SITTING IN A DALLAS THEATER on Wednesday night for a raucous, packed showing of Obsession, the new hit from YouTube wunderkind Curry Barker, I couldn’t help but wonder if this is what the film industry felt like in 1968.

Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution chronicles that key moment in Hollywood history, a hinge point that helped keep the motion picture industry relevant for a new generation of moviegoers. Five films released in 1967 representing Hollywood’s competing self-conceptions were up against each other for the best picture Oscar in 1968: The hopelessly out-of-touch Dr. Dolittle, a big-budget monstrosity that had flopped with audiences on release; contrasting social-issues movies, both starring Sidney Poitier, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner; and two howls of youthful rebellion in the ennui-ensconced The Graduate and the ultraviolent Bonnie and Clyde.

That diversity of pictures and themes and budgets and audiences reflected a key split in the Hollywood psyche. “What was an American film supposed to be? The men running the movie business used to have the answer; now, it had slipped just beyond their reach, and they couldn’t understand how they had lost sight of it,” Harris wrote in his 2008 book. In the Heat of the Night would eventually win best picture, but Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate would capture the soul of the business—at least until the blockbuster era’s emergence in the back half of the next decade.

These transition points—these shifts in taste, these periodic soul-searchings—happen every generation or two, often paired with shifts in distribution or new technologies. The Paramount Decrees in 1948, paired with the rise of television, led to the end of block booking and an overall decline in attendance. The influx of European films in the 1960s led to the movie brats of the 1970s and Hollywood’s embrace of auteurs as varied as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma, which in turn led to the blockbuster era’s outsized profits, embodied by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. The rise of VHS and then the explosion of DVD sales in the late 1990s subsidized the whole industry for a solid decade, at least until The Dark Knight and Iron Man revealed that the future was comic book universes and billion-dollar grosses just as the financial legs were about to be knocked out of Hollywood by streaming gutting home-video sales.

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Which brings us to today. It really cannot be overstated how unusual Obsession’s performance is. In the modern era, the box office take of films declines from weekend to weekend. We literally measure a film’s popularity in its declines: The smaller the decline, the better. Even something very good and very popular, like Get Out, is measured in declines: a 15.4 percent decline from first weekend to second weekend? That was truly amazing, almost unheard of in the modern era of big openings and big drop-offs. As such, it’s truly astounding that Obsession increased by nearly 40 percent weekend over weekend, from $17 million in its opening weekend to nearly $24 million in its second.1 And it increased each weekday in its second week compared to its first. Again: I cannot think of another movie for which this is true.

Meanwhile, Backrooms is about to become the highest-grossing film in A24 history. Projections suggest it is lined up for an opening of at least $65 million and it could go much higher than that. Don’t believe me? Check your local multiplex and see how many showtimes are completely or mostly sold out for this weekend. Like Obsession, Backrooms is the brainchild of a YouTube-native filmmaker: Kane Parsons, who can’t even legally buy a drink to celebrate his success until next month. And both films are movies made by young people about the concerns of young people: In Obsession’s case, the tricky nature of consent in all matters sexual; in Backrooms, the unreal nature of manufactured reality.

Between those two films (both of which were made by Blumhouse-Atomic Monster) and YouTuber Markiplier’s self-financed shock hit, Iron Lung—which opened just $1.3 million behind Sam Raimi’s $40 million action-horror-comedy Send Help back in January—I can’t help but feel as though we’re in another hinge moment after years of suggestions that streaming was sure to kill theaters and that younger audiences simply had too much to do to bother with theatrical presentations. We’re riding a cresting wave of youthful enthusiasm of the sort that has propelled Hollywood for the last sixty-some years. As an old person, this is obviously troubling: I don’t understand YouTube and I don’t like change. But as a lover of film and a believer in the theatrical experience, it’s undeniably exciting to see Gen Z embrace the big-screen experience.

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Fear and Physical Media

HORROR MOVIES LIKE THE TROIKA ABOVE are naturally well suited the theatrical experience, particularly those that deftly mix chills and laughs like Obsession: There’s just something to be said for laughing and screaming alongside other fans. (They’re also, interestingly, reliable underperformers on streaming services, according to the Entertainment Strategy Guy.)

I popped into the Texas Frightmare Weekend last Saturday to get the mood of the fans there, see how they were feeling about things. The vibes are good! It was crowded, the energy was high, the panels were fun. Another viral sensation was the most frequently spotted cosplay model: The Terrifier universe is always well represented at these events, and I saw more Art the Clowns than I could shake a stick at, from ages 6 to 60. (One hopes the 6-year-old simply thought he was going as a fun clown.)

But one other thing really leapt out: These conferences are one of the few places you can still find Blu-ray and 4K discs for sale in person. Yes, yes: The occasional Walmart has a good selection. But for the most part, physical disc sales are limited to increasingly rare specialty shops and the internet. I’ve bought more than my fair share of films from the websites of Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome, and Severin; it was nice to be able to sift through disc stacks like the old days, maybe discover something I’d never seen before. And despite underperforming on streaming, horror likely overperforms on physical media sales precisely because scary movies create passionate fan bases, and such collectors are increasingly overrepresented among physical media owners. Streaming is a mass medium; discs are a niche.

Anyway, the whole event was great: It’s always fun to be around fans who have gathered in celebration. James Wallace led a fantastic discussion with Warwick Davis (best known for Willow and the Leprechaun series and the Harry Potter movies) during the Saturday session as well as a really eye-opening chat with the cast and crew of the Saw series. (Tobin Bell, who plays the demented killer Jigsaw, said that he signed on for the first film—much of which sees him laying perfectly still on a tile floor—because it reminded him of Waiting for Godot.) People crave communal experiences, and Texas Frightmare Weekend has offered up twenty years of them.

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Assigned Viewing: Tuner (Theaters)

ANOTHER YOUNG FILMMAKER, Daniel Roher (33), has a film out this week, albeit one that plays like more of a throwback to years past. Here’s the elevator pitch for Tuner: A piano tuner learns how to use his perfect pitch to crack safes and embarks on a life of crime to help cover the medical debts of his mentor only to risk losing his job, girlfriend, and even life when things go sideways. Starring Leo Woodall as the tuner and Dustin Hoffman as the mentor, Roher has put together a tremendously effective and intimate indie endeavor.

This is the sort of movie we might have gotten in the 1970s, a personal story with a distinct sense of space and real emotional stakes anchored by genuinely brilliant performances from Woodall, Hoffman, and Havana Rose Liu as the tuner’s girlfriend. It’s not the sort of picture that’s going to change your life but it is the sort of picture that’s going to entertain you at a high level for a hundred or so minutes in a movie theater, and I really hope you check it out.

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Just as a heads up: This episode was posted on the Takes feed over the weekend, but I wanted to make sure and share it with y’all because a.) it was a lot of fun and b.) I did a weirdly large amount of work for it, having to rewatch three films and read a bunch of stuff. But I wanted to make sure you guys heard it in case you haven’t subscribed to the Takes feed. (And if you haven’t, for shame! You’re missing JVL and me riffing on the terrible America 250 concert!)

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A COUPLE WEEKS BACK, Mark Hertling and I talked about his favorite war movies, particularly those related to the tricky task of leading troops into combat. You can watch it here:

In the course of this conversation, Mark talked about a small box he keeps on his desk, one with images of all those who died under his command. He wrote more about that box this week ahead of Memorial Day, and I just wanted to share a snippet of it with you:

There is something veterans often struggle to explain to civilians without sounding exclusionary: the bond formed in combat. Most veterans do not believe they are better than those who did not serve. In fact, most deeply respect Americans who contribute to society in countless other ways.

But there is something uniquely intimate about serving beside others in dangerous places. It emerges from shared fear, shared exhaustion, shared discomfort, shared responsibility, and shared grief. It comes from understanding that your life may depend entirely on the competence and courage of the person beside you—and theirs on yours. You remember absurd humor in terrible places and exhaustion so deep it became numbness. You remember who shared water, who carried the heavier weapons, who cracked jokes when morale collapsed, and who checked on others first after contact.

And you remember who never came home.

You should read the whole thing (and buy his book, If I Don’t Return, which also, obviously, touches on this topic). I’ll just reiterate the point I made both in the video and in my newsletter last week, which is that Black Hawk Down is one of the best films I’ve ever seen on this point about the unique intimacy of combat; Eric Bana’s work as Hoot is definitional here.

Anyway, as part of the video, I asked viewers and listeners to send us some suggestions for movies we may have missed; I picked a handful here with an emphasis on sacrifice, as Memorial Day is for remembering those who have fallen rather than all who have served.

Glory, which is currently streaming on Netflix, was one of the most-requested films; as subscriber Kentuckistan noted, Glory is “an excellent examination of American Citizen Soldiers and why they volunteer to go to war, to risk and forfeit their lives, to secure something important for themselves and for humanity as well.” I remember the first time I saw Glory, sometime in high school, and being shocked by the ending. But the sense of loss and grief—of sacrifice—in the service of ending America’s original sin is a moving tribute to all who served in the pursuit of that goal.

Warfare was another film recommended by a few folks; it’s a more recent production, and currently streaming on HBO Max. I’ll let subscriber Travis explain why: “I found Warfare to be an excellent/realistic portrayal of small unit leadership in the kind of ground combat that was often seen in Iraq during the insurgency/civil war years. They did a really great job with set design and the ‘flow’ of the film as well as making you feel like you were with the small teams on the ground seeing things the way they would see them (including through supporting assets and radio traffic). I served on the ground across the Al Anbar province from ’05-’08 and this was the best portrayal of that place/time I’ve seen to date.” As it happens, I interviewed one of the directors of that film, Ray Mendoza; if you want more on Warfare, I suggest giving that a listen.

One last recommendation from a reader: Das Boot. Yes, it’s about a German submarine crew, but it is a riveting look at life underwater in the midst of naval warfare. As subscriber Donald Leonard notes, “I can still see, when the U-boat dives deep to avoid depth charges, the rivets popping off the interior of the sub from the great water pressure from such submerged depths. Submarine service is not for the claustrophobic. . . . [A]nd of 44,000 in the Kriegsmarine submarine service, only 10,000 survived!”

The comments were full of great suggestions—I have a real soft spot for Fury, and obviously Full Metal Jacket is one of the great films of all time, even if it’s not an entirely realistic portrait of the Vietnam War—too many to list them all here. But this should get you through the weekend if you need something a bit more serious than, say, a new Star Wars adventure.

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Review: The Mandalorian and Grogu

SPEAKING OF WHICH: There’s a new Star Wars adventure in theaters! It’s … fine. But I’m guessing my kids are going to love it. From my review:

The resultant picture is rarely boring; there’s an action beat every few minutes just in case you start to nod off. But it’s also not quite as rousing as you sense director Jon Favreau and writers Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Noah Kloor might have hoped. It’s also weirdly hard to see: Despite watching it in IMAX, it felt as if the picture was simply too dark, too muddy. As a result, the action sequences are almost obscured, the individual beats are a little difficult to parse. There’s often just a lot going on in any given sequence, often multiple points of attack and numerous characters squaring off. I sometimes found myself a little overwhelmed by everything that was going on. (This is also a very loud movie, particularly in IMAX; I don’t think I’ve ever heard blaster fire quite so extravagant. My head was practically shaking after the first shot of the film.)

The bottom line: Two things may be simultaneously true. I think my kids, for whom this picture is designed, are going to enjoy The Mandalorian and Grogu, and maybe quite a bit; and I think it plays like a couple of mid-tier episodes from the TV series. As such, I’m not sure it’s the rousing hit Disney needs to rekindle the moviegoing experience for the Star Wars franchise. But it’s probably good enough for a generation that has yet to experience the joy of Star Wars on the big screen.

Please read the whole thing!

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Assigned Viewing: The Boys (Prime Video)

I HAVE SOME ISSUES WITH HOW this show evolved over the years, and the ways in which it more explicitly tied together Homelander and Donald Trump as the show went on. And I think the showrunner eventually fell into the trap that all too many foes of Trump wind up pursuing, the idea that there’s One Easy Trick to defeat him. (I am being intentionally vague here so as to avoid spoilers.) But the show—which is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended; there are buckets of blood and tons of nudity—was never boring and even if it didn’t quite stick the landing this week, I do not regret watching the whole thing.

Antony Starr’s work as the Superman-stand-in Homelander is one of the great performances of the entire “Prestige TV” era we are living through and the fact that he has been completely ignored by awards viewers is a real indictment of all such events. He does pathetic evil about as well as anyone I’ve ever seen.

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On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by Julia Alexander to discuss her latest piece for Puck on why romantasy—the subgenre of fine literature dedicated to dragons and sex—has had a hard time gaining a foothold on streaming services despite burning up the book charts. We also chatted about Amazon’s advertising ambitions and how it hopes to use its supposedly profitable video division to drive business elsewhere on the site … and whether or not the company is getting so big, it might make sense for the government to force some parts of it to split off. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

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Few filmmakers regularly inspire weirder freakouts than Christopher Nolan.

You saw inklings of it with The Dark Knight and his casting of Heath Ledger as the Joker. It’s easy to forget now—for nearly twenty years The Dark Knight has been the go-to descriptor for comic book movie excellence and Ledger’s Joker is the gold standard against which every movie villain is measured—but this was a wildly controversial choice. The pretty boy from the teen romcoms? That guy? As the Joker? Nolan’s gone too far this time!

Now, freakouts over superhero movie castings were nothing new, as veterans of the Michael Keaton wars will remember. But this was just a taste of things to come. For its refusal to regurgitate a pat message about the dangers of climate change, Interstellar was condemned by some because it was “closer to climate skepticism than it is to climate fiction.” The Dark Knight Rises was an “evil masterpiece” advocating a “fascist police state.” Dunkirk was decried as “whitewashing” for not focusing on the Indian and Muslim soldiers in the British military during World War II. Some critics refused to review Tenet since they considered it irresponsible to release a film in theaters during COVID, and I remember more than one critic glibly suggesting Nolan was getting people killed for his own vanity. Oppenheimer, like Dunkirk, was guilty of “whitewashing.”

I will say that I was a little surprised by the source of the inevitable caterwauling about The Odyssey, however, as Christopher Nolan is broadly appreciated by conservative filmgoers and The Odyssey is the sort of classic that the right has long championed adapting for the masses. Sadly, the Very Online Right, spearheaded by its grand leader, Elon Musk, has decided that The Odyssey is bad now. It has too many black people, you see, and there are rumors that a trans individual might be playing Achilles.

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The “Elliot Page is playing Achilles” rumor is the most intriguing element of this whole idiotic kerfuffle, as it seems to have kicked off after an unconfirmed guess as to Page’s identity in the latest trailer was published on a clickbait website. That guess quickly morphed into conventional wisdom in X the Everything App’s more reactionary corners. Achilles might be who Page is playing—and really, if you wanted to show Achilles as a ghost of his former self, Page isn’t a terrible person to choose for that withered form—but it doesn’t really pass the smell test. The line uttered in the trailer (“Who’s looking after your wife and son?”) seems closer in spirit to what the ghost of Elpenor or the shade of Tiresias says to Odysseus during his trip to the land of the dead.1

The reason why Elon Musk has tweeted repeatedly about the casting of Lupita Nyong’o is more straightforward: Musk, a South African émigré, is just mad a black lady is playing Helen of Troy. Never mind she’s not only an Oscar-winning actress but also a renowned beauty, and thus likely a good choice to play Helen (and, in a nifty bit of casting, Helen’s murderous sister Clytemnestra). She’s black. Can’t have that now, can we? It is, apparently, offensive to . . . the Greeks? More offensive than having Will Hunting play Odysseus? Sure, why not.

The whole thing is a pretty perfect distillation of the tendencies of the so-called “woke right,” that cohort’s obsession with racial and gender purity serving as a mirror image for the previous panics over the “whitewashing” of Nolan’s previous historical epics. We can debate about how rooted in history The Odyssey and The Iliad are, but they are, at heart, mythical stories, tales of gods and monsters, of journeys to hell and disquisitions with ghosts. None of the leads—not the American Matt Damon, nor the Brits Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson, nor the South African Charlize Theron—is Greek. And just like their more progressively minded predecessors, these are almost certainly completely contrived outrages, an effort to find something in a movie to get mad about while chasing the endorphin rush they got for screaming online about the terrible live-action Snow White movie or the awful Buzz Lightyear.

Social media has many customs, some of them positive. But its primary tradition now seems to be fomenting silly outrages to poke the pleasure centers of perpetually unhappy people.

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Gen. Hertling on the Greatest War Movies

I had a blast taping this video on the ten greatest war films with Mark Hertling and I hope you check it out. I don’t think you’ll be surprised by the top pick on the list—spoiler: it’s the one with the greatest opening twenty minutes in movie history—but you might be intrigued by some of the choices along the way.

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Review: In the Grey

Guy Ritchie has a new movie out, his eighth (!) since 2019. It’s an odd duck of a movie—you can understand why it’s been on the shelf for a while; it has the feel of a movie that’s been taken apart and put back together with a couple of key pieces excised—but still quite charming. From my review:

It also feels like more of a sketch, a doodle, than a proper, fully fleshed-out feature film. Rife with voiceovers that hop us from plot beat to plot beat as Rachel (Eiza González) explains how she will recover a billion dollars owed to private equity powerhouse Bobby (Rosamund Pike) by international criminal Salazar (Carlos Bardem). It’s all quite convoluted and the legality of everything under discussion is so opaque that you just kind of accept that Rachel is able to command the courts over the course of a few days to seize all of Salazar’s assets. Indeed, Ritchie’s stylish enough and the cutting by Martin Walsh is electric enough that you almost don’t realize that Rachel is quite literally narrating everything we’re seeing happen in order to help us make sense of the plot, but that is very much what’s happening.

Ritchie has always been a somewhat vibes-based director, and I mean that complimentarily: Even if you don’t care about diamond heists and bare-knuckle boxers or American pot dealers cornering the market in British weed, his films are a pleasure to look at and luxuriate in because the characters all look so damn cool. In the Grey is no exception. This is a movie of very carefully popped collars and rolled sleeves, of impeccable layering for combat in any clime. It’s a movie in which we are, for no reason other than the fact that it looks cool and screams class, shown step by step how to make a Stovetop Negroni (Negroni Svegliato).

You can read the full thing here.

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Assigned Viewing: Black Hawk Down (Kanopy)

On the podcast with Mark Hertling, I mentioned that Black Hawk Down is one of the best-looking 4K discs I’ve ever seen and this is true. You should pick that up if you’re looking for a reference-quality disc. But the story itself remains so compelling and so tense that it’s worth watching even on streaming. And it has the sort of cast where every once in a while you’re just like “Wait, is that … yup, sure is.” The funniest iteration of this, at least for me, was a couple of years back when I was watching and was like “Wait, is that … the villain from Kindergarten Cop?” And, sure enough, Richard Tyson is in the movie. A veritable treasure trove of “That Guys.”

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Hey everyone, so: This posted in the Takes feed over the weekend. (You can watch the video on Substack here or YouTube here.) I Just wanted to make sure this episode got into the Bulwark Goes to Hollywood feed in case you don’t subscribe to the Takes feed (though you should!) and also to give everyone a heads up that Mona Charen and I will be doing an episode of her podcast on A Man for All Seasons. You can watch that movie for free on YouTube, so long as you don’t mind ads.

I just wanted to quickly tease a fun thing Mona Charen and I are going to be taping next week: a discussion of A Man for All Seasons, the 1966 film from director Fred Zinnemann based on the play of the same name by Robert Bolt. The film itself is not available to stream for free, unfortunately, but you can rent it for just $4 from Amazon, Apple, and other fine video-on-demand providers.

I rewatched it for the show for the first time in ages, and it’s really pretty striking, in part because I’d forgotten Orson Welles has a small part as the venal Cardinal Wolsey, a clergyman trying to convince Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield) to abandon his moral convictions and sign off on Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) being made head of the Church of England so he can divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. More, of course, refuses, and the bulk of the film involves the struggle between what the law can prove—and how little that matters in the face of supreme executive power and complete public cowardice.

Zinnemann is best remembered for High Noon, and this movie operates in a similar vein: one man, abandoned by friends and unable to be helped by family, pressured to abandon his post and his moral convictions under threat of mortal violence. In this film, there’s the additional pressure of life under a supreme executive: the whims of the king are linked to the needs of the state, they are inseparable. Shaw plays Henry VIII as a man of mad whims, to be sure: His is the showiest work in the film, by far, but it makes sense if Zinnemann wants to demonstrate how crazy it is to invest supreme power in any one individual. One line in particular continues to rattle around my head some days later: “I think that when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.”

No idea why that particular bit of wisdom resonates today!

Anyway, I quite enjoy these little movie-club-type episodes with my Bulwark colleagues and hope to do more of them. (Keep your eyes peeled for a chat with Gen. Mark Hertling about his favorite war films and the leadership lessons they impart!) I can’t promise a full resurrection of the Movie Club, but you never know.

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And That Made All the DIFFerence

Many thanks to James Faust over at the Dallas International Film Festival, who put together a great festival despite very foolishly asking me to sit on the narrative feature jury alongside award-winning filmmakers King Hollis and Amy Talkington.

Five films were in the narrative feature competition; we ended up choosing If I Go Will They Miss Me from writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández as the winner and highlighted Pinch from director/co-writer Uttera Singh with a special jury prize. Frankly, all the films were solid; I’ll just give a separate shoutout here to Misper, a very dry British workplace dramedy by Harry Sherriff starring Samuel Blenkin, whom American audiences might recognize from last year’s Alien: Earth.

Full disclosure: I am not, by nature, a festival guy. In part, because I don’t love watching more than one new movie a day (I need time to process!) and in part because I find the red carpets and the like of little use for my actual work, which is letting you know what’s to be watched and what’s to be avoided. But this was a good reminder of the importance of such events and the way they highlight films that aren’t likely to get huge releases. I will endeavor to keep track of the films we watched in the hopes of getting y’all’s eyeballs on them once they’re released more broadly.

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Review: The Sheep Detectives

One thing I definitely recommend you watch: The Sheep Detectives! It’s high-quality entertainment for ages 9 to 99. Here’s the opening portion of my review:

An odd thing has happened every time I’ve been in a theater where the trailer for The Sheep Detectives has played.

At first, there is a confused tittering, an almost palpable wave of disbelief that this ridiculous thing has the temerity to exist. The murmurs percolate and then boil over: “Hugh Jackman’s reading detective stories to a flock of sheep? And they talk? And they solve his murder? Wolverine’s murder? What the hell is this?” But as the trailer continues the murmuring slows and people start paying attention and they realize that, whatever this thing is, it’s . . . amusing. The murmurs turn to chuckles, some self-consciously stifled. More often than not, the audience is at least open to the possibility that this thing is not ridiculous and might, in fact, be worth their time.

And, indeed, it is: The Sheep Detective is a high-grade all-ages entertainment, a throwback kids’ movie that nudges up to that line of darkness that ran through so much of our 1980s cinematic entertainments without quite crossing over. Occasionally a bit arch and a little heavy-handed in its messaging, the jokes land and the mystery will keep audiences guessing up until the final moments.

Please read the whole thing!

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Looking Ahead. . .

The summer movie season is underway, which is why I wanted to check in with box-office guru Scott Mendelson. We chatted about the bombs, the blockbusters, and the . . . Infinity Vision? What on Earth is that? Well . . . listen to find out!

On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by Scott Mendelson of The Outside Scoop to preview the summer movie season and address some of the hottest questions in the biz. Why did Netflix push Greta Gerwig’s Narnia movie to next year and give it a full(ish) theatrical window? What’s shaping up to be the biggest flop of the summer? Is box office health finally back on the upswing after some down years post-COVID and post-strikes? And what the heck is “Infinity Vision”? All that and more on this week’s episode. Leave your most-anticipated film in the comments!

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Earlier this week, I hopped on camera with our very own Catherine Rampell largely to discuss the ways the FCC is both being used to ding opponents of Donald Trump (via FCC chief Brendan Carr’s ridiculous decision to demand ABC renew their broadcast licenses early in the face of mean jokes by Jimmy Kimmel) and being asked to aid allies of Donald Trump (by waiving a rule that requires foreign entities to own no more than 25 percent of companies that have broadcast licenses). You’ll want to watch the whole thing:

(Yes, half of the ad-free vid is locked for paying members only. We have to pay the bills somehow! And I ask so very little of y’all. Sign up now!)

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One of the things we discussed in that episode is why it seems relatively unlikely that the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) will conduct a review of the $111 billion Paramount–Warner Bros deal even though nearly half of the capital being used to complete it involves funding from Middle Eastern sovereign funds and other foreign sources.

In its 2025 SEC filing, Paramount declared that such a review isn’t necessary for two reasons. The second is that the sovereign wealth funds will have no governance role in the company. That is, despite three such funds ultimately investing 38.5 percent of the equity for the deal, they won’t have any official votes over the business’s direction. (Whether or not we believe they’ll have any unofficial votes over, say, coverage of international news on CNN or CBS is, of course, a separate and, frankly, unanswerable question.) The first: The Chinese company “Tencent will no longer be a financing partner in the transaction.” (Emphasis in the original.)

This is an interesting wrinkle for a couple of reasons. One is that even though Tencent was removed as a potential source of equity to ease the deal, a Chinese conglomerate with ties to the CCP that the Department of Defense has designated as a “Chinese Military Company” was an early investor in Skydance,1 the Ellison-owned company that merged with Paramount last year. Tencent reportedly held about 10 percent of Skydance and roughly five percent of the merged entity. So Tencent will at least be a passive investor in some way in the Skydance/Paramount/Warner Bros.-Discovery entity even if they do nothing else.

Tencent’s role is raising alarms in certain quarters. In a letter requesting a full CFIUS review, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker noted the following:

The fact that Tencent withdrew and has reportedly re-entered at a lower dollar amount does not eliminate the CFIUS question—it underscores it. If anything, the pattern of withdrawal and re-entry—each time at a level designed to stay below the jurisdictional threshold—is itself potential evidence that the transaction’s foreign capital structure is being managed to evade review.

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One might argue that, hey, this is about movies—what does it matter if a Chinese company with ties to that nation’s military plays some role? But earlier this spring, there were reports that the White House was considering forcing Tencent to divest from Epic Games out of a concern that the Chinese company would harvest too much personal data from Americans. Similar concerns could well come into play for a streaming giant with 210 million or so global subscribers, which is the combined user base for HBO Max and Paramount Plus. (The number of U.S.-only subscribers is harder to suss out since we don’t have great data on how many people subscribe to the standalone services and HBO via cable companies, nor do we know the overlap of HBO+/Paramount dual subscribers. But the number of households that would be impacted is likely in the mid–eight figures.)

Then again, maybe there’s nothing to worry about! But this is precisely the sort of thing a CFIUS review is designed to sort out. Hopefully they get the chance.

As a semi-regular reminder, Across the Movie Aisle has spun off of The Bulwark and is now available on its own via Apple and other podcast subscribers, as well as Substack. This week, we reviewed Michael. We had some issues with it!

Across the Movie Aisle

'Michael' Makes The King of Pop Boring

On this week’s episode, we take a sideways look into the sexual harassment suit filed against Mr. Beast. (That’s right: It’s a cons and nons pulled from the chat! It’s only for members, so sign up now if you want to help influence the show…

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a month ago · 14 likes · 9 comments · Sonny Bunch, Alyssa Rosenberg, and Peter Suderman

On this week’s Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, I talked to Jeff Annison of Legion M, a production and distribution company that takes its marching orders from its movie fan investors. What does that mean? We discuss!

Assigned Viewing: The Devil Wears Prada (HBO Max/Hulu)

Due to a confluence of events—namely, my wife being out of town all week and a funeral I will be attending when this newsletter hits your inbox—I was, sadly, unable to review The Devil Wears Prada 2. And I mean sadly: I’m a fan of the original! It’s a fascinating film, one that does the most important thing any film about any business can do (teach you something about the universality of that business and also its importance to your own life), and also, weirdly, one that some folks2 have singled out as a sotto voce sports movie.

No, seriously! Andy (Anne Hathaway) is a plucky underdog learning the ropes from the wily veteran Nigel (Stanley Tucci), who takes her under his wing, all while she tries to earn the respect of, and thus triumph over, her nemesis, Miranda (Meryl Streep). She even has an unsupportive jerk of a boyfriend in Adrien Grenier’s Nate, who perfectly mirrors the “Wet Blanket Girlfriend” trope prevalent in many sports films. (For more on this, see Bill Simmons’s column on the topic. Speaking of Simmons, he picked The Devil Wears Prada as his most-rewatchable film of the 2000s. Yet more proof this is basically a sports movie, if we’re being honest.)

Anyway, I hear good things about the new one. I’m excited to see it! But you could do worse than staying in and watching the original this weekend.

Occasionally, someone will ask me if I think they should invest in a movie. My answer is, invariably, the same: you should only invest in movies you really believe in; you should understand that even if you invest, the movie will likely never get made because most movies never do; and you should only invest if you’re willing to lose everything you put in, because even those movies that do get made tend to show a loss.

I lead with this because today I’m talking to Jeff Annison of Legion M, a production and distribution company built on the idea that fan investments are a great way to both develop seed capital and drive enthusiasm at theaters. Legion M is not a fly-by-night company and has a number of productions under its belt, including My Dead Friend Zoe and The Man in the White Van. Jeff will be the first to tell you that investing is risky and should only be done if you’re comfortable with losing it all, though he obviously has staked his claim with Legion M and put no small amount of his own capital at risk. And they’ve certainly seen some successes with films like the Nic Cage-starring Mandy (one of my favorites of the 2010s).

We discussed how changes to investment laws in 2016 helped spur a shift in indie fundraising from crowdfunding models to models that allow individuals to earn equity in the movies they contribute to the production of. We also discussed the Legion M Film Fund, their distribution-minded arm that provides last-in, first-out money for films seeking a domestic release. And we chatted about the effort to build a consistent fan base via the cultivation of retail investors.

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If you’re not in Dallas, I hope you check it out when it hits theaters later this year: July 10 is the official date. Don’t worry: I’ll make sure to drop a reminder.

THE RINGER’S SEAN FENNESSEY DEBUTED his new newsletter (you should subscribe!) with a nice effort to try and understand why it feels like there’s more energy and excitement around the movies than there has been in some time. His point about the paucity of kids’ movies jumped out at me:

I took my daughter to see Hoppers and GOAT in successive weekends. We had a ball with both movies. Two weeks after we saw Hoppers, out of nowhere, she plaintively asked me “Why did that girl become a beaver?” This led to an interesting exchange about how to save the environment and if we are doomed. This is called imprinting. These two movies were released three weeks apart. Neither one was wounded by the other. One featured a male lead, the other a female lead. One was about animals playing a form of basketball called “roarball.” The other is about an ecologically-minded girl coping with anxiety by entering her consciousness into an animatronic beaver. Weird stuff in both cases. They’re both original! Kids love these movies, they’re both among the top five of the year at the box office. Perhaps this is my theater-poisoned mind speaking, but why are there not 4-7 new kids features coming from every studio every year?

This is a point the Entertainment Strategy Guy also highlighted in his epic post about the biggest films of the year:

The obvious takeaway: audiences love family films and animated films; The Minecraft Movie, Lilo & Stitch and Zootopia 2 took the top three spots. … A few years ago, I read countless think pieces about horror films, but I was one of the only people arguing for more family films and complaining about the long dry spells between family films coming to theaters.

Two years ago I was arguing much the same point. If anything, things have gotten more dire, the success of Super Mario Galaxy and Hoppers aside. It just feels like we go incredibly long stretches without a darn thing for kids to watch, and we’re about to hit another such stretch. I guess The Mandalorian and Grogu counts as a kids’ film, kinda? That’ll be out next month. But we won’t get another proper animated film for the whole family until more than midway through June, with Toy Story 5, and a few weeks later with the upcoming Minions movie.

Set aside my own desire for an easy afternoon out with the kids. (I’m a lazy dad, I’m happy to outsource the family entertainment to a giant, domineering screen.) For the sake of the industry as a whole, you need to get kids back in the habit of getting excited to go to the theater or risk losing an entire generation to the tiny screens that will serve as the villain of Toy Story 5.

The good news is that Gen Z craves the movie theater mines: It is the demographic most likely to go to the theaters. Now, part of this is just common sense, as they’re right in the midst of the demo that’s long been most coveted by theater owners, the 13-to-25 set. But it demonstrates that for all the talk about Gen Z as the first demographic of digital natives, for all the worrying about them being addicted to short-form video and other phone-friendly formats, the link hasn’t been severed yet.

The benefits of encouraging theatergoing are palpable beyond simple grosses. Consider the impact of trailers on the big screen compared to your laptop: Seeing them in theaters leads to a surprise factor, a wow effect. “In the old days, a trailer would ‘occur’ to you when you sat down in your seat. You didn’t know what you were going to see. You didn’t click, ‘Oh, Mario,’ right? It would occur. It would reveal itself. And there’s something magical about that. So I would agree that we want to retain that magic,” Universal marketing chief Dwight Caines said on a panel at Variety’s Entertainment Marketing Summit earlier this week.

Again, I can only point to my own experiences, and my own experience involves my kids seeing a trailer and immediately asking to see the film, an impulse reinforced every time they see a poster outside of my local Drafthouse or a billboard on the side of the highway. If you build it, my kids will come. And I’m sure they’re not the only ones.

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‘Quite honestly, I was disgusted’

AS Y’ALL KNOW, I’ve been kind of bummed to watch the destruction of the Kennedy Center at the hands of the Trump administration. Which is one reason I was glad to talk to whistleblower Josef Palermo, who saw the malfeasance from the inside. It’s just an infuriating story and I hope you give it a watch or a listen.

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Michael Review

APPARENTLY, MICHAEL JACKSON STANS—a real thing that exists in the Year of our Lord 2026—are up in arms because critics aren’t swooning over the new film about the pop star that completely ignores the accusations of child abuse leveled at the singer of “Billie Jean” in the 1980s. I’m sure they’ll love my review, which opens with a comparison to Soviet propaganda documentaries.

As historian Thomas Doherty notes in his new book on documentaries drawn from newsreels, How Film Became History, cinema, at least until the rise of algorithmic social media, was the ultimate propagandist’s tool. In early Soviet Russia, for instance, “footage from the recent past was collected to teach Revolutionary doctrine, to deify Lenin (and later Stalin), and to tell, and retell, the Bolshevik origin story. The archival instinct merged with the totalitarian impulse to rewrite and recast the past to suit the ideological needs of the present.”

Understanding the ability of present filmmakers to rewrite (or erase) sins of the past is paramount to understanding why Michael exists in the form audiences will see it in.

Read the whole thing here.

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Assigned Viewing: Bang Bang (Kanopy, Paramount+)

THIS IS A 2024 FILM from Vincent Grashaw, the director of Keep Quiet. Tim Blake Nelson plays a boxer nicknamed Bang Bang who decides to train his estranged grandson in the family business, which leads to a bunch of old tensions coming to the surface. It’s an odd movie—there are some script issues; we kind of bounce around all over the place—but it a.) looks great, Grashaw has a keen eye and frames his shots really well; b.) is nicely paced; and c.) gives Nelson space to do some real work. He’s the sort of actor who always gets put in supporting parts, so it’s worth 100 minutes of your time just to see him show off why he’s such a reliable supporting actor.

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On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Lou Diamond Phillips, who you know from … well, tons of stuff. La Bamba, Young Guns, Longmire, and last year’s best new TV show, The Chair Company. He’s on the show this week to discuss his new film, Keep Quiet, which is playing this Saturday evening at the Dallas International Film Festival and should hit theaters this summer. We talked about all sorts of stuff, but one thing I find really fascinating is Keep Quiet’s place in the burgeoning mini-genre we might think of as Native Noir: films like this, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Wind River, TV shows like Reservation Dogs, Dark Winds, and Longmire, etc. It’s an interesting moment, and Keep Quiet is a key part of it. I hope you’ll seek it out once it hits theaters … don’t worry, I’ll remind you when it’s about to happen.

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THE BIG NEWS THIS WEEK was that a thousand—then two thousand, soon to be four thousand—folks in the movie business had signed a letter opposing the purchase of Warner Bros. by Paramount Skydance. You can read the letter here or the writeup in the New York Times here—or better yet, listen to some of the key figures discuss it with me.

First up is Damon Lindelof of Lost, The Leftovers, and Watchmen fame. After reading his Instagram post about the fear that came with signing the letter, I reached out to see if he be willing to talk in more detail about that emotion. Because if Lindelof—who is almost inarguably one of the most powerful people in the industry, with a bunch of hits and a great overall deal at Warner Bros.—is afraid to speak up, where does that leave everyone else?

Then on this week’s Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, I chatted about the letter’s origins and what has been lost in the indie ecosystem over the last decade or so as streaming has ripped the guts out of the home-video market and specialty labels have felt the squeeze from the increasing demand for blockbuster economics. Joining me were Ted Hope of Hope for Film and Jon Reiss and Jax Deluca of the Future Film Coalition, all signatories of the letter:

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, David Ellison appeared before the CinemaCon throngs shortly after his studio pulled advertising from the Ankler over Richard Rushfield’s protest of the merger and reiterated a promise the studio has been making since the deal neared approval: a “minimum” of thirty films a year released by Paramount and Warner Bros. Ellison also committed to a forty-five-day theatrical-exclusive window. Set aside the questions swirling around CBS and CNN and the effect of more consolidation of the news media in the hands of someone hand-picked by the Trump administration to own both of those outlets.1 A lot of the angst about this deal depends on just how much you believe Ellison when he makes these promises like this:

When the transaction is completed, Ellison pledged that Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. would make a “minimum” of 30 films for theaters across both studios.

“At Paramount, we’ve already demonstrated – since launching the new company just eight months ago – our ability to increase output with 15 films currently dated for 2026, up from eight in 2025,” said Ellison. “We want to tell even more great stories on the big screen – stories that make people think, laugh, dream, wonder and feel – and we want to share them with as broad an audience as possible.”

There are two separate issues here. One is the windowing, which I think most believe is necessary for the theatrical experience to survive.2 Whether or not forty-five days to transactional video-on-demand and ninetydays to streaming video-on-demand is a big enough window, I don’t know. (I tend to think probably not, at least on the SVOD front: Six months would do more than three months to encourage folks to show up at theaters. Still: It’s a step in the right direction.)

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The thirty-film commitment, on the other hand . . . I simply don’t believe it will happen and I don’t know anyone who does. The reason for this is twofold. One, Warner Bros. and Paramount haven’t combined to release thirty films per year for a long time. And two, when Disney and 20th Century Fox merged in the 2010s, their combined number of releases plummeted:

In 2016, Disney and 20th Century Fox released 26 new titles in more than 2,000 domestic theaters each. This year, the combined total is 14, a 46 percent decline. The impact of this drop on domestic box office is that 20th Century titles (Fox is no longer part of the title) are projected to gross $900 million less this year than in 2016, a drop of 63 percent.

Fewer releases mean fewer production jobs and fewer jobs in theaters. They also mean a reduction in consumer choice, as the combined studio is unlikely to compete against itself on any given weekend. It’s bad all around.

This is how consolidation hurts us all.

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Review: Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

SPEAKING OF HURTING US ALL: I did not care for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. I actually quite disliked it. A snippet from the top of my review:

I’ve written before about my critical hangups regarding children-in-peril films, so I won’t belabor that point here. But I feel the need to link to that piece and state, for the record, that Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a film that is, at heart, not only about cruelty to children but kind of revels in depicting that cruelty. As a result, I must admit to not only not enjoying it, but also finding it vaguely repugnant.

Read the whole thing.

Assigned Viewing: The Hunt (Peacock)

NOW THAT I HAVE Damon Lindelof’s contact information, I plan on slowly convincing him to partake in an oral history of 2020’s The Hunt.

Now, you may be asking yourself why I would want to do this. ‘The Hunt? I kind of remember that movie. Like The Most Dangerous Game, right? But with conspiracy theorists?’ But The Hunt exists at a crossroads of a bunch of interesting, overlapping phenomena. It’s a movie that was first delayed following a pair of mass shootings and then ran afoul of Donald Trump, who painted it as a film about corrupt elites gleefully hunting good-natured Red Staters for fun. Then it was lambasted by some on the left when it turned out the film poked a bit of fun at liberal pieties. And then, shortly after its release, COVID hit, shutting down theaters for months on end. (Indeed, The Hunt was the last film I saw in theaters before the world closed for business.) I can only imagine the stories still to be told about the strategy sessions that went into figuring out how to release this and then the sense of doom that must have unfurled once it finally did get a release and a mysterious plague shuttered society entirely.

Also: I just enjoy the movie! It’s an entertaining exploitation flick with a slightly nasty edge and a bunch of great supporting performances from folks like Amy Madigan, Ethan Suplee, Ike Barinholtz, and Glenn Howerton, to say nothing of stars Betty Gilpin and Hilary Swank. It’s fun! A little silly at times, sure, but I think you’ll enjoy it if you watch it.

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Special two-part episode of the podcast! The big news in Hollywood this week has been the burgeoning effort by Hollywood creatives to fight the purchase of Warner Bros. by Paramount Skydance. Thousands of names—including some of the biggest in the business—have signed an open letter in the hopes of demonstrating that not everyone in the industry is on board with the potential deal. So I wanted to talk to some of the folks behind it.

First up is an interview with Ted Hope, indie producer extraordinaire and author of the Hope for Film Substack. We talked about how indie production has changed over the last few decades and what could be lost if Warner Bros. and Paramount are allowed to merge.

Then I got Jon Reiss and Jax Deluca of the Future Film Coalition on the horn. We discussed what concrete steps could be taken to help fight this merger and what media consolidation means to the indie filmmakers out there.

If you found this podcast interesting or informative, I hope you share it with your friends!

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MY FRIEND RICHARD RUSHFIELD over at the Ankler noted briefly earlier this week that Italian courts had not only reversed a price increase enacted by Netflix but also required a refund of previous price increases. This led Richard to write the following:

So imagine that. In some countries, laws prevent companies from simply shoving an increase down their customers’ throats without making it abundantly clear what they are doing and why.

The idea that one’s customers are not just piggy banks to be shaken until all the coins fall out but partners in a relationship is nice to hear about, if it exists somewhere.

I understand the need to charge more to deliver more, which is what Netflix would say they’re doing. You see it all the time. I’ll just use a personal-professional example: Not long ago, The Bulwark itself raised the monthly rate from $10 to $12 a month for new subscribers, in no small part because we’ve added a whole raft of newsletters and writers, great additions like Adrian Carrasquillo, Catherine Rampell, Lauren Egan, Mark Hertling, and Will Sommer … to say nothing of new editors like Sam Stein, new video producers, and whole support teams to ensure that the trains run on time. Trust me: I look at the expansion inside The Bulwark and just marvel at how quickly and largely it has grown. That growth is made possible by our Bulwark+ members—and if you’re among them, thank you.

If you aren’t a paying member yet, well, here’s your chance. The good news is that the price of a yearly sub remained static, while a monthly sub is now $12 a month . . . meaning that signing up for a year saves you nearly a third off the monthly rate. Given that we’re also running a special giving you the first two weeks for free, you’re basically losing money by not signing up for an annual sub to take advantage of all the ad-free videos, the legions of podcasts, and newsletters via our brand-new handy-dandy app (available on Apple and Google).

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That said, it has become incredibly obvious that the business model of certain streamers, particularly the larger ones, is largely one of inertia. Most people don’t actively monitor how much they’re paying for each sub, and the renewal charges go through automatically because people just sign up for recurring payments with their credit cards. It’s all automated. There’s no friction for a price increase. My Disney+ sub has almost doubled in price over the last few years and I barely even notice it because it’s one of a thousand lines on a credit card statement. And their longer-term hope is to move some of those ad-free subscribers into the ad-supported tier, as advertising is where the real monetary growth will likely be in the future.

The Biden-era FTC tried to introduce some friction with its “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have required easier means of canceling subscriptions and active affirmation for price increases. The click-to-cancel rule was voided unanimously last year by the Eighth Circuit. I am in no position to judge the merits of this ruling, so I’ll just assume, for argument’s sake, that they handled it correctly; the Constitution is a tricky thing.

But that assumption allows me to make another assumption: Congress could absolutely pass a law demanding that service providers a.) make it easier to cancel subscriptions and b.) require active consent to increase prices. (Seems like pretty straightforward interstate commerce, no?) The form that active consent should take I leave up to the legislature, though I might add that merely clicking a button confirming the price increase simply will not do. There should be some further step, a requirement to restate the credit card number tied to an account, perhaps. Something to make the customer actually think about what they’re doing.

Because, let’s be real: Netflix’s decision to raise prices for the second time in less than a year feels pretty egregious. And I bet a lot of people, if they think about it, might not think it’s worth all that extra cash every year.

Anyway, I’m not in the business of offering the GOP Congress easy wins. But I genuinely cannot think of an easier win than ‘make it harder for faceless streaming companies to charge you more the sub you already have.’ And if they decide this is too hard? That they have better things to do than try to protect consumers from predation by the tech lords? Well, hey. Seems like an easy win for the sure-to-be-incoming Democratic majority, no?

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From Gaming to Podcasting: New Frontiers in Film

I’M NOT GOING TO REVIEW the new Super Mario Galaxy, but I feel confident saying that Exit 8 is the best video-game adaptation in theaters this week. And that’s at least in part because director and cowriter Genki Kawamura understood how to meld the source material’s gameplay with the tricks of cinema. A brief taste of my review of this Japanese psychological horror-thriller:

Some audiences will find Exit 8 grating, and I get it: It is repetitive by design, and if your brain hasn’t been trained by video game logic to pick up on tiny details or engage in foolishly intricate puzzle-solving to, say, extricate a medallion from a locker (I’m looking at you, Resident Evil), you’ll likely find the entire exercise pointless.

However. I couldn’t help but find Exit 8 charming at times and, eventually, quite moving. It is, ultimately, a film about a man trapped in a doom loop of his own making and trying to break out of it, a mode of living that corresponds well to the fears that so many in the younger generation struggle with. How can I get married; I don’t have a good job. How can I have kids; I’m just a temporary worker. Where will we live; we don’t have a proper home. I can’t move forward until everything is perfect; nothing is ever perfect, I can’t move forward.

Contrast that to Undertone—also in my review linked above—which uses a horror podcast as the basis of its story but doesn’t seem to have any interest in or knowledge of how podcasts actually, you know, work.

The biggest problem with Undertone is that it is, frequently, kind of boring. There are long stretches where nothing of import and nothing terrifying happens. But there are moments when it is tremendously effective—jarringly creepy and genuinely frightening—and those moments all revolve around Evy’s (ridiculous) podcast. I feel there is a lesson to be learned here.

The effectiveness is achieved by leaning into the advances and the limitations of the technology available to podcasters. The way the sound design mimics what it’s like to wear noise-canceling headphones, for instance, is striking: There’s something intensely eerie about being in a big, old, empty house while wearing cans that cut you off from the noise around you. It’s an unnatural short-circuiting of the systems we’ve evolved to protect ourselves, a lowering of our defenses in a situation where they should be up. (Or, at least, we know they should be up since we’re watching a horror movie.) We’re on edge because she’s on edge, and she’s on edge because once she starts listening to the audio files, things start getting weird.

Anyway, Exit 8 is hitting theaters today and Undertone is still on some screens. But if I were you, I would prioritize the Japanese film.

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Assigned Viewing: ‘The Christophers’ (Theaters)

IF HORROR’S NOT YOUR THING, you should go check out The Christophers (which is playing in a few cities this week and expanding wider next). I interviewed screenwriter Ed Solomon about his work on this film and his previous collaborations with Steven Soderbergh, alongside all sorts of questions about art and authenticity and set design and lens choices. It was a fun chat, and I hope you listen:

One thing we didn’t have time to discuss, though I alluded to it at the top of the interview, is that I recently showed my daughter 1997’s Men in Black, which Solomon wrote. She loved it and that made me very happy: Showing your kids something you watched and loved as a kid (I was 14 when this came out; she’s 10 now) is always a dicey proposition. However, the movie holds up well: Yes, a few of the CGI shots are a little dated, but it’s funny and propulsive and clever, and you have to give Solomon a good deal of the credit for that.

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I’m joined on this week’s episode by Ed Solomon, the writer of the new Steven Soderbergh feature, The Christophers, which is in limited release this weekend and going wider next. It’s the story of an aging artist, played by Ian McKellen, and his new assistant, played by Michaela Cole, who has been hired by the artist’s son and daughter to forge a series of paintings from an earlier, more successful period in his career. The idea being that, when he dies, the kids can sell the “found” works for millions.

Solomon discussed the idea for the film, which began with a single sentence from Steven Soderbergh, and blossomed from a twisty noir into something more emotionally resonant. We also discussed their previous collaboration, No Sudden Move, and why he wishes more people had had a chance to see it; the difference between more conceptual art and actual paintings; and the joy of working with McKellen and Cole in shaping the voice of the characters on the screen in The Christophers.

It was a wide-ranging chat, is what I’m saying, and we didn’t even get a chance to discuss Men in Black or the Bill & Ted series of films, which he co-wrote. Maybe next time! If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!

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I INTERVIEWED OSCAR-WINNING PRODUCER Steve Starkey this week about his new book, On the Set of Forrest Gump, for The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood. He had a ton of great stories to tell from the making of that film. (My favorite: the favor Robert Zemeckis called in to get the perfect voice for their Elvis stand-in.) I hope you give it a listen:

Steve was Zemeckis’s producing partner for many years, producing Death Becomes Her, Cast Away, Flight, and a host of other huge productions in addition to Forrest Gump. He has seen up close how the economics of production have changed, and he laments what’s happened in his home state of California.

“The genie’s out of the bottle,” he said. “So many states and so many countries have incentivized having film productions come to their country or their state. And they did that because it wasn’t offered here in California.” He proceeded to rattle off a handful of places that he and Zemeckis had filmed to keep costs down—Atlanta, Montreal, Vancouver, London, etc.—and noted that talent pools were now available in each of those locations that allowed for better work to be done there. But Los Angeles still has one big advantage for the folks who live there and the studios that remain based in the city.

“Everybody lives in town,” he said. “All you’re going to do is go, you’re just driving to work every day. That’s just a lot easier than going all the way to Atlanta to just go to a stage every day.”

This is the case with The Pitt, the hit HBO drama that wraps up its second season in two weeks.1 Star Noah Wyle and execs like John Wells have been very vocal about the joy of shooting in Los Angeles and how it was only really possible thanks to tax credits and other incentives offered by the state of California.

“Last year we filmed for about 135 days over seven months, plus two months of preproduction. We employed about 350 people, full time. We then brought on an additional about 1,100 people, averaging about 200 new people every day. We worked with about 1,400 background performers, averaging about 200 a day. We spent about $35 million in wages, we spent about $20 million in purchasing: lumber, construction materials, rentals, food,” etc., Wyle said at a press conference last year.

Earlier this month, he credited this job creation to the state’s newly generous tax incentives, noting at a Burbank hearing that the $12 million in savings afforded The Pitt was the cost of roughly two episodes of the show: “The ripple effect of that money . . . stimulates additional economic activity. It’s estimated that the procurements associated with The Pitt, season one, stimulated $22.6 million in contributions to the state’s GDP along a domestic supply chain.” This, Wyle said, led to 150 full-time jobs across the state of California.

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Now, there’s some debate about the overall efficacy of tax incentives when it comes to film and TV production. The Motion Picture Association’s website hosts a handy collection of studies demonstrating that tax credits lead to jobs in states as diverse as Texas, New York, and Oklahoma. My friend and noted libertarian Peter Suderman says not so fast: Yes, incentives can lead to a quick boom but as soon as they stop or are topped by better incentives, bye-bye jobs.

Still, the simple truth is that film productions have been fleeing from California and it’s largely because of incredibly generous subsidies in states like Georgia and countries like England. The number of shoot days in Los Angeles is in precipitous decline, dropping 16 percent between 2024 and 2025. I’m sure actors and crew alike would love to sleep in their Los Angeles homes rather than globetrot to find the cheapest soundstage space. But millions of dollars are at stake for each of these productions.

Folks in California have been pushing for a federal tax credit that could be stacked on top of state credits in the hopes of luring production—and jobs—back to the United States. I talked to Rep. Laura Friedman (D-Calif.) about this last year, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) was on Matt Belloni’s podcast last week discussing the ongoing efforts. Details remain light, but Schiff made an important point to Belloni: “It would be a baseline of 15 percent, but then you would add on, depending on whether work comes back and other factors,” he said. But “all of that, of course, will be the subject of negotiation. This has to be bipartisan. It won’t be successful otherwise.”

And this is where everything comes to a screeching halt. Donald Trump has his own preference for solving this problem: He wants to mash the “tariff” button on his desk. Even if a tariff would, potentially, be a way to short-circuit the race to the bottom that escalating tax credits represents, no one has any idea what a “100 percent tariff on foreign films” would look like in practice. Even though film production is a job producer in red and blue states alike—yes, California would be a big beneficiary here, but there are tons of productions in Texas and Georgia as well—rank-and-file Republicans aren’t likely to stick their neck out for filmmakers without Trump’s go-ahead. The primary attacks are simply too easy to imagine: Why does JOHN CONGRESSMAN back bailouts for HOLLYWOOD LIBS who HATE YOU?

And this is why the fight over film tax credits is perfectly representative of America’s problems. There are arguments for and against such a credit: I am skeptical of some of the rosier upsides, but it’s almost inarguable that foreign interference in the market is leading to a brain drain and the degradation of a legitimate economic hub in America. It would be nice to have a debate about this that didn’t simply boil down to ‘Well, how do we best fluff Donald Trump’s ego?’

But I guess we’re still a few years away from that.

THIS WEEK I REVIEWED The Drama, in which Robert Pattinson and Zendaya play a couple about to get married who suddenly learn some big things about one another. The top half of the review avoids spoilers, but you’ll have to read through to the bottom half to really get a sense of what those crazy kids and writer-director Kristoffer Borgli are up to:

Assigned Viewing: Fantasy Life (Theaters)

I DON’T OFTEN ASSIGN THEATRICAL FILMS, but I wanted to highlight the indie festival hit Fantasy Life, which expands from a single theater in New York City last weekend to a nationwide release this weekend.

Sam (Matthew Shear, who also directed and wrote the screenplay) is a nebbishy New Yorker: awkward and fussy with a touch of OCD and a near-crippling set of internal anxieties about what he feels when he sees fellow Jews on the street. After getting a new medicine dosage from his psychiatrist, Fred (Judd Hirsch), he also gets a new job from Fred’s wife, Helen (Andrea Martin): A manny gig for their bass-playing son, David (Alessandro Nivola) and his fading movie-star wife, Dianne (Amanda Peet).

The setup here is deceptively simple, and you can see a way in which Shear could have veered toward the commonplace: Sam spends his time watching David and Dianne’s three girls, learning how to be normal from them while also falling for Dianne, herself in search of some attention given her inability to get an acting job as a woman aging out of starlet roles but not quite old enough for grand dame parts. But Shear eschews the easy way out: When things start to get too cozy, Dianne emotionally clams up; there is no big, romantic release in this film. It’s mostly just a movie about folks who are all a little awkward, none entirely certain how the world sees them.

It’s a character study, is what I’m saying, and Shear has assembled an A+ cast for it. Nivola, hot off his outstanding work in The Brutalist and The Many Saints of Newark, brings a sort of studied cluelessness to his work as the aging hipster wannabe rock star who lucks into the real thing late in life. He projects both the confidence of a performer and the insecurity that comes with being a minor part of any performance he’s in; there’s a very funny moment where he betrays actual hurt at the fact that his wife, Dianne, doesn’t think his mustache is cool. He thinks his mustache is cool, but it’s clear others have told him his mustache is cool. So maybe it isn’t cool. Why doesn’t she think it’s cool? Does she not think he’s cool?

Shear does a good job of allowing this to be Peet’s film: She expertly embodies the aging actress who isn’t quite sure what the future holds for her, and we get glimpses of the insanity the life of an actress generates. The constant fear that age has robbed you of your most important asset—your looks—battered about by the constant insistence from agents and loved ones alike that you’re fine, everything’s good, things will pick up. No wonder she’s a bit of a mess. If Peet gets an Oscar nod for this (and I think she deserves it), I hope they use the sequence of her auditioning for an awful-sounding dystopian sci-fi film.

The cast is perfect throughout. Every movie could use Judd Hirsch. Bob Balaban has a nice turn as Dianne’s Sam-skeptical father. Zosia Mamet, always a delight, shows up for a single scene near the end. And Jessica Harper, star of cult Brian De Palma classic, Phantom of the Paradise, is lovely as Dianne’s mother.

It’s a pleasing and pleasant ninety-minute indie comedy with soulful performances and solid laughs that may get lost in the shuffle of the two huge releases duking it out (Project Hail Mary and Super Mario Galaxy) and a star-driven mid-major (The Drama) sucking up most of the rest of the screens, I hope you seek it out.

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On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Steve Starkey to discuss his new book, On the Set of Forrest Gump. Steve won an Oscar for best picture as producer on that film, but he has a career that, as I told him, has meant a lot to me, with credits on, among other pictures, Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the two Back to the Future sequels, Contact, Cast Away, and, of course, Forrest Gump.

We discussed all sorts of stuff here, from the movie magician who made Lt. Dan’s legs disappear, to his work as second unit director, to the early days of using digital trickery to fake the words and faces of famous people, to the worst note he’s ever gotten after an audience test, to the difficulties facing California’s film industry in the face of global tax rebates and production credits.

On the Set of Forrest Gump is laid out like a coffee table book and is beautifully illustrated with 250 or so full-color stills from set. So it’s nice to look at. But the story he tells is a fascinating glimpse into the push and pull of art and business, the struggle between the producer on the ground trying to make sure his director has the resources he needs and the studio bankrolling the whole thing and worried about losing tens of millions of dollars on a movie that isn’t a guaranteed hit.

Anyway, I hope you check it out. And if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you share it with a friend!

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TOWARD THE END of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, now out in theaters, codirector and chief interviewer Daniel Roher is talking to one of his guests when he drops the word “apocaloptimist.” A portmanteau of “apocalyptic” and “optimist,” the term handily sums up the schizophrenic nature of the documentary, veering as it does between terror and hope.

But the documentary is only schizoid because our age is schizoid: We exist on the knife’s edge of great change, a future of infinite promise and infinite peril beckoning in the middle distance.1 Will self-replicating machine intelligence offer us the tools to solve all of the world’s problems, ushering in an age of post-scarcity human excellence in which mankind focuses not on farming or food delivery or home construction but crafting perfect sonnets and great novels? Or does creating amoral intelligent machines empower immoral state actors, businessmen, and terror groups to unleash new horrors as yet unimagined by even our greatest poets and novelists?

As a longtime apocaloptimist myself, the answer I’ve settled on is, almost certainly, “yes.”

Roher’s journey begins as a filmmaker and an artist watching as artificial intelligence becomes able to create art (or, well, art-like designs) and write scripts (or, you know, script-like mutterings). Is he now obsolete? What does the future hold for him and his fellows? Will he join the masses of the unemployed and useless in our brave new world? Thus the first third of the film veers toward the apocalyptic: The AI skeptics air their concerns, their fears, their visions of doom. The problem with AI is that we only kinda-sorta know how it works: We understand the methods of weighting and how it jokes with us on ChatGPT. But it’s a black box in a very real way. We understand very few of the individual “decisions” these programs make. And they may well have “desires” that are so utterly alien to us they don’t even register to us as “desires.”

Freaking out atop his mountain of anxiety—an animated hill that calls to mind Richard Dreyfuss’s living room recreation of Devils Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, another totem of incomprehensible, alien doom—Roher calls in the optimists. Artificial intelligence, they say, will be like a rising tide that lifts all boats: The smarter we get and the more intelligence we have access to, the more problems we can solve. You know how you have Claude running the background helping you with your vibe coding to better sort your emails? What if we can do that to solve cold fusion and cure cancer? Good news: We can! We are! It’s all happening. We’ll all be happier and richer and freer than ever. The sonnets and novels, they’re coming. Our best selves are right around the corner.

It’s a pleasing vision of the future. But it’s one that relies on a big supposition: that people, broadly speaking, have any interest in finding their best selves. That their best selves are even findable.

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I am . . . skeptical. Because I’m a person and I’ve seen people and I’ve lived among them. We are, well—just look at the world, man! Our biggest problem isn’t AI.

It’s people.

Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere (Netflix) is not a film about artificial intelligence. At least, it’s not about artificial intelligence in the sense that The AI Doc is about artificial intelligence. But it is about artifice and a sort of emotional intelligence that allows a new generation of hyperaggressive, amoral, self-replicating man-children to influence the lost and the weak-willed into believing they are owed everything the world has to offer. Money, women, fame, success, adoration: It’s all there for the taking.

You just have to be good at sales.

If there’s a throughline in Theroux’s interviews with the coterie of well-muscled internet personalities, it’s that: sell, sell, sell. Always, Be, Closing as lifestyle. Harrison Sullivan (aka HS) says as much: If you can sell folks on something, you’ll never go hungry. One imagines that HS and Justin Waller see Wolf of Wall Streetprotagonist Jordan Belfort as a deliverer of life lessons rather than a cautionary tale. Sell sad young men lifestyle tip sheets, get them to pony up for the Tate Brothers’ education system, have them invest in the nonsense funds that do nothing but lose: As long as you can sell these saps on your own lifestyle, you’ll never run out of marks.

Again: Artifice, sold intelligently.

Believe it or not, this is the bright side of the manosphere. As Theroux digs deeper into the world inhabited by real creeps like streamers Myron Gaines and Sneako, we see a world of truly noxious misogyny and antisemitism being capitalized on, quite literally: commenters paying to get the most noxious comments read out loud, Gaines ritually humiliating the female “influencers” stupid enough to appear on his show. The modern Colosseum isn’t mixed martial arts or other human cockfights: It’s the stream, the endless river of torment and nastiness indulged in by millions for a few laughs.

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And this is why the apocalypticist inside of me has been edging out the optimist when it comes to our AI future. I don’t know how anyone can see the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated deepfakes fooling person after person and think we’re headed toward anything good, particularly when we can see who and what so many people choose to follow now.

Set aside the nightmare scenarios of bioterrorism or state-sponsored election interference or an AI that reduces humanity to gray goo to power an endless supply of super-Nvidia chips. The much more banal nightmare is the one we’re already living in. Where the techno-optimists fail is in their assumptions about human nature. Most people are not interested in human flourishing. Given their druthers, I can’t help but believe that many—maybe most—people in a post-scarcity society will revert to passive consumption, and revert further to the basest form of that consumption. Think of the fat slobs in Wall-E, or better yet, think of Dax Shepard on his toilet-chair in Idiocracy spending most of his time laughing at “Ow, My Balls” when he isn’t ’batin’. You can dismiss Idiocracy as meanspirited eugenics, if you like, but you can’t ignore the modern world in which so many have immersed themselves, the endless streams of petty cruelties and ugliness in which they indulge.

Maybe they’ll be anesthetized enough by their screens and their streams that they won’t realize they’re empty husks. But I am skeptical that the human urge to find meaning through production will be so easily sublimated. And I’d guess that more of these people will turn to Sneako and his heirs than to Shakespeare to find meaning.

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On this week’s episode, I’m very pleased to be joined by McKay Coppins, author of April’s cover story in The Atlantic: “Sucker: My Year as a Degenerate Gambler.” We discussed the rise of sports betting apps, why his boss gave him $10,000 to lose, how the wild proliferation of sports gambling could destroy faith in the sports we watch, and why Kalshi/Polymarket could wind up getting people killed. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend! And make sure to read McKay’s story! It’s really quite good.

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