← Plain English with Derek Thompson
Plain English with Derek Thompson
The Triple Crisis That’s Breaking Hollywood—and Changing the Future of Movies
01:10:58
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- [00:05]
A
This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. Look, I have my dream job. I get to explain complicated ideas to folks who have better things to do than read white papers. But even dream jobs have not so dreamy parts. The stuff that gets in the way of the actual work. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it. Start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. That way, you and your team can spend more time on what matters. Which for me is finding that one elusive stat that just makes everything click. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit ServiceNow.com today the new Rules of American Culture There is a triple crisis facing Hollywood today. You can see it in tickets bought, in jobs created, and in creativity squandered on the tickets front. The best year for the movie business this century was 2002, when Americans and Canadians bought 1.6 billion movie tickets, or about five tickets per person. Last year, Americans bought roughly half of that number. This is part of a long term trend. To be clear, 80 years ago the typical American went to the movies twice a month. Now we go about twice a year. On the jobs front, Hollywood studios are making fewer movies and TV shows than they did a few years ago, and they're increasingly making those movies overseas in other countries that offer subsidies. As a result, the business of entertainment in Hollywood has been shellacked. Employment has declined 30% since 2022 for actors, for carpenters, for costumers, for hundreds of other occupations and professions that actually make the movies and TV shows that you watch, according to the Wall Street Journal. And finally, the creativity front. For a while, I've talked about practically everybody has talked about how film and television has become more reliant on old IP sequels, prequels, adaptations that often reach into the 20th century for some character or storyline that they can pop into the mic, reheat for a 21st century audience. But it's not just the stories that are getting older. It's the stars. National Research Group has for the last few years released studies of the most effective movie stars, the one that actually put butts into seats. As puck and the town's Matt Bellany has reported. Among the top 14 actors of this decade, the average age is 57, half are over 60, and none is under 45 years old. This is true, by the way, even if you restrict your survey to Gen Z audiences. Young people's favorite movie stars in 2025 were, in order The Rock, Ryan Reynolds, Kevin Hart, Tom Cruise, Adam Sandler, Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, Keanu reeves, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Practically all of those people had a hit film in the 1990s before Gen Z was even born. Like, I'm trying to imagine something like this from my perspective. I was born in 1986. If someone asked me at like 25 who my favorite movie stars were and I was like, number one, Burt Reynolds, number two, Jane Fonda, and number three, Warren Beatty, like, that would be absurd. Something is clearly very broken here when it comes to Hollywood's ability to mint novelty either in the domain of the story or the star actor. So you add all that up, the tickets crisis, the jobs crisis, the novelty crisis, and this seems like a moment of breakdown for Hollywood. But to steal a line from one of Hollywood's few genuinely original storytellers, it's always darkest just before the dawn. And there are several trends in Hollywood that point toward a surprisingly bright, or perhaps just very different future. Today's guest is the Ringer's Sean Fennessy, the host of the podcast the Big Picture and the author of A New Projections. In an Essay published Thursday, April 23rd, Sean writes that something is happening in culture right now that defies the gloomiest narratives. Audience and box offices are perking up. Young stars are connecting with audiences. Key auteurs we've been tracking for 20 years have ascended to the center of movie culture. Sean asks, is this a boomlet or maybe a lovely passing coincidence? Or quite possibly a rumble from the depths of a society yearning for the monoculture? I'm not sure, but it's something. Today, Sean and I talk about that something. The new rules of Hollywood and what they tell us about the changing winds of American media and American life. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Sean Fennesy. Welcome to the show.
- [05:38]
B
Thanks, Derek. So nice to see you in this format.
- [05:41]
A
It is lovely to see you in this format. Yeah. So many zoom calls with you, none of which are recorded for public consumption, thank goodness. So I have three goals for this conversation. I want to talk about the state of Hollywood today. I want to talk about the future of movies, and I want to connect some of your predictions about the future of film to the larger project of trying to understand the direction of American culture, American life, human existence. How does that generally sound to you as a 58 minute project for us?
- [06:09]
B
Seems super easy. I think we'll solve everything and then everybody will be able to figure out how to go forward with their lives after this.
- [06:14]
A
Okay, great question. Number one, Sean, how's Hollywood doing these days?
- [06:20]
B
Well, very bad, but also good, I think possibly. There's obviously a tremendous crisis happening in the industry because of consolidation, because of a post Covid crisis, struggle to recover because of the radically shifting tides in terms of what these entertainment conglomerates think is going to be valuable relative to what has been valuable historically. And so there's a lot of tumult, there's a lot of job loss, there's a lot of struggle, particularly amongst the middle class of people who make movies. So I think there's a true feeling of sadness, frustration and anxiety kind of rippling through the business of Hollywood. The that to me, though, is a bit distinct from what is actually being made and what we're learning about, what people want in the future. So we can kind of talk about both of those tracks, if you'd like.
- [07:10]
A
Yeah, I mean, one of the curiosities I've always had of Hollywood in the last 10, 15 years in particular is this phenomenon that I guess you could call like the novelty recession. Right. It's like widely recognized that there's been an increasing reliance on 20th century IP to, to make 21st century entertainment. And maybe as an adjunct to that, I'm very interested in like the remarkable stickiness of old movie stars. I was really struck, as I mentioned just now in my open, by Matt Bellany's reporting that even if you ask Gen Z for their top movie stars, the movie stars that move them into movie theaters, according to National Research group, their top 10 stars are, in order, the Rock, Ryan Reynolds, Kevin Hart, Tom Cruise, Adam Sandler, Brad Pitt, Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves, Leonardo DiCaprio and Zendaya. The average age of that group, especially when you take out Zendaya, it's somewhere around 60. And I should say that survey, I think, was released about 12 months ago. And maybe a survey released this morning might put Timmy Chalamet on the list, might put Michael B. Jordan on the list. But I wonder, what do you think explains this phenomenon, the novelty recession, this struggle to not only break out new IP but also to break out new stars in really the last like 20 years?
- [08:31]
B
I think that's too singular a piece of data to analyze and discuss about what has actually happened? I think one other poll that would be useful would be who are your favorite movie characters of the last 20 years? And if you polled people, particularly young people, about that, I think you'd get a very predictable set of responses. Captain America and Iron man and Batman and all of these familiar IP strongholds. And I do think that those characters effectively replaced movie stars, or at least the development of a crop of movie stars over a roughly 20 year period in Hollywood. You've got in 2002, Sam Raimi's Spider man. That leads pretty elegantly into Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy and the launch of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And with that, alongside a handful of other sturdy franchises, the Jurassic World films, Fast and the Furious, a handful of others, they're effectively replacing what we come to know as your Tom Cruise can carry any style of movie movie star. And so what I think is now happening after this 20 year excursion into IP forward movie marketing is a bit of a retrenchment into stardom. It's going to take about 10 years to develop more stars, to get us to whatever it felt like was happening in the 1990s. Roughly the first 80 years of American movies were sold on the faces on the big screen and the relationship that you had to them this century has been much more about not just ip, but characters that you have built a relationship with over time. And I do think that they have kind of exhausted a lot of those, those means in Hollywood, we've seen that with the pretty dramatic decline in box office for all of those IP franchises that I've been talking about. So I think we're in a little bit of a middle stage. We're in a bit of a transition. And I don't think we're ever going back to Julia Roberts, Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis. You know, that period that we were raised on is impossible to recapture because of the stratified nature of all entertainment content across the world. But something is happening. You mentioned number 10 is Zendaya. And a person like Zendaya emerging into our popular consciousness in the way that she has and the very strategic way that she has put herself into it with two different kinds of projects in her, you know, relatively short career, I think is super instructive. Maybe she's just a, you know, Halley's comet of stardom that comes along once every 25 or 30 years. But I think she's actually carving a path for other young stars and showing the way that both young audiences and old audiences can get connected to. What she's interested in is Zendaya a
- [11:15]
A
movie star in the same way that, say, Julia Roberts was a movie star in the 1990s. Like, I loved Challengers, I loved it. It was one of my favorite movies of the year. It was not an enormous blockbuster. The movies that I would guess are her highest grossing movies Are movies where she is not the lead, Whether it's a spider man or a Dune, she has a celebrity that in some ways exists both within Hollywood and outside of the context of Hollywood. And that way it's like, it's maybe a little bit like Sydney Sweeney who has been in movies that were blockbuster hits, but it's also definitely been in movies that were enormous flops. And in a way, her fame is like this Venn diagram that contains her movie stardom, but also exists, her fame does, outside of the degree to which. The degree to which she is a movie star. Whereas Julia Roberts was like a movie star, like beginning, end, Tom Hanks was a movie star. Tom Cruise was not like someone who was famous for doing like advertisements and also was good in A Few Good Men. No, he was famous for being a movie star. And I wonder if there's an evolution of stardom that parallels sort of the fragmentation of culture, that in order to be a movie star today, movies have to be like one piece of the constellation, but they're not the entire identity of your celebrity. Is that a shift maybe that's happened in the last 25 years?
- [12:45]
B
Possibly. There's a canard that we talk about that Amanda and I talk about on the Big Picture all the time around the idea of the middle having eroded. That the legal thriller, the erotic thriller, the rom com, this sort of the programmer for adults looking for a date night has been seeded to streaming and to television. And that you can get those things more cheaply, more easily at home. And they're not not draws theatrically. And that was really a place where a star like Julia Roberts really thrived. She really thrived in those categories. Now those categories at the absolute top of their success could make 300, $400 million. The difference between someone like Zendaya and Julia Roberts is is she's using the well known IP to make movies that are not making 300 or $400 million. They're making a billion dollars or $2 billion. And what that does is it radiates her stardom. It allows her to become dramatically more famous than many other people who are doing the same kind of work. And then what she's doing with that stardom is she's making movies like challengers and making movies like the Drama, which is one of the bigger movies of the year this year. Both of those movies are complex movies for adults, I would argue more complex than many of Julia Roberts biggest hits. And they're crossing $100 million worldwide, which is incredibly difficult to do. And that's happening in large part because of the notoriety of the stars and then the kind of complex material within the movie and the dynamic where you get excited about talking about your favorite star from the Spider man movies appearing in a movie that has, you know, a very dramatic confrontation with taboos in our culture. And so, like, to me, this is what a very smart star does. Her co star in the movie. Robert Pattinson does something very similar with his career. He works with the Safdie brothers and he also makes Batman movies. He works with Christopher Nolan and he also works with David Cronenberg. This kind of balance, it necessitates taste and strategy, but it can be done. And in doing so, I think it creates, like a real equilibrium amongst moviegoing and what kinds of movies are made that we desperately need. And so I see what Zendaya is doing and to some extent, even what Sydney Sweeney is doing, who has certainly had bombs and has certainly had hits, and the hits seem to be all kind of somewhat similar, which is that they're either sex comedies or sex thrillers, and that we want to see her in a scenario in which she is the sexy woman. But that's the story of Hollywood is. It's not just iconography, it's archetype. You know, Marilyn Monroe used her gifts to draw us in, and then she revealed to us that there was more to her than just her body and her presentation, that she had great comic timing and that she could sing. So to me, this is all kind of baked into the history of Hollywood star making. And when stars are active and we know about them and we care about them, it means better things for the movies that are made in those times. So I actually. I feel kind of bullish about this. And I find the concern around, like, well, we haven't made a star since the Rock, to be slightly overstated. That being said, it's with the understanding that the movie business is smaller like it is. It is much smaller than it was 10 years ago. It is much smaller than it was 30 years ago. You just kind of have to accept that and then move on, knowing that movies are also not going anywhere. Like, it is actually still a good business. It's just not a good business for as many people as it used to be.
- [16:06]
A
One more question on the novelty recession before we talk to what's coming next, because you've gestured now a few times at the phase shift that you see happening. I turned 40 in May, so all of my friends have a very specific nostalgia for, like, the late 1990s, when many of the biggest blockbusters were original blockbusters. Like you go to 1996, Independence Day 1, Twister 1, 98, 99, the Matrix won, not three, not four. And there's this frustration. Why can't the movie studios make more original stuff? Where are the thriller blockbusters or the legal thrillers that you mentioned? Where's A Few Good Men? And so that's the criticism that I hear from audiences. But then when I do reporting, when I wrote my book, I talk to the studios and what they would always say is when we make original movies, people don't show up. So you've got the audiences, or at least the audiences that I speak to, my friends blaming the studios. You've got the studios blaming the audiences. Now, maybe both are right, or maybe only one is right. But you represent, right, the popular movie going audience, but also you do interviews with Steven Spielberg. Like you talk to Capitol, you talk to the class of movie makers. Who's right here? Whose fault is this?
- [17:33]
B
Well, it's always the studio's fault, Derek. I mean, you know, because the corporation is seeking growth at all cost. And so, particularly in the last 25 years, and I've written about this quite a bit over the years, the studios became addicted not just to domestic gross, but to international gross. And international gross means that movies need to play for all audiences around the world. And legal thrillers based in the American justice system don't work in Japan or China or France or England or Australia in exactly the same way that they work in America, but Spider man does. And so what happened is you had this pretty dramatic shift in terms of where resources were being allocated across studio filmmaking, where you found that these very high budgeted films with really high earning ceilings were getting prioritized much more dramatically over these star vehicles that are baked in historical drama strategies. And so it just tilted the balance pretty dramatically. And so it's not just that the studios were disinterested in originals because audiences didn't want them. The studios trained audiences to not want them. They reduced the number of films that they were making in that approach. And so that's what I, when I say that they, you know, that we don't have as many stars as we used to in the same way. It's because we were not being fed stars in those modes. So it's true that there are some studios, smaller studios, streamers, that are attempting to still make movies in those formats. But this addiction to billion dollar movies, which was not really a discussion point in the 1990s, movies did not Make a billion dollars. They only started making a billion dollars when China opened their doors to American films. And more specifically, when marketing became about a global consciousness. That's really the thing that happens to American movies. That is when things became a little bit more dire, when you started looking at the slates of the major studios and what films they felt could have success at scale that they desire.
- [19:33]
A
This is exactly how a lot of analysts have described this story to me, which is in the late. Well, really start, you said Sam Raimi, a 2002 Spider man, then the Batman trilogy. You have this sort of global awareness that has awakened in Hollywood that you can make 1 billion, 2 billion, 3 billion billion dollar movies by making that film. Not just for, you know, that family of four in Peoria, but for that family of four in Peoria and Tokyo and Shenzhen and Sydney. And you wanted to make these kind of not just four quadrant films, but like every single time zone of the world type of film. And there was a formula that was established in the 2010s that really, really worked. Superhero movies, franchise reboots. And it's a formula that I think the word that you used a few minutes ago is somewhat exhausted now, like the Marvel comics universe, the Star wars universe, the Jurassic park universe, if you want to call it that. Those franchises seem, I think tired is a fair word. I wonder why you think they tired themselves out. Because one answer could be sort of like a big picture, almost like Hegelian explanation. Like formulas exhaust themselves. That's what formulas do. No genre of entertainment lasts forever. But you could also argue that the movies just got shitty. Jurassic Park 6 was not as good as Jurassic Park 1. The Marvel comic movies made in the last five years were not Iron Man 1. How do you explain this exhaustion phenomenon that you've seen?
- [21:05]
B
I think it's actually rarely related to qualitative concern. I think you can look at each of those franchises individually and talk about the distinct ways in which they have overstayed their welcome. For Marvel, for example, I think it's very clear that in the aftermath of Endgame, which is one of the biggest movies of all time and was an extraordinary culmination of success across a 15 year storytelling strategy, they just started putting a bunch of stuff on tv. And those TV shows were varying in quality. Some of them I thought were quite audacious and interesting. Some I thought were boring. Some I thought were completely easy to ignore. And as soon as something became easy to ignore, it detached the fan base. Especially the fan base who was more casual. From this arc of storytelling that they were pursuing. The Marvel movies still make a lot of money. They don't make as much money as they used to. This December we'll see Avengers, Doomsday, and whether or not that franchise still has the juice. But that's one specific example. Not all of these franchises expanded into television streaming in the same way. That was a Disney choice, I would argue a pretty significant mistake. They made a somewhat similar mistake with Star Wars. We'll see once again this may whether or not fans still have the same appetite for theatrical movie going with the Mandalorian and grogu. But the thing that is more important to me around this idea that you're circling is movies have always worked this way, that genres, and I would say that these event films with heroes centered in the middle of them that are often either sci fi, fantasy or adventure is just a wave. The same way that westerns were a wave, or big fancy MGM musicals were a wave, or, you know, talkies were a wave that totally transformed our identification of what a movie actually was in time. And so these movies had their time. It was a fun time. I really enjoyed the MCU for about 10 years. I talked about it in the early years of the big picture. So there's some really fun movies in there. But their time, it's not that their time is over in full. The same way that westerns have not stopped being made since the heyday of the 30s, 40s, 50s and John Ford. There's going to be a new western every year. Sometimes there's five new westerns. Sometime a western is the. Sometimes a western is the best movie that's made that year. Superhero movies will continue in perpetuity. Dinosaur movies will continue in perpetuity. It's just about what gets to be at the absolute center. And they're not. They're moving away from the center. The thing that we don't quite know yet is what is going to be there. I have some theories about what's going in there, but their time is up. So what's next?
- [23:34]
A
So what's next? I want to answer that question by using a couple movies as sort of object lessons. And I think these object lessons can guide us through the question of what is next. Object lesson number one is also the number one box office grossing movie of 2026. Super Mario Galaxy movie. In your substack essay this morning, you wrote, quote, video games are the new superhero for studios. They're not only the new superhero for studios, they're the everything. What does that mean?
- [24:05]
B
Well, if they want Billion dollar movies. I think this is where they'll be leaning. And there are a number of them in production. There are a number of them on the calendar for the next three years. There are a number of them that have been licensed. And there are some studios that are more well positioned than others to capitalize on this moment. It's interesting, you were talking about you and your friends being 90s kids and having an affection for the 90s. And the 90s is really the last time I spent playing a lot of video games. I played some in the early days of college, but I've been out on video games for 20 plus years.
- [24:33]
A
Stop. Exact same. I was obsessed with video games. I played halo for approximately 1 million hours in college. And I don't think I've picked up a video game console remote in a decade at least.
- [24:47]
B
I hope you don't mind me speaking for you, but I think incredibly ambitious people who love their work. Video games are a challenge. They're a huge time suck and I don't really feel like I have the time for them. However, this is a huge challenge to me as a person who thinks about and talks about and writes about movies all the time. I gotta get familiar with these video games because so many of them are going to be in movie theaters and they're clearly clicking with audiences. We've now had this wave of films, the two Super Mario films, Minecraft recently, Sonic the Hedgehog, the Legend of Zelda comes next year. Those are just games that we played when we were kids. We're going to start getting into a mode. I mean, the Call of Duty film at Cinemacon, the recent movie theater exhibitor conference that I was at last week, that was one of the more amped up presentations that Paramount showed us. Peter Berg is directing the movie and Taylor Sheridan of Yellowstone fame is writing the script. And Call of Duty is one of the most successful video game franchises of all time. This is going to be a $250 million movie that is meant to make $2 billion. An epic action war film with a POV shooter style that to me is actually the centerpiece of movies in 2028. For better or for worse. We can talk about whether or not that's a good thing, but it's here that is actually happening now.
- [26:08]
A
And just to put meat on those bones, this is a list that either you sent me or that I found in your essay. This is the next, I think, two and a half years from Sony, Resident Evil, Legend of Zelda, Bloodborne, and Helldivers from Warner brothers. Mortal Kombat 2 and a Minecraft sequel from Universal. A lot more Super Mario from Paramount, Sonic street fighter, Angry Birds 3. I did not know about Angry Birds 1 and 2. And now I feel like I need to revisit my ability to survey culture from the last few years. And as you mentioned, Call of Duty, directed by Peter Berg, written by Taylor Sheridan, and from a 24 Elden ring by Alex Garland. I mean this, to me, the headline here is video games are just replacing superheroes. Like the studios, recognizing wisely or cravenly that people will only drive their butt to a movie theater if it's an enormous IP event with which they are already familiar, are saying, well, we've now exhausted the entire comic book genre. What's like comic books? What's something from the last 30 to 70 years where a lot of people have spent a lot of time looking into this thing? They decided it's video games and so you're just swapping one in for the other, you know, Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark kind of way. Is that an oversimplification of what's happening or is that basically what's happening, that video games are the new superhero?
- [27:30]
B
I don't know if I would have totally. I don't know if I would have said this to you. One year ago before the release of a Minecraft movie, a Minecraft movie changed my mentality about this. I saw that movie in movie theaters surrounded by 9 and 10 year olds throwing popcorn at the screen and having the time of their lives. I found it to be one of the most encouraging things I've ever seen in a movie theater, especially as a professional person thinking about this stuff, not because the kids were going crazy and throwing popcorn, but because they were in the movie theater and excited. And what that does is it builds a habit, it builds a connectivity. The Super Mario Brothers movie, which I thought was okay at best, also did the same thing. It's got 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 year olds going to the movies and getting engaged with that experience and having fun in a community with that experience that then leads to, sure, maybe in 10 years you're all about Helldivers 3 and that those movies are your new, you know, Captain Winter Soldier, the second installment in your favorite series of video games. So I do think that there's something positive there. I don't think they're fully replacing superhero movies or all IP just yet, but I think that the studios are preparing for a world in which these are just much more viable properties over a 10 to 20 year period. And they need to get their ducks in a row. Every single studio presentation last week in Las Vegas featured discussion of video games being integrated. Sony is in this unique position where while they are actually considered maybe the fourth or fifth place studio relative to their size, scope and success, they own PlayStation. And so they have a raft of IP that they can leverage over a period of time that puts them in this really unique position. And one of the first things that they're doing is they're making a new Resident Evil movie. There have been a number of Resident Evil movies over the years, most of which are fairly schlocky. Directed by Paul W.S. anderson, this new Resident Evil movie is directed by Zach Kreger, whose first two movies are Barbarian and Weapons. Arguably the most exciting new voice in horror filmmaking, Resident Evil is a horror video game. What he's doing sounds like, I don't know this for sure, but sounds like a not true blue faithful adaptation of the video game, but a movie in the world of the game with his creativity baked into it. To me, this is the solution. This is the answer. This is the path. Like you've empowering creative people who've had previous success and giving them space to move within these stories. One of the things that I think tripped up a lot of this IP dominance in the last 20 years is a kind of fealty and fear from the fandom. We can talk about Star wars and what happened to Star wars and the Star wars theatrical movie going strategy, but one of the worst things that ever happened was Lucasfilm just started listening closely to their fans. That's not what making movies is about. That's what working in favor of shareholders is about. The fans can't define creativity because they're the fans. They're not the makers of the thing. So to me, what I want to see if we're going to be leaning into this video game decade or century, is making sure that the studios are eyeing creative people who can take charge with the properties and are not stuck on worrying what the fans are going to think.
- [30:35]
A
Actually, Sean, I would love to hold on Star wars because one thing that I've always wondered is how did the same entertainment company, Disney, so perfectly master the Marvel Comics universe and so obviously bungle Star Wars? And that failure and success seems so opposite. You mentioned that Endgame felt like the culmination to a grand master plan. It was like it was all leading to this. And so it was like this 15 year vision where you finally got the apotheosis in those two movies. Star wars seemed Like the exact opposite. And I wonder what, like the business with the creativity lesson here is that the same entertainment company, Disney, could have this enormous success and this, I think, clear creative failure with two products it owned and was operating at the same time.
- [31:28]
B
I think Marvel is not without its failures in that respect. And it's a bit of a hindsight is 2020 vision around their grand plan. But Kevin Feige, who led and executed that entire team through that storytelling, pretty clearly had a strong idea of where he wanted those stories to go. And he picked filmmakers and writers and actors and below the line people to follow through on that vision. For the most recent Star wars trilogy, it was conceived as a trilogy, but the story was not written. It doesn't really seem like the arc was clear at all, because the arc pretty dramatically shifted from film to film. J.J. abrams first film was a real clear echo of Star A New Hope and meant to give us the same emotional beats that that film gave us, perhaps too much so. Rian Johnson's film, the second film, which I found to be fascinating and to be in some respects, like a kind of rejection or an undermining of what our expectations were of Star wars mythology, then set the next film up for a challenge. And if he had made the next film, maybe they would have followed through, but instead they returned to J.J. abrams, who was making a different kind of a film. And my understanding of it is that he made that film under duress with not a lot of time. And the script that they went with and the ideas that they followed there were completely misguided. And so you had this rejection of the second film because of some of the choices that Johnson made, followed by this very pathetic retrenchment on the third film that was just did not work at all. And what you see is decisions being made in real time instead of a grand plan. And why did that happen? Probably a variety of reasons. When you're Kathleen Kennedy and you're running Lucasfilm, you're reporting to Bob Iger, and Bob Iger sees the success of the Force Awakens, and he says, well, we got to make another one of these asap. They got another one going. The Last Jedi makes a lot of money. Maybe not quite as much money as the last one, but it makes a lot of. You know what that means. We need another $1.5 billion movie on our ledger for 2019. What's going on? What are we going to do? How are we going to respond to the negative feedback that we got from the Johnson film, but also serve the audience that wants the conclusion of this Rey Skywalker trilogy. Who's going to do it for us? Let's go back to jj. This is just bad planning and transparent to the world at large. It doesn't take a category expert to understand the mistakes that were made here. I think Kevin Feige made plenty of mistakes too. People who've seen the Dark World know that not every Marvel movie that came out during that stretch of time was a masterpiece. But they had more movies to work through in that time to figure out where they wanted to go. And when it came to the Avengers movies, they at least knew how to push the ball forward with the grand story that they were telling. Star Wars. You can't say the same. You know, I don't think Star wars is dead forever as a theatrical property. There's a movie coming out in a month. There's another one coming out 12 months from now starring Ryan Gosling. So I think Star wars will be fine. But to me, it's a Harvard business study in full. I mean, it's one of the most interesting things that's happened in modern media is what happened to Star wars over the last decade.
- [34:31]
A
I was actually going to say it's a really good Harvard business study. I was afraid the commenters would get mad at me for having consulting brains. So I'm really glad that you're on the record saying that it's a Harvard Business study, because I totally agree. I think from both the creativity standpoint and from a business management standpoint, there's this really interesting question, this interesting tension, and we're gonna ski back to the main run here of the future of Hollywood. But I just think this is really interesting. You said in your last two answers, one that you love this idea of auteur driven ip, right? Give Zach Kreger, Resident Evil. Give Christopher Nolan, Batman. Let's see what they cook up in their little weird laboratory. But at the same time, you also said that Some of these IPs need a kind of grandmaster vision that is inevitably, I would argue, going to stamp out the ability of individual auteurs to put their imprimatur on individual films that are part of a larger universe. And so I think it's like, I don't think there's an answer here. I don't think there's a formula. I think the tension is interesting for big Hollywood studios of essentially how Stalinist do you want to be versus, like, how libertarian do you want to be? To what extent do you want like a 5 year with a dictator at the Top. And to what extent are you like, let a thousand flowers bloom? I think it's awesome that Star Wars 7, 8 and 9 looked like completely different fucking movies that had no idea the other movies even existed. Right. It's just an interesting tension, I think, in terms of. In the world of creativity.
- [36:01]
B
Yeah. I think you gotta remember that the people who make the decisions to hire people to make these movies are not only imperfect, but are operating more quickly than you might imagine. And that they don't really know these people all that well. There's a handful of meetings, there are treatments submitted. You're looking back at the last movie that they made. There are a number of directors you can look at in recent years. Colin Trevorrow, for example, is a director who had a film at Sundance and springboarded out of the success of his film at Sundance, safety not guaranteed, and got to direct Jurassic World. And Jurassic World went on to make a billion dollars. It was a huge success, produced by Steven Spielberg, revived that franchise, and then he was going to be plugged into the Star wars universe. And then Lucasfilm got a look at his script and they thought about what it would mean for him to direct the third film in the Skywalker, the Rey Skywalker story. And they got nervous and they took him out of the movie because maybe they hadn't spent enough time thinking about what kind of a movie he would make. Or maybe they didn't agree. In fact, Lucasfilm fired Phil Lord and Chris Miller off of Solo the Han Solo Prequel because they didn't like the tone and comedy style that they brought, the sensibility that they brought to that movie and replaced him with Ron Howard and released effectively a non movie, a movie no one cares about and has no legacy at this point. And they did so because they were concerned and they didn't realize who they had hired and what they were doing. And like this does happen. This happens all the time. This happens in any job. You know, you hire someone, they wow you in an interview, you like their sample, you like the work that they'd done previously. Or at least as you understood it based on one phone call you had with a mutual friend. And then they get inside your system and you're like, this isn't what I wanted. And this is how Hollywood operates sometimes too, people have to remember that, like this is not machines making choices, it's human people. And so that sometimes leads to dramatic failures around billion dollar properties. But the Nolan thing around Batman is so instructive because here's what happened there. It's not just that those three Nolan movies came out and changed a generation of movie fans and redefined what a Batman movie could be. They changed the Academy Awards because there was so much outrage over the fact that the Dark Knight was not nominated that they re expanded the pool of best picture nominees to 10. And they also catapulted Christopher Nolan to the rarest error that a film director can get to. And it led to several consecutive movies that are non IP that are huge successes, which just helps Hollywood period movies like Oppenheimer and the forthcoming the Odyssey. That just helps the entire ecosystem of movies, of Hollywood, of moviegoing, of people who work below the line, everything. It's a net positive for Christopher Nolan to have more power and access to do the things that he wants. If studios get comfortable with locating figures like that and giving them more power and letting them pursue their ideas, it's going to pay off in the long term. Are there going to be failures? Yes. Are people worried who make those decisions that they're going to get fired for making those choices? Of course they are. And it's easy for me to be sitting on a podcast with you and say, let this guy have a billion dollars to do whatever he wants. It's not that easy. But you have to have courage if you want to do it. You really have to have courage. And the best movies, the movies that live on and the greatest successes almost often originate from creative voices with strong ideas. So I always kind of bang the drum for that. Because if you look over a hundred years, it's not 80 people in a room deciding what would be a good idea. It's one person having a good idea and then getting five people to agree to it and then working with 100 people collectively on the production of a movie to make that magic happen. So you know, whether or not that will happen with the video game revolution is tbd. And whether or not Star wars can recover from what it has been over the last year, last 10 years is also TBD. But I'm not. I'm still optimistic.
- [39:56]
A
Two ribbons I want to tie around this detour. Number one, not to be your sign in editor, but why the Dark Knight is the most quietly influential movie of the 21st century is an essay I would love to read on the Shawn fantasy substack that it not only changed the Oscars, but also accelerated, shifted, did something dramatic to the world of superhero movies that we've been living in for the last 15 years and finally launched Christopher Nolan, sort of previous auteur of not particularly high budget movies into someone who is now given $350 million on a check the second he walks into that studio office to make enormous original films, which are sort of incredibly just original and necessary in this landscape. So that's a really interesting thought that I'm left with. Number two circling back. This was like a great detour. But I want to remind people what the general purpose of this hike was. We were talking about the state of crisis in Hollywood. We were talking about using MOV as object lessons for where Hollywood's going. We just, I think, wrapped the first object lesson, which is that maybe not entirely, but certainly at the edges, video games are going to replace. Are already replacing superheroes as the IP of the moment. The second object lesson movie that I want to discuss is. Happens to be the second biggest movie of this year, which is Project Hail Mary. You've said that you think this might be the most significant movie of the year in terms of how it predicts where Hollywood is and where it's going. Why?
- [41:24]
B
Familiar but new. Familiar but new is the whole game. Now. It's. Project Hail Mary is a story we haven't seen before, but we have. We have seen a man alone in space. We have seen a man with a friendly alien in space. We have seen spectacle at this level. We have seen Ryan Gosling be mesmerizing. All of this is not new to us, but the package, the timing and the execution is very special. I mentioned that I was at Cinemacon in Las Vegas. I was also there last year. And last year, on the Wednesday night of that conference, they presented to theater owners in the press an extended look at Project Hail Mary. One year before its release. They kind of put it all on the table and said, this is our movie for Amazon. Mgm. We bought mgm. We're getting into the theatrical distribution game here. Really significantly, we're making hundreds of $200 million movies. We've got Ryan Gosling coming off of Barbie, and we've got Phil Lord and Chris Miller, these two guys that I mentioned earlier with a huge vision of a novel, a literary adaptation from the man who brought you the Martian, Andy Weir. And also, there's an alien in this movie. And we're showing you everything. We're putting the alien in the trailer. We're not even hiding that from you. They knew they had the goods. The movie is very expensive. Lord and Miller were on the big picture. They talked about how they made the movie. They made the movie with a tremendous amount of handcrafted, practical approach. They built an entire set. That was the ship. There is Plenty of CGI in the movie, but there was a level of care and a level of freedom that they were granted on the project that is unusual. So you take that familiarity and you take that creativity and you take that sense of independence that these guys were able to exert inside of that world. And then you take Ryan Gosling, who maybe isn't a name that came up in that top 10 that you just noted, but is it 11 or 12? And maybe now has penetrated the top 10 based on this success. And you put all these things together in a blender. I think this movie's got movie studios kind of freaked out because they know that this says something. They know that this indicates something about what we want at the movies. But these don't come along every day. They're hard to do. They're hard to pull off. Getting this convergence of all of these figures is really important. But the thing that is so great about Project Hail Mary is it's not just that it's not a sequel. It's not just that it's not a legacy quel. It's not just that it's not a prequel. It's not just that it's a remake. It's that it feels like something we haven't seen before, but it doesn't scare us. There's like something very comforting about something, delivering on what's on the label. Ryan Gosling in space with an alien. And it being heartful, thoughtful, dramatically and stylistically exhilarating and feeling like it was made by people, not feeling like it was made by a machine or computers. And so I am so hopeful that this movie inspires the people who agree to make movies that they can do this more regularly. This movie is going to cross $700 million at the box office worldwide. Again, this is also rare air. This is highly unusual for a movie like this to break containment. If you look at the holds weekend to weekend, the small percentage drop because people are going to see this movie and they're telling their friends, you should go see this. And then they're going to see it again and they're going to see it on premium large format screenshots. And they also. There's one other thing about this that is interesting. They found the right release date for this movie, which sounds like kind of a boring discussion to have. But a lot of what goes into movie strategy from the studios is figuring out when a movie is going to hit. This was an empty corridor here immediately after the Academy Awards when Project Hail Mary came out, which is not typically it's not the dumpy worry of January. It's not summer blockbuster season. It's in the same space where a movie called Civil War came out a few years ago from Alex Garland. And it's in the same space where a Minecraft movie and Sinners came out last year. What was once thought to be quiet is now open terrain. Every weekend of the year is now an interesting time to release a movie, as long as you're not competing against another movie that is like you. I bring this up because in December, Avengers, Doomsday, Aforementioned and Dune Part three come out on the same day. I am so interested to see what that means for both of those movies and whether or not the audiences, which are very similar on those two movies, will sustain the same level of enthusiasm for both over time. But Project Hail Mary is. It feels like a comet as well, but I don't think it has to be. I think that people just have to really commit the way that they committed to Lord Miller and Gosling on this one.
- [46:14]
A
Well, I love the fact that you said that. One reason why Project Hail Mary succeeded is that it had this ingredient of familiar but new. Nine years ago I wrote my first book, Hitmakers, which is about the question of why some things succeed in pop culture. And the thesis of that book basically was an idea that I called the Law of Familiar Surprises. I said that if you look at psychology, people are torn between two opposing forces. A love of discovery, a love of discovering things they didn't previously see, but a deep preference for high familiarity. So we love to find new things that remind us of old things. And the story that I told from Hollywood history, and maybe you can tell me if the story is a little bit apocryphal, is when George Lucas was writing episode four in 1960s, 1970s, he had this world building exercise that was like a little bit of Far east and a little bit of spaghetti Western. And he was turning scripts over to his friend Francis Ford Coppola, saying, what do you think of this? And over and over Coppola was saying, this is dog shit. I don't understand what story you're trying to tell here. And Lucas, again, this is just the story, discovers the work of Joseph Campbell, who wrote about mythologies around the world and whose thesis of mythology is that all mythologies are essentially the same story. The hero of A Thousand Faces that over and over again, what you see in religious origin stories is an orphan who is invited by a wizard to go on a quest, initially rejects that offer because he's so normal but eventually goes on the quest, in the process of going on the supernatural quest, discovers his own origin story and the origin story of his parents and why they died and returns to the world as the hero or the one or the son. And so one reason I offered that Star Wars Episode 4 was so successful is that it was this unbelievably original world building exercise where when you opened the door, you didn't find like a slightly familiar story, you found literally the most familiar story in the history of storytelling. The orphan who goes on a supernatural quest to discover the identity of his long lost father and his own possibility as a hero. And I love this idea of familiarity combining colliding with novelty. Not only because I think it works at the level of movies, I think it works frankly at the level of music. We love hearing new songs that remind us of our favorite music. I mean, look, I'm telling you're roughly my age, so. And have a vague understanding of your music tastes, I would guess that if you heard an artist, let's say average age of this band being, say 21 and a half years old, that sounded exactly like Kid A, we would lose our absolute goddamn minds because it would be a version of one of our favorite albums fit for the 2020s that reminded us of the experience of listening to Radiohead 20 to 30 years ago. We love this feeling of reaching for something that we thought was unique and new and discovering in it the feeling of home. And so, and I love, I think my favorite movie experiences, my favorite cultural experiences are often that this discovery of familiarity. So I love that you referenced that because any opportunity that I have to reach back to a nine year old project, I will always take. Why don't you make the last question?
- [49:33]
B
Can I add something to that and
- [49:34]
A
then we can go to the next one? Yeah, of course.
- [49:36]
B
So one of the things that I love about movies is their purposeful, iterative quality. One of the movies that changed my life was Pulp Fiction, which completely split my head Open at 13 years old and led me down a path that has me speaking with you here today. And I was just magnetized to the tone and exuberance of Quentin Tarantino's writing style and filmmaking style. And I did not know hardly any of the references he was making to the 75 years of film history in that movie. Likewise for most of the other movies that he made in the 90s when I was seeing them. And since that time, I've really educated myself. And I would argue I know almost every reference he's ever made. In a movie at this point. But there's something wonderful about that. There's something connective about finding a movie, feeling like it had never happened before, and then not feeling betrayed, but feeling inspired to then go back and understand each link in the chain for that filmmaker. If you look at Project Hail Mary and you look at the movies that inspired that movie, from 2001 to E.T. to Castaway to the Martian, all of those movies are inside that. And there's other movies, too. And if you talk to filmmakers, they'll tell you what movies they were thinking of when they were making the movie or what movie changed their life when they were 12 years old and how it informed the work that they do today. Movie loving is an act of spelunking. You have to go find more. There's always more to find. This is what makes it such a great hobby and pastime. And it's not like people who make movies, for the most part, are engineers who get their degree and then just go in and punch their cart every day. They're people who got into it because they love it. They really love what came before and what inspired them. So this is an example where that familiarity that you're talking about is not just the stratagem, right? It's not just George Lucas reading Campbell and thinking like, well, this will make me a successful movie maker. He's like, this will make a successful story that I love and that other people will love. So it's very valuable and very important. And I just. I hope, again, the people that are making the movies love them as much as the people that are watching them, because that's a huge part of this.
- [52:01]
A
We've got 10 minutes left, and I want to talk a little bit about some ideas that connect to the larger question of the state of American culture and how it's changed, even just during your career. If I'm not wrong, you were. You were a music writer, right? You were an editor at Vibe. You were writing Pitchfork reviews in 2009, 2010. There was a period not long ago when I feel like the album review, like, essays about music meant something. Like, I remember in 2010 when my beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy got a 10 from Pitchfork. That wasn't just a moment. Like, it meant something to Kanye. I. Like, I got texts from or emails from, like, five people saying, did you see this? Like, we loved late registration. This is going to be the best album we've ever heard. They were sending each other the same link. The conversation about the cultural product had its own prestige, had its Own allure. It meant something. I don't think album reviews mean what they used to mean. I don't think there are Pitchfork moments for Kanye style albums anymore. But conversations about movies, I think do mean something. And I wonder as someone who in the 2010s participated in writing essays about music when essays about music really meant something. And now you make podcasts about movies at a time when I would argue and you would hopefully agree, even if self servingly, that podcast about movies mean something. People listen in the millions to grow watchables to your show. I mean millions collectively, we're watchables your show. Blank check. Conversations about movies, even in a world where tickets bought to movies are declining, have a place in the discourse. In a way, I think that conversations about music don't. And I wonder what you think about this idea that sometimes or throughout cultural history, there's an evolution not just in what the product is, the cultural product, music or movies. There's an evolution in what kind of conversation we can have about culture. Because I feel like your career is constructive on this point.
- [54:14]
B
Yeah, definitely not by design. I think it's an interesting coincidence. A fascinating coincidence is that 10 out of 10 review that you refer to on Pitchfork about the Kanye album was written by Ryan Domble, who was my best friend in high school. And I reviewed the album for the Village Voice as well. And there was not a number assigned to it, but I also would have given it a 10 out of 10. At the time, I was obsessed with music magazines and that's what led me to becoming interested in album reviews. And my career kind of dovetailed neatly with the rise of Pitchfork. And I joined Pitchfork. I think I wrote my first review for Pitchfork in 2003, and that was just as the site was becoming extremely powerful and I felt very privileged to be there. They didn't pay very much, but it really developed an outsized voice. And then I think instilled in our generation this sense of importance in that publication which was operating in the lineage of Rolling Stone and Spin and Vibe and the Source and all of these other publications that came came before it. I think one of the reasons why that mode has shifted, there's a whole media podcast we could do about what happened to magazines and then websites and all these other things. But music and podcasts and television and even TikTok and all of these modes of consumption that we have for our entertainment are all passive modes of entertainment. They can be consumed while multitasking or while doing something else, or while barely paying attention. Moviegoing is an active participation. To go to a movie theater requires buying a ticket, going to a new place, sitting down quietly, and not doing anything else but looking. I think this is one of the reasons why I'm still hopeful about the future of movies and why I think that the conversations about them drive a lot of interest. I mean, I've been astonished to see, like, what's happened with movie podcasting since I've been doing it. It's obviously been incredibly heartening for me as someone who really cares about movies since I was five years old. But there's something about the attention span that is in peril right now that movies resist. And because of that, I think it is leading to an engagement, especially among young people. There's a lot of studies about this as well, about Gen Z's relationship to moviegoing that is very encouraging. And I think that that world of discovery that I also implied around Pulp Fiction is not as easy to conquer as other forms of newer media. But it is very fun to dive into. And so you can talk about letterboxd and the way that it encourages a kind of gamified, diaristic approach to movie watching. There's not really a version of that for music. There are people who can post their favorite songs, and I post my favorite song on Instagram all the time when I'm listening to a new record. And I love it and I still post it, but it doesn't have that same community orientation than movies do. So it's just by chance, but they're kind of lucky. Don't blow it. You've actually got something that is able to withstand this moment in loss of attention and in cultural overload. So it's up to the movies to be good, to manifest success there.
- [57:17]
A
Yeah, I think there's something interesting about the fact that attention writ large among the American population is flowing from long form to short form, from movies and books to TikTok and reels. And that's not just an impression, that's statistical. Like Americans in the early 2000s bought five movie tickets a year. Now they buy like two to three. And if you look at short form video, it's absolutely going exponential. But who has a favorite TikTok who's got like their five favorite reels? If I like find a 17 year old and I'm just like, really quick, top five TikToks, what are they? When I was 18 and went to college and remember when we first got Facebook, I was so excited to list my five favorite movies, my five favorite albums, they meant Something. I feel this way about books, too, that books, in a weird way, this was my experience with abundance. Certainly I'm doing this for a camera, but I'll describe it for folks who are not watching. The audience of people that read Abundance is like this little tiny circle. The audience of people that bought Abundance and didn't read it is this slightly larger concentric circle. And the audience of people that either listen to a podcast with me and Ezra or listen to a podcast where people talked about how much me and Ezra suck or just were vaguely aware of the existence of podcasts about how me and Ezra suck is this enormous concentric circle surrounding those concentric circles. And in a way, I remember both of us having this conversation on the book tour. I said, it's almost like the ultimate product of a book. Is the conversation like the largest, most significant way that this book is going to change politics, people's lives, their opinions, their voting habits, is not the degree to which they make it to page 57. It's the degree to which they are somehow pilled by, influenced by, infected by its ideas. And in a way that could happen maybe even more efficiently on a podcast than by reading the book. And I still, of course, encourage people to read it. But there's an interesting way here in which maybe both with books and film, which in the grand scheme over 80 years, might be declining in terms of their share of the cultural landscape. Nonetheless, because they are long form, because they are rich texts, sometimes even literally, you can have conversations about them. And that makes them sometimes perfect for podcasts in a way that, like, maybe the best TikToks aren't like. I certainly don't listen to podcasts that are like, here's the best five TikToks of last week, and let's discuss what they mean to American society. And so there's just this interesting relationship right now, I think of American attention flowing in one direction, but memorability and impact still sometimes holding in that space where it seems like attention is flowing away from that, that is to say, books and film. In the last few minutes, we've talked a little bit in our private conversations about a theory that you have of American culture that you call hypernitch. And I definitely don't want to leave this conversation without allowing you to cook a little bit on hypernitch and letting me react to it.
- [60:09]
B
Yeah, so it's oriented out of my experience in movie podcasting. And so what you were just discussing, I think, is really relevant to this one of my. I love to look at the performance of the Big Picture Podcast. Like literally what episodes are clicking the most and why. And I'm actually quite interested in that for plain English as well. Because of the kind of smorgasbord of options for topic choice that you have on your show and seeing what is connecting with people and what is not is not always as clear and expected as one might imagine. On the Big Picture, we do a lot of movie drafts. Those are always popular. People love that. They love me and Chris and Amanda yelling at each other and having fun and talking about a whole wide array of movies. But then sometimes there are movies that are not the biggest movie of the year, but are the biggest podcast of the year. And why is that? Why is it that One Battle was deemed a box office failure by industry analysts but is probably the most discussed movie of the year on popular movie podcasts? And why is it that people want to hear people talk about that movie? There's a lot of reasons why that is its relationship to the filmmaker. It's got the biggest star in the universe in the movie. It's an Academy Award contender and eventual winner. But there is something around that hyperniche that you're talking about that I think speaks to a lot of different modes of consumption. You opened this conversation by talking about ticket sales being down. I would love to see a similar data point around subscriptions in America. What are people subscribed to? I say this as I have just launched a newsletter and I am seeing literally people agreeing to subscribe to my thoughts. And the notes that they send me when they subscribe are, I've been listening to you for years. Thank you so much for all the free stuff. I'm more than happy to share some money with you, which is an extraordinary ideological cultural exchange that there is someone who is like, I like what you do and I want to directly reward you for doing that. As long as you keep working hard and doing it. I'm not the totality of movies or movie commentary. I'm just one person. But I exist in a kind of niche. I exist in a kind of small world of coverage that people are connecting to. I would argue this extends to all walks of life, that anything that features exploration into an idea is worthy of this. And people are starting to dot their time and their money in all of these smaller ways around, smaller things that appeal specifically to them. And they have a way to get a direct result. In the first newsletter that I wrote, I cited this newsletter that I love called MetsFix, which is a New York Mets newsletter they cover everything that's been going on with the New York Mets. New York Mets, of course, are an absolute nightmare and the bane of my existence. However, it's nice to have a place every morning where someone is communing with me about that failure. And I don't know that metsfix as a financial or creative proposition would have made sense in 1997 or even in 2007, maybe 2017. But right now, it's a vital way of understanding what's going on with the team. And it's just written by a small group of people who are working hard, who I think have other jobs, but they're able to kind of build this business around the obsession with this singular team. Not Major League Baseball, not the trends in the sport, just this team. And so I see this real pathway, this is a pathway for media. It's a pathway for people who are looking to reinvent their creative lives. You know, you're doing it yourself right now. There's something really unique happening in a kind of ecological way around people connecting with others that I find to be really fascinating. It's a business story. It's a creative story. It's a personal story. And it's not by leaning into the biggest possible story. It's by finding the right space for yourself and trying to be the most, if not authoritative, the most connected to and consistent around that space. So that's hyperniche. I'm interested in it. It's a bit of a crackpot theory, but I can see with my colleagues and my friends and all this work that we've been doing for 20 years trying to figure out what it means to participate in this world. The last five years has been whiplash in terms of what it is that people are doing and achieving.
- [64:15]
A
Yeah. I mean, one thought that leaves me with is it just taps into at least two phenomena that I've been following closely, not only on podcasts, but my writing over the last few weeks and months. One is I had. This is initially gonna sound like it has nothing to do with our conversation, a podcast episode with a religion scholar named Ryan Burge, who talked about what he called the substackification of religion. So he said, you know, if you look at the rise of secularism in America, Right. It's easy to tell that as being an anti institutional story. Right. People who say, I don't like the Catholic Church, I don't like what Judaism is about, therefore I'm going to be agnostic or atheist or anti theist. That's anti institutional. But what he said is even the rise of religion in this country, even the religions that are growing fastest tend to be what are called non doms, non denominational Christian faiths that tend to be built around a single individual who sometimes just starts in a garage or like some empty store down the street with a group of 13 people in a Bible study, and he's like, I got an idea about Jesus and I'm just gonna tell you what I think. And. And it grows into a megachurch and these non denominational churches are taking over. Ryan said it's a sub sacification of religion because it's not just the decline of religion that's anti institutional. Even the growth of religion, the success stories in religion are all about essentially individual substackers of faith saying, trust in me, subscribe to me, and them creating a new church. But the other tension point I think this reveals, and this gets us right back to the main theme of this conversation, is this difference between what you might call subscription media and ticket media, right? When people subscribe to you, they subscribe to Sean. When they subscribe to the big picture, they subscribe to you and Amanda. They have an ongoing weekly relationship with individuals that they hear from, that they form parasocial relationships with, that they see a movie, and then the first thought they have is, I cannot wait until Shawn and Amanda talk about this because I have some theories, but will they agree with me? And so there's this rolling relationship that we have with influencers and podcasters and writers that is taking over media, right? That individual subscriber, parasocial relationship. Movies are the exact opposite. Movies are a group of people you've never met and will never meet, who hundreds or thousands of miles away from where you live, got together and created a brief temporary startup that created one movie. And you buy one ticket or you don't buy that one ticket to see a production made by people you do not subscribe to. And that's one reason why I think there's this like, enormously high barrier to getting people who are familiar with interacting with culture through individual subscriptions to instead interact with culture through non individual group ticket buying. Buying a ticket to something that a group made. And I just think it's like, it's interesting to think of the challenge of movies as being essentially like to be the salmon that swims against this unbelievable stream of culture which is pushing everything toward substackification.
- [67:24]
B
Can I put an extra button on your button?
- [67:26]
A
Yeah, put a button on my button.
- [67:27]
B
One of my prevailing theories of movies is that the radical decline of participation in organized religion in America dovetails perfectly with the rise of Star wars and the release of Star wars, because people through their faith into that level of storytelling and character world building. And I do think that there's something similar happening. I'm a little bit reluctant to overstate the subscription to People as something that has changed forever because I'm very much a disciple of Siskel and Ebert and Mike and the Mad Dog and Howard Stern and people who had very similar relationships that podcasters have with their audiences now or that columnists have with their audiences now. Operating on substack, where you're in their world, you come into their world for a sustained period of time, it's on a regular basis. You don't necessarily pay in $5 increments or $300 increments or. It's not like buying a movie ticket per se. But I always loved going to those worlds. I loved when a new movie came out. You know, when Austin Powers came out, I could not wait to see what Siskel and Ebert were going to say about that movie. That's the kind of thing that is not going anywhere. It's just the way in which we receive it is evolving, which I don't think is a bad thing. I think as private equity has hollowed out much of our media institutions, I do think that there has to be alternatives and this feels like a viable alternative right now.
- [68:57]
A
Sean Fenasey, thank you very much.
- [68:59]
B
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