New Line Cinema Embodies The Perils of Movie Studio Consolidation

It's a little maddening existing. Specifically, it's enraging watching so many powerful people ignore the past just to stuff a few extra dollars into their pockets. We know what happens when you cut down environmental protection and measures to curb pollution in people's drinking water. Let's slash those anyway! History has shown America diving into wars in the Middle East for oil does nothing but inspire bloodshed and carnage. Let's do it anyway! Hopping onto tech trends only Wall Street bros and Silicon Valley losers deem "the future" merely produces entities like Quibi and the Metaverse. Let's put everyone's money into generative AI bullshit anyway!

For Hollywood right now, the same thing is happening regarding Skydance's proposed purchase of Warner Bros. Skydance would own two major studios in this regard, following its absorption of Paramount Pictures last year. It's clear this is a terrible idea. Having two massive studios owned by one company, nope, warning signs going off. However, so many prolific figures in the entertainment industry are greeting the news with either a shrug or attempts to curry the favor of Skydance head David Ellison should he gain control of Warner Bros. 

Deadline Hollywood described recent questions lobbed at Ellison about the proposed mega-merger as "softball" queries. Former Warner Bros. Pictures head Toby Emmerich said he feels the merger is a good thing and expressed hopes that the combined company would distribute films from his new production label. Openly conservative producer Jerry Bruckheimer, meanwhile, has openly supported the Skydance merger. Of course, he would. He's rich and sheltered enough to withstand any negative consequences from two movie studios becoming basically one. Meanwhile, working-class organizations like Hollywood teamsters or the theater owners' representative group Cinema United have openly opposed this proposed merger on many grounds.

These opponents have wisely pointed out how 20th Century Fox's output decreased dramatically once the studio was bought by Disney. Movie theaters and the general box office have since suffered. If they want another example of what horrors happen when movie studios consolidate, though, may I suggest referencing the poor struggles of New Line Cinema? Once a prosperous standalone studio, it was shuttered into a Warner Bros. division in the late 2000s. Cinema has suffered for that ever since.

New Line Cinema As An Independent Studio

This graphic from the University of Michigan (written by Daniel Herbert while the visual itself was made by Jamie Lai) and this timeline of New Line Cinema history from Variety writer Keith Collins should help provide a more specific and detailed history of New Line Cinema's earliest days. Real quickly, though, before we launch into New Line Cinema's 21st-century experiences, this studio was founded in 1967 by Bob Shaye. Originally, New Line handled super avant-garde and challenging arthouse titles meant to resonate with college-aged audiences. This included Jean-Luc Godard directorial efforts and the earliest John Waters directorial efforts. New Line wasn't a big label, in other words. It was the purveyor of counterculture cinema.

1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street, though, launched New Line Cinema into the stratosphere and new levels of notoriety. The studio expanded its operations, but didn't stop handling motion pictures many other studios and distributors wouldn't touch. For instance, in September 1984, New Line released Buddies, a terrific movie that served as one of American cinema's first explorations of the AIDS crisis. New Line also released fellow queer cinema staple Torch Song Trilogy in the final weeks of 1988 and, at the dawn of the 90s, this label put House Party into theaters. Similarly, when nobody else wanted to take on distribution rights to the first live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, New Line Cinema stepped up to the plate and made a fortune in the process.

New Line Cinema was putting out a lot of titles into movie theaters, including features like My Own Private Idaho released under its Fine Line Features banner (established in 1991). In 1994, the Turner Broadcasting System purchased New Line Cinema. Just two years later, Turner merged with Time Warner Entertainment. This meant New Line Cinema was now a sister company to Warner Bros., though the two remained disparate entities. Though no longer a solo act without any corporate owners, New Line Cinema still took mighty big risks like financing Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Between New Line Cinema and Fine Line, 16 New Line-owned movies got theatrical releases in 1999. New Line put out the same number of titles across its two divisions in 2002. Warner Bros. put out 23(!!!) separate new theatrical releases the same year. Unfortunately, New Line would cease to function as a standalone entity by the start of 2008. New Line's attempts to recreate that Lord of the Rings box office success with misguided, costly misfires like The Golden Compass had sunk the studio's fortunes. TimeWarner announced in late Feburary 2008 that Warner Bros. would be the company's only theatrical film studio going forward. Picturehouse (an arthouse label successor to Fine Line Features) was dead. New Line was now a Warner Bros. division.

"New Line Cinema Is Dead. Bury It."

For the next two years, Warner Bros. released a deluge of new releases (like The Final Destination, Sex and the City: The Movie, He's Just Not That Into You, Four Christmases, and more) that were already green-lit and/or filmed before New Line's demise. By 2010, though, it was clear New Line was in a new era. Only four new movies featured the New Line logo that year. Compare that to the 11 features New Line Cinema released three years earlier in 2007, or its 10 features in 2006 and 2005. In 2012, the nadir of New Line's existence, Warner Bros. only put out three films under this label. Just looking at the raw numbers here makes it apparent: corporate consolidation cost the film industry dearly. Fewer jobs, fewer titles for movie theaters to play, and fewer artistic endeavors were created after TimeWarner merged New Line into Warner Bros.

Initially, New Line Cinema’s fate under Warner Bros. appeared to be similar to 20th Century Fox’s fate under Disney leadership: a label for sequels to old movies, but nothing new. WB was happy to use the New Line Cinema logo for Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas, and Final Destination 5. From 2010 to 2012, though, it looked like the age of fresh New Line Cinema films was over. Thankfully, 2013’s The Conjuring breathed new life into New Line and allowed the label to slightly expand its annual output. 

Still, New Line, even with Conjuring and the It movies under its belt, was a shell of its former self. Excluding MGM co-productions, MGM only put out five films in 2016. The previous year, it only put out four titles (again, exempting MGM movies like Hot Pursuit and Creed). The closest the 2010s had to an “old school” year for New Line Cinema was 2019, when the label was attached to nine different movies. That included British indie Blinded by the Light, a Sundance 2019 sensation New Line acquired. A smaller scale independent title like that harkened back to the earliest days of New Line and the kind of output that used to be its bread and butter. 

Aside from 2019, though, New Line’s annual output has been significantly limited and often comprises franchise titles rather than the originals/non-sequels it used to take risks on. Recent features like Companion and Weapons are exceptions to the default releases Warner Bros. shuffles under the New Line banner. The days of New Line and Fine Line Features offering havens for John Waters movies, The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, My Own Private Idaho, Buddies, and more have been replaced by endless Conjuring sequels and spin-offs. New Line's annual theatrical output is often 75% less than its typical slate when it was a standalone entity.

What We Lose When Studios Consolidate 

Studio consolidation is not sad because we'll see a certain movie studio logo less or because change is inherently bad. It's because it only benefits the most powerful people. Reducing competition and how many studios to operate provides more dollars for the top executives of whoever owns Warner Bros. this week. It sure doesn't offer more choices or variety for the consumer, though. It also doesn't help ensure there are options in the marketplace for filmmakers and artists needing distributors.

To boot, New Line Cinema and Fine Line Features, as part of their "let's take some risks" practice, helped get films from marginalized artists off the ground. In addition to the LGBTQIA+ movies I've already mentioned, there was a slew of features from Black filmmakers that got made at New Line Cinema. Love & Basketball, for instance, was a New Line Cinema release. Ditto other titles from Black artists like Bamboozled, Set It Off, and B*A*P*S,  among many other titles, were also New Line/Fine Line titles. Since 2013, Blinded by the Light (an outside acquisition) is the only film helmed by a woman of color to get released by New Line Cinema. Reducing this studio to being a Warner Bros. label, whether intentional or not, deprived the world of more art from non-white voices.

That's what happens, though, when studios are absorbed, bought, and collapsed into larger entities. When 20th Century Fox was merged into Disney, fewer movies got made. When Sony merged TriStar into Columbia Pictures, fewer movies were made. When Lionsgate bought Summit Entertainment, the label was gradually discontinued. A distributor that put out seven or eight movies a year as late as 2011 no longer exists. Fewer movies got made. DreamWorks SKG, after being sold to Paramount in late 2005, went through a series of financial troubles and evolutions. It's now a Universal label that's had its logo attached to just three films since 2022. Fewer movies got made. The list goes on and on and on.

Unless your'e talking about Disney buying family movie labels that previously made one or two movies annually (like Pixar or Marvel Studios), the history of movie studios purchasing and/or absorbing other studios is diminishing returns. This is the sole outcome. David Ellison can spout his notions that Skydance will have the financing to make 30 movies across Paramount and Warner Bros. annually. The historical track record bears out that movie studio purchases limit options for creators and moviegoers. The only people who benefit are the uber-wealthy like Ellison.

New Line Cinema is one of the most tragic examples of this phenomenon (and, ironically, a cautionary tale its larger sister company, Warner Bros., seems doomed to mimic). New Line once was the place that steadily supplied all kinds of movies to theaters and birthed the careers of John Waters, Gina Prince-bythewood, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, John Cameron Mitchell, and more. Heck, we have the Lord of the Rings trilogy because of this studio. In the 2020s, though, it's the home of Black Adam and a series of reboots/remakes (like new Mortal Kombat, Final Destination, and Conjuring outings) exploiting its legacy. 

Both its volume of new theatrical releases and risk-taking (each of which theaters need to survive) are gone. Do not listen to the press release-ready jargon of David Ellison. Gaze upon the dwindled modern incarnation of New Line Cinema to witness what happens when movie studio consolidation goes unchecked. Mergers obliterate jobs. They do not create them.

All It Took Was This One Tweak to Finally Make Video Game Movies Box Office Juggernauts

For the longest time, only one video game movie cracked $100+ million domestically. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider sure looked lonely on this list pre-2016, as most other video game movies (even costly features like Warcraft and Assassin's Creed) failed to even hit $60 million domestically, let alone $100+ million domestically. Of course, just a decade after The Angry Birds Movie became only the second video game movie to hit $100+ million in North America, that all feels like a distant memory. In the first few weeks of the 2020s, Sonic the Hedgehog secured the title of biggest video game movie ever domestically. 

Since then, the Illumination Mario movies, A Minecraft Movie, the Sonic sequels, and even Uncharted have all amassed major box office hauls. Minecraft and Mario especially have become some of the biggest motion pictures (of any genre) in history. The video game movie, once box office poison, is now a massive business in Hollywood. There are several reasons the video game movie has come into its own. Gearing more of these films towards family audiences has certainly helped. Meanwhile, many people who grew up with Mario, Steve from Minecraft, and Sonic as part of their everyday lives are now adults with disposable income in the 2020s. That nostalgia-driven crowd might not have been able to drive one of these movies to massive numbers as late as 2015.

The biggest difference between new and old video game movies, though, is pretty simple. These films finally focused on concrete characters, rather than just brand names, people are familiar with. The quality of these features hasn't drastically improved. However, there's a big difference between promising people a movie containing Shadow the Hedgehog and a generic action movie that happens to have the Assassin's Creed brand name.

What Kind of Characters Did Old Video Game Movies Focus On?

The very first live-action video game movies, like Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, and Mortal Kombat, did bring Mario, M. Bison, and Johnny Cash, respectively, to the silver screen. Starting in the 21st century, though, video game films began largely eschewing familiar video game characters in favor of new fictional individuals. The Resident Evil movies, for instance, famously carved out their own new lead character (Alice) and ensemble casts.  Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, meanwhile, was adapting games based around an unnamed "Prince" character. That figure became the largely standalone new figure Prince Dastan of Persia. The Assassin's Creed movie didn't give Ezio Firenze or Edward Kenway a chance to shine on the silver screen. Instead, Michael Fassbender's Callum "Cal" Lynch was the centerpiece.

2016's Warcraft focused on a slew of various Orcs and humans that were unfamiliar to even the most hardcore World of Warcraft players. Need for Speed was adapting a series of racing games devoid of recognizable characters, so a deluge of new figures had to be conjured up for a motion picture adaptation. Mark Wahlberg's Max Payne, meanwhile, kept the titular character from the comics, but grounded him in a fantastical world with plenty of otherworldly beasties (known as Valkyrie) not from the games. On and on the examples go.

This is not to say the problems rooted in these projects were solely because they weren't loyal to the games. The Illumination Mario movies vividly demonstrate that slavish devotion to pre-existing material doesn't equal a quality motion picture. However, this phenomenon does help explain why these titles didn't register as must-see titles for most people. If you see an ad for a Spider-Man movie, you know you're going to see a story involving characters you love like Peter Parker, Miles Morales, Mary Jane Watson, and others. If you spot a billboard for a new 007 movie, you might get stoked that James Bond is back on the big screen.

Need for Speed, though, had no relation to the games beyond "cars go fast." A familiar video game moniker here just felt like a cynical cash grab, not a potentially exciting extension of a beloved gaming world. Without any specific characters to serve as connective tissue between different mediums, what on Earth does a Doom movie even mean to both hardcore Doom fans and casual moviegoers? When Tim Burton's Batman promised the first big-budget big screen version of its titular lead, there was momentous excitement even among those who didn't read Batman comics. Through cultural osmosis, everyone could understand the significance of both Batman as a fictional character and him finally getting translated into this cinematic form.

Compare that to Warcraft, which was adapted from a game where players customized their own characters and interacted with virtual friends in fantasy settings. What value was there in seeing Azeroth in the context of a narrative feature you couldn't control? World of Warcraft's joy came from interacting with your pals, not from controlling or meeting pre-existing characters like in a Mario or Last of Us title. The lack of distinguishable, concrete characters you could translate into a World of Warcraft movie epitomizes how that Duncan Jones directorial effort was a boondoggle from the start.

Frustratingly, too, eschewing source material didn't create compelling new movie experiences. This process can totally create masterpieces. Trust me as a girl who first read Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and then watched (and fell in love with) Steven Spielberg's movie adaptation, which radically changes the text. However, rather than producing the video game movie equivalent of Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army or Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, titles like Need for Speed, Assassin's Creed, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time were torturously boring. You got the worst of both worlds with these movies.

Lara Croft Offered A Glimpse of Video Game Cinema's Future

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was the exception amongst 2000s video game movies that proved how much identifiable characters could help these adaptations. I've never played the Lara Croft games, so I can't say how faithful the 2001 Tomb Raider film (which I found to be a snooze) is overall to its predecessors. However, I do know that the Tomb Raider marketing could emphasize a concrete character (Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft!) that audiences could finally see in a live-action movie. This wasn't just a generic action film incidentally featuring Need for Speed or Hitman's brand name. People had grown fond of Lara Croft and wanted to see her in further adventures in a new medium. Compare that to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which was graced with posters dominated by shrug-worthy characters nobody cared about.

Unsurprisingly, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider first lost its domestic box office crown amongst video game movies to Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, which could center its marketing campaign around that beloved yellow, electric rat. Since then, Hollywood has stuck to (largely) family-friendly video game adaptations rooted in games with concretely defined ensemble casts (Sonic and Pals, Mario and the Mushroom kingdom, etc). Even A Minecraft Movie, an adaptation of an online game built on farming and mining, avoided the Warcraft and Doom traps by making sure Steve was front and center in the marketing. 

Whereas Doom abandoned the central concept of the game's monsters coming from Hell, Minecraft bent over backwards to showcase recognizable Minecraft figures like Creepers, Skeletons, and Villagers. The Five Nights at Freddy's films, meanwhile, have centered their entire existence on the "novelty" of seeing Freddy Fazbear and the other animatronics on the big screen. The very appearance of these critters is clearly meant to elicit cheers when they show up in a key climactic Five Nights at Freddy's 2 moment.

In more directly intertwining these video game movies with their source material, and in particular characters, audiences have immense fondness for, well, "cousin, the video game movie businsess is a-boomin'!", as Lt. Aldo Raine might say. Tweaking video game movies isn't, of course, the only element propelling this subgenre to new box office heights. Chiefly, these new features are rooted in far more popular video games (Minecraft and Mario are the two most popular games in history) than Need for Speed or Max Payne.

That's also not to say this shift in priorities has enhanced the film artistically. On the contrary, video game movies have made a lateral shift in what cynical marketing desires motivate their existence. Previously, studios tried to make money by labeling Fast & Furious and Pirates of the Caribbean pastiches Need for Speed or Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, respectively. Now they try to make money through "surprise" cameos of Fox McCloud, Shadow the Hedgehog, or figures cribbed from the most obscure corners of Five Nights at Freddy's lore. The times change. Methods shift. Capitalistic urges persist. All the while, the newest Mario movies are actually worse than the 1993 film adaptation. Fidelity to the source material isn't a virtue unto itself.

Still, recognizing what separates the video game movie hits from the flops does help illustrate why audiences are finally turning out to these films in droves. It isn't enough to just invoke a recognizable brand name. A generic crime thriller that happened to be named Spider-Man would bomb at the box office. Ditto a forgettable automobile chase film that was incidentally named The Great Gatsby. Centering these projects on characters like Yoshi, Knuckles, and Nathan Drake, though, has made 2020s video game movies feel more like direct adaptations of beloved Nintendo and PlayStation titles. That's how the video game movie space is now regularly producing $1+ billion hits...even if the quality of these movies* still can't get past the tutorial level.

* = Except for Rampage and Sonic the Hedgehog 3, those two are actually goofy fun.

"Voicing My Issues": A Lisa Laman Original Poem

On March 22, 2026, I had the privilege of being one of many performers at a Sapphic Storytellers open-mic event. There were so many amazing, talented people here who bared their souls, performed for other people, and let us all have a little insight into their respective existences. It was an honor to perform alongside them, with my performance consisting of me reading a poem I've recently written, entitled "Voicing My Issues."

I'm proud of how this poem turned out and I think the performance went well (the crowd was certainly amazing and supportive). A friend of mine videotaped the performance and you can watch it below!  Here's to queer art and the folks who make it!

Project Hail Mary is a heartfelt space voyage with showmanship to spare

Rocky as seen in Project Hail Mary

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller know their way around visuals. Having cut their teeth in animated storytelling on Clone High and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, the duo understands the power of impactful imagery or a killer visual gag. Even when they're just writing and producing, like on the two Spider-Verse masterpieces, dazzling eye candy and moving visual details abound.  Project Hail Mary (which is based on an Andy Weir novel of the same name) constantly reaffirms those skills so perfectly well-suited to adapting novels. Dialogue-free segments or grandiose set pieces reveling in outer space's beauty offer something new compared to the wondrous word-driven literature realm. 

Lord & Miller's sensibilities ensure Project Hail Mary stands on its own two feet as a motion picture. They also guarantee that this production crackles as an excellent time at the movies. Turns out the guys with a tremendous filmmaking track record have done it again.

After making 21 Jump Street and Lego toys into delightful movie projects, Lord & Miller, working alongside folks like screenwriter Drew Goddard, have set their sights on astronaut Grace Ryland (Ryan Gosling). He begins Project Hail Mary waking up in deep space with no memory of how he got there or who he is. Recurring flashbacks reveal Ryland is a middle school teacher reluctantly recruited by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) to help with a critical project. The solar system's sun is dying thanks to microscopic organisms that nobody understands. Eventually, a plan is concocted to send three astronauts to the distant star Tau Ceti, which is somehow not dimming. Perhaps answers lie there for how to save the Earth's sun.

As these non-linear digressions crop up, Ryland tries to control his spaceship (bound for Tau Ceti) all on his lonesome. He's a scientist, not an astronaut, pilot, or anyone who should be out amongst the stars. Soon, though, this underdog lead makes a shocking discovery. He's not the only one trying to figure out what's going on with a dying sun. There's also an alien named Rocky (voiced and puppeteered by James Ortiz) on the same mission. Otherworldly life is real, and Ryland quickly finds that such organisms are fun to socialize with. This inexplicable friendship could prove critical on the duo's daunting quest. It truly is a hail mary operation...hey, that's the name of the show!

Perhaps my saying that I adored Project Hail Mary is unsurprising and not worth much. After all, I've adored so many other Lord & Miller projects (though even their producing credit couldn't make Strays tolerable), hopeful sci-fi movies like The Martian are my jam, and I can't get enough of puppets. Still, it's one thing to assemble yummy ingredients on a counter. It's another to actually boil them into a taste gumbo. The wide array of artists assembled for this sci-fi epic remarkably coalesces these promising elements into an excellent final form. Ironically, despite the production's grand, star-hopping scope (which is all the more towering if you watch it on an IMAX 70MM screen like I did), Project Hail Mary's joys come from more nonchalant circumstances.

Early on in the film's runtime, an enjoyable montage occurs concerning two characters making a run to the hardware store. It's an adorable sequence featuring elements like creating an impromptu bowling alley in an aisle, tossing objects into a cart, and realizing at the last minute you really need Sour Skittles. Meanwhile, Stratt's most memorable scene involves her crooning Harry Styles at karaoke in a cramped aircraft carrier bar. Ryalnd and Rocky have so many enthralling sequences where they're just trading banter or acting like roommates. Project Hail Mary is about imperiled stars and interstellar travel, but it never loses sight of the people threatened by elements like the sun dying out.

Another benefit of that intimate scope? It offers plenty of chances for Rocky to excel as a character. District 9 writer/director Neil Blomkamp lamented back in 2009 how he wanted to go even weirder with the designs of that film's "Prawns" aliens. However, "they had to be human-esque because our psychology doesn't allow us to really empathize with something unless it has a face and an anthropomorphic shape." Like Mickey17's gigantic beetle-esque critters, Rocky is the culmination of Blomkamp's vision of totally otherworldly-looking aliens anchoring mainstream cinema. Rocky's got no face. No eyes. There are so many design elements ingrained into this figure that should, in theory, make it impossible to invest in him.

However, that commitment to such an unorthodox look for Rocky only makes him more endearing and specific. Unbridled enthusiasm radiates off this creature (particularly when he's in his own little hamster ball inspecting Ryland's spaceship domain) that's impossible to resist. Meanwhile, without a face, James Ortiz, the other puppeteers, and digital effects artists instead suggest so much about his personality with tiny gestures or the way he holds his body. It's incredible how I could fully see and believe Rocky's interior world even with his impenetrable exterior. Project Hail Mary compels audience to see the humanity and spirit within a creature that doesn't look like them to outstanding effect. Blomkamp, your dream has come to fruition!

Ortiz's voice work and puppeteering as Rocky is so impressive that this cosmic being fully registers as another co-star, not a visual effect or a potential ploy for toys. That feat means Ryan Gosling has a terrific co-star to bounce off of. So much of Project Hail Mary is just a two-hander between Rocky and Ryland. It often has more in common with The Dumb Waiter than the sprawling ensemble casts of a typical MonsterVerse feature. Gosling makes that exercise totally transfixing. Even when he's alone at the film's start, he exudes an everyman spirit that feels so immediately authentic. 

While many modern American leading men (Alan Ritchson, Brandon Sklenar, Henry Cavill, etc.) look so brawny that it doesn't feel like anything could challenge them, Gosling (even with his abs and famous good looks) effortlessly suggests Ryland is a normal guy out of his depth. That makes nail-biter set pieces like Ryland trying to retrieve a container of important cosmic material on top of the spaceship so extra engrossing. He's no superhero or Chosen One! He's just a middle school teacher! Get him down from there!

The tremendously involving Project Hail Mary lead characters are emblematic of how this is a movie where everything's firing on all cylinders. Composer Daniel Pemberton, for instance, here continues his hot streak delivering inventive film scores. Of course the Across the Spider-Verse composers would make a space movie score that sometimes sounds like a French jazz group performance. Just as a voyage to the cosmos is rife with unknown variables, so too are Pemberton's orchestral tracks excitingly unpredictable. Cinematiographer Greig Fraser, meanwhile, ensures Project Hail Mary is a glorious-looking enterprise unafraid of bright colors.

Luscious hues of green and red dominate the scene in the film's most spellbinding set pieces. Even in the intentionally drabber Earthbound sequences, Fraser's work still oozes visual specificity (like the camera tilting motif). That includes the varying aspect ratios, which involve Ryland's flashbacks being filtered through narrow widescreen while his outer space exploits take up every inch of the IMAX 70MM screen. Among its many virtues, this choice suggests how Ryland only has fragments of the past. He doesn't have as much information about these events as the adventures he's experiencing right now. Plus, it just looks cool, an incredibly crucial factor for any movie. 

Project Hail Mary is incredibly satisfying. On paper, its accomplishments might seem like no-brainer decisions, but it's shocking how little showmanship or gusto so many modern American blockbusters exhibit. Whereas those titles are wary of bright colors and emotional sincerity, Project Hail Mary embraces them with open arms. Even details like its non-linear storytelling approach, shifting aspect ratios, or use of puppetry feel like rebukes to ham-fisted, visually static tendencies in modern American filmmaking. Best of all, it just leaves your spirit feeling refreshed and heart full without coming off as manipulative. Such accomplishments feel as natural as the wind blowing through your hair when a character like Rocky is around on-screen. I love this alien so much, I'd follow him to the ends of the cosmos.

Why Are Streaming Platforms Overrun With Buddy Action Comedies?

Streaming platforms (Apple TV, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video) have more money than God. The mind reels at what they could accomplish with all the cash at their disposal. They could cure world hunger. They could supply movie theaters with a plethora of movies. They could ensure artists like Eliza Hittman, Dee Rees, Mike Leigh, Karyn Kusama, and others never have to worry about getting their dream projects off the ground. Instead, they spend this tremendous influence on titles like Mark Wahlberg and Paul Walter Hauser's Balls Up, a Brazil-set comedy that Amazon just dropped a trailer for this morning.

It looks bad, because of course it does, it's a 21st-century Peter Farrelly directorial effort. Watching Wahlberg and Hauser scream through endless dick jokes and gunfire calcified a reality that had always lurked under my nose. Streaming services had no greater ambition than cranking out monthly Xerox copies of Jay Leno and Pat Morita's Collision Course. This is what cinematic Hell looks like. An endless string of buddy cop/mismatched duo action comedies where everyone talks like Ryan Reynolds and all the action sequences are inert.

But why? Why is this the specific mold of streaming TV movies? Why are spy movies focused on mismatched buddy comedy duos the de facto mold of Netflix, Apple, and (especially) Amazon cinema? What have we done to deserve this Hell? And to quote a wise fish from SpongeBob SquarePants, "Why am I asking you all these questions?"

The Enduring Popularity of Buddy Comedies

The comedic potential of mismatched duos has long been a staple of art, so of course, it would prove a fixture of cinema. Abbott and Costello comedies, for instance, were the precursors to Lethal Weapon or Men in Black. Ditto all those Bing Crosby and Bob Hope movies. Modern theatrical movies have also gotten lots of mileage out of this cinematic storytelling mold. Deadpool & Wolverine was 2024's biggest live-action movie because audiences couldn't get enough of Ryan Reynolds making gay panic jokes while Hugh Jackman rolled his eyes. Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Red One, and The Accountant 2 have all kept this trend alive in the 2020s.

But what about the specific mold of the streaming buddy action comedy? This mold is defined by the following films (among many others):

Back in Action

Ghosted

Balls Up

The Instigators

The Wrecking Crew

Heads of State

Wolfs 

The Family Plan

The Pickup

The Union

Jackpot! 

Playdate

Brothers

My Spy

Jesus Christ, what a collection of cinema.

A key pragmatic reason why streamers are making these movies is simply that theatrical movie studios largely dumped the mid-budget movie around 2014 and 2015. Titles like The Other Guys were deemed no longer viable to recieve $100+ million budgets and theatrical launchpads. Amazon, Netflix, and Apple, hungry for projects that could fill up their respective original film libraries, were more than happy to fill up that gap. 16 years ago, Balls Up probably would've been an August Sony/Columbia Pictures release.

Still, even back in 2008, Universal and Columbia weren't cranking these titles every month like Amazon is doing now. The ubiquity of these titles now is tied to streamers' mandates to flood the marketplace with "content." You don't need to market these titles for months on end and delicately make sure they each do well. You just throw them onto people's Amazon accounts, hope they take off. Plus, these titles are designed to be background noise while people fiddle on their phones and fold laundry. That's why Netflix allegedly asks its writers and directors to make sure exposition is constantly rehashed. 

Why buddy action comedies and not, say, superhero movies, remakes of old musicals, or other vintage molds of crowdpleaser cinema? My guess is that the buddy action comedy (almost always told with an espionage twist) is just a lot more practical and easier to realize for these streamers. All the big superhero IPs are tied up at Warner Bros., Disney, and Sony. Apple and Netflix, meanwhile, don't have extensive libraries of old movies to reboot and imitate. Just redoing the Lethal Weapon formula ad nauseum is an easier way to create lots of new crowdpleaser entertainment within these confines. After all, these were always star-driven projects (Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, together at last!). 

That makes them perfect for streamers looking for enticing tiles and thumbnails on their home page screen. Look! It's Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa standing together! It's easy to tell viewers exactly what they're getting into by making Heads of State or The Union.

Hollywood Loves Making Action Movies Because "Boys Rule"

Let's also not beat around the bush here: the buddy action comedy is perceived as more "viable" to make in gigantic quantities because Hollywood always prioritizes "boys movies". Obviously, gender is a societal construct. People identifying as any genre can like any movie. I know plenty of women and enby's (including me, a bimbo lady who adores Hard Target) who are master experts in the history of action cinema. However, the big film studios don't think like that. These are, after all, the executives who saw Elektra and Catwoman bombing as reason enough to abandon women-led superhero films. They think in very simplified, arcane terms. That means movies with explosions are "for boys". In an industry where Rapunzel gets retitled as Tangled so boys aren't "scared away," the perceived tastes of male-identifying audiences get prioritized every single time.

Amazon and other streamers will totally make "girly" romantic movies like Merv, Relationship Goals, or the two Your Christmas or Mine features. They, however, don't make them nearly as frequently. In just the last six months, Alan Ritchson & Kevin James, Jason Momoa & Dave Bautista, and Mark Wahlberg & LaKeith Stanfield have all headlined action movies that dropped on Amazon Prime Video. It's clear these kinds of titles are also popular with streamers because they can make companion pieces to popular TV shows. Amazon especially has become famous for delivering basically CBS+ shows like Reacher, Cross, The Terminal List, Jack Ryan, and more. Movies like The Wrecking Crew and Play Dirty are "perfect" to flash up as "play next" options on these platforms when people are done consuming Terminal List mush.

Combining Hollywood's tragically persistent male-focused ambitions in Hollywood with the desire of streamers to just crank out "content" endlessly means the marketplace is flooded with Temu Shane Black movies. The prevalence of these movies on Amazon Prime Video especially perversely fascinates me because this platform wasn't always emphasizing these kinds of movies. 

You Either Die a Hero or Live Long Enough to See Yourself Become the Villain

It's no surprise that jingoistic action fare like Alan Ritchson's War Machine are the M.O. of Netflix, a streamer that started its existence with The Ridiculous Six. As I noted back in 2020, though, Amazon's initial original film ambitions were artsier and grander. In that original piece, I lingered on a declaration from then-Vice President of Amazon Studios, Roy Price, that went:

"We look forward to expanding our production efforts into feature films. Our goal is to create close to 12 movies a year, with production starting later this year. Not only will we bring Prime Instant Video customers exciting, unique and exclusive films soon after a movie's theatrical run, but we hope this program will also benefit filmmakers, who too often struggle to mount fresh and daring stories that deserve an audience."

Price also emphasized in another interview that Amazon Studios would be making titles that were more Miramax and Annapurna than Disney. Initially, Amazon's cinematic forays reflected these ambitions. In its first three years of existence, Amazon Studios handled new films from Spike Lee, Park Chan-wook, Jim Jarmusch, Kenneth Lonergan, Asghar Farhadi, Gillian Robespierre, Lynne Ramsay, Paweł Pawlikowski, and Todd Haynes, among others. Acquiring Borat Subsequent Moviefilm in 2020 (when the original theatrical film was sent to streaming because of COVID-19), though, sent Amazon in a whole new direction. The floodgates were open for more commercial, traditional fare. Originally just acquiring titles like Coming 2 America and The Tomorrow War from other studios, Amazon has quickly created a pipeline to create monthly action movies in-house.

Only the occasional title from Orion Pictures (a label Amazon bought in 2022 with its MGM merger) reflects those initial grander cinematic aspirations. Rather than distributing movies that challenge conventions, Amazon MGM Studios (its new name since 2023) is creating works like Mercy that lionize cops surveilling citizens all day and night. The Handmaiden and its exciting depiction of lesbian heroes is too icky and gross. Paterson's nonchalant chronicling of working-class existence is similarly off-limits. Now Amazon's committed to Red One and the absolute worst buddy action comedies you've ever seen. Oh, and heroic portrayals of cops, the CIA, and the FBI.

Why try? Why make something new or excitingly unpredictable? These are the declarations streamers often build their works on. These TV movies are derivative projects feeling as algorithmically driven as you'd expect from something with the Amazon brand name stamped on it. Buddy action comedies are the cinematic mold that Netflix, Apple, and especially Amazon have seized upon as a realm they can produce in mass quantities to keep people glued to their couches. Next month's Balls Up isn't the first example of this phenomenon, and it won't be the last. To be clear, the problem isn't every movie needs to be weighty or visually transgressive. The issue is streamers cranking out the laziest versions of buddy action comedy movies. These features can be enjoyable! Mightily so!

However, from the limp lighting in these productions to the stale writing to the inert action sequences, these buddy action comedies radiate mechanical laziness. This is the future streaming platforms want. They could bankroll more challenging projects that let artists express unique and vital visions. But they won't. Why would rich people do anything useful? Instead, Amazon and Netflix's vision of "peak cinema" is Mark Wahlberg's firing a gun and screaming profanities in features people won't remember the moment the credits begin rolling. So many streaming buddy action comedies, so little artistry or even just fun to speak of.

Cancel culture and wokeness aren't a problem. They never were.

A candid snapshot of the people who think "cancel culture" is the biggest problem facing society today

The Scary Movie 6 trailer has irritated me.

Ever since I saw a leaked print of it on YouTube last Friday, this trailer and its idea of "transgressive" humor have persistently frustrated me. Scary Movie 6's inaugural piece of marketing begins with a stupid joke where a stabbed person corrects an onlooker by infuratingly saying "my pronouns are they/them!" Later, the trailer concludes with a tagline declaring "there are no safe spaces" when it comes to this tired legacy sequel.

For starters, these jokes are incredibly tired. Stupid pronoun gags have been run into the ground for over ten years. Meanwhile, the 2017 film The Hitman's Bodyguard already had a poster featuring the tagline "Get Triggered" while that same year's Bright was released with a production company entitled "Trigger Warning Entertianment." The right-wing paranoia documentary No Safe Spaces was released in December 2018. In short: are we still doing lampoonings of mid-2010s left-leaning college terminology? At least move on to new terms like ACAB or something. 

Laziness is one thing. What really sent my frustration into overdrive was Scary Movie 6 leading man and writer Marlon Wayans yesterday declaring that this film intends to "[bring back comedy to the way it used to be...the only way to do that is to cancel the cancel culture." That's the most important mission as America drops bombs on Iranian citizens, Dallas, Texas engages in voter suppression, and Kansas strips trans people of their rights. The priorities of the bourgeoisie are cool. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" in the modern world is "Pay not attention to how much power the wealthy weild, instead get mad at nebulous 'cancel culture' concepts and gay people!"

It's time for a Lisa Laman screed. It's time for this idiotic "cancel culture" boogeyman nonsense to die. Just because rich people with microphones and Netflix comedy specials keep saying "censorship is everywhere!" doesn't make it so.

"Wokeness" Never Took Over Culture

Human beings are shaped by narratives. We organize history, people's careers, artistic mediums, and so much more into easily digestible passages of time. "A narrative has begun cropping up. The Age of Enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution. Recently, there's been a growing perception that an "era of political correctness" has come to an end. This perception hinges on the idea that, circa. 2014 or 2015, college students and their trigger warnings/safe spaces/pronouns ushered in a new age of excessive sensitivity. The "powers that be" "suppressed" all speech, you just couldn't say anything anymore!

Donald Trump winning the popular vote in 2024 meant that "woke is dead." The r-word suddenly came back into general society. Pronouns in emails from federal employees have been banned. High-profile articles have hammered home being progressive is passe. Now comedy can return! Scary Movie 6 is possible!

In reality, none of this is true. Just keeping our gaze restricted to the film field for a moment (since Scary Movie 6 inspired this rant), but in this industry, systemic hostility towards marginalized identities hasn't budged. No matter how many pieces The New York Times writes lamenting how "out of control" woke college students are (as if these individuals under 25 can impact public policy), the reality is that long-standing challenges for trans and non-white people have endured in the last decade.

Heck, even the term "woke" or "diverse" were seen as "icky" by Hollywood brass. During 2015-2021, when Hollywood was supposedly "shoving diversity down people's throats", major studios kept doing everything possible to not use words or depict oppressed communities that could "offend" right-wingers. 

In 2017, Amy Pascal reassured an interviewer that Spider-Man: Homecoming wouldn't be "annoying" with its diverse cast. Former 20th Century Fox head Stacy Snider scrambled to make excuses for why more women weren't directing studio films. Netflix shelled out so much money to turn J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy into a movie, while feature films about Marsha P. Johnson, Angela Davis, or other non-white historical figures languished in development. In early 2022, Pixar artists alleged that Disney had constantly cut and censored queer material from this animation studio's films. Meanwhile, Nimona's creative team has alleged that, when the project was set up at Disney, Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn and other Mouse House brass were very hostile towards the film's queer material.

Meanwhile, as late as 2019, theatrical comedies like Little and Shaft were throwing in transphobic jokes for cheap laughs. South Park, the show now being vomit-inducingly heralded as some sort of "bastion" of transgressive comedy (they said Donald Trump was fat!!), was centering whole episodes on mocking trans athletes that same year. Joker director Todd Phillips, responsible for so many homophobic and transphobic jokes in his Hangover films, was whining about how "wokeness killed comedy" movies. In early 2019, conservative producer Dallas Sonnier (who now works on "films" and "TV shows" for The Daily Wire) dismissed any complaints of right-wing or fascist tendencies in his films, saying "people are too quick to be offended right now." We'll come back to that phrase later. 

I'm not seeing a lot of "cancel culture" ruining lives or keeping careers down or suddenly unleashing an avalanche of queer/PoC/disabled representation. I do see, however, a lot of rich people bitching about how it's less socially acceptable to say certain slurs now or how someone was critical of them on Twitter. I see streaming platforms like Netflix handing over millions to transphobic comedians like Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais while failing to foster trans voices. I see major publications like The Hollywood Reporter acting like people watching "secret" screenings of new Woody Allen movies is a "revolutionary" act. Jesus Christ, you're not Cassian Andor/a French 75 member because you want to watch new features from an alleged sexual predator. I see multiple major entertainment companies firing countless executives of color in the summer of 2023 and, in the case of WarnerDiscovery, summer 2022 (long before Trump retook office). 

Claiming "cancel culture" has been some "grave threat" to "free speech" or "the entertainment industry" isn't just incorrect. It's ludicrously out of touch with reality. The era where Tim Allen claimed conservative celebrities were being targeted like Jewish people during the Holocaust was instead an era tragically like any other. Specifically, the class-based status quo remained the same, and opportunities for marginalized voices were few and far between. To boot, institutional forces and people upholding those forces continued to demonize any ideology or communities that could challenge capitalism and white supremacy.

The American Entertainment Industry Isn't "Liberal". It Suppreses Disenfranchised Voices

Despite all the "liberal Hollywood" bashing, the American entertainment industry is largely a centrist, right-leaning entity. After all, it's a capitalist industry run by massive corporations. Openly conservative folks like Jerry Bruckheimer are among the most prolific figures in Hollywood. Thus, much of the American media skewers "political correctness" and ignores marginalized lives. Even before the mid-2010s, this was true with projects like 90s comedy PCU. After all, it's better to make progressive political figures or "overly sensitive" college kids antagonists rather than rich people destroying the world or racists that divide the working class.

This is an extension of far worse manifestations of Hollywood depicting marginalized groups as ominous boogeymen that must be either slaughtered or assimilated. White settlers committed a genocide against America's indigenous people. Yet the default norm for Western movies (both classic and modern) is to depict indigenous individuals as monsters that only white men settlers can properly vanquish. Women advocating for themselves or equality are depicted as shrews or nags that need to be domesticated. Countless action films, like the Death Wish sequels, only have room for non-white faces when they can be depicted as terrifying figures white male protaganists can slaughter. While Ronald Reagan was overseeing a genocide of gay people and normalizing cruel stereotypes about Black people, action films reassured viewers that the REAL threat to the world was poor Black and brown people.

Power structures are to be revered. Any populations or rhetoric threatening white supremacy and the bourgeoisie must be eliminated. This is a microcosm of America as a capitalist society and who that society prioritizes. These priorities are how we get HUAC and its dehumanization of communists. This is how we get Paramount+ housing TV shows lionizing Israel border officers while Palestinian cinema can't get major U.S. distribution. Barack Obama will tsk-tsk Ferguson protestors who damage property while approving drone strikes that killed women and children. Joe Biden will label all pro-Palestine protests as "anti-semetic" while turning a blind eye to genocide and refusing to get into the trenches of condemning transphobic legislation.

Protect the status quo. Suppress challengers to the white supremacist and capitalist power structures. These are American norms that inevitably infiltrate our movies and media. Because of that infiltration, tired jokes about "college students are so SENSITIVE" that were tired in Where's the Money nine years ago or mockeries of people existing outside of the gender binary are still being trotted out like they're fresh. 

It's also why "cancel culture" has become a go-to crutch and cloud to yell at for old comedians who hate that language is always evolving. Oh no, privileged people might suffer consequences for being assholes, what a terrible idea. That very concept is so terrifying that it's warped the brains of most comedians and media executives. They don't exist in a world where Louie C.K. quickly returned to making stand-up specials after allegations about him broke or David O. Russell got $80 million to make a new movie in 2022. They also don't exist in worlds with actual challenges (like how A.I. data centers are adversely impacting your hometown, legislation targeting your existence, etc.), so "cancel culture" occupies their every thought, every moment. Plus, it provides a "Goliath" that uber-wealthy comedians can pretend they're the "David" to. 

It's out of step with reality...but then again, isn't so much of American society built on such warped visions of the real world?

Comedy Movies Didn't Vanish Because of Cancel Culture

Let's wrap this up (and wind down my excessive ramblings) by returning to Marlon Wayans. Specifically, his quote about how "bringing comedy back." It's true, theatrical comedy movies have dwindled in quantity in the last eight years. That's not because of college students or non-binary people existing, surprise surprise. Per usual, it has to do with wealthy executives and Silicon Valley. In the mid-2010s, studios began eschewing mid-budget films of all genres and began focusing just on blockbusters. Once the COVID-19 pandemic closed down theaters, theatrical studios sent their comedies once set to hit theaters in 2020 (The Lovebirds, Coming 2 America, Happiest Season, My Spy, Bad Trip, Bill & Ted Face the Music, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, etc.) to streamers for some easy cash.

The perception was that the big-budget superhero movies, with all their spectacle, would be easier sells to people who hadn't returned to the theater in over a year. Grounded comedies, they TOTALLY belong on your iPad. Thus, even a gem like Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar was banished to premium-video-on-demand in February 2021. 

Once all North American theaters reopened in March 2021, studios opted to eschew "risky" theatrical comedies in favor of more "reliable" theatrical fare. Given that the surviving studios were releasing fewer films (and studios that previously released tons of comedies, like 20th Century Fox, were gone), there were fewer chances for comedy movies in theaters. Given that Paramount, Warner Bros., and other labels were all set to release tons of theatrical comedies in 2020, it's clear "cancel culture" didn't temporarily kill the theatrical comedy. Streaming executives dangling lots of money and the terrifying consolidation of the film industry made that possible.

Ah, but those forces are terrifying and immense. It's much easier to pin everything on trans people, immigrants, or "people being too sensitive these days," the go-to refrain of rich white people who're made they can't drop the N-word whenever they want. So the cancel culture myth persists. The most vulnerable people become scapegoats. A new study dropped this week, suggesting Black trans women are at the center of modern-day lynchings. There's also that group chat that just leaked of Miami Republicans gleefully trading anti-Semitic, racist, and disgusting verbiage. Elon Musk's happily dropping Nazi salutes in public...but the biggest threat is "they/them" pronouns.

Three years before she directed the anarchic comedy gem The People's Joker, writer/director/editor Vera Drew was interviewed by Them and asked about stand-up comics whining "about how comedy needs to be free to make fun of marginilized people or it's no longer 'challenging'." I'll let her words do the talking from here: 

"Well, for starters, I think that racism and transphobia are not challenging comedy at all. Especially when racism is so deeply ingrained in every institution imaginable. There’s nothing more mainstream than racism and transphobia. So relying on those as a crutch in your comedy is not edgy or interesting. 

I’ve definitely heard some pretty funny off-color jokes in my day, but generally speaking, it’s usually coming from a place of punching up and not punching down. I think that if you’re doing the kind of comedy that really calls people out or is mocking people or taking them down a peg, it shouldn’t be towards marginalized groups, because we’re already put down in the mainstream. 

It should be more about stripping power from corrupt people and the people who are taking advantage of those marginalized groups...I have yet to hear a cisgender comedian tell a joke about trans people that makes me laugh. They’re always so lazy and trite and just a bummer."

You're not transgressive or funny because you're transphobic or railing against cancel culture. It's not even that it's offensive...it's that you're just rehashing comedy beats that were tired in 2015. Congratulations, your punchlines could've been delivered in 1955, aren't you special. I've been hearing privileged people whine about "cancel culture," "Pronouns," "safe spaces," and all this shit for over a decade and I'm. So. Sick. Of. It. If you're so oppressed, with your multi-million dollar Netflix deals and constant elevation in the pop culture landscape, then why don't you shut the fuck up? Join the real world, where people of all genders, nationalities, ethnicities, and backgrounds are fighting against actual menaces to humanity, like white supremacy, fascism, and colonialism. Just for a few seconds, leave your fantasy world where some made-up 20-year-old college student will sniper you on sight if you don't know every Ethel Caine song by heart.

Also, instead of giving even more attention to tantrums about "cancel culture" and "wokeness" from Todd Phillips, Marlon Wayans, and other dinguses, why don't we appreciate the great comedy movies of the 2020s so far? The aforementioned People's Joker is a chaotic middle finger to corporate America, rife with hysterical visual imagination. Hundreds of Beavers is my favorite movie (of any genre) of 2024 for a reason. That movies a rib-tickling miracle, complete with an adorable frog puppet, ingenious homages to everything from silent comedies and video games, and so many unforgettable visual gags.

Last year's The Naked Gun was funny from start to finish, including in its end credits. They even did a great joke involving the R-word. See Deadpool & Wolverine, you can make that slur funny! Nirvanna: The Band - the Show - the Movie is my favorite movie of 2026 so far, I was cackling so hard throughout the whole movie. Never have jokes about the past-tense word for "skydive" been so funny. 

2023's Joy Ride a super giggle-inducing treat (Stephanie Hsu gets so much comedic mileage out of one annoyed "HMMM"), while Barbie was a miracle movie that channeled vintage Conan O'Brien Simpsons silliness to masterful effect. That same year gave the world Bottoms, which I quote incessantly (Ayo Edebiri's comic timing in that is insane). Do Not Expect Much From the End of the World had so many bleakly hilarious punchlines rooted in our late capitalist Hellscape, while Kneecap combined laughs with unforgettably catchy Irish rap tunes. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, if you haven't seen it, go watch it now and then proceed to climb up a palm tree like a cat up a palm tree whose decided to go up a palm tree.

Conner O'Malley's Rap World, which went straight to YouTube, showed that great comedy movies can truly appear anywhere these days. That feature's eerily on-point portrait of late 2000s white boys living in suburbia is a riot. At the start of the decade, indie comedies Palm Springs and especially Saint Frances got the ball rolling by setting a high bar for the next nine years of comedic filmmaking. Last year, Friendship, The Naked Gun, and One of Them Days were tremendously funny exercises reminding the world that modern theatrical comedies don't have to look like CBS sitcoms (what a concept!). 

The folks behind Scary Movie, its fans, and right-wing folks will inevitably read about me rolling my eyes at Scary Movie's transphobic jokes and once again bellow their war cry of "EVERYONE IS TOO SENSITIVE THESE DAYS" before sipping out of a Liberal Tears mug. First of all, leftist here, not a liberal. Secondly, what's really galling about this Scary Movie trailer is its laziness, especially compared to the feature-length 2020s comedies that have been keeping this medium alive in the face of corporate consolidation and Silicon Valley entities. You're really just going to regurgitate "HA THEY/THEM" and "kids are too sensitive" jokes in a post-Hundreds of Beavers world? 

Equally insulting is the idea of Scary Movie being some crusader against the non-existent "cancel culture" boogeyman. Please don't piss on me and call it rain by acting like a new movie from the Fifty Shades of Black and A Haunted House director will either "save" comedy motion pictures or defeat an "enemy force" that doesn't actually exist. Come to reality, filmmakers and comedians. Leave behind the nonsensical idea that the greatest societal threat is young people on college campuses or social media. And maybe, just maybe, come up with some fresh jokes that are actually funny. I'm sure it's not too late to do some reshoots and get a person in a beaver costume into Scary Movie.

Two Years of Pain and Moving Forward and Pain and Moving Forward

An exchange from 1953's Tokyo Story

Three words changed everything. "Collider Contributing Update." That was the header of an email that, two years ago, upended my existence.

As of February 27, 2014, I'd been writing for Collider.com for roughly three years. My first article was about which "chunky bois" from the Godzilla canon should appear in post-Godzilla vs. Kong movies. Subsequently, my writing exploits evolved to include movie reviews, deeply personal essays (including my first published pieces about my transness after I publicly came out), and analysis of all kinds of movies, including Agnes Varda works and Kokomo City. I was proud to work here, especially as I secured the privilege of procuring more responsibilities for the site. Heck, as silly as it sounds, it's still astonishing to me that my name appeared on a movie Metacritic's page (specifically Io Capitano), thanks to me reviewing it for Collider.

All that ended with one email. Those three words in the headline revealed a note from an entity called "People Operations Team" that "I've spoken with your editors, and we have decided that it would be best to end our professional relationship." The reason? "Your writing does not match with Collider's current standards."

"Gutpunch" doesn't even begin to describe the agony this email instilled in me. The floor had vanished beneath me. I was now falling through the sky, screaming for aid that would never come. Anger, frustration, and mostly tears bubbled through my body, cascading out of my mouth in a miasma of emotional incoherency. I had just talked to my editors on Slack a few hours earlier. There had been no indication of my writing having problems. 

What was going on? 

How would I afford my apartment? 

Collider provided so much of my monthly income, how could I live without it?

Was my writing career over?

Had I done something fatally wrong?

Things only got more bizarre as I took an Uber ride that day and reached out to one of my editors via LinkedIn to just say "thank you for everything, it's been a pleasure working with you." In response, this editor was immediately confused. They had no clue I was fired, and apparently, none of the other editors I worked with on a day-to-day basis were informed of this either. It was all confusing chaos. To add another layer of bizarreness to this turducken of misery, the next day, the Collider People Operations Team entity emailed me again. Suddenly, they conjured up another new reason for my firing. "25% of your content has failed to achieve 500 sessions and your active session per article has been around the 5k mark which is below the site's average." 

This was a totally separate notion from my prose not meeting "Collider's current standards." I'd also never previously heard of problems related to my viewership count. The lack of any concrete reason for my firing, as well as the lack of communication with my editors, amplified my frustration over this scenario. What was going on here? I've still never received a concrete reason for my firing. It'll undoubtedly remain a mystery despite how much it concretely impacted my life. That impact included the site deleting over 600 of my articles, including profoundly personal essays I wrote about being trans. I got no revenue or "residuals" from them existing online. I just wanted them to endure on Collider's servers so that other trans and queer readers could find them in times of hardship. Perhaps they could find solidarity or temporary relief in my words. Alas, they were obliterated in one fell swoop. All that effort. All those words. Eliminated.

 

In the aftermath of this traumatic event, I was immensely grateful to have friends who reached out to Colldier via e-mail and social media posts to chastise my firing and request my rehiring. They didn't move the needle with Collider's parent company, Valnet, but the kindness in a time of sorrow was tremendously appreciated. Meanwhile, without Collider consuming my day-to-day life, I began reaching out to new places to pitch freelance pieces. From these endeavors came my exploits with AutoStraddle, Salon, Pajiba, Culturess, Dallas Observer, Xtra, and other outlets. At least in that regard, a door closing led to some windows opening. 

Still, in the last 14 months, I've encountered a discernible extra level of difficulty getting any freelance pitches accepted. Outlets centered around experiences from queer and/or marginalized gender perspectives, like Culturess and IntoMore, have been shut down in the last year. Major outlets have begun removing their film critics and art sections. Nobody is safe from layoffs. Everywhere I look on social media, there are talented freelance writers pining for stable work or even just a freelance gig. In some warped way, the Collider firing at least helped provide a "trial run" for navigating the journalism-based heartbreak of 2025 and 2026's earliest months. 

__________________________________________________________________________________

A few months after this Collider boondoggle, I was talking to my therapist about how I still sometimes felt like crying over what had happened, especially whenever I looked at my struggling bank account. Given my proclivity for self-criticism and minimizing my anguish. I off-handedly remarked that it was "silly" to feel this way about a writing job. My therapist responded back that it wasn't ridiculous and I was navigating very real trauma over this experience. Trauma. I hadn't thought about using that word for these circumstances before then. I just couldn't imagine they'd apply, much like how I long thought I couldn't possibly have depression. 

Two years later, I can firmly say that my therapist was (once more) right. I did experience trauma that day. The unresolved nature of this whole ordeal means I'll probably always have a kernel of that trauma somewhere in my system.  Lord knows I can't see a Collider piece shared on social media without getting flashbacks to how abruptly my stint there ended. Two years later, I can't say the pain has vanished nor that "everything has gotten better." Money woes persist. An RT-approved site I wrote film reviews for, Culturess, was shuttered last June. Sometimes, I dream about what it would've been like if I'd kept going at Collider and kept on writing for them (including penning that Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire review I'd been assigned days before my firing).

But to quote Past Lives, "this is my life now." That life has been fully disconnected from Collider for two years to this day. In the wake of that firing, I was greeted with immense kindness from others in the wake of this firing. Opportunities, like speaking at the 2024 NLGJA conference, opened up that wouldn't have been possible if Collider hadn't cut me loose. I met so many great people and writers (like Eva Raggio, Drew Burnett Gregory, Henry Giardina, Charlie Jane Anders, etc.) after leaving Collider's orbit. My life has grown in exciting ways that have allowed me to evolve and discover so many incredibly human beings. 

Still, torment continues on. That doesn't erase the kindness I've been graced with nor the good events that have occurred in the last two years. That reality just shows how complicated existence is as well as what a dire landscape journalists are caught in. If it were just me struggling in the last two years, that'd be one thing. What really makes my heart ache, though, is that my firing now feels like a microcosm of larger, more serious issues plaguing the journalism world in the 2020s. 

Film critics all over are feeling the burn and anguish of unstable employment. It's staggering and disheartening to see so little care being given to writers. It is because of people like Lisa Schwarzbaum, Nathan Rabin, Pauline Kael, Siddhant Adlakha, Roger Ebert, and so many more that I even thought of film criticism as a career option. Those guiding lights will be greatly diminished in numbers for the next generation of movie fans, who deserve to know that talking about cinema can go deeper than clickbait YouTube or TikTok videos. These souls deserve to live in a world where journalism isn't molded by David Ellison, Steve Bannon, and Bari Weiss.

That's not the world they're getting. Skydance securing a winning bid for all the Warner Bros. entities last night only reinforces how dystopian everything is. The company that's allegedly kept a blacklist of pro-Palestine artists will now own multiple news organizations and Warner Bros., the studio that just gave the world Sinners and One Battle After Another. Whoopee. Hooray for capitalism. Worst of all, in the last two years, journalism and artists have been constantly under attack, including ICE agents apprehending and attacking journalists. It's a vortex of awfulness that just keeps getting worse day in, day out. 

Much like Dan Olson wrapping up his video about direct-to-video Jarhead sequels, I don't really feel compelled to end this piece on an upbeat note. "Maybe things aren't so hot right now....maybe [these thoughts] don't need a chipper final note," to quote Olson. This current hellscape's immense gravity cannot and shouldn't be diminished. If I can provide any sense of hope for navigating all this misery, though, it's this:

Two years ago, I woke up to a day that would change everything in my life. My bank account and psychological state wouldn't be the same. Art I'd poured my soul into vanished in the blink of an eye. I knew something screwy had gone on here, that I didn't do anything wrong. Yet my mental proclivity towards self-criticism and hatred meant I was still beating myself up for "ruining everything." If anything made this unspeakable torment remotely manageable, it was other people. Collider editors. Online film friends. My therapist. Hugs from real-world comrades. These are what made me feel like I could face tomorrow and that there was a future beyond Collider. Three words from a corporate email can change everything. Tenderness from other human beings, though, can be even more impactful.

We have each other. That doesn't erase the agony or the fascism bearing down on us all. But we don't navigate all that alone. Even if you think you're alone, I promise you, you're not. Your life is meaningful, and so are the words you put down on paper. 

The pain persists. So do art and the communal bonds making life worth living. 

Recently, hundreds of Washington Post journalists were laid off. Want to help these journalists? Here's a GoFundMe you can donate to that will help laid-off workers cover basic needs.

Here's also a GoFundMe for laid-off Vox employees, as well as a GoFundMe for Tonya Abari, a journalist facing housing insecurity. There are countless other crowdfunding campaigns going on right now for imperiled journalists, so be sure to donate to any you encounter.

On a personal note, I've salvaged some of my deleted Collider pieces and wanted to share just a handful that I'm proud of. Considering how many of my pieces (including a Trenque Lauquan piece I was super proud of) have been lost to time, preserving these essays brings me so much relief. The pieces are:

A look at Across the Spider-Verse composer Daniel Pemberton's film scores

Aftersun and its depiction of childhood memories

Does Taylor Swift exist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

Why documentaries should get nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars

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Please, Keep Letting Directors Talk About Movie Theaters And Projection Formats

On April 10, 2025, Kodak uploaded to its YouTube channel a video entitled "Aspect Ratios with Sinners Director Ryan Coogler". In this video, writer/director Ryan Coogler took viewers through the various film formats audiences could experience Sinners in at their local theater. There were IMAX showings (including those amazing IMAX 70mm versions), 4DX, ScreenX, Dolby Cinema, and, the default for most theaters, traditional DCP (Digital Cinema Package) showings. Coogler exudes persistent enthusiasm, knowledge, and excitement through every second of the video. It's impossible to not get wrapped up in his passion for all the formats Sinners was projected in. 

Yesterday, Amazon MGM Studios uploaded a YouTube video tied to the impending March 2026 release Project Hail Mary entitled "Theater Tour With Phil Lord And Christopher Miller". Here, Hail Mary directors Lord and Miller stroll through various movie theater auditoriums and let viewers know how they can witness this Ryan Gosling sci-fi blockbuster on the big screen. It's not as good as Coogler's Kodak video (how could it be?), but it's still delightfully endearing and full of neat behind-the-scenes information. 

I'm not normally one to advocate for incessant copies, but allow me to make an exception here. Please let these kinds of videos become staples of movie marketing. Please let directors talk about the joy of movie theaters and projection formats.

For starters, there's something so refreshing about seeing online movie marketing that's actually about cinema and the theatrical experience. For the last decade, the Jimmy Fallon-ification of news/interview media has led to director having to work as trained clowns to get the word out about their movies. In 2022, Shazam! director David F. Sandberg remarked in a YouTube video that he didn't mind doing "fun" interviews involving movie trivia questions...but he did resent being asked to "put on this funny hat" and do some dance that's temporarily popular on TikTok. Such stunts don't work to the strengths of the filmmakers nor do they actually help get the word out on new theatrical films.

These videos, though, accomplish so much in a short burst of time. They let filmmakers revel in knowledge and material they're passionate about. They emphasize the big screen domiciles where movies work best. Plus, features like Sinners and Project Hail Mary are front-and-center at all times. Marketers aren't contorting a film that's been in the works for years to suddenly exploit a viral trend that popped up five days ago. Instead, these featurettes remind viewers of all the hard work and specific detail that goes into making theatrical films so special. It's a win-win on so many fronts.

It's also sublime that these featurettes have emphasized the working-class souls and community of artists required to make any motion picture possible. In the Sinners video, Coogler repeatedly emphasizes how "we" made specific bold visual ideas regarding the film's imagery. That's a lovely way of acknowledging how much individuals like cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw contributed to Sinners. Meanwhile, the Lord and Miller video introduces viewers to Irving Barrios, Print Services Post Production Manager for IMAX. Watching these clips doesn't just expand your knowledge about how many "perfs" are in an IMAX frame. They also let people appreciate the villages required to bring any feature to life.

The Lord and Miller featurette, meanwhile, has the specific joy of seeing these directors interact with everyday Cinemark and IMAX auditoriums. They aren't just experiencing Project Hail Mary sequences on isolated soundstages. They're out in the actual multiplexes where this Andy Weir novel adaptation will be play in a month's time. Two cinema architects playing around in the domains where their works thrive (including some brief horsing around with Project Hail Mary standee) is so wholesome. Plus, it's cool to see the endless variety in what movie theater auditoriums can look like. No two movies are the same. Two different places to experience motion pictures have a similar variety. 

My personal favorite thing about both of these featurettes, though, is their personal qualities. Rather than feeling like artificial sales pitches masquerading as paeans to cinema, there's an emotional specificity to the anecdotes shared by each director. Coogler's Kodak video, for instance, features the director openly talking about how important movie theaters were to him as a youngster. “The reason I fell in love with theaters is because …my parents was working class, you know, Oakland,” Coogler recalls. “It was the most affordable way for us to go out and have a good time, have an experience. I still believe in that, that communal experience.”

Meanwhile, Lord and Miller end their movie theater voyages with a trip to the New Beverly Cinema. This Los Angeles landmark is one both directors recall as their go-to theater in their younger years and a place where their knowledge of film expanded drastically. The enthusiastic joy they feel in this space is palpable, ditto the gratitude for how much the New Beverly bolstered their artistic horizons. In both of these featurettes, filmmakers wear their appreciation and enthusiasm for the theatrical experience on their sleeves. Those irony-free emotions are superb to experience.

In the modern world, particularly among the bourgeoisie, apathy is glorified. Celebrities like Reese Witherspoon, for instance, shrug off the idea of challenging horrors like generative A.I. and simply say "the change is here." Who cares about a better future not run by Gen A.I.? It's so much easier to shrug off complaints and embrace the status quo. Drape yourself in nihilistic memes and worldviews. Ignore communal spaces. Stay at home! Stream stand-up comedy specials and TV shows demonizing marginalized people! Make sure your Ring camera is on so you can spy on anybody who looks different from you! Succumb to the Silicon Valley-induced dystopia; it's so much easier than resisting.

Engaging in artistic spaces like movie theaters is a small way to challenge these norms. As Lord mentions at the end of his Project Hail Mary featurette, watching movies theatrically is a vivid reminder that "we all laugh at the same things, we all cry at the same things." More binds us than separates us. Outstanding works like Sinners and (to mention just one of its many masterful idiosyncrasies) its trailblazing approach to aspect ratios, meanwhile, can help plant positive seeds in one's head. If Coogler and company can challenge how movie aspect ratios operate...what else is possible? What other changes can we instill in this world? 

Above all else, these featurettes emphasize the humanity going into movies and all actual art. While companies like Meta and OpenAI scramble over themselves to erase working-class people, Coogler and Lord & Miller celebrate how humanity informs their artistic endeavors. Whether it's formative movie theater memories shaping their enthusiasm for the theatrical experience or emphasis on the communities of artists bringing motion pictures to life, these featurettes are a welcome balm in the Gen A.I. age. 

So please, Hollywood, keep on cranking these featurettes out. I want to especially see Steven Spielberg talk about movie theaters and projection minutiae when Disclosure Day's release approaches. Perhaps Boots Riley could talk about his formative theatrical experiences to get I Love Boosters on more people's radar? Next time Nia DaCosta or Karyn Kusama have a movie coming out, I want to hear all of their thoughts on theatrical cinema. You can never have enough of people talking about the glories of motion pictures and movie theaters. Just ask Ryan Coogler and Phil Lord & Chris Miller.