The Big Picture - We're Watching Every New Movie at Home Now. Is That a Good Thing? Plus: Bill Simmons on 'The Hunt.' | The Big Picture

Episode Date: March 24, 2020

Suddenly, nearly every 2020 movie that's been released is available at home. Sean and Amanda break down our new (hopefully temporary) reality of home consumption, discuss the drawbacks of the VOD economy, and go in-depth on two new at-home releases, 'The Hunt' and 'Emma.' (0:32). Then, Bill Simmons stops by to talk about how excited he is for the future of seeing new movies from the comfort of his home, and why 'The Hunt' was the perfect movie for that experience (58:30). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Bill Simmons Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelley, and welcome to The Ringer Podcast Network. We hope The Ringer can provide you entertainment and companionship during this time. So as always, feel free to check out TheRinger.com, where we're still covering the latest in sports, pop culture, tech, and media. And The Ringer's YouTube channel can provide endless amounts of entertainment. You can find that at YouTube.com slash TheRinger. I'm Sean Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture,

a conversation show about the brave new world of watching movies at home. Later in the show, our boss Bill Simmons will join me in his new monthly segment, Bill Tells Sean He's Wrong About a Movie.

But first, here's where we are in movie world in 2020. Over the past 14 days, the industry has undergone a swift ad hoc revision of its business model. Studios are moving recent releases straight to video on demand. Independent distributors are punting on theatrical runs. Streaming services are well positioned to capitalize as Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix have all debuted original movies since COVID-19 struck stateside. And the future of movie theaters is in doubt for now. What does that mean for us? With no option to go outside and see the world, it means there's a lot more movies for us to watch at home. In my running tally of this year's movies, there are now just six releases I've not yet had a chance to see. By month's end,

I'll probably have seen most of those as well. Amanda, have you been spending as much time watching movies as I have this year? Believe it or not, I have not, Sean. I think that it is great that you are using this time in order to indulge your encyclopedic nature and to fill out your spreadsheets and to accrue as much knowledge as possible about the current state of the movie industry. And you host a movie podcast. So, you know, it's good that at least one of us is doing that. I would say that I have taken the more general approach to watching movies. I did watch a couple movies this weekend, and you and I are going to talk about a couple of them, but The Hunt hadn't seen that were kind of related to them, more related to Emma than The Hunt, if we're being totally honest.

And then I spent a lot of time watching Mark Wahlberg's TikTok. So I pretty much exclusively watched movies this weekend. We're in this fascinating period and it is not a permanent change. I think there's been a lot of desire to make a sweeping statement about how the industry has changed forever. That's not what we're saying here, but we're trying to, I guess we're trying to,

um, associate the new future, the short term future of movies with this podcast. In some ways, I think basically if we're doing two shows a week going forward and we will, and thanks to everybody who has said, thank you for continuing to do the show. We're happy to continue doing the show during this period.

But if we're going to do two shows, I think maybe one show a week will be about something current and what's happening in the state of the world. And then one show will be something looking back or more list-driven or more historical, more movie swaps, things like that. If we're looking at the current state of things, basically 11 recent 2020 theatrical releases

have sort of unexpectedly arrived in our homes. You mentioned Emma and the Hunt. By Tuesday morning, we'll also have movies like Birds of Prey and The Way Back. On March 31st, we get Sonic the Hedgehog. Onward was the number one movie on all streaming VOD over the weekend. And that comes to Disney Plus soon, too. We've already done episodes on this show about Onward and The Invisible Man and Birds of Prey and The Way Back and Sonic and Frozen 2 and The Gentleman.

So if you're seeing any of those movies at home now, please go back into the archives and check those out. I have really been exploiting this opportunity, though. I have been watching a lot of stuff. I spent all of basically Friday at 4 p.m. through the rest of the weekend digging into new stuff. Now, you use the word encyclopedic to describe how I tend to attack these things. I think it's perhaps a bit more emotionally and mentally challenged than encyclopedic. I think I'm like diseased in a particular kind of way. And like the comprehensiveness, it has been a big part of this.

Would you agree? You're kind of smiling and nodding. I said, you know, those are your words and not mine. I will say when I opened this outline and saw the list of movies that you watched this weekend, I had some questions about when you ate, slept, talked to your wife, or did anything besides look at a screen. I didn't do a ton of any of those other things. I talked to my wife a pretty good amount.

I think we're pretty connected. I'm feeling good about the state of my relationship. Everything else, who knows? It's kind of a coin flip. The movies I did watch, I'll read the movie I read and how I watched it. And that'll give you a sense of kind of what is available to people that wasn't available even four days ago. So I watched The Platform And that'll give you a sense of kind of what is available to people

that wasn't available even four days ago. So I watched The Platform on Netflix that debuted on Friday. I watched Emma on iTunes, which I had missed in theaters. I watched Blow the Man Down on Amazon Prime. I watched Black Christmas on Amazon Rental, which was a movie that was released at the end of 2019 that I missed. I watched Color Out of Space, a very trippy Nick Cage movie on iTunes. I watched The Jesus Rolls, an very trippy Nick Cage movie on iTunes. I watched The Jesus Rolls, an ostensible sequel to The Big Lebowski starring the Jesus character played by John Turturro on iTunes. And then late last night, I watched a movie called The Wild Goose Lake on a service called Film Movement, which we've not really talked about on this show.

And I got a virtual ticket to the movie. I paid $12 and I supported a local theater. And it was definitely the best movie that I watched all weekend. I was completely knocked out by it. I don't think very many people have seen it. It debuted at Cannes last year. And it was one of the best liked movies that was seen there. We're not going to devote an episode to the Wild Goose League anytime soon, but it was very, very good. What's up, Amanda? When you say virtual ticket, what does that mean exactly? Was it like a timed viewing experience? Or were you watching it along with other people?

It was a timed viewing experience. You pay your $12. And then as soon as you click start, you get 72 hours to finish the film. You're not watching it with anybody else. The film is basically just made available to you digitally on this service. You can download Film Movement on your Apple TV, on your iPhone. You can watch it kind of anywhere you want. You can even just stream it via browser. But it was pretty easy to do. And especially a lot of world cinema is being made available this way. I also rented another

movie that I haven't started watching through a oscilloscope called St. Francis, which is an independent feature about a young woman who's just had an abortion and a friendship that she makes with a young child in the aftermath of that, that apparently is very good that I probably would not have had a chance to see in theaters anyway. So I'm really knocking out a lot of stuff. And in addition to that, I'm kind of squeezing in, you know, like the episode of Survivor that I have to catch up on, maybe an older movie on Criterion Channel. I did not get a chance to watch Tiger King on Netflix. Did you

see Tiger King, Amanda? I saw a lot of people tweeting about Tiger King. Yes, as did I. Maybe I'll watch that. I'm not so sure. I would definitely recommend Blow the Man Down 2, which is on Amazon right now if you're a Prime subscriber, which I would describe as kind of like the Coen Brothers meets Nicole Holof Center. Very fun, but creepy and dark noir tale. It would make probably a tidy double feature with the lighthouse. You mentioned Mark Wahlberg's TikTok. How much of your screen time is devoted to your phone at this point? A lot of it, unless I'm purposefully putting it down, which I've been trying to do. The phone is really the source of connection with a lot of people, which, you know, I've been seeking out. Um, and I think a lot of people have, and also just a lot of stressful information. And I've really even, you know, the power of the phone also extends to screens. And I have been trying to take some time away from the screens when I can,

because otherwise I will just, I will go between Twitter where there's been a lot of useful information and camaraderie and also a lot of stressful information. And then I'll just go look at another of Mark Wahlberg's TikToks. And I have to tell you, I spent a lot of time on the TikTok and it's not a good TikTok. He's doing the same thing where he's posting Instagram and TikTok. It's the same stuff, which you have to be platform specific, guys, at this level. I don't like if you're asking for my time, be original and think about the medium. But it's really just Mark Wahlberg like working out.

And then there was one from Ash Wednesday where he was just monologuing about Ash Wednesday. And then one where he tried to do a dance with his daughter. And it was fascinating. I wish we'd had it in time for our Mark Wahlberg episode. People are out there spending their time in different ways. And apparently, that's what I'm watching. Do you follow exclusively celebrity accounts on TikTok? I don't follow anyone on TikTok. I don't know how to follow people on TikTok.

But I do find that when I'm looking at the main feed, which is the for you, I do look for... I pause when it's a celebrity or when they dance immediately, because that grabs my attention, or when it's a celebrity. Yeah, which is not how you're supposed to use it. TikTok is for the children. I'm using it wrong. I support the creativity of the young people, but also I'm human. What would we have to do to get you to make a TikTok? So one thing about TikTok, and I just said I mostly focus on the celebrities. But the best version of TikTok is when it's a celebrity parent who is like, okay, my kid

really wants to do this TikTok challenge. And so I'll do it along with them and look a little goofy. And I find that really endearing. And, you know, it's like the best side of all these celebrities. So we can't really do this right now because of social distancing. But like if if there were, you know, kids I knew who really needed some backup on the TikTok, then that then I would do it. But not right now. Once everyone is, you know, safe and healthy again. Okay. You heard it here. All the children listening to this episode of The Big Picture, please send your requests to Amandaanda for tiktok challenges she will respond only to children so please uh also share your birth certificate and let us know just how old

you are do not communicate with me if you are a child i do not want to be communicating with you in any meaningful way um i i can't i can't join tiktok i feel like i've aged out i feel like i've i've aged out of new social media platforms okay, I'm just trying to stay hip and find out what's new and what's going on in a different way than you are. You have watched every single new release, including movies that like maybe 15 other people will watch. God bless those 15 people that true cinema lovers. And I am just out here with Mark Wahlberg looking at TikToks. I feel like we're about to talk about a couple of movies, but I think that the most watched thing over the weekend had to have been D-Nice's Instagram live feed. Did you get a chance

to watch that or experience that at all? You bet I did. I kind of got there late. We were cooking dinner on Saturday night, which was fun. And I was like away from my phone. So I feel like I missed like, was Michelle Obama there? Michelle Obama was there. Barack Obama was there. Okay. So I missed the Obamas, which just, oh, damn it. I missed all the, I missed all the fun people.

I got there and I was like, oh, wow, I missed this party. But God bless, God bless him. It went for hours. And so I, you know, kind of caught the end of the Saturday night vibe. For those of you who don't know who D-Nice is, and there's been a lot of writing about him recently because of this live party that he put on Instagram Live that I assume he's just going to be doing now

for long stretches of time. I think there was north of 90,000 people on the Instagram Live at some point. He basically did a dance party, a Saturday night dance party from his apartment. It looked like in New York. D-Nice, absolute legend, icon of new york hip-hop history he was a member of boogie down productions in the 80s um discovered kid rock in the late 80s oddly when kid rock was more of a

rapper and less of a rap rock star uh i have been to a handful of parties when i was working in especially when i was working in rap journalism at rap magazines uh where he was the dj and he was the kind of the go-to for your anniversary party he's just like an all-time party dj if you're rich you should hire him to run your wedding music um but i i have not seen some maybe he's short of tiger king i've not seen so many people evangelize about a communal viewing experience like I have. It reminded me of like everyone when everyone was watching who wants to be a millionaire or something or was like, this is a this is a movement. We all need to watch this guy alone in his apartment playing old Michael Jackson records. Just I don't know. It was a fascinating phenomenon,

especially in light of the way that we talk about what we're all watching together. Yeah, I really do think the communal part of it is what made it work because everyone is longing not just to kind of be exposed to other people and have connection, but to be a shared part of something. And I think you watched a ton of movies this weekend. And I was being rude when I said that no one else is going to watch them. And I hope that people watch these films that filmmakers spent a lot of time and effort and thought making. But the downside of the streaming is that we lose that communal experience of everyone consuming the same thing at the same time and wanting to talk about it. And it feels, for the most part, culture-wise and life-wise, more decentralized than ever. And I really do think in every respect, but certainly in the way we watch movies and consume

culture, that sense of doing it with people still has a lot of value to everyone and also incentivizes a lot of people to watch stuff. I watched the movies that I needed to watch for this, this podcast, but then I went straight to kind of areas of personal interest or comfort zone rather than, you know, kind of doing my homework. And I think a lot of people do that as well. Yeah. I was thinking about that exact concept late last night after I finished the wild goose Lake. Um, I'm going to, just going to run out of new stuff to see i'm i'm really like kind of at the the end of 2020 movies that i want to be caught up on maybe i have four or five more and when i get to the end what i do will be interesting we talked last week about how i was

um battling anxiety with anxiety by watching stressful movies and i think i've come through the looking glass on that where now i i need to, I need some warm blankets. I need some, some calming influences. I need something just familiar that I can experience while having a glass of wine and like even just having a conversation with my wife, just having the movie on in the background. What those will be, I'm not totally sure. Maybe I'll talk about them on future episodes. But, you know, today we need to talk about these these two other movies that um i would say we're pretty we're little seen in theaters and are both kind of fascinating objects for us in particular because i think they both on paper feel like an amanda movie and a sean movie in very discreet

ways and whether they turn out to be exactly that is kind of an interesting topic of conversation this is like a pre-movie swap in a way. You know, it's sort of like we have landed on something that we would trade to one another. You know, one of the fascinating things about this is that, you know, the box office is closed. For really the first time in 40 years, there was no box office reporting over the weekend. Fewer than 200 theaters are open. VOD power rankings have sort of taken over the box office, which, as you know, longtime culture editor and writer, is kind of the lifeblood of Monday morning movie writing

and indicates to people kind of what's successful, what's not, indicates to executives what's successful and what we should do more of. You could certainly make the case that box office has completely poisoned the brains of everybody who is a part of the film going and filmmaking communities i personally am kind of fascinated to see whether this vod replacement catches on in any way because everything is so diffuse now there's not like one central body tracking all this stuff i mentioned that onward was number one. The Invisible Man, according to Tom Brueggemann at IndieWire, was number 25. Emma was 42 and The Hunt was at 70. Now, before we get into the heart of these movies, do you think that that is specifically because

these movies were in theaters and had a shot with audiences? Do you think it's because of the price point? What other factors do you think contributed to them not exactly soaring to the top of the charts? I think it has almost nothing to do with the fact that they were in theaters just because not very many people saw them in theaters. I think it might have something to do with the fact that a lot of the marketing budget was spent on promoting them in theaters or promoting them in a different way than the way that they were eventually released. And I think marketing and how you get people's attention really matters and is very different between streaming and theaters, obviously, for many reasons, including, I think, sometimes you are looking for slightly different audiences. I am sure that Price Point

had something to do with it. I mean, you know, $19.99 for one movie that you're kind of like, people said maybe I should check it out. And maybe I'll be a part of some online discussion on Monday versus the $10 or $12 or $15 a month that you're paying for a streaming service with just so many movies. I do think a lot of people pause posit that. I have to say, I was really surprised by The Hunt. Meaning it didn't perform well? Yeah. And specifically it being the lowest of the three. I would just kind of, I would not have predicted that. I think I said on this podcast last week that I thought they should

have just put it online sooner, that a lot of people would want to see it. And that turned out to be just 100% wrong. And I don't really know why. Well, something interesting with this movie happened, which is and I guess I contributed to it in a way. Obviously, it's been in the consciousness since last summer. And we'll talk about the nature of what happened in the movie when we focus on the movie itself. But there was just a lot of press about it. And then when it was released, there were a lot of reviews and criticism about it, more so even than a movie like Emma.

It was a very noisy movie, but most of the noise was not positive. And I don't want to step on too much of the conversation around that movie. But I wonder if just the overwhelming amount of negative and or blah press contributed to people just being like, you know what? Not worth it. Or I'll just wait until it's free. Whereas, you know, The Invisible Man, there was lots of good buzz and the movie performed very well in movie theaters. And I'm sure there were plenty of people who just

didn't get a chance to get out to theaters to see it. And so this was their chance. So that meant across all platforms, it did pretty well. And Emma is interesting. And let's like use this as an opportunity to go into Emma because on paper, the Jane Austen adaptation is a very known quantity. And because of that, it has a captive audience. You are perhaps the most vocal member of the movie podcasting community about the Jane Austen adaptation. And because of that, I think it kind of obscured what makes this movie unique. So why don't you just give it, can you give us just a little bit of like background on the Jane Austen experience and specifically the Emma movie experience? Yes. So the short version is that there are many Jane Austen adaptations in the world,

both many series and films. And there are um notable emma adaptations in the world including a pretty well-known 1996 version which stars gwyneth paltrow as emma there is a 2009 miniseries um i believe it was bbc it's on hulu right now if you subscribe to hulu starring roma garai as as emma i'm a huge fan of romaray, even if I'm not totally pronouncing her name correctly. You're getting it. And then there's Clueless, which is a modern version of Emma and probably, by my account, is the best Jane Austen adaptation film or TV that exists. I mean, it's a perfect movie. It is also peak formative movie for Amanda. So a lot of bias. I remember I saw it in 1995 at Lenox Mall in Atlanta, Georgia with my mother and was like,

wow, the world is changing. But in terms of its both faithfulness to the source text of Emma, which is a Jane Austen novel about a rich, handsome, and clever girl. I think that's the wrong order, but that's a direct quote, who has some things to learn about life. And it is both really faithful to everything in the Jane Austen movie and also kind of a pitch-perfect movie about Southern California and being a teenager on its own. So it gets both the Emma character and all of the social observations that Austin does in a lot of her books and applies them to a setting that is recognizable to people. So it's kind of tough to come in after Clueless. Yes, I would say that Clueless loomed large over my viewing of this version of emma um i i think i saw i've seen the gwyneth paltrow version but i was a um yeah i don't i don't know it a uh

inconsiderate teenager not really paying close enough attention to these stories as i've indicated to you in the past and we talked about sense and sensibility this isn't always my cup of tea to make a bad pun um but i i love clueless i i think clueless i completely agree with what you're saying i think it's a pretty much flat out masterpiece of mainstream movie making and a perfect teen movie a perfect high school movie a perfect friendship movie a perfect love story like it really nails so many things i think you might have talked about this on the clueless episode of the rewatchables and you just indicated it here too. Once you move to Los Angeles, it's a movie that makes so much more sense and it becomes,

it becomes like iridescent in a way that like driving and the distance between parts of the city and what it means to live in one part of town versus another part of town. And, you know, I don't want to step too much on our conversation about this version, but I just could not get Clueless out of my head

while watching this version. Well, I think a little bit about this is that this movie is definitely trying to, I wrote in our spreadsheet, it's like the quote, cool Emma, like the cool mom. And it is, you know, it is, I guess, period specific. I mean, it is set in the Jane Austen times, but it is also stylized and trying to be more modern or updated. It has a, it has a modern sensibility to it and is kind of making jokes and winking at a lot of what it is doing within the movie. And I think it's hard then to not compare it with Clueless or to compare it with other

similar kind of updated adaptations because it's not stayed. It clearly has something to say about the type of movie that it is and the genre that it is and kind of what a Jane Austen still applies. And so once you're doing that, and once you're kind of making jokes and trying to poke fun or be meta about your subject, then you necessarily think of other texts that have possibly done that more fully. Yeah, it's funny. I mean, I obviously was not aware of Emma when I watched Clueless, and I had it explained to me by reading about it that this was obviously a modern update. And there's something, the circular logic around the idea of only being able to think of the modern

update while watching the period remake of the movie is so fascinating. The idea of this movie even happening in the first place, I find a little bit confusing. I wonder if you could help me understand why you think this is a movie we should have now, just 25 years since Clueless and 24 years since the Emma adaptation that Gwyneth Paltrow starred in. Well, I think that we should have it because, you know, let's keep making all types of movies and let's keep letting people make different types of people make movies for different audiences. But beyond that, it's a great question. I don't know who this is for, which is really interesting, right? Because it should be exactly for me, 100%. And there is

something about how the movie doesn't quite take its own existence. I think it takes existence seriously, but especially the first half is really tongue in cheek to a point that if you like Jane Austen adaptations and you like costume dramas, you're kind of like, oh, are you making fun of my tastes? Are you telling me that I'm silly right now? And it comes around on that. But I think it's also a little bit shocking at times. There is some nudity they're trying to provoke. So if you are, for example, a slightly older Jane Austen audience, it's funny. I was talking with my mother last night who's been following our recommendations, and she asked if we would put together a list of recommendations for old people. It was her words, so I feel okay using it.

She was like, can you please put the recommendations for old people so mom I'm gonna work on it but typically these costume dramas are for an older audience and I don't really think that this one is meant for an older audience unless I'm old now which like it's there's too much going on please don't tell that. So I don't, I think that this is probably for real diehards of Jane Austen and or people who like putting it, putting it pretty things, but looking at pretty things. But the fact that I don't totally know who the audience is, is for this movie kind of answers her question. I don't, I don't totally know.

You know, I, I've been looking at real estate over the last couple of months, Amanda. And one of the interesting tricks about real estate is if you look at Compass or Zillow or Redfin or any of these sites, you can see a listing for a house. And there are a lot of flipped houses in greater Los Angeles County. And one of the interesting things to do is to go back to an old Zillow posting for a new house that has recently been flipped and look at what it looked like before it got that fresh coat of paint. And Emma, to me, feels like a flipped house. It feels like the story, the heart of the story, and a lot of the language right out of the book. The characters are slightly amplified and it's a little bit racier and it's a little bit more technicolor in terms of the costuming. You made a note about the hairstyles.

You know, I thought you cited a couple of influences on this movie that are very smart and it just feels a little bit like a flipped house. And a flipped house is great on the one hand because you've got new systems. Everything is clean. The floors are fresh. Everything's been stripped down and started over again. Maybe you got some nice black and Decker items in your home. Maybe you got some restoration hardware fixtures in your house. You're feeling good about your new purchases, but there's also something a little bit rickety and untrustworthy about a flip. And as I was watching this movie, I was like, I don't, is this, is this foundation stable? Is this like the right way to tell this story?

That is a great comparison, even down to the, you know, in a flipped house, you can always tell that they're like those, the teal cabinets are a sign that, okay, this is a brand new house. And there are a certain, like, there's definitely a color palette in this movie that is stolen 100% from Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, which always steal from Sofia Coppola. But I think it was Alison Wilmore's review and Vulture pointed out that it's also looking at every ad for an Instagram startup or every Instagram aesthetic. It's those exact colors. And it's just kind of meant to signal a very specific vision to a specific type of person.

The other thing about just kind of the rickety nature of this is that the whole thing about Emma, and it's pretty unique within the Jane Austen catalog, but just also as a story, it's about a main character learning to be a decent person and learning to not be horrible and superficial and learning some lessons about herself. And so it's hard when a movie starts off making fun of everything and then ultimately asks you to take a character development seriously. It just kind of, it's a, there's just something, there's a fundamental flaw in, you know, in this type of satire. It's kind of like no stakes. And I think it ultimately does get to a nice sentimental place at the end. I think that depends a lot on whether you buy the

chemistry between Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays Emma, and I think has quite a screen presence. And then Johnny Taylor plays Knightley. No, I'm sorry. Johnny Flynn plays Knightley. I don't know whether they had the chemistry that I particularly wanted, but, you know, can't win everything. But yeah, it's hard. It just, it feels a little mismatched. How about that? I agree with you.

I think Anya Taylor-Joy is really well cast for the first 90 minutes of this movie. And then the final 20 minutes when it becomes slightly more sentimental and the love story starts to come into focus, her specific energy as an actress doesn't convert as well. She's really interesting. I don't know how much familiarity you have with her. For someone like me, she is a pretty significant young movie star. She is the star of The Witch and gives just a flat out incredible performance in that movie.

She has appeared now in Glass and Split, the M. Night Shyamalan updates to Unbreakable. She was the star of this movie Thoroughbreds, which was directed by a guy named Corey Finley a couple of years ago. He has a new movie actually coming out on HBO called Bad Education on April 25th. She's going to be one of the stars of Edgar Wright's new movie, and she's also one of the stars of The New Mutants. She's kind of like, she's the genre queen

of this decade in a lot of ways. I mean, she's really appearing in a lot of kinds of movies that I love. This is a little bit outside of that realm, though. She is also just in all the fashion magazines already at this point she's reached that level of movie star where it's you're in the next big thing and you're in fashion spread wearing whatever and she obviously like has a very she's quite attractive but has a distinctive look that lends itself to that so i'm also familiar with her um yeah i i liked this movie i think that i would have if i hadn't seen this movie in theaters which i should say i didn't go to a screening i i just went to see it because i was interested in it and so i do think that i would have purchased it for 1999 this weekend if i hadn't already seen it

and you know been been glad that i watched. I wanted to ask you what you thought about watching it at home. It was not ideal. And I think that's like a subtext of a lot of this conversation today is I watched whatever eight, nine new movies over the weekend. Half of them I found it hard to fully lock into. And that's part of my concern about this writ large. A movie like Emma, if I went to a movie theater to see it as you did, I'm almost certain I would have enjoyed it more. I would have appreciated it more. You know, you've cited here just like the production design, the hairstyling, those color choices that the film is making.

I mean, it is a big screen movie. It's made by Autumn DeWild, who is a photographer. This is our first feature. Like, this is a movie that is meant to capture your eye. It's not meant to be watched while I scroll through Twitter on my iPad in bed at 11 p.m. on a Friday night. That's just not a good way to watch it. And I did watch it that way because that's life right now. Right. But nothing is. And that's how we all watch movies at home. I can't untrain myself to to not do that. I think I personally, based on what I'm interested in and kind of what I look at,

I would have had an easier like the candy color would have worked on me. I would have been like, oh, shiny pink thing and looked at it for a while. And we we talk a lot about how sometimes Netflix movies or other streaming movies seem almost engineered to hold your attention in the way that they're paced or just in the way that they're cutting. And I think that in that sense, this movie is probably engineered to hold my eye a little bit more. But I think you're right. It is so visually powerful and loud that seeing it in theater would be better.

For sure. I mean, I also watched it while my wife slept beside me. So the loudness was not even a possibility for me. I mean, that's the thing about all of this stuff is there is circumstance around how you watch shows. I don't live in a mansion. I live in a two bedroom house that is fairly small and you can hear the TV in the other room at all times. So no matter what I'm watching, and if I'm watching a violent horror movie, like I watched the platform on Friday at 4 p.m. and that's a movie in which like human bodies literally fall from a giant platform and like bang concrete on the way down and humans are screaming. It's a very unpleasant movie in a lot of ways. And that's not something that I think Eileen would want to hear while she's preparing for dinner or doing her job and on a conference

call, just as we all are these days. So there's some complications there. These are so far from ideal viewing experiences that it really does a disservice to the movies, whether they're good or not. Now, I basically landed on this version of Emma was well-made, but totally unnecessary to me. Like, I think the two pre-existing versions we have, and I've never even seen that Ramallah Garai version that you're referencing that's on Hulu right now. But those two stand on their own, are effective versions of the story. Now, far be it from me who likes to watch new Star Wars movies and Marvel movies and iterative content all the time to say we don't need something. But I didn't feel like I really got enough new insight into the story by watching this movie. Yeah, I agree. I think most of the pleasures that I took away from it were visual. And it's nice to see people trying. I do like the fact that there are as many

Austin adaptations as there are as many austin adaptations as there are you know star wars things or whatever for the nerds and the old people over here it's cool to see people try i don't know if it worked as well as the others do yeah i agree with you what's it do you have an old person recommendation off the top of your head i feel like you've got some some old people taste from time to time while you're miss marples and you're agatha christie you know stories that you love yeah that gosh off the top of my head i mean i guess the the two agatha christie's that we recommended during knives out which also i should just tell my mom to get knives out which i'm sure she hasn't seen yet so great call knives out and then also uh

death on the nile the the original 70s version before they remake it. And Evil Under the Sun, which are two kind of late 70s British Agatha Christie ones that are pretty fun. I also recommend those books. I think that Knives Out is also the number one movie in America on that VOD chart behind Onward, which is notable. movie to kind of bunker down with with a cocktail and your and your partner or you know whoever you're hanging out with even to do like a virtual hang via zoom it's a great movie to watch with people because of the twists and turns and the comedy of that movie um my old person recommendation the probably the best thing i saw this weekend was uh this movie that's on the criterion channel right now that i'd never seen called local hero, which is almost defies explanation. It's a 1983 dramedy by a man named Bill Forsyth, Scottish filmmaker, who has made a couple of really good movies, Gregory's Girl among them,

but is a little bit lost to time. Criterion put Local Hero out, I think last year, on its physical form in Blu-ray and DVD, and it put it on the service a couple weeks ago uh it stars peter riegert and burt lancaster it's about a texas oil executive who goes to a small town in scotland to essentially acquire the small town to build a new oil refinery but he's slow the man played by peter riegert slowly falls in love with the town and um oddity ensues one of the most charming movies i've seen in the last year. I think you would definitely love it, Amanda. I definitely think old people will love it. If you are 50 plus, check out Local Hero.

You will dig it. It's really a special movie and like the exact kind of movie that I needed after watching something as grueling as the platform. We're going to talk about The Hunt, but before we do that, let's take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor. Today's episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Masterclass. Masterclass lets you learn from the best with exclusive access to online classes taught by masters of their craft. I've got a significant more amount of time on my hands to watch things, so maybe I'll spend more of that time watching masterclasses from Spike Lee or

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And as a big picture listener, you'll get 15% off the annual all-access pass. Just go to masterclass.com slash big picture. That's masterclass.com slash B-I-G-P-I-C-T-U-R-E for 15% off Masterclass. Okay, Amanda, we're back. We're talking about The Hunt now. Let's talk first about the energy that surrounded The Hunt for six months, and then we'll talk about the movie itself. So, of course, this movie, previews for it started last summer it was set to be released last september then it seems that donald donald trump our president or maybe someone in his coterie of political bandits made him aware of this movie made him aware of the trailer for this movie which ostensibly portrayed a bunch of liberal elites hunting a bunch of uneducated red staters, MAGA folk.

That's a sort of accurate portrayal of what the story of this movie is about. Not entirely. I think it might actually give it too much credit for taking a side. But the movie, when the president tweeted about it, became a subject of,

I don't know, it became a political firestorm. And it was a talking point on MSNBC and Fox News. And it exceeded the typical boundaries of movie podcasting and movie blogging and entered the quote unquote real world. And the filmmakers, because of this controversy and also because of a pair of mass shootings in our country decided to postpone the release of the movie and they pushed it to an unknown date. That date ultimately became March 2020, which we now understand to be a very difficult a month in the in the history of America.

You know, you're not as interested in a movie like The Hunt, but I assume this was on your radar. We talked about it only a small bit here on the show. What did you make of the kind of life cycle before this movie got to us? I mean, it so quickly became a fascinating case study. And it's definitely, no spoilers for the rest of the podcast, where the circumstances of the movie and everything that happened around it are so much more interesting than the movie itself, which in a way is also a great summary of movie watching for the last two or three years. We've talked so much about like the movie that

exists online and the movie that exists in conversation versus the product that people actually see. And it's kind of like with The Hunt, they just managed to do away with the actual movie itself and just created a firestorm online. It will be interesting. I guess we will refer to it because every single thing that can happen to a studio release did happen to it. And it is definitely a confluence of events that no one could have foreseen. I am still really surprised that all of that controversy did not lead to people going to see it or people wanting to to buy it in their homes and maybe that's just 1999 which is a lot of money to spend on a movie that absolutely no one has called a must-see and maybe what you said is true that just like the

reviews got out of it out ahead of it and people felt like they had experienced enough of the controversy and they didn't actually need to watch the movie they could just watch tiktok or whatever um you know i think that actually does happen with for as many people who go see large movies there are many more people who just like watch memes and read things on the internet and are kind of like oh i i know what the superheroes are about so i i still am very surprised at the divide between the loudness of the conversation and the number of people who saw it. I think one contributing factor to that was the marketing campaign that Blumhouse and Universal pivoted to when they decided to put the movie back in theaters in March was essentially to use a phrase along the lines of the most talked about movie that no one

has seen. And that puts a very heavy burden on a movie like this, which, you know, has a big idea, has a lot of action, is in a very familiar genre, but ultimately is just kind of a B movie, you know? And it's not even like a B movie along the lines of Night of the Living Dead, where it has something like really meaningful to say about the way that society is organized about race. A lot of the best Blumhouse movies, I think, do exactly that thing. You know, that's what Get Out does. That's what the best iterations of The Purge do. That's even what something like Happy Death Day, I think, does really well. I think that the movies that aspire to great meaning and use that Blumhouse method tend to be kind of the most relevant mainstream non-franchise movies we have today. But the problem with The Hunt is it set this really

high bar for relevance. The freaking president was tweeting about it that's how high the bar was i mean that is the but that's the most exposure you can get in america in 2020 and the movie's just kind of okay it's just it's like it's kind of funny but i don't really know who it's poking fun at it's very violent and kind of like well made in a way i should say it's it's written by um Hughes and, and Damon Lindelof, the son of Carlton Hughes, who were sort of executive producers and co-writers on lost. And you know,

Damon Lindelof has a very particular sense of humor and style in this format. And it's directed by a guy named Greg Zobel, Craig Zobel, who directed compliance and a handful of other indie features. And I wanted to ask you specifically what you thought of the tone of it. Craig Zobel who directed Compliance and a handful of other indie features. And I wanted to ask you specifically what you thought of the tone of it, because it has what I would describe for movies like this. It's either too breezy or not breezy enough for me.

Like I couldn't figure out if it how funny it wanted to be versus how significant it wanted to be. And that was sort of what was holding me back from really enjoying myself. Yeah, I think it was breezy with a deep undercurrent of guilt or self-consciousness. And the self-consciousness in particular, while to an extent being part of what many things the movie is trying to parody, kind of gets in the way of enjoying it for me because if it I mean if it is just a romp and it's just totally ridiculous then you can almost get on board and be like okay whatever this is just total you know satire fun

but there there is enough awareness and kind of hand-wringing about the issues, just enough, while still, as you noted, not really picking a side, that it's just confusing. You don't really know what they're trying to say. And you spend the whole time being like, what is this silly movie with a lot of over-the-top violence trying to say? I don't think any movie wants to be in that position. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I know what it's trying to be about, which is just the idea of polarization. The idea that the middle ground is shrinking in favor of

distance between left and right ideology, between red and blue, between liberal and conservative and with such a great distance between us it makes it harder to ultimately like agree communicate not kill each other and those ideas are you know that one they're really obvious like all you need to do is have been reading vox.com for the last five years to know that that is just the political state of play. And this extends before Donald Trump's election. This is like the Tea Party. And I mentioned Slay the Dragon and redistricting last episode. And the political conversation has gotten more and more fraught over the last 20 years, and people feel more and more divided than ever. So the sort of thematic subject matter makes sense it's like a worthy topic i i have no idea what the movie wants to say about that other than it exists which is not

really a reason to make a movie no there is a really interesting subplot where it's it's also just about shit posting um and it's it's not even i mean it is about polarization and I kind of find it's like, you know, sweeping their liberal and red state, all that stuff to be kind of annoying. Though I understand that when politics is the only mainstream culture, it's how you get people's attention. But it is really interesting about it to the extent that it's about shit posting and miscommunication. And then the fact that all of that actually happened to the extent that it's about shit posting and miscommunication and then the fact that all of that actually happened to the movie and you know and to the extent that how we get information how we communicate with each other uh is very important now more than ever to me there was like there was a more interesting narrower version of this movie within the movie that they just abandoned i agree with you i think it tried to pull off this interesting trick where in the commercial, it showed you a lot of familiar,

if not outright famous people who you thought might be the stars of the movie. It showed you Emma Roberts. It showed you Ike Barinholtz. It showed you a handful of TV stars who might be familiar to people. And those people are dispatched with pretty quickly in the movie. I don't think I'm spoiling anything to say that. And then the movie starts to narrow its focus on this betty gilpin character uh betty gilpin for those of you who have not seen her before was uh i think on nurse betty for um a handful of years and is one of the stars of glow on netflix which is a show that i really like and i think when the movie is with Betty Gilpin, the movie works because Betty Gilpin is just a completely captivating screen presence.

And her character is kind of in the mold of the like Ripley from Aliens, Emily Blunt from Edge of Tomorrow, which we just did on rewatchables, the sort of like fearless, capable female lead subverting the final girl idea in most horror movies, where she's actually the smartest and most capable and most physically able person in the movie. But we don't really know anything about her. She's kind of blank. We don't really know what's

motivating her other than people are attacking her. We don't even really know what she thinks about the circumstances and the themes of the movie. She is kind of a cipher. And even though her performance is great and she's like this incredible physical presence on screen and she's very steely throughout. And I look forward to her getting a chance to make more movies because she seems like honestly a real character. All of her interviews around this movie have been very entertaining. I don't understand why the movie felt the need to kind of spend so much time with the other red state characters, why they spend so much time with the evil liberals who have been wronged by the red staters. Like, as you said, it's kind of like unfocused in an odd way for a 90 minute

exploitation movie. Did you get that sense? Yeah, and again, I just kind of had to keep guessing, okay, is this person someone that I'm supposed to invest in? And is this the key to what this is all about? I still don't know. Honestly, now that you're talking about it, I don't ultimately remember whether the Betty Gilpin character is one of the shit posters or not

because there was a twist at the end, but it wasn't really clear. And I don't even, I don't know. I don't understand. So I wouldn't say that anyone's motivations are well-developed in this film. Yeah, you make a good point. We're not even spoiling anything by saying we just don't, I kind of just don't know what the ending was supposed to mean. I don't know who her character is supposed to represent what's up with the pig uh i i think it's just a metaphor i think it's

just an opportunity for her to tell that story there is a pig in the mood so the film essentially opens for those of you who have not seen it and are still listening to this podcast uh with uh eight to eight to twelve deplorables quote-unquote deplorables red state people who have been apprehended by these elite liberals and flown somewhere and dropped in the middle of nowhere with gags in their mouths. And a giant crate has been dropped into the center of a field and a crowbar is made available and they can pry the crate open. And inside the crate are dozens of weapons for which to defend themselves and

a small pig and the pig waddles out and you know i think the pig is is is metaphorical it's it's just for the animal farm stuff at the end that's what they're yeah okay all right i just wanted to make sure i like didn't i didn't know whether it was like part of a game that i didn't understand you know like this the actual stakes of the the hunt aren't totally clear to me but that it doesn't matter i think if you were being charitable you could say they're not totally clear because they were invented by a bunch of dipshit liberal elites who just invented it on their own terms but um you know i'm i'm really just disappointed that the movie didn't work as well and i've been thinking about it and

i know you know bill is going to come on the show i think just to tell me that uh we're wrong and that this is a good movie and there's a reason that he thinks it's a good movie and if i had been able to like process it on the terms that he wants to use and i'm forecasting because i haven't even spoken to him about it yet but if i could i think i would have i would have gotten on board but because of the amount of political subterfuge it has gone through it's kind of impossible to experience on blank terms. I didn't have a terrible time, which for like a super gruesome movie, which is the type of thing I hate,

is saying something. And I recommended it to some friends, my Oscar nerd friends. And one of, or they asked about it. And I was like, you know what? I think you'll have a fun time. You know, it's not Citizen Kane, but why not if you're stuck at home and interested in it? And he hated it.

And I felt really bad. So and I do wonder whether some of that is because the anticipation, both of the all the conversation surrounding the movie itself. And then if you're at home and you're finally going to pay 20 bucks to see this thing, it's got to live up to a certain higher standard. So I don't really know. But yeah, I'm just still surprised that more people didn't seek it out. I think it's because of the experience that you're describing.

I think that the word of mouth is just bad. I think it's just that this movie is bad. And whether that's true or not, I basically agree with you. We've been pretty hard on the movie for the last 10 minutes. The truth is, it's very watchable and pretty peppy. And it's got some laughs. And it has some, if you care about horror movies or thrillers, like it has a couple of great kills.

It's not terrible. It's just not good. And when you're raising the stakes on what your movie is meant to be about, I just, I need a little bit more follow through. And it's not dissimilar from Emma, I think. My experience with Emma, where it's like, this is a very hallowed text. You're already raising the bar when you're going to adapt Emma. We already have the Emma 1996 version. We already have clueless. We already have these texts that are so much more meaningful. And I don't know, the hunt is just, it's just okay. And for 1999, just okay is not going to

cut it when Tiger King is dominating on Netflix and all your friends are talking about it and watching it you know what i mean yeah i do do you think if it had come out in september without the brouhaha that you would have felt differently yes that's a very good question though um very difficult to answer i think i'm sympathetic to this kind of movie in a very big way and even if it's not that good i find ways to to enjoy it um i do think that the political context just kind of fucked it and it was there's no way to unfuck it unfortunately and i think we've seen a lot of culture kind of go through the the donald trump prism of analysis and have tried to avoid it for the most part on this show and talking about things not just because we don't really want to talk about that but because it

can be a kind of um there's a circular logic to that conversation too. There's no way to get out of any meaning out of something when you see it only through that lens. Unfortunately, this was the noisiest story in the world of movies for like two plus weeks. And then the movie tried to capitalize on it when it came back this year. And so because of all that, it's just inextricable, unfortunately. Um unfortunately um you know anything else about the hunt that sticks out to you i was just gonna say if it hadn't been for all this noise i never would have seen it probably because it's really not my genre and not my interest set and i don't really need any more shit posting in my life than already exists but i am curious if it was just a pure theater release,

whether that type of marketing would have worked. And that's just kind of something that I think we'll talk about in the next few weeks and probably months is how you sell movies to someone based on where they're going to see them. Because I do think the type of movie that people want to watch in their home, but also what you say to them and how you present a movie to them in order to get them to seek it out is going to be very different than I think the traditional playbook for a theater release. I think you're right. And I think to your question about Emma, this is a movie that should work well at home because it's very brisk. The editing is very quick. It's got a lot of like catch your eye moments. It's got a lot of kills. It's got a

lot of flashy set pieces. You know, it's only 90 minutes. It'll, it should hold your attention. It doesn't really lag anywhere. The story has a lot of forward momentum, but I think it, and so I think in that case, it kind of makes sense as a home watch the same for the same reason that Netflix is constantly pumping out new horror movies and new thrillers on its platform because those are movies that are constantly churned through and that people are always wanting to watch and they feel like I don't really think it has much to offer. You know, I want to use this opportunity to, you know, indicate what we're going to be doing later in the week, which is a show that I've been wanting to do for a while. And Betty Gilpin is a good entree into that, as is Anya Taylor-Joy, actually, which is we've been wanting to do the best 35 under 35 movie stars that can be found right now. I think for the sake of this podcast, we're going to keep it to English speaking actors,

which is not to say that the actors in other countries that are appearing in films are not talented or not meaningful. But just for the sake of this podcast, we'll do English speakers. But if you have some people that you want to suggest to us the lines are open i think we already have a running list of i don't know i think i came up with over 50 people over the weekend i can't put adele hanel on the list is that what you're telling me i'm learning this now on this podcast wow is adele hanel south of 35 i believe so i'll double check it but i i mean let's look right now should we should we get a special international dispensation we each get one international performer i'm okay with that

she is apparently 31 years of age so she would qualify and we all know that she qualifies in my heart so yeah well when you guys get married that'll be great because she can take care of you and your dotage um it's very exciting that's so mean why'd you have to do that and just to qualify is it under 35 uh it's under 35 if you are 35 you are disqualified why who's 35 i'm also not eligible for this list tough beat neither of us are going to be eligible nor are we movie. So we're also not eligible in that respect. I do think it will be a fun exercise. Let us know who you think needs to be on there. Again, these are movie stars, not television stars. So if your man has been the star of, I don't know, Supernatural or something on the Disney channel, I'm not interested. We don't want to hear about that. You have to star in a movie to qualify for this.

Okay? Any other restrictions or notes you want to supply, Amanda? No, I mean, you've already opened this up to public debate more than I have any interest in doing. We will make the decisions

and you guys can disagree with them on your own time. But, you know, suggestions are welcome. They will be treated as suggestions and nothing more. Yes. Are you comfortable ranking them? We'll see. Let's get in the dock.

I guess you and I are going to have an interesting few days arguing over them. And we'll see whether we can come to an amicable ranking. I don't know. Do you think we can? I do. I think that in these troubling times, what we need is teamwork and we need to listen to each other. Why don't you remember that right down the day and time that you said that when you try to

voice some bullshit top 10 on me? Okay. I don't have to write it down because this is being recorded for posterity. Amanda, thank you as always. Now let's go to my chat with Bill Simmons. Bill, thanks for coming on The Big Picture. What did you want to talk about? I really want on-demand theatrical releases to work, and I'm supporting all movies that come out on-demand theatrical. All movies? Yeah, all movies. I saw Invisible Man in the theater.

Did I get it again on demand? Yeah. Did I get The Hunt? Sure. Am I going to get Emma? Yeah, probably. I want this to work because pretty soon we could head to a world where we never have to go to a movie theater again, unless we want to see like a comic book movie or Star Wars, something like that. I want this stuff. I want this stuff right away. I want the Ben Affleck thing is coming out Tuesday. Great.

I would have seen that in the theater before all the Corona stuff started. Now I just get to watch in my own house. So you've been on this corner for a long time. You've wanted this for a long time. So I have two questions for you. One, what was the maximum amount of money you would have paid for Invisible Man or The Hunt? Answer that one

first. How much would you have paid just to see The Hunt, you and Ben in your house? I'm a bad person to ask for that question because I have no concept of money when it's something that I just want to do. So I'll go to 30-year- old me living in Charlestown, making $39,000 a year. I would say $29.99 would have been fair for a movie I really wanted to see. Although it was more fun to go to the movies back then. But I thought that when they did this, that they would go $49.99 or $39.99

because when you think about it, a movie ticket's what? $16, $17 bucks now? So if it's two people, usually you go with somebody else, that's $31 bucks. So you figure $29.99 will cover the two tickets. But when you think about the economics of this,

the movie theaters, I think, get half the money of any theatrical release. So if you're talking about The Hunt, two people go to The Hunt in the movie theater, and that's like 32 bucks. The movie production company, that whole side of it would only get half of that, which is 16. So if they're selling The Hunt on demand at $19.99, that's actually more money than maybe they would have made with the theater. So if this works, I wonder what happens to movie theaters, whether we have half as many

in 2022 and i think the parallel is when we had um the uh the writer's strike in 2008 and the tv industry was just making way too many pilots and they kind of knew it but they didn't do anything about it every year they were making hundreds of pilots and just throwing money away in these pilots and then the money away on these pilots. And then the writer's strike made them reset. And I think they only made like 90 to 100 pilots, something like that. And guess what?

The system was fine. And they realized, oh yeah, we're spending way too much money on this. They reset it. And the way we did TV pilots from that point on, it either changed or they just greenlit ideas right away. I wonder, regardless of how long we're dealing with this corona disaster,

when we come out of it, will this completely reshape how we do movies? It's possible. I've talked about it a little bit. I think, for me, it's just bittersweet because I still like going to the movie theater. I still like being in the dark with a lot of people. I think it's hard to imagine being in the dark

with a lot of strangers right now, but I hope that doesn't go away forever. That being said, I feel like we haven't had a real test of the at-home experience because you said The Invisible Man. You and I both saw that in a movie theater. You mentioned Emma and The Hunt. These movies were already in theaters. There was already a lot of press about them. There were reviews. We haven't had an original movie that was supposed to go into theaters come straight to VOD. One is coming, a Trolls movie on April 10th, which I assume you won't be checking out the Trolls movie. But we'll have to see now if a movie that didn't get a chance

to come into theaters that a lot of people want to see and not just kids comes out, what that experience is like, how much they charge, because maybe they'll charge that $29.99 or $39.99 that you're talking about, and if it works as well. So before you tell me about The Hunt, did you feel like it worked well to watch a new movie that you had been anticipating as a theater movie at home? Yeah. Well, we had the experience because I'm in the producer's guild,

so I get all the screeners, and I've been getting the screeners now for 10 years. And I love watching the movies at my house. I'm at my own time. I would say nine out of 10 times, it's a pretty similar experience. There's times like I watched the Irishman at home at a lot of people in my house. I didn't get the right feel for it. I had to watch it again. I think you're missing out. You talk about how you love to go to a theater. You're also a guy who's married without kids. I think there's a couple of different demos of people. Yeah, I know. I know it's a savvy move on your part. When you have small kids, going to the movies is basically over. Going

to the movies was like one of my three favorite things to do in my late teens through my twenties, through my early thirties, basically until i had kids i love going to movies i saw as many movies as i possibly could in the theater when you have kids you can't do it anymore and if you do it you got to get a babysitter you got to figure it out or you got a solo i have a friend mike mendelsohn who when he had kids he just went to the latest movie possible after everybody in his house was asleep he'd go to like an 11 o'clock movie or a 1030 movie. And that was how he kept the movie theater thing. But I think when you have kids, it's just hard to get through.

You're going to pay a babysitter. Something like The Way Back, which was a movie that really worked 25 years ago, those type of movies just do not make a lot of money anymore. And if they do it is it's a complete anomaly i mean what happened once upon a time in hollywood that was a complete anomaly and tarantino is one of the few people who's been able to transcend you have to see me in a movie theater any person who loves movies wants to see tarantino in the theater how many directors are like that anymore is fin Fincher? Cuaron?

I mean, there's a couple. Gravity was a movie I had seen in the theater. But in general, I do think this is a time to remodel everything that worked and didn't work about movies. I'm sorry, to your chagrin. Yeah, I mean, it sucks. I think you're right that long-term... This was already happening.

This was already underway before we had coronavirus. There was already this fear about theaters long-term this was already happening this was already underway before we had coronavirus there was already this fear about theaters long term and a lot of these companies are going to close and these people are going to be out of work it's really a weird thing for the studios though because a lot of the original movies that we get on streaming services are just not as good as a lot of the movies that we get that are movie theater releases so how do we maintain the quality of straight to vod or straight to streaming service movies how do we maintain the quality of straight to VOD or straight to streaming service movies?

How do we put in the same budgets? How do we put in the same star power? How do we make people as famous as we used to make people? How do we make a new Ben Affleck if we don't have this big kind of event experience where everybody has to go out and see Armageddon together

and then go have dinner and talk about how much we liked it or hated it? We've seen that though with certain movies that have hit Netflix. We're seeing it right now with Tiger King on Netflix. Yeah. That's a thing that people have jumped into in the last five, six days. But I think Netflix's model, what was the movie where nobody could talk? Not A Quiet Place, but it was like that. Bird Box. Bird Box. That was one that I'm not sure I would have seen in the movie theater.

But at home, my kids were like, let's get Bird Box. And it felt like everybody watched Bird Box for a week. So I do think you could have experiences like that. I think horror movies, I think the Adam Sandler type of comedies, and then action movies, hit or or miss right like uh all due respect to pete berg and walberg two guys who brought me a lot of joy over the years spencer confidential was atrocious it was bad and if you're in netflix you're like oh we get to work with pete berg and

mark walberg this is a movie that would do well it would do well on our service anyway maybe it could be like triple threat unfortunately it was just. And I do think that model is in place though for them. Every once in a while, they'll have that Frank Grillo movie they made, Triple Threat. Once a month, there's some sort of action movie. And you and me and Chris Ryan, all three of us will see it within five days. It's definitely true. I think that model will work. The question for me is a movie like The Way Back. This weekend, I watched The Descendants with my wife. I hadn't seen it since it came out.

We had cabin fever, and we just kind of wanted to go to Hawaii in a movie. There's these movies where you just get to go to Hawaii for 100 minutes and just go with it. It's like that, too. You're like, oh, cool. I'm in Hawaii. This is great. I love Hawaii. And so we did The Descendants.

We just got to be in Kauai. We got to go to the Big Island. We got to go to Kauai. It was great. The Descendants is a movie that nine, ten years later, I wonder, is that a now Netflix movie? Is Up in the Air, the Reitman movie with Clooney, is that a Netflix movie? Little Miss Sunshine. Are those movies going to have more of a chance to succeed on demand? I think that they are, but I think it's hard to make them

successful. If The Way Back came out straight to Netflix, I don't know. Now, it wasn't very successful in movie theaters, but I don't know if it would be successful in a streaming service either. Amanda on this show has talked a couple of times, I think really smartly about how the pacing of movies is very different on streaming services. Like in Spencer Confidential, it's like cutting a lot and there's like three or four different genres happening at the same time because they're trying to make everybody happy. They're trying to like please a big, big audience of people that's sort of like algorithmically designed. And I don't know. I mean, I just don't know if A Little Miss Sunshine even gets made. That's really the tricky part is can

a script like that get a green light and get 10 million bucks from Netflix? Maybe you can. There's just a lot that we don't know at this exact moment. I mean, the movies that you watched this weekend, did you like them? Did you like The Hunt? So, I liked it more than you did. But I think my expectations were lower because I had read some of the stuff. I liked that it tried to be weird. I think it thought it was smarter than it was.

There was some unintentional comedy to it. There was comedy, but there was more unintentional comedy where you're going, wow, I can't believe they thought that would work. But I enjoyed the experience mainly because of the star. I thought Betty Gilpin was really a star. I thought she carried the movie in a way that, um, you know, I think it's really hard when you talk about female action stars,

there's a balance with a whole bunch of things you have to bring to the table at the same time that we have seen gone wrong more than we've seen gone right. And, you know, to me, like the textbook is Linda Hamilton, Terminator two, like really good looking,

seemed like she was actually could kick some ass, um, had real charisma, had a coolness to them. Um, there's just something about that performance that I always feel like is the model. And in this movie, Betty Gilpin's way better than the movie was, I thought.

I thought, I wasn't prepared to think of her like a star, but I felt like by the end of the movie, I was like, wow, she's actually a star. I totally agree with you. I think she's amazing. We talked about her a little bit with Amanda too. It's funny, like that's the kind of person who I'm talking about.

If you don't have, we like, we saw with Noah Centennial and Lana Condor went to all the boys came out last year. We were like, Oh, these are two people who I would watch them and other stuff. We saw with Glenn Powell last year with a Netflix movie.

We were like, Oh, Glenn Powell, I'll buy Glenn Powell stock. He's going to do good stuff. But I don't know if Betty, cause Betty Gilpin was a TV star. She was a star glow. She was on nurse Betty. she wasn't like a really a well-known quantity and i don't

know if you're just a if you're just a tv movie star is that way differently like i don't think of noah centennial the way that i thought of matt damon in 1995 you know what i mean? I do feel like all this stuff blends together now between genres, right? So what was that movie? Set It Up. Was that the Glenn Powell? And The Hunt. But then some seven episode, I don't know. Like I watched the first three episodes of that Hulu show, Reese Witherspoon.

Little fires everywhere. My wife and I watched that with my daughter. It's lacking. so i've heard all of these things are kind of the same thing it's like what can command my attention on a friday night we know now we know if you're staying in on a friday night friday night has now become a signature night for there's going to be new stuff and the other day is tuesday now it's like tuesday night is now the new movies that have hit on demand i could either buy them or potentially rent them or rent them for a little more than 4.99 and then friday night is like new shit's coming out and when you think about it when we were growing up tv oh i'm older than you in the

80s friday night still kind of mattered like that's where miami vice was and a couple other shows and then that died uh in the 70s i think dallas was friday night like friday nights was an important night then it then everybody decided it wasn't important anymore and now i feel like friday nights has come back and there's always something on netflix or in this case hulu's had a couple couple wins. They had high fidelity a couple weeks ago. So for me, it's like the short run TV shows that are three episodes, seven episodes versus The Hunt versus Spencer Confidential, all of them are competing for the same audience. It's people that are home that are of a certain age that have those services. The interesting thing to me is that I think the black audience has been kind of

underserved in this respect and i don't understand why that hasn't come around it see it seems like all these kind of shows are being geared toward a specific probably a white audience and you know like the last purge movie which they really they, which they really made that more of like an old school, you know, throwback to 70s black films kind of thing. Yeah, blaxploitation. I feel like that is a missing territory now for Netflix and Hulu. And you saw what happened with Power and Stars. Power became the signature show that had a really, really passionate audience. And I don't know why there isn't more of that.

I think that's on point. I mean, I think you saw Tyler Perry released a movie on Netflix this year. I think the first time he released a movie. So you're going to see more people like him. Charles King, who's a big time African-American producer, has a deal with Netflix now. But you're right. I think that there is still like a lot of different strata of audiences. There's like a big push to get latino audiences

on on netflix now and that's the thing though it's like it does feel like they're carving everything up into little pieces and whatever we saw as the mainstream before isn't just not as not as viable it's not mainstream there's not like the one big movie that everyone has to watch you have to get lucky with a tiger king i haven haven't even watched Tiger King yet, but I guess I will because every other damn person I know in my life has seen it and asked me if I like it. So is it good? Do you like it? Tiger King has been the only good thing that's come out of the coronavirus. The timing of it was very fortunate. It was right. It premiered during a weekend when I think people had passed some level of being bummed out to a whole other level where it was like all right quarantine i'll make the best of this for a

couple days and then by like thursday friday you start thinking is this what my life's going to be like for three months everybody's family is bothering them or your roommate or whoever you're with you're just wearing on each other and then tiger Tiger King and Joe Exotic show up. And it's just an incredible six to seven hours. But I think with all these new movies, like The Way Back's Tuesday, what's the one that just got bought that's coming out April 3rd? So The Lovebirds was going to come out April 3rd

with Paramount, but I don't think it's going to come out on April 3rd on Netflix. I think they're going to wait until the summer now to put it out. But that's a very interesting case of like a streamer just bought the rights to a movie from a major studio

and they're just going to put it on their service. They're not going to put it in theaters. Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae, to your point about serving different audiences are the stars of that movie. And I don't know, we'll see how it does. We're not really going to know how well it does. Have you been tracking the Netflix top 10? You know how they share their top 10

most viewed programs now? Are you looking at that every day? Not every day, but I've noticed it a couple of times. I think the movies, I think the studios would be making a mistake pushing stuff to the fall. I would actually be going the other way. I think people are starved for content right now if we play out the corona thing like a best case scenario and you just say let's say life is back to normal relatively so by july from the stuff we care about sports pop culture all the stuff it's going to be this condensed sports season where you're going to have two month basketball playoffs you'll have football coming you'll have a condensed baseball season, college football, four golf majors, Wimbledon, the Ryder Cup.

It'll all be crammed into seven months. And I think movies are really going to suffer with that because sports fans are always going to pick sports over anything else. The inefficiency for movies right now is right now. Like that Bond thing, I would have released the Bond thing for $59.99. I said $100. I suggested $99.99.

And you can have it in your house. And everybody's like, well, what about piracy? That shit happens anyway. Every movie is stolen. We get these screeners from the producers guild and it's every oscar movie that comes out starting in the end of november that like where's the piracy concerns on that nobody cares so i i never bought that argument i just feel like if bond was treated like wrestlemania 36 or wow they're fury 3 and it's like all right right, Bond, let's go. 80 bucks.

You don't have to get it if you don't want to. Sorry if you think the price is too high, but that's the price of four movie tickets. I wish somebody would roll the dice with that and see what happens. I'm also really interested to see what the data is and whether they'll release it for The Hunt, because The Hunt is like the prototypical, it's a good action movie.

It might have actually been a little high the way they priced it. It was $19.99. Maybe they should have gone $14.99. According to some estimates, it didn't do very well. It looks like Onward did really well, the Pixar movie, and then The Invisible Man did pretty well, but it looks like The Hunt didn't do well at all. But I think it also just had so much bad press that people were going in. Whereas you're like, I'll watch every movie like this. People who are iffy about a movie like that didn't check it out. But the point you're making about the glut is really notable. Like big movies like Mulan and Black Widow and all that stuff that has been pushed back. If you push that stuff into July, you're competing with Top Gun Maverick.

You're competing with the new Christopher Nolan movie. You're competing with the new Wes Anderson movie. June and July are always packed anyway. plus all the sports stuff you're talking about. It doesn't seem like the Olympics are going to happen, but if they do happen, they're supposed to start in July. Plus, you've got a presidential election coming this year, and people are so occupied with the news for various reasons. There actually is going to be an insane dog pile of content that we're going to have to deal with.

Right, and I think it's an opportunity for Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu specifically. If I was Netflix, and I knew the way back was thinking about just going straight to on-demand, I would have been like, hey, how about this? We'll give you $35 million right now. We'll buy out the on-demand for it. Just put this on Netflix immediately. And you think about it from a Netflix standpoint, what do they spend on? Would they spend on Triple Threat? Would they spend on every Adam Sandler movie? Would they spend on Spencer Confidential? It's probably in that $20 to $40 million range. So if they offered $25 million for The Way Back, is The Way Back going to make that up and on demand? I don't think so. It would be a bigger deal if it was on Netflix. Everybody would see it within a week. I feel like that would have been the best thing that could have happened in that movie. Can you come back on the show after you've seen The Way Back? Because I feel like there's a lot we need to discuss about Ben Affleck as a basketball coach.

Good or bad? I think it's good. I think it's a really good movie. I think it's the best he's been in a movie in like 15 years. What basketball coach would you compare him to? Like George Carle? No, maybe like Gene Keady you remember from purdue gene keady a little sweaty yeah sweaty he's got his he seems to have lost his voice a lot he's cursing a

lot he seems very animated um maybe he's maybe he's had some substances you know they're coursing through his veins your lack of respect for affleck is its own podcast like when you just throw out stuff like what he's been in 15 years first of all he's great in the town he's great in gone girl um yes yes and there was one other one that he was really good in there's three argo argo he's right i would have that third gone girl we which we did a rewatch of azan he's a legitimate a-list movie star in that movie i totally agree i'm i'm not down on affleck i love affleck felt like a shot at affleck well he's had a tough couple of years he's in the middle of bouncing back through a tough couple of years but he this is a different kind of

performance it's not exactly gonna make you feel good about the world necessarily, but it's much more internal. In the town, he's a fucking tough guy. He's a bank robber. In Gone Girl, he's almost doing a parody of himself. This is something different. I think you'll like it. I think you'll like it. I'm happy to report back. Is there going to be more movies that are going to be on demand? Because I'm really ready to get all of them. Yes, but they're going to run out of stuff. They're going to... What they're doing now is just like clearing the decks of all the stuff that was in theaters.

So nothing... The big test will be if a mainstream movie for adults comes along that was supposed to come out in April, May, or June that they decide to put on a service. And when that happens, that's what every movie theater in the country is afraid of. That's what they don't want to see the results of. And when Universal decided to do the Trolls movie, all the theaters got fucking pissed. They were really, really upset about that because they felt like they had broken this code that has existed for 50, 70 years in the movie business.

So we'll see what happens. I think, like you say, there are huge upsides. There are some downsides to this too. I'd like to have both. I feel like everything the last couple of years has been leading to this moment. We didn't know that the corona was gonna be the catalyst, but all the stuff that was happening with Netflix, which we've talked about on my podcast and yours,

where Netflix, Hulu to a lesser degree, were able to kind of own these two-day periods where everybody's like, oh, that movie's on. Did you see it yet? Bird Box is a great example. That owned the narrative for two, three days, the way that documentaries do for some of them, the way that Tiger King's doing it right now.

And I feel like everything's been leading to this. And I do wonder if we're going to look back 20 years from now and be like, man, remember when we didn't get rid of movie theaters for like 12 extra years? Remember when we were still going to movie theaters in 2019 and how stupid that was? Nobody wants to leave their house. The secret sauce of the quarantine is,

for a lot of people, it hasn't really changed 70% of their life. It's changed the part where they can't go to a gym, they can't go to a restaurant, they can't go to games, stuff like that. But for the most part, we were all kind of on our own, connected to people digitally anyway. And now it's just 100% of the time, so it feels overwhelming. But all of this is leading to us watching movies in our house.

I know, I'm sorry it breaks my heart honestly but uh i hear what you're saying and you're not wrong you're not wrong it's just one of those things where this is what the world was evolving this way anyway and unfortunately it's just been sped up and i do before we go a quick spoiler on the hunt so people haven't seen it can leave right now yes hillary swank you enjoyed it yeah uh she's looked in good shape good fight scene that fight scene was good it is a good fight scene she's in great shape she looks good uh she's she's she's doing a lot i would say it's a little bit a little bit of overact little bit of dion waiters a little bit? It's incredible about overacting. He's like really, really

feeling it and thinking like, I'm going completely over the top. Almost like, I don't know, John Lithgow in Cliffhanger or something where somebody's just like, I'm just going for this. I'm taking this to the ninth level. I think she's had the weirdest career of anyone in the last

30 years she has two oscars two oscars two for two there's no like if there was an athlete who would it be joe flacco that's a great call no comparison to you can't can't do it with anything are you sure it's not eli manning maybe two superbowls She was the next Karate Kid. She's been in some truly, truly, truly atrocious movies. She was in one of the global warming catastrophe movies in the late 90s. She's never been able to figure out how can I be like, what's my basic instinct type of part? Never really bought her as a rom-com actress um it's always weird parts like

this where she just comes in the last 20 minutes and she's this lunatic billionaire who's just decided to start killing people it totally made sense i thought the casting was perfect i don't even know who else you would have picked i enjoyed her i enjoyed she felt like she was in she was in a different movie than Betty Gilpin but it was okay Betty Gilpin is like under playing everything and Hilary Swank is over playing everything but it was fun to see them show down at the end uh the weirdest careers in Hollywood is a really good idea for a podcast though maybe we'll use that as some some coronavirus content going forward I want to be on that podcast we We can do Zoom. We can do four people. Yeah, you're on.

You're in. I think Hilary Swank, to me, is the incumbent until somebody else can unseat her. Okay, I'll buy it. I can't think of anybody who's had even close to the career that she's had. Two Oscars. Right. We'd have to invalidate certain people. Kevin Spacey's career has been really weird, but it got super weird for things that didn't have to do with just his pure imdb choices um i think travolta is

way way up there for um biggest star in the world basically creators to the point that he's uncastable then has this crazy resurgence and then turned into whatever is going on now where he's like he's like basically nick cage again they've they're filming face off too yes yes they're both just making terrible on-demand action movies that nobody has seen wait bill can i make a recommendation to you yeah there's a really crazy horror movie starring nick cage called color out of space on itunes it's It's borderline insane, but I want to know what you and Ben think of it. Okay. Color Out of Space. Color Out of Space. It's like a horror science fiction-y thing, but it's all on earth. There's no space, I promise you.

Okay. I look forward to it. Thanks for having me on Show Fantasy. Bill, thanks for coming on The Big picture see you soon man thank you to bill simmons thank you to amanda dobbins and thank you to bobby wagner and thank you for listening to the big picture we'll be back later this week with the best 35 movie stars under 35 appreciate everyone listening to the show and stay safe out there.