would go in the wrong direction. But we turned out not to be Alabama and the right thing appeared to happen. But it did cause a bunch of people in the women’s rights movements to say, this is what the abortion argument is about. This is about the way the courts are trying to…

Leila (10:39.807)

Mm-hmm.

Chris (10:55.293)

to govern women’s bodies.

Leila (10:57.147)

Yeah, and obviously that debate is still raging and depending on how the presidential election turns out, we could still see further ramifications of the end of Roe. I mean, it’s a very harrowing time. I’m glad that Beatty is bringing this particular woman to the public, you know, to the main stage.

Chris (11:19.321)

Well, Trump and his supporters who originally said this is a states rights issue, I’ve completely turned around because the states got hold of it. They started to say, yes, it is a states rights issue and we’re going to provide this as a constitutional right in our state. Now they’re saying, no, it’s not a states rights issue. We need to have a federal ban on abortions. And all the Trump lackeys are lining up to try and do that. That’s what makes this election so important in November.

Leila (11:25.447)

Absolutely.

Leila (11:33.717)

Mm-hmm.

Leila (11:43.135)

Terrifying, yes.

Lisa (11:44.126)

And the new front in this war is fetal personhood, which this Alabama case has brought to the forefront.

Chris (11:47.822)

Yeah.

Leila (11:51.517)

Yeah.

Chris (11:52.429)

Yeah, the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that the embryo, the collection of fertilized cells are a person has just alarmed people across the country is one of the most ridiculous rulings a court has ever made. But that’s the era we live in. You’re listening to Today in Ohio. The name Ohio Savings Bank is an iconic brand that has been around for more than a century, but no more. Laura, what’s happened to the name?

laura (12:18.686)

It got ditched in a national rebranding. So if you’re used to Ohio savings and who wouldn’t be because it has been in Cleveland, except for a very brief hiatus in the late 2000s, since 1889, it all of a sudden is branded as Flagstar Bank. And this happened over the weekend. Signs went up, there’s changes in the bank’s mobile app, its website. And that’s because there was a buyout of this. So it’s now a part of the

Flagstar, Ohio Savings Bank, and New York Community Bank are all the same bank, all the same bank on the same platform. This bank originally was Ohio Savings and Loan and Building Company. It started with one office in Cleveland in 1889. A century later, it was opening branches outside of Ohio, also known as AmTrust Bank. If you’ve out been in Florida or Arizona and seen AmTrust, that was the same bank.

But it was bought in 2009 by NYCB and then rebranded. And now it’s Flagstar.

Chris (13:20.973)

I never understand this because a brand takes years and millions of dollars to build. I think about our two brands, the Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com, which are trusted and valuable and everybody knows what they are. I think about what it would take to build that today. It would take tons of money. I just don’t understand how you could say, yeah, let’s just create a new name. It’s crazy. You want to…

laura (13:41.634)

Well, well…

Chris (13:50.705)

capitalize on a trusted brand that matters, but I guess not. Let’s go with Flagstar, which is, you know, it sounds like one of those phony names that you just kind of…

laura (14:02.038)

It made me think of maybe it’s the color of the logo made me think of the coin star in the grocery stores where you dump your coins in and you get like, you know, a receipt back and I don’t know, it has no relation. But you’re right. It’s just one of those things. They’re like, I took two nouns and put them together.

Chris (14:20.469)

It’s like you got a focus group together and played and instead you have this just iconic brand and gone. Poof. Go with Flagstar. You’re listening to Today in Ohio. Lisa, how does Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost propose to revamp training for police officers across the state?

Lisa (14:41.186)

Yeah, they have a lot of recommendations. This was a task force appointed by Attorney General Dave Yost, and they approved a new curriculum or curriculum recommendations for Ohio’s 30,000 law enforcement officers. They had 10 meetings. They had input from hundreds of officers and residents. Some of the highlights, one of the biggest one, is they want to add 48 hours of classes on communication skills.

This would be things like reading body language, de-escalation techniques, and how to speak to people under duress. They say that communication is missing in standard training for law enforcement officers. They also want to have a written firearms test in addition to the firing range. And then when they’re allowed to use weapons and how laws apply when they use their weapons. Thomas Quinlan with the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy says he would like to see decision-making models as well.

You know, having real time situations where they make decisions under pressure. He says that’s a big underserved area. They wanna make modest adjustments to the physical fitness standards, not a big deal, but tightening them just a little bit. They wanna add 80 hours of tactical training. And they wanna look at the use of virtual reality and other new technologies in basic and advanced law enforcement officer training. Yoast hopes to roll these out over the next two years, but some of these will need legislative approval.

Chris (16:05.097)

I like the idea they’re looking at training. When I first came to Cleveland, I live in Cleveland Heights, there was a police chief here named Marty Lentz who had brought in a practice of if his police officers wanted to go to law school, the city would pay for it because he thought an educated police force, particularly in a town like Cleveland Heights, which is pretty radical, would lead to a more professional department. And it did, it really made a huge difference. And I never understood why we didn’t push for more of that.

because the relationship between police and the community is really paramount. If you wanna stop crime, you need that cooperation. And the training for police in many ways is pretty rudimentary and it doesn’t get at that. Yost’s committee seems to be thinking more in those terms. It’s not paying for a college degree, but it is more relationship-based.

Lisa (16:58.398)

And I think they do need to learn their communication skills. I was surprised that they weren’t even taught, but apparently they’re not, or not in, you know, in any kind of rigor. So, you know, and increasingly, unfortunately, police officer have to be psychiatrists, psychologists, they have to be negotiators. So they really need these skills.

Chris (17:18.177)

Yeah, it’s a good sign. Dave Yost has done a number of things of light that have been forward looking. It’s good to see, of course, he’s running for governor in three years, so he’s trying to get attention for these kinds of things. You are listening to today in Ohio. What is going on out in Lake County? Mentor bought land in Painesville to preserve it. Painesville is unhappy. Layla, we don’t know everything about this yet, but what do we know so far?

Leila (17:43.407)

This is such a strange feud. Mentor acquired this 215 acre piece of land at the end of 2019 from a company called Shamrock Business Center. Shamrock was the name used there by Forest City Enterprises of Cleveland. In 2012, Forest City said it planned to get rid of 963 acres of undeveloped property that it owned in Ohio. Mentor says it paid $800,000 for this.

So Mentor plans to use the land for conservation, which would prevent future development. Painesville officials say that this could derail plans to create a proposed interchange off Shamrock Boulevard and Jackson Street. On Tuesday night, Mentor City Council voted seven to two to continue their plan to preserve this land. Over the objections of tons of people from Painesville who said that Mentor is robbing their city of the economic development opportunities that land represents.

It also hurts their school district. So what’s still unclear is why Mentor cares so much about preserving this land in Painesville. They didn’t publicly talk about it on Tuesday. But what’s the motivation here? The only thing I can think is that it’s part of some wetland mitigation plan. I mean, they must be planning some kind of development in Mentor and they have to replace that lost acreage somewhere so they’re doing it in Painesville or it has no economic impact on the city of Mentor. But

Chris (18:54.534)

Right.

Leila (19:06.475)

But I’ve been kind of poking around online and I’m seeing there’s like a Q&A on the Painesville website where they basically say that the Army Corps of Engineers has said this isn’t an ideal piece of land for preservation because it’s kind of sandwiched in between a lot of development. So that kind of debunks that theory. I don’t know.

Chris (19:29.809)

Now, I think that I bet that that’s what it is. Either they need to remediate something they already done or they’re planning to destroy some valuable piece of property and they need to do this to remediate. This feels so wrong. It gets back to when Cleveland owns a bunch of land out in the suburb where the golf course is in the Chagrin Highlands. And it’s been a bully out there with the way it flexes its muscles. I mean, the whole development agreement out in the Chagrin Highlands.

Cleveland gets half the income taxes and all sorts of things. And the suburbs hated it. It’s like, what are you doing? You have your own city. It feels like it shouldn’t be okay for one municipality to own land in another, but in Ohio it is. And so mentors like, we need the land. We don’t care about you, Painesville. And they’re flipping them off. And you got a feel for Painesville, which is much smaller, right? They don’t have nearly as much land to play with. They’re trying to have some economic development.

Leila (20:18.13)

Yeah.

Leila (20:22.727)

much smaller.

Chris (20:29.113)

and their neighbors just boxed them out.

Leila (20:31.875)

I know it’s mysterious, but you’re right mentor is much bigger than Painesville. So this piece of land really represents a pretty big chunk of the available land for economic development out in Painesville and they are they’re upset and I feel like they have a right to be as well.

laura (20:50.303)

You wonder if they had a chance to buy this land, like if Mender bought it for $800,000. It’s not to say that’s cheap, it’s not, but if they had known what Mender was going to do, they could have snapped it up and then resold it, right?

Chris (21:02.693)

Here’s my question, right? Jerry Serino, the state senator, represents this area and not a peep, not doing a thing, not trying to intercede. Yet when Cleveland, which he doesn’t represent, was trying to do some things with participatory budgeting, he immediately proposed a law to outlaw it. It’s fascinating that the guy who represents this, who is in the legislature,

isn’t really being answerable to anybody. What we need here is some transparency. What is Mentor doing? Why does it want the land? The fact that they didn’t even talk about it while all those Painesville folks were present is a mark against the transparency of that government. You’re listening to Today in Ohio. People love talking about malls, as we can see from our website traffic whenever we write about them and their history. And there are some big plans in the works for South Park Mall. Aira, what are they?

laura (21:56.502)

I agree. People do love malls. We had a whole Mall Monday series in a decade or so again. I remember when South Park was brand new, that is how old I am, and now it needs a whole revamp because that’s how old it is. They want to redevelop the shopping center, possibly at a hotel, microbreweries, a fitness center, a grocery store, medical facilities, and outdoor playing fields.

and they need rezoning to make this happen. Now we don’t have a plan. It’s not like they’ve presented renderings. What we know is what’s in this rezoning idea that’s gonna go before Strongsville City Council. And the mayor, Thomas Perciak, basically didn’t give much away, just said, “’The mall is attempting to reinvent itself “’and adapt to what the public wants in a mall today. “’We are making every effort to accommodate them “‘as much as possible.’” And so this hasn’t been presented publicly to the council.

company that owns it, which has only owned it for a couple of years, Kai’s Capital, they got it in May 2021. They’re not talking right now. So we’ll have to see what they want. I feel like Layla might be the expert on this mall because she has spent the night in it before. Oh, it just happened? Oh, wow. With Girl Scouts.

Leila (23:11.315)

Very recently, very recently, just this past weekend. I’m still recovering.

Chris (23:17.658)

Wait, when? You were just there this weekend?

Lisa (23:17.83)

Thank you.

Leila (23:21.195)

For the Girl Scout lock-in at the mall. Yeah, it just got over last year’s and I had to do it again. My husband thought I was nuts.

Chris (23:23.285)

Again? You did it? You did this once before!

Chris (23:29.102)

Wow.

laura (23:30.314)

You are a better troop leader than I am because I was like, I’m not even telling the girls that this is an opportunity that exists.

Chris (23:36.313)

God, I didn’t realize you were such a consumerist. You’re not a shopper, you are, sleeping in the malls. We probably should do a series on the transformations that are going on in a bunch of malls. Richmond Mall is being turned into housing right now. And I was reading a story about another mall yesterday that wants to do a huge overhaul. The whole era of the malls ended a long time ago as people moved into the Crocker Park Legacy Village kind of places.

Leila (23:39.917)

I’m out.

laura (24:02.862)

Mm-hmm.

Chris (24:03.362)

But you are seeing some serious redevelopment going on.

laura (24:06.398)

Yeah, actually, before it was before I moved to Rocky River, but our West Gate shopping center, which is a bunch of plazas now used to be a mall and now it is a thriving retail strip, but I agree at least South Park when it was developed, they were smart enough to like add the correct turning lanes and, you know, double left turn lanes and they have everything within the same parking lot, so you have a Coles on the outside and restaurants. So.

I feel like it was well planned for the 90s. So there’s a lot of opportunity within that footprint that in a very, very busy Strongsville retail district along 82.

Chris (24:44.733)

I don’t know with people like Leila, maybe there’s an opportunity for the mall sleepover tour where you just go to a different mall every weekend and sleep overnight. Okay, you’re listening to Today in Ohio. Remember when the Browns were perennial winners and dominated the league? Not if you were born after the 1960s. The Pro Football Hall of Fame wants you to know about the team’s glory days. Lisa, what’s it doing to spread that word?

Lisa (24:51.194)

Mmmm

laura (24:52.872)

She would never recover.

Leila (24:54.603)

Hard pass.

Lisa (25:12.826)

They’ll be opening an exhibit next month at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton called A Legacy Unleashed. They’re covering the 60th anniversary of the 1964 Browns Championship and the 70th anniversary of the 1954 championship, but they’re all gonna cover all the eras. They’re gonna cover the 80s, the cardiac kids era, the dog pound, and then the franchise’s reboot in 1999 when we got the team back.

This will open on Friday, March 15th at the Hall of Fame in Canton and will run through Sunday, April 21st. They’ll have a lot of artifacts from the Browns eight championships, including a jewelry case and bronze busts of 18 influential Browns players. They’re gonna have talks and meets with a lot of legends, Bernie Kosar, Peyton Hills, Felix Wright, Eric Metcalf, and many, many others. They’ll be featured each weekend of the exhibit.

And 1964 is the one that the old timers remember. We beat the Baltimore Colts 27 to zero right here in Cleveland, even though they were the underdogs, but they wanted to point out that the plane dealers, Chuck Heaton was one of the few sports writers who predicted that the Browns would win that championship. And of course, this was the running back Jim Brown’s era. You’ll get to see and learn about all of that at this exhibit.

Chris (26:32.357)

Yeah, and of course, this is pre-Super Bowl, because the Browns have never won a Super Bowl. There’s a bittersweet quality to this, right? Because they were phenomenal back then, but not so much since then. They’ve had a couple of periods since then, but it’s been a long, long time since they were a serious contender for the championship. And the fact that you have to go back 50 years for greatness, you know, you keep thinking, when will we have a new era of greatness to celebrate?

Lisa (27:01.666)

But I will say this being in Houston for many years is that Houston is full of fair weather fans. I mean, at least in Cleveland, they never gave up. I love that we had a celebration when we didn’t win a single game one season. We celebrated that.

Chris (27:14.457)

Yeah, right. Right. And it was like ten below or something. And Therongs went out there. It was freezing cold. You’re listening to Today in Ohio. Lastly, let’s talk about Superman. Born in Cleveland. He’s coming home. Reporter Joey Marrano tells us when will we see him, Leila?

Leila (27:32.559)

I’m sure this is super exciting for fans of the DC universe. Director James Gunn will shoot scenes for this upcoming film Superman Legacy in Cleveland and Cincinnati. Sources say that they’re going to begin production this summer. The film showed up last week in the Ohio Department of Development’s biannual list of upcoming film and television productions that were awarded tax credits by the state. This project was at the very top of the list because it’s getting the most with more than

No one spotted it at first because it was listed under the film’s working title, which was Genesis. So it’s unclear how much of the movie is going to be shot here or in Cincinnati, but we can make some assumptions based on the amount of the tax credit. We can assume that the Ohio portion of the production is about $37 million and budgets for this type of film usually run about $200 million. So most of the film will probably be shot at Trill of Studios near Atlanta.

They’re supposed to release this movie in July 2025. It stars David Corniswet as Superman, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, and Nicholas Holt as Lex Luthor. And Cleveland native Isabella Merced will also be featured as Hawkgirl.

Chris (28:43.149)

It’s cool that it’s going to be here because he is the Cleveland superhero. We used to have a reporter at the Plain Dealer, Mike San Giacomo, who was an expert on it, even drew up a Superman tour so you could go to all the key spots, including the home where the cartoonist created him. So there’s a kind of a justice to the fact that some of this will be shot here. I imagine it’ll get some national attention just for that fact that he was born in Cleveland, they’re shooting the movie in Cleveland.

Leila (28:48.307)

Yeah.

Leila (29:12.011)

Yeah. And Cleveland, of course, is an awesome backdrop for films like this. It’s got that gritty metropolis look to it. And our streets are generally not clogged with a lot of commuters. So there’s plenty of…

Chris (29:27.301)

Yeah.

Lisa (29:27.71)

Hehehe

laura (29:28.702)

And you said Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Midge Mazel herself. That’s a get, man. I love that. She’s my superhero. That’s my, Amy Sherman-Paladino, that’s my kind of superhero.

Leila (29:32.199)

Yeah, that’s pretty cool. Yeah.

That’s some good casting.

Chris (29:37.478)

Yeah.

Chris (29:42.769)

We’ve had a number of superhero movies filmed here, the biggest of which was the Avengers. And it’s just amazing to me we’re going to have yet another Superman movie. How many times can you tell the story? But they’re going to tell it in Cleveland. You’re listening to Today in Ohio. That’s it for the Thursday episode. Come back Friday when we wrap up the week of news. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Lisa. Thanks, Laura.