Obsession, Backrooms and the rise of the YouTube movie

Can saving Hollywood be as simple as this One Weird Trick?

Movies created by YouTubers are having a moment. A very, very lucrative moment.

In January of this year, video game YouTuber Markiplier released his self-financed, $3-million debut theatrical film, Iron Lung, which he mostly promoted by appealing directly to his 40 million YouTube subscribers. In its opening weekend, it looked like it might beat Send Help, legendary director Sam Raimi’s return to the horror genre after his adventures in the MCU. The Walt Disney Company financed, produced, and marketed that movie, with an estimated budget of $40 million, and Oscar-nominee Rachel McAdams played the lead.

In May of this year, Curry Barker, an aspiring actor and director of popular YouTube horror shorts, released his theatrical writing and directorial debut, Obsession, produced for a reported $750,000. It finished third at the box office on its opening weekend, with $17 million. The following weekend, it made even more money, landing in second place with $24 million. On its third weekend, it made even more more money, finishing again in second place, with $27 million. As a rule, movies don’t improve on their opening weekend in their second weekend. And they certainly don’t improve on their second weekend in their third weekend. The last movie to do so was, I kid you not, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial in friggin’ caveman days back in 1982 (editor’s note: this post’s author saw E.T. in the theater in the caveman days of 1982. Don’t even let him pretend like he didn’t.).

In Obsession’s third weekend, it finished second behind a new release, Backrooms, the theatrical directorial debut of 20-year-old Kane Parsons, based on his YouTube series of the same name. Produced on a budget of $10 million, it grossed over $80 million in its opening weekend, tying the previous weekend's haul for the debut of the latest Star Wars movie. By just its second weekend, Backrooms had already become distributor A24’s biggest release ever, beating the total domestic haul of last year’s Timothée Chalamet Oscar-vehicle Marty Supreme.

So… what’s going on? What does it mean?

Capsule Reviews

The Occam’s Razor answer to why these three movies are doing absolute gangbusters at the box office is, hey, maybe they're all just really good? Let's see.

Iron Lung: Based on a somewhat popular video game, the movie takes place almost entirely inside a small submarine, with only Simon (Markiplier) appearing onscreen. It is over 2 hours long. Markiplier is not an actor, and doesn’t know how to command the screen. But he's the only actor we get. There is a section of the film where we watch water drip. Later, something happens. We don’t know what. Maybe he’s hallucinating it. Maybe there are giant dead aliens outside the sub. It’s not clear. Then there is so much blood. So, so very much blood, and Simon's body begins to disintegrate. I don’t know why. From the blood maybe. This is a bad movie. But you know what? Markiplier stans went and saw it, they had a great time, and I have zero desire to take that away from them. It had a great opening, it made the folks who saw it happy, it made Markiplier a good return on investment, limped across a couple more weekends, and was gone. It’s not looking good for Occam’s Razor.

Obsession: Bear has a crush on his friend Nikki, but doesn’t have the nerve to tell her. She’s about to quit her job at the music store where they both work, alongside friends Ian and Sarah, so Bear buys her a going away present at a New Age store, a novelty toy called a One-Wish Willow. But Bear chickens out before he can give it to her, and makes his own wish on it—that Nikki would love him more than anything in the world. He gets his wish. Inspired by the Monkey’s Paw vignette in The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror anthology, it’s also the basic setup of a Twilight Zone episode, a million other things, and the aphorism “be careful what you wish for.” Sounds kinda derivative. But in execution, this movie is flawless. It’s not just that Inde Navarrette gives an all-time horror movie performance as Nikki, but the writing and the implications for things taking place just outside the frame of the movie’s point of view will stick with you for days after you leave the theater. It’s a phenomenal film.

Backrooms: This movie has a lot going for it. First, you’ve got a small cast led by magnetic Oscar nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renata Reinsve. Second, there is something primal and dreamlike in the basic premise of finding another room that somehow you’ve always missed before in a space you are intimately familiar with, maybe even living in. This is eerily similar to the closest thing I’ve ever had to a recurring dream. So when Ejiofor’s Clark finds a secret, permeable section of the basement wall in the furniture store he owns that opens into a seemingly never-ending network of (mostly) empty rooms, I for one felt a profound sense of uncanny recognition. But moments later, I realized that if this actually happened to me in real life, I would nope out of there so fast I’d leave vapor trails through the portal. So even though the direction is competent and the producers brought in a veteran TV writer to handle the screenplay, there’s a fundamental disconnect between the characters in this movie and believable human behavior. I think it’s a good movie, but it’s a good movie that feels like a talented young filmmaker with a lot of support trying to find their way. And, it must be said, once we do see the monster of the backrooms, it’s pretty derpy.

Despite a strong (for January) opening, Iron Lung wound up with only $50 million in worldwide grosses. Backrooms has, at the time of this writing, made over $300 million worldwide, but its week-over-week drop-offs have been massive. Obsession has made almost $400 million, and when I saw it last weekend on a Sunday at 5 pm, the theater was sold out. So with the exception of Obsession, I don’t think these are great movies where word of mouth is driving their success in theaters.

A Grand Theory

So not Occam’s Razor, then. What's the next simplest explanation? Probably that these creators were successful on YouTube and just brought their audiences out to the theaters. Let's check that one.

Markiplier is one of the most successful YouTubers on the platform, with nearly 40 million subscribers. He made multiple webseries for YouTube as his popularity expanded, and Iron Lung is a video game adaptation, which feels at home with his core content of the video game play-through. Massive YouTuber brings $17 million of ticket sales to the box office by hyping the movie on his channel throughout production, editing, behind-the-scenes, and as it neared release. Cool. Seems reasonable.

As of today, as I type this—even after the success of the movie—the Backrooms YouTube channel has 4 million subscribers. Obsession’s Curry Barker‘s channel—again, even after the black swan success of the film—has a little over 1 million subscribers. It seems implausible that these creators ported their vastly smaller YouTube audiences over into the multiplex seats in the same way that Markiplier did to multiples of that success. So what gives?

I think it’s actually really simple. You know who has always gone to the movies? At least since the 1950s, anyway? Teenagers. Young people. You know whom studios have been trying to lure into the theaters for the last 20 or so years? Families. “Four-quadrant pictures” that appeal to everybody, where parents can take their kids. The conglomerate-owned studios justify $200-400 million investments in IP and sequel-driven four-quadrant pictures by wagering that these are safe bets. But you know who doesn’t want to sit with their parents at the movies? Teenagers. These massive tentpole pictures have spent 20 years teaching young people that going to theaters is boring and for old people or little kids.

These three directors have something in common that I think is much more powerful than their shared YouTube origins—they're young people. Markiplier is the oldest—he's in his thirties, but he's been on YouTube since 2012 (same year this blog started. James Wan, call me).

These are young people making movies for young people. Where have we heard that before?

A… ahem… New Hope?

Earlier this year, Timothée Chalamet got in trouble during his Oscars blitz because he said he was worried that the theatrical experience was moving toward niche entertainment, like the ballet or opera. I found his comments utterly unobjectionable, but lots of folks got Big Mad. Not that Timmy C needs me in his corner, but box office has been down for years, never bouncing back from the pandemic closures, and the rise of streaming has led to so much hand-wringing and so, so many op-eds about whether or not this is the End of Cinema.

It's not. It never is. But as I wrote at the end of last year, Hollywood will become something different. It has to, and it always does.

The studio system collapsed throughout the 1950s, and in the 1960s young people like Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and other young filmmakers who either got their start or a significant boost from Roger Corman (my man, the GOAT, whom I interviewed in 2017). The thing that Corman gave them was an opportunity to get reps, to make things, to learn the ropes as storytellers, and to introduce themselves to other producers who could give them work on bigger platforms. It sure seems like YouTube gives today’s creative folks the same opportunities.

As the 1970s reached their back half, suddenly Stephen Spielberg gave us Jaws and George Lucas gave us Star Wars—both previously unimaginable box office and cultural successes. Lucas was 32 or 33 when he directed Star Wars, his third feature film. Spielberg was 29 when he made Jaws, his third theatrical feature and fifth or sixth overall including made-for-TV movies. These were all young guys. Spielberg and Lucas went on to be responsible for most of the top-10 highest grossing movies of the 1980s.

Moving forward in time, Spike Jonze was 30 when he made Being John Malkovich after a career in successful music videos. M. Night Shyamalan was 29 when he made The Sixth Sense. Quentin Tarantino was 31 when he made Pulp Fiction, which essentially invented an entire genre of 90s action movies by mashing up things Tarantino grew up with into a distinct package that appealed to young moviegoers and other young filmmakers.

So Hollywood will probably learn the wrong lesson from this year, because it usually does. Back in the early aughts, blogs and Twitter feeds were the new hotness, especially after blogger Diablo Cody’s script for Juno turned into such a beautiful movie. Hollywood signed everybody with a blog or a Twitter feed, resulting in utterly forgettable (or worse!) shows like Shit My Dad Says and movies like I Hope they Serve Beer in Hell. So they'll probably sign folks who have big YouTube channels, regardless of their storytelling ability, and some of them will never make anything, and some creators behind breakout hits (remember The Blair Witch Project? Remember?) will fizzle.

But others will not. Other creators will go on to write and direct movies that we will talk about forever. The nice thing is that the success of this year’s smaller movies will create a permission structure for not only distributors like A24 and NEON, but also for studios to take chances on more and smaller movies. And if they’re made by young people for young people, in a way that excites young people, or scares them, or reflects back to them a world that they recognize or dream of, then that’s what movies do best, and that’s what brings people together to experience them together.

I know Toy Story 5 just made all the money in the world this weekend. But if you are rooting for the future of movies in theaters, go see Obsession. Or if you’re squeamish, go see Backrooms. Don’t dismiss them because their filmmakers came from YouTube. In the end, these particular movies might not be for you, exactly, but their success will open the door to more movies in theaters that don’t start with the word “Avengers” or end in a number.

Posted by Vance K - co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together, and Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and producer.

Hollywood is Dead. Long Live Hollywood.

Netflix's Potential Purchase of Warner Bros. and the End of Hollywood (As We Know It… Now)

Last week, on December 4, 2025, news broke that Netflix had prevailed over Paramount and/or Comcast Universal to acquire Warner Bros. As I write this, news has just broken on December 8, 2025, that the Ellisons and Paramount have initiated a hostile takeover bid to prevent the Netflix purchase and bring Warner Bros. under the recently-expanded Paramount/CBS/Skydance umbrella. So we'll see what happens.

But whoever wins, the rest of us lose.

There will be different ramifications if Netflix buys Warner Bros. or if Paramount Skydance's shenanigans work out in their favor, but either way, the sale of Warner Bros. is the definitive closing of a chapter in Hollywood history. People have written "the end of Hollywood" pieces since before The Jazz Singer introduced talking pictures to the mainstream film audience in 1927, and yet Hollywood has managed to live on for another 100 years, so this piece will not be one of those. Movies and TV shows will persist as forms of entertainment moving forward, but this is the end of something, and what comes next will look different from what came before. The biggest questions in my mind are "What will be lost?" and "For what?"

What Will Be Lost?

First of all, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. When Disney bought Fox in 2019, there was some chatter that the majority of the job losses were going to be administrative, as the two studios merged their business operations. But the notion of relatively minimal job losses and the two studios' creative slates remaining independent was a fiction from the start. Disney immediately began shuttering specialty film groups like Fox 2000, which had been releasing cultural touchstone films like Fight Club, The Devil Wears Prada, and Hidden Figures since 1996.

So that brings us to what the audience is losing: the movies and TV shows that will never be made, the voices we will never hear, and maybe the spaces to share them.

When I moved to Los Angeles in 2005, there were six studios that could buy your project—Universal, Warner Bros., Disney, 20th Century Fox, Sony (formerly Columbia), and Paramount. There were other, smaller outfits that could buy projects because they had distribution deals with a studio or for straight-to-DVD releases, since DVD revenues were just absolutely insane at the time, and cable television channels that produced original content and were either wholly-owned subsidiaries or joint ventures between the major studios. Going a little farther back in time, MGM and United Artists used to be their own studios, too. So at one time, there were a lot of buyers, a lot of places that were mounting productions and employing crews, studio development departments shepherding feature film scripts, an entire pilot season apparatus where TV studios were making full pilots for shows that may or may not ever air, and an attendant set of opportunities for writers, actors, and directors to potentially break in or break through.

The loss of DVD revenue was transformative as the home media bubble burst alongside the advent of streaming, and industry contraction followed, alongside runaway production away from Los Angeles. There was a writers' strike, MGM folded, indie producers went under, but then Netflix jumped into original programming, and audiences soon found Peak TV dropped into their living rooms. Networks like AMC made must-watch programming like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, and suddenly Netflix had a bottomless appetite for original programming, with Amazon and Apple jumping in, and the glut of new streamers from Disney+ to FreeVee making new content specific to their own new platforms.

And then Peak TV peaked. For years, the number of theatrical feature films had been declining, but the explosion of TV and streaming productions led to an employment boom, particularly for writers. But under the surface, things were sketchy as hell. The unfair employment practices led to the concurrent 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes (which I wrote about here). The face of that employment battle was David Zaslav, CEO of the recently-merged Warner Bros. Discovery, who was on the receiving end of a quarter-billion-dollar compensation package and had recently dropped into town acting like the second coming of legendary studio head Robert Evans (even buying Evans's fabled home). As it stands today, the Writers' Guild reports TV employment has fallen by 42% and Zaslav's Frankenstein monster of Warner Bros. Discovery is being split back apart and sold off. Good work if you can get it—$250+ million to destroy a company in three years.

So either Netflix or Paramount is going to roll Warner Bros. up under its corporate umbrella, and what will result are job losses, fewer movies, and fewer TV shows.

If Paramount prevails in its hostile takeover bid, the films and TV shows it does wind up producing going forward are likely to bend toward Trump-friendly, fascist-curious content. Exhibits A through D: A) firing Stephen Colbert, B) installing heterodox blogger (and higher ed grifter?) Bari Weiss as the head of CBS News, C) greenlighting Rush Hour 4 after credibly-accused sex pest and director Brett Ratner made a Melania Trump documentary, and D) Jared Kushner's involvement in Paramount's hostile takeover bid. In the last year, Warner Bros.' current studio heads Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy oversaw Ryan Coogler's Sinners, Zach Cregger's Weapons, and Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. Say goodbye to movies like those. After Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, I weighed in along similar l ines, lamenting how the acquisition would shrink the range of releases that Disney would produce. Time has more than borne out that prediction, but it didn't have the ideological corollary, which makes the prospect of a shrinking media landscape even more troubling.

If Netflix's bid holds, a lot of smart industry watchers think it will mean the beginning of the terminal decline of movie theaters. Many speculate that Netflix only wants this acquisition in the first place as a way to remove the second-largest supplier of theatrical content (Warner Bros. lags behind only Disney) from the marketplace entirely. Last week, box office analyst Scott Mendelson told The Bulwark's cultural editor Sonny Bunch:

"Something that Netflix has done a lot of in the last few years is it seems like every time there’s this big, buzzy, crowd-pleasing festival flick that might theoretically do well in theaters, Netflix flies in, drops a $20 million check on it, grabs distribution rights, and then it dies in the algorithm. And I think, I would argue, that they are doing that at least partially intentionally because the worst thing that can happen for Netflix is for that film to be successful in theaters."

The argument here is that Netflix's entire business model is for you to watch movies at home, and anything that lures you out of the house to watch a movie is competition. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos recently said almost as much, prompting pushback from arguably the most commercially-successful film director of all time, James Cameron.

I go to movies a lot these days. I probably see more movies in theaters now than I have at any point since high school, when a typical Friday night was just going to the megaplex and seeing whatever was new that week. But the catch is that I almost never see first-run movies in the theaters these days. I am an annual member of the amazing American Cinematheque non-profit organization in Los Angeles, and live around the corner from the revitalized Vidiots, so a couple times a month I'll be in a theater seeing an animation retrospective with the animator in person, or a 70-mm restoration of a sci-fi or western classic, or introducing my kids to samurai movies, or a midnight screening of a bizarre French film, or… or… or. And that's a future we might all be heading for.

Will movie theaters vanish? No. Could the multiplex? Yeah. We've only had movie theaters for about a hundred years. That's nothing. They are not immutable. If Netflix prevails in a push to keep new movies out of theaters and force first-run films into the algorithmic churn of a decreasing number of streamers willing to vanish $90-million-dollar movies because David Zaslav needs a tax write-off because of his dipshit merger decisions, then we're all stuck with the consequences as a audience. We might all need to find, or create, our local repertory film screening series if we want to see anything at all projected on a screen in community. We might be looking at the very real possibility that the theatrical experience becomes akin to the way most of us experience live theater here in 2025: some small number of people see a ton, most people see none.

And for what?

In the beginning, movie studios made movies. That's what they did, and they did it like factory work, with actors, directors, writers, technicians all under contract. If they made enough movies that brought in enough people, the movie studios made money. Then Howard Hughes decided Jane Russell should be a star, so he got involved in Hollywood as a producer. Hughes had more money than he knew what to do with, but wanted to spend it. So he built the Spruce Goose, and he bought RKO Pictures, one of the major Hollywood studios, and brought it under the umbrella of the Hughes Tool Company. This was about the time that James Stewart decided to skip a studio contract and struck out on his own, under the guidance of his agent Lew Wasserman of MCA. This shift in the business model ruptured the studio system that had been in place since the nineteen-teens, and Hollywood was never the same.

Hughes sold RKO to the General Tire and Rubber Company, of all places. The manufacturing conglomerate Gulf+Western bought Paramount Pictures for some reason in the 1960s, and Lew Wasserman's MCA wound up buying Universal. Ever since, the movie studios have been chips in higher-and-higher-stakes corporate merger poker games. Amazon owns MGM (and MGM+, which is different from Prime Video). Disney owns Hulu (which is different from Disney+), Comcast owns Universal, and before Zaslav and Discovery came in and bought Warner Bros. and HBO, for some reason AT&T owned HBO. The studios don't make movies. They don't make TV shows. They "return value to the shareholders." If releasing a surefire IP-based hit like The Minecraft Movie returns value to the shareholders, they'll do that. If *not* releasing Batgirl returns value to the shareholders, then they'll do that instead. If installing an opinion journalist and blogger over their news division greases the wheels for governmental approval of a merger, they'll do that. It's all just corporate bullshit to make line go up after quarterly investor calls. The audience isn't even the product, like we were during the network TV days when networks were selling our eyeballs to advertisers.

So who benefits from any of this? Not the fans, not the audience, not the creators. Netflix is a tech company. Amazon is a tech company. Apple is a tech company. Apple makes their TV shows at a loss for a reason that they'll figure out some day but for now just seems like as good a way to set a billion dollars on fire as any. If Amazon decides that the MGM brand is a better fit for, I don't know, a line of dog and cat food, then we'll all be getting MGM Leo the Lion Pet Food on Prime Day and no more James Bond movies.

I recognize the Old-Man-Yells-At-Cloud vibe here, I do. But what I really want to emphasize is that these mergers didn't have to happen. These studios, provided a madman like Howard Hughes didn't systematically destroy them, probably could've kept going as they rebuilt after the fall of the studio system in the 1950s. Talking pictures came in the 1920s, and what came next was never the same. Television came, introducing a new medium and forcing filmmakers to innovate 3D and widescreen and VistaVision and CinemaScope and the R rating, and what came next was never the same. The studio system collapsed, but Blaxsploitation films, risk-taking visionaries like Robert Evans who gambled on Francis Ford Coppola, and upstarts like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper saved Hollywood in the 1960s and 70s, and what came next was never the same. A real estate boom in the 1990s led to the creation of the multiplex, and suddenly theater owners needed more, more, and more movies to fill their screens. So the independent cinema boom of the 1990s (seriously—just banger after banger after banger) changed the types of stories being told and the storytellers who had the opportunity to tell them, and what came next was never the same. The explosion of creativity that I got to witness at the megaplex in the 1990s on those Friday nights wasn't because there was something in the water, or everybody just got narratively hip all of a sudden, or because they took the lead out of the gasoline finally (OK, maybe that, a little bit), but it was because more people got to tell more stories that only they could tell.

The diversity of voices and opportunities gave us all better art, and created meaning in countless lives. How many people out there do you think have tattoos inspired by The Matrix? You ever had a case of The Mondays? I've got one right now. How many times have you looked at a rug and thought, "That rug really ties the room together"? My friend named his kid after a character from The Fifth Element. Suddenly the need for movies to put on all those screens made room for weird, idiosyncratic stories, queer filmmakers, more women, more people of color telling stories that spoke to individuals and communities and moments that would have not been seen or recognized before.

But that's the point, right? These days? Tighter control over who gets to tell their story? Fewer outlets? There are still a ton of cinema screens, but they're all showing the new Marvel movie, every half hour. On the apps, the algorithm serving up what the owner of the algorithm wants you to see? Hiding what it wants you *not* to see?

So, look. Whichever corporate entity prevails in this Warner Bros. buyout, it is the closing of a chapter. Not the closing of a book, I don't think, but whatever comes next will never be the same.

Hollywood is dead. Long live Hollywood.

Posted by Vance K -- Emmy Award-winning producer and director, cult film reviewer, and co-founder of nerds of a feather, flock together.

Summer Reading List 2017: Vance

I remember the night before I got married, I was laying on my bed reading a book — I don't remember which — and I realized that moment was to be prized, because it would be the last of its kind. I would certainly be alone in a room with a book again in the future, but it would never be exactly the same...and moving forward, I would probably never be able to allocate the same percentage of my time to just chillin' on my own with a book. Fast-forward *cough* years and *cough* children, and now the moments I spend with books are like the rarest of birds, come upon unexpectedly and with no expectation that they'll ever return.

All I can say is, thank the great ones and zeros that control our lives for Audible...

This year, a couple of the books on my list are coming to me in audiobook form, but more than half are staring at me right now...literally...taunting me, telling me they don't think I'm going to get to them. But I can hope.

Dirty Words & Filthy Pictures: Film and the First Amendment by Jeremy Geltzer

In case there was any doubt about how deeply the well of my love for off-the-beaten-path and outsider film runs, I admit to reading stuff like this for fun. Dirty Words & Filthy Pictures is a scholarly exploration of the tug-of-war between filmmakers and film censors from the late-19th century until today. Look, it wasn't until a 1952 Supreme Court case that film was even recognized as falling under the protection of the First Amendment. In the 1960s, it was Grove Press, the publisher that had worked to fight obscenity charges against the works of James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, took on the distribution of I Am Curious, Yellow in order to secure the same protections for film, preventing them from being barred from even entering the country on obscenity grounds. I find this stuff fascinating, and timely, as there are many overt and many subtle ways in which artistic expression might be curtailed, and they've all been tried against filmmakers.

Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

The Hollywood theme got me thinking about this one, and I happened to find a copy at my favorite used bookstore. I read it years and years ago, maybe in junior high, and most of it was utterly lost on me. Having read all of Raymond Chandler's novels in the ensuing years, and having now lived in Los Angeles for over a decade and worked in film, I'm eager to dive in. It's a funny thing — when Budd Schulberg published What Makes Sammy Run? in the 1930s, it was a huge scandal. Schulberg, a Hollywood legacy, was blackballed, and people were shocked at how seedy were the lives and business practices in the studios and production company bungalows. Reading it today, very little has changed, but it's all shrug-worthy. Producers prey on young writers and claim credit for their work? And don't pay them? People sell out and undermine friends for that next gig or to try to move a project toward a greenlight? Employers try to undermine union protections? Representatives represent themselves first and their clients second? *Yawn* All this is so commonplace and so openly on display trying to work in "the picture business" these days that the novel doesn't have much punch. I'm wondering what 80 years has done to the bloody, satirical punch of West's novel.

Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

That Bruce Springsteen, he can tell a story. No genre interest here, particularly, but if his keynote speech a few years back at South by Southwest is any indication, this should be a compelling and insightful read (ok, listen). Plus, I'm going to head into the studio this summer to start work on my fourth full-length folk album, so any and all inspiration is welcome.

Infomocracy by Malka Older

I'm behind on some of the more highly-recommended books other reviewers on this site have highlighted, but I've been keeping an informal list of some of the ones I'm most excited to tackle. I'm more of a sci-fi than a fantasy guy, and Older's book sounds like it's going to scratch a lot of my genre itches. Years ago, I had the idea that if corporations are people, then it's only a matter of time before one runs for office, and so I toyed with the idea of Ralph's grocery chain being President of the United States. I think Infomocracy is probably a better, less openly satirical look a similar concept, and I always admire artists who can take ideas that echo ones I've had myself, and then hit those pitches much farther than I ever could.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

Like I said, I'm behind on some books. This series from N.K. Jemisin is a site favorite, but here I am, on the cusp of the final book's publication, and I haven't even started the series. Bad nerd blogger. It's actually been a while since I read fantasy that wasn't tinged with steampunk or some other additive, so it'll be good to dive back in with both feet. And I can't imagine a more highly-touted series to do it with.

Oh, and I will say, if you haven't heard the 1997 album The Fifth Season by Sacrilege, it's a melodic death metal gem.

Morning Glories Vol. 2 - ??? by Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma

I really enjoyed this series after the first trade came out, but for whatever reason it got away from me and I never picked up any more volumes. Digging through my Comixology library, I recently re-read Vol. 1, and I'm going to grab a few more volumes and pursue the story a little farther. Nick Spenser has gotten a lot of coverage recently for penning the evil-Captain America arc going on right now, and while I'm not totally versed in all the details of that fray, I'm going to dig a little deeper into the original world of the Morning Glory Academy he created.


Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer, co-editor and Summer Reading List-maker for the (now Hugo nominated!) nerds of a feather, flock together, since 2012. Emmy-winning producer and nothing-nominated musician.

Hail, Caesar: A Love Letter to a Love Letter to Old Hollywood

I love old Hollywood.

I love it for the movies, of course, but also the bigger-than-life personalities, the amazing contradictions it contained, the fact that it was essentially a stage magician manufacturing illusion, and the behind-the-curtain rigging that made it possible. I'm also fascinated, of course, by the lives it destroyed, and the seedy tabloid underbelly. But to be honest, I grow easily tired of that. Hollywood Babylon was enough; I didn't need Hollywood Babylon II and the rumors of Hollywood Babylon III. But people love to fixate on that. The current podcast You Must Remember This is a perfect example, telling some of the most grim and depressing, little-known stories from days of Hollywood gone by. I felt like I needed to take a shower after listening to the Gloria Grahame episode. I get it, though. After living in LA for over 10 years, and working in and around Hollywood, I recognize that it's an unfair system that pays out rewards at random, and somebody's whim on a Tuesday after a disappointing lunch can ruin somebody else's career or life.

It's easy to be cynical, and it's easy to find, and to tell, the stories that support that position.

It's harder to be what The Coen Brothers' new movie, Hail, Caesar! is: affectionate and funny. This is a movie with very, very low stakes. We're not what you'd call worried about the outcome. It's not full of what you might call narrative rigor. Yet, I found the movie utterly transfixing because it took all the things I love about old Hollywood and amplified them, and it took all the seedy, nasty stuff, and made jokes out of it. In the opening scene, when Josh Brolin's character secrets a starlet out of a bungalow at 5 am on a rainy night and pays hush money to cops, you know that in the real version of that story, the starlet was making porn movies or worse. In this version, she's dressed in some kind of lederhosen and churning butter.



I got a lot of the in-jokes, and the (not so) veiled references to real people, but I felt like for every one I got, five more went past in the background. People will write books about the references hidden in this movie. Hail, Caesar! does with old Hollywood what The Big Lebowski did with 1940s noir pictures. The casting was amazing, as in most everything the Coens do, but so often in their movies they seem to treat their characters with contempt (see Burn After Reading or Intolerable Cruelty), but in their best work they let their weirdos be weirdos and show us how we might love them in spite of everything. In this movie, that may be most true of Alden Erenreich's Hobie Doyle, who comes across at first as an idiotic movie cowboy, but becomes much more as the movie goes on. I've seen movies in the theater in the last couple of years that made me happy, and that I thought were good movies, but I haven't seen anything that made me fall in love with movies themselves as much as this did in a long, long time.

As a film nerd, hands down, Hair, Caesar! is my favorite movie about movies since Ed Wood, and that's high praise, indeed.

Also, check out this great interview with Josh Brolin about the movie.