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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Late-breaking news: Chuck Norris, the iconic martial artist and movie star, has died at the age of 86. I wrote a quick obit for him while sitting in the Austin airport as I waited to fly home after our amazing show at the Paramount Theater last night.

Which is to say: My tribute to Norris is slight and quickly done, but I hope it suffices.

And now, on to your regularly scheduled newsletter.

On The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood this week, I talked to David Streitfeld about his new book on the late Larry McMurtry, Western Star. It was a fun chat and I hope you give it a listen:

McMurtry’s relationship to and with Texas is … complicated. The bookish son of cattlemen who never quite fit in with the cowboy ethos, McMurtry both understood the state’s appeal and was repelled by the hypocrisies large and small of all such folk. Hud (which was based on McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By) and The Last Picture Show (the film adaptation of which was cowritten by McMurtry and director Peter Bogdanovich) both hit on the quiet desperation and the undercurrent of seedy sexual infidelity that small towns harbor. It’s no wonder that folks in McMurtry’s base of operations, Archer City, weren’t all that fond of him.

But his masterpiece is Lonesome Dove, a book that was published more than forty years ago and yet remains near the top of the Amazon bestseller charts on a fairly regular basis; when we taped that episode, it was in the top 100 or so. And it feels like people all around me are itching to read or reread McMurtry’s classic. Just one example: Toward the end of last year, my friend John DeVore wrote about trying to convince one of his friends to read it—he called it “the Lord of the Rings of Texas” in a (thus far unsuccessful) effort to convince him to crack it open—and summarized the book thus:

Every time I read this book, I am moved. Yes, it’s a corny western. The prose ping-pongs between pulp and purple. It’s a long book that takes its sweet time getting started. The story is simple, but I still find it stunning.

Life is a long, treacherous, breathtaking journey, like a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to the Rockies, and the only way to get through it all, from start to finish, is with those you love.

This is a fair and accurate description of Lonesome Dove: The book is compulsively readable; filled with great, lovable characters; and, frequently, deeply unsettling.

I get the sense that there are some who read Lonesome Dove and consider it to be an elegy to a better, forgotten time—Gone with the Wind but on a cattle drive and set in the West instead of the South. I don’t know what book those people read. Maybe they just saw the miniseries and were confused by the irritatingly jaunty music that played over the constant death, the immiseration of nearly everyone onscreen. Because Lonesome Dove is one of the saddest texts I think I’ve ever read.

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It is, more than anything else, a book about people compelled to build a world that wants nothing to do with them—and with which they want nothing to do. As Streitfeld puts it in his book, “The cowboy flourishes through contradictions: He is quick with his fists and deadly with his six-shooter but disdains violence. His life is close to the earth and its creatures but he has a spiritual air. He respects property but has only his horse and his gun. He works to create a better civilization but declines to join it.”

This, better than just about anything else, sums up the ethos of the discursive Capt. Augustus McCrae and the laconic Capt. Woodrow F. Call, formerly of the Texas Rangers. Augustus laments having killed all the interesting people in the West—the Comanche and the rustlers and the bandits—to make the world safe for “bankers” and “lawyers.”

“We’ll be the Indians, if we last another twenty years,” an agitated McCrae says to Call in San Antonio after the talkative captain was forced to slap some respect into a mouthy bartender. “The way this place is settling up it’ll be nothing but churches and dry-goods stores before you know it. Next thing you know they’ll have to round up us old rowdies and stick us on a reservation to keep us from scaring the ladies.”

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And this, ultimately, is what Lonesome Dove is really about: the drive to see the wilderness before it is tamed. McCrae and Call are like Johnny Appleseed, clearing land and planting towns rather than apple orchards. But they don’t want to live on the orchard. They want to see that little bit left to be tamed before folks like them can bring it to heel. But there’s a cost to that, and it’s a cost paid by characters throughout the book: the young Irish boy who dies after stumbling onto a water moccasin nest; the longtime trailhand of McCrae and Call killed by a young Indian fighter while offering aid to a blind child; the woman taken captive by a vicious native bandit; and the fate suffered by McCrae himself. It’s a hard life in a hard world, one that few modern Americans are fit for.

We are lawyers and bankers (and school teachers and shopkeepers and, ew, journalists). And yet Lonesome Dove’s depiction of life on the trail calls to many of us; in our chat, Streitfeld suggested this was particularly during times of international strife, at moments when it feels as though the world has grown dangerous and some portion of the American mood turns expansionary. But as the oil fields in Iran, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia burn, maybe we should think back to the poor Irish boy screaming in the water, covered in snakes, venom coursing through his veins.

It’s a dangerous world out there. One not fit to be settled by lawyers and bankers.

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FOR REASONS HAVING TO DO WITH TRAVEL—I’ve gone from Paris, France with my flesh-and-blood family to Dallas and Austin, Texas, with my Bulwark family for our (fabulously fun and successful Bulwark Live shows this week)—I don’t have a new movie review this week. Instead, I’ll just remind you that Project Hail Mary is out this week and that you should see it if you enjoy seeing things that are fun and good. From my positively gushing review:

Project Hail Mary, from Goddard and the directing team of Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, is a little like Interstellar but with the Spielbergisms turned up to 11. It is the most perfectly crowd-pleasing movie I’ve ever seen in my life: the comedy is carefully calibrated to generate laughs on demand; the emotional well it draws from is deep and produces tears with precision; and it’s smart without feeling preachy or condescending. Indeed, it’s so successful I almost dismissed it as manipulative while I was watching it. And then I realized that if I was being manipulated, I didn’t really care.

Project Hail Mary is, in short, a masterpiece of pop filmmaking.

Assigned Viewing: Heat (Hulu, Disney+)

Real talk: This is the most disgusting (entertainment-related) story I’ve seen in some time. Short version: Val Kilmer is being resurrected by AI to star in a movie he’d signed on to do before getting sick with cancer. His daughter says this is something he would have loved, yadda yadda. I’m sorry, I don’t care. The idea that Kilmer himself—a consummate pro who reveled in finding the soul of every individual character—would sign off on this effort to “create” a performance from an amalgamation of past Kilmer performances strikes me as insane. I just don’t believe it.

Anyway, instead of ever watching this (or, indeed, ever thinking about it again), you should just watch Heat. It’s always a good time for Heat. And Val Kilmer is delightful in it.

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On this week’s episode, I’m very pleased to be joined by David Streitfeld to discuss his new book, Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry. Amongst the topics discussed: McMurtry’s obsession with book buying and selling; how his books and the films they were made from helped shape the view of the west; and why Lonesome Dove—both the book and the miniseries—endures more than forty years later. From The Last Picture Show to Brokeback Mountain, McMurtry rests alongside Cormac McCarthy one of the great modern voices of the American West.

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I AM GENERALLY a pretty competent Oscars prognosticator. Not great, not terrible. But this year I find myself at a loss in several of the major categories. Some of them feel pretty obvious: Jessie Buckley is a stone-cold lock for best actress in Hamnet; if anyone beats Sinners writer-director Ryan Coogler for best original screenplay, I’ll eat my Oasis-fonted Bulwark hat.

That said: A lot of the big races feel weirdly close! Maybe it’s a mirage brought on by a too-long campaign season, I dunno. Even at the top of the ticket, though, it’s felt all year like One Battle After Another is the film to beat, and maybe it still is, but I get the sense that maybe, somehow, Sinners is going to best it? There’s precedent for Oscar forecasters underappreciating films aimed at African-American audiences, most recently with Moonlight and La La Land. One Battle After Another remains the movie of the moment, for obvious reasons, and I don’t think a Tourette’s-inspired controversy is going to shift the momentum enough. But you never know.

It’s too bad, as Sinners really is the best movie of those nominated, and the sort of movie the Oscars really should be celebrating: It’s not just a marvelous artistic achievement, it’s also the highest-grossing nominated film of the year, at least domestically. Yes, yes: Box office doesn’t matter! We don’t care what the plebs like; all that concerns us is The Art, man! And I am not only happy to admit that the tastes of the Academy and the audience have diverged over the years, I have made this argument myself: A film should not be honored solely because it made a lot of money, as lots of middling to bad movies make lots of money. But if you want people to watch the Oscars, they need to think the movies they love at least have a chance of winning.

I firmly believe we should want people to watch! Every year I say the same thing and every year it’s true: The Oscars don’t matter at all as a measure of quality. But they do matter as a way of highlighting lesser-seen, lesser-known projects. Maybe someone will see that the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi earned a best foreign language nomination and be tempted to seek out his picture, given the war in Iran. Maybe Sirāt will win best sound like it should and folks who thought F1 was a shoo-in will consider checking it out. Train Dreams isn’t going to win best picture but it’s one of the best movies of the year and I hope someone somewhere might be inspired to check it out on Netflix.

So yes, the Oscars are silly and they don’t matter and the best movie never wins, etc., etc., etc. That’s all fine. But I will never stop believing that it’s good to remind the casual film fans out there of the breadth and depth of the cinematic experience.

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Project Hail Mary review

I TRY TO PUBLISH reviews of movies the week they come out, but I didn’t want to wait on this one: Project Hail Mary is one of the most crowd-pleasing movies I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Directors Christopher Lord and Phil Miller just push all the buttons like maestros making the film sing. A quick snippet of my (unusually gushing!) review:

Project Hail Mary, from Goddard and the directing team of Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, is a little like Interstellar but with the Spielbergisms turned up to 11. It is the most perfectly crowd-pleasing movie I’ve ever seen in my life: the comedy is carefully calibrated to generate laughs on demand; the emotional well it draws from is deep and produces tears with precision; and it’s smart without feeling preachy or condescending. Indeed, it’s so successful I almost dismissed it as manipulative while I was watching it. And then I realized that if I was being manipulated, I didn’t really care.

Project Hail Mary is, in short, a masterpiece of pop filmmaking.

In a just world, this movie would be a huge hit. We’ll see how things shake out. But I think audiences are going to adore this movie and I really hope folks give it a shot.

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The art and science of movie testing

SPEAKING OF AUDIENCES: I talked to Kevin Goetz this week about his recent book, How to Score in Hollywood. Kevin is the screen-testing guru, the guy behind Screen Engine/ASI, the guy who helps filmmakers fine-tune things to make sure audiences have as good a time as possible. I would’ve killed to have sat in on the test-screenings and focus groups for this movie; I bet it crushed with test audiences.

Anyway, listen to our chat and buy his book! Both this and his previous effort, Audienceology, are pretty important books to understand what’s getting made in Hollywood and how it’s getting made:

‘Big Screen or Stream?’

The folks at Open to Debate were kind enough to have me on as a guest questioner this week for their debate between Hawk Koch, film producer and former president of both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Producers Guild of America, and Chris Aronson, formerly head of domestic distribution at Paramount. Hawk was arguing for the primacy of movie theaters; Chris for accepting the future of streaming. I could’ve listened to them go all day, I almost felt bad jumping in with my own question.

Anyway, it was a really interesting debate, and I hope you check it out:

Assigned Viewing: Interstellar (Paramount+)

Project Hail Mary is a lot like Interstellar so you should watch Interstellar. I would’ve picked The Martian here, based on an earlier novel by Andy Weir, but The Martian isn’t streaming for free anywhere. So if you don’t want to rent The Martian and you already subscribe to Paramount+, watch Interstellar.

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On this week’s episode, I’m very pleased to be rejoined by Kevin Goetz, who is the guru of movie testing to discuss his latest book, How to Score in Hollywood. When you spend nine figures on a film and another eight figures marketing it, you want to know what works for audiences and what doesn’t, and Kevin’s the guy who can help you do that. He believes that nearly every movie—if it’s made for the right price and marketed to the right people—should be able to make money, and he’s happy to explain how his company, Screen Engine/ASI, can help make that hope a reality. Our discussion runs the gamut—from concept testing to post-screening focus groups to some Oscar chatter—and I hope you enjoy.

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AS A JOURNALIST, I get a lot of weird pitches for coverage, random emails on random topics that have little to do with my beat or anything anyone could reasonably care about. But earlier this week I saw something that … well, it caught my eye:

“Sophie Rain Claps Back At UFC Star Justin Gaethje Earning Comparisons.”

If you are blissfully unaware, Sophie Rain is a big deal in the world of boutique pornography, having amassed an enormous following on OnlyFans. Which means that what I was being pitched here is a story about a porn star explaining to a guy who gets choked out for a living—choked out in an MMA octagon, I mean, not on OnlyFans—that she has more than earned her 2025 payout of, and I had to look at this number twice, $103 million. The numbers here are unfathomable, almost as unfathomable as the idea that anyone should or would care about it.

And it was at this point that I realized I felt like nothing so much as an extra in the film Southland Tales, Richard Kelly’s cult classic 2006 war on terror opus that features, among other characters, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Krysta Now, a pornstar-turned-talkshow-host who is having an affair with the son-in-law of the GOP candidate for vice president (played by Dwayne Johnson, himself often floated as a potential politician by members of both parties). That we happened to be kicking off a war with Iran as I opened the email was icing on the cake.

The stark unreality of our reality is growing more disconcerting by the day. How am I supposed to respond to the news that Glenn Beck is asking an AI George Washington for its thoughts about the Iran War?

I don’t even know what kind of madness this is. Like a more demented version of Her, one in which boomers pine for the wisdom of the founders rather than female companionship. I guess it’s preferable to creating AI companions who tell vulnerable users to kill themselves and others.

I’m sorry: Every single AI story is crazier than the last. This whole Anthropic fight is giving me the willies. It’s not often you see a private company ask for their product to be used more carefully and ethically, but Pete Hegseth wants AI to be able to autonomously select human targets? Hasn’t he heard of Skynet?

For a few minutes, I wondered if I could make a few bucks off of all this nonsense, as the hopeless addicts prediction market experts on Polymarket offered an option on whether or not there would be a nuclear strike in Iran. Polymarket has since pulled this contract, but the fact that it was even an option is yet more proof that we’re veering ever closer to Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop, what with its murderous game shows and nuclear war board games. Some might suggest that gambling on whether or not America will rain death from the sky on random Middle Eastern countries is gauche, but those losers don’t understand how to rise and grind, now do they?

Look, Idiocracy is a common cultural touchstone and for good reason, what with the WWE-trained Donald Trump running the show while the Fox News-trained Hegseth peacocks about American military prowess. It’s enough to make even the biggest peacenik long for the staid days of Donald Rumsfeld and his unknown unknowns. But I can’t help thinking of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil—a movie that begins with a bureaucratic snafu confusing Tuttle and Buttle that culminates in a labyrinthine, Kafkaesque nightmare—every time I read a story about ICE shanghaiing kids and sending them across the country without their families.

Luckily, when the news gets to be too much—and, honestly, that’s happening more and more—I can just slip away into my stream of videos. The endless scroll, the constantly flickering short films providing endorphin bursts and allowing me a chance to either slap a like on something or tell the author to kill themselves. Gore Verbinski and Matthew Robinson hit on this in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, which is still in theaters now: there’s a fantastic sequence where kids scroll through a series of videos that call to mind an AI slop version of the nightmare imagery from the cursed videotape in The Ring. But this is fertile soil to till, and David Foster Wallace got there first: Infinite Jest is a guide to so much of modern life that it’s kind of scary. Set aside the germophobic entertainer-as-president promising to clean up America and consider instead the great threat at the heart of the book, “The Entertainment,” a vision of the endless scroll that is so compelling, so captivating, that people cannot look away, cannot do or want anything else, eventually wasting away into nothing.

Wallace envisioned “The Entertainment” as a terrorist weapon of sorts, one accidentally created by a visionary genius before being unleashed on North America by Quebecois separatists. But let’s be honest: In our heart of hearts, we know it’s what society craves, just as the plants crave Brawndo. The social media gurus haven’t quite mastered it yet; we’re still, unfortunately, able to look away and return to the real world. For now. God willing, our techno billionaires can figure out the precise AI algorithm that will get us to that state of blissful emptiness soon enough.

Which makes me wonder: Is there a Kalshi contract for a timeline on the complete nullification of human will? I’d buy that for a dollar.

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Two New Interviews for You

We dropped two new episodes of The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood this week. There was just too much good stuff to hold any till next week. Importantly, both of the movies under discussion are in theaters now and need support to stay here.

First up on Wednesday was my chat with Óliver Laxe, the director of Sirāt. The film has been nominated for two Oscars and Laxe is touring with it this week around the United States. It’s the sort of movie that should be seen in a theater with an audience, as one of the film’s key ideas is finding community in an age of seeming apocalypse.

And from this morning, here’s my interview with Rod Blackhurst and Ethan Suplee, director and star of the new horror film Dolly. The film is not likely to be nominated for any Oscars, but it is, like most horror movies, best enjoyed with an audience: Just as there’s something to be said for watching a comedy with a crowd and laughing in unison, there’s something to be said for watching a horror film with an audience and cringing in unison. That instant community, that idea of coming together alone in the dark to experience something: It’s real, and it’s powerful.

Par for the Corpse

Up on the homepage, I’ve got a review out this morning of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new riff on the Frankenstein story, The Bride! It was interesting! It just wasn’t... good.

Spectacularly ill-conceived from start to finish and stuffed to the gills with lots of Big Choices from stars Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale while having only the loosest grasp of the ideas it is playing with—a sort of cataclysmic mishmash of post-MeToo, post-ACAB mutterings—The Bride! does manage to be interesting. It’s never boring! You’re never tempted to look away from the screen, even when writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s script goes into spastic repetition or Buckley jerks her head like she’s coping with Tourette’s.

Read the whole thing.

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Assigned Viewing: Robocop 2 (Prime Video)

This sequel is not directed by Paul Verhoeven, but it is very good in no small part because of the menace radiated by the villain, Cain, played by Tom Noonan. Noonan died a couple of weeks back (my friend Bill Ryan wrote a nice obituary for him at his site), and while this is by no means his best or his biggest role, it is, in many ways, my favorite of his performances. Cain radiates a sort of cool menace that almost doesn’t fit with a movie that leans so hard into the dystopic parody of the Robocop universe.

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On this week’s episode, I’m very pleased to be rejoined by Rod Blackhurst (we had him on a couple of years back to discuss his indie crime drama Blood for Dust) and joined for the first time by Ethan Suplee, veteran character actor we all know and love from films like Mallrats, Remember the Titans, and The Wolf of Wall Street and TV shows like My Name Is Earl.

We’re discussing their new film, Dolly, a true indie endeavor made in the spirit of American classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Evil Dead or the New French Extremity’s High Tension. Rod and his partners raised some money, brought some folks to the woods of Tennessee, and put together something he hopes will be memorable for the audiences who see it. It’s hitting theaters this weekend, playing around 800 or so screens across the country, and if you’re a horror head—or just someone looking for something different—I hope you’ll check it out. (It is a horror movie, though, so I cannot provide any refunds if the onscreen terror sparks a walkout.)

As I said, getting Ethan on the show is a real treat because I’ve been a fan for years and it’s been interesting to watch him dip his toes into some darker waters in recent years in films like Dolly, Babylon, Blood for Dust, and God Is a Bullet. It was fun to pick his brain about consciously making that shift and why his film work often gives him a little more space to stretch than his TV work.

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We have a special bonus episode this week: I’m joined by Óliver Laxe, the director of the Oscar-nominated Sirāt, to discuss his film about a rave at the end of the world and how we can find community in an age of dislocation and isolation. I wanted to get this out now because a.) the film is expanding this weekend, b.) Laxe himself will be in attendance at a handful of shows across the country over the next week or two here, and c.) it really is the sort of movie you need to see in a theater. For the sound system and the big picture, yes, but also the sense of community a packed theatrical showing can generate. You’ll want to experience it with other people, believe me.

Laxe will be appearing for Q&As in person through the 8th in DC, Boston, Chicago, Austin, and Nashville; you can see the dates on the flyer below. But if you don’t live near one of these shows, I hope you check out the movie in a theater near you. It’s a real trip.

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FOLLOWING AN IMPROVED BID by Paramount Skydance for Warner Bros. and a quiet visit by Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos to the Trump White House yesterday, the streaming giant dropped out of the hunt for WB in a move that practically guarantees a consortium of deep-pocketed GOP donors (and Qatari money) will take over the storied movie studio that is home to Superman and Harry Potter.

While regulatory hurdles remain—possibly including a antitrust investigation by the Department of Justice and, more likely, lawsuits from progressive attorneys general at the state level—the terms of the Larry and David Ellison–backed deal suggest the Paramount Skydance team has great confidence it has effectively greased the skids for speedy approval. In addition to raising their all-cash offer for the entirety of Warner Bros.-Discovery to $31 a share and paying the $2.8 billion breakup fee Warner Bros. owes to Netflix, Paramount Skydance signed off on a $7 billion regulatory termination fee and a fee of 25 cents per share per quarter if the deal hasn’t closed by September 30, 2026.

The deal would give Paramount Skydance control not only of Warner Bros.’s theatrical production and distribution and HBO Max, but also the Warner panoply of cable networks. That includes CNN, a company that so agitated Donald Trump during his first term that his Department of Justice spent nearly two years trying to block a deal between AT&T and Time Warner. Given Paramount Skydance’s pliancy with regard to CBS, where it has placed the Free Press’s Bari Weiss in charge of news operations, it seems unlikely that CNN will inspire similar tsuris this time around.

Indeed, the deal seems primed for speedy approval.

As Matt Stoller noted last week in his writeup of what would happen if a Netflix-WB deal fell apart, Paramount has been operating as if the DOJ wouldn’t be much of an obstacle, largely completing the paperwork needed to finish a deal before the sale was even officially announced. “If the Netflix deal falls apart and Paramount wins the bidding war, then the antitrust enforcers have just fifteen days to rush a complaint out to a court to ask to pause the merger,” Stoller writes.

If the Trump DOJ doesn’t show much interest in fighting this—and we’ve seen nothing to suggest they will—state AGs can still try to step in. Last week, California AG Rob Bonta issued a fairly weak statement saying that he was keeping an eye on things. Cool beans, but he’ll likely have a tough time proving that the feds were wrong to skip their fight. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said something similar in a statement: “With the cloud of corruption looming over Trump’s Department of Justice, it’ll be up to the American people to speak up and state attorneys general to enforce the law.”

The question is whether or not the merger rises to the level of monopolistic concern. As Josh Wright wrote late last year, it seems unlikely that a Paramount-Warners deal will merit a “PNB Presumption”—which is to say, it’s unlikely to capture 30 percent of the market in any market segment, the level at which a merger is presumed to be unlawful—and therefore could be hard to strike down.

And the numbers here are pretty clear. According to Nielsen’s Media Distributor Gauge, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery controlled just 13.7 percent of total TV usage last month when considering all channels: streaming, cable, broadcast, etc. When looking just at streaming video on demand (SVOD)—that is, HBO Max and Paramount+—the two companies control less than 8 percent of all streaming viewing on television in January.1 The best case against Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. on antitrust grounds is that they would control too much of the theatrical film business, but even here we don’t quite hit a PNB Presumption: According to the movie-biz website The Numbers, between 1995 and 2026 Paramount and Warner Bros. accounted for 25.4 percent of the total domestic box office.

This isn’t to say that fans of theatrical distribution like myself have nothing to worry about. The lesson of the Disney/20th Century Fox deal is pretty clear here: We’re likely to see fewer wide releases and stingier prestige acquisitions, which in turn could cripple theatrical exhibition fatally. It’s certainly what Cinema United (the exhibitor trade group formerly known as NATO) is worried about. “If Paramount or another major studio ends up displacing Netflix as the buyer, our concerns are no less serious. A combination of Paramount and Warner Bros., for instance, would consolidate as much as 40% of each year’s domestic box office in the hands of a single dominant studio,” they said in a written statement submitted to a House hearing last month.

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Regardless, it’s important to emphasize that the only part of Paramount Skydance’s improved deal that is guaranteed to put more money in the pockets of WB shareholders is the dollar-per-share uptick in price. Every other element here is functionally a bet by the Ellisons that they have enough sway over the Trump administration and its DOJ to get the deal done, and done quickly.

It’s worth noting that, just as Democratic state attorneys general are now gearing up to scrutinize the Warner Bros. deal, it was eleven Republican state attorneys general who, just a few days ago, wrote a letter criticizing the now-dead Netflix offer—expressing concern “that the proposed merger . . . will likely result in undue market concentration that stifles competition and therefore creates higher prices, lower reliability, and less innovation for one of America’s major industries—all to the detriment of American consumers.” You can see why Paramount has some confidence in their ability to get this done and why Sarandos decided to pull the plug.

Needless to say, this is a horrible way to manage an economy. This is the most troubling aspect of the whole deal: The whims of a mad king should not be the main calculus involved in the sale of a company worth tens of billions of dollars. That’s insane. It’s an insane way to run a business, and it’s an insane way to run a country. And look: I am open to the idea that there were legitimate concerns about Netflix taking over WB! I voiced concerns myself! But any such concerns also apply to Paramount, arguably even more so in the world of theatrical distribution, for reasons noted above. And any regulatory concerns I have about monopolies pale in comparison to the political concerns I have about an administration monkeying with the process for its own nefarious ends.

I was, and remain, a Netflix skeptic. I’m not horribly disappointed their deal was shot down. That said, I can’t help but hear a line from one of my favorite Warner Bros. movies echoing around in the back of my mind.

“Not like this. Not like this.”

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Much More on the Merger

This morning I talked about the Paramount/Warner Bros. deal with my colleagues JVL, Sam Stein, and Catherine Rampell. Check it out here on Substack or over on YouTube:

The Greatest Cinematic Decade Ever

On this week’s episode of The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, I talked to Paul Fischer about his new book, The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema. I hope you give it a listen:

Apologies for repeating myself here, but one thing I’m always struck by is how good Francis Ford Coppola was for the entirety of the 1970s. I mean, he kicks things off by winning a screenplay Oscar for Patton, then two years later makes what is arguably the greatest American film of all time, The Godfather, and then two years after that has a pair of films competing against each other in several Oscars categories (The Godfather Part II and The Conversation). Then he disappears to the jungle for a few years only to close out the decade with what is, arguably, the greatest war film of all time: Apocalypse Now.

There are a handful of filmmakers you could argue had better decades (Billy Wilder’s run in the 1950s that starts with Sunset Boulevard and ends with Some Like It Hot is certainly up there), and there are a handful of directors you could argue had better ten-year runs that weren’t bounded by a numerical decade (Spielberg himself has, arguably, had two of them: 1975 to 1984, and 1993 to 2002). But for my money, Coppola’s 1970s were the absolute peak. It’s hard to imagine we’ll see anyone pull off anything quite like it again.

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Assigned Viewing: High Tension and Snow White (1937)

Next week on The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, I’m going to be joined by Rod Blackhurst (we discussed his film Blood for Dust a couple of years back) as well as actor Ethan Suplee (who you will know from projects as varied as Mallrats, “My Name Is Earl,” and The Wolf of Wall Street) to discuss Rod’s new horror film, Dolly.

Now, I’ve seen Dolly and it’s a pretty lean and mean horror film starring Suplee, Seann William Scott, and Fabianne Therese. I asked him for an assignment for this week to help prepare folks for the movie, which hits theaters March 6, and he suggested a gnarly double feature: Alexandre Aja’s 2003 slasher High Tension and Walt Disney’s classic animated feature, Snow White (1937). That is not a combo for the faint of heart!

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I’m joined by Paul Fischer on this week’s episode to discuss his new book, The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema. It’s a fascinating look at a pivotal moment in film history, when the breakdown of the studio system gave rise to the auteurist 1970s, the first half of which was dominated by Francis Ford Coppola, only to cede the landscape to the blockbuster entertainments that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg mastered in the back half of the decade and beyond.

You can also watch on YouTube, if you prefer. And I hope you share this far and wide: it’s an important topic.

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I want to emphasize one thing to try and hammer home the power of this film: I am not a prison reformer. I do not believe we should abolish prisons or work toward massive decarceration. Most of the people in prison deserve to be there. Indeed, most of the people in this movie deserve to be in prison. They are killers and crooks, and removing them from society is necessary and good. But we also have a responsibility to ensure the humane treatment of such individuals—HBO’s Oz should be a cautionary tale rather than a how-to guide—and, as The Alabama Solution demonstrates, it is a responsibility that we all too frequently fail to meet.

Anyway, you should watch the documentary, which is streaming now on HBO Max. And after you see it, you should check out the film’s website, TheAlabamaSolution.com, to really dive into some of the horrors of the prison system.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is a decidedly weird film: a cinematic adaptation of a cult classic web series and TV show that owes as much to Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future as it does its own history; a pastiche of cinematic time-travel ideas that nevertheless feels heartfelt and original; and a tribute to eternal truths of friendship and the very specific idea of Canadian nice.

Which is to say that despite sometimes feeling as though it’s cobbled together from the component parts of other things, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie nevertheless is wholly original and completely unique, a film that uses its reference points not as simple memberberries but as something deeper, more profound. In an age of artificial mechanical reproduction and recreation, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie has real soul and sweetness that puts it above all the AI slop that some people might be tempted to compare it to.

Full disclosure: I’ve never seen the series on which this is based. So I was coming in totally cold. But cowriters and costars Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol nimbly navigate the terrain for newcomers like myself without holding our hands. The broad strokes of their relationship become obvious almost immediately: Jay and Matt are in a band; they don’t actually have any songs or albums to promote; Matt is a schemer, kicking off the movie with a harebrained plan to parachute off the CN Tower and into the Skydome to promote their show that night at the Rivoli, which they haven’t actually booked; and, finally, Jay is both the member of the “band” with some musical talent and also the one who is growing disillusioned with Matt’s idiotic plans.

Via a series of convoluted machinations involving an RV and a twenty-five-year-old bottle of Orbitz (the drink with the little floating balls made by the creators of Clearly Canadian), one of Matt’s moronic ideas accidentally succeeds, sending the pair back in time to 2008. When they return to our present, everything has changed, and the big question the film asks is how they can “fix” the future … and whether they even want to do so.

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Again, this is a very strange movie, almost a metatextual prank of sorts. It’s not enough to simply borrow liberally from the plots of various Back to the Future movies, the film is often playing in the background and the guys riff on how much of the score they can use while staying within the confines of fair use. And there are other time-travel movies in the mix here as well, from The Butterfly Effect to Primer; a joke about how Matt learns about their predicament after the pair travels back in time to 2008 unfolds subtly and gracefully and then bluntly, like a slap to the face. It hits so hard and so hilariously that I guffawed in the theater, something I almost never do.

But this isn’t really a time-travel movie. It’s a relationship movie, a movie about friendship and what it means to put up with your pals and their idiocies and how such relationships shape your own life, your own idiocies. And this is one reason why the referential nature of the film works to its benefit rather than feeling like a stale copy of something better: If you’re a guy in your early-thirties to late-forties, you spent your whole life talking in referential pop-cultural code with your friends. Back to the Future could just as easily be Anchorman or Monty Python or Goodfellas or Napoleon Dynamite or Animal House; it’s a lingua franca, a sort of conversational shorthand. Like that Next Generation episode. “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Biff, the sports almanac stolen.” You get the idea.

The mockumentary style of the film is never really explained—why would a camera crew be following these guys around for nearly two decades?—which only adds to the pastiche quality of the whole endeavor, aping the style so common in sitcoms since The Office and Modern Family dominated the landscape. There are also elements of Jackass and The Tom Green Show here, little bits and pieces of reality-TV trappings, and extras who don’t know they’re extras while filming is happening, which makes one wonder “What, how real is this?”

As I was watching the film and then afterwards considering why it works, I kept thinking about the recursive natures of the conversations we’re currently having about AI and originality, about the insistence that typing a prompt into a resource-hogging idiot box is the equivalent of making a feature film or drawing a panel of a comic book. Is Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie not just borrowing the same reference points as Claude would be? How is Johnson’s appropriation different from ChatGPT’s?

And the answer, ultimately, is that this is simply real in a way that AI isn’t and can’t be. You’ll never ask “Wait how did they do that? How real is this?” with an AI prompt; the answer is that some box of circuits somewhere stole the imagery and rearranged it at your behest. But you’ll find yourself wondering that repeatedly while watching Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. I feel a greater human connection to these two guys I’ve never seen before than I ever will to the rivers of AI-generated fanfic “fixing” Game of Thrones or showing us the further adventures of Tony Stark that the tech-addled goobers of the world seem to think will replace the artists of our age.

Assigned Viewing: The Godfather (Paramount+)

I spent a lot of time talking about Open Range in my obituary of Robert Duvall, but it probably wouldn’t crack most people’s list of the best Robert Duvall movies. It’s also not streaming for free or available on Blu-ray or 4K. (C’mon, Disney.) The Godfather, however, would have to be at or near the top of any such list. And Duvall is so ridiculously good in it. It’s fascinating to watch the film through the eyes of Tom Hagen: He’s the guy who has been trained in the family business but he can never take over the family business. So when Michael Corleone arrives on the scene, he’s almost an interloper, a kid who doesn’t know what he’s doing. There’s the faintest trace of resentment in Duvall’s eyes, a little anger hiding just behind the wry smile perpetually resting on Tom’s face. It’s a brilliantly subtle performance in a movie full of them.

This week, I’m joined by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman to discuss their Oscar-nominated documentary, The Alabama Solution. Currently streaming on HBO, their documentary combines interviews, investigative journalism, and footage from within the prisons themselves obtained via contraband cellphones to reveal the horrible and dangerous living conditions of those serving time in the Alabama correctional system. It’s a documentary primed to shock the conscience, and I hope everyone out there watches it—even, perhaps especially, if you do not consider yourself a prison reform advocate.

You can also go to the documentary’s website, TheAlabamaSolution.com, to learn more about the deaths inside Alabama’s prisons. And if you think this is an important film and an important issue, please share it with a friend.

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The Dallas show is at the Texas Theatre, which is this very cool, old-school, cavernous movie theater/event space. (It’s where I saw Francis Ford Coppola present Megalopolis last year!) And it has some historical resonance, as it’s the theater that Lee Harvey Oswald fled to after killing JFK. I could not possibly be more excited to be part of a show at that venue; it’s going to be incredibly fun. Buy your tickets today!

One Last Day at the Kennedy Center

LAST WEEKEND I POPPED INTO D.C. for twenty hours to take in a day’s worth of shows at the Kennedy Center. It was a slightly surreal experience—like saying farewell to an old friend—made all the more surreal by what happened when I put on the winter clothes I’d brought with me but rarely get to use at my new home in Dallas.

Shrugging into my heavy Schott Bros. peacoat as I exited the Watergate Hotel on my way over to the Kennedy Center, I felt something jostle against my chest. Reaching into the inside pocket, I pulled out a Kennedy Center ticket. For a show dated December 2019. “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus: The Musical,” as it happens, which was the last I saw at the Kennedy Center and a nice little pre-Christmas, pre-cross-country-move treat for my (then-4-year-old) daughter.

It was a reminder of a different time: For all the weirdness that surrounded Donald Trump’s first term, the Kennedy Center more or less remained above the fray. The touring troupe of Hamilton performed there in 2018, unlike this time around. That was the same year Philip Glass, who just withdrew his symphony honoring Abraham Lincoln, received the Kennedy Center Honor. And, of course, Mo Willems brought his cherished pigeon to masses of delighted DMV-area children while serving as artist-in-residence beginning in 2019.

As I document in a big piece I wrote for the Bulwark homepage this week, all that has changed, obviously: Trump took a personal interest in the activities of the Kennedy Center. He installed his crony Richard Grenell at the center along with a handpicked board of flunkies, which led to the calamitous decision to slap Trump’s name on the front of the building, which in turn added to the series of defections by performers and an exodus of patrons vexed by the desecration. The Washington National Opera announced it was leaving, dealing another blow to the beleaguered center. This in turn led Trump to petulantly announce that the Kennedy Center would be closed for two years—can’t have disappointing sales if you don’t have any disappointing shows to sell for—for “renovations.”

Anyway, I hope you give the piece below a read. And if you have any memories of the shows you saw at the Kennedy Center that you want to share, please do so in the comments, I know folks would love to hear about them.

Also, if you haven’t yet become a Bulwark+ member, please consider taking the leap. Can’t afford publish pieces like this without the generous support of our members.

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Hello, Clarice.

On this week’s Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, I interviewed Brian Raftery, the author of Hannibal Lecter: A Life, about his book and the president’s weird, repeated references to Lecter during the 2024 presidential campaign. It’s a fun chat, and his book is particularly interesting for the deep dive into the life of Thomas Harris, one of the few true literary recluses of our age. I hope you give it a listen and if you enjoy our talk, please pick up his book!

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Crime 101 Review

I couldn’t help but feel that Crime 101 was trying to be something a little more than what it is while watching it. It’s not terrible, it’s just . . . a little off. From my review:

Crime 101 is one of those oddly paced movies that either needed to be twenty minutes shorter and lean into the high-concept, elevator-pitch nature of the idea or be twenty minutes longer and really dive into all the side characters, like the deranged and sloppy Ormon (Barry Keoghan) and the fence Money (Nick Nolte). Nolte in particular just kind of disappears from the film despite setting the third-act conflict into motion; one wonders if there isn’t a whole subplot involving Money and Mike’s relationship on the cutting room floor. Jennifer Jason Leigh, as Lou’s wife, also shows up for basically a single scene, in which she informs Lou that she’s been having an affair. It’s a genuine ‘Wait, what?’ moment, the sort of thing that again makes you feel like the movie is missing something.

We spend more time with Sharon Colvin (Halle Berry), an insurance adjuster who is aging up (and therefore out) of her gig as a high-end saleswoman assuaging the egos of billionaires, but she still feels tertiary to all the action, both integral to the schemes cooked up by Lou and Mike and also stuck on the outside looking in. For a movie that seems very concerned about the unfair treatment of women in an industry dependent on looks, she isn’t given much to do but look pretty, and that’s a problem. And I won’t spoil anything except to say that, ultimately, [writer/director Burt] Layton is too forgiving of his lead characters: he likes them all too much and thus ends up giving them passes they don’t deserve, which is a problem for a movie so clearly modeled on something as remorseless as Heat.

You can read the full review here.

Assigned Viewing: Wuthering Heights (1939) (HBO Max, Criterion, Kanopy, and more)

I haven’t yet seen Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation (or “adaptation,” as the scare quotes the studio demands critics use to surround the film’s title in their reviews suggests) of Emily Brontë’s novel. But I get the sense it is . . . not terribly faithful. That doesn’t mean it can’t be great! William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation omits the second half of the book and is considered a classic. It’s streaming all over the place now, so if you want to avoid the opening-weekend crowds (projections are through the roof for this one, it’s going to be a big hit), maybe stay in and watch Wyler’s version.