The Watch - What 'Strange World' and 'Glass Onion' Can Tell Us About the Goals of Streaming Companies Right Now. Plus, 'The White Lotus' S2E5.

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

Chris and Andy talk about the Disney movie 'Strange World' bombing at the box office and Netflix's decision to put 'Glass Onion' in theaters for just one week, and what these two things can tell us about the strategies of streaming companies right now (1:00). Then they talk briefly about the trailer for the new Taylor Sheridan series '1923' (34:38), before talking about the latest episode of 'The White Lotus' (39:20). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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See terms at Fandul.com slash predict slash bonus dash offer dash terms. I need supports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to the watch. My name is Chris Ryan and I am an editor at the ringer.com and joining me on the other line just as soon as he finishes doing something for his uncle,

it's Andy Greenwald. Is that phrase? That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, it's out the window. Yeah, it really means something now. Andy, it's wonderful to see you. It's Monday after Thanksgiving. Always a sentimental time.

in the Greenwald Ryan relationship because some of our best memories were forged during the long Thanksgiving weekends spent in Philadelphia. Andy, some would say that's when we did the best studying. Studying, yes. Oh, without question.

I would also say that you say some of the best memories. I would say some of the most significant missing memories, just like huge lacunae of time, just gone. That's right. Yeah, you were missed. You were missed on the East Coast. Yeah, I stayed here. hung out. We did a little time in a Huntington Beach. Shout out,

uh, Costa Mesa just did a, uh, a little, some family stuff out there. It was pretty intense out on the roads in California. Nobody really wants to hear my traffic report, but 10-10 wind style. Uh, it's just say, people are driving pretty aggressively. Were you out there, uh, canvassing for Katie Porter and no one told you that it was over? Dude, you don't want to know what I've done for, uh, keeping California blue out here. Um, Greenwald, uh, a lot of stuff to talk about, White Lotus specifically, but I want to wanted to open it up to just discuss, it's got a feel for where your heads at. It's been actually like a full week since we've chatted about culture. And, you know, I don't think that we're in

full Iger counter zone right now. We certainly have covered it thoroughly on this podcast, on the town, on Bill's Pod, on plain English. But I did want to ask if you had a chance to check out the most recent Disney World release, Disney World, Disney, Walt Disney Company release, Strange World. Yep. Yeah. 100% did. I saw the films. And I assume you watched that on a streaming service. Is that right?

No, no. It's theatrical only. Okay. So you were one of the 19 people who went and saw that. So this is actually, so I'm glad we can fold this into a larger industry conversation because, you know, I understand that I used all my Datington Island chips when I interviewed Joe Brum, the creator of Bluey, a show that you, to repeat, a quote, ended your bloodline rather than ever risk seeing.

That's right. You know, perhaps your hottest take, but we can save that for a later podcast. Strange World is excellent. Let me start there. Strange World is a very, very good film that apparently catastrophically bombed at the weekend. And, you know, straw poll among people, professional, personal that I've talked to in the last three days. A majority of them, even some with children, had never heard of it. I had never heard of it until you texted me and said, I need to address this on the podcast.

So broadstrokes, just from the Datington Island perspective, this is a very, very good animated film. It is a, you know, it's a Disney release around Thanksgiving. So it's a family story in which Dennis Quaid voices the character of a legendary explorer of a small town surrounded by mountains. And his son, searcher, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, does not want to follow in his father's footsteps. Their father's obsessed with finding what's beyond the mountains. The son refuses. The father storms off. The son discovers instead a plant.

that basically creates electricity, turning this place into a sort of steampunk Jules Verne paradise and find success as a farmer, but then the electric plants, something's wrong with them. And he,

along with his family, his son, Ethan, played by Djibuki Young White, and his wife, Meridian, played by Gabriel Union. They go in an expedition and they end up falling through a crack in the ground and they discover this strange world

that is like, truly, I mean this with high praise, this movie's beautiful in a way that Disney movies or American animated movies usually aren't. It's very surreal. It's very poetic. It's more Miyazaki and it's like, let's go for it, design sense. That's dope. So I know you're listening to you. Start slipping an American animated. I'm going to start saying that about like, um, about like crime. You know, not a lot of American bank robbery

films. Chris? Truly reckon with the more complexities of. I get this. You get to talk about the Yellowstone prequel in five minutes. Okay. Let me, let me have my space. I just, it's a very well done, well-written, very well-designed movie that absolutely fell flat on his face. And that's a bummer. So I think that hopefully people will discover it and check it out. But in researching why it failed, I mean, it kind of gets into some of the issues

that we've been talking about, not just in regards to Disney, but in regards to what is even a success anymore. So there was a very kind of, honestly, difficult to parse article on deadline over the weekend. But I think there were other versions of the story and other trade publications, basically comparing and contrasting

the fate of Strange World, which was released and according to the headlines could lose $200 million for Disney because of its low ticket sales over the weekend. We want to circle back to that part, but go ahead. Yeah. I mean, 200 million, that's nothing. Bob Chaypec lost 1.5 Billy last quarter alone, right?

So come on. With the New Knives Out movie, Glass Onion, which apparently did Gangbusters business in its... On a per-screen basis, yeah. Only weekend of release. Because as people know, Brian Johnson and his producing partner in the studio as MRC sold the rights to two knives-out sequels directly to Netflix and a pretty groundbreaking deal.

For a cool 300. Yeah. And so basically one and a half strange world losses. And but of course, Ryan Johnson being a filmmaker and of a certain age and, you know, in belief system was like, this has to be in theaters. And Netflix was like, okay, you can have six days around Thanksgiving, but we didn't buy this to put it. in theaters. So anyway, the industry trade talk was like, here is why this was a good decision for Disney to release Strange World into theaters and lose a ton of money, as opposed to doing what it had done with a lot of other recent movies, which is putting them directly on the pluse streaming surface. And here's why it's questionable, why Netflix is leaving tens of millions

of dollars on the table by only giving Glass Onion a week-long release. And I guess I just want to start from the place of this is just so weird. It's such a weird conversation. I haven't seen Glass Onion yet. We were talking about seeing it this week in the theater because the momentum that I've heard behind it seems to be that this is actually a really great theatrical experience. And I would like to take part in that. But the place to start is apparently these are both good movies. I can confirm one. I've heard tell from people I trust. That's a thing to be celebrated. But the fact that their relative success and the ability to see them is just at the mercy and whimsy of the needs of these multinational corporations is nothing new, but it strikes me as odd.

Oh, yeah. I mean, Andy, I don't understand it anymore. Like, you told me about Strange World. I kind of voraciously read everything I could about this box office weekend after the fact. And I came away with more questions than I had answers, which is pretty typical. But like, I'm kind of like all upside down here. You know, the analysis of a strange world was particularly fascinating to me because you're talking about this sort of, this is like a slot that Disney typically occupies, right? Like having a theatrical kids movie in theaters for Thanksgiving for that weekend. As an option for families. And they have been going back and forth kind of with a lot of these Disney animated projects over the last few years of pulling them and putting them on Disney Plus,

because Disney Plus should be what it is to you and your family, which is like the nightlight. It is the go-to application to put on on your application. TV on your whatever to say, okay, kids, you can watch this for an hour, you can watch this for 15 minutes, whatever it is. For us, it's more of like an Andor machine, you know what I mean? Or it's more of like a Star Wars or an MCU machine. But like I think it's general like probably overriding purposes to provide family entertainment, right?

It is. But so let's go through some of the reasons that we read. So the reasoning that Deadline said that this was a good move. And I'm not arguing that it was good or bad. Like I was really happy to see it in the theater. And I think the bigger issue behind it. it is, I think they didn't understand what they had, and I think they screwed up the marketing of it. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the marketing of it, but it is a tough sell.

There are no songs. It's a new world. It's new characters. And it doesn't have a villain, which was another thing that I thought was great about Frozen 2, but that made half a billion. So maybe it's not in the conversation. It is not an easy thing to communicate what's appealing and charming and unique about this movie. I get that.

But the thinking was this. Disney generally historically has this Thanksgiving. lot, right? And that's a good option for families. They don't want to give up that real estate. They don't want to disappoint people. There's value in that kind of like loyalty and understanding of your consumer base that Disney is often excelled at and maybe people feel like they've gotten away from. Two, it has to have rankled the staff, the creative staff, everyone in the animation department and at Pixar that basically the last, like seven years worth of work has been dumped on a streaming service over the last few years. Don Hill, who directed

this movie's last film was Ryan and the Last Dragon that went straight to streaming last year, Turning Red, Soul, Oscar-nominated Pixar movies straight to streaming. Doesn't mean people didn't see them and love them, but it's different. And you don't go to work for those companies, or at least you didn't, to make a product that wasn't going to have the fanfare of a theatrical release. But what was confusing to me... Oh, and then the other point, which I thought was interesting, was that this movie has, what I believe is Disney's first out young person, teenage character. And that's the character of Ethan voiced by Djibuki Young White. Yeah, the comments in the deadline blog post are a love

place to be if you want to read about that. This movie is celebratory, honestly, and it handles issues of representation in a really lovely, thoughtful way. It's really, I thought it was a phenomenal family movie. The thinking in this article was, after Chepex's sort of two-step about the don't-say gay bill, they couldn't back off from putting this movie into theaters. It's a shame for any movie to be a political grenade in any way, even if that's true, whether that's true or not.

But then also in the article, they were like, hocus pocus, too. which I know you've been checking for, was apparently a huge deal. But they put that straight streaming. Disenchanted with starring Amy Adams, a movie that exists, a sequel to like the 12-year-old movie enchanted. When I was looking at the pictures of Hocus Pocus 2 and Disenchanted,

I was like, did I go to 700 Club in Philadelphia over the weekend and have myself a full night out? Because I was like, Amy Adams had a movie recently. Bet Midler and Sarah Jessica Parker were to a movie recently. While you were there, did you check if our friend Matt's fleece is still above the speaker? because I think he stuffed it up there in 2003 and never took it back. I guess the thinking there was, I don't know what the thinking there was.

There's stuff that we are not privy to, which is like talent compensation deals. And there was a lot of talk about how do we pay the directors of these Warner Brothers movies that are going straight to streaming who have profit participation deals. The same would be true in reverse. If you sign up to do something that is intended to be streaming. Yeah, and then you put it in the box office, it's like, sorry, Sarah Jessica Parker, the $45 million that we made on opening weekend or whatever, you don't see a piece of that.

I got it. You don't get to touch that. But it's weird, but I guess Disney is in a weird place because they are actively involved in multiple businesses at once. The theatrical business and the streaming business, in addition to theme parks and cruises. Netflix story is different, right? Because for as much as Glass Onion being a box office draw

is great for theatrical movies, that is absolutely without value for Netflix. Yeah, isn't that sort of funny though? of millions. Yeah. It's like if you're in a retoo and you want to get Bardo out on, you know, screens for a week, that's probably like true interritu heads might go see that and be like, yeah, I needed the big screen theatrical experience. Putting glass onion out, frankly, is to me not a good idea. I mean, if the whole point of paying $300 million is to own the rights to these movies, and you don't care about the 15 million that they bring in and limited release over the course

of a week before it gets to streaming, the only thing you're doing is, the $15 million worth of people off of the people who would be like, at midnight, I am going to watch Glass Onion. And not just those people. The people who are like, boy, I really want to see that, I better restart my Netflix subscription or I better subscribe now that they've cracked out on password sharing or whatever. They spent that $300 million for a very specific goal, and it was not box office receipts. It was to give themselves an unimpeachable draw to get people to either sign up for or stick with the service. And from that perspective, it seems like it was good investment. But we are still in this very uncomfortable moment where, you know, I don't,

I'm about to say, we don't know Ryan Johnson personally. I think that may make us the only members of the media in Los Angeles who could claim that. But I feel like he must be, like, he knows he made this deal. And people told him and he sees the zeros and it was a good deal. But I feel like we know who this, we know who this guy and what motivates him. And theatrical matters, right? I'm sure. I would imagine that he's in there. His people are calling Reed Hastings and Netflix over the weekend being like, come on. come on, come on, let's let this happen. And then you can be like HBO a week later, but it simply doesn't make sense.

I don't know. I mean, so what we're really talking about here is one movie can do good per screen business and actually maybe be bad for the company that released it on screens. And another movie can have, I don't know, I guess it flopped, $27 million, right? Is that what I saw, a global box office against like a $245 million budget somehow? you know and that can be cheap and then that gets into these questions about whether or not well should it have gone to disney pluse or should it have you know what what went wrong here and was it just the wrong movie for the wrong moment or was it not marketed appropriately or properly or whatever the question is but the thing that's kind of been fascinating me both reading about the iger stuff all the fallout from that this idea that he is going to quote unquote fix what chapec did even though there is obviously plenty of a pretty active school of thought that suggests that cheapeck maybe not delicately, but was more or less running the Iger playbook of where we're going to go going forward. This is something that we touched on when the Iger thing happened, which is basically,

I think we're now only now reckoning with COVID. And that like everything that COVID did to this industry and the way in which some of the masters of the universe tried to make COVID rather than a crisis into an opportunity to reshape everything and change the paradigm is they accidentally did. And now nobody knows what to do with it. It's almost like, the, to paraphrase, like, the no country for old men line where it's like, if the rule you followed got you here of what use was the rule. Like, you guys tried to like break the wheel and show us that, you know, movies can come out the same day on your streaming service. You don't have to leave the house. Just give us 15 bucks a month and look at this library of content. And it's like, oh yeah,

well, now the movie theaters are dying. And then it's like, well, okay, we'll put it in the movie theaters for a little bit. And it's like, well, yeah, now I don't need to watch it on Netflix. Do you know what I mean? So these kinds of weird machinations that everybody did over the course of COVID, have now come home at a time when people are more or less willing to go to the movie theaters. And we don't have a like a sort of functional cinema going experience, nor do we have a particularly like satisfactory streaming experience. No, it's the worst of all worlds. And I think that it's interesting because Disney basically broke movies over the last 10 years. Yeah. And, you know, created a paradigm where movies to be successful have to be,

to cost upwards of $200 million and get in receipts worldwide close to a billion dollars. Otherwise, what is it? It's not even a movie. That set expectations at a certain place of what movies are. Then movies, as an experience, went away. But the expectations and standards did not. And so now Disney is existing in a world very much of its own making where to make Marvel product, to make Star Wars product, and the third piece of it that we didn't touch on when we had the beginnings of this

conversation last week. Animated films, they need to spend upwards of $200 million on all of them and put them in a place where there are no ticket sales. Give them away, essentially, at a service that they decided to heavily discount as a lost leader for brand identity and shareholder subscriber information and et cetera, et cetera. That's not tenable, but that's where we are. And so I do think the real, you know, Iger is a million percent in the honeymoon phase, and it only continues. Like since we did the podcast about it last week, any conversation I've had with anyone creative,

whether it's a network executive or people making movies, they're overjoyed. They all love him personally, and they love his creative vision. They're like, oh, well, he watches cuts before I do, and he invests in us. And that was an interesting thing in this deadline story

about the strange world release, which is that I guess the ding on Chepec, which feels very convenient. You know, he was some bean counter Bob was that he had sort of let the bright boys and finance decide what went in what box. And that Iger will return that to the creative heads of the company whom he trusts to give the best platform and opportunity for the vision of the people who made it.

That's lovely. That's going to get people excited. That's within the company. That's going to get them invested in their projects and doing their best work, et cetera, et cetera. But what happens when the next visionary thing stiffs? Yeah, I mean. It has to get eaten as a loss for streaming.

I don't quite know what to do with it. the margins are just way too high and way too big. And the stakes now existentially for these companies are enormous. And I don't know what they're playing for. Are they playing for Global Box Office? Are they playing for subs? What happens if subs just plateau? What happens if we're finding out relatively in real time? This is how many people on Earth want Disney Plus. And you can put Luke Skywalker on there or you can put Strange World on there or you can put whatever on there. There is going to be a plateau. And there's going to be a plateau for Netflix and there's going to be a plateau for these things. And when we get to that point and we find out that that plateau does not

necessarily pay for the levels of content investment that these companies have been making, these billion dollar bets on content, yet we've changed everybody's viewing behaviors to the point where even though I'm two episodes into 1899, I'm like, what else is there on Netflix to watch? Yep. My brain's broken by like the, what happens. So I don't, I can only imagine what it's like for anybody else. And so then what's the actual metric of success? We also, your point about plateauing is correct. And I feel like people a lot smarter than us have been checking on that for a while. We may have reached it. You know, I remember talking to someone a few years ago being like, you know, the international expansion is because that's where they're still

undecided voters, basically. Like Apple can push into different territories. Netflix can go big in India because there are still relatively large, you know, communities that have not been given the beautiful opportunity of spending $8.99 a month. or $1599 a month or whatever. Or watching an ad support tier or whatever, yeah. To join the fun. But you can't just expand forever. There is a limit.

And the next frontier is, I was only half joking before, is password sharing. Like that's where the next crackdown comes in because the next opportunity to get more people paying in every month is to make sure that everyone is fairly paying in. Now, when you do that, you're going to piss off a lot of people.

You're going to make the user experience even harder because, you know, I don't know how this game's out, but right now, and I'm not encouraging any thieves to come do this, but right now I am ostensibly signed into HBO Max, like on my phone, on my iPad, and on my Apple TV,

that's an opportunity, that's password sharing, right? I mean, it's within myself, but other people I could lend it to someone. So are we going to enter a world where you have to enter your password every time you choose to watch Netflix, which is another barrier that seems small, but will affect people's feelings about service?

There are benefits to this, Wild Rush, which was just this flood of content, some of which has been amazing, but we might start feeling the other side of it soon. Yeah, and then you start to get into questions about what kind of stuff gets made, which is ultimately the thing that we care about the most. And it's like, you know, there will always be, or at least it seems for the time being, there will be an HBO or they make things like White Lotus. There will be an FX, at least for the time being, on Disney, that still makes things like The Bear. But whether or not these bets get so huge, that if even something as traditional, frankly, as Glass Onion,

requires a $300 million investment by a tech company, you know, your stories of like we made this movie for $25 million and it made $75 million and everybody went home happy and a little bit richer are going to become fewer and fewer. I mean, even this year, you can count on one hand the amount of times that's happened. It's really like that Channing Tatum movie, dog was one where kind of came out in a dead zone.

It was a feel-good movie that would appeal to, to a lot of different quadrants of people. I think they made that movie really cheap. It's essentially like Channing Tatum and literally a dog. And it made like 80 million bucks. And so like those are the kinds of movies that used to be like the bread and butter of Hollywood because they were, they made everybody feel good about making them,

but they also like then cut a tidy profit. And now it's just like, well, okay, so we have to put in a quarter of a billion dollars to get this thing off the ground. And it needs to make a billion for everybody to feel good about it. then you're only going to be making five kinds of movies. Well, okay, so here's three examples of what's the best case forward for Hollywood. And I think the answer is clear, but I don't know if that's the answer that's been chosen. So on one end of the spectrum, you have, I mean, let's not beat up on Lord of the Rings or Dragon.

Let's say Secret Invasion, which is an upcoming Disney Plus Marvel show based on a really good storyline in the comic books that essentially feels like a movie. And does that deal with the admiralty of William Rhodes? or it's actually you find out that he was not born in the United States. He's a citizen of So it actually, it's kind of the birther movement comes to the MCU. You're going to love it. It's basically the discovery that many, many people, whether they're heroes, villains, or political people are scrolls, the shape-shifting villains from they were used in the Captain Marvel movies. So Sam Jackson is back as Nick Fury in this TV show. I imagine Kobe Smolders is in it.

I know Amelia Clark is making her MCU debut. it feels like the kind of project that will have significance for the larger movies and a lot of cameos probably from the movie stars. They've been making it forever. It's probably stupid expensive. Just dumb. You don't even want to think about it expensive.

Then you have another option, which is our favorite thing to talk about, which is Andor, which is a vision, a path forward for just grown-up, brilliant storytelling, production design, character work, genre, everything we love and the genre not just being sci-fi

Trojan horse into a Star Wars show but we could pretend it's Trojan horsed but the Trojan horse was fucking expensive that was a big horse Oh yeah

so this is also a $200 million show when all is said and done without like the amortized whatever season two like is this the same cost as Secret Invasion?

Maybe but it's really good and I feel confident saying it'll be better even though I don't know anything about Secret Invasion and then you have the bear the bear

the bear cost the catering budget for the episodes in the prison of Andor. The whole series. Right. They filmed it in like six weeks in Chicago. Nobody was checking for it. And in terms of return on investment, eyeballs, buzz, potentially award stuff.

IP potential. Right. Enormous. I mean, like I'm saying, it doesn't have IP potential. It doesn't have like downstream like merchandising opportunities, although I've been seeing a lot of yes chef. Yeah, it actually does.

Yeah, you could make a whole cookware line. But to your. point, like, it seems, we credit FX a lot for using their lack of, I mean, they don't have the same artillery and firepower, even though they're now in by Disney, of being more nimble, right, and market inefficiencies. So, like, could more of these people realize the market inefficiency is making smaller things that are better? Like, can we do that? Or will they lose face if one of the misses or shareholder confidence or whatever? But, like, I mean, White Lotus, especially this season, you see the money of these rich people. But it's still not.

not as expensive to some of these other shows. The amazing things is that you and I really did grow up in a time when, say, like, it wasn't that uncommon for one of our, for our favorite movies to be directors maxing out a credit card and taking that movie on the festival. That was the whole thing. That was the dream of the 90s. There was El Mariachi or Jim Jarmeish movies or Hal Hartley

movies or early Steven Soderberg movies. Like, these movies were made really fast, cheap. And then they would, if they could make three, four, five, eight million dollars at the box. office at art houses, that would be a huge return on investment. And now I feel like the cost of production and whatever you owe that to, whether, you know, when you go see Tar or you go see Triangle of Sadness, there's 47 production companies from all over the globe involved. You know what I

mean? By the time it gets to your screen and that movie makes $7 million at like boutique cinemas. And it just has to basically hope on getting an awards boost. Yeah, but I feel like it's worth making a distinction between like the Tars of the world. And let me just say watching TAR, one of the great experiences I've had in the last year, I absolutely fucking loved that movie. Me too. Oh my God. I hope everyone goes and sees it, especially in a theater.

But TAR and Dog, you know, shouldn't be in the same conversation because TAR's ceiling was always low. I mean, TAR can get awards. It is art. It deserves to be made. But, you know, a two-and-a-half-hour meditation on women in classical conducting and cancel culture is not the same upside as Channing Tatum and a dog. It's just not. But I am curious to see who can be nimble here and just invest.

Not everything, the best way to win an arms race might be not to get into the arms race. And I don't know how that makes sense for companies and what they do. There was also a time where you could reliably count on studios to have either. you know, your Fox Searchlight or Paramount Vantage-style shingles that they would be like, well, we want to be in business of making interesting and provocative movies and every once in a while, one of these might jump over to the mainstream and really take off. And I, we don't really see a lot of that. Now, you and I have been talking past each other a little bit in this conversation, mixing up what's TV and what's movies. But the problem is that, you know, Glass Onion was made by Netflix,

which usually puts out TV shows. Disney Plus put out Andor, which is the best thing I've seen this year, but it was like, that's a TV show, you know, on what is essentially like a company that's known for making historically important pop culture movies. All that stuff gets confused after a while. But we're not the only ones confusing it. I mean, I had a meeting recently with Searchlight, and they were like, we're a film company historically, but now we make TV because we just make stuff and we're not sure which box to put it in.

Like, that's what's happening on both ends of it. You know, or you have a thing like you're most anticipated for 2023, Armor Wars about Colonel Rhodes, you know, that his story is just too big to be a TV show. That's true. And thank God, Kevin Feige, you realize that and put it on the big screen where it belongs. But the big, for me, the big, like, is this a TV show or a movie thing, is coming in this next phase of Marvel movies, where they're like, they're making a movie called Thunderbolts with Julie Dreyfus and Wyatt Russell. And it's like, and, you know, many other people as well.

and David Harbor. But I'm like, that doesn't sound like a movie to me. And is it going to succeed because it's Marvel? And Marvel tells us it's a movie. Or have we gotten to the point where none of that matters? Or is it also confused now that everything middles out? Maybe it's a reaction to what they felt like was ultimately a muted relationship that fans had with that batch of shows that came out in 2020.

Or, you know, like when the Wanda, Falcon, Loki, Rump, which those shows have, varying degrees of attributes, but I would guess that like none of them ever feel like Dr. Strange to Disney. You haven't seen Wakanda yet, right? I haven't. You saw a triangle of sadness instead? I'll tell you what I watched. So I was over the, over the, I was planning on to see Wakanda over the weekend, but I never got

to it. While I was hanging out at the house, and I watched a bunch of stuff, I watched the first few episodes of 1890, not to be confused with 1923, I watched more Fleischman. Watched the White Lotus, obviously. But one night I was hanging out in the living room reading, and I hear from the other room, my wife go, does Bubba Bix come back? And she had started watching Andor.

What? Why didn't I get texts about this? So I just started rewatching Andor from episode two on. And let me tell you something. If you guys are listening to us, obviously you're probably Endor fans. The rewatch is pretty incredible. I dare say maybe even more rewarding than the first time through

because when you know what's going to happen to some of these people, you can kind of dial in earlier conversations that may have felt not like throwaways, but maybe like connective tissue. And there's an episode specifically announcement that I thought was kind of not the weakest of the amazing batch of episodes that we got, but was like a little lower on my totem pole of importance. I was kind of more of like the I, episode 10, that kind of thing.

And announcement's fucking incredible on it. rewatch. Which one is that? That's the one where he goes back and they have the conversation where it's like, I'll worry about you all the time, and Marva's like, that's just love. Yeah, like, but that whole episode is great. Now, do you intend to have

Tony Gilroy back in the pod to talk about the rewatch three times? Video off on this podcast now, because he was pretty disappointed that you didn't show up on Wednesday. Not the only one. I mean, I hope you told him I was choosing the magic of Broadway over the opportunity to talk to him again.

Yeah, so anyway, it's just incredible. In fact, one of the things that's been cool about Andor is that in talking with Tony on Wednesday, he was talking about the funeral sequence at the end of the season finale and how the music was inspired by the horns on the first two albums by the band. Yeah. And so I just read the band biography this weekend. I was just like this guy's just got living rent-free in my head right now. I don't know if it's worth mentioning, but, you know, I think there used to be a time in this podcast where people were interested in what I watched on airplanes, and it was relevant

because I know what it was. I guess what I want to say, though, Chris, is that Strange World wasn't the only movie I watched this weekend in which a son is ambivalent about farming, despite that being the legacy of his father. Your takes on Interstellar are very weird to me. I had never seen Interstellar guys. And as you know, I deeply believe the best place to see Christopher Nolan cinema is on the back of a delta seat flying over Colorado. And it's not that my takes are weird.

I just felt so keenly that it was the most expensive apology letter ever written from a dad to his kids being like, here's why I have to go film Batman in Pittsburgh. Like it is entirely about- How can that be your reaction to Interstellar? I mean, I can you understand if you hate it, but that is a- I didn't hate it. Okay. But it was so keenly, I don't think, this isn't a bit.

Like, it does feel to me a movie about a father who is taken away from his family a lot for work and finding some sort of noble or heroic structure scaffolding to put his work into in order to justify his absence. Because the movie, I mean, my guy, sorry, spoilers for a nine-year-old movie. by the way, I thought the movie was five years old. But I was like, wow, Ann Hathaway, interesting bump in her career during the fallow period. And it's like, no, no, this was still part of the upswing. Right. So the movie, I mean, the dude,

he just pieces on his children. He fully pieces on his children. To save humanity, yeah. Eh, well, does he? I mean, yeah. Okay, yeah, I guess he does. My feeling about the movie was, I mean this sincerely.

Like, I'm very, very happy still. Even when I don't like his movies and make fun of him, like, it is wild that at least one person gets to be like, Dear Warner Brothers Pictures, please write me a check for $300 million for some wild-ass fucking shit, my brother and I thought up. Right. And you watch Interstellar,

and the first 30 minutes are so insane and compressed. We're like, this is a season of television, but he doesn't do television. So instead he's just like, guess what, gang? NASA's in Kansas. And you're like, bet. That makes sense.

That totally works. And that's good. I actually really like that it's not, here's why they built it here. Like that has ruined storytelling in a lot of ways. The need to have that architecture always to explain every single thing and then stretch it over the course of a season. Like he does widescreen, big screen stuff and he takes crazy swings. And did all of this work? No.

I don't think you would argue that it does. But like, there are moments that are transcendent. Absolutely. The Library of Love, man. How can you ask for anything else from a bookshop? I would ask for anything but that. Yet, at the same time, I was like, yeah, they went for it. I was like, he's not going to say it's love.

He's not going to, oh, he's going to say, he's going to say it's love. Also, shout out to West Bentley. That's a tough beat for my guy. West Bentley's living life large on Yellowstone right now. No, it's working out for him now. Speaking of Yellowstone, I wanted to ask you if you'd gotten a chance to watch the 1923 trailer that I sent over. You added that you sent it

just to make it more personal. Did you know that it existed? Yes. And in fact, I wanted to watch it before I recorded my consistent pop culture podcast with my friend Chris Ryan. A lot of people are asking, when is Andy going to commit to one of these shows

named after a year? Did you hear this at CPAC? Is that where people are talking about? Many people have been coming up to me on the street with tears in their eyes saying, I thought Andy was going to talk about 1899. 1923, I just want to say that I can't believe that Helen Mirren is ripping off your Bono calling the president from stage accent. Mine. Excuse me. Wow. It originated with you in Bill's pool house when we were recording the early versions of this podcast. Really? For the rare. Yes. We were hanging out with Bill doing a pod and I think that's when I think we did like a long U-2 episode.

Well, we did talk about that because that was a memorable thing that I think you would. Did we both? We didn't know each other. But I did see you two at Veterans Stadium on the zoo station or zoo TV tour. He called the president. He called the White House every. Yeah. Wow.

Well, you took it and you ran with it. That's your thing. And then Helen Mirren, Helen Mirren flew with it. So this is the new Yellowstone saga. It's about the Dutton family. It's set in 1923, obviously, in Montana as they build the ranch. it stars Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. Crazy.

And then in the trailer, you're like, okay, cool, Timothy Dalton's in this. He plays a, of like a land baron who's running up against Harrison Ford here and Bronn from Game of Thrones is his muscle. And then it just kind of like is like also big game hunting in Africa with James Badge Dale. Yeah, it's out of Africa also.

It's fucking wild. I mean, there's certain things, I think Christopher Nolan, appreciate this. There are certain things that do make me think sometimes we're living in a simulation, and it's not that like Berenstein Bears used to be spelled with an E or that Nelson Mandela died in prison

or whatever else people feel like was true. It is that James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Queen Elizabeth are co-starring in an epic Western miniseries on Paramount fucking Plus. Yep. Okay. Next thing you're going to tell me

Sean Penn and Julia Roberts are starring in a Watergate show on Stars. You know what I mean? Like, at least we know that never happened. Like that's, this is crazy. Yeah. It is entirely insane. The price tag on this show,

I can't even get into it. It is definitely more secret invasion than it is the bear. Well, I do think that they have gotten to the point where they have now built up, like the sets are in Montana that he shoots on. That's true and he writes everything.

Yeah. So I think that like overhead wise, they're probably just shooting him where they shoot Yellowstone. even the Africa sequences? I mean, especially the Africa sequences. That did not scream Africa to me. Will you be watching this show?

Well... Will you give it a chance? Yeah, I mean, did I watch 1880... What was it called? 1883. Did I watch that? You may have the Sam LF one? Yeah.

Yeah. Right. Yeah, I think it'll be similar. Okay. Will I take one for the team? Yes. I mean, Helen Mirren looks like she's on one. And there's a difference here, too, I will say, like, there are actors like Helen Mirren and Timothy Dalton who are classically trained and blah, blah, blah, but when they see red meat, they go for it.

Whereas I think Harrison Ford, especially age 80 Harrison Ford, is just like, point me in this direction, and I'll growl. You know, I don't think he's necessarily modulating his fun meter for something like this. So I am curious about that. But, yeah. Will you watch 1899? Do you think you'll check that out? I did want to say, yes. That is next on my cue.

save my takes until I watch like one or two more. I will say that just as far as I'm concerned, though, I'm missing the, the relatability of the high school kids from Dark. Well, there's one thing that Dark was, it was relatable. From the cops driving outies, right down to the absolute nihilistic,

heavy, heavy, gothic Germanness of it. No, that's next on my list. I might even start it tonight. I was in a similar place to it. I love Dark, as everybody knows. And I didn't feel, felt like it needed a full attention, not traveling, visiting people, and maybe watching one and falling asleep during an energy, which was all I could muster.

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areas. Terms apply. Should we get into White Lois? Yes, very curious to hear your thoughts on this. I love, and I am not originating this thought, but I cannot pinpoint exactly who kind of started talking about this. I love the fact that there is no hero or villain on this show yet. Yeah.

at episode five and that every person who you're like, okay, I'm, I'm, I'm going to fixate on Portia or I'm going to fixate on Harper. I'm, I'm thinking it's going to be this person. It's just like, it's just writing and TV making that's free of that, the weight of like the protagonist's journey, the hero's journey, and all of the things that go along with that I think make, make TV feel very familiar, make movies feel very familiar.

But I just feel like flying without a net, you know, when I'm watching the show. And so it almost makes it difficult, like, again, like, you can feel him slowly turning the heat up over the course of the season. Things getting crazier and crazier. The alcohol flowing a little bit more literally, people partying a little harder, people getting a little bit more burned out on being where they are. It's obviously become much more sexually charged in a variety of different ways. And I just find myself, like, intoxicated by it, which I think is the point. But it's so interesting because, like, what do you, when somebody's like, oh, what do you? what did you think of this season of White Lotus so far? What would you actually say other than

I love it? I'm having a hard time. That's come up a few times with people who were skeptical or dubious or just wanted to hear like maybe, maybe that I did or you had like a much pithier, quicker answer as to what's good about it. And I find that very hard to reckon with or respond to because I agree. I find it intoxicating. I actually feel like a little bit queasy in my liver watching it due to the amount of drinking that's in this season. One thing that strikes me is that Mike White in his career has never, ever catered really to mainstream expectations or taste. No, but like Enlightened, for instance, it's like Laura Dern's character is very much like the hero of Enlightened, even if she's a complicated one. This is what I'm saying. This is him

at his most unfettered because he made a hit. And then he had carte blanche basically as long as it was characters who were checking into a resort, which isn't to say he didn't get, I'm sure, robust notes from the excellent team at HBO drama development or whatever. But this is him without a net. He doesn't need to cater to anyone. And this is what we're seeing him do. And I find it fascinating. He is not playing the hits.

I think the best example of that is what he's done with Tanya. Like Jennifer Coolidge character and Jennifer Coolidge as a performer, you know, has always been loved or frankly not loved by people for what she does, the thing that she does. And Mike White is the poet laureate of the thing that she does and gave her, gave us her showcase role as that nuance. It's not just one note. I don't mean to suggest that it is,

but there is a clear delineation from who she is in Bestin Show to who she is in White Lotus season one. It's richer, it's deeper, it's award-winning, but you know what I mean. You get the sense that it's going to be more of the same this season. Oh, but now she has an assistant

and now she's married, but she's never happy, et cetera, et cetera. And then once Greg left, what's going on with her is totally off the map. She's giving a very, very different performance. she's giving a whole different emotional spectrum and her usage rate in the show is entirely different.

She is not an extreme character anymore. In fact, she's in some ways the most stable. I was going to say, you're reacting to the fact that she is the straight man now because she's paired with Tom Hollander and Tom Hollander is like, I am the category five storm blowing across this island now. So Jennifer Coolidge has like these great one liners,

but Tom Hollander is the one who's like soaking up the entire screen. So it's like this ingenious mid-season pivot to take the most kind of cartoonish, frankly, character that he's got and then make that person into somebody who's basically a bystander, but an amazing bystander. And there is nothing being done. There's two episodes left. At this point, in the first season, we had the robbery. You know what I mean? There were bigger, stakesier, more traditional things. We saw the arc of Murray Bartlett's character as it was unfolding. You know, there was a slow motion catastrophe,

the drugs in the bag, and we kind of saw where that was going. We knew a little bit about the character. The escalating war between Murray Bartlett and Jake Lacey, right, we knew that was heading nowhere, nowhere good. This season is much quieter, it's much sadder. People are sort of, they're not strafing each other with machine guns, they're sticking each other with shivs.

And the effect is that, very, it's disconcerting and it's unfamiliar. And I keep coming back to the word intoxicating because I watch these episodes. I never look at my watch. I never really think, oh, this is going to happen next. We're going to go to these characters and clearly this is where it's all going. I felt the strain in some of the coverage of this episode today. I sort of buzzed around and looked at recaps.

And you see headlines like, jaws drop at that shocking moment. and okay, yeah, it was, it wasn't shock, it was a little bit surprising. I kind of saw it coming when they were like, oh, yeah. I mean, like, for instance, like, I definitely think that, you know, you mentioned to me, you were like, oh, is Daphne's kid, is the father of Daphne's first child, like, supposed to be her trainer or something like that, right? Like, I had not picked up on that.

I thought that was just her screwing up when showing her iPhone photos. And then there's a lot of like what's going on with the Quentin click are these guys con men? Is that why Quentin's quote unquote nephew doesn't have money

for dinner that night and they run out on the bill? There's a lot of like you can speculate and you can and of course there's just the like who's going to wind up in these body bags and how many of them are killed by Aubrey Plaza or whatever

but it does not feel like there are sometimes when you watch shows and you're like that's what you're consumed by. You're like, who's going to do this and who's going to do that and what's going to happen at this person. And I'm just kind of like, I'm much more floating with this show in a really cool way. Yeah, I agree. I think the, I mean, I think there's a relatively simple version of this where the so-called

nephew is also an escort of some kind and best doesn't have walking around money. And, you know, he and Porsche are actually, in that case, they're sort of similar status, right? And that they are appendages and they have to. go where they're told and do what they're told. I think the Cameron doesn't actually have any money theory that you floated to me last week starts to feel potentially true. The moment with the baby picture was deeply confusing to me, and I don't know if that's in a good way.

I did go on to these recaps to be like, I'm sure someone is... Vulture seemed confused by it as well, just sort of... Yeah, I was like, they must know. But my takeaway was she's like, there's a very strong, handsome, blonde man in my life. Oh, whoops, I showed you the wrong picture, which is that... So her baby is not Cameron's, their first babies. But then there's another version of it where she's just like, you should have a child.

I thought this was a really stunning showcase episode for Megan Fahey, who's just low-key, one of the best performers on this season. But yeah, I think it's really, I could see people having the exact opposite take on this or reaction to this, which is me saying, if you look at the three generations of Italian American men storyline and Albi now with Lucia and father having to watch this and being like, this isn't my fault, but to my dad,

it's his fault, et cetera, et cetera. You could look at that and say, all of this is very clearly predictable and was sketched out from the beginning. And you could then branch off in one of two ways. My take is that speaks to the mastery here that I love this. I love that it is slowly walking towards this inevitability between them, and giving space for each of these moments,

for each, like almost banging, you know, those old cartoons where a character falls off a building and hits every ledge and flagpole, like, we're hitting everyone on the way down. Yeah, yeah. There's a version of it where you're like, so he set up something obvious

and is delivering on something obvious. I could get that as a criticism, but I just think it's kind of sumptuous. And there's something unsettling, too, about the usage of Sicily, because this, more than any other episode, we're like, oh, COVID's over. Now, fun fact, not over,

but in terms of what people, are limited to, and that has fundamentally changed what the show is, which was absolutely just limited by its location last season and intentionally so, then the visual language of it changes once they're on a fucking yacht with a hot tub on it, and they're walking through downtown Palermo at night, going to the opera. I mean, it's just a different level, and it becomes almost like eyes wide shut Kubricki in horror when Quentin is like, I would die for beauty. I mean, that, what is that? Yeah. What do we do with that? I think that the characters in the first season to me might be more indelible. Like, I think that there are performances in that first

season and also just, you know, inventions in that first season that will stick with me. But I think that the writing and that the storytelling in this season is far more to my liking and to, like, you know, maybe more sophisticated in a lot of ways. I think it's interesting that for a season of a show that actually was able to knock down barriers and walls and get outside, this feels more like a horror movie to me. Interesting. It feels, I mean, there was some interesting camera stuff. They did, he did the, um, the dolly zoom in the villa when Tanya wakes up.

And that's the, that's the thing where you put, you lay the track for the camera and you pull it backwards as you zoom in. Yeah, it's the Scorsese zoom. I actually refer to it as the Briar Patch Pilot Zoom, which is weird. I don't know who you're referring to. Someone else said Spike Lee and I don't, again, not familiar. Well, you stopped watching Scorsese after you just, respected Marvel. I retroactively

erased all the films from my memory. No, but like it's a horror movie in a way and it's there in, what's your name, Valentina, the concierge or the manager, like her face, you know,

staring at the woman that she's actually Isabella, right? She's making her uncomfortable. Like, there is something to that theory, and that's part of the feeling that we're feeling it. You know, it reminds me of what people have told me about movies that I won't see like midsummer. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's awesome how he's also just talking about this place is like this sort of den of corruption and how everybody comes

into these vacations with an idea about what they want and what they want, who they want to present themselves as, and even the staff are supposed to be presenting themselves. I mean, Valentin is correcting them on which hand to wave with and everything. But by the mid-season point or a little bit further past that, Valentin is essentially using her position of power to try to seduce a woman, right? Like, I mean, she's getting rid of the guy who was flirting with her. She's making sure that she's like kind of adjacent to wherever she's going to be that day. And everybody is trying to get what they want. You know, Mia wants to be the piano player. Lucia wants to go to California. Valentina wants to be loved. Like all these people are kind of

operating in a way where it's just very zero sum, but it's, it's, it's the way that he tells the story. It's not, that's not on the text. That's more in the subtext. Two things I want to run by you before we call it a day. One is, do you believe, or do you, have you parsed the Lucia storyline? Like, was that encounter with, quote, unquote, her pimp? Was that real? Was that staged? Is she playing Albi?

Because there's a lot of play acting going on right now, right? Because, like, if you think that Cameron and Daphne are running some sort of game, and if you think that Lucia is essentially creating an environment where Albi is going to feel compelled to take her to California with him, you know, like... Or pay for everything or whatever, maybe. So there's a lot. And then this whole thing with Quentin just stinks, whatever it is. Like, you know, like obviously he has access to a lot of money and access to a lot of wealth, like a kuterman of wealth, but seems to be really sicking himself on Tanya.

And I wonder whether or not for good reasons. So, yeah, I didn't think that that was straight up. Yeah, I think Tanya's line is worth holding in our minds where she's just like, when they get to the villa and she's like, it's such a relief to be around people with money. Yeah. Because they don't want any of yours. which seems a little weighted. Naive, yeah. The only other thing I was going to say was,

I was prepared to start dinging the show for the thing that I find most offensive, which is not the gratuitous display of wealth. It's that these idiots are in Sicily and they only eat at the hotel restaurant. Is it all included, do you think? Definitely not. Yeah, so they're just like that limited

that they're just going to the hotel restaurant every night. Yeah, but again, I think that's a feature, not a bug, right? Like, that's intentional. That's saying who these people are. They're trapped. with each other, they're trapped with their lack of imagination or choices. Like, they don't actually engage with the place that they're in. It's just another box to sit in and have the same things that you're used to. And you saw, I mean, obviously, the most offensive scene to me was the wine

tasting, where they're just like, let's just get drunk. Yeah. I was like, are you not even, are you not even sniffing? Like, what are we doing here? What about the volcanic minerality of this place? Would it, would it kill you to swirl? You know what I mean? Unreal. We can wrap it up there. On Thursday, what are we going to talk about? Oh, you're putting it to me? I'm going to tell you what we're going to talk about. Oh. Slow horses is coming back. On Thursday?

I think it comes back Friday. But we can do a little... It's back this week? Yeah, December 2nd. Jeez. Wow. I didn't know that. Yeah.

What else? Tell me some more news about television. I'll gather up some more headlines and I'll send you a digest. How about that? What else are watching? 1899. Slow horses. Fleischman is in trouble.

We got lots of stuff. And then, you know, I'm always... points down to just revisit random and or episodes if you want to. Andy, thank you so much. Kaya, thank you for producing us. We'll be back on Thursday. It's great to be back. Kai, just leave this channel open. I'm just going to lay down some, just some secondary and tertiary interstellar thoughts. I just feel like, I just feel like that's what the people want.