The Big Picture - The Top 10 Fantasy Films, The Toy Movie Hall of Fame, and ‘Masters of the Universe,’ with Griffin Newman!

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

Sean joins forces with Griffin Newman of the Blank Check podcast. Together, they discuss the recent run of box-office successes and what it says about the current state of movies (2:16), before answering the call of Grayskull and journeying to Eternia to unpack the latest adaptation of 'Masters of the Universe' (21:25). While there, they discuss the best high-fantasy films of all time (1:15:40), and Griffin unveils his Toy Movie Hall of Fame (1:25:58). Later, Sean sits down with Samara Weaving and Adam Rehmeier, the star and director of the new crime romance 'Carolina Caroline,' to discuss making the film and the winding paths that led them there (1:45:20). Hosts: Sean Fennessey Guests: Griffin Newman, Samara Weaving, and Adam Rehmeier Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh, Sarah Reddy, and Jamie Yukich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is the Big Picture A Conversation Show about He-Man. That's right. Today we are talking about Adam, aka He-Man, the most significant action-hero toy figure of my childhood and the new adaptation of his story, Masters of the Universe, which opens this weekend. There was only one man on earth who can grab the sword of power for this conversation with me about the movie, the best high fantasy films, and to build his toy movie Hall of Fame. I'm talking, of course, about the great Griffin Newman from the Blank Checker, podcast. Later in this episode, I'll be joined by Samara Weaving and Adam Ray Meyer, the star and director of Carolina Carolina, a new crime romance. Ray Meyer is the man behind 24 Snackshack,

one of my favorite movies of that year, and weaving has emerged this decade as one of the most leading and exciting genre stars in movies like Ready or Not over your Dead Body and my beloved Babylon. Carolina Caroline is a big step forward for her as a woman who gets caught up with a con man and becomes ensnared in the life of very sexy crime. It's great chatting with them both about this movie and how they got this moment in their careers. I hope. highly recommend you stick around for it. But first, let's talk about some movie news with Griffin right after this.

Okay, Griffin, Newman is here. Griffin, you have the power. How are you? It's supposed to... It's supposed to trigger the power motion, but it feels a little... That's what you're not the chosen one, man. Oh, hey. Mine doesn't do that. You know, I was given one of those at CinemaCon

this year, and I felt very special, but yours appears to have LED lighting in it? It does, and it shakes. One could say it has the power within it. It is, it is imbued with the power. Thank you for giving me the excuse to make that a business expense. I really appreciate you having me on the pod to talk about this. What feels like a real psychological crux point for both of us? Yeah. This is a confrontation with our youth, with your adult career in many ways. I do want to get into the movie very shortly, but before you do that, I got to talk to you about what's

happening with movies right now because it's fascinating and this movie feels like a vestige of a thing that has ended that's exactly right you know i you you are famed for your um skills at the box office game on blank check you understand the box office as well as anybody in the world and yet just before we started recording i saw that obsession made five million dollars on a wednesday in its third week of release which as long as i've been following this is in is it really odd unusual extraordinary territory. So like, give me your gloss on everything going on right now. It actually is breaking my brain. It doesn't track as reality. Even the backroom's number was so much bigger than anyone was expecting, but it still felt like, well, this is what sometimes happens. There is a surprise.

There was an audience that the industry didn't recognize was as big as it was. Obsession is defying basically every rule of how we study these things. And the only comps I can think of are these things that have humongous asteris next to them, such as Sound of Freedom, where you were like, oh, it had this big second weekend jump. But is anyone actually in the theater? Are people just donating tickets? And when you hear about things like Nijah 2 making a billion dollars, you know, there was a question of, well, but the government reports the numbers.

I mean, any of the other things that perform like obsession, there are truly conspicu. theories that you can point to immediately of, but who's buying the tickets and are people actually seeing it? And obsession is a thing that basically has not happened within our lifetime, which is like a different type of word of mouth hit, which is opened big and growing. You know, I feel like I think of some comps of things in recent memory. You obviously have platform releases that slowly get to something. the same as this, obviously. Obsession opened wide on 2,500 screens. Totally. And, you know, something like Get Out having a single digit drop in the second weekend is kind of the closest

comp to this. And that was 10 years ago, and that was a drop. It wasn't a gain. That's what you're used to. You're used to things that open well and then hold well. The growing is, I actually don't know how to explain it. I think you used the phrase. It is just the thing of a lot of people have been out of the habit of going to movies in the last 10 years. And people are getting more interested in going back to the theater. Plus, you have obviously younger audiences that are building a bigger relationship to it. And then the phrase is word of mouth is people saying, you got to see this.

You got to see Nikki. You got to see what this experience is like. It's really fun in a room together. And that obviously, it felt like that's special. specifically happened all the time for 75 years, but it has not happened as frequently with a series like unknown people, a small movie, a filmmaker with basically no track record.

The movie that I was looking at data-wise this morning, just to see if it matched up at all was paranormal activity, which was the last time there was a thing that was like, we've never seen anything like this before. It's a horror movie. The in-theater experience was a lot of fun. But the numbers, like, they don't match up. Like, there's nothing like $5 million on a Wednesday

for paranormal activity, as big as that movie was. And that movie basically invented Jason Blum, Horrormaster. So I'm kind of fascinated to see now if this is just a blip, if it is just an unforgettable performance, is it more like maybe a Sixth Sense kind of thing

where that kind of puts Chamelon on the map and then there's like a Curry Barker brand? Like, it can't really go in any direction at this point. It really could. You're making me think of a couple different things here. I mean, Sixth Sense is kind of the closest comp in that it opened big but not huge. It opened it number one.

It made like 20 million. that was seen as an overperformance in that weekend, a weekend that famously sparked the box office game on our podcast. Right. It's my favorite box office weekend of all time because it was like a five-car pile-up of studio releases that all bombed except for the six cents. What were the other four? Do you remember?

Yeah, it's Iron Giant. It's Mystery Men. It is a dick, which opened outside of the top 10. and then I want to say it was maybe maybe it was the first weekend of Thomas Crown Affair which opened a little soft and then held well. Wow, Dick and Thomas Crown Affir, a huge weekend for Amanda. Geez.

A humongous. I mean, her personality is basically built in the first weekend of August 1999. But that was a movie that the idea that it was doing so well became its own form of marketing. Yeah. I think paranormal activity was a little bit more of

you got to see this thing. I can't even explain it. The breathless reporting of something weird is happening here has created its own must-see factor. I was talking to my best friend, Sophie Fader, who is the mother, you can do it mama, of a two-year-old, and thus has not been to the movie theaters in years, barely even watch the stuff at home.

And my friend and I were going to see backrooms, and I was trying to explain to her what's going on. And I could see the shift in the conversation from, this is the kind of thing she's tolerated hearing me talk about for years as my best friend to wait actually, what are you saying? What does that mean? That is weird, you know? And it's the kind of thing where sometimes a person can explain to me

something that is happening in the world of sports. And I go, oh, this is actually just objectively unique. Yes. This isn't interesting to sports fans. This is, it's Wembe. Yes, yes. How is someone born with these proportions? Yes.

I know, but the obsession thing is so strange, though, because it is, and obviously the Blair Witch project is a forbear here in a lot of ways. And there have been other kind of unique storytelling styles like paranormal activity, like Blair Witch, that have become phenomenons in theaters and word of mouth hits, especially among young people. I think even like the jackass movie kind of falls into this where it's sort of like, this is an unusual thing that we're seeing be very successful in a movie theater. The thing about upset. And part of, excuse me, but part of, excuse me, the part of. Part of it, too, I think, is this feels like we shouldn't be seeing this in the theater. Right, exactly. There's something incendiary about this experience, even though it is a commercial release by a major studio.

Right. Obsession is not bad. It has no stars, but it's just a horror movie. I mean, I think it's quite good and entertaining horror movie. Yeah. But it is structurally, functionally, even intellectually, intellectually, ideologically, like, it is just a horror movie. And so that's what is making this so fascinating to me that, like, I do tend to overread these things, but the idea of people getting very excited about a movie this long into

its run, so to speak, is just so unique. Yeah, it's why I bring up my friend Sophie, not that I think it's going to get her to go to the theaters, but I saw something in her where even when, you know, nine months ago I was saying, you got to see one battle, I think you specifically would really like it. Her response was, it's just so hard to get out of the house. Yeah. And here she was like, wait, what is happening here? And there is, I feel like studios and all the prognosticators and the analysts and everybody have been trying to post the pandemic. You know, there's the pre-pandemic wave of, is it over for everything other than Marvel?

And then there's the post-pandemic wave of, is it just over? Yep. And this is an inexplicable, something is happening here, and people like being a part of it, which is the thing that's been so hard to synthesize. What is the thing that gets people out? The movie we're going to talk about today is a movie that is very much going by an old playbook of how do we engineer around a couple models we know

to make something that should check boxes. And there is some weird form of fomo happening with obsession, which I also think, you know, you bring up paranormal activity and you bring up Blair Witch. Those are movies that, like, had a semi-wide, you know, hyper-limited opening weekend, over-performed, and then the second weekend they put it in 800 or a thousand screens and it went big, it went bigger, and then it dips. There was a clear cresting point of it's grown to the right size and now it's trickled. It all built to the one weekend.

And usually that weekend was met with a lot of disappointment of people saying, I didn't think it was that scary. And there's been discourse around obsession, but I'm not hearing that much what the fuck is this movie, which usually you get with these kind of out-of-the-box surprises. And I also think it's fascinating. Well, that's what Backrooms is going through right now. Backrooms is getting that sort of like, what all this noise about this, you know, this didn't scare me or this doesn't work or whatever. It's getting that kind of classic backlash, especially to a horror movie and one that

is so, is so internet-born. Whereas obsession just being a down-the-middle scary movie and people being like, you know what, it is scary. I like it. It reminds me a lot of weapons. It's very similar to weapons where, like, weapons did have a lot of discourse, but for the most part, people were like, well, that movie is good. And it had a kind of like force field around it in terms of quality.

And this feels like it is operating in a similar way. But I think Sean Milan is the closest comparison. And it's not a twist movie. It's a hook movie. But to your point, it's a hook that could have existed. West Craven could have made this movie 30 years ago. And he could have made it with, you know, two cast members from Beverly Hills 90210. There's nothing about this movie that could only exist in this moment.

Wow. Shannon Doherty and Brian Austin Green. I think that's the pair, right? That's who it would be. Perry would be the friend. Yes, he'd be in the Cooper's Homlinson role. Exactly. And Andrea Zucker would be, she would be the other girl.

She would be Sam, right? Yes, that's correct. We nailed this. But right, it's not a movie like backrooms where you go, well, this could only come out of this current moment, could come out of YouTube, could come out of a culture looking back on itself, could come out of technology, all these things. And it's also that for years there has been this failed effort to take the most popular

people on the internet and slot them into the traditional system. And things like Beast Games, I don't know a single person who has watched of their own volition. He's the most watched man on the internet. It's not that he's fallen off. His video still continue to do well. But when you say, put him in the Amazon system and give him infinite money and make him tell him to make a normal TV show,

it feels like the whole thing goes off the rails and neither side is happy. He doesn't find a new audience and his original audience is like, we like the 20-minute thing. And there's been this false kind of hunting of who has the biggest audience, who has the biggest numbers,

versus who is, dare I say, artistically developing in the most intriguing way that feels parallel to these pre-existing forms. and mediums, right? Where there's an obvious, they're evolving towards this door. And I think what you're seeing a little bit of, that's the starting point for both of these movies,

is an audience that feels invested in these people. It's not that they're subscribed and they'll go see anything they do just because they're a fan. It's that they've been watching the evolution of the career, and it feels like some satisfying graduation of all the steps have built up to this and it's working.

That only gets you to the starting line. Right. That gets you to the opening weekend being bigger than you think, you know, or the buzz being bigger than you think. But I do think that's, if there's anything replicatable here, it's that. And it goes back to the studios can't apply dumb thinking to this. The only way you're going to replicate this is to watch a bunch of stuff and find what's good.

It's not about finding the thing that has the view count, in my opinion. The obsession thing in particular is fascinating to me. I think Backrooms has been kind of picked over and analyzed and deconstructed in a lot of ways already because it's, it feels so unusual, but there is a long history of liminal storytelling at the movies. And so there are a lot of comps. With obsession, a lot of people are claiming credit for that movie right now, but that was an independently financed $750,000 movie. And Curry Barker did not have James Wan and Oz Perkins shadowing him while he was making that movie. His father, you know, worked in the business in some respects and understood things, and he was working with James Harris, a season producer, but the things that are in the movie that I think you're kind of classic film critic think don't work, like the way that the film is lit, for example, that would have been fixed on a studio film. Like, a 26-year-old would not have been allowed to kind of make that mistake, quote-unquote. And I think that that mistake, which feels wrong to a certain kind of trained movie watcher eye, is actually working to an untrained

eye. I agree. I agree. And that's why I think Sean Malon's the real comparison point. is the star of the movie becomes, what's going on here? Who made this and what is this feeling? Those Shomelon movies, as much as you could point and say, well, there are bits of Hishcock and there are bits of this and that, there was a feeling there, even with the sort of emotionality of it, the melodrama of it, combined with the hookiness and whatever, that felt very unique.

And then similarly had this, you have to see it performance. Yeah. And I think unlike weapons, which obviously is a humongous performance and an Oscar-winning performance, that's about creating like an icon of horror, right? And it's also a vet just killing it, you know, getting a great opportunity and nailing it. I think this has a little bit of that magic trick feeling that Haley Joel Osman had where you go, where did this person come from?

What are they doing? How are they doing this? And that combined with the language of the movie itself and the weird look of it and the odd pacing of it and all these things where you go, well, is that someone evolving the language? or is that an element of outsider art because these are people who didn't have to go to foam school. Yeah, yeah.

Who learned how to make movies by making movies. They just kept iterating and putting it out and getting feedback and doing it again. We've never had a pipeline like that before that worked. It's so funny, though, because most of the movies

that we think of as the foundational, generational horror films. And like, you know, you and David and Alex Ross Perry did this legendary episode on Halloween on your show. And, you know, Alex talked a lot about the kind of the groundwork of a certain kind of a horror movie. And where Halloween comes from,

that it doesn't come out of a vacuum, that there's sort of four evolutionary strains leading to that moment where it feels like suddenly the atom is split. Right. But so if you look back at Night of the Living Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Last House on the Left or even Halloween to some extent, those are films that feel handmade independently that have flaws that are not polished.

And I'm not. not comparing obsession qualitatively to those movies. It's not really in their realm in terms of what it's doing. Although I do think socially it's getting at something about desire and sexual relationships generationally. But I don't think it's kind of as sophisticated as like what Night of the Living Dead meant about the violence that people were experiencing in America at a certain time. Whether it be in our country or in Vietnam or all these other ways you can read the film. But I just say that to say that sometimes that unpolish is. is so essential for a horror moment and that the more that something is groomed and and and and and buffed, the more suspicious the core audience becomes of the product.

And so that's why this era, and you know, Blumhouse has been guilty of this of like trying to scale up their movies and IPify their movies over the last seven or eight years and getting away from these kinds of movies has been completely antithetical to I think what is at the core of the fandom. You can say there are counter examples that the conjuring franchise. being as big as it is, kind of runs counter to that. They're always going to be pivots against that. But something about obsession just being an indie makes me think that it's

contributing to the quote unquote moment aspect. Yeah, I think so too. And I think there's something weirdly to the fact that you can't spoil it. That it isn't based around a hook that today people

would Google and then go, does that sound corny to me or not. Do I even need to see it? Do I wait until later? That what is being relayed to people in word of mouth is that thing may be really uncomfortable. And the premise, though. What happens? The premise is simple. The premise is simple, but then what actually is upsetting about what plays out outside of maybe two or three moments that you could describe to someone and you go, I get how that's an effectively scary or violent sequence. You know, the scene at the party, how do you describe that to somebody? You don't.

And you could not successfully convey what about that is kind of electrifying. I mean, it's text shant saw is fascinating because Karee Barker's obviously signed on to do a new one. And there's the shot in that movie of leatherface in the field with the sort of lens flare in the sun where suddenly it feels like you're watching like a Terence Malick movie. And it's this sort of inverse of what you're saying of this moment of almost like accidental poetry. suddenly your feelings about what you're seeing get completely flipped around because there's such a beauty in an image that is loaded with so much dread. And I feel like no one's ever been able to explain why that moment feels that way and why it's in the movie.

And on paper, it actually works against everything the movie's doing. But I do think you're right that there's something to, as much as we love the idea of these... Rickian horror otters who have complete control of the frame and of every second of sound

and movement, um, sometimes the inexplicable out of the box hits are either touching on, um, a cultural hot button that you could not have predicted would meet the moment in that sort of way.

Or there's just some fucking thing. Yeah. Yeah. That no one can put their finger on, but people will be watching at sleepovers for 50 years. Yeah, I agree. There's an enough. ineffable quality. I just saw teenage sex and death at camp miasma yesterday. I'm so excited to see that. And it's such an interesting movie and it's almost feels like a movie that is, it's a movie that's like responding to the last 40 years of horror movies. But for all of these things to kind of be happening simultaneously, for the postmodern reading plus a back roomsy and internet focused thing, plus a really more classical Monkey's Paw movie that still has the juice like obsession happening. It's just a fascinating time for the genre and at the movies. Okay.

So I think you set it up perfectly too with He-Man, which is that this is an old playbook. This is a movie that is using something that feels like on, if you just showed a photograph of the characters to a young child, they would be interested. But I'm not sure that the IP holds the same sway in the same way that Star Wars and superhero films and Transformers and a lot of other things have been drafting off of millennial and Gen X born interests.

This being, and I'll use that as a way to kind of, talk about our histories with this character in this world. Yeah. I've said before, He-Man is my first obsession. It is my first, like, I need to collect all the toys line. It started in 1982, the year of my birth by Mattel. Many people think the cartoon started first. It did not.

This was an action figure line first and foremost that then developed IP out of it. It's kind of incoherent in terms of storytelling. It's remedial. It is obviously born very specifically out of a Reagan era. kind of machismo, Arnold Schwarzenegro, Sylvester Stallone, I want to pump you up moment in the culture. Also, a Reagan era striking down of laws that were preventing cartoon shows created solely to sell toys. Right. She-Man is the one that basically breaks the Berlin wall of these can be 22-minute commercials now.

That's right, the deregulatory moment, yeah. Exactly. And to fill in a couple gaps here, because, I mean, this is one of my real nerd corners. And hopefully I don't get too much wrong. But so much of He-Man and the 80s for toys is a response to every major company passing on Star Wars. That Star Wars is the whiff that no one can live down. And so everyone goes, we need our Star Wars killer. And Hasbro has G.I. Joe in its history. They go, let's make them small.

Let's make them fight crazy snake people and use lasers. You know, we can sell more vehicles. They rebrand that. They also simultaneously start collecting a bunch of different Japanese toys, push them together into one mythology, that becomes transformers. There's all this sort of everyone is trying to come up with their killer. And Mattel has Barbie is their biggest brand, and Hob Wheels, which is cars but not characters.

And they, like, needed a thing with characters. And He-Man comes out of, like, a panicked year of development of what is the thing that can compete with Star Wars. and as I always affectionately put it, what I love about it is that it's a garbage plate. What they ended up doing was kind of combining every pitch. There are like 10 guys who claim that they created He-Man, and all of them are correct because they all created

what would be the one fundamental piece in any other property. But with He-Man, they took 10 pieces and they mush them all together. And they said, why are we choosing between barbarians and robots? Why aren't magic and technology existing in the same thing? also ninjas, also a cyborg cowboy, right? It's monsters and it's high fantasy and it's all of this sort of stuff. And that was the genius of it was how kind of crass it was

that it's it. But then within it, what I think is fascinating and I was talking about, we had Matt Johnson on the podcast and we were talking off Mike about how we're obsessed similarly with these corners of pop culture and said, you know, the thing that's fascinating

is that these were like assignments for people. These were sort of in-term jobs on the way to what they actually wanted to do, whether it was to write novels or to be a business executive or whatever it was. Either you have lofty your creative ambitions or you're stuck in a creative position while you want to get to a management position. And you're the guy who gets the rights to this Japanese video game and you have to rename the characters. You know, these assignments that become like it's four o'clock on a Friday. And when they hit right, they become things that people like you and I study like religious text. And the meaning is not behind it in the decision-making process. And there's the clip that goes viral once a year from Power of Grey Skull,

which is a really good documentary about how the toy line was made of what does Heeman ride? What's his vehicle? We don't have money for a vehicle. And there was another toy line called Big Jim. And they said, give him Big Jim's Jaguar. He's got like a Big Jaguar. And they went, well, Big Jim was like this tall. It was like 13 inches.

and He-Man's five inches, the cat's too big for He-Man to ride, and they go, just paint it green or some shit. And that's the decision. You're like, well, if the cat's green, then it can be giant. And then it's a battle cat. And then you can ride it, right? All this sort of stuff. But you did get people like Paul Deanie,

who was later primarily responsible for most of, or a lot of what made Batman the animated series great and Jay Michaels Frizzinsky, and all these people who worked on the early days of He-Man, who were accidentally making interesting things, you know, but none of the mythology lines up with itself. This is really key, as you said, is they create the toys first. They go to the toy companies, or the toy stores, rather,

and they go, who's going to buy the toys if the kids don't know the characters? They go, we'll write comic books and put them inside the package. Then they start developing a cartoon show. There are basically three mythologies being developed simultaneously, there is no IP management. No one's really talking to each other. The guys writing the comics are doing one thing. The intent when they created the toys was one thing.

And the cartoon is only when they add in Prince Adam. Not to mention orco and sorcerers. All this stuff is so piecemeal. It is what has made this movie a development hell project for about 25 years is how the fuck do you adapt this? Combined with it's got cachet. There's a fandom. There's nostalgia.

But as you said, it's never been as big as Marvel, DC, G.I. Joe, Transformers. It doesn't have the immediate, everyone knows what that means when you say it, even if they can't name all the characters. And so it's always been in this weird zone of, there's no way to make a cheap version of this movie.

It maybe could be a big hit if you nailed it. But how do you nail it while giving it the backing it needs to appease the fandom, which isn't big enough to support the budget on its own, while also bringing in a new audience. And it's truly been 25 years of basically every major studio. I mean, it was Fox, Warner Brothers, Sony, all had their goes with this,

and then Netflix for years before it ended up with the current Amazon MGM thing. Yeah, so in addition to this long road to adapting it into a movie and the way in which they adapted into a movie, I think speaks to some of the anxieties that it has gone through in the development process. It's also been rebooted as an animated series twice,

and there have been multiple, three times, three times. Arguably four times. Four times. Okay, I definitely don't know about the fourth time. Yeah. And each time, it's had varying levels of success, but never replicated that experience in the 1980s. And I think there are a lot of reasons for that,

but primarily because it is, in its sense, It's inscapable from its roots. Like the actual, the time in which it was made does not pour it over neatly the way that something like Spider-Man does. Or Spider-Man has a kind of eternal quality. There is something very locked into that 80s mentality and also some of the kind of raggedy quality of its development. You know, that the characters don't all make sense together tonally, that the technologies don't all fit together. So it does, that smorgasbord quality that you're describing, it just, it makes it feel like it never should have happened in the first place. It's like this weird, beautiful accident.

It's like a peanut butter truck and a chocolate truck crashing into each other, except there were also 20 other trucks. And I think you hear about the development hell of this movie over two plus decades. And it's always the, is the move that we have to ground it and make it more. serious and actually make it make sense, or do you need to lean all the way in and make everything a joke and make it a total comedy? And it, the original thing in its moment had this insane rise and fall. You know, unlike G.I. Joe and Transformers, which continue to exist and have their peaks in valleys, He-Man was done by 1988. It starts in 1982. There's the one previous live-action movie with Dolfunger in an 87. And by the time that movie comes out, it basically had ended.

It had crashed and burned. It was insane. It went from, you know, like tens of millions of dollars to hundreds to a billion back to tens to nothing. Within the span of five years. I can map it so perfect because I'm born in 82, so I can map it perfectly onto my shifting interest specifically into Marvel and Teenage Mutiny Ninja Turtles. And those being the two pathways of fandom that I, in addition to like baseball, that I was kind of pouring myself into when I was six, seven, eight, nine years. years old and away from He-Man. He-Man, it having this kind of primal quality when you're four and you see He-Man

and you see Skeletor and you see Evil-in and you see sorceress and you see Crenger. I have the power as a statement. I mean, they talk about they did all these focus groups to try to figure out what the toy line needed to be. And they kept circling back to kids really light up if you throw the idea of power in front of them. All kids kind of feel powerless. And if there's an idea of being able to take.

control of power in some kind of way. And then the idea that Keman is basically, despite the fact that he looks like he could be Conan the barbarian, he is this affable goofball. He's the smiling, sort of hyper-friendly. He's what a child thinks they would be as a grown-up if they got really buff and strong. But also still have their manners, you know?

Yeah. Remember what their parents sought them. You know, you know this because you've been kind enough to gift my daughter some toys from this universe. I have. She sort of independently got into it. Yeah, well, so she just pulled a Shira disc off of a video store shelf when she was like four years old.

And then about a year ago, we went to go see a bunch of He-Man episodes strung together at the Egyptian one morning. And, you know, she was pretty young. She was like three and a half, four years old when she was getting into it. And I think it is specifically what you're describing, that there is this essential heroic, oversimplified quality to both of those characters. She were a little bit more complex, but not really. Yeah, yeah.

And so it makes sense that it was clicking for people at that time. Now, I'm a bit older than you. So how did you get into this since it was gone by the time you came around? Correct. I'm basically born the year it's put to bed. So they did a desperate attempt to reboot it immediately when it was dying, which was the second cartoon show, which was called the New Adventures of He-Man.

And that was He-Man and Skeletor go to space and otherwise entirely different cast of characters. Now they're just like actually trying to tackle Star Wars directly. So that's running when I'm little, but that was a big flop.

And then I went to a summer camp that podcast listeners love when I invoke where I mostly got taken under the wing of the cooler teenage counselors in training. And I had always been sort of obsessed with the pop culture that had come right before me.

And there was one guy in particular who named himself Grunge, and his two greatest obsessions in the world were the Vuevus universe and Masters of the Universe. It was the two verses. This explains why we're friends right now. Totally. But also, just to get ahead of this,

the insanity of I ended up, voicing orco on a He-Man cartoon show run by Kevin Smith is like what's happening in Grunge's backgrounds. You know that's like... Are you in touch with Grunge? Do you know where he is right now? He called me a couple months ago. I actually, oh, I'm a call back.

I, you know, he is a guy I will run into a conventions. Okay. Very often. But, but yes, so I was like getting into He-Man when I was like 11, 12, 10 years. after it had created and cratered, which was a really weird time. And I think I was just sort of fascinated by the sort of uncanny pop culture object nature of it

and trying to make sense of how something could have been that big of a cultural phenomenon and completely disappeared by the time that I was conscious. Like, how is that a thing? When as all these other things were saying, Star Wars, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, Waxon Wayne never truly disappeared. None of those things ever went away in the way that he meant it.

And then in the early 2000s was the first major reboot where there was a new cartoon show, new toy line video games, everything. They really made an effort to try to like give it another go. And that cartoon shows, I'm not one of these people who's going to pretend it's better than the wire, but it is a very, very well-written children's fantasy show, you know? Yeah. Very different though, very anime inspired. A little proto-avitur the Last Air Bandar, I would say.

And I was into that, which was a really cool thing to be doing in high school. And then I sort of just kind of stayed with it forever. And then about seven years ago, I guess now, I got a message from a guy I knew, Eric Carrasco, who's a great writer for TV, who I have mutual friends with. and he said, I just got hired to write on a new he-man cartoon show, and Derek gave me your number because he said you're a big fan

and I wanted to pick your brain about some stuff. And so I got on the phone with him, and he was just like, you know, I've been trying to dig into the canon. It's so complicated and it doesn't really talk to itself well. Like, I just want to talk to some fans and ask, like, what are the things that mean the most to you? What would you want to see in a show, yada, yada, yada.

We talked on the phone for about an hour. this is like summer 2019. And then at the end of it, he said, what do you think about Orko? And I said, Orko's obviously the best character. And he was like, okay, because my first takeaway from rewashing the cartoons is, I want to pitch you to play Orko.

And there was a very prolonged process to actually get the part from there. But it very much felt like a realization of, it was as much a dream job as anything I've ever gotten to do and is the hardest I've ever worked to get a job that paid scale. that to most people would not make sense on paper.

Right. But Orko, to me, is like such an embodiment of what I like about He-Man, where he's a character that was created for the cartoon, not for the toys. He's a little flying magical trawlin. He's basically a troll whose face you can't see because he's wearing a scarf and a hat. And I'm wearing the replica hoodie right now. I have way too much He-Man merchandise.

But he was basically another self-insert. character for children who felt so powerless they couldn't even relate to Heman as the guy who sometimes gets the power. Orko is the little tiny thing who messes everything up. All he's trying to do is be like the core gesture magician and he can't get that right. And yeah, I just always loved that character and love playing him. So that's interesting relative to the film. And your experience, I think, probably maps a little bit more closely onto Travis Knight's experience, with it because he's he's 52 and so when the when the series came around he had to be 8, 9, 10 and that's really interesting to talk about around what this movie ultimately has become because as you

said it was in development for many years Amazon now is in the midst of this um from my perspective much appreciated push back into theatrical um and this was a year ago at cinema con one of the big centerpiece things that they presented after project tell Mary they said we've got this big piece of IP. We've got this exciting filmmaker. We've got Nicholas Galatine. Is this the one you have? That's the one that has. Yes. They gave us that sort of this year.

But even last year, there was all of this kind of behind the scenes package that was shared with us around. And frankly, I was like, oh, wow, this is Idris Elba and Allison Brie. And like, there are some legitimate people in this movie. And, you know, there was a 2001, I think, was the start of the modern development on this.

It was John Wu originally announced. Then it was McGee at one point. Yes. Anyone who's ever been a teen heartthrobs since 2001 at one point was kind of attached to playing Keyman or rumored. And you would have the moments where they'd go, we're going to do the Lord of the Rings style version, or we're going to do the version that mostly takes place on Earth.

That's more of a fish out of water comedy or a self-parity. Or you try to make it a gritty action movie. Or is it the MCU-inspired version? version. It did feel like when this finally came together, it was coming together in a semi-legit way. And Travis Knight on paper makes as much sense to direct this movie as anybody? Yeah, I think he's a great pick. And I'm going to talk about why. This is a really, the movie is a really interesting thing to pull apart. We'll pull it apart right now. So it's written by Chris Butler, Aaron Knee, Adam Ney, and David Callahan. You can see that a lot of hands were throwing in on this over a period of time. And these were previously directors on the movie. So they're still fingerprints from the last iteration.

Yes. And, you know, they directed The Lost City. You know, Dave Callahan, who is a friend of mine, like, has written on 25 movies like this. You know, he's always called in to kind of polish or update or improve upon fight sequences. It stars Nicholas Galitzine, who people may know from Red, White and Royal Blue, or The Idea of You. Camilla Mendez is Tila. Jared Leto is Skeletor. We have to discuss that.

He is indeed. I regret to inform you that you heard let of a Skeletor. He is Skeletor, Allison, Brie, James, Purefoy, so on and so forth. Yeah, here's the logline of the film. The Sword of Power leads Adam back to Eternia, a world shattered under the fiendish rule of Skeletor. Joining forces with Tila and Man at Arms, Adam must embrace his true destiny as He-Man, the most powerful man in the universe. Now, I did not know until about two months ago that this was going to be a meta-textual action comedy. I thought based on that BTS that I saw that we were getting pure down the middle

He-man lore. And I actually think it was a good choice even if it doesn't always work. And that's basically where I net out on this movie at large. I had fun with it. It's wildly flawed. It's way too long.

It only hits its jokes at like a 33% hit rate. I think that's generous. I think the comedy is the most disastrous element of this film. I would put the hit rate lower. but I agree with everything else you're saying. The other thing that I'll say is just because of this movie arriving at this time in my life, if they nailed one specific thing, it was going to get me to feel big feelings,

which is that in Nicholas Galitzine and specifically with transforming in the He-Man, they just, they did it. Like, they did it and I just felt chills. I felt tears filling my eyes. I was like, this is the realization of a little boy's dream that Dolph Lundgren could never possibly live up to. that doesn't mean the movie is good. I think it's got a ton of problems, but it gave me a feeling that I wanted it to give me.

And so I just want to foreground or dissection of this property with that expression. Well, let me foreground additionally here. I was fighting like two different things while watching this movie. There were the moments where the film was jangling keys and I went, regrettably, it has my keys.

It has stolen my keys from my pocket. It is jangling my keys in front of my face. There is no way I'm not going to look at this and have an emotional response. Right? This movie just has my number. I clearly, from explaining my history with this franchise, I'm a bizarre broken person, and

this silly thing means a lot. It doesn't mean that I'm going to be an easy life or anything this movie does. It also doesn't mean that I was sitting there with my notepad being like, they better get this right. Right, right. I wasn't either. But I was, I felt pretty

at peace with just the idea of seeing I want to see a he-man movie and I hope it gives me some feelings of any sorts. I was at other times watching this movie and I kept thinking of the steep Bousami character and ghost world when Thorough Birch recommends that he needs a woman his age

who shares his interest and he goes, I hate my interest. There were times and I know you've had a bit of a spiral like this watching mutant mayhem, the Ninja Turtles movie, which I think is an infinitely better film. pretty excellent movie. But there is something about watching these films now as guys who are both massive movie fans and pop culture fans, but also now have built weird lives for ourselves as like commentators on these things.

What we even are is hard to define. I know the is Sean Fantasy, a film critic or not conversation breaks the internet twice a week. But these are the same thing. Let's keep having it, you know. Let's keep talking about it. It's really healthy. and all the work happening over on Reddit is good and productive. And all corners of Reddit.

I've yet to find a bad one. But there's something weird about being people. We just had this conversation about backrooms and obsession that is so exciting. It's two movies that we like that feel like pure expressions of creativity that are connecting with an audience organically and a younger audience that people had written off as moviegoers. And then here's a movie that just keeps looking at you and I and being like, huh?

Are you happy? That's exactly right. Sometimes it made me happy and I felt guilty. And other times it did something that annoyed me and I was disgusted at myself for caring, you know? And other times I was just kind of stepping back and going for someone who doesn't know anything, which this movie, once again, needs to function

as a clean entry point for people because the he-man audience alone is not enough to justify this budget. And that for me was a real up and down thing. There were moments where I went, this is smart. The framework you said, it basically turns Adam, who is the character that is the prince of attorney who in a kind of Shazam style setup is able to transform into He-Man, be imbued with the power of the most powerful man in the universe. It basically turns him into a fan of He-Man.

Yes. As you said, there's this metatextual hook, which is he grew up in this. world and then he was sent to our world. My favorite thing to make up, make fun of is magically they somehow end up in our world as the studio fix for adapting any nostalgic property. Of course. But he's literally like what, dropped into the river and has, I guess doesn't have amnesia. Half remembers his childhood and is trying to figure out how to get back almost in like an Alice in Wonderland kind of way. Yeah, I think actually a lot of the, construction of that and the way that it sort of resolves in the final act of the movie is quite clever.

Yes. Because there's such a dumb guy quality to all of the characters in the Masters of the Universe story, the way that they're named specifically. It feels like it could have only come from the mind of a 10-year-old boy with a shoddy memory. And that idea is so smart. Yes. I agree with that. The way that it's told, I think the movie has a little bit of like when you're reading the biography of a famous person and you're like, Can we, like, get past the first 15 years here a little quickly?

Like, I don't really want to spend time with young Adam. I don't want to spend time with Adam and his job on Earth. Like, I just... Let's go to Eternia and let's have battles and see Skeletor. And so for a movie that is two hours and 20 minutes long, to spend roughly 45 minutes through that... Maybe more is asking a lot. This movie ostensibly has two first acts.

And it is. It's 45 minutes. It's 20 minutes spent on, wow, we're going... straight into the deep end. This movie is opening with multi-colored skies and voiceovers and talking birds and explaining the lore and showing him as a little boy and setting up the emotional

stakes and the fights and all the characters. And then at the 20-minute mark, basically, it resets to Nicholas Galatine in our world explaining this has been his story that he's been telling on a disastrous date, which is kind of a funny reveal,

but gets into some of these movies like, I don't, I'm not going to logic police it on the big things because that's what he means about is that Lovic police standby, stand down. But stuff like this where you're like, okay, so he looks like Nicholas Gallatin. He's ripped as hell. He's on a date with someone who looks like a model. And he thinks I should for 40 minutes monologue about my childhood that everyone tells me is crazy. the sort of questions of like, who raised this guy once he landed on Earth?

How does he explain himself? How does he have a government identity? You literally can't do any of those things. Like, you can't try to understand the movie in that way. And that might be the fatal flaw of it as a new moviegoer, right? As somebody who's like, I don't know what this is if you're coming down. But if you're us and you sit down and you can accept that in the same way that we can accept, but I think is the movie's closest comp, which is Barbie,

Greta Gerwig's Barbie. And this movie is Barbie in reverse, because Barbie is a movie about, obviously, femininity, the glass ceiling, self-determinism, all of these big existential ideas around womanhood that Greta Gerwig is interested in. But it's a movie about escaping the fantasy world to become real on Earth.

That is really how Barbie realizes her true self. Adam is the flip side. Adam is, I need to go back to this special place where I come from. And honestly, what an amazing insight that is into the way that men think and the way that women think. You're right. Women try to become realized in the world and seen and accepted and promoted. And the way that men are just like, take me back to when me and grunge were talking about the view of skeuniverse universe in camp.

And there's truth in it. Like, it's a clever idea. This movie is also literally going like, take me back to my mommy. I want to play with all my old toys. Yes. That is the characters drive. Right? Like he really wants to. My dad was a little bit brash with me. My mom was always supportive. I miss her and I miss my friends that I used to draw. Yes. Where all these characters with silly names. I think that is a smart framework for the movie. And it, you know, in working on the cartoon show, but also being such a big fan and following these things closely and being someone like my friend Eric who would get calls sometimes, oh, I got a he-man scoop if you want to hear it like anonymously.

There's a lot of stuff I can't say, but there's a lot of the various stages of development of this movie over at least the last 10, 15 years that I had heard off the record. And it feels like to some degree, this is a mashup of a lot of those different elements. But that was the element they finally kind of cracked that made the movie work. And I feel like they got halfway there to the most functional, dramatic exploration of that. Yeah. They didn't quite crack it into being a totally satisfying narrative around that, but it is the right emotional entry point. And it's the right framework with which to engage with the spirit of the silliness of the thing.

Part of my, it's not confusion. Part of my sort of like unsettledness with the movie is that, one, it's kind of a, it's jumping from lily to lily pad to lily pad tonally where it can't really decide, Does it want to be a kind of sincere exploration of lost childhood? Does it want to be a really arch satire of 80s consumerism? Does it want to be an exploration of toxic masculinity? Does it want to be just a pure high fantasy movie? It's trying to do a lot of things at the same time.

That's very, very challenging for a movie. The one thing that is a little bit particularly odd is that Adam on Earth works in human resources and has learned the language of safe work spaces and safe spaces in general. And he is presented as a pink button-down-wearing kind of evolved man. And then obviously running underneath that is this desire to Hulk out

and to become He-Man. Totally. Is the movie like, is it sending up toxic masculinity? Is it like commenting on woke culture surrounding a certain kind of masculinity? Is it trying to have its cake and eat it too? It seems a little bit undefined. It's another idea where I felt like they got 60% of the way there.

They were having the right conversation and they didn't ultimately get to the conclusion of it. Part of the deregulation of cartoons at that time and allowing these things to exist that were produced by literal toy companies and were, you know, transparently existing just to sell action. action figures is that they had to frame some degree of educational content. And so much like G.I. Joe, every episode of He-Man would end with a PSA. Yes.

It would end with, often it would be He-Man himself, but sometimes it'd be the newest character that needs to sell. Or Goa would do it a lot. And, you know, no spoilers, but this movie is engaging with that legacy. But it, there is that nature to, there were still a lot of guidelines around violence. He Man is defined by having this sword. The sword is the thing that helps him transform. He could never use the sword on the cartoon. It's almost a Mandela effect. If you rewatch the show now, in your mind's eye, you go, of course, he was sword fighting constantly. He literally never uses it.

He takes it out when he transforms, and I think the only other time they were allowed to use it is if he basically was using it to restrain a bad guy. He held it over his chest and was holding him. But there's like never sword fighting. So you have this cartoon show about a quote-unquote weakling who everyone always jokes looks exactly the same. His transformation is just he gets a base tan. Right. And he switches from a pink vest to being shirtless and right, strapped. And then he's the coolest, strongest guy, except he can't really fight. And he mostly says to Skeletor like, Skeletor, lying is never good. And then at the end of the episode, he looks at every kid in the audience and goes, today we learned why lying is bad. When you lie, you get caught. You know,

and so it's part of the odd nature of this thing. When the trailer came out, Sean is on the verge of tears. You're tapping into something very raw in my history. Yeah. When the trailer came out, they had the big spotlighted shot of his placard on his desk at his HR job that said he, him. And there was a certain amount of hammering from a very healthy side of the internet going, oh, are they trying to make He-Man woke? And part of the problem with He-Man and trying to adapt it in a modern era is it is fundamentally

the woke-ish shit in the world. But now that lands differently for people. He was always this very sensitive, emotionally intelligent softy, even when he looked like Conan the Barbarian. He was hulking out, but he wasn't hulking out. He's not even smart hulk because he's a professor. He's just basically a team leader.

That's always kind of what he was. And he's got this, incredibly diverse group of allies. I mean, literally, and he's just fighting what is, you know, you could argue a somewhat offensive of the stereotype, but is also just an evil man who just wants to consolidate power. And He-Man is the ultimate kind of like reckoning with, I, everyone's going to roll the rise when I say this, but it's just textually there. It is just about reckoning with fucking straight white, straight white male privilege. He Man is like to the man are born.

He is a prince who is born on like third base, right? And is like jacked and handsome and then is given even more power. And what defines He-Man is that he tries to share it and divide it responsibly and empower others. And he's doing all of that in this way, not because there was some grand unifying theory behind the show. It wasn't Sesame Street that was trying to teach children something. It had to land on that in order to sell its toys. But that is what it is. But think about who's making this movie.

Travis Knight, who is the son of Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, whose father bought him an animation studio, which he trans-from Will Vinton Studios that he transformed into Lyca, which then, by his own skill and team leadership, truly turned into one of the very best animation studios in the world. He individually, he directed films that are great animated films. He's made live-action movies that are good. So even though he is to the man are born, he is talented. It's very clear that he is talented.

It's why he was a good choice for this, because I think often people were struggling to crack Hennan as a character because he seems too perfect and devoid of conflict. And the answer is you're going to need someone with the lived experience in psyche of a Travis Knight, who is the son of a billionaire who couldn't figure out his dad's thing, and who it took a while to figure out what his thing was. he had a failed rap career. He did.

There were many eras of Travis Knight's life before he fell into stop motion and started out as just an animator and then basically became the head of entire company and then a director and now has made two toy movies that feel very much like him living out what animated him as a child,

no pun intended. All of that is smart to me. Like I'm like, you have a kind of metatextual structure that makes this a little more understandable for people of what it represents. And then you have a director who has like a really clean emotional end to what the story is about. I turned to my friend who I saw it with like halfway through.

There's a scene where he man's father is disapproving of his son not being tough enough. And I turn to my friend and just went, I wish you understood the shoe business. It feels like it is coming from such a real place. I agree. And it's not like this is entirely some deeply personal statement that has been stuck through the studio system. It's trying to serve like 20 masters. But I think it's part of why you and I are both resistant to totally dismissing this movie.

And it's not just because it has our number in terms of showing the characters we like. There's stuff that's close. And then there's stuff that makes you want to rip your hair. Yeah. It's actually not a very fun movie, I think, to talk about scene by scene. I think it actually is way more of a load-bearing idea movie, which sounds ridiculous about Masters of the Universe. But it is true. There's way more going on.

Like, you and I can talk about, like, was the air chase sequence with Adam and Tila and a hungover man-at-arms, like, too long? Or was it effective or not? Like, that stuff is just kind of like... Who cares? It's just in a stew of an action movie, you know? It doesn't really mean anything. It doesn't matter. But, like, even down to Jared Leto being cast a Skeletor, who is simultaneously an iconic villain and one of the stupidest characters in animated show history.

I mean, 50% of He-Man's lasting cultural purchase is just Skeletor's memeability. Yes. Him and the tone of his voice, his laugh, him halfway through the first season of the animated series, turning into a vaudevillian comedian and not really a true villain. Turing into like Paul Lind as well. Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, and like, also like pursuing some like effete, like awkward, like homoerotic, consideration in the show.

Which I want to throw this out as well. In the sort of dark years where He-Man Masters the Universe has been fallow, what basically has always kept He-Man afloat are the Latin American community and the LGBT-plus community. They are actually the tenants of the thing almost even more than growing up nerdy white boys like that.

like truly and it's it's always had all this kind of purchase there in both directions so yeah casting Jared Leto who is I'm the most famous person in the cast but then and him being cast and then now going through this roughly 10 year period of like very gentle cancellation where like it has become clearer and clearer that he both doesn't not hold a strong draw for audiences nor does seem to be a person that people are very fond of. And so this is happening at the same time. He gets cast as this arch villain from the 1980s animated series. And he also has never seen because he is CGIed with a skeleton face.

There's something like kind of magical. We need to unpack this even further. Yes, because I'm just realizing how sticky this entire corner of conversation is. You're also considering the fact that like this second. era of Jared Leto's career. He has his heartthrob era. He has his, is he the next interesting, dramatic leading man kind of era? Fincher is one of the only people who feels like he knows how to use him well in the post,

my so-called life era. I'm just talking through my Leto eras. And then he disappears for a little while and focuses on the music. And then he has this Dallas Buyers Club comeback where he plays a trans woman in a performance that wins every single award and two years later would have been canceled. Like, it was, the last moment someone would have been awarded for giving that performance. And so his new revived A-Lift status of the studio suddenly going, is Jared Leto a movie star? How do we get Jared Leto?

Is tied to the upswing from a thing that would be shunned today? And it was a lot of him seemingly wanting to transform and not do an obvious movie star thing. that they kept putting him at the center of these really big movies. And it felt like time after time audiences kept saying, we don't like him. We don't like the work he's doing. And we keep hearing bad things about him as a person. So as you're saying, it's the softest cancellation

because there was no friction to it. The friction was only that studios kept putting him at the center. And audiences were saying, like, we're not asking for this. We're not wringing our hands over this guy. we'd just rather not think about him. And so when he got announced for this, and when the trailers are coming out right after Tron Ares,

everyone was like, why are they doing this? Is the movie shooting itself in the foot? I don't like Jared Leto being in movies. I think you have to admit he is the best performance in this thing? By far. By far. He's really, really good. And it sucks to say. And part of it is probably that you don't see his face.

It helps that it's the one time I have watched Jared Letto in the last 15 years and not thought about Jared Leto. But there's a specific reason for this. The reason is that Jared Leto is always too much. He has no ability to turn. And this didn't necessarily always used to be the case. I would not describe his performance on my so-called life as overplayed. And he has developed a lot of showy bad habits as a performer where he demands the gravity be operating around him in a movie at all times.

And if you look at the movies he's made since Dallas Byers Club. Suicide Squad. It's not that many. Blade Runner 2049. The Little Things. Zach Snyder's Justice League, House of Gucci, Morbius, Haunted Mansion, and Tron Ares.

All of those movies, it's about him all the time. He's drawing all the attention to him. And Skeletor kind of needs that. He's a ridiculous, overplayed character. And also it helps that you don't have to look at his face. But he honestly just has the sense of humor in this performance that it needs and is working.

It's crazy that he's funny in this. It's crazy that it feels. like, the stickiness of Skeletor is this weird thing of. He is presented as just this is the most evil creature in the world. Skeletor loves being evil. What's his motivation? Evil. Yes.

The movie plays with that. The relentless pursuit of evil, right? But then also he is ridiculous. He's sort of this like daughter and fool. You know, as you said, he's so camp and everything that it does feel weirdly aligned with Jared Leto constantly insisting that he is like this generation's digital Peter Sellers needing to completely transform himself into some. I feel like most of his performances have this real loud self-consciousness of can you

believe what I'm doing? Like he wants the audience the whole time to think, I can't believe that's Jared Leto, rather than actually playing a character. I was going to say as a human being, but he's played very few human beings in the last 15 years as you just pointed out, but they rarely feel like living creatures. They feel like exercises. And weirdly, that's what Skeletor is

and the movie makes that textual. You have what I think is kind of the most interesting sequence in the movie where Skeletor basically invades He Man's brain and starts like forcing him to relive scenes from his life with Skeletor now representing his own personal shame. And that felt to me like where the movie was

fully cooking in a, Barbie-esque way. I agree. You made this Barbie comparison. One of the things I really love about Barbie is that it feels very unconcerned with explaining its own logic. It does what it needs to do to tell the story it wants to tell, which is the thing that movies used to do, and especially children's films and fantasy films and genre films.

The setup is the setup. It's more important to spend the time executing emotionally what you want to do in the story. And I rewatch big recently, which I hadn't seen in a while. And it is astounding to watch that today, and he gets to the fortune teller machine within less than 10 minutes. And there is no backstory of who made the machine or why or why it's possessed with a ghost or why it works or how to undo it. It's just like, this thing can make you big and it can make you small again. And that's all you need to know. And Barbie similarly goes, how do you get from Barbie World to California?

You take, you know, a car to a bike, to a spaceship, to a boat. And if you want to go the other way, you have to reverse the process. And this movie doesn't do that. This movie often ends up in the uncanny valley of trying to explain stuff too much, i.e. when 20 minutes in, the movie, like, kicks you out of reality to our world and then spends 20 minutes trying to get back to the movie

that we were already in, and I think largely enjoying. And I think that Skeletor sequence is what the movie should be doing, which is, who cares? Yep, I agree with you. Like, what's interesting and what's entertaining. Yeah, I mean, just to put a button on it, because we have a bunch of other things to go through.

It feels like a movie almost entirely made for people between the ages of 35 and 50. But it's also a candy-colored PG-13 action adventure fantasy movie. And I was certain I was going to be able to bring Alice to this, and now I don't think I can. Like, I just don't. I think it's too violent and too weird. And you have a kid who like organically has gotten into this property that has such difficulty developing new audiences. Yeah. And she is too young to see the movie at the time it comes out.

You agree with me though, right? I mean, it feels like a little too rough. I also think it's like really long. I think that's another problem is I imagine a kid getting antsy at sections of this. I think like the middle chunk is pretty deadly. The movie just, it resets itself like multiple. times and even down to there's this whole notion of well he got kicked out of attorney

because his mom sent him to be safe on earth and a Superman style setup. The only way for him to get back is using the sword, but he's lost the sword. And for 20 years he's been trying to find the sword. And then he just finds the sword. Yeah. And like it is, you know, like why was the sword there?

Somebody found it in the river one day and they decided it should be part of a comic book store's presentation. Like the whole thing. is just all of that stuff on Earth, which is kind of essential to make that late scene, Skeletor scene work. But all of it is just like,

what is this? Like, why are we even trying to make this seem as though it is operating on our planet? It almost would be better if he just went to a different planet entirely. I think so too. Or, you know,

was cast out to the woods or whatever it is. But it does feel like this movie is, um, it's like a filmed adaptation of an in-between draft. you know, obviously, a script is only done when it's said it's done, but this feels like they were trying out some ideas,

and some of them should have responded to with more of that and less of that, and instead we're just like straight up filming that, and you have some of these odd ends. But, as you said, like, I appreciate this movie looking like a bag of candy. Having characters who have ridiculous powers, using them in silly ways, What I don't appreciate is the movie genuinely has 100 versions of the joke of, your name is what? I thought they landed the plane very well with the final name reveal, though.

I think so, too, but that's a great example of maybe you get two of those jokes. Yeah, yeah. You set it up and you pay it off at the end. It feels like the movie does it 10 times for each character, and it speaks to, this movie feels very inspired by Thor Ragnarok to me. And when I saw that film, I went, man, I really think Motu is a major touchstone for Tyca on this, even more so than Kirby Comics or any of the other things. The colors, the sort of barbarianism of it, and the weirdness of all the creatures

and the transforming weapons and vehicles and all that sort of stuff. And so you could see executives lighting up and going that movie was a hit. It wasn't too weird for people. It took Thor. It put him in a spaceland. We can copy this. The way Taika, in my opinion,

does this sort of deflation joke feels like it's coming from a place of, I'm a little embarrassed that I'm making this movie, so I'm putting it down so I don't look uncool. He's also better at executing those jokes because he's got more experience in comedy. The comic performer, yeah. I've always found that tone of it a little.

little bit annoying because I feel like if you're embarrassed by the movie, then don't make it. You know? Yeah. This feels like these jokes are made defensively from a position of, I like this so much and I'm worried they're going to make fun of me. I'm wearing a shirt with my favorite thing in the world on it, but I guess I have to lampshade the joke before anyone else bullies me. And this is a movie that has a running bit about being shoved into lockers, a thing that

kind of doesn't make sense for this planet. No, no. But it has that tone to it where I, as much as I thought the comedy was not working, I almost found sympathetic that it felt like it came from a place of such genuine personal insecurity. And I wanted to just grab it and be like, chill out, man, it's fine. We're here. We're watching the movie.

Just be the movie. I don't think the film is going to be a very big hit. And I think that probably puts an end to Masters of the Universe as a theatrical property for now. which I find interesting because first of all there are three different end credit sequences which we don't have to spoil

for people but that all kind of lean towards well this is coming and this is coming and this is coming and that also just feels like 2018 that just is like

actually even Marvel seems to be kind of getting over the end credits addiction and you know this sort of teasing of the audience about what could be coming next and the idea of withholding something and I'll just say like

withholding orco from the Masters of the Universe movie it's just fucking annoying. Like, it's just annoying that they did that. And I know why they're doing it because they think they had something on their hands, but they just did that. I'm biased.

I'm very personally, deeply invested in this character, but that was the one thing in the movie that made me kind of, like, dig my nails into the armrests, where it was, it hit harder for me because it's a character. I've spent time actually trying to professionally apologize. So it now feels like my home team,

but I'm also just tired of that. that type of thing, it felt really close to me to the moment at the end of the Fedé Alvarez, Evil Dead reboot, where in the end credits, it just inserts a shot of old Bruce Campbell saying groovy. And I'm like, well, that doesn't mean anything. You can't just show me the guy who hasn't been in the movie up until this point and have him do the thing that he did in the original thing with the promise of, well, next time maybe we'll do that. Yeah. And the other two credit scenes are much more the classic tee-up of this feels like a dangling plot thread of where this thing will go next time.

But I'm just kind of allergic to all of this now. I want to watch a movie finish itself. I want to see it be complete. And I don't know if Orko is, you know, like a logistical, technical reservation they had or if it's a, is this character the one thing that pushes it into being too silly. But it's like, do it or don't. You should have done it. But I'm not going to give you credit for showing him for three seconds in the end credits. I couldn't agree more.

I couldn't agree more. Yeah. And that's where all this stuff feels very, very post-marvel. Even like at the final scene of the movie, we see our 10 main characters and all of them have slightly updated looks. They've taken all these designs that are really similar to the cartoon and the toys, and they made them just 10% closer. And it feels like the end of X-Men Apocalypse, where,

suddenly the promise is, wait a second, are they all going to have the 90s costumes next time? No, the next movie they all wear black leather. But like all of this stuff feels like this echo of the exact thing that has been in a death rattle at a time that something new is being born. And there's a feeling, even when this is the thing that we like, where I'm like, are we watching Dr. Doolittle? And like Bonnie and Clyde and the graduate are playing on the adjacent screens. Dude. From whatever parts of this. movie works, this is Dr. Doolittle.

Yes. Anything that I like about this movie is either something that I have extracted intellectually or emotionally connected to at the basest level of my undeveloped brain. Like that's it. And I'm okay with it as a fan, but I can't look, you know, I'll be going to my daughter's art show later this afternoon and I'll be talking to a lot of parents. I will not be able to look at a single parent at that art show and be like, you've got to check out Masters of the Universe this weekend. That's not, that's not acceptable. That's a great point, though, that the way in which this movie works the least is actually just as a functional summer blockbuster. Should you see this movie?

There is interesting meta-textual stuff going on here that they can't quite land, but it's thorny and it's interesting to think through. And there's also the dumbest base level bullshit that makes us happy because we're broken sad men. And the stuff in the middle is what I think a lot of audiences are going to sit there and go like, huh? And I went to a screening in New York that felt like it was 30% critic screening, 30% premiere, but after the L.A. premiere that had been the big explosive everyone's here. This was a smaller selection of cast and crew. And then 30% fans. Yeah, that mine was the exact same. Right.

there was a lot of, especially for the first 30 minutes, anytime anything showed up on screen that looked like one of the toys, they would applaud. And it made me, I didn't want to hold it against the movie because it's not the movie's fault. But every time it got that response, I felt embarrassed. I felt embarrassed for myself that I cared, you know, because I'm like, well, that's not really storytelling.

I like seeing these things too, but we can't just applaud them putting a thing on. screen. It's about what you do with it when you put it on spring. So when I was thinking about doing this episode with you, and we talked about this when we recorded the Mosquito Coast episode, like, how long ago is that? A year ago. I was like, all right, I'm just going to rewatch every high fan, or just watch every high fantasy movie. I'm going to, I'm going to situate myself inside of that 80s period where there was this

enormous number of movies, mostly, you know, kicked off by the success. of Conan the Barbarian, but there were just in so many films in that period of time, some of which had seen, some of which I hadn't, and I'm going to do the ultimate list, and I'm going to love it, and it's going to be so great. And I watched a bunch of them, and I, you know, I watched Krull, and I watched Dragon Slayer, and I watched The Sword and the Sorcerer, and I watched Deathstalker, and, you know, I'd already seen, of course, like Dark Crystal and Labyrinth and all these other films.

And I came away not really loving as many of them as I had hoped. I would. I admired a lot of them because there's a lot of really cool practical stuff in them. But then I went to go make a list of my favorite movies like this and I was like, these are all movies that I've known and have seen and were a part of my childhood or a part of my daughter's childhood now. And there's

something like that kind of masculine man defending his castle and ravishing damsel aspect of it that has actually just kind of never been my thing despite having this attraction to He-Man. So like, I

Hey, He-Man has always sort of been my least favorite part of He-Man. What I find funny is the incongruity of that being the character at the center of this store. Yeah. Like, I'm just like, I don't know if this was an easy exercise or not to just come up with favorite fantasy movies. But, like, to me, very quickly, like, I'll just tell you the movies. They don't need much explanation. Yeah. The Neverending Story, which is I probably saw at a very similar age and then I'm about to show my daughter.

The only very recent film is The Green Knight, which I think, you know, Lowry's movie, which I think really kind of like tries to simultaneously explore like Arthurian legend and a kind of mystical legend and blend those two things together and draw you out with a much more folkloric exploration of the ideas. Princess Mononokey, which I just watched with Alice, which is still unbelievable in a movie with a very, very big idea on top of it about, you know, ecology and the future of the planet. Willow, which changed my life and the fellowship of the ring, which is just like, to me, one of the most pitch-perfect, here's how you build a world, introduce characters you instantaneously love

and do the thing where you get excited for what's next but you don't feel like you've been tricked into anything when you get to the what's next. You desperately are like I need to go to the next stage of this journey with these characters that I love and like it felt like a very kind of unoriginal list but I couldn't talk myself into saying like

well actually Beast Master has some really cool effects in it and Costco at the beginning of his career you know what I mean? Yeah I would I would throw Dark Crystal and Excalibur into that canon those are the two that I think are worthy are sitting alongside it, but it is sometimes, as guys like us who do this kind of

pop cultural spulunking, sometimes you try to go deeper into a canon to make a more interesting list and you realize it is just the five things that everyone says. I know. Certain careers are just the top layer. Certain genres are really only represented well

by the movies that everyone remembers. And the start of the modern development, cycle for this movie that we're getting now in 2026 really comes after Lord of the Rings, where there was this feeding frenzy of what's the next Lord of the Rings. Basically, none of them work. I mean, it's not surprising that the Green Knight, which is great, is doing its own thing. It's doing our three and legend, you know, and it's doing it in a 24 silo. But the attempts to find the next big fantasy, high fantasy IP, nothing works. in movies post Lord of the Rings until Narnia,

which then fell off a cliff, the sequels couldn't sustain it. It was only really the first one. And then it becomes Game of Thrones. Then it becomes TV. In movies, it never comes back. And, you know, the hobbits made a lot of money, but they didn't capture the world in the same way.

No, they didn't. I mean, are any other, I agree with you that Labyrinth and Dark Crystal, there's something very special about them, and you and I are both Hensonians and very fascinated in that history, in the world and the creation of all of those movies. And I love that he pivoted into like a much darker realm of storytelling at that point in his career.

Yeah. But are there any other titles that you're like, well, this has to be in the conversation for the best versions of these movies? I mean, Conan, obviously, Conan looms large. I like Conan film. Yeah. Yes. I think is kind of your text for what we're talking about.

And then before that, it really is kind of, it's more Tarzan and things. things like that. You know, that's sort of, the Johnny Wartmuller, Tarzan films are sort of what evolve into things like Dragon Slayer and things like that. Yeah, the only other thing is that I thought about including the Ray Harryhausen movies and it's like, what is the, what's the line between Greek and Roman mythology versus high fantasy and how much, you know, I could put the seventh voyage of Sinbad on a list like this, you know? I think we could put that or Jason the Argonauts. I think putting one or the other makes sense,

at least representationally. But also so much of it is the visual language of what those movies develop. And then I think a lot more of what we have in film that has stuck in fantasy is stuff that is one foot in, one foot out. It's stuff like Jurassic, where it's, can I put something fantastical

or that feels historical into a modern setting? Can I have everyday people relate to this? Right. Harry Potter. Harry Potter is that? Harry Potter is magic and it's also a coming of age drama about being a young person in school. I also think it's telling and why this movie ended up with the framing device it had probably is most of the canon you just put out are children's stores. You know, they're often centered around children or they're from the perspective of a child or a child's sort of way of thinking.

And they are about exploring and discovering a new. world. Yeah. The movies where someone starts out being Master of the Universe and continues to just kick ass for two hours usually have a pretty low ceiling on them. You know what movie Masters of the Universe has a lot in common with that is in this conversation is the Princess Bride. Yes.

The Princess Bride is like a deconstructivist exploration of a lot of the tropes of those stories, but it never blinks. It never is like, we're doing a meta-textual. It's like it's playing it straight, but there is a sense of. comic tone that I think Reiner and Goldman were like such a great match for that story and the actors that Reiner is able to cast. Just getting

Billy Crystal and Wallace Sean and all of these people in that movie that lets it lets it have that cake and eat it too in a way the Masters of the Universe never can. But that's so hard. I mean there's a reason that movie is so legendary. It's a perfect movie. Exactly. Because people can't replicate it. I also think that movie makes its only deflation

happen through Fred Savage, which has its own emotional arc of watching his cynicism melt away. Versus a thing I felt this movie got wrong is, you alluded to it, but the Idriselva character, Man at Arms, who is kind of the right-hand man, the loyal ally, a little bit of a father figure to Hemet, they make this decision that in the time that Nicholas Galatine was gone, he's just become a sad drunk.

And there's about an hour plus of the movie that's him stumbling and not knowing how to, to do stuff, vomiting on other characters, and several moments where they do the buildup as if he's going to do something badass, and then he slips, or he falls, or he burps, or whatever it is. And it felt like you can do a movie where one character is deflating. You can do your kind of Guardians of the Galaxy.

You can do your Ghostbusters. You know, there is this classic format of having the one guy who's a little cynical and questions the reality of the world a bit. Or you can do your, there's a literal, outsider who's dropped in fish out of water and they don't know how it works. And so they're going to question it. You can't do the movie where everyone's kind of going like, but I sort of suck, right? Yeah.

It's weird. Idris, too, has attached himself to so many different. I mean, he was literally in the Thor films. He was in the gun suicide squad. Like, he keeps doing this in a way that it's, like, this character almost feels like a continuation of all of those other characters that he's played to the point of he's so over it that he is now like a drunk. It's a very strange career, Idriselba.

He's not bad in the movie. He's never really bad in anything, but there's a kind of autopilot quality. I really liked him in the first chunk. I thought the scenes with him and the little boy were really good, and I thought he was really kind of sensitive and locked in. His action sequence there were good, but then it becomes the Idraselba problem,

where you're like, is there a greater example of a guy who just should have been a movie star but was stuck at a time where the industry had no, idea what they were doing. Yep. Like, he is emblematic of the movie star crisis of the last 20 years, which wasn't about lack of talent. It was a pipeline problem.

It was a framing problem. And here's a guy who's just ended up being, like, the villain in the Fast and Furious spin-off and the third Star Trek movie, the seventh guy in Thor, you know, the third guy in human. Think about his first really big role after the wire is he stars. American Bunkster? Yeah, but his first real leading part is in the first streaming movie.

It's in Beast of No Nation. Oh, yeah. Which is like, that's kind of emblematic of the thing that happened. Whereas, like, he should have been going into a period in his career where he was going up like a rocket ship. And then it was like, well, streaming movies are TV. And if you want to be in a movie,

you've got to be the sixth lead behind Chris Hemsworth. Not only that, but incredibly weird stat. He wins Best Supporting Actor at the Sag Awards that year for Beast of No Nation and is not nominated for the Oscar. Yeah. Yeah. Which kind of lends that movie more of it's like, does it even exist quality?

Yeah, that's a really weird one. Okay. We've got 30 minutes here. This is your time to shine. Now, you've been doing a lot of research. Is it a Lettsean level of research, would you say, to prepare for this? I wouldn't say full letzian. I went in with Lettsean ambition and I realized very quickly it was not worth going that deep.

But I compile the list, which, I've made public and we can share of toy stories. I was trying to find it as movies that are specifically based off of a toy or characters within. And it could get a little non-literal with that. It's not a great canon. It does break into a couple different silos. You have a lot of adaptations of TV shows of toys.

So that's sort of copy of a copy of a copy of a... copy. This is a movie version of a show that was already trying to adapt these characters. That's like original Transformers, animated movie, G.I. Joe movie. You have My Little Pony movies, Care Bears, movies.

And those do you count here? I think so. I think they have to because there is a straight line, even though there is the step in between of really this is just a continuation of a TV show. Then there's sort of toy as

object movies where there's not really the same kind of narrative or characters to adapt. I guess Clue is kind of at the midpoint there, but then more so we did a series on our blank check Patreon of tabletop game movies where we did the two Ouija films, Battleship, Clue, and the two Dungeons and Dragons movies, which are all adapting things, but they're sort of more adapting what it feels like to engage. with the toy. Yeah. You mentioned Matt Johnson earlier.

I'm wondering if his magic, the gathering film, will have a similar energy. 100%. Yeah. And then there's sort of like the big dogs you have to discuss of the Transformers franchise

is obviously humongous. Beyond Transformers, just having greater name recognition, when we were saying earlier, you know, He-N's never had the same kind of instant sellable IP as Transformers. I think part of that is

there have been what now, seven live action Transformers movies and two animated movies theatrically. It's nine films in total. Most of them have made over $100 million domestically and hundreds worldwide. I think most people you would ask, even the ones who have seen all of them,

could not tell you two things about the lore of Transformers, but the big idea of Transformers is so fucking big that just saying these robots are going to turn. turn into other things, we'll always sell some degree of tickets. Yep. These movies have varying levels of engagement with the lore of the toys,

which, as I said, was sort of cobbled together by Hasbro buying different Japanese toys and mushing them together into a mythology. I've never known much about Transformers mythology. I think you and I have a very similar relationship to these movies, which is, by and large,

the most satisfying version of key jangling for us. In the theater on opening night, an absolute blast. I don't really spend any time thinking about them after that. I let them sit on my shelf and maybe one day I'll go back and explore but I have always had fun with them

even when they're dog shit and some of them have been dog shit. Some of them have been horrendous. Like crimes against humanity. Yes. But I was at the premiere of the original Transformers Michael Bay film and it just rocked my world. I was like, this is fucking awesome guys. And if you don't get it, then you don't get it.

They're made by Michael Bay. The guy's incredible. at putting like sound and images together. Transformers are an incredible excuse to explore those things on a big scale. Barbie, obviously, I think now sits as like arguably the top of the heap along with, I would say, the Lego movie, the first Lego movie, feel like the two modern examples that have kicked off the wave. Post-transformers, there was a real rush of can we adapt this stuff. I feel like Barbie and Lego have been seen as the two that creatively, not only succeeded, but engaged so smartly with the toy, didn't feel ashamed by the fact that they were adapted from a piece of plastic,

that they're actually kind of trying to reckon with cultural legacy and also using that IP, I hate that I keep saying IP so much in this episode, but this was unavoidable in a He Man episode, that using them to sort of analyze children's relationships to their imagination and what toys represent in that sort of way and what they reflect in us and are they aspirational or are they sort of of, I don't know, mirroring, you know,

of our internal feelings. The Lego Batman movie I love in particular, although that's getting a little bit more into tackling superhero culture and movie culture as well. But those are movies that take place within the sort of logic of a child's mind. And then there's obviously the Toy Story franchise, which I think does need to get acknowledged here, even though its main characters are original.

It uses a lot of obviously preexisting IP and becomes kind of the definitive. I'm biased. This is like my favorite franchise, sort of exploration of how we think about toys and pop culture and the relationship between kids and toys. And this whole thing that Barbie and Lego movie are both obviously riffing on as well, of like, do we imbue life into these things? Is that the way you tell stories with these characters? Yeah, I mean, I should note this, because we've talked about it off mic,

this month is just an absolute thunderdome for you. It is a remarkable thing. You texted me and said, June is Griffin-Newman's psyche on trial. It is Toy Story 5, it's He-Man movie. Then the amount of time I spend ringing my hands about the death at Theatrical comedy. We have scary movie six opening against K-Man,

New Star Wars movie, Madelorian and Grogo, and Mandelorian and Grogo. And that's the run-up. Yes. So you're like, there's Spielberg going classic Spielberg, Toy Story, Star Wars, Jackass. It's kind of everything I believe in in in terms of commercial cinema just in terms of like what I want Hollywood to be putting out and all of them are being tested in really extreme ways.

We're kind of O for two right now. We're not doing great. But this is what's fascinating to me is, I think there's another era in which if you don't have things like backrooms, obsession, sheep detectives, devil war's prodot to, which I really love, movies that are doing well right now

and that I think are creatively successful, succeeding, then the fact that the things that I have historically cared about not really working would depress me deeply and I would get into a, it's so over spiral. Versus now I'd go like, maybe nature is healing. Maybe these movies don't need to be made for us anymore.

You know, I'm still enjoying them. Something else needs to happen. I want to call it two other toy movies that I sort of, I text to you, I'm thinking of going freak mode. There's also shit that just is not even worth talking about. There's shit like the Ugly Dolls movies. The Trolls trilogy is the more successful version of the Ugly Dolls. movie. There's a Max Steele, which was a Mattel attempt to do. There are a new kind of

He-Man in the early 2000, who was like an extreme sports secret agent kid. There are things like the Brats movie, which stars Chet Hank's weirdly as a nerd who the Brats pick on. And John Voight as the principal, all these sorts of like, those are more like just dumbass. We bought the rights to a toy and made a movie over a weekend. And it was made all with like tax shelter money bullshit. But the two other ones I want to call out that are personal favorites of money. One, I think we do need to consider the Hudsucker

proxy a toy movie. It is a movie entirely about the Hulu Hoop. It is a movie about the business of toys. Sure. And it is sort of exploring the predatory nature of trying to make a thing that will break a kid's mind. I'll allow

it because it's you. And I know how much that movie means to you. It's a real favorite of mine. The other one I really love. You can't recommend the Brats movies or the trolls movies at all, right? No. I'm trying to think if there's anything I watched that isn't obvious that I would recommend. No.

I think all of that stuff is bad. I really think that I went through it. It's really bad. It's really bad. It's like its lowest common denominator of dress. I mean, I do think the second Mike Flanagan Ouija movie is really good. Agreed. Agreed.

Yes. And if people haven't seen the the daily gold scene Dungeons of Dragons Honor Among Thieves. That's also really good. Yes, I enjoyed that as well. Talked about it. Those are really, really successful genre movies. But otherwise, it's sort of like your barbarian problem of the good ones are the ones that everyone knows are the good ones.

There aren't really hidden gems. The one I want to shout out for people. And I think it's pretty readily washable on YouTube and not through many other means. Richard Williams, The Adventures of Raggedy Ann and Andy, have you ever seen this movie? No. Richard Williams, one of the greatest character animators in the history of cinema who did all the animated sequences and characters

and who frame Roger Rabbit, his big sort of Fitzcaraldo-esque Passon Project was The Thief and the Cobbler, which was never completed, then taken, and finished as a different movie, Arabian Nights, without him. It's sort of one of the great Magnuson Ambersons of animation. What would this have been if he had ever gotten to the finish line? In the period where he was trying to get Thief and the Cobbler made, he took this assignment job to get the money to self-produce more of Thief and the Cobbler. And he made a Raggedy Ann and Andy movie that was truly like an IP play. Some musical theater guys got the rights and wrote songs and hired him to animate it. And it is an absolute nightmare movie. It feels

like the Jim Tansen fantasy films we were talking about, it falls into that sort of minded the child. It's halfway in between feeling like you're watching a film of what a kid imagines their toys are doing and what Toy Story gets to later,

which is the psychology of God, it would actually be an existential nightmare to be a toy. It is some of the best animated stuff you will ever seem. In particular, if you don't have the time of patience to watch the entire film, there is a musical sequence

in this called Blue, sung by a camel with four legs, and the dancing the camel does is some of the most technically impressive animation you will ever see. It's astonishing. It leads to the final thing, which is the more obvious thing in the canon. I do think you've got to include Winnie the Pooh in this. Now, Winnie the Pooh wasn't IP in the same way, but Winnie the Pooh was a child's series of toys and characters he created

that then his father wrote stories about. they are tales adapted from the mythology created by kids for their toys. You've really drilled down as deeply as you can, but that is... I try. That is true about Winnie the Pooh. It's true. I think of it as a literary adaptation, but you're right that that literature is born of a boy and his bear. If you watch the many adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which was the package film they did of what had been three theatrical shorts, the framing device of that is,

a live action camera pushing into a boy's room surrounded by the dolls and then the book opens and you're like, oh, right, what we're seeing is what he imagines his toys do. Is it A.A. Milne? Is that the author? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Damn. Well, it's kind of a sordid history. I mean, it's really not very impressive. And there are a lot of the movies that you named are almost like what I sometimes call like a movie kink.

Like clue and like transformers. Like those are movies where I'm like, this just kind of touches something inside me that matters to me. And I, you're joking about me being a critic or not. But one of the reasons why I've always kind of tried to dismiss that is I'm kind of like, I just have a lot of biases. And some of those biases are like I know people in the business and some of them are like, you know, I have a different kind of a role in my professional life that makes it difficult for me to have this position. But sometimes I'm just like, I don't really subscribe personally to the objective ivory tower vision. of these things. I'm like, I want to get on a Masters of the Universe pod and be like,

I almost cried when Adam raised the sword. Like, that's not criticism. That's like, I'm expressing an emotional feeling. And a lot of the movies that you just went through, they conjure the same feelings in me, even though I know that from this kind of distanced critical lens,

they're not only flawed, but they're like cynical and kind of ugly at times. Yes, that's the big thing with the history of toy movies and why so many of the ones I'm calling out aren't actually driven by a product. You You know, in order to make a canon that is good, you have to cheat and put in things like Winnie the Pooh, toy store. Yeah. And the hud sucker proxy, you know?

And then you're like, really, it's only Barbie and Lego movie that came from the cynical place and ended up somewhere fairly pure. Yeah. And they both did the thing that we were talking about, the Masters of the Universe does too, where they are openly acknowledging what the act of adapting them means. and that's extremely unusual and it's very, very millennial to do that. It is. And this has been a millennial conversation about our kind of fascination and struggles

with the things that we care about. And you know, when Greta was on the show for Barbie, I said this to her. I was like, this is so interesting that you keep making things that are about things that happened to you when you were 12. Yeah.

And all of your movies are that. And this new movie, it sounds like, is also going to be that. and you know, she seemed to receive it nicely, but she was like, I hadn't thought about it that way, but then was like, I have to give that some thought. And I think that a lot of the ways that you were describing the way that the box office is changing

and like what our expectations are for movies and whether, like, where you would feel a bit stymied by something like solo in 2018 where you'd be like, ah, this is so disappointing that this is where these things have gotten. To me, there was almost like a relief that Mandeloreen and Grogu wasn't good. You know, I was like,

it actually is a let the past die moment. I was just listening to you, you guys and Getherd talking about the movie on your pod. And I thought it was such an interesting conversation. Just even the dynamics between, are we supposed to be holding these things to a certain standard? Or are we supposed to be resetting our minds and just Getherd having like a completely different mentality to you guys

about what a movie could and should be trying to accomplish individually? It was really interesting to me. And this is one of our very close friends, someone we've known so long and so important the history of the podcast. Anytime he comes on to do Star Wars, we all almost have nervous breakdowns. And we accept the differences of what we're asking of this thing,

Star Wars and what it represents. But increasingly, I'm just like, I'm so tired. I just actually, it doesn't feel worth the effort for me to fight through Star Wars to figure out what I still like about it. And I know you've had this experience watching them all with your daughter for the first time, which is sort of like the purest way to, re-engage with what the thing actually is away from all the conversation. And I had the opposite experience, which was in the lead up to Mandalorian and Grogu, I decided to watch all the Disney

Plus shows that I had skipped and outside of Andor, which was such a delight to watch for the first time. You know, a lot of that was a struggle. But in watching the stuff that didn't work, I kept remembering what I love about Star Wars. Yes. And part of that for me was like, maybe I just need to let that be over there, and I'm fine with that, and I'm not going to get worked up about this. And it's fine if this all moves on from us and our interest, and also we let some of these things actually sit on ice. Like, you know, there have been multiple he-man cartoons, but it's largely existed outside of the spotlight of the public consciousness for most of the last 35 years.

And whatever response this movie is getting, it's not getting, oh, Jesus, another he-man movie. It's getting some, are we still really making movies based on toys? But it doesn't feel like something that's beating us over the head. People seem to be reacting more to the fresher things. And that's exciting. And it's exciting that there's something happening that feels essential. I think you might have cited this on that episode.

But this anxiety that we had that there were going to be so many toy movies in the aftermath of Barbie and all these things went into development, you know, Lena Dunham's Polly Pocket movie and all that stuff. And then this is really the only one that has come out. This is the only thing that has happened. And it sounds like maybe the Barney movie will happen. There was the Snake Eyes movie, which totally has been white from memory, Henry Golding, which was the third live action G.I. Joe. And was the one that happened kind of in the post-transformers wake, but I guess pre-Barby.

I guess Hot Wheels is coming out later this year. That's the other thing is that apparently that's an Apple movie. Excuse me, not to correct you here. I think Matchbox is coming out. Matchbox. Sorry, Matchbox. But Hot Wheels is still in development. My apologies to the fine people making tiny cars. Yes.

Do you know they're owned by the same company? Are they really? Yes, they're not even rival brands. Did Mattel buy Matchbox at a certain point? Yes, but it's been a while. It's not like a recent acquisition. Okay. Hey, Griffin, you're the best, man.

Thank you for doing this for me. You're the best. Such a pleasure. This was really fun. What it's about, At the end of the day is bros being bros. And sometimes it is fun to see a guy named Mechanic, who's a mechanic with a mechanical neck, use said neck to hit people.

Yeah. Some real structural challenges in many of the creatures and beings on Eternia. But, you know, let's not explore. I'm thinking how much that would have hurt. Yeah, but you don't, right. You just want to unplug that. Yeah, triclops. Like, what's his day-to-day life like?

Terrible. is he like, horrendous. Like, is he, can he go on dates? Like, how does it work? It's a tough one.

I don't, yeah, yeah, it's really rough. Yeah. Well, thanks, man.

Hey, just never grow old. Stay young, okay? Stay gold, pony boy. It's not, it's not looking good

when I, when I peek in the mirror, but I'm trying. See you, Griffin. See you. Okay, let's go to my conversation now

with Samarow Weaving and Adam Raymire. Very happy to be joined by Samara Weaving and Adam Raymire. Thank you guys for being here. I like to start these conversations by asking folks who make movies, what were the movies that made them think they could make movies. Do you remember? Yeah. Could have been as a kid. Could have been as an adult.

I really do remember. Go for it. Go for it. What did you? I was with my family. And I hadn't been into the theater in a long time because we were living overseas. And there wasn't a lot of English-speaking movie theaters. And we found a theater that had an English.

speaking movie playing and it was Pirates of the Caribbean the first one. Wow. And I think I was about 12 and I remember watching it and having the like blacking out like being so immersed with like childlike wonder at this world and I had completely like escaped my body and like got into this fantasy and I walked out of the theater furious that I wasn't a part of it. of what had just happened. You know, I was going, it was like watching a party but not being invited. I was like, how dare they make this without who? They're all playing dress-ups and they look so much fun and they're fighting and I'm laughing

and they're wearing all these costumes. Like, where am I? Oh, all of them, you know? I just, it was like the perfect movie experience at that age and at that time. And I think I turned to my dad like pretty soon after going, okay, so. I can do make-believe for a living. Like how it's a job? Like, what are we doing here?

Amazing. How do we make that happen? I mean, I grew up in the heyday of like Star Wars and like that. So, I mean, you know, seeing like the Empire Strikes Back, you know, and like my crowded theater in nowhere, Nebraska, you know, it was really cool. But beyond that, like, and we were just talking about Severn, you know, but like things like the Grim Reaper and like sort of like lower budget horror movies were very inspirational to me, you know, madman comes to mind. But like just seeing those and then emulating

that type of stuff with my friends. I had a friend whose mom had, you know, a VHS, you know, camcorder and she would like, she would tape us. And it was like, you know, she was the DP and we would roll around and kind of do, you know, emulate Chuck Norris movies mixed with, it's like martial arts mixed with horror and stuff like that and just making stuff when we were, you know, 10, 11, 12. Me and my cousins did the same thing and they were always really horror heavy. Like someone always was dead. Yeah. It's like the greatest entry point because it's achievable, but it also is like fascinating to little kids.

What, um, did you just like decide at that time you were going to act and you were like, I'm going to be Kieran Ely or Johnny Depp? Like that's the thing I want to do. I was going, what are we doing? It was the, I think I put two and two together that it was like a thing that a adults could do as a job. And after that, what are we doing with geography and maths and the rest of this? I just want to dress up and play.

Yeah. It all feels like a waste of time other than that. Yeah. For you, I mean, you have been working in independent film. So, like, there is something about holding a camera as a young person where it's, like, achievable. Yeah. And I went to Columbia College in Chicago, and I learned how to shoot. This is a time when everything was film.

So I learned how to load cameras and shoot, you know, everything, edit on a steamback and all of that. And so for me, I learned a practical trade like in college. And I went out and then I worked as a working camera operator, working BP for many, many years. And yeah, I mean, that was my entry point. And then I, you know, I always wanted to direct and write. And I was doing those types of things with my friends. But after many, many years of helping other people with their dreams, you know, you're like, take a chance on yourself. when I made a very low-budget, you know, $13,000 feature called The Bunny Game with my friend Rodleen.

And it ended up, like, it ended up getting banned in the UK. We sold it to a bunch of territories. And it was very successful as a micro-budget film. What about for you? Do you remember when you cracked in and you were like, this is actually going to happen for me? Yeah, I had done a, like a crime drama when I was about 13. I played like a brady kid, just like myself essentially. And then I did a soap opera called Home and Away.

It's like the famous Aussie one. I still want to see this. It don't. I want to see it so bad. I'm so bad at it. And I remember I basically had to decide between university and the soap opera wanting me back on the show. They were like, we're going to pick up your storyline. You can come to us for three years, which felt like,

a lifetime to a 16-year-old. You do a lot of episodes a year, right? Like, it's like insane, right? Right, how many did you do all in? You're shooting, like, a movie a day. That's insane. That's crazy. Because you're doing 10 episodes in a week.

And you, I mean, like, lines. I mean, I think the, it's a great, like, school for the technical sides of how to, like, build your craft. Like you need to know your lines. You need to find your light. Because if you don't hit your mark and like remember, they'll just recast you. They can't. They don't have time. So did you sign up?

Did you sign up for three more years? And I remember sitting in the bathroom like after like art class or something. And I was in the bathroom and the casting director was calling me being like, we need to tell the studio if you're doing it or not. And I really, I think at that age you just want to go to university with your friends because your friends are like the most meaningful thing of your life. And I remember going, okay, I'm going to do the show. that's what I want to do. I think after that, it was like, okay, this is what I'm going to do. Right, you had committed with my life, yeah. What about for you, after the first film, were you like, I'm going to be able to stick with this and make a career out of this?

I was doing a lot of second unit work and stuff like that. So I was like constantly on sets and around things. And I was learning from other people's mistakes. I was on, I also did BTS for like a company. and I'd go around and shoot on things like Fast and the Furious and like these big, you know, big, big job. So I could see how things moved on the bigger shows. And I could see what I gravitated, you know, towards, which was character driven, smaller, you know, those, like, telling more personal stories. That's instead of doing, like, green screen stuff and the cars on some type of, you know, thing doing slow, it was, that to me is kind of boring, you know. But getting to do something, you know, that's, I mean, when you started talking about the soap operas, like, you know, we did Carolina Carolina on a 25-day schedule, you know, and I'm with almost 100 locations. So I'm thinking that there's a correlation to your work ethic, like, and being able to move like that.

I don't know. You just have to. There's no time. I think, and like maybe it's the Australian culture of how they treat actors very much. like the crew, you know, that, like, we had one trailer for 20 of us to all hang out in. There's no sort of, like, it's not very glamorous at all. So I think that kind of helps. Not like working with me, where it's just total glamorous.

Very deep. Exactly. Well, I feel like your career, you have really nicely balanced this blend of indie and kind of like slightly more running gun with studio stuff. And your sensibilities, I feel like, are often rooted in studio history movies. Yeah. But the way that you're making them feels more independent, is that fair to say? That is fair to say.

Yeah, I feel like I'm doing like commercial work. Yeah. But it's just with this sort of indie spirit and a different slant to it. Yeah. So I'm curious, let's talk about this movie. So one thing that jumped out to me is you didn't write this movie. I did not. And I feel like your movies have a very specific tone that you've written.

Yeah. And so I'm curious, like, why you wanted to direct a script that you didn't write. And then maybe when you read it, like, why you connected with it too. I think for the same reason, actors want to make them. vulnerable and try different things. For me, that was a huge part of it, like being really vulnerable and being like, okay, I didn't write this. And at the same time, that's super liberating if you didn't write the project, like, because

you're not precious about anything. When I write something, I'm really slow and it's very designing. I'm thinking about shot for shot, how it all is connecting together. With Tom's script, I could just take things out, which is let's get rid of that. I wasn't precious with anything. So I did a couple passes with Tom in as we sort of, we, one of the things that happened was we were really ready to go with this probably 2023, but then the strikes happened. And when the strikes happened, we couldn't go. So we had like a year or so to wait.

And in the meantime, I had done Snack shack and we had shot that and cut that and everything. But as in the ramp up to like making the film and after casting Samar and after casting Kyle and Tom went off to shoot Charlie Harper, I had the ability to, he gave me his blessing to do what I wanted with the script too. And we had sort of shifted it from more of a crime thriller when I read it. And I read the first act. I'm like, man, this thing really wants to be like a 70-style romantic, you know, romance movie. That's what it's telling me to do with it. And so I was able to put my stamp on it. And I'd never done that with something before.

And it felt, like I said, very liberating to be able to do that. But it was just cool, like to have an idea that was outside of my wheelhouse that I wouldn't have really thought. I would not have thought of this story. And so it was cool. And I'm open to that now to other things coming to me. And, you know, some things come and there's less that I want to finesse. And then sometimes I'll look at something. I'm like, the first five pages of this is great.

I would just take over into, you know, so things come to me like that, too, where I want to just overhaul the whole thing. But I like the concept or the idea. Samara, I'm curious, like, not just what you responded to in the screenplay, but are you strategic about the kinds of parts you want to take in succession? Like, do you want to do something very different from what you had previously just done? Do you think about the body of work when you're thinking about picking a movie? I think I'm starting to, it's hard, you know, because when you're starting out as an actor, especially when I first moved to L.A., it was like, does anyone want to hire me? So there's this imposter syndrome that's still looming of going, can I say no to something?

Is that so presumptuous of me to think that something else will come along? But I'm starting to, like, believe that that's not going to be a problem anymore. So in the last, I'd say, like, five years I've tried to be a little bit more deliberate and, like, careful about what I'm doing, but definitely, and trying to live by, you know, if it's not an absolute yes, it's a no. And this was just an absolute yes, I read Tom's script and it just captured like a feeling, a tone of the movies that I really loved growing up, that like true romance, Bonnie and Clyde, like that I just hadn't really seen a lot of recently, you know, where it's just this beautiful, like fun, entertaining story.

And I hadn't played a character like that before. So there was a lot of fear around, okay, can I pull this off? I've always wanted to. Let's see if I can. And then I watched Adam's movie Dinner in America and fell in love with Adam and Kyle. So it just felt like all the pieces came together in such an incredible way. And to Adam's point, what I find, fascinating about this shoot that I'd never experienced before was Adam and Tom being so

collaborative as writers, not only with themselves, but with Kyle and I, because as we were shooting and Adam is genius shooting in chronological order. So Kyle and I started realizing, oh, wow, we've got really good chemistry. Like, this is great. Like, this is kind of the heart of the story. And we changed the ending. Yeah, we did. Because... Like, as we were shooting. We realized it didn't fight. A writer would never, do you know what I mean? Like it takes such a...

We realized that it wasn't quite lining up with how, what we had shot, like, leading up to it. And we were like, wow, we have an opportunity to sort of finesse this. And we got together, like, at a restaurant, like, the weekend before we shot the sort of... We had just, like, a little small window of time. And then we made changes based on just our sort of how we felt about everything. up into that point. We were like living in a story and we were going, wait, does this ending make sense? I think he's like a good guy actually.

I think he needs to be, I think these two need to like ride or die fully. And just the fact that that happens so like organically. Organically and just authentically. And Tom was watching the Daily's going, yeah, you know. That choice is the thing that made it feel even more classical to me. And, you know, you cited a couple of movies that have that same energy. And I feel like in all your movies, Adam, they're very sincere. Thanks.

And that's, like, very uncommon in contemporary movies. I know. You know what I mean? Why is that? I want to ask you guys about that. If you look at stuff from like the early 80s, you look like the volume of stuff coming out, every movie is a classic movie. Like, you look at like the bills for theater bills and stuff.

And you're like, oh, my God. It was like, you know, the trading. places and Beverly Hills, you're like, wait, these Eddie Murphy movies and this, they're all like close together and it's like they're, it's like a great run. I mean, just, and the variety of things that you could see like on any given month was amazing. And they all had heart, you know? That, yeah, maybe that's the word too. So earnest.

It's earnest, but not cloying, right? It's not like sentimental, but the movie, I think is a really interesting representation of when you meet somebody and even if it's not necessarily the best idea for your life. Like there's something the tractor beam quality that brings to it. But do you, does that come naturally for you to just tell a story that sincerely? Or are you like working with restraint? No, I know. It's just that part of it.

I don't know. It just comes out through me. It just, when people say that like your films have so much heart. They have so much heart. And I look at dinner in America, you know, I can barely make it through that movie without, you know, crying. When I see Emily and Kyle together, there's a good. And the same thing with, you know, with Connor and Gabe and Snackshack and Mika and Nick.

I mean, it's beautiful. And now with Sam and Kyle in this movie, it's like, I have, like, I was in Cleveland and I was just watching it and randomly. And I just started crying. And it wasn't had anything to do with anything other than I was really proud of you guys for like your commitment and just like, it was a hard shoot. It was a really hard shoot. Like, we didn't have a lot of time.

We had 25 days. And there's like 100 locations. and it's really crazy. But to watch you guys and see the gifts that you give, like take to take and what we were able, you know, Justin and I were able to use my editor, we're able to use. It's, it's, I love that. And I think that we were able to really, you gave so many gifts, Kyle gave so many gifts, and we're able to just pull that out in the movie.

And it just, yeah, it's just filled with heart. Can you? Just a big soft, yeah. Yeah, seriously. Can you, can you, can you, um, you mentioned Kyle and finding, that you guys had chemistry, can you demythologize that for us a little bit? Like when you're as a working actor, especially in a movie that is very romantic. Yeah. How does it feel on set when you know you have to like very quickly establish something so that it's believable? And then how do you find a way

to get along with someone? How do you, if you hadn't met them before, how do you make a connection with them so that you can sell it? It's hard. It's hard. I really do think that we got really lucky. I do believe. Or Adam saw something and was going, these two will get along. So, I don't know, it could have just been good foresight or it was luck. I knew Kyle forever with that. And when I met you, I was like dead set on that. I was like, I remember we had our meeting at Great White and I was like, she's Caroline.

Yeah, thanks. But I am like, I don't know, I think chemistry reads and chemistry tests are so important because I really don't think you can fake chemistry. It's really hard to do to really sell it. And I think a lot of movies that I'm excited to go and see and then I watch the two big movie stars and I'm going, oh, they cast these two because they're big names and they're going to draw attention,

but they don't have that quality, you know. So I don't know, I think we got really lucky. The whole industry is like that, you know. And it just feels very like most of the time, was very false and it feels like a lot of just bad choices and bad pairings. But this one for me was easy to see with these two. And I knew your work ethic was strong. I knew Kyle's work ethic was strong. I hadn't worked with you before, but I did my homework, you know. Made some calls. Stiffing around to ask him, Tyler, you know. Hey, how is Sam? Yeah, I don't know. The chemistry thing's

weird because it's sort of like the camera can pick it up and you can feel it in a room, you know, like if you have two friends over and you're like, oh, Leinstone are getting along. Like, it's not like a tangible. You can't like manufacture it. I don't think. Yeah. It's interesting too. I wonder how did it impact the fact that Kyle and Adam already had a working relationship

knew each other and you're coming into something that is pre-established? It was quite comforting, I think. And Adam, like he uses the whole, the same crew, basically. So it felt like a very well-oiled machine because sometimes, you know, it's a bunch of strangers getting to know each other and trying to work with each other. You got to spend a couple weeks, like getting into the rhythm of things. Yeah, but it was like, and everyone was really warm and welcoming. Things went great after day one.

I mean, that was the thing. The day one on this film we shot when Oliver pulls up in the car and they meet for the first time. And, you know, I like to do the fluff day. Get the, getting to know you part of it out of the way. That should always be first in my mind. Shouldn't do the end of the movie. first. Yeah.

Yeah. Hold off on that. But not everyone agrees with you, though. Sometimes you mention you shot chronologically, but that's not common. It's not common. I actually sometimes like to do. Who said this? There was an actor who said this, and I really agree.

He likes to shoot the middle of the movie first to get the rust off. Then you do the beginning and the end, and you're really good. Because as an audience member... We weren't entirely chronological, but I made a point to shoot the... most dramatic part of the ending, we were doing that on the last day. I was always like, that has to be on the last day because I want as much runway on the tarmac of them together to really sell that. And I want them to, like the schedule, they need to, we need to make sure that the first

day is a meeting for the first time because that's, you know, where she has some stuff prior to that, but it's all kind of like flash forward, flashback kind of, yeah. I've been riding with Kyle since Veronica Mars, so it's so interesting to watch him become like a legit indie movie star. And I think you're somewhat responsible for kickstarting that with Dinner in America. He's been doing some really cool work. Like, why did you first cast him? Like, what is he like now? Has anything changed?

I was so interested in him. There was, so when I was casting Dinner in America, you know, I was looking at four or five actors. and Kyle was one of the top five actors that I was looking at. And there's a picture of him. You can find it online. It's like some type of de Garra type or tin type of him. And he looks like James Dean. He looks like a bad boy.

But he has like in the image too, there's a vulnerability to him that's just amazing. And I was like, I would cast him off of that single image. I would cast anybody off of a single image if it showed me their soul. And this image showed his. his soul, and I was just like, I would love to cast this guy. And he had auditioned for a movie that Ross Putman was producing with Karam Songa called First. No, it wasn't First Girl. It was the Young Kijlowski.

And he didn't get the role. This guy, Ryan Malgarini got it. And they had Kyle's email. So Karam sent Kyle the script, crickets. We didn't hear shit. Kyle was also doing a TV show called Outsiders. And we cast the movie with different set of actors and a different DP. The movie fell apart.

And then I found a new DP. And he was working with Kyle in like Romania on a project. And he was like, hey, there's this movie that I'm attached to. The film just fell apart and they're looking for a new lead. I think you'd love it. It's called Dinner in America. Kyle was like, where have I heard of that before? He went back in his email like two and a half years back.

And, you know, he searched for it. And the script was in his email. He read it and like the next day we're talking on the phone. Wow. Twist of fate. Like, you fucker. I made this movie like two and a half years ago, you know, because we struggled. And, you know, as movies often do, they come together.

They fall apart. And, yeah, so cast him the next day and, you know, the rest is history. That's fascinating. Did you guys watch any movies before you made this? Was there any reference points or touch points that you were like, this is what we're looking for? I did watch a few. I watched like that. I probably did you abstract kind of things.

But I watched like, I really like I love Patricia Arquette. Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. She's great. Yeah. Alabama. Yeah. She's the best.

Yeah. I mean, the whole cast in that movie is like, like, there's no weak links. And I feel like, Kira's almost like the Dennis Hopper of that. You know, kind of has like that really nice, long, tasty sequence with Christopher Walken. That's a great sequence. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about Carolyn for you because she's, it's pretty restrained, like, what is going on with her. It takes a long time to kind of figure out what is maybe motivating her, how she's gotten to this place in her life.

Like, as an actor, especially if you're shooting chronologically, like, how do you do that? How do you, like, hide something and then wait? And then, you know, you mentioned Kira and you guys have a very emotional conference. later in the movie. I don't know. Tell me about building that out. I mean, really, it's just credit to Tom's writing. I think he captured this vulnerable but strong woman and you can just feel this like yearning for trying to find out who she is as a person. And there's this big sort of overhanging question of who am I and am I good or am I bad? And I know I related so much to, you know, being in a smaller town and having bigger dreams and kind of feeling stuck.

And what else? I mean, honestly, for this character, the accent was a really big, like, key to her. Once I got the accent down and then once I started putting the costume on, it really came together because I think, If you wear that outfit and you sound like that, you can kind of get away with being like, you can get away with a lot, you know? Like you can be bored and snarky and like kind of annoying to your dad and, you know, late and making bad choices and everyone's a bit like, ah, you know? Like as soon as Aaron the makeup artist is putting extra freckles on my face and this like blonde, bouncy hair,

like, you can go rob a bank and everyone will be like, good on you. Yeah. Yeah. What about the music, which is like amazingly well chosen, I will say? I would love to take credit for that. I would love to. In this situation, not at all. Okay.

It was my editor, Justin Crone. Justin is, he's very well versed in country music and adjacent things, and that is him going fucking bonkers. So did you just say to him, like, drop some people. cues in? What do you think would be good here? So a little bit of history. Justin was like a college roommate. Like we've known each other for 29 years. And, you know, he's a close friend. And I think we had done, we had done SnackShack together. And SnackShack, I had written in like a lot of the cues were written in. I think Justin had a handful of ones that he had like picked that were that were great for the movie. But I was super specific about that. And I hadn't worked with an editor

before. I had always, up until that point, I edited everything that I did myself. And so I was super specific about the music in Snackshack because that was my summer movie. That was my story, my experience in 1991. So I wanted it very curated like from what I, what I remember from being around the pool. And then we got into, you know, then we got into Carolina. And he, he just had more, I'm not as well-versed in country type of stuff. And there wasn't anything specific outside of prior to it. I had a couple artists commission the song Carolina Carolina, which we ended up kind of abandoning at a certain point.

Like, totally it just didn't feel right in the spots that we had it in. But outside of that, Justin was just peppering in, you know, music and a lot of female driven country and stuff that felt really good with Caroline's story. And so just an intuitive process. I mean, he would try things sometimes and we'd listen and it wasn't something that I wanted or worked, but I would say 85% of the time on this movie, it was so smooth and effortless, and he just curated this amazing. There's like 24 songs, needle drops.

Yeah, yeah. And all of that is offset with Chris Bears. amazing score that's like this sort of synth-driven score. I think those two things just go really, like it's a mashup. We had done that similarly in Dinner in America had this sort of edium, big thing against the punk aesthetic. And Snackshack had, you know, Kegan DeWitt's, like, really pretty score against these kind of pop music things.

And it was like the same thing with this. It was like Chris Bear's score really offset. It made it this really cool mashup of like, you know, you've got. the country western thing, but you've also in, like, the robberies and stuff like that, you've got something driving it to at times that's, you know, more akin to heat or something like that. Yeah, yeah. So it's cool.

There's one other thing about the movie that you guys haven't mentioned, but I really like which is like, it is a real con man movie, you know, which is another kind of classical thing, a very like 80s-centric thing. And selling that is also challenging. Like, and honestly, as a viewer, keeping track of how I'm being conned is. a lot of fun. Like, maybe you can talk about the mechanics of figuring out how these things work and how you can do it. I still don't know.

I have no idea. I spent weeks, like, YouTubeing it and, like, again, I didn't do maths at school. I thought I would be an actor. Like, I did the, it got to the point where there was, I know, there was like a whole crew we had stopped for like half an hour going, okay, let's just figure it out. And we all were baffled. I was sitting there on this table outside this thing. trying to show them. Like, no, I do this.

Then you think this. You still don't? No, I don't think. I do. Was that intentional for you to, like, disorient us as the viewer to, like, it's, because sometimes in a movie, it's about, it is about deconstructing what's happening and showing us. And you even, we have Kyle explaining it.

Yeah. But it is still confusing. Yeah, it is confusing. And I think the first one is the best because, you know, Sam is watching the whole time. She doesn't say anything in that initial sort of exchange with her boss, Charlie. and Kyle they're doing the thing and then she's like God damn it Charlie and she goes outside

she's the one that recognized it and somehow knew that it was dirty and she calls him out on it and so we know something's going if you watch it it's all very accurate you see him put the 10 down and walk away and he's like whoa hold out there us you know so yeah it's

it does work I will say if you're going to do it you want to catch people off guard you want them to be you want it to be busy you want maybe a like a line to people like where it's like like hurry up hurry up you know you want you want them to feel rushed you don't have to think about it too much at one of the screenings um somebody popped up and said my first day I work at a gas station this happened to me really yeah and so yeah interesting do you do you identify

with a con man at all um not really okay I'm a little too straightforward and like you know I wanted to I like I've I've said this a few times but I wanted to on I I I I didn't at attempt to do it. I thought in my head, I was, I was, when we were shooting, we were in Kentucky, and there was a situation with the clerk one night at a gas station. I almost did it. Oh. I almost did it. And, and I prevented myself from. I just, the cameras and stuff. I didn't. It could have just been research, you know, you were just trying to see how legible it was. I didn't want to get busted. Yeah.

What are your hopes when a movie like this comes around? Like, do you, is your expectation, because you've been doing this for a long time now? and working independently. Like I said, you're balancing this, like these two strands, it seems like, in your career of independent, you know, a lot of genre-focused stuff. And then you're in big studio movies. And is it you want the movie to be critically well reviewed? You wanted to make X number of dollars, you know, like you had a festival premiere.

Like, how do you think about expectations around a movie like this? I mean, for this one, I love it so much. Like, I'm a true fan of this movie. so I really just want people to go and see it and watch it. You know, I'm like quite proud of it. I think sometimes it's different, you know? You're like, oh, I hope some people see it and I hope that I get reviewed okay.

But this one, I'm just like, I want to scream it from the rooftops. It's just such a nice feeling. I mean, for me, it's like every, you know, you guys get to come, you sweep in and do your thing and then you're out. But for me, it's like, you know, there's nine, ten, eleven months after that where you're working and you're building and, you know, deconstructing and reconstructing. And so, you know, at the end of the day, I just, you simply want people to see it. You want eyeballs on it. You want people to have an experience.

And, you know, when they walk out of it, people will come up and they're very grateful. And they're like, this is how movies used to feel. Thank you. And I, like, that's a, that's, I feel like that's enough, you know? That is why I asked you guys to be here. I was like, this doesn't make me feel something that feels a little ancient in a good way. Yeah. So congrats on that. We end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers what is the last great thing they have seen. Oh my gosh. I watched the best movie I'd never seen it. What was it? Reds. Oh God. Warren Baby.

Unbelievable movie. Are you joking? Yeah. How have I not seen that before? Did you watch them one sitting? Yes. In a theater. Yeah. It was incredible. In a theater? Yeah. No kidding. What augured that? What do you mean? Like what did you, where did it play? Why was it in a thing? We built a theater. Oh, my God. What? If you ever want to, it's been so amazing. We built a cheeky little theater under the house. And we have been watching, like, movies that we're either too young to have seen in the theater.

And it's so much fun. But Reds, it's a masterpiece. It is. I had never heard of it before. Yeah. I mean, it's incredible. They getaway with so much. Like, there's so many things that shouldn't work that do.

it's an epic it's a love so it's incredible i mean that last shot where it goes from um like all the men walking off the train and then it pans to her and then there's a dead body going past and then he's the oh sorry spoiler but oh my god it is i and it is three hours yeah more i think i was going no it wasn't that was like an hour it was yeah anyway i'm a big fan it's a great recommendation god what did i just have in my head and i got swept away. So sorry. No, I got swept away. I had, I did have, oh, I know what it was. I went with Gabe LaBelle. We went and saw Jackass 1 and 2 at the New Bev. Oh, nice. Like a few months ago. Oh my God, nice. And Johnny Knoxville was there like Jeff Tremaine, Lance Bangs, Rick Cossack. So I got like, this is like hero status stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did they introduce it and everything? They did. And it was. I love that this fell in its, but. Honestly, what you just did is like the polarity of this show, which is like those are two very different and distinct styles of movies than I love both of them. They are. That's a good double feature. I got to talk to Jeff Tremaine for like 15, 20 minutes outside. It was like amazing. And I just, I'm just a fan of those guys. Like I think that as far as like comedy is concerned, they push things in a direction that was, I'm thinking of things really caught up to that.

Like it's just, you know, like maybe. Maybe some Sasha Baron Cohen stuff. Like, I, you know, Orat in the theater was amazing with people. Jackass 2 in the theater when I saw it originally was like. Electric. Electric. It was. It was.

It was just, yeah. It really was electric. Yeah. It was like being in a party. But to see it at the new Bev totally packed. I mean, everybody was as rowdy as fuck. Gabe and I were screaming. I told Johnny, I love you, Johnny.

You know, like, yeah. It was, it was really, really special. Guys, those are great. Congrats on the film. Thanks for doing the show. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks to Adam and Samara.

Thanks to Griffin. Thanks to Lucas Kavanaugh, Sarah Reddy, and Jamie Yukits for their production support on this episode next week. We're breaking down the new scary movie movie and we're also talking about Mel Brooks's entire career to celebrate his 100th birthday. And you know what?

Scary movie would not even exist without Mel Brooks. So show some respect. Check out his films. We'll talk about them here on the show. See you next week. Thank you.