The Comic Book Movie Death Rattle and ‘Supergirl.’ Plus: ‘Jackass: Best and Last’ Goes Out With a Bang.

Sean and Amanda open the show by covering myriad movie news headlines, including the status of Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Artificial’, new footage released of Tom Cruise in his highly anticipated film, ‘Digger,’ and the Academy inviting 529 members, including Jacob Elordi, Teyana Taylor, Josh O’Connor, and more. Then, Sean and Amanda use the new DC film, ‘Supergirl,' which they found creatively and technically empty, as a springboard to have a wide-ranging conversation about the decline in importance of superhero movie culture. Finally, Chris Ryan joins the show to discuss the (potentially) final film of the ‘Jackass’ franchise: ‘Jackass: Best and Last’, a movie they all thoroughly enjoyed. (0:00) Intro (0:49) Movie news (23:42) ‘Supergirl’ (45:12) What was the superhero movie era? (1:03:23) ‘Jackass: Best and Last’ with Chris Ryan Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Chris Ryan Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the Personal Price Plan®️. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there®️. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:15Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Finacy.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 0:17Sean Fennessey?

  And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about two new movies, both signifying the end of something beautiful and painful. The first is Supergirl, the first superhero comic book movie in nearly a calendar year, and the second feature from James Gunn's DC Studios. The second is Jackass: Best and Last. It is allegedly the final installment in the decade-spanning five-film self-harm extravaganza, which Chris Ryan's gonna join us to discuss, thankfully. But first, let's get into some movie news, right after this.

• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:48Sean Fennessey?

  This episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Amazon Prime. What pairs with a good comedy? The cozy blanket arriving with Prime. What pairs with a nail-biting thriller? Snacks arriving with Prime. What pairs with Big Game on Prime Video? That new couch arriving with Prime. Whatever feeling you're after, Prime helps bring it to life with great entertainment and fast shipping that delivers what the moment calls for. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime.

• 2:13Sean Fennessey?

  We've been pre-taping some episodes.

• 2:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:15Sean Fennessey?

  And so a lot of news has been transpiring. Do you feel ready to break down each and every component of this news?

• 2:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Most of it, yes.

• 2:21Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, but let's start with the debut. This is one of the only movies that we did not mention when we had our little side text chain about potential Oscar contenders.

• 2:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 2:30Sean Fennessey?

  Last week. We didn't know the title of the movie. We didn't know when it was going to come out, but it has been on the slate for 824 for a long time. It's Jesse Eisenberg's new movie as writer-director. He has also written the words and music to this alleged musical, sort of a musical.

• 2:50Sean Fennessey?

  It stars Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti. We have a trailer. You know, as I recall.

• 2:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:57Sean Fennessey?

  Jesse's previous film, not your favorite movie of that year.

• 2:59Amanda Dobbins?

  That's not fair. I liked it, and I even liked Kieran Culkin's performance.

• 3:04Sean Fennessey?

  Oscar-winning.

• 3:05Amanda Dobbins?

  And once we decided in like July that he was going to be the Oscar winner, I think it was actually a telly ride, but it was at least six months in advance and he steamrolled through the season, I just, I didn't think it reached that level. And I was also annoyed with the lack of interrogation of that decision. But I like Jesse Eisenberg. I liked the movie.

• 3:27Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, cool.

• 3:28Amanda Dobbins?

  I like everyone involved with this movie, Julianne Moore, Paul Giamatti. Nervous about singing, you know, that's a blanket situation for me.

• 3:36Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 3:37Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't like it when people sing.

• 3:39Sean Fennessey?

  You know, Paul Giamatti doesn't have an Oscar.

• 3:41Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true, because you and I denied him one for the holdovers. It was us personally.

• 3:46Sean Fennessey?

  That wasn't, that wasn't, I claim no responsibility for that. You know, I do like Jesse's last movie quite a bit. This movie looks interesting. You know, there's a very famous episode of The Simpsons in which Marge joins a local theater production of, I believe, A Streetcar Named Desire. I think the name of the episode is A Streetcar Named Marge. And this movie's plot looks eerily similar to that episode of the show.

• 4:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Well.

• 4:09Sean Fennessey?

  Which, in which Julianne Moore plays a middle-aged woman who discovers her soul and creativity in a local theatrical playhouse. And- That's funny, because you know, obsession was also inspired by a Simpsons episode, and I feel like this is going to keep happening.

• 4:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 4:25Sean Fennessey?

  The Simpsons, the well runs deep.

• 4:27Amanda Dobbins?

  We have all come of age, people who grew up with The Simpsons, both like interpreting and regurgitating old culture and then inspiring new culture are now being given like small to medium sized budgets?

• 4:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah. This looks like a nicely mounted film.

• 4:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, yeah.

• 4:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, so I'm looking forward to that. It's coming this fall and I suspect will be at some of the film festivals. This feels like a Telly Ride movie to me, does it not?

• 4:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Absolutely.

• 4:56Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, that's just a guess.

• 4:57Amanda Dobbins?

  That's exciting for you in the mountains, some musical singing, Julianne Moore hanging out. Julianne Moore seated like fourth row, third row at the Knicks games?

• 5:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, well, a long time Knicks fan.

• 5:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Exactly, but once again, there were there were certain individuals who will not be named, who displaced her to the third or fourth row, but she was there with dignity.

• 5:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 5:16Amanda Dobbins?

  And with and with purpose.

• 5:17Sean Fennessey?

  But what we really respect about her is in 2017, when things were bad, bad, bad, she was in the front first row.

• 5:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 5:26Sean Fennessey?

  With her husband in like game 48 against the Hornets. And you know, she was showing out, so she earned this title as well.

• 5:33Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm a little mad that she didn't get courtside for the moments of actual glory, but you know.

• 5:39Sean Fennessey?

  Let's get her courtside at the Academy Awards, that's what I say. Okay, next thing, artificial status. Status check. This is a film that does not have a distributor. It has a director, it has a cast, it has a completed scenario.

• 5:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 5:52Sean Fennessey?

  It's a movie about Sam Altman, we talked about it last week. As of June 21st, Netflix, A24 and Focus reportedly passed. Mubi is reportedly pursuing and Neon is also possibly circling. Is this movie going to come out? Gut check.

• 6:11Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I, yes.

• 6:15Sean Fennessey?

  That's not a very confident response.

• 6:17Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, they're, they're releasing the, the Looney Tunes movie now, right?

• 6:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, they are. Coyote versus Acme.

• 6:24Amanda Dobbins?

  But they never released Batgirl, right?

• 6:26Sean Fennessey?

  They never, Batgirl, yes, was deleted from the hard drive.

• 6:28Amanda Dobbins?

  So I'm trying to think of other recent instances. Now, those were both like tax justification, quote unquote, tax justification.

• 6:36Sean Fennessey?

  I believe that's the case.

• 6:37Amanda Dobbins?

  For Warner Brothers of that it was cheaper to do a write-off, given their various debt restructuring. Who can even know what's going on at Warner Brothers, which is something we will discuss later in this episode. But this is different because this is, this is content. And as we discussed, I don't remember at this point when that episode was, last week?

• 6:59Sean Fennessey?

  Several years ago.

• 7:02Amanda Dobbins?

  It's really about who doesn't, who is not compromised enough by big tech money to take this on. And we, we went through the list and we knew that, you know, Netflix, Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, whatever's going on there. We're never going to compete. We didn't think that Universal would be in the mix because they don't take on this type of controversy. A24, we had some wobblings about. Then would you like to move to the next?

• 7:32Sean Fennessey?

  This amazingly well timed information that Google invested $75 million into A24 and it's to develop AI-powered filmmaking tools. Now this, they, they went to great pains to communicate that this was separate and distinct from their film library and their film content. And this would not be a generative AI filmmaking structure. However, you know, there's optics here about that and people seem a little bit mad.

• 7:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 7:58Sean Fennessey?

  Anytime AI is associated with the film business or any creative arts, people are going to get mad. And this kind of association, in addition to, you know, Thrive Capital being a major investor in AI.

• 8:09Amanda Dobbins?

  And also in A24. It was 2024, I believe.

• 8:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. So, you know, all of those relationships, I think, make all that a little bit dicey. And so, yeah, I mean, Luca, he might just find himself without a chair in this game of musical chairs. It's possible. This does happen. Sometimes these movies just go away. And, you know.

• 8:29Amanda Dobbins?

  It does, but it does also seem. Like such an opportunity for some upstart or someone, you have Luca, you have Andrew Garfield. Those are big names. You have that this is a very negative movie about Sam Altman at AI at a time where there are many people who seem ready to receive that.

• 8:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 8:50Amanda Dobbins?

  And now you have the controversy of, as we said, the movie they don't want you to see.

• 8:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 8:54Amanda Dobbins?

  So the question is if there is anyone left related to the movies, or anyone left in a distribution capacity who is untouched by, and not just AI, but really tech at this point, because big tech has put so much of its money into like making AI happen. And yes, that was a Mean Girls Fetch reference. So I don't know. I mean, like, it would be really fun if someone gets creative. It does feel a little bit like we're gonna make, you know, someone livestream it like Rob Mahoney on his Instagram. But I don't know, I would, I would crowdfund for that.

• 9:32Sean Fennessey?

  It's tricky because it's obviously an expensive movie. It's a, it's a big budget Hollywood drama, you know? It's not a small indie. And so 10 or 15 years ago, this sort of thing, when this sort of thing would happen, movies could more quickly find homes because in addition to the fact that I think some of the kind of like shingles inside of the majors were more adventurous in terms of the kind of movies that they would put out, there were some more small companies, small distributors that would be able to take on a movie like this. Ketchup Entertainment is taking on Coyote vs. Acme. You know, it's a very thin pool, even a bunch of the new studios, you know, Roque, Black Bear, a bunch of the distributors who kind of emerged in the last 12 months. It's, it's proved a little challenging for them to really gain a foothold. And so taking on a tens of millions of dollars investment in a movie like this,

• 10:17Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, I'm sure Amazon will eat some of the production cost to give the movie away. I don't really know how all of that necessarily works, but it does remind me a little bit of The state of the Mets roster, where we've just got a lot of guys who are making a lot of money and we just need other teams to just take those guys away from us forever. And so I don't have to think about them anymore. And one of the only ways you can get people to do that is to pay down some of the, some of the salaries. And this might be a similar situation where to get this movie off the books.

• 10:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 10:45Sean Fennessey?

  You might just have to pay down some of that, that budget.

• 10:47Amanda Dobbins?

  That seems incredibly likely. I, I assume that anyone who does take this movie will, will get a discount. As Matt Bellamy put it on his episode, I've just been Googling the various investors in Mubi and Neon.

• 11:02Sean Fennessey?

  Sure, famously Sequoia Capital.

• 11:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Exactly, which is a major investor, or not a major investor. No one sent me the, you know, deal sheets.

• 11:09Sean Fennessey?

  Think quite a bit.

• 11:10Amanda Dobbins?

  In AI, in OpenAI specifically, so that's tricky.

• 11:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 11:14Amanda Dobbins?

  And then I'm, I'm looking because Neon recently got an infusion of.

• 11:20Sean Fennessey?

  They did, that was, that was through, that was through, well reportedly through Department M.

• 11:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 11:24Sean Fennessey?

  Which is a, a production company.

• 11:26Amanda Dobbins?

  A production company, so.

• 11:27Sean Fennessey?

  But where their money is rooted is, is, is unknown specifically. Um, and that's the thing, like you said, all of these places are compromised in one way or another. You know, if we're being really honest.

• 11:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 11:38Sean Fennessey?

  Every movie studio forever has been compromised by where their money comes from.

• 11:42Amanda Dobbins?

  For sure.

• 11:43Sean Fennessey?

  You know, the great wealth that engenders artistic opportunity very rarely comes from, you know, charitable organizations.

• 11:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, Paramount, Gulf and Western Company, like we all know.

• 11:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, this one is extremely challenging because it's, the subject matter of the film is rooted in the, the origins of the money. And so, you know, it's just, it's a fascinating story, a fascinating test case. In addition to the fact that it's a, you know, director who we really like, and so we really want to see the movie and so.

• 12:10Amanda Dobbins?

  And who needs to win?

• 12:11Sean Fennessey?

  He does need to win.

• 12:12Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, that's not really fair. Challengers was like two years ago, but if you're only as good as your last.

• 12:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, well, yeah, Queer and, and After the Hunt, neither went over super well. So we'll see what happens. We'll keep checking in on this. Sense and Sensibility.

• 12:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 12:27Sean Fennessey?

  The new retelling of the famed novel.

• 12:32Amanda Dobbins?

  It's not a, it's a, not a retelling. It's just the latest.

• 12:35Sean Fennessey?

  New adaptation.

• 12:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Latest adaptation.

• 12:37Sean Fennessey?

  Reboot.

• 12:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 12:38Sean Fennessey?

  It's a reboot. It's a prequel.

• 12:41Amanda Dobbins?

  It's just like, Austin is like Shakespeare. People are just doing interpretations of the core text over and over again.

• 12:47Sean Fennessey?

  Trailer came out.

• 12:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 12:49Sean Fennessey?

  You say what?

• 12:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, this we saw in Vegas at CinemaCon. I just have to claim like a personal, what's it called in golf? Where you take a penalty or you take a-

• 13:02Sean Fennessey?

  A mulligan?

• 13:03Amanda Dobbins?

  A mulligan.

• 13:04Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 13:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 13:05Sean Fennessey?

  You have to take a mulligan on the film?

• 13:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, or I don't know. I don't know if that's the right sports comparison, but I'm too close. I'm too close to the 95 version, which is not to say that anyone can't do this.

• 13:16Sean Fennessey?

  Let's use Chris Ryan's golf game as a way to portal into this metaphor.

• 13:21Amanda Dobbins?

  What everyone was hoping for when we talked about a Jane Austen adaptation.

• 13:24Sean Fennessey?

  Chris lines himself up on the first tee of the golf course.

• 13:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 13:28Sean Fennessey?

  He pulls out driver.

• 13:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh huh.

• 13:31Sean Fennessey?

  He looks down the fairway.

• 13:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Sean Fennessey?

  He gets his mind clear. He bees the ball. Takes a big ol' whack.

• 13:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 13:41Sean Fennessey?

  First swing of the day, shanks it far right, right into a tree.

• 13:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 13:45Sean Fennessey?

  Hits the tree, bounces all the way back at him. In the parlance of golf, he can take a mulligan, that first shot doesn't count. He takes the second shot. He pipes one right down the fairway and he's off and running and he's gonna have the game of his life, the round of his life.

• 14:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 14:01Sean Fennessey?

  So is that what you're saying you're gonna do here?

• 14:03Amanda Dobbins?

  I think that my opinion probably shouldn't count.

• 14:06Sean Fennessey?

  Oh wow.

• 14:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, I think that I-

• 14:07Sean Fennessey?

  What a joy to hear that out loud.

• 14:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I am just, in this one case, and maybe you could learn from me as we talk about all the rest of the world of cinema, which is catered to your interests.

• 14:18Sean Fennessey?

  No thanks.

• 14:18Amanda Dobbins?

  But this one's catered to mine, and I'm too close. I am too close to the Emma Thompson 1995. I've seen it too many times. I have, like, it's my comfort film. I put it on when we had to stay up until, had to, but the canned ticketing system was such that with time zones, we needed to stay up until midnight a lot of nights in order to be able to get tickets, which for me, at my phase of life, is difficult. Put on Sense and Sensibility one night, just to hang out. So, and that was the 1995 version. So I don't know how to respond to this.

• 14:54Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 14:55Amanda Dobbins?

  I can't respond to this. I would say that Daisy Edgar Jones does not bring the same things to cinema that Emma Thompson does to me, but- Emma Thompson's version was also an adaptation. So I'm not trying to keep people away from this. I just have one truth, and that truth is Ang Lee's 1995 Sense and Sensibility.

• 15:17Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 15:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Thank you.

• 15:18Sean Fennessey?

  This new version is directed by George Oakley. As you mentioned, Daisy Edgar Jones, George Mackay, Katrina Balf, Frank Delane. Good cast. We'll see.

• 15:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 15:26Sean Fennessey?

  What if I love it a lot more than the Ang Lee version? Then what happens?

• 15:32Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't, we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

• 15:34Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Uh, Timothy Chalamet and Selena Gomez are gonna star in an animated alien movie.

• 15:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Cool. I don't know. Get that check. Of all the ways that Timothy Chalamet has been getting checks in the last three months, I have fewer problems with this.

• 15:50Sean Fennessey?

  We need to get some of the Timothy Chalamet money to Mitchell Robinson to keep the Knicks together next season.

• 15:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 15:55Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think we can make that happen?

• 15:55Amanda Dobbins?

  So that's attention?

• 15:57Sean Fennessey?

  That's a, yes, yeah. Yeah, he's a free agent.

• 16:00Amanda Dobbins?

  And?

• 16:01Sean Fennessey?

  We need Mitch back.

• 16:02Amanda Dobbins?

  And who is the, who's the problem there? Is it Dolan?

• 16:05Sean Fennessey?

  The problem is the collective bargaining agreement of the National Basketball Association.

• 16:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 16:09Sean Fennessey?

  Which if you exceed the second apron, enter the second apron financially, there's dramatic penalties involved, and we're trying to avoid that.

• 16:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 16:20Sean Fennessey?

  Trying to maintain flexibility and keep the team together. Um, you go into the dunk tank.

• 16:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 16:26Sean Fennessey?

  No, you're disallowed from making certain kinds of trades. No, no, I have thrown, um, a ball at a target and put someone in a dunk tank, but I've never sat in the chair.

• 16:35Amanda Dobbins?

  We should figure out a way to bring a dunk take into the big picture in 2027. That's one of my goals.

• 16:41Sean Fennessey?

  Will you sit?

• 16:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 16:43Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 16:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I like water.

• 16:44Sean Fennessey?

  Let's put a pin in that.

• 16:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Um.

• 16:46Sean Fennessey?

  This movie's coming from Illumination.

• 16:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 16:48Sean Fennessey?

  Timmy, it's coming in, in April 2027.

• 16:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 16:51Sean Fennessey?

  Which is very soon.

• 16:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 16:54Sean Fennessey?

  And this will come on the heels of his Oscar win for Dune Part Three, no?

• 17:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 17:01Sean Fennessey?

  Right?

• 17:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally.

• 17:02Sean Fennessey?

  One month later?

• 17:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Who is best actor right now? It is, it's June? Is it June right now? Are we recording for June or July? Where am I?

• 17:08Sean Fennessey?

  We, uh, we don't know. No, this is the June 26th episode. It's June. So we're about at that, at that six month mark.

• 17:16Amanda Dobbins?

  All right.

• 17:16Sean Fennessey?

  Who's best, I mean, it's Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary.

• 17:20Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean nomination, yes. Is there anyone else on the board? And it's Sebastian Stan from Fjord.

• 17:25Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's, that's in play.

• 17:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that's, that's possible.

• 17:29Sean Fennessey?

  Not, not a lot else that we've seen out there.

• 17:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Do we think that Jeremy Strong is gonna run in Best Actor or Supporting?

• 17:37Sean Fennessey?

  Feels like Supporting.

• 17:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 17:38Sean Fennessey?

  Feels like the A story is Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison in Social Reckoning.

• 17:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. And then obviously, of course, Jeremy Allen White is the large hut.

• 17:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Ro to the hut.

• 17:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 17:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Rod of the hut, Rod of the hut.

• 17:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. Stinky.

• 17:50Sean Fennessey?

  Stinky, yeah. Well, he, but you know, also jacked. Did you see The Bear, season four yet?

• 17:56Amanda Dobbins?

  It's out?

• 17:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it came out yesterday in full.

• 17:59Amanda Dobbins?

  No, and also they made a new season of The Agency starring Michael Fassbender.

• 18:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. They dumped that all in one shot as well, just like The Bear.

• 18:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know. I haven't seen any TV in six months, but I'm gonna get into it. All right, turn it back around.

• 18:12Sean Fennessey?

  Let's come back to binging streaming TV, because that's related to what I, some of what I want to talk about with Supergirl.

• 18:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 18:19Sean Fennessey?

  You know who Best Actor is?

• 18:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. It's, yeah, here we go.

• 18:22Sean Fennessey?

  It's Tom Cruise.

• 18:23Amanda Dobbins?

  That's right.

• 18:23Sean Fennessey?

  We, we segwayed ourself. Digger footage was released this week, as was a clip reel of some highlights from Tom Cruise's career, which was then, I'm sure, very organically shared by several dozen notable people on social media, including our boy Glenn Powell, J.J. Abrams. Michael Mann noted how excited he is about the film Digger Online.

• 18:46Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Obviously, just watching Tom Cruise be entertaining in a clip reel, that's just something I like. I can't, I can't pretend I don't want to just watch highlights of Tom maniacally smiling and delivering dialogue. I love that.

• 19:00Sean Fennessey?

  There's very little Digger in this compilation that was circulated. It's a three and a half minute video, maybe 20 seconds of Digger.

• 19:10Sean Fennessey?

  You think they're hiding this for some reason?

• 19:13Amanda Dobbins?

  The Digger footage?

• 19:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Cause the film's coming out in three months.

• 19:18Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm, I don't know if hiding is what I would use. I'm sure that they have a very carefully calibrated release schedule of when they think they want to put this stuff out. And because, as we know from the poster, Digger is a comedy.

• 19:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 19:35Amanda Dobbins?

  It includes some of the jokes. We've seen, we've seen footage from Digger. They did show it to us at some point.

• 19:39Sean Fennessey?

  A big extended trailer we saw.

• 19:42Amanda Dobbins?

  So with a trailer for a comedy, you end up putting a lot of the jokes and the setup in the comedy. So I, maybe they think they can just sell Tom Cruise instead of having to sell this movie. I mean, I think that's probably why.

• 19:54Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's what they're doing, yeah.

• 19:55Amanda Dobbins?

  So do they need to put it out that soon? I don't think so.

• 20:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's really interesting, because, you know, I liked what we saw. And I'm not, as you know, not the biggest Inaritu fan, been really cold on him for the last 15 years. I do think that there's a lot of like straining in the marketing and everything around it. But I love a strange, Loveian, over the top satire that has big scale and a big performance. Like, I'm kind of, I'm into that. I'm into the idea of this movie. And they're not really, as you say, selling the movie. There's plenty of time. A trailer can come out in three days and, you know, we can dispense with this conversation. But I found it interesting that they were basically like, also, there's a movie coming out? Like, you love Tom Cruise, and that's the most important part of this marketing campaign?

• 20:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I mean, I think it's savvy because of the footage we saw. What I responded to most was Tom Cruise doing Tom Cruise stuff. And I'm, I'm a little more nervous about the Inaritu of it all, even in what we saw, because sure, in, in concept, you know, a big concept, big-ish budget.

• 20:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Apocalyptic comedy. I'm interested, but, you know, who's, who's doing it?

• 21:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 21:07Amanda Dobbins?

  But the, the other half of it is who is doing it is Tom Cruise. And, yeah, I, you know, lit up as soon as he was on the screen because he has a movie startup. So they, they guess, I'm, marketing wise, they know what they're doing.

• 21:18Sean Fennessey?

  It's so funny, because, you know, in that clip reel, too, there's plenty of movies that don't really have a lot of cultural weight, you know? Like, Rock of Ages is featured in that clip reel. Like, that's not, that's not a movie anybody really cares about, and is not one that's, you know, he, he gives an amusing performance in that movie, but it's, it's a, it's a blip in his career. So it's interesting the way that they kind of pick and chose how to highlight his magnetism as a movie star. You know, obviously, we'll be very digger forward in the month of October, so we'll circle back. Film Academy, Ampus invited 529 new members.

• 21:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 21:56Sean Fennessey?

  Including some of your goats, Jacob Elordi, for example, the Safdys, my boy Zach Craig, who's barbarian was announced on 4K Steelbook. What?

• 22:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Congratulations.

• 22:08Sean Fennessey?

  We did it. Disney somehow decided that this would be a good idea. Thank you to them. Tiana Taylor invited, Jenna Ortega, Josh O'Connor, Jon Bernthal.

• 22:18Amanda Dobbins?

  I was gonna say Jon Bernthal.

• 22:21Sean Fennessey?

  Many other people invited, you know, yet another year in which hundreds more people are joining the Academy and we're getting, I think we're over 11,000 now and a lot of young people added to the mix here. Some names that I was surprised were not previously in the mix.

• 22:36Sean Fennessey?

  And so we'll see how that affects voting for Tom Cruise in nine months.

• 22:39Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm excited for Josh O'Connor.

• 22:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, sure. He needs a win.

• 22:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I would love, hey, hey, that's mean. I agree that people didn't, were not as kind to him as they should have been. It was the role. It wasn't him.

• 22:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he wasn't supported.

• 22:57Amanda Dobbins?

  And he was wonderful on the press tour. So love to know how much of his time. I would love to see his voting process. They should, they should open up his ballot and just follow him around and then he's gardening and then being like, I guess I'll watch this short film.

• 23:12Sean Fennessey?

  He strikes me as a man with very good taste.

• 23:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Amazing taste, but also like maybe not fluent with this, like the streaming interface.

• 23:21Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, interesting. You think of him as like kind of an older gentleman.

• 23:24Amanda Dobbins?

  He doesn't know what TikTok is, or he didn't for many years.

• 23:27Sean Fennessey?

  Neither do I. I mean, what does that mean?

• 23:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. No, but I think he literally like didn't know what TikTok was. Someone asked him, will you do a TikTok with me? And he said, I don't know what that is.

• 23:35Sean Fennessey?

  That must be such a great way to be alive.

• 23:37Amanda Dobbins?

  I completely agree.

• 23:41Amanda Dobbins?

  And he's got great clothes and a little earring. I'm into it.

• 23:44Sean Fennessey?

  About that. Okay. One last piece of news. The Blair Witch movie reboot lands a 2027 release. Now, this new movie, which features producers and stars from the original film and will be associated with the original film in some ways, but has a completely new filmmaker. I know it's been in the works for a long time, but it feels very responsive

• 24:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 24:04Sean Fennessey?

  to the moment in horror that we are having with a young filmmaker with a lot of YouTube experience and using, leveraging some history to make something new.

• 24:13Amanda Dobbins?

  And also trying to recreate a generational phenomenon in the horror genre. You know, watching Backrooms, I think many of us thought, okay, so this is Blair Witch for young people.

• 24:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 24:25Amanda Dobbins?

  And Blair Witch was Blair Witch for me and it was very powerful. You cannot reheat a souffle, but you know, try and make some money.

• 24:32Sean Fennessey?

  It's a tall order because.

• 24:35Sean Fennessey?

  You know, they've tried with this movie before. Adam Wingard had a remake, or sort of like a reboot circa 2017, I think. Obviously Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows went down in the annals of terrible movie sequels. But the original Blair Witch, there's something special and there's still a chemical association with the feeling of that movie. So I look forward to seeing what they do with it. That is coming out next fall, I want to say. Speaking of chemical associations, would you like to talk about Supergirl?

• 25:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I'd love to.

• 25:11Sean Fennessey?

  Can I please foreground this conversation in a blanket statement?

• 25:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Wonderful, yes.

• 25:18Sean Fennessey?

  It's not directed at you, it's directed to the listeners at home.

• 25:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 25:22Sean Fennessey?

  The sweeping declarations that I am perhaps too fond of making are gonna come with like context. I know that the Spider-Man movie comes out in one month, and I know that Avengers: Doomsday comes out in December, and that in all likelihood, those movies will be very big. I look forward to both of them. Spider-Man more than Avengers, but I honestly look forward to the Avengers movies. I do think that this conversation that we're about to have, though, is in part about something ending. It doesn't mean it's the end of superhero movies or comic book movies, but the era

• 26:03Sean Fennessey?

  in which they basically dominated our adult lives feels like it's wrapped up. And it doesn't mean that something new can't start, it doesn't mean that there won't be movies like this again. There will be, there'll be a lot of movies like this, because movies like this can make a lot of money, especially if they're done well. But I felt like a certainty, like a calm, actually, when this movie ended, where I was like, alright, the ability to do this specific thing, which we will get into in one second, I promise you, does feel now.

• 26:36Sean Fennessey?

  Ended. And I'm trying to be sort of measured and dramatic at the same time when I say this because I've spent a lot of time talking about these movies for the last 10 years. And you've watched me twist myself in knots about their relevance, their power, their loss of power, you know, what they mean to the box office, what they mean to creativity, how movie stars were sidelined for years playing with these projects, what it meant for generations of filmmakers who got shuttled into these stories. You've heard it all from me.

• 27:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:02Sean Fennessey?

  You know, you've mostly sat patiently. Sometimes you've whinged about it. Sometimes you've enjoyed it.

• 27:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I've seen all the movies.

• 27:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 27:09Amanda Dobbins?

  I've been sort of on the other half of that conversation. And I think that I care, or not even that, I mean, I do care less, but I'm less interested in the subject matter, which gives me more distance, I think, than you have to talk about it.

• 27:27Sean Fennessey?

  You do.

• 27:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Which just makes me, you know, a different perspective than yours. But I agree with you. I, you know, it honestly, it just feels like I have to spend less time on this. And that makes me happy. But there was a time when doing this job, it was so central to the culture of movies and to the culture around movies, which are symbiotic but different things, that I just had to consume it and know about it. And at this point, and with this movie, we went to the screening, we had a drink, like, then we went home, we're going to podcast about it, and then we never have to talk about it again.

• 28:07Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 28:07Amanda Dobbins?

  And they live within their container, which I think is a healthy way to consume entertainment. And to me, this is a little bit of the undoing of the superhero fan culture or the mainstreaming of that, the throttle that that has on the way we consume and talk about entertainment.

• 28:28Sean Fennessey?

  That's it.

• 28:29Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and, and to be totally fair, not to be totally clear, I have always objected way more to the fandom-ification of movies and our universe than I have to the movies themselves. Some of them are not very good and, and some of them I enjoyed. Like, I can turn my brain off and be stupid and watch people fly around. So.

• 28:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, yes, I'm happy and I'm happy to hear you say that, but this isn't like a victory dance and I can hear you anticipating all of the discourse and the people yelling and many of those so-called fans sharing their opinions and you guys can do that.

• 29:10Sean Fennessey?

  Well, they've been in a defensive crouch for two or three years because they feel it's slipping through their fingers and they're gonna, and I think they will very understandably say, well, there have always been bad comic book movies. It's not, this isn't really Supergirl's fault. It's more just a moment of kind of finality and let's use it to get into the movie because then we can kind of circle back to some of the grand eloquent theorizing around it. This movie is directed by Craig Gillespie, who has directed many movies over the last 20 years, including Dumb Money, Cruella with Emma Stone, the Oscar-winning I, Tonya, Lars and the Real Girl. It stars Millie Alcock, probably best known for House of the Dragon as Supergirl, Matthias Shonarz, Eve Ridley, Emily Beecham, David Krumholtz,

• 29:53Sean Fennessey?

  David Cornsweat returning as Superman, and Jason Momoa, who returns to the DC Universe, not as Aquaman, but as Lobo, who is a character that you now know about.

• 30:02Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I've known about him for some time because you and Chris have said Lobo for about a year and a half. And so when he showed up on the screen, I had a real Once Upon a Time in Hollywood moment, just being like, Lobo!

• 30:14Sean Fennessey?

  Lobo. Lobo is in the movie. Here's the story. Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl, joins forces with an unlikely companion on an interstellar journey of vengeance and justice when an unexpected adversary strikes too close to home. If that sounds vague, it's because the movie is very vague. This is an attempt by the James Gunn DC Universe to not just add a layer to the Superman story that he started last year with his version of that film, but to build a bench, you know, to tell more stories with new characters in this world. And it's a very old-fashioned version of that. It feels like a Marvel movie

• 30:57Sean Fennessey?

  from 2014, where you've got a new character who maybe was teased in a previous film, but we didn't really learn much about them, and we need to send them on an adventure. And in the course of that adventure, we will learn a lot about what happened to them and why they are the way that they are, and why they are on a mission to ultimately become heroic. They are reluctant at first. But they will eventually get on board with-

• 31:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, and we will physically get them back to the main stage and the main characters so that they can join the team.

• 31:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, this is a very trope-y adventure story structure. And it's very unsuccessful. It's unsuccessful for a variety of reasons. Let's, let's identify some of them.

• 31:38Amanda Dobbins?

  I can give you two.

• 31:40Sean Fennessey?

  Fire away.

• 31:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I mean, I think there are two problems. And one, you've identified that it is so trope-y and formulaic, while also unspecific. And so the, the places, the villains, the, the side heroes who are actually secretly the main heroes, come out of nowhere, have no backstory, have no development. And so you're just not invested in, in either Supergirl or in any of these people. It's, it's, it just doesn't do the fundamental thing of making you invested in the story. Or it didn't do that for me. Maybe, maybe some people will, but I, you know, I'm coming in as a blank slate, don't know a lot about Supergirl.

• 32:26Amanda Dobbins?

  I think I turned to you about 20 minutes in and I said, what's her damage? And I, I think for these movies to be successful as movies, they do have to separate themselves from the homework and the lore and be able to create like a, a basic on-ramp for you to be invested in the stakes. And this just doesn't really do that. It's not that interesting. And then it is also just on a, a practical, technical filmmaking level, hot garbage.

• 32:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's really not good.

• 32:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, like looks very bad, very grony script. There is a music cue where I almost, you know, slid under my seat and, but also like a music cue that is supposed to communicate to you that a sense of triumph and all the themes of the movie. So I would say it's both. Creatively and technically empty.

• 33:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's the brownest movie of the year. It takes place on a series of nondescript desertish planets. We don't really have a sense of the geography of the story. We know it's intergalactic in some way, but we don't really feel like we know how far from Earth Kara is, or why, you know, it's her birthday week. The film takes place during her birthday week. You know, I think she probably acts the way that you act during your week, you know, just getting shithoused, going to bars.

• 33:48Amanda Dobbins?

  And we know it's her birthday week because of the elegant expositional storytelling of David Cordswat as Superman, FaceTiming her or Zoom calling her. I'm not really sure what the technology is on unnamed planets.

• 34:00Sean Fennessey?

  Video phone.

• 34:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, video phoning. And honestly, they didn't even, they just, they put him on like a Sears photo drop to video phone her. They didn't even like make it at his home.

• 34:10Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know where he is.

• 34:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm so confused. I mean, maybe, maybe he has Zoom backgrounds on his version of Skype, but he's just like, hey, it's your birthday. Happy birthday.

• 34:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Kal-El is Kara's cousin. And I guess they're close. Kara was some, some years behind Superman in her arrival to Earth. They weren't classmates in arriving to Earth to, to realize their superpowers together. And she's, you know, she is a little bit less interested in following the kind of dopey, sincere, but very powerful mission that Superman has.

• 34:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 34:50Sean Fennessey?

  And one of the problems with the movie is that like, I think James Gunn really got Superman. Superman is like a hyper sincere boy scout. And I think that that could be a very powerful tool in telling a story. And what's not that interesting to me is a character who's like oh so over it and burnt out and, you know, like sarcastic, like Gen X-y, like, oh God, okay, guys, I guess I'll go kick your ass now. And we've seen that many times in superhero movies before. And this is just like, it just feel, and the thing is, is like, it's not, again, not Supergirl's fault. Like, this is kind of based on Woman of Tomorrow, a Tom King series about Supergirl. It's somewhat in keeping with that characterization.

• 35:33Sean Fennessey?

  It's just, and people rave about that, that series. I haven't read it, but I, it's just, it's a movie we've seen. You know, we've seen this over and over again and done better. And so it, it looking the way that it looks and it having this really rickety foundation, where it feels like the movie's been kind of chopped up. And you can feel the places where the edits are moving quick. And we're trying to get to the next stage of the story, because we don't have enough material to make this stage of the story coherent enough. And, you know, you could just kind of feel people in, in the, in the screening squirming in their chairs a little bit. And that was notable for us at our screening, because that was a captive audience that we saw the movie with. It was one part press screening, one part fan screening.

• 36:15Amanda Dobbins?

  I would say one part press screening, two parts press screening with also a baby.

• 36:19Sean Fennessey?

  Two parts fan screening.

• 36:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, two parts fan screening with, um, plus a baby.

• 36:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 36:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Who was not interested in the movie.

• 36:25Sean Fennessey?

  No, the baby needed to be walked around in a stroller during the screening. That was, that was a choice.

• 36:30Amanda Dobbins?

  The baby kept going back and forth. Listen, sometimes parents do need, it's, it's hard to see movies when you have a baby. I don't blame the parents for that. I do have some questions for Warner Brothers and, and I got yelled at by a trivia person, but anyway.

• 36:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, there was trivia, a lot of people wearing Supergirl t-shirts.

• 36:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, so it was a, it was a home crowd.

• 36:50Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:50Amanda Dobbins?

  And it was pretty much silent. There was no laughter and definitely no cheering at moments of triumph. Possibly because there aren't really any moments of triumph?

• 36:59Sean Fennessey?

  And there are battle sequences in which Supergirl and, and Lobo and, and Ruthie emerge victorious. Ruthie Evedley's character, who is the, who plays a, um, young woman who has witnessed her parents be murdered by Krem, who is Matthias Shonar's villain figure.

• 37:15Amanda Dobbins?

  We have also witnessed that.

• 37:16Sean Fennessey?

  We witnessed it as well in a flashback and.

• 37:19Amanda Dobbins?

  And her brother.

• 37:19Sean Fennessey?

  And her brother, and she is seeking revenge on him. Um, simultaneously, Krem has also shot a poison dart into Crypto, Supergirl's dog's neck, threatening his life.

• 37:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 37:32Sean Fennessey?

  And so while Ruthie seeks vengeance for her family's death, uh, Supergirl is seeking an antidote for the poison dart.

• 37:43Sean Fennessey?

  I guess that's a plot of a movie. I, you know, it's just a real thin gruel relative to even Superman, which I thought was real good. Like, I really enjoyed it.

• 37:53Amanda Dobbins?

  I was very charmed by it. And so you chose to go to the bathroom at an inopportune moment.

• 37:59Sean Fennessey?

  I did.

• 37:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is, and listen, life happens, but you went to the bathroom during the five minutes of the film when David Corin Sweat meets Supergirl and shows up as Superman. And he's there in person. It is Supergirl Kara arriving on Earth. And that kind of like ice winter palace that we saw in Superman.

• 38:22Sean Fennessey?

  The Fortress of Solitude.

• 38:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. And because she has just come from kryptonite?

• 38:27Sean Fennessey?

  Krypton.

• 38:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Krypton, right. Kryptonite is the element. Since she has just come from krypton, she does not speak English. And, and this scene actually just does really give her the only character development that I responded to, which is that, you know, unlike Superman, she was born somewhere else. She had a life somewhere else. So she's been put at this place. She can't communicate. She doesn't know anyone, as opposed to Superman, who has grown up and is, is an all-American boy. As much as he is, you know, an alien with superpowers.

• 38:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 38:59Amanda Dobbins?

  So, but anyway, so she's there silent and it's David Corin Sweat acting and speaking to her in English and talking to her and welcoming her and doing all his Superman stuff. And the movie just comes alive. He's really good as Superman.

• 39:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 39:13Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's really unfortunate that the best scene in the movie, Supergirl, is a movie in which Supergirl does not speak.

• 39:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And I, I don't think that it's really the fault of Millie Alcock. And I do understand why she was cast in this part as a kind of subversion of the like, you know, Gal Gadot, like six foot tall, Amazonian, like beautiful, long, sweeping hair. Like, there's clearly a decision to kind of upend that expectation of what a female superhero should be. And her performance style is like, kind of interesting and does feel a little bit unpolished. Where she is doing, she has kind of like, Gosh, it's almost like all the characters from Heathers became one person, you know? And where it's like a little biting, but then a little soft.

• 40:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 40:01Sean Fennessey?

  And, and you can never really figure out when, when she's going to decide to be one or the other. I just don't think that the script serves her very well.

• 40:09Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 40:09Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think the, the way the film is shot serves her very well.

• 40:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I think that she is, she is checked out from the movie, which is probably 80% a performance choice and in the script, but also thus hard to pull off because you are trying to communicate this sarcastic, spiky, unlikable person, but also you have to be the hero of the movie.

• 40:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 40:36Amanda Dobbins?

  So I don't think the script serves her. And then I did sort of wonder if maybe she became aware of the mess that was swirling around her at all time. Also presumably she's just on a green screen for large swaths of this.

• 40:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. The other thing is like, this is a Craig Gillespie movie for better or worse. And I, I think it's more usually for worse. And he's got a lot of stylistic habits that feel borrowed from better filmmakers and especially trying to deploy them in a movie like this is very obvious and uninteresting. James Gunn is somebody who uses needle drops really effectively. He has kind of made one of his signature components as a filmmaker is having these kind of counteracting needle drops. He didn't invent that. A lot of filmmakers have been doing it for a really, really long time. Martin Scorsese probably does it better than anybody. Craig Gillespie also apes a lot of stuff from Martin Scorsese. He tends to use slow motion. He tends to use these

• 41:31Sean Fennessey?

  really diagrammatic camera movements where you're, there's a real like, oh wow, quality that you're supposed to have while watching them, but they feel, they're very rarely rooted in intention. They're just moves. Like if you watch Cruella, it's the same thing. There's a lot of flashy stuff going on in Cruella, but it never really psychologizes the characters. It never really puts us in a place where we feel like a deeper sense of understanding of what the world is. And in a world like this. Which is just like Junk Trader Mad Max Fury Road.

• 42:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 42:02Sean Fennessey?

  Like low, low, low grade Fury Road.

• 42:06Sean Fennessey?

  It's not elevating anything. It's not making us feel differently about the story that he's trying to tell. And so, you know, you can see why somebody like this gets this job, right? He's like a safe pair of hands. He's run a lot of big movie productions in the past. And so, you know, in theory, he'll be able to handle this hundred million dollar superhero movie. But it's just boring. Like, one, this is a lame complaint, but like not finding a woman to direct Supergirl is just weird. Like, it's just, it's 2026. Like, what?

• 42:34Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I wanted to talk about this because you, you know, invoked Gagadat and, and Wonder Woman. But I was thinking through all of the standalone movies about a woman superhero. And across both Marvel and DC, with the exception of the first Wonder Woman, which I was really delighted by.

• 42:55Sean Fennessey?

  Fun movie.

• 42:57Amanda Dobbins?

  And looks good and at least until the end and all of the slop. And is definitely helped by the Chris Pine supporting performance, but fizzy. All of the standalone girl movies are, are not good and not well handled. And that's a real bummer. And I think that says something larger about the, the machines and also.

• 43:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 43:17Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's, it's depressing.

• 43:19Sean Fennessey?

  I think, I think Black Widow is not bad. I think it has some things about it that are cool. I didn't see it on a big screen and so I, it's a little, it's harder to judge that one particularly. The movie that this movie reminded me a lot of is Captain Marvel. The original Captain Marvel movie with Brie Larson. And, and I can almost feel them, Millie Alcock and Brie Larson, giving somewhat similar performances where they almost don't know what movie they're in. And, you know, that movie was directed by two filmmakers, one of whom was a woman, is a woman. But I think I'm not trying to.

• 43:52Sean Fennessey?

  Be some like progressive saber rattling about how like women need to direct more of these movies. It's more just like, for the perspective of the story, why is like a middle aged British guy directing this movie? It's very strange.

• 44:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, and, and that was not like my argument either, that only a woman could have made those good. It's just that, that this is an entire, not even subculture of movies now, but in like the dominant culture of movies, and they just have not figured out how to make successful like women characters, both, both by male or female directors, you know? It's, it's an industry issue, not any individual director.

• 44:31Sean Fennessey?

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• 45:04Sean Fennessey?

  I think there's also, you can see other components. A, a, a woman, Anna O'Gara, did, did write the screenplay for this movie, but like, there's a moment in the movie where Kara has been felled by Krem with kryptonite, and the only way that she's saved before he cuts her head off is that Lobo shows up out of nowhere. And it's a real like, we're in the Supergirl movie, we can't, we shouldn't, having, just having Lobo save her in the, at the climactic moment of the movie, just feels like real retrograde stuff that I felt like we were past. And I feel like James Gunn especially, like, knows better than, he's really smart about this stuff. Part of the reason why the Guardians movies are so good is because they feel kind of new. They feel like iterative of something from

• 45:44Sean Fennessey?

  the past, but they feel like an elevation of that thing. So, you know, when, when I'm making these proclamations at the top of the episode and trying to put context around them, it's because movies like this keep happening. You know, we keep getting Captain America Brave New World. We keep getting lousy movies. And this is a lousy movie. It's not good. And it's supposed to be a big summer tent pole. And we've, we're coming off this wonderful. 12 weeks

• 46:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 46:14Sean Fennessey?

  of movie stuff going on. And the the projections for this movie are going down and down and down. The word of mouth is very bad. There's been some very funny posts of reviews from influencers who are like, even I cannot tell you that this is good. And they hit him with an inception six out of 10, you know? And it's just like, from from an influencer, that's that's that's tough.

• 46:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 46:36Sean Fennessey?

  So, you know, I've been trying to process and think about what all this was. I wrote about it in the newsletter this morning. I'm curious what you think it means. I I have been drawing the comparisons to the big budget musicals and to the Westerns in the, you know, mid 20th century, a lot, where those were really the dominant forms, dominant genre forms in the movies.

• 46:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Sean Fennessey?

  About 30 years, 35 years. And they kind of expired. And when they expired, the new Hollywood filled the vacuum, or they broke it and they filled the vacuum.

• 47:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 47:06Sean Fennessey?

  And I do see this in a somewhat similar context. I don't know if you think about it in that same way.

• 47:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I sure, in terms of it is a a genre that like came to prominence at one point in time, and that we've just been making tons of them and interpolating other genres into the genre. And it's really a framework. So, yeah, and certainly it's been dominant. To me, the the influencers, the influencers leaving you is kind of, it is very important because for a while superheroes and the superhero genre were too big to fail. But that required a participation of everyone, of the studios throwing all of the money at it, and then the fans also doing their work to keep it up.

• 47:53Amanda Dobbins?

  And, you know, it like, it was a group effort and fascinating from like a both an economic and cultural perspective. And I think what has like weirded me out so much about fandom culture is just.

• 48:10Amanda Dobbins?

  How much it felt just like a gross capitalistic exchange, right? You know, and all of these people were just doing the work for, um, for these companies and accepting less. And now that pact is broken, which, you know, I'm, I'm happy about, but it does seem like what happened is they lost the fans or they lost that magic agreement of we're all just, we're going towards the same cause and we're all gonna pretend that this is working. And

• 48:44Sean Fennessey?

  It's cyclical.

• 48:45Amanda Dobbins?

  It's not working.

• 48:46Sean Fennessey?

  It will be back when Spider-Man comes out. Like it's gonna come back.

• 48:49Amanda Dobbins?

  And it will absolutely be there for Avengers because we were there in the room at CinemaCon, which many longtime CinemaCon attendees said to us, like, that was, that was very strange. It feels like they brought a lot of fans into the room. CinemaCon didn't used to be like this, but they had to, you know, fan, you know, fanification of the industry event. So it'll, it'll definitely be a thing.

• 49:16Sean Fennessey?

  There's a very naughty conversation to be had too, about sort of like, what is the media and what is the responsibility of somebody who has a platform to talk about things and so on and so forth? We don't have to unpack all of those things.

• 49:27Amanda Dobbins?

  And also like, it's not an accident that we, the press, were also at an influencer and fan screening because who Warner Brothers or who any studio decides to show their movie to ahead of time and for what reason? It's their right to decide, but it is more valuable for them at this point to, to show it to people who are gonna post positive things.

• 49:45Sean Fennessey?

  No, no doubt about it. The fact that it didn't, seemingly didn't work on this one is, is, is fascinating. But, you know, this was true. I saw Masters of the Universe last month and it was the same thing. I was, you know, I was at a fan screening, me and, and Rob Mahoney and Steve Alman were at a fan screening. And

• 50:02Amanda Dobbins?

  That's cute.

• 50:03Sean Fennessey?

  That is how it goes now. That, that is, because that is effectively all that is left in that space. Now, here's the thing, like, I, I agree with what you said, that there, there was a very transactional quality to the rise of fandom influencer culture, but I do think that it was born out of sincerity. I do think, and I, and I think that as negative as I have been about this stuff for the last six years, if you listen to the show before 2020, you'll hear a person who's frequently like, this is so fun and I loved this. And I, I was never in that like cohort of fandom influencer, but I, I understand if you're 27 right now and you were

• 50:40Sean Fennessey?

  You know, nine when Iron Man came out and you grew up loving those movies and you watched The Dark Knight happen. You watched the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy. You watched how James Malgold kind of screwed up Wolverine and then fixed it with Logan. You know, you watched movies like even Superman last year. Like, I think a lot of the fandom is sincere and hard earned and it did eventually become this thing about access and lore and it became a really kind of like overheated engine.

• 51:10Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and, and ownership also because there is this very strict version of fandom and sticking to the canon and what can or cannot be included that always gets toxic. But no, I think you're totally right. And I, you know, this is why it wasn't all bad and it was both a very smart, creative and certainly financial decision to take something that like a lot of people love and are really passionate about and then give them what they want and for the most part, do it well.

• 51:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 51:44Amanda Dobbins?

  And like, you know, because we live in capitalism, that can't exist on its own. Then it just has to keep getting bigger and bigger and more people have to like be brought along for the ride because we always have to keep growing forever.

• 51:58Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 51:58Amanda Dobbins?

  But it's, it's smart and it's also influenced, you know, many other movie companies. Like we have, we've got Nolan Bros now. We've got 824 Bros. We have Barbenheimer. We have like the eventization and the, as you call it, the hyper niche, you know, ification of pop culture where what you do is you find a passionate fan base and then you try to serve things. Colin Hoover, same thing. And that's not new, but this superhero era proved that it can make you like a lot of money.

• 52:30Sean Fennessey?

  Totally.

• 52:30Amanda Dobbins?

  The problem is, is that like no money's ever enough.

• 52:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and I think the up until the right trajectory of all this stuff, obviously ultimately soiled it. It always kind of ruins all all genre exploitation from the studio side. I think something that you that I've heard frequently from people who do like these movies, but know what's been going on for the last five years, which was brought on by COVID streaming, but most specifically that they that Marvel in particular had this 12 year project

• 53:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 53:04Sean Fennessey?

  to get a story told, the Infinity Saga. It wasn't always as perfectly mapped out as it might have seemed at times. It changed a lot. You should read Joanna Robinson's great book about the MCU, which details some of the stops and starts along the way. But they finished a story. They did a thing that had never really been done before, a serialization of movie going that is wildly commercially successful, sometimes artistically successful and no doubt generation defining.

• 53:31Sean Fennessey?

  And they did it and it worked. And even irony poisoned dicks like me were like, oh, my God, this is so fun.

• 53:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 53:39Sean Fennessey?

  And then they kept going. And you know why they kept going? They've got shareholder interests and they're part of a massive corporation. And they've got their livelihood like, and I don't blame them for keeping going. But if they'd stopped, and the thing that I hear from the people is if you'd stopped, you would have been Irving Falkberg. It would have been like, this is one of the greatest achievements in American commercial artistic history.

• 54:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but

• 54:03Sean Fennessey?

  And now we're like, well, fuck these movies.

• 54:04Amanda Dobbins?

  But more, more, more, you know, I mean, that's what it is. It's that's the problem with TV as a medium. That's a it's a problem with many things and not just artistic endeavors, which is that, you know, no one ever knows when to stop or market forces will not allow you to stop.

• 54:18Sean Fennessey?

  It's true, but you know.

• 54:20Amanda Dobbins?

  But you're right that that run, even though someone had to some by someone, I mean, Chris Ryan had to explain to me why people were cheering when Captain America got the hammer. I was like, that just looks like a hammer.

• 54:31Sean Fennessey?

  It is just a hammer.

• 54:32Amanda Dobbins?

  But it's not powerful.

• 54:34Sean Fennessey?

  Of course it's powerful.

• 54:34Amanda Dobbins?

  What's it made of?

• 54:36Sean Fennessey?

  North mythological tool called Mjolnir.

• 54:39Amanda Dobbins?

  What is it made of? Which element?

• 54:41Sean Fennessey?

  I'm sure cadmium.

• 54:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I was no, I was trying to remember what's the what's

• 54:45Sean Fennessey?

  Xenon?

• 54:45Amanda Dobbins?

  No, no, no, no, no. What's the Wolverine one? Adamantium.

• 54:48Sean Fennessey?

  It's not made of adamantium, no. He's from Asgard.

• 54:52Amanda Dobbins?

  But you got

• 54:52Sean Fennessey?

  Adamantium is an earthbound.

• 54:55Amanda Dobbins?

  That you know.

• 54:57Sean Fennessey?

  True.

• 54:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 54:57Sean Fennessey?

  Fair point.

• 54:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Have you been to Asgard?

• 54:59Sean Fennessey?

  No, I haven't been.

• 55:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Do they have mines there? Like, what's going on?

• 55:02Sean Fennessey?

  Wonderful question.

• 55:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 55:04Sean Fennessey?

  Feel like we should get you in the, in the writing rooms to some of these films because you're asking those salient questions.

• 55:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Anyway, I, it didn't mean to me what it meant to a lot of people who were on that project and who were from that original fanbase and not even from that original fanbase because you've talked a lot about how your little sister, she's like, she really, really grew up with those movies and that is a defining movie going event for her. So that stretch through Endgame did create a whole world and did bring a lot of people to the movies and train them to watch movies in a very specific way.

• 55:36Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 55:36Amanda Dobbins?

  And they were thrilled and they were jazzed and it worked. And then they kept going.

• 55:42Sean Fennessey?

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• 56:22Sean Fennessey?

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• 57:01Sean Fennessey?

  And, you know, these movies shifting, they're not ending. I'm going to repeat this, like Fantastic Four First Steps, which I did not think was successful, still made $500 million, you know? Spider-Man will clear a billion, Doomsday will clear a billion. There'll be other stuff next year. I'm not even sure what it is that is coming after this, but this stuff's going to keep happening and doing well. But.

• 57:25Sean Fennessey?

  They're making way for Minecraft. You know, they're making way for another kind of movie that is going to start doing this. And obsession in backrooms is kind of baked into this as well. And this sort of like demand for something new that is originating from something that feel like that younger people feel like they have more ownership of. And now what has happened is, you know, 25 years in, these are not the movies that belong to Gen Alpha.

• 57:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Sean Fennessey?

  This is, this is like my thing and maybe Gen Z's thing, but it's not for 10 year olds anymore. And so there's something kind of fascinating about Doomsday coming around and being this. I compared it in the newsletter to How the West Was Won, the 1962 kind of mega Western that featured lots of very familiar but aging Western stars in this film that is directed by three different people in this beautiful format, but it's like a slow, rickety old Western.

• 58:20Sean Fennessey?

  Doomsday might end up looking like that. You know, Robert Downey Jr., I've seen his 60s, like.

• 58:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean.

• 58:25Sean Fennessey?

  These guys are getting old.

• 58:27Amanda Dobbins?

  But he's got a lot of tinctures and stuff.

• 58:28Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, he's amazing.

• 58:29Amanda Dobbins?

  In his duodenum in Malibu.

• 58:30Sean Fennessey?

  He's a beautiful man and I love his work.

• 58:31Amanda Dobbins?

  You're saying that Infinity Vision is going to be the most beautiful format we've ever seen?

• 58:37Sean Fennessey?

  There's something very Trump coded about Infinity Vision.

• 58:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Of course.

• 58:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, very, very like Trump coin crypto. Yeah, the whole thing. I, I am, I'm really, really interested in this stuff, not just because of my adolescent interest in comic books, but because it does hit that meeting point of how I think the movie business, more than any other artistic business, is a very public thing. It's a very analyzable thing and you can look at what's inside of the movies and see what was going on in the real world. I wrote about how I genuinely think that the rise of superhero movie culture was attuned to a post 9 11 world where we had good guys and we had bad guys. We had terrorists and we had the American way. And movies about superheroes could be dichotomous in that way. Like, I really believe that there's something to that.

• 59:25Sean Fennessey?

  That wasn't going to last. We've cycled through multiple.

• 59:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 59:29Sean Fennessey?

  Political presidential administrations over time. We've seen the rise of totally different political movements. And one of the reasons why I think this has stopped being as relevant as it is, is that people every day fight online.

• 59:43Sean Fennessey?

  About truth, justice in the American way, and we don't need avatars to do that. And like whether they're on the left or the right or in the middle.

• 59:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 59:50Sean Fennessey?

  They are the ones who are like, today I stand athwart history.

• 59:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh huh.

• 59:54Sean Fennessey?

  And I say, no mas, you know?

• 59:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 59:58Sean Fennessey?

  So there's all the, I find all this stuff in the stew to be really fascinating, but that's all, it's all external. It's all being in the ideological minefields. It's not really like, it doesn't change the fact Supergirl is just a bland, forgettable superhero movie.

• 1:00:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's not good.

• 1:00:18Amanda Dobbins?

  That's the other problem. It's just not good. They didn't do it well.

• 1:00:20Sean Fennessey?

  No, they didn't do it well.

• 1:00:22Amanda Dobbins?

  They, there have been a series of five, 10 years. What was the last very good superhero movie?

• 1:00:29Sean Fennessey?

  I liked Thunderbolts.

• 1:00:32Amanda Dobbins?

  It was, yes, I guess it cleared the bar of if you, you had a good time watching it. It wasn't bad.

• 1:00:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I liked that. I liked the Batman.

• 1:00:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Don't remember that, yeah.

• 1:00:44Sean Fennessey?

  I liked,

• 1:00:47Sean Fennessey?

  you know, some things about Doctor Strange and the multiverse of madness. We're getting into that, like, there's stuff I enjoyed about it.

• 1:00:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:00:53Sean Fennessey?

  But what's, what has happened is, is that there's more stuff like, like a Thor God of Love and Thunder, where you're just like, well, this just stinks. Like, this is just terrible. There, there are more and more movies that are like this, that are like Supergirl, you know, that are like Craving the Hunter, where you're like, this just stinks.

• 1:01:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:01:11Sean Fennessey?

  Like, it's just terrible and it's going to be forgotten instantaneously. And there's been a much higher preponderance of those.

• 1:01:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and I wouldn't overlook that, that just like when, when things are quite bad, people check out.

• 1:01:23Sean Fennessey?

  You're right.

• 1:01:23Amanda Dobbins?

  And when there's nothing to hang on to.

• 1:01:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:01:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Then you don't, and you find new audiences.

• 1:01:28Sean Fennessey?

  Let me ask you an unanswerable question.

• 1:01:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:01:29Sean Fennessey?

  In the parlance of the rewatchables, if COVID didn't happen. And if the only way to really get Marvel storytelling was through streaming shows. Didn't happen.

• 1:01:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, it didn't happen?

• 1:01:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, like there was always.

• 1:01:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, if you didn't have COVID, then why would you need to stream at all?

• 1:01:46Sean Fennessey?

  They did, they did, they did, they were going to make the streaming shows regardless, but they became the primacy of Marvel for like 18 months because Black Widow went straight to, to VOD and the other movies basically had to take a pause. And they couldn't launch new heroes like Shang-Chi. They failed to kind of effectively do that in the imagination of the fans. So if the pandemic doesn't happen, is any of this different? Does this have a longer shelf life?

• 1:02:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Are you divesting creative and technological and filmmaking resources to the streaming show still?

• 1:02:19Sean Fennessey?

  You are.

• 1:02:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Then that's, then no, because I do honestly think that there, there was always going to be a down slope. Because you finish Endgame and, you know, when you find an ending, stick to your ending. And of course, they weren't going to do that. And also, just, you know, as you said, there are cycles. People get interested in new things. People grow up. Your sister's a grown up now, you know, it's like, you know, life moves on.

• 1:02:46Sean Fennessey?

  I should ask her if she's going to see this movie.

• 1:02:48Amanda Dobbins?

  But I, I do think that some of it is just like, they're all quite bad. And, and it is because they're using less resource material. They're more, the effects and the number of people who can work on the effects and how much they're being paid. And it's just.

• 1:03:03Sean Fennessey?

  There's a resource constraint going on now. Yeah, for sure.

• 1:03:06Amanda Dobbins?

  So I think that as long as that continues. And also if the streaming shows exist, then in this web that they've created, everyone, all the shows and the movies and everything still have to speak to each other. And you become, um, it's always sunny guy, you know?

• 1:03:23Sean Fennessey?

  That was, that was a big, big problem for them.

• 1:03:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Sean Fennessey?

  They, they clearly made some major mistakes by putting too much of the necessary understanding in the streaming series, which people just clearly were not engaging with at a certain point.

• 1:03:34Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's a numbers thing, right? Just of the more you try to do, the more that can go wrong. I mean, I always think of the Matt Damon on Bill Simmons podcast as being like, making a movie is really hard. And everything can go wrong at any time. And so you multiply that and you add in all these streaming shows and all of these things. I just, the numbers are against them, which is fine, because they have billions of dollars and the other stuff. So they could have just retired, but I guess they don't like the beach.

• 1:04:03Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, and people want to work because they feel a sense of purpose. I don't, I won't take that away from them.

• 1:04:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't either.

• 1:04:09Sean Fennessey?

  To me, it's not about the individual people at Marvel or DC or even, even the movie studios per se. It's much more structural, like that there was no way they were ever going to be able to turn the faucet off. The same way that they didn't turn the faucet off on thoroughly modern Millie in 1967, even though it was like, ah, you know, thoroughly modern Millie, it made some money. It got some Oscar nominations, you know? These things are, they're systemic, they're not individuated. And so it's the same way, I'm like, Supergirl, yeah, they kind of fucked it up. They fucked it up.

• 1:04:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Well.

• 1:04:39Sean Fennessey?

  You know, it happens, but it does, it will augur change in the business pretty meaningfully over the next 10 years in a way that I find interesting. Hey, uh, two things that I want to say to you. One, appreciate you hanging with me on superhero movies for 10 years on the pod.

• 1:04:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, you're so welcome.

• 1:04:52Sean Fennessey?

  Two, um, I promised to not make the Spider-Man episode this. And I promised to not really do this anymore about this genre. Cause I feel a sense of finality, the same way that like all my box office freakouts in 23, 24, 22.

• 1:05:07Amanda Dobbins?

  You're announcing them?

• 1:05:08Sean Fennessey?

  I put those to bed and I'm putting this larger concern to bed. I feel like I've written through my idea too. And I'm like, I've, I figured it out. I figured out how I feel about it.

• 1:05:16Amanda Dobbins?

  We need like, you know, some sort of like bell or, you know, save like situation, like some sort of thing here, like a ceremony to like, set you free, you know?

• 1:05:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Amanda Dobbins?

  They're ascending forth, congratulations.

• 1:05:29Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you. I feel whole again.

• 1:05:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Sean Fennessey?

  And now, and now, you know, I can enjoy Deadpool four.

• 1:05:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh my God, I forgot that was happening.

• 1:05:37Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like there'd be plenty of more stuff for me to like.

• 1:05:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:05:39Sean Fennessey?

  Spider-verse movie, you know, those are my favorite movies, Spider-verse movies.

• 1:05:42Amanda Dobbins?

  They're good.

• 1:05:43Sean Fennessey?

  They're very good.

• 1:05:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Sean Fennessey?

  Um, okay. I think I, and anything else you want to say? As we close the book?

• 1:05:51Amanda Dobbins?

  It's been a great ride. I loved every minute of it.

• 1:05:55Sean Fennessey?

  I'm sure you did. Uh, okay, let's bring in CR and talk now about the end of something else. Jackass best and last.

• 1:06:05Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, CR has appeared magically. Hello.

• 1:06:07Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 1:06:09Sean Fennessey?

  You showed up like a, like a bull.

• 1:06:11Speaker 04

  I did.

• 1:06:11Sean Fennessey?

  In a ring.

• 1:06:12Speaker 04

  To gore you guys.

• 1:06:13Sean Fennessey?

  You're gonna, you're gonna take us out with your takes. We just spent an hour plus doing an emotional rending of superhero garments about Supergirl.

• 1:06:20Speaker 04

  What's, uh, Kara? She, she didn't?

• 1:06:22Amanda Dobbins?

  I think you'll find it's Kara.

• 1:06:24Speaker 04

  Kara, my bad.

• 1:06:25Sean Fennessey?

  She did not rise to the occasion, so to speak. You will, though, as we talk about Jackass Best and Last. Okay, weird movie.

• 1:06:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Sean Fennessey?

  This movie.

• 1:06:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:32Speaker 04

  Um.

• 1:06:34Sean Fennessey?

  Easily one of the best times I've had at the movies this year. I'm not sure that that makes it a movie.

• 1:06:39Amanda Dobbins?

  No. No, it's definitely not a movie, but we had fun.

• 1:06:42Sean Fennessey?

  We had a lot of fun. The three of us saw it together last night. This is the fifth installment in the Jackass film series, although there have also been the, the bad grandpa, bad grandpa, dirty grandpa?

• 1:06:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then there was like, cause a couple of them, and I would put this in the category, as many people have noted, is this is a 8.5. It's like a degree, just a clip show, some greatest hits, some, some very poo-forward stunts, which I think is probably where those guys have wound up, where like, in their 50s, they're like, what we can do is experiment with poo, but we can't really get, you know, thrown out of moving vehicles anymore.

• 1:07:16Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. The movie, which is probably 40% new stunts and gags, and 60% retrospective celebration of some of their greatest works.

• 1:07:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:27Sean Fennessey?

  And where they're at now is that they have to downshift physically into what they're allowed to do, able to do to survive, especially Knoxville, Steve-O, Danger, Aaron, Chris Pontius, Dave Anglin, the guys who've been around for the, the majority of these movies. Now, I'm not sure if we've ever podcasted about the Jackass movies. Now, Chris and I certainly have at least once and maybe even twice. But it was, it was very fun to see the movie with you too, cause you were, you dug it. You were having a grand old time.

• 1:07:57Amanda Dobbins?

  But it was funny to see when we laughed, and sometimes, and I think I laughed at different things than the two of you did. And then I also laughed when you guys really lost it, but I wasn't laughing at the movie as much. I was laughing at you.

• 1:08:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, but we were talking on the way out that I guess we haven't podcasted about Jackass, but Jackass is very important to my life because I live with three men. And I do feel like there are some things that I don't understand that's happening in my house. And it like grows every day and it does often remind me of Jackass. And I feel like it has been a skeleton key to understanding the primal urges and relationships of the people that I cohabitate with and also predictive of what's to come. But there is something, you know, this is a very poop forward movie, as is my life on a day to day basis at home. So there's something cyclical about it in a way.

• 1:08:57Amanda Dobbins?

  And there was one, I mean, there are many different types of poops that you see over the course of Jackass.

• 1:09:05Sean Fennessey?

  This is the most scatological of the Jackass movies.

• 1:09:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And, and, and many of them are.

• 1:09:10Speaker 04

  Really saying something.

• 1:09:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Many of them are, are quite gross, but the, but there was one where I was, some of them I was like judging the texture based on like what I dealt with, you know, earlier throughout the day. And I was like, oh, this seems fine. And then I was like, oh, I never thought about using crunchy peanut butter in that way. But yes, yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. But see like, you don't know, also Zach's still only one arm. So I am changing all the dirty diapers in my house.

• 1:09:35Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Let's, let's try to break up the Jackass experience into three distinct strata. Final, whatever you want to call it. There is pure pain. There is a giant hand smacks you in the face. There is you launch yourself to a rocket and you fly off into the ocean.

• 1:09:51Speaker 04

  Saying that in this new film, a man has to walk on a balance beam while a shock collar is attached to his penis.

• 1:09:58Sean Fennessey?

  So that to me falls in the second category, which is dick pain. Dick pain is a category of Jackass stunts. There is, there is as low grade as a robot just hits you in the nuts.

• 1:10:10Speaker 04

  Or just nut taps, like lots of guys doing dick taps.

• 1:10:13Sean Fennessey?

  A lot of taps throughout the entirety of this franchise. And then the third is shit vomitous, you know, smell anxiety. Like this, like we're exposing you to a bodily orifice that will make you ill in one way or another. Now. Number one is my favorite. Number, the, the, the glee of watching another man get hit in the face. And then his group of friends laughing at him.

• 1:10:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:40Sean Fennessey?

  That to me is when Jackass is at its very best.

• 1:10:43Amanda Dobbins?

  I would like to add to like a subcategory of that where like a hit that sends someone flying into the air.

• 1:10:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:10:49Amanda Dobbins?

  So it's really like when someone takes flight.

• 1:10:52Speaker 04

  I think you and I are Knoxville originalists.

• 1:10:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:10:55Speaker 04

  I want to see him strapped to the back of a rocket.

• 1:10:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  I want to see him with a bull. I, we are, we, I don't think anybody's ever seen the footage that opens this movie. Is that right?

• 1:11:04Sean Fennessey?

  Which is crazy.

• 1:11:05Amanda Dobbins?

  So insane.

• 1:11:06Speaker 04

  Which is so fucking nuts. I don't even want to spoil it. Um, I am, I go Knoxville and then probably like, I would say Steve and Pontius, while I respect what they are capable of, are like a little lower down the power ranking of me.

• 1:11:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:20Speaker 04

  For me, for like, just pure nudity, running up to guys and being like, here's my penis. Or, we're just, go for it.

• 1:11:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Not something you've done?

• 1:11:28Speaker 04

  Things that I'm pulling out of or putting into my bum.

• 1:11:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that to me.

• 1:11:33Amanda Dobbins?

  There was, in terms of like penis, and I guess, I, I understand that testicles are different than penis.

• 1:11:39Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, good.

• 1:11:39Amanda Dobbins?

  But there was some ball, listen.

• 1:11:41Speaker 04

  No, the bad grandpa.

• 1:11:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, I know about penises in one way, but also like I'm having to learn about them in new ways.

• 1:11:48Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I mean enumerate them. What are the ways in which you know about them?

• 1:11:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm not Mallory. So, um, but, so I found Jackass instructive in that way, as you also try to like, I don't know how to teach two young kids about their penis.

• 1:12:02Sean Fennessey?

  It's the, it's the exploration of the, the male body.

• 1:12:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, but you guys, I think, laughed the most of anything, if I recall, at the, uh, stunt involving just like very, very, like elongated anatomy, I like, I don't want to spoil anymore. Um, and that physically being on display. And that was when you were looking at him go, and you're losing your mind. That was the most giggling that I saw.

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  I, it had also the element of Jackass that I think that they've probably lost as their celebrity has grown, which is their ability to go guerrilla filmmaking.

• 1:12:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Speaker 04

  And I have to say, I mean, obviously Knoxville, in the course of this film, has several. Emotional moments, say, realizing that he can no longer do this. And, you know, I think not unlike Mission Impossible 4, they never really truly turned the franchise over to a new generation.

• 1:12:51Sean Fennessey?

  It's true.

• 1:12:51Speaker 04

  And YouTube sort of market corrected for a lot of the prank stuff. But the guerrilla filmmaking side of this, and the moment where I found myself getting very emotional is towards the end of the film, there's a multifaceted stunt that they do. And they go to the control room and Spike Jonze is there. And I was like, I can't believe that this is one of our great filmmakers, like, one of the greatest filmmakers of our lifetimes. And the thing that gives him the most joy is still the thing that gives me the most joy, which is seeing Dave kicked in the nuts 50 times.

• 1:13:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, by a contraption that is a wheel of spinning shoes.

• 1:13:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I, there's, I felt a little sad during that sequence. Seeing Spike is the only time Spike is really on screen. You hear his voice a couple of times through some of the retrospective stuff. But, you know, he hasn't made a movie in over 10 years. And he was, that was one of my guys. So that was, you know, going all the way back to the music videos. And obviously, he is a critical part of this because he comes out of the skate culture and skate videos that all these guys are born out of. And they all, all these guys have this interesting thing now where, especially that first generation of jackasses are skate and surf punks. And they're not like ideological punks, they're anarchy punks. And it's like, it was a very particular flavor of dude that I certainly knew. They're very prevalent in California.

• 1:14:11Sean Fennessey?

  And the mischief and the sense of glee that I always felt like Knoxville and Steve-O. And then the other component is Bam. And Bam Margera is featured in this movie, and he's had a lot of troubles over the last 10 years. And Ryan Dunn is featured in this movie, he's no longer with us. So there's like, there's a little bit of a teardrop in the film, too. But they do actually kind of get the band back together for one specific stunt in the movie, which is maybe like the funniest idea, if not the funniest execution, about the darkroom with the snake.

• 1:14:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:40Sean Fennessey?

  Which I enjoyed, and it was nice seeing Bam be very scared of snakes. Because actually, as you noted on the 2010 movie draft.

• 1:14:46Speaker 04

  It's incredible content.

• 1:14:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, I was surprised they didn't take us back to that moment.

• 1:14:50Speaker 04

  Me too, they describe it. But yeah, I mean, I really enjoy. The sequences where like Jackass is happening out in the wild. There's one that I think has been pretty big on YouTube. So I'm not hoping about spoiling anything, but where Brad Pitt gets abducted outside of Pink's Hot Dogs. What era Brad Pitt is that?

• 1:15:11Amanda Dobbins?

  That's 01. It's like summer 01, so he has the rusty Ocean's Eleven haircut.

• 1:15:17Sean Fennessey?

  It's just post like Fight Club.

• 1:15:19Speaker 04

  That's so fucking cool.

• 1:15:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Sean Fennessey?

  But wasn't that stunts on the show?

• 1:15:24Amanda Dobbins?

  It was like, I see, you know, I knew about that. And that's sort of, I mean, that is how Jackass comes into like Amanda's pop cultural orbit. And is more of a frame of mind than me having every single stunt memorized. But I remember them abducting Brad Pitt.

• 1:15:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it was interesting to see how they picked and chose what their most iconic moments were, or what were the launchpads for discussions between Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine, the longtime director and producer of the series and Steve-O and, you know, the kind of the godfathers of the thing. And I think the fairly uneasy integration of the new class of people, which I think they struggled with in Jackass Forever 2, where it was like, it's cool to watch, you know, Zach Holmes or Jasper do stuff. And I did watch, I really enjoyed watching Jasper get rammed by a ram for 20 minutes in the movie.

• 1:16:11Amanda Dobbins?

  That was one of my favorite.

• 1:16:12Speaker 04

  That was one of the best bits.

• 1:16:14Sean Fennessey?

  But Rachel doesn't do, she doesn't get anything to do.

• 1:16:16Amanda Dobbins?

  I related.

• 1:16:19Amanda Dobbins?

  She just wandered around in the back.

• 1:16:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, not ideal.

• 1:16:22Amanda Dobbins?

  They don't even let her be in like the grocery cart.

• 1:16:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, let her get rammed by a ram for Christ's sake.

• 1:16:26Speaker 04

  I know.

• 1:16:28Sean Fennessey?

  But I just, I like watching Knoxville get throttled. Like I don't, that's just, there's a primal quality to this series where when he, like when he gets gored, which we saw, you know, it's from a previous film. But when he gets gored and he gets, he gets hit once and then they're like, we gotta do take two. That sequence of filmmaking, I was like, something is alive here.

• 1:16:48Speaker 04

  And he gets knocked out and everybody is like, that's why he's Knoxville. And that is the thing that I guess.

• 1:16:53Amanda Dobbins?

  And then he's put in the, like literally in ambulance doing like tricky dick fingers on the stretcher.

• 1:16:59Sean Fennessey?

  Like that bull didn't like magic.

• 1:17:02Speaker 04

  It's funny. It's like, obviously, if it's like, if you had invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook. Like, this was, is been done, like, other prank shows. There are other, like, Fear Factor. There are things on YouTube you can watch of people being like, "I'm, I'm jumping through a plate glass window," you know, whatever. These guys are kind of stars. And it is really weird to be in my late 40s, a little bit younger than these guys, having watched them for most of my life, like, half of my life, and seeing a little bit of the toll it takes on them, you know?

• 1:17:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:37Speaker 04

  And I, I think that this is like, an appropriate place to end it, you know?

• 1:17:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think it is the ending?

• 1:17:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, no. Who can say? I did wonder, you know, this is a Paramount film, and a Paramount franchise, though conceived over previous owners. And you start to wonder how risk-averse or not the new ownership is gonna be. So like, will they be able to get away with all of this stuff?

• 1:18:04Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. It's a really interesting question, and it dovetails with, I think, a lot of the Knoxville's emotionality around the movie. Like, he's done interviews over the last couple of years where he's talked about how he's basically been told, like, "You cannot get another bull-oriented concussion. Like, your life will be in jeopardy if you keep doing this to yourself." And he's really sad about it, and he has this, like, really complex relationship to being punished on screen, and knowing that it's kind of his calling. Like, it is his art. And the, the films have made this very smart association with Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin, and the history of kind of physical comedy.

• 1:18:38Speaker 04

  It opens with basically a dance, a big dance number, this film does, yeah, so.

• 1:18:42Sean Fennessey?

  Um, that is sort of Jamiroquai-inspired?

• 1:18:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:46Sean Fennessey?

  The sliding rooms. Uh, and, so it's weird to have, like, big feelings around Jackass that are not polarity, but this was true when, when Chris and I did the Jackass Forever conversation, too.

• 1:18:59Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, there's no other movie that gets me just moving around as much in my seat. You know, like reacting so profoundly like.

• 1:19:06Speaker 04

  It's pure cinema.

• 1:19:06Sean Fennessey?

  It really, in that way.

• 1:19:08Speaker 04

  It is pure cinema. It is like, cover my eyes, crying with laughter, like, like wanting sequences to go on forever, wanting sequences to be over in one second. And, and I do love these things.

• 1:19:20Amanda Dobbins?

  And I'm not joking. It captures something about like the male urge, like that, that I don't understand and don't have, but have never seen so clearly articulated. I'm grateful for the work. And then also, I mean, this one, the, one of the final stunts is, the premise is based around colonoscopy prep. So we are all of an age, you know? And, and then we're recognizing that and seeing it. And so are the people on the screen. And, you know, life comes at you fast and it's horrible.

• 1:19:52Sean Fennessey?

  I hope this isn't a HIPAA violation, but Chris and I have both had colonoscopies this year. And the prep is the worst part.

• 1:19:59Amanda Dobbins?

  I had to do it for a different surgery recently. Like.

• 1:20:02Sean Fennessey?

  It's horrible.

• 1:20:02Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm traumatized by that drink. The drink is the worst thing I've ever had in my entire life.

• 1:20:08Speaker 04

  When you see them chugging it, you're like, oh my God, I can't believe this is.

• 1:20:12Sean Fennessey?

  And there's something so ingenious, though, at being at colonoscopy age, which many of those guys are, and being like, let's just do a gag built around this. You know, there's some, something very real and honest, even though the gag they do is let's play Twister.

• 1:20:25Speaker 04

  Like, you know, all the stuff that I love about early Jackass is why they can't make any more Jackass, because this, this show airs, I, I don't remember seeing the box before.

• 1:20:37Sean Fennessey?

  I don't remember it either.

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  And so they basically put Knoxville in a cardboard box and throw him down the stairs. And he's like, I, I herniated two discs. I'm like.

• 1:20:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. They said they couldn't air it.

• 1:20:46Speaker 04

  Sean sat on his wallet, weirdly, for like six months and had like crippling back pain. Imagine throwing you down the stairs.

• 1:20:53Amanda Dobbins?

  But they said they weren't allowed to air it because it was too replicable.

• 1:20:56Speaker 04

  Oh, too replicable.

• 1:20:56Amanda Dobbins?

  And that people could figure out a box and tape yourself in it at home. So.

• 1:21:00Sean Fennessey?

  But it is like, like the origins of the show. Are so wonderfully adolescent in that way, where that is the kind of thing you would do when you're 11 years old with your friends.

• 1:21:09Speaker 04

  Well, that's what he's gonna miss. He's gonna miss having a reason to get together with these guys and come up with stupid shit and get paid for it.

• 1:21:15Sean Fennessey?

  I know. It's a wonderful thing. I think it should be celebrated. It is not really a movie, and yet, like, it didn't really matter. I had a great time. It was 90 minutes long. I was happy to actually be watching the retrospective stuff and to be reminded of it and to be seeing it in a room with a lot of other people laughing. And it kinda, I feel like normally I'd be pretty cynical about this. I'd be like, this is a cash in or whatever, but I'm like, these guys might die. So if this is the best they could do, it's fine by me.

• 1:21:36Speaker 04

  It's also just like, you know exactly what you're getting when you're going to these movies. So like, there's nobody in the theater who's like, oh, I can't believe I'm being subjected to this. He's like, you knew what it was. You know what it is. Enjoy it or don't watch it.

• 1:21:47Amanda Dobbins?

  It was like a family reunion. It was like the slideshow projected at a family reunion.

• 1:21:51Sean Fennessey?

  Well put. Any, any closing thoughts?

• 1:21:54Speaker 04

  Uh, do you want, uh, Jackass New Blood? Like, do you, do you think Paramount will leave this alone?

• 1:22:01Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think they'll leave it alone because money is money, right? But whether it will ever get back to, I know, there's something specifically about when Knoxville, like, taser somebody and then starts giggling when they're in extreme pain that, like, you cannot replicate. Like, they can't, there's never gonna be that specific feeling of, of anarchy and mania that they watch.

• 1:22:22Speaker 04

  They also have to have, like, a certain brat. I mean, like, they talk about how when they brought on the new people, they would talk about what they're scared of. And Tremaine's like, I can't believe this guy's just telling me everything he's scared of. I'm definitely just gonna have him put in all of these situations. And he does, you know? Um, I don't know. I, I, I, well, we always have, like, the previous TV seasons and the movies, so.

• 1:22:43Amanda Dobbins?

  And also, you can come to my house.

• 1:22:44Speaker 04

  Zach could come to your house.

• 1:22:45Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe that's where the next season is happening. Jackass 6, The Dobbins Baron Household. Uh, okay. Well, CR, fortunately, you're sticking around because you're doing another episode with us. Uh, thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on this episode. Thanks to Lucas Kavina for his production support. Next week, I think we're gonna have three episodes.

• 1:23:04Amanda Dobbins?

  But you're not sure. This is the magic of podcasting.

• 1:23:07Sean Fennessey?

  And I'm not gonna even tease what it might be.

• 1:23:10Speaker 04

  It'll be a solo pod by me, direct to camera. I stand with Supergirl.

• 1:23:16Sean Fennessey?

  See you then.

• 1:23:36Speaker 05

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