The Watch - Ep. 131: Live From SXSW

Episode Date: March 13, 2017

The Ringer's Chris Ryan and Sean Fennessey host a live discussion on the latest trends in the film industry and the must-see movies being premiered at SXSW (0:30). They also take audience questions about the shifting landscape of media and entertainment (34:20). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get started with today's episode, let me tell you a little bit about a new book of poetry by Mike Posner, titled Teardrops and Balloons. You may know Posner as a washed-up pop star with a couple of songs that you don't even like. The book might come as a shock to you. He takes on topics such as fame, God, masturbation, horses, death, dating, Bruno Mars, plane crashes, and chewing gum.

Available March 17th at Amazon and also Mike Posner.com. I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at The Ringer.com, and I am joined in Austin, Texas, at South by Southwest by Sean Fennessey.

Thank you very much, Chris. Sean is the editor-in-chief of The Ringer.com, and I am the executive editor. I'm very sorry. I'm not Andy Greenwald. Yeah, Andy regrets his absence, but we are here to talk about trends in movies. But generally, like, I think when Sean and I were talking about,

what are we going to talk about down here, it was right after we had seen Get Out, right after we'd seen Logan, we got a chance to see Lost City of Z, which is the new James Gray movie based on an incredible David Graham book. And we were just very excited about like the state of movies.

All of a sudden, after this kind of like multi-month slog through award season, which was very binary, it was very like, La Land or Moonlight, what do you think? It was just very, like, it was a grind. You know, you basically have these six films that you're talking about for

four months, three months, and then all of a sudden, you know, the New Year pops around, we get through January and bang, bang, bang, there's just like a movie every 10 days that you're just incredibly excited about, incredibly, like, engaged with the art form, and it feels a lot more like how you want to talk about movies, right? Because every day is this, like, day-long conversation where you're, like, looking through social media streams

and reading stuff online, and it feels like you kind of want a lot of different titles to fuel that, but it grinds down towards the award season. What do you think it is about this? time of year because this isn't new that makes this such a fertile time for a movie going. Yeah, I guess we should just say historically January, February, and even March to some extent really suck in the movie season. I used to call it Dumpuary. Dumpuary, yeah.

And it's not that anymore. I think the success of Deadpool last February has a huge part in this, the fact that it became such a huge hit. It was an R-rated movie. It was a comic book movie, but not a comic book movie like we've seen before. And the fact that it took off in the way that it did, I think kind of scrambled the major studios brains. So like sometimes you'd have cool independent movies. You'd have a mid-level drama that would come out in March that would be interesting. But now... Did Green Room come out? April?

Green Room was last March. Yeah. But this is totally different. I mean, a movie like Logan seems, at least strategically marketing-wise, like a total reaction to the success of Deadpool. Lost City of Z, I think, is one of those things where that movie theoretically should be coming out in November for award season. But... It's coming out mid-April. It will be probably on Amazon shortly. not too long after that, right? Yeah, I'm loath to use the word disruption at this festival, but

I think... You can use activation instead, I think that has a lot more legs as far as keywords go. That's good. That's more 2017. So the studios both major and independent, I think, have been activated in a new way. Like, there's just no... There is no schedule. There is no

month thing. It's just every month matters in a way, which is... That's new. That's brand new. Yeah, I think that there was a period of time... We talked about this a lot going into award season where there was this every late summer, early fall, there was the Interstellar slot, which was, you know, Martian, Gravity had gotten that. It was basically like, I mean, maybe gravity was a little later, but it was basically a pre-award season blockbuster that wound up being part of award season chatter, getting mentioned,

Martian obviously got nominated. I wouldn't be surprised if two, I would be, definitely would not be surprise of Logan Gatsamony for Best Picture, not that I want to start talking about Oscars again. But it would be kind of fascinating if some of these films that are coming out in March, which is really an unheard of time, wound up being part of a conversation 12, 15 months later. Yeah, there's a hot take going around the ringer right now, which is that good movies only come out between... This is Sean's take. It's not that hot. It's going around. February 25th and April 25th, and then October 28th and November 25th, that's all the good movies. Everything else sucks.

Yeah. And then, like, to be fair, I mean, this summer could be cool, but there's a lot of, like, Transformers 9, which even though every Transformers trailer, I'm like, what if this one's going to be the one? Like, what if this is apocalypse now, but with robot? And then it's never that. It's always... What's this one called? The Last Night? The Last Night. And it's Anthony Hopkins. Is Anthony Hopkins the last night? Yeah, and there's like, there was like a bleeding cross and King Arthur is in it. Like, I'm really excited. I think I'm really excited for this movie. Good luck. It's probably four and a half hours long. I doubt it makes any sense. Is Josh Duomo in this one? Sure. Yeah. So, I'm in.

Anyway, we were very excited to be down here because we were looking at the schedule of films and there's a lot of really cool stuff happening and sort of in this vein of what a great time to kind of be a movie goer. Sean and I got a chance to see a bunch of Alien Covenant. We're not a bunch. I guess like 25 minutes they showed last night of Alien Covenant.

And one thing that is that jumps out at you, aside from aliens, is that it's gross and that it is like a really hard art and that they are not trying to sugarcoat not that you would want to sugarcoat something like alien,

but with the success of Logan, with the success of Get Out, it does seem like we were in a real, like, R-rated movies are like box office crack right now. Yeah, you made a good point about it, which is just that the, especially with regard to superhero movies,

people who were 13 when Spider-Man or the first X-Men came out are 26 now, and those people won R-rated movies, and they're ready for them, and there's a huge audience for them because they were raised in a very specific movie-going environment. So I don't know if that necessarily specifically explains Alien Covenant, which is really gross, but I think it's clear that that movie will be really successful, whereas before, even in the last four years, studios historically have worked very hard to hit all four quadrants, so young women,

young men, middle-aged women, middle-aged men. And there was a big focus on getting 13-year-old boys into theaters. And there seems to be less of a focus on that, which is kind of a big deal. I wonder if that means we'll get more and more nihilistic or more and more sophisticated or more severe comic book movies, action movies. I want to know what, like, what's the Logan of Transformers going to be? Yeah, it's just the Optimus Prime Origin story. Yeah.

But it's him as like a samurai, you know? That sounds good. They already made that movie. It's gone. The thing with Alien that was interesting, we were watching, and, you know, Logan is a kind of, aside from being excellent

and really thought-provoking, it kind of just does away with a lot of the franchise building stuff. There is a little bit in there. I mean, there's obviously a Deadpool trailer at the beginning of the film, rather, but it is an endpoint, right? And that is sort of something

that's plagued a lot of movie-making, Hollywood movie-making recently, is this idea that everything has to be a step in another direction towards building a franchise and building a franchise. And when we came out of Alien last night, I was kind of like, do you go to Alien to be scared, or do you go to it for the larger mythology?

And strangely, in the case of Alien, I actually go to it for the large... I'm very intrigued by like, how did this happen and where is this story going and where did it start, which is, you know, not the case for Batman. You love a great Reddit thread about HR... There is a legendary... legendary live journal post about Prometheus.

I don't know if you guys, if you guys ever just go home and Google Prometheus Live Journal. And some dude, like, explained Prometheus completely. It's like, it's 25,000 words. It's so long. And he is like,

here's what Prometheus is about. Let me begin by talking about, like, neo-romantic French painting. And then it gets to like, all goes all through the story of Jesus. It's all about Christ. Yeah.

It is, it is like pure internet before people were like, should I make money off of this? It's just like, nope, I am going to write all of my thoughts about Prometheus and put it on live journal. And that's what you're into. And I wrote it. No, but it was, that was like kind of the thing that kind of was really like, you know,

even though Prometheus is a flawed movie, it was a very cool exploration of that world. And that was when we came out of covenant, there is, we saw bits that suggested that they would keep doing that. But really Scott, actually, surreedly Scott, as I learned last night multiple times, was like, I'm here to scare you. And I was like, ah, yeah. Aliens, like, super scary. But.

I think his words were, after 35 years, my mantra has not changed. I'm here to scare the shit out of you. Yes. Which is a weird thing for us, a knight to be saying. Yeah, and it's also the guy who made the wine movie with Russell Crow. Oh, yeah. I guess that was scary for some people. But it's interesting to see these different franchises dabble in, like, how do we, how do we, like, get the

most out of this. And you can see a very clear dot connecting where they're building up to getting to Alien. And then, you know what? Like, they might just make them all again. You know, like, they might just keep going through the timeline of Alien. But like, you can see it like, oh, we're getting to the point where you're going to find out why John Hurt walked by this guy who had an alien explode out of him in a chair. Yeah, there was a, there was a lot of set up for the future movies, which is a weird thing to be doing 35 years later. I guess. it's interesting, but you didn't really answer your own question. You go specifically to learn about the mythology and the philosophy.

Well, I just don't find aliens scary. Tough guy. No. No, I don't, do you guys think aliens scary? Show of hands? 50, right? Like, there's... You guys are weak. Yeah.

I would say, like, the Blair Rich remake remake, right, is almost like 63 minutes in strobe light in, like, the dark forest while people are screaming. Like, that I found. stressful and scary. This is like more mood building, you know? Yeah. Yeah, it's extremely violent. I feel like you're looking at me like I've changed or something like that. Well, I think you're putting on a bit of a show about how you're not scared. I'm not. I'm not. No, I thought it was really scary. But I do think it's an interesting thing where they're going to run into the original movie probably very soon. And then what do you do? Do we really have to have another alien that is just

alien. And they showed alien after they showed us this footage last night and still great. And you see that like we definitely don't need another alien. And so there is, there's kind of give and take. You talked about Logan and how that's like an endpoint. In that franchise, it's kind of unclear what's going to happen next. Whereas in the alien franchise, we have, we know exactly what's going to happen next, which is an unusual storytelling thing that when you get stuck in this franchise universe, there's a little bit of repetition and revolution going around. Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the other stuff that we're excited about here because it's not, it's all alien. One of the things that we're really interested in, obviously, is these

genre films that are, largely been relegated to streaming services or very small indies. Instead of, you know, back in the 90s, you would have like 10 to 12 to 15 thrillers per year or just like small crime films, and, you know, you'd hope that one of them was an award success or box office success. And those are largely now the domain of Netflix and Amazon and other smaller distributors. A couple of the movies that I'm excited about seeing fall into that category. So small crimes, which features Jamie Lannister

as a cop, a disgraced cop, kind of trying to put his life back together. Small town crimes, a different movie. That's confusing. Yeah, John Hawks from Deadwood is in that. And Gemini with Lola Kirk and Zoe Kravitz, which is about kind of like an L.A. Noir movie, it sounds like. These are all very small films that I think they are finding like an audience probably of people in this room who are interested in watching these kinds of small genre films that just do not have an extra level to sell to like a major

distributor unless they already get someone like Charlie's Throne in it, which is what kind of what Atomic Blonde is all that looks more like Jane Wick. Jane Wick. Yeah, right. What do you think about this sort of development where a lot of these genre movies are kind of winding up on streaming services? It's great, it's great. My version of the crime movies that you like are movies about gambling. And so we're seeing later tonight, Win It All, the new Joe Swanberg, Jake Johnson movie. And I'm,

I just don't think that movie would get made by a studio anytime after 1995. So it's great that we're going to get it. And I wish, like, there's a part of the description, the plot description for Win It All is finds a bag of money. Yes. Which is one of the great plot

synopsis devices ever. Just like put it in any, like if a transformer found a bag of money, it would be an awesome movie. Yeah. You're like, why do I have this bag of money? What would a xenomorph do with a bag of money? I don't know. It would just like hiding it.

So yeah, I think the reason it's happening is obvious, which is that these guys want to keep making movies. People are willing to work in a budget of between $500,000 and $5 million. They don't have to worry about marketing expenses. They don't have to worry about, you know, putting a huge cast together to sell the story. It's treating movies much, it's treating film much more like television. And even those things are not serialized,

Joe Swanberg basically is treating his relationship with Netflix the way that Noah Hawley treats his relationship with FX where he's just like, I make stuff and I make stuff and I make stuff. It's all a little different, but it's part of this greater continuum of creativity that I'm putting together. And, you know, he had a TV show that was an eight-part anthology called Easy. Before that, he had a movie. Now he has another movie, and he's just going to keep on doing this.

The Duplas Brothers are doing the same thing. So it's cool to see people like EL Katz, who made small crimes, who made a small movie called Cheap Thrills a couple years ago. that I would highly recommend the fact that Netflix is giving him the budget and Jamie Lannister to make a cool crime movie. It's like it's a great thing. But it will create a little bit of tension and movie going because for somebody like me, I love to go to the movies for those movies.

I don't just like to go for Alien Covenant. So when you remove that kind of a movie from the theater experience, then you only get loud things or animated things or prestigey things that are going into theaters to qualify for awards. So it creates a little bit of a crisis, even though it's very good for the consumer. Yeah, well, you're talking, there's almost like a, you're talking about either about the privacy of the film, the theater-going experience for that. And then there's just like the general, like, where, like, when you have to, like,

market something on so many different levels, like, where does something like that fit in? And so does it matter that small-town crimes will not have, like, will not be a summer movie. It'll just be like a movie that comes out, like, and all of a sudden it'll be on the front page of Netflix for a while and people will recommend it or whatever. And that is sincerely different. But as long as it keeps up the spirit, I mean, we're in Austin.

This is the home of Richard Linklater. He was one of the reasons, like, I know that you and you and I were in high school and in college. Like those kinds of movies, the slacker and the movies that were coming out in the mid to late 90s and the independent cinema were like, one of the gateways for us to get into all different kinds of movies, from old Hollywood movies to foreign films. And I hope that that can keep that kind of like conversation keeps happening for younger people and that this is their access. point. It is an interesting question, though. Like, Slacker is a very unconventional movie and it was part of the independent cinema

movement. The stuff that's happening on Netflix, which is funding a lot of this stuff now, I wouldn't really describe as unconventional. It's just a smaller version of something. You know, could a movie, is Netflix willing to make a movie like Slacker right now? I don't know. I'd be curious. Well, Amazon's willing to make a movie like Patterson.

Yeah. But that's, you know, Jim Jarmish. He's a 60-year-old man. He's made 14 movies. So if you were 35 and you went and you were trying to get your version of Patterson or your version of Slacker made. it's like this kind of incredibly idiosyncratic, but like nominally a normal, like a narrative film.

Yeah. Do you think it would be harder or easier to get it made now than it was 20 years ago? I think there's more money to go around, but it didn't even lower number. So there's obviously more movies being made than ever before. There are more places to put them because of the services that we're talking about, but Slacker is a really strange movie. And I think to convince anybody that you can do that, I mean, it's essentially a student film.

It's a full-length student film. I think it would be interesting to see. them take a chance on that or to see Amazon take a chance on it, but there's no evidence yet that they're willing to do something that raw. Everything's very polished. Yeah, it's, I'm trying to think of like when the last time I saw something on a streaming service or in the theater that felt as progressive, as Slacker felt back then, or not even progressive, but as upending. I think there's different versions. I just really don't want to say disruptive. I just, but, you know, like Orange is the New Black in a way is a very progressive TV show. It's very progressive product. It's

different than any show that's ever existed before. But it's not the same in terms of the way that it's made. Yeah. Okay. Well, so what are some of the other movies that you're kind of looking forward to outside of like the crime film, the smaller crimes film? So sort of the flip side of what we're talking about is later tonight is another crime film, Baby Driver, which is a movie that's going into theaters, Edgar Wright's new movie,

which is really exciting. And that'll be an interesting test, I think, not just at the box office, but even just the way that it turns out because it's a movie with a movie with a movie. movie stars Jamie Fox is in and John Hamm is in it. Your boy Ansel Elgort who once tweeted at you that he was going to dunk on you. Which is a great moment in Chris history. I wrote a blog post because Ansel

Elgort went to a Knicks game and there was all these Getty photos of him looking like a goober. I don't think he's here. Sorry. But he did and he had like and he just like and then like we got tweeted out from the Grantland account and he was like come to Brooklyn and I will dunk on you and he

tweeted a video of him dunking and I'm pretty convinced it was still on an eight foot rim but possibly could be right. Yeah. Well, we'll find out tonight. Yeah. After the screening, we're all going to a local court. Me and Elgore are going one-on-one for pink slips for our car.

Cars, yeah. So, yeah, baby driver will be an interesting test case. I'm really excited about it. Edgar Wright has never made a bad movie. You know, I think it's a car chase, bank robbery, kind of slick, clever story. Yeah, and a lot of it is built around this idea that he is like everything is soundtrack,

like every getaway he has, all these stuff. Is he mute in the movie? I don't know. You better hope so. Yeah. I don't know. So, yeah, Edgar Wright is an interesting case of a filmmaker who probably and almost did, like, get into this major franchise track of doing Ant Man, has been, like, his name has been

associated with Star Wars a bunch, you know, and never, has continued to make his own movies. And that's an interesting case because one person that we were talking about recently, I mean, we've talked about this for Jordan Peel. We have talked about this for James Gray. We've talked about this for a bunch of these people. Those guys getting sucked into these franchises. Like, Ryan Coogler is a very good example of something like, I'm very excited to see Black Panther.

I think it would be cool also to see like 10 other Ryan Coogler movies that had nothing to do with comic books, you know? And that is, but they are such a viable, like, underwriting of your careers. If you get involved in doing something like that, it's really no surprise why you see, like, Cape Blanchet in a Thor movie because she can do like weird Australian

the theater for two years after that if she wants to. The director David Lowry, who made Pete's Dragon last year, I don't know how many people actually saw Pete's Dragon. And he was like, Intem Body Saints, right? Right. His first movie is Anthem Body Saints. So he did an interesting thing where in the downtime when he was making Pete's Dragon, he secretly made another movie with Casey Affleck and Runei Mara that played at Sundance

called A Ghost Story, which is sort of one of the most acclaimed movies coming out of Sundance. And he's an example of something that I sort of wish someone like Ryan Coogler would do, which is kind of his version. version of one for them and one for me where I'm making something small, low-key, and really strange while also working inside of the studio system to kind of, you know, put an interesting twist on big-time IP. So I think it can be done. It'll be interesting to see what Ryan Cougler or Ava DuVernay, who's doing a wrinkle in time

now for Disney, all these people who have a very interesting point of view, you know, very promising careers, have opportunities that they never would have had 25 years ago. But in getting those opportunities, you lose kind of an essential part of what made them most interesting in the first place, I think, or at least that's how some people feel. And will they be able to kind of do something smaller or different or more personal in the interregnum between those things? Yeah, or will they get pulled into television, which I guess is like the other sort of part of this conversation as we talk about where things are at.

We were, I remember we were discussing after Logan, not only the finality that's involved in like the narrative there, but just like how it seemed like such a complete statement, just like a paragraph about this character. and it didn't need six hours one way or the other to kind of, and I know I do a podcast about television every week, so I don't want to make it sound like this is, we're not going through an incredibly fruitful television period. But I have kind of like come to start to appreciate

the complete sentences that movies are. You know what I mean? Rather than the rolling, like, well, we'll get back to this in a little bit. And I haven't seen a show this year that really warranted the episode count that it had. You know, I didn't think that Young Pope needed to be eight episodes. I didn't think Taboo needed to be 10 episodes. Or one.

But, you know, it is interesting to see, like, as these directors, inevitably, like, I think Barry Jenkins and a bunch of these, like, a bunch of, like, very acclaimed directors will almost inevitably also have a television show in production or in development, like, as we're sitting here, whether or not they bring some of their, like, narrative sensibility to television and whether the next great kind of development in TV is like a little bit more of an elastic like order like order count like or like episode order is whether or not like you know what it's five and it doesn't have to be a limited series and we don't have to like make a big deal about it but it's like it's a five hour movie not a 10 hour movie with a bunch of of stuff

punched into it do you miss that that like sunday night thing we used to get in the 90s of like Stephen kings the langlears and it's just like a three night event I can't say that I was like a huge Langelier's head. What about the stand? Do you know like that? I miss the stand. We have like that weird thing where I'm like a couple years older than you. And like I think you were like a little bit more like the TV thing.

Like when TV got good, I was like, ah, but I'm in college. I got to go out. So and Sean was at home. Sean was home. But you know, there's a few. I have a few like 90s TV blank spots because of that. For me, that was actually a very exciting thing. I kind of wish we could go back to that.

some versions of it. You know, there was a miniseries on ABC last week about gay rights and sort of gay identity in the 20th century. There are still mini series, but I do miss that three-night event thing where you kind of had to be there for it. It's a big reason why I also really liked OJ Made in America. I thought that was a cool way to roll that out specifically. If they had made that a weekly series the way that Legion is, it would have not nearly been as interesting to me. Yeah, Legion's a really good example of I'm not really sure. sure whether would Legion have been better as a film? I mean, I actually quite like Legion, but I think that it's one of those things where it's

like week to week. It's very hard to parse some of the like the narrative points in it. So it's very difficult. It's an interesting question about whether or not if Holly had made that as like a two hour and 15 minute movie, it may have left a lot of like narrative stuff on the bone. But it would have been like, oh, what's going on? And now it's over. And you and Andy have talked a lot about the effectiveness of stranger things, the way that

you could consume it over that weekend because it just felt it just felt like a long movie in a lot of ways and you're willing to get to the end of it in a short period of time. And it did actually make traditional TV rollout feel antiquated. And we always talk about kind of what movies are taking from TV now. But that that is really something that TV took from movies. Let's open the conversation up a little bit more generally because you've been doing these podcasts with directors. You wrote a lot about the sort of state of the industry towards the end of the year with the award season.

We've both written about movies a lot in the last couple of months more than I think we thought we would be at honestly. Love movies. Yeah. What are some like general, I don't know, like, not trends, but like, if you were like going to say something about like what we, when we get to the end of the year, like, what we'll look back on this year as like the year of this, or do you think, I mean, do you see any shifts happening that you would be worth illuminating? It's a great question. I think the Netflix and Amazon stuff that we talked about is by far the biggest. I think this is the first time where streaming services every single week have a new movie that theoretically would have been playing at the Angelica 10 years ago in New York.

That is a full-blown shift. And it's also going to change the way I think people talk about and communicate about movies. You know, like word of mouth is very effective for movies. And I wonder if it'll be even more effective for those small things. As far as big-time studio movies, it's a little early to tell. You and I always rate movie years based on like which filmmakers have movies in that year. So if it's a Paul Thomas Anderson year or a Quentin Tarantino year or something like that.

This isn't my favorite what's coming for. You know, like your boy, David Fincher, is doing a TV show. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of people who are not working on stuff the way that we want them to. I thought last summer was really drab, and this summer looks really drab as well. We got Dunkirk, though.

Dunkirk, yeah. I'm not a big Christopher Nolan fan, but you are. Yeah, well, I mean, I certainly really enjoy going to his movies. Sometimes when I start thinking about them, I'm like, oh, it didn't make any sense. You look like McConaughey crying into the, screen. That's right.

I'm looking at my younger self. Let's see. What else do we want to talk about? You know, this is an interesting thing because you were like, you mentioned the conversation and we rarely get to do podcasts

in front of people. So I'm kind of curious in terms of, I mean, if you guys have any questions, obviously I'd love to hear them. But how much of a bubble are we in when it comes to like how we're talking about these things and how overwhelmed we do or don't sound when we are talking about like,

oh, there's a movie. Like, when you hear there's a movie, there's going to be a pretty cool movie every week on Netflix for the rest of the year. There's going to be a new stand-up special on Netflix for the rest of the year. Does that sound like, are you excited? Show ahead. Is that like an exciting time to be alive?

Is anybody here feel overwhelmed by that? Yeah. Right? And it's difficult to stay on top of it. I don't know. I mean, candidly, just from even working at the website that we work at, it's very confounding figuring out how to write about and engage with the stuff because there's no expectation about when people are going to be consuming the written word

about the thing that we don't know if people have seen. Yet, you know, we talked the other day about the deluge of reviews around Iron Fist and Beauty and the Beast. Like two weeks before they were out. And I don't know who that's for. And I don't know if it's our responsibility to be covering those shows and those movies two weeks before they come out. Obviously, there are very cynical reasons for that. There's SEO and people just trying to get the first word on things, which I understand and I don't like. But in real time, I mean, we're genuinely making a site, podcasts, everything that we do.

is so people can consume them so they can enjoy them and understand them interact, get the sense of our voice and what our taste is. Hopefully it aligns with your taste. But it is a very strange thing to know, well, small crimes will be on Netflix on March 28th. Should we review that movie on March 28th? Should we wait for a month and just say, here are the six best movies that have been streaming on Netflix all year? I don't know.

I'm not quite sure. And we've talked about this a lot at the office in terms of television. Because when we started working together, on Grantland, one of the things that was happening was there was this sense of like, even if the numbers, the ratings didn't bear it out,

like a television monoculture, right? So you had like Breaking Bad, loss it ended, you had Breaking Bad Men Game of Thrones. Is there anything else that was like, early homeland was like a big deal? You know, like it felt like everybody knew was watching these shows,

talking about them watching and then like in the same Sunday night, we're all going to sit down and do this and then Monday we're going to talk about it. And like the Mad Men recap, economy. It was like a real thing. It was like an industry. And especially in talking about television, one of the most interesting things in the last six months, to 12 months that I would say is since Andy and I started the watch from

over in Hollywood Perspectus, it was the amount of different shows people ask us to talk about. Like it's not just like, hey, can you guys hit this again or can you guys talk about this? We used to basically pick a couple of shows. I would say like, there would only be like 10 shows a year we would talk about it. And we would be like, okay, we're just going to talk about every episode of this of this show. What's the number one they hit you up about now? Well, it's so random, right? It'll be like, please talk about The Expans.

Please talk about Black Sales. Please talk about Patriot on Amazon. Please talk about this show on Crackle that I saw. Please, can you talk, do all the Marvel shows on Netflix? Are you caught up on all the original Crackle series? I have. I am, that's, I'm saving that for my book. My Tashian book on Crackle shows.

No, it's been a fascinating shattering of the, like, whatever monoculture there was. And I think we've actually been through this before, with music, right? Because, and a lot of that had to do with our perspective being coming through, like the media, our surrounding music kind of falling apart, you know, for the lack of a better term.

I mean, we used to, every year, we would, it's like, the conversation about the album and the single of the year would be was like this huge debate that would get documented in the Village Voice and you would sort of, all these other year-end issues.

And you just see that slowly dissipate. And, of course, obviously, the introduction of streaming music kind of negates the need for music, critics as gatekeepers to music at all. I wonder if that's going to happen to television, frankly. Like in the way where in five years, maybe it'll happen to movies as the two kind of start to blend together, where you're just going to have like these small clusters of fans

of different things, but they're not going to need to feel like there is a one-stop place that has like, adjudicates what is good and bad television. Yeah, I think we always use the threes and layups metaphor to describe. everything. So like the Golden State Warriors, San Antonio Spurs style of play in basketball, where it's just like we only go really big and really small. And I feel like that applies to everything now in culture as well. Like Kong Skull Island is not going anywhere. Those movies are going to be made for the next 25 years because they draw in a lot of different kinds of people. It's something that is easily understood. Giant ape smashes stuff is so easy

to explain. They've been making those movies for literally 100 years. Giant ape finds a bag of money. Right. Well, that's a great sequel. Yeah. You got a call... Kong Bag of Money Island. Sounds great. But on the flip side, yeah, I think it's going to be just also a lot of layups, a lot of... You know, that's the reason you see this proliferation of the stand-up specials that you're talking about of cheap documentaries that people consume at such a crazy rate.

There was an interesting story in The New York Times this week about Netflix's push into documentary because, you know, the people in the marketing department, they realize that there is a big audience for those movies. They're just not, like, date movies. They're not movies that people are like, let's all go out and watch a dot. Saturday afternoon before I go out movie. Exactly. That's how I watched those stand-ups. It's like it'll be like three or four and like I don't really feel like committing to a film or anything or maybe I'm caught up on TV or I don't feel like diving into taboo again. And it's just like, oh, I'll just watch this Michael Che.

I'll watch like half an hour of this Michael Chei stand-up show. Right. I'm still reading a lot of Quantico Recaps though. I feel like Quantico Recap culture is strong. That's good. What's the one where the girl has all the tattoos? Don't know. Jamie Alexander.

Yeah, but it's, what's that one called? That's my... Great job, guys. You should have a podcast. Yeah. I've been writing recaps that show, but I just keep... No, I don't. On Live Journal.

Yeah, it's my Prometheus Live Journal. Hey, before we continue with this conversation, let's just take a quick break for our sponsors. Guys, I'm sitting here. I have a close shave, and it is all thanks to Harry's. I can't talk enough about Harry's. It's just made shaving so much more of a pleasurable experience. It was started by two guys who were fed up with being overcharged for razors, which I agree, man, because you get that your usual store-bought razor, run out of blades, and then you find out that you're basically paying, like, you might as well just keep buying new razors, given how expensive it is.

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Cool. I'd love to hear from you guys. Ask your questions. Never get to do this in front of audiences. In the back. So last year, Hell or High Water, I caught up with it months later on DVD. And I thought it was one of those really good like middle, small crime movies. But because the script had, I guess, more lofty ambitions that got vaulted into the awards

conversation. So with the disappearance of kind of that middle ground, do you think a lot of those middle ground movies that you would just talk about like, oh yeah, that was a great movie. I caught it again on cable last night. But do you think more of those movies are going to be jumping into awards conversation? I think there will be, I definitely think that the hell or high water movie will be a thing. It'll be one of them. I don't know if you're going to get more than one of them, but just the same way that there is a The Martian movie every year, which is like a smart sci-fi movie that like a rival or interstellar that people generally did well at the box office and people respected, I think that you will get like a

low to mid-level budget crime film that leaps into like a mainstream critical discourse. Yeah, as like middle ground as that movie seems, it actually triangulates a few important things. It's got high pedigree with the actors and the script and the direct. right of you know second filmmaker making his second film david mackenzie's first movie start up was very well well thought of so whatever he was going to make next was going to be a big deal taylor sheridan wrote the script he wrote cicario he was a very hot screenwriter at the time jeff bridges oscar winner then you've got chris pine who's basically a full-blown movie star slumming it in this smaller movie and ben foster who's just kind of a wards bait in general great character actor plus you have a movie

that is a Western, sort of a bag of money movie, and a movie that, depending on your point of view, was positioned as sort of like a Trump's America, right post, you know, sort of this is what small town struggle really looks like. That's a lot of themes that can be, you know, bent and twisted in a lot of directions. And I think that's a big reason why that movie

was so successful and so well received and was able to be both, it was pretty successful at the box office for a small movie, plus it was a huge VOD movie. plus becoming an awards contender. I think that that is like not, there were so many things going for it that it's hard to use it specifically

as an example of what could happen. But I do think you're right that there will be at least one movie every year that finds us way into the best picture conversation. I wish we could do like basically like A-B testing with that. Like I would be very, Green Room has been called a horror film and Green Room is terrifying in a way that hell or high water isn't.

But you weren't scared. But, but I, I, I feel like it had some of the same themes of just kind of like a forgotten America that is just like terrifying right now and very difficult to live in. And I, you know, like there was like a lot of stuff in Green Room

that I think would stop it from being appreciated on a mass level the way how high water was. But I would be curious to know if those both came out like the same day and at the same reviews that they got, like what would have done better? Green Room might have being like kind of like a quiet film that came out in the beginning part of it. It was a great question though.

One more thing about Ben Foster. Are you guys in or out on Galveston, which is the Nick Pizzolato novel adaptation that they're doing. Is he doing it? Yeah, he's the lead in Melanie Laurent's. I got Pizz's back, no matter what. So I'm still alone on True Detective Season 2 Island. That's okay.

Whenever they want to come back for three, I'll be there for them. What did he write, Rees? Oh, Magnificent 7. Have you guys seen Magnificent 7, the reboot? He totally wrote this Peter Starsgard stuff, and it's like really, really, obvious that it is Nick Pizzolado. It's awesome. No comment. You've read his year. You got one right over there. So you mentioned this a little bit earlier in the podcast, but as editors of an entertainment site, you know, I remember the week leading up to get out, there were

like four or five different articles from Vulture, like very specific, spoilery plot, you know, driven stories about Allison Williams and then, you know, all the racial. So there's all this a conversation leading up to a film like that and obviously very spoiler-heavy is there, what's the incentive I guess as a website to promote a movie in that way when you know most of your audience

hasn't even seen the movie yet and does it maybe as the incentive help promote the movie itself? That's a great question. We're literally had this conversation last week. We were trying to figure it out. Yeah. Well, I mean, he can speak to this almost better than I can,

but we are, this is just a business decision for us because we're also like in love with the product. So we're like we don't want to betray how we would want to read about it. But it's a very weird time where like, I mean, you just look at, if you look at Twitter last night, like just people had their reviews of song to song like 30 seconds after the movie letter, like the review, even though it was you tweeted, but it was like four tweets and it was like this is what I think. Who is that for?

There's only like the people who saw the movie already are in the theater with you. have their opinion, but like, nobody else can see that movie for another week. Yeah, there's a I think there's a couple of reasons for it. I mean, I can't, it's hard to say how I feel about it because I'm very competitive, so I see that piece on a website on Friday morning that's like, here's why get out ended the way it did, and you should find out right now, even though you've never seen it. And you might not see it for three weeks. I see that and I'm like, God, I wish we had that, but I also don't want to betray that feeling where people can just kind of come to the site and not feel like they've had everything that they, like, spoiled for them.

I think that the two reasons that people do it are, like I mentioned earlier, which is that there is clearly a strategic choice to just own a storyline and say, we're first on this, we own it, and it's good for us for traffic, and it's also good for us to kind of say, this movie really matters, and we know it matters this much. And we couldn't get an interview with Jordan Peel or Daniel Kaluah. So if we can't get that today, then we'll do the spoiler post today, and then we'll do the Q&A on Monday, and then on Thursday we'll do the box office analysis,

What does this mean for Jordan Peel's future as a filmmaker? There is also just something that is just very land grabby that Chris is talking about, where people are tweeting their song to song review instantaneously after not really thinking about it. Like the movie ends, and they say, well, I've been stewing over my take through the first 90 minutes of this. Doesn't really matter what the final 35 minutes look like. I'm going to sharpen my take mid-movie and then share it with the world. So people know that I was at this movie and that it's important that you understand that I understand this movie, which is complicated.

I certainly understand the impulse, especially... Yeah, it's not shot. I'm not taking shots. It's like, I get why you would do that. And I actually, I'm sure I've done it in some bizarre way or another. You love to do it like when Kevin Durant goes to the Warriors. Yeah. Great move by the Warriors.

Here's how this ends. Yeah. I don't love it, but I'm also pragmatic, and I think it's something that will happen more and more. Well, let me ask you, do you like it? Are you like, why is all this here? I just end up bookmarking it and then come back to it in five days after I've seen it. I'm glad we're still bookmarking. I'm an instapaper guy through and through.

Yeah, but then your instapaper is like 18 get-out blog posts. Yeah, well, I read them all. Okay. Well, so you like it, but you feel like you just save it for later. Okay. Great question. We're all screwed. The media screwed.

Next question? I have another is media screwed question. Great. So with proliferation of like Netflix and Amazon as product activators, it's okay, we're going to save space for that. Disruptors where they're not really disclosing the what they're making from their products. And we have this culture of like this box office prognostication culture with major studios. How do you see that perpetuating over time?

Do you think there's a bubble that would burst from that? Do you think that that's something that will last? I don't know. definitely robs us of like a metric, which is frustrating. I don't think any of us are like, films should be evaluated on how much money they make, but what it does is tells a story about who's going to see this movie. Has this movie like reached a certain amount of people or people like, is it engaging with people? And if it's not, is it the fault of the film or is it the fault of the distribution or it's fault of the marketing? What do you think about this idea? I mean,

like, are we going to be like, okay, you show me the money in 18 months? I don't, there's no incentive for Netflix to start. releasing that information, which people have been saying for years now, and there won't be for a long time. There will probably ultimately be a crisis moment where producers and people that are, you know, have this built-in identity about how, what measures success for them, they start to demand, like, how many people actually saw this, was this worth it for you or not? I think when enough people get angry about it, and we've heard it, you know, in the Hollywood Reporter, sort of every six to 12 months, there's a new piece that's like major producers,

are pissed at Netflix because they won't tell us how many people watch their show. But until there is some sort of major crisis, it's just going to continue to be like this. From my perspective, especially doing the site that we're doing, which on the sports side is often very analytical and very precise, it is fun in some ways to look at what is deemed success. On the other hand, notions of success have been completely shattered for television because of L plus 3 and L plus 7 and all these new ways we measure how many people. people who are watching shows, it'd be interesting to see if movies get something similar. I could see there's something developing there where you don't just look at box office receipts, which are

misleading, and you look at something that is a little bit broader. I'd like to know right now how many people have seen Hell or Highwater, for example. You know, now that we're eight months removed from the release date, it's had an awards run, it's been on VOD, it's been on, I don't think it's on a streaming service yet, but you can rent it from iTunes and Amazon. Yeah. But I don't see that changing anytime soon. Will it be bad for the product? I don't really. I don't really. no. I mean, creative people are always going to make creative stuff. Netflix, for the most part, is a great thing because they're spending a ton of money and they're giving it to interesting people. And by all accounts are not, I mean, every, almost every director, every filmmaker

works with them is like, yeah, no notes. It was just they gave me a check and then they were like give us the finished product. I will say this. All of like, especially recent human history suggests that like it's a bubble, right? That they will be like, we ran out of subscribers. Like we hit the ceiling and now we're out of money. But the way that would be different is if Netflix literally like that, what do you, when you go home, when you start to think of going home and turning on Netflix rather than television, when you're like, I'm going to go to the movies. What you mean is you're going to turn on Netflix.

If it basically replaces the platform, well, then no. The curious thing would be what happens to those smaller filmmakers when Netflix can start. making Transformers, right? Like what happens to those smaller filmmakers to the Swanbergs and to everybody else when they can get into buying comic book properties like they already have with Marvel? The real last night, part six.

The last night, 23 episodes about Anthony Hopkins. Any other questions? You want to do one more? This is, I'm interested in how you go with this, but with the advent of all these new streaming TV services coming out with YouTube announcing their $35 option and all of the other ones that people are starting to actually use. How do you see the creative of those 35 main channels changing

when their audience is stopping being the traditional house, like the traditional Kansas Midwestern house, to a younger audience that might have actually, might be subscribing and college audiences that are using YouTube and other TV services? So like the traditional, like the big three, networks and like the premium cable networks. Do you see their creative changing?

We talk about it at work all the time. I mean, every millennial that works for us does not have cable. It's galling. It's insane. Period. Yeah. Which is like a thing that you read in Bloomberg and people like managers say that and you're like, and then we'll be on Slack and people are like, who is watching the Oscars so I can

come over and see it? It's just like it's who has an illegal stream of this soccer game because I would never pay for a soccer game. Yeah. I think you're seeing some experimentation already, right? So CBS All Access, they'll have the Star Trek show. They have the good wife spin off, which is excellent. Yeah, I should really check it out if you haven't already seen it.

Good fight? Yeah. Who's the star of that? Christine Vransky. NBC has been experimenting a lot with some of their comedy stuff. I think that The Good Place is an example of that. And I was just talking with Allison Herman about this on an episode a couple of days ago. This idea that Fox is kind of like letting Lord Miller just kind of have Sunday nights

to play around with, like they did Last Man on Earth, they did... Making history. Making history. What was the He-Man one they did? Son of Zorn. Yeah, which I actually see that one. But, like, I think you'll see a lot of experimentation, but people still expect Westworlds from HBO.

You know what I mean? I think that some of those bigger networks, and HBO is kind of like in a really nice position to do this because I think they've started to, like, basically, like, say, like, if you want to go big, go with us. Yeah. You want an event? We got an event.

Yeah. And even Big Little Lies in a way is, an event, just given the talent that's involved with it. That will be the challenge for all these, like, other, like, the YouTube's and the Netflix and the Amazon is like, when are you going to get, not your Game of Thrones, like, when are you going to get your sword and shield drama? But when are you going to get something that actually 20 million people sit down and watch at the same time?

It'll be, as you were talking, I was thinking, it'll be interesting to see if we can get, say, like, how I met your mother again. You know, like a moderately successful show that has a sincere fan base that's on a major network that has some consensus around it but is not the Big Bang theory. It's not a world beater. But it just kind of steadily hums along for 10 years. There will be a this is us every three or four years. Right. But yeah, that's a really good point. In the back? You can each ask one major executive any question and they will answer honestly. What do you each ask them? Oh, man. It's fantastic. Specific executive? Wow. Like a specific executive?

You should be that executive. That's a fantastic question. Yeah. Um, I would ask, Man, thinking. Are you thinking? I'm not thinking. You're just staring at me? I'm going to split it in half. I've heard Jason Blum talk a lot about how he has built

Blumhouse into this insane money-making machine. Blumhouse made Get Out, for those of you who don't know, many other horror movies Chris wrote about Blumhouse four or five months ago for The Ringer. And he seems extremely pragmatic and smart. and he treats his business like a business, but he also trusts artists. So I want to know why major studios don't treat their business the way that he does. Because I think a lot of what has happened is, you know, that threes and layups thing that we were talking about is happening because people see the success of the first Transformers movie and they say, great, the lesson here is more transformers.

That's all that we're taking away from this. And the next one has to be, has to cost $25 million more and has to have a bigger set piece and the next one has to cost $25 million more. So if you're Jim Ginopoulos, Jim Janopoulos was just announced as the head of motion pictures of Paramount, which is a very, it's a complicated time to be a paramount, it's a complicated time to be part of Viacom. Jim Janopoulos has to turn that movie division around. Is his strategy going to be, I need to find my transformers, or is it going to be I need to find my Jason Blum? I need to find my person who knows where the, you know, he needs to find the disruptor of the industry. And it's not so much a question is just sort of like, how can you reinvent being a major studio today? How can you make this work?

Because as we have all these conversations about the industry, and, you know, we're just, we're observers and journalists. We're not pure experts, and we don't have experience inside of the industry. But when you talk to people, when you talk to producers, when you talk to people who work at studios, and especially when you talk to filmmakers, there is a weird feeling of, like, dread and frustration and lack of clarity. So I would just want to know if somebody thinks they know how to do it. The problem with putting the same guy who's been doing this job for 25 years back in this job is they only know how to do it in the old way. That's really interesting. I would love to see the Blum kind of method applied across different genres.

I was thinking that my question would be to the guys at Warner Brothers and it would be, how's it going? Just because it doesn't, I'm not sure what they're going to do. Like they just, they now have like, Fox went from having, like, Fantastic Four, and so a really maligned X-Men movie to now having Logan and Deadpool. And now it seems like they've kind of figured out how to make those movies. And, you know, there's all this stuff with, like, who's going to direct the Batman movie? And, like, are they going to go super dark? And there was, like, an article a couple days ago that was, like, D.C. is totally ready to make

super dark, you know, comic book movies. that's like a big rock on their back. Like they have to pull that thing over the mountain for this to work. So I would be very curious about that. And I think I would just be fascinated to know whether or not if we're ending this cycle of reboots, like are we in the middle of it, or are we at the beginning of it or we at the end of,

hey, let's just take any household object and make a movie out of it. And that's like the baseline that you need to get into a studio pitch. I'd be curious to know if there's like some brilliant original idea coming from it somewhere. One more. On a different topic, you were talking about Netflix. And I was just curious to see what your feelings are regarding the fact that Netflix releases the entire series at one time for binge watching and how the effect has changed because before people would be the water cooler syndrome.

You know, every Monday morning, whatever night before. before, everyone was talking about a particular episode. Today, everybody's watching episodes and groups. Some binge the entire thing at once, others do two or three at a time, and pretty much everything is on demand when you have time to do it. So when you want to talk about something, you're fine that you might not want to talk about it because you don't want to spoil it for someone else because you don't know where they are in the series.

So how do you feel about that? And do you think that's a better thing or what the pros, cons? In my experience, there's only been one unicorn show that did both, right? That was the water cooler and the streaming show, and that was stranger things. And I'm not sure if that was the case for everybody, but at least in our experience, it was something that it didn't feel like people were breaking their backs to finish it. They genuinely wanted to watch all of it at once because they liked it that much. and there was something about the story,

which wasn't so, trying to think of an example without giving away something from another show, but it wasn't so like, oh, did you see that? Like, did you hear that this character's dead? And no, I didn't, because I had to, you know, go to dinner,

so I didn't see eight episodes of something. It somehow, like, found this incredible middle ground, which is why I think it is so beloved, because it was actually something that was appreciated in a way that was very similar to, like, the monoculture prestige shows from years past that was like, we all watched The Wire. That was an amazing episode. Let's talk

about it all week until the next one. That was like for two weeks or something like that, three weeks. And then much longer in reality, people were just like, I just loved that show. I'm happy to talk about Barb whenever you want. Yeah, it was interesting. I talked to Jordan Peel last week about Get Out. And the thing that he was saying was that when he was writing the script for the movie, he wanted a water cooler movie, which is not necessarily a phrase here. You often hear about, you know, Thrones. Thrones, exactly. And he was like, I'm going to put five things in this movie that I know are going to make

people want to talk about it immediately. They have to see it the first weekend so that on Monday morning they can all convene and discuss it at work, which I thought was interesting and seems obvious, but you don't hear about very often. And in a way, it seemed like he was doing that because we've lost some of that on the TV side. The only other example I could think of when you were describing Stranger Things is making a murderer, which I think was.

somewhat close, even though obviously the format and the story that is being told is completely different. There was a lot of like, can I talk to you, have you finished episode eight, episode nine is where things really slow down and is boring. There's nothing worse than a dinner where like everybody's at a different episode. Oh, God. And two people are like, I'm on eight and the other person's like, I'm on four. And you're like, oh, but you'll wait until you get to eight. And it's just like, this is terrible. I love to dunk on you and be like, I've seen it all.

You're going to hate it, but you might love it. Yeah, just like Elgort. I would say that it does, and we can wrap it up, but I do think we've been talking a lot about the way we cover it. It is completely changed the way we cover it. And it has, you know, I noticed this at first with the second seasons of House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, where I felt like there was an announcement that the show was back,

and then all of the content about the show went into these like underground bunkers. And plenty of people could go hang out there if they'd watched 10 episodes on the first night. but for the most part, like, there was no continuous coverage of those shows. I don't think we do, like, two weeks after it's debuted, hey, by the way, like, this Netflix show is super good or bad. You know, like, we just, like, if it doesn't happen the first night and there isn't a sensational moment that everyone's talking about, there's really not a demand for us to revisit it, which is kind of sad. And that is the theme of this podcast. Yeah.

I want to thank you guys so much for coming out. I really appreciate. I know the weather's not great, but I hope you have a great festival, and we thank you for listening. Appreciate it. Texas Branskies. Thank you. Thanks. All this month, we are asking you to tell a friend about a podcast that they would love.

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