#918 - Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?

Summary

Modern Wisdom Podcast Episode #918: "Critical Drinker - Why Do Modern Movies Suck So Much?"

Release Date: March 22, 2025

In this engaging episode of Modern Wisdom, host Chris Williamson sits down with The Critical Drinker to dissect the declining quality of modern movies. They delve deep into the corporatization of beloved franchises, the impact of streaming services, and the broader cultural shifts influencing Hollywood's current trajectory. The conversation is rich with insights, critical analysis, and candid opinions, making it a must-listen for movie enthusiasts and cultural commentators alike.

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1. The Corporatization of Iconic Franchises

James Bond's Evolution Under Amazon

The discussion kicks off with an analysis of the James Bond franchise. The Critical Drinker expresses concern over Amazon's acquisition of MGM and the subsequent creative control shift:

“They have tapped out essentially and now Amazon have got full creative control over the Bond franchise and they are already talking about turning it into the next Marvel Cinematic Universe.”
[00:03]

He fears that this move towards an “exploitation of the IP” could dilute the essence that has made Bond a cultural staple for over six decades.

Comparison with Lord of the Rings and Star Wars

Drawing parallels, The Critical Drinker criticizes Amazon's handling of Bond by referencing the mismanagement seen in franchises like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings:

“They found a way to destroy something as thoroughly as they did and to blow a billion dollar, you know, show.”
[01:48]

He highlights how corporate overreach can lead to the downfall of once-cherished series, emphasizing that such mismanagement erodes the foundational allure of these franchises.

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2. Challenges Within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)

Character Development and Franchise Fatigue

The conversation shifts to Marvel's handling of characters like Loki and Thor. The Critical Drinker laments the loss of original character depth:

“Loki at his best is actually a really intimidating character...”
[06:05]

He criticizes the MCU's trend of making beloved characters more vulnerable or sidelining their strengths, which diminishes their original appeal and menace.

Excessive Spin-offs and Superhero Fatigue

Predicting the eventual decline of the superhero genre, he points to over-saturation and diminishing returns:

“We're going to see the demise of the superhero genre... after that, the genre is cooked.”
[13:09]

He anticipates a shift from superhero films to video game adaptations, citing the burgeoning success and larger budgets of the gaming industry.

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3. The Impact of Streaming Services on Movie Production

Shortened Theatrical Windows and Streaming Dominance

The Critical Drinker discusses the accelerated shift towards streaming, influenced by economic incentives and consumer preferences:

“You do see a really short theatrical window now... it's just the economics of the new technology that we're grappling with.”
[28:12]

He argues that the convenience and affordability of streaming are making traditional cinema-going less appealing, leading to a transformation in how movies are produced and distributed.

Pros and Cons of Streaming Exclusives

While acknowledging the rise of high-quality streaming exclusives, he notes that this trend could marginalize traditional movie theaters:

“It will become gradually more like the way we see going to the theater, you know, to go see a stage play...”
[30:04]

He envisions cinemas becoming niche venues for immersive experiences rather than mainstream entertainment hubs.

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4. The Decline of Traditional Genres: Rom-Coms and Comedies

Romantic Comedies and Cultural Shifts

The episode highlights the near extinction of romantic comedies in mainstream cinema:

“Comedies have died... it's impossible.”
[31:26]

The Critical Drinker attributes this decline to heightened political correctness and the difficulty of creating humor without offending audiences, leading to a barren landscape for traditional comedic narratives.

Potential for a Comedy Comeback

Optimistically, he suggests that a backlash against excessive political correctness might pave the way for the resurgence of bold and edgy comedies:

“If some studio actually has the balls to do it and make a comedy that's not afraid to be a little bit edgy and offensive... I actually think it would play really well.”
[32:24]

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5. Cultural and Political Influences on Hollywood

Progressive Overreach and Industry Self-Awareness

The conversation delves into Hollywood's entanglement with cultural and political agendas, questioning the sustainability of such influences:

“They know that this stuff doesn't sell anymore... They're increasingly uninterested in your actual movies even.”
[53:35]

The Impact on Award Ceremonies

Discussing events like the Oscars, The Critical Drinker criticizes their shift towards being industry-only events, detached from mainstream appeal:

“It's like an industry event... it's a chance for them to recognize talent within their industry.”
[54:39]

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6. Future Predictions for the Movie Industry

Superhero Genre's Downfall and Video Game Adaptations

Reiterating his earlier points, The Critical Drinker firmly believes that the superhero genre will wane, replaced by the lucrative and expansive world of video game adaptations:

“They make a shit zillion dollars every day from like their actual online website... This is just a vanity project.”
[69:15]

The Resilience of Iconic Franchises

He remains skeptical about the Star Wars franchise reclaiming its former glory, suggesting that time and fresh creative directions are necessary:

“There is something timeless and consistently appealing about James Bond...”
[04:55]
“I think this is one. And it's gonna be hilarious.”
[25:05]

Conclusion: A Call for Authenticity and Quality

The episode closes with a lament for the loss of authenticity and quality in modern filmmaking. The Critical Drinker advocates for a return to respecting source material, maintaining character mystique, and prioritizing genuine storytelling over corporate profit motives.

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Notable Quotes

• The Critical Drinker on James Bond's corporatization:
  “They want to spin offs of Moneypenny... it's about exploitation of the IP.”
  [00:03]

• The Critical Drinker on Marvel's Loki show:
  “Loki at his best is actually a really intimidating character... when they tried to do this TV show with him, he's getting knocked out by people.”
  [06:05]

• The Critical Drinker on the demise of comedies:
  “All those things like political correctness is the death of fun and it's the death of comedy and it's the death of entertainment.”
  [31:26]

• The Critical Drinker on the future of movie genres:
  “Superhero genre... cooked because it's super expensive to make.”
  [13:09]

---

Key Takeaways

• Corporate Control Dilutes Franchises: The shift of creative control from original families or managers to large corporations like Amazon risks diluting the essence of iconic franchises such as James Bond.

• Streaming Services Reshape the Industry: The dominance of streaming platforms is altering traditional movie distribution, leading to shorter theatrical windows and prioritizing streaming exclusives over cinema releases.

• Genre Decline Due to Cultural Shifts: Traditional genres like romantic comedies and comedies are struggling to survive amidst increased political correctness and changing audience sensitivities.

• Future Lies in Adaptations: The rise of video game adaptations is poised to become the next blockbuster trend, given the proven success and massive budgets involved.

• Authenticity Over Exploitation: There's a growing call for Hollywood to return to authentic storytelling and respect for source materials, rather than exploit intellectual properties for profit.

This episode provides a comprehensive critique of current trends in the movie industry, blending sharp observations with a nostalgic yearning for quality and authenticity in filmmaking. Whether you're a casual moviegoer or a seasoned cinephile, the insights shared by The Critical Drinker offer a thought-provoking perspective on why modern movies often miss the mark.

Transcript

[Chris Williamson]

What is happening with James Bond? Give me the updates.

[The Critical Drinker]

It's a bit of a mess at the moment. So in a nutshell, it is now been corporatized the Broccoli family who have been running James Bond on screen ever since the 1960s. And I can't believe I'm saying the word broccoli in relation to James Bond, but there it is. It was originally Albert Broccoli and then his daughter Barbara took over and they have in a way safeguarded it to some degree. It's debatable how good of a job they did in the Daniel Craig era. But you know, they kept it from becoming too exploited. I think they got a little bit frustrated with dealing with Amazon who had bought over mgm, which ultimately owns the rights to Bond. And so the most recent development is that they have tapped out essentially and now Amazon have got full creative control over the Bond franchise and they are already talking about turning it into the next Marvel Cinematic Universe. Essentially you're going to have the Bond cinematic universe. So what they want to do is spin offs of Moneypenny and you know, can she shuffle files quickly enough to meet her deadlines and you know, Bond, the early years when he was a kid and you know, we're probably going to have TV shows with all the other double O agents, you know, with all them getting like their own little spin offs and, and then having big team up events. That's what they want to do. It's about exploitation of the ip. So that's where we're at now and it's not a good place to be. Sadly, there's a reason that Bond has endured as a franchise and as a character for the past, what, 60 years now. And it's not because he was milked dry by a big money hung, money hungry corporation.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, they did step in and manage to turn around Lord of the Rings in a manner that I think was actually impressive.

[The Critical Drinker]

I mean it takes a certain level of skill to destroy something as thoroughly as they did and to blow a billion dollar, you know, show. But they found a way you and.

[Chris Williamson]

Then run it back on season two.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, they'll keep going with it because they said they were going to do five seasons and they will just out of pure spite, kind of in the same way that Disney have managed to absolutely tank Star wars as a brand, one of the most recognizable IPs in entertainment history. In the space of less than a decade, they've completely and utterly destroyed it. So it takes a certain level of skill. But luckily that skill seems to be prevalent in Hollywood these days. Great.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, we saw this recent thing with Bezos stepping in with the Washington Post. You see that he was saying, we're going to have more balance, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know, maybe we'll start to see some more of that crossover a little bit into the world of Amazon. Amazon prime, you might see it.

[The Critical Drinker]

The problem is that Jeff Bezos does not run Amazon Studios. That is run by a woman called Jennifer Salke. And she is the one who's largely responsible for failures like Rings of Power, because she is very much into the message, as I talk about in my videos, quite a lot. And she essentially directed the way that Rings of Power has gone as a show, even to the point where they had a Tolkien scholar in who was tearing his hair out, saying, no, all of this stuff that you're writing is complete nonsense. This would never happen in Tolkien's world. And for his efforts, he was fired. So that tells you everything you need to know. So, yeah, Jeff Bezos may well indeed be wanting to restore a bit of balance, which is great, but as long as people like her are actually in charge of their creative output at Amazon Studios, that's not going to change. So people like her have to go. Sadly.

[Chris Williamson]

I was thinking about how Bond seems to have been protected, but as you've suggested, it's, you know, one very tightly defined set of boundaries around who it is that's got creative control. And as soon as you start to build that out into teams of 150, with a couple of people at top that paid a few million dollars a year, I imagine that your ability to stay true to the source material starts to go out the window.

[The Critical Drinker]

It absolutely does. Yeah. And as I said earlier, there's a reason that the Bond franchise has been this cultural mainstay for, you know, all the decades that it's been around, well over half a century. There is something timeless and consistently appealing about James Bond as a character. And they never lost sight of the fact that was center stage in everything it is about Bond. We don't want a money penny spin off, we don't want a Q department spin off or anything like that. You can't franchise Bond because he is the core of everything and he's a character that needs to be used sparingly. You know, one movie every couple of years. Don't delve too much into his private life, into his backstory, Maintain the mystique, maintain the things that have made characters like him so appealing for so long. That's been the secret to his longevity. And they're gonna lose that.

[Chris Williamson]

I think it is interesting how the sort of allurement of Bond is in his aloofness. It's the fact that there are all of these open loops. And as soon as you begin to say, well, this is the real woman that he loved and this is why he's womanized all the way down from. This is what happened in his past and he did orphan and blah, blah, blah, and you think, ah, okay, this. As soon as you give an answer, all of the speculation that was exciting gets collapsed down to see. It's like Schrodinger's Bond, you know, there's so many different versions that it could be, and then they tell you and it gets collapsed into the version that it is based on what they said. But yeah, I mean, fucking she Hulk, you know, like, you know, there we go.

[The Critical Drinker]

Why did you have to say that name? Sorry.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I'm aware it's a trigger word for you.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah. I mean, well, it was a disastrous show. I think everyone recognized that. Nobody, even at Marvel can pretend that that show was a success. And it's been pretty much scrapped now, so they can chalk that one up to bad ideas, I think.

[Chris Williamson]

What did you think of Loki? What did you make of that?

[The Critical Drinker]

Loki as a show? The concepts were interesting, but I hated how it absolutely cucked him as a character. Loki at his best is actually a really intimidating character. They got him right when they did him in Avengers, the first Avengers movie, where he was actually kind of terrifying. He's actually really physically powerful, incredibly intelligent. He's a schemer, he's a manipulator. That is the core element of Loki. When they tried to do this TV show with him, he's getting knocked out by people. He's. He's crying all the time. He's emotionally vulnerable. You know, he comes up against a female version of himself, who of course is better than him in every way because she has to be.

[Chris Williamson]

Be.

[The Critical Drinker]

And all of those things diminish him as a character and they make him less interesting in the same way that, you know, having Bond no longer be able to seduce women and. And have him be emotionally vulnerable diminishes the mystique of his character. He was always more interesting as a. An idea rather than a flesh and blood human. They did the same thing to Loki. You know, the. The more vulnerabilities you introduce to a character like that, the. The less interesting he becomes and the less menacing he becomes.

[Chris Williamson]

We saw it with Thor as well, right, that you go from this beautiful arc where competent, powerful, maybe a little bit sort of naive, immature, sort of childish in a way, but that was part of charm. And then over time, it just gets ramped up and up and up and up and up. And then he's doing the splits over a set of dragons or whatever. And.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, I mean, how many movies can we have where Thor needs to find his true purpose in life? Like, he's done that about five times now.

[Chris Williamson]

It seems it's a permanent midlife. Well, I suppose if you live for a few thousand years, you get a couple of midlife crises, so perhaps that's.

[The Critical Drinker]

Sure. I mean, a lot of these problems I would put down to Taika Waititi as a creative. And he. He was straight up saying, wouldn't it be funny if Thor goes through a midlife crisis? And that was as far as he got, essentially. And then he just based a movie around that. So it wouldn't be funny if he was, like, kind of useless and he didn't know where he wanted to, and he was just lost. And, you know, you think, okay, after everything he's been through, after saving literally the entire universe, you probably have found your purpose by that point. You can't keep resetting that clock. But that's what he tried to do and just turned him into a complete joke.

[Chris Williamson]

Can you remind me of the stages that I think it's either movie franchises or sub genres go through that finishes with parody? I swear that you taught me about this.

[The Critical Drinker]

Oh, yeah, yeah. So I'm going to paraphrase here, because I'm just dredging this up from my memory, but you've essentially got the early stages. Stages of the genre, Right? So the. The trailblazers, the. The experimental movies that define it. Then you've got the. The classic era where they've nailed the. The formula, they've made it work. They. They know exactly what works with it. Then you've got the revisionist era, where the, you know, the classic era no longer resonates with audiences. We've got to find a new angle. Well, let's. Let's look back now and try and reframe things. A good example would be the. In their late 80s, early 90s Westerns had fallen out of favor. You've got, like, movies like Unforgiven, which start to redefine it and reexamine it in a more mature way. And then when you get beyond that, the final stage is parody. That's where it's just like, we've got nothing else to do. Dramatically, classically, you know, in terms of mining new ideas, we're just going to make fun of it now. And that's when a genre dies.

[Chris Williamson]

Seeing that and knowing that parody's kind of the. There's a couple more nails to go into the coffin and then it's about to be brown bread. Once I've seen that, I can't unsee it. And I'm always on the lookout for whatever it is, whether it's a genre, whether it's a series, whether it's a movie, whether it's a franchise, even directors, you know, their style almost becoming a caricature of itself. You being able to predict what it's going to be, even if it's a totally new movie. M. Night Shyamalan, I think is sort of perilously close to becoming a caricature of himself.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, I think so. I mean, like when your career is predicated on having mind blowing twists that no one's going to see coming, you're always in a competition to, to one up yourself and to try and do better next time. And you can only take that so far before everyone knows, well, it's an M. Night Shyamalan movie. So of course there's going to be some crazy twist at the end and that's it. You've pigeonholed yourself to the point where you can't do anything new at that point. So yeah, he definitely fell victim to that and he just ended up, you know, putting out absolute sludge.

[Chris Williamson]

If you want to cast your daughter in a movie like, you know, what a lovely last hurrah.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, yeah. He put himself in most of his movies in smaller roles and sometimes larger roles. Like I think lady in the Water was the most egregious one where he cast himself as a misunderstood genius who was ultimately going to reshape humanity after his death. And I just thought, well, everyone thought this. Yeah, you're, you're reaching quite a bit there, sir.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, the lady doth protest too much. So you mentioned, you mentioned the message there. I. Every single time that I talk to somebody about sort of culture stuff and we talk about have we passed peak woke and how much inertia momentum is this thing got? Surely the movie and TV industry can only keep pushing awful productions that don't make returns for so long before they run out of money and need to change. So how much longer has the message got?

[The Critical Drinker]

It's already changed behind the scenes. That's the key takeaway here, right? What you see when you get movies that come out today, they were commissioned like Two, three, even four years ago. So they were based around the cultural zeitgeist of the time. Four years ago, half a decade almost. And so, you know, there's always a delayed effect before these things actually come out. And from what I've been told by various people within the industry, most of the executives at the big. The big studios are very aware of the problem. They know that this stuff doesn't sell anymore. They know that the culture has shifted radically, especially over the past six months. And they. They want to fix it. They want to change things. But they obviously have movies that are in the pipeline that were commissioned years ago, and they're just coming out now. And so you're kind of seeing the last remnants of it coming out now. Like that Mickey 17 movie that I just reviewed a day or two ago is a good example of that, where you've got Mark Ruffalo doing his worst possible Trump impression. It just. It honestly felt like a movie that would have been cutting edge like 10 years ago. Now. It's just absolutely stale and cringe and played. But that's the delayed effect that you get with Hollywood movies. They take a long time to get made, unfortunately. But yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

What do you predict for the next five to ten years if you could throw a couple of coins onto a roulette wheel? For what we're going to see, I.

[The Critical Drinker]

Think we're going to see the demise of the superhero genre. We've kind of seen it already. There's a bunch of Marvel movies that are coming out this year. The first one has already flopped. Captain America Thunderbolts is also probably. No one's going to be interested in that. The big test will be in July when we've got Superman and we've got. What's it called, the Fantastic Four coming out, right? Two movies same month. If they don't succeed, that's it. The genre is cooked because it's super expensive to make. So you probably will see after that a massive reduction in the budgets and the number of superhero movies. There's probably going to be a switch more towards video game adaptations because that's probably the next big thing that's going to happen. There's a lot of money in that. The amount of money that is made by the video game industry dwarfs Hollywood is insane. How much money changes hands there. And so if they can capitalize on that momentum and that fan base, it will actually. It'll be a new gold rush. It'll be like 10, 15 years ago with the superhero genre when that's really exploded. So I think there's that and I think you're going to see a return to a bit of a swing more towards the center in terms of like the cultural impression that these movies want to make and the politics they want to push. I think they're going to be a lot more neutral. You're never going to get Hollywood pushing conservative ideas. It's just, it's not in their DNA at this point. But they will probably be forced to concede defeat and they know this stuff doesn't sell anymore. So I think you're going to see us a swing more towards politically neutral movies that are just about entertainment, hopefully.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, well, let's not speak too soon. People vote with their feet and their butts on seats and their dollars and as much as you can say, well, we want to make something that stands up for what we believe in. Go. Yeah. But eventually there's going to be some very, very high up guy with a very, very sort of long job title whose entire job is to look at spreadsheets all day. And the far right hand column is going to be a big bright red number with a minus in front of it and lots and lots and lots of zeros after it. He's going to say, I don't fucking care. I don't care about how cool you think this new movement is. We're a business, ultimately we're a business. This isn't a charity. We're not here to try and promote some message at the expense of shareholders, stakeholders, ip, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, it's going to be interesting. I mean you touched there on the video game industry. I think I'm right in saying the video game industry makes more money than movies, TV and music combined together.

[The Critical Drinker]

It's so weird because to some extent the general culture is insulated from video games a little bit. It doesn't have that sort of mainstream impact that you might think. But the amount of money that's actually changing hands in that industry is insane. The top level video games have budgets that would almost embarrass Hollywood films at this point.

[Chris Williamson]

What are they getting up to?

[The Critical Drinker]

Some of them are up to 3,400 million easily for the, for triple A titles. That's a lot of money.

[Chris Williamson]

I remember when Kevin Spacey was cast in Call of Duty. This is probably about 10 years ago, I think.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

And then Conor McGregor was put in it. Not that Conor McGregor is exactly a sort of a triple A star, but I do remember thinking like, oh fuck, like Kevin Spacey as a fully facial mapped all you know, soundboard, all the stuff. Yeah, that it always felt like video games were cool and exciting and interactive, but the prestige was held with movies. Right. You know, that's what you go to go see at the, at the cinema. And now it feels like, if what you're suggesting is correct, that the world of Hollywood and movies are going to have to suckle at the teat of the IP from video games.

[The Critical Drinker]

So how they will to some extent and you know, from their point of view, it's actually a godsend because you've got characters and storylines and entire worlds that have already been created for you. All you need to do is adapt it. And Hollywood, you know, throughout the say the 90s and the 2000s, they were notoriously bad at this sort of thing. They couldn't find the formula to crack video games. That's why you had God awful films like the Mario Brothers movies and stuff from the 90s. But in the 2000s maybe they started to get it with like things like the Tomb Raider films that actually were fairly commercially successful, all those Resident Evil movies which were dogshit interpretations of the games, but they made money again. And now we're into this modern era where we've got things like the Last of Us TV show which not only is making a lot of money for hbo, it's getting lots of critical praise as well because the games were very cinematic in their own right. So you're seeing this convergence where games are getting closer to movies in terms of their maturity, the themes and ideas they present, the characters and the acting that they are able to present to you and the commercial appeal of crossing that over into actual movies and TV shows because you've got a built in audience, a built in fan base and a pre made story with pre made characters. So the potential there is enormous.

[Chris Williamson]

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[The Critical Drinker]

Generally speaking, because books no longer have that cultural impact. Like when was the last time we had say a Harry Potter series, something that like crosses over into mainstream cultural awareness?

[Chris Williamson]

Fifty Shades, probably.

[The Critical Drinker]

We had that, we tried to do that, you know, and that's great if you're like a frustrated middle aged spinster who drinks a bottle of wine every night. But like that's not appealing to general audiences, you know, and that's the reality, man. Like the, at this point the publishing industry is super female oriented. It is designed for middle aged liberal women. Unfortunately, like that's all you get. And so there's, there's no more massive fantasy series, no more massive sci fi series. You're, you're not going to get a Dune or a Lord of the Rings anymore, or even a Harry Potter anymore because the conditions that can allow that to flourish and appeal to a broad market don't really exist anymore. It's geared towards a subset of the population.

[Chris Williamson]

What's happening with the Harry Potter TV series? Because I heard that. Oh no, I haven't, I didn't check.

[The Critical Drinker]

In Black Snape, man.

[Chris Williamson]

We've got a what?

[The Critical Drinker]

So Severus Snape from the movies and from the. Obviously from the books. Famously played by Alan Rickman, who was a great approximation of the character. They've cast a black actor now to play him. They've decided to race swap him and. Yeah, good luck with that, I suppose. Yeah. The problem is he's explicitly described in the books as having like long dark hair, pale skin, like dark eyes. So we know what he looks like. Everyone agreed that Alan Rickman did a great performance as Snape, but they've race swapped him and it's just, it's endemic to the way of thinking that you have in Hollywood productions now. Well, we've got to get more Diversity in there, no matter what it means to the lore or, you know, being accurate or respectful to the source material, it doesn't matter.

[Chris Williamson]

JK is still heavily involved though, isn't she?

[The Critical Drinker]

She is, yeah. I can imagine signing off on this. Like I think she said in the past, like, oh, well, you know, there's. There's nothing in the books that explicitly says that Harry has to be white. Sure. I mean, it's her. It's her series. Like, if she wants to trash it, I'm not going to defend her for it.

[Chris Williamson]

Say what you want, jk. Yeah, I suppose it's interesting that you've got this sort of concern against progressive overreach thing, which in some ways slash many ways. JK People might assume from the outside seeing JK tweet about trans issues that she would be aligned with, but actually she's just very, very specific about protecting women's spaces. And I don't think that it seems to bleed out that much into the rest of her politics. I don't know much about. I don't know much about her politics, but I imagine that she's probably quite a progressive, sort of liberal lady who just happens to have one very staunch set of beliefs around women.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, 100%. It's so funny when people start saying, like, oh, based J.K. rowling. It's like just because she has a problem with trans people, like, people assume like a whole slew of ideas about her politics. In every other respect, she is a raging hardcore lefty. You know, it's just that one issue that she has a problem with. So, yeah, like, I can totally see her being behind changes like this to the TV show and not having an issue with it. So fine, if that's what she wants to do.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't know, man. I mean, look, every time that you go home for Christmas, it's kind of like some sort of weird tribute that you need to do where it's mandatory to watch at least 30 minutes of one Harry Potter movie at some point, sort of between the 20th of December and the sort of second of January. It just, it's on TV in the background at some point.

[The Critical Drinker]

I. I'll be totally honest with you, man. I never really gave much of a shit about the Harry Potter movies. I mean, for me, I was always much more of a, like, Lord of the Rings guy or whatever. And when it comes to Christmas, you know, I've got Die Hard, I've got Home Alone. I've got like all the Christmas classics there. Harry Potter never figured into it. That much for me, I totally respect the fan base around it and like, if they love it, then great. It's just. It never particularly grabbed me as a viewer.

[Chris Williamson]

So, yeah, it seems to. Whether you like it or not, it just seems to appear kind of. It just sort of emerges like Michael Buble around about Christmas time and just comes up, disappears. Mariah Carey and Michael and Harry Potter Harry Potter omnibuses. But my point was, you know, those are really dated. Like the first one will be coming up on 20 years now, or maybe it'll already be over 20 years old. And it does surprise me that it's taken this long to sort of get back to continuing to rinse this franchise. Because this Harry Potter world at Universal Studios and all of the clothing and you go to Edinburgh and there's Harry Potter stores, bookshops all over the place, memorabilia.

[The Critical Drinker]

Tell me about it.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, of course. Closer.

[The Critical Drinker]

And a lot of them have queues, like right out the door and onto the street. Like that's still the level of enthusiasm for it. So it's still a massive brand. I don't know if they're still doing those, you know, Fantastic Beasts movies. Maybe they are.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, I know they're certainly doing. I think it's called the Forbidden Forest, which is this sort of outdoor experience. I did that in the north of the UK a couple of Christmases ago. It's happening here in Austin, Texas right now. Like, dude, it's. I mean, at no point in the Harry Potter lore did it talk about scorching hot 30 degree sunshine for five days in a row. So I don't know how true to the source material that is. You mentioned Dune there. I think one of the interesting challenges that seems to be faced is can you have Blockbuster that also does well when it comes to awards? Can you have Blockbuster that also ends up actually making its money back? Because it's a real challenge. What was the. I haven't done any research on this. What's the synopsis of how Dune got on? I mean, I loved it, thought it was great, seemed to have a lot of critical acclaim. But from a awards, monetary standpoint, everything else, how did it do?

[The Critical Drinker]

I think with Dune 2, it certainly did better than the first one. There was a lot more hype around it when it came out. So, like, there was definitely more enthusiasm there. And I think it probably is a good example of a movie that achieves quite a lot of cultural and commercial success and also was actually a pretty intelligent sci fi movie and a good stab at replicating the source material. Let's see actually what it got. It was. Yeah, so it made 714 million worldwide, which is set against the budget of 190 million. That's actually all right. That's, that's a pretty good earner, I would say.

[Chris Williamson]

It's not bad.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah. I mean, the thing is, you see tallies like that and you think, oh my God, that's insane amounts of money. But like, you've got to factor in the cost of like advertising. You've got to factor in the fact that distributors take like between 40 and 60% of that revenue. And so when you see it makes like 700 million at the box office or $1 billion really only like maybe 5, sorry, 500 million actually goes back to the studio that made it. So the margins are often tighter than you think.

[Chris Williamson]

I was thinking about this. I'd really love to kind of get an insight about the state of the movie industry and what's happened to it. Now up against streaming, airlines seem to have movies within, I don't know, six weeks to sort of 12 weeks of them being in theaters and then you can watch it on some transatlantic flight on British Airways or something. You know, a lot of the time, I know musicians have got problems with what Spotify and streaming has done to record sales and the fact that there's basically a much smaller pie and everyone's having to do different things now. We've got to do more live, we need merch, we've got to have a membership site, you've got to get exclusive access. There's going to be a Patreon or whatever when it comes to the movie industry and sort of what the theater to Netflix, Amazon Prime Pipeline or airlines and stuff like that's done. Is this, is this kind of a just a slow plane crash, a slow car crash into it not being viable and stuff's just going to go straight to streaming. What do you think?

[The Critical Drinker]

I mean, to a degree you're seeing streaming exclusive movies that are getting bigger and bigger now, like the Gorge was, I think that came straight out onto streaming with pretty respectable budgets and pretty big stars attached to them. So it's no longer this idea of like direct to TV or direct to streaming. Movies that are just like low budget trash. So it's definitely changing. I think the, the fact that piracy is more of an issue now, the fact that streaming services are able to throw so much more money at it does incentivize studios to get things out on streaming as quickly as possible. So you do see a really short theatrical window now. And a really short gap between theatrical release and, you know, streaming or whatever. So it's just the economics of the new technology that we're grappling with. And also. Yeah, like maybe for a lot of people now, the hassle of going to the cinema and the expense of it is becoming more of a thought for them. And it's becoming more of a, you know, big investment for you because, you know, say you. You want to take your wife and kids to go see the latest Disney, you know, kids movie or whatever. You want to go and see Snow White. If you've completely lost your mind, then, you know, that's. You factor in the cost of tickets, you factor in the cost of all the popcorn and all the crap that everyone needs. That's well over $100.

[Chris Williamson]

It's probably, what, six months of your Netflix subscription.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah. And that's to sit in a crowded movie theater with a bunch of people who are talking and looking at their phones and just disrupting the whole experience. Or you could wait a few weeks and watch it at home in your nice comfortable living room and do whatever you want and you could pause it whenever you want. What would you rather choose? That's the reality of cinema going now as an experience. It's changing.

[Chris Williamson]

So what does that mean for the future?

[The Critical Drinker]

Of. Probably means that it will become gradually more like the way we see going to the theater, you know, to go to see a stage play or something. It'll become more of a niche thing gradually where, you know, a smaller selection of people who are real connoisseurs or real passionate about that particular, you know, method of performance still go to see it. But general audiences will just watch at home.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, well, I mean, we saw it was enlivening to see, I think, the passion around Interstellar's 10 year anniversary. And, you know, they put that back into 70 mil IMAX theaters. Maybe there'd been a little bit of tinkering to sort of dial up some sound and, you know, refine some resolutions and stuff like that. You think that caught. I spoke to McConaughey about this very thing, and that's a question. He was perhaps unsurprisingly lamenting the loss of the ROM com. And, you know, he said that you could sort of spin this thing up for between $10 and 20 million and it would be an easy return at the box office. And you get, you know, replays on holidays, replays at Valentine's Day date nights. That seems to be. That seems to be a genre which is almost exclusively just been Eviscerated. Is it ever gonna come back?

[The Critical Drinker]

Well, I mean, we didn't. We have the Bridget Jones whatever, like Bridget Jones 17, like the old Folks Home or something that just came out. Yeah, I didn't see it either, but I know it did exist. And so there's still the concept of rom coms, I think comedies in general, just straight up comedies are dead at the, the cinema. And the reason being everyone's offended by everything. And so when you, you, you've got to tiptoe around every potential issue and you don't want to offend anyone, you can't be funny anymore. It's impossible. And so comedies have died. I've talked about this many times on live streams and so on. We tried to name, like, what was the last truly good comedy that hit cinemas. And the best we could come up with was like Tropic Thunder. And that's well over a decade ago.

[Chris Williamson]

Yep. And would cause an awful lot of uproar if you did it.

[The Critical Drinker]

Sure, it would never be allowed today, but all that stuff like political correctness is the death of fun and it's the death of comedy and it's the death of entertainment. What's the reality of it?

[Chris Williamson]

We're seeing, you know, I think Andrew Schultz's live special Life is number two, number three in America @ the moment on Netflix. And maybe we're seeing comedians who can kind of bear the brunt and have less oversight from executives and franchise owners and different stakeholders and people that say, we can't say that, we must not talk about this problem. So there maybe the absence of comedy movies has created a vacuum which is going to allow more standup specials to appear on streaming services and stuff like that.

[The Critical Drinker]

I think the hunger is always going to be there for comedy because everyone wants to have a good laugh every once in a while and you need it. And I think what you're eventually going to see is this is all part of this growing backlash that we've seen to wokeness, for lack of a better word, that it's so puritanical. It's told you all these things you're not allowed to say, that you're not allowed to laugh at, that you're not allowed to make fun of. And I think as a collective society, we have reached the point of saying, I don't give a fuck anymore. I just don't care. I don't care about your stupid censorship. I don't care about your fake offense. I don't care if you, you think that's racist or sexist. Or anything. All of those words have stopped meaning anything now. You've used them to the point of insanity. No one cares anymore. And I think now the. The ground is now like prepared for comedy to actually make a comeback. If some studio actually has the balls to do it and make a comedy that's not afraid to be a little bit edgy and offensive. If they were to do something like Tropic Thunder now, I actually think it would play really well because the. Societally, I think we're ready for it now. We pass through all this crap and we're ready.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I think you're right. And you might not be realizing that these two things are related, but I promise you they are. Lizzo's BMI and the preparedness of the world to accept new comedy movies. The reason I say that is I think we had a period where toxic compassion or performative empathy or I stand up for the good guy. Look at me, I. This is, you know, saying good whilst doing bad. Or the very least saying good whilst not doing good. Kind of. Nobody scrutinized for a while and it was all around close, posting a black square and making sure that you sort of support the message. But Lizzo has dropped a fucking ton of weight because Ozempic is a hell of a drug and she appears to genuinely be taking care of her health. And you go, okay, well if. And the same thing at the Golden Globes. You know, the Golden Globes just proved that body positivity was a total fucking farce all along because as soon as people were given an easy route to be able to get themselves out of being plus sized, they did. And I think that. But that is one more little Jenga piece that gets pulled out of this tower, which was already pretty unstable of the performative empathy of the saying good whilst not doing good thing. And yeah, I think it's. It's so fragile that it's getting to the stage where it's in its own parody phase, if that makes sense. So, yeah, I think, I think the. That's progressive overreach stuff, I'm fucking. For those of us that have been swimming in the waters of it for the last, whatever, five years. Like, it felt like we were already in parody come back end of 2020 and then we've just been waiting for this behemoth leviathan to finally kick the bucket.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah. And it's great to see it actually collapsing now. But it makes me. Excuse me. It makes me sad to think about all the people that have suffered as a result of this. Whether it's all the people that said the wrong thing, or, you know, they dug up an edgy tweet that they made 10 years ago and that got them canceled. Or they were forced to issue groveling apolog or the people who literally ate themselves to death because they were told like, oh, yeah, you're five foot two and you weigh 300 pounds. Oh, that's fine. Like, you can be healthy at any size. No, you fucking can. Like, if you're, if you sweat walking across the room, guess what, you're, you're in trouble, man. And yeah, this is. I'm glad that common sense is gradually reasserting itself, but man, how many people have suffered and died because of this? Yeah, you know, I shudder to think about that. How many fat influencers that were so proud of themselves literally died before they were even 40? You know, that didn't have to happen.

[Chris Williamson]

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[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, we all lost our fucking minds as a society. And we were, you know, we were prevented from a certain Common sense. And we just had to agree with everything, no matter how stupid it was. You know, it's crazy time that we had to live through.

[Chris Williamson]

If you'd said to me 12 months ago that Ryan Reynolds would be considered one of the less likable or would be sort of a declining stock, that would have been something that I. I mean, I fucking adore that man. Like, I think he's so charming, so funny, so likable. Seems really down to earth. Doesn't take himself too seriously. Had this sort of great fourth wall breaky thing with his wife going on where I think she posted a photo of Hugh Jackman on his birthday saying happy birthday, honey. Love you or something. And then he did it, he did it back. And you just think, this, this is so cool. This is exactly what you want. Sort of Hollywood, they're not, they, they swear a lot. And this Blake Lively thing has really sort of turned the eye of scrutiny in his direction in a way that I just straight up couldn't have expected from, you know, 50, 000ft straight down to cruising altitude 100.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah. And look, I want to be judicious about what I say because, like, the facts are still coming out and so on. Like, it's still very much.

[Chris Williamson]

Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly.

[The Critical Drinker]

Exactly. Yeah. And allegedly he is an absolute dick behind the scenes, throws his weight around. He is not the happy, go lucky, self deprecating, you know, lovable guy next door that we know him as. Allegedly. He is a real asshole. And, you know, this is what he does. He leverages his power within Hollywood to prop up his wife, which, you know, you can understand. Like, you're obviously going to want to defend her, but to the point where you're bullying directors into doing what you want them to do. And so, yeah, it's kind of a sad downfall really, because like you said, he really seemed like one of the good guys. A guy who didn't take himself too seriously and was. Seemed to be very accessible, was always up for a laugh. And we're seeing a very different side to it all night. But hey, man, you don't become like one of the biggest names in Hollywood by being nice. I think that's probably the thing to remember.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't know. I just wish I'm aware that every movie that Hollywood has produced has tried to tell us that sometimes the good guys actually do finish first. But I kind of hope that that was the way that it worked anyway, maybe it's not. But I wondered whether you think we'll be seeing more production 4th wall breaking fuckery in the future after this sort of it ends with us debacle, whether it's going to be the. Yeah, like the production equivalent of MeToo, that behind the scenes we're going to be hearing a lot more about not only whether a movie is good or bad, but what the process of creating that was like. Because you can say what you want. This has garnered an awful lot of attention. It's driven an awful lot of attention. If people think they might not learn the lesson, which is to allege things incorrectly and to overblow and to selectively edit the storyline that you put out, that's bad. But what the lesson they may take away from it is, if I want to put myself on the front page for six months, I just need to cause a bit of a hoo ha about the way that this movie was made.

[The Critical Drinker]

I think if they've got any sense, they'll be very careful about doing stuff like that because then you're getting into lawsuit territory. That's the reality of Hollywood most of the time. When you sign onto movies like this, you sign an NDA, you definitely have a non disparagement clause in any contract like that. And so if you break that, you're getting into the territory where everyone has to sue everyone else and that can bankrupt you and ruin your life. This was an exceptional circumstance. I don't know if we're going to see more like this because everyone thought like after the Oscars where Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, it's like, oh, damn, there's going to be like a punch up at every Oscar ceremony now because someone's going to want to garner the attention. It's not happened. So yeah, I think they have to be very careful when they do stuff like that. This is something that was just quite unique. And yeah, there's always things that you learn about movies after the fact. There's plenty of movies that have had torturous production processes. Whether it was just difficult shooting or, you know, the actors and directors being absolute dicks towards each other. It's hilarious when it happens, but it usually comes out years down the line.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I remember watching a behind the scenes of maybe the third or the fourth episode of the final series of Game of Thrones. It's the one where they had the battle at Winterfell and the actors and actresses were talking about how, you know, it's pretty cold and they're just sat on their little stools with their name on the back with the little foot thing. They just sat on that shivering for Ages and ages and ages for the shot to be gotten right. And I don't know, I've been on a couple of movie sets, but I've not exactly sort of lived and breathed it in that way. But I do get the sense that it probably from the outside seems like it would be all glamorous and fun and sexy, and you turn up and sort of say the lines and, oh, my God, here's an award. Like, go and spend your hundred million dollars. But in reality, it's lots of waiting. There's lots and lots of waiting.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, there's a lot of waiting around. I mean, I could say from tiny little bit of experience, like, I used to be an extra on things back when I was at uni, just like for beer money, basically. And, yeah, you spend. You can spend the whole day just like sitting in the green room or just waiting on site, just waiting to get used and nothing happens. And it's. It's usually boring and it's quite cold, especially if you're in Scotland. And so, yeah, it's not always a glamorous process, for sure, but that's just the nature of the work that they do. I'm sure the stars are looked after for the most part.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, they'll have a big RV and the makeup artist and the masseuse and so on and so forth.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, for sure.

[Chris Williamson]

You mentioned the disparagement thing. Rachel Ziegler, what happened? Or do we know? Because Snow White's coming out imminently.

[The Critical Drinker]

Ten days, I think.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[The Critical Drinker]

From now? Yeah, the 21st.

[Chris Williamson]

And have you got any idea how much they've had to retrospectively edit, add, remove stuff from that? Or is it all speculation?

[The Critical Drinker]

It's speculation at this point. No one's really come out with a, you know, good, reliable leak on this one. We do know that they put the movie back by an entire year. And I think you can surmise that they did a lot of reshoots during that time. I'm pretty sure they changed the entire dwarf thing where they were going to be played by live action humans. And now suddenly you've got these CGI monstrosities that are just pure nightmare fuel. It's just. It's the most predictable failure ever. Like, when you have to do all of this, when you do massive reshoots like this, you add tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to your budget. And the word of mouth around the film is terrible. Everyone hates the idea of it. Rachel Zegler is super unpopular on a personal level. This movie has got everything that you could possibly ask to go against a movie. It's all pinned to this film. So it's a perfect storm of shittiness. And it's gonna be hilarious.

[Chris Williamson]

I was gonna say this is like a catnip for you. This is just pure YouTube channel fuel.

[The Critical Drinker]

Sure. And there's always that temptation to report on every new development. And it's like, no, I'm not doing that. I'm not going to go to that extent.

[Chris Williamson]

This isn't the Snow White breaking news channel.

[The Critical Drinker]

Sure. Exactly. Yeah. Because like, you can put Rachel Zegler's face onto a thumbnail and you'll get like a million views over it. It's insane. But I'm going to wait now. Just wait till the movie comes out and then do a review of it because I've talked about a few different aspects of it and that's enough at this point. And man. Yeah, you can only beat that horse so much. But it is content gold for. For YouTubers. That's the reality of it. Just like the acolyte was for Star Wars. You know, when something truly terrible like people, it's just human nature, they like to see it get torn down.

[Chris Williamson]

Speaking about beaten down horses, Meghan Markle new series.

[The Critical Drinker]

Is that that from. Or sorry, with love or something from Meghan Markle. Yeah. It'll probably shock you to know that I haven't watched that. I thought that was quite my thing.

[Chris Williamson]

At the front of the queue of Netflix, there's a scene, polo.

[The Critical Drinker]

That was bitching, man. I couldn't get enough of that stuff.

[Chris Williamson]

There was a screenshot floating around on Twitter. That's her hands reaching down toward a cake or something. And the sentence says, when I think of honey, I think of bees. As in, like this really profound insight. And apparently there's one episode where she spends a good bit of time explaining how to build a balloon arch. It's like, you know, bitch, you haven't built a balloon arch. What are you talking about? Yeah, you know, fucking balloon arches, mate. You know, your. Your butler's butler knows how to make the balloon arch.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah. It's like, what can she teach normal people? Like, what has she got that people can aspire to? There's nothing really like you're just gonna do another generic, like, home lifestyle.

[Chris Williamson]

Exactly. And a thinly veiled PR rehabilitation process. This is allegedly on the podcast run that she had that she did briefly. In between each answer from the guest and her response, there was a producer sat next to her telling her what to say. So that's how heavily curated it was that she was being ventriloquized by some person sat slightly off camera.

[The Critical Drinker]

It's so funny when you've got people like that who have actually no discernible skills or personality or like personal history that makes them interesting, but they're somehow famous anyway, and so you've got to try and do something with them. Like, what do you do? I think the Kardashians kind of encountered that problem with Kim where it's like her one and only ability is to stand still looking hot, and anytime she has to speak or do anything intelligent, she's completely lost. But somehow you can parlay that into a billion dollar empire.

[Chris Williamson]

Run Skims up, dude. Yeah, I mean, look, I really enjoyed Suits. I think I bailed out in season five or six. It kind of got a bit confusing. But the first few seasons of Suits I thought was great. I thought she was like a good character in it. She sort of definitely visually fit what you would have wanted to expect. This sort of overly glitzy. Everybody is unnecessarily hot in this law firm for no apparent reason. But I thought that was. I thought that was good. I enjoyed her in that. But yeah, I mean, holy shit, what a way to. What a way to not only torpedo your own trajectory, but that of a literal royal at the same time.

[The Critical Drinker]

He's so going to regret this in years to come. He really is.

[Chris Williamson]

Do you think you'd be able to. I mean, can you, as a royal divorce someone like that? Like that just seems like it would be such a huge U turn. The amount of egg that you'd need to wear on your face would fucking suffocate you.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, I mean, I think the. If you really wanted to do it, you'd have to divorce her and come back to the UK and beg forgiveness from the king.

[Chris Williamson]

Serve in the armed forces for another couple of years.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, I mean, he's getting a bit old for that, but, like, maybe there's something that could be done there. But yeah, there would have to be a humiliation tour, I think, to get him back on track. And I just. I just don't think he would be willing to do it. I think he's just too. He honestly feels like a. A hostage. Almost like he looks like he's been completely emotionally captured by her.

[Chris Williamson]

Has anyone seen if he's blinking Morse code secret.

[The Critical Drinker]

I know. Yeah. Help me. Yeah, it's like when they do the, like, interviews with people like Oprah and like, he's almost like waiting for permission to speak from her. You can tell one Hundred percent. Like, she just, like, wears the trousers and just dictates everything that he does.

[Chris Williamson]

You know, the energy, the end of the energy, it gives me. It gives me Jada Pinkett Smith energy.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Yep, real Jada Pinkett Smith energy. Speaking of which, give me your thoughts on the Oscars. Should we have thanked the sex work community before we started the episode today?

[The Critical Drinker]

That was a weird one. Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure if, like, honoring them is quite what you should be doing.

[Chris Williamson]

Like a land acknowledgement before you start.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, because what was that actress saying? Like, oh, I want to pay tribute to the sex workers of the world. Like, maybe you should, like, focused more on helping them so they don't have to, like, be doing this for their. Their careers. I don't know. I don't think there's anything particularly noble about that. But, yeah, man, the Oscars in general were just a snooze fest this year. There was nothing particularly controversial. There was not nothing particularly interesting. And Nora pretty much was the big winner of the Night Up, a fairly solid, stodgy drama. Like, there wasn't a huge, huge amount I could say about it. Yeah, the Oscars was just boring, really. There was nothing really to pick up from it.

[Chris Williamson]

Would Dune 2 not have been in the bucket for this one?

[The Critical Drinker]

It would Theory. I think it was nominated for best Visual effects or something, so it was there, but I don't know, I just.

[Chris Williamson]

Figured, you know, it's this epic movie, did really well at the box office. Fan favorite artistically, seemed to be sufficiently legitimate and edgy that it would, you know, justify people that know what movies are about to put it in.

[The Critical Drinker]

I think they wanted to do a bit of a 180 from the previous year where there was a lot of big name box office successes up for contention. You know, you had things like Oppenheimer, Barbie, that sort of thing. And this year, I think they wanted to go the opposite direction. It was very much like smaller films, you know, independent movies, all that sort of thing. Like, very much your traditional Oscar bait kind of movies. I don't know if they thought that was gonna give them a bit more legitimacy and, like, raise the interest in it or what. But it seemed to have the opposite effect, really. No one was really talking about it.

[Chris Williamson]

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[The Critical Drinker]

I think so. I think that maybe there was a memo that got passed around saying like, right, don't get political, okay? That shit ain't working for us anymore. Like, I don't care how much you hate the orange man. There's no point ranting about it because no one cares anymore. We've done this for 10 years and it's, it's old now. I think so because they were pretty, pretty toned down about it for the most part.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. I mean. Or alternatively, Hollywood realizes that nobody really cares all that much now and that celebrity law is genuinely losing steam and they're adapting. I'm aware that both me and you might be skeptical of Hollywood's ability for like self awareness, but perhaps that's actually happening.

[The Critical Drinker]

It might be to a degree. And yeah, the way I described it was like Hollywood at this entire awards season, they gave the impression of a man who has been bent over a table and violently humbled by society at large. They have been told in no uncertain terms, we don't give a shit about your political views. We don't care what protest or what cause you want to support. We're not interested in that. And we're increasingly uninterested in your actual movies even. So, yeah, it was very toned down. It was very sedate and almost intentionally non controversial. And if anything, that is a good thing. Like, it's good that they're, they're recognizing that. And now that's probably where I would recommend that they go as an awards ceremony. And maybe they need to let go of the idea that it's going to be this huge event that, like, hundreds of millions of people are going to tune into. It's not really. It's an industry event. It's a chance for them to, like, recognize talent within their industry in the same way that companies have award nights for, like, best employee of the year or whatever.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, okay.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, okay. Yeah. It's like, you're not going to pretend that, like, you know, the. The average person on the street's going to give a. About, like, Microsoft's top coder this year or anything, but for the people in it, for the people in that industry, it's super important. So.

[Chris Williamson]

Such a good take. Yeah, yeah, Totally makes sense. I don't know. It's. You've got this weird, like, anchoring bias thing from the past. People used to be normal people used to be interested in award ceremonies, therefore they should be moving forward. But there's no reason to assume that that was what was accurate and now is an aberration or some sort of flaw in the typical system as opposed to they fluked it. People were interested for a bit, but this is actually reverting back to what it is.

[The Critical Drinker]

You know what it is? I think it was the novelty of seeing your favorite movie stars unscripted. They were just there. They were all hanging out together. Like back in the day, it'd be like, oh, my God, you know, like, Steve McQueen is hanging out with Paul Newman. Just, like, chatting away and they're having a few beers or whatever. Like, that was quite the novelty. And like, to hear them get up on stage and give their unfiltered speeches or whatever, that was cool. But now you see them everywhere. They're on social media. They're giving every retarded thought that pops into their head is like going out onto their Twitter feed. And so the novelty of seeing them in this unscripted environment doesn't exist anymore. And so the appeal of that starts to diminish.

[Chris Williamson]

I think that's the reason it's so true. I've thought about this for ages. That the allure of celebrity, for the most part, is really hard to hold on to. How are you supposed to do that? People know the name of your dog, you know, they know that you recently bought new pet food for them, and they didn't agree with it or whatever. This, the fourth wall has been sort of thoroughly smashed open and left open, and people can just stare in 24 hours a day on your Instagram feed or on your Twitter feed or whatever.

[The Critical Drinker]

Thing is, it's not obligatory for you to do that as a celebrity, as a movie star. You don't have to have an Instagram feed, you don't have to be on Twitter or whatever. You can forego all of that and maintain that distance between you and the fans. It's just they're chasing that cheap dopamine hit. And I think probably during things like the pandemic, it was really acute because they couldn't be in movies anymore. Everything was shut down for a time. And so they wanted a hit somehow they wanted attention. And so they would go on social media and do it that way and get that validation. But the downside is, yeah, we get to see you as a human, as a flesh and blood person, just like me and you and not the star anymore. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

You're not supposed to be. Yeah, you're supposed to be untouchable.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, you're supposed to.

[The Critical Drinker]

And obviously it's a fantasy, but like, it was something that made them interesting, like the mystique around them. Kind of like what we talked about earlier with James Bond. The more you tell me about his private life, the less I'm interested in him as a character. It's the same with movie stars. The mystique is what drives our interest in them.

[Chris Williamson]

So true. Who do you think has got the right balance? Who do you think from sort of modern movie stars has got a good. A good blend?

[The Critical Drinker]

Gosh, now you're asking. I'm trying to think maybe someone like Anya Taylor Joy. I think she's not super active on social media, in which case that's great. Like she's.

[Chris Williamson]

Congratulations.

[The Critical Drinker]

An interesting performer. I'm always kind of curious about what movies she's in. They're not always great, but, you know, I think she's still quite an interested star.

[Chris Williamson]

Keanu Reeves seems to have got a good blend of it as well.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yes. I mean, he's obviously from a different generation, but he's still, yeah, very much active now.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. And.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, it's cool.

[Chris Williamson]

I don't know, would you. There's a bit of me that kind of wishes that Nick Cage in his heyday was like uploading stories all the time behind the scenes. Because that would have just been fucking brilliant.

[The Critical Drinker]

It would have been bonkers. Yeah. Like Nic Cage is. He's something truly special. I hope that man never stops working.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, I think based on his financial position, I don't think that that's an option for Him.

[The Critical Drinker]

Possibly not, no.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Star Wars. Is it redeemable?

[The Critical Drinker]

That's a complex question, right? Can it get back to being profitable financially? It can, yes. It needs to rest for between five and 10 years before they start doing more stuff. The ideal scenario would be stop making new things in Star Wars. Say that we're kind of shelving this brand for a time. Fire everyone at Lucasfilm who's responsible for anything that's happened in the past 10 years, and then come at it fresh with a new trilogy of movies to great fanfare and great fan anticipation. Let people miss it again, because that's what we need. So, yeah, that can come back to being profitable. Will it be this cultural juggernaut that, like, you know, you. You walk down the street and, like, everyone you. You meet will have heard of someone like Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader? Will it get back to being that? Probably not. No. I think that's. That time has come and gone, sadly, and it's just. It's brand destruction, and there's certain. There's certain bits of damage that you can't undo. And I think this is one.

[Chris Williamson]

You had a tweet. I think this is four or five years old now, but how to be a Hollywood creative today? Number one, pick some old franchise with a loyal fan base. Number two, remake it, but remove everything that once made it popular. Number three, insult the fan base when they protest your creative decisions. Number four, blame negative reviews on toxic trolls. Number five, move on. Yeah, it still holds true. It still holds true today.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, that's pretty much it. And wow. They just do not learn from their mistakes on that one. It's crazy, man.

[Chris Williamson]

You can lay the playbook out, and it's always going to happen. So, yeah, we have this odd world in which we're at Star wars saturation. Meanwhile, George R.R. martin seems to be having a competition with Patrick Rothfuss for who's going to write their next book Last. Yeah, like, I saw he opened a coffee shop or something the other day. Cocktail bar. Yeah. And you think someone had tweeted? It's like, it's been 2,100 days since Windsor winter came out.

[The Critical Drinker]

More like 4,000. Is this. Yeah, it's Nerdrotic, an absolutely excellent channel that you should definitely have on here to talk to. But, yeah, he's. Every time something new about George R.R. martin comes out, like some business venture or whatever, he'll just post the number of days since the last book. Yeah, that dude will do. Like, George R.R. martin will do anything to avoid writing that book, and I think we all know why. He doesn't know how to end it. He doesn't know how to continue this series.

[Chris Williamson]

Is this the final one or is it the penultimate?

[The Critical Drinker]

No. So there's one more called Dream, sorry, A Dream of Spring that's supposed to end the Song of Ice and Fire. Realistically, that's never going to happen in his lifetime. He's already really old and fat and really unhealthy. And if he even gets Winds of Winter done, that'll be a miracle.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow, that sucks. I mean, so does someone know? Is there a, is there a potential for somebody to continue on his legacy? Is he going to pass this down to the people that did the World of Ice and Fire? Are they going to complete it?

[The Critical Drinker]

I, I mean, I don't know if he's named anyone potentially named a successor, a health successor. I think so, because really the publishing house must have some kind of plan in place to say, look, George is. He's probably not going to finish this and we need to have someone who can pick it up and carry it on. They'll probably talk to him about it. And I think maybe some people have suggested that this is intentional on his part. He doesn't know how to finish it and he doesn't want to live with the backlash of it being a crap.

[Chris Williamson]

So I'm going to open a cocktail bar instead.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, well, he'll do anything. He'll produce like five more TV shows and he can use that as an excuse to not be right and, or he can say that, you know, it was a cloudy day and he felt sad or, you know, Trump's in the White House and that made him distracted. So he couldn't do anything this year and like, anything basically to avoid like writing the book. Because if he passes away, and I'm not wishing that on him in the slightest, I hope he lives for another hundred years. But when he eventually happens, he can go down as like, well, this, this genius who never quite got to finish his creative vision and if the subsequent books come out, they're not great, well, that's someone el his fault.

[Chris Williamson]

I really hope that that's not the case. Meanwhile, fucking Brandon Sanderson is just a one man word factory who seems to be able to put out what was it that he announced? Was it last year or the year before? Said, oh yeah, alongside all of the other stuff that I've been doing. By the way, he is a five buck series that I just wrote on the side. Just dumped another couple of million words.

[The Critical Drinker]

On You, I mean, when you, when you've got that creative drive going and it's in full swing, like, why interrupt it? I mean, it's great to see.

[Chris Williamson]

Plus hard Mormon energy. That's what George should do. George, if you are listening and you convert to Mormonism, there is a, there's a spirit that speaks through your pen.

[The Critical Drinker]

There was a great Twitter thread like you, I don't know if you ever saw it, but it was some other author who offered their opinion on George and his work. And they said that his fundamental problem is that he is a lazy, nihilistic, Malay, sorry, liberal boomer. You know, he comes from that baby boom generation. And his, his entire worldview is colored by like, this nihilistic view that there's no good or evil, that, like, everything is just shades of gray and that, like, heroes can never, like, really get the job done. And, like, no one is. The, the people that you think of are evil, are not. And it's like he, he conceived his entire storytelling philosophy as a direct response to people like J.R.R. tolkien. He didn't want that clear delineation between good and evil, and good ultimately triumphing. It was much more bleak and nihilistic than that. The problem is you ultimately end up hating your own creation because it is so depressing and it is so difficult to wrestle with as a creative. To the point where now he just doesn't know what to do with it. And it's interesting. I think it's an interesting philosophy.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, it's sexy and complex in some ways because you have twists and turns and you realize that the person you thought you hated, you don't actually end up hating. Jaime Lannister, a really great example of this. Pushes a fucking eight year old kid out of a window, episode one. And by the end of it, you think, I really respect this man. I really, you know, he's standing up for his principles. Yeah, sure, he's fucking his sister, but, you know, aside aside from that twin.

[The Critical Drinker]

Sister, you know, nobody's perfect.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, We've all got our ways that we like to spend our evenings, but. And you end up really. I ended up really liking him. I thought he was one of my favorite characters in the entire series by the end of it. And that's cool and unexpected and subversive in a way, and that's pretty exciting. But it's also the delineation when you haven't actually worked out what the trajectory is. This is one of the reasons I think that Top Gun Maverick was such a success, that it was Easy bastards in black helmets versus good guys that wear leather. Right? Like, that's it. They are very easy to work out, good versus bad. But, I mean, even now we've seen Suicide Squad, the only way that you can have a goodie is for the baddies to be the goodies. And even they are conflicted somehow internally. And there's. There's no clear delineation anymore between heroes and villains.

[The Critical Drinker]

I think ultimately it's gonna come down to the execution. Cause there is ways to make it work. But I think what you want to circle round to eventually is a redemption arc or an idea of there being clear lines between good and evil and that you just have to go through a bit of a torturous path to get to that. And I think that's what George might have once had in mind for A Song of Ice and Fire. That you've got all these characters squabbling over their petty political R rays and all that crap. But meanwhile, you've got this big existential threat that's creeping up on you in the form of the white walkers that are literally going to end the world. And, you know, eventually those characters have to put aside all their bullshit and all their politics and, like, band together to actually defeat this much bigger threat. And actual heroes have to rise to take them on again. He's just never quite gotten to that point. I don't know if he has the ability now.

[Chris Williamson]

Are you a severance fan? This is something I haven't watched, but increasingly I'm seeing break the Internet.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yes. So I only started it relatively recently. So I'm like four episodes in season one. Yes, season one. Yeah. So I'm late to the party on this one. But a very interesting show. Really cool premise. Deals with some very interesting ideas from that premise. You know, if you're lit, your personality is literally split into two people with two different memory sets. What do they do? How do they come into conflict with each other and can they interact in some way? So, so very, very interesting. Hopefully it doesn't go down the bad road of mystery box storytelling where the answers are, like, super disappointing. And you just think, christ, I waited like five seasons for that.

[Chris Williamson]

Lost.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yes, exactly. Hopefully they've learned some lessons for that. But yeah, man, like Apple tv, they don't make a lot of stuff, but they do generally make pretty good stuff. I will say that for them.

[Chris Williamson]

What was that one with Jason Momoa where he was blind? Was everybody blind? Maybe everybody was blind sight or something. What the fuck was it called? Jason. Jason Momoa. Apple TV C. It was called C, right? 7.6 on IMDb. 63%. Rotten Tomatoes came out in 2019. Only did one series. It was really cool. Yeah, all of their descendants have lost their sense of sight, and that was pretty fun. I remember thinking that was the first thing I ever saw on Apple tv. And I was like, ugh, Apple tv, They're just going to be buying up other series. But no, they're a legitimate, like, production house and they're making this stuff and they're commissioning things and the ideas seem to be interesting. And yeah, the only issue is that for every new exciting network or technology that has a production house attached to it that actually makes good stuff, it's another membership that I need to buy. And I'm like, okay, well, I need Max and I need Disney plus and I need Apple tv and I definitely need Netflix. And obviously I need Amazon Prime. And before long, you like, how the fuck am I aggregate all of this stuff?

[The Critical Drinker]

I mean, unless you're willing to sail the high seas, of course. That's the solution. Even just, you know what would be useful is just like a search engine that encompasses all.

[Chris Williamson]

An aggregator. Oh, that would be so good. Well, just put your logins here and we'll give you all of the options that we think that you'd like. And then if you could. I've thought this for ages. A lot of the time you don't know what to watch. People will send you Spotify songs, they'll send you albums and tracks from artists freely. There's no. I don't even know how I send a friend something from Netflix. I don't even know. I'd take a photo of it and say, hey, you should find this on Netflix. But I'm not gonna do that. It's just not. Not in. It's not the sort of headspace that I'm in when I'm doing it. But if there was a way for your friends to refer to you what they think you would like.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, Steven suggested that you should watch Severance with a little note or a star rating or something like that. That would be fucking awesome.

[The Critical Drinker]

But, yeah, I mean, we are in this weird scenario where there's all these different streaming networks. They don't really communicate with each other. And, like, if you want to watch one thing it's on one network, you want to watch something else that's on another, and it means lots of logins, lots of subscriptions, and it does really start to mount up. And the. The ones that are ultimately going to stand the test of time. And the ones that are going to be successful are the ones that have got some other business attached to them. Right, so Amazon. Right. It almost doesn't matter whether Amazon Prime Video is successful or not because they make a shit zillion dollars every day from like their actual online website, of course. So this is just a vanity project. It's like we can have fun with that. Same with Apple, you know, it's a trillion dollar company. Who cares if like people watch their stuff, but it allows them to finance it and do interesting things. So great. The ones that are in danger are things like Paramount plus stuff like the smaller networks, even Disney plus. Actually they do have the theme park business attached to that, but it's still a smaller network that doesn't have a huge financial infrastructure to support it. And those are the ones that I think are eventually going to get swallowed up by other people.

[Chris Williamson]

What's happening with the production of Rust after the Alec Baldwin incident? Is that just fucking continuing as if nothing ever happened?

[The Critical Drinker]

So I have no idea what's happening in that movie. I don't know if they can even release it at this point. Like the public perception around it has got to be absolute toxic.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, I've just asked ChatGPT what is happening with the production of Rust? Production of film Rust being notably turbulent due to a tragic incident in. Okay, I mean this is years ago.

[The Critical Drinker]

That the accident happened.

[Chris Williamson]

So 2021, following this event, production was halted, but late resumed in April 23. Film was completed in May 23, premiered in Poland, November 20, 2024. As of now, there is no announced release date for Rust in the United States. But Alec Baldwin is doing the Baldwins.

[The Critical Drinker]

I watched one episode of that out of pure morbid curiosity. And it's the Alec Baldwin equivalent of that Meghan Markle show.

[Chris Williamson]

Thinly veiled pr.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah, that's all it is. It's like, hey, let's all pretend like we're a happy family.

[Chris Williamson]

This didn't happen. Let's all pretend that this didn't happen.

[The Critical Drinker]

Yeah. And it's like, well, they do actually, they do reference Rust and the court case and all that. But it's like what they want to do is garner sympathy by showing that he's got like 12 kids or something ridiculous. His wife is about 30 years younger than him, you know, and it's like, oh, well, you can't send this guy to jail because, you know, look how many people rely on him. And look at them having fun together. And it's like watching them do things that they've clearly never done in their entire lives. Like try and bake a cake. Honestly, it would be like watching my pet dog trying to like code a video game, you know, They've clearly got no experience of this whatsoever. And yeah, it's just fake. It's all fake.

[Chris Williamson]

Dude. What are you focused on over the next couple of weeks and months? What have you got? Apart from obviously the star studded release of Snow White, what else are you focused on?

[The Critical Drinker]

We've got some more movie projects in the works because I did a short film that we released last year. We are doing more of that that we're working on right now and we're hoping that we're going to launch a Kickstarter in the near future to hopefully finance that. And we want to branch out rather than just doing one movie. Want to do a slew of like smaller films and give people who back it an opportunity to get some of their projects made as well. So it's like a little mini production studio that we're going to start to do where we can crowdfund movies and like let people vote on the things that they want to get made. Which we think is hopefully going to be quite an interesting idea.

[Chris Williamson]

Unreal. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all of that stuff and everything you do?

[The Critical Drinker]

So yeah, you can find my channel on YouTube, the Critical Drinker. I also have a gaming channel called the Critical Gamer. Very imaginative. And you can obviously find me on the usual places like X and so on.

[Chris Williamson]

Fuck yeah, dude. I appreciate you. Until next time man.

[The Critical Drinker]

Thank you very much. Pleasure.

[Chris Williamson]

I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free and you can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.