Tom Cruise is a man with no off switch. And his final act could be his greatest.

He turns 64 this year. Cruise received his first Oscar, an honorary one, in November 2025, handed to him by a Mexican auteur who’d just spent six months directing him in a dark comedy. He closed the book on Ethan Hunt after nearly thirty years and $3.5 billion in cumulative box office. He dated his co-star, broke up with his co-star, and watched their $275 million underwater thriller get shelved in the fallout. He confirmed sequels to two different legacy properties in the same press tour. He has at least six movies in various stages of development, spanning World War II dramas, racing films, comedies, and a project where he plays the most powerful man in the world causing a disaster and then trying to convince humanity he’s their savior.

For the first time in over a decade, Tom Cruise is not making a Mission: Impossible movie, and the question of what he does next is more interesting than anything Ethan Hunt did in his final two outings. The Mission franchise became a trap of its own making. The stunts kept escalating. The profits not so much. Dead Reckoning cost $291 million and made $571 million, which sounds fine until you realize it needed closer to $600 million just to break even. The Final Reckoning cost $400 million. It made $599 million. The reviews softened from the near-perfect scores of Fallout and Rogue Nation down to a respectable but uninspired 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. The biplane stunt was extraordinary. The submarine sequence was extraordinary. The exposition in the first hour was not. The writing couldn’t keep up with the man dangling from the wing of an aircraft at 10,000 feet over Africa, operating the camera himself and lighting the shot by positioning the plane relative to the sun.

The recent stretch of Tom Cruise's career is one that people are only now starting to appreciate properly. I didn’t even know about him that well before this year! I feel stupid! Everything from Ghost Protocol onward represents a man operating at a level nobody else in Hollywood comes close to, and for years the conversation around him was still stuck on couches and Scientology. Maverick changed that. A $1.4 billion box office run forced people to reckon with what he'd been doing for a decade: throwing himself out of planes, breaking ankles on camera, holding his breath for six minutes underwater, learning to fly helicopters, and treating every sequel like a personal dare. The culture is now reorienting around his greatness in real time, and it's overdue. Some recent examples from twitter. Shoutout to Adam Townsend, as always, for spreading the gospel:

The Christopher McQuarrie Collaboration

Tom Cruise is the greatest action star alive. Christopher McQuarrie is a gifted filmmaker who wrote The Usual Suspects at 27. Their collaboration produced Fallout, which I’d put against any action movie made in history. But the back-to-back Dead & Final Reckoning films led to an anticlimactic ending. Bloated runtimes, AI villains that never quite landed, too much nostalgia. At points, they came across as a series of consecutive high quality action sequences more than a cohesive movie.

Reports surfaced in late 2024 that Cruise sought to cast Glen Powell as the new lead for potential future Mission: Impossible installments. Powell, the guy Cruise hand-picked for Maverick, the guy who’s now one of the most bankable young stars in Hollywood. If that happens, Cruise becomes the mentor figure across two franchises simultaneously, engineering his own succession rather than clinging to roles until the audience does it for him. That’s a different energy than most aging stars. While I’m not sure he can carry the Mission franchise just yet (Miles Teller added a lot to Top Gun: Maverick, it was the combined dynamic of the trio that fueled that movie) Powell, for my money, deserves this type of opportunity after seeing him in The Running Man.

McQuarrie and Cruise are still working together. McQuarrie dropped his entire rep team in early 2024, left CAA and his longtime manager, and moved to Cruise’s own attorney. They appeared together at Cannes in May 2025. They have at least four projects in the pipeline together: Broadsword, a WWII film co-starring Henry Cavill and Marion Cotillard; The Gauntlet, a remake of the Clint Eastwood thriller; Top Gun 3, which McQuarrie is co-writing with Ehren Kruger; and the Les Grossman movie, which McQuarrie has described as a project they riff on at breakfast just to decompress from whatever else they’re shooting. “The conversations we’ve had about Les Grossman are so fucking funny,” McQuarrie told Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. He said they’re having “very serious conversations” about it. Ben Stiller has separately confirmed he and Cruise have talked. I believe all of them.

Broadsword was supposed to start filming in July 2025 with Cavill and Cotillard attached. The plan was for Cruise to wrap the Final Reckoning press tour and head straight into a WWII epic with his favorite director before pivoting to Top Gun 3. That hasn’t happened. As of March 2026, McQuarrie has signed on to write and direct King Conan for 20th Century Studios, a legacy sequel with a 78-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger playing an aged barbarian king who gets deposed and has to fight his way back to the throne. “They just hired a fantastic writer-director who did Tom Cruise’s last four movies,” Schwarzenegger announced at his own Arnold Sports Festival. McQuarrie’s slate already included Broadsword, The Gauntlet, Top Gun 3 (as writer), and the Les Grossman project. Something has to give. Either Broadsword is quietly being delayed while McQuarrie juggles his expanding slate, or the project has cooled and nobody’s saying so publicly. The Cruise-McQuarrie partnership isn’t over, but for the first time since 2012, McQuarrie is directing someone else. That’s worth noticing. Regardless, as a Henry Cavill stan, I hope they get around to Broadsword soon. Imagine Mission Impossible: Fallout energy set in WW2.

Digger

Alejandro González Iñárritu hasn’t made an English-language film since The Revenant. He’s a four-time Oscar winner. He’s the guy who made Birdman, which is a movie about the psychic cost of being famous, and Babel, which is a movie about the impossibility of connection, and The Revenant, which is a movie about a man who refuses to die. Now he’s made a movie about the most powerful man in the world who causes a catastrophe and then goes on a mission to prove he’s humanity’s savior.

The tagline calls it “a comedy of catastrophic proportions.”

I don’t know what Digger is. Nobody does. The plot details are thin. What I know is this: the cast includes Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde, Emma D’Arcy, John Goodman, and Cruise as a character named Digger Rockwell. The budget is $125 million, which in Cruise terms is modest. It’s a Warner Bros. and Legendary co-production. It shot in the UK for six months. Iñárritu has said, “The range that I discovered working with Tom is unprecedented for me as a director. I was so fucking impressed and happy.” He’s also said it won’t have much action.

That last detail is the one that matters. Tom Cruise, in a movie with almost no action, directed by a guy who makes actors crawl through frozen rivers and deliver ten-minute monologues about mortality. This is Cruise doing something he arguably hasn’t done seriously since Eyes Wide Shut in 1999: submitting to an auteur’s vision. Kubrick kept him on set for 400 days. Cruise spent that shoot wandering New York as Bill Harford, a man whose certainties dissolve in a single night. He was great in it. People forget that because they remember the publicity cycle with Nicole Kidman, or they remember the Scientology of it all, or they just remember that Kubrick died and the conversation became about everything except the performance. But the Tom Cruise of Magnolia, Vanilla Sky and Eyes Wide Shut is an actor through and through.

There’s a pattern here. In 1999, Cruise was at the absolute peak of his stardom. He’d just done Mission: Impossible and Jerry Maguire back to back. He could have done anything. He chose to spend 400 days on a Kubrick set being directed into submission. In 2024, he was at the peak of his action-star phase, coming off Maverick’s $1.4 billion run and the Final Reckoning press tour. Theoretically he could have jumped straight into Top Gun 3 or Broadsword, despite the last Mission: Impossible movies struggling struggling. But he chose to spend six months on an Iñárritu set doing the same thing. Maybe Cruise uses these collaborations to reset.

Digger could be the role that reminds people who he is as an actor. Iñárritu is the kind of director who peels actors open. He got elite performances out of Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Keaton, and Brad Pitt. This could be the beginning of an elite late-career arc.

Test screening reactions have reportedly called Cruise “unrecognizable.” I can’t wait.

Warner Bros, Paramount-Skydance Merger

Everything on Cruise’s slate runs through Warner Bros. That mattered a lot six months ago. The situation has evolved further since.

To understand why, you have to follow the chain of events. Cruise and Paramount had been drifting for years. In 2021, the studio announced Top Gun: Maverick would get a 45-day theatrical window, and Cruise lawyered up. They pressed him to approve a Mission: Impossible TV show for Paramount+. Plus A Days of Thunder streaming series. Cruise said no to all of it. Meanwhile, the budgets on Dead Reckoning were spiraling, and the relationship was fraying from both sides. Cruise and McQuarrie had developed a habit of rewriting on the fly, which is how you get Fallout and also how you get movies that lose a lot of money like the last 2. Paramount complained he wouldn’t send script pages, wouldn’t share dailies, wouldn’t collaborate the way studios expect. Cruise, for his part, could see what Paramount was becoming. A company in search of a buyer (this was before the Skydance merger). He wasn’t going to let his next decade ride on someone else’s merger timeline.

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So in January 2024, he left. Signed a multi-year deal with Warner Bros. to develop and produce original and franchise films. Set up offices on the Burbank lot. Brought his whole operation over. Digger is WB and Legendary. Broadsword is WB. Deeper, the $275 million underwater thriller with Ana de Armas, was at WB before it stalled. Edge of Tomorrow 2 is WB. Warner Bros. was betting that Tom Cruise’s post-Mission: Impossible career was their franchise. The man himself. Not a character. Not an IP.

And then David Ellison bought everybody.

Skydance finished merging with Paramount in August 2025. Ellison, who had co-financed five Mission: Impossible films and Top Gun: Maverick, was now running the studio Cruise had just left. Within months, he was pursuing Warner Bros. Discovery. Netflix made a play. Ellison outbid them. On February 27, 2026, Paramount Skydance announced the acquisition of WBD for roughly $110 billion. The deal is expected to close in Q3 2026, right around the time Digger hits theaters.

Cruise left Paramount because the studio was sinking. Now, ironically, the guy who ran his franchises at Skydance owns Paramount and is about to own Warner Bros. too. Cruise’s old home and his new home are merging into one company, and the person running that company is someone he’s worked with for over a decade. A few weeks ago, Cruise was spotted on the Paramount lot shooting a secret promo video with Jon M. Chu, celebrating the merger and what executives are internally calling a “brand new day.” The combined entity would control Mission: Impossible, Top Gun, DC Comics, Harry Potter, Comedy Central, Game of Thrones, and HBO. It would rival Disney for IP firepower and Netflix for reach. And Tom Cruise, the guy who walked out of Paramount eighteen months ago, would be one of the creators at the center of it.

This changes the calculus on everything. The DC villain idea isn’t fan speculation anymore. Cruise is in the building where DC lives, and the man writing the checks has built his career on Cruise vehicles. Edge of Tomorrow 2 doesn’t need to compete for WB’s attention against other priorities; it’s now a legacy asset for a combined company that needs theatrical events. Even the Les Grossman movie, a comedy about a deranged studio executive, takes on a different flavor when the studio landscape is being redrawn in this fashion. Keep all of this in mind.

Tom Cruise’s Upcoming Slate

Then there’s the question of what happens after Digger. Cruise’s slate right now reads like a man trying to do everything at once, which is how he’s always operated, except now the clock is more visible. The full list is staggering: Digger with Iñárritu this October. Broadsword and The Gauntlet with McQuarrie whenever McQuarrie’s schedule allows. Top Gun 3 in development. Days of Thunder 2 in early development. Edge of Tomorrow 2, fast-tracked to fill the gap left by Deeper, the $275 million underwater thriller with Ana de Armas that Warner Bros. paused over budget concerns and that collapsed further when Cruise and de Armas broke up in October 2025. And then the projects that exist more as ideas than plans: a Les Grossman movie, a potential DC role, and a film that was supposed to be shot in actual outer space.

Top Gun 3 is stalled by logistics, and the reason is the most interesting thing on this list. Joseph Kosinski, who directed Maverick, is committed to a Miami Vice reboot releasing in August 2027. Michael B. Jordan as Tubbs, Austin Butler as Crockett, set in 1985, shooting this summer in Miami for IMAX. Michael Mann is producing (yes, the same Mann who’s doing Heat 2 with Butler, and the same Heat 2 that was too expensive for Warner Brothers and got bought my Amazon MGM) which means we really might get two of the greatest crime action thrillers ever in the next few years.

And here’s where it gets interesting: World of Reel reported recently that Cruise is being eyed to play the villain. The director is Kosinski, who made Maverick with him. The producer is Mann, who directed Cruise in Collateral, the last time he played an antagonist, twenty-two years ago. Cruise’s schedule is wide open until Digger promotion starts in September. The role would put him opposite Jordan, one of the hottest actors in the industry after his Best Actor win for Sinners, and Butler, who’s quietly building one of the most interesting careers of his generation. Cruise as a mid-80s Miami drug lord, with Mann producing and Kosinski shooting it for IMAX, would be the kind of event casting that makes people buy tickets on the title alone. It would also be his first villain since Vincent in Collateral, which remains the most chilling thing he’s ever done. That silver hair. Those dead eyes. The way he moved through the LA night like a man who’d already decided everyone around him was expendable.

All of this means Top Gun 3 probably doesn’t shoot until 2027 at the earliest, putting it in theaters around 2028 or 2029. Cruise will be 66, possibly 67 by then. McQuarrie and Kruger have cracked the story. Maverick will face an existential crisis. Glen Powell and Miles Teller are both attached to return. This will print money whenever it arrives, but the longer it takes, the harder it becomes to justify putting a man approaching 70 in a fighter jet cockpit. Cruise will do it anyway. That’s the point of him.

Days of Thunder 2 is the wildest card in the deck. Jerry Bruckheimer confirmed it. Jeff Gordon confirmed it. Cruise himself told Gordon at the Final Reckoning premiere, “We’re doing it. We’re doing Days of Thunder 2.” The original was a fine movie from 1990, notable primarily for being where Cruise met Nicole Kidman and for being called “Top Gun on wheels” for the rest of eternity. The sequel’s existence is clearly motivated by the success of Brad Pitt’s F1, which cleared $57 million on opening weekend and proved there’s a massive appetite for racing movies with aging stars. Here’s where it gets interesting. Bruckheimer produced both F1 and the original Days of Thunder. Kosinski directed both Top Gun: Maverick and F1. The pieces are all sitting on the same table. Imagine, for a second, that they don’t just make Days of Thunder 2 as a standalone NASCAR movie. Imagine they cross it over with the F1 universe. Cole Trickle and Sonny Hayes. Cruise and Pitt. Bruckheimer sitting in the producer’s chair grinning while two of the biggest movie stars of their generation try to outrace each other on screen. Would it be ridiculous? Yes. I’d buy a ticket day one. The racing movie industrial complex is real now, and this would capitalize on it. While this idea might be too far-fledged, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in the same movie would make a billion dollars.

The Les Grossman movie remains exciting. Grossman worked in Tropic Thunder because he was a chaotic interjection, a grotesque cameo that stole every scene he was in. Stretching that into a feature requires a story, and the story has to justify a 63-year-old man in a fat suit and prosthetic hands screaming at people for 90 minutes. McQuarrie says they riff on it constantly. Stiller says maybe something in that world but not necessarily a Tropic Thunder sequel. Justin Theroux says the project isn’t dead but has no movement. The smart bet is that Grossman appears somewhere, maybe in one of the other McQuarrie projects as a cameo or a meta-gag, rather than carrying his own film. But if they find the right angle, if they make Grossman a lens for satirizing today’s Hollywood, with its streaming mergers and AI anxiety and franchise exhaustion, there’s a version of this that’s the funniest thing Cruise has ever done.

Then there’s Edge of Tomorrow 2. The original is a masterpiece of action filmmaking that nobody saw in theaters and everybody discovered on streaming. It’s iconic. A sequel has been in development purgatory for a decade. McQuarrie once said Cruise had a concept that was “locked and loaded.” A script has reportedly been worked on. With Deeper stalled, Production Weekly reported in late 2025 that filming is now slated for late 2026, fast-tracked by Warner Bros. as part of Cruise’s multi-year deal. The working title is Live Die Repeat and Repeat, which is perfect. If they get Blunt back, if the script honors what made the first one special while delivering novelty, this could be the best movie on Cruise’s entire slate.

And then there was, for a while, the space movie. Tom Cruise and Doug Liman had been developing a project with NASA and SpaceX that would have made Cruise the first civilian to perform a spacewalk on camera for a feature film. McQuarrie was writing. Elon Musk described it as “Mission: Impossible in space.” Cruise told Variety in 2023 that he was working on it “diligently.” Nobody talks about it anymore. It represents the logical endpoint of the Cruise stunt philosophy: go higher, go faster, go further, until you literally leave the atmosphere. The fact that even Tom Cruise couldn’t will it into existence says something about where that philosophy hits its ceiling. You can jump out of planes. You can hang off buildings. You can burn a parachute at 10,000 feet and open your backup with 2,000 left. But you can’t make NASA and SpaceX align their schedules with a movie production, and you can’t insure it.

Ultimately, I can’t help but feel Tom Cruise is poised to have the most interesting arc of his career.

Cruise broke his ankle on the Fallout set in 2018, kept shooting, and turned the limp into a character beat. He did the burning parachute jump sixteen times for Final Reckoning. He’s been hit by cars, thrown from motorcycles, held his breath for six minutes underwater, clung to the outside of a plane during takeoff. Val Kilmer, his Iceman, died at 65. Cruise is 63. The clock is real. But instead of slowing him down, it seems to be clarifying his choices.

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Think about what could actually be in front of him. A villain turn in Miami Vice that would reunite him with the producer of Collateral and the director of Maverick. A DC role as a sociopathic villain. A potential Days of Thunder sequel or F1 crossover that would put him and Brad Pitt on screen together for the first time in thirty years. Top Gun 3, where a 67-year-old man will climb into a fighter jet and dare you to say he's too old. And Digger, where he apparently becomes a different person entirely. That's what's on the cards. My bucket list goes further: more Michael Mann movies like Collateral, more villain roles like Collateral, a new timeless action franchise like Mission: Impossible, and at minimum one Denis Villeneuve and one Christopher Nolan collaboration each. I've written about the Nolan one before.

Now imagine what happens when the guy who made Fallout, who did the HALO jump and the helicopter chase and the bathroom fight, brings that same intensity to movies with better scripts. Cruise with Iñárritu writing and directing is a different animal than Cruise with a $400 million budget and an AI villain that never quite works. Give him a great writer and a great director who pre-plan the shoot and a character worth caring about, and the results could make everything before it look like a warm-up. He’s done Jerry Maguire. He’s done Eyes Wide Shut. He’s done Magnolia. He knows how to do this. He just hasn’t been asked to in a long time.

And the action isn’t going away. That’s what makes this window so wild. He’s not choosing between being an actor and being an action star. He can do both at once, for the first time since the late ‘90s, except now he has thirty more years of stunt work in his body and a franchise playbook nobody else in the industry can touch. Mission Impossible: Fallout with better writing is the next step. Collateral on a bigger stage is inevitable. Top Gun: Maverick was one of the best movies of his career, and you bet he’s been working to push boundaries even further. He’s only begun tapping into his collaboration potential with Joseph Kosinski, and created 2 of the most visually stunning movies ever (Oblivion being the other).

Tom Cruise hasn’t hit his ceiling yet. He’s been circling it for years, and the projects lining up right now are the ones that could finally get him there.

I can’t wait to see what he does next. I don’t say that about many people.

The best way to feel this is in a theater. I saw The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers extended cut on the big screen recently. Phenomenal experience. Interstellar in IMAX 70mm last year was an event. Top Gun: Maverick will been one whenever they get around to it. But the re-releases that hit hardest are the ones that transport you to a time you either barely remember or never got to experience. Jerry Maguire is back in theaters April 12th for its 30th anniversary. Three nights only. Ocean’s Eleven returns June 21st for its 25th. I’m going to both. I plan on getting dressed up and pretending I’m at the original premiere.

There’s a communal memory thing happening here that I think matters. Some of your parents saw Jerry Maguire opening weekend in ‘96. You see it thirty years later in the same kind of darkened room with the same film playing. Now you share a movie memory across a generation.

There’s something about sitting in a dark room for two and a half hours, no phone, one story, one thread from start to finish, that rebuilds something in your brain. In a world where almost everyone has chronic, low-grade ADHD, you can feel your attention span repairing itself in real time. Movies are among the best social experiences we can still have that involve electronics. Better than video games, which offer community but are engineered for addiction and carry real cognitive strain (e-sports exempted, those people earn a living. And some single-player role playing games are exempted for their artistic qualities as well). Better than watching sports, honestly, which give you the rush of competition wrapped in a product full of inconsistencies and officiating disasters worse than the worst plot hole you’ve ever seen in a movie. A movie is clean. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and someone thought through all three.

Not every new release earns its theater ticket. We all know this. Some weekends you look at what’s playing and nothing justifies the drive, the parking, the $20-30 including food and drink. Re-releases solve that problem elegantly. They guarantee that at any given time, a percentage of the theatrical catalogue is proven, quality, nostalgia-tested material. They don’t oversaturate because they’re limited runs. They play to our desire for cozy nostalgia without flooding the market. And from the studio side, the economics are incredible. No $200 million production budget, no press tour, no marketing blitz. The audience is pre-built. It’s nearly pure margin on screens that would otherwise sit half-empty on a slow weekend. Studios leaving this money on the table is one of the stranger business decisions in entertainment.

I think about this more broadly. We live in a world where the default leisure activity is some form of low-grade self-medication. Vaping. Edibles. Four hours of a TV series you half-watch while scrolling Instagram reels on your phone. Weed culture went from counterculture to commonplace. People are more isolated than ever and calling it introversion. The average person’s evening is a rotating menu of dopamine hits that require nothing from them and give back even less. A movie asks you to show up. To sit with other people, commit to a single narrative, feel something on someone else’s schedule, and walk out having shared an experience with strangers. That’s increasingly rare. Going to a theater is one of the last social rituals that doesn’t revolve around consumption on a screen you control. You surrender the remote. And the thing I keep noticing is that I feel genuinely better afterward.

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Which brings me to Paramount+.

I’ve been deep in their catalogue lately and it’s remarkable. The Firm. The Rainmaker. The Talented Mr. Ripley. They just added Primal Fear on April 1st. Road to Perdition is on there. These films share a quality I can only describe as old American cinematic energy: studios that trusted grown-up stories, directors obsessed with craft, productions that made things look beautiful because beautiful was worth the effort. There is a texture to these movies that you don’t find in the straight-to-streaming flicks like RIP or The Gorge, films built around recognizable names and engineered for audience capture. Those are products. The Paramount catalogue is full of movies that feel like they were made. You can feel the care in the lighting of a room, the argument over the right lens for a courtroom scene. You can tell the difference.

I missed The Revenant when it got a re-release, and I’m a little annoyed about it. There are so many more opportunities here. A Few Good Men and The Nice Guys are playing in my area this year too. Studios are sitting on decades of films that audiences would pay to see projected properly, to remind people that the theatrical experience has always been worth protecting when there’s actual quality behind it.

As you know, Paramount is acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery for roughly $111 billion, with the deal expected to close this fall. The WBD shareholder vote is set for April 23rd. David Ellison’s Paramount is absorbing everything: HBO, Warner Bros. Studios, DC, CNN, Turner Classic Movies, the whole portfolio. Think about what that combined catalogue looks like. Paramount’s legal thrillers and Grisham adaptations living next to Warner’s heist films and prestige dramas. The Firm next to The Departed. Road to Perdition next to Goodfellas. The merger gives one entity control over an almost absurd concentration of American cinema’s greatest hits. And tucked inside that WBD portfolio is Turner Classic Movies, a brand with decades of expertise in curation, preservation, and programming classics. If Ellison’s team is smart about it, and that’s a real if, TCM becomes the engine for both the streaming catalogue and the theatrical re-release pipeline. This could mean the deepest, best-curated library anyone’s ever assembled, and a steady supply of proven films keeping theaters alive on weekends when new releases don’t show up.

I feel like there was something healthier about the world before everyone had a screen in their pocket. I don’t romanticize it blindly. I just notice that the movies from that era hit different, and sometimes watching them is the closest I’ll get to visiting that world. You sit in the dark, the lights go down, your phone is away, and for two hours you live in a version of reality where people are present with each other. Stories take their time, and craft matters for its own sake.

That’s what the Paramount catalogue has been giving me. And if the merger means more of it, in better quality, on bigger screens, with a company that actually understands what it’s sitting on? I’ll take that bet.

Jerry Maguire. April 12th. I’ll be there.

The Gorge is one of the best-looking movies you'll stream, a genre pile-up that wants to be a horror film, a romance, an action thriller, and a conspiracy movie all at once. It succeeds most at the things Apple does best: making beautiful objects that make you forget you're staring at a screen. The story runs out of ideas before the camera does, but for two hours, you won't care as much as you'd expect. A fascinating entry when considered within Apple TV’s new movie strategy.

The Gorge is stunning in a way that streaming movies almost never are, the kind of film where you pause to stare at a wide shot of Norwegian forest and wonder why you’re watching it on your couch instead of an IMAX screen. The gorge itself, a mist-choked abyss flanked by concrete guard towers and lined with automated turrets, is one of the better pieces of world-building I’ve seen in a recent genre film. The technology, the protocols, the surrounding wilderness. The unlimited wild game. Scott Derrickson builds a place you believe in.

The premise gives you two elite operatives stationed in guard towers on opposite sides of a vast, classified gorge, tasked with keeping something contained. The first half is where the film is sharpest, a slow-burn that lets its world breathe and its characters find each other across an impossible distance. The setup is genuinely excellent. The second half is where the genres start colliding, and the film gets busier than it needs to be. Horror bleeds into action bleeds into conspiracy thriller, and while each piece is competent, the pile-up dilutes what made the opening so effective. If they’d narrowed the scope even slightly, this could have been something special instead of something solid.

The horror works in bursts. Jump scares, mostly, and a few of them land. But The Gorge is not pure horror. Here, the horror is more of a set dressing for the action, and the action is more of a vehicle for the romance, and the romance gives way to a conspiracy thread that gets more predictable the longer it goes. You see the problem. The movie is trying to be four things at once, and while it manages to be competent at all of them, it’s great at none of them.

Except the visuals. The visuals are great.

Miles Teller plays the American operative, and he’s the right guy for this. Teller has always been best when a role asks him to be smart and a little damaged, and this one gives him both. You invest in him early, during the handoff scene with Sope Dirisu, who explains the rules of the gig with the weariness of someone who’s been alone too long. Dirisu is terrific in limited screen time.

Anya Taylor-Joy plays the operative on the other side, a Lithuanian covert specialist with close-cropped black hair and a cute accent. She’s well cast here, physical in the action sequences, and watching her move through fight choreography makes you understand why Villeneuve tapped her for Alia Atreides. If The Gorge is any indication, she’s going to be something in Dune 3.

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The two leads have genuine chemistry, which matters because so much of the film depends on you buying their connection before they ever share a physical space. It’s charming. The script, by Zach Dean, who wrote this as a spec that landed on the 2020 Black List, is sharpest in these quieter early stretches. There’s a Christmas montage where they play chess and bang on improvised drum sets across the gorge, a nod to Taylor-Joy’s breakout in The Queen’s Gambit and Teller’s in Whiplash. The references were in the script before either actor was cast. Both tried to get the scene cut. The producers overruled them. They were right to. That was iconic.

Sigourney Weaver shows up as their handler, and she brings the right energy. It’s a small role, but Weaver has been doing menacing government types since before most of this cast was born, and she doesn’t waste a line.

The visuals are everything. Derrickson and cinematographer Chris Soos, who came up shooting music videos for David Bowie and the White Stripes and Marilyn Manson, give the film a neo-noir quality that’s genuinely stunning. The forest exteriors, shot along Norway’s Rauma River, are pristine. Beautiful pines and granites. The movie has a Steve Jobs quality to it. Apple’s visual brand, the obsession with clean lines and light falling just so, bleeds into the way this movie looks. Darkness inside the gorge contrasts with the hyper-sharp greens above, and the towers are always well framed. Even the VFX, handled by DNEG and Framestore, have a tactile quality that most streaming-exclusive films don’t bother with. They spared no expense.

Which brings me to Apple.

The Gorge became Apple TV+’s biggest movie launch ever, beating out Wolfs with Clooney and Pitt. It drove double-digit subscriber growth globally and boosted new viewers by 80% the weekend it dropped. All of this as a streaming exclusive, without a theatrical window or an Oscar campaign or months of festival buzz. A Valentine’s Day debut and strong word of mouth.

This is the new Apple playbook, and it’s fascinating. For years, Apple tried to be a prestige studio. They bankrolled Killers of the Flower Moon, Napoleon, Argylle, Fly Me to the Moon. The results were mixed at best. Scorsese’s film earned ten Oscar nominations but struggled commercially. Napoleon divided critics. Argylle was a genuine bomb. The theatrical strategy was burning money without building the subscriber base that justifies the whole enterprise. So Apple pivoted. Streaming-first releases. Mid-budget genre films with recognizable casts. Movies designed to be watched on a Friday night on your couch, not debated at Cannes. The Gorge is the proof of concept. So was Highest 2 Lowest with Denzel and Spike Lee later that year, and The Lost Bus with McConaughey. Then F1 got a full theatrical run, grossed over $630 million worldwide, and proved Apple could do both when the project warranted it.

There’s something instructive about the fact that Apple’s biggest streaming hit isn’t their most critically acclaimed or their most ambitious. It’s the most watchable. The Gorge is a Friday night movie. It knows what it is. Two attractive people, a gorgeous location, cool technology, monsters, explosions, a kiss at the end. That combination, packaged at this level of visual quality, turns out to be exactly what streaming audiences want. The critics gave it a 62% on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences gave it a 74%. That gap tells you everything about what this movie is doing and who it’s doing it for.

Apple’s strategy now is to spend big annually but keep budgets under $100M per film, reserve wide theatrical for only one or two titles a year, and use limited runs mainly for awards eligibility.

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The Reznor and Ross score is not their most adventurous work. They produced a ten-track album runs 34 minutes. “Millipedes and Fire Ants” opens with a low buzz that builds into something organic and unsettling. “The Other Side” is the closest thing to a theme, a slow piano figure that plays whenever the two leads are communicating across the gorge. It does the job.

So what do you do with a movie like The Gorge? If you judge it as a visual experience, as a showcase for what a mid-budget streaming film can look like when Apple’s money and taste are behind it, it’s a 9. If you judge it purely on story, on whether the back half delivers on the front half’s promise, it’s closer to a 6. A gorgeous wrapper around an average story, and whether you love it depends on how much you like these genres. There’s definitely real craft here, real chemistry between the leads, and enough striking images to justify the two hours. I just wish the script was a little better. The gorge was interesting when it was mysterious. The deeper the movie went into it, the less there was to find.

I’m half joking. I don’t really mean to pit one franchise against the other. I haven’t seen all the Bond films in the same timespan. Bond has six decades of history, humongous cultural gravity, an amazing theme song like no other. The franchise has grossed nearly $8 billion worldwide across 27 films. Mission: Impossible, starting thirty-four years later with a fraction of the mythology, has pulled in over $4.35 billion across just eight films. Both of them have recently closed out on a bad note relative to their peak, except Bond will continue perpetually.

Contents:

1. Failing With Dignity

2. One Franchise, Many Directors, One Constant

3. Bond’s Corporate Decline

4. Can Denis Villeneuve Revive James Bond?

5. The Case for Cavill (Even If It Won’t Happen)

6. What Bond Needs Now

Failing With Dignity

Mission Impossible, even when it fails, fails by trying something genuinely new and exciting, constantly attempting to push the boundaries of filmmaking. The James Bond franchise seems comparatively risk averse and needs more of that energy. I’m still going through older Bond films, so I’ll try to keep this comparison brief.

What makes the Mission: Impossible series remarkable compared to other franchises and major IPs is the overall level of craft and attention to detail. Yes, Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning represent a dip. The pandemic and the writers’ strike hurt them. They both lost money. But even in those two films, the stunt work alone is groundbreaking. Tom Cruise burned through parachutes, set Guinness records, and threw his 62-year-old body at sequences that no other actors have ever attempted. When someone is physically doing the thing you’re watching, your body knows. Your grip tightens. The stakes register differently. You can tell the difference. The Bond films still have some phenomenal action scenes, but with obvious stunt doubles where necessary, even though Craig did more of his own stunts than most actors. And the stunts don’t push the boundaries half as much.

One Franchise, Many Directors, One Constant

What Cruise understood, and what the Bond producers never quite figured out, is that a franchise benefits from genuine reinvention and obsession with the details. The first four Mission: Impossible films had four different directors. Brian De Palma made the first one a paranoid thriller. John Woo turned the second into a stylish Hong Kong-flavored spectacle. Then J.J. Abrams brought in a strong love interest and Philip Seymour Hoffman was the franchise’s most memorable villain. Brad Bird, the Ratatouille director making his live-action debut, delivered Ghost Protocol which rejuvenated the franchise with its Burj Khalifa set piece.

"Do you have a wife? A girlfriend? Because if you do, I'm gonna find her. I'm gonna hurt her. I'm gonna make her bleed, and cry, and call out your name. And then I'm gonna find you, and kill you right in front of her." — Owen Davian (Mission: Impossible III)

Hoffman in MI:3 was unbelievable. At the time, he hadn’t done any major blockbuster roles of that caliber.

Then Christopher McQuarrie took over for the last four. Yet each film still felt distinct. Rogue Nation is Rebecca Ferguson’s arrival, and she steals that movie. It also had the amazing underwater sequence. Fallout is the peak: the best action, the best stunts integrated into the best story, the best soundtrack, the best catharsis. Henry Cavill cooks as August Walker. Vanessa Kirby as the White Widow. Fallout grossed $791 million and remains the series’ peak for a reason. Everything works.

Through all eight films, the constant is Cruise himself. Producer, star, stunt performer, quality control. The franchise exists because of him. That level of ownership is vanishingly rare, and across 28 years it produced a miracle: a blockbuster series that got better as it went, peaked in its sixth entry. But unlike Bond, even when it stumbled, Mission stumbled while doing things that have never been done before.

And the music grew on me. I’ll admit it. Hearing the iconic Mission Impossible theme swell as Ethan Hunt wins feels as cathartic now as the Bond theme dropping over an end-credits sequence. Each film reworked the melody with its own composer: Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, Michael Giacchino, Joe Kraemer, Lorne Balfe.

Bond’s Corporate Decline

Now compare this to Bond since Mission: Impossible entered the picture in 1996. In the same span, Bond has produced nine films across the Brosnan and Craig eras. Casino Royale is a legitimate masterpiece. Skyfall is elite cinema. I’ll never forget watching it in theaters, and Adele’s title track was unforgettable. Javier Bardem was a phenomenal villain. Those two films were Bond at the absolute peak of its powers. They had great soundtracks.

The rest is where Bond's consistency problem shows. No Time To Die starts strong but falls flat as soon as Rami Malek appears on screen (it’s not him, it’s the writing). Billie Eilish’s title track is incredible, although sonically it doesn’t do that much differently or explore much more than Adele’s Skyfall. Hans Zimmer was brought in very late, so while the score has strong elements, it’s far from Zimmer’s best work.

Casino Royale to me stands out as arguably the best Bond movie ever made, and probably the strongest of the era. It came out in 2006, 20 whole years ago. They haven’t come close to writing a character like Eva Green as a Bond girl, and abandoned Chris Cornell’s amazing intro for nonstop moody entries:

Ironically Casino Royale was inspired by Batman Begins as a gritty reboot. But unlike Warner Bros, who fought to keep Nolan till the very end on Dark Knight Rises, Bond’s producers did not follow through and get their Dark Knight because they never handed the vision over to an auteur.

Skyfall should’ve been the last entry in the Craig series and saved for later, but they used it too early and then dragged it on. The overall picture: two all-time Craig peaks in Casino Royale and Skyfall, a Brosnan peak with GoldenEye, with lots of formulaic filmmaking in between.

The Brosnan era is interesting. Many consider him a poorly utilized Bond. Mission also had 3 consecutive high quality movies between Ghost Protocol and Fallout; a trilogy within a saga. Bond never quite hits that continuity. Going off what I can glean online from consensus and individual reviews: GoldenEye is great. Tomorrow Never Dies (6.4 on IMDb), The World Is Not Enough (6.3), and Die Another Day (6.1) oscillate between fun and forgettable, with Die Another Day currently sitting as the lowest-rated Bond film in IMDb's entire 27-film history (I may change my mind and enjoy the over-the-top style of the Brosnan era, but I’ll save my complete analysis when I’m done watching all the Bonds, for now I assume the consensus is directionally accurate).

Mission: Impossible's eight films average a 7.2 on IMDb. The lowest-rated entry, MI:2, sits at 6.1. The highest, Fallout, hits 7.7. Most of them sit in a remarkably tight band. Bond's nine films across the Brosnan and Craig eras average around 6.9, but with swings: Casino Royale at 8.0 and Skyfall at 7.8 represent genuine peaks, while five of the nine sit at 6.8 or below. Also, 7.3 seems a bit too high for No Time To Die and the rating strikes me as grading it on a heavy curve.

Bond's nine films from GoldenEye through No Time to Die have grossed roughly $5.4 billion worldwide, buoyed enormously by Skyfall's billion-dollar run and the Craig-era prestige bump. Mission: Impossible's eight films have crossed $4.35 billion. Bond has the larger total, but it also had a head start, a deeper cultural footprint, and the most famous theme in action cinema. What's striking is how efficiently Mission: Impossible closed that gap with fewer films, a shorter history, and a fraction of the brand recognition.

That’s three genuinely great films out of eight. Mission: Impossible, in the same period, produced at least five strong entries and two more that are a mess but still worth watching for the craft alone.

The problem isn’t talent, nor production budget, but direction from the people up top. The Bond franchise has had extraordinary directors, composers, cinematographers. Among the absolute best Great Britain has to offer. Roger Deakins shot Skyfall, and it looks like a painting of London burning. Sam Mendes did a great job on that movie. But Bond has been guarded too cautiously by its owners.

Mendes himself said as much.

"They tend to want someone who's a bit younger, a bit more... malleable, a bit more controllable by the studio." — Sam Mendes, Inverse, October 2024

The track record supports this. For decades, many A-list directors wanted the gig and couldn't get through the door. Steven Spielberg was repeatedly turned down. Christopher Nolan was interested. Quentin Tarantino lobbied publicly. Peter Jackson, Alfonso Cuarón, Matthew Vaughn, Guy Ritchie, all circled Bond at various points. None of them got the call. Bond kept hiring reliable craftsmen who could hit deadlines and take notes. John Glen directed five Bond films. Martin Campbell got two. These are competent directors who made competent films, and that's not an insult to them. But Bond treated directorial ambition as a liability rather than an asset.

Meanwhile, Cruise ran his franchise like a studio head who also happens to jump off buildings. He's been the lead producer on every Mission: Impossible film since the first one in 1996, when he founded Cruise/Wagner Productions and chose M:I as its inaugural project. He has creative control, and according to a Hollywood Reporter investigation, Paramount executives who've worked with him describe the studio's role as, at best, an ability to "influence" Cruise and McQuarrie rather than control them. One exec put it simply: given the money Cruise delivers, who's going to tell him no?

But Cruise used his control to hire people who challenge the franchise. He told interviewers that he began producing the films with a specific goal, that a different director with their own vision would make each one. He hired Brian De Palma, a paranoid-thriller auteur, for the first. John Woo, a Hong Kong action stylist, for the second. J.J. Abrams, a TV showrunner making his feature debut, for the third. Brad Bird, a Pixar animation director who'd never shot live-action narrative, for the fourth. Each time, he picked someone whose instincts ran counter to the previous film. He actively courted variety and then gave those directors room to work, because Cruise understood something the Bond producers didn't: a franchise stays alive by reinventing itself, and reinvention requires directors who aren't fully controllable.

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Even when he found Christopher McQuarrie, a writer-director who became his primary creative partner after McQuarrie replaced Paula Wagner in that role, he continued to differentiate each movie. McQuarrie first contributed uncredited rewrites on Ghost Protocol during production, then directed every film from Rogue Nation onward. He also made Tom Cruise’s underrated Jack Reacher movie. Their working method, as the Hollywood Reporter described it, is surprisingly improvisational: they added a submarine sequence to Dead Reckoning after the film was supposedly wrapped. They hold onto unfinished cuts to preserve flexibility. They take an approach that would give most studio accountants an aneurysm.

But most importantly, they constantly innovate and push the boundaries. You can respect their films for not taking you, the audience, for granted and spending money and time and energy to truly push the filmmaking craft forward. In that regard, Mission: Impossible is far superior to any generic corporate schlop like the Star Wars and Marvel universes.

Can Denis Villeneuve Revive James Bond?

This is why the Villeneuve announcement matters more than any Bond news in a generation. Amazon MGM appears to be taking yet another big swing.

Denis Villeneuve was confirmed as the director of Bond 26 on June 25, 2025. Steven Knight, the mind behind Peaky Blinders, is writing the script. Amy Pascal and David Heyman are producing. Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, the family that stewarded Bond since GoldenEye in 1995, have stepped down. Amazon paid roughly $1 billion for full creative control. The entire power structure has shifted for the first time in thirty years.

Villeneuve is the first genuinely auteur-level filmmaker to helm a Bond film since... ever, arguably. Mendes is a great director, but for me Villeneuve operates on a different level. He knows how to make large-scale cinema feel intimate, intense and epic at the same time: Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, Dune, Dune: Part Two. He’s currently finishing Dune: Messiah before turning his full attention to Bond. He’s proven, repeatedly, that he can take established IP and revolutionize it further. Blade Runner 2049 is a three-hour sequel to a forty-year-old cult film, and it works as both homage while being visually distinct in its own right. The Dune films turned a notoriously unadaptable novel into one of the greatest works of science fiction ever. If anyone can crack Bond open and find something new inside without destroying what makes it Bond, it’s him.

The reports say he won’t have final cut, which is standard for Bond and the thing that has historically scared off bigger directors. Whether Villeneuve can work within those constraints, or whether he’ll butt heads with Amazon the way Danny Boyle clashed with the corporate regime on No Time to Die, will determine everything. But even Villeneuve operating at 80% capacity produces work that most directors can’t touch at their peak.

And his collaborators matter. He’s worked with Hans Zimmer on his last three films. He’s worked with cinematographers Greig Fraser and Roger Deakins. His editor Joe Walker has cut his last five films. Villeneuve’s presence signals a heightened level of ambition.

Knight is a smart choice for the script, too. His work on Peaky Blinders lives in the same space Bond should: violence with style, characters who are charming and ruthless and scarred by both. He told Radio Times in January that working on Bond was like working with a character of folklore, comparing 007 to Robin Hood. That’s the right instinct. Bond is an idea that gets recast every decade. The question is always what the idea means now.

The Case for Cavill (Even If It Won’t Happen)

The reports from Deadline say Villeneuve wants an unknown. A British actor in his late 20s or early 30s. A fresh face. This rules out nearly every name the internet has speculated about: Timothée Chalamet, Glen Powell, Tom Holland, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jacob Elordi. And it reportedly rules out Henry Cavill, who’s 42 and far too famous.

Casting an unknown worked brilliantly with Daniel Craig. It can work again. But Cavill is right there, largely underrated, and what he brings to the table is exactly what Bond needs. At the very least, he should be considered as a villain, or even a recurring villain.

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Watch him in Mission: Impossible Fallout. Or as Superman. Watch the physicality, the way he fills a frame with presence and menace. He is a Greek god in the most literal casting-director sense of the term, but he can act, too. I need to watch The Man from U.N.C.L.E. I’ve heard that’s Bond.

There’s a silly debate circulating online about Henry Cavill and Timothee Chalamet. They’re different archetypes entirely. Chalamet is a great talent and I loved him as Paul Atreides in Dune, but he’s not Bond. Tom Holland is Spider-Man (though, I don’t even think he’s that good as Peter Parker). He’s not Bond. Bond requires a specific kind of masculine gravity. A physical authority. An ease with violence and charm in equal measure. Cavill has all of it. I can’t wait for his In the Grey coming out in May with my GOAT Jake Gyllenhaal, another Guy Ritchie joint. I don’t even care what the movie is about. I’ll watch it for Jake and Henry:

The fact that Chalamet gets compared to Cavill at all is a symptom of something bigger. A generation of men with declining testosterone levels and women whose hormonal profiles have been altered by decades of widespread birth control use have shifted what 'attractive' even means at a population level. Chalamet is a good actor. But the idea that he occupies the same physical category as Cavill would have been laughable thirty years ago. Cavill looks like he was engineered to play these roles. Broad shoulders, square jaw, a frame that communicates authority before he opens his mouth. Chalamet looks like he'd lose most fights. That’s what happens when a culture's hormonal baseline shifts and the definition of 'leading man' changes with it. Evie Magazine covered this well. The comparison only exists because the audience changed, not because the standard did Evie Magazine discussed this well in their article:

“If You’re Into Timothee Chalamet, Harry Styles, And LilHuddy, Then You Might Be On The Pill”

Maybe the unknown-actor approach protects the franchise’s economics. A massive star commands a massive salary. An unknown becomes Bond, and Bond becomes their identity. That’s how Connery worked. That’s how Craig worked. Villeneuve understands that the character should be bigger than the actor. I get it. I just think Cavill would be special, and sometimes you have to cast the person who’s already proved they can do the thing rather than betting on potential.

What Bond Needs Now

The franchise needs three things, and Villeneuve can deliver all of them.

First: a genuine vision. Not a committee-approved corporate product that is trying not to offend people, but a film that feels like one person’s idea of what Bond should be. Villeneuve’s Dune films are proof he can build rich worlds. Bond needs that. The Craig era’s best moments, Casino Royale and Skyfall, worked because Martin Campbell and Sam Mendes brought real directorial identity. The worst moments happened when the franchise felt like it was running on institutional autopilot.

Second: a soundtrack that does real work. Bond music has a rich legacy, obviously. John Barry, David Arnold, Thomas Newman, Zimmer. I loved the Casino Royale and Skyfall scores, and No Time To Die was no slouch. But at times, it feels like the franchise has been coasting on the strength of its theme and its title songs without consistently investing in the score as a storytelling engine the way the best film music should operate. They have some good pieces in every movie, but at points it feels like they don’t really go all out. Villeneuve’s collaboration with Zimmer on Dune produced some of the most inventive film scoring in recent memory. If Zimmer returns for Bond, or if Villeneuve brings in someone equally ambitious, that would be great.

Third: respect for the audience’s intelligence. The best Bond films trust the viewer. Casino Royale’s poker game works because it assumes you’ll follow the emotional stakes even if you don’t know Texas Hold’em. Skyfall works because it weaves and twists. The worst Bond films treat the audience like children who need explosions every twelve minutes and a joke every ninety seconds to stay engaged. Villeneuve has never made a film that talks down to its audience.

Mission: Impossible proved that consistency, ambition, and a commitment to physical filmmaking can sustain a franchise for nearly three decades. Tom Cruise did that through sheer force of will and taste. Bond has the deeper mythology, the bigger cultural footprint, and the longer runway. What it’s lacked is someone with the vision and the stubbornness to insist on greatness.

Villeneuve might be that person. If Amazon lets him work, if the film is allowed to breathe with its runtime, and if the casting delivers someone who can carry the character for the next decade, Bond 26 could be the film that rejuvenates the franchise the way Christopher Nolan rejuvenated Batman.

Part 1 Review: From Dongri To Dubai To Dhurandhar

Here is a movie that will make you feel like a propagandized fool for three hours and forty-nine minutes, and then send you down a research rabbit hole that makes you feel like a fool for doubting it. Aditya Dhar’s conclusion to the Dhurandhar duology is louder, messier, and more indulgent than the first. It’s also more emotionally devastating, and the gap between what feels dramatized and what actually happened is so narrow it’ll unsettle you for days. The unknown men are real. The killings are real. And the movie you thought was masala is closer to a documentary than you’d ever be comfortable admitting.

I walked into Dhurandhar: The Revenge expecting a drop-off. No Akshaye Khanna as Rahman Dakait, which meant losing the most magnetic screen presence from Part 1. Nearly four hours of runtime for what I assumed would be a more bloated, more formulaic finish. I was ready to be disappointed. And for stretches, the film almost gave me reasons to be. But at some point it finds its flow. Then I went home and started reading about the events it depicted, and my entire experience with the movie inverted. The things I’d written off as over-the-top were the things that actually happened. That’s the trick of this film. The more absurd a scene feels, the more likely it is to be grounded in something verifiable.

Dhurandhar: The Revenge is a different animal than its predecessor. The first film was a chess match. This one is a war. It’s messier, louder, more boisterous in its vibes, more willing to lean into violence and let sequences breathe as kinetic music videos. Think Tarantino’s hyperviolence combined with Zack Snyder’s visual maximalism, set to the rhythm of Scorsese’s gangster montages. As someone who grew up on that style of filmmaking, I was into it. There’s something about a movie that lets you zone out and sink into the rhythm while playing like a music video. That takes real vision. The camera is shaky during the violence, but the stills have this slow, deliberate drift to them, like the lens is breathing with the characters. Aerial shots are used sparingly, same as the first movie, but when they appear they stretch the world open.

The cinematography from Vikash Nowlakha is genuinely elite across both parts. Some shots here are flat-out genius in their composition. The way the extras are positioned, the way lighting is designed to let the camera move through a space without cutting. There’s a mix of stills and moving shots that creates this incredible kinetic energy. You feel present. The “show don’t tell” craft is doing real work. A lot of information moves through facial expressions, body language, spatial arrangement. As Denis Villeneuve says, that’s what separates movies from television shows, and Dhar clearly understands the difference.

Spy films almost never touch events this recent. Historical distance allows the genre to breathe more comfortably. Argo is set thirty years before its release. Bridge of Spies dramatized a 1960s prisoner exchange half a century later. Munich waited thirty years to revisit the 1972 Olympics. Even Apple TV's Tehran, one of the more daring contemporary entries, is careful to fictionalize its Mossad operations enough that no specific mission is identifiable. Remarkably, Dhurandhar seems to be depicting assassinations that were still being reported by The Guardian and The Washington Post in 2024, killings that continued into 2025. Dhar is dramatizing operations that are, by every indication, still active, (though obviously not in the same areas depicted).

At 235 minutes (the US version is six minutes longer than the censored Indian release), this is one of the longest Indian films ever made. Perhaps it could have been tightened by fifteen, maybe twenty minutes compared to the first one. There’s one song placement early on that’s genuinely jarring, a momentum killer dropped into a section where the story hadn’t earned a pause. But otherwise, the music-video approach actually helps, because the rhythm of it keeps you engaged even when the plot mechanics might drag. You can zone out and vibe out while still following the action. It’s masala, sure. But it’s masala with intent. Like with any long movie, work out hard before you sit down for this. You’ll need the physical stillness. There is no halftime break in the theaters, at least in the United States.

The film’s opening is a nice change-up: a Sikh man killed by the Sikh gangsters connected to politicians to seize his land, establishing from the first minutes that the violence at the center of this story doesn’t start with radical Islam or Pakistan. It starts with ordinary people caught in systems designed to consume them.

“You will learn to stay silent. Because silence improves your odds of survival.”

Ranveer Singh carries this movie on his back, and while the first half occasionally makes his path too easy, with figures like Arshad Pappu falling a little too quickly, the second half tightens the screws considerably. This must be the best performance of his career. The deliberate, delayed reactions and his eyes are where he’s best. Only great actors can convey so much information through their eyes when their facial expressions are relatively covered up by the beard. His performance in the final stretch, choosing not to return to the life his family built for him, is devastating in a quiet way. He owns this role, and Jaskirat Singh will forever go down as a legend.

Pacing wise, the movie isn’t as perfect as its predecessor. But the death of Alam was when the movie really picked up. Gaurav Gera, playing the juice shop owner who is really Ranveer’s partner from RAW, is highly memorable. When Alam dies, the way Dhar sequences it is extraordinary: Ranveer’s Hamza walking out of a tense encounter, drinking in the rain, leaving us confused, and only then does the film pull back to show us what happened right before. Ranveer’s delayed reaction to the gunshot, because he already knew what had occurred, was incredible filmmaking. The non-linear choice turns a sad death into a devastating one. Show that scene linearly and it hits maybe half as hard. That’s craft. You know Alam had no choice, that the sacrifice was necessary or Ranveer’s cover would have been blown. But knowing it doesn’t soften it. The weight of a spy’s life, the loneliness of that career, the emotional cost of operating under a false identity for years. Gera is genuinely excellent here. And so is Ranveer. And everyone else in the room when they’re trying to find his accomplices. The death lands. Ranveer has several moments in the movie where he briefly becomes too emotional to keep up his alias as Hamza, and you can see Jaskirat underneath. Incredible work.

Today, a Bareilly's pickpocket giving his life for his country. Don't take that right away from me, my brother. — Mohammad Alam

Madhavan is even better as Ajay Sanyal in this one. He has that quiet, terrifying competence, and powerful aura. His line on men is brilliant and spiritually relevant:

“We are men, Jaskirat. From the moment we’re born till the day we die, we are meant to fight for our cause, for our dreams, for our rights, for our family. And we get no appreciation or medals for it. This is our duty.” — Ajay Sanyal

No matter how you feel about serving your country, nor your religious affiliation, the Bhagavad Gita and its thoughts on dharma and action are some of the most powerful forms of esoteric wisdom on the planet. The movie makes great use of that spiritual warrior energy. The moment where Ajay Sanyal, who’d been threatened by the Zahoor Mistry character to come across the border in the first film, actually gets to him through Hamza’s operations, is the payoff of two films’ worth of setup. Madhavan’s face when he FaceTimes Hamza to say goodbye is an unrealistic cinematic touch, but the arc from being threatened to delivering on the threat is real. The man he portrays, Ajit Doval, India’s National Security Advisor, is a huge winner from the Dhurandhar franchise. He was already compelling in the first. He gets vindicated in this one.

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Arjun Rampal puts in the best performance of his career. His Major Iqbal, inspired by Ilyas Kashmiri, is feral, ideologically possessed, and physically terrifying. I liked him in Don. He’s another level in this. The fight between him and Ranveer is the film’s showpiece, and what makes it land is the screaming. Rampal screaming KAFIR, Ranveer screaming back JIHADI. Their vulgar, violent threats. The collision of those two words, those two worldviews, with literal battle cries while these men try to kill each other. It’s primal in a way that most action sequences never reach. You will not find many more deep-rooted ethno-cultural rivalries than this one in the history of the world. I loved watching it, it was pure conflict. Rampal turns what could’ve been a standard villain role into something genuinely unnerving. That genuine insanity in his voice, the way his body language shifts between strategic operator and ideological zealot. He had that real madness to him.

Rampal’s birthday was on 26/11. This was the opportunity of a lifetime for him, to tell the other side of the story. This was a way for even the actors to process the trauma they’ve grown up with:

The Yalina arc hits too. Love as the thing that cracks open a person’s loyalties, that lets them see their own country’s machinery for what it is. I do genuinely believe there are Pakistanis, native and diaspora alike, who hold their own government in contempt, who are tired of past wars with India being weaponized to justify stripping their country’s resources and training militants for attacks like Pahalgam. Some will call this propaganda. I think the loudest voices making that charge are often the most invested in sustaining the status quo. Rational people want to see corrupt systems overthrown. Love is frequently what lets us see beyond our own tribal loyalties, and the film understands that.

“Our war isn't against your country. It's against terrorist inside it. You think they're your people? What have they been doing in Pakistan all these years? 520 people from Hazara community killed in the past 5 years, 630 injured in Quetta. Do you know what they do to the Baloch? 300 boys are picked in name of interrogation and killed. Recently they poisoned their water. 63 children died. These people as dangerous as they are to India, they are even more dangerous to Pakistan.” — Hamza Ali Mazari

Shashwat Sachdev’s score is a step down from the first film, though still effective. The background score in Part 1 was a character unto itself. Here, the score functions more as atmosphere. It does good work sustaining momentum, keeping you sunk into the film’s rhythm when the music-video passages stretch out, and it hits hard during the heaviest emotional moments. But it doesn’t surprise you. I missed the way Part 1’s score could consistently overwhelm you. There’s a sequence where Ranveer’s character visits the Baloch and dances that is just so far removed from the quality of the first one. However, where the first installment demanded a score that built worlds, this one needs music that sustains momentum across nearly four hours of montage-driven filmmaking and lands gut punches in the quieter moments.

Token’s “Destiny” during the credits sequence is an unexpected choice that works exceptionally well. The English lyric use was present again and helped modernize the score. Like Indian-American singer Jasmine Sandlas here:

The credits sequence is brilliant. “Destiny” plays over shots of Indian intelligence operatives training:

The montage sequences are often quite groovy though, with songs like this building momentum:

I loved the use of “Rasputin” by Boney M, an all time classic.

Unexpected Realism

The reason this film has been rattling around in my brain since I left the theater is the realism. I need to be straight with you. When I first watched certain scenes, Sanjay Dutt’s Chaudhry Aslam dying, some of the assassinations unfolding a little too cleanly, I thought the film was stretching. I figured Dhar was dramatizing for effect. I was wrong. The more I read about the actual events afterward, the more this movie grew. What I thought was cinematic exaggeration turns out to be more than true. Indian intelligence had both infiltrated the Lyari gang wars, and eventually killed several terrorists in Pakistan.

Chaudhry Aslam. The real man was called “Pakistan’s toughest cop,” a Sindh Police superintendent who survived nine assassination attempts, including a 2011 truck bomb that destroyed his house and killed eight people. He stood in the rubble and told reporters he’d bury the militants in the same ground. On January 9, 2014, the Tehrik-i-Taliban finally got him. A suicide car bomb on the Lyari Expressway, the blast so powerful it threw his armored vehicle twenty meters from the point of impact. The Taliban specifically trained a bomber for the job, a man named Naeemullah, and celebrated the kill as a “huge victory.” The movie shows his death by suicide bombing. That’s exactly how it happened.

Here’s the thing that Sanjay Dutt’s casting makes even wilder: Dutt was himself famously connected to the gangster behind subversive Bollywood storytelling: Dawood Ibrahim. The casting is almost perverse in its self-awareness. The irony runs deeper: the real SP Aslam was a fan of Sanjay Dutt as an actor. And now he’s acting in this. Further confirmation that Bollywood’s days of putting out awful movies financed by Dawood Ibrahim’s drug and terrorist money networks are long gone. The real life resemblance is uncanny. The makeup, hairstyle and costume work in this movie was absolutely incredible. Everyone looks like the person they were based on in real life. And once again, Sanjay Dutt gives Chaudhry Aslam a brute physicality and a weary decency. You understand why the Taliban wanted him dead ten different times.

There’s a thread at the beginning of the film that I confirmed after watching. Rahman Dakait killed Dawood Ibrahim’s brother after Dawood seized one of Rahman’s close associates’ properties without paying market value. Rahman kidnapped the brother, demanded ransom, got the money, and killed the brother anyway. This actually happened. Dawood, who’s portrayed as having the highest connections in Pakistan and even foreign backing, couldn’t do anything to him. The audacity of it, the chain of escalation it set off, is staggering. It puts the aura and power of Rahman Dakait from the first movie into context. There was also a subtle reference to this in the first movie when SP Aslam talks to Jameel Jamali and says he has help from “Bade Sahab” (Dawood) to deal with Rahman Dakait. Pretty crazy that India infiltrated Lyari amidst all this happening.

The Dawood Ibrahim appearance partly makes up for Khanna’s absence from this movie. Dhar films him at a White House-adjacent compound, surrounded by seemingly American women and attendants, perhaps a deliberate visual suggestion of CIA-adjacent funding. It’s well documented that Dawood had historical connections to American intelligence through drug trade operations, and the visual easter egg is hard to miss. Dawood’s aura in the film is absurd, not quite Rahman Dakait from Part 1, but he’s never been portrayed on camera with this kind of gravity before. I love that the assassination attempt on him fails. It mirrors reality, where multiple efforts to apprehend him have come up empty. That he still reportedly lives in that house in Karachi is one of those facts that reads like fiction.

The Khanani brothers. The film shows Pakistan’s shadow banking empire collapsing after demonetization. In real life, Javed Khanani, who ran Khanani & Kalia International, one of the world’s largest hawala networks, a network the U.S. Treasury designated a Transnational Criminal Organization, fell from an under-construction building in Karachi on December 4, 2016. Twenty-six days after India demonetized its ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes. His family refused an autopsy and removed the body from the hospital before police could complete any medico-legal formalities. Pakistan called it suicide. The family called it an accident. His twin brother Altaf had already been arrested in a US DEA sting in Panama and pled guilty to laundering billions for drug cartels, the Taliban, and terror outfits like LeT and JeM (also shown here). The film shows the Khanani figure’s suspicious death and illustrates how demonetization was a counterterrorism strike.

The lighting during Khanani’s murder was stunning.

Zahoor Mistry. The IC-814 hijacker who murdered newlywed passenger Rupin Katyal during the 1999 Kandahar crisis. He’d been living in Karachi for over twenty years under the alias Zahid Akhund, running a furniture store called Crescent Furniture. On March 1, 2022, two bike-borne assailants walked into his shop in Akhtar Colony and shot him dead at point-blank range. CCTV footage captured the whole thing. At his funeral, senior Jaish-e-Mohammed leadership including Masood Azhar’s brother Rauf Asghar attended. That detail says everything about how openly these men lived in Pakistan.

Atif Ahmed. The character is clearly based on Atiq Ahmed, the gangster-turned-politician from Uttar Pradesh who ran a criminal empire from prison for decades. More than 100 criminal cases. He served as both MLA and MP. His network moved counterfeit currency and laundered money linked to terror financing, and was connected to Pakistan’s ISI and Lashkar-e-Taiba. In April 2023, Atiq and his brother Ashraf were shot dead on live television while being escorted by police for a medical check-up. Three gunmen posing as journalists. The film recreates this killing in a way that’s nearly identical to the real footage. There’s no question this man was working to subvert his country.

Uzair Baloch wanted SP Aslam killed after Rahman Dakait’s death:

One scene shows a reporter covering the Lyari gang war in Pakistan with live gunfire in the background. That was inspired by real footage of a reporter:

Uzair Baloch’s story was actually arrested in Dubai with an Iranian passport:

At a certain point you stop asking “how much of this is real” and start asking “what did they leave out and why.”

VICE did a series on Karachi that shows you how accurate the movie’s depictions were, with Uzair baloch, SP Aslam Chaudhary, and Nabeel Gabol (Jameel Jamali).

India’s Unknown Men

This brings us to the reporting that should be at the center of every serious conversation about this film.

In April 2024, The Guardian published an investigation based on interviews with supposed intelligence officials from both India and Pakistan, alongside documents shared by Pakistani investigators, detailing how India’s Research & Analysis Wing allegedly carried out assassinations on foreign soil as part of a strategy that intensified after the 2019 Pulwama attack. The reporting documented nearly twenty killings since 2020, carried out by unknown gunmen in Pakistan, with sleeper cells operating primarily out of the United Arab Emirates coordinating the executions. Indian intelligence officers told The Guardian that the shift was triggered by a simple realization: the safe havens were in Pakistan, and India had to get to the source. One officer cited the killing of Jamal Khashoggi as a direct discussion point at the highest levels of Indian intelligence: if the Saudis could operate abroad, so could India. The Khashoggi model wasn’t about the method. It was about the principle. You eliminate your enemy on foreign soil and send a message at the same time. Pakistani investigators pointed to evidence across seven cases, including witness testimonies, arrest records, financial statements, and WhatsApp messages linking RAW to the operations. Targets included commanders of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, and Khalistan-linked militants.

The Washington Post ran its own investigation in late 2024, examining the same pattern of targeted killings and confirming the contours of the assassination programme. Al Jazeera corroborated the findings independently. Pakistan’s foreign secretary formally accused India of “extraterritorial and extrajudicial killings” in early 2024, citing what he called “credible evidence” of Indian involvement and a “sophisticated international set-up spread over multiple jurisdictions.” India denied the claims. But India’s own defense minister, Rajnath Singh, said in an interview: if a terrorist escapes to Pakistan after attacking India, we will go to Pakistan and kill him there. Home Minister Amit Shah, asked about the unknown men killings, said simply: “Whoever has killed, what is the problem?”

India stopped negotiating with terrorists, stopped bowing down and behaving like cucks, and started dealing with them in the only language they understand. I think only truly delusional people see this as a problem.

The killings continued even after the April 2024 reporting brought global attention. In May 2025, unknown gunmen assassinated a Lashkar-e-Taiba operative in Sindh who’d been involved in the 2005 Indian Institute of Science attack in Bangalore. In February 2025, the brother-in-law of globally designated terrorist Hafiz Saeed was shot dead in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The modus operandi is always the same. Two gunmen. Bike. Close range. Gone in ten seconds. Some men get identified, but many get away, and the network remains at large.

Even on March 21st, after the movie released, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) commander Bilal Arif Salafi was reportedly shot and stabbed to death inside Markaz Taiba in Muridke, Pakistan, by unidentified gunmen shortly after Eid prayers. Muridke is where the movie’s conclusion takes place. It’s almost like India is daring Pakistan to stop them, comfortable knowing how easy it is to complete these executions.

It’s all too easy because Pakistan keeps manufacturing the conditions that produce these “unknown men.” The Baloch that Ranveer infiltrates successfully with in the movie are being killed by state-backed death squads, as shown in the film. Over 1,200 forcibly disappeared in 2025 alone, according to the Baloch Yakjehti Committee. Students. Farmers. Teenagers. Bodies dumped with signs of torture in districts the army has sealed off from journalists and ambulances alike. The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, a peaceful rights group, was banned outright in 2024 under anti-terrorism laws for the crime of asking where their missing people went. In 2025, 329 Pashtun civilians were killed along the Durand Line by Pakistan’s own military.

The Baloch and the Pashtuns are entire nations inside Pakistan’s borders who’ve been treated as disposable populations for decades, and they’re done being quiet about it. When critics call Dhurandhar anti-Muslim, this is the part they skip. The film’s villains aren’t Muslims. They’re the Pakistani state, the suicidal Islamic extremists they sponsor and the networks affiliated with them. Mustafa Ahmed, the Indian Muslim actor who plays Rizwan, put it simply: “My name is Mustafa Ahmed. If this were propaganda, why would Aditya Dhar cast me? He could’ve cast a Mahesh or a Mukesh.” He’s right. Indian Muslims aren’t fleeing enforced disappearances or getting their houses bulldozed by death squads for attending a protest. The people suffering most from the oppression the film depicts are Muslim too. The Baloch are Muslim. The Pashtuns are Muslim. The idea that showing what Pakistan does to its own people constitutes anti-Muslim bigotry requires you to dehumanize the Baloch and Pashtuns.

In reality, many righteous Indian Muslims participate in these operations along with Afghans and domestic Pakistani rebel groups. They are extremely difficult to catch in Pakistan because of the genetic similarities between populations. Of course, the movie makes it look like a small team of agents pulling off surgical hits. The reality appears to involve a sprawling network of sleeper cells, locally recruited operatives paid through Dubai, and coordination across multiple countries.

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The type of person who calls this film propaganda is, almost without exception, someone who has never had to deal with the real world. They don't run a business. They haven't navigated India's suffocating bureaucracy, its corruption, its poverty, the daily reality of a country that is, in many ways, disgusting. They're blind to India's actual flaws because they've replaced observation with ideology. They think discrimination explains everything, that justified counterterrorism is the same as fascism. These are people with weak genetics, spiritually speaking. The kind who would have laid down when their ancestors were under attack. Who would have watched temples burn and said "let's have a dialogue." Who would have negotiated with the men who displaced entire populations from Kashmir. They call it propaganda because confronting what's real, that sometimes the correct response to terrorism is to send men to kill terrorists, makes them uncomfortable.

The numbers tell the story the critics won't. Dhurandhar Part 1 sits at 35% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes and 96% with audiences. Part 2: 40% critics, 95% audience. That's a 61-point gap on the first film and a 55-point gap on the second, the widest sustained critic-audience divide of any major Indian franchise. And the critic sample is laughable: 14 reviews for Part 2. Fourteen. Likely all handpicked for their ideological leanings. For a film that broke Indian box office records. The audience score reflects verified ticket purchases, people who actually sat in the theater for nearly four hours. The critics score reflects a handful of English-language outlets, many of whom decided the film was propaganda before the opening credits rolled. When the gap between professional critics and the paying public is that wide, that consistent, across two films, the question stops being "is this film good?" The question becomes "who are film critics actually writing for?" Because it clearly isn't the audience.

Whether someone calls this film propaganda becomes a litmus test for whether you can trust their judgment on anything.

The film’s depiction of India’s 2014 election is one of its most darkly funny sequences. Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus floods India with counterfeit currency and funnels money through NGOs and propaganda networks to prevent Modi from winning, and the film shows their fury when he wins anyway. If you know the history of India’s Congress party’s relationship with Pakistan’s interests in the post-26/11 era, the sequence lands even harder. The entire political class in India either tolerated, or benefited from foreign influences or Pakistani money laundering, and was functionally compromised. Remember, this is the country where a creepy dude like Gandhi is celebrated and put on their currency. Gandhi was a Mason, a subversive agent working against India, who conducted controversial “experiments” in celibacy (brahmacharya) in his later years, sleeping naked with young women, including grandnieces. Modi’s speech in 2009 is excellent and emblematic of the attitudes among many Indians over the years:

There were so many stories of Indian politicians being totally compromised, the idea that anything depicted here is propaganda is laughable.

The film’s impact on the real world has been hilarious. India’s Congress party is paying or attempting to take down old news articles revealing the extent of their foreign infiltration. Posts like these are making the rounds on social media:

The guy who was based on the character Jameel Jamali embraced it in the first movie, now he’s being questioned because the movie made him an Indian spy. To be honest, I did find that plot touch to be a bit unrealistic in the moment, because the movie doesn’t feel like it fully earned it over 2 parts. But if I think about the actual realities, it’s likely that people have been positioned in politics solely to push intelligence.

Pakistan’s treatment of the Baloch people is what enables India to infiltrate so effectively. The systemic oppression creates the vulnerability. The film makes no attempt to pretend India is clean, either. Ranveer’s backstory isn’t a classic Muslim conflict but something rooted in ordinary people trapped in gang wars in India itself. India is a murky place full of corrupt scum too. But the film’s argument is that fighting terrorism is a higher cause than pretending your own house is in perfect order.

That this film exists, and was made by Kashmiri Pandits processing generational trauma through the spy genre, tells you something about where Indian cinema is going. Aditya Dhar, born into a Kashmiri Pandit family displaced from Kashmir, the very region where Pakistan’s militant operations have been strongest, has built a two-parter that treats covert intelligence work with a specificity and emotional intelligence that Bollywood’s previous attempts at the genre couldn’t touch. He shot both films back-to-back, principal photography running from July 2024 to October 2025 across Punjab, Chandigarh, Maharashtra, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, and Thailand. He split the footage into two films during post-production. Both films have a distinct identity. Part 1 builds the world. Part 2 burns it down.

Look at what passes for mainstream Bollywood filmmaking from the industry’s biggest names. The spy genre has been attempted repeatedly by stars with far larger budgets and far less homework. You get spectacle without research, subversion of nationalism, and action without consequence. The vast majority of Old Bollywood is full of rent-seekers who just want to maintain their celebrity and status. Shah Rukh Khan’s mediocre recent output, Salman Khan’s factory-produced garbage that coasts on star power and treats audiences like ATMs. The era of phoning it in, of CGI replacing commitment and scripts being written during lunch, is what Dhurandhar is actively replacing. A generation of Indians was raised on films produced by people with documented connections to Dawood Ibrahim’s network who didn’t care about their craft. The radio silence from Bollywood’s elite on this movie tells you everything. Their films were subversive in the original sense: they subverted reality, replaced it with fantasy, while the men funding the industry were actively working against the nation’s interests. Dhurandhar researches reality. That’s the difference.

Even India’s upcoming mythological productions face the same question: is the creative team doing the work to honor the material, or treating sacred source material with the same casualness that’s defined an industry built on connections rather than craft? The casting of Sai Pallavi as Sita, who doesn’t look nor sound the part, or Hollywood’s habit of casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy for what feels like ideological reasons: it’s the same instinct: sacrificing the sacred at the altar of contemporary. Giving Ramayana to the same people connected to the old Bollywood mafia ecosystem is absurd when you have filmmakers like Dhar who are willing to do the actual work. The audience can tell the difference. When a film grounds its most dramatic moments in events that The Guardian and The Washington Post have independently verified, it exposes how hollow the competition has been.

The record-breaking opening is no coincidence. Dhurandhar: The Revenge set paid preview records, crossed ₹500 crore net in its first week, and is tracking toward the ₹1,000 crore club faster than any Hindi film in history. The franchise has now crossed ₹2,200 crore worldwide, behind only the Baahubali and YRF Spy Universe franchises. If it has even half the legs of the first film, this becomes the greatest Indian movie franchise of all time. The numbers are the sound of an audience that was starving for a cinema that takes their reality seriously and gives it back to them on the largest possible screen.

If you’ve lived through trauma, if you’ve experienced violence or ideology up close and survived it with the need for purpose ingrained into your nervous system, this movie speaks a language you already know. I relate to Hamza’s arc more than I expected to. My own years of pain with health, of depression, of suicidal ideation, of existential crisis, of needing something, anything, to pull me out. Creativity and building and brand-building and moving forward became my version of what serving his country is for Hamza. The ending, where he doesn’t go back, where the life his family built exists without him in it, is the truest thing in the film. Some purposes consume you. The lucky ones find a purpose that gives back. The principle underneath, that men must take action, that sitting idle while the world burns is its own form of cowardice, is spot on.

“A true warrior is one who fights for a cause. Even if he cuts into pieces, he never abandons the battlefield.” — Ajay Sanyal

If you’re Greek and your Hagia Sophia was taken, if you’re Iranian and your civilization was overwritten, if you’re Indian and your temples were demolished and ancestors forcefully converted and your people displaced from Kashmir, you’ll feel this in your bones. The pain of the tragedy of terrorism and conquest on India is not always told well. This film finally does it.

It isn’t quite The Dark Knight of sequels. It’s missing Akshaye Khanna, it lets its hero win too easily in places, and it’s about twenty minutes too long. But once you understand the factual foundation underneath the masala, once you’ve read The Guardian’s reporting and the Washington Post’s investigation and cross-referenced the names and the dates and the methods, you realize you’re watching something extraordinary. A film that wraps verified covert history in the language of commercial Indian cinema and trusts the audience to discover the truth underneath.

The unknown men are real. They’re still operating. And this movie is the closest anyone has come to putting their story on a screen.

Project Hail Mary is a $200 million space film with the soul of a family bedtime story, the kind of movie where a grown man befriends something he can’t understand and the whole theater falls in love with both of them. Ryan Gosling wakes up alone on a spaceship, figures out why he’s there, and makes you care about every single step of the process. It’s funny, warm, gorgeous to look at, and built for the biggest screen you can find.

There’s a moment somewhere in the second act of Project Hail Mary where I realized I was watching one of the best family movies ever made. This will be watched on family and Christmas movie nights fifteen years from now.

You warm to Gosling fast. I mean really fast. He’s playing a regular guy, a science teacher who’s smart and a little awkward and deeply human, and within ten minutes you’re rooting for him the way you root for a friend. I’ve loved Gosling in different roles. He was magnetic in The Big Short, haunted in Blade Runner 2049, and carried Drive. He’s funny & sincere without being corny, and does a great job physically maneuvering the sets. He carries two and a half hours almost entirely by himself (and one companion). That’s remarkable for any actor in any genre.

Drew Goddard’s screenplay is genuinely funny. Not quippy, not Marvel-punchline funny where every emotional beat gets ruined by a one-liner, but funny in the way a smart person is funny when they’re scared and trying to figure things out. The comedy keeps things light without undercutting the stakes. There were several moments where the joke lands so well the whole theater laughed out loud, and a handful of quieter ones that just made me grin. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller know comic timing better than almost anyone working right now.

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Lord and Miller haven’t directed a live-action film since 22 Jump Street in 2014. Twelve years between directorial efforts. In the interim they produced the Spider-Verse films, which won Oscars and redefined what animated movies could look like. They got fired from the Han Solo film at Lucasfilm, which, in retrospect, looks more like a badge of honor than a blemish. And then they came back with this. A $200 million original science fiction film that isn’t a sequel, isn’t part of a franchise, and isn’t based on existing IP beyond a novel most general audiences haven’t read. Amazon MGM handed them a quarter of a billion dollars to make a movie about a guy talking to a rock in space. That took guts from everyone involved, and you can feel that commitment in every frame.

There is no green screen in this movie. Not a single green or blue screen was used during production. The entire interior of the Hail Mary spacecraft was built as a physical set at Shepperton Studios. The ship rotates to simulate gravity. When Gosling moves through the corridors, pushes off walls, and interacts with equipment, he’s doing it on a real set that Greig Fraser’s team lit with practical lights. The exterior of the ship was partially built as well. Of course, there are thousands of VFX shots in the film, and the space sequences are handled masterfully by Framestore and ILM. But the foundation is real. And you can feel it. I’m a stan of Tom Cruise, Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, and any filmmaker who takes this approach. Thank you Lord and Miller.

Rocky, the alien companion at the heart of the story, is a practical puppet. Much like CASE and TARS from Interstellar. Built by Neal Scanlan’s creature shop. Performed on set by James Ortiz and a team of five puppeteers they called “The Rockyteers.” Gosling acted against a real, physical puppet in every scene they share. The CG artists at Framestore took it from there, enhancing and extending what was captured on set, but the baseline performance is a puppet operated by human hands. Rocky is fun. Rocky is cute. Rocky does the job the movie needs, which is to make you care about something that looks and sounds nothing like a person. Guillermo del Toro saw the film and publicly praised the puppetry and practical work as inspiring. He’s right. This is how you do it.

They also did something technically unusual with the image itself. The film was shot digitally, then transferred to actual film stock, and then re-digitized. The purpose was to give the digital footage the warmth and texture of analog film, the slight grain and softness that your eye registers as “real” even when you can’t name why. It worked. When I was watching, I thought it was shot with film. Admittedly pure IMAX with real film looks slightly better, but the grainy look hits hard for sure and I was thinking about the ‘depth’ and sophisticated feeling of the shots thanks to the grainy look.

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Greig Fraser shot this movie. The man is on a historic run. Dune. Dune: Part Two. The Batman. He even made Rogue One look good despite Disney's oversight. And now this. Every single frame of Project Hail Mary looks like a painting. I don’t say that to sound smart. There are sequences in this film where I stopped following the plot for a few seconds because the composition and the light were so striking I just wanted to look at them. Fraser has this habit of letting everything around his subject fall into these gorgeous pools of blur while the person in the center stays pin-sharp. Hence the term painting:

The colors feel warm and grounded on the ship, cold and vast in space, and there’s a flying sequence in the back half that is genuinely breathtaking. Edge-of-your-seat, stomach-lifting, hold-your-breath stuff. Fraser knows how to make scale feel real. He knows how to light a face inside a helmet so the actor’s eyes do the work. He knows when to let a wide shot sit and when to push in close. For my money, he’s on track to be on the Mount Rushmore of cinematography.

The karaoke scene is fire. I won’t spoil the context, but Sandra Hüller sings, and it’s one of those moments that doesn’t advance the plot at all and is absolutely essential to the movie. It makes the film richer. The backstory to the song is awesome too. Gosling heard her singing it on set, and they decided to work it in.

Daniel Pemberton reunited with Lord and Miller after the Spider-Verse films (where he did a great job), and what he delivered is a 38-track, two-hour piece of work built on an idea the directors called “Hope Core.” His approach was to keep everything organic and tactile. He traveled to Paris to record a Cristal Baschet, a 1940s French glass organ played with wet fingertips. He recorded children from Wells Cathedral school clapping and stomping to build percussive textures. He sampled a squeaky water tap and transformed it into an unstable, fragile-sounding instrument that recurs throughout the film. Steel drums, human vocals, choral layers. The result feels handmade and warm in a way that space movie scores rarely do. Gosling actually had Pemberton’s early compositions in his personal playlist while shooting, listening to them to stay in character. It all has a gentleness that matches the movie’s soul.

There are lot of parallels with Interstellar thematically and from a filmmaking craft perspective. In the way they have a hint of religious motifs in the soundtrack and plot. In the way they are about humanity’s place in the stars. In the way they built their practical space sets and made practical puppets for characters instead of using CGI. In some ways, Project Hail Mary is a family version of Interstellar.

I’ll be honest: I still like Interstellar more. The Zimmer score on that film is in a different class, arguably the best soundtrack of all time. Interstellar is also darker, more emotionally punishing, and more visually ambitious in certain sequences thanks to the story. Nolan’s IMAX footage of the black hole and the water planet and the docking sequence, those are all-time images. Project Hail Mary doesn’t try to compete with that, of course. The comparison is natural since they’re both space movies about people trying to save Earth, but the tone is completely different. Interstellar is a father’s desperation to save his children. Project Hail Mary is a buddy adventure with a big heart. It’s more of a warm space buddy adventure movie than Interstellar’s space tragedy-epic. Pemberton’s score is good. It serves the film. It’s the right score for this movie. It’s not the kind of score that haunts you the way Zimmer’s organ does. That’s okay. Different movies, different ambitions. Ultimately, both movies push the boundaries of space filmmaking, look gorgeous, achieve their own goals, and deserve to be seen in theaters.

I will say, Hail Mary choosing to keep the science lighter was essential to its flow. The more family-friendly nature may see it outperform Interstellar at the box office. I respect that trade-off a lot. Ultimately, I’m just happy we got it in an age of schlop. I want a space movie with this flavor to exist, just like I want a space movie with Interstellar’s flavor. They are both healthy for the soul.

The one thing I’ll dock? I felt there’s a minor plot hole near the end that doesn’t quite hold up if you think about it for more than a minute. But the movie earns so much goodwill by that point that you shrug and move on.

On opening night Gosling showed up unannounced at a New York theater, stood in front of a packed house, and told them: “It’s not your job to keep theaters open. It’s our job to make things that make it worth you coming out.” That’s exactly right. The film industry has spent years blaming audiences for not showing up, blaming streaming, blaming phones, blaming everything except the quality of what’s being offered. Gosling is one of my favorites. Blade Runner 2049, Drive, The Big Short, La La Land, Barbie. He picks projects that are worth making. And now he spent six years producing and starring in an original sci-fi film because he read the manucript before the book it’s based on even came out and thought it was too good not to try.

I want to give Amazon MGM credit here, what they did took real conviction. This is their first legitimate theatrical hit since acquiring MGM for $8.5 billion, and they backed it to the tune of $200 million on an original property with no franchise safety net. That matters. Amazon and Apple are doing something genuinely useful for movies and television right now. They're tech companies with deep pockets and a different profit calculus than traditional studios, which means they can finance ambitious, expensive films that don't need to be guaranteed home runs to justify their existence. Apple bankrolled F1, which other studios balked at. Amazon bankrolled this. Jeff Bezos has Blue Origin sending rockets into space and Amazon MGM sending Ryan Gosling there, and both bets are paying off. When more studios are in the mix and more money flows toward actual filmmaking instead of IP management, the whole ecosystem gets better. Greenlight more movies like this and Villeneuve’s Bond, and less garbage like Stephen Colbert’s Lord of the Rings nonsense please Amazon.

A $200 million family movie that respects its audience, doesn’t pander, and isn’t the fourteenth installment of anything. No cinematic universe. No post-credits teaser for the next one. A complete, well-made film that stands on its own. Right now it feels radical.

This is a film designed for a kid to watch with their parents, and for both of them to walk out happy. And this stuff is a way better influence for them than Disney or Marvel’s drivel, that’s for sure. It doesn’t talk down to anyone. It assumes you’re smart enough to follow the science and patient enough to let the story unfold. It’s wholesome without being cheesy. It’s positive without being naive. It believes that people are good, that problems are solvable, and that the universe is worth exploring, and it makes you believe all of that too.

See it on the biggest screen you can find. Bring your kids. Maybe even bring the person who says they don’t like space movies, they might discover they were wrong.

Here is a movie that does something Indian blockbuster cinema doesn’t do too often: it takes itself seriously. A spy thriller with rules, with craft, with a high level of suspense and attention to detail. Dhurandhar is three and a half hours of controlled escalation, a film built like a video game where each level brings a more dangerous boss and higher stakes. It is the film that puts Indian cinema on the global thriller map, and represents the absolute pinnacle of Bollywood filmmaking. Akshaye Khanna turns in one of the all-time performances in cinema history. Shashwat Sachdev’s soundtrack is the first Bollywood album to land every track simultaneously on the Spotify Global Top 200. The innovative score jumps between rock, nostalgic Hindi, and a fusion techno-modern Indian sound with English samples.

Dhurandhar is one of the greatest movies I’ve ever seen. A definitive gangster-spy thriller: a stylistic mashup of a counterterrorism/spy movie with Godfather style family dynamics and Scorsese-inspired mafia drama, with Quentin Tarantino’s gore.

Often Indian films feel like plays. They have the wink, the self-awareness, the Bollywood handshake where everyone agrees they’re performing for an audience. That kills the immersion for more seasoned, sophisticated viewers. Dhurandhar takes itself seriously in a way that Indian cinema almost never does. Every frame. Every silence. Every lit cigarette. This is a movie that can be enjoyed by global audiences. Don’t compare it to other Indian movies spoken about in a similar vein like Baahubali or RRR. Those are still over the top in nature and don’t come close.

The whole film feels groovy. Modern. It has a swagger and a rhythm that I associate with the best American gangster thrillers, except the texture is entirely Indian & Pakistani. Could you cut five or ten minutes here and there? Probably. But everything in there earns its place. It gives the film a style, a willingness to breathe, to let scenes linger until the tension has nowhere left to go. At 214 minutes, the longest Bollywood release in 17 years until its sequel, this is a film that knows it’s long and makes a case for every minute.

Ranveer Singh plays Jaskirat Singh Rangi, a RAW agent who crosses into Pakistan posing as a Baloch man named Hamza Ali Mazari. He enters Lyari, the beating criminal heart of Karachi, and works his way from the absolute bottom. A waiter. A guy who keeps his head down and watches. The film unfolds in chapters, each one a rung on a ladder: local gangs, local politicians, national politicians, ISI. The level-to-level progression gives the film a propulsive video game quality. You clear one boss, and the next one’s already watching you.

And the irony running through every rung is delicious. A politician who thinks he’s manipulating Rahman Dakait doesn’t realize Rahman is three moves ahead. Ranveer’s character is constantly pretending to be Baloch, and Rahman thinks he’s sincere. The ISI handler thinks he can outplay Rahman, and Rahman is quietly guarded. Everyone in this film is playing a game inside a game. This is what a world without rules looks like.

Akshaye Khanna puts in one of the all-time great performances as a villain.

His Rahman Dakait has infinite aura. Watch what happens when he enters a room. The film slows down. People stop talking. He doesn’t raise his voice often, and when he does, the room has already been his for minutes. His nonverbal work is absurd. His facial expressions. His frowns. His smiles. His eyebrows. The pauses between words carry as much information as the words themselves. He’s terrifying yet magnetic, a gangster-politician-philosopher. Khanna has been playing versions of this character across his career, but this feels like the culmination. The story of the casting is worth telling:

Casting director Mukesh Chhabra proposed Khanna for the role. Aditya Dhar thought he was being overly ambitious. Khanna’s first reaction on the phone was to scold Chhabra. Then Chhabra convinced him to at least hear the script. Khanna showed up, sat for four hours, chain-smoked, barely interrupted. When the narration ended, he broke the silence: “F**k, it’s very good. This will be a lot of fun. ” Two anxious days later, Chhabra’s phone rang. “Let’s do it, bro.” That was it.

In a serious world, Khanna wins an academy award for Dhurandhar. Easily. He was that good. But the academy isn’t driven by merit.

Ranveer Singh locks in. This is a subtle Ranveer performance. We look to his eyes and facial expressions for information. His character’s survival depends on stillness, on watching, on absorbing information without reacting. The moments where Rahman notices something flicker across Ranveer’s face and asks what’s on his mind are masterpieces of tension. Ranveer gives him some smooth deflection about what he’s thinking. You hold your breath.

Madhavan plays IB Director Ajay Sanyal, the man running the operation from India, inspired by India’s Security Advisor Ajit Doval. His recurring philosophy of “collect evidence, wait till someone new comes to power, our time will come” is reflective of the mindset of the country. India had repeatedly been let down by its leaders for decades. Their spineless leaders repeatedly sold out to foreign powers and destroyed the country’s economy. Madhavan starts out in an era where India is busy self-sabotaging itself.

India's biggest enemies are Indians themselves. Pakistan comes second. — Ajay Sanyal

Sanjay Dutt as SP Choudhry Aslam is outstanding with swagger and menace. His character was a real person in Lyari, who actually fought against gangs and tried imposing law and order.

“You sparked a flame and thought that you had brought the fire under control ... don't live under that illusion ... because I'm a heap of gunpowder meant to turn people like you into ashes.” — SP Choudhry Aslam

Arjun Rampal as the ISI agent Major Iqbal is ridiculous in the best way. His interrogation scene has an intensity that makes you uncomfortable in your seat.

Even the smaller players land. Sara Arjun looks the part. Her discussion of “burger bacche,” a real Karachi term for the wealthy westernized class, and the restrictions placed on political families and the detail about her father’s age gap with her mother, feel like they were written by someone who actually knows Pakistan. The Lyari Task Force subplot gives the film a street-level grit that the espionage plot needs.

“Do you know what is the most beautiful habit of destiny ... it changes when the time comes.” — Ajay Sanyal

The casting choices were excellent. The makeup and hairstyles even moreso. Sara Arjun’s facial features and hair read more northern, more Pakistani. The crowds of Lyari are populated with extras who add raw realism. Dhar shot in Thailand as a stand-in for Karachi, and the film is smart about its limitations. How much of Thailand can you show before it obviously isn’t Lyari? A decent amount, but not too much. So the film leans into the people instead. The gangsters, the bystanders, the media voiceover of a woman discussing Rahman’s rise to power.

In totality, the cast was among the strongest ever seen in Indian cinema:

The story reveals an interesting slice of life in the subcontinent. India is somewhat Balkanized. Everyone knows this. But Pakistan, despite the guise of Islam as a unifying force, is far more fractured. Pashtuns. Balochs. Sindhis. The movie does a great job portraying the inter-tribal conflicts and tensions.

The film has arguably the best depiction India-Pakistan conflict ever. The rivalries and intensity of hatred are made clear. Pakistan is shown as a place where the state, the military, the intelligence apparatus, the crime syndicates, and the religious establishment all operate on different agendas that occasionally align and frequently don’t. The word “kaafir” gets deployed in the film the way it gets deployed there in real life: as a weapon of convenience, a label that shuts down conversation and justifies whatever comes next, including terrorism. Ranveer’s desire for justice is representative of the Indian mindset as of late. This is a great movie for anyone who wants to understand the extent of the tensions between both countries.

“I am lethal because I am wounded.” — Hamza Ali Mazari / Jaskirat Singh

There’s a scene where Ranveer calls the cops on a group of rich kids at a club, and Ranveer promises the officers millions. It’s a small subplot, but it captures something about Pakistan’s social contradictions. Clubbing and drinking are culturally forbidden under Islam. Everyone knows it happens. The wealthy do it openly. And when something goes wrong, the parents pay off the police and the whole thing disappears. That’s Pakistan.

The film puts real historical events on screen with unbelievable accuracy. The level of research was simply meticulous. The hijacking of Indian Airlines 814 opens the movie up. The 2001 Parliament attack sets the tone. The illegal currency note facilitation that contributed to 26/11 is eerily accurate. The scamming politician P. Chidambaram’s alleged role in that scam appears, mildly disguised but recognizable. The corrupt nature of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, and how it’s used to launch Pakistani operations in India, repeatedly rears its head. Javed Khanani was actually bankrolling the ISI, as depicted in the movie. David Headley and Ajmal Kasab both get depictions, and I recognized Kasab the second he appeared, before the movie told you. You could feel it in the youthfulness of his face, the same face you saw on TV in 2008.

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I am impressed at how accurately the scripting weaves everything. In 2006, when P. Chidambaram was India’s Finance Minister, Arvind Mayaram was Joint Secretary and Ashok Chawla Additional Secretary, they carved out the Security Printing & Minting Corporation of India (SPMCIL) and started buying security printing paper exclusively from Britain’s De La Rue, the same firm Pakistan was already using. Intelligence alerts made clear how this single-source arrangement handed counterfeiters the exact materials they needed to flood India with near-perfect fakes that propped up Pakistan’s economy for years. When he ascended to Finance Minister in 2010, Pranab Mukherjee blacklisted De La Rue on those very warnings. Then Chidambaram returned as Finance Minister in 2012 and the UPA quietly reversed the ban, with Mayaram’s office restarting the purchases. It took Narendra Modi becoming Prime Minister in 2014 to shut the tap for good and trigger the investigations that eventually led to the CBI FIR against Mayaram for the dubious extensions.

The 26/11 attacks - India’s equivalent of 9/11 - being shown on screen, as part of the story, as a result of internal sabotage and the currency printing scheme, along with the recording of Pakistani intelligence handlers guiding the terrorists was a powerful moment. You knew that’s how it played out in 2008.

The general ridicule of Pakistani politicians and the way they sell out to various interests is something you can appreciate regardless of where you sit politically. The minister with a bet on a cricket match. The line about failing 8th grade and still wanting to become a politician. These moments are darkly funny and grounded.

“Anyone who’s climbed to the top of Pakistani politics has got their hands dirty.”

This wouldn’t have been made in the old Bollywood. S. Hussain Zaidi documented the Mumbai mafia’s arc in his book Dongri to Dubai, tracing how the infamous gangster Dawood Ibrahim built an empire from a small neighborhood to the skyscrapers of the Gulf. But the book’s most unsettling detail was Dawood’s reach into Bollywood. The money laundering through production houses, the coercion of producers and stars, the hits on people who didn’t comply, the way drug money fueled it all. For decades, organized crime and Pakistani intelligence interests shaped what stories got told and which ones didn’t. Films that softened Pakistan’s image got greenlit and bankrolled. Films that didn’t got buried. Dhurandhar takes that arc further. The film is what happens when a country decides it’s done being passive, and when an industry finally makes movies that serve its own national interests unshackled by subversive foreign influences. The line that rattled around in my brain:

“This is the new India. We barge into your homes and take you out.” — Hamza Ali Mazari / Jaskirat Singh Rangi

You see in the 2000s, Indian cities were getting hit almost monthly. Delhi. Mumbai. Jaipur. Ahmedabad. Hyderabad. Varanasi. Bangalore. Bomb after bomb after bomb, and the geopolitical reality behind many of them traced back across the border into Pakistan. This is the decade the film lives in. It trusts you to remember what it felt like to turn on the news and see another city burning, another market shredded, another train ripped apart, another family mourning, with shameless politicians blaming it on their own. Dhurandhar doesn’t explain this. It assumes you were there, or that you’ve read enough to understand why an entire generation stopped believing in restraint. For those who are uninformed, perhaps this comes across as propaganda. But it’s the truth.

India still has a long road ahead. But the turnaround in national security and raw, unapologetic sovereignty under Narendra Modi is decisive and undeniable. Dhurandhar is the first half of a hard-won, deserved victory lap. It remembers the years when the country was run by people like Manmohan Singh and the delusional Rahul Gandhi: corrupt sellout frauds who were willing to accommodate the very extremists chipping away at it from within. The film doesn’t shy away from saying the quiet part out loud: enough was finally enough. And in Ranveer Singh’s undercover shadow war across Karachi and Lyari, you feel every ounce of that pent-up national resolve finally being unleashed. Dhurandhar is a way for a billion people to process their generational trauma.

Dhurandhar represents something about the industry itself. Recent blockbuster films like Pathaan, where Indian and Pakistani spies team up in slick buddy-cop fashion, felt like fossils from an old agenda. Audience data suggests those films inflated and outright faked their box office numbers. Dhurandhar is popular because it doesn’t gaslight its audience for recognizing what the Indian diaspora has felt for years. It supports them, and gives them the movie they’ve been asking for.

Of course, the mafia’s grip on Bollywood didn’t loosen on its own. The Modi government has waged a visible, if messy, campaign to break the old networks. Lawrence Bishnoi, the gangster whose name now circulates through Bollywood like a whispered threat, functions as the blunt instrument of a new order: the old mafia dons who ran the industry from Dubai get replaced by a domestic enforcer who answers to different masters. Whether that’s justice or a changing of the guard depends on who you ask. But the result is the same. The stories the old gatekeepers suppressed got made. The audience - and market - is always right. The films that would have been buried a decade ago now gross ₹1,350 crore. Dhurandhar’s commercial triumph is a product of this shift. The audience showed up because someone finally let them have the movie they wanted.

Shashwat Sachdev on Dhurandhar has built a soundtrack that I think will be studied. It’s the ultimate fusion of modern and old to hit all quadrants of audiences. It has rock elements that feel almost American in places, then flips into nostalgic Hindi remixes, then into this fusion techno-modern Indian sound. The club scene and the song that follows it felt designed to penetrate the global mind. This wasn’t solely music made for people who already relate to the culture. They composed something that could reach everyone while staying authentic to their vibe.

“Naal Nachna” is when I really noticed how innovative the soundtrack was. The English samples make it immediately international, but it also weaves in old Hindi music remixed within the same song. “Ishq Jalakar - Karvaan” reworks a qawwali from Barsaat Ki Raat (1960), and initially got pulled from YouTube because its bass riff sounded like Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” They re-released it with a different riff, but that global vibe remains in the background. “Run Down The City - Monica” remakes “Piya Tu Ab To Aja” from Caravan (1971). The Balochistan song, with the Arabic track “FA9LA” by Bahraini rapper Flipperachi, plays over Akshaye Khanna’s introduction and became one of the most iconic moments of the movie. Diljit Dosanjh and Hanumankind show up on “Ez-Ez.” Arijit Singh sings arguably the best song of the movie “Gehra Hua.” The album has 11 tracks across 38 minutes and the range is staggering. Music to drive through the night with the windows down.

My personal favorite was the piece that played when Rahman Dakait ascended to power as a politician:

The editing by Shivkumar V. Panicker deserves mention. The Akshaye Khanna dancing edit, where the FA9LA sequence cuts between his swaggering entrance and the shooting that follows, the guns arriving while your brain is still processing the dance, is brilliant filmmaking. Vikash Nowlakha’s cinematography is phenomenal and makes you feel immersed into the world. Lyari is dusty and alive. The wide shots of crowds cheering add a lot. The framing of Ranveer in the early chapters makes him look smaller, more easily swallowed by the world he’s infiltrating. As his power grows, the camera moves with him differently.

The combat in the final act is the film’s one weakness. The ending fight between Ranveer and Akshaye Khanna runs too long and too unrealistically. Wounds don’t seem to stay. Even the shooting: Rahman’s buddy gets shot and doesn’t flinch. The back-and-forth should leave someone incapacitated but never does. It’s contrived twice over: once to build to the moment where Ranveer sees 26/11 and summons his final strength, and again to get him across the Lyari border with Rahman still breathing. The punches that follow are satisfying. The emotional payoff lands. But the whole sequence could’ve been avoided with a better structural choice. Keep Rahman alive. Build a fight where you expect him to die and he doesn’t. The audience would’ve felt the gut-punch of his survival harder than any fistfight, and you’d preserve the chess logic the film spent three hours building. The boss battle should’ve been a chess problem, not a brawl, because the entire film up to that point was chess. To switch to checkers in the final twenty minutes is a misread. Ranveer carrying a thoroughly beaten Akshaye to the hospital afterward is hilarious, though. I’ll give them that.

The reference to the “unknown men” was cool. In esoteric history, the Nine Unknown Men were a secret society originating with Emperor Ashoka, India’s legendary ruler who converted to non-violence after the bloodiest conquest in ancient history. The idea that modern Indian intelligence carries this legacy, that sovereignty and intelligence are old traditions being reclaimed, gives the film a mythic beauty. A small touch that rewards those who know and believe.

I haven’t seen Ne Zha 2 yet. But Dhurandhar feels like the same kind of moment for India that Ne Zha 2 represents for China. Or Parasite for South Korea. A domestic industry proving it can compete globally on craft, on scale, on ambition. Indian cinema has made great movies before. But most of those were art-house successes or dramas that played on cultural specificity. Dhurandhar is a ₹1,350 crore spy thriller that makes no concessions and has global relevance.

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Project Hail Mary, the Ryan Gosling sci-fi film directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, moved its entire Indian release from March 20 to March 26 to avoid Dhurandhar 2. A major Hollywood studio looked at the release calendar, saw an Indian sequel sitting there, and blinked. When asked about it, Lord and Miller joked: “How dare you have your own successful film industry.” Then Miller said he’d heard about the sequel and was happy for it. Both directors said a rising tide lifts all boats and called it good for the health of the global movie business. I agree. It’s a shame that the fraudulent academy, so thoroughly subverted from within, probably won’t recognize it as such. You can see a glimpse of that in how the critics called it propaganda:

A 35% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and a 96% from audiences. Rotten Tomatoes’ critics seem completely out of touch. I’ve rarely seen a split that bad. The critical establishment called it propaganda. The audience called it the movie they’d been waiting for.

I don’t see anything inaccurate or overly propagandized in the movie. I love questioning public narratives that solicit emotional reactions from large groups of people. In private I’m what some people call a conspiracy theorist. But I can say on my trip to Mumbai in 2024, I met people with friends who died in 26/11. It’s real. It’s sad. It’s insane. It’s not propaganda. These aren’t false flag attacks conducted by the Indian government. Maybe the implication that Pakistan is connected to every single terror attack in the history of the world is a stretch. But a country whose intelligence agency harbored Bin Laden, whose territory served as the staging ground for 26/11, whose military has run the state through coups for half its existence, does not get to claim the benefit of the doubt. Pakistan is a failed state. That’s not an ideological position. The people within the country would largely agree. And the film shows that. I’ve long been fascinated by the Balochs and the Pashtuns. Nations within a nation, with stories the world barely knows. The film does a great job telling their story. It lets you see them as people caught in a machine that grinds everyone, including its own. If that’s propaganda, I don’t know what word we’re using for films that pretend none of this is real.

Dhurandhar is the best spy thriller India has ever produced, with the best ensemble Bollywood has assembled in years, with a strong soundtrack, and with a level of geopolitical detail that assumes its viewers are rational adults. How well does it do it? Nearly perfectly. The ending fight almost costs it. Almost. But three and a half hours of this kind of filmmaking earns the benefit of the doubt on one miscalculated sequence. Bollywood has finally arrived on the global stage. From Dongri to Dubai to Dhurandhar.

Edgar Wright's adaptation of Stephen King's 1982 novel is a paranoid thriller where Glen Powell plays a man forced into a televised death game. The worldbuilding is the star here: the UX of the in-world technology, the broadcast graphics, the game mechanics make for a stunning watch. It's a dark comedy about the attention economy that feels uncomfortably close to the one we already live in. If you can buy the premise, you won't look away.

Director: Edgar Wright

Writers: Edgar Wright & Michael Bacall

Cast: Glen Powell, Josh Brolin, Colman Domingo, Jayme Lawson, Lee Pace, Michael Cera, William H. Macy, Sean Hayes, Emilia Jones

Cinematographer: Bill Pope

Composer: Steven Price

Studio: Paramount Pictures

Genres: Dystopian, Survival Thriller, Dark Comedy, Sci-Fi, Action, Conspiracy

There's a moment in The Running Man where Glen Powell has to deposit a recording into one of those safe boxes, and you realize you've been holding your breath. Nothing exploded. But the world Edgar Wright built has convinced you, bone-deep, that this small errand could get a man killed.

This is Wright's adaptation of Stephen King's 1982 novel, his dream project since at least 2017. I haven’t seen Schwarzenegger’s original 1987 version. Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall drew from King's original premise: a man hunted across a real city, tracked by a real audience, with the entire country watching and participating. It didn’t get the same love as F1, Sinners, or other movies of 2025. But I found this to be one of the most enjoyable movies of the year, and unique among action movies in recent history.

Most studio thrillers never reach the obsessive detail poured into how the game operates. The game runs for 30 days. You survive, you win a billion dollars. Nobody’s ever survived. Powell plays Ben Richards, a blacklisted laborer who enters to pay for his sick daughter’s medical care. Josh Brolin’s Dan Killian, the show’s producer, convinces him to sign up.

The show is beautiful. The UX of the in-world technology. The fonts on the broadcast screens. The way television coverage cuts between camera angles, graphics, and audience reaction shots. The tracking system that monitors Powell's location at all times. The mandatory daily recordings he has to file. The safe box deposits. The rules about forfeiting. You could write a rulebook for this thing. That specificity is what makes it so interesting. I sat forward through most of this movie. The editing was phenomenal. My hands were tense for stretches I didn't notice until they ended.

Wright shot this in London, Glasgow, and Bulgaria, and the film keeps things brutal. Cityscapes, highways, the contained corridors of civilization. No tropical hideouts. The claustrophobia is the point. Richards can't outrun the system because the system is everywhere. Chung-hoon Chung, Wright’s cinematographer who previously shot Last Night in Soho for him, finds an interesting visual look for the world. Think of our reality with the saturation dialed back slightly and a layer of grime across everything, and slightly more neons. The desaturated neons make it more immersive than the full cyberpunk palette. This is closer to home. Enough color to feel lived-in, enough dimness to feel wrong. Dystopia that feels like it’s not too far removed from our world.

Powell is well cast. You believe he’s cornered, angry, and running out of options even when he’s winning. Wright is smart enough not to make him superhuman. There's a ceiling on what this man can survive, because the film respects you as a viewer. Powell does a great job portraying rage and arrogance. This is the most anyone has demanded of Powell physically and emotionally in a single film, and he carries it. The desperation of a father watching the clock while the country watches him.

“He’s capable, but he’s still not John Wick. He’s not a superhero. He’s a dad, and he’s kind of flying by the seat of his pants.” — Edgar Wright, Den of Geek

The cast around Powell does a good job. Brolin is great, a caricature corporate villain who has confused ratings with righteousness. He genuinely believes what he's doing is entertainment, maybe even public service. He thinks in demographics and engagement metrics while people die. Brolin gives him a cheerfulness that makes your skin crawl. The man is a producer through and through. Colman Domingo, Jayme Lawson, and Michael Cera all play convincing roles. Domingo in particular is excellent as the show’s host, the man who makes the game feel like fun for the people watching at home.

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The way the game's operators fabricate stories about Powell to manipulate public opinion felt uncomfortably real. Watching someone get torn apart online based on things that turned out to be invented. Also, in this case, turning the common man against one another. The underground resistance that helps Powell is a nice counterpunch. People who’ve decided the system is broken and are doing something about it. The different attempts to help Powell, and their varying levels of futility, are fun to watch.

"Even since we shot the movie, it has become more and more timely. It is unbelievable how Stephen King saw the future of 2025, the year that we are in right now, and how eerie it is to see where we are living and what it looks like, and how similar it is to all the events that are happening in this book" — Glen Powell, Den of Geek

Steven Price won an Oscar for Gravity and has worked with Wright on every film since The World's End. His work here is appropriate to the world. Dark, electronic, propulsive music.

The pacing kept me locked in. The 133-minute runtime passed by without me noticing. The one thing that felt slightly rushed was how quickly Richards gets tricked into participating. But that’s a necessary shortcut. You have to get the man running.

Speaking of rushed, if anything, I wish we could’ve explored the world more visually with establishing shots and moments where we can chill and experience the movie’s world when it’s not being shot up. The cinematography is good, don’t get me wrong. But Powell rarely spends any time in any one location, because he’s always on the run. The rushed pace sometimes gives you too little room to breathe. I wish there was a little more meat on the bone. But it’s still a fun movie.

This is my second Edgar Wright film after Baby Driver, and I still need to catch up on the Cornetto trilogy. Baby Driver might be a smoother ride, a more elegant piece of filmmaking. But The Running Man is extremely gritty, dark, and tons of fun. Wright abandons his signature humor wherever necessary to serve this movie. I love it. Critical reception be damned. We live in strange times anyways.

Why are reviewers, podcasts, youtubers panning The Running Man?
It’s because that is their industry. They love what they’re paid to love, hate what they’re not paid to love. Worst, and most dangerous, is unsettled spirit in them when they are not paid, because then they are neither authentic or a merchant. They are a sneer at scale.

I am not knocking people who found the movie unfulfilling, because many of them loved the movie but wanted something a little more, a sentiment I agree with. Glenn Powell is amazing, I wanted just a little more OOMPH. — Adam Townsend

If it counts for much, Stephen King gave Wright his approval:

Paramount couldn't figure out how to sell it. Is it a dystopian thriller? A satirical action movie? An Edgar Wright genre experiment? Marketing dollars got cut when audience diagnostics looked soft, and the release date bounced around the calendar before landing in a November slot that satisfied nobody. Once it hit Paramount+, it surged to the top on streaming. Because when people actually watch the thing, they have fun. This is a film that got killed by its own distribution strategy and an annoying critical class. It would’ve been better off as an October release around Halloween. I’d like to think that if you give it five years, more people will talk about it. I hope Glen Powell gets more opportunities in action movies.

This was reminiscent of David Fincher's The Game with Michael Douglas. Both are about men trapped in elaborate systems designed to destroy them. The Game had more varied locations. But The Running Man is better paced, better presented, and its vision of how media and power intersect feels more urgent. And Glen Powell was more fun to root for than Michael Douglas.

For a dark comedy conspiracy thriller, The Running Man achieves everything it sets out to do. It held me at the edge of my seat with the constant anticipation of fight or flight. What else can you ask for?

A series about the birth of criminal profiling at the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, based loosely on the real agents who coined the term "serial killer" and built the framework that spawned Criminal Minds, Silence of the Lambs, and most of modern true crime. It spans the late '70s to early '80s, following Holden Ford and Bill Tench as they drive from prison to prison interviewing the worst people alive, trying to find the patterns in what everyone else calls senseless violence. Along the way, a psychologist named Wendy Carr tries to impose academic rigor on their gut instincts, and their work reshapes the FBI from within. The show drew its serial killer dialogue from real interview transcripts and case files, and the casting is so precise that side-by-side comparisons with the actual killers became a genre of their own online. The Atlanta Child Murders arc in season two sticks closer to documented fact than almost any prestige drama has dared, and what it reveals about the case is the kind of thing that sends you down research holes for weeks. This is David Fincher at his obsessive best.. Jason Hill’s score is the kind of thing you listen to on headphones at 1 AM when you can’t sleep and don’t want to.

Creator: Joe Penhall

Director: David Fincher (plus Andrew Douglas, Carl Franklin, Asif Kapadia)

Cast: Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, Anna Torv, Cameron Britton, Damon Herriman, Oliver Cooper, Sonny Valicenti

Composer: Jason Hill

Studio: Netflix / Denver and Delilah Productions

Based on: Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker

Budget: ~$10M per episode (lower estimate)

Seasons: 2 (2017, 2019)

Genres: True Crime, Drama, Docudrama, Police Procedural, Psychological Thriller, Mystery

There's a moment in the second season of Mindhunter where agent Holden Ford sits across from a kid in Atlanta, during the height of the child murders, and offers him ten dollars since the arcade will be open soon. The kid says he doesn't do that. He knows what ten dollars buys. Holden plays it off: a lot of Asteroids. Just stay inside. But as he starts to walk away, something clicks, and he turns back. What does ten dollars normally buy? Five for a picture. Like a Polaroid? Yeah. Did you know any of the missing kids? Some of them. Did any take money? A couple. Did they go to a brick house in Lakewood? No, the brown house by the stadium. Holden takes a breath and shows his badge. The kid runs. The scene moves on. And yet it sat in my chest for days, because the show trusts you to understand what that kid is actually talking about, and what it means that nobody in that world wanted to find out.

Mindhunter is the greatest true crime show ever. Arguably the greatest noir ever. Fincher makes the serial killer era of America feel like lived experience for people who weren’t alive for it. If you grew up hearing your parents or grandparents talk about Son of Sam, or the Atlanta murders, or Manson, this show puts you inside that world. Many younger people only know these cases as true crime trivia.

The show occasionally follows a case-of-the-week format before settling into its longer arcs. Even in those standalone episodes, nothing feels disposable. Each case becomes its own small noir tragedy. The Beverly Jean arc. The parade of killers in interview rooms, each one calmly explaining the logic behind evil. Mindhunter has everything the genre runs on: paranoia bleeding into the detectives' home lives, cigarette smoke hanging in fluorescent-lit offices, silhouettes behind glass, bureaucratic maneuvering that feels more dangerous than the criminals. But with its realism, it goes even beyond all that, and transcends the genre completely.

The curfews, the neighborhood watches, the way a city’s mood shifts when people stop letting their kids walk to school. My generation knows about terrorists and school shooters. We don’t know what it felt like when a killer operated for months or years in a single city, before cellphones and cameras were everywhere, when sketches went up on telephone poles and everyone looked at their neighbor differently. Mindhunter bridges that gap. I can see this being a show you watch with your parents or grandparents and suddenly understand why they tell certain stories the way they do, why certain names still make them go quiet. It takes a forgotten world, one before cameras and smartphones, and reconstructs it so precisely that the dread transfers across decades through the screen. That’s rare.

The FBI didn’t even use the term serial killer till these guys came onto the scene, even though they were living through the peak of serial killings in the United States. At first Holden comes across as frustratingly naive, the kind of guy who’d get outmaneuvered by a Denny’s waitress, let alone Ed Kemper. But the show finds its rhythm a few episodes in, and from that point through the final frame of season two, it is extremely binge-worthy and keeps you on the edge of your seat. For a show with almost no action sequences, no car chases, no gunfights, no fights, no real violence, that’s a remarkable thing to say. But here, the lack of action only adds to the murky, muddy atmosphere. Serial killers are strange humans, seemingly protected by even stranger forces.

Manson: “We’re all our own prisons. We are each our own wardens. We do our own time. Prison is in your mind.”

The lead cast Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, and Anna Torv were all unknown to me before this show. They shouldn’t have been. Groff makes Holden’s growing obsession with the truth feel addictive as he runs into shady or corrupt bureaucracy. McCallany gives Tench a weight that grounds the whole series. He’s the guy who’s seen enough to know the cost of looking too closely, and McCallany carries that knowledge in his shoulders, in the way he holds a beer, in the flatness of his voice when he tells his wife everything is fine.

FORD: So what are you teaching?

CARR: Um, I’m teaching a class on the intersection of sociopathy and fame. People like, um, Andy Warhol, Jim Morrison. Their celebrity becomes the only thing they need to sustain their ego.

TENCH: Nixon was a sociopath.

CARR: Very similar.

FORD: How do you get to be president of the United States if you’re a sociopath?

CARR: The question is, how do you get to be president of the United States if you’re not?

Torv’s Wendy Carr delivers one of the show’s sharpest lines almost offhandedly. It lands because Torv plays it like an observation. The show is full of moments like this, where something deeply uncomfortable about how society works gets stated plainly, almost casually, and you're left sitting with it.

Carr is a closeted lesbian working inside the late-'70s FBI, and Torv plays it well. She never telegraphs it. You see it in how she measures every room, how she calibrates exactly how much of herself to reveal and to whom. Her subplot with a woman in Annapolis adds a lot to her character, as does her general act of compartmentalizing, learning to live in two worlds.

Mindhunter keeps circling a quiet thesis: that the people who should be solving these cases are often the same people making sure they stay unsolved. Evidence gets buried. Witnesses get discouraged. Jurisdictions overlap in ways that seem designed to create blind spots. The Atlanta arc makes it explicit, with photographs withheld from case files and political pressure dictating investigative direction, but the pattern runs through the whole series. The FBI’s own bureaucracy treats Holden and Tench’s work as a nuisance before it becomes useful, and useful only insofar as it can be controlled. Wendy Carr’s research gets defunded the moment it threatens to produce conclusions that make the institution uncomfortable. The serial killers in the interview rooms keep saying versions of the same thing: nobody stopped me because nobody was really looking. And the show, without ever tipping into conspiracy, keeps showing you why. The connections between cases, the overlapping names, the institutional reflex to close a file rather than follow a thread somewhere inconvenient. Fincher lets it accumulate without editorializing (at least, to the degree the Overton window will allow). By the end of season two, the horror isn’t just that monsters exist, but the fact that our police system wasn’t designed to catch them. How many more killers have slipped through the cracks since the 80s?

Fincher’s direction is a thing unto itself. The man is famous for shooting 50 to 75 takes of a single shot. He’s obsessive about matching camera height, velocity, and acceleration to the movement of a character. Not just speed: velocity and acceleration at any given point. The result is a show where every frame feels locked in, inevitable, like there was only ever one correct way to photograph each moment. The camera lives and breathes the character’s movements. The cinematography & composition, and lighting are literally perfect.

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Much of that is Erik Messerschmidt, who shot both seasons and later won the Oscar for Best Cinematography on Fincher's Mank. His work here is unparalleled. The institutional fluorescents, the way interviews are lit so one side of a killer's face disappears into nothing.

Mindhunter cost millions per episode, much of it eaten by keeping actors on set for repeated takes, the rest used to make the thing look authentic to the time period, and that expense is why we never got a third season. But it’s hard to fault the perfectionism when the output is this flawless. The acting is incredible. Every shot earns its place. This is an all time great.

KEMPER: “Seems to me everything you know about serial killers has been gleaned from the ones who’ve been caught.”

The color grading and overall costume design are worth studying. The show looks like the ‘80s without looking like a costume party. The palette is muted, institutional, full of wood paneling and fluorescent light and the particular beige of government buildings. It’s hard to believe you’re watching something made in 2017. It feels like you’re actually being transported back in time. The buildings specifically are so realistic. It makes you want to go hang out with the agents and investigate things yourself, during one of the most fascinating periods to be a detective.

The villains are where Mindhunter becomes something else entirely. Every conversation with a serial killer plays like a short film within the episode. The suspense is often heightened with smoke and sexy shadowy-noir lighting.

Cameron Britton’s Ed Kemper is one of the great performances in television. Period. He’s enormous, articulate, weirdly warm, and absolutely terrifying because you find yourself almost liking him. The casting of Berkowitz, Manson, every single one of the serial killers, was surgically precise. Britton earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor for the role, one of the show's only major awards recognitions despite its quality.

Ed Kemper: “Butchering people is hard work. Physically and mentally. I don’t think people realize. You need to vent.”

The dialogue was drawn from real transcripts. These people felt so real, almost documentary-like, and the actors played them without a shred of caricature. The meeting with Manson felt like one of the great moments in criminal history. The interview with Tex Winter, Manson’s accomplice, is superbly eery. The man tries convincing the agents that Manson didn’t make them kill anyone, but that he just removed their fear of committing murder (with LSD and other means).

The score is one of the best things about the show. The soundtrack starts quiet and functional in the early episodes, then takes off around mid-season one and never comes back down. “Silk Drape” became one of the anthems of the show. It plays behind scenes of Tench going home, trying to be a normal father and husband after spending his days inside the heads of people who tortured and killed. The piece is dark, patient, and deeply sad. It turned those domestic scenes into something that felt like peak film noir, the shots always perfect, the lighting always catching Tench in half-shadow. “I Know You’re Not Just Here To Teach” reflects the strange ambience of that serial killer era perfectly.

But there’s another piece, used during both the Beverly Jean episode and at points in Season 1, then again in Season 2 in Atlanta during the aforementioned scene when the kid names his price, called “Rose Confession” that steals the show for me. It resurfaces throughout the second season at pivotal moments. It’s the best composition in the show. When it plays during the Atlanta investigation, it’s devastating.

Mindhunter's use of silence is equally remarkable. I noticed it most in season two. When the agents arrive at a new prison or police station, the background noise runs hot: other prisoners talking, doors clanging, fluorescent buzz, the ambient life of the building. Wide-angle shots pull you into the space. The sensory information grounds you into the location. Then, as the scene narrows to the interview itself, all of that falls away. The camera tightens. The wide shots give way to close-ups, faces filling the frame. The ambient sound drops to nothing. No hum, no air conditioning, no room tone. Just two people talking. The camera work and the sound design are doing the same thing in tandem: giving you the wide, loud impression of a setting, then stripping it all back until you're locked in on the personal tension between interviewer and subject. It's a Fincher signature, but it's never been more effective than here. The absence of sound makes the dialogue feel like it's happening inside your own head, like you're the one sitting across the table. When the score does return after one of those interviews, the contrast hits physically.

Season 1 of Mindhunter was elite TV. But Season 2 pivots toward the Atlanta Child Murders, and this is where Mindhunter enters Greatest-Of-All-Time territory. The investigation sprawls across multiple episodes of the back half of the season with a singular focus. From 1979 to 1981, dozens of young people, mostly black children, were abducted and murdered in Atlanta. The show recreates the fear of that period: the curfews, the parents escorting teenagers to the movies, the kids talking among themselves about who might be next. We get to see how a city tears itself apart when its children start disappearing and nobody in power seems to care enough. The serial-killer era of America, on full display.

Mindhunter reveals how many of the children adjacent to the victims - and their parents - were never even interrogated by local police until the FBI got to the scene, even though many of the missing children knew each-other. People knew about what was going on, but nobody bothered connecting the dots. Something deeply sinister was going down in Atlanta.

Eventually, they find a suspect: Wayne Williams. And the capture of Wayne Williams is iconic television. The investigation is exhausting, and builds to an incredible climax. The end of season 2, episode 8 is one of the most anticipated moments I’ve ever come across. Atlanta police had been patrolling the Georgia rivers for five consecutive weeks, burning through their budget with nothing to show for it. This was the last night, and of course some details were dramatized. But the casting of Williams is perfect. This is a deranged man, and the actor is phenomenal playing him: denying everything, sending cops on wild goose chases. The scene where he brings an entourage to the mayor's house demanding justice is legendary, and it's real. Wayne Williams was actually this unhinged. The chase through Atlanta in the finale is something to behold too, full of stunningly accurate aerial shots of the city in the early '80s.

But the show’s bravest choice is what comes after. Holden discovers that someone inside the Atlanta Police Department withheld photographs of black children from the suspect’s case file and only left white children in there, deliberately sabotaging his profile of the killer. The show puts it on screen plainly: the case was never really solved. Wayne Williams was likely a patsy. It lets that fact sit there, unresolved.

ALBERT JONES (Atlanta FBI Agent): Remember your kid in the mall, the house next to Fulton County Stadium he talked about? I asked a recruit to go through three years of pedophile complaints and convictions, look for any red flags. Found this guy. Sixty-three-years-old, black. We got complaints of young boys being given drugs and spending the night. There's no connection between him and the house in Lakewood. The old white guy (another suspect).

This recruit was on the detail that boxed up the Polaroids from Lakewood. He swears there were pictures of black children among them. Evidence log said the photos were exclusively young white males. He also said they hauled out thousands of Polaroids. This puts the number between 300 and 400. He says APD locked up the photos. But when they got logged into evidence, there were no pictures of black children.

TENCH: Would your recruit go on record with the district attorney?

ALBERT JONES: He doesn't want his name to be used. He's just giving us something to run down. We’ve been working with this task force for months. Somebody from APD knew we should have been looking at these guys all along.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I started reading.

What I found was even worse than what the show depicts. Many of the missing children knew each other. Several were seen on the streets after their reported disappearances. Some made phone calls after they went missing. There were many more victims past the 28 that police kept tabs on. Indeed, as seen in the show, the police didn’t do proper diligence before the FBI got there.

Somebody within the police force was likely involved in covering things up. A child pornography ring was operating in the area, and many victims had connections to it or to people involved in it. The older children in the ring would recruit younger ones. The show certainly alludes to all this quite well. The investigative journalist who went by the pen name Cisco Streetlove, who apparently grew up near the victims, confirmed much of this on the Opperman Report podcast before his death. He named suspects, described two separate rings, and connected the case to broader trafficking networks. His work tracks with the show’s implications but goes much further than Fincher could on a Netflix series.

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Williams himself had a documented connection to a CIA training program. In a 2011 CNN interview, Soledad O’Brien asked him about a document called “Finding Myself” that discussed his past as a CIA trainee. He was evasive. The fiber evidence connected him to fifteen victims, but the full picture includes a paramilitary training camp near Atlanta run by Mitch WerBell, where Williams and others trained. The order to arrest Williams reportedly came from the vice president.

Fincher knew. He stuck to the source material on Atlanta with a stubbornness he didn’t apply anywhere else in the show or in any of his work, and in doing so he revealed things most entertainment is too cowardly to touch.

This show had me digging for weeks after I finished it. Not just on Atlanta. On every serial killer case the show touches, and then on cases it doesn't. The 20th century is full of them, and the deeper you look, the stranger the patterns get.

The BTK killer teasers threaded through both seasons are tantalizing and ultimately cruel. The show sets up Dennis Rader’s arc with cold opens that never pay off because the third season never came. Fincher shoots his scenes almost entirely without dialogue. Dennis Rader goes to work, binds packages, adjusts his glasses, drives home. It’s one of the great unfinished stories in television. Season three was reportedly going to show how the Behavioral Science Unit influenced the creation of shows like Criminal Minds and films like Silence of the Lambs, and the extended cat-and-mouse with BTK would have been its centerpiece. That we’ll likely never see it is a huge loss.

Mindhunter reminded me most of True Detective's first season, the only other show that matched this level of craft and atmosphere in the true crime space. But this eclipsed its level of realism. True Detective leaned into rebellious heroism and Rust Cohle's philosophical monologues. It built its horror around archetypes and metaphor. The Yellow King, Carcosa, was a real person and all of it pointed at something real (Reverend Tuttle obviously based on real people) but through a mythic lens. Mindhunter is 100% grounded. These are real people, real cases, and the show forensically breaks down how evil actually operates. There’s a lot more here for someone genuinely interested in serial killers. It’s a lot more like a dramatized documentary.

That makes sense when you consider the source. John E. Douglas, the real agent behind Holden Ford, consulted on The Silence of the Lambs. Bill Tench is drawn from Robert Ressler, who worked alongside Douglas and coined the term "serial killer." This show is the origin story of the men whose careers built the genre that made the show possible. The serial killer dialogue was pulled from real recorded interviews, and the show's depiction of those conversations is widely regarded as the most accurate dramatization of the BSU's early work.

The sheer volume of all-time crazy serial killers & accomplices Mindhunter brings on screen is noteworthy: Edmund Kemper, Jerry Brudos, Richard Speck, Monte Rissell, Dennis Rader, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Wayne Williams, William "Junior" Pierce, Elmer Wayne Henley Jr, Paul Bateson, William Henry Hance, Tex Winter.

CARR: I’m glad this worked out. When you sent me your notes from the Kemper meetings, I was in a real rut with my new book.

FORD: What’s your book about?

CARR: It’s about white-collar criminals, men not so different to your Edmund Kemper.

FORD: How do you think the men you study are similar to Edmund Kemper?

CARR: Well, first of all, they’re all psychopaths. I study captains of industry: IBM, MGM, Ford, Exxon, you name it. And sure, these men all have wives, kids, dogs, goldfish, but not because they stopped being psychopaths, but because they just had different leanings.

FORD: But you think they have the same underlying personality traits?

CARR: Well, Kemper shows a total lack of remorse, a lack of inner emotional structure, no ability to reflect on the experience of others. [...] Although your project is obviously in the nascent stages, it already feels like a clear successor to The Mask of Sanity, which, as you know, is quite a compliment.

(For those unfamiliar, The Mask of Sanity is a 1941 book by psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley that's considered foundational to how we understand psychopathy. His core idea is that psychopaths wear an outward mask, mimicking normal human behavior well enough to move through society undetected.)

Both True Detective & Mindhunter do something rare for prestige television: they take unglamorous, costly, necessary work seriously. Every detective pays a price. Relationships strain. Sleep disappears. The ability to be present in any room not connected to the worst things humans do fades. That's what makes them so good. There's a real shortage of dramatic work that treats true crime with this kind of gravity. Done right, a show like this can make a young person want to be the one who looks at a hard problem and doesn't walk away. We need more of both, because the world keeps producing the kinds of problems that need people willing to stare at them.

Season two of Mindhunter belongs in the conversation for best single season of television ever produced. And across both seasons, this is Fincher’s definitive work. It’s more nuanced and rewarding than Zodiac, more emotionally complex than Se7en, and perhaps the most visually impressive work in his catalogue. The darkness of the agents’ work spills into their homes. Tench watches his adopted son exhibit behaviors that mirror the killers he studies. Holden’s relationship disintegrates under the weight of what he can’t stop thinking about. The show understands that this work changes what you bring home.

Netflix needs to bring this show back. Mindhunter is the most chilling, carefully constructed, honest piece of true crime television ever made. It respects the dead by refusing to look away from how they were failed. It respects the audience by refusing to explain what it’s showing you. There's nothing else like it. A show with this level of craft and budget that treats real history like an unfolding investigation rather than a retrospective. Most period pieces tell you what happened. Mindhunter makes you realize nobody knows yet.

Anyone who relies on the Oscars as the backbone of their film discourse is telling on themselves. They’re telling you they don’t evaluate movies from first principles. That their tastes can be shaped by people they’ve never met. That they need an external authority to validate their taste, a stamp of approval before they can confidently call something great.

Recently, Deadline’s Pete Hammond published an email from an anonymous Oscar-nominated filmmaker who’d decided not to vote at all this year. He called Best Picture winners like Anora, CODA, and Everything Everywhere All At Once “irrelevant” compared to The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, and Patton, then said he’d rather spend Oscar night watching Singin’ in the Rain or North by Northwest or The Searchers, films he called “REAL best pictures which weren’t even nominated.”

“Hi, Pete, I enjoy your articles. I thought you might be interested to hear a take from an Academy member about this year’s rules. I haven’t seen even half of the nominated films, nor do I care to, because my time is far too valuable to spend watching movies I know I’d never vote for (much less be able to sit through). I found most of the films I did see to be mediocre, and nothing that I nominated made the final cut. Therefore, since I don’t want to lie, I decided I simply would not vote at all this year. Yes, I’d like to vote for K-Pop Demon Hunters, but not at the price of watching four other movies I know won’t be as good. But really, the Oscars have become pretty irrelevant. Anora? CODA? Everything Everywhere All At Once? vs The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, Patton? Which three movies will people still be watching five years from now? It’s all about the film, not the award. Rather than watch the Awards, I’ll probably watch Singin’ In The Rain or North By Northwest or The Searchers – REAL best pictures which weren’t even nominated.
Feel free to quote me, but please don’t use my name.”

This is an Academy member. A previous nominee in a major category, saying out loud what most people who love movies know: the Oscars have nothing to do with identifying the best films.

The Night They Lost the Plot

Most people started noticing in 2009. The Dark Knight earned over a billion dollars worldwide, received eight Academy Award nominations, won two of them, and was widely regarded as one of the finest films of the year by audiences, critics, and every guild that matters. The Producers Guild nominated it. The Directors Guild nominated it. The Writers Guild nominated it. The Screen Actors Guild nominated it. These are the people who actually make movies, and they all agreed: this was one of the best films of the year.

The Academy disagreed. The Dark Knight didn’t even get a Best Picture nomination. The five films that did? Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, and… The Reader? The Reader was a middling Holocaust drama with a 60-something percent on Rotten Tomatoes and the backing of Harvey Weinstein. It took the spot that should have been reserved for Nolan’s film, because Weinstein knew how to work the room and a comic book movie, no matter how extraordinary, offended the Academy’s sense of superiority. As ScreenRant reported, AMPAS president Sid Ganis later admitted that “the words Dark Knight did come up” when the Academy expanded to ten nominees the following year.

And the Dark Knight snub isn’t even the most egregious example. It’s just the one that broke the seal. Citizen Kane, widely considered the greatest American film ever made, lost Best Picture in 1942 to How Green Was My Valley. Alfred Hitchcock was nominated five times for Best Director and never won. Stanley Kubrick, who made 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, never won a directing Oscar. His only competitive win was for visual effects. Goodfellas lost Best Picture to Dances With Wolves. Singin’ in the Rain wasn’t even nominated. These are the consensus greatest films in the history of the medium, and the Academy got them wrong.

Yes, the Academy has gotten it right before. Schindler’s List. The Godfather. No Country for Old Men. Most recently, Oppenheimer. There are years where the Best Picture winner is genuinely, unarguably, the best film of the year. Nobody is disputing those.

But that’s almost worse. Because it proves the Academy is capable of good judgment when it chooses to exercise it. They can recognize greatness when it arrives in the right packaging, when it comes from the right filmmaker, when it carries the right cultural signals. The years they get it right are what keep the institution’s lingering scraps of credibility alive. Those wins are the alibi. “We gave it to Schindler’s List, so trust us when we give it to Anora.” The occasional correct answer makes all the wrong ones harder to challenge. If they got it wrong every single year, nobody would take them seriously at all. The fact that they nail it just often enough is exactly what allows the rest of the fraud to continue.

Sexual Predators Designed the System

Nobody in Hollywood wants to say this out loud, but the modern Oscar campaign was designed by predators.

Harvey Weinstein built the playbook. His 1999 campaign for Shakespeare in Love upset Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture, and the tactics he used became the industry standard. Lavish parties. Whisper campaigns against rivals. Relentless schmoozing of the roughly 10,000 Academy voters. As LAist documented in their history of Oscar campaigning, every aggressive strategy the Academy now technically prohibits was invented at Weinstein’s Miramax, and the consultants who ran those campaigns “have since kind of fanned out across town and now run the awards campaigns for all the different places that are in the game.” The architecture of the modern Oscar race was built by a sexually deviant convinced creep with a $1.68 billion verdict against him.

When Mo’Nique won her SAG and Golden Globe for Precious and was the clear Oscar frontrunner, she was told to go above and beyond promoting the film.

“The performance is on the screen,” she said. “Y’all are making this now personal. I don’t need to have a personal relationship with any of these people, nor do they need to have one with me. They’re judging the performance.”

She refused the full schmooze circuit. She says she was blackballed for it. She still won the Oscar, but her career stalled for years afterward. That’s the system. Play the game or get punished.

Ricky Gervais stood on the Golden Globes stage in 2020 and brought a rare dose of common sense to the ceremony. He joked about Jeffrey Epstein and then told the groaning crowd: “Shut up. I know he’s your friend, but I don’t care.” He compared working for Weinstein to starring in Bird Box, “a movie where people survive by acting like they don’t see a thing.” He told every winner not to use the stage for political speeches because “you’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world.” Two hundred million people watched that monologue. It was the most honest eight minutes in the history of awards television, and the room hated every second of it. The best jokes contain half-truths. This was an iconic speech in a room full of people who had dined with Weinstein and Epstein and Diddy, who knew what was happening behind closed doors for decades, who smiled to cameras and said nothing, and who then had the nerve to stand on a stage and lecture the public about morality.

These are the people who decide what the best movie is. These are the experts. The ones who make a show of reminding you they hate ICE and that there’s nobody illegal on stolen land, who perform outrage about whatever cause is trending that week, while living in mansions behind gates in neighborhoods they got after they went through whatever perverted initiation ceremony the industry requires.

“If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.” — Ricky Gervais, 2020 Golden Globes

The topics they moralize on are causes they discovered through their publicists five minutes before the telecast. Disgusting, ignorant people whose actual track record of looking the other way on abuse, trafficking, and exploitation spans decades. Nobody needs an ethics lecture from that crowd. Audiences see through it now, which is part of why the industry is struggling to bring people to theaters.

What Best Picture Actually Rewards

So what does this industry, with all its moral grandstanding, choose to celebrate?

Anora won Best Picture at the 2025 ceremony. Five Oscars total. A movie about a sex worker. Made for $6 million. Grossed $40 million worldwide, one of the lowest-grossing Best Picture winners in history. Sean Baker dedicated his Palme d’Or win to “sex workers past, present, and future.” The Academy looked at every film released in 2024 and decided that this was the pinnacle. A movie that almost felt purposely steered to the top to provoke, to dare families and regular moviegoers to object so they could be told they don’t understand art. It’s a sexualized, transgressive film presented as the year’s crowning achievement, and if you think that selection exists in a vacuum, disconnected from the broader cultural agenda that rewards exactly this kind of provocation, I have a golden statue to sell you.

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I remember when Moonlight won Best Picture. I went to see it because the reviews were relentless. Every critic in America falling over themselves. I sat through the whole thing waiting for the movie everyone described to start. It never did. Instead, I got one of the most awkwardly sexualized, creepy, uncomfortable theatrical experiences of my life. There’s no hero. There’s no arc that earns its resolution. There’s no transformation that the audience gets to ride along with. The film is structured as a triptych, three chapters in a man’s life, and in each one the character is essentially passive, things happening to him while the camera asks you to feel sympathy for his queerness. The whole movie operates like a social essay pretending to be cinema, a statement piece where the statement is the point and the filmmaking serves it rather than the other way around. There’s nothing to grab onto as a viewer. No momentum. No stakes beyond “empathize with the homosexual experience or admit you’re a bigot.” If that movie changed your life, great. Art is personal. But the idea that it was the best picture produced by the American film industry that year requires a definition of “best” that most people who buy movie tickets would not recognize. It won because voting for it signaled the right values. In a sane world, Moonlight is a small, respected indie film that finds its audience. In a world obsessed with highlighting DEI and performing suicidal empathy, it wins the biggest prize in cinema.

There’s a pattern here. The Academy consistently rewards films that push sexualized, transgressive, or identity-focused content to the top of the pile. Films that seem designed to make normal audiences, parents, families, feel like outsiders in their own culture. And if you object, you’re the one with the problem. You’re the one who doesn’t get it. The Academy has been optimized to celebrate a very specific worldview and to punish anyone who questions it by making them feel unsophisticated.

The Price of "Victory”

The crazy part is how much the Oscar campaigns cost. William Friedkin, who won Best Director for The French Connection and later produced the Oscar ceremony itself, described the Academy Awards as “the greatest promotion scheme that any industry ever devised for itself.” George C. Scott called the ceremony “a two-hour meat parade.” Dustin Hoffman called them “obscene, dirty, no better than a beauty contest.” These are people who won and still found the process repulsive.

Studios spend between $5 million and $30 million per film campaigning for Oscar nominations and wins. Netflix reportedly spent $25 million on Roma’s campaign alone, sending Academy voters custom pillows and 200-page coffee table books. The total industry spend on Oscar campaigning is estimated at over half a billion dollars per year. That’s roughly the combined production budgets of all ten Best Picture nominees. For context, Warner Bros. spent around $20 million campaigning for Argo, and another $20 million for Gravity. Netflix’s campaign budget for a single season has been reported as high as $100 million.

“The (Academy Award) ceremonies are a two-hour meat parade, a public display with contrived suspense for economic reasons.” — George C. Scott, who refused his Best Actor award for Patton

Studios hire dedicated Oscar consultants whose entire job is to wine and dine voters. They host lavish Q&A screenings, curated luncheons, “For Your Consideration” ad blitzes on every billboard in Hollywood. The Academy has rules against directly asking for votes, so the operation is structured as a euphemism: we’re just hosting a discussion about the film, not asking you to vote for it. And then there’s a catered lunch and a gift bag worth $200,000 and the unspoken understanding that reciprocity is the currency of the industry.

“If there’s some big dark secret about the academy that the public can’t appreciate, it’s that these are people with day jobs so, like you, they have limited time to see movies. They will vote without seeing movies. That’s where campaigns make a difference.” — An Academy voter, speaking to ABC News

And the new rules don’t fix it. The Academy introduced a requirement in 2025 that voters must attest they’ve watched all nominees in a category before voting. It’s enforced on the honor system. The anonymous filmmaker who emailed Deadline this week proved exactly how well that’s working: he hasn’t seen half the films and isn’t going to bother. Deadline’s own reporting confirms that out of 317 eligible films, only 30 titles received nominations across the major categories, and just 15 of those received more than one nomination. The same few films dominate every category. The movies with the biggest campaigns and consensus that they deserve to win take up all the oxygen, and everything else, no matter how good, never gets seen by the people voting.

So when someone tells you a film “won Best Picture,” what they’re really telling you is that a film’s distributor spent millions of dollars over six months convincing a small group of voters to check a box.

The Gatekeepers

The Academy doesn’t just anoint “winners.” It actively influences what’s allowed to be considered great and sophisticated.

Christopher Nolan made The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk before the Academy gave him a single Best Director nomination. Think about that filmography. The ambition, the technical innovation, the cultural impact. Nolan pioneered the use of IMAX cameras in narrative filmmaking. He built practical sets that other directors wouldn’t attempt. He made original, complex, adult blockbusters that grossed hundreds of millions while respecting the audience’s intelligence. The Academy’s response for fifteen years was “not good enough.”

Then Oppenheimer came along. A serious historical drama. Three hours. Black and white sequences. Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography. Finally, the Academy decided Nolan was worth recognizing, because he’d finally made the type of movie the Academy was comfortable celebrating. He’d played their game, and they rewarded him for it. As Steven Spielberg himself acknowledged, The Dark Knight “would have definitely garnered a Best Picture nomination today.” Fifteen years too late. The think pieces about Nolan’s “relationship with the Oscars” all feel like part of a ritualized humiliation process, the whole industry watching a generational filmmaker wait for the Academy to grant permission for his work to be taken seriously.

Tom Cruise is the same story. Four Oscar nominations across his career. Three for acting, one for producing Top Gun: Maverick. Zero competitive wins. The man has spent forty years as one of the most committed, physically daring actors in the history of the medium. He jumps out of planes. He hangs off the side of buildings. He broke his ankle on camera and kept shooting. At 63, he’s doing things that stunt performers half his age won’t attempt. The Academy’s response? An honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards in November 2025, a separate ceremony that doesn’t even air on television. A consolation prize at a private dinner.

And the timing is perfect in the worst way. The Academy announced a new stunt design category in April 2025, set to debut at the 100th ceremony in 2028 for films released in 2027. After decades of stunt performers risking their lives without recognition, they finally created the award. Except it arrives after the peak of the most extraordinary stunt career in film history. They gave Cruise an honorary statue and created the real award too late for it to matter to the person who made the case for it. I believe that’s consistent with the Academy’s petty behavior: institutional contempt masquerading as recognition. Peter O’Toole got the same treatment: eight acting nominations, zero wins, and an honorary Oscar in 2003 after a career that included Lawrence of Arabia. “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, my foot,” he said on stage. The Academy loves giving you the real thing after it no longer matters.

There’s a snobbish belief within the Academy and the critical circles that orbit it that entertaining movies don’t expand the art of filmmaking. That mass appeal is suspicious. That if millions of people love something, it probably isn’t serious enough to be great. So they punish filmmakers like Nolan and Cruise for the crime of being popular, and they reward films that most of the ticket-buying public will never see and wouldn’t enjoy if they did.

“I lost faith in the Oscars the first year I was a movie critic — the year that Bonnie and Clyde didn’t win.” — Roger Ebert

The best action movies of all time don’t win Best Picture. Best Picture, in many years, is reserved for niche, arthouse films that appeal to the weird theater kid sensibility, the quirky, self-serious intensity that mistakes its own niche taste for universal sophistication. If you knew theater kids growing up, you know exactly the energy I’m describing. That energy runs the Academy.

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The foreign film category is its own kind of farce. A film like Dhurandhar, India’s highest-grossing Hindi film of 2025, a spy thriller that audiences across India and the diaspora showed up for in record numbers, grossing over ₹1,000 crore worldwide, has zero chance at the Academy. Arguably the best Indian movie ever made! It’s hard to believe this can be separated from its story, which runs against certain liberal narratives that would make its celebration uncomfortable for the voting body. A film that calls out Islamic terrorism becomes “Islamophobic” in the Academy’s framework. The Academy’s idea of “international” cinema is carefully curated to include films that reinforce a particular worldview and to exclude anything that challenges it. The foreign category probably doesn’t even consider most foreign language films: it only considers the ones that pass the vibe check of a very specific political sensibility.

The Independent Mind

Anyone who relies on the Oscars as the backbone of their film discourse is outing themselves. They’re telling you they don’t evaluate movies from first principles. They need an external authority to validate their taste, a stamp of approval before they can confidently call something great. They wait for the nominations to come out before deciding what’s important. They let the event shape their tastes instead of ignoring it.

The entire award ceremony is a scam. A marketing event designed by predators, sustained by lobbying, and weaponized to enforce a cultural agenda that has nothing to do with identifying the best films and everything to do with telling you what you’re allowed to admire. Timothee Chalamet’s supposed decline in Academy Award chances after accurately calling out ballet kinda shows you where their priorities lie.

This is groupthink in a tuxedo. The Academy tells you the consensus. The critics reinforce it. The discourse amplifies it. And anyone who disagrees is either a populist who doesn’t understand cinema or a contrarian trying to get attention. The possibility that the system itself is broken, that the people making these decisions are incentivized by politics and money and social positioning rather than genuine love of the craft, is never seriously entertained. Most within Hollywood become, by default, participants in the corporate Hollywood machine’s lack of innovation and the overall nepotistic, closed-door nature of the Academy.

Here’s who I trust: the filmmaker who made something ambitious and doesn’t care whether it gets nominated. The audience member who can tell you exactly why a movie worked or didn’t, who felt it in their body, who walked out of the theater vibrating and can explain why without referencing a single award. The person who has the conviction to say The Dark Knight is a great film without adding “for a superhero movie,” and who doesn’t need the Academy’s permission to believe it.

The Oscars are a political sham. True cinephiles don’t pay attention. The best films ever made don’t need a trophy to prove it, and the trophy doesn’t prove anything except that someone spent enough money, threw enough parties, and said the right things to the right people in the right rooms.

The next time someone asks if you watched the Oscars, try this: tell them you spent the evening watching a great movie instead. You chose it yourself. No one told you it was the best. You just knew.

Christopher Nolan spent ten years building a heist film about the thing he does for a living: assembling specialists, constructing false realities, and smuggling ideas into your head while you sit in the dark. DiCaprio brings real grief to a role that could have been cold. The ensemble around him is one of the best in modern blockbuster filmmaking. Hans Zimmer's score might be the finest piece of film music ever composed. And the ending still starts arguments fifteen years later. This is peak Nolan, all his stars aligned at once.

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy, Elliot Page, Cillian Murphy, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine, Tom Berenger, Dileep Rao

Composer: Hans Zimmer

Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures / Legendary Pictures

Budget: $160M | Box Office: $839M | Net: ~$400M

Genres: Sci-Fi, Heist, Thriller, Drama

Inception is a movie about planting an idea so deep inside someone’s mind that they believe it’s their own. It is also, if you tilt your head, a confession. Christopher Nolan spent ten years writing a heist film about the exact thing he does for a living: he assembles a crew of specialists, constructs an elaborate false reality, and smuggles feelings and ideas into your subconscious while you sit in the dark eating popcorn. The heist isn’t unfolding in the plot. The heist is the movie itself. And by the time the credits roll, the idea is already inside you.

DiCaprio plays Cobb, an extractor who enters people’s dreams to steal secrets. Nolan had a character named Cobb in his first feature, Following, a decade earlier. The two Cobbs share a certain quality: they’re men who’ve gotten too deep into the act of watching and infiltrating other people’s lives. This Cobb has a specific job to do. A powerful businessman named Saito, played by Ken Watanabe with a calm authority that makes you believe this man could buy an airline on a whim, hires Cobb not to steal an idea but to plant one. Inception. The team Cobb assembles to pull it off is one of the great ensembles in modern blockbuster filmmaking.

COBB: "What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient. Highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate."

I’ve seen Inception more times than I’ve seen almost any film. It has not diminished. Most movies with a puzzle at their center get smaller every time you solve a piece. This one gets bigger, because the puzzle keeps building.

Nolan builds dream logic better than anyone ever has on screen. The dream layers are beautifully designed. Each level down runs on a different clock, at a different speed, with different physics and different stakes. The surface level is a rainy city chase. Below that, a hotel. Below that, a snow fortress. Each one has its own mood, its own color temperature, its own tempo of violence. Nolan cuts between them to build tension, and it works because the rules are so clearly established that you always know where you are and what’s at risk, even when three realities are unraveling at once.

COBB: They say we only use a fraction of our brain’s true potential. Now that’s when we’re awake. When we’re asleep, we can do almost anything.

The texture of the dreams are enticing. His dreams don’t look like acid trips and break immersion. They look like reality with one wrong detail, like a city that folds over on itself while people keep walking, like a staircase that goes up forever, like a hotel hallway that won’t stay level. They feel the way dreams actually feel: plausible in the moment, insane in retrospect .

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Even the scenes that aren’t supposed to be dreams feel dreamlike. The Mombasa sequence, where Cobb is running through narrow corridors that seem to close in around him, has the quality of a chase you’d have in sleep, the walls tightening, the exits shrinking. The whole movie lives in that space between waking and dreaming, and after enough viewings, you start to wonder if that’s the point. This is, of course, the great debate. The spinning top at the end. Did it fall? The wedding ring. The children’s clothes. Thousands of frame-by-frame analyses exist. Nolan built a film that turns its audience into investigators after the credits.

DiCaprio is the reason the investigation matters. The emotional centerpiece of the movie. Without him, the dream mechanics would have fallen flat. He brings grief. Real, heavy, specific grief. Cobb lost his wife, and he carries her with him into every dream like a virus he can’t shake. DiCaprio plays this with a rawness that came from pushing Nolan behind the scenes to humanize what could have been a cold cerebral exercise. You can feel the tension between Nolan’s architectural instincts and DiCaprio’s emotional ones, and the movie is all the more extraordinary because of it. You can feel his pain in the scene where Cobb sees Mal commit suicide.

There’s a physical resemblance between DiCaprio and Nolan himself that I can’t quite shake. Whether it’s intentional or not, it adds a layer. The director as the dreamer. The actor as his projection. The audience as the mark.

The rest of the cast fills in every gap. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Arthur with a lightness that makes his action sequences feel effortless. The hallway fight, where he’s battling a man in a corridor that rotates like a washing machine, is one of the great practical stunts in the history of cinema. Gordon-Levitt sells every second of it with the athleticism of someone who looks like they genuinely enjoy getting thrown into walls.

Tom Hardy, as Eames the forger, brings a warmth and humor that the movie desperately needs. He’s the guy cracking jokes at the edge of the abyss, and Hardy plays him with such easy charisma that you wish he had more screen time.

ARTHUR: Eames, I am impressed.

EAMES: Your condescension, as always, is much appreciated, Arthur, thank you.

Ellen Page grounds Cobb as Ariadne, the architect, and her wide-eyed curiosity is the audience’s way in. Ken Watanabe is a perfect fit as Saito. Murphy is phenomenal as Robert Fischer, the man who wants to create his own legacy.

EAMES: "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."

Now. The soundtrack.

Hans Zimmer’s score for Inception might be the single best piece of film music composed in history, and I say that knowing full well what Zimmer did with Interstellar a few years later. Where the Dark Knight trilogy leaned on heavy, grinding bass, Inception goes somewhere else with the same bass. Brass swells that feel like Parisian architecture. Strings that ache. And then there’s the piece at the center of the sound design: Édith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” slowed down across dream layers, warped and stretched until it becomes the foghorn-like blasts that define the movie’s sonic identity.

The score and the sound design are inseparable here. They’re the same thing at different speeds. The way sound warps in the dream layers, the way a kick in one level manifests as a shudder in another, the way the Piaf track drifts in and out of the dream logic like a signal from another frequency, and gets integrated into the soundtrack itself. This is meticulous work.

Specific tracks stay with me the way scenes do. “Mombasa” is pure momentum. “One Simple Idea” is my personal favorite, used during the planning sequence it has the energy of a team that knows exactly what they’re about to do and can’t wait to start.

“Old Souls” and “Waiting for a Train” are devastating, quiet pieces that reflect the tragedy of Cobb and Mal’s story. “Dream Is Collapsing” does exactly what the title says. “Radical Notion” is incredible during the movie’s climax in the final dream level. That’s before we get into Hans Zimmer’s recording sessions, which has even more music never released in the soundtrack, and pieces like “Mr. Charles” or “Strategy”

And “Time,” which everyone knows, which plays over the ending and has been used in a thousand YouTube videos since, is somehow the least interesting track on the album. Not because it’s bad. Because everything around it is even better for deep work. This is a soundtrack I’ve listened to hundreds of times while working, studying, thinking. It puts you in a flow state. It makes you feel like you’re planning something important. Very few scores do that outside the context of their film.

Visually, Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister opt for cool blues with handheld cameras that give the image a slight blur, a slight instability. It’s not the crisp, locked-down framing you’d expect from a movie this expensive. But it works because it mirrors the imprecision of dream recall. You’re never quite sure if what you’re seeing is perfectly real. The color palette shifts between layers: warmer in Mombasa, sterile in the snow, grey and rain-soaked on the surface. Each layer has its own visual grammar, and you absorb it without thinking about it, which is exactly how dreams deliver information.

COBB: [notices that he’s being followed] That price on my head, was that dead or alive?

EAMES: Not sure. See if he starts shooting.

The pacing is relentless in the best way. This is one of the great movies that never loses you. Not a scene. Not a beat. The tension ratchets from the opening and doesn’t let up. Once they get into the dream, the sequence where the team realizes they’re up against militarized subconscious security, when DiCaprio turns on Gordon-Levitt with real anger, is close to the peak of the film’s intensity, and it comes well before the climax.

Nolan builds pressure the way the best stories do: by making every piece of new information raise the stakes instead of just adding complexity. You’re always learning something and always worried about something, and those two feelings feed each other until the final act becomes almost unbearable in the best possible way.

Arthur: So, once we’ve made the plant, how do we go out? Hope you have something more elegant in mind than shooting me in the head?

Cobb: A kick.

Ariadne: What’s a kick?

Eames: This, Ariadne, would be a kick

[kicks the leg of the chair Arthur’s swinging at]

Arthur: [finds his balance and glares at Eames]

Inception is a philosophy movie wearing a Bond suit. One of Nolan’s finest tricks. It’s got the globe-trotting locations, the sharp-dressed operatives, the ticking clocks, the gunfights in snow fortresses. It moves like a spy thriller. It feels like a heist. But look beyond the set pieces and you’re watching a film about the nature of reality, about whether we can trust our own minds, about what separates a genuine belief from one that was put there by someone else. Most films that ask those questions forget to be exciting. Most films that are this exciting don’t bother asking. Nolan figured out that if you disguise philosophy as espionage, people will sit through two and a half hours of it and leave wanting more.

Inception is about how stories infiltrate us. Cobb’s team does what filmmakers do. The architect builds the world. The forger plays a role. The chemist handles the medium. The point man manages logistics. And the extractor, the director, orchestrates it all so that the target walks away believing a new idea was their own. Nolan is telling you, in the most entertaining way possible, that this is what movies do to you. They plant ideas. They make foreign emotions feel native. They’re psychological operations dressed as entertainment. It’s a remarkably honest thing to put in a blockbuster, and most audiences absorb it without ever consciously registering it, which is, of course, the whole point.

I keep coming back to this movie because it rewards obsession. Every rewatch surfaces something new, some detail in the background, some line reading that means something different now, some structural echo between dream layers. It’s dense without being difficult. The making of this movie was something to behold. The real sets. The hallway fight. The train in LA. The castle sequence. The use of practical effects elevates the whole thing. There’s a featurette that’s over 1 hour in length that used to be available on YouTube in multiple parts; it’s gone now, but here is part 1 and part 2 of the closest thing I can find.

Maurice Fischer: [Robert opens the vault to see Maurice on his death bed struggling to say something] Disa... disap... disappointed

Fischer: I know, Dad. I know you were disappointed I couldn’t be you.

Maurice Fischer: No. No, no. I was disappointed... that you tried.

[Robert opens the safe to find the new Last Will and Testament along with the pinwheel from when he was a kid. The inception has worked]

Anyone can watch Inception. Nolan made a $160 million original science fiction film about dream architecture and subliminal persuasion, and it grossed $800 million worldwide. That number matters because it proved something the industry keeps trying to forget: audiences will show up for ambitious, original, complicated work if you make it thrilling enough. If you give them characters they care about. If you build dreams that feel like dreams.

The only viewers who might struggle are those who need their stories rooted firmly in the real. If you can’t suspend disbelief for the mechanics, the exposition in the first act will feel like homework. Everyone else will find something here. Dreamers, planners, grief-carriers, puzzle-solvers, anyone who’s ever woken from a dream and spent the morning trying to remember why it mattered.

This was peak Nolan. He’d just made The Dark Knight and proved he could turn a comic book into a crime epic. Inception proved something harder: that he could make the inside of his own head into a worldwide event. He’s made great films since, Interstellar and Oppenheimer chief among them. But this is the one where all his lucky stars lined up at once, where the ending became a cultural argument. It stands alone.

The top wobbles. Cut to black. And you’re still thinking about it, years later. Are you sure the idea is even yours?

Tom Cruise and Christopher Nolan have never worked together. That might be the single biggest missed opportunity in modern cinema.

The overlap between these two is absurd. Both are obsessive about practical filmmaking. Both have staked their reputations on the idea that audiences can tell the difference between something real and something rendered. Both negotiate backend deals that give them a piece of the gross, which means both have a financial incentive to put people in seats, and both deliver on it. Both are among a vanishingly small group of names that can open a movie on reputation alone. Both have pushed the boundaries of visual storytelling and action filmmaking in the past 15 years. Your aunt who sees three movies a year will go see a Tom Cruise movie. She’ll also go see a Christopher Nolan movie. There might be five people left in the industry who can make that claim. Two of them are these guys.

“You saved Hollywood’s ass and you might have saved theatrical distribution. Seriously, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ might have saved the entire theatrical industry.” — Steven Spielberg (speaking to Tom Cruise, 2023 Oscar luncheon)

And between them, they've produced the greatest action and technical filmmaking of our generation. Top Gun: Maverick put real actors in real F/A-18s pulling real Gs, and the footage looks like nothing that has ever existed in a movie before. Mission: Impossible: Fallout is the most physically ambitious action film of the 21st century, a movie where the lead actor broke his ankle on camera, got up, and kept the shot. On the other side, Nolan gave us The Dark Knight, which redefined what a superhero film could feel like in IMAX. He gave us Dunkirk, which used IMAX film to put you on that beach so viscerally that veterans walked out of screenings shaking. Even Tenet, whatever you think of its story, is a technical achievement: practical sequences running forward and backward simultaneously, shot in-camera, on real locations, in IMAX. Their obsessions run parallel but point in slightly different directions. Nolan is consumed by the camera itself, by mounting IMAX where IMAX has never been mounted, by capturing images so large and so detailed that they become physiological experiences. Cruise is consumed by the action, by being the body in the frame, by making sure the person on screen is actually doing the thing the audience is watching. Both make you feel it in your gut.

“My preference is always to do things in-camera as much as possible. It sets a big challenge for every department to actually bring the reality of the thing there for the actors… the more things can just be real, the better they’re going to feel to the audience.” — Christopher Nolan

They are mirror images of the same phenomenon. Nolan is one of the only directors working today whose name sells tickets the way a movie star’s does. Cruise is one of the only stars who functions like a director, shaping the script and production of every film he’s in as of late. And both of them have the box office receipts to prove it.

One could argue they each have a gap that the other person fills. And yet, somehow, the conversation about a Cruise-Nolan collaboration barely exists. People talk about it online the way you’d talk about time travel. Nice idea, never happening.

Two Philosophies, One Religion

Cruise and Nolan arrived at the same destination from completely different directions. Nolan came up as a writer-director, an architect of narrative. His obsession with practical effects is an extension of his obsession with control over every frame. When he crashes a real Boeing 747 into a building for Tenet, or detonates a practical recreation of the Trinity test for Oppenheimer, it's because he believes the camera registers reality differently than it registers simulation. And he's grown technically over the years in a way that's worth tracking. From the neo-noir grit of Following to the IMAX-native spectacle of Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, there's a clear line of escalation. Each film pushed the format further, demanded more of the camera, and found new ways to make scale feel personal. By Oppenheimer, he was shooting conversations in IMAX and making them feel as monumental as any explosion he'd ever staged.

Cruise came from the opposite end. He started as an actor. And here’s something I think gets overlooked: he might be the only major star in Hollywood history who began as a legitimate character actor and evolved into an action icon, rather than the other way around. Think about his run through the ‘80s and ‘90s. The Color of Money with Scorsese. Rain Man with Levinson. Born on the Fourth of July for Stone. A Few Good Men, Jerry Maguire, Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut for Kubrick. He was working with every canonized director in the business, turning in performances that had nothing to do with hanging off helicopters. The guy was robbed of a Best Actor Oscar for Jerry Maguire, and his work in Magnolia is as raw and unhinged as anything you’ll see from any actor of his generation.

Then something shifted. The Mission: Impossible franchise became his vehicle, and over the course of eight films, he turned himself into the most committed practical action filmmaker alive, from the cockpit, the cliff edge, the side of an airplane at 5,000 feet. What he achieved physically in these films is completely unique. The HALO jump in Fallout, shot at 25,000 feet over Abu Dhabi with Cruise actually jumping over 100 times to get the shot. The helicopter chase in the same film, which Cruise flew himself after logging thousands of hours of flight training. The motorcycle cliff jump in Dead Reckoning, which required him to ride off a 4,000-foot cliff in Norway and deploy a parachute mid-fall, a stunt so dangerous they built a ramp on the side of a mountain and he did it six times. These are real things a human being did in front of a real camera. No other actor in the history of the medium has committed to this level of physical filmmaking.

But somewhere in this transformation, the franchise's recent returns reflect the toll of a production process that stopped working. To be fair: Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning were both hampered by forces partly outside Cruise's control, (much like Tenet for Nolan). The pandemic blew up the original production schedule for MI7. The 2023 writers' and actors' strikes froze development at critical moments for the last installment. But a self-inflicted problem would also exist: both films went into production without completed scripts. Scenes were being written and rewritten during shooting. Story threads were being figured out on the fly, with a budget clock running. Dead Reckoning made $571 million on a $291 million budget, which sounds fine until you do the math on marketing and distribution. The Final Reckoning cost a reported $400 million and topped out under $600 million worldwide. These are films that need a billion dollars to justify their existence, and they're not getting there. The action is still extraordinary. Cruise lit his parachute on fire sixteen times for a single stunt. But when you're writing the story while you're building the set, the writing suffers. The stories were running on fumes.

“I love making movies. It’s not what I do. It’s who I am.” — Tom Cruise (People magazine, 2025)

This is where Nolan's approach could help. Nolan shows up on day one with a finished script. Every shot is planned. Every timeline is mapped. Every set piece is designed to serve the narrative, not the other way around. That discipline is central to his production strategy. Completed scripts mean accurate budgets. Accurate budgets mean controlled costs. Controlled costs mean you hit your release window. Nolan's films come out when they're supposed to come out. They don't slip. They don't balloon. Nolan takes pride on undershooting his budget, and is a lot more careful asking for money from studios (which is why he seemingly commands an even higher percentage of first dollar gross than Cruise). Oppenheimer was budgeted at $100 million, shot on schedule, and released on its announced date. It made $953 million and won seven Oscars.

Imagine Cruise having a full script before the cameras roll.

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Where Cruise Helps Nolan

Nolan’s films are structurally brilliant, visually staggering, but can be emotionally distant. Tenet is the clearest case: a film of breathtaking ambition with a main character so opaque that audiences couldn’t find an emotional anchor. John David Washington is a talented actor, but the Protagonist, literally unnamed, is a function of the plot rather than a person you’d follow off a cliff. Dunkirk deliberately stripped character out of its structure, and while that worked for its purpose, it left audiences admiring the craft more than aching for the people.

The exceptions prove the rule. Inception‘s Cobb is warmer because DiCaprio brought his own gravity to the role. Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer is Nolan’s most human protagonist because Murphy’s face can carry the weight of a civilization in a single close-up. But Oppenheimer isn’t an action film. Nolan’s challenge has always been marrying his architectural storytelling to protagonists who make you feel something physical, who make you grip the armrest not because the set piece is impressive but because you’re terrified for that person.

Tom Cruise is the answer to that problem. His entire screen presence is built on making you follow him off a cliff. When he runs, you run. When he’s hanging off the side of a building, your palms sweat. He brings decades of earned audience trust. Cruise makes you care about the body on screen in a way that very few actors in history have managed. Put him inside a Nolan narrative, inside one of those intricate structural puzzles, and suddenly you have a film where the architecture has an emotional heartbeat.

And Nolan is the answer to Cruise’s problem. After eight Mission: Impossible films, Cruise could use a script completed before filming that matches his physical commitment. Nolan is among the best structural screenwriters working in commercial cinema. He builds narratives like an engineer: every load-bearing element in its precise place, every timeline folding into every other timeline, every reveal earning its moment. That rigor, applied to a character Cruise would inhabit physically, is the pinnacle of what realistic filmmaking can be.

Listening to either of Cruise or Nolan talk about their films is infectious. Look at how Cruise discusses his water tanks in Final Reckoning around the 7 minute mark of this interview. So meticulous. So obsessed.

Nolan’s interviews are all the same. For example, his explanation of the making of Memento is phenomenal:

Dead Reckoning, Oppenheimer & IMAX Drama

If there’s a practical reason this collaboration hasn’t happened, perhaps the summer of 2023 is a good place to start looking. Dead Reckoning Part One opened on July 12th. Oppenheimer opened on July 21st. Nine days apart. And Nolan’s team at Universal had locked down every IMAX screen in North America for Oppenheimer‘s first three weeks, which meant Cruise’s film got bumped from the premium format after barely a week.

Nolan shot Oppenheimer on native 65 mm IMAX film with Hoyte van Hoytema. Dead Reckoning was shot on the Sony CineAlta Venice, which is an IMAX-certified digital camera but not native to the format. Oppenheimer had first dibs. Dead Reckoning was only in the conversation because of delays, and Paramount refused to move their dates.

Still, Cruise had a right to be frustrated. Here’s a guy who had just saved theatrical distribution one year earlier. Cruise declined every streaming offer during the pandemic and held out for a theatrical release. He put his money where his philosophy was. Nolan, to his credit, had tried the same thing with Tenet in 2020, releasing it into a pandemic to try to lure audiences back to theaters. It didn’t work the way he hoped. Tenet made $365 million globally, Nolan’s lowest return since The Prestige. Cruise waited, released Maverick in 2022, and it made $1.49 billion. He finished the job Nolan started.

“I think IMAX is the best film format that was ever invented. It’s the gold standard and what any other technology has to match up to, but none have, in my opinion.” — Christopher Nolan (DGA Quarterly interview)

I understand the sting. These two were supposed to be on the same side. In a lot of ways, they are the same side. Two of the last people standing between the theatrical experience and a future where everything premieres on your phone.

But here’s what Cruise did next, and this is why I think the man is genuinely something special: he promoted Oppenheimer. The movie that had just stolen his IMAX screens. He showed up on social media and told people to go see it. Because Tom Cruise cares about people going to the movies. Shoutout Adam Townsend, the founder of the Tom Cruise Day of Visibility, and the man who put me onto Cruise’s genius recently and inspired the creation of this blog, for suggesting this is part of Cruise’s “Hollywood visibility campaign.”

This is where I start to get a little frustrated with Nolan, and I say this as someone who grew up watching his films. Batman Begins shaped how I think about movies. The Dark Knight is one of the best films ever made. Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer: I have seen them all multiple times in IMAX. Christopher Nolan is one of the most important filmmakers alive.

But the man does not give Tom Cruise enough credit.

Cruise promotes everything. He showed up for Tenet when it launched into a dead marketplace. He promoted Oppenheimer and Barbie when both were competing with his own film. He went to a screening of Sinners and posted about it, telling people it’s a must-see in a cinema. He showed up at the UK premiere of Edgar Wright’s The Running Man and publicly championed Glen Powell, a guy he mentored on Top Gun: Maverick. Powell has said Cruise was the first person he called when he got cast, because Cruise taught him how to run on camera. Spielberg has praised him. Michael B. Jordan lights up talking about meeting him. Ryan Coogler has said publicly how much Cruise’s support meant for Sinners. Cruise is the unofficial ambassador of theatrical cinema. He’s doing the work.

“You’re not going to feel as connected with the character if I went with a regular mask and a thing in my mouth to breath. Luckily when you’re flying jets you train for hypoxia and for carbon dioxide buildup. You start to be able to perceive your body and how it’s reacting so that I knew when to stop.” — Tom Cruise (People magazine, 2025)

Where is Nolan in this? Nolan talks about Kubrick. He talks about Michael Mann. He talks about.. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II? I can’t recall a single instance of Nolan publicly praising Tom Cruise’s contribution to practical filmmaking or theatrical exhibition. The guy who arguably did more than anyone to keep theaters alive during and after the pandemic. The guy whose aerial sequences in Top Gun: Maverick rival anything Nolan achieved in Dunkirk. The guy who has been championing IMAX and physical filmmaking for two decades. Not a word.

Maybe that’s just how Nolan operates. He’s private. He does his own thing. He doesn’t play the public mutual-admiration circuit. Fine. But when you’re one of the two most important voices advocating for theatrical cinema, and the other voice is out there promoting everyone else’s work, the silence is noticeable.

What’s Stopping Collaboration?

The real obstacle to a collaboration is probably simpler than ego or rivalry. Both men think in decade-long arcs. Cruise imagines sequences years before they’re filmed, building the physical training and logistics required to execute a single stunt. Nolan writes scripts on timelines that stretch far beyond normal development cycles, constructing narratives with the patience of someone who knows the audience will wait. Any collaboration requires both of them to want it at the same time, and for two people who plan this far ahead, finding a window where those arcs align is actually a harder problem than the money. Two orbits that have to intersect at precisely the right moment, and neither person is in the business of adjusting their trajectory for anyone else.

And the money is hard. Cruise commands a 20+ million dollar salary plus about 10% first dollar gross. Nolan commands similar compensation upfront, and 15-20% first dollar gross. On Minority Report, Spielberg solved this exact problem: he and Cruise both waived their upfront salaries and took 15% of the gross each, keeping the budget under $100 million. The film made $358 million. Both got paid handsomely. Spielberg’s framing was explicit: “I haven’t taken a salary in 18 years for a movie, so if my film makes no money I get no money. They should be prepared to do the same.” It was a gamble, and it worked because the two biggest names in the industry bet on each other instead of against each other. For War of the Worlds, Cruise took 20% of the gross and no upfront salary, ultimately earning around $100 million on a film that made $603 million.

That template exists. Cruise and Nolan could replicate it. Two people taking a percentage of the gross on a film that both their names are selling? On a practical-effects-driven IMAX spectacle written & directed by Nolan and physically embodied by Cruise? That film makes a billion dollars. The math works if the egos can.

“The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it’s an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography. However sophisticated your computer-generated imagery is, if it’s been created from no physical elements and you haven’t shot anything, it’s going to feel like animation.” — Christopher Nolan

Another question is creative control. Nolan writes his own scripts. He designs the story, the structure, the visual grammar. His actors serve the narrative. He doesn’t make Tom Cruise movies. He makes Christopher Nolan movies. Cruise, on the other hand, has spent two decades building a system where he is the creative engine. He develops the stunts. He shapes the action sequences. He’s the producer, the star, and in many ways the architect of how his films look and feel. The Mission: Impossible franchise works because Cruise is the auteur, regardless of whose name is on the director’s chair.

“Anytime you see Tom in the plane, he’s at the controls,” says director Christopher McQuarrie, who has helped helm every Mission film since 2015’s Rogue Nation and co-wrote the seventh and eighth installments with Erik Jendresen. “He’s basically a one-man film crew: operating the camera, acting and flying.”

So who leads?

This is where the Kubrick precedent matters. Eyes Wide Shut is an example we have of Tom Cruise genuinely surrendering to a director’s vision. Kubrick was the most controlling director in the history of the medium. He shot that film for over 400 days. He demanded take after take after take. He reshaped the production schedule around his obsessive standards and expected total submission from everyone on set. Cruise gave it to him. Completely. The result is one of the most haunting, psychologically layered performances of Cruise’s career. A performance that has nothing to do with running or jumping or hanging off things. Bill Harford wandering through that New York night, out of his depth, out of control, slowly realizing that the world he thought he understood is something else entirely. That’s acting. That’s the Tom Cruise people forgot existed.

Kubrick appealed to the actor beneath the movie star. And Cruise, who by that point was already one of the biggest stars on Earth, let himself be directed in a way he hasn’t allowed since. The guy who controls every aspect of every Mission: Impossible production walked into Kubrick’s world and became a tool of the director’s vision.

Nolan operates with similar authority. His sets, his timelines, his rules. The actors who thrive under him are the ones who trust the structure he’s built and bring their internal work to it. Murphy did it. DiCaprio did it. Downey did it. Can Cruise do it again? He’s reportedly looking to. Variety reported in 2024 that he wants to return to working with auteurs. He’s doing a film with Alejandro González Iñárritu. But Nolan is the more interesting prospect, because of his obsession with practical high budget filmmaking. How would he go about this with Cruise?

That question is worth a movie. Nolan would get something he’s never had: an action protagonist whose screen presence and blockbuster sensibilities create the emotional connection his narratives sometimes lack. Cruise would get something the Mission: Impossible franchise stopped giving him towards the end: writing rigorous enough to match what his body does on screen.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

I grew up on Nolan. He taught me what cinema could be when it was operating at the highest level of ambition. Discovering Cruise’s body of work later, especially the Mission: Impossible films from Ghost Protocol forward and then working backward through his ‘90s run, felt like finding the other half of the same argument. These two people believe the same things about what movies owe an audience. They execute on that belief with a rigor that nobody else in Hollywood consistently matches outside Denis Villeneuve, or Joseph Kosinski who did brilliant work with Top Gun: Maverick and showed similar instincts with F1.

The industry is full of people making content. Algorithmic products designed to be consumed on a tablet at 1.5x speed. Franchise entries that look like they were color-graded by a committee. Disney’s assembly-line visual mediocrity. Marvel’s washed-out palettes. Cruise and Nolan are the antidote to all of it, and they’re fighting the same war from different foxholes.

They should be in the same foxhole.

Cruise is 63 years old. He’s still doing his own stunts, still flying his own jets, still getting new licenses and pushing boundaries. But the window isn’t infinite, and the Mission: Impossible franchise ended with diminishing returns on escalating budgets. The next phase of his movies need to deliver at the box office. Nolan is 55 and operating at the peak of his powers, coming off an Oscar sweep and heading into what looks like the most ambitious production of his career with The Odyssey. Both men plan years ahead. Both are probably already thinking about what comes after their current projects. The question is whether those timelines ever converge, whether two people who think in decade-long arcs can find a window where the arcs overlap.

“I’m going to make movies into my 80s; actually, I’m going to make them into my 100s. I will never stop. I will never stop doing action, I will never stop doing drama, comedy films.. I’m excited.” — Tom Cruise (The Hollywood Reporter, 2025)

I don’t know if it’ll ever happen. Maybe the competitive energy between them is actually productive. Maybe the best version of this story is the one where they keep pushing each other from a distance, each one raising the bar for the other.

But I don’t think so. I think the best version of this story is the one where somebody picks up the phone. Where Cruise walks onto a Nolan set and submits to something bigger than himself, the way he did for Kubrick 27 years ago. Where Nolan writes a character who demands the kind of physical presence that only one person on Earth can deliver, and gives that character a story for the ages. Where two people who have spent their careers proving that audiences deserve reality decide to give them the most real thing cinema has ever produced.

I’ll be in the IMAX seat. I won’t be checking my phone.

The Force Awakens came out in 2015 and I was a teenager, freshly moved to New Jersey after a detour in Singapore for middle school, excited to plug back into American culture. I grew up watching Star Wars in the Chicago suburbs. My childhood was returning. Star Wars was back! The hype was real. The critical establishment lined up to praise it. The writing was strong, they said. The characters were refreshing. It felt like the real thing again. Star Wars: Battlefront dropped as a video game and fed the same nostalgia loop. The momentum was impossible to resist. I’ll give it to Disney: the trailer was iconic.

But the feeling didn’t last. Snoke was Palpatine again. Rey was another unknown on another desert planet, Jakku standing in for Tatooine. Maz Kanata’s castle was the Mos Eisley cantina. Harrison Ford was fan service. Starkiller Base was a Death Star, except bigger, because that’s the only creative move this kind of thinking allows. The entire film was Star Wars: A New Hope all over again.

George Lucas saw it immediately. According to Bob Iger’s own memoir, Lucas watched an early cut and didn’t hide his disappointment. “There’s nothing new,” he said. In every film he made, it was important to him to present new worlds, new stories, new technologies. The Force Awakens had none of that. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Lucas was even more direct:

LUCAS: “They wanted to do a retro movie. I don’t like that. Every movie, I worked very hard to make them completely different, different planets, different spaceships, to make it new.”

Disney had taken his story treatments, thrown them out, and decided to make something “for the fans.” Lucas’s response was essentially: fine, you’ll give them exactly what they think they want, and they’ll cheer, and it’ll be the beginning of the end. He was right. An entire generation got sold derivative material as the real thing, and the corporate-critical complex applauded it into a $2 billion box office.

The Road Not Taken

What bothers me most about the Star Wars sequel trilogy? The one film that actually tried something got punished for it.

"Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That's the only way to become what you were meant to be." — Kylo Ren, The Last Jedi

The Last Jedi is hated. I understand why. It does some weird things. But Rian Johnson is a smart filmmaker who looked at the trajectory J.J. Abrams had set and understood, correctly, that following it would doom the franchise to repeating itself forever. So he swung the hammer. Kylo Ren kills Snoke halfway through the movie. He becomes his own villain instead of another Vader answering to another Emperor. “Let the past die” is the thesis statement of the only person in the room who understood what Star Wars needed.

Luke Skywalker’s final act, projecting himself across the galaxy to defend the Resistance, is genuinely beautiful filmmaking. The cinematography is absolutely stunning.

The sequences of Rey learning from Luke have a mystical suspense to them, this student-master energy that works well. Lucas himself, through a representative, called it “beautifully made.” Coming from a man who trashed The Force Awakens to the CEO’s face. The creator of Star Wars himself! But unfortunately, the fans hated it.

Was The Last Jedi perfect? No. But Johnson was dealt a losing hand. Abrams and Disney had built the foundation out of nostalgia and repetition, and Johnson was left to either continue building on that shaky ground or try to steer the whole thing somewhere new. He chose the braver path. And then The Rise of Skywalker came along, undid everything Johnson set up, brought Palpatine back from the dead (seriously: he wasn’t dead in Episode VI?), shoved Rey and Kylo into a kiss nobody asked for, and delivered the most cowardly finale imaginable. Lucas never commented publicly on Episode IX. He didn’t attend the premiere. That silence says everything. The entire trilogy should be struck from canon and restarted. But as long as Disney is running things, admitting a mistake that large and doing something bold about it is a fantasy more far-fetched than anything in the films.

The comments on that first Force Awakens trailer are emblematic of what went wrong:

The Nostalgia Engine Never Stops

And then they did it to television.

I watched Kenobi on Disney+. This is a show that should have been a slam dunk. Ewan McGregor returning as Obi-Wan Kenobi ten years after Revenge of the Sith, Hayden Christensen back as Vader, a $25 million per episode budget. This should have been a dark, tight, emotionally devastating mini-series about a broken man hiding from the Empire while watching over Luke from a distance.

“There’s almost no original thinking in filmmaking these days. The stories they’re telling are just old movies. ‘Let’s do a sequel, let’s do another version of this movie.’ And it’s not just in movies, but in almost everything, there’s almost no original thinking.” — George Lucas

What they delivered was a six-episode stretch job that padded a two-hour story into six hours of television. The pacing is off. The action is underwhelming for the budget. Deadline called the premiere “an empty vessel jammed with Easter eggs, tired Western motifs and clear script-by-committee pitfalls.” The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes sank to 57%, and while some of that was review-bombing, a lot of it was earned.

The show’s fundamental problem is that it’s built entirely on false jeopardy. We know Obi-Wan survives. We know Leia survives. We know Vader survives. When the show puts them in danger, there are no stakes, just the appearance of stakes dressed up with John Williams’ score. Ewan McGregor is excellent, because he’s always excellent, but the material around him is thin. The Inquisitors feel like B-tier villains from a video game. The show stretches scenes that should be dense and propulsive into slow walks down corridors.

“I was the one who really knew what Star Wars was… who actually knew this world… The Force, for example, nobody understood the Force.” — George Lucas

Even the people who tend to defend Disney’s output had a hard time with this one. The critical score sat at 87% while audiences scored it far lower, and the gap told the story. The nostalgia worked on me at various points, I’ll be honest. Seeing Vader again, hearing the music swell, watching McGregor’s face carry the weight of Anakin’s fall. But that’s the trap. Disney and Marvel get everyone this way: nostalgia hits that trigger a memory of something great, packaged inside something that never rises to meet the original. You feel something, and you mistake it for the show being good. It’s not. It’s your childhood being good. Disney just knows how to milk you for the memory.

The Marvel Machine

Star Wars is only half the problem. The other half is Marvel.

There’s a difference between a great movie that has comic-book characters, like the Dark Knight, and a comic-book movie.

Marvel made comic-book movies. And they made movies worse. Not just their own movies. Movies in general. They proved you could print money by never challenging an audience. The formula is airtight: spend $200 million. Hire a director who won't fight you. Write a script where every dramatic beat gets defused by a quip before anyone has to sit with an uncomfortable feeling. Test-screen it until every rough edge is gone. Release it into an ecosystem of YouTubers and fan sites that have been conditioned to grade on the Marvel curve. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. They conditioned an entire generation to accept mediocrity as the baseline, to mistake franchise continuity for storytelling, to walk out of a theater saying "that was fun" about something they won't remember in six months. They had the money and the talent to do something extraordinary, and they chose safe every single time. Not only did they waste their own potential, but they moved the bar for everyone else.

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Over the course of a decade with that much money and that many swings, some of Marvel/Disney’s stuff has connected. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a legitimately great spy thriller. The Russo Brothers made a paranoid, tight, well-shot film that holds up against anything in the genre, comic book label or not. Black Panther’s soundtrack was good (way better than the actual movie). Downey is Downey. I've heard the Doctor Strange films are worth watching for their references to real magical traditions, esoterica, and occult systems (though I couldn’t be bothered to find out just yet). And fine, I'm not a Deadpool guy, so I'll leave that one alone. Andor, from what everyone tells me, is the one Star Wars show that actually treated its audience like adults. The Mandalorian’s first season apparently had some of that energy too, before Disney did what Disney does to anything that works and stretched it until the goodwill snapped. But that's the list. That's what a decade of the most well-funded franchise machine in entertainment history produced that's worth defending. You can count it on one hand.

Robert Downey Jr. is Marvel. He is the entire reason the MCU worked. I’ve watched Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. They’re cool. But they’re not great movies. Given their budgets and the decade of setup feeding into them, their cinematography was fine. Josh Brolin makes a solid Thanos. But strip away Downey’s performance, his expressions, the weight he brings to every scene he’s in, and those movies - and that entire Marvel Cinematic Universe - is expensive, mediocre television. His personal story, the addiction, the comeback, the channeling of all that chaotic energy into creation, that story gives Tony Stark a gravity the scripts don’t earn on their own. He carried.

“I don’t think they’re cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.” — Martin Scorsese on Marvel

Marvel’s philosophy is escapism. Villains who threaten the universe but never make you feel genuinely afraid. A factory line where every film is optimized through focus groups and test screenings until anything that might challenge or offend a single demographic has been sanded away. Zero consequences to actions. Predictable storytelling. The safe route.

What I hate most is the humor. Even when the jokes land, I didn’t buy a ticket for a comedy adventure. I want grit. Realism. Villains who can actually win, who threaten in the way the real world threatens, so that when a hero acts heroically, you feel the significance. Disney can’t allow that. Their model requires that every film hit every quadrant, offend nobody, and move merchandise. So the directors they hire are largely cooperative executors of a house style, and the ones who aren’t get fired (ask Edgar Wright). The cutting edge of the films, the thing that makes heroism feel heroic, gets blunted. By trying to depolarize everything, they’re removing the hero from the hero’s journey, or reducing it to a milquetoast caricature where every act of courage is followed by a quip. Young men need heroes who feel like heroes. Disney gives them content that feels like content.

“Cinema is art; art is risk. Since the beginning, cinema has been a weird balance between art and commerce. It’s part of the game.” — Denis Villeneuve

Compare that to what’s happening outside the Disney ecosystem. The Dune films made less money but are superior artistic achievements by any measure. Matt Reeves made The Batman in 2022, a three-hour noir crime thriller about a man in a bat suit, and it’s one of the best films ever made. Disney would never greenlight that. Too dark, too long, too few opportunities for jokes. Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, still, remains the gold standard. Those are great films that happen to feature a comic book character, and the distance between them and the average MCU entry is gargantuan.

Groupthink In Film Discourse

Remember 2016? Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War released within weeks of each other, and the discourse around them tells you everything about how the game is rigged.

Batman v Superman had epic action. It blew me away in the theater. The theatrical cut had real problems, missing thirty minutes of connective tissue that the Ultimate Edition restored, and the story suffered for it. Fair criticism. But Civil War got a pass on things that would have buried a DC film. You know these characters are teaming up again in five minutes. War Machine falls out of the sky and only gets paralyzed, because nobody can actually die in this universe. The fights, barring the final one between Cap, Bucky, and Tony, are childish and lean into humor instead of consequence. The critical establishment treated Civil War as the mature, sophisticated version of what BvS was trying to do, but Civil War was scared of its own premise. It raised the question of whether superheroes should be accountable and then shrugged.

I’m not here to relitigate that war. My point is about the infrastructure. The review ecosystem, the fan communities, the YouTube breakdown channels, all of it had already been trained by Marvel marketing to evaluate films on the Marvel curve. Something that played by Marvel rules got graded generously. Something that didn’t got the full critical firing squad. If you enjoyed Batman vs Superman, you were made to feel crazy and delusional. And over time, that training reshaped what audiences expected from blockbuster filmmaking. The bar dropped.

DC learned this lesson the hard way. After Batman v Superman took its beating in the press, Warner Bros. panicked. They looked at the audience data, the critical consensus, the way Marvel's tone had become the default expectation for what a superhero movie should feel like, and they flinched. They brought in Joss Whedon to reshoot Justice League, brighten the color grade, add jokes, sand down every edge Zack Snyder had built. The result was a film that pleased nobody. DC & Snyder fans, who grew up on Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, hated the movie. Marvel's audience didn't switch loyalties over one movie. And the film itself became a weird mish-mash, two visions stitched together with neither one intact. That's how deep the conditioning ran. A major studio with Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman in the same film looked at what audiences had been trained to expect and decided it had to become Marvel to survive. It didn't work, because you can't out-Marvel Marvel. The audience knows the difference between the original and the imitation.

What’s worth noting is that Warner Bros. recovered. They gave Villeneuve Dune. They let Zack Snyder make his version of Justice League (which is simply extraordinary). They let Matt Reeves make a three-hour Batman noir. They greenlit Gunn's Superman. For all the Justice League stumble, the studio has maintained a commitment to real filmmakers that Disney has never matched.

As a result of Disney’s hegemony, a lot of people have given up on the movie-going experience somewhere in the last decade and a half. At some point it stopped feeling like an escape and started feeling like a lecture. Cast with people who looked miserable, doing miserable things, performing bland scripts that seemed engineered to make you feel bad about feeling good.

I really enjoy Adam Townsend’s thoughts on this subject.

As Adam argues, the Western idea of virtue used to mean something specific. It meant distinguishing yourself. Standing apart. Doing the difficult, remarkable, singular thing that nobody else could or would do. That definition got quietly swapped out for something closer to a Chinese social credit model, where virtue means scoring well on a checklist of pre-approved behaviors. Good and bad got sorted into upfront categories before the story even started.

We go to movies to see beautiful people, stripped away of the limitations of their daily lives, letting the best version of the human spirit loose on screen. That beauty got replaced by compliance and conformity.

You can see it most clearly in the superhero movies. The Marvel characters of this the last era don’t possess virtue in the old sense. They don’t distinguish themselves through the painful, individual act of becoming something extraordinary. They’re exemplars of the new virtue. They say the right things, hold the right positions, perform the right emotional beats on cue, deliver the inoffensive lines, and beat the hero on time. They are, functionally, the highest achievable score on a social credit system projected onto a screen. They’re not aspirational because of what they’ve overcome or what they’ve dared; they’re aspirational because they behave correctly, formulaically. But that’s not what movies are for. That’s not why anyone ever sat down in a dark room full of strangers and gave two hours of their life to a screen.

The Cameron Problem

I should say something about Avatar, because its box office numbers make it part of this conversation even though it’s not Disney-Marvel in the traditional sense.

James Cameron is a better filmmaker than anyone at Disney’s studio system. I respect the man’s commitment to building technology and pushing what a camera can do. The Avatar films are technically astonishing. But the writing makes them unwatchable for me. The entire franchise runs on a suicidal empathy toward the Na’vi that asks you to root against your own species. The films treat the Na’vi as a stand-in for colonized peoples and indigenous communities, and the whole thing is this heavy-handed exercise in making the audience feel guilty for being human. If you’re someone who’s fine with the complexity of human history, conquest included, the moral framing of Avatar feels like a lecture from a filmmaker who built his fortune inside the very system he’s asking you to condemn.

CAMERON: “A lot of things I did earlier, I wouldn’t do - career‑wise and just risks that you take as a wild, testosterone‑poisoned young man.”

“I always think of [testosterone] as a toxin that you have to slowly work out of your system.”

Here’s a guy who built his legacy on characters who sweat, bleed, and refuse to quit, then turned around and called testosterone a toxin. I don’t need to agree with everything a filmmaker believes off-camera to appreciate what they put on it, but when the sentiment lines up with what Disney’s been doing to its own heroes for a decade, it’s hard not to notice the pattern. Male protagonists in the MCU got progressively softer, dumber, more punchline than person. Meanwhile, in the real world, testosterone levels in men have been declining for years, and the health consequences are serious and well-documented. I’m not drawing a straight line from one to the other. But a culture that treats masculine competence as something to parody or apologize for isn’t helping anyone, and Hollywood’s biggest studio spent the better part of a decade doing exactly that.

Cameron’s movies are still better than the Disney focus-group assembly line, because at least there’s a singular vision behind them and a genuine commitment to pushing the medium forward. At least Cameron earns your attention through his craft.

The Last Straw

2021 was when it broke for me. Spider-Man: No Way Home made $1.9 billion, and it was the last Marvel movie I saw in theaters. I am embarrassed to admit I watched it.

The story is bad. The writing is lazy. The internal logic falls apart in real time as you’re watching. It breaks up intense moments with jokes. But Tobey Maguire walks through a portal and the theater erupts, and suddenly none of that matters. The same strategy as The Force Awakens, refined and weaponized: take something the audience already loves, put it on screen again, let the memory of the original do the emotional heavy lifting, and pocket the audience’s cash.

Sam Raimi’s original Spiderman trilogy was superior to anything Marvel has put out with the character, and also brought people to the theater for a taste of that energy. I know people who are sharp about this stuff, who see through corporate manipulation in every other context, who got nostalgia-baited into the theater for Tobey and Andrew Garfield. It’s Spiderman, it can’t be that bad, right? Yet even they started turning. Even people who cheered came out of that movie with a sour taste.

No Way Home was the point where a critical mass of the audience realized Disney ruins everything it touches. The movie made its money. It’ll always make money. But something shifted after that. The trust was gone. People who’d been defending the MCU for years started opting out. The goodwill that carried Marvel through mediocre Phase Four entries evaporated, and when Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts showed up in 2025 with their $180 million budgets and their interconnected homework assignments, the audience wasn’t there anymore. No Way Home killed the belief that these movies were worth caring about.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

The exhaustion is showing up in the data now.

In 2025, Marvel released three films. Captain America: Brave New World grossed $415 million against a $180 million budget, with an additional $100 million in marketing. Thunderbolts* made $382 million on a similar budget. The Fantastic Four: First Steps was the strongest of the three at $521 million, but even that fell short of expectations for one of Marvel’s most iconic properties. None cracked the top five highest-grossing films worldwide for the year. For context: Deadpool & Wolverine alone made $1.3 billion in 2024, more than all three 2025 films combined. And even that success was built on nostalgia: Hugh Jackman coming back, Ryan Reynolds riffing on the meta-comedy of it all. Marvel hasn’t successfully launched a new franchise since Endgame.

“You always have to be aware that an audience is extremely ruthless in its demand for newness, novelty and freshness.” — Christopher Nolan

Meanwhile, James Gunn’s Superman made over $616 million, outperforming every Marvel release of the year. Gunn, by the way, is one of the only directors who ever infused Marvel with any real life during his Guardians run, even if those weren’t my preferred flavor of superhero film. His success at DC tells you something. Audiences aren’t done with superheroes. They’re done with the way Disney makes them.

Give the Marketing Machine to the Artists

Here’s what drives me crazy: the Disney marketing apparatus is one of the most powerful forces in entertainment. They can make a mediocre film feel like an event. They can manufacture hype on a global scale, saturate every platform, and put bodies in seats through sheer volume and repetition. In today’s attention economy, if you can market something with enough loudness and frequency, people will show up regardless of quality. Disney has mastered that.

So why does that machine only serve the assembly line? Why does Mission: Impossible, a franchise made by a man who literally risks his life for every shot, top out at $800 million while Endgame hits $2.8 billion? Why didn’t Fallout, which is one of the greatest action films ever made, hit $1.5 billion? Why don’t the Dune movies make more money? From my experience, it’s to do with marketing infrastructure and audience conditioning. Disney trained a generation to show up for their movies. Their audiences are under some sort of trance. As seen with Batman vs Superman, the marketing ecosystem is rigged to make the safe, bland product feel cooler than the ambitious one.

Top Gun: Maverick was proof that the tide can turn. That film made $1.5 billion because Tom Cruise and the marketing team at Paramount gave audiences a reason to care that went beyond IP recognition. It was a real movie, made by people who believed in what they were doing, and it was marketed like the event it actually was. We need more of that. We need the marketing machine pointed at Villeneuve and Nolan and Cruise with the same intensity it gets pointed at the next Avengers installment. Dune: Part Two is a greater artistic achievement than anything Marvel has produced since the first Iron Man. Mission: Impossible films are made by a man who does his own stunts. The audiences who show up for these films know it.

I want to see these filmmakers hit $2 billion. I want the Top Gun Maverick model to become the rule instead of the exception. The best filmmaker in a genre must get the same promotional firepower that Disney gives to its weakest sequel.

On The Fence With Brand New Day

Then there’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, releasing July 2026.

On paper, it’s everything I’ve been asking for. Tom Holland has called it “a rebirth, something completely new,” the first movie in a new chapter rather than the fourth installment of a franchise. Director Destin Daniel Cretton has described a tonal shift from the previous trilogy. They shot on location in Glasgow. Jon Bernthal is in it as the Punisher, bringing his gritty vibes to the MCU. Bernthal said that what was important to him, to Cretton, and to Holland was that the Punisher who walks off the Spider-Man set could walk onto the Punisher special set and feel like the same character. Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk is reportedly going savage again. The villains are street-level: Scorpion, Tombstone. Kevin Feige has talked about this being Marvel’s return to grounded, street-level storytelling.

I want to believe it. I really do. But I’ve seen this trick before. Disney tells you the next one will be different. They use words like “gritty” and “grounded” and “new direction.” And then you sit down in the theater and it’s the same house style with a slightly darker color grade and one fewer joke per scene. Brand New Day is being marketed as the corrective. The question is whether the institution that made all the mistakes I’ve spent this entire piece cataloging is actually capable of correcting them, or whether this is another cycle of promising change to buy one more round of goodwill.

If it’s good, I’ll say so. I judge the work, every time. But I am on the fence about seeing it in theaters for now.

Will Robert Downey Carry Marvel Again?

Robert Downey Jr. is coming back. Can he save the day?

He’s playing Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday, releasing December 2026, with the Russo Brothers directing. The production has already wrapped, and every report from set tells the same story: Downey is running things. Vanessa Kirby, who plays Sue Storm, said it plainly: “Robert’s never not been on set. He is our leader. We call him our Godfather.” Joseph Quinn called him “an amazing leader.” Simu Liu described being invited to “Downey Land,” a convoy of trailers with private chefs and Andy Warhol-style portraits where every character is Downey. The man has built a small city inside the production.

“He’s an amazing leader. He’s so generous. He’s hilarious, and he’s a remarkable actor. There’s no shock as to why he is where he is.” — Joseph Quinn

This is what Marvel does when its back is against the wall: it brings back the person who made the whole thing work in the first place. Disney spared no expense. Downey got paid an enormous sum to return, and given what 2025 looked like for the MCU, the investment makes sense. He’s a leader on set. He’s preparing for a carry job. Whether the material around him is strong enough to support a genuine comeback rather than another nostalgia play, that’s the question. The trajectory Marvel is on, limping toward the end of its Multiverse Saga after its worst commercial year in over a decade, doesn’t inspire confidence. But if anyone can brute-force a course correction through sheer charisma and work ethic, it’s the man who built the house in the first place.

They’re leaning back into nostalgia. Chris Evans is coming back. The X-Men are being folded in. There are rumors Tobey Maguire shows up just to get killed in the opening scene, the ultimate nostalgia sacrifice play: bring back the thing you loved so the audience feels something in the first five minutes, then use that emotional goodwill to coast through whatever comes next. It’s the same playbook. It’s always the same playbook. The multiverse concept exists specifically so Marvel never has to commit to anything new. Every actor who ever wore a costume is one portal away from a cameo. Every farewell is reversible. Every death is a suggestion. I hate that Downey got paid what he got paid to come back for this. The man is one of the most talented actors of his generation. He was reportedly in the conversation for a role in the Odyssey as Poseidon. Think about that after Oppenheimer. Maybe Doomsday introduces something genuinely new. Maybe the Russos and Downey pull it off. But the architecture of the thing, every piece of casting news, every leak, every trailer beat, all of it points to the same strategy: sell the audience its own memories, one more time, at scale.

The Paramount-Warner Bros Counterweight?

This past week, Paramount Skydance officially signed a merger agreement to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery for $110 billion. The deal, unanimously approved by both boards, is expected to close in Q3 2026. Netflix dropped out of the bidding war after Paramount raised its offer to $31 per share, and Paramount is committing to 30 theatrical releases per year across both studios with 45-day theatrical windows.

Think about what’s now under one roof. From Paramount: Mission: Impossible, Top Gun, Star Trek, Transformers, the Godfather library, Nickelodeon’s entire catalog, Yellowstone. From Warner Bros.: Batman, Superman, the entire DC universe under James Gunn, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Game of Thrones, HBO, Dune, Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. That’s a combined IP portfolio that dwarfs Disney’s. Paramount-Skydance has a record of backing big-budget filmmaker-driven projects.

This is the counterweight the industry has needed. Disney has operated without a true peer for over a decade. Their ability to set the terms of what a blockbuster looks like, how it’s marketed, how it’s reviewed, and how audiences are conditioned to receive it has been largely unchallenged. A Paramount-Warner Bros. entity with this much IP, this much production infrastructure, and their commitment to theatrical filmmaking could change that. Warner Bros. had its best box office year in recent memory in 2025, led by Superman, Sinners, and A Minecraft Movie. Paramount had Top Gun: Maverick. Together, they have the catalog and the muscle to compete with Disney.

I’m not naive about mergers. Consolidation has its own problems. Jobs will be lost. Creative decisions will still be filtered through corporate priorities. But the structural reality is that Disney’s dominance has been bad for movies, and any entity with enough scale to force real competition is worth paying attention to. If the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger means Villeneuve’s Dune gets the same promotional war chest that Disney gives to its next derivative sequel, that’s a win.

The Bottom Line

There are two types of people right now. There’s the person who consumes whatever Disney and Marvel serve and calls it a good time. And there’s the person who’s opted out, or wants to, and is looking for someone to remind them they’re not crazy. The movies got worse. The system that makes them prioritizes inoffensive content over art. And the so called critical media establishment that should be holding the line has been compromised by access, by ideology, by the same nostalgia it should be scrutinizing.

I’m not rooting for these franchises to fail. I grew up on them. I want them to be great. What I’m rooting against is the machine that took the things I loved and turned them into a bland product, that trained an entire generation to accept less, that buried the filmmakers who tried to do more and rewarded the ones who played it safe.

The antidote exists. It’s in every film that trusts its audience enough to be ambitious, specific, and real. It’s in every director who chooses the hard way because they believe you’ll feel the difference. Go watch Dune. Go watch Oppenheimer. Go watch Mission: Impossible. Put your phone in another room and sit in the dark with something that was made to be more than content. You deserve better than what the biggest entertainment company on Earth has been selling you.

The industry changes when you stop buying what it’s selling.