‘Verity’ Is Trash. But Is It Good Trash? Plus: ‘Digger’ Flopped and Warner Bros. Is No More.

Another year, another Colleen Hoover adaptation. How lucky are we? Before diving into the biggest box office success from the weekend, Sean and Amanda react to the news that Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy will not continue their roles at David Ellison’s Skydance. They look back at their biggest successes and failures, and wonder what the future of Skydance looks like. Then, they briefly discuss ‘Sicario 3’ being greenlit with all of the returning stars, but notably neither Denis Villeneuve or Stefano Sollima. Finally, they cover ‘Verity,’ an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s erotic thriller, starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett. They break down why the original source material sets the movie up for failure, what they want from the erotic thriller genre going forward, and debate whether we have a “Dakota Johnson problem.” (0:00) Intro (0:50) ‘Digger’ bombs at the box office (7:32) Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy out at Warner Bros.-Paramount, and the future of Skydance (38:04) ‘Sicario 3’ a go with Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro, and Josh Brolin to return (41:09) ‘Verity’ (1:02:07) SPOILER WARNING (1:23:31) Dakota Johnson temperature check (1:29:24) The state of erotic thrillers vs. what we want (1:32:46) Looking forward to the October slate Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh and Remy Hernandez This episode is sponsored by State Farm®️. A State Farm agent can help you choose the coverage you need. 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 Fennessey.

• 0:16Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 0:17Sean Fennessey?

  And this is the Big Picture, a conversation show about verity and endings. Today on the show, we are talking about the new Colleen Hoover adaptation, Verity, starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson. It was the biggest movie of the weekend and is also a heaping pile of steamy, pulpy trash. But is it good trash? And what do we mean by that exactly? Amanda and I will explain. There was also a dramatic change in studio leadership at the newly merged Warner Brothers Paramount over the weekend, and we'll talk about that, as well as the failure of the movie Digger. It's all coming up right after this.

• 0:49Sean Fennessey?

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• 1:31Sean Fennessey?

  That's LinkedIn.com/thebigpicture. Terms and conditions apply.

• 1:37Speaker 02

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• 2:06Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Amanda, a lot happened over the weekend. I've been in New York, living a fabulous life. You've been in Los Angeles, living another life. I wish you well.

• 2:18Amanda Dobbins?

  How was dinner with my husband?

• 2:21Sean Fennessey?

  I did, in fact, have dinner with your husband in New York. We were both away from our children and we were, we were living it up. We went to an old haunt of ours that we, we dined in many times and we had a nice time. We are working here. Your husband is working and I'm working, maybe not as hard as you're working. You know who wasn't working? It was the film Digger. The film Digger did not work for audiences around this great nation. $7.9 million opening weekend, is that, was that the final tally? I didn't even update the final numbers, but boy, this movie did not perform well on a budget north of $150 million. What do you, what do you make of that?

• 2:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Not surprised. The main reaction, the only thing that I was very sure about, well, I was sure of two things. One, I found the experience of watching the film irritating, and two, that it was not commercial. So I, that seemed to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, that the movie just really was so uncommercial that people gave up going to see it. And I do feel, this weekend, anecdotally, everyone I saw wanted to ask me about Digger and what I thought about it, but none of them had seen it. And no one really had plans to see it. You know, I, we said on our Digger episode, which I hope people will listen to after seeing the film, that we hoped they would see the film and before they listen to the podcast. No one did.

• 3:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Everyone was just like, no, no, no, I'm, I'm not gonna bother with this. Maybe I'll check it out on streaming, but this is so DOA that I don't have to go. So I do think that the reviews and just the negative buzz and tracking probably pressed it down even further.

• 3:58Sean Fennessey?

  I think you're right. I think the, the word was out pretty quickly that this was maybe not for everyone, but is still, it had a car crash quality. And so I think there was a curiosity about what it was that people were checking. So there's a lot of media about the film. There are a lot of takes flying around about the film.

• 4:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 4:14Sean Fennessey?

  I think you and I anticipated correctly that there would also be a kind of counter wave, that there would be some, some, some defense of the movie, maybe even a rising cult of this movie. And that's interesting. I've been trying to sort it out. There's a couple of things I wanted to talk to you about with respect to that. One of them is that, you know, many of Alejandro Iñárritu's compatriots publicly went to bat for him. Alfonso Cuarón took to X.com, the everything app, to share some thoughts about other films historically that received negative reviews and then were ultimately praised as all-time classics, which, you know what? I love my friends, too. You know, I, I, I understand.

• 4:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Sean Fennessey?

  And, and as you know, there are some things about Digger that I really quite liked.

• 5:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Damn.

• 5:03Sean Fennessey?

  I, I came out mixed positive on the movie with some, with some notes. The, the other thing is that the movie arrived at, at the, at the exact moment when Pam Abdi and Mike DeLuca were beheaded publicly by, by David Ellison. They're, they're not joining the Warner Brothers Paramount merger. They're not gonna run the film slate at Warner Brothers anymore. And I do want to have a long conversation with you about what their reign meant and what it means for them to not be in that position. But there's one quick Digger thing that I wanted to speak to you about. And I don't want to spoil the movie for anybody who skipped the last episode, but there's this kind of question of, is the whole point of the movie to satireize satires?

• 5:48Sean Fennessey?

  And I don't know that we had a very specific conversation about that, but this is the week of the social reckoning, and Aaron Sorkin has been identified as perhaps a target of the movie Digger. And I, I'm a little reluctant to be like, that's the sum total of what the point of Digger is, because that seems like the smallest target imaginable, and I felt like it was a bit bigger than that. And I think a lot of what we see in the crew's characters' emotional complication makes it a bit wider and deeper. Do you, do you think it's as simple as like, this is just, this is a, you know, don't look up and the newsroom and shit like that is just very stupid and we should make fun of it because it doesn't change anything in the real world?

• 6:29Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I think that's good posting, right? I think that's using all of the proper nouns available to you and connecting the dots. And you gotta have somewhere to go with the content. And also, you can't use the movie itself because really no one has seen the movie. So bring, bring in extra meme-able moments. See Aaron Sorkin's tan. I think that the movie is most bigger, both bigger and smaller than that. I think that it is operating on a very grand, non-specific, what does it mean to, to make satire or make art? And what can art do in the face of world, the world's great complications?

• 7:12Amanda Dobbins?

  And I think it's also just very much about Iñárritu. So, and, and about the lone filmmaker or, you know, the, the actor, in this case, Tom Cruise, and there is a meta Tom Cruise quality to it. But it feels very, very turned inward or on the grandest scale possible. Like, I'm, I'm not sure that, I, I would be surprised if Iñárritu crushed all four seasons of The Newsroom, three?

• 7:40Sean Fennessey?

  I think it was three. I did watch all three.

• 7:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Sean Fennessey?

  And, and enjoyed it.

• 7:44Amanda Dobbins?

  And you don't have any Oscars, so.

• 7:46Sean Fennessey?

  No, no. You think I'll get to over/under two Oscars for me before I die? What do you think?

• 7:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I think under, because you are historically against people having two Oscars. So if you got the first one, then you would sabotage the second. You'd try to spread the wealth. You know, that's the kind of guy you are.

• 8:05Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 8:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 8:06Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you for reading me that way. I agree with you about Digger, and you know, I suspect we'll talk about it a little bit more, because people are gonna start checking it out, and it's gonna be on VOD probably in about two weeks here. So, once that happens, we'll be able to.

• 8:18Amanda Dobbins?

  But which D? Like, which, I guess it'll be.

• 8:21Sean Fennessey?

  Which D indeed?

• 8:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Where, where will it be available? I, you know, you'll pay for it, but once it's free on streaming, which is where most people will watch the first 20 minutes, will they even make it to the twist? Is the big question.

• 8:37Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, when will they check out? That's a fascinating, yes, that's a fascinating note. I mean, presumably it goes to HBO Max by January?

• 8:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. And that'll exist as HBO Max?

• 8:48Sean Fennessey?

  I think so. When those two things will fuse as an elegant transition into our broader conversation about Warner Brothers and Paramount and everything that happened over the weekend. I do think that Digger is the last of its kind, for now. The $150 million auteurist, solipsistic fantasy with a massive movie star is the most emblematic possible movie of the Mike and Pam era, for good and for ill. And when you look at the movie that triumphed over it in Verity, which did very well this weekend, and is kind of, is, is IP, it is the opposite of the auteur-driven movie

• 9:31Sean Fennessey?

  that is original, in theory. It's a pretty stark comp to where we're all headed here. I'm not sure that Digger should have been number one. Like, it's not really qualitative judgment. I think it's just indicative of.

• 9:48Sean Fennessey?

  If you don't have the goods, see Sinners or Weapons, this business is really, really hard when trying to do those things. And one thing that I thought was quite cool about the Abdi and DeLuca era was that they somehow convinced David Zaslove that this was the way. And they had, I think, about as many wins as they did losses in this regime, which started in 2022, but probably really properly starts like end of 23, 24, because that's when the films that they chose started to hit the board. I mean, you can talk about that each one kind of individually briefly, but I don't know. What do you make of this news that they're not coming and that this period, this very

• 10:29Sean Fennessey?

  brief post-COVID period that from a major studio that was throwing all this stuff against the wall has ended and is now leading into Skydance?

• 10:40Amanda Dobbins?

  It's pretty grim. I'm feeling quite sad about it and hopeless. I think we've traded places and maybe that's because we've literally traded places and you've been in New York gallivanting around and seeing the future of cinema. Yeah, look at those jazz hands. And I learned the Mike and Pam news, like I think everyone possibly, including Mike DeLuca, from Matt Bellamy's newsletter on Thursday night. And I read that newsletter 20 minutes before I walked into a party for a Netflix film. And the mood was quite interesting. And the, it's not like I spoke to anyone.

• 11:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I didn't do any reporting. I just had a glass of wine and left. But the vibe of being at a, at a party for a film that will go straight to streaming, that we'll talk about, that is not, it's, you know, it's not One Battle After Another. It's not Digger. It's just another movie. And these people have just had their, these people who at least were trying to make original projects and put them in theaters have been fired. David Ellison is coming to bring, you know, all of his aviation movies to the masses. And everyone, lots of people are going to get fired.

• 12:06Amanda Dobbins?

  And the, the history of cinema of in Paramount and Warner Brothers, which have existed for decades and are part of Old Hollywood are now being, you know, erased with Larry Ellison's money. It was just, it was kind of grim. It was like, oh, so this is the future, huh? This seems, this is exciting. Not.

• 12:29Sean Fennessey?

  It's, it's pretty grim.

• 12:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 12:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean, in addition to the news about Abdi and DeLuca, the news that Ynon Kryts, the former Mattel CEO, would be coming in as the CEO of Skydance and that he is an experienced business executive who will probably be responsible for executing the redundancies and reducing a lot of the synergies between the two companies and all that business stuff. And also that, you know, that was something that he did at Mattel and he also is responsible for helping to shepherd the IP maturation of Barbie and less successfully Masters of the Universe and He-Man and the Matchbox film that's coming to Apple this month.

• 13:09Sean Fennessey?

  And so, yeah, Paramount and Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg, they will run the film division there and they have been at Paramount for about a year. And look, they're, they're pretty seasoned executives. Greenstein has mostly worked in movie marketing. He's been in a number of studios over the years, including he was in Paramount in the 2010s and he came back. Dana Goldberg has worked for David Ellison at Skydance for 15 or 16 years. Look at the movies that Skydance made. They made some cool stuff, right? They made Top Gun Maverick.

• 13:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Top Gun Maverick.

• 13:42Sean Fennessey?

  Big fan of that movie. They are, their first film was True Grit. Love that movie. They also made some other stuff. And that other stuff isn't great.

• 13:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Last night I was looking at, can we just read the slate of Paramount for the rest of 2026?

• 13:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. You do that and then I'll do the upside, okay?

• 14:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Where is, yes. Okay. What, what makes you think this isn't an upside?

• 14:07Sean Fennessey?

  Well, okay, well, fire away.

• 14:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, so upcoming, your, your most anticipated film of October, Street Fighter, October 16th.

• 14:16Sean Fennessey?

  I am pumped. I must say, I am pumped.

• 14:19Amanda Dobbins?

  And that's good. Listen, we, we all have our enthusiasms. Mine is Top Gun Maverick. November 13th, Ebenezer, starring Johnny Depp. November 25th, Focker-in-law, which is a co-production with Universal Pictures. I guess this is international distribution for Paramount. Okay, so here we go. Angry Birds Movie 3, December 23rd.

• 14:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, what did you think of Angry Birds Movie 2?

• 14:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Have you ever played any Angry Birds?

• 14:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 14:50Amanda Dobbins?

  You have?

• 14:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 14:51Amanda Dobbins?

  That's cool. Okay, were you really into phone games?

• 14:56Sean Fennessey?

  Was I really into phone games? No, I wasn't really into them. I've played, I've played phone games.

• 15:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 15:02Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 15:03Amanda Dobbins?

  I played some Candy Crush, but that's kind of it.

• 15:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Brick Breaker?

• 15:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Nope.

• 15:07Sean Fennessey?

  You never played Brick Breaker on your, on your, on your BlackBerry?

• 15:11Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 15:12Sean Fennessey?

  Do you have a BlackBerry?

• 15:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, but I didn't play any games with it. I just did the, what was the messaging called?

• 15:19Sean Fennessey?

  The messaging?

• 15:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 15:22Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. I guess it wasn't called texting.

• 15:24Amanda Dobbins?

  It wasn't, it was something different. Anyway, Mr. Irrelevant.

• 15:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm looking forward to that.

• 15:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I am as well.

• 15:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I saw the trailer for that ahead of Verity and I was like, yeah.

• 15:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 15:34Sean Fennessey?

  Down the middle sentimental sports drama, yes.

• 15:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, but so Street Fighter, Ebenezer, Angry Birds Movie 3 and Mr. Irrelevant.

• 15:43Sean Fennessey?

  Right, so I think, I think based on that, I don't think that's the worst slate of all time.

• 15:48Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 15:48Sean Fennessey?

  And honestly Paramount has had a pretty mid last three or four years in general with the studio because they've been in this kind of transitory moment. I think that you can also look at all the people that they've signed up to make stuff in the last six to 12 months as also indicative of what they're interested in. Now, I do think that there is a little bit of like Americana that feels meaningful to them, you know? Like that there's going to be, they're, they're making a Call of Duty movie with Peter Burke.

• 16:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 16:17Sean Fennessey?

  Right, which I think is a very smart IP adaptation and Peter Burke is very good at war movies, but that does speak to a different kind of audience, I think, than what some of what Pam and Mike were doing. But, you know, they also signed the Duffer Brothers away from Netflix, the creators of Stranger Things, who I'm, I'm interested to see what kinds of movies they'll make. They signed John M. Chu to a multi-picture deal. I'm kind of, kind of a coin flip on John Chu movies. I really, neither of us really cared for Wicked at all, but like I like Crazy Rich Asians. He's made some movies I like.

• 16:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I wish, but Crazy Rich Asians just should be so much better. And that's one where I, I wish that they would just like redo it and they can even give, give John, John M. Chu another chance, but I'm just like, it's one of those where it's just not good enough.

• 16:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I think he's like a steady Hollywood hand, not like, that's not like an embarrassment. There's no code there for what it means that they hired John Chu. And then there's more people, there's, you know, they, the first thing that Goldberg and Greenstein did was they signed James Mangold and Timothy Chalamet to make a crime movie, which I'm, I mean, I'm, I'm great with that.

• 17:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 17:19Sean Fennessey?

  I love that conceptually. They, they extended Dan Trachtenberg, who's been making the Predator films for Fox to a new deal. Parker Finn, who made the Smile movies, which I'm a little bit more mixed on, but now he's making a remake of Possession, which I don't think is necessarily the greatest idea in the world, but it's at least, it's, it's aggressive. It's, it, there's something fresh about that. And then Will Smith has a new deal with the studio as well, which is complicated.

• 17:46Amanda Dobbins?

  And Damien Chazelle's The Prison Movie is also.

• 17:50Sean Fennessey?

  His Prison Movie is theoretically coming out next year, starring Killian Murphy and Daniel Craig. So I, I think there are some like optimistic notes. You know, Tiana Taylor's directorial debut comes out next year.

• 18:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Sean Fennessey?

  There'll be some other stuff. I don't know if it's going to be amazing, but if you look back at Mike and Pam and even the, the eras before that, right? You had a pretty successful stretch for the Warner Brothers Film Studio in the 2000s because it's also the same time as Harry Potter and the rise of the Nolan Batman films. And of course, all the Nolan movies, all the way up until after the Tenet fiasco. And, you know, we also have had, the Dune movies have been coming out over this time, which are like, I'm not sure that Abdi and DeLuca necessarily got credit for that. But then when you had all that IP in place and then you stacked it on top of these movies, it was pretty exciting.

• 18:49Sean Fennessey?

  So like, let's go through the list. What do you think? I've put together the wins here.

• 18:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:53Sean Fennessey?

  And they're, they're almost in order to me, but I'll start. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Sinners was the first film that came to mind because Sinners was a movie where like they made a really tough deal on Sinners where they had to give the copyright back to the filmmaker and that was widely criticized. And it turned out to be a really smart move because Sinners was such a huge hit and also an awards film and I think goes down as like a very memorable movie from, if not this decade, maybe this century, that people have a big relationship to. So if you make just one of those, that's pretty good. Will they be making Sinners at Paramount? I'm not sure.

• 19:28Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, and they certainly won't be making that deal in order to, to land the film, both from a business perspective and also the, the Ryan Coogler's carve out or special contract, whatever you want to call it, was. In part because of the text of the film and what the film was about. And it just does not really seem so far like the Skydance ownership is going to be sensitive to those kinds of themes and requests, but I guess we don't know. Maybe that's not fair to say. Yeah. But also, so you have in here Sinners, Weapons, and then One Battle After Another, winning Best Picture, all grouped in a row, but those were all in the same year.

• 20:11Sean Fennessey?

  They were.

• 20:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. So that's, that's a pretty good job.

• 20:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's a really good job, though. I do have a question for you when we get through the wins and losses about that.

• 20:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I want to talk about it, too, which is just kind of, they stacked one amazing year that they coasted on for 18 months. And that was clearly a strategy of sorts, though I do start to wonder how much of a strategy it is, because all of these movies are big productions and with lots of people and you're working far in advance. And I think you have some say of when things are ready and when things are going to be rolled out. And, but I don't, do we think that they were there long enough and had enough foresight? And could arrange things enough that they were like, okay, we'll just do 2025 and stack

• 21:02Amanda Dobbins?

  all of our good movies at once so that then hopefully the sale goes through and we're in a, in a good place?

• 21:09Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, I think they and other people at the company knew which movies, not so much which movies to release, because you know, when you're, when you're in that environment, like these films are tested, they have an expectation of what audiences are going to do. There's a long range tracking for certain movies and that have certain particular audiences.

• 21:27Sean Fennessey?

  It's really more about what movies to hold. And what they did is they held six absolute stinkers till 2026 to make the film studio seem as attractive as possible in the negotiation phase. So that choice, to me, made the 2025 gambit look really good. I mean, in addition to those three movies that we talked about, and look, One Battle After Another is not like a massive financial success, but it is also basically a forever movie annuity, having one Best Picture. So you put those three together, those are big wins.

• 21:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Also, also on this podcast, we do care about like the quality of films.

• 22:00Sean Fennessey?

  No doubt.

• 22:01Amanda Dobbins?

  And like, and doing the right thing and investing in art, which is also when you were talking about how Mike and Pam were criticized for the Ryan Coogler deal, like criticized by who? Bankers. We're not bankers, right?

• 22:12Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 22:12Amanda Dobbins?

  So like, we, good job on that one.

• 22:14Sean Fennessey?

  I know, but the problem is, is that like, you're, you're right, but they're executives. You know, they're not creatives.

• 22:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally. And we are having a conversation about their business decisions that led to a business decision of them no longer having a job. I get it. But I do also want us to remember that One Battle After Another was our favorite film of last year, and we, we like it when movies are good.

• 22:35Sean Fennessey?

  Totally. There are many episodes in which you can hear me saying that very thing.

• 22:39Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, I'm just, I'm trying to hold on to our humanity. If no one else can, we are, we're holding on to it.

• 22:45Sean Fennessey?

  No, I've lost it. Mine's gone. It's over. It's over. I'm just, I'm just a banker now. Dune, kept the train on the tracks with Dune. Dune is obviously a legendary production, not, I don't mean that in the adjectival sense. I mean, literally the company legendary. Getting a Minecraft movie out in the world the way that they did, I think Toby Emmerich's regime hired the director and got that movie started, but they marketed it well, they released it well, and now it's a mega hit, and they're putting out another one next year.

• 23:12Amanda Dobbins?

  And they signed Kirsten Dunst for a number two, so.

• 23:14Sean Fennessey?

  Huge. Huge for you, huge for all of us. Distributed F1, they didn't pay for it, but they put it out in the world and they made that movie a hit. Superman, I think Superman's a win. I think especially in the slow decay of new superhero content, they did pretty good business with that. It probably could have been bigger, but it definitely wasn't bad. Weathering Heights did pretty good business as well, and that was another deal that they signed where they really went aggressively after that movie and they won it over Netflix by giving it theatrical. And, you know, even though you and I were not really crazy about Weathering Heights, I like that. I like the idea of Emerald Fennel getting, getting a deal like that and putting a movie as, as big as that movie is out in the world.

• 23:54Amanda Dobbins?

  It's cool. It's doing cool things instead of Ebenezer.

• 23:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Beetlejuice 2, you didn't really like that one.

• 24:01Amanda Dobbins?

  It was okay. It felt a little reheated. I mean, it gave us one of the great jokes of this podcast, which was you texting us from Las Vegas in like 2020, being like, hey, word on the street, Beetlejuice 2, the new citizen came.

• 24:17Sean Fennessey?

  No, that is not what I said. It was going to be huge is what I said, which is what happened.

• 24:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 24:24Sean Fennessey?

  New Line, the train was on the tracks. Conjuring 5 came out and crushed and Conjuring 4, and Final Destination 6 was a banger, and all those movies seemed to be doing just fine. And you know, they marketed Wonka straight to success.

• 24:41Amanda Dobbins?

  How did, how did your body feel as you were saying that out loud?

• 24:45Sean Fennessey?

  Well, at least I said it. I tell the truth on this podcast.

• 24:49Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, here are some misses.

• 24:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 24:51Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, they almost got fired twice.

• 24:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 24:53Sean Fennessey?

  So.

• 24:54Amanda Dobbins?

  And then they did get fired, so.

• 24:56Sean Fennessey?

  And then they did get fired. That's not ideal.

• 24:57Amanda Dobbins?

  It's, it's funny how they, they would show up in Las Vegas every year to present their slate, and their presence was, one year they were definitely about to get fired, except then they just presented like a historic run of movies, so they were fine. And then the next year, they just tried to do a victory lap, but they were about to get fired again. And they were also like, here are all of the movies that we know that no one's going to go see, which as well. Yeah, they've been through it. I hope they don't read the comments.

• 25:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, they've both had really big and great careers in many ways, but they have just become so emblematic of this kind of cinephilia versus the encroaching tech monster eating Hollywood war. So that's sort of why we're memorializing their era in this way.

• 25:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 25:50Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, Joker, fully adieu.

• 25:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, didn't work out.

• 25:53Sean Fennessey?

  It didn't. And honestly, I think it changed movies in a huge way because it now means that no Hollywood movies go to film festivals anymore.

• 26:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Really true. So thanks for that.

• 26:02Sean Fennessey?

  That was interesting. Digger, obviously, is a massive L. The movie's going to lose $200 million to the studio. That's not good. That's not good, Amanda.

• 26:09Amanda Dobbins?

  It's not good.

• 26:11Sean Fennessey?

  You don't want that.

• 26:11Amanda Dobbins?

  It's not your money.

• 26:13Sean Fennessey?

  It's not my money. The Bride?

• 26:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Sean Fennessey?

  Again, another movie that like, I kind of liked. Whispers, I kind of liked it.

• 26:21Amanda Dobbins?

  That's good. That was another very irritating movie to watch.

• 26:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And, and I guess in some ways it's really matched with both Digger and the next film, which is Mickey 17, which you compared it to when we discussed the Digger last week. And those three movies are the downside, I think specifically of the weapons, sinners, One Battle After Another trilogy of power. Like, they are auteur-driven flops. And there's no other way around it. Mickey 17 did okay business. You know, it did like, it crossed like 100 million worldwide. Like, it made a lot more money than Digger's going to make, that's for sure. But, um, yeah, those three movies are not total successes. The End of Oak Street is a weird one where like, it was kind of on the shelf for a while, got recut. I ended up liking it. Did you end up seeing it?

• 27:04Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I still didn't see it because it got dumped in August. And it's available on streaming. I just, you know, I think about it every night, and then I have to watch something else for the show, which is, I guess, how many people are experiencing it.

• 27:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, maybe when it hits like HBO Max, we should, we should chat about it a little bit, because I'm curious what your thoughts are on it. I liked it, but it didn't totally hit the way they were hoping. Another thing that has been happening, which is so interesting, and we've only talked about maybe once so far, is, you know, they were not able to lobby to keep Coyote versus Acme. We don't know what their role was in terms of the David Zaslove decision to pump that movie off the slate entirely and eventually sell it to Ketchup Entertainment. But Coyote versus Acme, over the weekend, crossed $100 million worldwide in the box office. That's pretty good, you know?

• 27:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Congratulations to Ketchup Media.

• 27:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, very exciting for them. They bet wisely. And people seem to like that movie. I think most of the people who like that movie are 37 and not nine.

• 27:59Amanda Dobbins?

  That was our experience. Yeah.

• 28:00Sean Fennessey?

  But they like it, and that, and that's certainly something. And then, of course, the Batgirl fiasco, which is not, it's not Abdi and De Luca's fault, but that, to just delete a movie is, is abhorrent. I mean, that's just horrible.

• 28:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, the, the Batgirl of it all leads into the next issue, which is DC more broadly. And you put Superman in the win column, but everything else is, been pretty bleak. And Supergirl is still the worst movie of the year for me personally.

• 28:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's down there for me, too.

• 28:32Amanda Dobbins?

  And there just does not seem like there's a lot of juice with anything that James Gunn has going on. And I know that I'm not supposed to count him out because you all liked those movies with the raccoon, and that's very beautiful.

• 28:49Sean Fennessey?

  Guardians of the Galaxy, great films. Um, yeah, I think Man of Tomorrow will be big. I think, because I think he's gonna, I think he's gonna pour a lot of the DC Universe into that movie, and it's gonna feel more like an Avengers DC movie, where a lot of figures that we know about, and so they're gonna, it's gonna draw us in. I mean, I liked Superman, so I'm curious to see what he does. But in general, I do think the future of DC is a little dodgy, and it seems like while James Gunn and Peter Safran are coming over in the transition to Paramount, it's a little bit of a like wait and see period here in terms of what the rest of their slate looks like, because after Clayface and Man of Tomorrow, I'm not sure if there's another film that's officially been greenlit yet. Okay, since we're talking about the future of DC Studios, too, we should also mention

• 29:30Sean Fennessey?

  the Batman Part 2, which is technically not under the James Gunn and Peter Safran leadership, but is a movie that is hugely anticipated. We had heard that Robert Pattinson had returned to London to start shooting that movie. This is the sequel to Matt Reeves' original film, which came out a few years ago. And then there's been some news this morning that Matt Reeves is stepping away from this movie for personal reasons, and there had been some rumblings about that going on. And so this movie that was originally planned for February of 2028, it now may be a little bit longer. I'm not sure if there's much for us to necessarily discuss here, but it is another film that is a piece of the puzzle in this merger. Horizon?

• 30:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I mean, release the tapes, you know?

• 30:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, that was only distribution for that first movie, but the second movie is now, is it never going to come out? Kevin Costner's Western trilogy, cortology, whatever it's going to, supposed to end up becoming?

• 30:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I have no idea. I know two people who have seen it.

• 30:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 30:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Zach Baron and Griffin Newman.

• 30:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 30:31Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and you didn't go?

• 30:33Sean Fennessey?

  Two goats. I fucked up. I should have gone to the Santa Barbara Film Festival and gone to see Horizon Part 2, and then I didn't. And then there was some negative press around the film, and then, I don't know, just now it's gone. Sad.

• 30:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Very, very weird. Were they part of the decision-making process that allowed the original plan of Horizon 1 premiering, I believe in June, and Horizon 2 being slated six weeks later?

• 31:00Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know.

• 31:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Because that's not what you want.

• 31:03Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 31:04Amanda Dobbins?

  That, that decision belongs in the L column for whoever, whosever it was.

• 31:08Sean Fennessey?

  You're right, and thank you for reminding me of that. And the, the removal of it, given its performance, uh, is ridiculous.

• 31:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Sean Fennessey?

  And yet, like, they, I hon- I honestly feel like they could have just dropped two on streaming and done good business. Because it, I mean, that, that film with its multi-story narrative, like, it kind of feels like a TV show. It feels more like a TV show than it does a film. And it's got like five different storylines and, you know, it's like cutting back and forth between the A-plot and the C-plot and the D-plot, you know?

• 31:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Who's to say they still can't? I assume that Horizon Two is owned by Warner Brothers today and...

• 31:44Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's owned by Kevin Costner.

• 31:46Amanda Dobbins?

  It's still owned by Kevin?

• 31:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, they're only distributing the movie.

• 31:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, that's right. Okay.

• 31:52Sean Fennessey?

  This is a Megalopolis situation.

• 31:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, I forgot about that. That's right, because he put, he sold the ranch or whatever, or the, you know, the carpenter area beach.

• 32:01Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 32:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Sean Fennessey?

  So, he sold it to me.

• 32:05Amanda Dobbins?

  You love the beach, so congratulations.

• 32:07Sean Fennessey?

  He did not sell it to me. Uh, Practical Magic Two, I put on here even though it, like, whatever, its financial fortunes didn't really matter to anything, I just thought it sucked. So, I just put it on here as a loss.

• 32:16Amanda Dobbins?

  It wasn't very good.

• 32:18Sean Fennessey?

  Big swings still to come. That's the other thing that is really fascinating about this next 12 months is there's all these Pam and Mike movies that they greenlit that are just coming out. And, and some of them are, are like Man of Tomorrow, right, where it's like, that's a big IP summer movie and, you know, anybody would have made that movie essentially, like James Gunn and Peter Safran were the ones who pushed that forward. But the first one to come is Remain, which in February comes out, the new M. Night Shyamalan movie, which actually screened at Beyond Fest last week. And I'm kicking myself that I was not there. They did a screening at the Directors Village Theater of The Sixth Sense. Did you see this?

• 32:51Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 32:52Sean Fennessey?

  They did the screening of The Sixth Sense at Directors Village Theater. There, a series of Shyamalan films were shown at Beyond Fest here in LA. And then he came out after the film and he said, "Guys, if I was really cool, I would just, like, show you Remain right now, but it's not finished, so I'm really sorry." You know what? Fuck it, I'm just gonna show it to you. And then they just ran the movie four months before it's coming out. And it got a very positive response. Now, it got a positive response from people, sickos who went to go see The Sixth Sense on like a Wednesday night in Los Angeles.

• 33:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, and then we're also able to stay in their seats for another two-hour movie unplanned, which is the target audience for that. It's very savvy.

• 33:27Sean Fennessey?

  It was smart, yeah. They generated some nice buzz for the movie.

• 33:30Amanda Dobbins?

  But you, you can't kick yourself for that, because how could you have known to go see...

• 33:35Sean Fennessey?

  Not to be too much of a freak, but I just had a feeling that was gonna happen. I, I swear to God, I swear to God. And I thought about that with like my travel dates and stuff. Anyway, I blew it. Number two is the most important movie of the year for you in 2027. It's, it's Paris Paramount, which could not have a more amazing title.

• 33:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, although it may be renamed, apparently according to Nancy Meyers' Instagram, because, um, a, a crew member got a Paris Paramount tattoo that she Instagrammed, and then she noted that she told him it might change anyway. That, that's kind of what we know about Paris Paramount in a nutshell. That story says it all.

• 34:16Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 34:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Anyway, this is the much-delayed Nancy Meyers-written and directed film that was at Netflix with Scarlett Johansson and now is at Warner Brothers, soon to be Skydance, not with Scarlett Johansson. And, um, a lot of, a lot of information coming about this movie right now. You know, I'm protecting my heart. We'll, we'll wait and see. It's slated for Christmas 2027. I think it has been quite expensive. It's certainly been shooting for a very long time. And I've seen them building a lot of sets on Nancy's Instagram. I don't know.

• 34:54Sean Fennessey?

  That's a big risk. Uh, it may not really matter long-term because it's happening and it's coming out no matter what, so Paramount's gonna have to market it. And we've got J.J. Abrams' The Great Beyond, which was delayed one year from November to next October.

• 35:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Sean Fennessey?

  We've got our friend Sam Esmael's new movie, starring Julia Roberts' Panic Carefully, which I'm really looking forward to. That's coming in the spring. Uh, we've got Zach Craigers The Flood, of course, his follow-up to Resident Evil, which is an original sci-fi extravaganza that you talked about when he was on the show. And I suspect will probably work, just given what Craigers been up to over the last few years.

• 35:24Amanda Dobbins?

  And Jennifer Lawrence is gonna star in it, right?

• 35:26Sean Fennessey?

  She is indeed going to star in that.

• 35:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 35:28Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I'm excited about that. And then Gladys, which is the spin-off of Weapons, and I wonder if that will still happen. Because maybe Paramount may want to relook at the Weapons IP and do something that they want to do, rather than what was pushed forward, since this is very, a very valuable property. I don't know what stage Gladys is in right now, but Craigers not directing that movie. So, if I were Paramount, I'd be looking very closely at the way they're executing on every single bit of valuable film coming along. There's a couple of other examples of that, like Gremlins Three is coming out, I think in 2028, directed by Chris Columbus. Yes, indeed, that Chris Columbus.

• 36:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Wow.

• 36:06Sean Fennessey?

  Not, not the other Chris Columbus.

• 36:09Sean Fennessey?

  So, the, the famed explorer who's been dead for 600 years is directing the film, which is really exciting.

• 36:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Great.

• 36:14Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, and yeah, Gremlins. Have you seen Gremlins?

• 36:18Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't think so. I think that I've seen, I, you know, I know what the Gremlins are. I, I guess I don't know their mythology. It is a bit of a what is, uh, what is her legend situation, but I do know what they look like.

• 36:30Sean Fennessey?

  It's time. It's time. This, this, this Christmas, it's, it's a Christmas film. It's time.

• 36:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you think my children will like it, or is it just for me?

• 36:38Sean Fennessey?

  It's too scary, too scary.

• 36:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh.

• 36:40Sean Fennessey?

  Too scary. Seven, maybe, for Gremlins, I would say. Gremlins Rocks, Gremlins Two, all-time classic, one of the greatest films ever made.

• 36:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 36:50Sean Fennessey?

  Simply put, Gremlins Two: The New Batch.

• 36:54Sean Fennessey?

  An extraordinary satire. So, it does things Digger could never even dream of.

• 36:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, I believe you, because Digger dreamed of a lot of things, but did very few of them.

• 37:03Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. Uh, what's, what's, what's Pam and Mike's legacy?

• 37:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, it, it feels like the end of an era of Hollywood. And I don't know whether it's the end of the first 100 years of Hollywood, or just the end of this very weird time in Hollywood, where, as you said, uh, big tech companies are coming in and disrupting used, uh, intentionally as, uh, the way that films are made and distributed. And so, director names, movie stars, theatrical releases, big, big original, uh, swings don't make sense anymore.

• 37:46Amanda Dobbins?

  And they were the last people doing it, and, and now it's done, and we all march into the ocean together with Skydance and its airplane movies.

• 37:58Sean Fennessey?

  I hope not. I hope it's better than that. I hope it's better than that.

• 38:00Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, you've seen a lot of things in New York this week. There, you know, there is, there are many other things happening in film culture that are exciting. But they were old-school studio heads doing a thing, trying in a lot of ways to recreate what we loved about the 90s. And every once in a while succeeding and also coming up against the market realities of the last five years. And now it's done.

• 38:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we're, um, I'm gonna keep a close watch on whether or not they pop up again, because it's not out of the realm of possibility to me that they could appear at Sony if Tom Rothman, uh, retires. You know, I think he's in his early 70s at this point. Or if Apple continues to build their film department, that's somewhere that they could go. However, like even this conversation that we're having here, which is again, an extended conversation about executives on a movie celebration podcast.

• 38:55Sean Fennessey?

  I think it speaks to a little bit of the mourning and a little bit of my, our, our shared concern that their particular skillset is just less meaningful to the future of the business. And then that impacts the kinds of movies we get to talk about on the show. But you're right, and I have been seeing some good stuff in New York, and I will, we, we can talk about that, because you've seen a couple of the things as well at this point that have been here at the festival. So, on Friday's episode, we'll get into some of the cool stuff that we can preview that we've liked or, or not liked out of the festival. Okay, Amanda, before we dive into Verity, we do have some breaking news here this morning, which is that, um, Sicario Three is happening. I don't know if Jack can pipe in a CR screaming Sicario at the top of his lungs.

• 39:36Sean Fennessey?

  News alert, but it's not only happening, Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin are returning. Did you, have you seen Sicario: Day of the Soldado, the second Sicario film?

• 39:46Amanda Dobbins?

  I haven't. I've consumed much content of Chris Ryan talking about it.

• 39:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, sure.

• 39:51Amanda Dobbins?

  And I almost feel like I, I should have like a, one of those like CR, you know, cut-out masks that I could just put over my face right here, and then I could just pretend to be CR. I'm very happy for him. Denis Villeneuve is not directing this, so, you know?

• 40:06Sean Fennessey?

  Nor is Stefano Sollima, who directed the second film. And I'm, I'm not seeing, um, I'm not seeing Taylor Sheridan's name here in the news either. In fact, um, Patrick McKinley, who directed, uh, The Weight, the film we talked about a couple, couple of episodes ago, the Ethan Hawke's survival thriller, is the new director. And Stephen Knight, a very, you know, well-known, uh, writer behind Peaky Blinders, among other things, is writing the screenplay. And I guess I hadn't realized that Sicario was one of those properties that is not actually properly attached to a studio. And that it sounded, the Lionsgate released the first two movies, not clear who's gonna be releasing this movie, they're gonna take it to market. I'm sure Taylor Sheridan stands to profit from this in some way, since he created it, but...

• 40:47Amanda Dobbins?

  And that's always what we worry about.

• 40:49Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I think he's doing pretty well, actually, you heard. He bought a ranch. It's crazy.

• 40:54Sean Fennessey?

  Emily Blunt returning?

• 40:56Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I, I want nice things for her.

• 41:00Sean Fennessey?

  She was not into, just so you know.

• 41:02Amanda Dobbins?

  All right.

• 41:02Sean Fennessey?

  Did not make an appearance. Two, one of the most, um...

• 41:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Depraved films.

• 41:06Sean Fennessey?

  Darkly violent films. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:08Amanda Dobbins?

  That was the, the top-line report, and so I just thought I would leave it to Chris. You know, I've been listening to a lot of Gwen Stefani in the past few weeks.

• 41:19Sean Fennessey?

  Gwen Stefani?

• 41:19Amanda Dobbins?

  In honor of Emily Blunt and her performance in Disclosure Day, which

• 41:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 41:24Amanda Dobbins?

  been overlooked and underappreciated. So, whatever she wants to do, you know, that isn't being Mary Poppins again.

• 41:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna keep my eye on this one.

• 41:35Amanda Dobbins?

  I think we all will.

• 41:36Sean Fennessey?

  Feels a bit like a cash grab to me. I'm not sure if there's another chapter in this story, but you know what? Uh, I await CR's thoughts. That's what I'll say. Okay, let's transition now to our conversation about Verity, which we'll do right after this.

• 41:54Sean Fennessey?

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• 44:19Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Verity. This is the new feature film directed by Michael Showalter. It's written by Nick Antosca. It's an adaptation of Colleen Hoover's bestselling novel of the same name. It stars Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett.

• 44:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. Set the scene for us. Set the scene for us. Where were you?

• 44:35Sean Fennessey?

  The screening or the story?

• 44:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Your screening.

• 44:38Sean Fennessey?

  I saw it at the AMC Lincoln Square, one of the greatest movie theaters in America. I saw it in the Dolby room there. Sold-out crowd at noon on a Saturday.

• 44:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 44:49Sean Fennessey?

  And yeah, there was a buzz in the air. We're about to witness cinema.

• 44:58Amanda Dobbins?

  You went alone.

• 45:00Sean Fennessey?

  I went alone, yeah. No, I wasn't casting around to see if anybody would join me and spend their Saturday afternoon with me. I mean, even on a trip to New York, where I'm seeing the great works of cinema at an international film festival, honestly, candidly, meeting many cool people, some very famous people, like I'm having a very fun weekend. I did go see Verity at an AMC.

• 45:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Alone on a Saturday at noon.

• 45:24Sean Fennessey?

  This is the life that we chose.

• 45:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Alone at noon on a Saturday, that's freedom to a parent of a young child.

• 45:31Sean Fennessey?

  You are absolutely right. And in that way, I really appreciated it. How did you see it? It's that your scene.

• 45:37Amanda Dobbins?

  I went with Yasi Solak to one of the Wednesday night special fans preview screenings.

• 45:44Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, wow.

• 45:44Amanda Dobbins?

  At the, well, I mean, just that you could buy tickets for.

• 45:47Sean Fennessey?

  Did you have like a watermelon appletini or anything?

• 45:49Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I did have a glass of Kim Crawford, obviously. And Yasi tried to bring her Cheesecake Factory meal into the theater and was stopped. So that set sort of a tough tone for the night.

• 46:04Sean Fennessey?

  That absolutely breaks my rule, Amanda. We do not bring meals into screenings. That's just not okay. I love Yasi, but Yasi, please, come on.

• 46:12Amanda Dobbins?

  It wasn't me, first of all. I had a meal at home alone with my child because it was, I went on my child's second birthday to see Verity alone. I was like, good night, happy birthday. And then...

• 46:26Sean Fennessey?

  You make it sound like you left him at like 3:00 PM.

• 46:32Amanda Dobbins?

  I did sort of. I was like, we really, we got to wrap this up because the tickets, they're for 720 bucks, so I need you to go to sleep. It was also the night before his first day of school, so I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, school, I love you, bye. Threw him in the crib, drove straight to the Americana, we had the whole Cheesecake Factory altercation, and then I got a large glass of Kim Crawford. And we were, I don't know if we were in the Dolby room or like the prime room, but so I also saw it at an AMC without my children. And it was pretty packed. And this wasn't like a gatekeeping screening. It was open to the public. You just could, if you were very excited about the release of Verity, go early.

• 47:16Amanda Dobbins?

  And it seemed that people did.

• 47:18Sean Fennessey?

  Increasingly common now to get the two days early screening, especially at the major theater chains for movies like this. For anybody who's not aware of it, I'll give them the description of what happens in the movie. "Hired to be a ghostwriter for renowned author Verity Crawford, Lowen Ashley's assignment takes a dark turn when she discovers chilling autobiographical notes. As she wrestles with disturbing and twisted confessions about Verity's husband, she soon finds it hard to separate fiction from reality, manipulation from attraction, and opportunity from obsession." What did you think of the film Verity?

• 47:53Amanda Dobbins?

  I've been writing for this, right? Not having read the book and not having seen it. I think I drafted it and most anticipated whatever. I thought there was possibility for this to be my kind of fun at the movies. And I did have fun, primarily because I was sitting next to Yasi and I had a large glass of Kim Crawford. And yeah, I was in the mood to have fun, but I was quite disappointed. I was really, this was not the level of trash that I wanted.

• 48:29Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's not good.

• 48:30Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 48:30Sean Fennessey?

  It's not good for a variety of reasons. I think this is an interesting cast, and we can have a long emotional conversation about the unemotionality of Dakota Johnson at some point here. But I think, given some of the folks who were involved, and the sense that the movie does seem to have some relationship to its own idea of camp, its own idea of trashiness, and that it sort of finds itself in a having its cake and eating it too scenario, where there are times when Anne Hathaway's performance in particular is so outsized and mannered and specific and kind of referencing things that make us think of another time.

• 49:14Sean Fennessey?

  And Josh Hartnett similarly, I think, is in sort of like the Richard Gere role in this film, you know? Playing a very specific kind of man who like maybe cuckolded, but may also be in charge and maybe deviant, or maybe isn't.

• 49:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 49:26Sean Fennessey?

  And Dakota Johnson is somewhere between Sharon Stone and Gene Triplehorn here, you know? Is she the willowy innocent, or is she the voracious feminine psycho? And so it knows about the archetypes. It has a couple of amusing lines of dialogue or trashy exploitation-style moments.

• 49:51Amanda Dobbins?

  It has excellent production design and costume design. It is expensive.

• 49:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 49:59Amanda Dobbins?

  And when we're talking about this particular genre and even the Colleen Hoover adaptations, it is noticeably different in a positive way.

• 50:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you should, I think you should talk a little bit about what we can expect at this point from Colleen Hoover stories, though, because this movie isn't Basic Instinct or Jagged Edge. You know, it's not an erotic thriller. It's not like an erotic legal thriller. This is a new kind of brand of movie that has been born out of her fiction. How would you describe it? Like, what are the signals of it?

• 50:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Very taboo subjects, kind of playing into a lot of what is popular in true crime. Right now, there is always an imperiled woman. There's always some sort of evil husband. Their relationships are complicated, sometimes abusive, sometimes violent. There are, there are often kids in danger. There is, there's just, there's really, really kind of lurid conflict throughout that is

• 51:19Amanda Dobbins?

  packaged in a way where it serves the lurid interest of the reader, I think, but also is supposed to make them feel okay about being interested in it because they're wrapped up in some sort of weird love story or romance most of the time. And so they, I guess technically are romances, but they're always, I think the, the phrase in the industry is like, quote, dark romance, because it's always something really messed up. And there's a woman who is either trying to find herself or find someone else in these

• 52:02Amanda Dobbins?

  extremely, extremely fucked up situations.

• 52:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, so this is the fourth adaptation. And, you know, four for four in terms of success. Right now, we've had the, it ends with us, which is the Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni cultural fiasco. We have regretting you, the funniest movie of 2025. We have reminders of him, which came out earlier this year, the Micah Monroe, Tyreek Withers movie. And now we have this movie. This is a very starry cast. Michael Showalter, you know, to me is a legend forever as a member of the state comedy troupe. One of my favorite shows as a kid on MTV and has transitioned into what has historically been known as women's pictures. You know, he directed Jessica Chastain to an Academy Award for her performance as Tammy Faye Baker.

• 52:54Sean Fennessey?

  And this movie is in a somewhat similar vein. It's not a docu drama, but it's sort of a spin on that. His last movie was the idea of you, which also starred Anne Hathaway for Amazon, also a literary adaptation.

• 53:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 53:05Sean Fennessey?

  And, you know, he has a facility, I guess, with these kinds of performers, you know, and there are not very many great male directors of female stars at this moment. So points for that, I suppose. I just feel like this movie is tilted in an angle that like makes it relatively unsatisfying. And then also I think has like a truly awful ending.

• 53:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Stinks. The movie is at war with its source material and you really do feel like show up because the idea of you is, is also a romance. I think it's broadly in the same genre of, it's very different audiences, I think, because these audience have, you know, their own armies that it's, it's a thing. They are, they're very powerful and you see that in the box office. But, but the idea of you is not that dissimilar in that it is adapted from a self-published romance that had a rabid online following starring Anne Hathaway.

• 54:08Amanda Dobbins?

  That is about a woman in a creative field who finds herself in an unusual relationship. And how is she gonna get through it? The idea of you is that she's found herself in an unusual relationship with Harry Styles and is navigating like the media. And the, in verity, it's that she's found herself in a relationship with a man who has a wife in a coma and is also, and the wife in the coma might also be haunting her. And also she wants to have the wife in the coma's life because they're both writers.

• 54:49Amanda Dobbins?

  So I, you can just feel that the film has disdain for the source material, or at least, if not disdain, feels really constricted by it and doesn't know what to do with it. And so you mentioned, there is kind of a self-awareness and there are campy, funny moments where I do think the, the movie and the filmmakers are making their version of what this, this setup would be. And it is ridiculous. And Anne Hathaway is basically like playing Joan Collins and there are funny jump scares and, and, and that, that aren't scary, that are, that are laughing and the reveals are sort of interesting.

• 55:34Amanda Dobbins?

  And then they, they keep being pulled back to like what actually happens in the book. And you can tell that the film isn't that interested in the source material and also that the source material ultimately does not really align with this campy, aren't we all having fun here? Isn't this ridiculous take on the story? And you said, it's like having your cake and eating your, eating it too, which it sort of is, but honestly, it ultimately can't have it both ways. And that's why the ending is so very, very frustrating and falls so flat. Because number one, it doesn't make sense, but number two, it just, any, any adaptive

• 56:19Amanda Dobbins?

  juice that the filmmakers bring to the material, it kind of gets let's go at the very end.

• 56:24Sean Fennessey?

  And due to its faithfulness, right? Like ultimately by sticking to the script of what's in the plotting of the story. Yeah. And I mean, we can talk about some of the details of it.

• 56:34Sean Fennessey?

  The movie, the three previous Colleen Hoover adaptations are not, there's no wink in any of those three movies. They're very straightforward, sincere, melodramatic explorations of, as you said, sort of women in very difficult relationships, for lack of a better phrase. And some of them are really, you know, about mortality and some of them are about abuse and some of them are also just like, I wish I was fucking my husband's brother-in-law. You know, like there's always like-

• 57:02Amanda Dobbins?

  But all three, but also there was a car crash, but also, you know, there was some sort of domestic abuse.

• 57:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 57:12Sean Fennessey?

  This movie is about a young writer who is cast to effectively ghostwrite another writer's work after they've been paralyzed. And the, I would say roughly 32% of the movie is Dakota Johnson reading.

• 57:30Amanda Dobbins?

  It's true.

• 57:31Sean Fennessey?

  Which is one of the least cinematic things I've ever seen.

• 57:35Amanda Dobbins?

  I would say, oh, so you mean just visually? Well, so it's Dakota Johnson reading, but it is Anne Hathaway narrating.

• 57:45Sean Fennessey?

  Correct.

• 57:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. So you're looking at Anne Hathaway reading in a beautiful house, which is a real house, by the way, in Armonk, New York.

• 57:53Sean Fennessey?

  Nice, standing in for Vermont.

• 57:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, but the bathroom and the, like the stone tub, which is featured prominently, were the creation of the production designer, working with the, the original designer's energy. So shout out to the production designer.

• 58:09Sean Fennessey?

  Let me tell you, they get great use out of that tub.

• 58:11Amanda Dobbins?

  They sure do, right? And so every once in a while, they know what they're doing. And I mean, and the house, it is, it is house porn. It's so beautiful and the sweaters are just so, just so. And Dakota Johnson's hair is so shiny. It's so shiny. But you're right that she does spend a lot of time reading. Though there was one point where she gets in bed to read and she's, everyone else is asleep in the house and she's so cozy and she's got this book and she's in this beautiful, like primary suite.

• 58:43Amanda Dobbins?

  And I did think to myself, as they showed this, I was like, that's the life. Like that's all I want in life is to get into a cozy like bed like this and be able to read for hours and have no one bother me. I can't do it anymore. So, so even that, even your note that it's just her reading for a while, does understand something about its audience, right? It is aspirational to me. That, that was not my problem. The problem when they're just showing the manuscript, right? For a while, and you're just seeing lots of insert shots of the actual text and it's, it is badly written and boring. That, that was less aspirational.

• 59:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, I'll make a very brief comparison to a movie I've just recently seen that I wrote about in the newsletter this week or last week, which is Chronovisor, which is this small indie that's about a young PhD professor of philosophy who has learned about the potential existence of this thing called a chronovisor, which is a device that allows you to effectively see memories of amazing historical events, such as the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. And the movie is literally just about this, this scholar, reading in libraries and trying to learn more about this magical mystical device that was developed by a Benedictine priest in the 1990s. And the movie is, you read the movie.

• 1:00:09Sean Fennessey?

  The movie is constantly showing you text during the research of this project, this exploration, translated from Latin or Spanish or Italian or English, and then highlighted on screen. I've never seen a movie like it. The way that the music is used, the way that it's cut, the reading, the, the act of reading is made into a thriller. This movie is easily a thriller because there's life and death consequences and we don't know, there's a, you know, a plot, a scheme of some kind that we're trying to unpack while we're watching the movie. And I, I just found it to be terribly inert and I did not care where it was going. I mean, I guess I kind of sort of wanted to know what the conclusion was going to be. And I regretted wanting to know that when I got to it, but the vibe is just off, you know?

• 1:00:52Sean Fennessey?

  It just isn't really, it never really clicks into place what the movie ultimately wants to be. And maybe, maybe you're right. It is just that this is kind of junky source material and she's, she's trying to write this sort of knowing piece of literary inward self-mocking analysis. And it's just so schlocky and unfun.

• 1:01:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, we can get to, to the ending because, in a minute, because it does also reveal things about the premise and the, the setup and the source material that I think are just-

• 1:01:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Insurmountable, you know, it was kind of like One Night Only where it's like, well, if this is what it was, then we were just, it was never going to work, you know? And you can, and you can try your best and you can, you know, condition to go to Johnson's hair as much as you want and make it look as cozy as possible. And they did, but you can't solve this inherent problem. But I, I agree with you that I do think, I didn't mind the reading so much. And I thought Anne Hathaway's narration was so over the top as to be funny. You know, she is doing her best audible, like on Quaaludes impersonation,

• 1:02:05Amanda Dobbins?

  and it's quite funny. The sex scenes were so poorly shot as to just be confusing. It's not even that they weren't hot, which they weren't. And we are very far from erotic thriller territory. And, you know, it honestly seemed like they just, there was, there were some blocking issues, like they didn't have the shots that they needed. But it was so slow and the pacing of it all, compared with a couple of moments where they do actually manage to set up the suspense of whatever's going on with the Verity character. And there are some like creepy moments. Creepy, they figured out. Sexy, there's just, there's

• 1:02:50Amanda Dobbins?

  nothing. All there is, is Josh Hartnett's short gym shorts. That's it.

• 1:02:54Sean Fennessey?

  You know, you clocked those, huh?

• 1:02:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, yeah. Immediately. I was, incredible choice.

• 1:03:00Sean Fennessey?

  Anne Hathaway, at a certain point in the film, is a stride Josh Hartnett.

• 1:03:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:04Sean Fennessey?

  And it's not really that steamy.

• 1:03:05Amanda Dobbins?

  No. And then, and again, there's also the source material issue of they're tied to something about teeth in a wooden bedpost and being able to see the teeth marks.

• 1:03:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is just-

• 1:03:19Sean Fennessey?

  Have you done that? Has that happened to you before?

• 1:03:21Amanda Dobbins?

  It's not logical. You know, it's not going to work. The teeth are going to break, which is all Yasi and I could talk about in the theater. And yes, we were whispering, so we were trying to be respectful. But first of all, and it's not, that's not what you would do. Second of all, there is some ergonomic angles. Third issues, right? Third, your teeth would break. And fourth, how are you, how are your teeth going to fit into the other woman's teeth marks so perfectly? Right?

• 1:03:50Sean Fennessey?

  That's a huge spoiler. Um, so you're not a biter? That's what you're saying?

• 1:03:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Not of, you know what?

• 1:03:59Sean Fennessey?

  Not a wood, not a wood biter.

• 1:04:00Amanda Dobbins?

  I was about to say. I didn't walk right into it.

• 1:04:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I think a lot, it's just very mannered, you know, like a lot of, and if, I don't know if the wood biting is from the book.

• 1:04:11Amanda Dobbins?

  I assumed it had to be because it was so specific.

• 1:04:14Sean Fennessey?

  I should check with Eileen. You know, my wife, Eileen, read the novel. She read it in 48 hours, effectively. And I raced to finish it before going to like a 2pm screening on Thursday or Friday.

• 1:04:28Amanda Dobbins?

  It was Thursday.

• 1:04:29Sean Fennessey?

  And she, she did finish the book and did not seem like she liked the movie very much. And maybe even had some regrets. And, you know, we talked about this, we talked about this coming out of CinemaCon and, you know, being handed the book on the way out and how-

• 1:04:44Amanda Dobbins?

  My friend Mary saying, no, you won't like it.

• 1:04:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And, you know, assuming it is as faithful as it seems like, that's the biggest problem with it. And, you know, I think generally Anne Hathaway is innocent and she's kind of having fun in a different movie. And it feels a little bit like it's the evil dark mirror version of Gone Girl, where Gone Girl operates in a very similar fashion, where there's a lot of moments where we're reading Amy's diary, and then we're using that as a portal to flashback on a relationship in a happier time. And the way that this movie kind of pivots that is that we learn late in the film, and we're really spoiling at this point, that a lot of what's been written in this discovered manifesto autobiography

• 1:05:32Sean Fennessey?

  exposition machine is that it's a writing exercise that the Anne Hathaway character has taken on to write the most kind of negative untrue thoughts, the sort of, the sort of evil reality, like unreality that could be, to get into the mind state of the very devilish female characters that she writes in her books. Which I don't, is that a thing? Is that a known strategy?

• 1:06:01Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, only a writer this bad could come up with a writing exercise this nonsensical. Was the only way that I could justify it. Also, the editor in question is named Amanda, who suggests the writing exercise. So I was just like, why bring me into all of this?

• 1:06:15Sean Fennessey?

  It's tough.

• 1:06:16Amanda Dobbins?

  But the key to the whole movie, which is, this is just a writing exercise, is about a 90 second flashback montage that is clearly filmed later and it's, it makes no sense. It's, goes by so fast, you don't get any of the motivation of, you have no explanation to what's going on with a Verity character, or how you're supposed to feel about her. And Anne Hathaway is innocent, but also wasted in this movie because she doesn't really get to do anything. They don't even use that much of the flashbacks or of the, of the evil character that turns out was just a writing exercise. I mean, it was

• 1:06:59Amanda Dobbins?

  just a writing exercise is worse than it was just a dream, or he's a psychopath in terms of explanations for thrillers.

• 1:07:08Sean Fennessey?

  I agree with you. And because of that, we're meant to sit through this movie where she does all of these terrible things where like she considers, you know, smothering her infant child. And she, you know, regrets being a mother and plots to murder her family and has all of these awful ideas. And, you know, the movie is pitched at a register where you're like, this isn't exactly what happened. I can tell. Like a lot of, particularly like the death of the daughter, which underlines so much of the movie as this kind of tragic moment that shifted everything, is shot from so far, at such a distance-

• 1:07:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:07:40Sean Fennessey?

  That you're almost meant to feel like, well, something is off about this. We know the whole time.

• 1:07:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Of course.

• 1:07:45Sean Fennessey?

  But the explanation being the, this was a writing exercise is so lame.

• 1:07:49Amanda Dobbins?

  It sucks.

• 1:07:50Sean Fennessey?

  And unconvincing, you know?

• 1:07:52Amanda Dobbins?

  And I would, I want to give the filmmakers credit of that they are signaling to you that something's weird here. So you're going through, okay, so was it the other kid? Was it Josh Hartnett? Did she actually do it? And it's, you know, what's going on with the nurse? Where did the nurse go? Yasi asked me this when we got home. Where is this nurse in a terrible wig, who seems to be some sort of helper? She's just wandering around. She's always looking at Dakota Johnson's character very suspiciously, as if she's just put something in her food, you know? And then she just disappears.

• 1:08:29Sean Fennessey?

  I think she's almost literally only there to try to represent a kind of Mrs. Danvers-esque character to remind us of Rebecca. Like, I think that's the only reason that she's there. And then there's no payoff on that or follow through on that. She doesn't meaningfully participate in the, in the, other than leaving.

• 1:08:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. And she, she announces-

• 1:08:51Sean Fennessey?

  She's not present, yeah.

• 1:08:52Amanda Dobbins?

  She announces, hello, I'm leaving. And then you think that that's going to set in motion some sort of, will she come back? Will she, like, and she just announced that she was leaving. There is absolutely no follow through to the character.

• 1:09:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, it explains, it creates the opportunity for Dakota Johnson's character to be alone with Anne Hathaway's character in the house after the young boy injures himself and Josh Hartnett needs to take his young son to the urgent care. And so then that leads to the sort of like, I thought atrocious conclusion of the movie that I'm still kind of sorting through what actually even transpired. So let's talk about it briefly.

• 1:09:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:09:32Sean Fennessey?

  Eventually, Josh Hartnett does come back with his son. And he's been made aware, at that point, he's made aware of the truth about his wife, that she is in fact responsible for the death of their daughter, according to this autobiography that Dakota Johnson's character has discovered. And Dakota Johnson shares all this information with him.

• 1:09:54Amanda Dobbins?

  He's, he has handed a printed manuscript, which she printed out on a Brother laser printer that we also have at home. Shout out Brother for the product placement.

• 1:10:03Sean Fennessey?

  Great.

• 1:10:03Amanda Dobbins?

  And so she prints this out, then seems to just leave it in a trash can where no one finds it for at least a week and maybe three to four weeks. And then she finally picks it up, reads to the end of it. She sets up a baby monitor in Verity's room so that she can try to catch her in the act of not being in a coma.

• 1:10:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:10:32Amanda Dobbins?

  And she hands the manuscript over to Josh Hartnett and says, look, this is what I found. This is what's really going on. This is why I set up a baby monitor.

• 1:10:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Then they go in and he, he's finally in her face, right? She, because Lowen at first, Lowen, that's the Dakota Johnson character. The child is named Crew, C R E W. Anyway, just, just.

• 1:10:59Sean Fennessey?

  We've encountered this with, with every Hoover movie where all the names are like, ma'am, have a glass of water. Come on, what are we doing? Lowen?

• 1:11:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, Lowen is at least, Lowen, I was like, Crew? How are we spelling Crew? It's C R E W.

• 1:11:14Sean Fennessey?

  I just feel like her trick every time is to be like, here's a normal person's name, Ashley Lowen. What if I made the last name, the first name and the first name, the last name? Like, all right.

• 1:11:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:11:22Sean Fennessey?

  Cool. You gonna keep doing this?

• 1:11:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Anyway, so Lowen has tried to wake her from her coma and she doesn't wake up. But she, Lowen and the Josh Hartnett character, whose name I don't know or care about because he's Josh Hartnett, walk back into the room and he gets into her face and is yelling at her and threatening her, you're never gonna see us again, blah, blah, blah. And then the moment when the Verity character breaks the coma and is like, you don't understand, I started cheering and several people in my audience, that was the one moment where I was like, this is funny.

• 1:11:56Sean Fennessey?

  You skipped over one small detail, which is that the way that Lowen tries to wake her is by sticking a thumbtack into her thumb and making her bleed. And Anne Hathaway doesn't flinch. She doesn't move. Nothing happens. She doesn't react at all.

• 1:12:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I did forget about that.

• 1:12:12Sean Fennessey?

  To a thumbtack poking her body and bleeding. And then Josh Hartnett yells loudly one time and she's like, hey, whoa, my bad. It's me, I'm here, what up? It's me, Verity.

• 1:12:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Josh Hartnett threatens her access to her son, you know? And it's the power of a mother's love, right? We can withstand thumbtacks, but not Josh Hartnett threatening us.

• 1:12:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Except what happens later, which makes this more illogical.

• 1:12:38Amanda Dobbins?

  You weren't, you weren't at all excited when she woke up?

• 1:12:44Sean Fennessey?

  You don't get, even get a chance to be because within five seconds, he's choking her to death.

• 1:12:47Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true. That's true. But then, then you get.

• 1:12:50Sean Fennessey?

  Didn't even let Verity cook.

• 1:12:53Sean Fennessey?

  Also, this was the only time we saw the real Verity and not flashback writing exercise Verity.

• 1:12:58Amanda Dobbins?

  I still.

• 1:12:59Sean Fennessey?

  And I was like, all right, what does she have to say?

• 1:13:00Amanda Dobbins?

  I chuckled. Like, I was like, okay, this is funny because I, you know, I, I knew that she was faking it, but still, they, that was one of the heightened moments where I was like, okay, this at least everyone's in on the same joke right now in this moment. And this is funny. You're right. Then he starts choking her because in a Colin Whoare adaptation, you can't be more than two seconds away from domestic abuse and violence. And so the Dakota Johnson character, Lowen screams at him to stop. And then there's a pause. And then what does she say, Sean?

• 1:13:33Sean Fennessey?

  What does she say?

• 1:13:34Amanda Dobbins?

  She says, you'll crush her windpipe. And that, which I really also laughed at. I thought that was, I mean, it's not funny. Don't crush someone's windpipe. It's, none of this is funny, but the way that Dakota Johnson plays it so soullessly and then gives the explanation as to how to kill Verity so that the police will not be suspicious.

• 1:13:59Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I mean, I didn't laugh out loud, but I chuckled.

• 1:14:03Sean Fennessey?

  Can someone just like hand her a glass of seven up or something before doing a take? Like, wake up.

• 1:14:08Amanda Dobbins?

  See?

• 1:14:09Sean Fennessey?

  You can't say, you'll crush her windpipe.

• 1:14:12Amanda Dobbins?

  I thought that was funny.

• 1:14:13Sean Fennessey?

  In a blank monotone. That's insane.

• 1:14:14Amanda Dobbins?

  That's the only time where just the blankness makes any sense. And it was really, really, really funny to me. If you're gonna be that blank for the rest of the movie, then just say, you, you're gonna crush her windpipe like you're barely awake. It's, I, I laughed.

• 1:14:33Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I, I thought it was absurd. He does in fact, um, not crush her windpipe, but close her mouth and nose until Verity suffocates. And then they dump her body in the lake. And then they've conspired to be together. That's what it turns out that these two people, Mr. Crawford and, uh, and, and Lowen Ashley are in love. They have murdered this evil woman who killed his daughter. And they're ready to ride off into the sunset. We get a smash cut to seven months later.

• 1:15:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:08Sean Fennessey?

  And it appears that Lowen is pregnant and they're still in the Vermont home. The Verity death was ruled a suicide or was ruled in, uh, an accidental death. And they're moving out. They got a house in, was it North Carolina, South Carolina? Where are they going? Somewhere down south.

• 1:15:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I can't remember if it was North Carolina or Florida. And maybe I'm just bringing in unfair Florida associations.

• 1:15:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Crew, the young boy is excited. He's got a new mom, seems totally over the death of his sister and his mother, seems to be handling it quite well.

• 1:15:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:15:44Sean Fennessey?

  Um, he's getting ready to be a southern boy, happy for him. And he says, oh, hold on, I gotta go get my drawings. He races back into his room.

• 1:15:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:54Sean Fennessey?

  And I love to recap bad movies. Um, and he gets his drawings and, and Lowen is like, what are those drawings? Where'd that come from? And he's like, they're my secret drawings in my secret space, which sure, that's something that happens. And it appears that there's a floorboard that has been loosed.

• 1:16:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:11Sean Fennessey?

  And Lowen clocks this and this hiding place that this young boy has. She opens it up and, and what does she find, of course, but an expositional letter.

• 1:16:24Sean Fennessey?

  And I love when that happens in a film. And the letter is handwritten by Verity to Josh Hartnett's character, Mr. Crawford, explaining everything that he has done to him via letter, which is something you would.

• 1:16:42Amanda Dobbins?

  He has done to her?

• 1:16:44Sean Fennessey?

  To her, yes.

• 1:16:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Everything he has done to her. Um, and why did she do that, Amanda?

• 1:16:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Also, it's not just explaining what he has done to her, but it is also explaining the mechanics of writing and writing exercises and how to get into the mind of a villain, right?

• 1:17:06Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 1:17:07Amanda Dobbins?

  And postpartum depression and love for your children and how to stage a, a death via car and tree and anger.

• 1:17:19Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:17:20Amanda Dobbins?

  I, it's a great question. Is it addressed to him? Does it say?

• 1:17:25Sean Fennessey?

  I believe so.

• 1:17:26Amanda Dobbins?

  It says, if you're reading this, then Crew and I are, are gone. And I think she says that she's ashamed, right? That's, so that's why she did it? That's why she agreed to be in a coma? I'm not defending the explanation. I'm just trying to recall the, the contents of the expositional letter. And I think shame is part of it. So then she was just like, I wanted to stay in the coma to be near my son Crew, C R E W.

• 1:17:58Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:59Amanda Dobbins?

  It's very normal. It makes a lot of sense and it teaches us a lot about writing and, uh, womanhood.

• 1:18:06Sean Fennessey?

  Right. But this also explains that Mr. Crawford has, um, taken his, has taken his wife out into the forest and put her in a car and dropped a concrete block on the gas pedal.

• 1:18:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:18:22Sean Fennessey?

  And driven her into a tree in an attempt to murder her, which is a very.

• 1:18:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:18:28Sean Fennessey?

  Ornate way to murder someone.

• 1:18:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, but it is the, it is the method of death that is described at the end of the fake manuscript writing exercise. Because he finds the manuscript as he learns in the letter and.

• 1:18:45Sean Fennessey?

  Exactly.

• 1:18:47Amanda Dobbins?

  He reads it thinking it's real and not a writing exercise.

• 1:18:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:18:53Amanda Dobbins?

  And then he's so angry because of what she's done. And, and she's confessing to killing her child in the fake manuscript. So.

• 1:19:04Sean Fennessey?

  Who would ever write that? Who would ever put that to words? What are we talking, Amanda? What is happening here?

• 1:19:11Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know. It's such fucking nonsense. I agree with you. It doesn't, it doesn't make sense. It's clearly all cut together and it also is, it's garbage source material. I mean, that, the rot starts in the book. That's what I have to say. Anyway, so that's why he, he decides to bring the manuscript to life and actually kill her via tree, the way that she kills herself in this book that he doesn't know is just a writing exercise.

• 1:19:39Amanda Dobbins?

  And then it doesn't work or she doesn't, she's not fully killed. She's just in a coma.

• 1:19:45Amanda Dobbins?

  And then.

• 1:19:46Sean Fennessey?

  But then she's kind of not, and then the doctors don't realize that? This is a very wealthy person who's like faked, like tricked everyone into believing she's in a, a paralytic state and, and cannot respond? I'm, I, I don't, well, what's this nurse doing every day?

• 1:20:00Amanda Dobbins?

  They do explain that she can eat, she can swallow, she can go to the bathroom.

• 1:20:06Sean Fennessey?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:20:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, but that she doesn't like make eye contact or talk and there's no brain activity. And it does sort of, they kind of yada, yada with it, like the brain is magical and unexplained, you know? There's so much we don't know about science, you know? Which honestly, you go to some doctors these days and it's still like, well, there's a lot we don't know. Great, thanks so much. Um, so.

• 1:20:30Amanda Dobbins?

  They do yada, yada, that, but I agree. She's faking from with everyone. Is she self medicating? To like induce a coma state or she's just?

• 1:20:40Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think so. I think she's play acting for an extended period of time.

• 1:20:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. And we do also see that she's still communicating with her son.

• 1:20:47Sean Fennessey?

  Only one time. She makes it clear to him that this is their secret. We don't know that they're consistently talking to each other. That's not made clear to us.

• 1:20:55Amanda Dobbins?

  But he does say earlier in the film, my mommy said that I shouldn't talk to you about these things. And that is what inspires the Dakota Johnson character to go get the baby monitor.

• 1:21:10Sean Fennessey?

  Right, right. It also just, yeah, it's the culmination of the Hitchcockian freakout that is set up throughout the film. Um, so.

• 1:21:21Amanda Dobbins?

  This is good. This is good that this is how we're spending our time on this podcast.

• 1:21:25Sean Fennessey?

  I actually feel great about it because this, to me, much like Digger, it's like, I cannot endorse this movie at all. And the success of these films I find quite worrying. And I, and I fucking felt this way with Ends With Us. I was like, this is, this is not right. There's something very off about the way that these stories are being told. And this one to me isn't like, it's not problematic. It's just lousy. But you know, the Dakota Johnson character discovers this letter and reads this letter that Verity has written. And then that makes her worried that she's now with a psychopath who has murdered his wife and pregnant with her child. And then they move out of the house and hop in the car for a long drive down south. And then the movie cuts to black.

• 1:22:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I don't know.

• 1:22:13Sean Fennessey?

  I was like, what? So like, are we waiting on Verity two to see if she seeks to avenge the slain Verity by killing the father of her child? Like, I, is that, are we meant to be like, wow, life's crazy. Sometimes you accidentally marry a murderer. Like, what, what, what the fuck was that?

• 1:22:35Amanda Dobbins?

  I have no idea.

• 1:22:38Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. I mean, it's made worse. It's made worse, obviously, by the fact that there was a piece in Variety over the weekend about the direction that the filmmakers thought about taking this story, which was, there was another ending that had been filmed that, um, well, let's, why don't you just read the quote that Showalter shared?

• 1:22:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. In one version, Lowen, in that car scene, has that moment where she says, I don't know who to believe. One thing's for sure, Verity was a master manipulator, which is the last line of the film. Again, there's just like top to bottom, great writing.

• 1:23:14Sean Fennessey?

  Well, the last line is her on Hot Ones. We forgot about, to talk about Hot Ones and Alex Cooper as well as components of this movie.

• 1:23:22Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true. And then she puts on a pair of sunglasses, leans back and has this very cat with a mouse in its mouth look. Puts her hand out the window and as they're driving away and a song is playing, she's making uh, stage directions, waves through the air with her hands. So I'm doing that roller coaster. So the idea is that Lowen is the master villain. And then you cut back to Verity sinking into the lake and her eyes open.

• 1:23:53Sean Fennessey?

  Right. So I'm not, I don't think that that's a more logical ending.

• 1:23:57Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 1:23:58Sean Fennessey?

  But I, but I do think it's a much more fun ending.

• 1:24:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Correct.

• 1:24:01Sean Fennessey?

  And if this movie wants to land on, this is campy, self-knowing trash. I would have, I would have smirked. I would have been like, all right, cool. That's fun. This wasn't a great success to me, but that was pretty fun. And I'll, I can forgive the plotting oddities and the writing exercise nonsense and be like, all right, well.

• 1:24:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Bad sex scenes.

• 1:24:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:23Amanda Dobbins?

  And the Bavarian restaurant.

• 1:24:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah, man. But I have no, no notes on the, uh, on the tub scene. No notes.

• 1:24:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Tub scene was very fun. She looks great in the dress that she borrows from Verity's closet, which is an insane thing to do. Um, there is an incredible, single white female thing going on in this that they just completely abandon. And well, they, they abandon it or they don't, they were having fun with it for a bit.

• 1:24:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I think it is homage generally.

• 1:24:58Amanda Dobbins?

  And then they stop, they stop having fun with it. They're like, now we have to feel bad about this for some reason now. And, and, and I think the ending that Showalter describes to Variety would at least be in keeping with the, this is all ridiculous.

• 1:25:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And, but they listened to the focus groups. They listened to audience testing and audiences, both audiences who had read the books and not read the books reportedly did not respond to that ending. They responded to the ending that we got, which, what?

• 1:25:28Amanda Dobbins?

  But did they? Because then the cinema score was a C. So like, you know, what are we?

• 1:25:34Sean Fennessey?

  Very odd.

• 1:25:35Amanda Dobbins?

  It's very odd. What I, what I, reading between the lines, because Colleen Hoover is also quoted in that Variety piece. And she was a consultant on the film. She's involved in all of her films. And she is very happy with the ending. The ending mirrors the book. So I don't, I guess it was focus groups. To me, it just reads like they got bullied into doing the book and they had to stick, they had to stick to the original ending.

• 1:25:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, possibly, possibly.

• 1:25:59Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I'm, that's just an interpretation. I, I don't know anything, but that they had, that the source material is what is so valuable about this IP. And it is what has the built-in audience. And so they were just kind of stuck with it. And it stinks because I think a more inventive ending would have at least made us feel better going out of the movie.

• 1:26:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it would have softened the blow for sure. I, um, I found this to be quite poor. I thought this was really bad. And, uh, I, and it's got a bunch of people who I really like. Um, I should, by a bunch of people, I mean, two people, Anne Hathaway and Josh Hartnett. Uh, Dakota Johnson, let's speak on it once more.

• 1:26:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:26:45Sean Fennessey?

  You know, she just hosted SNL over the weekend. Um, I think she's a radically better comic performer than she is dramatic actress. She's had a couple of dramatic parts over the years that I've been okay with, that I think have effectively utilized her emotional distance, you know, her, her blankness very well. But this is getting out of hand. This is, this is becoming an issue. Um, and, and I addressed this on the Materialist pod.

• 1:27:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:13Sean Fennessey?

  We spoke, we spoke about Madame Web. It's, it's, it's, it's time for an intervention. She's, she's stunningly beautiful. She seems like a very smart and cool person. She seems, she's quite a good celebrity. But she is weighing down these feature films. This is an issue.

• 1:27:29Amanda Dobbins?

  But put someone, first of all, who do you want to put in her spot in this, in the film? Who are you going to cast that has the same mixture of, um, of aspirational beauty? Honestly, she's so, she's so pretty, but also because she's willing to be blank is believable. And is slightly younger than Anne Hathaway is believable. As the younger figure.

• 1:27:57Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, there, there are top line actors that could go into these parts.

• 1:28:00Amanda Dobbins?

  I think you need that because I think Dakota Johnson is cast in this because she's going to do the press tour and bring in a certain amount of, um, of, of audience, a J, outside of the Colleen Hoover built-in audience.

• 1:28:13Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, there's the, there's the Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, Margot Robbie ring of mid 30s actresses. Who just like, would be bet, all three of them would just make this movie better. They would just make the movie better. And then there's like another tier. And they're slightly more serious act, self-serious actors, but I'll say like, if Daisy Edgar Jones or Alicia Vikander were in this movie, I think they would be better. I just think they would be better. And for whatever reason, Dakota Johnson's got a chokehold on this kind of thing right now. And, uh, I'm sure I can come up with a bunch of other, Anna de Armas, if you put Anna de Armas in this part, it would be so much better.

• 1:28:51Amanda Dobbins?

  I think that's true that they did sort of with the Adrian Lyne movie with Ben Affleck.

• 1:28:56Sean Fennessey?

  Deep Water.

• 1:28:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Deep Water. That's right. That I think we're the only people that ever saw the end of it. And that didn't work out so well.

• 1:29:03Sean Fennessey?

  Incredible Tracy Lott's performance.

• 1:29:05Amanda Dobbins?

  He's, he's wonderful as always. The, the only thing.

• 1:29:09Sean Fennessey?

  Elizabeth Olsen, Elizabeth Olsen.

• 1:29:12Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know because, because here's the, here, no, no, no, no. Well, if you're putting Elizabeth Olsen in this movie or Daisy Edgar Jones in this movie, then you're making the serious Colleen Hoover version of this movie. And you're, you're making it sincere.

• 1:29:32Sean Fennessey?

  I disagree. Daisy Edgar, Daisy Edgar Jones was in Twisters, you know, Elizabeth Olsen was the Scarlet Witch. Like, it doesn't automatically have to be serious.

• 1:29:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't think that neither of them are as funny. And Elizabeth Olsen was in Eternity, which I think that she was the weakest part of Eternity, in my opinion. And so it kind of can't carry the tone that the film wants to be going for. The problem is that then at the end, they're still making a Colleen Hoover movie. To me, the issue is that this story is really stupid and we have to stop making these books and we need better source material. Um, and I think if Dakota Johnson, like the opening scene, when she gets splattered with the blood and just doesn't react. And then they're in the bathroom with Josh Hartnett. That's the sexiest part of the movie. Uh, and, and that is campier and it's ridiculous.

• 1:30:26Amanda Dobbins?

  And you know that he's going to be the husband and he's going to be in the meeting. Like you understand, and the film knows that you understand. It's playing in those like very broad, campy registers. And I think the blankness works there because the blankness paired with the comedy, like the wink, wink of it all does fit in a way that those other people couldn't. And also I do think that there's something to see Dakota Johnson, movie star, though is she, uh, in, in one of these adaptations. It's, I don't think it's her fault. I do think it's the material's fault.

• 1:31:01Sean Fennessey?

  She was funny in Splitsville. Enjoyed that. I just, I think she's a comic actress. I feel like everyone is so confused by her, her obvious beauty.

• 1:31:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:10Sean Fennessey?

  They believe that she should be cast in things like this and

• 1:31:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I thought she was-

• 1:31:14Sean Fennessey?

  It almost never works.

• 1:31:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Very funny in the hot tub scene in this film.

• 1:31:20Sean Fennessey?

  She was, she was, she was many things.

• 1:31:22Amanda Dobbins?

  She was many things, but that is funny. I mean, she's going for it.

• 1:31:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. This is a tough one. This is a tough one for the, for the Dakota heads.

• 1:31:31Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know.

• 1:31:32Sean Fennessey?

  The movie, the movie, boffo business.

• 1:31:35Amanda Dobbins?

  They're-

• 1:31:35Sean Fennessey?

  Thirty-three million, four for four for Hoover, four different movie studios. She's shepherding this stuff very smartly. She seems to know what she's doing. How many more, more books does she have? I don't even know. Does she have like 10 books?

• 1:31:46Amanda Dobbins?

  I think more. I think she just cranks them out. It's a volume business.

• 1:31:50Sean Fennessey?

  Wow, like CR. Damn. Uh, okay, so we'll just be doing five more of these?

• 1:31:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:57Sean Fennessey?

  Or is this a moratorium on, on Hoover episodes?

• 1:32:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, if actors we like keep making them.

• 1:32:04Sean Fennessey?

  I know, I know.

• 1:32:05Amanda Dobbins?

  That's the thing. We really like, you like two of the three and I like all three.

• 1:32:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And they, you know, they're also doing the thing where it's like, oh, Alison Williams is in this one and Micah Monroe, all my gals.

• 1:32:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:18Sean Fennessey?

  They keep casting all my gals. It's tough. It's tough for me.

• 1:32:22Amanda Dobbins?

  The Alison Williams ones was so good.

• 1:32:25Sean Fennessey?

  Hysterical, absolute pure, it was like going to see The Hangover for the first time, rolling in the aisles.

• 1:32:34Sean Fennessey?

  These aren't erotic thrillers. This one is as close as we've gotten to this.

• 1:32:39Amanda Dobbins?

  I guess so.

• 1:32:39Sean Fennessey?

  When we talk about good trash, I'm trying to think of what is our version of good trash right now that is in our popular culture.

• 1:32:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I was thinking a lot about The Housemaid and the-

• 1:32:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, right.

• 1:32:48Amanda Dobbins?

  And The Housemaid Two, which I believe the book The Housemaid was written, I don't think in response to Colleen Hoover, but that these, these books, you know, come of a similar wave and that this project was, I think, greenlit as a like, okay, well, we don't have Colleen Hoover stuff, but we can buy these books that are also very successful that have a lot of the same. I mean, you know, and that is like domestic abuse and, uh, people having sex in places that they're not supposed to be having sex. So, you know, related. I, The Housemaid is much more successful and it is campier and, and weirder.

• 1:33:28Amanda Dobbins?

  And I think the situation itself is also a lot more ridiculous, uh, while also being upsetting, but it shows more. And it also has, has better, like, it probably is an erotic thriller.

• 1:33:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:33:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:44Sean Fennessey?

  I think it is.

• 1:33:46Amanda Dobbins?

  And I, that works for me a lot more than whatever this is.

• 1:33:52Sean Fennessey?

  I was more down on The Housemaid than you were, I think, for similar plotting reasons, but you know what? If I'm being honest, it would be hard for me to have, I would have enjoyed Basic Instinct because that movie, they just, Verhoeven directed the fuck out of that movie and Stone is unbelievable. But like if I, if we had seen Sliver in real time or Body of Evidence, it would have been hard to be like, what a great time. Like we would have been like, ah, this story is really shitty and like, doesn't really work.

• 1:34:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:16Sean Fennessey?

  And it would have been hard to appreciate its charms. So I guess there's a case to be made that in a few years you look at Verity and you're like, oh, if I watched it at home and it's a hundred minutes and it's sexy and it's got some funny stuff going on. And look at how Anne Hathaway is styled while appearing on Hot Ones. You know, I think, I think Joan Collins is apt. I was thinking of Danielle Steele a bit, watching her too. You know, the sort of like pearls and the, you know, the, the lady suit, you know, the Nancy Reagan suit and

• 1:34:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:45Sean Fennessey?

  The hair coiffed in the way that it is.

• 1:34:47Amanda Dobbins?

  And her office is like a sunken living room type circular and they, they have it styled in that very like eighties glitz sort of way. So I think that those references are intentional.

• 1:34:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Well, it's a little odd that she looks that way in 2024 or whenever those interviews are happening, but it's also kind of funny. How'd you feel about Alex Cooper's performance?

• 1:35:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, I, she did okay. She's fine. She's, yeah, she's fine. She was better than Sean Evans is the Hot Ones guy.

• 1:35:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:16Amanda Dobbins?

  But, but also I think that the Sean Evans questions that he asks in the Verity Hot Ones are the best writing within Verity because they are the truest to how he asks questions on Hot Ones.

• 1:35:27Sean Fennessey?

  It was a straight up Sean Evans question.

• 1:35:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:29Sean Fennessey?

  And he was like, in your stories, there are, what are the nine, is like nine modes of integrity or whatever it was that she was using?

• 1:35:39Amanda Dobbins?

  And the delivery was, was spot on. Um, we didn't get to see her eat any wings though, so that's disappointing.

• 1:35:45Sean Fennessey?

  When will they cast you in a film as a podcast host?

• 1:35:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Never.

• 1:35:50Sean Fennessey?

  I wouldn't be so sure of that. Many people out there listening, thinking about how to get Amanda Dobbins in their movie. Any closing thoughts here? You feeling good about?

• 1:35:59Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 1:35:59Sean Fennessey?

  State of the Worlds? No?

• 1:36:00Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 1:36:00Sean Fennessey?

  Cinema?

• 1:36:01Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 1:36:02Sean Fennessey?

  No? Your life at large?

• 1:36:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm excited for, I'm not excited for The Social Reckoning, but I'm excited for this weekend and the other films that we get to talk about. You know, we've been building up October. It's like October is when all the great stuff happens. And I think we're, again, we haven't seen The Social Reckoning yet, uh, but we might be zero for three.

• 1:36:26Sean Fennessey?

  It could be a very dark month.

• 1:36:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that's kind of where I have.

• 1:36:29Sean Fennessey?

  I think they're all worth discussion.

• 1:36:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Of course.

• 1:36:32Sean Fennessey?

  That's the thing that is notable. It's like they, they fit the bill for the mission of the show.

• 1:36:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:37Sean Fennessey?

  But there's no guarantee that we're getting something great. You know, I was thinking about how, um, when I was talking about Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, that was like a September movie and that was a really big movie. It wasn't like a great movie. It wasn't great to talk about, but then, you know, last September was, uh, one battle after another.

• 1:36:53Amanda Dobbins?

  I remember.

• 1:36:54Sean Fennessey?

  And then this past September, you know, we got primetime. That was pretty cool. I really liked that. But it's been, it's been a very soft fall.

• 1:37:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:03Sean Fennessey?

  Which is something we were worried about.

• 1:37:05Amanda Dobbins?

  And the festivals were soft.

• 1:37:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:08Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and, you know, and then the, the Paramount Warner Brothers Skydance of it all, which is official very soon, becomes just, yeah, it's not, it's not ideal.

• 1:37:18Sean Fennessey?

  Here's two things that are happening. You can see everything.

• 1:37:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:22Sean Fennessey?

  And whale fall. Those two things, I can say with some confidence, are worth paying attention to.

• 1:37:32Amanda Dobbins?

  And we're going to see everything, including, that was not an intentional pun, but we are, we will be talking about The Social Reckoning. But I don't know. It's not, I'm not like, oh, this is a little rocky. It's a little rockier than I hoped we would be at this point in the fall.

• 1:37:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. It might be November season. Might not be October's year. Might be November's year. Could it be December's year? Egger's season?

• 1:37:59Sean Fennessey?

  Could be. We'll see.

• 1:38:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Great.

• 1:38:01Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, okay. What are you going to go do for the rest of your day?

• 1:38:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, I'm, I'm going to see a film. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that I'm going to see it. I'm seeing the same film you're seeing tonight.

• 1:38:09Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, fun.

• 1:38:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:10Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, great. I'm going to say what I'm seeing. I'm seeing Artificial.

• 1:38:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:13Sean Fennessey?

  At the New York Film Festival. Um, big gala premiere at the Alice Tully Hall. In fact, I have to get going very shortly to go do that. So, uh, Amanda, thank you. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on today's episode. Thanks, thanks to Remy here in New York for helping us out. Thanks to Lucas Cavanagh for his production support. As Amanda said, later this week, we are finally seeing and discussing the legacy sequel of one of our favorite movies of all time, The Social Network. It's Aaron Storkins, The Social Reckoning. He's the writer and the director of that movie. We'll watch it and then we'll see you then.