I believe there are films you can see at home and films that should be seen on a big screen.

I do not mean only the obvious spectacles with enormous budgets, collapsing cities and sound systems that shake the fillings in your teeth. Some films need a big screen because they require your full attention. Some need a room filled with other people. Some become different films when there is nowhere to look but forward.

And some films should reach us before the world has had a chance to make us cynical.

I believe every child should see Pollyanna on a big screen before the age of 12. Not because it is quaint or nostalgic, but because there is something important about watching a child insist that the world can be approached with hope. That message lands differently in a dark theater, when you are sitting among strangers and nobody can pause the film to check a text.

That is what I thought about when I read that AMC Theatres is launching Leawood Films, (Great piece, Hollywood Reporter) a new distribution company, intended to bring more small and mid-budget films into theaters.

AMC has announced that there are too many empty movie screens and too many worthwhile films that never reach them.

Independent movie houses might be forgiven for responding, “Yes. We know.”

They have been making that argument for years, usually while operating on perilously small margins and doing the painstaking work of persuading people to leave their homes, silence their phones and take a chance on a film they may never have heard of.

Now the largest movie theater company in the world has discovered that smaller films may be part of the answer to the industry’s empty seats.

Leawood Films will concentrate on movies that might otherwise have difficulty finding theatrical distribution. AMC will not finance productions or develop scripts. Filmmakers must arrive with their financing secured or their films already completed.

What AMC will offer is what independent filmmakers often have the greatest difficulty obtaining: access to screens, distribution expertise and marketing power.

Leawood Films also intends to distribute its movies beyond AMC theaters, working with other exhibitors in the United States and internationally. AMC says filmmakers will generally retain ownership of their intellectual property and most of the revenue generated after the theatrical release.

Those are meaningful promises. They could allow films that might otherwise disappear into the endless streaming scroll to have an actual theatrical life.

The first Leawood films are not expected until 2027 or 2028, so there is plenty we do not know. We do not know which films AMC will select, how many screens they will receive, how long they will remain in theaters or what will happen when one of them does not sell enough tickets during its first weekend.

Hollywood has been known to discover its devotion to artistic filmmaking right up until the moment something more profitable needs the screen.

Still, this announcement matters.

AMC is not doing this as an act of charity. The company says quite plainly that the movie theater industry has substantial excess capacity. In less elegant language, it has screens sitting empty and needs more films to put on them.

That does not make the venture cynical. It makes it a business decision. And perhaps that is more significant.

The largest exhibitor in the world has concluded that smaller films are not simply cultural garnish to be admired during awards season. They may be part of the economic future of theatrical exhibition.

Independent movie houses should pay very close attention because AMC has just validated the business they have been in all along.

But validation is not protection.

AMC has thousands of screens, national marketing reach, enormous customer databases, subscription programs and the ability to give a film significant placement almost immediately.

Independent film houses have something else.

They know their audiences.

They know which documentary will fill the theater on a Tuesday night because the subject matters to their community. They know when a filmmaker should be invited for a conversation, which local organization should become a partner and which film needs to be given more than three days to find its audience.

They also understand that the film itself does not have to be the entire event.

I often create film series with small independent theaters. We might show The Silence of the Lambs, for example, but it does not begin and end with turning on the projector. I introduce the film beforehand. Afterward, I give an hour-long presentation about what happened behind the scenes, how the film was made and why it works. Then, of course, there is a conversation.

The audience has not simply watched The Silence of the Lambs. It has spent an evening inside the film.

There is so much more that independent theaters could do with that idea.

A theater could program films every child should see before turning 12. It could build a series around films that changed how women were portrayed, films that were misunderstood when they were released, films made in a particular community or films that predicted the world we now inhabit. It could pair movies with historians, actors, psychologists, musicians, authors and people who understand the subject from entirely unexpected directions.

It could show a classic film to three generations of the same family and then let them argue about it in the lobby.

That is not something streaming can reproduce. Streaming delivers a film to your house. A movie theater can create a shared experience around it.

This is where independent theaters have an advantage that AMC cannot automatically acquire through size.

AMC can put a smaller film on hundreds of screens. It cannot make people care about it. Scale can deliver availability. It cannot guarantee connection.

Independent theaters build that connection every day. They curate rather than simply schedule. They create conversations around films. They introduce audiences to filmmakers and filmmakers to audiences. At their best, they are not merely places where movies are shown. They are part of the cultural infrastructure of their communities.

Independent theaters should not greet Leawood Films by congratulating themselves and returning to business as usual. They have a window before the first films are released, and they should use it.

They should be talking to AMC now about becoming exhibition partners. They should be speaking to one another about regional alliances that could offer filmmakers meaningful reach without sacrificing local knowledge. They should be collecting the evidence that shows how their memberships, events, discussions and community partnerships help smaller films find and sustain audiences.

Most importantly, they should make the case that independent films need independent exhibitors, not merely available screens.

Leawood Films could become an important new route into theaters for filmmakers who have financing and a completed film but no conventional distributor willing to take the chance. Independent movie houses could be essential to making those releases work, especially in communities where a national advertising campaign cannot substitute for local trust.

Or they could wait until AMC has designed the entire system and then accept whatever role they are offered.

I would not recommend waiting.

For years, independent theaters have been told that audiences only want sequels, superheroes, familiar franchises and something they can watch while eating popcorn from a container large enough to require its own seat.

The survival of independent movie houses has always suggested otherwise.

Now AMC is suggesting otherwise too.

That is good news for filmmakers. It may be good news for moviegoers. Whether it becomes good news for independent theaters will depend on whether they recognize this announcement for what it is.

It is not simply AMC entering the independent film business.

It is an opportunity for independent movie houses to remind all of us that what happens around a film can be every bit as important as what happens on the screen.

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My podcast, Screen Thoughts, just dropped my review of The Drama. If you did not see it, do. And, if you did, would love your feedback …

Zendaya and Robert Pattinson play a couple preparing to get married when a confession from her past changes everything. The film then moves into deeply disturbing territory, confronting a planned school shooting and the way people respond when someone’s worst act, or even the intention to commit it, becomes the only thing they can see.

Audiences and critics panned the film, in part because they arrived expecting a quirky romance and instead found themselves watching something dark, painful and profoundly unsettling. The marketing was not merely misleading. It put the film in front of the wrong audience with completely false expectations, then left the film to absorb the backlash.

Much discussion about why The Drama deserves a place on your dance card. They talk about Zendaya’s extraordinary sadness and desperation, Robert Pattinson’s remarkable performance, including one unforgettable scene in which he dances alone in an apartment, and Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli’s outsider’s view of America’s relationship with gun violence.

They also consider why the industry no longer seems to know how to market a film that refuses to fit neatly into one genre, how trailers have begun giving away far too much and why a difficult film should not be dismissed simply because it makes us uncomfortable.

“If you’ll notice, women don’t method act because we have things to take care of, so we can’t completely lose our minds.”

It’s a great line.

Except Natalie Portman said essentially the same thing two years earlier. She called Method acting “a luxury that women can’t afford.” Portman explained that she could never imagine coming home to her children and partner and insisting they call her Jackie Kennedy.

Two extraordinarily successful women. Different generations. Same observation.

And that made me wonder why they needed to say it at all.

First, the premise isn’t quite true. Women do Method act.

Marilyn Monroe studied at the Actors Studio. So did Jane Fonda, Geraldine Page, Shelley Winters, Anne Bancroft and Ellen Burstyn. Sally Field trained with Lee Strasberg and has been quite unequivocal about it.

“I am a Method actor.”

There is enough history here that film scholar Keri Walsh wrote an entire book, Women, Method Acting, and the Hollywood Film, arguing that women have largely been written out of the history of a technique they helped develop.

So Anya Taylor-Joy is wrong about women not Method acting.

But I don’t think she’s wrong about the sentence underneath that sentence.

We have things to take care of.

That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.

Because Taylor-Joy didn’t explain what the “things” were.

She didn’t have to.

There is plenty of research showing that women continue to perform more unpaid household and caregiving work than men. But I think this goes beyond who does the laundry or remembers the dentist appointment.

It is about who feels permitted to disappear.

And I had just finished watching Taylor-Joy in Lucky, which makes her comment even more interesting to me.

Talk about disappearing into a role.

Every expression. Every pause. Every physical movement. Watching her felt almost like watching a choreographed dance. Nothing seemed accidental, and yet nothing felt performed. The control was extraordinary.

Whatever her method is, somebody should get the instruction manual.

Method acting has developed a mythology around the actor who becomes so consumed by the work that ordinary rules temporarily cease to apply. He stays in character between takes. His body changes. His habits change. His family adjusts. The crew adjusts. Other actors adjust. Sometimes everyone around him becomes a supporting player not only in the movie, but in his process of making the movie.

And somehow we turned that into evidence of artistic seriousness.

What makes Taylor-Joy’s comment particularly interesting is that she wasn’t only talking about responsibilities at home. She talked about the hundreds of people involved in making a movie and said she feels a responsibility to be good to them and help them do their best work.

In other words, even while disappearing into a character, she remains aware of everyone else in the room.

And that’s where the women who actually practiced the Method become fascinating.

Sally Field has always worked this way. She has always gone deeply into character and tried to remain there between takes.

What she hadn’t always had was a production built to accommodate it.

Then she made Lincoln with Daniel Day-Lewis.

Day-Lewis’s immersive process is legendary. He prepares for months, sometimes far longer, and remains inside the character throughout production. It has become part of the mythology surrounding him as one of the greatest actors of his generation. On Lincoln, Steven Spielberg created an environment that protected that immersion.

And Sally Field got to work inside it too.

She called it “nirvana.”

That word suddenly feels important. Because Sally Field hadn’t changed her method. The circumstances around her method had changed.

Daniel Day-Lewis’s immersion was something worth building around. Sally Field’s immersion was something she had learned to manage quietly on her own. And I can’t help wondering what would have happened if it had been the other way around.

If Sally Field had arrived requiring the production to protect her immersion into Mary Todd Lincoln, would it have become part of the legend of Sally Field’s artistic genius?

Or would somebody have called her a prima donna?

Watch her speak about Method Acting in Lincoln and Norma Rae.

Jane Fonda studied with Strasberg and has described herself as “Method-ish.” During They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, she became so immersed in the character that she partly lived on the set and in her dressing room. She has talked about loving the feeling of disappearing into a character.

Ellen Burstyn, another Strasberg student who eventually became co-president of the Actors Studio, complicates the story further. She has argued that much of what we now casually call Method acting isn’t the Method at all. Staying in character twenty-four hours a day isn’t the Method. Extreme behavior isn’t the Method. Making everybody else accommodate your character isn’t the Method.

The Method is about making imaginary circumstances psychologically and physically real to the actor.

Which leaves me wondering whether we’ve been asking the wrong question. Maybe the difference isn’t whether men and women are capable of losing themselves in their work. Of course women are.

Maybe the difference is what happens around them when we do.

Is a man consumed by his work more likely to be called brilliant and uncompromising while a woman behaving exactly the same way risks being called difficult? Is the ability to disappear partly dependent on knowing that somebody else will keep everything functioning while you’re gone? And when women do disappear, have they learned to do it without expecting the world around them to disappear too?

I don’t know. And perhaps that’s why this piece needs an expiration date. I think I’ll put a note on my calendar to revisit it in ten years. God willing. Not to see whether women are Method acting. They always have.

I want to see whether, by then, someone has built the room for them.

Thirty-five writers worked on The Flintstones.

Think about that for a minute. Thirty-five people writing, rewriting, pitching, punching up and trying to figure out how to turn a television cartoon into a movie. Only three ultimately received screenplay credit, and the fight over who deserved those credits became so complicated that it helped change the Writers Guild arbitration process.

Rick Moranis later joked that it was “one of those scripts that had about 18 writers.” He was undercounting by almost half.

And after all of that writing, critics pretty much agreed on one thing. The script was terrible.

Which is rather remarkable when you consider everything else that went into the 1994 Flintstones. Steven Spielberg produced it, wonderfully crediting himself as Steven Spielrock. John Goodman was Fred. Rick Moranis was Barney. Elizabeth Perkins was Wilma. Rosie O’Donnell was Betty. Halle Berry was Miss Stone. Kyle MacLachlan was the villain. Elizabeth Taylor came out of retirement to play Wilma’s mother in what would become her final theatrical film.

Universal built Bedrock in the California desert. Not a couple of sets. Bedrock. Houses, streets, businesses, the quarry, the cars, the animal appliances. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and Industrial Light & Magic helped create the prehistoric world. They reportedly spent about $46 million making the movie, which was a lot of money in 1994.

And audiences came. The Flintstones made roughly $340 million worldwide.

So what exactly went wrong?

I think the answer starts more than 30 years earlier, because The Flintstones wasn’t just another cartoon. It premiered in 1960 in prime time. Friday nights at 8:30. It wasn’t Saturday morning television designed to keep children occupied while their parents slept. Adults watched it. Families watched it. It was the first animated television series to hold a prime-time slot.

And it was essentially a sitcom.

Fred went to work. He had a boss. He wanted more money. He bowled. He belonged to a lodge. He fought with his best friend. He adored his wife while regularly lying to her about something stupid. Wilma generally figured it out before Fred had made it very far into the lie. Barney and Betty lived next door and were part of almost everything.

It was The Honeymooners with dinosaurs.

And we loved it. Name a better cartoon from that period. I’ll wait.

That matters because more than 30 years later, the people who got the chance to make The Flintstones weren’t simply adapting an old piece of intellectual property somebody had pulled out of a studio vault. They were making something they had grown up watching.

They weren’t being handed characters. They were being handed memories.

And I think that may be where everything started to go wrong.

Director Brian Levant was a huge Flintstones fan himself, and when the screenplay wasn’t working, he did something that actually makes enormous sense. He went back to television.

Brian Levant had come out of television, and he assembled writers who knew how to write television comedy, including people who had worked on Happy Days, Family Ties and Laverne & Shirley. They sat around a table. People pitched jokes. Someone topped the joke. Someone rewrote a scene. Someone else came in and took another shot at it.

Brian Levant reportedly described what they were making as a “sitcom on steroids.”

And there it is.

Because The Flintstones television show was a sitcom.

The problem is that a movie isn’t a sitcom on steroids. It’s a movie.

The writers’ room is one of television’s great inventions. It makes enormous sense when you’re producing episode after episode under relentless deadlines. Someone pitches the premise. Someone finds the joke. Someone tops it. Someone fixes Act Two. Twenty-two minutes later, Fred has learned whatever Fred is going to learn, Wilma has forgiven him, Barney is still his best friend and everyone comes back next week.

That rhythm was perfect for The Flintstones.

A movie asks something different of its story. We have to stay with these people for 90 minutes. Something has to build. Characters have to move. The story has to take us somewhere. A joke can be passed around a table until somebody makes it funnier. A point of view is much harder to pass around.

And one of the writers who worked on the movie essentially said exactly that afterward. Jim Jennewein argued that movies and television were different crafts and that a movie comedy still needed a unifying voice.

Thirty-five writers weren’t necessarily collaboration. They may have been evidence that nobody could figure out what movie they were actually trying to make.

Because I don’t think they were really trying to make a movie.

I think they were trying to recreate the feeling of watching The Flintstones.

Look at how painstakingly they reproduced everything. Bedrock. The cars. Dino. The appliances that were animals. Fred sliding down the dinosaur at quitting time. Even Fred’s “Twinkle Toes” bowling mattered because people remembered it.

They were preserving memories.

And they did that part extraordinarily well.

Which brings me to Rosie O’Donnell.

I have seen Rosie O’Donnell introduce herself as Betty Rubble from The Flintstones. And every time I’ve heard her do it, I’ve wondered why.

Betty Rubble? Really?

You were Doris Murphy in A League of Their Own. You were in Sleepless in Seattle. You had one of the biggest talk shows in America. You have an enormous body of work to choose from, and when you reach into that bag to tell us who you are, you choose Betty Rubble?

But the more I thought about this movie, the more I thought about Rosie O’Donnell as a little girl.

Her mother died of breast cancer when Rosie O’Donnell was 10. She has talked publicly about the enormous hole that left in her life and the difficulty of what came afterward. I have no idea what The Flintstones specifically meant to her as a child, and I wouldn’t pretend that I do.

But I know what was on the television.

Betty Rubble lived in a remarkably safe little world. She had Barney. Wilma was next door. Eventually Betty and Barney adopted Bamm-Bamm and became parents. The same people were always there. Husbands went to work and came home. Best friends remained best friends. Families ate together. Whatever disaster Fred created was generally fixed before the credits rolled, and everybody would be back again next week.

Maybe Betty Rubble isn’t such a strange way for Rosie O’Donnell to introduce herself after all.

And maybe that’s the clue to understanding why Hollywood approached The Flintstones the way it did.

These people weren’t nostalgic for a television program. They were nostalgic for how that television program made them feel.

There is a difference.

The original Flintstones wasn’t really about dinosaurs. It was about us. Fred Flintstone was a mid-century American husband who happened to drive a car with his feet. Wilma was a mid-century American wife who was usually three steps ahead of him. Fred and Barney’s friendship was recognizable. So were Wilma and Betty. So was work. So was marriage. So was money. So was envy. So was wanting a little more than you had and discovering that you had been pretty lucky all along.

The Stone Age was the joke.

Contemporary American life underneath it was the reason the joke worked.

And by 1994, contemporary American life had changed. Marriage had changed. Women had changed. Work had changed. Television had changed. Comedy had changed. The children who watched Fred and Wilma in 1960 were now the adults making the movie.

But instead of asking what Fred and Wilma would mean now, Hollywood seems to have asked how accurately it could rebuild what they had meant then.

And wow, did they rebuild it.

They got the car right. They got Dino right. They got the quarry right. They got the clothes right. They got the houses right. They assembled an extraordinary cast. They brought in television writers because television writers had created the kind of comedy they remembered. And when that didn’t quite work, they brought in more writers.

And more writers.

Until approximately 35 people had worked on a screenplay that almost nobody thought was very good.

The irony is that commercially, at least initially, it worked. The movie made roughly $340 million worldwide. Nostalgia got us through the door.

Then Hollywood tried it again.

The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas arrived six years later with another enormous budget and made less than $60 million worldwide.

Apparently there was only so much Bedrock we needed.

Usually when an adaptation goes wrong, we accuse the people making it of not understanding or respecting the source material. I think The Flintstones may be interesting because exactly the opposite happened.

They understood it. They respected it. They remembered it, and they absolutely loved it.

Maybe too much.

Because they spent $46 million meticulously rebuilding the thing they remembered instead of figuring out what had made them remember it in the first place. -CM

Thanks to for the post on Threads which inspired my five into the script…

Something happened in Hollywood in 2024 that should have been a turning point. For the first time in the 18 years that USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative had been tracking the 100 highest-grossing movies, women and girls achieved parity as leads and co-leads. More than half of the biggest films of the year had a woman or girl at the center.

Then came 2025, and Hollywood went backward. Only 39 of the 100 top-grossing films featured a woman or girl as a lead or co-lead. Only nine of 111 directors were women, 8.1 percent and a seven-year low. Just six were women of color. Not one of the 100 films featured a woman of color over 45 in a leading or co-leading role.

Women directors were essentially back where they had been in 2008. That is not slow progress. That is progress followed by retreat. And I want to know why.

The easiest explanation is sexism. Hollywood has historically been controlled by men. Men hire men. Men tell stories about men. Women have had to fight for access. All true. But it is no longer a sufficient explanation because we now have too much evidence.

Hollywood has been running this experiment for years, and the results keep coming back the same. Women can make movies. Audiences will watch stories about women. Those movies can be critically and commercially successful. And women are an enormous part of the audience buying what Hollywood sells.

USC’s research has found that when the other important variables are accounted for, films with female leads do not perform significantly differently at the box office from films with male leads. What predicts financial performance much more strongly are things such as production budget, marketing, number of theaters and the strength of the story. In other words, the problem isn’t that Hollywood tried women and discovered they weren’t profitable.

Reese Witherspoon Should Have Changed Everything

Reese Witherspoon may be the most important piece of this story because she didn’t write an op-ed demanding that Hollywood give women more opportunities. She built the proof herself.

After years as one of the most recognizable actresses in the world, including winning an Academy Award, she found herself looking at the roles being offered to women and asking a fairly basic question. Where are the good stories?

She has described going on what she called a listening tour of the studios, asking executives what they had in development with women at the center. The answer, essentially, was almost nothing. At least one executive told her that the studio had already made its movie about a woman and couldn’t make another one that year.

Think about that. It wasn’t that a particular movie wasn’t commercially viable or that the studio didn’t like the script. They had filled the woman slot.

So Witherspoon stopped waiting. She helped build what became Hello Sunshine around a ridiculously simple proposition. Put women at the center of stories. Then she proceeded to demonstrate that this wasn’t charity. It was business.

Big Little Lies, The Morning Show, Little Fires Everywhere and Where the Crawdads Sing followed. Reese’s Book Club became its own extraordinarily powerful engine for discovering stories, creating audiences for them and turning intellectual property into film and television projects. Hello Sunshine built an entire ecosystem around something Hollywood had somehow continued treating as a niche. Women.

Then came the number Hollywood supposedly understands better than anything else. In 2021, a Blackstone-backed media company purchased a majority stake in Hello Sunshine in a transaction that valued the company at roughly $900 million.

You would think $900 million would settle the argument. Women aren’t a worthy demographic Hollywood occasionally needs to remember. They’re a market. Women’s stories aren’t some cultural obligation. They’re intellectual property. Putting women at the center isn’t merely the right thing to do. It can be extremely good business.

Blackstone itself described female-focused content as a historically underserved market. That’s business language, not feminist language. So why, five years after a company built around serving that market was valued at approximately $900 million, are we talking about women directors falling back to 2008 levels?

That’s where this gets interesting.

Maybe Reese Didn’t Prove Hollywood Had Changed

Maybe she proved exactly the opposite. Look at what Witherspoon had to do. She didn’t simply get handed a $150 million franchise and told, “We believe in you.” She had to become the infrastructure.

She had to find the books, build the audience, acquire and develop the stories, produce them, create the brand and build the community. She had to demonstrate that women would show up, advertisers wanted them, streamers wanted the programming and the stories could win awards. Then she had to demonstrate that the company itself had enormous financial value.

That’s an astonishing accomplishment, but there’s something a little infuriating about it too. How much proof were women supposed to provide? And why didn’t that proof change the larger system?

There are other women who have built their own powerful production structures. Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap comes immediately to mind. Women increasingly discovered that one way to gain power in Hollywood was to stop waiting for the existing system to give it to them and start producing their own material.

That is real progress, but it is different from institutional change. There is a huge difference between Hollywood saying women can build successful companies outside its traditional power structure and Hollywood changing whom it instinctively trusts with its own money. That distinction may explain a lot.

Hollywood’s Definition of Safe

Movies are expensive, and the largest theatrical movies are extraordinarily expensive. When an industry becomes frightened, it tends to become conservative. Not politically conservative. Institutionally conservative.

Who has done this before? Who has directed a movie this big before? Who has handled action? Who has worked with this studio? Who has delivered a franchise? Who is already on the list?

Every one of those questions sounds perfectly reasonable. Together, they can create a nearly perfect system for preserving the past. If men historically received the opportunities to direct enormous movies, then men are disproportionately the people who can answer yes when somebody asks, “Have you ever directed an enormous movie?”

USC has been documenting this cycle for years. Women directors have historically been much more likely to be “one and done” in top-grossing films, while successful male directors receive repeated opportunities. Men have also been overwhelmingly more likely to be hired in lucrative action, science-fiction and thriller genres. The disparity becomes particularly striking as the money gets bigger.

Research following filmmakers from Sundance into commercial filmmaking found that women were perfectly capable of getting distribution, but their movies were more likely to be handled by independent distributors with fewer resources. At the highest levels of theatrical distribution, male directors dramatically outnumbered women. USC called what happens as women move toward commercial filmmaking a “fiscal cliff.”

That’s the connective tissue. You can’t prove you can handle the big movie until somebody gives you the big movie. Somebody is reluctant to give you the big movie because you haven’t already handled the big movie. Meanwhile, the man who already got one gets another. Experience becomes the justification for creating more experience.

Then Hollywood Got Scared

The timing matters. The entertainment business has been going through a painful contraction. Streaming economics changed. Production slowed. Companies cut costs. Jobs disappeared. Studios became increasingly anxious about what could still get people into movie theaters.

USC was already warning in 2024 that the industry’s contraction appeared to be affecting inclusion. At the same time, DEI became a political and legal battleground. Corporate America began backing away from programs associated with it, and Hollywood was not immune. USC’s 2025 report specifically described DEI efforts in entertainment as increasingly under attack amid lawsuits, political pressure and corporate retreat.

Here is the possibility I can’t get past. When Hollywood feels safe, it experiments. When Hollywood gets scared, it goes back to what it thinks is safe. And Hollywood still appears to think safe looks like a man.

That would help explain why progress can happen and then disappear. Perhaps we confused changed behavior with changed belief. For a period of time, studios were being pushed to look beyond their usual lists. Advocacy organizations were watching. Inclusion initiatives existed. Executives were being asked questions they hadn’t traditionally been asked.

Who else are you considering? Where are the women? Where are the women of color? Have you expanded the list?

The numbers moved, but USC itself warned after the apparent breakthrough that the gains looked sporadic rather than systemic. Its researchers argued that without evidence-based strategies, progress would continue to be uneven. They were right.

Take away some of that pressure while simultaneously increasing the financial fear, and Hollywood’s muscle memory takes over. The old lists come back. The people who have “done it before” come back. Because the people who have historically done it before are overwhelmingly men, yesterday starts reproducing itself. Again.

Except There’s a Problem With the Risk Argument

The numbers don’t support it. That may be the most maddening part. Hollywood behaves as though male-centered films and male filmmakers are financially safer, but research doesn’t demonstrate that simply having a man at the center produces superior economics.

USC examined 1,200 films and found that once production, marketing, distribution and other factors were considered, films with female leads or co-leads didn’t perform significantly differently from those with male leads. Hollywood may be responding to financial uncertainty with a risk calculation based partly on an assumption the evidence doesn’t support.

And it gets worse. Movies with women and underrepresented people at the center have historically received smaller budgets, less marketing support and narrower distribution. Then we look at the resulting box office and ask whether audiences wanted them.

Really?

Give two runners different shoes, different training, different starting positions and different distances to run, and then declare that the finishing times tell us which runner had more potential. They don’t. They tell us what happened after we made a series of decisions about each runner.

And Then There’s Age

One number from the 2025 findings should stop us cold. Not one top-grossing movie featured a woman of color age 45 or older in a leading or co-leading role.

That isn’t simply a diversity statistic. It tells us something about whose life Hollywood believes deserves to occupy the center of a story. Men are allowed to age into authority. They become presidents, detectives, assassins, CEOs, judges, generals, professors, fathers, villains, lovers, geniuses and deeply complicated, screwed-up human beings.

Women still have a much shorter runway, and women of color have an even shorter one. This matters because representation isn’t just about counting bodies on a screen. Stories tell us who matters, who gets desire, who gets ambition, who gets to make mistakes, who gets another chapter, who gets to be complicated, who gets to be seen and who disappears.

Follow the Decision Upstream

This brings me to where I think we have been looking in the wrong place. Every year we count women directors, women protagonists, women writers and women of color. Those numbers matter, but maybe we should start counting something else.

Who chose them?

Directors don’t hire themselves. Actors don’t greenlight themselves. A movie doesn’t wake up one morning and decide its protagonist will be a 58-year-old woman. Somebody makes that decision.

Somebody approves the budget. Somebody decides which project gets $150 million and which gets $15 million. Somebody decides which director has enough experience and which movie gets 4,000 screens. Somebody decides how much money gets spent telling us we absolutely must see it. Somebody decides which failure is forgivable and which failure proves that an entire category of people was a bad bet.

That is where I want to look. If women have demonstrated that they can create commercially successful movies, female-centered stories have demonstrated that they can attract audiences, women directors have demonstrated that they can make critically successful films, and Reese Witherspoon can build a company centered explicitly around women and have it valued at roughly $900 million, then lack of evidence is no longer the problem.

We have the evidence.

Reese Witherspoon Built the Proof. Hollywood Still Hasn’t Learned the Lesson.

That may be the real significance of Reese Witherspoon. Hello Sunshine wasn’t merely a successful production company. It was a controlled experiment conducted right in front of Hollywood.

Witherspoon looked at something the industry considered a limitation and saw a market failure. Hollywood said there weren’t enough stories about women, so she found them. Hollywood behaved as though audiences wouldn’t support them, so she built an audience. Hollywood treated women-centered entertainment as a niche, so she built a company around it. The market eventually put an approximately $900 million valuation on that company.

Yet here we are. Eight-point-one percent of the directors of 2025’s biggest films were women. That makes Reese Witherspoon’s success more than an inspirational story. It makes it an indictment.

The question can no longer be whether women can do this. They have. It can’t be whether audiences will watch. They do. It can’t be whether stories about women can make money. They can. And it certainly can’t be where the proof is. Reese Witherspoon built the proof.

Perhaps the question we should finally be asking Hollywood is a much less comfortable one. How much proof does a woman have to provide before you stop treating a man as the safer bet?

Maybe the great Hollywood inclusion experiment of the last decade has revealed something we didn’t expect. Hollywood knows women can make money. It knows audiences will watch women, women can direct, women’s stories sell and there is an enormous underserved market waiting for more of them.

The information changed. The evidence changed. The audience changed. The economics changed. But when Hollywood gets scared, the person it trusts with the money still looks remarkably like the person it trusted before any of that changed.

That may be why 2025 matters. It didn’t prove that Hollywood can’t change. 2024 already proved that it can. 2025 showed us how quickly it changes back.

********************************

I’ve been a film and streaming critic for more than 15 years and am the host of the successful Screen Thoughts podcast, where we review film and streaming through a lens that pays particular attention to women, both on the screen and behind it.

In the latest episode, I take on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, a film I believe is a masterpiece despite one casting decision I simply cannot forgive. Listen here. - Christine Merser

The Odyssey…. Is it a success? That depends on what you were looking for when The Odyssey started rolling.

Different people came to this film expecting very different things. Emily Wilson, whose translation helped inspire Christopher Nolan to take it on, was looking for something quite different from film aficionados. Christine was looking for an education in the Classics she never got—and didn’t realize mattered until she saw the film.

And Wilder? She is all in, but with thoughtful commentary on everything from the production to Nolan’s approach to the original poem.

Then there’s the casting. Christine will tell you there is no way Matt Damon should have played Odysseus. But you may be surprised by who she thinks should have.

So climb aboard. This may not be Homer’s Odyssey, or even Nolan’s. It’s ours now.

OK. You no longer need to be ashamed to admit that you have watched the same television series over and over and over again.

I will go first.

I have probably watched The West Wing in its entirety 15 times.

There are 156 episodes of The West Wing. That means I have watched approximately 2,340 episodes of Jed Bartlet and company.

Let’s absolutely not calculate the hours I’ve spent doing this. There is research, and then there is information one simply does not need to have.

But here’s the good news.

Apparently, I wasn’t wasting my time.

I was regulating my nervous system.

At least that’s what I’m going with.

I recently came across some research about the neuropsychology of repetitive viewing, particularly sitcoms and familiar television shows, and it sent me down a rabbit hole. Because this isn’t just someone on Instagram telling us that watching Friends for the 11th time is “self-care.”

Researchers have actually studied this.

Psychologist Jaye Derrick studied what happens when people return to what she calls “familiar fictional worlds.” Her research found that after people had exerted significant self-control, they were more likely to seek out a familiar fictional world, like a favorite television show. Even more interesting, spending time in that familiar world appeared to help restore them. The social nature of those fictional worlds seemed to be part of what was doing the work.

In other words, our relationships with fictional people may not be quite as fictional as I thought.

Think about it.

When I turn on The West Wing, I know President Bartlet is going to be smarter than almost everyone in the room. I know Josh is going to be Josh. I know C.J. is going to walk down a hallway at a speed that would put me in traction. And I know that whatever national catastrophe has occurred will probably be handled before I go to bed.

There’s comfort in that.

Especially in these times, when I find absolutely zero comfort in the President of the United States. In fact, I’m terrified. So yes, watching Jed Bartlet sit behind the Resolute desk calms me.

I know he’s fictional.

My brain apparently doesn’t care as much about that distinction as I thought it did.

And suddenly those 2,340 episodes look a little less like an alarming inability to find something new to watch and a little more like self-preservation.

But then I found a number that stopped me.

During 2020, Americans watched more than 57 billion minutes of The Office.

Fifty-seven BILLION.

And remember when this was happening. COVID. Lockdowns. Fear. Isolation. Nobody knew what was coming next.

And apparently, when the actual world became terrifying, millions of Americans did not collectively say, “Please introduce me to some challenging new characters.”

We went back to Michael Scott.

Nielsen itself made essentially this observation when it looked at what Americans streamed in 2020. The biggest streaming programs weren’t simply shiny new originals. Older television series dominated, and Nielsen described library shows as the programs people return to for comfort because they are already known to us and we have established relationships with them.

Fifty-seven billion minutes.

That’s not a few people rewatching a favorite sitcom.

That’s a behavior.

And that got me thinking about Hollywood.

Because maybe one of the most valuable things Hollywood owns isn’t intellectual property.

Maybe it’s our history with that intellectual property.

Take And Just Like That...

I watched it even though, in my opinion, it wasn’t within a thousand miles of Sex and the City.

Why?

Carrie.

Miranda.

Charlotte.

The apartment.

The shoes.

Big.

And certainly Samantha, whose absence may have demonstrated the point better than anything else. We knew she was supposed to be there. It was like someone had removed a family member from Thanksgiving and expected everyone to politely eat the turkey without mentioning the empty chair.

HBO didn’t have to introduce these women to us.

We arrived with decades invested in them.

And here’s the data point I love.

When And Just Like That... premiered, the original Sex and the City suddenly jumped 59 percent in viewing on HBO Max in a single week.

Think about that. Carrie came back. And we went looking for the old Carrie.

Maybe we wanted to remember. Maybe we wanted to compare. Maybe the new show triggered the desire to return to the familiar fictional world we already loved.

Whatever the reason, we went back. That’s an extraordinary advantage.

We talk endlessly about Hollywood’s obsession with sequels, reboots and franchises, usually as evidence that Hollywood has run out of ideas.

And sometimes I’m sure it has. But maybe there is something much more interesting happening.

What if familiarity itself has value? Not just marketing value.

Emotional value.

A studio doesn’t simply own Sex and the City. It owns the ability to unlock memories and feelings millions of us have attached to Sex and the City.

That is a very different asset.

And once I started thinking about that, I started thinking about Netflix.

Because Netflix and the other streamers have spent years training us to believe that dropping all eight episodes of a series at once is a gift.

Here you go.

Eight episodes. Have at it. Cancel your weekend. Order Chinese food. We’ll see you Sunday. But what if that’s actually not the smartest way to build a television show that lasts?

And again, there’s data.

A large randomized field experiment involving approximately 84,000 streaming viewers over five weeks compared people who received episodes gradually with people who could get them all at once.

The gradual release changed the way people behaved. It led to greater engagement with the platform and higher subscription retention. The researchers concluded that gradual releases could be significantly more valuable to streaming platforms than simply handing viewers the entire season at once.

Eighty-four thousand people.

That’s not me sitting on my couch theorizing about Netflix.

Which makes me wonder whether streaming has spent billions of dollars perfecting the wrong measurement.

Because television used to have something streaming has largely eliminated. Waiting. We watched an episode on Thursday and then we had to wait an entire week. Remember that?

During that week, we talked about it. We wondered about it. We argued about it. We thought about what was going to happen next. We missed the characters. Ten episodes weren’t simply ten hours of entertainment. They occupied ten weeks of our lives.

Which makes me wonder whether the streamers have confused consumption with connection.

They’ve become extraordinarily good at getting us to finish things. But have they made it harder for us to fall in love with them? Be committed to the characters? You cannot manufacture nostalgia in a weekend.

And nostalgia is worth a fortune.

Twenty years after Sex and the City, nobody had to persuade me to care about Carrie Bradshaw. Put Sarah Jessica Parker in those shoes, tell me Carrie is back and I’m at least going to take a look.

I showed up.

But here’s where Hollywood needs to be careful. Showing up and staying committed are not the same thing.

Familiarity may get me through the door. It does not give you permission to serve me crap once I’m inside.

And Just Like That... could borrow my affection for Sex and the City long enough to get me to press PLAY.

It couldn’t automatically inherit it. You still have to make something good. And that may be where this gets really interesting for both streaming and film.

Movies have a harder job. Unless you’re making the 47th installment of an established franchise, you’ve got about two hours to introduce me to strangers and make me care whether they live, die, fall in love or save the world.

Television used to have years to do that. Now streaming is trying to compress the relationship. Watch eight episodes this weekend. And, the weekend after that, and the weekend after that.

Something is gained in that model. But maybe something enormous has been lost.

Time.

The time it takes for characters to move from people we watch to people we know. And here’s the number I keep coming back to.

57 billion minutes.

During one of the most frightening periods most of us had ever lived through, Americans spent 57 billion minutes with a sitcom that had already ended seven years earlier.

Maybe that wasn’t because there was nothing new to watch. Maybe we didn’t want new. Maybe we wanted familiar.

Hollywood keeps talking about franchises, libraries, intellectual property, subscriber retention and engagement.

I think they may be overlooking the most valuable asset they have.

Us.

More specifically, our memories.

The show you watched during a divorce. The movie you saw on your first date with someone. The sitcom your family watched together. The series you discovered during COVID. The character you turn to on a night when the actual world feels like more than you want to deal with.

Or the fictional president you turn to when the real one terrifies you. That’s not just content. That’s history. Our history. Hollywood has figured out that, years later, it can sell our history back to us.

The question is whether it understands how that history got created in the first place. Because perhaps the lesson isn’t simply that we like familiar things. Perhaps it’s that stories need time with us to become familiar things.

Which means Netflix may want to think twice before handing me eight episodes on Friday and congratulating itself when I’m finished by Sunday.

You got eight hours of my attention.

The West Wing got 2,340 episodes of my life.

And apparently, my nervous system would like another one.

One of the things I’ve learned over the last decade of my ever-too-fast-moving life is that two things can be true at the same time, even when they seem completely dissonant.

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a masterpiece. Nope, not up for debate right now. He also cast the wrong man as Odysseus, which, let’s face it, should take the film out of contention as a masterpiece.

Matt Damon is America’s hero. For thirty years, his films have trained us to see him a certain way. Whether he’s Jason Bourne, the astronaut stranded on Mars, the soldier we have to save, or the genius kid from South Boston who has a soul, Matt Damon almost always represents decency. We don’t just watch him. We bring decades of history with us into the theater.

Odysseus is the wrong character for that actor.

Odysseus is not a hero, at least not in the way Americans understand the word. He lies. He deceives. He repeatedly violates Zeus’s law of xenia. He cheats on Penelope despite claiming she’s the reason he’s desperate to get home. And when he finally arrives home, he slaughters more than a hundred men.

That isn’t a redemption story. It’s the story of a deeply flawed man whose brilliance and corruption exist side by side.

I never stopped seeing Matt Damon, which is why the casting didn’t work. And because the sound, not the dialogue, was apparently meant to increase the need for hearing aids in the U.S.A., Damon couldn’t course-correct through dialogue. You have to see the film numerous times before you can actually hear enough to let the dialogue take you there.

I have another theory too. Because Chris and I don’t brush each other’s hair and talk about our inner feelings, I can’t be sure, but I suspect he cast Damon because he knew Damon’s almost childlike need to have Chris pick him, choose him, love him would mean he’d endure whatever abuse was necessary to give Nolan exactly what he wanted. Nolan makes films like no one else because he’s willing to sacrifice every known form of human comfort to make sure a green screen never appears. Maybe his fear that another actor wouldn’t be able, or willing to go the distance is precisely why he chose Damon.

Christopher Nolan Americanized The Odyssey to teach us a few lessons? Americans like heroes. We like redemption. We like happy endings. We want to believe that if someone suffers enough, learns enough, and endures enough, he becomes a better person.

Nolan has Odysseus sailing into the setting sun to teach us all the lessons he never really learned. After all, who suffers through the evils of war, spends twenty years trying to get home, and then celebrates his return by slaughtering an entire room of men who never had a prayer of protecting themselves? If the journey was supposed to teach Odysseus anything, the ending tells us he didn’t learn it. But those of us sitting in the theater could still sigh with relief as Odysseus and Penelope sailed into the setting sun, surely on their way below deck to have passionate sex, together again in a love we were never shown had any reason to survive what it did.

It’s not the story Homer wrote. Homer wrote something far more unsettling.

The journey doesn’t redeem Odysseus. It reveals him.

Let’s end this part of my ranting about casting and inappropriate happy endings with this last bit around casting. It would be like casting Tom Hanks as Donald Trump. No matter how accomplished the performance, I’d never stop seeing Tom Hanks, and I certainly could never have found DT. The history is too strong. The character never fully arrives.

Okay, you should never criticize without providing another option. Took a while, but here we go.

Rami Malek would have been the better choice. Odysseus isn’t a man we’re supposed to trust. He’s a man we’re supposed to study.

Malek has earned that choice role by role. As Elliot Alderson in Mr. Robot, he made brilliance look dangerous and vulnerability feel like something that could turn on you. As Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, he proved he could carry enormous charisma without ever making it simple. In No Time to Die, he was unsettling before he even did anything, and in Oppenheimer, he made a relatively small role impossible to forget. Malek never lets us become completely comfortable with him. There is always something happening behind his eyes that we haven’t been invited into. That’s Odysseus. Nolan cast him in Oppenheimer, so he clearly gets what Malek can do. But maybe he also learned from working with him that Malek would never put up with the abuse Matt Damon apparently will.

Rami Malek can make intelligence feel dangerous. There is always something happening behind his eyes that he isn’t giving us access to. He can be vulnerable without seeming innocent, charismatic without asking us to trust him, and strange without turning the character into a villain. I could believe that Malek’s Odysseus was thinking five moves ahead while lying directly to my face. More importantly, I wouldn’t arrive at the theater with thirty years of certainty that, underneath it all, he was a good man.

Okay, back to my feelings about it all. I loved Nolan’s film. I loved that my pitiful history of studying the Classics spurred me to go and get some education. I’m still in the middle of it, and oh, how it is game-changing when it comes to looking at your life, trying to make sense of it, and planning for what is left of it.

And isn’t that what film is supposed to do?

Oh, thank you, Obi-Wan Nolan.

And I also loved reading Emily Wilson’s review, not because she understood Nolan’s movie, but because she reminded me of everything I didn’t yet understand about Homer’s poem.

That’s the difference.

Emily Wilson is one of the world’s foremost Homeric scholars. She knows more about The Odyssey than just about anyone alive, and I’ll read everything she ever writes about Homer.

But she shouldn’t have reviewed Christopher Nolan’s film.

She reviewed it as a Homeric scholar. But a film isn’t an explanation of someone else’s work. It isn’t an annotated translation. It isn’t a history lesson. It’s a director’s point of view. It’s one artist telling us what another artist means to him.

Nolan wasn’t translating Homer. He was telling us what The Odyssey means to Christopher Nolan.

Emily Wilson taught me more about The Odyssey, the poem. Christopher Nolan taught me more about The Odyssey, the human condition.

I wrote a piece about Emily’s error in writing a revew instead of enticing us to read her translation. It’s here if you want to read it. But this should give you enough if you’re done with my musings here.

All this, and I haven’t even reviewed the film.

My podcast will. We’re taping it today.

See the film. Even if you’re one of the people who will find it torturous. Do it because you will have to think about some things that are worth the mental torment.

Thank you, Christopher Nolan. Thank you, Emily Wilson.

I hope you have lunch and talk about the bigger picture of it all.

Richard Gere’s New Movie, Asymmetry, Is Already Being Condemned. We Haven’t Even Seen It Yet.

Oh, everyone is up in arms. Older man. Position of power. Much younger woman.

How dare Hollywood make a movie reflecting what’s actually happening in society?

First of all, the story isn’t fiction. Start on Billionaires’ Row if you’d like. Then work your way through publishing, entertainment, politics, law, finance. These relationships exist. The interesting part is they’re very rarely between people without money or influence.

But that’s an old cliché.

Who cares?

There are two things here that are actually worth looking at.

The first is the marketing. The studio keeps releasing images from the filming that were always going to go viral. And, they are provocative. Very. They knew exactly what would happen. Every photograph creates another round of outrage, much of it from women who have never been in that position themselves.

By the time this movie comes out, and it will, everyone will know exactly what it is.

And they’ll go see it.

Just look at Fifty Shades of Grey. Churches throughout the South condemned the movie. Opening weekend? The South had the biggest advance ticket sales in the country.

You get the picture. (Forgive the pun.)

Outrage is still one of the best marketing strategies ever invented.

But there’s something else that interests me even more.

Maybe the movie could be great. Maybe the movie could tell her perspective honestly.

The perception of people who have never been in this position is that she’s automatically the victim. In some cases, that may absolutely be true. But there’s a whole other story behind relationships like this, one that has nothing to do with movies and everything to do with human nature.

Everybody wants to be seen. When you’re standing next to someone in your industry who is an icon, someone you admire, someone who is attractive, interesting, and never boring, there’s an attraction there that’s very appealing.

Yes, I married an older man.

Not that much older, but older.

Age was never the attraction. To be honest, men my own age always bored me. Or at least the ones I met.

My ex-husband taught me about art and culture, especially in Europe, which simply wasn’t an area I had much interest in or knowledge of before him. I thought he was very attractive. He had a wonderful sense of humor.

He was never in control of me or had power over me in our relationship.

I left him.

Interestingly, most people assumed he left me. I suppose that fit the stereotype better, rich man leaves wife for younger woman, which is exactly why so many people find the premise of this movie outrageous before they’ve even seen it.

Charlie Chaplin’s fourth and final marriage, to Oona O’Neill, appears to have been the great love of his life. He was 54 and she was 18 when they married in 1943, but despite the age difference and considerable public skepticism, they remained together for 34 years, had eight children, and built a close family life in Switzerland. By nearly every account, the marriage was devoted and enduring, lasting until Chaplin’s death in 1977. It reminds us that relationships with large age gaps don’t all fit into the same narrative.

Whether this movie ends up being an indictment of older men, a thoughtful examination of power, a love story, or a complete disaster will depend entirely on how her character is written.

Does she have agency?

Does she make her own choices?

Or is she simply there to serve his story?

We don’t know yet.

I will see it opening day. I’m hopeful they can get it right. For once.

Emily Wilson’s critique of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey became a case study in something much bigger than film.

Not because everyone agreed with it. The opposite.

The piece was sharp, dismissive, and almost guaranteed to provoke a reaction. Had she written a more polite, diplomatic review, it probably would have received a fraction of the attention. Instead, people shared it, argued about it, defended her, attacked her, defended Nolan, and attacked Nolan. The review moved beyond criticism and became part of the story surrounding the film.

That is what caught my attention.

In today’s world, being right is not enough. Being thoughtful is not enough. Sometimes even being brilliant is not enough. How you say something can be the difference between success and obscurity.

Emily Wilson knows something about both.

When her translation of The Odyssey was published in 2017, it was celebrated, and deservedly so. It was elegant, readable, and introduced Homer to an entirely new generation of readers. It also carried an historic distinction: she was the first woman to publish an English verse translation of the complete Odyssey.

But the response was not entirely congratulatory. Classicists and fellow translators debated her choices, sometimes intensely. One of the biggest arguments centered on the very first line. For generations, translators had rendered the Greek word polytropos as “the man of many ways,” “the man of twists and turns,” or “resourceful.” Wilson chose, “Tell me about a complicated man.”

It is a beautiful line. It is also an interpretation.

Some critics argued that “complicated” was a modern psychological description that subtly shifted Homer’s moral universe. Others believed she presented Odysseus more harshly while making characters such as the Cyclops and even the suitors more sympathetic. The criticism was not that she had failed because she interpreted Homer. The argument was about how she interpreted him and how much of Emily Wilson had entered the translation.

That is the nature of serious work. Once you put a strong interpretation into the world, people are going to examine it, challenge it, and occasionally come at it with a knife and fork.

So here we are years later, and Christopher Nolan chose Wilson’s translation as one of the works that inspired and helped shape his screenplay. That was not a small compliment buried in a footnote. He publicly praised her work and connected one of the most anticipated films in the world to her scholarship. In doing so, he introduced Emily Wilson to millions of people who had never taken a classics course and probably could not have named a living translator of Homer if offered cash and a lifeline.

Then she wrote a blistering critique of his film.

Ouch.

I do not know whether she intended the review to have the effect it had. After reading more of her writing, I actually doubt it. This does not appear to be her normal style. She generally writes with the precision and restraint of an academic, not someone entering the ring at Madison Square Garden.

But the outcome is the outcome.

Her review went everywhere. People who had never heard of Emily Wilson suddenly knew her name. Some agreed with her. Some thought she was brilliant. Others called the review snobbish, ungenerous, or simply wrong. None of that changed the central fact, she had become impossible to ignore.

There is also a gender element here that I find fascinating.

Women are rarely encouraged to use this tactic. We are taught to preserve relationships, soften criticism, acknowledge generosity, and worry about how the other person might feel. We are expected to be honest, but not too honest. Forceful, but not abrasive. Grateful, preferably forever.

Emily Wilson did not appear terribly concerned about Christopher Nolan’s feelings. He had praised her publicly, credited her work, and helped bring her name from the world of academia into the larger culture. She then took apart his film without much cushioning around the edges.

Men do this all the time. They accept praise, introductions, opportunities, and help, then turn around and deliver their unvarnished opinion without spending three paragraphs reassuring everyone that they remain deeply appreciative. Women tend to understand that there may be a social invoice coming later.

Wilson either did not see the invoice or decided not to pay it.

I am not saying she owed Nolan a favorable review. She did not. Public praise does not buy future silence, and gratitude should not require intellectual surrender. But I am interested in how rarely women allow themselves to separate those things so completely.

There is an irony here too.

When Wilson published her translation, critics accused her of allowing her own perspective to shape Homer. Then, in reviewing Nolan’s film, she appeared to judge his interpretation partly by how faithfully it reflected the poem rather than by what Nolan was trying to say through the poem.

A film adaptation is not an illustrated edition of a book. It is a work of art in its own right. Every director brings a point of view. Every translator brings a point of view. Every actor brings a point of view. That is not the flaw. That is the work.

The real question is whether the interpretation gives us something worth seeing.

But I am not writing this to re-litigate her review or defend the movie. What interests me is what happened around it, because that is where the lesson is.

We still like to believe that the best idea wins. It does not. The idea that gets attention earns the opportunity to be considered. The extraordinary idea nobody notices goes nowhere.

I have spent my career watching remarkable people and companies struggle to be seen while louder, simpler, and sometimes weaker ideas take up all the oxygen. The difference is not always talent. Often, it is presentation. Timing. Language. Nerve. The willingness to say the thing in a way that makes people stop.

That does not mean everyone should become inflammatory. Provocation without substance wears thin quickly. Attention may open the door, but there has to be something in the room once people enter.

Emily Wilson had the substance. She had spent years establishing the scholarship, the expertise, and the authority. When the review exploded, people did not find an empty brand behind it. They found a serious academic whose work had already survived praise, criticism, and years of debate.

That matters.

Attention is not a substitute for credibility. It is a way of bringing credibility into view.

I do not know whether Emily Wilson consciously decided to write the kind of critique that would dominate the conversation. I suspect she simply wrote what she thought, in a voice sharper than the one she usually uses, and the world reacted.

But I keep coming back to what happened next.

A translator who had once been attacked for interpreting Homer became internationally visible by attacking someone else’s interpretation of Homer. A filmmaker who had publicly elevated her work helped create the audience that would then read her criticism of his. And a review that might have remained inside a small academic conversation became a cultural event because of how it was written.

That is not just a story about criticism.

It is a story about business, reputation, and the increasingly narrow distance between being excellent and being seen.

The quality of the work matters.

So does whether anyone notices it.

And, for screen lovers. It’s a lesson to remind critics that they need to judge the film, not the original manuscript. We’ve been to this rodeo before.

Anyone who knows me knows I would have laughed someone out of the room if they’d made that claim before I saw A Real Pain. Then I saw it.

Jesse Eisenberg isn’t simply an extraordinary actor. I think he’s one of the most talented people working in cinema today. His performances have always displayed an unusual intelligence, but with A Real Pain he revealed something even more remarkable: an ability to write dialogue that feels completely natural while exposing complicated truths about grief, family, guilt, humor, and the contradictions that make us human. Writing dialogue that sounds effortless is one of the hardest things a screenwriter can do. Eisenberg made it look easy, and that’s usually the mark of someone operating at the very highest level.

His second film comes out in a few weeks, and I will be first in line. The Debut. The Trailer will have you at hello.

What really caught my attention this week, however, wasn’t his next movie. It was something he said while accepting the President’s Award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Eisenberg explained that he was only days away from becoming a Polish citizen. He also explained why. The kinds of films he wants to make, he said, are becoming increasingly difficult to finance in the United States. Europe, through public funding and international co-productions, has created an environment where filmmaker-driven stories like his are not only welcomed but encouraged. He wasn’t talking about patriotism. He wasn’t talking about politics. He was talking about economics.

That struck me because it perfectly illustrates something I’ve been writing about for the better part of six months.

We’ve entered a scorched-earth era in entertainment. Yes, the mergers matter. Paramount matters. Warner Bros. Discovery matters. Disney, Netflix, Amazon—they all matter. But only if you’re still looking at the entertainment industry through an American lens. I think that’s becoming a mistake because film is no longer an American industry with international distribution. It has become an international industry that happens to include Hollywood. Capital is global. Talent is global. Production incentives are global. Audiences are global. The filmmakers who understand that shift first will have opportunities that simply didn’t exist a decade ago.

For generations, aspiring filmmakers believed there was one path to success. You moved to Los Angeles, found representation, pitched studios, and hoped someone with power believed in your story. Access was controlled by a remarkably small group of executives, financiers, distributors, and production companies. If they said no, the conversation was usually over.

Today, that’s no longer true.

A filmmaker can assemble financing from several countries, partner with international producers, shoot wherever the economics make sense, premiere at festivals across Europe or Asia, and build a worldwide audience without depending entirely on a handful of American studios. That’s not an alternative business model anymore. It’s rapidly becoming the business model.

I think the larger opportunity, though, isn’t financial.

It’s freedom.

Creative freedom has always been the engine that drives great filmmaking. The best films aren’t created by committees. They aren’t born from fear. They come from writers and directors who are willing to take risks, challenge audiences, and tell stories that don’t fit neatly inside someone else’s definition of what is commercially or politically acceptable.

Increasingly, however, filmmakers are working inside a system where politics, shareholder concerns, public relations, social media backlash, and corporate risk management all influence what gets financed. Whether that pressure comes from the Trump administration, a future administration, activist organizations, multinational corporations, or studio executives trying to avoid controversy is almost beside the point. The result is the same. Every additional layer of approval makes it harder for original voices to emerge.

That’s why I think Eisenberg’s comments matter.

He’s not running away from America. He’s running toward a marketplace that gives him greater freedom to make the films he wants to make. There’s an enormous difference between those two ideas, and I suspect many filmmakers have quietly reached the same conclusion. They simply haven’t said it publicly.

The entrepreneur filmmaker has more power today than at any time in modern history. Instead of waiting for permission, they can build international partnerships, seek financing wherever it exists, produce films where incentives are strongest, and find audiences that care more about the quality of the work than the zip code where it was produced. As festivals continue elevating these films and as organizations like the Academy increasingly recognize work originating outside the traditional Hollywood system, the balance of power shifts even further away from the old gatekeepers.

That’s the real story.

Jesse Eisenberg isn’t simply making another movie. He’s demonstrating what the next generation of filmmaking may look like. Hollywood will remain enormously important, but it will no longer be the only center of gravity. The future belongs to filmmakers who think globally, finance globally, collaborate globally, and refuse to believe that creativity must pass through one city or one system before it deserves to exist.

That future isn’t coming.

It’s already here.

Every July, Hollywood reacts to the Emmy nominations as though they are a report card on the entire television industry. There are celebration dinners. There are snubs. There are headlines about who won, who lost, and who was somehow overlooked.

This year was no different.

The Pitt led all shows with 25 nominations. Hacks followed with 24, the most ever for a comedy series. Apple TV+ earned a record 87 nominations, HBO received 122, Netflix 111, and Disney 111, even though each of those totals was down from last year. Stephen Colbert’s final season collected nine nominations. Sally Field received her first Emmy nomination in 17 years. Sir David Attenborough became a nominee at the age of 100.

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Shout out here to The Industry … amazing overview of the Emmy nominations. Great piece, which gave me much food for thought. - CM

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Those are impressive numbers.

The question is whether anyone outside Hollywood actually cares.

For decades, an Emmy nomination meant three things.

First, it drove viewers. If a show was “the Emmy winner,” millions of people who hadn’t been watching suddenly wanted to see what they had missed.

Second, it created stars. Winning an Emmy could fundamentally change an actor’s career. It wasn’t simply a trophy. It meant leverage, better roles, larger salaries, and recognition that extended well beyond Hollywood.

Third, the Emmys were a marketing event for television itself. They reminded audiences that television was producing work worth celebrating.

I’m not convinced that’s still true.

Look through this year’s nominations. They’re fascinating if you work in entertainment. They’re fascinating if you’re an awards obsessive. But ask the average viewer whether they know The Pitt received 25 nominations, that Apple earned 87, or that HBO’s total dropped from 142 last year to 122 this year.

Most have no idea.

That’s because television itself has changed.

In the era of Cheers, Seinfeld, ER, or even The Sopranos, America largely watched the same shows. When those programs won awards, millions of viewers had actually seen them.

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Today, television isn’t one business. It’s dozens of businesses spread across dozens of platforms. A critically acclaimed series can receive twenty nominations while most Americans have never even heard of it because it’s sitting three menus deep on a streaming service they don’t subscribe to.

The audience hasn’t disappeared. It has fragmented.

That changes what the Emmys actually accomplish.

They still matter enormously to studios trying to market prestige. They matter to actors negotiating contracts. They matter to producers raising financing, to agents recruiting talent, and to executives trying to convince the industry’s best writers and directors that their platform is the place to create ambitious work.

But do they matter to viewers?

Far less than they once did.

Some of this year’s numbers illustrate that perfectly.

Apple’s record 87 nominations tell investors, filmmakers, and top creative talent that Apple TV+ has become a prestige destination. They don’t necessarily convince someone to subscribe this weekend.

The Pitt is one of the year’s most interesting success stories precisely because it managed something increasingly rare. It attracted both audiences and awards recognition. Those two things don’t automatically happen together anymore.

Stephen Colbert’s nine nominations feel less like a consumer event than an industry standing ovation for a respected institution ending its run.

Sally Field’s return after a 17-year absence reminds us why awards can still be meaningful. Great work can still be recognized, even after years away.

Then there are the stories that generated almost as much conversation as the nominations themselves: the people who weren’t there.

Sydney Sweeney received no Emmy nomination despite becoming one of Hollywood’s biggest young stars. Jeremy Allen White, after dominating awards conversations with The Bear, was also absent from the acting nominations. Taylor Sheridan, whose television empire includes some of the most watched shows in America, once again found himself largely outside the Academy’s biggest categories.

Those omissions say something important.

Popularity and prestige are no longer the same thing.

Sydney Sweeney is unquestionably one of the industry’s biggest stars. Jeremy Allen White has become one of television’s defining actors of the past several years. Taylor Sheridan arguably understands mass audiences better than almost anyone working in television today. Yet none of that guarantees Emmy recognition.

The Academy rewards a particular definition of excellence. Viewers reward something else entirely.

Increasingly, those circles don’t overlap.

I was also struck by something quieter.

YouTube’s SubwayTakes earned an Emmy nomination.

That may seem like a footnote, but it reflects something much larger. The Academy is acknowledging what audiences figured out years ago. Premium storytelling no longer belongs exclusively to traditional television. Great content can come from streaming platforms, social platforms, or places that barely existed when the Emmys were created.

The medium keeps changing.

So does influence.

We’re seeing the same pattern across entertainment.

The Oscars no longer guarantee blockbuster box office.

The Grammys no longer determine what dominates playlists.

The Emmys no longer tell America what to watch.

Algorithms do. TikTok clips do. Podcasts do. Word of mouth does.

A recommendation from someone you trust often carries more weight than a gold statue.

That doesn’t make the Emmys irrelevant. It simply changes their purpose.

Today they function less as a national cultural event and more as an industry signal. They tell Hollywood who is respected by Hollywood.

Every once in a while, they still perform their original magic by introducing audiences to a remarkable show they otherwise might have missed.

But the days when America gathered around one television set, watched the ceremony together, and spent the following week catching up on the winners are largely behind us.

Ironically, that may be the biggest story hidden inside this year’s Emmy nominations.

The awards still matter.

They just don’t matter for the same reasons they used to.

A recent Bloomberg analysis examining why so many Netflix series lose viewers between their first and second seasons revealed something surprising. The problem isn’t simply that Netflix cancels too many shows after one season. Even when it renews them, a remarkable number of viewers never come back. Shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Four Seasons, Beef, and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder all suffered dramatic declines in audience from their first season to their second. And, their first season was a success.

At first glance, this looks like a programming problem. Maybe the second season wasn’t as good. Maybe viewers lost interest. Maybe there was simply too much time between seasons.

I don’t think that’s the story. I think we’re looking at something much bigger than Netflix.

We’re looking at us.

We no longer watch television. We date it. We used to marry it.

For most of television history, we built relationships with shows. We arranged our evenings around them. We talked about them with friends and coworkers all week. (Dare I date myself by going back to Charlies Angels and Eight is Enough?) We wondered what would happen next. Characters slowly became part of our lives because they kept showing up in them.

Remember when The West Week’s season would end at the beginning of summer, and we would have skipped summer to find out if Josh died in the assassination attempt or not? Ok, I will speak for myself. I would have skipped to summer to find out if he was a goner.

Network television asked us to make a commitment. Streaming asks for a weekend.

That sounds like progress?

I’m not sure it is.

Eight episodes arrive on Friday. By Sunday night we’ve finished them, talked about them for a day or two, and moved on to whatever the algorithm recommends next. Somewhere along the way we stopped living with stories. We started consuming them.

Netflix didn’t invent this behavior, but I think it accidentally perfected it. Every recommendation quietly says the same thing: “You’ve finished that. Here’s something new.” Not, “What did that story mean to you?” Not, “Would you like to spend more time with these characters?” Just, “Here’s something new.”

The platform rewards novelty, not loyalty. Ironically, Netflix became so good at giving us endless choice that every individual choice began to feel disposable.

But I think there is another reason audiences have become reluctant to fall in love and commit for life.

Some genuinely terrific series simply disappeared.

Think about 1899. It ended with one of the biggest cliffhangers in recent television, only to be canceled before viewers ever learned what was really happening. The Society was renewed and then canceled before production began, leaving every storyline suspended. Archive 81 built an intensely loyal audience, ended with its hero trapped in another time, and was gone. The OA became a cultural phenomenon with one of the most passionate fan bases in streaming, only to leave viewers permanently waiting for the next chapter. Mindhunter, while not officially canceled, has effectively vanished despite being regarded as one of the finest crime series ever produced.

None of these shows simply ended. They stopped.

There is a difference.

Stories have endings. Relationships have goodbyes. Many streaming audiences received neither. Instead, they were left with unfinished mysteries, unresolved characters, and cliffhangers that were clearly written to launch another season that never came. The investment audiences made wasn’t simply unrewarded. It was abandoned.

Viewers learned something from that. Don’t get too attached.

Whether Netflix deserves all the blame is almost beside the point. The audience’s perception became its own reality. Many viewers now hesitate before beginning a new series because they aren’t convinced they’ll ever get an ending. Trust has become part of entertainment.

Then there is another problem that receives far less attention.

The gap between seasons has become so long that viewers often lose not only their memory of the story, but their emotional connection to it.

Think about The Gilded Age. Season One premiered in January 2022. Season Two didn’t arrive until October 2023. Season Three premiered in June 2025. If the series returns for a fourth season on a similar schedule, audiences will have spent roughly five to six years following four seasons of one show.

And, do not get me started about The Handmaid’s Tale. I don’t care how busy Elisabeth Moss is. And I thank her for her service.

That kind of time lapse between seasons would have been unimaginable during the network television era.

Shows like Friends, ER, The West Wing, Lost, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men became part of our lives because they returned with a dependable rhythm. We didn’t have to remember who everyone was or why we cared because they never really left us. They stayed in our conversations. They stayed in our routines. They stayed in our lives. We were married to them.

There were 156 episodes in seven seasons of The West Wing. I rest my case.

Today, a season ends, eighteen months or two years pass, and streaming services expect us to remember not only the plot, but why we cared in the first place.

We rarely do.

By then we’ve watched dozens of other series, hundreds of YouTube videos, countless Instagram Reels and TikToks, listened to podcasts, subscribed to new Substacks, experimented with AI, followed breaking news, and discovered entirely new obsessions.

Season Two isn’t competing with Season One. It’s competing with everything we’ve discovered since Season One. The original show hasn’t simply faded. It has been buried beneath an avalanche of everything else that has demanded our attention.

Entertainment has changed. It used to occupy our attention. Now it competes for it.

A television series isn’t simply competing against another television series anymore. It’s competing against YouTube, podcasts, TikTok, Instagram, Substack, AI, video games, live sports, work, email, and every notification that interrupts our day.

The battle is no longer for ratings.

It’s for memory.

Meanwhile, look at what happens when a series is allowed to breathe. The White Lotus didn’t become a phenomenon because audiences binged it over one weekend. It became a phenomenon because people spent weeks discussing every episode, every theory, every performance. The Last of Us didn’t simply live on a streaming service. It lived in the culture.

That’s an important distinction.

Weekly releases don’t simply build anticipation. They build memory. They create ten weeks of conversations, ten weeks of podcasts, ten weeks of speculation, and ten weeks of waiting together. The show lives in culture instead of simply living on a server.

I think Netflix may have underestimated the value of anticipation. Waiting isn’t the enemy of storytelling. Waiting is part of storytelling. It gives stories time to breathe. It gives characters time to become part of our lives. It gives audiences something increasingly rare: shared anticipation.

Perhaps that’s what the Bloomberg numbers are really telling us. The greatest challenge facing television today isn’t creating a brilliant first season. It’s creating a relationship strong enough that, eighteen months later, we remember we ever loved it.

And perhaps that’s true of much more than television.

We don’t stay with shows as long. We don’t stay with books as long. We don’t stay with music as long. We don’t stay with ideas as long. We don’t even stay with outrage as long. Everything moves faster. Everything gets replaced sooner.

Streaming didn’t create that culture. But it may be its clearest mirror.

Maybe that’s why the Bloomberg numbers fascinated me. They aren’t really about Netflix. They’re about whether we’ve lost the ability to sustain long-term relationships—not just with television, but with stories, books, music, ideas, and perhaps even each other.

We used to wait for stories.

Today, stories wait for us.

And while they’re waiting, another thousand arrive.

If you ask people to fall in love with a story, you owe me an ending.

And if you ask me to wait two years for the next chapter, you shouldn’t be surprised if, by the time it arrives, I’ve fallen in love with something else.

The news that Fox is acquiring Roku generated the predictable headlines about scale, synergies, advertising opportunities, and distribution. Wall Street loves these deals because they are easy to explain. More viewers. More data. More control. More revenue.

What interested me was something else entirely.

At what point do media companies stop competing on the quality of what they produce and start competing on their ability to control what audiences see?

For decades, Hollywood worried about who owned the studios. Today, the more important question may be who owns the front door.

If a company produces the content, distributes the content, sells the advertising around the content, gathers the audience data, and controls the recommendation engine that decides what appears on your home screen, it possesses an extraordinary amount of influence over what succeeds and what fails. The challenge is not that these companies are evil. Most are simply trying to maximize shareholder value. The challenge is that over time the incentives shift away from finding the best work and toward promoting their own work.

A better film can lose to a lesser film if the lesser film belongs to the company controlling the distribution.

That should concern all of us.

The entertainment business has always had gatekeepers, but technology was supposed to change that. The internet was going to democratize everything. Streaming was going to create unlimited opportunities. Filmmakers would no longer need permission. Audiences would discover great work wherever it appeared.

Some of that happened.

A great deal of it did not.

Instead, we have watched a handful of companies become larger and larger while simultaneously controlling more pieces of the ecosystem. The result is not necessarily censorship. The result is often something far more subtle. Fewer risks. Fewer original ideas. More sequels. More franchises. More content selected because it resembles something that worked before.

Nobody walks into a conference room and says, “Let’s make mediocre films.”

They simply say, “Let’s reduce risk.”

The outcome can be remarkably similar.

This is not only happening in entertainment. We are watching a version of it unfold in journalism as well. The controversy surrounding 60 Minutes has less to do with any single story and more to do with the growing perception that corporate interests, political interests, legal concerns, and journalism are colliding in uncomfortable ways. Whether those concerns are fair or not is almost beside the point. Once audiences begin questioning whether business considerations are influencing editorial decisions, trust begins to erode.

And when trust erodes, viewers start looking elsewhere.

That is exactly where the opportunity lies.

Every period of consolidation creates openings for independents willing to do things differently. When the major studios ignored independent filmmakers, Sundance emerged as a force. When network television became predictable, HBO changed the game. When Hollywood dismissed streaming, Netflix built an entirely new model. The pattern repeats because large organizations become focused on protecting what they have while outsiders focus on creating what does not yet exist.

The answer is not to complain about the system.

The answer is to build.

If I were an actor today, I would be looking for independent producers. If I were a writer, I would be studying financing and distribution instead of waiting for a studio executive to return my call. If I were a director, I would be learning how audiences actually discover content rather than assuming a traditional release is the only path to success.

Reese Witherspoon understood this years ago. Instead of waiting for Hollywood to tell stories she believed audiences wanted, she built Hello Sunshine and began producing them herself. Tyler Perry built an entire studio system outside traditional Hollywood power structures. Whether every project succeeds is irrelevant. They understood something fundamental. Ownership matters.

More actors should be producing.

More writers should be financing.

More directors should be partnering with entrepreneurs instead of waiting for permission.

The technology exists. The audience exists. What is often missing is the willingness to step outside the established system.

The most interesting irony of all may be that these giant mergers are creating the very conditions that make independent creators more valuable. As large media companies become increasingly focused on protecting billion-dollar assets, they become less capable of taking creative risks. They have too much to lose. The independent filmmaker, journalist, writer, or producer often has the opposite problem. They have little to lose and everything to gain.

That freedom has always been the birthplace of innovation.

Fox buying Roku will not be the last acquisition. There will be more. There will be larger ones. Companies will continue trying to control not only content but distribution, discovery, data, and advertising. The logic is obvious.

What is less obvious is that audiences have a long history of surprising executives.

Viewers do not ultimately follow distribution.

They follow stories.

They follow trust.

They follow quality.

The companies buying the airwaves would be wise to remember that.

And the independent creators should be preparing for the opportunity.

I recently read an essay by writer Celeste Davis titled What Makes a Woman Worthy of a Starring Role?

In it, Davis explores a startling reality. In today’s movies, a man who happens to be named Chris is more likely to be the star of a major film than a woman over 60, and she argues that the reason has less to do with age than with how our culture continues to define women’s value.

The piece has stayed with me for days.

The statistics are amusing at first.

Then they become depressing.

“Guess how many women there are over 60 in the US?

According to Statistica, there are approximately 31 million.

Guess how many men named Chris there are in the US?

According to the Social Security Baby Names Database, there are an about 140 thousand.” Celeste Davis

Most coverage of the study has focused on the numbers. Davis takes a different approach. She asks why.

Why are women, who make up half the population and whose lives are every bit as complicated, adventurous, heartbreaking, funny, ambitious, and fascinating as men’s, so often absent from the stories we tell?

Davis’ argument is not simply that Hollywood overlooks older women. It is that Hollywood reflects a much larger cultural belief about women’s value. She points to everything from the Bechdel Test, which measures whether two women in a film speak to each other about something other than a man, to what she calls the “Sexy Lamp Test,” which asks whether a female character could be replaced by a decorative object without affecting the plot. Her conclusion is that women are too often presented not as fully realized human beings but as supporting characters in men’s stories. When youth and beauty become the primary currency assigned to women, aging becomes a liability. Men are allowed to become more interesting as they age. Women, she argues, are often treated as though they become less valuable.

As someone who has spent decades watching, reviewing, teaching, and talking about film, both for Screen Thoughts and Women in Film and in lectures around the country, I have certainly complained about the lack of roles for older women, and women in general. Most women who love movies have. We notice it every time an actress disappears from leading roles somewhere between fifty and sixty while her male contemporaries continue carrying franchises, action films, thrillers, and prestige dramas well into their seventies and eighties.

But Davis pushes beyond the numbers to ask a more uncomfortable question. What determines whether a woman is considered worthy of being at the center of a story?

And while I agree with much of her analysis, I’m not sure she completely answers her own question.

Beauty and sex appeal are certainly part of the equation. Women have long been judged by a narrower set of standards than men. But older male actors are not carrying movies because audiences find them irresistibly attractive. Most of them aren’t being cast because they are handsome. They are being cast because Hollywood has spent generations imagining men as the protagonists of their own adventures.

That may be the deeper issue.

Hollywood has traditionally viewed men’s lives as stories and women’s lives as relationships.

An older man can be a detective, a billionaire, a president, a criminal mastermind, a warrior, a mentor, a cowboy, or an explorer. He can seek revenge, save the world, solve a mystery, build an empire, or lose everything and fight his way back.

An older woman is too often portrayed as helping someone else do those things.

That is a storytelling problem as much as it is a sexism problem.

For generations, Hollywood has allowed men to be complicated. Men can be old, grumpy, bald, overweight, frightened, foolish, morally conflicted, physically ordinary, or outright unattractive and still be viewed as fascinating enough to carry a film.

Women have rarely been afforded the same range.

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been exceptions. We have had extraordinary performances from Meryl Streep, Sally Field, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, and Frances McDormand. But the fact that we can so easily list the exceptions is part of the problem. We remember them because they are exceptions.

Meanwhile, Hollywood continues to produce endless stories about aging men who remain central to the action.

The detective. The billionaire. The mentor. The president. The antihero. The cowboy. The action star.

The older woman is too often relegated to the sidelines. She becomes the grandmother, the wife, the mother, the wise observer, or she disappears entirely.

What’s particularly odd is how little this reflects actual life.

The most interesting conversations I have every week are with women over sixty. They are building businesses, caring for aging spouses, navigating illness, falling in love, leaving marriages, writing books, changing careers, raising grandchildren, traveling the world, and reinventing themselves.

In other words, they are doing exactly the kinds of things that generate great stories.

Yet Hollywood frequently behaves as if their lives ended twenty years ago.

Davis references the famous moment when Dustin Hoffman discussed making Tootsie and realized how often he had overlooked women who didn’t fit conventional standards of beauty. His emotional admission remains powerful because it exposed something many of us recognize but rarely articulate. We are conditioned to see women first and foremost through appearance.

That conditioning inevitably affects storytelling.

But I also wonder whether the problem goes beyond appearance. I wonder if Hollywood simply has not spent enough time imagining older women as heroes.

Not survivors. Not supporters. Not mothers. Not mentors.

Heroes.

Women with agency. Women with ambition. Women who make terrible decisions. Women who save the day. Women who destroy their own lives. Women who reinvent themselves. Women who pursue impossible goals.

In short, women who are as interesting and messy and contradictory as men have been allowed to be for generations.

The irony is that some of the best recent work in film and television has come when creators ignored the old assumptions. Audiences embraced older female characters because they were allowed to be funny, angry, ambitious, flawed, sexual, lonely, brilliant, reckless, and fully human.

The lesson is not that audiences won’t watch older women.

The lesson is that audiences will watch compelling characters.

Perhaps that is why Celeste Davis’ piece resonated so strongly with me. It isn’t really about actresses over sixty.

It’s about whose stories we believe matter.

And if Hollywood truly wants new stories in an era when audiences increasingly complain that everything feels recycled, it might start by looking at the millions of women whose lives remain largely unexplored on screen.

There are certainly more than enough of them.

In fact, there are about 31 million over the age of sixty in America alone. According to Davis, that’s roughly 30 million more potential protagonists than there are men named Chris.

The question isn’t whether those women exist.

The question is whether Hollywood is finally ready to imagine them as the stars of the story.

Whenever I’m asked my favorite feminist Disney character, I don’t waver. “Why, it’s Cruella de Vil,” I reply without hesitation.

I was 8 years old when “101 Dalmatians” was released. I felt relief when I saw her on the screen.

Cinderella made me anxious. I couldn’t see an ounce of myself in her. Why would she not fight back? Why was she so nice to such awful people? And Bambi? Let’s not even go there. Snow White? How come she had to do all the work for so many of them? And her hair? It wasn’t like mine — perfectly coiffed even after she had been struggling in the woods all that time? Little Red Riding Hood? Was she stupid? Those female characters didn’t reflect my sense of self at all, and if anything, they made me doubt myself.

I stood up to the boys in the playground and insisted they let me play dodgeball with them. My hair had cowlicks in a few unfortunate places, and I had blue glasses with rhinestones, which seemed like a good choice in the store, but not so much when I hit the playground. I had skinned knees and eczema, which I am convinced was caused by my anxiety based on the female characters that stared me down from the enormous cinema screens and made me feel bad about myself. And let’s not even speak about the ridiculous Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music”! Seriously?! Clothes out of curtains? Puhlease.

So imagine my surprise when Cruella de Vil came to me in “101 Dalmatians”: disheveled hair flying out behind her, careening this side of out of control through the streets with a cigarette hanging from her mouth, which reminded me of my mother, furious when she didn’t get her way. I loved her. My friends and I were talking about what we would name our daughters when we had them after marrying some “Prince Charming” or another (I think we can all agree on the misnomer of that myth), and I said, “Cruella. I will name my daughter Cruella.” They thought I was nuts, and clearly, I came to my senses years later when I named my daughter Sarah, but I really liked that she was authentically herself. She made me less ashamed of whom I sometimes felt I was inside. And she was funny; at least, I thought she was. And I never believed she would have all those puppies killed for a coat, and frankly, with the number of fur coats on the women who came to our house for Saturday night dinner parties, I wasn’t really aware that it was an issue.

But the history of the creation of Cruella is what is important too. She was a real character, unlike Snow White or Cinderella.

“Cruella was the creation of Marc Davis. Davis wanted her to be a contemporary woman, and he began searching for someone in the real world whom he could then use as the model for this fiendish fashion maven. And he eventually found her at a cocktail party that he and his wife Alice attended in the late 1950s or early 1960s.

Now, because this woman was a family acquaintance (and, more importantly, because her children are still alive, and let’s face it, no one would ever want to hear that their mother’s awful behavior at a cocktail party over 50 years ago served as the inspiration for the way Cruella de Vil moves and behaves), the Davises have never revealed the name of this woman. However, given that Davis’ original concept sketches for Cruella showed her to be a far more attractive woman … it’s often been suggested that Davis was inspired by one of the wives of the other artists and animators he worked directly with at Disney. But the inspiration for Cruella came from within the Davis family’s very small circle of friends.

That said, in order to further obscure the identity of the acquaintance who inspired the flamboyant way that Cruella moves and acts, Davis had veteran character actress Mary Wickes come in to shoot some live-action reference footage for the film. And a lot of the comic choices that Wickes made Davis then incorporated in Cruella.

But as to who the family friend was who served as the inspiration for this Disney villain, Davis took this secret to the grave when he passed in January 2000. And while his wife Alice is still with us, she honors her husband’s wishes and, to this day, has not revealed who the real-life inspiration for Cruella de Vil is or was.” Excerpt from Huffington Post.

Of course the feminist in me thinks Marc created her as evil so the women emerging at that time would question their right to be assertive? But enough about what the men saw in us and moving right along to what we see in ourselves.

Let’s face it, ladies; we all work hard to overcome that which is inside us that doesn’t sing to our better angels. I remember my therapist (I’ve mentioned him before; he was blind and I realize now that seeing a blind therapist to see yourself more clearly has some real roadblocks) asking me, “When are you going to start behaving the way you want to be remembered?” It was a pivotal moment in my personal quest for greatness, although not particularly helpful in unraveling the complexity of the family in which I grew up and their effect on my personality.

I try every day to behave the way I want to be remembered. But it was Cruella that enabled me to look in the mirror and see that we all have the “bad girl” inside us — or at least I do, and I will own her. I will apologize when she is unchecked and shows me my worst self. I will see her coming to the doorway of my life, and shut the door in her face when I can. And, I get to control her as long as I don’t pretend she isn’t there.

So here’s to Cruella de Vil, my first heroine. And as for Cinderella and Snow White? Bite me, ladies.

You cannot watch The Testaments in a vacuum. You simply can’t. It has to be viewed in relationship to The Handmaid’s Tale because the emotional weight of the entire series depends on what we already lived through with June, with Hannah, with Gilead itself.

I came into this series carrying years of fear, grief, rage, and exhaustion from The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Testaments smartly uses that history instead of trying to recreate it.

A sidebar… What surprised me was how many people apparently did not immediately realize Agnes was Hannah. Seriously? Even if you somehow missed the clues, the emotional DNA was there from the beginning. The guardedness. The intelligence. The quiet observation of everything happening around her. And Chase Infiniti absolutely owns the screen. Owns it. There are certain performers you can spot immediately, where the camera simply belongs to them the second they appear. She has that quality. Her performance as Agnes is layered with restraint, intelligence, fear, longing, and a strange inherited dignity that makes every scene feel alive underneath the dialogue. I would be stunned if there is not an Academy Award somewhere in her future.

And honestly, all three of the young women at the center of this series are remarkable. Truly remarkable. What they are doing here is not easy acting. They are playing girls raised inside repression who are only beginning to understand that something inside them does not fully fit the world they have inherited. That requires restraint. Nuance. Tiny emotional shifts. A flicker of doubt crossing a face that has been trained never to reveal doubt. A longing for friendship mixed with fear of saying the wrong thing. They are not performing rebellion loudly. They are performing the slow awakening of consciousness, and they do it beautifully.

Lucy Halliday brings Daisy a rawness and unpredictability that gives the series energy every time she appears. You feel her fighting internally even before the character fully understands what she is fighting against.

Rowan Blanchard as Shunammite is chilling in all the right ways, embodying the terrifying confidence of someone who completely believes in the hierarchy that gives her power.

Mattea Conforti gives Becka warmth and emotional accessibility that becomes one of the series’ quiet anchors. Even smaller performances linger. Isolde Ardies as Hulda understands exactly how dangerous insecurity can become inside rigid systems, and Mabel Li’s Aunt Vidala carries authority with an almost serene menace that makes her scenes deeply uncomfortable. None of these performances feel young in the inexperienced sense. They feel disciplined. Thoughtful. Controlled. The girls are not overacting emotion. They are revealing tiny cracks in people trained never to reveal anything at all.

For me, what makes The Testaments so compelling is that these young women were raised entirely inside Gilead. They are not remembering another life. They are not mourning freedoms they once had because many of them never experienced freedom at all. Their understanding of womanhood, friendship, marriage, faith, duty, and even safety was built completely inside this system. That changes everything psychologically.

And what fascinated me most is watching the tiny fractures begin anyway.

Because oppression does not eliminate ordinary girlhood. It reshapes it.

These girls still obsess over friendships. They still want approval from one another. They still whisper, compete, protect, judge, and form alliances exactly the way girls always have.

One of the smartest choices the series makes is showing how deeply social pressure operates inside Gilead among the girls themselves, not just from the men or the state.

There is enormous pressure surrounding puberty and menstruation because getting a period means entering the marriage marketplace. Becoming visible. Becoming valuable.

Entire emotional futures are tied to biology and timing. And then comes the husband question. Not “Will I love him?” Not even “Will he love me?” The standard is far lower and far more frightening. Will he be cruel? Will he have status? Will he embarrass the family? Will he hurt me? Love barely enters the conversation because these girls have not been raised to imagine marriage as emotional fulfillment. Marriage is placement. Security. Duty. Survival.

And what makes the series work is that the girls themselves often enforce these expectations on each other. That is how systems sustain themselves. Through social belonging.

Several critics have pointed to this shift in perspective as the series’ greatest strength.

Variety called it “a magnificent coming-of-age story” and praised the way it explores “the uniqueness of girlhood and how the patriarchy underestimates the power of female connection.”

The Guardian described it as “a study in groupthink,” while also noting that the younger protagonists bring an innate sense of hope to the series.

Even reviewers who were mixed on the show repeatedly praised the performances and the quieter emotional texture.

I actually think the acting may be better than in The Handmaid’s Tale. Not because it is bigger, but because it is more restrained. More nuanced.

The Handmaid’s Tale often existed in a constant state of emotional emergency, intentionally so. It was frantic, terrifying, exhausting. I was spent at the end of so many episodes.

Elisabeth Moss carried the audience through a kind of psychological warfare week after week. But The Testaments breathes differently. There is more stillness. More dignity. More ritual. Sometimes even moments of calm.

And honestly, that calm makes it more frightening to me.

Because authoritarian systems do not survive through terror alone. They survive through routine, aspiration, manners, hierarchy, and the illusion of stability. The Testaments understands that. Which is why it often feels more psychologically sophisticated than its predecessor.

And watching it now feels different than it would have ten years ago.

I found myself watching not simply as entertainment, but almost as a warning exercise. A chance to take notes. And I am making light of it. I’m serious. Deadly.

Because what makes Gilead possible is not simply religious extremism. It is economic imbalance. It is power concentrated into fewer and fewer hands while everyone else slowly becomes dependent on servicing those with access, wealth, influence, and protection.

I look around my country right now and I can already see the early architecture of that possibility. A shrinking ownership class. A growing service class. Entire industries being hollowed out by AI while political leadership seems more interested in protecting power than protecting citizens. People who once considered themselves stable, middle class, professionally secure, are beginning to realize how fragile their place actually is.

It seems entirely possible to me that within a decade many of the jobs available in this country will revolve around servicing the wealthy. Not because Americans are lazy or untalented, but because technology and political corruption together can hollow out opportunity extraordinarily fast.

The “have nots” of Gilead were not always have nots. That is the part people forget.

Systems shift. Economies shift. Power consolidates. Rights erode quietly first, then all at once.

And once enough people become economically vulnerable, freedom itself becomes negotiable.

That is the truly frightening thing about Gilead. Not the costumes. Not the rituals. Not even the violence. It is how ordinary the transition feels while it is happening. How people adapt. How quickly human beings normalize limitation when survival depends on it.

That is why The Testaments lingers after the credits roll. Because it no longer feels entirely impossible. And that is a very uncomfortable realization.

It needs to be seen, not just for its relevance to the world in which we are living in, but because the nuance in its acting, directing and cinematography is a lesson in how to make magic on the screen.

In 1984, I was at a preview performance of Death of a Salesman, starring Dustin Hoffman, and ended up sitting next to Arthur Miller. He was on the aisle. Third row.

For the entire first act, he sat with a yellow legal pad balanced on his lap, writing furiously. Page after page after page of notes. I was barely watching the stage. I was trying to read what he was writing.

At one point I considered grabbing the legal pad at intermission and running out of the theater. I was with the man who would become my husband, so in the end I decided stealing from Arthur Miller and racing out of the theater probably was not the strongest foundation for a lasting relationship. Though honestly, it might have made for a better ending.

When the curtain finally came down for intermission, Mr. Miller turned to me and apologized if the writing had distracted me.

I told him I would forgive him if he let me read a few sentences.

To my shock, he handed me the pad.

On the first page, which is all I saw, the notes were about the dialogue. What he’d written. Not how it was delivered.

Arthur Miller got up during intermission and never came back. So the dreams I had of he and I developing a deeper relationship never happened. Perhaps all for the better.

Recently, my friend Larry saw the new Broadway revival starring Nathan Lane and Celia Keenan-Bolger, which is getting rave reviews. He called me singing about it, and I remembered my time with Arthur and told him the story.

Now, years later, as a writer myself, I understand the moment in an entirely different way. But it was more than that. Willy Loman, like so many characters written by great writers transcends time. He means more to me today than all those years ago.

Of course Arthur Miller was rewriting it.

How could he not?

A work written decades earlier would naturally land differently once life itself had expanded. Experience changes the writer. Time changes the writer. Grief changes the writer. Insight changes the writer. Hopefully wisdom does too.

And then I started thinking about Willy Loman.

And then I started thinking about the world now.

Willy Loman is not simply a failed salesman. He is a man who built his identity around a promise that turned out not to be true.

Work hard. Be liked. Present yourself correctly. Stay loyal. Perform success. Eventually the world will reward you.

That promise is unraveling everywhere now.

People are exhausted from performing versions of themselves professionally, socially, politically, and digitally. Entire industries revolve around branding ourselves. LinkedIn sometimes feels like one giant Willy Loman convention where everyone is trying to appear indispensable, visionary, thriving, connected.

Meanwhile many people privately feel terrified, invisible, replaceable, financially unstable, aging out, or emotionally disconnected from the very lives they spent decades trying to build.

That is Willy Loman.

The play lands differently now after decades of hustle culture because Miller understood something America still struggles to admit. A system built entirely around achievement eventually begins consuming the people trying hardest to succeed inside it.

And then there is the loneliness.

Willy keeps trying to convince everyone, including himself, that he matters. That he was almost somebody. That his life added up.

That may be the most devastatingly modern part of the play.

We are now living in a culture where millions of people quietly fear irrelevance while publicly performing certainty.

I didn’t like Dustin Hoffman in the role. At least what I saw in the second act. His angst is centuries old, in his DNA, and I found it somehow got in the way. Too much maybe?

As for Nathan Lane, his face carries vulnerability naturally. I am sure he’s amazing.

Even in comedy there has always been sadness underneath him, a softness that makes us instinctively protective of him. That matters enormously for Willy. If Willy is played as arrogant or delusional, (sorry Dustin) the character becomes frustrating. If he is played as wounded, frightened, and desperate to still matter, the audience recognizes someone they know.

Or worse.

Themselves.

What makes Death of a Salesman endure is that Miller was never really writing about sales.

He was writing about the terror of discovering that the version of success we built our entire identity around may not love us back. These are perilous times. Plays like Death of a Salesman matter. They are lessons in helping us not get tangled in the tsunami that is our world right now.

Cannes 2026? Where are the American studio films? Where are the giant Hollywood premieres? Where are the orchestrated standing ovations attached to carefully managed awards campaigns?

But I think the more interesting question is not what is absent.

It is what has arrived in its place.

This year’s Cannes lineup feels less like a celebration of Hollywood and more like a map of a changing creative world. The festival is increasingly dominated by international auteurs, European financing structures, Asian filmmakers, Middle Eastern voices, and stories originating outside the traditional American studio system.

And maybe that is not temporary.

Maybe we are watching the center of gravity move.

For decades, Hollywood existed as both a business machine and the artistic capital of global filmmaking. Even when Cannes positioned itself as more intellectually serious than the Oscars, Hollywood still arrived with force. American stars. American money. American cultural dominance.

Now the official lineup is filled with filmmakers like Pedro Almodóvar, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Asghar Farhadi, and Cristian Mungiu, filmmakers whose work often explores memory, class, nationalism, morality, migration, political instability, family fracture, and identity through deeply local and culturally specific storytelling.

Meanwhile, many of America’s largest studio films this year continue to orbit around existing intellectual property. Films like Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Jurassic World Rebirth, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and Tron: Ares are built around legacy franchises, cinematic universes, recognizable brands, and audience familiarity.

That does not automatically make them bad films.

But compare the underlying storytelling priorities.

One system is increasingly asking, “What already has a built in audience?”

The other is still asking, “What is happening to human beings and societies right now?”

To be fair, part of the studio absence may simply be caution. In an era where online narratives form within minutes, studios increasingly prefer carefully controlled launches over the unpredictability of a Cannes premiere, where a standing ovation or a public rejection can instantly shape the global conversation around a film.

But I think something deeper is happening too.

To me, Hollywood itself feels creatively exhausted.

The modern American studio system increasingly rewards intellectual property over artistic risk. Sequels over singularity. Familiarity over vision. Films are built around franchise protection, global market testing, and algorithmic predictability. The safest possible version of storytelling often wins internally.

And, the American investment is strongly focused on streaming now, much more than overseas. And, art is not the focus of streaming. Telling stories and counting viewers is.

It has to be said. Art rarely thrives in overly managed environments. And, Hollywood is nothing if not over managed right now.

So what happens?

The artistry migrates.

Not all at once. Not permanently. But gradually.

You start seeing daring work emerge from countries and financing systems that still allow filmmakers to fail, experiment, provoke, and move slowly. European co productions. Korean cinema. Iranian filmmakers. Arab filmmakers. Independent Japanese directors. Smaller films built around emotional risk instead of opening weekend projections.

That matters.

Because throughout history, artistic capitals are never permanent.

Florence had its era.

Paris had its era.

New York City had its era.

Hollywood had its era.

Power moves where artists are allowed to breathe.

And there is another uncomfortable layer underneath all of this.

America itself feels culturally unstable right now. Politically divided. Financially anxious. Increasingly hostile to nuance. Public discourse has become so weaponized that artists are often expected to function as ideological representatives before they are allowed to simply be artists.

That pressure changes storytelling.

It changes financing.

It changes risk tolerance.

It changes what executives approve.

It changes what audiences punish.

You can feel some of that tension hovering around Cannes this year too. Jury conversations quickly moved into politics, Gaza, censorship, blacklisting, and the future of artistry itself.

Maybe that is what Cannes 2026 really represents.

Not the death of Hollywood.

Hollywood is too financially powerful to disappear.

But perhaps the beginning of a world where Hollywood is no longer automatically assumed to be the artistic center of cinema.

And that is a very different thing. - Christine Merser

Seeing The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Remarkably Bright Creatures back to back profoundly affected me in terms of how I view two actresses I have watched my entire adult life, Meryl Streep and Sally Field.

Sally Field reflects back to us a piece of ourselves we are often trying not to see. Meryl Streep represents something almost unreachable that we believe we could never attain.

And unfortunately, because of the way our culture works, we tend to value the aspiration more than the reflection.

We stand beneath aspiration in awe. We photograph it. We point at it. We study it. We try to imitate it.

But reflection tells us the truth. About ourselves.

And maybe that’s the reversal I realized watching these two films one right after the other. We have spent decades elevating the actress who can transform herself into anyone, while perhaps undervaluing the actress willing to reveal herself to everyone.

The truth is, the order of creative talent may actually belong the other way around.

We could never be Meryl Streep. She possesses something we feel we ourselves do not. In Meryl Streep we see a window into something elevated, controlled, intellectual, untouchable. Aloof, perhaps? Like she is holding onto some secret of mastery the rest of us could never quite attain.

But Sally Field reflects us back to ourselves on our best day. Or worst. Vulnerable. Open. Hoping to be loved. Hoping to matter.

Remember Sally Field’s Academy Award acceptance speech? “You like me. You really like me.”

And then think about Meryl, standing there almost shyly, looking upward from beneath her eyelashes at the camera in perfect position. We’ve now seen her in twenty variations of that composure and every single one of them works. She slays us with precision.

Watching these two films, I suddenly realized that Meryl Streep may be the greatest mime in modern acting.

She becomes the character she is playing. She mimics them though. I’m not sure feels them.

But Sally Field does something entirely different. She finds the part of herself that already contains the character and then hands it to us so nakedly that we feel it inside ourselves. I think it’s a greater gift to us.

Norma Rae. And now Tova in Remarkably Bright Creatures. Sally Field is emotionally naked in those performances, and many more.

Meryl Streep is never naked. Never out of control. She’s amazing, yes. Prime Minister. Miranda Priestly. But she isn’t in danger of losing anything.

Oddly enough, it made me think about Dustin Hoffman and those famous stories from Kramer vs. Kramer, where he pushed her emotionally to expose pain onscreen while she herself was going through profound heartbreak. He slapped her across the face. Slammed a wine glass against a wall, and her reaction won her the award, according to some. I would genuinely love to know what he thinks about her acting process now.

Because it made me realize there are two different kinds of actors who win Academy Awards.

There are the stars of Devil Wears Prada 2, a film I honestly don’t even want to review because to me it represents the disintegration of our culture over the past twenty years rather than some witty evolution of fashion in the age of social media. But that’s another essay.

And, Remarkably Bright Creatures? Remarkably Bright Creatures is one of the quietest films I’ve seen in years, and maybe one of the most powerful because of it. The film unfolds slowly, patiently, almost tenderly, as it explores grief, loneliness, friendship, aging, and the strange ways human beings find each other again after heartbreak. And at the center of it all is an octopus named Marcellus, who may understand more about humanity than the humans themselves. It’s an important film for us to see to remember what used to be and could be again.

But back to the actresses of DWP2. The actresses promoting that film have been all over the world in glossy interviews, giddy about characters they clearly adore playing. Characters who, if we’re honest, are actually very shallow.

But look at the plot. Andy Sachs is still a sellout in the second film, only now without any moral conflict about it. In one of the final scenes she instantly forgives Emily, played by Emily Blunt, after a profound betrayal without even asking, “How could you do that to us?”

And suddenly you realize there are no scruples left in the world they inhabit. And maybe that is true of our world now as well. Maybe the last twenty years have stripped away what a Ted Turner bought with his riches to be replaced by the Jeff Bezos billionaires we now need to contend with.

And worst, of all, the film is being heralded as a fun, wonderful way to celebrate fashion and shiny objects. Seriously? We have lost the plot.

And Meryl? At least Miranda Priestly in the original film possessed an uncompromising devotion to excellence. Now she simply wants global dominance, just like Jeff Bezos.

All three women in Devil Wears Prada 2 represent a certain type.

Anne Hathaway. Emily Blunt. Meryl Streep.

God they look good.

God they love championing each other. Uplifting each other.

Watch the interviews. Watch the way they look at one another. Watch the way they genuflect to Meryl Streep. There is a hierarchy there, and they are completely comfortable inside it. They made it to the top of the pyramid and they know it. They have no intention of shaking the foundation.

One of the interviews was shocking. They were all asked what they do when they run into a star after a film (or play) comes out they didn’t like. What do they say? They said they lie. Meryl says she says she hasn’t seen it - sorry, and Stanley says glibly, “Oh you were on stage!” and laughs, laughs, laughs. You have to be kidding. Their public lack of class was shocking.

Can we believe anything they say?

But they are also polished. Their delivery of callous, disingenuous shallowness is lost amidst the glitter and glam. They are brilliant at presenting their schtick. They understand power, image, posture, rhythm, timing, narrative. They know exactly how to exist inside modern celebrity culture without ever allowing the audience too close to the real machinery.

And, there is a circle of them. Stars. Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Aniston. Nicole Kidman actually brought her fourteen year old daughter to the Met Gala last week even though there is no one allowed under eighteen. Rules be damned.

But there is another kind of actress who wins Academy Awards, and Sally Field is one of them.

Jodie Foster is another. And, those are the ones we need to celebrate, for their performances are built on exposure of our inner most selves, and theirs.

And I think there is a younger generation of actresses quietly moving in this direction too. Women taking smaller independent film roles instead of simply building franchises and brands.

Mikey Madison. Daisy Edgar-Jones. Thomasin McKenzie. Cailee Spaeny. Greta Lee. Lily Gladstone. Anya Taylor-Joy.

And then there are the bridge actresses between both worlds. Frances McDormand. Sissy Spacek. Olivia Colman. Women who became celebrated enough to enter the system but somehow never entirely surrendered to it.

Hillary Swank. Won an Academy Award and couldn’t get another roll for years.

These are Sally Field actresses.

Please don’t attack my message. I think Meryl Streep is a great actress.

But I now think it is a different kind of great.

When we watch Meryl Streep, we are often watching one of the finest impersonators who has ever lived. Watch her acceptance speeches. Watch how she delivers outrage with perfectly calibrated restraint. Watch the walk. The pauses. The gestures. Every inch of it controlled. Premeditated. There is nothing spontaneous in anything she does, in my opinion.

Extraordinary.

But controlled.

And honestly? I would imagine it doesn’t take her very long to shake a role from her shoulders once filming ends.

I think Sally Field ages five years every time she finishes one.

Because one actress performs the character.

The other allows the character to wound her.

And maybe that is the difference between movie stars and actors.

We should probably make sure we still understand the difference.

Especially now, in a culture increasingly obsessed with image, hierarchy, branding, power, and performance.

Because I am no longer convinced we have been valuing the richer art form.

My review of Remarkably Bright Creatures is here on my podcast, or can be read here.

They have done it again. Adjusted the rules, tightened the language, responded to pressure, and still missed the point.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has introduced new rules for the upcoming Oscars, and on the surface, they read as thoughtful, even necessary. Human authorship must be provable. Performances must be demonstrably human and consensual. Actors can now receive multiple nominations in the same category.

All of that sounds like progress.

It isn’t.

It is, once again, the Academy trying to regulate symptoms instead of addressing the structure that creates the problem in the first place.

Let’s start with the most headline-friendly rule: AI.

The Academy now requires that performances and screenplays be human-authored, with consent clearly established. That sounds definitive until you actually sit with it for more than five seconds. Because in 2026, authorship is not binary. It is layered, assisted, iterative, and, in many cases, invisible.

You cannot tell me with certainty how much AI touches a modern screenplay. You simply cannot.

You cannot look at a script from Aaron Sorkin, or anyone else working at that level, and know whether AI was used for structure, dialogue refinement, or research. And more importantly, neither can the Academy. So the question becomes simple and uncomfortable.

How exactly are you policing this?

Disclosure? Self-reporting? Legal affidavits?

That is not enforcement. That is theater. Well, they are in the right place for that I guess.

The rule assumes a clarity that does not exist anymore. AI is not a separate tool sitting on the desk. It is embedded in the process. Quietly. Efficiently. Increasingly indistinguishable from the human hand guiding it.

So what the Academy has really done is create a rule that will only catch the obvious violations while completely missing the reality of how work is actually being made.

Then there is the performance rule.

Only human performances, performed with consent, are eligible. Again, reasonable. Until you consider the edge cases that are no longer edge cases. Digital touch-ups. Voice smoothing. Facial adjustments. De-aging. Post-production enhancements that are already standard.

At what point does a performance stop being “demonstrably human”?

And who decides?

Because if you think that line is clear, you have not been paying attention to how quickly this technology has evolved.

The Academy is trying to draw a bright line in a world that has already gone grayscale.

And then we arrive at what may be the most quietly disruptive change. Actors can now receive multiple nominations in the same category.

On paper, this eliminates category fraud. In reality, it opens the door to something far more absurd.

One actor could, theoretically, occupy multiple slots in a single category. Three out of five nominations. Maybe more over time.

We are already asking the question with people like Zendaya, Tom Holland, and Robert Pattinson, who are stacking serious roles in the same year.

But step back for a moment.

Is that what this is supposed to be?

An awards system where one person competes against themselves multiple times while others are pushed out entirely?

A great performance is a great performance. Yes. But the Oscars have never just been about isolated excellence. They are about recognition across a field, a moment, an industry.

This rule doesn’t expand recognition. It concentrates it.

And it creates a new kind of campaigning chaos, where studios are not just competing against each other, they are competing against themselves through the same actor.

Which brings us to the part the Academy continues to avoid entirely.

Money.

There is still no ceiling on campaign spending.

None.

Studios can pour millions into “For Your Consideration” campaigns, screenings, events, media placements, and influence strategies. The playing field is not just uneven, it is engineered that way.

If the Academy actually wanted fairness, this is where they would act.

Cap campaign spending.

Force creativity over brute force visibility.

Because right now, the Oscars are not just about what is best. They are about what is most seen.

And visibility is bought.

Here’s what that typically looks like in today’s awards landscape:

Baseline for a real campaign

• Smaller independent film: $500,000 to $3 million

• Mid-level contender with backing: $3 million to $10 million

• Major studio push (Best Picture serious run): $10 million to $30+ million

And that’s just the campaign; not the production budget.

Where the money goes

• Trade ads in places like Variety and Hollywood Reporter

• “For Your Consideration” digital and print campaigns

• Private screenings and Q&As (travel, venues, hospitality)

• Talent appearances and media tours

• PR teams and awards consultants

• Guild screenings (SAG, DGA, PGA, etc.)

• Event hosting — receptions, dinners, panels

• Social and targeted digital campaigns

The uncomfortable truth

The Oscars are not just a merit-based system. They are a visibility-based system.

The more people see your film — and see your talent — the more likely you are to be nominated.

That’s why a film can cost $10 million to make… and another $15 million to campaign.

And this is exactly the piece the Academy refuses to touch.

No cap.
No transparency requirement.
No leveling mechanism.

The same question applies to production budgets.

Should there be a cap on the size of films eligible for certain categories? Should there be clearer distinctions between independent and studio-backed films? Should resource disparity be acknowledged instead of ignored?

These are structural questions.

They are not being asked.

Instead, the Academy tweaks around the edges.

They adjust nomination rules. They attempt to define authorship in an era where authorship itself is evolving. They react to industry pressure from strikes and technology without rethinking the system those pressures are exposing.

And they continue to ignore the fundamental truth.

The Oscars are not broken because of AI.

They are not broken because of category fraud.

They are not broken because an actor might be nominated twice.

They are broken because they refuse to confront the machinery behind influence, access, and visibility.

Until there is transparency in campaigning, limits on spending, and a real acknowledgment of how films are made and marketed today, these rule changes will remain what they have always been.

Adjustments that look meaningful.

And change very little.

I was speaking to an independent filmmaker yesterday, someone who has been in it long enough to know the numbers, and he said something that has always been treated as fact. “Independent filmmakers almost never make money.” Not rarely. Almost never. It’s been baked into the model for decades, part warning, part resignation. But as he said it, it felt dated. Because the system that made that statement true is no longer intact, and what’s replacing it is far more unpredictable, but also, for the first real time, full of possibility.

At least that is the way I see it.

For decades, the math was brutal. Make a film, pray for a festival, hope for a distributor, lose control, maybe get a limited theatrical run, and then disappear. The money rarely flowed back to the filmmaker. It flowed to the system.

That system is now unstable.

Studios are merging, streamers are pulling back, theatrical windows are inconsistent, and audiences are no longer trained to go to the movies the way they once were. That sounds like bad news. It is, if you are trying to follow the old path.

But if you understand how attention works now, it is the first real moment where independent films can make money in a different way.

Take Christy, which I wrote about last week. It didn’t work theatrically. It failed in the traditional model. And then it landed on HBO, found an audience, and went to number one. That’s not a fluke. That’s a signal. A film can fail in one channel and succeed in another if the audience finds it at the right moment, in the right context.

We are no longer dealing with one release. We are dealing with waves.

Look at Skinamarink. Made for almost nothing, it built an audience on TikTok before most people even knew what it was. By the time it hit theaters, it already had demand. It turned a microbudget into millions.

Or Terrifier 2. No traditional studio backing, no massive campaign. It leaned into a niche horror audience, built word of mouth, and then exploded. It didn’t try to be for everyone. It went deep instead of wide.

Then there’s Sound of Freedom, which is a different case politically, but strategically important. It bypassed traditional marketing logic and mobilized a specific audience with intensity. Whatever you think of the film, it proved something very clearly. If an audience feels ownership, they will show up and they will pay.

And go back a little further to The Blair Witch Project. That film understood early what we are now seeing at scale. Build curiosity first. Let the audience do the marketing. Make discovery part of the experience.

What’s different now is speed and access. TikTok, YouTube, streaming platforms, and fragmented distribution mean a film can find its audience without asking permission from the traditional gatekeepers.

But here’s the part most people miss.

This is not easier. It’s harder.

Because now the burden shifts to the filmmaker.

You are not just making a film. You are building an audience. You are understanding timing. You are thinking about where your film lives before and after release. You are asking a different question entirely. Not is this good, but who is this for, and how will they find it?

Independent films make money now when three things line up.

First, a clearly defined audience. Not broad. Specific. Horror fans. Women over forty. True crime obsessives. Faith-based communities. Pick one.

Second, a platform that matches behavior. Some films are theatrical. Most are not. Some belong on HBO. Some belong on TikTok first. Some belong in pieces before they are ever seen as a whole.

Third, timing. Cultural timing, emotional timing, even algorithmic timing. Christy didn’t change as a film. Its context changed. And that changed everything.

We are moving into a world where distribution is not a single event. It is a strategy.

Now look at what’s happening on the awards side.

The Academy Awards are no longer dominated exclusively by traditional studio films. Over the last few years, some of the most visible nominees and winners have come from independent or quasi-independent models.

Take Everything Everywhere All at Once. Backed by A24, made outside the traditional studio system, strange on paper, risky in execution. It didn’t just get nominated. It won Best Picture.

Or Nomadland. A quiet, observational film with minimal structure. It won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress.

Look at Moonlight. A small, deeply personal film that took Best Picture over a major studio production.

More recently, Past Lives earned Best Picture and screenplay nominations. Intimate. Quiet. No spectacle.

And Anatomy of a Fall won Best Original Screenplay and became a global conversation piece.

Even The Zone of Interest, formally daring and uncomfortable, was recognized at the highest level.

This is the shift.

The Academy is still influenced by campaigns and money. That hasn’t gone away. But the definition of what is viable has expanded.

And that matters.

Because awards are not just about prestige. They are about amplification.

An Oscar nomination or win pushes a film back into the algorithm. It gives it a second life on streaming. It introduces it to audiences who missed it the first time. For an independent film, that can translate directly into revenue, licensing value, and long-term cultural relevance.

So when you put it all together, something real is happening.

The independent filmmaker who clearly knows his or her audience, and who can find the channels to reach that audience, has a legitimate opportunity now. Not just to make money, but to build visibility, extend the life of the film, and break through into critical recognition.

Money and acclaim used to be on two different tracks.

They are starting, finally, to intersect.