The 25 Best Movies of the Century: No. 1 - 'The Social Network’

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Big Picture - The 25 Best Movies of the Century: No. 1 – 'The Social Network’

Podcast: The Big Picture
Host: The Ringer
Episode: The 25 Best Movies of the Century: No. 1 – 'The Social Network'
Date: December 31, 2025
Hosts: Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins

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Overview: Why ‘The Social Network’ Is #1

Sean Fennessy and Amanda Dobbins cap off their “25 for 25” countdown by declaring David Fincher’s The Social Network as the best film of the century so far. They celebrate the film as an era-defining work that serves as both a masterclass in cinematic craftsmanship and an increasingly prescient examination of technology, power, and social alienation. The hosts dissect the movie’s impact, themes, production, casting, score, and cultural legacy, making a passionate case for its enduring relevance and artistic achievement.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Unanimous #1 Pick

• No Debate About the Top Spot
  • The selection of The Social Network as their top film was never in serious question. As Amanda notes:

    "It has been a collective favorite of this podcast since we've been doing it. It's where we meet, where our tastes meet." [00:51]

  • Song: The Social Network represents the pinnacle of grown-up, mainstream, auteur-driven American filmmaking.
• The American Trilogy Context
  • Sean frames the film as the final piece in a trilogy about America: the past (“the America that we had”), the present, and what's to come.

    "The movie, in its construction and its intention, wants to show you...a guy who's a ruthless creator...But I don't know if it even really knew how much foresight it was going to have." [01:58]

Plot and Structure

• The Social Network is described as “our generation’s Citizen Kane”—a media/tech mogul's story that becomes an allegory about ambition, alienation, and the emotional costs of ruthless innovation.
  Amanda:

  "It is about a media tech mogul who builds something and takes over the world while alienating everyone around him and ends up at the very end...searching for a piece of connection." [04:38]

The Film’s Craft: Fincher + Sorkin (+ Rudin)

• Fincher’s Clinical Precision, Sorkin’s Talky Brilliance
  • The hosts praise the collaboration between Fincher’s cold, meticulous style and Sorkin’s energetic, stylized dialogue as creating something greater than the sum of its parts.
    Amanda:

    "The sum is greater than the parts in this particular case. They bring out the best in each other." [10:17]

  • Sean:

    "This is a rare case where the meeting point between Fincher's style and Sorkin's strong writing ... makes this a very special case of docudrama that is also mass allegory." [06:39]

• Scott Rudin’s Influence
  • Note is made of producer Scott Rudin’s role—producing six films on their century list—and the complicated legacies involved (including Rudin, Kevin Spacey, and Armie Hammer).

The Characters and Performances

• Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg
  • Eisenberg’s unlikable, defensive, and enigmatic performance is called the movie’s “ticking clock,” essential for its success. Sean:

    "Jesse Eisenberg is the absolute center ... he's deeply unlikable. He's, like, wounded, but always protecting himself..." [12:24]

  • Casting other actors (like Jake Gyllenhaal, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eddie Redmayne) is discussed and dismissed as less effective.
• Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin
  • Garfield’s warmth and vulnerability are vital for audience empathy—a human heart in an otherwise cold world. Amanda:

    "Garfield also brings some warmth to what is otherwise like a very muted movie..." [21:32]

• Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker
  • Fincher’s casting weaponizes Timberlake’s “worst qualities,” delivering a contemptuous, slippery “devil” on Zuckerberg’s shoulder. Sean:

    "Fincher weaponizes everything that is the worst about Justin Timberlake in this role. It's amazing." [44:24]

Themes: Power, Alienation, and Cultural Consequences

• Score-Settling and Motivation
  • The film is viewed as the ultimate “score-settling movie”—Zuckerberg is driven by insecurity and social resentment, not just romantic disappointment. Sean:

    "He was already that guy...pettiness that we have seen exposed in Mark Zuckerberg..." [15:58]

• Tech as Emotional and Social Disruptor
  • Zuckerberg and his contemporaries are “petulant men with too much money” who “accidentally designed how we live our lives...” [11:02]
  • The movie is about the “consequences of people in Adidas slides who just didn’t consider anything.” [04:38]
• Institutions and Class Critique
  • Harvard and its elite clubs are targets of ridicule, shown as insular, stuffed-shirt worlds ripe for disruption—but replaced by something possibly worse. Amanda:

    "Even the idea of 'gentlemen of Harvard' is played as ludicrous and ridiculous." [32:34]

The Score: Reznor & Ross’s Game-Changer

• Innovative Soundtrack
  • The electronic, propulsive score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is praised as a generational turning point in film music, evoking both anxiety and comfort. Amanda:

    "In the way that The Matrix visualized what the internet looks like ... this did, this is what the internet sounds like now." [26:40]

  • Sean:

    "Sad boys making powerful shit with technology ... What a perfect evocation of the weirdness of this movie." [28:11]

The Film’s Cinematic Legacy

• Major Breakthrough in Digital Filmmaking
  • Fincher’s use of digital cameras creates a “clinical,” “sterile” look that matches the movie’s themes of technological detachment. Amanda:

    "To me, it's clinical. The way that it all looks, and it's supposed to be sterile and unexamined and cut off from everybody else." [49:04]

• Cultural Impact
  • The film not only changed perceptions about Facebook and tech but also influenced art, trailers (with its iconic “Creep” cover by a children’s choir), and the broader landscape of adult-oriented studio movies.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• "It is our generation’s Citizen Kane, in a pretty literal sense..." – Amanda Dobbins [04:38]
• "This movie is right. And it’s unusual for a movie to be so right about something." – Sean Fennessy [08:10]
• "It is a comfort movie about how everything is horrible." – Amanda Dobbins [10:17]
• "He just wants to be told he’s great...and he can’t really get anybody to tell him that or at least tell him in exactly the way that would make him happy." – Sean Fennessy [25:06]
• "If you don’t get Mark Zuckerberg right, the movie doesn't work at all." – Sean Fennessy [24:26]
• "The movie doesn’t go out of its way to psychologize him...in that first scene, he’s a sour narcissist. He was already that guy." – Sean Fennessy [15:58]
• "It just creates such an ecstatic sensation...for a movie that is so mean." – Sean Fennessy [12:24]
• "This is kind of dipping into the legacy of the movie question. But there’s a couple things that I wanted to talk through. One, this movie is a massive breakthrough in digital Filmmaking." – Sean Fennessy [48:39]
• "The Reznor casting is so inspired..." – Amanda Dobbins [27:43]
• "You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies..." – Social Network tagline, discussed by Sean [51:55]
• "The illusion of access, the illusion of connectivity, is so powerful and so wrong." – Sean Fennessy [55:37]
• "The movie does not really express or commit itself to any of the upsides of the Internet." – Amanda Dobbins [56:06]
• (On Oscar loss) "King’s Speech wins Best Picture...Tom Hooper wins director over David Fincher...It was bad in the moment. It gets worse the further we get from it." – Amanda Dobbins [58:25]
• "How did this happen? How could we let this happen?" – Sean Fennessy, on the Oscar snub [63:22]

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Discussion of the Oscar Loss and Cultural Reappraisal

• The hosts express lingering frustration—and disbelief—that The Social Network lost Best Picture/Director to The King's Speech and Tom Hooper, despite critical acclaim and winning all major critics awards.
• Amanda:

  "It was bad in the moment. It gets worse the further we get from it.... It's just like—the if you have Winston Churchill in your movie, you win an Oscar rule, which is really silly, but you win Best Director." [62:41]

• Sean:

  "I probably will have the energy to do that spiel for the rest of my life." [63:41]

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Generational & Personal Impact

• The hosts examine how the film’s era coincided with formative years in their own lives—Facebook launching as they were graduating university—directly shaping their outlook and their connections, personally and professionally.
• Amanda:

  "It literalizes the performance. Right. It literalizes the perception and kind of makes the perception the overriding experience." [53:39]

• Sean:

  "This is a movie that clicked for both of us. Two people who've really spent the bulk of their lives working on the Internet and seeing the ways in which the Internet can be incredibly creative and gratifying..." [55:10]

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Final Thoughts & Legacy

• The Social Network is praised as a film that combines perfect craft, high artistic ambition, and immense cultural relevance, redefining what movies about the digital age could be. The hosts hail it as "eternal" and lament that its prescience is only more chilling as time passes.
• The episode ends with gratitude to their team and listeners, and a call to keep both watching movies and engaging with the physical world.

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Key Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------------|------------| | Introduction & Project Wrap | 00:15–01:58| | Why The Social Network Is #1 | 01:58–04:38| | Citizen Kane Comparison | 04:38–06:39| | Meanness of the Movie & Sorkin vs. Fincher | 10:08–12:24| | Eisenberg’s Crucial Performance | 12:24–14:07| | Eduardo Saverin and Empathy | 19:58–21:04| | The Score by Reznor & Ross | 25:55–29:32| | Harvard, Class, and Gatekeeping | 32:33–38:21| | Trailer & Friend Request Culture | 49:30–53:53| | Oscars Snub | 57:11–63:41| | Comparing to Zodiac; Fincher’s Other Films | 65:26–70:15| | Wrap-up: Gratitude and Reflections | 71:29–73:20|

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TL;DR

The Social Network is celebrated not just as a great film, but as a prophetic cultural document—Mercilessly precise, brilliantly crafted, and devastating in its vision of the world Facebook made. Fincher and Sorkin’s fusion, Eisenberg’s performance, and the innovative score all elevate it. The episode is a master class in understanding why certain movies come to define eras—while the sting of its Oscar loss remains a metaphor for how, sometimes, genius goes unrecognized until long after the conversation has moved on.

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For anyone who missed it: This is a must-listen for fans of great movies, pop culture history, and the evolving impact of technology on human connection.

Transcript

[Sean Fennessy]

I'm Sean Fennessy.

[Amanda Davenant]

I'm Amanda Davenant.

[Sean Fennessy]

And this is 25 for 25, a big picture special conversation show about the social network. You know, you really don't need a forensics team to get to the bottom of this. If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook. Here we, we come to the end. We come to the end of this project.

[Amanda Davenant]

We come to this place for magic.

[Sean Fennessy]

Well, maybe not this specific place. We come to the movies for magic. And this is a magical movie that we're talking about today. The number one movie on our countdown. There was never really any doubt that this was going to be the number one movie, right?

[Amanda Davenant]

It was not discussed. I think we'll be airing the selection special later this week that we recorded in March. And I don't recall any back and forth about whether this should move from the spot. It was slotted in at number one. And there it stayed. It has been a collective favorite of this podcast since we've been doing it. It's where we meet, where our tastes meet. And it is also an astonishing and increasingly underappreciated film of our generation, about the world that we lived in, live in, and are going to continue living in. This episode of the Big Picture is presented by Amazon Prime. You know how in every great holiday movie, there's that last minute scramble to make it all come together, from gifts to hosting essentials. Prime's fast shipping is always there for you during the holidays, especially when it's last minute and just can't wait. So if you need fast free delivery that saves the day, it's on Prime. Head to Amazon.comprime to shop now.

[Sean Fennessy]

So we've been saying that the final three films in the list are this trilogy about America and the America that we had and the America that we were and then the America that we are in and will continue to be in today. And the movie, in its construction and its intention wants to show you that it's a character study of a guy who's a ruthless creator, builder, innovator, monster. And it knows that it's showing us something about what could happen. But I don't know if it even really knew how much foresight it was going to eventually have to our culture. But let's talk about it now. So it's of course directed by David Fincher with a script from Aaron Sorkin. This is based on the Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. Though much of this film was written before apparently Aaron Sorkin even got a look at the book.

[Amanda Davenant]

Right.

[Sean Fennessy]

It is, of course, a true story. It's produced by Scott Rudin, which is notable here in our notes. We've got that Scott Rudin produced six movies on 25 for 25. And he represented a very specific thing about American filmmaking and auteurs and a certain kind of mainstream, serious, adult filmmaking.

[Amanda Davenant]

Right.

[Sean Fennessy]

And you can make the case that this is the pinnacle of that in the last 25 years. The film stars Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer and Max Minghella. You know, music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

Suspect. We'll get into that a little bit in this discussion. It made $225 million on a $40 million budget. It is exactly 120 minutes.

[Amanda Davenant]

That's so beautiful.

[Sean Fennessy]

A clean two hours. It is not the only thing that is clean about this movie. One of the most you can eat off the floor movies ever made.

[Amanda Davenant]

It is a Swiss watch.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes.

[Amanda Davenant]

Truly filmmaking design.

[Sean Fennessy]

The movie premiered at the New York film festival in 2010. And I was at the premiere screening of this movie. Yes. And I levitated at the conclusion of this movie. So, you know, I think most people know this, but as Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg creates the social networking site that would become known as Facebook. He is sued by the twins, who claimed he stole their idea, and by the co founder who was later squeezed out of the business. That's the plot of the movie. I think it's a fairly accurate representation of what the film is tracking. This kind of twin betrayal that Mark Zuckerberg enacts upon these people and the ways in which that illuminates really what is underneath the rise of the tech, bro. And the way that social media has infected our souls and the ways in which we have been kind of disemboweled emotionally by a lot of what these people built over the last 25 years. So I say to you, why did this movie make our list?

[Amanda Davenant]

It is our generation. Citizen Kane, in a pretty literal sense, which it is that it is about a media tech mogul of sorts who builds something and takes over the world while alienating everyone around him and ends up at the very end of the film sitting there searching for a piece of connection that represents maybe the shell of something that he once had. I mean, there is an actual structural and textual relationship to it. It is also like a deft, virtuosic cinema like filmmaking exercise from Fincher that I think we sometimes undersell the amount of craft that goes into this, because it is. There's people talking in rooms. And it is a very talky Aaron Sorkin script, which is another reason that it's on this list. It's the best of Aaron Sorkin and it is also about, as you said, the way that Silicon Valley and the Internet and the tech world took over our way of life and exposed something about not just the institutions that we had, but the institutions that are coming and are taking over. And most chilling to me, like the thoughtlessness behind all of it, that there is, this is a machine of a movie and this is about machines. And you know, Aaron Sorkin writes all his version of Rosebud stuff as much as he can in it, but it is really about a bunch of of men who are not thinking about what they're doing until it's too late. And even then do they have the capacity to think about it. And it does continually feel like we are living in the consequences of a bunch of people in Adidas slides who just didn't consider the. Didn't consider anything.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yeah, I think that's definitely true. And there's something even more going on beyond that, which is that their motivations for making a lot of these choices, some of which are kind of constructed in the story, but we can assume have some basis in reality, which is that these were very thin skinned and capricious people. They were like all people. They were reacting to what just happened to them or they were reacting to the way that they feared that the world saw them and that they made a lot of choices to regain a kind of power in the best way that they knew how. In the case of Mark Zuckerberg, it was coding. It was figuring out a way to build something that he understood in a way nobody else did and that that was his way to exert power over the world, over his social circle, over the girl who broke his heart. It's interesting that Sorkin uses a lot of really conventional storytelling strategies that he like kind of is inventing to make the conceit of the creation of Facebook make sense in a movie going structure. But it never feels like dishonest, you know, like the entire Erica Albright character, who is an invention or who is a kind of a composite of a series of encounters that Zuckerberg had. That character is not real, but it feels authentic and it feels like the pettiness that we have seen exposed in Mark Zuckerberg over not just this period of time, but in the last 10 years is really revelatory and insightful. And I'm a fan of Aaron Sorkin's. But I feel at times I can feel his hands on the wheel of a story. This is the rare case where the meeting point between Fincher's style and Sorkin's strong writing and point of view, in addition to the fact that the story, I think really can support this kind of shaping, makes this a very special case of docudrama that is also mass allegory. It's like this is a story about everything that happened and we're using these very real people as a portal into it. And I continue to be amazed by the way in which it was still correct. A lot of movies are beautiful and they move you and they reveal something true about our lives or they thrill us and they make us excited. This movie is right. And it's unusual for a movie to be so right about something. And that doesn't make it great unto itself because there's a lot of other things that we can talk about that we really like about it. But I got chills at the end of the movie again watching it last night just thinking about that kind of sad, lonely guy who's like, I'll show you. And the I'll show you quality of life right now that just sucks every day that it's just so unpleasant to watch people just score settling at all times. This is kind of one of the ultimate score settling movies. And then what do you get at the end of it? But you know, you get your money, I guess.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah, you get baby, you're a rich man. Which is still just, you know, one of the great, one of the great music cues after an amazing score.

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[Amanda Davenant]

I was taken during my rewatch, which is like the thousandth time I've rewatched this movie. And you know, I saved.

[Sean Fennessy]

It's gotta be pretty high on both of our lists.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah, I saved it for a treat after I'd done all my other work and I was like, okay, now I get to watch like my. It is a comfort movie about how everything is horrible. And you know, you mentioned that it's Fincher and Sorkin 2 film. You know, a filmmaker and a screenwriter who we love independently coming together. The sum of is greater, you know, the sum is greater than the parts in this particular case. Or rather, they bring out the best in each other. And I can be a mark for Sorkin's, you know, sentimental streak, his cutesy ness, even. Like, he usually tries to find the heart in anything, including, I guess, like, maybe Mitt Romney, like, saving the presidency or whatever that was, you know.

[Sean Fennessy]

No, his sense of musical theater. Right.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yes. And it's.

[Sean Fennessy]

And.

[Amanda Davenant]

And it can be a weakness, and Fincher, like, just absolutely eradicates that. And there are moments of, you know, like, softness or almost sincerity. But this is a mean movie. And I was struck by how mean it is when I. Which is, you know, what we like about Fincher. That's where we come together. And so it's funny that it's a comfort watch. And then, like, all of the small character observations and small moments of pettiness and revenge. And I was thinking about, you know, the weird stunt that Mark Zuckerberg pulls on an investor with Sean Parker's help. You know, he goes in the bathrobe, and then. I'd forgotten that that results in the guy being so impressed that he invests more money, and you're just like, wow, we really do just live among, you know, tiny, petulant men with too much money who are. Who are just accidentally designing how we live our lives while blogging about it. It is the coldness and the impulsive ickiness that is revealed that just shapes how we speak to each other now. Pretty depressing.

[Sean Fennessy]

It is. And it's so unusual that a movie like this just creates such an ecstatic sensation. Because to your point, you know, I don't think that Jesse Eisenberg is the first thing that people think about when they think about this movie. I think they think about, like, the power of the story, that this, like, steam engine that is, like, moving through the way that the real world kind of reflects some of the things. Just what role Facebook has played in our lives in the last 25 years. I think we think about all those things. Jesse Eisenberg is the absolute center of this movie. He is the ticking clock of the movie. He's deeply unlikable. Yeah, just. You said mean. He is. He's, like, wounded, but always protecting himself, always biting back, always ready with a snide response to whatever is shared with him. Even in moments when you can. When he lets us see that he feels he may have made a mistake, particularly that incredible confrontation with Eduardo near the end of the film where you can read on Eisenberg's face, like, we've gone too far. The fact that the movie just sits with him the whole time, it never, like, breaks back for, oh, I hope Erica is okay. Let's spend 20 minutes with her. Or, you know, actually, like, we don't really spend very much time with Eduardo when he's just being Eduardo. It's always about Eduardo in relationship to Mark. And the fact that the movie works while you're spending all this time with a person that we do not like and we do not think is a nice person and we can't even. The movie doesn't go out of its way to, to psychologize him. You know, I was, I was thinking about, like, why is Mark this. Mark Zuckerberg in this movie the way that he is? And it's not. It kind of dispenses with his trauma or his, you know, anxiety or his resentments. It's. It's a really interesting choice.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about it in relationship to our conversation about There Will Be Blood, which makes a similar choice of. I mean, and that is even more opaque. And he, you know, they even have the character saying, like, I don't, you know, I don't like to talk about that or I don't like to remember these things. But, you know, the script does have a pretty like classical scorned guy structure and it, you know, comes back to even like, it has the Rashida Jones character, which, you know, like, not every casting can be right. But that's okay.

[Sean Fennessy]

I think that's more an issue of the character than the casting. But, you know, it's true.

[Amanda Davenant]

One of my lawyer friends was like, there is no way a second year associate is like an expert in voir dire. But anyway, you know, listen, sometimes you need exposition.

[Sean Fennessy]

Even perfect things have flaws. Ask any diamond jeweler.

[Amanda Davenant]

So. But, you know, she has the callback. You're not an asshole. You're just trying so hard to be one. So there is within the text like a. Oh, you know, a fast. So like, oh, he started Facebook because this girl was like, mean to him and he got drunk. But that's not actually what's happening in the film and in the character at all. And they don't explore what makes the. This person unable to hold his tongue or say the right thing or, or, or do the right, you know, make the admirable choice ever. And every time he gets close to it and you're like, every time you think, oh, he has a point, or like, oh, the, like Winklevi, you know.

[Sean Fennessy]

Like, yeah, they do suck.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah, like, learn to code, you know, like, if you eat, like, 40, you have an idea. It's not worth anything if you can't do it. But then at every. As soon as you get to that place, the film just like. And Eisenberg just pulls it away from you, and you're like, oh, no. Actually, there's, like, something going on with you, and I don't know what it is, but you just can't. You cannot talk to people. You can't figure it out.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes, it is relentlessly bitter in a way that is, I find, really admirable. Like, I really. You know, we talked about. I talked about Eddington a bunch this year, and I'm just like, I'm so in awe of filmmakers who are so unafraid to push away the audience to make its point. This has so many things about it that are easy to kind of grab onto and enjoy, though, that it makes it really distinct and really rare in that way. But you're right on. Over the years, we've heard this levied against the movie, which is like, oh, this guy who got his heartbroken led to the creation of Facebook. It's like, no, in that first scene, he's a sour narcissist. He was already that guy. It's not as though he became that guy because Erica broke his heart. Maybe it activated something ugly in him, but. But he was already bent out of shape about who he wasn't and how to get to the next place in his life and what he deserves.

[Amanda Davenant]

Rowing crew.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yeah, all that stuff. All of these, like, petty resentments or frustrations about your lot in life that lead to. With this superpower that is in this film, coding, but in life, the access to developed new kinds of developed power. Right? Like, that's really what this is about, is like, who are all these fucking ghouls who are not content with a modest life and will do anything to step on people and hurt them so they can get more. That's what the movie is really about. And it's so incendiary in the way that it's communicating that, and so fascinating. I totally agree with the way that you're framing it as Sorkin and Fincher kind of extinguishing what can sometimes be unpleasant or the sort of, like, the small allergies that I have to either of their works, which is that sometimes Fincher is so ice that you don't feel like there's a person inside of the movie. And sometimes Sorkin is so, like, Bibbidi bobbidi with things that I'm like, what is this guy? Like, why is this guy such a goof?

[Amanda Davenant]

That's a really good description.

[Sean Fennessy]

And they do cancel those things out in each other, you know, and they're both at really interesting times in their careers too. Like, I see this very much as Fincher's, like, kind of second act in the middle of his real golden period where he's coming off of this huge acclaim for the Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a movie that, like, was very successful, got a lot of Oscar nominations, but maybe was like, a bit of a left turn for him and a mat. Like a real mastery of form movie. But him, like, kind of reaching for that emotion that he maybe isn't super access. Can't access that closely as a filmmaker. And, you know, that's also his movie.

[Amanda Davenant]

About his dad, so it's like a whole thing. Well, one of the movies about his dad.

[Sean Fennessy]

That's right. Well, they're all movies about our dad. We know that. We've learned that more and more in 2025 as well. And then Sorkin is also at a really interesting stage of his career. Like, I guess he's made Charlie Wilson's War. It's Aftermath of the West Wing. He is certainly considered one of the great screenwriters in Hollywood and dramatists, but maybe, like, hasn't fully engaged. I'm the best alive.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

And there is some. There's, like. It's weird because this movie is such an assignment movie for both of them. It's such a. Like, there's this book coming out. Do you guys want to make it? We should say, in addition to Scott Rudin, Mike DeLuca, also one of the producers of this movie. Kevin Spacey, also a producer of this movie. This is during the Amy Pascal era at Sony, when a lot of movies like this were being pushed to the forest. And, you know, it's like, it's a hot news story that we got that we're turning into an exciting film from Made for Adults. Feels like a total relic. I don't. What, like, what's the comp right now? What's the comp in the last 10 years of a movie like this that was successful?

[Amanda Davenant]

I mean, they're trying to make it again with the Social Reckoning, which I just. I feel quite queasy about.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think we both know where we stand on that. I think if it was directed by David Fincher, I would be incredibly open minded.

[Amanda Davenant]

Absolutely.

[Sean Fennessy]

Because the story is still resonating.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah. But even there, it's also you know, no Fincher and no Zuckerberg.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yeah.

[Amanda Davenant]

And I guess. And no Andrew Garfield. Because this story has moved on. And I do think Andrew Garfield is also essential to this. There are kind of, you know, there are the twin betrayals and then there are also the angel and the devil. On Mark Zuckerberg's shoulder, Eduardo Savin and then Sean Barker as played by Justin Timberlake. Incredible casting. You know, you.

[Sean Fennessy]

Again, he's excellent in the movie.

[Amanda Davenant]

You win some, you lose some. But the Eduardo character is, is the heart, is the Sorkin. And. But, but because it's a Fincher movie, like, he still is kind of a screw up and he makes, you know, bad decisions and what happens, happens. But I do think that that's. Without Garfield, you don't. It's ice cold. You don't have anyone to relate to, anyone to at least empathize with if you're not totally rooting for him. Because, like, why didn't you just go to Silicon Valley, you know, instead of staying in New York and pounding the pavement and like, obviously advertising was not the right. You know, he's wrong, but you still root for him.

[Sean Fennessy]

So he's just, he's vulnerable in a world of invulnerable dicks. He's somebody who you can feel. Garfield's a very empathetic actor. He's an actor who always wears his heart on his sleeve in movies. And because you can feel how he's feeling, you want to be with Eduardo. You know, in the grand scheme of things, is Eduardo a hero of our times? No, he's like another tech guy.

[Amanda Davenant]

You've got a huge amount of money and he's restored to the mastiff.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes.

[Amanda Davenant]

Garfield also brings some. Some warmth to what is otherwise like a very muted movie and just some highs. I mean, you know, Chris loves to do Mark, but you need someone loud. You need something to fight against or otherwise it does become sort of inert.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yeah. I think he just has like access to his feelings. The moment when Brenda Song's character recognizes him at the speech and he realizes what the creation of Facebook will mean for him, which is like, he's gonna get that ego boost and that sense of being seen that, like the fact that that's just not enough for Mark, like, that doesn't convey in the way that it would for most 21 year old guys where they're like, damn. Brenda Song is interested in what I have to say about anything, which would be very powerful for most people. Mark Zuckerberg is on another path. He's On a warpath that is much more disturbing. And, you know, who knows if that's accurate to what was going on at that time? We can't really say, but. But the movie conveys that really well. And I agree. Garfield is really, really special. I didn't have a huge relation to him as an actor when I saw this movie. It's another example of Fincher kind of plucking somebody and being like, here, think about this. They're really special. Eisenberg's kind of the opposite. Eisenberg in 2010 is coming off of Zombieland and Adventureland and is a very rare kind of actor. Feels like an actor who would have been very famous in the 1970s. You know, a lot of hallmarks of Dustin Hoffman and Elliot Gould and Robert Duvall. A kind of, like, handsome character actor who can carry a movie on his shoulders. But I was just trying to think of, like, who are the other actors that would even are, like, in this league, you know, guys who are now, you know, they're roughly our age. That would have been up for this part that you would have said, like, okay, they could carry the movie. It's like, funky list that I made. Yeah.

[Amanda Davenant]

And they're all too charismatic, you know, like Eisenberg, Jesse Eisenberg. It's like, very charismatic. I've seen the now youw See Me films, and I've seen him, like, thanking, you know, the social media managers on the. On, like, his press tours. But he can turn it off. None of the people you wrote down here with the, like. Even if when Jake Gyllenhaal turns it off, he's. There's like anti charisma going, well, he's.

[Sean Fennessy]

So I'll. I'll read the names and we can kind of talk through it very briefly. Just because I thought it was an interesting exercise. I mean, guys who are roughly between 40 and 45 right now. Jake Gyllenhaal, John Krasinski, Ryan Gosling, Rami Malek, Eddie Redmayne, Joseph Gordon Levitt. You know, these are. That's kind of the zone of the type of actor that we're looking for now. Jake Gyllenhaal is jacked. John Krasinski is 6 4. Not all of this makes sense, but just trying to think about who could carry a movie like this. There aren't a lot of actors. And if you don't get Mark Zuckerberg. Right. The movie doesn't work at all.

[Amanda Davenant]

No.

[Sean Fennessy]

So I think that alone is a fascinating feat. You could see it with Eddie Redmayne. It's not impossible to imagine the movie. It just wouldn't work very well.

[Amanda Davenant]

It would be too emotional. He does all the things with his big eyes, and you're just like, okay, you're sad. We know you just want to connect with people. And that's the thing, is that, like, Mark Zuckerberg, as played by Jesse Eisenberg, sort of. I don't know if he actually wants to connect with people or he wants the approval, which is different than actually opening himself up to anyone.

[Sean Fennessy]

I think he. I don't. Maybe this has been true of men for hundreds of years, but I think he's a very modern condition where he just wants to be told he's great. He wants to be told not only that he has value, but that he's great. And he can't really get anybody to tell him that or at least tell him in exactly the way that would make him happy. And that we're meant to believe that that is what keeps motivating him. And you look at the way that Facebook has grown over time. The movie ends with this grace note about how Facebook is now worth $25 billion. Do you know what Facebook's market cap is right now?

[Amanda Davenant]

No.

[Sean Fennessy]

I believe it's $1.16 trillion. This is only 15 years ago this movie was made, and that's how exponentially it has grown since then. So there's been something ceaseless about the path that they've been on, too, that I find really fascinating. Let's talk about the score.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

Many years ago, I described the score as the ultimate writing to music that I would. When I was writing a movie column at the Ringer, I would always listen to this score while writing a column at midnight. And it was a very propulsive, strange. But you used the word comforting, and I found it comforting, too. Felt very safe and metronomic in its way. It's very unusual for a movie like this. It sounds more like the score to a horror movie, or maybe a very tense thriller than a docudrama about college students. And the decision to bring on Reznor and Ross at the time felt like kind of novel. I don't recall if this is exactly their first score, but it's very early.

[Amanda Davenant]

In their career, and it breaks out.

[Sean Fennessy]

And they're now considered by some people to be the greatest composers in film right now.

[Amanda Davenant]

I mean, it is essential to this movie if you get this wrong, because it drives so many of the memorable set pieces, specifically the building face mash intercut with the final club party and. And so. And you really get a portrait of Harvard and elitism and, you know, it's all coming together, but it is just coding, like, so if you don't have that driving. And it. I was listening to it on the drive on the way here, and I was thinking, I guess, in the way that the Matrix, like, visualized what the Internet sounds like, you know, and when you. Or it looks like and you see the zeros and ones, and you're like, oh, that's. Everything's green. This did. This is what the Internet sounds like now. It just kind of coined it. And so just. And there it is kind of literal when you listen to it that way. There are bleeps and bloops, you know.

[Sean Fennessy]

Totally. No, I mean, the Reznor casting is so inspired because there's two tracks of his music. There's this one that is really kind of sad and plaintive and kind of, like, classically morose.

[Amanda Davenant]

Right. Which is the opening theme, which hand.

[Sean Fennessy]

Covers Bruise, which, you know, is like, very, like the plinking piano. And there's, like, a real melancholy in a lot of his. In a lot of his best songs. But then also he's this, like, kind of techno industrial electronic figure.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

Who is using synthesizers and computers to make music that is, like a digitized heartbeat. And the movie also has this kind of propulsive club sound, and the two things are colliding, and what. What a perfect evocation of the weirdness of this movie of, like, sad boys making powerful shit with technology that can then make you feel, like, alive. And the whole idea of, like, being on the Internet and constantly triggering these hits in your mind that make you feel, like, keep going, keep going. The serotonin blast that you get from going through these experiences, you know, Clicking. I like that girl. I like that girl better. That girl. Left, right, left, right, Swipe. Like, all the feelings that the movie evokes so clearly it's just an amazing idea. And I guess it's not surprising. And it's not surprising that someone like David Fincher would have good sense to be into Nine Inch Nails and know that Reznor could do something like this and. But it works so, so, so well.

[Amanda Davenant]

And it's sort of. It immediately became kind of a turning point in terms of music scores and a reference and what. You know, whatever came next in terms of people making interesting choices or even, you know, whether it's going towards, you know, electronic styles or just doing something that you wouldn't expect, it's like, oh, they're kind of in the Like Reznor Ross mold. And it really did break through in a way that is, I guess, not surprising, but remarkable.

[Sean Fennessy]

I think you nailed it. It is a turning point in what we think film music can be. It is so far away from James Newton Howard doing some.

[Amanda Davenant]

And imagine how bad the Social Network would be if it were James Newton Howard or that.

[Sean Fennessy]

I mean, it would just be fine. It's the same thing with the Eisenberg question, where there's just a series of really, really good choices. I. I am very amused always by the needle drops in the movie, which feel more like a Gen X filmmaker being like, here's a cool white striped song that I like that maybe these kids were listening to in this bar in 2003 and then like the Dead Kennedys drop and the Zap Drop and like, songs that just like, you know, 20 year olds hanging out in Palo Alto in 2004 were probably not listening to. I don't think California Uber Alice was like the kickoff to the launch of the Facebook team.

[Amanda Davenant]

But.

[Sean Fennessy]

But it says a lot, I think, about how that generation views these kids, you know, and that there. There was like a misappropriation of the punk rock spirit of the generation that came before them. You know, that in. In the, like, Techno Cruise, in the tech crusader mentality, you think you are, like, breaking the paradigm and breaking the system, when in fact you are just like fortifying the system with new tools. And again, I think the choices in the movie are really, really smart to that extent. And also the fact that there's always an older guy who's right behind the scenes who's actually making things happen. We don't really spend any time with Peter Thiel in this movie, but Peter Thiel is an engine of what transpires.

[Amanda Davenant]

It does hit differently than it did in 2010. When you say, do you know who Peter Thiel is?

[Sean Fennessy]

Yeah, but the movie knows.

[Amanda Davenant]

Who's that? The movie knows. Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

It's very powerful in the way that it associates who really are the decision makers. And obviously someone like Mark Zuckerberg has become the decision maker. But there's so many things about this that haven't aged well, for lack of a better phrase. To borrow a rewatchables ism. It's like Armie Hammer.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

Produced by Kevin Spacey. There's a bunch of stuff in this that's just like, ooh, gosh.

[Amanda Davenant]

I think we've learned more about Scott Rudin's behavior. Scott Rudin, than we knew in 2020.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yeah.

[Amanda Davenant]

No, it's not.

[Sean Fennessy]

What does that tell you about it.

[Amanda Davenant]

But it is also, you know, make what you know. I guess. And also there is something poetic, I guess, about this is a movie about, you know, systems and like all the guys behind the curtain or reinventing the curtain and no one is behaving well.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes.

[Amanda Davenant]

And you know, it's. What does breaking something to improve it mean?

[Sean Fennessy]

It's a really, really good point.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

Um, I think that one of my takeaways watching it last night was that the idea of just because you can do something doesn't mean you should really resonates and that I feel like that era is over. Like we're not in society at large. It's like there is no. There are not guardrails really anymore.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

In terms of what can be said, what can be done, what you can do at other people's expense.

[Amanda Davenant]

Right. There are no gentlemen of Harvard.

[Sean Fennessy]

Exactly.

[Amanda Davenant]

Sure. But even, you know, but even the idea of gentlemen of Harvard is played as ludicrous and ridiculous. And speaking of canceled people, then they demand their meaning for the Harvard code of ethics in front of Larry Summers.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes, exactly.

[Amanda Davenant]

Who is the president?

[Sean Fennessy]

Keep rising to the surface. Yes.

[Amanda Davenant]

It's assholes all the way down, right?

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes, yes. And it's a real takes one to no one kind of thing. And the fact that all of these people populate this world I think tells you everything you need to know about what really is going on in this world. The gentleman of Harvard thing is really interesting. I would say I don't have as much exposure to these institutions that you've had over the years. I'm curious for your insights on how they operate and how accurate they are because I think to the common consumer, pretty mistrustful, but mistrustful of the institution.

[Amanda Davenant]

Or the portrayal on this?

[Sean Fennessy]

No, the institutions and the people who come out of them. Yeah, of course. But that feeling that my middle class parents had when I was growing up has been contorted and co opted by American political leaders now about why you can't trust.

[Amanda Davenant]

Oh, I see. Okay.

[Sean Fennessy]

The elevated classes or the folks at these elite institutions.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

This movie has like a slightly different attitude towards it. It is a very 2010 attitude toward it, which is like these people are all stuffed shirts and they don't actually do anything or make anything right.

[Amanda Davenant]

And you know, and that it's handed down to them and that the Winklevi call, their dad's in house lawyer. And there's a whole bit about like they are going through like the credentials, you know, the whole thing about the Final clubs which. Which is like real and. And you know, they're. The porcelain is a real club. They. They all are. But the Mark Zuckerberg character listing, well, so and so was like this and so. And so it. It does it apt. And I think at least 2010, accurate reflection of like the old world vibe of these places and Harvard in particular, and the value that, like the. The gatekeeping that those. Those people, the final clubs and anyone who tries to get in Harvard. And really, like, at least in 2010, what you thought you were paying for or what you thought that you were inheriting if you went to one of those places. So I think it's accurate and I think, you know, the Larry Summers scene is perfect in many ways because, like, two entitled rich kids who get the meeting because of their dad and then are whining about the Harvard code of ethics and then the former Fed chair who is now stepping back for, you know, like, everyone is just gross and ugly and. And connected in a way to things that you don't want to be connected.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yeah. And the idea that, you know, there's like a friction in the movie where we do want this web of connectivity amongst this closed circuit of people to be broken. We do want to see it broken. We don't want all this power to be concentrated in this place. It feels like a very kind of ancient concept of like the Roman consuls are all gathered together and they're. They're deciding the fate of the common people. However careful what you wish for, right? Because the way it can be shattered can be, you know, society altered.

[Amanda Davenant]

I mean, that's what like the Face Mash final club party, like, Intercut is to me, just like a real flex on a number of levels, including the actual. Just, you know, the filmmaking, the cutting. But on. But thematically, on the one hand, you have this guy building a gross website to pick which girl is hotter and also, you know, hacking all of the quote unquote, stealing things. I mean, who really cares, right? But which. Which is part of the. The fabric of the setup and on, like. And then you're cutting to all the girls being bussed in to the club and, you know, showing off for these guys in backwards hats. That's my only note about the accuracy of how these worlds are portrayed is like, no one in those rooms is that attractive. Just. Just like, for a note. And I do also wonder whether they're wearing backwards hats, but that's.

[Sean Fennessy]

You think no one's ever worn a.

[Amanda Davenant]

Backwards hat at Harvard in the Phoenix. I don't know, it's a different type of bro that they're going for, but I could be wrong.

[Sean Fennessy]

I don't think I would have fit in at Ithaca College with their suit.

[Amanda Davenant]

I mean, like, at the party, I'm sure they're wearing on their own time.

[Sean Fennessy]

I mean, that sequence does a really, really smart thing, which is that it shows you this fantasia of wealth and power where you watch the girls grinding and dancing and the guys kind of ogling, and you see that, like, this is the inside of the inside.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

You know, this is the real skull and crossbones in 2010 or in 2003. But then the party, it feels like, is literally interrupted by the introduction of the tools that these guys create. You know that the conclusion of that sequence is someone's looking at a laptop and they're like, whoa, check this out. And then that is, like, a perfect metaphor for everything that happened to, like, multiple generations of people where they're just like, we no longer, like, ogle girls and they go to parties. We just, like, look at our phones and our laptops all the time. It's just such a smart idea, you know?

[Amanda Davenant]

But it's like. But, like, the fundamental problem is unchanged. It's just how we're doing it.

[Sean Fennessy]

And who has the power intensified and worsened because there's no human interaction. I'm not saying it was good the way that, like, the elites controlled people, but sure, it's.

[Amanda Davenant]

I mean, it's arguable whether, you know, I, as a young woman of college age, when this was happening. I don't know whether I would rather be in the room at the Phoenix or on the website. I honestly don't know what's better for me in my development. Happily, I was neither.

[Sean Fennessy]

Well, I think that's another important thing to note, is that the three movies that are at the top of our list, I think, came out at pretty critical developmental periods of our life.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

And so the 25th hour is a movie that was released when, I GUESS I was 21 and you were 19, and the Social Network was released when I was 28. You were 26.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

But the period that it captures is the same period in which the 25th Hour was released, which is very pivotal for us. Facebook was essentially just getting introduced in my junior and senior year of college. And I remember it taking off like a flash right after I got out of college. You were at an Ivy, so you must have gotten it early. You had it early.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah, I had it my second sophomore year.

[Sean Fennessy]

Okay. What was your experience with it?

[Amanda Davenant]

I mean, exactly what is portrayed. But I thought you wrote that the Dakota Johnson scene is not good. But that's how life happened in 2004. In. I think her performance is. I never woke up in bed with Sean Parker. I would like to state that for anyone listening at home.

[Sean Fennessy]

There's just. There's a. There's a critical flaw in the movie that many people have pointed out. But. And this girl would not have seen things in this fashion. And no human did. Sean Parker did not invent Facebook. Sean Fanning invented Facebook. We knew this in 2001.

[Amanda Davenant]

You mean Napster.

[Sean Fennessy]

Sorry, Napster.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

No one was like. No one knew who Sean Parker was. You knew who Sean Parker was. Maybe if you read like Forbes or you read Billboard. Sean Fanning was the kid. He was the Mark Zuckerberg of that story. So that scene which is Sean Parker invented Napster. Yes.

[Amanda Davenant]

Nice to meet you.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes. That's like a massive exposition dump that's queuing us up for this character. You don't need it. I guess maybe you're revealing he has a proclivity for young girls, which the movie also points back to a number of times throughout. But that's the one sequence when I watch it.

[Amanda Davenant]

Then you wouldn't get what's your latest preneur? Which is still one of my favorite lines of this movie.

[Sean Fennessy]

I think she's quite charming. You can make the case she's never been better than in this movie.

[Amanda Davenant]

Is anyone majoring in French at Stanford?

[Sean Fennessy]

The really good question, why go to Stanford for your French degree?

[Amanda Davenant]

It's also not the only young woman majoring in French in this movie. Because then the Oxford guy's daughter, he's like French literature. Didn't know there was such a thing. So I guess one of Aaron Sorkin, like someone in Aaron Sorkin's life who's a woman was majoring in French and he was upset about that.

[Sean Fennessy]

Write what you know.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

Do we think Rashida Jones's character also majored in French while studying law? French law.

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[Amanda Davenant]

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[Sean Fennessy]

The scene is just like. It's just funny. It feels a little bit outside of the energy of the rest of the movie. And it is really riffing on Justin Timberlake's kind of turn of the century celebrity. He is another figure who kind of rose to power in the midst of this Napster craze and then ultimately social media. And Justin Timberlake's not what he once was. He's not. He is understood socially and culturally in such a different way. In 2010, the world tour was still going. In 2010 he was considered cool. Like, I know this has got real like back to bed grandpa vibes, but Justin Timberlake was cool. He was corny. He was like a Disney kid. Is this. But he was a cool version of that.

[Amanda Davenant]

When Was it the 2020 experience?

[Sean Fennessy]

Was this before that was the beginning of the end.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah, but this was before that.

[Sean Fennessy]

Oh yeah.

[Amanda Davenant]

So this is like before mirror or mirror.

[Sean Fennessy]

I think this is before future sex love sounds. Right? Or maybe it's right around the same time.

[Amanda Davenant]

No, it can't be. Justin Timberlake albums. This is. This is the logical conclusion. No future Sex love sounds of 2006. Listen, my college experience.

[Sean Fennessy]

20 sex love sounds. 2020 experiences. What? 2012.

[Amanda Davenant]

2013.

[Sean Fennessy]

2013.

[Amanda Davenant]

Okay, so yeah, this is the pivot point. And again, you really have to credit Fincher for understanding like what was lurking beneath Justin Timberlake.

[Sean Fennessy]

But this movie has contempt for Sean Parker.

[Amanda Davenant]

I know.

[Sean Fennessy]

And does Justin Timberlake know the way in which David Fincher is reading into him so elegantly?

[Amanda Davenant]

I do not think so.

[Sean Fennessy]

It's amazing. It's an amazing choice.

[Amanda Davenant]

Beautiful.

[Sean Fennessy]

Did Justin Timberlake mean anything to you, Jack? Not as much as it was for you guys, but I think everything you said is perfectly put. Like, he. Fincher weaponizes everything that is the worst about Justin Timberlake in this role. It's amazing.

[Amanda Davenant]

And it's like he opened, like, the rest of our eyes, and then, you.

[Sean Fennessy]

Know, out comes all downhill from there. Yeah, he did a few other things that didn't really help him, but it is a brilliant bit of casting. I think there's great casting all the way down the line in this movie that is really, really incredible. What else. What else do you want to say about this movie that means so much to us and to this show?

[Amanda Davenant]

I mean, we've talked a lot about how prescient it was, how much it understands the world that we live in and to some extent, how it has lived on, but it's kind of hard to. I do feel that some of the younger listeners of the show who weren't there don't understand kind of the instant cultural impact that this film had. I mean, Obviously, it made $240 million, so that's good.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes.

[Amanda Davenant]

But, you know, we talk a lot about films on this movie that are art for art's sake, and I think it's very important to keep making real art. And I also think the Social Network is incredible on a, like, basic artistic level. Everyone is doing their job perfectly. But we also like movies that find an audience that have, like, a cultural moment. Like, we are. We are children of Hollywood. And so there is something that, you know, this movie was a huge success in the moment, but it changed the way that we understood Facebook. It launched. It changed the way we understood the Internet. Like, the sociological impact of this movie is cool because, you know, movies still matter. And so when a film finds not just its audience, but kind of its place in the culture, that is significant. Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

And I think for us specifically, it's a developmental stepstone. Like, it's just a time in your life where you're like, this is an adult examination of something that we experience as younger people, and that. That tends to always make a deeper impact on us. If we were 60 when the movie came out or 10 when the movie came out, it might not be number one on our list, even though we still would have huge admiration for Fincher and Sorkin and the like. This is kind of dipping into the legacy of the movie question. But there's a couple things that I wanted to talk through. One, this movie is a massive breakthrough in digital Filmmaking. I'm fond of films that are shot on film, as am I advocate for going to see movies projected on film. I think it's very important. I think some filmmakers are getting really deft and adept at digital photography in movies. Fincher's always been good, and this is, like, a massive exploration of the different kinds of texture and feeling that you can get from digital. Now, this is a movie about the digital world, so it makes sense that in a movie like this, you would want to explore, I guess it's. The red one is the camera that was used on this film. Jeff Cronenweth shot it, and he shot a lot of Fincher's movies. But it is very dark, very intimate, very smooth. That can sometimes be, like, code for, like, gloppy or, like, AI enhanced or something. In this particular case, it is porcelain. Like, the movie is meant to be this smooth feeling, like. Like running your hands over a dell laptop in 2003, that you're meant to have this kind of, like, frictionless experience. That's kind of what the Internet created. It created this idea of, like, convenience and ease and the false sense of connectivity that we believe we have, when in fact, you know, what we really have is, like, division. We have, like, literally tools in front of us that are keeping us apart. But the use of digital makes all that make sense. It makes all of it feel in a way that, like, it communicates, at least to me, that there's danger in a lot of this stuff. But also it can look good and it can be really appealing, and that's what draws us in.

[Amanda Davenant]

And it's not all great filmmakers can just pick up a new camera or digital and make it work. And I can think of a lot of my favorite filmmakers who have tried their digital because it's set. It fit this, the era or the subject of the film, and it doesn't. It doesn't look quite right. So this is.

[Sean Fennessy]

It's.

[Amanda Davenant]

It. To me, it's clinical. The. The way that it all looks, and it's supposed to be sterile and, you know, and, like, unexamined and. And.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yeah.

[Amanda Davenant]

And cut off from everybody else.

[Sean Fennessy]

It's like a colonoscopy, though. Like, that's this clinical aspect of it. It's like it's really getting in there, you know, it's like it is. Everything is picture perfectly clear. Yeah. Another point that I think you've made here that is really smart about the legacy is the trailer.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

So the trailer is unbelievable. It does introduce a convention.

[Amanda Davenant]

Ba ba ba ba. Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

What does the song remind me of the song?

[Amanda Davenant]

It's Radiohead. It's Creep.

[Sean Fennessy]

Right. Creep, the children's choir cover of Creep, which wouldn't. I don't know if it was the very first example of that. There probably was something that came before it, but it launched a thousand ships.

[Amanda Davenant]

I still remember where I was when I saw the trailer.

[Sean Fennessy]

Where were you?

[Amanda Davenant]

I was at Buzzfeed offices where I worked briefly. The new ones. I mean, there have been many since. And we just watched it on loop over and over again. And then I think, like, this was still the era where then you would just listen. I listened to a children's choir singing radio, and I was like, I'm not really sure. And then people started doing all the mashups. They were like, oh, you can put a children's choir singing Radiohead over anything and make it look, you know, meaningful or, like, important. So this was. It was understood in real time as like, oh, we do this now.

[Sean Fennessy]

Let me ask you a question.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

This is maybe a little penetrating, but I'm going to ask you.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

Did you, at any point in your life, worry about having friends or enough friends or feeling socially like you were in a good place?

[Amanda Davenant]

At any point in my life, yeah. Yeah. Certainly in high school. Right? Don't.

[Sean Fennessy]

I mean, I'm asking.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah, absolutely. And. But. And which is, I guess, pre Internet, and I think high school is particularly isolating for. Well, I was gonna say young women, but everyone. I know it's hard out here for the guys as well, and you don't know who your friends are supposed to be. But there is such a performance embedded into our ideas of what American high school should be and how you're supposed to fit into it. And I went to a pretty, like, quote unquote, traditional high school. So it was football and cheerleaders and. Or you were gonna be the. Or you're gonna do all your homework. And I was like, the homework girl. So I think, yes, in the sense that I was worried about, like, the outward perception of it all, which is a little bit because of high school and a little bit because of the age. I don't know if I was, like, worried about amassing, like, friends on Facebook.

[Sean Fennessy]

Well, I mean, that's why I bring it up, because the trailer is so propulsive and so impressive and so, like, kind of inviting the way a thriller would be inviting. And it has this immortal tagline. You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies, which is written in this white helvetica. Text across Jesse Eisenberg's face on that poster, which is just an incredible movie poster as well. Again, this is like, we used to be a proper country stuff, you know, where, like, the studios and the. The might that they had to work really hard to nail this stuff did make a difference, but.

[Amanda Davenant]

But everyone had staplers thrown at them, so.

[Sean Fennessy]

Well, among other things.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yes.

[Sean Fennessy]

I pointed out, because one thing that the movie really circles well, that I don't think I really. I don't think I intellectualized when we were going through it with the rise of social media was the idea of the friend request. This film ends on a friend request. The idea that you could ask someone, will you be my friend digitally? And await their response and the anxiety that provoked in us. And I think many people will. Most people will relate to what you described. In high school, I actually had a little bit more trouble in the first few months of college than I did in high school. In high school, I always felt like I had a big group of people that I was friends with. And then in college, I was like, oh, I have to make an effort in a way that I don't really know how to. But I think most people going through life, you move to a new city, you start a new job, you meet your partner's friends. This kind of disorientation socially that a lot of people feel at different stages of their life. This movie introduced, like, a new and very. Not this movie the Facebook did, but this movie located a very dynamic and intense version of that. You don't have social media in quite the same way.

[Amanda Davenant]

It literalizes the performance. Right. It literalizes the perception and kind of makes the perception the overriding experience. And, you know, now we have it, and it's like Instagram versus real life and all of that stuff, which we all.

[Sean Fennessy]

That is the evolution of that thing.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah. Which, like, you know, we all live by. And I obviously only. You know, I still only post the cute, happy pictures of my children.

[Sean Fennessy]

There are no unhappy photos of my child. Why would I take an unhappy photo?

[Amanda Davenant]

I really thought I was gonna get a crying baby at Santa this year, and I, like, wanted it, but I didn't.

[Sean Fennessy]

You got a good performance.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah, well, I just. I think that the unhappy Santa photos are classic too, you know, but in our. In our life, you know, now you only ever see the smiling ones, so it's true. But I think you're right that this. That this era was a cementing of what maybe only existed in our. In our heads or interpersonally and Then it was, like, written in ink, as Rooney Mara says, like, on the Internet.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes.

[Amanda Davenant]

And took on a life of its own.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes.

[Amanda Davenant]

And. And for us, that was a big transition. I know. I'm sorry, Jack. That's all you've ever known in life. We screwed up.

[Sean Fennessy]

You know, I did nothing.

[Amanda Davenant]

As. As one battle taught us. It's the. It's not what we wanted to hand down to you. Yeah, but we're sorry. And it's your turn.

[Sean Fennessy]

It's your time now, Jack. You got this, buddy. All you gotta do is destroy Facebook.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah. This is, in many ways the most like, Go to Bed, grandpa podcast of all. But that's okay. This is. It's our podcast.

[Sean Fennessy]

Well, I think it's helpful, like, as we get to the end of this list, to talk a bit about, like, the emotional forces that led to the creation of the list. You know, like, there's no good list and there's no bad list. It's a personal. It's personal choices. This is a movie that clicked for both of us. Two people who've really spent the bulk of their lives working on the Internet and seeing the ways in which the Internet can be incredibly creative and gratifying and exciting or even just, like, endorphin hitting.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

And also all the ways that can, like, make people feel bad and hurt them and put distance between them. And the illusion of access, the illusion of connectivity, is so powerful and so wrong. And yet I've told stories on this show many times that, like, some of my best friends, including your husband and Chris Ryan, I only know because of the Internet, like, I would not have been connected to those people. So, like, the power that the movie is expressing is real. It's just, like, used for evil.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah. But also, the movie does not really express or commit itself to any of the upsides of the Internet.

[Sean Fennessy]

That's a very Sorkin thing.

[Amanda Davenant]

I mean, it is. And it's even to the point where, you know, at some point, Mark Zuckerberg does get chastised for blogging, because this is. Aaron Sorkin lived through all the West Wing message boards and all the sunset, you know, Studio 60.

[Sean Fennessy]

You know, it's understandable. No one likes to be criticized. No one likes to be criticized in permanent ink on the Internet. That's not easy. It's not that. The point is more that there is. The movie does understand that this kicked the portal wide open, but everybody walked through in handcuffs. You know what I mean? Like, just because you got in the door, it doesn't mean that you're Free. And it's just a fascinating exploration of that. Whether or not the filmmakers projected all of this deep meaning onto the movie at the time in which they were making it, who knows? It pretty much doesn't matter at this point. The movie is eternal for us for all of these reasons. And yet it didn't. Yeah, it did not win Best Picture.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

Even though it was widely hailed as a masterpiece, was a box office hit, felt chilling in the way that it summed up all of these feelings that were just really rising to the surface in our culture. Eight nominations, three wins. I won for Adaptive screenplay, Aaron Sorkin, one for editing. Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, who are Honor. Honor. This is one of the tightest, sharp, like, sharpest, just like sexiest movies ever made because of that. Like, it is just gorgeously put together.

[Amanda Davenant]

And the two hour, you know, there is a precision to it. Like everything has to hit its mark. Exactly.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes. For, like, super organized type A people. This movie is full of pornography. And then Reznor and Ross won for Score, of course, which is a great win and a very cool win. And we give the Academy a lot of shit over the years about the dumb stuff that they do. And I'm about to give them shit about this one. But giving Reznor and Ross the score win, that's awesome. That's really cool. That's a fairly progressive choice to your point, about how it being a turning point in film music composition. King Speech wins Best Picture.

[Amanda Davenant]

I mean, this was tough. And Tom Hooper wins director over David Fincher. And David Fincher still does not have a best Director Oscar or any Oscar.

[Sean Fennessy]

No, he does not have any Oscar.

[Amanda Davenant]

It was bad. It was bad in the moment. It gets worse the further we get from it. Obviously, Harvey Weinstein played a massive role in that. And this was kind of one of the last, I think, major triumphs.

[Sean Fennessy]

Not the last.

[Amanda Davenant]

Not right.

[Sean Fennessy]

Of course, the Artist comes immediately after this. What the fuck?

[Amanda Davenant]

I mean, things were bad.

[Sean Fennessy]

I mean, that's abominable to go. Is it? Were they in succession? I think they were in succession. King Speech and the Artist. I mean, that's just brutal. Anyhow, I think the. The Hooper win is really bad. Let's just look back at the Hooper win really quickly. The other nominees that year were Darren Aronofsky for Black Swan, David O. Russell for the Fighter, Fincher and Joel and Ethan Cohen for True Grit. I mean, say what you will about the character of any of those four men who were nominated alongside Tom Hooper. They are bigger stars, more celebrated. Auteurs with huge careers. Also, all these movies were big hits.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

How the fuck did the King Speech. What happened? How did this happen? I will never get over this. I will never get over it. From the moment it happened, I was like, how can we possibly live in these times? There have been many of these over the years. I think we can talk about a couple of the most extraordinary and baffling choices. Most of them are ex post facto. Most of them are like How Green Was My Valley over Citizen Kane. That's one we talk about all the time on the show. You called this. This is like Citizen Kane if he went on trial in the middle of the movie. Right. That's what the Social Network is. Right. Where you get these deposition sequences where you get to explore the William Randolph, Dolph Hearst type character being interrogated by lawyers.

[Amanda Davenant]

Right.

[Sean Fennessy]

But How Green knows My Valley came from John Ford. It's a big, romantic, beautiful family epic. You kind of see it. Citizen Kane was not considered the greatest movie of all time when it was first released. Forrest Gump over Shawshank or Pulp Fiction, you know, it's a bad win. Yeah, it's a bad win. I like Forrest Gump. I'm on the record about liking Forrest Gump.

[Amanda Davenant]

Right.

[Sean Fennessy]

Pulp Fiction was massive in its time as well, but you could see it was like an edgier movie, Right? Yeah. It was a new form of filmmaking. It was Harvey Weinstein in an earlier era. It was a director who we didn't have a huge relationship to. Robert Zemeckis had already given us a lot of big movies and Back to the Future and so on and so forth.

[Amanda Davenant]

Dances With Wolves over goodfella. Goodfellas is a tough one.

[Sean Fennessy]

It is. You can see the case for it. But, yeah, American Western, like, ultimately uplifting or not uplifting, but like, heartful tale of the origins of this country. Like a slightly more progressive bent on the stories that we saw set in the American west with a. With a sort of bona fide screen icon at the center of it. You know, writing, directing, doing all that.

[Amanda Davenant]

Like you understand why it happened. Even though if you don't agree.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes. And you can still go back and look at Dances With Wolves and say, there's a lot in this movie that is good. It's not good, fellas. You know, just like How Green Was My Valley is not Citizen Kane, but you can kind of see it. Even Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan. Even that. You could say Tom Stoppard's script. Really great performances. There's something about the kind of verve in that movie that is at least defensible to me.

[Amanda Davenant]

Right. Listen, I always liked it. And with the release of Hamnet, I'm like, oh, I really like it.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes. And you can also say that Steven Spielberg already had his moment with Jurassic park and Schindler's List and winning the Oscar and all that all happened. So the Academy was like, you know what? We are going to zag on this. Crash over Brokeback is just as bad. I'm not going to pretend like it's not right. It's just as bad. Crash sucks. It sucked when it came out. Brokeback Mountain is a beautiful movie. It's probably, like, number 27 or 28 on our list. It should have won. I think it's a borderline masterpiece. So I won't pretend like that one isn't as defensible, because it's not. But all the way up until that point. And the King Speech is not a bad film. It's just, like, not really anything interesting. Like, it's fine.

[Amanda Davenant]

It's just like. It is the. If you have Winston Churchill in your movie, you win an Oscar rule, which is really silly, but you win Best Director. I don't. I don't defend it. Are you kidding me?

[Sean Fennessy]

I've done this spiel so many times.

[Amanda Davenant]

You haven't even seen Tom Hooper's Les Miserables. Okay? So you can't come to me and say that you understand the disgrace of Tom Hooper winning over David Schwartz.

[Sean Fennessy]

Any Tom Hooper film since he defeated David Fincher.

[Amanda Davenant]

I don't know how close it is on Anne Hathaway's face when she's singing for her Oscar.

[Sean Fennessy]

I totally forgot he directed Cats. Yeah.

[Amanda Davenant]

Listen, it's not good.

[Sean Fennessy]

You know how many films he's made since then?

[Amanda Davenant]

Cats?

[Sean Fennessy]

Yeah.

[Amanda Davenant]

Zero.

[Sean Fennessy]

Zero.

[Amanda Davenant]

That was a tough one.

[Sean Fennessy]

How did this happen? How could we let this happen?

[Amanda Davenant]

I really, really don't know. I mean, it is an extension of how could we let Harvey Weinstein, you know, happen? And there are far graver things that Harvey Weinstein did.

[Sean Fennessy]

He's a monster.

[Amanda Davenant]

So it's. But it's. It's really bad.

[Sean Fennessy]

It's really bad.

[Amanda Davenant]

Thumbs down.

[Sean Fennessy]

I'm sorry. I probably will have the energy to do that spiel for the rest of my life. That's good. Yeah.

[Amanda Davenant]

You got to channel things.

[Sean Fennessy]

I do believe in this.

[Amanda Davenant]

You won't have earned it until you've sat through Tom Hooper's limits. Up. I just want to let you know.

[Sean Fennessy]

Some additional context for how crazy this. This loss was for the Social Network.

[Amanda Davenant]

Okay.

[Sean Fennessy]

Only three films have ever swept the big four Critics Awards.

[Amanda Davenant]

Okay.

[Sean Fennessy]

Schindler's List, which did go on to win Best Picture, L.A. confidential, which did not.

[Amanda Davenant]

Right.

[Sean Fennessy]

And the Social Network. Now, one battle after another.

[Amanda Davenant]

Has it swept?

[Sean Fennessy]

Not yet.

[Amanda Davenant]

That's right. What are we waiting for?

[Sean Fennessy]

New York Film critics.

[Amanda Davenant]

Right.

[Sean Fennessy]

Los Angeles film Critics, npr. And I don't believe the National Society of Film Critics has weighed in yet.

[Amanda Davenant]

Okay.

[Sean Fennessy]

That will be announced on January 3rd.

[Amanda Davenant]

Interesting.

[Sean Fennessy]

So we can find out very soon whether or not it joins it. And are There Will Be Blood episode. I quoted Manola Dargis's review at the time. I'll quote her again here. Mr. Fincher and Mr. Sorkin offer up a creation story for the digital age. And something of a morality tale. One driven by desire, marked by triumph, tainted by betrayal, and inspired by the new gospel, the geek shall inherit the earth. Manola, always the best. Yeah, I think this came in at number 10 on the Times top 100 and also number 10 on the readers. Are you surprised by that placement?

[Amanda Davenant]

No. Again, I do think that it has been a little lost to time or underappreciated or people didn't connect with it in the way that we did. Where was Zodiac?

[Sean Fennessy]

Zodiac is 19.

[Amanda Davenant]

Okay, so it did tap Zodiac. I mean, do you.

[Sean Fennessy]

Gone girl.

[Amanda Davenant]

Is 64 also just a phenomenal film?

[Sean Fennessy]

Yeah. What were you going to ask?

[Amanda Davenant]

Do you want to. You want to get into this over Zodiac? This is the Fincher pick.

[Sean Fennessy]

Let's do that.

[Amanda Davenant]

Okay.

[Sean Fennessy]

You want me to express my feelings first, or do you want to talk about the proposed trade?

[Amanda Davenant]

Oh, right. So a couple weeks ago, you said you would give me one battle over There Will Be Blood if I gave you Zodiac over Social Network, which I thought was just two bad decisions. And I said, absolutely not.

[Sean Fennessy]

It was a ripe fodder for a podcast, which we are now exploring. I thought it was an interesting idea. I'll make the case for it. Zodiac does not have Aaron Sorkin, and so it doesn't neatly tie up this series that we've done, and I think you're right. That speak to twinned interests of ours. Zodiac does something. Zodiac is the master in the way that the Social Network is. There Will Be Blood.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

And that those two films that are the more mysterious explorations by filmmakers at turning points in their careers. You know, there's something interesting about that. And Zodiac is a movie, to me, that is still unresolved, not just in terms of the crime in the film, but in terms of what obsession really does to us. The Social Network is also a film about obsession. This is a recurring theme for all of Fincher's work. I think it is the movie that is the most representative of his work.

[Amanda Davenant]

I think that's fair, and.

[Sean Fennessy]

I'm very excited to watch it again. But it's a different kind of watch than the Social Network watch that you were describing, which I shared. Which I was like, this is fun. You know, like, it's really enjoyable to just be on the hang glider of this movie and to just be flying through in one hour and 56 minutes, the entire story of how everything came apart. The Zodiac is longer, more discursive. It has way more characters. It's a much bigger world. It's more confusing.

[Amanda Davenant]

It's upsetting in a different way.

[Sean Fennessy]

It is.

[Amanda Davenant]

And I can think of specific set pieces that are so messed up, and they're electrifyingly messed up. So you're like, I can't believe you're doing this. And now I feel really terrible. And that can happen all at once in broad daylight. I just. I do feel that we already have a movie from one of our great male filmmakers about how being obsessed in California in a time that is not the present or the recent past.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes.

[Amanda Davenant]

Can really fuck with you.

[Sean Fennessy]

And that film is called Mission Impossible Fallout. I agree with you. I was offering to trade because I was like, there's no way you can get away with There Will Be Blood in Zodiac. They're too similar, in a way. Yeah, they're too similar in terms of.

[Amanda Davenant]

What they're trying to accomplish, I think.

[Sean Fennessy]

And they came out within a month of each other.

[Amanda Davenant]

Right. And There Will Be Blood is truer is your PTA pick, and that's your passion. So if we were going to do that, then there's no reason to do Zodiac as well.

[Sean Fennessy]

I agree. I understand it. It's the only other movie that I think was really genuinely contending for me. I agree that Gone Girl is very much in third place, like, and is a great movie that we love and I think is also a bit. Still a bit misunderstood and incredibly clever and insightful about a lot of things in our culture and the way in which we, like, consume and identify celebrity, what we share publicly about our relationship versus what's really going on.

[Amanda Davenant]

An incredible movie about Ben Affleck, who is the patron saint of my half of this podcast.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes. He's made a bunch of movies this century, though, you know, he has not been. He's, you know, Panic Room, very slick, cool thriller that I love. The Curious Kiss of Benjamin Button. A film I've always had a hard time getting into, to be honest with you. So that wasn't really under consideration. Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. Awesome movie.

[Amanda Davenant]

Banger.

[Sean Fennessy]

Awesome movie. Great winter holiday movie. Underrated Christmas movie. A movie I like a lot. A movie I would love to do on the rewatchables.

[Amanda Davenant]

Longtime Enya movie.

[Sean Fennessy]

Absolutely. Among many other things. Mank. Yeah.

[Amanda Davenant]

We've got a soft spot for mankind. Who doesn't like Mank?

[Sean Fennessy]

A lot of people.

[Amanda Davenant]

That's true.

[Sean Fennessy]

I think it's bad. Yeah. They like.

[Amanda Davenant]

But Mank is also like. If Mank had been co written with Aaron Sorkin. Like, you do kind of wonder whether. Because Mank is Fincher.

[Sean Fennessy]

Interesting thought.

[Amanda Davenant]

Mank is Fincher trying to get into his more sensitive, sentimental side. But, you know, those are not muscles that he exercises that often. So what could they have done together?

[Sean Fennessy]

They never did reunite, you know. You know, apparently a little bit of interesting creative tension between them in the making of this movie. The Killer, a movie I also love that was not going to be a contender. And then next year, the Adventures of Cliff Booth.

[Amanda Davenant]

I'm open to it.

[Sean Fennessy]

Well, I think we have to be for a variety of reasons. That would be a curious choice. Recommend it if you like. I think Sidis and Kane. We can leave it at that.

[Amanda Davenant]

Or I wrote down the big picture podcast.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yeah. If you like this pod. If you like the vile energy that we are giving each other every day, you'll probably. But in a rat a tat format. You know, we're talking fast.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

We got a lot of ideas.

[Amanda Davenant]

Everything's done. And we're just talking through it.

[Sean Fennessy]

We are talking through it, potentially. Luke Gardenino's artificial next year about Sam Altman, maybe. Who knows? Oh, wow.

[Amanda Davenant]

Well, I'd like to like it.

[Sean Fennessy]

Wow. Is that actually happening, that movie? I mean, I think so, as far as I know. Who's playing Sam Altman?

[Amanda Davenant]

Andrew Garfield.

[Sean Fennessy]

Andrew Garfield. Oh, yeah. Sheesh. That's the real sequel to the Social Network. Man, oh, man. Well, that's it for the countdown.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

I wanted to say thank you to Sam Burtwistle, who really helped us a lot in the construction of this list and in putting together a lot of research, especially over the summer. Thanks to our producer Jack Sanders for his work on this episode and the entire series, which has been quite an undertaking for this show. It may not seem that way, hopefully, because there's a lot of ease of use with these episodes, but tacking on a third episode virtually every week.

[Amanda Davenant]

It was a choice that we made.

[Sean Fennessy]

It was a choice that we made. As you mentioned, the selection special will be airing later this week. That is. I don't even. Is that conversation, like two hours? How long was it, Jack? Roughly two hours. I think it's a touch.

[Amanda Davenant]

Maybe over two.

[Sean Fennessy]

It's right around there.

[Amanda Davenant]

Was there screen sharing? Is that part of the final edit?

[Sean Fennessy]

There is no screen sharing.

[Amanda Davenant]

There's no screen sharing. That was just. Yeah. So we're just narrating the spreadsheet in real time.

[Sean Fennessy]

It's a. Yeah. Probably not very visually interesting.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yeah.

[Sean Fennessy]

This is our last episode of 2025.

[Amanda Davenant]

Yes.

[Sean Fennessy]

How are you feeling about that?

[Amanda Davenant]

I'm ready to not look at my face. And I would hope that other people also take a break from my face and yours. But I'm grateful to everyone for listening. Right.

[Sean Fennessy]

Yes. And watching here and seeing your face.

[Amanda Davenant]

I guess so.

[Sean Fennessy]

This has been a very big and at times challenging but fun year for the show. We are very grateful for all the people who listen to the show. Watch the show, go to the movies, engage with movie culture, think about what movies mean to them and why they matter so darn much to us. Buy plastic. I love the people who buy plastic and physical media. Do more of that in 2026.

[Amanda Davenant]

I like people who watch movies and then go outside.

[Sean Fennessy]

Okay.

[Amanda Davenant]

But it is true. We could not do this show. We wouldn't get to do this if it weren't people listening to it and caring about it and caring about movies. So thank you to all of you, truly, thank you.

[Sean Fennessy]

Happy New Year. We'll see you at the movies.