Every major studio in Hollywood seems to have it’s origin story about how they came to conquer their chunk of the movie industry.  For Disney, it was all started by a mouse.  For Warner Brothers, they were a family business that knew what the audiences wanted.  And Paramount became it’s own icon when founder Adolf Zukor looked out his office window to see a mountain peak in the distance.  These are all the things that made these studios more than just a business, but also a brand; the thing that made their names known throughout the world.  Universal Pictures had a story just like the rest, but their origin story was a fairly different kind of one.  The oldest studio in Hollywood still running today, Universal Pictures is known for a lot of different kinds of movies, but only one genre can be credited for making them the powerhouse that they are today; horror movies.  Universal was the industry leader when it came to delivering chilling thrillers for audiences, and to this day they are still leading the way in delivering crowd-pleasing horror movies thanks to their long term partnership with the Blumhouse production company.  While Universal horror movies are noteworthy for their chilling atmosphere and iconic scares, more than anything else what has helped to make their movies iconic are the actual monsters themselves.  Universal Monsters have become a brand all on their own, becoming not just a staple in their cinematic output over the years, but also within their theme parks as well.  Some of these characters are sourced from literature, but a couple of others were invented by Universal themselves and have joined the pantheon of celebrated monsters within the whole of pop culture.  While we view these movie monsters through the prism of how Universal markets them as a brand today, it’s also worth noting that their presence in Universal Pictures history is foundational to the studio as a whole, and it could be said that Universal wouldn’t be what it is today had it not been for these Monsters.  It’s a tale that goes all the way back to Universal’s early years, and the fact that the Monsters continue to be a key presence in the studio’s identity today is a real testament to their legacy both on and off the screen.

Carl Laemmle founded Universal Studios in 1912, and in less than a year of starting their production company, Universal made their first ever monster movie.  It was a simple two reel adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1913), but this would be the beginning of something much bigger down the road.  In 1915, Laemmle’s company had done well enough for them to aggressively expand.  Universal moved out of New York City and came to Los Angeles, where Laemmle bought a large parcel of land just off of the Cahuenga Pass in the San Fernando Valley.  Over 100 years later, modern day Universal Studios Hollywood still occupies that same parcel of land, which is now called Universal City.  In the early days of the lot, Universal had built a large variety of outdoor sets, and even charged admission for guests to come and watch the movies getting made, since everything was still shot with no recorded sound.  In one corner of the studio you would have an old Western town set up and then on another corner there would be the walls of a medieval castle, all within a few feet of each other.  One particular space on the studio lot would prove to be very important to the development of the studio, and that space has since become known as “Little Europe.”  The Little Europe sets were made to look like a 19th century European village, with cobblestone streets and open public squares.  The construction of this set helped to open up Universal’s abilities to film movies with European settings in the glow of the California sun.  During this time, Universal had a movie star that was quickly rising in esteem as a man know for a thousand faces.  Lon Chaney’s greatest talent as a movie actor was his ability to completely disappear into a role.  He pioneered many techniques in make-up effects, transforming his face into many different kinds of characters, including monstrous ones.  When he came to Universal in 1917, he had a desire to play one of the most notable literary characters of the 19th century; Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923).  Chaney’s performance as the Hunchback became such a hit with audiences that it prompted Universal to greenlight another ambitious adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera (1925), giving Chaney another chance to disappear into another screen monster.  With these two movies, Universal began to establish itself as the home of cinema’s most iconic monsters, and it was only just the beginning.

Sadly, Lon Chaney’s career did not last long after the roaring successes of his early horror movies.  He died suddenly in 1930 at the age of 47, leaving behind an amazing body of work of which he was also the driving creative force.  He only ever made a single sound film, The Unholy Three (1930), and one would imagine that he would’ve adapted well to the sound era if he had survived.  But, even though Universal lost a pioneer with Chaney, they had a few more daring filmmakers who were ready to pick up the mantle at the studio.  Two filmmakers in particular would become instrumental in creating more than just horror movies for Universal; they would be the ones who gave Universal it’s identity as the home of the monsters.  These filmmakers were Tod Browning and James Whale.  Whale was an English born artist who had come to Hollywood as a producer of stage play adaptations being made for the silver screen.  He came under contract with Universal with the adaptation of Waterloo Bridge (1931), a WWI set drama.  Universal granted him permission to create any movie he wanted afterwards, and Whale landed on making an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s gothic horror classic Frankenstein (1931).  At the same time Tod Browning, a one-time circus performer turned filmmaker, had been with Universal since 1919 and would go on to direct many films there, including several with Lon Chaney.  After Chaney’s death, Browning wanted to keep horror alive at the studio, so he pitched them the idea of adapting Bram Stoker’s horror novel Dracula (1931) to the big screen.  There was famously a failed attempt to secure the rights to the novel from Stoker’s stubbornly protective estate, which led to the legendary German filmmaker F. W. Murnau to create the legal distinct but still very similar Nosferatu in 1922.  For Universal, their plan was to base their adaptation on a stage adaptation rather than the book itself, which they could secure the rights to.  One other thing would also be noteworthy about Dracula at Universal, as it would be the first ever talkie horror film.  This would be a breakthrough for the genre, and as it was following in the pipeline right behind it, James Whale’s Frankenstein would also go into production with sound as well.  Together, these two productions would leave a lasting legacy on the studio that still can be felt nearly a century later.

What mattered more than anything else with these productions was who would be cast in these iconic roles of Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster.  Tod Browning initially wanted his longtime collaborator and friend Lon Chaney to play the part, but Chaney’s death unfortunately brought that plan to end.  After some time searching, Browning and his team came across a tall and imposing Hungarian actor named Bela Ferenc Deszo Blasco, who was going by the stage name Bela Lugosi.  Lugosi had been playing the role on stage for years in America, so he already had a good handle on the character already.  Today, it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role.  Bela’s whole persona seems inexorably tied to the Transylvanian count, with every portrayal of the character thereafter taking some cue from Bela’s performance.  What is remarkable is just how much Bela was able to instill fear without doing much on screen.  There isn’t a lot of onscreen violence shown, just the suggestion of horror.  But Bela strikes just a hypnotic presence on screen that you can’t help but be chilled to the bone when he delivers his unnerving stare.  Not to be outdone, James Whale managed to find the right person to bring Frankenstein’s creature to life.  An English actor named William Henry Pratt tried to create a more exotic identity for himself, so he adopted the stage name of Boris Karloff.  He had been making the rounds of stage work in both Canada and America, before eventually coming to Hollywood in 1919. Karloff’s striking features helped him to land roles in many movies, notably playing villains for the most part.  He already had 81 screen credits by the time James Whale selected him to play the monster in Frankenstein.  The role would be physically demanding.  Karloff was an average 5’11” in height, but to play the gigantic monster he had to wear four inch platform boots as well as a bulky costume to give his skinny frame more mass.  And yet, it came together as Karloff’s creature was instantly iconic.  While some of the features of the character were taken from Shelley’s original descriptions in her novel, James Whale and Karloff added their own unique touches, like the flattop shape to the creature’s head, and the bolts sticking out of his neck.  Just like with Lugosi’s Dracula, Karloff’s portrayal of Frankenstein’s creature would have a lasting impact on all the versions of the character that followed thereafter.

Universal Monster movies as a brand really started due to the massive success of these two films, and thanks to the iconic portrayals from both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.  On the heels of the success of the Frankenstein, Universal wanted James Whale to create a follow-up sequel, and they granted him a massive amount of creative control.  From this, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) was made.  Whale would expand on the story of the original novel, taking the concept of the creature coercing Dr. Frankenstein to make him a mate in his own likeness and expanded it into a feature length story.  In this film, the Bride herself would actually be brought to life, and she herself would join the ranks of the iconic Universal Monsters.  In the movie she would be played by English actress Elsa Lanchester, who did double duty by also playing Mary Shelley herself in an opening prologue.  Lanchester’s appearance as the Bride is brief, coming in right at the end of the movie, but she was instantly iconic with her white flowing robes and the lightning strike strips of white in her beehive hairdo.  Karloff also returned to reprise his role as the creature and even gave the character the power of speech in the film for the first time.  After playing Frankenstein’s creature the first time, Karloff also would led his star power to bringing to life another horror movie icon, The Mummy.  In The Mummy (1932), Karloff would portray Imhotep, the cursed Egyptian undead monster wrapped head to toe in his mummification wrappings.  The character was inspired by the fairly recent unearthing of the tomb of King Tutankhamun, and he would also be the first original monster developed for the silver screen, as opposed to the previous ones that were adapted from literary sources.  James Whale would also successfully bring another iconic literary monster to the big screen with 1933’s The Invisible Man, starring Claude Rains in his first major movie role.  Unfortunately, due to the Hays Code, there were fewer horror films made in the later half of the 1930’s.  James Whale chose not to work under the stricter code placed on Hollywood, and he faced higher social pressure due to his homosexuality being at odds with much of the rest of American society at the time, so he left Universal and Hollywood behind.  Tod Browning also saw his career decline, especially after his controversial film Freaks (1932) flopped at the box office.

But, even as horror went into decline, Universal still found success with their collection of Monsters.  In 1939, Boris Karloff would play the creature one more time in Son of Frankenstein.  And this time, hew would be sharing the screen with Bela Lugosi, not as Dracula mind you, but as another original character who would go on to appear in many other horror movies thereafter; Ygor.  Though Universal would go on to make more Frankenstein films thereafter, this one would mark the last time Karloff would play the role.  It also marked the end of Bela’s time at Universal as well.  But with the departure of these two icons, another actor with a legacy at Universal would step in and keep the monster movies coming.  Lon Chaney, Jr. picked up his father’s mantle and would also become an actor of a thousand faces.  Chaney did play Frankenstein’s monster in the movie The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), but Chaney left a bigger mark by bringing to life a whole other movie monster with his portrayal of The Wolf Man.  Using the same make-up techniques that his father pioneered, Chaney Jr. completely transformed and gave Hollywood it’s first truly iconic portrayal of a werewolf.  Lon Cheney Jr. would continue to make many more horror movies over the years until his death in 1973, but it’s his portrayal in The Wolf Man (1941) that has cemented him as an icon within the monster movie pantheon.  In the post-war years, the horror movie genre would go through many changes.  The major studios began to invest less in the horror genre, and smaller independent companies were filling that hole left behind, leading to the era of B-movie horror.  But even still, Universal would still invest a bit in the legacy of their monsters.  And with the invention of new gimmicks like 3D, they even managed to make another horror film that added even more to their roster of movie monsters.  In 1954, Univeral shot a small little horror thriller on a pond located in the middle of their lot.  This pond would serve as a setting for a place in the Amazon jungle called the Black Lagoon, and living inside it was a fish man creature that was preying on human beings.  The Creature From the Black Lagoon suddenly became another horror movie icon that Universal could proudly tout as one of their own.  With his movie shot in 3D, the film became a hit with younger audiences and he would be the last big addition to Universal’s movie monsters for a long while.

What is interesting is how Universal has managed to keep these characters in the public’s eyes for all these decades after.  Even long after Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Sr. and Jr. have left these characters behind, their iconic status has endured.  Universal Studios still is very much aware of how much these horror icons matter to their identity.  That’s why their theme parks still carve out space for these monsters to be represented.  There are references to these characters in almost every Universal park, and in the freshly opened Epic Universe park in Orlando, Florida, the Universal Monsters have a land devoted just to them.  Traces of the history of these films can still be found at the original Universal Studios in Hollywood.  The sets for “Little Europe” that were used extensively for these early monster movies sadly burned down in a fire on the studio lot in 1967.  A replica of the original sets was constructed on the same spot, and that re-construction still survives to this day.  The Court of Miracles section in particular can still be recognizable when compared to scenes that were shot there for The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and Frankenstein (1931).  The pond that played the part of the Black Lagoon is also still present on the lot, though it’s been more recently crowded in by construction of new soundstages on the property.  And today, these iconic locations mingle with some of the more recent movie monsters that have come from Universal Pictures, like the Bates Motel from Psycho (1960), the shark from Jaws (1975), and an encounter with Peter Jackson’s version of King Kong (2005).  And the park’s yearly tradition of Halloween Horror Nights also heavily feauture appearances from all of the Universal Monsters.  The characters also have their own merchandise wing in the stores at Universal.  It’s a clear sign that Universal is still aware of the strong legacy these characters have, and they are determined to maintain ownership of that legacy.  While some of their characters belong to the public domain like Dracula and Frankenstein, others are wholly original to their movies, and they very much want to spotlight that.  While many other studios can try to make monster movies, Universal can firmly state that their foundation was built off of these characters.

It’s harder today to know exactly how to keep marketing oneself as the home of movie monsters.  Universal famously failed hard trying to make their movie monsters exist with a shared cinematic universe similar to what Marvel had done with their super heroes.  The ill-fated Dark Universe crashed and burned after just two movies; the box office bombs of Dracula Untold (2017) and The Mummy (2017).  But, out of the ashes of this Dark Universe experiment came a different way of bringing these characters up to the modern day, with a partnership that Universal has with independent production company Blumhouse.  Blumhouse managed to reinvent some of Universal’s iconic monsters with more modern takes.  Filmmaker Leigh Whanell got to do his fresh new takes on The Invisible Man (2020) and Wolf Man (2025).  There’s also visionary director Robert Eggers whose been working with Universal’s art house label Focus Features to create visually daring movies based on characters similar to the Universal movie monsters, such as Nosferatu (2024) and Werwulf (2026) coming out later this year.  But even as Universal makes several attempts to keep monster movies going at their studio, the original classics still hold a lot of power.  They undeniably wrote the rules of how to make horror work within the Hollywood machine.  And that has inspired generations of horror filmmakers over the years.  Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro was particularly influenced by Universal horror, and his home almost acts like a museum devoted to the legacy of those movies, especially Frankenstein, which Del Toro finally got to make his own version of last year to great acclaim.  Hell, his Best Picture-winning The Shape of Water (2017) owes it’s very existence to the legacy of The Creature From the Black Lagoon.  The fact that most depictions of Count Dracula today still speak with a vaguely Hungarian accent (yes even the one on Sesame Street) and most depictions of Frankenstein’s monster still have those bolt in the neck are undeniable signs that Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff’s performances are still the gold standard for these characters.  That’s why Universal continues to value these characters; because they endure well beyond just their presence on the big screen.  They are icons that continue to be a presence in the culture at large, and Universal is largely responsible for getting them to that place.  Even with all of the great movies that Universal Pictures has released over the years outside of the horror genre, it’s these monster movies that clearly helped to give Universal it’s most important identity.  After nearly a century in the game, the Universal Monsters are no where near forgotten, and hopefully they allow Universal to keep scaring audiences again and again for another century.

In the last 10 years, we have seen a dramatic shift in the make-up of Hollywood, and not in a good way.  The streaming wars ignited by the rise of Netflix sparked a frenzy of business restructuring at all of the Hollywood studios.  To deal with this newly formed means of distribution, each studio poured billions of dollars into development of their own platforms as well as into producing exclusive content that would play on those platforms.  In all that rush, some of the power players in the industry weren’t able to keep up.  So, then came the era of mergers and acquisitions, where the mid-level majors began to be gobbled up by the bigger companies.  Not only that, but a giant shift towards tech companies being involved in the entertainment began to occur.  Amazon Studios, the production wing of the largest online retailer in the world, merged with the MGM/UA after Amazon bought the once mighty studio after they need to be financially bailed out.  Rupert Murdoch decided to put 20th Century Fox on the market after 30 years of ownership so that he could cash in and focus more on his new media empire in his twilight years.  After a fierce battle, Disney won out and acquired Fox for a then record $75 billion transaction, which put Disney into a staggering amount of debt that they are only now starting to manage after a couple turbulent years of budget cuts.  But now, that merger between Fox and Disney seems pretty small compared to the looming $111 billion deal struck to merge two of Hollywood’s most legendary studios into one: Paramount and Warner Brothers.  This deal has been controversial to say the least, and is causing a lot of justifiable worry across the industry as a whole.  There are a lot of concerns about what it’s going to mean for employment opportunities, for the independence of the media, for what kind of entertainment value we are going to get, and for the legacy of two of the studios that were instrumental for creating Hollywood into what it is.

This merger has happened on the heels of yet another mega-merger that led into this one.  Paramount, which had been under the steady ownership of Viacom for 30 years, was now looking for a buyer after the passing of the company’s longtime CEO Sumner Redstone in 2023.  Sumner’s daughter Shari needed to grapple with a significant amount of debt that was affecting the bottom line of Paramount Pictures after the limited success of the launch of their streaming platform Paramount+.  That relief came with an offer from Skydance Media’s CEO David Ellison, who were frequent production partners with Paramount on a variety of projects over the years; most notably the Mission: Impossible movies.  In a deal valued at $8 billion, the Skydance assets would be merged into Paramount Studios, and the new company would carry a value of $28 billion.  Shari would step aside from management of the studio side, with David Ellison taking over as the new CEO.  This now put David Ellison in the driver’s seat of one of the top “Big 5” studios in Hollywood.  But, his ambitions didn’t end there.  He had sights on gaining even more control of the industry.  In September 2025, Ellison proposed the idea of acquiring Warner Brothers Discovery, one of Paramount’s competitors in the film industry.  He then met with David Zaslev to propose a deal which would be a cash and stock bid for $19 a share.  Bound by legal obligations to his shareholders, Zaslev had to publicly announce that Warner Brothers was now officialy up for sale, and sought to see if anyone could beat Paramount’s price.  Indeed for a moment it did appear that there was.  Netflix put in an even stronger offer to buy the Warner Brothers studio for $82 billion.  This wasn’t even for all of the assests that Warners had; they just wanted their studio and the library, with linear television assets likely to be sold in a seperate deal.  But Ellison was not through yet.  Despite an agreement in principle already being reached between Netflix and Warner Brothers, Ellison put up yet another offer that blew away all that had been seen before in Hollywood; $111 billion for everything; all of Warner Brother’s assests including linear television, such as their cable networks HBO and CNN.  Netflix walked away and the deal seemed to have been reached.  Paramount and Warner Brothers were now going to be joined into one.

Of course, mergers of this size cannot go through so easily.  Anti-trust laws in this country require oversight of the impact that such a deal may have over the market as a whole.  Combining two of Hollywood’s major studios into just one entity would make it so that the majority of media in this country would now be in the control of just four mega-corporations: the new Paramount/WB studio, Disney, Comcast (the owners of NBC Universal) and Sony.  This would greatly limit competition in the marketplace when only four players are competing, and this can effect everything from job opportunities with the industry as well consumer pricing.  If anti-trust laws worked the way they are supposed to, a merger like this wouldn’t be allowed to move forward, and if it were, it would still take months to years of review to get the all clear.  But this is where the red flags become even more apparent, as David Ellison and his father Larry Ellison (the world’s second richest man) have a cozy relationship with the current Trump administration.  And sure enough, not only has Trump and his allies given the greenlight for this deal, but they have even speed run through it, giving the deal the minimalist of oversight.  A lot of that probably has to do with Warner Brothers being in possession of CNN, one of the most watched cable news networks in America.  With the Ellisons taking over the network and exerting editorial control over their news room, Trump can now force another news outlet into compliance with favorable coverage of his administration.  And this may have likely been the deal the Ellisons made with the President to speed up the approval process.  But, not all clearance was so easily made.  State governments wanted more assurance from Paramount that this wasn’t going to affect the job market of the already hurting and highly competitive film industry.  With California leading the way, 11 state attorney generals filed a legal hold on the merger, preventing it from closing until they could have a court hearing to plead a case that the deal was breaking crucial anti-trust laws.  Many legal experts believed that the state AGs had a strong case to make and could force many crucial concessions from Paramount to ensure that long term damage was not made to the industry.  Unfortunately, Paramount exerted enough political pressure that California’s attorney general Rob Bonta folded and the last ditch effort failed to stop this merger.

There are a lot of problems about this merger that range across a variety of issues.  One is the fact that we are going to lose yet another independent studio in Hollywood.  One doesn’t have to look very far to see how one of these mega-mergers has a ripple effect across the industry.  When Disney acquired Fox, there was some hope that the two studios would simply operate as two pillars under one roof.  But alas over time, we clearly saw who won out in that merger.  20th Century Fox quickly began to recede into the background at Disney.  For one thing, the Fox part of the name was completely jettisoned, with 20th Century Studios being the new rebrand.  The once mighty studio that dated back to the silent era of Hollywood was now just another brand under the Disney umbrella with no more importance to the company than what Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm already offered.  Disney did acquire the whole of Fox’s library, but thus far we have only seen the spotlight given to the studio’s most famous films such as The Sound of Music (1965), while most of the other titles are just taking up shelf space in Disney’s expanded library.  And this was just the cost to the legacy of the studio.  Because of the staggering amount of debt that Disney took on to close the deal, steep financial cuts were made across the company; especially with regards to labor.  Several thousands of well paying jobs were cut across both studio entities, and those who were let go had few options available to them in Hollywood, as there was less competition overall thanks to the merger that had also cost them their job.  And taking on ownership of Fox didn’t help with the quality of Disney’s productivity either.  It certainly didn’t help that Disney also faced the struggles of Covid as well as the mis-management of failed CEO Bob Chapek’s short run in that same amount of time, but when your company is spending so much of it’s time cutting spending that it desperately needs and putting money where it doesn’t need to be, it’s going to lead to some bad results.  Disney didn’t improve after acquiring Fox; it more than anything suffered a blow to it’s reputation as a creative friendly company.  That’s the worry that many are having about what may happen when Paramount and Warner Brothers are merged together.

Another big worry is the intention behind acquiring Warner Brothers for the Ellison family.  It’s been observed that David Ellison has been pushing an agenda within Paramount since acquiring the studio.  This is apparent with what is going on at CBS, the network that was already under the Paramount umbrella from it’s Viacom days.  CBS’s programing has been tampered with very much by the Ellisons, most clearly in the news room side of things.  David Ellison appointed Bari Weiss as the head of CBS News, a former New York Times columnist and blogger with no prior experience in running a broadcast newsroom.  Weiss managed to convince David’s father Larry to buy her blog, the ironically called “Free Press,” for a baffling $250 million price tag, and in exchange she now has full editorial control over the news output of CBS and it’s subsidiaries.  In exchange, she must now devote CBS News’ coverage to the pet causes of the Ellison family, which includes favorable treatment of the Ellisons’ ally Donald Trump, as well as promoting the industries that the Ellisons are involved in, namely data centers and AI.  Proof of Weiss doing the bidding of her media overlords is the decision she made to kill a story on the program 60 Minutes that was exposing the brutal conditions of the illegal immigrant detention centers that the Trump administration was running.  This was a clear example of her silencing anything that may appear critical of the current administration in a deliberate act of censorship, which she had hypocritically had championed herself as a fighter against.  Another sign of the Ellison’s pushing their agendas across their companies was the decision they made to cancel the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, despite it being a ratings leader in it’s time slot.  Colbert’s show was not losing audience interest, and had been retaining it’s viewership better than some of the other late night talk shows that had long been seeing a downturn in the last decade.  No good excuse was ever given as to why they canceled the show.  The only excuse that we have to go with is the speculation that Colbert was cancelled because he’s been an unapologetic critic of the President and his administration, and that this cancellation was retaliatory.  If the Ellison’s are able to exert this much control over the editorial and creative chocies of their company, it’s safe to say that there are a lot of worries about what they’ll do to the parts that belong to Warner Brothers.

There’s also the question about what kind of debt the company is putting itself under.  Disney financially suffered after they merged with Fox, but that was for an amount that was $40 billion  less than what Paramount is acquiring Warner Brothers for.  You have to ask, where is the money coming from.  A significant portion of that is being funneled by David Ellison’s father Larry, whose tapping into his own vast fortune that’s been built up from ownerships of data centers and investments in AI.  But it’s not the only source of money put into the deal.  The Ellisons are also getting financial backing from foreign entities as well, including wealth funds from the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE.  So, one of Hollywood’s most important media empires that about to acquire another major media empire, will be under the influence of petrol states with some dubious human rights records.  That’s going to make a lot of people in Hollywood anxious, given that these studios have always operated as American institutions.  Sure, it’s not the first time that Paramount fell under the ownership of oil barons, as they were a subsidiary of Gulf+Western before Viacom took over.  Apart from the dubious alliances of who is investing in this deal, the staggering amount is going to overwhelm the newly formed company for a while as they have to deal with a mountain of debt.  This puts a lot of pressure on the company that already has been promising too much upfront.  David Ellison, in order to convince investors that this is the best possible deal (especially for wary movie theater owners) he has promised an ambitious 30 movie a year slate of films making their way to the big screen.  How they are going to pay for that amidst the debt obligations that they’ll also have to cover every year is beyond anyone’s guess.  There’s no way that they’ll be able to do this without making steep cuts to labor and significantly restructuring the company.  And even that probably won’t even cover the many expenses that David Ellison has been promising shareholders.  And what then happens if it all collapses.  What happens if the AI bubble bursts, and the Ellisons lose a significant part of their fortune meant to invest in their new studio?  What if they are forced to sell, and what do they sell?  Who ends up buying the remains of what the Ellisons turned Paramount and Warner Brothers into?  The reality is that the Ellisons may end up leading to the ruin of not one but two of Hollywood’s most legendary studio brands.

And this leads to an examination of one of the biggest red flags of them all; David Ellison himself.  Ellison fancies himself as one of the biggest power brokers in Hollywood, but it’s largely been a dream financed largely by his family name.  Larry Ellison gave David the financial backing to form Skydance Media 20 years ago, which he also did for David’s sister Megan Ellison, who founded the indie film production company Annapurna Pictures.  Credit where credit is due, Ellison did oversee Skydance become a success over the years, particularly as a producer of successful action movies.  When Paramount was looking for his new leadership, he made his play and got the merger between Skydance and Paramount done, putting him in the position of CEO at a major studio, which probably was a dream come true.  It’s easy to believe him when he says that he does what he does out of love for movies that he’s telling the truth.  But, saying one thing and doing another is different.  The problem with Ellison is that he’s been in the job of CEO now for 2 years at Paramount, and he has yet to actually demonstrate anything close to a creative vision for the studio.  Instead, he has spent the majority of his tenure focused entirely on this deal to acquire Warner Brothers.  His laser like focus on that has left a creative hole at Paramount.  The studio has been a non-entity at the box office this summer, with it’s highest grossing movie of the year embarrassingly being the Scary Movie reboot, which grossed little over $100 million domestic.  If David wanted to make a power play for Warner Brothers, he should have demonstrated he could lead Paramount to box office glory first.  There’s no visionary direction going on right now at Paramount, and that lack of vision could sadly also extend to Warner Brothers once the deal closes.  And Ellison’s approach to getting the deal done has been rather unsavory as well.  He has been really callously brushing aside real concerns from industry professionals, trying to gaslight everyone into thinking this is essential for Hollywood to survive.  He’s also acted like a bully, threatening anyone who has resisted the merger.  His most recent threat was that he was going to move Paramount out of California and take it to a more politically “friendly” state like Texas or Tennesse.  Sadly, no one called his bluff, because that threat would never have been practical.  Paramount has deep roots in California which it has built up over 100 years, and moving a whole studio away from that and starting new in a whole different state would have been extremely cost prohibitive.  Plus you would also be leaving the biggest talent pool in the nation behind; not just with celebrities, but also with below the line workers as well.  Tom Cruise is not going all the way to Nashville to take a meeting with David Ellison.  He’d rather do a meeting close to home, like most other people in Hollywood would.

As of right now, the deal seems to be moving forward.  As of this writing, only one last legal roadblock remains, and all it’s going to do is delay the inevitable by a couple weeks at most.  It’s unfortunate that so many caved to the pressure put on them by the Ellisons who have in many ways bullied their way into the halls of power in Hollywood.  If this all goes through as it seems it will, it’s going to be dire for the industry as a whole.  The job market will shrink even more as it has in the film industry over the last couple years.  Another legendary studio will be consumed by another, ending it’s legacy as an independent player.  The big worry is that the Ellisons may have gotten in way over their heads trying to take over so much of the media landscape in such a short amount of time.  Sure, they have the support of the White House for now, but nothing lasts forever, and future administrations will be more diligent when it comes to enforcing anti-trust laws.  In the case of this merger, if David Ellison doesn’t fulfill every obligation he promised the state governments, the investors, the movie theater chains, and just the audience in general, it will lead to the implosion of the new studio he created out of the assets of Paramount and Warner Brothers.  If a sale in the future happens, the two studios won’t be split up into what they once were like nothing ever happened.  Both the remains of Paramount and Warner Brothers would be sold off as scraps one piece at a time, and that would be the end of two legendary studios that were instrumental in the building of Hollywood as a whole.  This is the great danger of these big media acquisitions; the loss of cultural institutions.  Warner Brothers and Paramount had identities that were all their own, and they functioned much better as competitors rather than as part of the same company.  That’s what Hollywood needs more than anything else; more competition.  David Ellison says that his plan to merge the two studios is so that they together can be competitive in a market that includes the likes of Disney, Netflix, Amazon and Apple.  But he would have better made his case for more competition by using the time and money his studio had not in trying to acquire another studio, but to improve what he already had, and sell that as competition to the rest of them.  Sadly, Hollywood is not investing the money where it should go in general, which is back into the industry itself and investing in better talent and product.  The Paramount/Warner Brothers deal is sadly just showing us how little the actual art of filmmaking is being valued by the people in charge, and instead it’s all about making power plays and exerting more control over the media we consume.  In essence, it’s making the magic of Hollywood feel more and more like a faded memory, found now only on celluloid treasures of the past.

We know from much of cinematic history that movies can sometimes be lost to the world.  For the most part, these are movies that were made long ago that were forgotten by time and were too far gone to be salvaged by film preservation.  Then there are the movies that disappear out of neglect because their distributors have gone out of business and the movies stop being circulated in the marketplace.  Thanks to the creation of home entertainment it’s much harder now for a movie to disappear, though it can still happen.  But what is even worse than losing a movie through the passage of time is seeing a movie be destroyed even before it has had a chance to even live.  In the wake of the massive shift in Hollywood that has occurred due to the advancement of streaming as well as the disruptions of Covid and the strikes in the last decade, a different kind of way to destroy a film has occurred which is erasing it from the library altogether to collect a tax break.  After the major studios spent a ton of money building out their streaming catalogs in the early years of the boom and realizing very quickly that it all lead to slower than expected revenue growth, many of them decided to capitalize on a short window where they could collect tax breaks on write offs if they were to demonstrate that they would never profit off of these same films and shows again,  This meant that these movies and shows that the studios literally spent billions of dollars on would have to be permanently shelved, or otherwise they lose that tax break.  So, hundreds of hours worth of programming across all the streaming platforms were suddenly wiped out in a flash, so the studios could make a quick profit to satisfy weary shareholders.  But while executives and shareholders were happy, many people who were fans of these shows and films, or were interested in seeing them for the first time, were suddenly denied the choice.  At least for some time these programs had been seen by audiences, but in some cases the axing of projects went even further, where completely finished films were not even allowed to be seen at all.

Enter the main character of this story; a little film called Coyote vs. Acme.  The movie was first pitched to Warner Brothers executives by none other than future DCU creative director James Gunn.  He presented the team at Warner Brothers, which at the time was still under the ownership of Time Warner Inc., a satirical article from The New Yorker which speculated on an imagined scenario where the fictional Acme Corporation of the Looney Tunes cartoons was faced with a lawsuit from the character of Wile E. Coyote.  Gunn saw the potential in this being fleshed out into feature length story, and the executives agreed.  Unfortunately, the project languished in development hell for a number of years while Warner Brothers changed ownership not once but twice.  First AT&T came in, and pushed the project to the back of the line in favor of a Space Jam sequel starring LeBron James.  Then when AT&T was looking to sell their stake in the company, Discovery Networks swooped in and merged with the studio.  Under the leadership of new CEO David Zaslev, there seemed to finally be some momentum for the Coyote vs. Acme project, and cameras started to roll with the movie now being set up as a streaming exclusive for the struggling HBO Max platform.  But then came the day when things were completely halted.  The streaming boom seemed to be falling apart as subscribers were being torn between multiple different channels, all of which cannibalized off of each other and couldn’t continue to grow in the same way Netflix had done in the decade prior.  So, in order to justify the massive costs of operating and expanding these streaming platforms, the studios that launched them now had to begin consolidating and downsizing.  With Warner Brothers now joined with Discovery, this created a massive mound of debt that David Zaslev now had to find ways of paying off, and that meant cutting costs anywhere he could.  A lot of movies and shows were suddenly without warning completely wiped off of HBO Max, never to be seen again, including multi-season shows like Westworld.  But that wasn’t all, movies that were either finished but unreleased were also subject to cancellation, and unfortunately Coyote vs. Acme fell into this camp.

This boggled the minds of so many people in the industry, that a studio that spent tens of millions of dollars on these films could just so casually decide to not release them.  Those millions of dollars went into the hard work of hundreds of craftspeople who devoted several weeks of their time towards making a movie they hoped would be enjoyed by audiences anywhere.  And here it was, the head of the studio deciding that none of that mattered and it was better in the financial interest of the studio to collect a tax write off instead.  Sure, this made a lot of shareholders happy that they were getting paid instead of seeing the studio further lose money on the waning streaming market, but for the creatives that worked hard on the film, there was a sense of betrayal.  Coyote vs. Acme was complete at the time Zaslev decided it would never see the light of the day.  Not only that, but it had already screened for test audiences and performed very well.  But when a studio pulls the plug on a movie in the middle of production, it gives that movie the stigma of being a bad film.  All indications were saying that Coyote vs. Acme was not bad at all, and even great in some test reviews.  But according to Zaslev, the movie was in his words, “unreleasable.”  It was the same assertion that he gave to another movie that got the can that unfortunately suffered a worse fate than Coyote faced.  One of the last projects under the old DCEU franchise was a movie adaptation of Batgirl.  The movie had a nearly $100 million budget and was going to star Leslie Grace as the titular hero, as well as Michael Keaton returning as Batman and Oscar-winner Brendan Fraser playing the villainous Firefly.  The movie was said to be nearly complete, with principle photography already done and only the visual effects left to complete.  But not only did Zaslev and the other execs at Warners decide to cancel the completion of the film; they also ordered the destruction of the material they had already shot so that there was no chance at all of Warner Brothers ever resurrecting the movie again to make money off it, otherwise they lose the tax write off.  This was the sad fate of the film, as cast and crew attended one final screening on the lot to see the movie they worked on for the last time right before it was wiped away forever.

The same fate was likely in store for Coyote vs. Acme as well, but some clever individuals who worked on the movie managed to go behind Warner Brothers backs.  Not long after word got out that the movie was going to be shelved permanently and possibly lined up for destruction by Warners, behind the scenes footage from the set started to leak onto social media, showing people what the movie could have looked like.  Pretty soon, the mainstream press took notice of the leaked footage and were stating to share it on their platforms as well.  Audiences started to become interested in this film, wondering what exactly made it so expendable to the executives at Warner Brothers.  One of the things that really sparked interest in peoples minds was the heavy use of practical effects that were employed in the making of the movie.  It recalled the extensive visual effects work that  went into a classic film like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), which also magically and convincingly mixed animated characters into a real world setting.  While this renewed interest didn’t seem to avert Zaslev’s intentions of shelving the movie, it did stay the film’s execution for a little while longer.  It of course wouldn’t be a good look for the company if they were to destroy yet another completed film.  What filmmaker or actor would want to come work at Warner Brothers if the CEO in charge was so cavalier about their hard work that he would destroy it just for a tax credit?  In many ways, Coyote vs. Acme became the rallying point for all the complaints that creatives have had with the industry in this era of media consolidation.  More and more studio executives are not in the business of creating art but creating product, and they are giving audiences less of a say in what they are allowed to see.  By leaking the footage of Coyote vs. Acme to the public, those brave crew members managed to shine a spotlight on it, and it helped prevent the movie from being forgotten, which is the thing that Zaslev and the other Warner Brothers execs were hoping would happen.

But, at the same time, Warner Brothers had already collected their tax write-off, so having it be released under the Warner Brothers label was out of the question.  While the movie was temporarily saved from destruction, it was still in a permanent state of limbo, likely to never leave the Warner Brothers archives for eternity.  But, the outcry among fans began to grow.  Looney Tunes fans in particular, who had long been starved of new material starring their beloved characters, really wanted this movie to see the light of day.  But thankfully Warner Brothers, seeing the interest in this film grow over time, couldn’t ignore the fans’ outcry much longer.  So, they decided to put the movie up for sale.  They themselves were not able to  release the film themselves, but tax write off laws still allowed them to put the film out into the market, and have it be sold for either at the cost of production, or for a loss in value to them.  Unfortunately with a production budget at an estimated $70 million, the movie would have a steep price tag on it, even amongst deep pocketed rival studios.  Warner Brothers sought out interested parties like Netflix and Amazon, seeing if they would bite.  But alas, few studios were willing to take on the risk of spending nearly $70 million just to buy the film, and then pay the extra money to promote and distribute it afterwards.  So, the movie languished in this state of limbo for a few more years, with no one taking up the challenge of giving the movie a home.  But then there finally came the heroes of this story.  Independent distributor Ketchup Entertainment finally put in a bid to buy the rights to the movie.  Warner Brothers ended up selling the movie at a loss, letting Ketchup have it for $50 million.  But for Warner Brothers, $50 million was the best they could get out of it, and was a small loss for them in the grand scheme of things.  Meanwhile, Ketchup Entertainment was taking on a heavy risk accepting this price tag.  Their catalog of films are made up of very small, micro budget movies.  More recently they have been partnering up with other production companies on bigger films like Michael Mann’s Ferrari (2023) and Robert Rodriguez’s Hypnotic (2023).  But, they also seem to have had an interest in salvaging movies from Warner Brothers’ scrap heap, particularly when it came to the Looney Tunes.  Just a year before acquiring the rights to Coyote vs. Acme, Ketchup also saved another film that Warners had developed for HBO Max before shelving it, which was the animated comedy The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (2024).  They were even able to put the movie out in a limited theatrical run, and while the movie didn’t light up the box office, it still got a strong critical reception and has even developed a small cult following since it’s release.  This is one of the reasons why they seemed like the ideal new home for Coyote.

But it would only matter if audiences were still able to show up.  Because of Ketchup’s huge financial risk in taking this movie on, they needed to be careful how they marketed the movie.  Their marketing budget would be a small $10 million, which pales compared to what is spent on most other movies.  But, Ketchup carefully targeted their marketing, appealing to those who were most adamant about seeing the movie.  They knew that longtime fans of the Looney Tunes would support the movie, but who they were also hoping would show up for the film were people who were upset about what Warner Brothers had done in their short term quest for quick financial gain.  A lot of the marketing for the movie was very subtly aimed at conflating the film’s fictional Acme Corporation with Warner Brothers themselves.  The tag line for the movie in most of the marketing called it “The Movie Acme doesn’t want you to see.”  They smartly connected the film’s long and complicated road to getting released with the tale of fighting back against corporate greed that is actually at the heart of the film’s story; blurring the lines between fiction and reality.  The marketing team even pulled off some hilarious stunts, including having a performer dress in a Wile E. Coyote costume and having him protest outside the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, complete with a picket sign saying “Acme Sucks.”  It may have come across as petty, but it was tapping into something that was really connecting with people.  Watching this movie would be making a statement, showing Warner Brothers that they were very much in the wrong for wanting to erase this movie from existence.  Ketchup continued to play up this David vs. Goliath aspect of the film, and it was indeed working.  They also got a major assist from people involved in the making of the movie, including it’s stars.  In particular, actor Will Forte who plays the lawyer representing Wile. E Coyote in court devoted much of his social media towards getting the word out about this movie, encouraging people to make their voices heard in demanding this movie get released.  Voice actor Eric Bauza, who is the current voice for almost all of the Looney Tunes characters these days, and who also led the voice cast in this movie, likewise spread the word about this movie, appearing on multiple podcasts over the last couple years pleading with fans to raise the heat on Warner Brothers to make them release the film.  And all that finally culminated in a big theatrical release at the tail end of this summer.  But did it all work?

The greatest outcome of all this is that the movie was more than just alright;  it actually turned out to be great.  The movie currently sits at a very impressive 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is even higher than Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) by the way.  The film even outperformed expectations on its opening weekend, grossing a respectable $15 million.  Sure it’s got a long way to go before Ketchup Entertainment can make a profit on its investment, but it’s far from a flop either.  The conversation is now no longer if the movie can live up to the hype, but rather it has turned towards wondering what David Zaslev was thinking when he called the movie “unwatchable.”  It very clearly is not anything like he described, and in fact it’s one of the best crowd pleasers of the summer.  What has become clear is that Coyote vs. Acme was never cancelled on the basis of its quality.  It was shelved because the big wigs at Warner Brothers clearly have the wrong idea about what audiences actually want.  David Zaslev is not a creative person.  He is there to take Warner Brothers and turn it into a commodity that can be bought and sold to other investors at a profit to both him and the shareholders.  Sure enough, that’s what is currently happening with Warner Brothers as we speak with it’s planned merger with Paramount.  The only ones who are going to benefit from that merger are the executives and shareholders, while thousands of creatives at both studios are likely to lose their jobs through the process of consolidation.  Zaslev is going to come away from that merger nearly $100 million dollars richer, and in his wake, two legendary studios may end up being destroyed in the process, consumed into a single giant media conglomerate with a frighteningly agenda driven management team that’ll favor their own interests over the desires of the audiences they are supposed to cater to.  That’s what’s been appealing about Coyote vs. Acme to audiences; the fact that it’s a movie that actually speaks about these concerns about greedy corporations that are never held accountable, and end up cheapening the things that we love after they have taken control of them.  In every way shape and form, Coyote vs. Acme is a survivor and a movie that we need more than ever to remind us of what’s at stake when it comes to our collective culture.

One of the metaphors used in the movie is the Ancient Greek mythological story of Sisyphus; the man doomed forever to roll a bolder uphill, only to have all his progress undone each day.  It’s a struggle that mirrors that of Wile E. Coyote, which is something that his co-creator Chuck Jones very much emphasized in his discussion about how he defined the character.  The point of Wile E. Coyote is that he will never catch the Roadrunner, but it’s that struggle that gives him purpose to live.  The movie draws that distinction, and shows us why it’s important to take on seemingly impossible tasks, because it’s the only way that changes can happen.  Yes, we will all fail at something, but if we give up the fight, we ultimately lose everything that is important.  That is ultimately what evil corporations like Acme count on, that we give up after we fail and just settle for less.  That’s what makes the movie so poignant; it shows that failure is nothing to be afraid of, and that it’s better to keep pushing that boulder uphill than just letting it sit motionless where it is.  In a strange twist of fate, the movie Coyote vs. Acme became it’s own Sisyphisian struggle, with Warner Brothers coming across as the cruel Gods trying to wear us down to accept the inevitable.  But unlike the myth,  Coyote vs. Acme managed to crest that hill and come out on top.  Despite us having to wait nearly four years to see the actual film, it’s release actually marks something that we rarely see anymore in Hollywood, which is an actual underdog triumph story.  For one thing, it still shows that audiences still love the Looney Tunes characters, and that they are very much an under-appreciated and underutilized part of the Warner Brothers portfolio right now.  It’s also a movie that manages to give voice to a concern of many in the industry right now, which is the value of profits over people.  In the movie, the story actually involves showing how cartoons are treated as expendable pawns in Acme’s product testing phase, due to them being more durable to injury than humans.  Like most dubious corporations, they are valuing one set of customers over another.  You could point to the same thing happening in Hollywood, with shareholders needed being valued over those of the employees of the company or the long term fans who themselves feel ignored more and more.  Coyote vs. Acme gives voice to that, but even manages to be more.  It’s a movie with a lot of heart as well, turning Wile E. Coyote into something of an Everyman hero, and they even managed to give his contentious relationship with the Road Runner some surprising depth and heart too.  Hopefully this movie makes Ketchup Entertainment a lot of money in the long run and helps to convince them and many others that it’s worthwhile to save these movies that are being tossed aside by the major studios.  In the case of Coyote vs. Acme, we may have almost lost what could be a new classic of the genre, and the fact that it has survived is a story worth celebrating for many years to come.

Martin Scorsese’s status as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time is undeniable.  From his humble post-film school beginnings working with the likes of Roger Corman to becoming one of Hollywood’s most revered elder statesmen, Scorsese’s career in the business has been an undeniable success.  But for a long time, many people felt that he was still undervalued as a filmmaker, mainly for one major reason; because he hadn’t won an Oscar.  After you’ve made movies as iconic as Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980) and Goodfellas (1990), you would think that the Academy would’ve shown their love to Marty for all that he had done over his career.  But, Scorsese continued to remain a consummate bridesmaid on Oscar night.  This especially began to become an issue for many fans of the director during the 2000’s.  Scorsese was reaching his 60’s and many worried that he would be overlooked while still in his prime, believing that as he reached his senior years that he would become as less productive and likely never get the chance to make that movie that would finally win him Oscar glory.  But it wasn’t for lack of trying though.  Martin Scorsese did manage to get a project he had long had in development finally across the finish line with his historical epic Gangs of New York (2002), starring heavy hitters like Daniel Day-Lewis and also marked his first collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio.  This would surely be the movie that would finally win him an Oscar, because it had all the ingredients that Oscar voters valued.  But, despite quite a few nominations, Gangs of New York came up empty on Oscar night, with the Academy instead going for the musical Chicago (2002) that year, and Scorsese losing out Best Director to Roman “Statutory” Polanski for The Pianist (2002).  For a lot of people this started to make them worry that Scorsese may never get his due honors, because if he couldn’t win it with a passion project he had been working on for decades then it may never happen.  This only seemed to be reinforced when two years later he also struck out with the epic biopic The Aviator (2004).  What would it take for Martin Scorsese to finally win the gold in the end.  The answer would indeed be a bit surprising, and yet at the same time the most logical conclusion as well.

In the early 2000’s, Warner Brothers secured the rights to remake a Hong Kong action crime thriller called Infernal Affairs (2002).  The original film, starring Andy Lau and Tony Leung, was about two men who become moles on opposite sides of the law.  One is a police officer who has infiltrated a dangerous gang while the other is working within the police force to protect members of the Triad.  Both have to maintain their cover and more importantly make sure that neither is aware of the other’s existence.  Hollywood saw a lot of potential in this story, and were eager to bring it stateside as a action movie vehicle for some A-List stars.  The decision was to bring the story to Boston, given it’s culture of the Irish American community falling into both sides of the law; often sometimes within the same families.  One other reason for picking Boston as the setting was that the crime boss at the center would be largely based on real life Bostonian mafia leader James “Whitey” Bulger.  To work on the adaptation of Infernal Affairs into this Boston set crime story, Warner Brothers tapped journalist turned novelist William Monahan to write the screenplay.  Though Monahan was at the time a prolific writer, he was still fairly new to the art of screenwriting.  He first got the attention of Hollywood with his original script Tripoli, a historical epic that got optioned in a six figure deal with Scott Free Productions, with the potential of being directed by Ridley Scott himself.  Alas, Tripoli died quietly in development, but Ridley Scott wanted to keep Monahan around so the two of them worked together to create another epic movie set during the Crusades in the Holy Land.  This became the film Kingdom of Heaven (2005), which was unfortunately heavily cut down by the studio and released in theaters to disappointing box office.  Only in the years since has Kingdom of Heaven been reassessed by audiences thanks to a vastly superior 3 hour director’s cut released years later.  But, even despite the disappointment in Kingdom of Heaven’s box office, people saw a lot of potential in Monahan’s work, and that’s why he seemed like an ideal choice for this project.  For one thing, it would allow him to write closer to his own home given that he was a Boston boy himself.  But what was especially important about Monahan’s writing is that it caught the interest of Scorsese, who decided on this new movie, now called The Departed, as his next project.

A crime thriller set in the mafia world is nothing new to someone like Scorsese.  If anything, it’s a homecoming for him.  With movies like Goodfellas and Casino (1995), Martin cemented himself as the quintessential mafia movie king; even eclipsing Francis Ford Coppola in this category.  But a lot of those movies also tapped into his roots as an Italian American and as a New Yorker.  Boston was an entirely different kind of city with an entirely different kind of mafia.  The question would be whether or not Scorsese’s style would translate over into this new setting.  Marty certainly seemed to think so, and him being attached to this project suddenly gave it a lot more prestige than it otherwise would’ve likely had before.  With Scorsese now on board, the project was suddenly now glimpsed as an A-list production.  But who would bring their star power to the roles in the movie.  In particular, they needed to find the right actors to play the roles of the two moles, who in this film would be named William Costigan and Colin Sullivan.  For the longest time, Brad Pitt had eyed the role of Sullivan, the mole on the inside of the Boston PD, and at one time he was hoping to rope in his friend and fellow A-lister Tom Cruise to play the role of Costigan in the movie.  But, Cruise was less interested and passed on the part, and eventually Brad Pitt began to drift away from the project as well.  Pitt did stay involved as a producer however under his Plan B production company, though most of the producing credit would go to Graham King, whom Martin Scorsese brought over with him from The Aviator.  This producing credit would later lead to a bit of controversy later on.  The casting of Frank Costello, the Whitey Bulger stand-in, would also be an important choice as well.  Initially, Martin wanted to give the role to his long time collaborator Robert DeNiro, but DeNiro was too busy at the time working on his own directorial debut The Good Shepard (2006).  Scorsese also offered the role to Al Pacino, who he had yet to work with at the time, but unfortunately the two would wait another 13 years before finally making a movie together with The Irishman (2019).  While many of these actors would’ve certainly been interesting choices for this film, the movie would eventually benefit from the right actors getting the roles.

For one thing, Scorsese benefitted from there being Boston raised actors that were just right for the roles.  One, of course, was Matt Damon, who was cast as Colin Sullivan.  Damon of course made his mark alongside his longtime friend and fellow Bostonian Ben Affleck with their Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting (1997), which was a film steeped in the local flavor of the city.  He also perfectly played into the good old boy facade that was needed for the role, given that he had to play a cop who was secretly helping the mafia from within.  But, his role also had to have the perfect counterbalance on the opposite end.  With the casting of William Costigan, Scorsese once again went with the leading man of his last two films, Leonardo DiCaprio, to play the part.  DiCaprio of course neither has Irish ancestry nor is from anywhere close to Boston.  And yet the chameleon like actor managed to find his way into the role and perfectly channel a Bostonian identity into the character.  But, who would fill out the role of Frank Costello, the crime boss who looms large over everyone in the movie.  Turns out there was another legendary actor that had never worked with Scorsese before who would be absolutely perfect for the part.  Jack Nicholson had wanted to work with Marty for a long time, but things hadn’t aligned for both of them until now.  At this point, Jack was eager to sink his teeth into a juicy villainous role, and the part of Frank Costello, with all of his menacing swagger and twisted sense of humor seemed to be tailor made for the actor.  While DeNiro and Pacino would’ve certainly been solid choices too, it’s fortuitous that Nicholson ended up playing the part instead, because it allowed to Scorsese to differentiate this mafia movie from the ones he had made in the past.  Nicholson’s Frank Costello was very much a product of the city of Boston and defined it’s very brash and very Irish identity.  In addition to these actors, Scorsese round out his cast with some pretty heavy hitters, such as Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Vera Farmiga, Ray Winstone, and Mark Wahlberg, who really tapped into his Bostonian roots with his scene stealing performance as Sergeant Dignam.

It’s undeniable that the city of Boston is a character in of itself within the movie.  New York may run through Scorsese’s blood, but he did justice to the identity of Boston; capturing the swagger of the community beautifully in all of it’s hard edges.  But even despite the change in scenery, the movie does feel in line with Scorsese’s Italian mafia epics of the past.  This is thanks to him working with some of his trusted longtime collaborators.  The Departed would sadly be the last time that Marty worked with his longtime cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who had been working with Marty since 1985’s After Hours.  Ballhaus only shot one more movie after The Departed and passed away in 2017 at the age of 80, capping off a storied career of shooting some truly beautiful films such as The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Goodfella, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).  Scorsese’s longtime friend and collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker also returned to edit this movie, fresh off an Oscar win for The Aviator.  While their work on the film is not the flashiest they had ever done working with Scorsese, given the other movies listed, they nevertheless delivered a solid, well crafted movie that serviced the story well.  There are some hauntingly beautiful moments that do bring out the best of their talents.  One is the breathtaking opening montage that serves as the prologue of the movie, set to the Rolling Stones’ “Gimmie Shelter.”  It’s an outstanding tone setter that primes you perfectly for the movie you are about to see, with Ballhaus’ striking camera work and Schoonmaker’s lyrical editing doing a great job setting up the city of Boston and the characters within in an almost mythical way.  And like many of Martin Scorsese’s movies, the needle drops in the movie are especially poignant.  Apart from “Gimmie Shelter,” there is also a haunting cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” sung by Irish R&B signer Van Morrison used halfway through the movie during a romantic moment.  But no song got more of a boost from appearing in this film more than Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphy’s “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” which has almost become an unofficial anthem for the city, played at sporting events for the Patriots and the Celtics to this day.

But, how was the world going to receive this new Scorsese film.  Despite the shift from New York to Boston, many thought this was just Scorsese falling back on old tricks by making yet another mafia movie.  But, audiences responded quite well to the film.  To this day, it is still Martin Scorsese’s highest grossing film at the box office, making $292 million worldwide, which is pretty good for an R-rated mafia movie.  But, the question remained, would the Academy finally take notice.  The film did receive nominations for Best Picture and Director, but it’s victory was not a guarantee as it only had 5 nominations total in a very competitive year.  Not only that, but it would be a rematch of 2004, where Scorsese’s The Aviator lost out to Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004).  Eastwood, who’s clout with the Academy was undeniably strong, was nominated again for his WWII epic Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), and it was going to be a difficult choice between these two titans of the industry.  But, it became clear through the night that this may have finally been the movie to get Marty up to the podium.  Both William Monahan and Thelma Schoonmaker walked away with Oscar wins for their work on the film, giving the movie momentum.  And then came the award for Best Director.  Though the Academy didn’t know for certain given the secrecy of Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s ballot counting, they seemed to have a pretty good inkling about who was going to win given who they chose to present the Award.  Walking onstage to present Best Picture were directing legends Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas.  These weren’t just some of the biggest names in Hollywood, they were also longtime friends of Marty’s going all the way back to their early days in the 1970’s when they were just starting out in the business.  It was an indicator that the Academy knew the time had come and they wanted to make the moment special.  And sure enough, a great sigh of relief could be felt as Steven Spielberg read out the name of Martin Scorsese.  He was a bridesmaid no more, and would now forever have the title of Oscar winner on his resume.  And though deeply grateful, Scorsese also tried to keep it humble as well, joking to his friends, “can you check the envelope again, please?”  But it was undeniable to everyone; this was a long time coming and very well deserved.

But, despite the fears that this would be Scorsese’s last chance to win the coveted Award, finally winning it didn’t cause Scorsese to slow down either.  If anything, it rejuvenated his career.  Scorsese has honestly put out some of his best work since The Departed, with movies like Hugo (2011), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Irishman (2019), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), all of which he has received more Oscar nominations for.  And this year, at the age of 83, he still has more movies in development with no indication yet that he’s ready to retire.  Given his whole body of work, it’s actually quite unusual to think that The Departed was the one that got him on the Oscar stage.  It’s not a particularly showy movie, with the movie most grounded in realism throughout.  It’s also a movie that despite being a mafia film also feels the least like any of the other characteristically Scorsese crime epics.  You would think that for Scorsese to get the attention of the Academy, he would’ve had to have made a film that showcased a lot more of his unique style, rather than just do a better than average competent action flick.  But, that’s underselling what Marty achieved with The Departed.  It is a brilliantly crafted character study about these two individuals who have to carefully maintain these facades within places they do not belong or else their lives will literally be destroyed.  It’s ultimately a parable about paranoia and mistrust, and thinking that there is a rat in every corner of society.  It’s no surprise that this movie existed in a post-9/11 world, where paranoia and distrust was rampant in American society.  With the Scorsese touch, he made this cops and robbers thriller feel more reflexive and introspective of where America was standing at the time.  In his hands, this story takes on a far greater mythical sense, showing how we as a society was starting to evolve, with the lines between good and bad, lawful and unlawful being increasingly blurred.  A lot of people have critiqued the film over the years with regards to the final shot.  In the closing moments, Scorsese holds on a window shot overlooking the Massachusetts State House, and in the foreground appears a literal rat.  People thought this was too much of a heavy handed metaphor, but honestly after the chaos of what preceded it in the shocking third act of the movie, heavy handed symbolism does seem right in the parting shot of the movie.

20 years later and The Departed still holds up as one of the best mafia movies ever made.  It may not be up to the epic level of The Godfather (1971), but it’s undoubtedly one of the best executed ones in the last quarter century and that’s thanks to the talents of Martin Scorsese.  He took what could have been just another standard action thriller which are a dime a dozen in Hollywood, and created an Oscar winning movie out of it.  Certainly a lot of that has to do with it’s absolutely perfect cast, with DiCaprio, Damon and Nicholson all delivering some of the best performances of their careers.  It may be a subdued, by the numbers film for Martin Scorsese, but even with those limitations he still managed to deliver an all time classic under his direction.  And as we’ve seen, he still is not done yet.  William Monahan, who also came away an Oscar winner, has continued to work as a screenwriter on several more movies, and has even directed a couple as well.  Leonardo DiCaprio has also continued to remain a favorite of Marty’s, and they have worked on many more films together since, including The Wolf of Wall Street and Killers of the Flower Moon.  Matt Damon has also continued to remain an A-lister in Hollywood, and though he has not worked with Scorsese again since The Departed, he still considers his work in the movie to be some of the best he’s ever done.  This also has marked one of the last great roles for Jack Nicholson.  Though as of this writing Jack Nicholson is still alive and well at the age of 89, but he has not made a new film in 16 years, retiring after a small part in James L. Brooks’ How Do You Know (2010). The Departed is looked at as the last true Nicholson star role, and it’s great that he and Marty’s paths managed to cross and result in this film before he called it quits.  One of the benefits of making The Departed the way he did is that it gives Scorsese a film with a bit of universal and timeless appeal.  You don’t have to be familiar with what Scorsese has done prior to enjoy the movie.  It stands apart from his other work in a good way.  That’s why it’s Oscar win for Best Picture hasn’t aged one bit since it happened, because the movie still works just as well today as it did 20 years ago.  Sure, Scorsese deserved the Oscar much more for many other movies prior, but I don’t hear too many complaints about this being the one that got him there.  Often a filmmaker will end up winning the top award for a movie that wasn’t quite representative of the filmmaker they really are.  Here, I think it works better for Scorsese that he won for this movie rather than a traditional Oscar bait flick like Gangs of New York or The Aviator.  The movie may have been outside of his comfort zone of the streets of New York, but it’s fitting that by going to Boston that Scorsese still won the award for a mafia movie; the kind of film that he did better than anyone else.

How many different choices are out there to experience Christopher Nolan’s new epic film, The Odyssey (2026).  There’s certainly the standard digital projection that most multiplexes around the world will make available to audiences.  But, for those looking for something more special, there are also plenty of premium movie experiences available for The Odyssey.  There’s the Dolby Cinema experience, with laser enhanced picture quality, and of course digital IMAX available in most major cinemas.  But for many true cinephiles, the best way to watch a movie like this is when it’s projected on film.  In certain cinemas around the world, the movie is also getting a release on 70mm film.  70mm, a film stock that has been in use since the 1950’s, is know for having incredible picture quality and has been used to film and exhibit some of cinema’s greatest epics such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Sound of Music (1965), and 2001: The Space Odyssey (1968).  Any film that gets a brand new 70mm print is incredibly lucky given the limited infrastructure in place to manufacture and screen those kinds of films today.  And yet, even this is not the most exclusive way to screen a film.  The Odyssey is in a rare class of film that has been designed and filmed purposely for one particular format in mind, and that is the 15perf 70mm IMAX format.  This is Christopher Nolan’s preferred format of filmmaking, and he has utilized it more and more on every film he’s made since The Dark Knight (2008).  But what is 15perf 70mm IMAX and why is it such a big deal in cinema right now.  More than anything else, it is quite simply the biggest possible format that can capture images through a camera, given the captured image the highest amount of detail possible without the aid of digital enchancement.  To film with it is one thing, but to screen it, theaters not only need to have a massive amount of specialized equipment set up for it, but they also need to have a screen big enough to do justice to the image quality possible with IMAX 70mm (mainly in the 80 to 100ft height range).  It’s a specialized kind of film that can only play in a specialized kind of theater, and in The Odyssey’s case, only 25 theaters are playing the film this way in all of North America.  So, count yourself lucky if one of these is your theater.

Universal Pictures, the studio behind Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, were so confident that screenings at these 25 theaters were going to sell out that they put tickets up for sale a full year in advance, and they did almost instantly.  Even while cameras we still rolling on set, there were sell out shows for this movie.  This is very much a testament to the selling power of not just Christopher Nolan as a name, but also 70mm IMAX as a format.  You can imagine people buying passes for a concert or a convention a year ahead of time, but for a movie?  This wasn’t entirely surprising either.  70mm IMAX has been steadily climbing in esteem, particularly in the last couple of years, and Hollywood is taking notice that these rare format screenings are becoming hot ticket events.  Watching a movie in 70mm IMAX is now being looked at as the peak of the movie going experience.  There are many other theaters out there in the country that advertise that they have IMAX, but in reality what they have is a digital IMAX projector that can play a IMAX quality image on a standard size screen.  Sure, it’s better than the average digital projector, but it’s not a “true” IMAX experience.  That’s why a lot of these types of IMAX theaters are referred to as LieMAX.  For a true IMAX experience, you need a screen taller than a mid-rise office building, the most start of the art sound system in all corners, and a steep slope of stadium seating that puts the audience as close to the screen as is comfortably possible.  What this gives you is an immersive experience, where it feels like the screen is enveloping you.  One thing to help spot a true IMAX theater in your area is to see a section of a multiplex that looks like it is jutting out from the rest of the building.  These screening rooms are so big that they often require their own footprints as to not take up the majority of the space inside the rest of the theater.  For myself, I fortunately live near one such theater; the Universal Cinemas at Universal Studios CityWalk in Hollywood, CA.  The architecture of this building is interesting, as it looks from the front like a standard multiplex, but when you step back, you’ll see a large blocky extension rising from the back of the building.  That’s the IMAX theater, which has been a part of the building since a 2000 remodel and expansion.  It’s been my go to IMAX theater since moving to the San Fernando Valley 15 years ago.  It’s also why I’m not reviewing The Odyssey this week, because I could only get a ticket for Sunday, past my Saturday deadline, and I don’t want to see it first in any other format.

So, instead of a review, I wanted to discuss exactly why seeing it in this format is such a big deal.  Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is the first film ever to be entirely shot in 15perf 70mm IMAX.  Up to this point, most films have had select scenes shot in the format, but never the entire film itself.  This is often because of the limitations of the equipment involved.  The film backs that hold the 70mm film in the camera can only hold enough stock for 5 minutes of screen time in a single spool.  Not only that, but the camera itself is also extremely loud and cumbersome given the size of the film that it has to shuffle through.  The noise factor alone makes 70mm IMAX unusable on set for quiet, dialogue scenes, because it would drown out the actors’ voices.  That’s why up to now, IMAX cameras have been more widely used for action scenes in movies, where the camera noise is less of a factor.  For the last couple of decades, 70mm IMAX films have typically been hybrid films, switching between different formats in various parts of the movie, with noticeable aspect ratio changes to indicate which format was used for what scene.   When a movie couldn’t use 70mm IMAX for a dialogue scene, the filmmakers would instead use a standard 70mm camera, or some other standard format.  In the early days, IMAX shots were often very rare, but over time, filmmakers would find more and more use for them, to the point where a sizable chunk of a film’s run time would be in the IMAX format.  Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker that has continually tried to push the format further with ever new film that he makes.  It started with using the format for aerial shots in The Dark Knight, but Nolan also managed to create two entire sequences of the movie using the 70mm IMAX format; the opening bank robbery scene with the Joker, and the Bat Pod chase sequence in the middle of the film.  He even put out the bank robbery scene in its entirety as a teaser trailer in IMAX theaters months before the film’s release.  While the movie got rave reviews across the board, many also took notice of the special experience that the IMAX showings provided.  For all his movies since, The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Interstellar (2014), Dunkirk (2017), Tenet (2020) and Oppenheimer (2023), more and more of the movie’s runtimes are shot with IMAX film.

To understand the significance of an all IMAX movie like The Odyssey, we have to know a bit about what led to here, because IMAX of course had been around a long time before Christopher Nolan.  70mm film stock dates all the way back to the turn of the century, but it wouldn’t be used for filmmaking purposes until the late 1920’s when Fox Films used it for what they called the Grandeur process.  It only resulted in one film, 1930’s The Big Trail starring a young John Wayne, before being abandoned due to the high cost.  Then in the 1950’s, 70mm film was seen as a viable format for creating widescreen films to compete with television.  While other formats like Cinerama and Cinemascope already existed, 70mm was celebrated for it’s incredibly sharp picture quality.  Producer Mike Todd combined his spherical camera lenses with 70mm to create a new process called Todd-AO, which first premiered with the movie musical Oklahoma (1955), and with it came a boom of big film projects all using 70mm film to create magnificent widescreen extravaganzas.  While the epic movie craze died over the years, the use of 70mm did not.  It would remain in use for many years after that on select projects, and also as the film stock of choice by special effects artists, such as the wizards at ILM who used 70mm to create the effects in the Star Wars movies.  At the same time 70mm was coming up in the 1950’s, another format was also being popularized using the more commonly used 35mm film stock.  For most movie cameras, film is shuffled through the aperture vertically, with the captured image size being about 4 perforations (sprocket holes on the edges) in height on 35mm, or 5 perforations on 70mm.  But a new format called Vistavision changed the way film was shuffled through the camera by having it move horizontally past the aperture as opposed to vertically.  What this resulted in was an image on 35mm stock that was 8 perforations wide, creating a much larger image overall that could contain a lot more detail.  This was a favorite format for Alfred Hitchcock in particular, who used it for some of his most popular films like Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959).  It was also used to create incredible vast epics like The Ten Commandments (1956) and The Searchers (1956) feel even grander.  But, it would also lead some filmmakers to wonder; could they do with 70mm film stock what Vistavision did with 35mm?

The first to experiment with that idea were Canadian filmmakers Graeme Ferguson and Roman Kroitor who formed what would eventually become the IMAX corporation in 1967.  They initially had develop a multiscreen large format that would create one large image out of multiple projections, but found difficulty in the synchronization.  They instead looked towards creating the same kind of large screen experience with a single camera and projector.  They took the idea of flipping 70mm film stock on it’s side like Vistavision did with 35 and designed a camera system that was capable of handling that a format that big.  Their results culminated in a camera that could capture an image a full whopping 15 perforations wide.  This 15/70 format was first used on a short film from Ferguson and Kroitor called Tiger Child, which was screened publicly at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan.  The 17 minute short would play on a loop for expo quests in a rotating theater, creating an immersive experience.  Little did the people who saw this exhibit know that they were looking at the future of cinema.  But, it wasn’t a future that would happen overnight.  IMAX was a very costly format to both manufacture and exhibit, so it was limited to just a couple of projects at a time; mainly documentaries.  Hollywood and multiplexes weren’t quite ready to go all in on IMAX, but Science and History museums were.  Through the 80’s and 90’s, the likeliest places you would find an IMAX theater was in one of these museum spaces, playing documentaries about nature, space, and even the Titanic, which had a 1992 film called Titanica about the exploration of the wreck which for many years was the highest grossing IMAX film, at a paltry $8 million.  This was also my own personal introduction to the format, as I saw it on a class field trip to a science museum in Portland, Oregon.  Still, narrative use of 15/70 IMAX film was thought to be unlikely as studios thought the format was too niche.  And then the Walt Disney Company decided to use IMAX as their format of choice for their new animated film Fantasia 2000 (2000).  This would mark the first ever studio made movie to premiere in IMAX cinemas, and they would get an exclusive 6 month run before the film would open everywhere else.  It was the kind of mainstream acceptance that IMAX finally needed, although it would be some time before Hollywood would actually fall all in with IMAX.

For a while, the studios were more interested in screening their movies in IMAX theaters, as the size of the screens offered a much more premium experience than a standard multiplex facility.  On the heels of Fantasia 2000, Disney would also re-release some of their animated classics in the format, such as Beauty and the Beast (1991) and The Lion King (1994).  Meanwhile, big action franchises like Star Wars, Harry Potter and Transformers would also use IMAX to screen some of their films.  But these movies weren’t shot in the 15/70 IMAX format, but rather received a blow-up as their standard format was printed onto an IMAX reel.  It would get the IMAX size, but not the image detail.  One big tell you were watching a blow-up movie in IMAX is that it still has the letterbox effect, creating black bars on the top and bottom of the image in order to make it fit within the 1.43:1 ratio dimensions of 15/70 IMAX film.  A true IMAX image wouldn’t have that letterbox effect, and instead would fill the entire screen from top to bottom.  That’s the thing that people noted whenever they watched a film shot with 15/70 IMAX in mind.  This was only true for the most part with the documentaries that screen the most often in these specialty cinemas, but that would change dramatically once Christopher Nolan began to arrive on the scene.  He saw the dramatic potential in the format, and he even went directly to IMAX themselves to discuss how it could be implemented.  On each film they have collaborated on, Nolan and IMAX have tried to find new ways to push the format to it’s limits.  On Dunkirk, they mounted IMAX cameras on the wings of WWII era fighter planes.  In Tenet, they experimented with running IMAX film backwards in the camera.  And with Oppenheimer, IMAX did something they never had before by inventing black and white IMAX film stock.  With The Odyssey, Nolan and IMAX wanted to finally solve that annoying noise problem, so they re-engineered the camera itself to be lighter and more insulated.  They even created a massive new sound blimp to house the camera in in order to cut the noise down even more.  The result allowed IMAX to finally have it’s dream become a reality; a full length studio made film shot entirely on their format.

While Christopher Nolan is certainly the filmmaker that has pushed the IMAX format the most into the mainstream, he’s also not the only one who has used the format in recent memory.  More and more filmmakers are now looking to 15/70 IMAX film as an ideal format to use for their event films.  In 2022, filmmaker Jordan Peele used IMAX for the biggest action moments in his sci-fi thriller Nope; even going as far as to hire Christopher Nolan’s go to cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who has quickly gained the reputation of being the world’s best IMAX cameraman.  Denis Villeneuve has also turned to IMAX 15/70 for his series of Dune films, and like with Nolan’s Odyssey, his Dune: Part Three has already sold out screenings months in advance.  Last year, Ryan Coogler managed to make a big splash with his own use of the format in the Oscar-winning Sinners (2025).  The interesting thing about how the format was used in Sinners was in the way Coogler also mixed it in with another rarely used film format called Ultra Panavision 70.  Ultra Panavision has the widest aspect ratio of any format at 2.76:1, so there’s this incredible juxtaposition between extremes in the film, between the ultra wide Panavision in some scenes and the ultra tall 15/70 IMAX in others.  The night club scene in that film also accomplished a feat by creating a long tracking one shot, which is nearly impossible given the small amount of film that one camera can carry at a single time.  The way it came together in the final film even impressed Christopher Nolan who gave a Ryan Coogler and his cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw massive amounts of praise for their work on the film.  And earlier this year, Christopher Miller and Phil Lord had a big hit with the space adventure Project Hail Mary (2026), which also made extensive use of the 15/70 IMAX format.  So, while Christopher Nolan has been the top standard bearer for the IMAX format for a long time, he now has a lot more company among his peers who now use the format regularly in their own film projects.  If anything, there is a renewed interest in all analog film formats recently among filmmakers, with long dormant formats like Ultra Panavision 70 and Vistavision making comebacks of their own thanks to movies like The Hateful Eight (2015), The Brutalist (2024) and One Battle After Another (2025). Because of all this, IMAX no longer is a niche format in cinematic filmmaking, but perhaps the future of cinema itself.

If anything, the fact that we can now produce an entire film in the 15/70 IMAX format tells you that the sky’s the limit with regards to IMAX’s future in Hollywood.  Not only will Nolan continue working with the format, but so many generations after him will also be making their films on the format.  IMAX has come a long way since it’s novelty as an attraction at museums and expos around the world.  Now it is the hottest ticket in town, with people scrambling for tickets even before the film is finished filming.  It wouldn’t surprise me if theater chains start looking at remodeling their buildings in order to fit screening rooms big enough for 15/70 IMAX projection.  And there are still more boundaries to break in this field as well.  Apparently the maximum amount of film that IMAX film projectors can hold for a single movie is just a little over three hours.  Nolan really pushed that limit with his exactly three hour long Oppenheimer, and The Odyssey comes close with it’s 2 hour 52 minute run time.  It might not be too long before we see IMAX innovate some more in order to break beyond that 3 hour limit.  It will also be interesting to see how different filmmakers use the  format in creative ways, like with Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.  But there’s no doubt that The Odyssey will be a historic achievement in how it showed that the format could be used for a full film; quiet parts and all.  As of writing this, I still have not seen it for myself and am eagerly waiting my turn.  I was lucky just to get the one ticket that I did; literally one of the last seats left.  I’m also lucky to be seeing this movie in what Christopher Nolan considers to be his personal favorite theater.  My introduction to the CityWalk IMAX actually coincided with Nolan, as I went there for the first time to see Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011), which had the opening prologue of The Dark Knight Rises as a teaser.  I mainly went for that one teaser, but also ended up enjoying the main film itself, which also made use of 15/70 IMAX with the Burj Khalifa scenes.  Since then, all of my IMAX screenings have been there, including every Marvel move, every Dune movie, and of course every Nolan movie.  I hope The Odyssey is an event worthy of a year of waiting.  At least I’ll know one thing for sure, and that’s that I would never want to watch the movie in any other way.  With 15/70 IMAX, you really feel the closest to feeling immersed in the movie itself.

The Renaissance Era at Walt Disney Animation was a legendary moment in the artform.  Animation was finally being looked at as a powerful force in cinema, with Disney’s movies constantly breaking box office records and even getting a lot of love during Awards season.  The peak of this period in time came in the early 90’s, with the trifecta of Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994) all building on each other’s success.  Given the confidence that this built amongst the artists and producers at the Disney company, the studio would embark on an ambitious, one movie a year film slate over the next 10 years.  The hope was that the trend of success would continue over that time, and the studio was very invested in making new movies that would continue to raise the bar.  But, in a way, Disney would also become a victim of their own success.  The massive success of The Lion King almost became too high a bar to clear for anything that came after, and that would truly become the case.  The more serious in tone Pocahontas (1995) was next on the slate of films, and it struggled to stand on it’s own in the massive shadow of The Lion King.  It did decent box office numbers, but no where near what the previous 3 films had made.  The equally ambitious The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) also struggled to gain traction at the box office.  And when Hercules (1997) became their first film in a long while to fail to cross the $100 million mark, it began to make a lot of the top brass at Disney feel a little worried.  There was a small uptick again with the success of Mulan (1998) and Tarzan (1999) at the box office, but there were definitely signs that Disney was definitely loosing momentum as the industry leader in animation.  And with other animation studios on the rise like Pixar and Dreamworks, Disney needed to come up with a way to keep their place at the top a certainty.

For Disney, the belief was that audiences were no longer interested in the formula they had built their success during the Renaissance.  That formula being Broadway musical style storytelling.  Sure, making fairy tale stories like The Little Mermaid (1989) and Beauty and the Beast into musicals made sense because it fits with the fantastical nature of those narratives.  But for stories based on real life historical figure Pocahontas as well as Victor Hugo’s Hunchback bell ringer, it was a bit more difficult for audiences to embrace.  But the more existential threat that was causing the decline of traditional animation at Disney Animation was the emergence of CGI animation.  Again Disney fell victim to their own success as their collaboration with Pixar Animation, Toy Story (1995), became such a hit that it caused Hollywood to start investing like crazy into this new artform of computer animation.  The result would cannibalize Disney’s own in-house animation department.  But, to change the direction of this trend, Disney decided it was best to change up their formula.  For much of the Renaissance, they were making movies that fit at home in a place like Fantasyland at their own theme parks.  To change course, they began to think of something that was more Adventureland in nature.  After all, in addition to finding success with his animated fairy tales, Walt Disney also succeeded with live action adventure films like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Swiss Family Robinson (1960).  Even after Walt was gone, the Disney studios would continue to make more adventure based films throughout the years, except in animation.  So, Disney decided it was time to make an adventure themed film that was wildly different from what they had made before.  But what would it be about?  The successful directing team of Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale who had previously made Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame at Disney proposed what they thought would be an ideal place to set their story around; the mythical lost city of Atlantis.  But it wouldn’t be about Atlantis alone; it would be a expedition style story in the same vein as an Indiana Jones adventure, filled with a colorful cast of oddballs and misfits.  The fact that this movie was so wildly different from anything that Disney had made before became it’s biggest asset at a time when Disney was ready to shake things up.  The mantra around the making of this movie was that it had “fewer songs and more explosions.”

A lot of prep work went into the planning of the story.  The problem with tackling a new idea for an animated film is that you are pretty much starting from scratch.  There was no classic piece of literature or folk tale for Disney to build their movie on; Atlantis was a blank slate.  Sure, Atlantis as a mythological place has been discussed for centuries, ever since the poet Plato first wrote about it in Ancient Greece, but there’s so many different interpretations and theories surrounding Atlantis that there really is no consensus about what kind of a place it actually is.  So, Wise and Trousdale had to come up with something cohesive to wrap their story around.  They enlisted the help of screenwriter Tab Murphy (Gorillas in the Mist), who had helped them before on Hunchback, to craft a story based on the Atlantis myth that could work for their film.  The project would prove to be pretty monumental, as Murphy’s first draft came in at a staggering 150 pages; nearly double what a typical animated film ends up being.  Instead of just focusing on just one singular idea of what Atlantis needed to be, the team at Disney decided to throw everything at the wall to see what would stick.  This, inevitably became one of the biggest problems with the production of the film, which was the struggle to wrap this project around something cohesive.  Eventually they landed on the hollow earth theory, which is the idea that entire ecosystems and even cultures can exist within  vast pockets beneath the crust of the Earth.  This coincides with Plato’s original poem, where he described Atlantis disappearing beneath the waves.  In this film, disappearing beneath the waves means that Atlantis itself survived buried underground beneath the surface of the sea floor.  For the filmmakers, the journey to Atlantis was the main focus, but after learning that their original cut of the story took nearly 80 minutes of screentime just to get to Atlantis (the length of an average animated film), they realized that they needed to trim a lot of the fat off of their story.  Gone were a lot of the monster encounters along the road to Atlantis.  Character interactions were also minimized, because it was believed that they needed to get the story to Atlantis as quickly as possible.

One of the most interesting aspects of the production of Atlantis was that it wildly changed up the animation style at Disney.  Instead of the storybook like visual style they had worked with before on Beauty and Hunchback, Wise and Trousdale decided they wanted their film to look more like a comic book come to life.  They sought out artists from outside the studio to conceptualize different visual ideas that could be applied to their story.  One particular artist that would go on to have the most profound impact on the production was Hellboy creator Mike Mignola.  It’s strange to think that someone of Mignola’s pedigree in comic book art would find himself working on a Disney film, but not only was he brought on board, he would be the chief creative influence for the entire film.  Not since Sleeping Beauty (1959) had Disney Animation formed a film around a singular visual style attributed to one artist.  And it wouldn’t just be the look of the environments that Mignola’s art would influence.  He would also be instrumental in shaping the designs of the characters.  The characters would still have the same rounded eyes that most Disney characters in other films had, but their other features would be sharply defined and often exaggerated.  One particular Mignola feature that made it into every character in the movie was the squared off finger tips; a trademark of his drawing style in the comic books he’s created.  In addition to changing up their art style,  the directors also wanted to make this a widescreen film as well.  Making widescreen animated movies was rare in those days due to the costs involved in working with a wider canvas.  Disney themselves had only done it three times before, the last being the very costly flop The Black Cauldron (1985).  Disney managed to find a cost cutting way around that by planning their shots around what they would be able to crop out of the image, meaning they would still be working with the same sized animation tools they’ve worked with before and not have to worry about upscaling what they had to draw or paint.  Given that all of their artwork was being finalized in the computers anyway through their CAPS system, they were able to make their film widescreen without loosing any clarity in the picture as they cropped their image.

One of the things that was essential to make the movie work was creating characters that audiences would want to follow along with.  Because this was breaking with the typical Disney formula, Atlantis would be entirely without cute animal sidekicks that make for great toys during the merchandising phase of a film’s release.  The characters would range solely between the explorers and the Atlantean natives.  And it would be a very robust cast indeed, with perhaps more characters than the story really needed.  For inspiration, Disney looked at how action movies with ensemble casts worked to build up their characters over the course of a movie; particularly movies like The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Dirty Dozen (1967).  But, what the Atlantis team put their most focus on was building up the character at the heart of the story.  The film’s biggest triumph is the character Milo Thatch, the bookworm historian key to finding the trail to Atlantis, who by the end also becomes it’s savior.  Milo manages to carry most of the film on his shoulders (as scrawny as they are) because he’s a likable and relatable protagonist with a charming sense of enthusiasm for the adventure that he’s on.  One of the things that really helped to define Milo’s character was giving him the voice of Michael J. Fox.  Fox, who himself has been the charming center protagonist in other adventure movies like Back to the Future (1985), was perfectly cast for this role, and it’s one that’s tailor made for his persona.  Fox brings a lot of personality to the character, keeping him charmingly silly in his awkwardness, but also heartwarming sincere at the same time.  It also helps that the duty of animating Milo was also given to a veteran like John Pomeroy.  Pomeroy was one of the animators who left Disney in the late 70’s during the great exodus led by animation director Don Bluth, but he returned in the Renaissance era where he started work as the lead animator on the character John Smith in Pocahontas.  Pomeroy feels especially proud of the work he did on animating Milo, stating that it’s the closest he’s ever come to creating a self portrait.  Unfortunately, with a strong central character like Milo, the rest of the movie is given over to developing the rest of the cast.  A lot of the supporting characters barely get any development in the story and what they do get is rushed through with heavy exposition.

Perhaps the thing that gets short-changed the most in the film is Atlantis itself, and the people who live there.  This was a realization that came fairly late in the movie’s production, as they realized that they were taking way too long to get to the place that was the main focus of their story.  Not only that, the film’s female lead didn’t get her introduction until the film’s halfway point.  A very last minute decision was made to change the prologue of the movie, introducing the city of Atlantis and the character of Princess Kida in the opening minutes of the movie.  The problem is that they already had a prologue involving Vikings searching for Atlantis already fully animated and complete.  Excising and replacing a fully animated sequence is something that all animated films try to avoid because of the costs involved, but Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale realized that it had to be done in order for us to care more about the Atlantean people later in the movie.  Doing this also laid more importance on the character of Kida, the princess of Atlantis.  Her connection to the story needed to be set up right in the beginning, so that by the time she shows up again halfway through the story, we already understand where she came from.  One nice thing is that Disney didn’t attempt to cast a big name for the role, but instead gave the role to a veteran voice actress named Cree Summer.  Cree had by that time already been in a ton of animated shows, including Inspector Gadget and Tiny Toon Adventures, and she still is an in demand voice actor to this day.  Giving her the key role of Kida was beneficial for the character because she does sound so different from other Disney princesses.  Her more grounded performance also balances off of Michael J. Fox’s Milo perfectly, making them a surprisingly strong pair.  And while many of the characters do get shortchanged by the lack of time devoted to their development, the voice actors do a fine job of at least bringing some personality to them all, including established veterans like James Garner and Leonard Nimoy, as well as the late Jim Varney of Ernest fame in what would be his last role as he passed away during the film’s making.

There were a lot of high hopes surrounding the release of Atlantis: The Lost Empire.  This was going to mark a sea change for Disney, showing that they could indeed do more than just musical fairy tales.  Unfortunately, it did not deliver the way it was planned.  The film failed to launch at the box office, grossing only half of what it cost to make.  While the bigger box office failure of Treasure Planet (2002) is mostly and unfairly labeled as the movie that killed traditional animation at Disney, it was honestly a trend that was already gaining steam under the box office disappointment of Atlantis long before.  Audiences at the time really didn’t know what to make of Atlantis: The Lost Empire.  It was a confusing mash of different concepts thrown together into a movie that didn’t really devote enough time to allow the audience to absorb it all in.  Even though it is longer than the average Disney animated film at 96 minutes in length, it still feel truncated as a whole.  We never get enough time to savor the expedition of the explorers, nor the time they spend in Atlantis once they are finally there, because the movie has to constantly keep moving just to fit in everything that the filmmakers needed to put in for the plot to make sense.  One other thing that also worked against Atlantis was the fact that it was in direct competition at the box office with Dreamwork’s breakout hit, Shrek (2001).  This was the real sea change moment in animation, as Disney’s traditional animation machine was no match anymore against the novelty of computer animation.  And this is what ultimately led to then Disney CEO Michael Eisner deciding it was time to abandon hand drawn animation all together, which was further reinforced by Treasure Planet’s dismal run the following year.  It sadly also marked the end for Wise and Trousdale as a directing team.  Kirk Wise would stay on a bit longer at Disney before eventually going freelance, but Gary Trousdale would leave Disney not long after Atlantis’s theatrical run, ironically moving on to Dreamworks where he would direct Shrek holiday specials.  While the end of the Disney Renaissance era was always an inevitability, it is unfortunate that it also broke up one of the most celebrated teams of artists the studio had ever had as traditional animation was clearly seeing it’s days numbered in this new world order in animation.

But 25 years later, Atlantis: The Lost Empire has managed like a lot of other Disney misfits to find it’s audience over time.  Just like how one time box office failures such as The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) and Treasure Planet (2002) have been reassessed over the years and gained a devoted following by fans, Atlantis is also getting a cult following of it’s own.  One of the things it is being celebrated for is the fact that it is so unique in the Disney canon.  No other movie from the Disney Company looks the way this movie does, with it’s very comic book like style in the animation.  It’s also very different from the typical Disney formula; favoring action instead of musical numbers.  It was also only the second PG rated Disney animated film ever after The Black Cauldron, and it does earn that rating with it’s more violent action moments.  But, even despite having it’s own devoted fan base, there’s still no denying that it is a very flawed movie.  The plot is too condensed to ever work effectively and the movie needed a bit more trimming down of ideas and even characters in order to find it’s rhythm.  What we get is certainly ambitious, and at times quite beautiful, (especially in it’s “explosive” climax), it never truly gels together, and that’s truly a shame because it could have been something quite special.  There are certainly a lot worse Disney animated films, especially in the last days of the Renaissance era like Brother Bear (2003) and Home on the Range (2004), and as far as blown opportunities, it doesn’t miss the mark as badly as the movie Wish (2023).  But given all the ideas and ingredients that Disney had as their disposal during the making of Atlantis, the fact that they couldn’t get it all to come together with all the top tier talent involved is still a tragedy.  It’s a compromised film, squandering it’s potential due to the fact that it was made at a time when the animation industry was moving on to something else and it couldn’t keep up with the change.  There is still a lot to admire in the artistry though, and the fact that it is seeing renewed life as a cult film is encouraging.  As a movie, it is managing to stand the test of time and not becoming lost overall.  But the greatest tragedy about the film was the fact that it did spark the beginning of the end of one of the greatest traditions within animation, that being hand drawn art.  Only time will tell if that is as lost to time as the city of Atlantis itself.

Hollywood has gone through many different phases when it comes to finding new talent behind the camera.  The studio system that built up in the early days of cinema procured filmmakers through a apprenticeships and workshops, with people moving up the ladder from department to department much like any other factory system, albeit bound to the culture of the studio itself.  Then when the studio system collapsed in the 1950’s, the studios had to look to other systems of production to find a new crop of filmmakers.  This new generation was found in the field of television.  People who shot live television specials and newsreel pieces were now being tapped to bring their skills to the Hollywood movie machine, and they in turn changed the culture of cinema as a result.  The TV generation helped to ground cinema in way that felt grittier and truer to life that the movies that came before.  And out of this crop came the filmmaking mavericks that formed the New Hollywood.  But, it wouldn’t be the last significant generational change in Hollywood.  The rise of the film festival circuit, particularly the Sundance Film Festival, sought out films made by people who worked outside of the Hollywood system, telling stories that the studios would often steer away from because they didn’t have broad mass appeal.  As a result of spotlights placed on these films that otherwise would have been ignored by Hollywood, we saw the rise of the Independent Film Generation.  Out of this crop came unique voices like Quentin Tarantino, Gus Van Sant, Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, and Darren Aronofsky, all of whom would have a profound affect on the next generation of filmmakers.  Each of these different generations have passed on their knowledge of cinema to the next, but what profoundly separates them is the road in which they took to become successful filmmakers.  There is no single way to become a filmmaker, but there are oftentimes when new tides come into the industry and lifts up the boats of these individual talents who otherwise would have been ignored before.  And now, we are starting to see that tide turn once again.

What is different this time is that the rising tide is not coming from the world of cinema itself, but rather from the internet.  In particular, the video streaming platform YouTube.  YouTube has grown into this mass media marketplace that even rivals television itself, with user uploaded videos sometimes garnering millions and even billions of views over time.  While it’s safe to say that most of the videos on YouTube are no where near what anyone would call cinematic, there are quite a few content creators on the platform that have used YouTube to craft some truly unique and artistic videos.  What YouTube has done is that it has allowed aspiring filmmakers to have an outlet for their creativity and get it seen by the world.  YouTube has become a place to test out new techniques for filmmaking, without having to break the bank to work it into a movie.  On YouTube, people can use their channels to present their own work and procure their own audience; even allowing some of them to participate in projects through crowdsourcing.   And the larger the audience grows for some of these channels, the more places like Hollywood begins to take notice.  It’s not at all surprising that a lot of YouTube creators are now being asked to collaborate on bigger things, like commercials and music videos, because they were able to catch the attention of someone in the industry who wanted to take these experimental techniques and apply it to their own products.  But, for a long time, Hollywood had been keeping somewhat of a distance between itself and YouTube content creation.  These content creators certainly have their dedicated fanbases, but can they make their films appeal to mass audiences outside of the internet space and put butts in movie theaters.  For the YouTube generation, they had still yet to prove that their skills could translate to the big screen.  But that barrier seems to be finally coming down, as Hollywood is now giving movie deals to people who have come up through the YouTube pipeline.

There have been plenty of Youtubers that have made the transition to studio filmmaking before, but 2026 seems to be a truly banner year for them.  The reason for that is because the movies made by these filmmakers are suddenly gaining traction at the box office, meaning that they are no longer niche YouTube filmmakers, but actual crossover hit makers.  Two movies that have demonstrated this have released in the last month; the horror flicks Obsession (2026) and Backrooms (2026).  Now, the low risk high reward nature of horror filmmaking makes it a bit easier for filmmakers outside of the Hollywood system to suddenly generate a hit.  But, it’s the scale of the success of these two movies that really has Hollywood buzzing.  Obsession started off modestly at the box office, typical of most low budget horror movies.  But, what it did the following weekend made heads turn in the industry, as it grew it’s box office numbers into it’s second weekend; an unbelievable feat of a movie defying gravity and having a better second week of release than the first, even in direct competition with a Star Wars movie.  And then we have Backrooms, an A24 produced horror flick that is poised to have a massive opening weekend as of this writing.  A24 typically has never had a massive showing at the box office, with not a single one of their films having crossed the $100 million mark at the domestic box office, with only last year’s Marty Supreme (2025) coming the closest at around $90 million.  That is all set to change thanks to Backrooms, which is going to gross more in it’s opening weekend than over 80% of all of A24’s releases managed to make in their entire runs, and it’s easily going to blow past that $100 million threshold, shattering all records for the indie studio.  And this is all thanks to a pair of filmmakers in their early 20’s that cut their teeth making Creepypasta videos on YouTube.  Hollywood isn’t just finding new talent on YouTube; they are possibly finding the newest hitmakers that will transform the face of Hollywood for the next generation.

But, the types of filmmakers making the leap from YouTube to the big screen is not all uniform as you’d expect.  There’s a difference between YouTube talent, and people who make stuff to watch on YouTube.  Kane Parsons, the 20 year old filmmaker behind Backrooms for instance, is someone who made stuff for YouTube and was never public facing.  His YouTube channel, Kane Pixels, is a collection of filmmaking experiments that play upon the Creepypasta horror trope of liminal spaces.  He crafted videos centered around exploration of a space called the Backrooms, where the spaces are like empty rooms but the architectural style is just slightly off-kilter to the point where it makes the space feel unsettling.  In addition, the videos show that hallways connecting the rooms seemingly have no end, and there’s something lurking around in the shadows.  Kane’s video effectively used this style of creepy liminal spaces to generate a feeling of foreboding dread; like being stuck in a nightmare, which was enhanced further by the fact that the videos were from the first person perspective and often made to look like grainy found footage.  A lot of it is impressive because Kane was able to create these videos on his own through his own self taught skills as a visual effects artist.  The videos gained a viral following, and this helped Kane get the attention of people in the movie industry, namely A24.  Honestly, he’s a good match for the A24 house style, because his videos are very atmospheric in nature.  In Kane’s case, his big screen debut is an extension of what he was able to do on his YouTube channel.  Sometimes that transition can falter because it’s hard to take something that worked as a short internet video and make it work as a full length feature, but the results seemed to have worked out for both Kane and A24.  Kane brings his vision and A24 can help to enrich it with Oscar caliber talent involved like actors Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve.  But one of the main reasons why Kane Parsons managed to make that transition be a success is because he allowed his vision to be his calling card.

This is different for other types of YouTube creators, namely those who are more public facing.  The interesting thing about this Youtuber turned filmmaker class is that many of the ones who are now getting movie deals from Hollywood likely didn’t start out with that as a career path in mind.  This is true about gaming streamer Mark Fischbach, aka Markiplier.  His channel grew out of his popular gameplay streams, where he was often had very entertaining reactions to the games he was playing.  His most viral videos often were the ones where he had hilariously over the top reactions to scary moments in horror video games.  Given how successful he has been as a streamer, he probably would’ve been content just making that his sole career.  But instead, he decided he wanted to invest his earnings into and time into making a movie.  It wouldn’t be a movie version of his channel, but instead an adaptation of a game that he was fond of and wanted to bring to the big screen, with him working both in front and behind the camera.  The movie, Iron Lung (2026), was a sci-fi horror flick that wasn’t going to be cheap to make, but Markiplier believed in this project enough to use his own capital as a YouTube celebrity to get the movie funded and distributed.  This also likely helped the movie get a wide theatrical release, because there was enough internet buzz generated thanks to Markiplier’s fanbase to convince large chains like AMC and Regal to four wall the movie.  And it worked out.  Iron Lung managed to be a surprise hit, opening at #2 on it’s opening weekend.  The thing that probably helped Markiplier the most is that as a Youtuber, he’s also a personality that stands out and has managed to keep his audience entertained throughout the years.  And that public persona helped to generate a devoted following of fans who showed up to the movie theater to see his film.  The surprise box office for Iron Lung was probably not the result of the appeal of the movie itself, but because of Markiplier’s appeal to his fanbase.  They enjoy what he makes, and they were willing to give his transition into filmmaking a deserving look.

This doesn’t translate across the board however.  YouTube film critic Chris Stuckmann also made his recent directorial debut with the horror flick Shelby Oaks (2024).  In contrast with Markiplier, Stuckmann seemed to always have a career in filmmaking in the cards for him from the beginning.  As many aspiring filmmakers have done, Chris found a platform on on YouTube and grew an audience from there.  But he didn’t use his platform to make filmmaking experimentations.  He instead found his niche as a film critic, shooting most of his videos from the comforts of his home office studio, with him sharing his opinions about newly released films and shows directly to the camera.  Over time, he became one of the most frequently watched film critics on the platform with a 2 million subscriber fanbase.  But, along with being a person with an opinion about movies, he also wanted to be a maker of movies (don’t we all).  So, like Markiplier, he looked to his audience to help him with pursuing that passion.  He created a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund the movie, and to a lot of people’s surprise he managed to break a lot of records for a crowdfunded horror movie on the Kickstarter site, generating $1.3 million from over 14,000 backers.  This is what brought a lot of attention to Chris Stuckmann’s dream project, with the industry taking notice of Stuckmann’s impressive funding pull.  The only question is, would it work.  True to his word, Stuckmann poured every cent of the campaign into making the film, and he managed to get a distribution deal with indie studio Neon.  But, unlike Markiplier’s Iron Lung, Shelby Oaks wasn’t able to translate Stuckmann’s internet fame into strong box office.  Perhaps it’s because Stuckmann didn’t make himself the face of this project, using his celebrity to spotlight the film.  He purely worked behind the camera as the writer, producer and director.  Sure, he would talk about this film and promote it on his channel, but if you went to the cinema looking for a Chris Stuckmann film, there was nothing about the promotion surrounding the movie that really tied back to him as a YouTube personality.  Unfortunately for Stuckmann, the movie had a mediocre theatrical run, and Stuckmann has made no mention of a follow-up film in the future.  His YouTube career is still flourishing, but it’s too early to know if his filmmaking career will ever see a second act.

Whether these filmmakers are public facing people or no, what it does show is that YouTube is no longer looked at as a niche market for entertainment.  The people who create content for their audience on the platform are now demonstrating that they are capable of translating their talents into movie making as well. One thing that is benefitting a lot of these filmmakers right now is that a lot of them are self-taught and also self-funding their projects.  It’s a very DIY community of artists and performers , and that’s shaking up the order of how Hollywood trains their talent.  These are new filmmakers that can make things quick and cheap that can also connect with audiences.  It’s very much in that same spirit of the new crop of filmmakers that arose from the early days of television.  YouTube filmmakers know exactly how to work within limitations, and that mindset is helping them appeal to Hollywood.  Much like Roger Corman school of filmmaking, Youtubers are making the most of their limited resources, and breaking the rules of filmmaking in a way that actually benefits the artform because it shows a very hands on approach.  Sure, there are many slop channels on YouTube, where a lot of Youtubers just loads stuff on there for clicks, often aided with AI.  But, those are not the channels getting Hollywood’s attention.  It’s the hands on people like Kane Parsons, Markiplier, and Obsession’s Curry Baker that are generating the buzz in the industry.  Since YouTube has been competing with Hollywood for audience attention, Hollywood is now starting to look for ways to gain that attention back, and that’s by finding talent that can bring that same kind of energy in a way that is compatible with their business.  Remember, some of the Roger Corman alum turned out to be Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, James Cameron, and Joe Dante, and these were the ones who changed the culture of Hollywood.  We’ll see if that holds true for this generation of internet filmmakers, but there’s a pretty good chance that someday someone with a YouTube channel today will one day be an Oscar winning filmmaker of tomorrow.

As of right now, the YouTube generation is leaving their mark on the horror movie genre, which is the genre most receptive to innovation and change at the moment.  What is also striking is just how young these YouTube filmmakers are.  Kane Parson was born in 2005, the same year that YouTube launched.  He has never known a day where the platform has not existed, and it’s the platform that has quickly catapulted him to the top of Hollywood with a blockbuster hit.  Sure a lot of it has to do with luck, but Kane never set out to be a blockbuster filmmaker.  He started playing around with Blender and Adobe After Effects as a hobby, and he mixed that hobby with a fascination with liminal space horror and created videos that connected with people on the internet.  Now that hobby has turned into a career, and it all boils down to having a creative drive and the right kind of method to express it.  He created something unique, and it managed to gain traction on a platform that rewards things that go viral.  In the end, like with most filmmakers, it comes down to the talent of the filmmaker.  Kane Parsons and the other Youtubers who are currently breaking out in Hollywood now may not have all set out to become filmmakers, but they nevertheless had it in them.  YouTube just allowed them to have a platform to test out what they wanted to do, and have it seen by people, even in it’s rawest form.  Hollywood may get the wrong idea and think that any YouTuber can make a hit movie.  I dread the idea that there may be a Mr. Beast or Logan Paul movie in the future.  Hollywood needs to look at where the talent lies in the YouTube space and find the right kind of future filmmaker on the platform; the ones who want to tell good stories and express their art, and not be a spectacle of themselves.  We are seeing that come true this year, and it’s pleasing to see Hollywood starting to look outside of their bubble to find the next big thing in cinema.  It’s not just limited to horror filmmaking either, there are talented comedians, animators, and dramatists who are all using YouTube as a showcase for their craft and getting some well deserved attention for it too.  For an industry that has long been playing things too safe and sticking to long worn out brands to save them at the box office, the rise of YouTube is offering an alternative to the Hollywood dream machine that Tinseltown really needs to take notice of.  And if they find the right talent on the platform to help them make that leap forward, we might see a new re-shaping of Hollywood that can indeed be a benefit to all.

Here’s an interesting case study about how Hollywood, and in particular Academy voters, make their choices come Awards season.  It’s 1982 at the 54th Academy Awards.  It was a year that perfectly summed up the transition between old Hollywood and the new.  The movie On Golden Pond won two of the elder icons of the industry their final Oscar wins for Best Actor and Actress; the only one ever for Henry Fonda and the fourth for Kathrine Hepburn.  At the same time, one of Hollywood’s most celebrated new directors, Steven Spielberg, was enjoying his resurgence with the big hit Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), itself a nominee for Best Picture.  But if there was any film that looked like a certainty for the top award at that year’s ceremony, it was the epic historical drama Reds (1981).  Warren Beatty was a firmly established leading man by the time he Directed and Produced this movie biopic about American Communist John Reed and his chronicling of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, but his rise was certainly a by product of the shifting tide in Hollywood.  He was a representative of that transition in the industry, having started under the old Hollywood system and becoming a central figure of the new Hollywood that came up afterwards.  Reds was only his second film as a director after Heaven Can Wait (1978), and it was ambitious to say the least.  A sprawling 3 hour and 17 minute epic with an all star cast that included Beatty as well as Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson.  It was the kind of historical drama that Hollywood often fawns over, and it went into the Oscar season as a heavy favorite.  The movie picked up many Awards on Oscar night, including one for Warren Beatty for Best Director, though he lost out on Actor and Screenplay.  But, Best Director almost always indicates that Best Picture is in the bag as well.  But to everyone’s surprise, and perhaps most of all to Warren Beatty’s, Reds ended up losing Best Picture that year.  And the victor was one that few saw coming; a little British movie about Olympic track runners called Chariots of Fire (1981).

The loss of Best Picture for Reds may have made sense if a movie like On Golden Pond or even Raiders of the Lost Ark had gotten it instead, but Chariots of Fire?  When stacked up against these juggernaut films, Chariots seems trivial, and yet it managed to pull off the upset.  It’s not quite the most egregious upset in Oscar history; no Crash (2005) or Green Book (2018) here.  Chariots was a generally well liked movie by both critics and audiences alike, and that may have been key to it’s last minute victory.  There are a lot of political factors that go into play leading up to Oscar night.  There are Academy voters that certainly put a lot of thought into their selections, but there are also Academy voters that rarely see any of the nominated movies, and their choices are purely made on just vibes alone.  Sometimes, an Academy voters pick for Best Picture may have been the only nominated movie that they had seen that year.  It’s not necessarily about Academy voters being lazy; a lot of them are still actively working in the industry so it’s difficult to find the time to actually watch all the nominated movies.  So, to still be a participating Academy voter, a lot of them purely go by what their gut tells them, and this can sometimes go against what the prevailing winds say about who’s out in front in the race for Oscar.  There’s also the factor of the ranked choice voting system that is used to tally votes in the Best Picture race.  This is where things can get complicated, because Oscar favorites can rise and fall based on the consensus of how well they are liked by the voters.  However, the 1982 Oscars didn’t have that voting system in place.  Back then, it was a purely decided by popular vote, which made the upset all the more impressive.  But, why Chariots of Fire.  It was not a particularly huge success at the box office, and while it was liked by audiences it wasn’t exactly loved either.  Really, the only remarkable thing about it was the Vangelis musical score, with it’s groundbreaking use of electronic synth rhythms, which of course won an Oscar itself.  What helped to carry Chariots of Fire across the Oscar finish line more than anything was that it was a feel good movie, and that has indeed been a winning formula in most Oscar seasons.

Reds was an ambitiously assembled film with grand vision and a lot of passion.  There’s no denying that Warren Beatty did an amazing job directing the film and he certainly deserved that Oscar.  But, it’s a 3 hour epic with a tragic ending, the death of it’s main hero after a steep decline in both his health and well-being.  While Academy voters may be impressed with the technical aspects of the movie, they just don’t seem to want to sit through 3 hours if the endpoint is a tragedy.  Like regular audiences, Academy members like rousing stories of over-coming adversity, and that’s what Chariots of Fire represented.  It was not just a movie about overcoming prejudice, but also a sports flick about underdogs competing in the Olympics.  What it did, and what Reds failed to do, was leave the audience uplifted as the credits rolled.  Of course there was also the political environment at the time, with Warren Beatty’s unapologetic favorable portrayal of a Communist leader in American history perhaps not going over too well with Academy voters during the ultra conservative Reagan years.  Chariots of Fire, by being a safer, less political film made it a less controversial choice.  While this held true in the year 1982, it’s also been evident in many other years throughout Oscar history.  The Academy Awards are often more defined as a snapshot of each year on it’s road throughout history rather than a indicator of the direction of the industry as a whole.  Each year the studios submit what they think is their best shot at the Oscars and then those movies are up to a vote.  There are quite a few movies that indeed have withstood the test of time, and their Oscar wins are just another jewel in their crowns.  But there are plenty of Oscar wins that only make sense in the context of their respective years and have aged very poorly over time.  And the common thing that a lot of those Oscar wins that have aged poorly is that they were the safe choice.

Perhaps the most famous example of the Oscars missing the mark is the year when How Green Was My Valley (1941) beat out Citizen Kane (1941) for Best Picture.  One of the movies was a beautifully made drama from one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors, and the other would go on to be considered the Greatest American Movie of all time.  How Green Was My Valley had all the things that the Academy valued; John Ford behind the camera, lavish production values and heartfelt performances from established actors.  Orson Welles came into Hollywood as a bit of an outsider and he was using his film Citizen Kane to break down many long held traditions in filmmaking, as well as taking aim at some powerful targets.  It’s very well known that Welles based his Charles Foster Kane character after William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate and one of the most powerful men in the whole of America as well as in Hollywood.  On that Oscar night, a loss for Citizen Kane in the Best Picture category may not have been seen as that shocking given that Welles made a pretty powerful enemy with his unflattering parody of the vindictive Hearst.  But, through the arc of time, Citizen Kane‘s profile has only improved while How Green Was My Valley has been almost completely forgotten.  Safe choices don’t always pan out beyond their moment in time.  Over the years, the greatest movies manage to find their audience and it’s often because they were movies that took chances and moved the needle in Hollywood towards a different direction.  There are plenty of other times when movies with darker themes missed out on the Oscars and have gone on to become heralded as masterpieces; Vertigo (1958), Do the Right Thing (1989), and The Matrix (1999) to name a few.  They all had the disadvantage of being a little harsh for their time, but even if Academy voters turn a blind eye to them, the audiences will ultimately have the final say determining their place in history.

But even darker themed movies can somehow push through to win Best Picture at the Oscars.  It seems that the best way to do it is to be so good that your movie cannot be ignored, even if it is a bit of a downer.  One of the best examples of this is The Silence of the Lambs (1991).  The Jonathan Demme masterpiece managed to defy all expectations and sweep through the Oscars despite it’s dark and often grisly subject matter.  The Academy overlooked all that, even though there were more traditional and safer alternatives that year at the Oscars, like The Prince of Tides (1991), JFK (1991) and Beauty and the Beast (1991).  But Lambs managed to beat them all because it was just that good, and time has only proven the Academy right in their decision as the movie is still viewed as a masterpiece 35 years later.  And it’s a story involving cannibalism and torture where even after the case is solved, a mad serial killer is still on the loose by the end.  Sometimes these movies do luck out by running the table in a year with little competition, but great movies can still win at the Oscars even with uncompromising elements to their stories.  Sometimes a movie can win the Oscar with darker themes at it’s center if they do offer that little glimpse of hope at the end.  Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) is one of harshest movies ever put on screen with it’s unvarnished look at the horrors of the Holocaust, and yet it offers hope in the end through the inspiring story of how so many Jews’ lives were spared thanks to the efforts of the movie’s main subject, businessman Oskar Schindler.  Spielberg’s movie is a gut punch, but you don’t leave the movie feeling awful in the end.  Even a movie that ends on a downer, like Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) where it’s main character stresses over how he’s responsible for a nuclear arms race, still had enough moments of triumph beforehand that make the journey to that dark moment still feel worthwhile.  There are certainly these exceptions that prove it’s possible to win over the Academy even when your movie is not a pleasant watch all the way through and it seems that the only way it works is if the movie is exceptionally good.

But, it all depends on the mood of the Academy voters as well.  The voting body of the Academy is made up of mostly actors and also includes industry professionals as well as people of special distinction by the Academy. Just like any other election, campaigning is a crucial part of the process in voting for the Academy Awards.  This includes many different tactics like trade ads and special functions to draw awareness to a film, as well as Academy screenings throughout the season.  But, like I stated earlier, some Academy members don’t have the time to see everything, so they’ll sometimes vote based on vibes or defer to their friends and staff over what they think will be the right choice.  When the span of awareness is limited, what usually ends up happening is that the movie that has the most appeal to the broadest audience possible ends up winning in the end.  A great recent example was in 2022, when the “feel good” movie CODA (2021) picked up Best Picture over the more nihilistic The Power of the Dog (2021).  While objectively looking at both movies, The Power of the Dog was the more impressively assembled film, with great cinematography and standout performances delivering a monumental cinematic experience; but it was also bleak and unforgiving as well.  CODA on the other hand was very unassuming and low budget, but it had heart and warmth to it.  It’s not surprising that CODA appealed to an Academy that was in need of a pick-me-up after the harsh Covid lockdown year prior, though Power of the Dog’s Jane Campion still came away with a Directing Oscar.  When Academy voters are low on awareness of the movies to choose from, they often go with the movie that makes them the happiest.  It’s where the ranked choice voting works the most in favor of “Feel Good” movies.  It’s a voting body motivated by feelings more than by technical merits.  This can sometimes shed a light on some of the inherent biases found in the Academy too.  It was reported that a lot of Academy voters admitted to not having seen the movie 12 Years a Slave (2013), but they still voted for it as Best Picture because they felt it’s message was important.  They’re not wrong to feel that way, but they would’ve been better able to back up their claim of the movie’s importance if they had actually seen the movie and judged it on that.  Unfortunately, it’s that lack of insight that can sometimes cause the Academy to be out of lockstep with the rest of the audience when it comes to these movies.

So, looking at this year’s Academy Awards, does this “Feel Good” formula still apply.  As of this writing a couple weeks prior to the Academy Awards of 2026, the front-runner appears to be Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025).  It’s not too surprising, given that it’s not exactly a harsh movie to watch, often filled with enough levity to keep things entertaining throughout.  But, it’s also a movie that doesn’t pull it’s punches either, being shockingly prescient with today’s headlines involving authoritarian acts by the government and the everyday resistance that the citizens of this country are trying to enact to fight back against oppression.  It’s legacy over time will be interesting to watch, but for right now the movie is connecting at the right time by being a dark mirror of our current world.  But, even with it’s darker elements, it still has a story that comes across as a “feel good” one.  It’s a traditional good vs. evil storyline, where the bad guy loses and the good guys win, even if the larger backdrop of the movie’s setting still paints a bleak picture.  The micro, intimate main plot gives us that traditional story of triumph, as Leonardo DiCaprio’s father figure character does reunite with his daughter by movie’s end.  One Battle After Another seems unique in this way amidst the field it’s up against in the Best Picture race.  It’s main competition, Sinners (2025), has a lot of incredible moments in it, but it’s also a movie where all but one of the main characters is either dead at the end or turned into a vampire.  Movies like Sentimental Value (2025) and Hamnet (2025) spend most of their run times dealing with characters processing their grief.  And then there’s also Marty Supreme (2025), which is a story of triumph for the worst kind of person in the world.  From the looks of it, the odds favor One Battle After Another because it does come the closest to matching that “feel good” formula, but this race is still undecided for now.  In the end, it helps to be the most entertaining of the nominated films, because it leaves the best final impression.  It may not be a great indicator of how well the movie might age over time, but it certainly makes a difference when the choice needs to be made in the moment by Academy voters.

Movies by design are meant to be appealing; otherwise what’s the point in making them.  The best movies take risks, and sometimes that can be enough to gain the attention of the Academy voters when they are choosing Best Picture.  But most of the time, what matters in the moment is how this relatively small voting block feels while they watch a movie.  For some Academy members it’s what matters most.  Back in 2012, actor and singer Meat Loaf (who was an active Academy member with voting privileges) confessed that he voted for the Steven Spielberg movie War Horse (2011) for Best Picture purely because it was the movie that made him cry that year.  If that was the determining factor for him, then all the power to him; at least he voted for a movie he had watched.  But the bigger problem is disengagement from the voting members of the Academy, where they just go by vibes rather than making educated choices based on what they watched.  There may have been a variety of factors that could’ve contributed to Warren Beatty losing out on Best Picture to Chariots of Fire; his political stances, the entrenchment of old Hollywood in the Academy, the fact that Warren may have burned a few bridges over the years to get where he was at the time.  The judgement over time is that the Academy was ultimately making the safe choice that year and picked the least controversial film in the pack.  What Warren also represented (the outspoken voice of New Hollywood) also may have ruffled a few old time Academy members as well.  Thankfully, requirements for Academy membership has changed, and the Academy now has a broader, more diverse voting body than it did decades ago.  This has helped lead to more risk taking movies winning Best Picture, such as Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022) and Anora (2024), but even still, those were movies with that were crowd-pleasing in the end, with a lot of “feel good” elements.  Unless you are one of the best movies ever made, you’ll be all but forgotten if you don’t leave a positive impression on your audience.  Happy Academy voters are generous Academy voters, and in the nearly century long history of the Academy Awards, this has been the formula that has most often brought home the gold.

For generations, the Muppets have been entertaining audiences with their good natured and yet slightly chaotic sense of fun.  And the remarkable thing is just how broad their fanbase has become.  They are truly an audience of all ages pleaser, from grown ups to young toddlers.  For many of us, Generation X’s all the way to Gen Alpha, they have always been there as a part of growth as individuals.  We learn the ABC’s and 123’s from the likes of Big Bird and all of his friends on Sesame Street during our youngest years and eventually we grow up to appreciate the delightfully absurdist and subtly adult humor of the Muppet Show.  Kermit the Frog may be the most recognizable character to represent a whole brand across the whole world since Mickey Mouse.  And the Muppets can even count people like Elton John and Quentin Tarantino among their biggest fans.  But what has made these characters who are just puppets made of felt so beloved by so many.  The Muppets weren’t the first puppet characters to become household names.  Puppeteering has been an artform for centuries, going all the way back to the Punch and Judy days.  But what seems to have set the Muppets apart has been the way they are presented to us.  The men and women behind the Muppets are not just great puppeteers, they are also skilled in the art of filmmaking as well.  The Jim Henson Company has been just as instrumental over the years as Industrial Light and Magic and the Stan Winston Studio in changing the way that movies are made.  What started as just a place to build and craft new types of puppets has grown into a visual effects workshop where some of the most creative minds in the industry can experiment with new ways to make the impossible possible.  And yet, even with all the technical advancements that have been employed by the Jim Henson Company to create all their brilliant practical effects over the years, the Muppets which are still puppeteered by hand are still their most magical creations.

To understand the reason why this kind of “Muppet Filmmaking” is special, it helps to understand the man who made it all happen.  The company’s namesake, Jim Henson, was a true original creative genius.  Born in Mississippi and raised in Maryland, Henson always dreamed of becoming a filmmaker.  While in high school, he found a creative outlet in creating puppets and performing with them.  He attended many workshops over the years where he would meet other puppeteers that shared his interests, including a fortuitous meeting with a future collaborator named Frank Oz.  After college, Henson and his small band of fellow puppeteers created a short form comedy for a local Baltimore TV station called Sam and Friends.  The puppets in the show were very simplistic, often lacking in much detail and character, but one puppet modeled after a frog that Henson puppeteered himself managed to stand out from the rest.  The other Sam and Friends puppets faded into obscurity, but Kermit as he became known lived on and would become the catalyst for what was to follow.  In 1968, Jim Henson’s workshop was hired to develop puppets for the new public broadcasting show for children called Sesame Street, a show that took the nation by storm and quickly became a institution for young audiences everywhere.  All the while, Henson was developing more and more elaborate puppets, which by now were being called Muppets.  In 1976, Henson and his team were given a prime time slot on television with The Muppet Show, and it became his biggest breakout hit yet.  Not only was the Henson Company making it big with their success as puppeteers, but they were also doing so while take bold experimental swings with what they could do with puppets on television.  They weren’t just bringing puppets to life, they were making them feel alive.  On the Muppet Show and Sesame Street, the most magical trick that Henson and his team pulled off was to make you forget you were watching puppets at all.  The Muppets feel like real living characters and that’s largely due not just to how they are performed, but the way they are staged as well.

Jim Henson, surprisingly, never considered himself a family friendly entertainer.  It was never his ambition to make anything just for children.  He always saw himself more as an Avant Garde filmmaker; someone using the medium of film to experiment with the illusion of life.  And while we may view the Muppets as a mainstream entity today, what Henson saw with his popular characters was a way to do things in film that no one would have ever thought was possible.  After the success of The Muppet Show, Henson was granted his greatest wish which was to direct a feature film, naturally starring the Muppets.  The Muppet Movie (1979) may seem like a fun comedic romp starring Kermit and the gang, but when you take a step back and think about some of the scenes in the movie, especially those where the Muppets are out in the real world, you start to realize just how experimental the film acutally was.  It’s simple things like Kermit and Fozzie the Bear driving around in a car that you don’t think are out of the ordinary until you realize they had to rig a car to drive on it’s own just so they could fit Jim Henson and Frank Oz into the front of the car to make it look like the Muppet characters are really driving.  There are many other incredible illusions found throughout the film, including in the opening shot where Kermit sits on a log in a real swamp playing his banjo, which involved Jim Henson cramming himself tightly into a hidden submersible that they then placed into swamp water so it would leave Jim hidden from view.  But perhaps the most mind-blowing sequence that the Henson Company ever put into one of their movies was in 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper, where the Muppets all ride bicycles through a park.  This sequence baffled visual effects experts for years wondering how they managed to get Muppets to look like they are really riding bicycles.  It was revealed that there was a hidden marionette rig just out of frame that helped to create the illusion, but it’s just another great example of how the Jim Henson Workshop was taking both filmmaking and puppeteering and elevating both artforms at the same time.

But the Henson Company wasn’t just keeping these tricks strictly in house either.  They were gladly aiding other filmmakers in developing more imaginative worlds for the big screen.  They worked on movies like The Witches (1990) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), creating creatures that could believably exist in the real world, while still being entirely out of this world at the same time.  Perhaps the strongest example of just how well the Jim Henson team’s talents had grown over the years was found in the galaxy far, far away known as the world of Star Wars.  While Star Wars creator George Lucas was getting help from many different visual effects companies from all over the industry, he saved a very special assignment for Henson and his crew.  In the second film of the trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas created this important new character called Yoda; a centuries old, diminitive alien creature who would end up training the hero of the story, Luke Skywalker.  It would’ve been impossible to cast any human actor in the role, so he knew that he had to turn to puppeteers to bring Yoda to life.  And who better to turn to than the greatest workshop for lifelike puppets in the entire world.  Yoda would be a lot different than the other Muppets.  Instead of felt, he would be made of foam and plastic, with highly detailed features sculpted into his face so that he would feel more lifelike.  To bring him to life, Frank Oz would be doing the honors of giving Yoda voice and movement.  The results were beyond successful, as Frank Oz and the Jim Henson artists proved that their Muppet characters could not only hold their own acting opposite human characters, but that it was also possible to have them give dramatic performances as well.  Yoda’s even sharing the screen with an acting titan like Alec Guiness and he still doesn’t feel out of place.  George Lucas tried and failed to campaign for an Oscar nomination for Frank Oz’s performance as Yoda, but regardless of a nomination or not, the creation of the character proved just how far the artform had progressed to where an acting nomination didn’t seem like too much of a stretch for a Muppet character.

One of the key things that really helps to make these characters come alive is the way real human actors interact with them.   It’s not just the case with Yoda holding his own with his Star Wars co-stars.  The collection of Muppet films over the years also demonstrates many different examples where the human actors truly make you believe that talking directly to a puppet is completely ordinary.  It’s honestly not a difficult thing to do, because the Jim Henson puppeteers are so good at their craft that they can bring the illusion of life easily into these characters just through personality alone.  There are so many examples you can find through interviews and special appearances made by the Muppets over the years where your eye is drawn directly towards the character and not at the performer puppeteering them, even when they are visible too.  These puppeteers just know how to make these felt creations feel alive in front of you and that’s helpful for the actor on the opposite end.  It’s easy to see how The Muppets have attracted so many talented people to appear beside them in both the Muppet Show series and in their films.  Sometimes, you even get performances from the human actors in the movie that actually shine through beyond what is called for in a movie where Muppets are their co-stars.  Some of the most special cases are Charles Grodin’s hilariously over the top villainous role in The Great Muppet Caper, as well as Michael Caine’s surprisingly straight forward performance as Ebenezer Scrooge in Muppet Christmas Carol (1993).  The fact that Caine’s performance as Scrooge would feel right at home in any other serious adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic novel is all the more remarkable when he’s acting opposite Kermit the Frog.  It’s always a great thing that these Muppet movies have human actors that are selling the illusion alongside their puppet co-stars.  Keeping the artiface up only helps to make us see these characters as genuinely alive, and it’s remarkable how well that translates even into the real world.

Unfortunately, many films today don’t seem to try as hard in making the impossible feel real like these Jim Henson enhanced movies have over the years.  When Henson died suddenly in 1990 at the age of 53, he left a big hole in the world of visual effects.  No one quite had the same intuitive ability to think of ways of doing things differently the way he did.  A large reason why the Henson Company is now a part of the larger Walt Disney Company today is because Henson agreed to have them operate the management of his company while he would continue doing the things he loved the most, which was crafting in his workshop.  He wanted to create bold new things, and having the responsibility to run a company was getting in the way of that.  Sadly as a result of his absence, the industry began to move away from his workshop’s very DIY method of filmmaking.  One of the big things that changed was the advancements in computer generated imagery, which unfortunately was making the need for handcrafted puppetry obsolete in the creation of fantastical creautres on screen.  Ironically, it was a filmmaker who helped to give them one of their big breaks that was also leading the change that would hasten their downfall.  When he decided to create his prequel trilogy to the original run of Star Wars, George Lucas didn’t return to the Henson company to have them craft new and imaginative alien Muppets to populate his film.  Instead, he had his team rely heavily on CGI, including with the creation of characters in the film.  Jar Jar Binks would be a break through creation in character animation through computer animation, and sadly even Yoda would be given a CG make-over in the series (albeit still voiced by Frank Oz.  Now, Jim Henson was never opposed to embracing new technology to help improve the work that his team was doing.  In fact, Henson was already starting to experiment with a new rigging system that would allow him to animate a CGI character by hand the same way he would do with a puppet in something they called Project Waldo.  However, the only time this experiment was ever used was in Jim Henson’s last ever project before he died; the Muppet Vision 3D attraction found at the Disney Hollywood Studios at Disney World.

Since then, the need for these felt puppets in live action films began to wane, as CGI was giving filmmakers better and more lifelike results.  Even still, the Muppets never truly went away.  Sesame Street still provides valuable educational entertainment to young children even after being on public broadcasting for over 50 years.  The Muppets have also continued to make movies over the years, though many of them don’t have the same high quality as the ones that came out during Jim Henson’s time.  And though they keep trying, the Walt Disney Company doesn’t to know quite what to do with the Muppets that are now under their control.  They’ve tried to reboot the characters in many different ways, but audience interest seems to have waned considerably.  There really hasn’t been an adequate replacement at the Jim Henson Workshop since the sudden loss of Jim Henson himself.  Frank Oz had already left the workshop to pursue his own career as a film director and Jim’s son Brian didn’t last very long at the time top before leaving to pursue other things as well.  It also didn’t help that Henson’s hand-picked successor to play Kermit after him, Steve Whitmire, was fired by Disney due to toxic workplace complaints leveled against him by Workshop staff.  The Jim Henson Company has been in search of an identity in the years since Jim’s death, and sadly it has led to a long decline where the their influence in the world of visual effects has considerably waned.  And yet, there is still an appetite for Muppet related content.  The visual wonder of the movies made by Jim Henson during the 1980’s, including his more mature films like The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986) have a strong nostalgic value, especailly as more and more people are getting bored with what CGI has been offering us lately.  And who knows what will happed to the Muppets in the AI era of visual effects. What really made the Jim Henson visual effects stand out is the fact that so much of the creativity comes through in the construction of the visuals.  Unlike other movies today, the Henson visual effects team are building things that are tangible and present in front of the camera. And that’s what’s getting audiences more interested again in the practice of Muppet Filmmaking; the fact that what we are seeing is present in the scene itself, even when it’s a talking Frog or Pig.

There are strong signs that some filmmakers want to bring back more physical effects into their movies.  And when your movie or show is filled with alien style creatures, the Henson Company  has a proven history in delivering on that.  This was definitely evident in parts of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, with J.J. Abrams incorporating many puppeteered aliens to fill out his scenes in The Force Awakens (2015), and Rian Johnson bringing back the non-CGI, Muppet version of Yoda in The Last Jedi (2017).  Sticking with the practical effect of having a Muppet style puppet in Star Wars properties, the popular Mandalorian series also won over many audiences with the introduction of Grogu (aka Baby Yoda), a true fully puppeteered character just like the original Yoda.  But the real test of the future will be whether the Muppets manage to survive the shifting sands of the movie industry.  As a counter balance to the rise of AI, more and more people are valuing the things that are tangible and real in their consumption of media, and the Muppets fit right into that.  Even as AI media generation improves, the appeal of the hand-crafted Muppets is enough to help boost it’s profile into a whole new generation of audiences.  One would hope it’s not just the characters themselves that are gaining popular traction with audiences; that the inventive thinking that enabled the Jim Henson company to take bold artistic risks also spills over into the general visual effects field as well.  There’s a reason why the original Muppet projects like the Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island still hold up and it’s not just the characters alone.  Jim Henson knew that audiences needed to be dazzled by visuals often never achieved before by special effects.  Muppet Filmmaking may be undervalued at the moment by the industry, but audiences are coming to realize it’s value, and it is shifting movie studios towards considering more practical approaches to creating imaginative special effects without the aid of computers.  Regardless of the shifting priorities in Hollywood, we know that there are still enough people out there who have been raised their whole lives with the Muppets being an especially fond part of our childhood memories.  Tmes will change, but there will always be a place in our culture  for Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear and Gonzo to keep us looking for that rainbow connection.

It’s been only a couple of months into this back and forth battle between two media titans in Hollywood over the ownership of another media titan.  After declaring it’s intent on taking ownership of Warner Brothers last fall, the new Paramount media empire under the leadership of Skydance opened up a pandoras box that may likely change the make-up of Hollywood and movie-making in general forever.  Paramount’s intentions were ambitious, but ultimately they found themselves out maneuvered by Netflix, which put in the more lucrative bid for Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslev.  Netflix’s intentions were to bid as high as Paramount was in their first pitch, but say that they only were looking into buying the parts of Warner Brothers that weren’t connected to television broadcasting.  Since the merger with Discovery Networks in 2022, Warner Brothers has struggled to keep their massive media empire in top form, so they were looking to re-split the company up and sell each part for profit to new owners.  Warner Brothers would retain it’s movie production infrastructure, it’s studio lot, and it’s legendary library, while Discovery would be bundled together with all of the cable channel assets that Warner Brothers already held, such as networks like TBS and TNT, as well as the new channel CNN.  Paramount’s new owners, the Ellison family who had created Skydance Entertainment, were intent on collecting the entire package of both Warner Brothers and Discovery, but Netflix’s very huge offer to buy just the WB side of the business perhaps may have put Paramount out of reach.  They may still be able to purchase the spun off Discovery side, which will be worth significantly less, but from the actions that the Ellison family has taken in the wake of their dismissed offer indicates that they are still intent on winning the entire thing.

David Ellison, the new CEO of Paramount Skydance, and son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, escalated things pretty heatedly by trying to circumvent David Zaslev’s agreement with Netflix, and go directly to the Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders in what is known in the business world as a hostile takeover.  But there’s still the flaw in their overall plan as they try to appeal to the shareholders with new bids to buy out the company with an assessment that still falls short of the value that Netflix has put on the Warner Brothers side of the business alone.  As it currently stands, Warner Brothers shareholders seem to be backing Zaslev’s plan to split the company up and secure two profitable sales instead of just the one.  Paramount may soon try to double up their offer if they truly want to gain the whole thing, but by that point, they may put themselves so deep in a debt hole that it could thwart any long term plans they have in building up their business.  This is the same situation that Disney has found itself in after they bought (and some would say overpaid) 20th Century Fox.  Disney beat out Comcast for the ownership of the legendary movie studio, but the cost was so high that it has put Disney into a debt whole that they’ve been trying hard to dig themselves out of.  Disney isn’t suffering too much, but having to deal with Covid on top of paying down the debt they accumulated from the acquisition of Fox led to many severe cut back over the last decade, and it’s led to a loss in quality control with many of their properties like Star Wars and Marvel.  Also, they own the massive Fox library of movies and shows, and have barely done anything with it.  Eventually things will be sorted out at Disney, and signs have recently shown that they are balancing out already for the studio, but it was after years of cost cutting, layoffs, and damage to the brand.  Whoever ends up getting Warner Brothers in the end will likely have to deal with some of the same problems, and it’s a symptom of one of the larger problems facing the industry as a whole, which is the trend of media consolidation negatively affecting the artform of movie-making.

Much like the banks, communications, and airlines, Hollywood is an industry that has fallen into the trend of consolidation as a means of generating profits for shareholders at the expense of the consumers.  This isn’t something new to the business however.  Movie studios have risen and fallen, and sometimes it was the regulating power of the government that had to step in to make the movie studios play more fair.  Ironically, one of the biggest regulatory smackdowns that affected Hollywood for years also involved Paramount Pictures.  The Paramount Decision delivered by the Supreme Court in 1948 broke up the monopoly that movie studios had over distribution in the early years of cinema.  Before the decision, the studios owned the movie theaters that their films played in, meaning that they had completely control over the programming.  It was great for the Studio system, but bad for the consumer, because depending on the market, your access to the movies would be limited by who owned the theaters in your area.  It also shut out independent theater owners from having access to movies that were in high demand.  So, recognizing that the movie studios wielded too much power over the access to the movies they made, the Supreme Court broke up their monopolies, which in turn led to the rise of the movie theater industry that ran independently from the studios.  This led to new exhibition innovations over the years that would in turn help to revolutionize Hollywood, such as the creation of multiplexes and large formats like IMAX being used for blockbuster films.  Had the Paramount Decision not been laid down, cinema would be very different today, and likely wouldn’t have proliferated like it had and become consumer driven.  For an industry to survive, it needs competition, and the more of it the better.  Monopolies only end up stifling innovation, because when fewer and fewer companies own a giant percentage in the market, they have less incentive to make changes that lead to improvement in their industries.

Unfortunately over the years, the regulatory restraints that helped to keep Hollywood in a competitive nature for a while have lessened, and we are seeing a renewed push to consolidate our media landscape again so that more power is in the hands of fewer people.  One of the biggest moves that has caused this in recent years is the rise in streaming.  Streaming offered Hollywood a new way of distributing their products; one which faced fewer regulatory restrictions than distributing through movie theaters and home video.  Netflix jumped on board this new technology early and it has grown them to such a level that they are now making a play to buy a big chunk of the old Hollywood with Warner Brothers.  All the other studios tried to jump in to compete, but Netflix has still managed to outpace them all.  Unfortunately, it’s all coming at a cost, with the movie theater industry suffering a significant reduction in revenue as they have had to adjust in this new streaming dominated environment.  In many ways, Netflix and streaming’s rise in general is Hollywood’s way of clawing back some of that monopoly like power they had before the Paramount Decision was thrust on them.  And indeed, the Paramount Decision has been defanged over the years, to the point where it no longer is enforced.  Movie studios have been able to own individual theaters across the country in years past, such as Disney buying up the El Capitan and Netflix buying Grauman’s Egyptian Theater (both in Hollywood), but in the last couple years we saw one major studio buy up an entire chain of theaters when Sony Pictures became the new owners of Alamo Drafthouse.  On the plus side, an institution as beloved as the Alamo Drafthouse has been save from bankruptcy, but on the other hand, they are now beholden to a mega corporation like Sony.  Is it possible that we might see more studios buying up more theater chains.  Alamo Drafthouse doesn’t quite have the same reach as say Regal or AMC, but it’s not that far off to think of a media conglomeration like Apple or Amazon buying up those chains just like Sony did.

That’s the other big fear being cast over Hollywood; the groups that are coming in to buy up these legacy studios.  It’s not unusual for the big Hollywood studios to have been part of some larger conglomerate.  At one point, Paramount Pictures was owned by an oil company called Gulf+Western, and this was during a time when Paramount was experiencing it’s Golden Age in the 60’s and 70’s, with movies like The Godfather (1972) coming from their studio.  Warner Brothers at one point was owned by AT&T and Columbia Pictures of course is now just referred to as Sony Pictures.  Out of all the major movie studios in Hollywood, only one has managed to retain it’s own independence throughout it’s whole history, and that’s Disney, which in a way has become a conglomerate in it’s own right.  One way or another, Hollywood has done what it need to do to keep the showbiz rolling along, including many of it’s most storied studios having to sell to outside interests.  The only hope that we can get from this shuffling around of ownership in Hollywood is that the studios themselves will manage to maintain an identity through all of it and still deliver for audiences.  Gulf+Western managed to succeed with Paramount during it’s time because they had someone like Robert Evans in charge of production; a guy who could pick all the right films to make.  But, when a bad leadership team is in place, one that usually is put in by a corporation that doesn’t know how to run a movie studio, it leads to some disastrous results.  A major reason why Warner Brothers is in the position of being bought out now is because of poor management in the past, especially after the disastrous launch and re-branding of HBO Max and the Project Popcorn initiative that saw them suffer heavy financial losses.  But bad management alone is not the only worry.  A lot of the new suitors that are trying to consolidate power in Hollywood are making changes that will fundamentally change Hollywood, and not always for the better.

Coming back to Paramount Skydance again, there are some troubling signs about what might happen to both Paramount and Warner Brothers if both were to come under the control of the Ellisons.  Larry Ellison is a major figure in the world of big tech, and one of his most recent business ventures has been to invest heavily in the field of AI.  This has boosted his net worth making him one of the richest men in the world as his Oracle data centers and cloud services have been instrumental in building the rise in AI.  And with his son David now calling the shots at Paramount, it’s very possible that AI is going to be integrated into the productivity of that studio to a very invasive degree.  It’s something that we are already seeing being played out at another massive data driven company that also now owns a legacy studio.  Amazon became the owners of MGM 2021, which itself was already a heavily diminished brand from it’s heyday, and in the years since people have noticed that they’re movie output has leaned very heavily on Amazon product placement.  The notorious straight to streaming remake of War of the Worlds (2025) was ridiculed heavily for it’s shameless incorporation of Amazon branded products, but it doesn’t just stop at the things we buy off their website.  Amazon is also a web hosting platform for much of the internet, and they are very much trying to jump on that AI bandwagon.  Their most recent action film release, Mercy (2026) starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson, is just straight up pro-AI propaganda, and that is a tad bit concerning.  It’s also very sad given that it’s an MGM release, further tarnishing that legendary brand.  At this moment, we don’t know what the Ellisons may end up doing with Paramount because they have only just started there.  And it’s not a good sign when David Ellison’s first action as a studio head is to aggressively pursue the acquisition of another studio.  He should honestly prove himself at Paramount first before we think he would do a good job of running Warner Brothers as well.  The meddling from Larry Ellison is also not a great bode of confidence, given his shady ties with fellow financers.

Netflix being the other top contender isn’t ideal either.  If their streaming business model were to be applied to a studio like Warner Brothers, it would be Armageddon for the movie theater and home video industries.  Netflix Productions CEO Ted Serandos has publicly put it out there that he would honor the same theatrical window that Warner Brothers already has for all their future projects, but what guarantee do we have that he’ll keep that promise?  Netflix is also another mega corporation that’s built on collecting data, and they are not opposed to incorporating more AI technology into their platform.  One of the more disturbing ideas that has been floated around with regards to places like Netflix and Paramount is a thing called User Generated Content.  The movie studios basically want to turn their streaming platforms into another YouTube space, with more of the platform being devoted to short videos made with AI to boost the content available on their platforms.  It’s one of the reasons why Disney allowed OpenAI to use their IP characters for their video generating AI software Sora.  Disney at some point wants to host these AI videos on their streaming platform, creating more user engagement similar to the traffic that YouTube sees on a regular basis.  Unfortunately, it minimizes what makes streaming worthwhile in the first place, which is to have movie and TV shows on demand.  By turning these platforms into YouTube clones, with lower quality AI videos as their main draw, it continues to devalue media in general.  It’s already bad enough that movies and shows have been reduced to being called content.  Now they’ll have to compete for attention with AI shorts, which by the way the users on the platform will never be able to own for themselves, because these streaming giants will own all the rights.  That’s one of the disturbing realities of tech companies starting to move in an take over Hollywood.  It’s a further erosion of the things that made movies special.  You just know that this AI driven stuff is what will be boosted by the algorithms, and the movies that were made by hand and employed hundreds of people are going to be push into obscurity.

In any case, the most immediate problem is that Hollywood is going to feel a lot smaller.  No matter who ends up with it, Warner Brothers will no longer be independent, and it may end up loosing it’s identity in the process, like how 20th Century Fox has now just become 20th Century Studios, a subsidiary of the Disney Company.  Every time there is one of these consolidations in Hollywood, it makes it all the harder to get anything made because one more buyer has been taken out of the market.  But, it’s something that can’t be stopped at this point.  By law, Warner Brothers must be sold to the highest bidder in order to please their shareholders.  The fact that such a transaction is so insanely expensive that only the biggest corporations in the world would have the kind of capital to make it happen is itself another troubling aspect of all this.  More and more money is in fewer hands these days, and the ones with the kind of capital to buy a legendary, 100 year old studio like Warner Brothers are also the ones with not the greatest intentions for running a studio the way it should be run.  A lot of these acquisitions usually leads to a loss over time in the original studio’s identity.  MGM is a shell of it’s former self, and Amazon is not exactly helping to restore it to glory.  We don’t even know how Paramount will be under the Ellisons because all they’ve done is try to buy more of the pie that is Hollywood.  Netflix could have kept growing to become a competitor with all the other major studios, but instead they’re using their capital to move into a legacy studio.  In the end, whoever gets Warner Brothers will then have ownership of one of the greatest movie libraries in Hollywood, if not the greatest one.  But the cost will be severe for the industry, as many people will be laid off due to redundancies and the competition between studios will be reduced.  Like I said before, industries see better innovation when there is competition.  When the number of studios in Hollywood is reduced by one, we get less needs from those remaining studios to improve on their own output.  Eventually, prices will rise while the “content” becomes less appealing, because there is less care put into them.  That push for User Generated Content is one of the most troubling new trends, though hopefully the failure of Quibi showed that consumers are not interested in paying premium prices for short form content.  It’s up to us the consumer to keep the standards up with our demands of the studios, and let’s hope that we’ll make our demands heard depending on who ends up with Warner Brothers in the end, because that’s what a studio with it’s great legacy of making our lives better with it’s movies deserves.