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World Ends, Movie Theaters Hardest Hit

It’s nice to have a big new movie in theaters like The Odyssey, because the buzz at the multiplex and in the online chatter is palpable. Folks are excited and that excitement carries over for months to come. Nothing helps sell movies like a big movie: People see trailers, they get excited for future films, and the cycle repeats.

Enjoy it while it lasts! If there’s one refrain from the latest rounds of legal filings and public statements, it’s that the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger is likely to result in the closure of some number of them.

It is, I think, noteworthy that, in their filing asking for an injunction delaying the merger, California’s Rob Bonta and the other state AGs led the list of victims thus: “This proposed $110 billion merger, the largest in Hollywood history, would extinguish competition between Paramount and Warner Bros. and inflict substantial harm on movie theatres, basic cable distributors, and, ultimately, audiences nationwide.”1 Not the workers of these companies, or the shareholders, but the theaters.

Here’s the basic reasoning:

Paramount and Warner Bros. compete fiercely to create and disseminate new, different, and innovative film and television content to American audiences. To promote their films, they negotiate with thousands of movie theatres across the country. They bargain with those theatres to secure the most coveted screens. And they negotiate a range of terms, including box office revenue splits, minimum ticket prices, caps on discounts, limits on complimentary tickets, and theatrical exclusivity windows. Movie theatres rely on competition between Paramount and Warner Bros. Through this competition, theatres incentivize creativity and quality, and they secure competitive prices and terms for themselves and for audiences.”

How fierce that competition truly is can be debated; the number of distributors and major releases have dwindled enough that theater owners are often forced to just take what they can get. And certain studios have amassed enough power at times to force drastically unfavorable terms, as when Disney was taking upwards of 70 percent of grosses and requiring extended runs of Marvel Cinematic Universe films on their biggest screens regardless of how well they were playing.

Theaters have been in a precarious position ever since the pandemic shutdowns, which were followed by a calamitous dual writers and actors strike that stifled the production lines and kept movies from flowing back into theaters in a timely fashion. And all this was preceded by the merger of Disney and 20th Century Fox, which had a disastrous impact on the overall number of movies released:

This is why the head of the theatrical trade group Cinema United, Michael O’Leary, was pretty blunt earlier this year on the question of a merger: “If Paramount buys Warner Bros. and production drops, there’s no question that theaters will close.” To assuage these concerns, David Ellison has insisted that Warner Bros. and Paramount will combine to release thirty movies a year. They swear it! Pinky promise!

And maybe they will. Stranger things have happened, I suppose. But the simple truth is that we have no reason to believe him and every reason from examining the history of studio mergers to believe that’s unlikely to happen. This promise is what regulators refer to as a “behavioral remedy” (as opposed to a “structural remedy,” like a divestiture). And if Paramount-Skydance doesn’t hold to that promise? Well, there’s not a whole lot that can be done about it, as Bonta told Matt Belloni on “The Town” this week: “Behavioral remedies just are tough to realize. And even in [the] Ticketmaster [merger with] Live Nation, there were behavioral remedies in that case, in a consent decree from years ago, and we ended up in court with them again for violation of antitrust law, and won on every single question posed to the jury.”

Look, I’m not a lawyer and I’m not an expert in antitrust law; I’m a humble film critic who loves going to the movie theater. I can accept that blocking this merger at the state level is pretty unlikely. But I don’t think any of us should pretend that the merger won’t have consequences for the movie business writ large, some of them quite deleterious.

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Review: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

SPEAKING OF THEATERS, The Odyssey is out now and playing in about fifty different formats. For starters, there are IMAX, 70mm, and 70mm IMAX, which are, believe it or not, three entirely distinct formats. Amazing stuff. I saw it in IMAX at the press screening and attempted to place it within Nolan’s broader body of work:

Nestled in between his Batman films was a sort of shadow trilogy. And while The Prestige, Inception, and Interstellar couldn’t seem more different—a period magic drama; a near-future sci-fi action flick; and a Spielbergian space adventure—they are all connected by a thematic unity, the drive of parents to reunite with their children. Watch them all in order; it’s a series of films about semi-negligent fathers attempting to protect, and get home to, their kids. That’s what drives the action in each of them, and it’s the best rejoinder to any dolt out there who insists on calling Nolan a robotic fashioner of multiplex puzzle boxes.

His three most recent films—Tenet, Oppenheimer, and The Odyssey—are, on the surface, also radically different. A Bond-inflected sci-fi adventure film; a historical drama about the fashioning of the atomic bomb; and a recreation of one of the West’s foundational myths. But they too have an underlying thematic unity, albeit one that’s a bit darker than his other films. They are, all of them, fascinated by the human compulsion toward self-destruction. Toward annihilation.

The Odyssey, then, is the conclusion of Nolan’s Death Drive Trilogy.

Look, I don’t want to freak anyone out, but our greatest pop filmmaker has become obsessed with an onrushing apocalypse. Whether or not this has anything to do with the existential threat faced by his beloved theaters, well, I leave to you to determine. Read the whole thing here.

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On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by Chris Fenton to discuss efforts to pass a federal tax credit that would help reshore American film production and his own made-in-America film, Bad Counselors, which hits theaters next week. Things got a little spicy as we debated some of the downsides of these programs—and, specifically, how they might come to pass; I think the federal government should be working for all of America on this issue rather than picking winners and losers state by state—but something clearly needs to be done. Film production and the culture industry more broadly is one of the great American exports, and we’ll all be better off if we can find a way to keep those jobs in America.

On this week’s Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, I talked to veteran film critic and historian David Thomson about his new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light. I always enjoy having Mr. Thomson on the show (I’ve previously had him on to discuss his book on acting and his book tracing the history of how we think about directors), but I felt a little trepidation this time around because his new book is, to put it bluntly, distraught about film and what it has done to us.

Noting the explosion of attendance at movie theaters by 1930, Thomson writes that “there had never been a time in which such a large part of a nation was seeing the same thing and having its imagination extended yet hived off in the process.” This was a problem, since “the medium cared no more about messages than Fritz Lang felt for people.” Which is to say, not at all. There is an amorality to the artistry of film1—the facts of lighting and blocking and continuity don’t care about your feelings; there is, as Thomson puts it in a slightly different context, a “stupid neutrality” to the nature of quality filmmaking—and an even more obvious amorality to the business of film. As Thomson writes about early exhibition mogul Marcus Lowe, “No one said he favored one film over others; he wanted whatever the crowd wanted.”

The question Thomson is asking throughout A Sudden Flicker of Light has to do with that amorality and the danger of letting the screens that dominate our field of vision hive off that imagination, to colonize it with ugly nihilism. “Anything with pretensions to being an art or an entertainment has as much duty to serve our nature as photography was once treated as the imprint of reality,” Thomson writes. “This medium has begun to diminish our nature.” Thomson echoes Pauline Kael’s assessment that Citizen Kane is a “shallow masterpiece,” arguing “maybe it is just a shrewd estimate of the whole medium.”

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Film led inevitably to television, to Thomson’s chagrin: “It beggars belief that we or our ancestors gave up places like the Granada Tooting and Radio City Music Hall for a screen measured in inches with a picture that looked like ghosts drifting through a blizzard and a soundtrack dredged out of gravel.” But it was free, and it was in your home, and cost and convenience are going to beat out quality nine times out of ten. Eventually, the screens and the transmissions would get bigger and better; nowadays, the screens and resolutions we have in our homes are arguably better than those we deal with in lesser exhibition halls (though few of us have a sound system that can match even a subpar screening room).

The technology of TV mattered less than how the medium rewired our brains, however. The screens kept getting smaller—from theaters to TV, from TV to PC, from PC to smartphone—and as if in reflection of that diminishment, they demanded less and less of our time and energy in the form of focus. The effects here can only be described as disastrous, at least when it comes to literacy. In a lengthy cover story for the Atlantic ominously titled “The End of Reading Is Here,” Rose Horowitch traced the marked decline in reading comprehension among young people that just so happened to coincide with the rise of smartphones and may only be accelerating in the face of AI adoption.

The facts are startling, though you—almost certainly one of the literate few if you’re reading an essay about reading and writing and watching in a publication where you might even pay to have longform news delivered right to your inbox—are likely familiar with some or all of them. “According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022,” Horowitch writes. “Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.” Sentence lengths in bestselling books are decreasing. Fewer people read the news than ever before. Basic reading skills are in freefall, with roughly a third of high school seniors ranked as “proficient” in analyzing written fiction or arguments. The dagger: “Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.”

That this is the result of screens is taken as a given and for good reason, as anyone who has lived through the shift to smartphones can tell you from personal experience. Lord knows I can. If I can be so bold as to paraphrase Frank Herbert, fear of missing notifications is the mind-killer. I read more than the average American by a wide margin, and yet even I have trouble focusing fully on a codex. Did my phone just vibrate. What just flashed on the screen. A news alert. A new DM. Oh, someone just Slacked me. What time is it. How long have I been reading. Can I take a break. Can I please get some sweet endorphins yet. Can I look at my screen. Please tell me I can look at my screen.

But the broader point here, the one that dovetails with Thomson’s book, is that the screens are changing the very nature of what we desire to experience, altering what we want to experience out of screens. And I think this is trickling down to TV itself in very obvious, potentially alarming ways. As Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw noted earlier this week, Netflix is seeing enormous season-over-season drops:

One Piece, one of Netflix’s most-watched shows of 2023, lost more than 30% of its audience for the second season. Season two of Beef suffered a drop of more than 70%. The Night Agent shed 50% of its audience for the second season and another 35% for its third season. These figures are all through the first four weeks of a show’s release and come straight from Netflix. Adding insult to injury, the latest season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of Netflix’s most-watched titles in 2024, suffered a drop of more than 60% over week one. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the month.

Meanwhile, Netflix is responding to this by trying to become more like TikTok via its short video content, expanding offerings in podcasts and its “Clips” feature that highlights bits and pieces of library titles in an easy-to-consume, bite-sized format. As Jessica Toonkel and Ben Fritz reported, concerns about declines in user engagement have also led to Netflix considering the creation of what amount to television channels: “executives at the company have recently discussed adding live channels that would continuously stream certain programs, or shows and films from a certain genre.” And Netflix considers its biggest rivals to be not HBO Max or Paramount+ but YouTube with its shorts and Instagram with its reels.

I’ve written before about Netflix’s push into “second screen” viewing, the idea that you have to dumb down shows enough that people can follow them while simultaneously scrolling on social media. (Indeed, I praised Widow’s Bay precisely for being a “single-screen show.”) It seems now that they want to simply cut out the middleman.

But maybe this is the inevitable endpoint of that sudden flicker of light. In the beginning, there was light. In the end, the light will be with us all the time, blinking at us from our pockets, beckoning to watch one more clip, scroll through one more picture carousel, click on one more caption, like one more reel. The zombified teens of Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, hypnotized by their screens, are our future. The end of reading may be here. But so too might be the end of watching anything that lasts longer than the time it took you to read this sentence.

Catch my conversation with David Thomson here:

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Double Review: The Invite and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass

This week, I reviewed two very different species of an increasingly endangered genre: comedy. Check it out, and let me know in the comments whether your tastes veer more toward the cerebral or the silly.

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On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by renowned critic and film historian David Thomson to discuss his new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies. It’s a bracing tome, given its thesis: That the film screen has fundamentally altered who we are and how we interact with the world, in ways mostly negative. I’ll have more on this book in my newsletter this week, but I really hope you pick it up; there’s a lot to chew on in it.

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THERE’S AN OMNIPRESENT DRONE in Robert Altman’s Nashville, a constant hum in the background. It’s not the country music tunes that warble throughout the 1975 movie, songs made for the motion picture by Altman and his team. Nor am I referring to Altman’s trademark overlapping dialogue, the thrum and throb of which lent his films their lived-in, real-life quality.

No, it’s a voice coming through a loudspeaker attached to a car, a blaring statement of principles and beliefs: the platform espoused by the “Replacement” party, the standard-bearer of which is one Hal Phillip Walker. One presumes the voice is Walker’s, and one can, at least theoretically, understand the appeal of a man who decries that an automobile costs more than Columbus’s voyage and that there are 288 lawyers in Congress. Do these facts and figures mean a thing? Well, no, they’re quite obviously gibberish. But they sound bad, they sound like something we should all be opposed to, and if there’s anything we’ve learned about the American people these last few years, it’s that they’re suckers for a guy saying things that sound bad.

Nashville is a sprawling, vibrant picture that rotates around that humming drone. The narrative thrust, insofar as the film has a narrative thrust, derives from John Triplette’s (Michael Murphy) efforts to shore up support for Walker’s primary campaign from the musical community in the titular city. (Why there’s so much excitement around a third party’s primary campaign is a separate question; the film’s understanding of politics feels about as slipshod as the campaign it’s mocking.) But neither Altman nor screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury is that interested in politics and policy; they care more about mood and motivation. And there’s no greater motivator in America than the drive for celebrity.

Altman captures an America preparing to celebrate its bicentennial, an America that has grown weary of the tricky politicians and wary of the violence that has swept the nation at home and abroad. The opening scene of the film tracks Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) as he attempts to record a hacky song celebrating America’s birthday: “I share our country’s motto / And in God I place my trust. / We may have had our ups and down / Our times of trials and fears. / But we must be doin’ somethin’ right / to last two hundred years.” It’s not that Hamilton doesn’t believe what he’s singing, precisely, it’s that it’s calculated, soulless. The contrast with the vibrant gospel choir singing in the next studio over is telling, but Haven is the bigger name, the more popular figure, and thus the object of Triplette’s attention.

It is celebrity that America revolves around, celebrity that has driven us since the rise of mass media, celebrity that has become the kingmaker in the age of film and TV. It is why Martha, aka L.A. Joan (Shelley Duvall), spends most of her time hanging around rallies and concerts in the hopes of cornering a famous singer for an assignation. It’s why Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles) dreams of becoming a singer despite having no talent for lyrics and no ability to stay in tune; eventually, she ends up performing a strip show for a bunch of donors on the promise that she’ll get to play at Walker’s big rally, literally shedding her dignity for scraps of attention. And it’s why Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin) is, perhaps, the happiest character in the film, maybe the film’s only happy character, aside from Jeff Goldblum’s mute magician atop a three-wheeled motorcycle flitting from scene to scene. She’s the one least obsessed with celebrity; her joy comes not from a late-film assignation with a popular musician but from hearing her deaf children explain their day.

“All the allusions tell the story of the great American popularity contest,” Pauline Kael wrote of the film in the months before its release, having seen an early cut of the picture and taken to the New Yorker to sing its praises. “Nashville arrives at a time when America is congratulating itself for having got rid of the bad guys who were pulling the wool over people’s eyes. The movie says that it isn’t only the politicians who live the big lie—the big lie is something we’re all capable of trying for.”

THE ETERNAL DRIVE FOR POPULARITY is also a key component of Dazed and Confused, another bicentennial-set ensemble film, albeit one that came nearly two decades after the celebration rather than a year before. Richard Linklater’s semi-autobiographical look back at life in a mid-size Texas town for competing cliques of high school kids is sentimental without being mawkish or rose-tinted.

Starting on the last day of school in 1976 and winding up early the next morning, Linklater’s camera follows jocks and dorks, nerds and burnouts, all of whom believe they are living in a moment of significance, none of whom experience the catharsis of a significant event. Unlike Nashville, moving remorselessly, if chaotically, toward its tragic climax, Dazed and Confused has the rough-hewn feeling of life: a series of things that just kind of happen, a panoply of small decisions that add up to the world we choose to build.

And for a film about traditions and the crushing inescapability of them, this is very much a movie about choice. One of the running subplots involves rising freshmen attempting to avoid being paddled by more psychotic members of the senior class like Fred O’Bannion (Ben Affleck). He’s the sort of guy who watches Deliverance and sees an instruction manual in the “squeal like a pig” sequence: He wants to make sure the young’uns remember their encounter with his thick stick of hickory. Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), on the other hand, lets them off with love taps.

But Pink still submits to the tradition; he understands his place as king of the jocks makes certain demands on him. This is, maybe, the most American of all traits, the desire to fit in within the in-group; for a nation of rebels, a nation born in rebellion some 250 years ago, it is also a nation of strivers, of people seeking to belong. It is telling that Pink’s eventual act of defiance—his refusal to sign a pledge renouncing the use of drugs or alcohol that he knows neither he nor his teammates will uphold, despite the rest of them all having signed it—is itself rooted in his coach’s violation of tradition. This is a new demand, a new requirement, one the team has never been forced to submit to before. When Pink refuses to live by lies, he is, in his own weird way, defending tradition by maintaining his individual autonomy.

And how does Pink celebrate? By hopping in a car and heading to Houston to pick up tickets to see Aerosmith. Because, as Nashville before it was keenly aware, music is as intricately woven into the tapestry of American life as baseball, apple pie, and high school keggers.

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This week I’m joined by CNN’s media analyst Brian Stelter to discuss the big news of the week, Comcast’s decision to spin NBC Universal off into a separate company. What will happen to the broadcast network? Who might some of the suitors be for the standalone company? All that and more on this week’s episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend!

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I WAS HAPPY TO JOIN the Ankler’s Sean McNulty this week for his Monday Morning Quarterbacking of the weekend box office. Actually, I wasn’t happy: I was thrilled. Because this is an exceptionally exciting time at our nation’s movie theaters.

It’s not just that the box office is tracking for its best year since the one-two punch of the pandemic’s theater closures and the strikes that shut down Hollywood. It’s that it has been years—maybe a decade or more—since it felt like we had such a diversity of films racking up huge numbers at the box office. There’s something for everyone, and it feels like everyone is showing up.

Toy Story 5 is on track to be the biggest movie of the year (at least until Spider-Man: Brand New Day drops at the end of next month), and it’s always nice to have some family fare putting up numbers. (This is how you hook the next generation, after all: Get them addicted to popcorn.) But look at what else has topped the charts in recent weeks.

Last week, we had an adult sci-fi drama from an old master top the charts in the form of Disclosure Day. The weekend before that, there was an R-rated comedy of the abrasive, raunchy sort that seems to have more or less disappeared from theaters come in at number one, Scary Movie. The weekend before that, Backrooms—a key text in the nouveau tube taking the nation’s youth by storm—debuted with the biggest numbers ever from mini-major A24. There’s a musical biopic, Michael, that’s about to cross a billion dollars worldwide; a big-budget sci-fi adventure, Project Hail Mary, that has wowed audiences; and a millennial nostalgia play, The Devil Wears Prada 2, that has outperformed virtually everyone’s expectations.

And those are just the hits. Elsewhere on the charts, you have The Furious, a Hong Kong import that is the craziest martial arts movie since The Raid; a pair of queer indies in the horror film Leviticus and the coming-of-age drama Girls Like Girls; socialist agitprop in Boosters; a World War II Dad Movie about, of all things, weather, in Pressure; and an indie heist flick about a piano tuner turned safe cracker in Tuner. Behold the power of this fully armed and operational multiplex!

One of David Poland’s major talking points, the thing he hits on time and again, is that we simply don’t have enough movies in release, that the number of wide releases remains down over the peak in years past. That’s still true; movie theaters could always use more movies. But for the first time in a long time it genuinely feels like there’s something for everyone, that nearly every audience niche is getting serviced by something.

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Review: Supergirl

The box office is at the highest it’s been on a year-to-date level since the pandemic despite one notable absence from the multiplex in recent months: comic book movies. Supergirl is the first in nearly a year. It’s not tracking well, and if audiences stay home, they won’t be missing out on much: It’s a stinker. And kind of a bummer! From my review:

Okay, so, to recap: We’ve got a depressed hero and a dying dog, who team up with the orphaned girl Ruthye (Eve Ridley), who is seeking revenge against the brigands who killed her parents and brother. These brigands, it should be noted, spend most of the film traversing the galaxy kidnapping underage girls in order to rape them to propagate their species, which, for some reason, is male-only.

Supergirl: It’s the feel-good film of the summer!

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Hollywood and AI

I talked to Ben Fritz of the Wall Street Journal about his exclusive on A24 partnering with Google to see what AI can do for the film studio. But we also ran through all the tech entanglements the studios have with the burgeoning AI boom, from Amazon’s decision not to distribute the forthcoming anti-AI drama Artificial to Disney’s weird dance with Sora and OpenAI.

Assigned Viewing: The Complete Kubrick (Criterion Collection)

Okay, I’m kidding, kinda. But you should watch this trailer for the box set:

I do my darndest to keep this newsletter from devolving into rants about nonsense I see on social media that makes me mad, and I think I do a pretty good job of it. But when I saw a weird consortium of folks who seemed downright angry that Criterion was going to release a massive, thirty-disc box set that includes every Stanley Kubrick feature film and short, from Killer’s Kiss on, on 4K UHD and Blu-ray, I was genuinely befuddled.

Look, here’s the thing: Restoring and releasing these films isn’t cheap. I pinged someone at a non-Criterion boutique house about the cost of releases like this; he asked to stay anonymous since he doesn’t have any special insight into the state of the films being released, but said that costs could run between $15,000 and $100,000 per film, depending on the negative quality. Honestly, I’d assume they wouldn’t have to do too much given the fact that there are already some pretty good 4K transfers out there, but you never know. New encoding for DolbyVision, cleanups of the rarer ones like Killer’s Kiss: It adds up.

And that is before you get to what would likely be the single biggest cost for Criterion: licensing. They have to license these films from Warner Bros., Universal, etc. That’s not cheap, and it’s not cheap because Stanley Kubrick still moves units. There are some people, real sickos out there, who have bought these movies in three or four different formats. I don’t want to name any names, but, well, they’re out there.

And that doesn’t include the cost of producing new features. You have to pay folks to film them, to edit them, to conduct interviews, to do research. Twenty-five hours of bonus features don’t pay for themselves.

And even if you don’t care about any of that, here’s one last thing to keep in mind if you want to position yourself as a defender of The Cin-e-mah: The success of this set (and I have no doubt it will be a success) will help fund any number of restorations of films that Criterion might otherwise not be able to afford to bring to the world. I mean, I don’t have any special insight into the universe of boutique physical media distribution, but I’d guess that August’s Eclipse Series 49: Five Radical Documentaries by Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi isn’t going to blow the doors off the Criterion Closet?

Look, this isn’t sponcon; I’m not even on Criterion’s comp list. I buy my discs $30 a whack during the half-off sales at Barnes & Noble and Criterion.com like you, the common man. And as such, I cannot believe that there are folks out there who are upset in any way that Criterion is putting this set out there. This is a gift to students of cinema history. If you pick it up during a half-off sale, you’re getting the entire oeuvre of arguably the greatest filmmaker of all time in the best (and probably final) home-video format ever released for just $30 a movie. In my opinion, that’s a pretty good deal. And we should be glad that companies like Criterion help make it happen.

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On this week’s episode, I’m joined by Ben Fritz of the Wall Street Journal to discuss his exclusive on the partnership between Google and A24 and what it portends for the rest of the studios who are either diving into the world of AI filmmaking or cautiously sitting on the sidelines waiting to see how things shake out.

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THERE IS A GREAT NUMBER of ancillary reasons why the Fox Corporation dropped $22 billion to purchase Roku, the maker of set-top boxes and television operating systems through which an enormous amount of streaming traffic flows. But all of them come back to two charts in the last two annual reports to Fox investors.

Here’s the estimated number of subscribers to various Fox cable networks from 2023 to 2024:

And here’s the estimated number of subscribers to those networks from 2024 to 2025:

As you can see, the only word to describe the declines here is “precipitous.” Fox News Channel—which is, alongside ESPN and CNN, among the most ubiquitous cable channels—has declined from 72 million subscribers in 2023 to 61 million subscribers by 2025. Fox Business, from 70 million to 60 million. The sports networks have seen similar, albeit less dramatic, declines.

Now, none of this is new knowledge and nothing here is unique to Fox. People are not unsubscribing from Fox News in protest; indeed, Fox’s ratings compare pretty well even to broadcast TV. Cable packages are, simply, in terminal decline as more and more consumers of television opt for rotating streaming subscriptions and free services like YouTube and Tubi. (More on that last one in a moment.) But it will eventually be an enormous problem for Fox, given how much revenue the company generates from “affiliate fees,” the per-subscriber (around $2) charge Fox earns monthly.1 (Indeed, Fox generates more revenue from affiliate fees than advertising, by far.)

Of all the legacy networks, Fox is in the worst shape in the streaming world. Despite launching Hulu alongside NBC, Fox divested its interest in the company as part of the sale of the 20th Century Fox movie studio and those assets to Disney.2 And since then they’ve been kind of adrift.

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Fox One, the standalone streaming service combining Fox News and Fox Sports, doesn’t seem to be lighting the world on fire; the last numbers I’ve seen suggest that the $20/month service has just a couple million subscribers. And while Lachlan Murdoch insists that churn is low and audiences stuck around after football season for Fox News content, we don’t have much in the way of hard data to back that up. Regardless, no one disputes it lags far behind competitors like Paramount+ (CBS) or Peacock (NBC).

Fox does have one bright spot, however: Tubi, a free ad-supported TV (FAST) channel specializing in terrible movies that no one else seems to have. According to Nielsen’s measure of television-based audience behavior, the Gauge, Tubi captures about 3 percent of audience viewing time; when combined with Fox’s broadcast and cable networks, that meant that Fox, as of May, accounted for roughly 7.2 percent of total TV usage. Folding Roku TV—which controls about 3 percent of total viewing time, according to the Gauge—into the Fox family instantly moves it near the top of the charts, ahead of Netflix, NBC, and Paramount. This will instantly scale their advertising efforts. And the passive revenue generated by the cut taken from users who subscribe to other services through Roku will replace a decent chunk of those diminishing affiliate fees; Roku generated more than $4 billion in “platform revenue” last year, which includes both their advertising rates and the fees they charged other streamers for distribution on the Roku platform.

But they’ll also control what is considered by many to be among the most valuable pieces of real estate in the world of streaming: Roku’s homepage. They’ll be able to drive Roku’s 100 million users to subscribe to Fox One.3 And they’ll need some percentage of those users to sign up to counter the ongoing collapse of the cable bundle.

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SPEAKING OF TV, I had a big sitdown with the one and only Richard Rushfield of the Ankler to discuss the state of TV and interrogate him about his creation of a Mount Rushmore of television. It was a fun episode, hope you give it a listen:

KIND OF INTENSE episode of Across the Movie Aisle this week. Lines crossed, friendships ended, classics defended and denigrated. (I kid. It was a lot of fun! If you’re a debate-team kid, you might enjoy it!)

Across the Movie Aisle

Steven Spielberg's Greatest Five-Film Stretch: A Strenuous Debate

OK, so, for this week’s bonus episode, we wanted to try something a little different. I’m prefacing this because this show is, generally speaking, a very earnest one: We have our beliefs and our preferences and we argue for them. However, we’re all debate team kids to some extent, which means we all have a penchant for being able/wanting to argue either…

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

Three Separate Reviews!

OKAY, THE BIG RELEASE this week is Toy Story 5. Gonna make oodles of money. The short version of my review: “It’s closer to the fourth than the first three, but all five movies are winners.” Longer version: The slow march of death approaches for us all. A taste of my review:

I was 12 or so when the original film came out, not too far removed from the age of toys myself; I now have a daughter just a few years older than Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), who spends much of this film wrestling with the weird in-between age of toys and friends and screens and social media.

That the franchise is, generally speaking, a metaphor for parenthood and all its troubles is neither a new nor profound insight: Cowboy Woody (Tom Hanks) and Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) have spent the franchise fretting about the fates of their kids, Andy and Bonnie. Yes, yes: They also worry about their own obsolescence—this is, naturally, the key theme of Toy Story 5, what with the arrival of the tablet known as Lilypad (Greta Lee)—as well as the general fear of being forgotten by those they raised.

But the worries of the toys are wrapped up in their self-imposed burden to prepare their kids for life outside the home.

The Death of Robin Hood, meanwhile, is pretty aggressive counterprogramming: It is much darker, much slower, and much more contemplative. From my review:

The Death of Robin Hood is a hard film to recommend. After the intense bloodiness of that opening sequence it slows to a crawl: This is a movie about the search for redemption, but it doesn’t end in cathartic, purifying bloodshed a là Unforgiven. Sarnoski is too contemplative for that, perhaps to a fault. But his seriousness and commitment to the ideals under consideration give the film real moral heft.

You may not mind the shift to a more languid pace, since the film simply looks great: Cinematographer Pat Scola (who worked with Sarnoski on his previous two features) makes excellent use of his 35mm film and natural light. There are these wonderfully backlit shots throughout that make the film sometimes feel as if it’s a shadow play, silhouettes doing combat against a burning hut or figures talking into the sun. The light itself almost feels like a character: in those first brutal forty minutes, there is a constant murk, an inescapable griminess. Wind and fog and snow and smoke obscure the sights. But once Robin lands on Brigid’s island, the murk lifts and the sun shines so bright it hurts your eyes. There’s a cleansing glow to the place, a beacon of light that shoots directly into Robin’s soul, exposing the darkness within.

And finally, there’s The Furious. I didn’t write a full review, but I did log it on Letterboxd; apologies for the profanity, but I would like to hammer home how wild the last 30 minutes of that movie are here:

I’ll be honest: I was ever-so-slightly underwhelmed by the first 80 minutes or so (“yeah, this is cool, but that’s it?”) and then the last 30 minutes is one continuous series of “holy shit! Holy shit!!” moments. Like, first it’s just cool because Yayan Ruhian shows up (holy shit, look at that bow and arrow) and then they start the two-on-two fight sequence (holy shit, they’re fighting back and forth and it’s genuinely two on two, not two one on one choreographies cut together) and then that guy who looks like a bowling ball reappears (holy shit!) and starts fighting like Blanca from Street Fighter (holy shit!!) and it turns into a LEGIT FIVE MAN BATTLE ROYALE (holy shit!!!).

All three get thumbs-ups of varying enthusiasms from me. Consider one of them your assigned viewing and get your butts to a theater!

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On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by my first guest, the great Richard Rushfield, to talk all things TV. What’s the deal with Fox buying Roku? What does the post-peak-TV era look like? And, perhaps most importantly, who is on the Mount Rushmore of television? All that and more on this week’s episode. Leave your pick for the all-time-top-four TV figures in the comments!

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ONE OF THE REAL TREATS of the early summer season has been Widow’s Bay, the new Apple TV show that wraps up its first season on Wednesday. I haven’t seen the finale yet, so I don’t know if it’ll stick the landing, but the streamer seems to have a decent amount of faith in it given that they’ve already signed off on a second season.

This renewal comes despite the fact that, according to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, the numbers on Widow’s Bay are somewhat soft. Okay, very soft, given that the show “didn’t make any of the viewership charts.” Well I say “charts schmarts”! Because it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a show that was this well constructed, nailed this precise mixture of comedy and horror, and featured performances that elicited quite this many literal laugh-out-loud moments from me.

Here’s the setup: Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) is the mayor of Widow’s Bay, a small fishing island off the coast of New England. In the opening moments, a mysterious fog descends upon the village, leading to a disappearance and much more consternation; this is the first of several weird occurrences to trouble Loftis and his fellow citizens. Bad timing, this: Loftis has gotten the New York Times to send someone out to profile the town in the hopes they might be the next vacation hotspot.

The Times reporter raves; the tourists come; and things continue getting weird. Local sailor Wyck (Stephen Root) believes the island to be cursed and tells Loftis that the evil fog means it has “woken up.” To do what? Mostly creep everyone out. Every episode features a new manner of spook or zombie or goblin. Revenants, witches, sea hags: You name it, Widow’s Bay’s got it. And the joy of the show is watching Loftis come to accept that the townspeople have been right all along, at least potentially. Maybe his assistant, Patricia (Kate O’Flynn), really was almost killed by the Boogeyman. Maybe there is an evil presence haunting the town inn.

For all these horrifying elements, Widow’s Bay is much more of a comedy than, I think, early ads let on. This is an incredibly funny show, prompting a guffaw or two an episode, at least. It is also, almost defiantly, a single-screen show: the jokes are frequently sight gags, either relying on the audience seeing Loftis react to something bizarre or the bizarre thing itself laid out for all to enjoy.

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Just one small early example: In the second episode, Tom—who has been dared to spend the night in the town’s supposedly haunted hotel—is playing a board game with a fellow lodger. The game, “Daddy’s Home,” was found on the inn’s shelves next to other games like “Teeth,” the box for which simply contains a pair of pliers. Which is to say: Something’s off here. Among the cards one can draw are actions like “Daddy’s younger boss yelled at him today, move back three spaces.” But it’s all the little design choices that really drive home the morbid humor of the situation: “Daddy’s Home” has a harried-looking man on the front; the tokens contain, it appears, a belt and a bottle of booze; the spinner wheel has a spot titled “Daddy had a bad day, move back three spaces.”

Now: This is a very dark joke if you think about it for any length of time. But you have to work for that darkness, you really have to pay attention. And this is a show that rewards doing the very basic thing of simply paying attention: In the fourth episode, for instance, you’ll miss flashes of what’s really happening at the town mixer if you’re looking at your phone the whole time.

I feel like I’m going nuts even having to emphasize this: Duh, of course you should be looking at the TV while you’re watching it. But we live in an age of second-screen programming. At least, this is what Netflix tells some of its showrunners and writers and executives, according to Daphne Rena Idiz of the University of Toronto. Here’s how one of her interview subjects put it: “What you need to know about your audience here is that they will watch the show, perhaps on their mobile phone, or on a second or third screen while doing something else and talking to their friends, so you need to both show and tell.”

Maybe Widow’s Bay creator Katie Dippold was told by Apple she needed to show and tell. But I kind of doubt it. This is a show that only really lands if you’re watching it with some focus. It’s a single-screen show. And you need to start watching it.

What else is everyone watching this summer? My wife and I just finished up Hacks, which closed pretty well. Anything else on the docket? Let everyone know what you’re watching in the comments, let’s crowdsource a summer viewing guide.

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The creator of the revered graphic novel, Persepolis, died last week. To honor Marjane Satrapi, Peter, Alyssa, and I revisited the film of the same name and discussed its lasting impact—as well as the disgusting reaction in certain quarters to her passing.

Across the Movie Aisle

Marjane Satrapi's 'Persepolis'

Sad news last week that Marjane Satrapi, the creator of Persepolis, had died. We decided to dedicate this week’s bonus episode to the film adaptation of her graphic novel. If you’ve never seen it, I really hope you check it out…

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a month ago · 10 likes · 3 comments · Sonny Bunch, Alyssa Rosenberg, and Peter Suderman

I interviewed onetime Carolco CEO Peter Hoffman this week about his new memoir, Karmic Winds, and how films got made in the 1980s. He’s a good person to ask, given that under his watch Carolco churned out a string of hits that included Basic Instinct and Terminator 2. I hope you give the episode a listen!

Assigned Viewing: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Criterion, Peacock)

Unfortunately, I did not love Disclosure Day, the new film from Steven Spielberg. From my review:

Disclosure Day is rarely boring but it’s never exciting, an oddity for a Spielberg action film. This is not to say that it’s a film made without skill: This is Steven Spielberg, after all, and the man can direct a killer set piece. It’s the little things he does with such seeming ease, like a tracking shot through a newsroom as Margaret is running to her post to make it on air just in time, a oner that would take most directors two days to set up and light and that Spielberg probably drew up the morning of shooting. The performances are good—Blunt as the fast-talking broadcaster is the best of the leads and I haven’t even mentioned her boyfriend, who is played with perfect comic timing by Wyatt Russell—but rarely rise beyond that.

You can practically feel Spielberg straining to convey the importance of Disclosure Day’s message, and there’s something admirable in his desire to say what’s clearly so deeply felt. But it’s that very strain that makes the film feel silly, almost trite.

I rewatched Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind this week and it really is just better in almost every way, at least in part because it doesn’t make any grand pronouncements: It doesn’t demand the audience feel anything aside from awe and wonder at the unknown. There’s a message in that, of course, but it’s a less didactic one, a little more open-ended.

I’m joined by Peter M. Hoffman this week to discuss his new memoir, Karmic Winds, about his time in Hollywood as the tax lawyer who could figure out how to get movies financed and get people paid. Fans of 1980s action movies will recognize many of the names here, as Hoffman was a key figure in the Golan and Globus empire before becoming CEO of Carolco Pictures during their epic run of films that included Basic Instinct and Terminator 2. We also discussed the way tax laws helped—and then hindered—getting movies made, and Peter’s own unfortunate run-in with IRS authorities. If you want the full story, make sure to check out his book, which goes into much more detail than we had time for here.

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This episode gets a bit in the weeds about tax law and the such, but I’d love to hear from folks about their favorite Carolco films. One that we touched on very briefly is Jacob’s Ladder, a movie I’ve always found fascinating in part because I don’t think it entirely works. Or at least, it didn’t for me … but Peter’s book highlights the ways in which the film reflects the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which may just be the key to unlocking it all. I’m excited to go back and revisit it with that idea in mind.

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IT’S BEEN FUN WATCHING 20-year-old Kane Parsons—the director of the frightfully good Backrooms—take a victory lap this week. He is well-spoken, guarded in a way that belies his years, and thoughtfully provocative in ways you might not necessarily expect.

Consider his take on the use of AI in filmmaking. Speaking with the Australian, Parsons said, “If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would. Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me.” When Matt Belloni, on his podcast, asked Parsons to elaborate, the young director made a crucial distinction:

When I see in a project online that generative fill or some sort of generative AI has been used in some way for some detail, the part of my brain that desires to really live with a piece of art and look into the details and the nooks and crannies and get excited about what I might see in the background or look for little details and just look for a general deliberate richness in the set direction—that immediately goes away.

Because if the artist is willing to make that kind of completely arbitrary choice and whatever the tool they’re using to create that piece of media is going to obviously not be something that came from them, it’s something they didn’t place there. If it becomes arbitrary, I’m then open to conclude almost any choice in that project is arbitrary on a human level.

I think the underlying issue with AI, at least from a creative perspective, is this precise question of intentionality, this idea that our work is our own. It’s why, when confronted with something like Steven Rosenbaum admitting to using falsehood-introducing AI in his book about AI and the nature of truth, we react with something like revulsion. At least, I do. Because what’s the point of writing if you are not choosing what to include and what not to include, if you are not doing the research yourself and instead trusting some hallucination box to do your work for you. And when I read Rosenbaum try to defend himself to Wired by saying, functionally, that everyone does it anyway, I just want to stand up and scream “No, actually, we don’t, and the fact that you think everyone does suggests no one should ever read anything you write ever again.”

It’s why it’s genuinely pretty disheartening to see Martin Scorsese (presumably) taking pallets of AI cash to shill for a company that generates storyboards. Because Scorsese, as a kid, learned how to conceive of shots by drawing storyboards by hand, a process he discovered on his own. “I was amazed by the size of the images on the screen, and I would come back and draw what I saw,” he recounts in an interview collected in Scorsese on Scorsese. “I made up my own stories, taking my cue from newspaper comic strips and books, and although I didn’t realize it at the time, I soon started using close-ups just like they did.” You can see some of his boyhood storyboards for yourself!

It’s a deeply human way of becoming an artist, starting with analyzing how others make their art and then beginning to tentatively explore how to create your own. And it’s a world apart from the pseudocreativity—really pushbutton parasitism—of generative AI.

The generative AI set will reply that their technology will unleash untold numbers of Scorseses. I guess. It’s certainly possible. But maybe what makes a Scorsese or a Parsons or any other interesting filmmaker is having to muddle through that process on your own, having to make and build and suss out different compositions and ideas. Intentionality is all artists have. I find it insane that we could think they can outsource it and remain artists.

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Art, Human Choices, and Zombies

“INTENTIONALITY” IS A GOOD WORD to keep in mind when thinking about Day of the Dead, a huge new collector’s set of which is out on June 16 from Shout Factory.1 I was lucky enough to score a review copy and spent a good solid week going through the film’s special features: an archival commentary featuring writer-director George Romero and legendary special-effects artist Tom Savini; a new commentary with critic Drew McWeeny and novelist Daniel Kraus; a full-length archival documentary from a 2013 Blu-ray of the film; and hours of brand new interviews with tons of cast and crew, as well as a behind-the-scenes look at the restoration process.

I interviewed John Harrison (the first assistant director and composer on Day of the Dead) and Jeff Roland (the producer at Shout Factory who put together this four-disc set) about both the making of this seminal film (I would argue it’s Romero’s best) and the work that went into putting this collection together; I hope you give it a listen:

But there was one thing I couldn’t help but think of over and over as I watched Savini devise new ways to dismember people onscreen or heard Romero discuss the difficulties that arose from the film losing half its budget when he refused to make it R-rated instead of unrated: Every single thing those filmmakers did—every makeup choice, every acting choice, every piece of set design—was done with intentionality.

And yes, this meant there were limits: Savini talks about the different levels of zombie prep, and how featured zombies up front would take hours to ready, while those in the middle would take less time, and those in the back would just have relatively crappy zombie masks. Could generative AI have created a thousand feature-quality zombies? It’s tempting to say “yes,” but the answer is actually no. Even if the quality of the image increases to Savini levels—a big if—you’re still substituting the idea of the creator for the idea of some artificial average, some false reproduction.

And that falseness represents a repudiation of what it means to be an artist.

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Review: Masters of the Universe

It’s bad. Unless you’re really into double entendres about penetrative sex acts. If you’re into double entendres about penetrative sex acts, this is probably your Citizen Kane. I explain why in my review:

Assigned Viewing: Dead Man’s Wire (Netflix)

I reviewed this movie when it came out and I hope more folks find it now that it’s on Netflix. As I wrote:

Dead Man’s Wire, the new film from Gus Van Sant, is a slyly comic, subtly stylish throwback that evokes populist-minded, angst-filled thrillers like Dog Day Afternoon and The Sugarland Express. Not quite an issue movie like a John Q or a Money Monster, Dead Man’s Wire is more a howl of rage, one that connects with audiences because there’s no shortage of stories about little guys getting screwed over by faceless banks and powerful moneymen. Some things never change.

Check it out for yourself now.

I’m super-excited about this week’s episode, as I’m getting to talk about one of my favorite zombie movies (Day of the Dead) with one of the creators of that film (John Harrison, the first assistant director and composer of its iconic score) and one of the producers at one of my favorite boutique Blu-ray labels (Jeff Roland from Shout Factory/Scream Factory). We talk all about the making of the film, of course, but also the making of this set: one of my favorite special features on the bonus disc is a 30-minute-or-so doc about the actual restoration of this film. How they tracked down the interpositive, what they had to do to get the transfer into shape for a 4K release, how they had to mix the sound, etc.

I really cannot recommend this set enough: it comes out June 16, but I strongly recommend picking up a copy now, as these collector’s editions can be hard to keep in stock. Obviously, the fans of Romero’s films are going to want it. But I would pitch it to anyone who appreciates a good piece of archival work: There are documentaries on this thing that will simply help you understand the world of physical media better. Plus a fun new audio commentary featuring Drew McWeeny and Daniel Kraus. And, of course, a pristine new transfer that gives extra depth and definition to all of those scenes set in the underground mines where most of the movie takes place.

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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.