Kimi K3 Reactions, The Odyssey Hits $264M in Debut, Netflix Embraces AI | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:01John Coogan?

  It's Monday and there's a lot of news, the big stuff. Kimi K3 drop, but first we should recap the weekend. How was your weekend?

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  The elephant in the room, that I'm wearing a suit.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  Yes, the elephant in the room. Did somebody say that? The elephant in the room. Jordy's suited up, he's feeling good, he's refreshed.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, refreshed. I, yeah, was in, was in the elephant of the weekend.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Dragged to the old country.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes, exactly. Really fun time, glad to be back. Very, very refreshed.

• 0:31John Coogan?

  Very fun. I was at a Caruso property this weekend and I gotta say, being there, being at the Miramar, Rosewood, I can never vote for him for public office ever again.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  Why? Because you want him to develop more properties like that?

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want him laser focused on resorts and malls.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't really hold up because the whole, the whole point was that he could, there was some possibility that he could make greater Los Angeles, something like his incredible promise.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  You gotta get Rosewood and every city in America and maybe all over the world.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  Or take private of the, of the city of Los Angeles, turn it all into a Caruso property.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  Potentially, but it was, it was a good weekend, glad to be back. The timeline was burning up over the weekend over the AI Cold War that's breaking out between the US Frontier Labs and Chinese open source. There's been a whole bunch of new Chinese open source models that have dropped with some promising benchmarks. The latest one that everyone is up in arms about is Moonshot's Kimi K3. It was unveiled last Thursday. Now, they aren't actually.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  I kept opening X and thinking, looking, scrolling a few times, thinking, oh, I'm happy for you or sorry that happened. I put my phone away. I feel like I missed a lot.

• 1:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's gated behind a, behind an app right now. The waits are not actually open just yet. That should happen Monday if things go to plan, but of course, there's a lot going back and forth with the administration. People are, you know, weighing every possible consequence of this. It's a, you know, the classic, it's over, we're back. Is this good for semiconductors? Is this bad for semiconductors? Is this Jebins paradox? Is it the counter example of Jebins paradox? It's all very interesting debates and everyone's coming out with their own opinion. Dean Ball was going back and forth with two people, David Sacks and also Emile Michael,

• 2:32John Coogan?

  were duking it out on the timeline, fighting it out, back and forth. But, you know, decent takes on both sides, lots to chew through. The headlines for Kimi are impressive, but not wildly surprising based on the current trend lines and model progress. But it does seem to invalidate the thesis that open source would start falling behind, which was something that was start, there was that chart from the government, I believe, that showed closed model progress was, you know, accelerating on this particular exponential and open models were falling behind. This seems like a proper catch up, something that was predicted from, you know, many lab leaders that, you know, the six month gap, three month gap, nine month gap, it will

• 3:16John Coogan?

  remain just that gap for the foreseeable future. But there are of course, a bunch of other nuances here. In the most above board scenario, sort of here's what happened, like the Moonshot team, it's just a bunch of highly talented AI researchers who marshaled enough compute to release, to release a great model. Open sourcing Kimi is a great way to grab attention, attract talent, drive demand for hosted API services that are more turnkey eventually. There's a very reasonable business model behind open sourcing. Red Hat Linux, of course, is an open source company owned by IBM now. I think the acquisition price was in the $30 billion range and at any point, you could just say, I'm just doing Red Hat on my own, but a lot of companies pay for, you know,

• 3:58John Coogan?

  consulting, hosted and all sorts of different services around the open source piece of software. That's sort of like the, the, the bull case, like, you know, everything's going well. The more skeptical folks on the timeline are pointing to, you know, ideas such as maybe the compute was smuggled into China against chip controls, maybe the data was exfiltrated from Frontier Lab APIs routed through wrapper companies, maybe this is a distillation attack. The open source strategy is a deliberate attempt to destroy American companies, it's geopolitical warfare, it's the AI Cold War. And there might even be spies inside companies stealing IP directly. And so that's sort of like the bad version. The reality is probably a mix of both, but we'll know more over time and we'll hear more

• 4:42John Coogan?

  statements from the labs and from all sorts of different participants to understand. People are going back and forth on, you know, if you ask Kimi its name, will it just say it's Claude or GPT? And there were some examples of people doing that, seemed like it was photoshopped, seemed like, that also seems like the easiest thing to fix possibly is just put it in the, put it in the prompt, put it in the fine tuning, never say, you know, find and replace. Seems pretty easy.

• 5:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they were showing it in the reasoning trace.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, you know, I, I, I don't know, all these things are hard to, hard to assess over time. It takes time to actually work through what's real, what's fake, what's a hallucination, you know, they all, they all make mistakes from time to time. But there are bigger questions about AI safety in a world of powerful open source AI. I haven't seen a ton of takes from this crowd, but you have to imagine that they aren't happy about it. Maybe the, the Stop AI protests will head over to Beijing next and beat down the, the doors of Moonshot directly. But it is an odd thing because even if you're not worried about the fast takeoff, you know, gray goo, paperclip monster, from a cybersecurity's perspective, like things are going to get more complex.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  There's reasonable solutions to all of this, but it is a more powerful tool in the hackers or the attackers tool chest. Fortunately, defenders have had roughly six months of Frontier exclusivity with GPT Cyber and Mythos for a while. And so there's been a lot of preparation. We've talked to Nikasia at Palo Alto Networks and George at CrowdStrike about this, like they have been aware that this is coming for a while. And so a lot of systems have been patched, but at the same time, you can just imagine now, anyone who's a hacker can spin up a very, very intelligent model and start sending a bunch of spam emails or spam text messages that stop seeming so AI and they're not as

• 6:33John Coogan?

  clockable because it's just another level of intelligence and it can do reasoning traces and research and, and so, you know, the, the, the spammer or the phishing attack can actually know what insurance you have and then pose as your insurance agent and actually know a little bit about your insurance agent instead of just sort of sending you a generic spam text. Your, things are going to get more customized, more personalizable. Of course, there will be more advanced defense layers, but the war is continuing. There really is no debating that open source is just cool, like open source AI, it just feels punk rock to me. It feels like Napster, like as a kid, the idea of just like liberating all the information.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's culturally aligned to the internet itself.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just a cool thing, even though you do have to grapple with all the different problems that come from it downstream. Like the, there's something just deeply satisfying about the idea of like a solar powered server rack, serving you up unstoppable intelligence, which is another good name for a NeoLab. You know, a country of geniuses.

• 7:36Jordi Hays?

  It feels, yeah, in some ways to me, it feels like aligned to America's ideals.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, it's like as the.

• 7:43Jordi Hays?

  Like it feels like, like very empowering.

• 7:46John Coogan?

  It's total second amendment, totally second amendment.

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like, I should be able to go off grid and have, you know, not a country of geniuses in a data center controlled by a corporation, but just like my own genius who's riding with me no matter what, in my basement, you know? And it's like, even if you're not thinking like nefarious, it's like this, it's this idea that, you know, I like to have a copy of a movie in case like the grid goes down, you know, the, the more like, you know, apocalyptic thinking, this is a very general thing that I think a lot of people align to, especially if they're at all crypto native, it's like, why do you want Bitcoin? Well, it's unstoppable money, the government can't take it from you in certain scenarios. Of course, like there's a bunch of ways that they can, of course, like anything else. But there, there is just something very, very attractive about having just a machine

• 8:34John Coogan?

  with all of human knowledge on it. It's like a, it's like the, you know, every house used to have the, the full encyclopedia Britannica and you could just look up anything. And now you have the LLM that can solve, you know, any math problem for you. But, you know, the US government is going back and forth on this issue, how to handle the situation. And I imagine we'll see, you know, developments this week. The Kimi K3 waits drop next Monday, and so this is the week where if the government wants to do something one way or another, they have the opportunity to do that. There were some back and forth on like, would there be a, a direct ban, a hard ban, a soft ban, maybe just some like messaging around, hey, like, please be a patriot, don't use

• 9:18John Coogan?

  this foreign product, you know? There's all sorts of different ways, like the original like buy made in America, buy American. That's just marketing, but it does have some effect. It's not enough to make GoPro a, you know, $10 billion company, but it is enough to, you know, cause a little bit of motion in the, in the, in the economy.

• 9:39Jordi Hays?

  One thing that was notable over the weekend, Kimi on X said that, Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected and our GPUs are feeling it over the past 48 hours. Demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity to protect the experience of existing subscribers. We're temporarily pausing new subscriptions and prioritizing compute for current members. We're adding capacity as fast as we can and we will reopen new subscription spots and batches. So Kimi and the world more broadly are quite supply constrained and showing that the other dimension of this whole geopolitical battle is around the hardware side.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  I mean, in general, I think my, my takeaway was, and Tyler, I'd be interested to hear how you process this, but like I, I just don't see this as a black pill, even if it's like a deep seek moment and the market's sort of bouncing around for a little bit. It seems like there's still a lot of demand for frontier intelligence, a lot of demand for near, near frontier intelligence, a lot of demand for really cheap older models that have been baked down to basically intelligence too cheap to meter. And we are going to be in this process of go and find an actual use for something and then bake it down to be really, really cheap so that it can be offered.

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and in so, so many moments over the last two years. We've, there's been a company that's come out, maybe they've raised some money. You maybe forget about them for like six months. And then they pop up and it turns out, even though they're the number 10 company in their category, they're still growing faster than almost any company that existed like six years ago.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, and a lot of it goes down to deployment, too. There's like certain companies, if they're in consumer, like they just have a really good go-to-market motion. Like they're just able to get customers to subscribe or use their product. Or if they're in enterprise, like they just have a great like forward deployed motion to actually do the change necessary as opposed to just like, here's an API law firm. Like they could have done that and yet you have legal AI companies that have done a great job of coming in and actually creating a product that works within the confines of the broader organization. Well, what are your Kimi K3 reactions, Tyler?

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I mean, I think it was definitely like a surprise and update. Like this is extremely good model. The idea that open source is falling behind seems like very much.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  We sort of got a preview with GLM 5.2. Like people were already saying like, oh, GLM 5.2 is sort of catching up, so.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Yes, but even that, that was closer to, you know, maybe a year, maybe a little less than a year behind. It seems like much closer.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  But I think I broadly agree, like, okay, there's this great open source model. And now we have, okay, the Jacobian, you know, conjecture, like this, this kind of storied math problem.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll have to see.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  And so like, yeah, there's just gonna be a lot more use like everywhere. I expect, you know, these kinds of models to be used everywhere.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  It seems like a lot of hype is around like specifically the parameters, the size of the model, the way it was trained. It'll be, and then also it did very well in the front end arena, which was interesting. Because that's, I mean, it jumped ahead of everything there and that feels like a particular, like, it's, it'll be interesting to see because you see more and more taste going into these models. Like OpenAI is really big into the math stuff and Anthropic was really big on code early. And there's all these different, like, you can just tell that like, oh, this lab cares about chess now and now the model's good at chess or the model got better at writing because like they, they took the time to spend a month sprinting on that. And it'll be interesting to see like, where did they sprint? If anywhere, where didn't they sprint? And it's sort of lagging.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Uh, and then what harness it works best with? How important is the harness relative to everything else? But, uh, will be, will be interesting to, to continue following. Semi analysis said, similar to the panic over DeepSeek R1, some uneducated people think Kimi K3's use of linear attention, KDA, is bad for Nvidia HBM DRAM and networking because it has relatively lower KV cache requirements. The opposite is true and they'll explain. Kimi K3 is actually quite positive for Nvidia as large model inference is where the NVL 72 shines because K3 has more than 2.8 trillion parameters. It requires a large scale up domain to store its weights. Secondly, although Kimi Delta attention has up to 10x lower networking requirements for KV cache transfers,

• 14:00John Coogan?

  its large weights require even more network bandwidth to implement an optimization called wide EP, which spreads weights across different GPUs. Is China getting TPUs? Those have to be chip export restricted and probably more difficult to get into the country because there's less resellers. And in order to set up a TPU-based data center, you probably have to work very closely with Google. Whereas Nvidia GPUs are sort of going to like all sorts of small Neo clouds. And there's a lot of places where seven steps down the chain, it can wind up in a suitcase with a, uh, with a hairdryer, removing the label or something like that.

• 14:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's not even that. You can imagine like if you were a Chinese lab and you wanted to get access to compute, there would be a number of ways to like set up US entities that then basically get compute through a variety of different sources here in the US.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  And you're, you're, uh, just getting it remotely.

• 14:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Nicholas Bustamante at Microsoft, uh, who is working on AI for knowledge workers, uh, says, guys, the world is so compute constrained. I honestly don't understand how anyone thinks otherwise. Almost nobody is seriously using AI today and we're already hitting capacity. Everything is a bottleneck. Land for data centers, permits, electricity, grid connections, chips, construction, cooling. Demand is growing far faster than supply. An expanding supply is insanely expensive in this game. The best positioned companies are the ones with massive net income from non-AI products. They can fund hundreds of billions in capex. He's given a little bit of a bull case for Microsoft.

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, here's the bill. Guillermo over at Versel says, Kimi.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  Tested it.

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  What's that?

• 15:40John Coogan?

  Oh, uh, yeah, that's good to hear.

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Kimi K3 is top tier at cybersecurity. Uh, that will, uh, that will be interesting as the, as basically, uh, the weights are released. Do we see an uptick in tax?

• 15:54John Coogan?

  And it's also sort of a refutation of like the, it's just distilled because the models that you would be distilling from are pretty severely nerfed on cybersecurity, at least in theory. And so it's like you would need to distill on the non, uh, the non-nerfed model, which is probably way harder because those are much more restricted. And so, uh, it, it, it does feel like there's a, uh, there's a little bit of a refutation of the idea that these are purely distilled.

• 16:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Sol is a leap ahead in cyber capability at a significantly higher cost, but quite remarkable still. Fable refuses everything. We couldn't get it to complete the run at all. What is interesting is that Sol in comparison was much more open to helping with defensive cyber hardening. TLDR frontier open weight cyber capability is here. This was good. Hi, you're, Harry says, RIP the bear case, July 16th to July 19th. Perfectly coinciding with my trip, uh, which, which is, which is nice.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Dean Ball was going back and forth, uh, oh, some deleted posts now. His observations were getting taken to task going back and forth. He says, it's a very good model. I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that in agentic coding sessions. It seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also seems very token hungry. Dean says, I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, given potential risks. Now, it seems like the, that is very much like from the top, they are pro open source right now. Dean says, to be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I'm surprised that China is fine with it.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  I suspect the reason is that they, uh, they are is 75% explained by strategic blindness, lack of AGI pilledness. The CCP is very Jan La Cooney in its view of AI. Uh, the other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference, making China's open weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls. That's interesting. And the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports for the companies as opposed to the government. The decision to open source is partially ideological and partially because they are behind. And they know that very few people would pay for sub-frontier models from China. Yeah, you have to imagine that it like, the idea of sending, I mean, people are having discussion over like, should you send your corporate data to a, to an American frontier lab?

• 18:23John Coogan?

  Imagine that, that same level of, should we upload our entire code base to the moonshot API? Because we've gone all in on Chinese closed source. It seems like that's a very, very hard sell. So there is a world where there's like no money to be made in America. I don't know. Maybe there's some American businesses that would just be like, yeah, I'm cool with it. Like, take my, take everything, take all my IP. I'm anti-fragile, I can't be, you can't clone me. So, and I have no IP, so just upload it all.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  I mean, if you're a local plumbing company.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  Probably in a good spot.

• 18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe. This is a pretty hot take. Dean says, open weight models are inherently decelerationist. And Tyler and I were debating this before the show. Uh, he said, I'm continually surprised to see the so-called accelerationists so excited about open weight models. I suspect the reason is that they know open weight models are effectively ungovernable. That's correct. Uh, and they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open weight models uh, create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy. It reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the Hill people in The Art of Not Being Governed. Still, in the end, open weight models deter further AI capex.

• 19:36John Coogan?

  And this is the debate that we were having was like, how capex intensive are these frontier training runs? Because Moonshot's raised, I think, a billion dollars recently. Uh, and, and it just feels like even the, even the latest labs, like there's a lot of cost, a lot of researchers, and they do a lot of experiments, but the, but the core run might not, we might not be talking about 50 billion yet. Maybe in the future, like you, you need to accrue towards that. And maybe people wouldn't fund it if they're like, oh, you're only going to be able to monetize this for, for like three months because you're going to get distilled so fast or you're going to get copied so fast. That is tricky. Like it is nicer when you have a monopoly or oligopoly for some period of time to, to actually earn profits off of what you invested against.

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, if anyone listening to this is over at Kimi or Moonshot.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  Come on the show.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  No, don't come on the show, just, uh, feel free to let us know how, how you made it.

• 20:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 20:32Jordi Hays?

  Feel free to, to leak the secret sauce.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  On the show. Come on the show.

• 20:37Jordi Hays?

  On the show, yeah. Yeah, if you're so, if you're so open, why not? The Odyssey is up to 264 million. Biggest non-animated opening of the year until Spider-Man in two weeks, according to Lucas Shaw over at Bloomberg.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  375 million dollar budget. Production was 250 million dollars. They recoup that and, uh, immediately. 125 million in global marketing, apparently. Um, and looks like a big financial win, but very much, you know, priced in. Like, uh, you know, the base case here, uh, the film will make a little bit over a billion dollars. Uh, the cash flow to Universal and Comcast, who are, uh, the studio behind this. Uh, you're looking at 250 million dollars in pre-tax lifetime profit. That's 0.2% of Comcast's market value. So it's not like this crazy thing for the corporate entity, but it is exciting for the film.

• 21:34John Coogan?

  And it's exciting for Christopher Nolan, who's in the Journal today in the business and finance section. Uh, because Nolan's The Odyssey shows directors are franchises now. They have an interesting statistic in here. 53% of Odyssey attendees said that the director was their number one reason for attending.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  Not the actor, not the fact that they loved the book and they were waiting for the IP to get adapted, not that it's a, you know, oh, they like Sword and Sandals, they were looking, or that it was IMAX, they wanted a Nolan film. And that's, I mean, everyone knows this intuitively from talking to everyone. Everyone's like, I want to see the next Nolan film. But it's just interesting that, that there has been this huge shift towards franchises built around particular intellectual property verticals, Marvel, Star Wars, Disney stuff, Pixar and whatnot. But now, people are saying, I'm, I'm just going to ride with this director in whatever he does. And he can take me to the past, he can take me to the future, wherever he goes, I'm riding with Nolan.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  I had a funny run in with Christopher Nolan. I was walking on the beach and Christopher Nolan was walking in front of me.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Yeah!

• 22:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm not hitting any sound effects, to be clear. And he's walking with his dog. I don't know who he is or what he looks like. Someone else who I'm with says, that's Christopher Nolan. I said, who? And then, and then it came to me. But then this dog ran up behind us. He was walking his dog. Another dog joins and is like really messing with his dog. And so I had to be like, I just had to say, hey, man, it's not my dog. Because it seemed, it seemed like my dog was off.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  You were getting framed.

• 23:23Jordi Hays?

  I was being framed for having a poorly trained dog that was harassing his dog.

• 23:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:28Jordi Hays?

  But he was pretty unbothered. Let's head over to this picture from Gaultier. He had the best seat in the house.

• 23:37John Coogan?

  This is, is this a real photo? Or do you think this is like, take a photo and then put it in AI and say like, make it even more distorted? Because this is what it looks like to be truly in the front row of an IMAX showing. People were really, were really crazy about like, the IMAX looked way better. I think some folks on the team saw the film once, twice, three times. Who saw it in IMAX? Okay, we got some IMAX chats back there.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  I haven't seen it yet. Mike's seen it twice.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Give us the review. You liked it? How many thumbs up out of 10? What do you got for me? Tyler, you can, you can chime in too. What do you think?

• 24:12Speaker 03

  It was fantastic.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  It was fantastic.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  Were you taking, were you taking notes the whole time? Like, did you have a notebook?

• 24:17Speaker 03

  Mentally, mentally. No. But it, it's great. It's an amazing accomplishment.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  You're like, shoot the next movie in IMAX.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Dude, I mean, it's one of the best looking films, I think, ever. I mean, the quality is just like unmatched.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  You did 70 millimeter?

• 24:32Speaker 03

  70 mil IMAX. It's, it's, it's incredible. It's incredible.

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  How many times do you think, how many times do you think you'll see it in theaters?

• 24:40Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I'm already scheduled for four total.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Four total? That's crazy.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  We'll see, we'll see how that goes.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was slumming it in normal theaters. I don't want to spoil it in case you haven't read it yet.

• 24:51John Coogan?

  Hmm, okay, yeah, thank you.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  You know, just, yeah. But I, I think.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  I'm really excited to find out if he gets home.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we'll see.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, wait.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  My, my take, I posted, it was missing some, some high jinks and some gas. There were a few scenes missing from the actual poem that I would like to see. But I think it was like pretty solid.

• 25:06John Coogan?

  Wait, are there high jinks in the poem that you didn't, that didn't make it in?

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  It was, it was low on high jinks.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  We should do an episode on IMAX.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. We got to film this show in IMAX.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  That'd be awesome.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  How would you rank it in the Nolan canon? Top five, top two? What are we doing?

• 25:24Speaker 03

  He's not going to beat The Dark Knight.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, Dark Knight.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  Dark Knight's better.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Interstellar, Inception.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  Inception, Tenet, obviously.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  Wait, Mike's coming back.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  I love Tenet.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  I think it says a lot about the filmmaker. If, if this film doesn't make his top three for some people, that says a lot about, or top five, just with like his filmography.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  Top five, right now. Top five Nolan films, go.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Inception, Dark Knight, Interstellar, Oppenheimer, Odyssey's got to be up there.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  Okay, Odyssey's in the, in the top five. There you go. Well, hopefully, Jordi can take a look at it. I think we're going next.

• 25:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll wait till I can chime in to solidify that top five.

• 26:00John Coogan?

  Every Hollywood studio wants its own Christopher Nolan. And I'm interested to know, like, how locked in is he with Comcast, particularly? Like, Universal, like, it, it feels like it's this huge asset, but it's wildly different than, you know, when you're Disney and you just own Marvel and there's absolutely no key man risk. But it's clearly worked out very well. The Odyssey was written and directed by Christopher Nolan. It opened to an estimated 600, $264 million worldwide domestically. Its 124 million debut was the third biggest for any film this year. So it's not that huge. It didn't beat Toy Story 5, didn't beat Super Mario Galaxy. But it does feel like it'll have a longer run of people seeing

• 26:45John Coogan?

  it multiple times, paying more for IMAX. And it is just a breakout for an R-rated historical movie. That's a niche that typically doesn't put up massive numbers, like a Toy Story, for example. The opening was higher than many 2026 releases based on current, more current intellectual properties. It smoked Star Wars, The Mandalorian and Grogu, smoked Supergirl, and it also beat Scream 7. Nolan's brand power and commercial track record got Comcast, Universal Pictures to say yes to a roughly $250 million R-rated adaptation of an ancient Greek poem shot across Europe with largely practical visual effects, including

• 27:25John Coogan?

  a 35-foot-tall Trojan horse. According to data, data from RenTrak, 53% of the Odyssey attendees said the director was the number one reason for attending. "It's not often you see that," said Universal President of Domestic Distribution. Chris Nolan has earned the audience's trust and respect, and that's completely true. In the late 2000s and 2010, franchises dominated the movie industry. Studios hired directors who could pump out sequels, spinoffs, and remakes as efficiently as possible. Nolan was the most successful and prolific among a tiny number of filmmakers who still called their own shots. Along with the hugely successful Dark Knight trilogy, he made his original hit movies like Inception

• 28:07John Coogan?

  and Interstellar. But Marvel, Fast and Furious, and Transformers have all stumbled at the box office recently, as audiences have grown tired of them. Gen Z, in particular, appears skeptical of the industry's reliance on aging brands and technology-driven filmmaking. They're more drawn to stories told by an authentic, recognizable filmmaker with a point of view, says The Wall Street Journal. Like Currie Barker, director of surprise horror blockbuster Obsession, though that film was one of the several new-to-the-big-screen director-driven hits this year, including Project Hail Mary and Backrooms. In response, studios that used to obsess over franchise management are devoting more energy to signing

• 28:49John Coogan?

  the most promising filmmakers. So you can imagine a 10 movie deal. I think Currie Barker already has a multiple movie deal just on the back of Backrooms, even though it's his first film. "Studios are lost as far as knowing what works and what doesn't," said Byron Lord, CEO of CIA. "Things have generally, generationally changed, and individual singular voices are taking advantage." Warner Brothers gave Black Panther and Creed director Ryan Coogler an unusually generous deal to the rights to make his own original horror movie Sinners, which became a hit last year. Weapons director Zach Krieger is helming an adaptation of the video game Resident Evil for Sony Pictures this fall and was part of a recent multimillion-dollar deal Warner made for a new horror property. Barrie, director Greta

• 29:34John Coogan?

  Gerwig, used her clout to convince Netflix to make her adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia. Interesting, they're rebooting that.

• 29:41Jordi Hays?

  Netflix disclosed it has used generative AI in about 300 different productions this year already.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  People are gonna love this.

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  They wrote, "Across the production lifecycle, from concept and pre-visualization through post and delivery, Gen AI utilization by our creative partners is scaling quickly. In 2026, Gen AI workflows have been used in roughly 300 of our titles, with the largest concentration of work in post-production. We are increasingly leveraging these tools to deliver higher-quality output more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional methods."

• 30:12John Coogan?

  One of the clearest examples came from The American Experiment, a docu-series about the American Revolution. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the series included 17 minutes of AI-enhanced footage that explained the scale of the project and, that expanded the scale of the project and would not have been financially feasible using traditional production methods. The company insists that AI is not being introduced to replace writers, directors, actors, or other creative professionals. Instead, Netflix is positioning the technology as the next evolution of filmmaking software, allowing productions to create shots and sequences that would previously have been impossible or overly expensive. Very cool. I don't know.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  That is our show today, folks.

• 30:55John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning in.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  It's an honor to be back here in the Ultra Dome.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  With you all.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpi.com. And we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.