This has been a popular, if exhausting, topic for years. Think about the new Star Wars trilogy, where Rey is the hero — well, she’s a woman, so that’s woke. Or the Snow White live-action remake. Or The Little Mermaid, where casting a Halle Bailey as Ariel supposedly made it woke. This argument has been ridiculous for years, but it’s managed to stick around and build a following, because a lot of these movies were bad movies. It wasn’t because they were “woke” or did something crazy. It was because they weren’t good and they failed to meet expectations. And so we get this whole sentiment: go woke, go broke. But luckily, The Odyssey is going to prove how small and insignificant that cohort of people really is, in the grand scheme of things.

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The So-Called Flops Were Never Actually About Casting

Take Rachel Zegler, who got absolutely slammed for starring in Snow White. She’s half Polish, half Colombian — it’s not like the studio “went off script.” But God forbid a woman who was not pale white was cast as Snow White.

They cast a talented actress they believed could lead the film, and then the film itself just wasn’t good. That doesn’t mean woke goes broke. It means a bad movie goes broke. Bad movies don’t make money. That’s what a handful of studios have gotten stuck with these last few years — they made movies people didn’t want to see, and the anti-woke crowd jumped on that as “proof” that going woke means going broke.

The Woke Crowd Lost With Rings of Power

You saw the same pattern with Amazon’s The Rings of Power. Long before a single episode aired, the show was getting torched online for casting Black and brown actors as elves and dwarves — treated as some kind of betrayal of Tolkien, as if Middle-earth, with its wizards and hobbits and orcs, were a documentary.

The backlash got so ugly that Amazon had to suspend user reviews for the first 72 hours just to keep the review-bombing from drowning out real audience reaction. And when the actual numbers came in, critics loved it. The show got renewed and it’s still going, now on its third season later in 2026. None of the “this will kill the franchise” predictions came true, because — say it with me — casting wasn’t the problem. There was never a problem. There was just a loud, angry, mostly-online minority who decided in advance they were going to hate it, and the rest of the world went and watched a good show anyway.

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Now Here Comes The Odyssey, Right on Schedule

The Odyssey sold out tickets a year in advance and simultaneously has one of the most disliked trailers on YouTube — over a couple of minor casting choices. The controversy centers on Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page playing a Greek soldier, Sinon. Both have limited screen time, and both are great in their roles. Remember, this is a mythological retelling of historical events. In a movie with a cyclopes, sea monsters, and witches, there can absolutely be a Helen of Troy whose skin is darker than some people might have imagined, especially when its Lupita Nyong’o. Are we really going to argue that Lupita Nyong’o isn’t one of the most beautiful women in the world? She fits the role perfectly and she is an incredible actress. But the anti-trans, anti-woke crowd who don’t want to see anyone but a straight white actor cast in a role latched onto it anyway, and thought they’d win.

I would know. My early reviews on social media were flooded with bigoted, racist, genuinely disgusting comments about this movie. And yet I knew none of it would matter, because The Odyssey is a great movie, and because this vocal minority of bots, trolls, and angry people online is far less significant than it thinks it is. They were never going to see this movie. They were never buying tickets. And meanwhile, it’s on track to be one of Christopher Nolan’s biggest openings, possibly the third R-rated movie to cross a billion dollars, with screenings sold out weeks and weeks into its release.

This movie is a phenomenon, and it proves how little cultural impact the anti-woke crowd actually has - none. They don’t move the needle. They didn’t cause Snow White or The Little Mermaid or any other project to flop. Making a bad product did that. They have no impact because they aren’t actually part of the audience for the arts. They don’t watch movies, plays, or shows. They sit in echo chambers repeating the same talking points because it makes them feel like they have some kind of power, like something in their lives is finally going right.

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If they had legitimate criticism, it might be worth engaging with. But they don’t — they’re parroting the same lines. I’ve seen people confuse Elliot Page with playing Achilles, over and over. He never played Achilles. He isn’t playing Achilles in this movie. But that rumor stuck a year ago, and people are still repeating it like it’s truth to this day. And even if it were true — who cares? It just shows how out of touch, and how uninterested in facts, this crowd is.

Barbie Already Ran This Experiment Once and Everyone Forgot

I thought this crowd would have died off when Barbie came out. Obviously Barbie is “woke” — it has a heavy feminist themes. But that movie made an enormous amount of money because it was good. It was entertaining as hell, unique, interesting, and a cultural phenomenon.

The anti-woke crowd operates on false confidence: every time a movie bombs, they take credit. Every time a movie succeeds, they go quiet and disappear — exactly like they will with The Odyssey in a few weeks. They can review-bomb it all they want. It won’t matter, because the vast majority of people — the ones who haven’t fallen down this conspiracy-theory rabbit hole — understand what makes a movie good, and understand that none of what this cohort talks about has anything to do with a film’s success. They take credit when it’s convenient and vanish when it isn’t.

So are some movies “woke”? No. I think “woke” is a made-up term at this point. It’s just a buzzword. It used to describe people who were forward-thinking; being “woke” used to be a compliment. But not anymore. Now it’s a meaningless label the right wing and various extremists use to discredit anyone whose opinions differ from their own. There are entire websites and YouTube channels built around “is it woke or is it worth it” content, thriving on clicks from men who can’t accept that something not centered on a straight white male protagonist might still be good — or that a slightly different casting choice doesn’t automatically ruin a character.

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This Was Never a New Trend, You Just Weren’t Reading Movies Closely Enough

The idea that “everything went woke” recently says more about media literacy than about Hollywood. Movies have always carried cultural messages and undertones. In the past, they tended to do it with more subtlety — and that subtlety is exactly what made them work. It’s also exactly why people who couldn’t engage with deeper themes never noticed it was there. If you think movies “never used to be like this,” it’s because you weren’t picking up on it, not because it wasn’t happening. Attention spans have shortened, audiences increasingly want instant gratification, and storytelling has gotten more blunt as a result.

The Odyssey actually has strong antiwar and feminist themes running through it, and they’re handled with restraint. Think about the guilt Odysseus carries over the Trojan War, the way Athena needles at that guilt, and the steadiness of his wife back home — the one actually holding everything together. The film didn’t need Odysseus to turn to the camera and say “war is hell.” You get that from the performances and the storytelling — the same way Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter did it decades ago. The same way Rambo did it: a movie fundamentally about a veteran’s PTSD and how badly Vietnam veterans were treated when they came home, which a lot of people still reduce to “the cool shoot-em-up movie” because they never looked past the surface.

These themes have always been there, because movies are political. They shape culture and start important conversations, and they have always done this across every era and every genre. The idea that this is some new phenomenon designed to erase white people or American culture is asinine and ignorant.

When The Billion-Dollar Numbers Come In, This Crowd Has Nothing Left to Say

Will this crowd disappear when The Odyssey crosses a billion dollars, when it has a massive opening weekend, when it’s still selling out theaters eight or ten weeks later? No. They won’t. They’ll move on to the next talking point that gives them rage clicks and a dopamine hit, the next chance to call someone like me a slur or an idiot for having an opinion. The list of things I’ve been called goes on and on, and it really comes down to this: I have a brain. I can think critically.

I can tell you with total confidence that the live-action Snow White is bad, and it’s not because it’s woke. I can tell you at the same time that The Odyssey is great, and Barbie is great — not because they’re woke, but because they’re good movies. That’s the difference between good and bad, and I can tell the two apart because I’m capable of thinking outside an echo chamber.

That’s the message being sold to consumers all over the world right now by major corporations and governments. And it’s exactly why physical media, and physical ownership of all of your consumer goods, matters so much.

Public corporations exist to grow. They operate on an infinite growth model — constantly increasing profits to keep shareholders happy. It’s the basic logic of capitalism. But every company has a peak. There are only so many of us out there buying so many things. So they have to find other ways to keep growing, and the easiest way is to move customer onto monthly subscription plans they can raise the price on with the click of a button.

Ownership vs. Access

Think about it this way: you buy a movie for $25. The corporation gets its cut of that $25, the retail store gets its cut, and that’s it — the transaction is done. If you’re finished with it, you can resell it on eBay for $10. You can lend it to a friend. It might end up at a thrift store where someone else picks it up for $2. But none of what happens after that initial purchase goes back to the corporation.

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That’s what gives us control as consumers. We own it, so we decide what happens to it. We can lend it out, resell it, give it away, or re-use it over and over again forever. The ball is in our court.

Now compare that to how a subscription works. You pay $25 a month for access. You can’t share the password. Sometimes you can’t even use it across every device in your own household. It’s locked down to the point where you have no choice but to keep paying, every single month. And if the corporation decides next quarter that it needs 20% growth, it simply raises the subscription price 20%. They’ve already done the math: they know some percentage of people will cancel, but they’ll come out ahead on everyone who keeps paying. They run the numbers — “we’ll lose X, but we’ll gain Y in profit” — and if Y wins, that’s what they will do.

This is why corporations don’t want you to own anything. In a capitalist system, ownership isn’t growth. Subscriptions are growth. That’s why everything has become a subscription — HelloFresh for food, clothing subscription boxes, every piece of software you use, your phone plan, even the phone itself. Hell you can subscribe to cars now, getting a new vehicle every week. There is almost nothing that has not become a monthly subscription cost. It’s all recurring monthly revenue, because recurring revenue is consistent, and increasing the costs of a recurring subscription plan is a lever companies can pull whenever they want more growth.

I recognize the irony of saying this on a platform like Substack where subscriptions are how writers get paid, but that is why I keep my Substack free to read for everyone. I consider a subscription a donation to my work, not a necessity to access it.

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The PlayStation Example

This reasoning is why you’re seeing a company like Sony pull this lever right now. They’ve announced they’re ending physical media for PlayStation starting in 2028. The reasoning is that hardware and game development costs have gotten too expensive. But instead of simply charging a few dollars more per disc, they’d rather eliminate physical media altogether and push everything digital — something that costs them nothing to distribute and that they can revoke from you at any time.

You will own nothing, and you will like it.

And realistically, gaming is probably headed toward a full subscription model too, the same way Netflix reshaped television. The subscription infrastructure is already there with PlayStation Plus and Xbox Live, but Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus Premium tiers are the real preview of where this is going. Eventually, companies won’t even want you to own the digital games outright. They’ll want a monthly fee for access to a library they control. If they remove a game, sorry! You lose access.

The Gym Membership Model

The sinister part of subscription models is that these companies are also banking on you not using what you’re paying for. It’s the gym membership playbook. You sign up, show up for a month, and then never use it again. Gyms know roughly 67% of gym memberships go unused or barely used. That unused 67% is free money. The people who actually show up every day aren’t the core business. The core business is the people paying every month and rarely, if ever, walking through the door.

Netflix loves a subscriber who pays $25 a month and watches nothing. That person has no bandwidth costs and no pressure to keep producing content to retain them. They are just pure profit. The same logic applies to PlayStation, software companies, meal kits, clothing subscriptions, anyone running a subscription model. Their best-case customer is someone who forgets they’re even paying, keeps getting billed, and never costs them a dime in actual usage.

How messed up is that?

We Still Hold the Power

Here’s the good news: we live in a capitalist society, which means consumers are the ones who actually run this system. None of these companies do anything without us. If we stop giving them the money, they have to change. If we cancel subscriptions, if we refuse to buy digital products we don’t actually own, they have to adjust to protect their growth. We have to hit them where it hurts — in their earnings reports.

The only way this changes is if people push back against the idea that we should own nothing and be happy about it. I’ll admit, this is harder in some areas than others — you can’t exactly opt out of housing and refuse to pay rent. But in plenty of other areas, we have real leverage as consumers to push back.

This isn’t a lost cause. We don’t have to just sit here, pay the subscriptions, and complain. Cancel them if you don’t use them. Buy your own movies, music, books, and video games. Own things. Show these corporations that this isn’t the future we’re willing to accept, and that it’s not how they win.

Winning looks like working with consumers. We need a balanced system that works for everyone, with a real back-and-forth built on mutual respect. Right now, it’s entirely one-sided. That has to change.

First, PlayStation is deleting over 500 movies from people’s libraries, movies people paid $20 to “own”. Those people are simply losing access with no refund and no recourse because a licensing deal expired. And starting in January 2028, PlayStation has announced that they are ending physical disc production for new games entirely.

These are two different announcements, but they’re really saying the same thing. Physical media is disappearing, and what’s replacing it isn’t ownership. It’s an unlimited rental with no consumer protections. There today, gone tomorrow.

So what does the future of physical media actually look like? I think there’s a real answer here, but it starts with understanding why physical media still matters in the first place.

The Myth of Digital Ownership

When you buy a digital movie or game, you’re not actually buying it. You’re buying access to it for as long as the platform decides to keep it available. Five hundred movies missing from people’s digital libraries just proved that. People paid full price for those titles, and PlayStation can take them back whenever they want, because you never owned them to begin with.

Consumers already sense this, even if they can’t fully put it into words. Look at what happened when GTA VI got announced last week. There was a lot of backlash online when people realized there was no disc, and Rockstar came out and said there would be a “physical edition.” Here’s the problem. That physical edition isn’t a physical copy of the game. It’s a box with a download code inside it. So the “physical” version is a piece of plastic and a code, nothing you could hand to a friend, resell as an actual game, or play without an internet connection to redeem it. That’s not physical media, that’s digital media wearing a costume

There’s some irony in it too. Go back and find PlayStation’s old ads mocking Xbox for being too restrictive and too digital, the ones where Sony bragged about how easy it was to just hand a physical PS4 game to a friend, no logging in, no digital gatekeeping required. That was PlayStation’s whole pitch against Xbox’s restrictions on used games and their “always online” future. Now PlayStation is walking straight into the thing they used to make fun of.

Why Digital Only Media Puts Preservation at Risk

Here’s what worries me more than any single deleted library: media that only exists on a server can disappear completely, and it already has.

Remember PT, the Silent Hill playable teaser from 2015? It was huge. When the Silent Hill game it was teasing got cancelled, PT got pulled from the PlayStation Store, and you cannot legally access it today. No disc, no download, nothing. It’s just gone.

There’s an argument that media is more at risk of being lost now, in the digital age, than it was when we had nitrate film reels that could spontaneously catch fire, or paperback books, or CDs and cassette tapes sitting in a box for thirty years. A digital file is just a file on a server, and if that server shuts down, it’s gone with it. I have music I can only find on YouTube or SoundCloud, and if those platforms disappear tomorrow, that music disappears with them, because there’s no physical backup anywhere.

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It’s the same story for movies, games, and books, every type of media we’ve pushed fully into the cloud. We’re one corporate decision away from permanent gaps in what we’re able to watch, hear, play, or read, and most people won’t think about it until it happens to something they actually cared about.

The Problem With Going All In on Physical

So physical media protects you from a server disappearing and maintains your rights as a consumer to the purchases you make. But physical media comes with its own two problems, and neither one is small.

The first is environmental. A study from Greenly, a French carbon accounting firm, found that manufacturing and shipping one million physical game discs produces about 312 tons of CO2, while one million digital downloads of that same size game only produces about 3 tons. That’s roughly a hundred times more carbon intensive for physical discs than for digital downloads, and at the scale these companies operate, that difference adds up fast. Plastic cases, rare earth metals, global shipping, all of it costs something to the environment. Digital isn’t free either, it just moves the cost somewhere less visible, like a data center burning electricity instead of a container ship burning fuel. But there’s no getting around the fact that physical production and shipping leaves a much bigger carbon footprint than a download does.

The second problem is just practical. Physical media takes up space, and a lot of it. I have thousands of physical movies in my house, and thousands more in binders. I can tell you firsthand that storing physical media is a genuine task. It’s rooms, closets, shelves, and storage units full of discs for some people. We have entire systems built around organizing and protecting discs that scratch, warp, or grow mold if you’re not careful with them. Multiply that by everyone who wants to own their movies, games, music, and books the way I do, and you start to see why the industry keeps pushing everyone toward digital. Committing to physical media ownership costs space, money, and lots of time.

So we’re stuck between two problematic defaults. Fully digital means you own nothing and your media can vanish the moment a company decides to pull it. Fully physical means a bigger carbon footprint and a storage problem that gets worse every year you keep collecting. Neither one is perfect, and I believe there is a middle ground where we can have the best of both worlds.

So What’s the Solution?

I don’t think we have to choose between owning nothing and drowning in plastic discs. I’m not a technologist, I don’t have the engineering answer laid out, but I do think we already have the technology to find a real middle ground here. The industry just hasn’t been forced to build it yet.

One option is some kind of platform agnostic ownership key, a physical code tied to a unique identifier, kind of like an NFT but without the nonsense that made NFTs a punchline. You’d still buy through a platform or marketplace. The platform still gets paid and the publisher still gets paid, but the actual record of ownership would live outside any one company’s server. That ownership would travel with you across platforms, and nobody could just delete what you already paid for.

Another option looks something like Kaleidescape, a home media server that lets you download the highest quality version of a film directly to a device you own. No disc required and no shelf space needed. That gets you disc level audio and video quality without needing a house full of plastic cases. But Kaleidescape isn’t the full answer either. The media unit alone runs from $3,000 to $5,000, storage is limited, and availability depends on what studios decide to license to them. And at the end of the day it’s still a platform, so if Kaleidescape goes under (which happened in 2016), there’s a real question about what happens to the movies you already paid for through them. That’s the same fragility we’re trying to get away from, just with nicer hardware.

There’s also the format question itself. A Nintendo Switch cartridge is tiny, and yet it still ships in an oversized case. We already have microSD cards that hold a terabyte of data. There’s no reason we couldn’t shrink physical ownership down to something the size of a house key that holds an entire collection. It is still yours, still tangible, still not something a company can delete on a whim, and small enough that storage stops being the burden it is today.

As someone who collects, I don’t need a disc and a case for every single title I own. I want that for the ones that matter — the limited editions, steelbooks, and the movies I actually love and collect. I don’t need packaging for the other five hundred movies my kids watch on a random Tuesday. Right now those are in a binder full of loose discs, and it could just as easily be one drive, holding everything, taking up almost no space, and still belonging to me.

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People are already building versions of this themselves with NAS systems, and yes, through piracy too. It works, but it’s expensive to set up, technically complicated, and easy to mess up if you don’t already know what you’re doing. None of that is consumer friendly. What the industry needs to do is build the legitimate, simple version of what people are already figuring out on their own.

What Consumers Can Do Next

I’m not naive about who actually solves this. Corporations aren’t going to fix any of this out of goodwill. If you think lower emissions or your ownership rights are ever going to outweigh their bottom line on their own, you’re lying to yourself. Nobody at PlayStation is losing sleep over PT being unavailable, and nobody there is losing sleep over your five hundred deleted movies either.

This only changes if consumers make it change. That means pushing for expanded digital rights and changes to DRM laws. We need to normalize the right to make backups of media you’ve actually purchased, the same way ripping a CD you owned used to be completely normal. Normalizing that will lead to easier digital backups without jumping through hoops to setup MakeMKV and an NAS and all the other workarounds it requires now.

It means rejecting the idea that a purchase can just be quietly taken back. Consumers have rights, and a purchase should be a purchase for life. It means demanding formats that respect the planet and the customer at the same time, instead of whichever option is cheapest for the shareholders.

There’s a version of the future where all of this works. Where you own what you pay for, where that ownership doesn’t depend on some server staying online forever, and where getting there doesn’t require shipping a warehouse of plastic across the ocean every time. The technology already exists. Nobody’s building it yet, because as consumers, we aren’t making them.

In five years, who knows what games, music, books, or movies will actually still be in our libraries. We deserve control over what we paid for. It’s time we started acting like we care, and pushing back against these changes. We can do better.

Below is everything you need to know: how the sale works, how to stack the rewards program on top of it, what new merch is showing up in stores this year, and a rundown of titles that are worth picking up whether you’re buying your first Criterion or your hundredth.

What Is the Sale?

Every Criterion Collection title at Barnes & Noble is 50% off its MSRP for the entire duration of the sale — typically a full month each time it runs. There are no codes, no membership required, and no limit on how many titles you can grab. It’s just 50% off one of the most respected film libraries ever assembled on disc.

The math is straightforward: a $40 title becomes $20, a $50 release is $25, and a $300 box set drops to $150.

Barnes & Noble carries the largest selection of Criterion Collection titles of any physical retailer in the country. The bigger the store, the deeper the inventory. Flagship locations in larger cities will have more spine numbers on the shelf than most collectors have ever seen in one place. Your mileage may vary depending on where you live, but even here by me in New Hampshire we have several stores with great selections.

Criterion does run flash sales on criterion.com throughout the year, but those are 24 hours only and online exclusive. Barnes & Noble gives you a full month, twice a year, with the added benefit of browsing in person at the largest physical Criterion retailer in the country. If you’ve ever wanted to build a serious collection without paying full Criterion prices — which are fair, but not cheap — this is how you do it.

Watch the full breakdown — including a hands-on look at the titles Barnes & Noble sent over for me to showcase!

How to Get the Most Out of the Rewards Program

Before you spend anything, sign up for the Barnes & Noble membership program.

The program has two tiers:

Free membership — Earn $5 in rewards for every $100 you spend.

Put $500 through during the sale and you’re essentially getting a free Criterion title at sale price. If you shop at B&N a lot, there is no reason not to sign-up.

Premium membership ($39.99/year) — Everything above, plus 10% off almost every purchase online and in-store, and free shipping on online orders.

The 10% should stack on top of the 50% sale price. Success rates vary based on the store and online vs in-person, but in July 2026, I did hear of this working online.

If you’re planning to spend any real money during the sale, the premium membership pays for itself quickly. You also get other benefits like a free tote bag, drink upgrades at the store cafes, and exclusive member deals throughout the year.

New This Year: Criterion Merch in Select Stores

For the first time, select Barnes & Noble locations will carry Criterion Collection merchandise alongside the films:

• Criterion Collection Hat

• Wooden Diecast Criterion Closet Van — a replica of the fan-favorite mobile Criterion closet van that tours the country

• Tote bags — available in black and tan

Not every location will carry all of it, so it’s worth calling ahead if you’re making the trip specifically for merch.

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Titles Worth Picking Up

The Criterion Collection is huge — over 1,300 titles and counting — so here is a list of titles to look for. I threw in a mix of recent additions and long-standing essentials, so whether you’re filling gaps or starting from scratch this should give you a good place to begin. Again, the best part of this sale is the ability to browse in a store, so go look around and find something new!

Killers of the Flower Moon (4K) — Scorsese’s Apple TV+ epic finally arrives on physical media for the first time. A landmark release for 4K collectors.

This Is Spinal Tap (4K) — Spine #12, one of the earliest Criterion releases ever, now upgraded to 4K and loaded with special features.

John Singleton’s Hood Trilogy (4K box set) — Boyz n the Hood, Poetic Justice, and Baby Boy collected together on 4K for the first time. One of the best box sets Criterion has ever released.

Network (4K) — Sidney Lumet’s media satire is one of the best films ever made. If you don’t own it, this is the version to get.

Eyes Wide Shut (4K) — Kubrick’s final film gets a Criterion upgrade ahead of the forthcoming full Kubrick box set. If you want individual titles rather than waiting on a $500+ set, now’s the time.

The Grifters (4K) — Produced by Scorsese, directed by Stephen Frears. Anjelica Huston, John Cusack, and Annette Bening in a sharp neo-noir.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (4K) — A long-standing collection title now available in 4K. Terry Gilliam’s adaptation has never looked better.

Body Heat (4K) — Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 neo-noir throwback, brand new to 4K. Underseen and overdue for a proper presentation.

Gregg Araki: Teen Apocalypse Trilogy (4K box set) — Totally F**ed Up*, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere — a definitive auteur collection and a great example of what Criterion does with box sets.

All That Jazz (Blu-ray) — Bob Fosse’s semi-autobiographical musical drama. Roy Scheider is extraordinary. An easy blind buy if you haven’t seen it.

A Note for First-Time Buyers

Start with something you already love. Find titles from a director you’re obsessed with, or buy a film you know you’d rewatch. The Criterion presentation — the transfers, supplements, and booklets — rewards collectors on these great films you already care about. Once you have a few, you’ll be hooked. The sale makes the entry point easier than it’ll ever be, and at worst, you might have spent $25 on a movie you didn’t like instead of $50. If you don’t like the movie, resale value on Criterion titles is solid.

The sale runs all of July and again in November if you miss it or need a second run. But don’t treat this like an online shopping cart situation where you fill a list, check out, and move on. Go to the store and walk the shelves. Pick up something you’ve never heard of, flip it over, read the back, and look at the artwork.

One of the best things about this sale is that it gives you permission to take a chance on something outside your comfort zone without the sting of paying full price. Grab something by a director you’ve been meaning to explore. Pick up a film from a decade or country you don’t usually gravitate toward. Let the spine numbers and the cover art do some of the work for you. Who knows, you might walk out with your new favorite movie.

If you have any questions — about specific titles, whether something is worth the upgrade to 4K, where to start if you’re new to Criterion, anything — drop them in the comments. I’m happy to help you figure out what belongs in your collection.

Happy browsing!

A quick note: the links below are affiliate links. If you buy through them, I get a small commission at no extra cost to you — it’s one of the ways you can directly support this newsletter and everything else I make. So thank you, genuinely.

Browse everything on sale → Amazon Prime Day Movie & TV Deals

Movies & TV on 4K, Blu-ray & DVD

• Superman I–IV: 5-Film Collection (4K) $30.00

• Back to the Future: 40th Anniversary Trilogy (4K) $26.00

• Oppenheimer (4K) $11.99

• Sinners (4K) $13.99

• The Substance (4K) $14.99

• F1: The Movie (4K) $12.99

• Weapons (4K) $12.99

• Boogie Nights (4K) $12.99

• Se7en (4K) $11.99

• Companion (4K) $11.99

• Event Horizon (4K) $19.99

• Howard the Duck: 40th Anniversary Steelbook (4K) $29.99

• The Lord of the Rings: Motion Picture Trilogy (4K) $50.56

• Harry Potter: 8-Film Collection (4K) $56.04

• Jurassic World: 7-Movie Collection (4K) $56.49

• Fast & Furious: 10-Movie Collection (4K) $46.99

• Alfred Hitchcock: The Ultimate Collection (4K) $88.99

• Batman: 4-Film Collection (4K) $37.49

• Shrek: 4-Movie Collection (4K) $21.99

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Trilogy (4K) $43.99

• A Nightmare on Elm Street: 7-Film Collection (4K) $69.00

• Mr. Robot: The Complete Series (Blu-ray) $29.49

• Transformers Animated: The Complete Series (Blu-ray) $24.99

• The Office: The Complete Series (DVD) $22.00

• CatDog: The Complete Series (DVD) $12.99

• Courage the Cowardly Dog: The Complete Series (DVD) $11.99

• Dexter’s Laboratory: The Complete Series (DVD) $22.00

TVs, Home Theater & Audio

• Sony 65” BRAVIA XR8B OLED 4K Smart TV (K-65XR8B) $1,198.00

• LG 65” OLED evo AI 4K C5 Smart TV (OLED65C5PUA, 2025) $1,199.00

• Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K $24.99

• Onkyo TX-RZ30 9.2-Channel AV Receiver – IMAX Enhanced (4K) $797.00

• Yamaha RX-V6A 7.2-Channel AV Receiver with MusicCast (4K) $598.00

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The problem isn’t that Hollywood is run by older people. Every industry has older leaders. Music labels have veteran executives. Publishing houses have experienced editors. Television networks are filled with people who have been around for decades. The difference is that those industries generally seem capable of adapting to cultural shifts as they’re happening.

Hollywood feels like it’s operating five to ten years behind the rest of society.

You can see it in the movies getting greenlit. You can see it in the stories being told. And you can see it in the assumptions those movies make about how people live, communicate, consume media, and understand the world around them.

Hollywood is filled with talented directors, writers, actors, producers, and craftspeople. The issue is not with them, its an institutional problem. The larger a studio becomes, the more layers of decision-making get added between a creative idea and the audience. By the time a movie reaches theaters, it often feels like it’s responding to a version of culture that no longer exists.

I kept thinking about this while watching Toy Story 5.

The film’s central conflict revolves around children’s relationship with screens and technology. That’s not a bad idea, but it feels strangely delayed. The children who first grew up with iPads are now old enough to be bringing their own kids to Toy Story movies. The debate over whether screens belong in children’s lives isn’t new anymore. We’ve been having that conversation for well over a decade.

The more relevant question today isn’t whether technology is good or bad, but it’s how we balance it. Screens aren’t going anywhere - that conversation is over. They’re a part of modern life. Parents, teachers, and kids are navigating questions of moderation, socialization, and healthy relationships with technology, not debating whether technology should exist at all.

It also misses what feels like the far more obvious technological conversation of the last few years: artificial intelligence. Whether people are excited by AI or terrified of it, it’s one of the defining issues of the moment. If Toy Story wanted to explore technology’s relationship with childhood, creativity, and imagination, AI seems like the natural place to start. But again, they were 5-10 years behind the ball.

The same thing happened with Disclosure Day.

I enjoyed the movie. Spielberg is one of the greatest filmmakers to ever do it. He can still direct spectacle better than almost anyone alive. But the entire premise felt like something that would have been cutting-edge in 2006.

Spoilers ahead…

The major plot point revolves around getting evidence of alien disclosure to a television news station. Twenty years ago, that would have made perfect sense. Today, it feels almost impossible to imagine.

If someone had legitimate proof of extraterrestrial life tomorrow, it wouldn’t break through traditional media first. It would hit YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Reddit, X, and a dozen other platforms before a television producer had even scheduled a segment. Then the news networks would report on the fact that it was already spreading online.

That’s how the spread of information works now. It’s worked that way for years. Look at WikiLeaks, Snowden and the NSA, the Epstein Files. We learn about new wars through TikTok videos from civilians on location before it ever hits CNN or BBC.

The movie isn’t bad because of this. It’s still entertaining. But it reveals the same underlying problem: Hollywood is still telling stories based on assumptions about society that are increasingly outdated.

Even some of the broader themes feel rooted in an earlier era. Secret government agencies hiding aliens in underground facilities for decades is a concept we’ve seen countless times before. Meanwhile, public conversations around unidentified aerial phenomena, disclosure, and non-human intelligence have become significantly more complicated and interesting than they were twenty years ago. There was an opportunity to engage with those newer ideas, but instead, the film largely falls back on familiar territory.

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Then there’s Scary Movie 6.

I don’t think the problem is that it’s “offensive” or “edgy”. Nothing in that movie offended me. The formula simply hasn’t evolved much since the early 2000s. The movie still seems to operate under the assumption that shock value alone is enough to generate laughs.

Defenders of this movie will say its because younger audiences are overly sensitive. They can’t handle this cutting edge comedy. But that’s not it. It’s because comedy comedy has changed dramatically over the last two decades, and Scary Movie did not.

The comedians and creators defining the current era aren’t relying on the same tools. People like Tim Robinson, Nathan Fielder, Tim Heidecker, Bo Burnham, Ayo Edebiri, Sarah Sherman, and Rachel Sennott understand that modern comedy often comes from awkwardness, specificity, absurdity, social observation, and self-awareness. The humor reflects the internet age, media saturation, and the weirdness of modern life.

Scary Movie 6 still has moments that work. It’ll make its money. Most of these movies will. But it feels designed for a version of comedy that stopped being culturally dominant years ago.

What’s interesting is that this problem feels particularly severe in film.

Television has undergone a creative renaissance. Music constantly discovers and elevates new voices. Publishing continues to find younger writers and fresh perspectives. Even social media, for all its flaws, has become remarkably effective at identifying emerging talent and cultural trends.

Hollywood, by comparison, often feels much slower.

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Part of that is simply the nature of the business. Movies take years to develop, finance, produce, market, and release. Large budgets create risk aversion for studios. Franchises dominate studio slates because they are familiar. Executives want easy, familiar, revenue-guaranteed projects. It’s boring - but its the system at work.

That’s why some of the most interesting work in film is increasingly coming from outside the traditional studio system. Indie distributors and smaller studio arms like Blumhouse, NEON, A24, Focus Features, and Searchlight have built reputations by backing filmmakers earlier from festival buys, taking creative risks, and paying attention to where audiences are heading rather than where they’ve already been. It was telling that in 2026, the Cannes Film Festival had no major studio releases. This is a new world, and the smaller distributors are the ones who are leading the charge.

Meanwhile, many of the major studios remain heavily dependent on sequels, remakes, reboots, and familiar intellectual property. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that — some of those movies are great, like The Naked Gun reboot that captured modern comedy sensibilities and nailed an IP — but it does raise a question: when was the last time one of the major studios truly changed the culture?

Not with a box office record or a quarterly earnings report, but creatively.

When Disney released Snow White and The Lion King, those films were trendsetters Today, the largest studios often feel more focused on preserving existing brands than creating the next generation of them.

Audiences haven’t fallen out of love with movies. If anything, people are hungry for stories that feel relevant, surprising, and connected to the world they’re actually living in. That’s why films from smaller studios so often break through. They don’t feel like they’re responding to a cultural moment from five years ago.

Hollywood has reinvented itself before, and it’ll probably do it again. But right now, some of the most influential people in the industry seem to be spending their time catching up to where culture was, while younger filmmakers and audiences are already moving on to what’s next.

They are not wrong that something significant is happening, but they are very wrong about what it is. Let’s start with the numbers, because the numbers are genuinely extraordinary and should be celebrated.

Curry Barker made Obsession for $750,000. After three weekends in theaters — and three consecutive weekends of box office growth, which almost never happens — the film has crossed $148 million worldwide. Focus Features acquired it out of TIFF for $15 million, so they are thrilled. It is a historically anomalous performance, and it deserves to be recognized as such.

Then Kane Parsons, who is 20 years old, opened Backrooms this past weekend to $81 million domestically and $118 million globally. That is the largest opening in A24’s history — more than triple the previous record set by Civil War in 2024. Parsons is now the youngest filmmaker ever to land the number one movie in America, breaking the record held by Josh Trank, who was 27 when Chronicle opened at number one in 2012. Backrooms was made for roughly $10 million.

Meanwhile, The Mandalorian and Grogu — a Star Wars movie with the full Disney machine behind it and three seasons on Disney+ — dropped 70% in its second weekend and landed in third place behind two original horror films. That detail is getting buried in the coverage a bit, but it might be the biggest story of this whole thing.

The Media Is Missing the Point by Treating These Two Films as the Same Story

Every major outlet is packaging Obsession and Backrooms together as if they are the same phenomenon, but they are not. They are two different kinds of success, built on two different models, and conflating them leads to the wrong lessons.

Obsession is a micro-budget supernatural horror film with no pre-existing IP. It premiered at TIFF, got into a bidding war, and then word of mouth carried it from a $17M opening to a $23.9M second weekend to a continued climb in week three at $26 million. That kind of sustained momentum is earned purely by the quality of the film, word of mouth through social media, and the community Barker built around his work. It’s a grassroots success story in the most literal sense.

Backrooms is a different animal. It is adapted from Parsons’ viral YouTube series, which already had a massive, devoted following built around the liminal space horror concept. That built-in audience is real and it showed up — 88% of the opening weekend audience was under 35. A better comparison for Backrooms is Five Nights at Freddy’s, which also converted an enormous existing internet audience into a theatrical event.

Both films are impressive. But the reasons they are impressive are different, and treating them as one story produces lazy analysis.

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YouTubers Changing Hollywood Is Not a 2026 Development

CNN’s headline this week read: “YouTubers are setting box office records. It could change the future of moviemaking.”

The article opens with this quote:

The biggest two movies in America right now, “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” come from twentysomething filmmakers who honed their craft on YouTube.

Their films were made with relatively low budgets and were marketed online. Now that they’re filling theaters with teens and young adults who rarely show up at the movies, all of Hollywood is paying attention, with experts predicting that studios will copy this moviemaking model many times over.

This is presented as breaking news, but it really is not.

In 2023, Talk to Me became A24’s biggest horror hit at the time, surpassing Hereditary. It was made by the Philippou Brothers — Danny and Michael — who built their following on YouTube with a channel called RackaRacka. At the time, articles ran across every major outlet saying the brothers were “changing the industry.” The conversation was nearly identical to what is being written right now.

Before that: Iron Lung, released in 2025, came from Youtuber Markiplier. Shelby Oaks, released in 2024, came from Chris Stuckmann, a film critic and filmmaker who built his audience entirely on YouTube. Neither of those films performed at the level of Obsession or Backrooms, but they were operating on the same model — creator-to-filmmaker pipeline, built-in audience, low budget, horror. The pattern was already there, but the industry just wasn’t paying full attention yet.

Young Audiences Have Always Gone to the Movies

The other persistent error in the coverage is the framing around young audiences “coming back” to theaters.

Millennials and Gen Z make up approximately 71% of movie ticket sales in America while representing roughly 43% of the population. They are not absent from theaters. They never were. But they are selective. They show up for films that feel like events. They want original stories with cultural momentum, or films tied to communities they already belong to. They will show up in week two, three, and four of a film’s release as hype spreads on social media. It is a great argument for expanded theatrical windows. Focus Features had to learn this lesson quickly - they had planned for a June 2nd release of Obsession on digital rental platforms for audiences to watch at home, but they pushed that back quickly to their standard 45 day window when they saw the reaction to the second weekend.

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Longlegs. Obsession. Backrooms. Five Nights at Freddy’s. Hereditary. Get Out. The Substance. Weapons. Sinners. Iron Lung. These are not films that dragged reluctant young audiences back to the cinema. These are films that gave them a reason to show up that franchise fatigue could not provide.

The “young people don’t go to movies anymore” narrative is demonstrably false. What’s true is that young audiences don’t go to every movie anymore. They are not going to see the fifth iteration of a franchise they have no attachment to. That is not the same thing as abandoning the theatrical experience. The industry conflates these constantly, and the coverage follows suit.

A Long Tradition That Keeps Evolving

Horror has been the most reliably profitable genre in Hollywood for decades, and it has consistently served as the launching pad for major filmmakers.

Halloween launched John Carpenter in 1978. The Blair Witch Project redefined what a horror film could be made for. Paranormal Activity’s massive success is the foundation for Blumhouse — without it, Blumhouse as it exists today does not happen. Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, George Romero, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Kathryn Bigelow, and Brian De Palma all started in horror. More recently, we have Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, and Oz Perkins. Now Curry Barker, Kane Parsons, and the Philippou Brothers. The genre has always been the most accessible entry point for a filmmaker working with limited resources and maximum creative freedom.

What changes is the medium that precedes the transition into film. In the 1960s and 70s, many directors came up through television. That was the accessible medium of the time. Today, the accessible medium is YouTube and short-form social video. That is where young creative people are building audiences, developing a visual language, and finding out whether they have something to say. The pipeline from that space into film is not surprising. It is obvious. It has been obvious for ten years. But the mainstream media and Hollywood are ten years behind, and it is showing with recent year’s box office returns.

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This same pattern is playing out across every creative industry. YouTube shows become network series. Social media stars are selling out stadiums as musicians, landing leading roles in films and TV, writing bestselling books, and building consumer brands that compete directly with legacy corporations. Prime Energy came into a saturated category and dominated. Mr Beast’s chocolate bars went up against a brand juggernaut like Hershey. Emma Chamberlain’s coffee brand became a cultural presence. The mechanism is the same in every case: build an authentic audience, then leverage that trust into a new context. The filmmakers doing this are not an anomaly. They are part of a continuous pattern that the mainstream has been slow to recognize.

The Right Lessons, and the Ones Hollywood Will Probably Learn Instead

The correct takeaway from Obsession and Backrooms is not “we need to find YouTubers and put them in charge of projects.” The correct takeaway is that audiences respond to original, creator-driven work made by people who have a genuine relationship with their audience or can tap into the culture of the moment. The YouTube background is incidental, but the authenticity is not.

Hollywood’s history with moments like this is not encouraging. When something works, the immediate instinct is to replicate the surface feature rather than the underlying quality. After Blair Witch, studios flooded the market with found footage films, most of them missing the point. After Paranormal Activity, it was the same thing. After Get Out, the hype about “elevated horror” produced a lot of films that chased the magic without any of the craft. The next step is predictable: studios will start approaching YouTube creators with large subscriber counts and offering them projects, without distinguishing between someone who has a genuine cinematic vision and someone who has learned to perform for an algorithm. Some of those projects will work, but most will not.

The filmmakers who will matter in the long run — the ones who actually represent the future of the medium — are not the ones with the most followers. They are the ones using whatever platform is available to them to tell stories that nobody else is telling, in a language they developed themselves.

The next Steven Spielberg is making short films on an iPhone right now and posting them somewhere. The next Stephen King is writing horror on Reddit or telling stories on TikTok. The next great cinematographer is shooting their friends on Instagram and figuring out lighting and camera angles through trial and error. I am not predicting this — this is happening today across the world. This is the reality of where filmmaking and all creative endeavors are headed.

Let me be clear about what’s at stake here. Last year, IMAX generated a record $1.28 billion at the global box office, a more than 40% increase over 2024 and 13% higher than its previous record set in 2019. IMAX’s domestic box office market share rose to a record 5.2% last year, up from 4.5% in 2024, while its global market share increased to 3.8% from 3.1%. IMAX is a company at the top of its game, expanding globally, and reaffirming projections for a record $1.4 billion in 2026. So why sell? Because when you’re at your peak, that’s exactly when you cash out.

The Three Scenarios

If IMAX sells, there are really only three types of buyers that make sense, and they are not created equal.

Option One: A Major Theater Chain

I could easily see AMC, Regal — one of the big exhibitor groups — absorbing IMAX and folding it into their portfolio. This is probably the most logical structural fit, but also the most financially unlikely right now. Theater chains are not swimming in cash. They’ve been rebuilding since the pandemic, and acquiring a company like IMAX would require capital they may simply not have. AMC has a market cap of $1.18 billion, Regal sits at $3.1 billion, and IMAX is at $1.8 billion. Smaller companies don’t buy larger companies - so AMC is out without another investor. Regal could make it work, but that would be a huge acquisition for a company of roughly the same size.

It would be a good outcome for the product itself — a theater chain has every incentive to maintain and grow the premium experience — but I’d put this at the lowest probability of the three.

Option Two: A Major Studio or Streamer

This is where it gets interesting. Netflix, Universal, and Disney could be one of these players could acquire the IMAX brand and reshape the theatrical landscape. The play here is straightforward: either you lock IMAX technology to your own films as a competitive moat, or you run it as a licensing business and collect fees from every studio that wants their movie shown on those screens. Both strategies have merit.

Disney makes a ton of sense. They just announced their Infinity Vision premium format. If we’re being honest, is essentially an advanced Dolby Cinema with better branding. It doesn’t do anything revolutionary. But if Disney acquired IMAX and rebranded it as Infinity Vision? That is a power move. Suddenly you’ve taken the most recognized name in large-format cinema and made it your own. Every Marvel film, every Pixar release, every Star Wars event becomes an Infinity Vision experience. The brand power alone would be enormous. Plus, they might be able to steal back some theaters from Dune!

The problem is whether Disney actually wants to spend the money. Wall Street analysts broadly see IMAX as an attractive asset that could draw interest from a variety of businesses, from Hollywood studios and theatrical partners — but wanting something and writing the check are two different things. Disney is in a consolidation mode of its own right now, and a major acquisition would need to pencil out against all their other priorities.

Netflix might be very interested as well, especially after losing out on the big Warner Brothers deal and having some cash to spend. Can’t you see Netflix taking on IMAX and turning them into Netflix theaters, delivering a premium experience for theatrical showings? They could get into the world of theatrical via the smaller subset of IMAX theaters, own the best technology to see a movie, and truly have a monopoly on being the biggest streaming service and the biggest premium theatrical format. For what Netflix was going to spend on Warner Brothers, this would be a drop in the bucket.

Option Three: Private Equity or an Investment Group

This is the nightmare scenario, and unfortunately, the one I think is most likely. Investment groups and PE firms almost always have more liquidity and leverage than a theater chain or even a major studio at any given moment. They can move fast and offer a premium price that’s hard to turn down.

To understand why this worries me quite a bit, you need to understand about IMAX actually operates: IMAX owns its theaters. Even when an IMAX screen is inside an AMC multiplex, IMAX owns that screen and owns that equipment. They are essentially renting floorspace from AMC.

But private equity has a playbook, and it never deviates. Step one: cut headcount and reduce overhead. Step two: charge more for the product. Step three: extract value until there’s nothing left to extract. What that means practically is there will be fewer people to maintain the equipment, fewer technicians who understand how to optimize the projection and sound, and ticket prices climbing from $20 to $30 or beyond. Consumers are going to get a degraded experience at a premium price. It is the worst possible outcome for everyone except the fund that bought it.

Think about what happened to your favorite food brands when they got acquired by a conglomerate. The recipe changed. The ingredients got cheaper. It tastes like garbage now. Same thing happens to clothing brands, car brands, software companies, etc. IMAX has become a true standard — one of the few remaining experiences that genuinely justifies leaving the house and paying a premium to see a film the way it was meant to be seen. I do not want to watch it get hollowed out.

This Is Just Another Domino

If you zoom out further than this single sale, you can easily see what’s really happening. IMAX is not an isolated case — it’s the latest entry in what I’ve been calling for years: the great consolidation of the entertainment industry. We’re watching it happen in real time.

Letterboxd is exploring another sale. Drafthouse went through its own upheaval — Sony now owns it, and there’s been plenty of drama around that. Warner Brothers Discovery is still in talks to finalize the deal where it was acquired by Paramount. Streaming services continue to merge and absorb one another. Disney is consolidating Hulu and Disney+ into a single product. Paramount went through its own acquisition saga with Skydance. The walls are closing in on every corner of this industry.

The common thread is profitability. These companies are having a harder time staying independently profitable and growing at the pace that public markets or investors demand. And so they sell, they merge, or they get absorbed. IMAX is in a better position than most — they’re growing, profitable, and at a peak — which is exactly why now is the time for its leadership to consider an exit. Maybe people are ready to move on. Maybe after building something this significant, they want to hand it off while it’s still at its best. I understand that impulse completely.

In December 2025, CEO Rich Gelfond told shareholders that IMAX is “an incredibly valuable player, either as a wholly differentiated publicly-traded company or as part of a larger company.” That sure sounds like someone who was considering a sale already, even before this news broke.

What It Means

We don’t know how this ends. The process is in a very early stage and may not result in a sale. But the signal is clear. IMAX is testing the market. News like this doesn’t leak by accident. Someone involved put this out into the world to see what the response would be, and once that genie is out of the bottle, it is hard to get it back in.

The best outcome is a buyer who understands that the value of IMAX is the experience — not just the assets, technology, or brand recognition. It’s the fact that walking into an IMAX theater still means something. It still delivers the best experience, in my opinion, of any theatrical showing. A theater chain gets that. A studio like Disney probably gets that. A private equity firm getting that would be the exception, not the rule.

When we look back on this decade in Hollywood, we’re going to see it as the moment when almost everything changed hands. Every major media property — the studios, the streamers, the exhibitors, the platforms — is up for grabs in one way or another. IMAX is just the latest name on that list. Whether it survives the transition intact is the only question that matters to me.

But that was the reality of home video for a long time. If you wanted to watch a movie in the comfort of your own home, you either paid a serious amount of money to own it, or you waited however long it took for the most popular films to show up on cable. Or you made the trip to the rental store and paid around $5 for a tape — which, adjusted for inflation, is about $12 today. That is more than most standard 4K movie rentals which are delivered right to your TV in an instant today.

I’ve been seeing a lot of discourse lately about Project Hail Mary being available to watch at home just two months after its massively successful theatrical run. It’s a movie you really should see in a theater, but not everyone has that option. The issue people are taking is around the cost of this early access rental. The rental is $20 and the digital purchase is $25. The complaints are mostly the same — this is too much money, it’s predatory, it should be included with Amazon Prime, etc.

This is a brand new, major studio release — available in your home, on your schedule, just two months after it hit theaters — for under $25. A kid in the 80s or 90s would have dreamed of that kind of access. Think about how long people had to wait for Star Wars to come to home video. Part of the reason it sold so many theater tickets is that people went back multiple times because they genuinely didn’t know when they’d see it again.

There’s a broader shift happening in how people think about paying for art. They want music for free. They want movies for free. They assume that paying for a Netflix subscription means they should have access to every film ever made. And I genuinely don’t know how we got here, because by any objective measure, this is the best time in history to be a movie fan.

The access we have to film — and the speed at which we get it — is unbelievable. And yet the sentiment online suggests that general audiences feel like they’re being ripped off. To be fair, these aren’t hardcore cinephiles complaining. These are people with a casual interest in a movie because it’s become a cultural moment, and they still balk at $20. Somewhere along the way, the assumption became that everything should be folded into a subscription fee or simply be free. I think it is a major contributor to why Hollywood is struggling right now and why the economics of the business have been so bad for most filmmakers over the last decade.

It helps to understand how a movie actually moves through the world, because there’s a logic to it that most people don’t think about. A film opens in theaters — though this is increasingly difficult for indie movies. Then it moves to premium video on demand (PVOD), sometimes even while it’s still playing in theaters, for around $20-$25. This was a post-COVID development that opened things up to more audiences. I welcomed this change when it happened, and still love having this early access if I can’t catch a new release in theaters.

From there it drops to standard rentals in the $10–$15 range before falling to $5–$10 over time. It eventually comes out on physical media, faster than ever before, for around $25 for Blu-ray and $30 for 4K UHD. And finally, it lands on streaming. That last step is where studios make the least money, and there’s a reason it comes last. Streaming services don’t do much for filmmakers. Residuals are largely dead. Paying $20 a month for access to thousands of movies and TV shows is genuinely incredible value for consumers, but it doesn’t leave much meat on the bone for the people who actually made those things. So the idea that your streaming subscription entitles you to every new release the moment it hits home entertainment is, at best, a misunderstanding of how the economics work.

Does $20 feel like a lot right now? That is totally fair. Inflation is real and it’s hitting everything — groceries, gas, housing. I get it. But let’s put the number in context. To take your partner to see Project Hail Mary in theaters, you’re spending at least $30 for a standard showing, $40 or more if it is in IMAX. If you have kids and need a babysitter, add $20 an hour and suddenly you’re looking at a $100 night out for one movie. The $20 premium rental exists precisely for this situation: earlier access at home, at a cost lower than the theater, with no logistics required. If you want to watch it with the whole family, that’s $80 in theater tickets versus $20 at home. And if you can’t swing the $20 right now, that’s completely fine — nobody is making you. You can wait until the price drops or until it hits streaming as part of your subscription. What you’re paying for in the premium tier is early access. This option didn’t exist before. The fact that it exists at all, at any price, is great for movie lovers.

I understand the argument that a digital rental costs the studio almost nothing to distribute. But we’re not talking about material cost when it comes to art. We’re talking about the time, effort, and livelihoods of thousands of people who worked on that project. When you pay for a rental, you’re supporting them. It is imperfect, and the imbalance between what goes to workers versus what goes to executives and superstar talent is a real and legitimate criticism. But if you opt out entirely, you’re accelerating a future where AI-generated content fills the void, costs nothing to produce, and operates as pure profit. If we cheapen the support for the arts, the arts will cheapen their output. That’s just basic economics, and these major studios will not hesitate to keep their bottom line looking good at the cost of human artists.

So step back and look at what we actually have in 2026. That $50 Laserdisc is $110 in today’s money. $110 almost covers an entire year of Amazon Prime. It could cover an annual subscription to a niche streaming service like Shudder in total with money left over. With $110, you could get 5 of these premium movie rentals. You could get 20 standard rentals. You could get 7 movie tickets at $15 a piece. You could buy 5 brand new Blu-rays, and many more used or older catalog titles. We have never been in a better position as movie fans who want to watch things at home.

The options are better. The access is better. The speed at which we get to watch movies again after theatrical runs is much better. We have more control over how and what we pay to watch than at any point in the history of the medium. So $20 to watch a brand new film at home two months after its theatrical release? That’s a good deal. And we’re lucky that it isn’t even our only choice.

So if you genuinely love movies, you have to do a little more. Buy a ticket to the theater, especially for indie films if you can. Pay for a documentary. Buy physical media. Go to your local theater for a repertory screening. Find your local film festival. Support community exhibition events. This is not an art form that survives without active participation from the people who love it. To assume that a $20 monthly streaming subscription covers your full obligation to cinema is simply not enough — and in a world where the economics are already stacked against the people doing the actual creative work, it matters more than ever.

How did you first hear about the last movie you watched? As most of you likely said, it was through an online source. But it was also entirely out of your control. If you saw it from a social media post or a content creator like me, an algorithm pushed that content in front of you. If you saw a movie poster on Reddit, an algorithm pushed that to your front page. If you saw an article in your Google news alerts from Variety featuring an interview with Ben Affleck on his new movie, an algorithm made the decision to prompt you with that link.

This is what I and experts in this field of study would call “the illusion of choice.” We have more choices than we have ever had to get our news, connect with our friends, listen to music, engage in our communities, and of course, watch movies and TV shows. But we aren’t truly choosing any of that. It is all based on a machine that sucks up all of our data and spits it back out into tightly curated experiences that it believes we will enjoy.

While there are no definitive numbers on just how many algorithms we interact with each day, educated guesses by industry experts put that number around several hundred, if not 1,000 or more, every day. There are algorithms determining our healthcare, education, careers, criminal justice system, and of course, entertainment. If you are looking for a deeper dive into algorithms and the massive impact that they have in modern society, I highly recommend Hannah Fry’s book Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms, which is a fascinating and occasionally terrifying look into this recent phenomenon.

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These algorithms can also be difficult to break, or reset, which amplifies the echo chamber that users can get trapped in. There is a fascinating recent study out of the University of Pennsylvania and their Annenberg School for Communication’s Computational Social Science Lab that aimed to determine how much impact YouTube algorithms versus user input played into the content that users would see on the platform. The main goal of the study was to investigate the impact that YouTube’s algorithm has on the radicalization of individuals. However, the most interesting part of that study for me was the experiment the team ran to determine how long it took to “break free” from the algorithm’s grasp.

To do this, researchers took one of their bot accounts that had a long history (120 videos) of watching far-right news and changed the bot’s consumption to more moderate news channels for the next sixty videos. The findings surprised me. From the report:

If partisan consumers switch to moderate content, YouTube’s sidebar recommender “forgets” their partisan preference within roughly thirty videos regardless of their prior history, while homepage recommendations shift more gradually toward moderate content.

In the world of YouTube, thirty videos would equate to roughly six hours of viewing based on an average length of twelve minutes per video. For many people, this may not take long at all — a couple of days with consistent viewing and you could “reset” your algorithm. However, this study did not consider all of the other data points that YouTube would have on a typical user as part of the Google ecosystem. These bots did not have a documented history of search inquiries, emails, website logins via Google, tons of phone data from Android users, and more. With this data included, I am sure that it would take even longer than thirty videos to break free from the algorithm’s hold.

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If we apply some of that data to streaming apps and assume that they are using similar algorithms to YouTube and other entertainment apps, it is likely an even harder task to break free. Even if the streaming algorithms required less content, say ten to fifteen movies or TV shows to “break free,” that is multiple days or weeks for the average user. It also would require a consistent shift, which might be even harder to do.

For example, say you had a month or two where you were on a big comedy kick. Every time you opened Netflix, you went straight to I Think You Should Leave or Seinfeld or Arrested Development. Naturally, the algorithm is going to recommend similar content to keep you engaged. But say October rolls around and you want some horror movies, or it’s July and you are in the mood for some summer romance movies. Well, you won’t see those recommended to you, even after several watches. And if you do jump back into Seinfeld in the middle of this shift, it will set the algorithm straight again.

There are ways to manually reset recommendations, usually in user settings, by deleting all of your existing history and starting fresh. But even then, you are served recommendations based on what’s trending and popular amongst the masses. The reality is that you can’t put people into a box, but that is what these algorithms want to do. Humans don’t fit nicely into a single category. We are too complex for that. Algorithms will continue to improve and get “smarter,” but as long as they rely on user input for their learning, it is so hard for a streaming service to make a solid recommendation or challenge you to try something new without being human and thinking outside the box.

Is it depressing? Sure. Scary? Yep. But luckily, we don’t have to live that way. There are ways out of the bubble, and there are ways to break out of the algorithm and find movies that aren’t trending. There are so many great movies out there, even from just the past decade, that you likely missed. And if you are a member of the younger millennial or Gen Z generations, even more “old” movies don’t get nearly enough love from these algorithms because they aren’t “sexy” and new. They don’t drive clicks and new user sign-ups, so some of them disappear from the zeitgeist.

But they don’t have to disappear. You control what you watch. You control where you click. You control what you buy. And it is time that we all took back that control.

This post is an excerpt from my book, Lost in the Stream, available now wherever books are sold.

I have a bit of a unique perspective here. I was born in 1992. I grew up in what I’d consider to be the heyday and peak of children’s television. Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, Cartoon Network — it was truly a golden era for live action and animated shows.

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I also have a perspective from the 2010s that most people my age missed. I started dating my wife in 2010, just three months after her youngest brother was born. At the time there was a three-month-old, a four-year-old, and a three-year-old in the house. We spent a lot of time babysitting and hanging out with those kids through the decade, watching the evolution of programming in real time, before we had our first kid in 2021.

So from 2021 through today, I’ve had a deep understanding of the children’s television market through both my work as a creator in this space and my role as a father. I try to research and pick the best options for my kids — screen time is inevitable no matter what idealistic view you have of raising a child before you actually have one. I want to make it count. And more often than not, I find myself putting on older programming because most of the new stuff just doesn’t cut it.

Growing up, I watched animated shows like Angry Beavers, Dexter’s Laboratory, Rugrats, SpongeBob, Hey Arnold, Doug, KaBlam!, Recess, Ed, Edd n Eddy, and Rocko’s Modern Life. I watched live action shows like Even Stevens, All That, Kenan and Kel, Drake and Josh, and Lizzie McGuire, and game shows like Figure It Out, Double Dare, GUTS, and Legends of the Hidden Temple. Tell me that wasn’t a golden era of children’s TV programming. It’s a hill I am willing to die on.

Those shows were insane. Silly. Completely irreverent at times. It all explains my current sense of humor and why I love comics like Nathan Fielder, Tim Robinson, and Tim Heidecker — weird, funny, and completely off the wall. But they all had something even more important in common: the pacing and the way they were shot and edited.

Even Stevens was revolutionary for kids. It was a multi-camera sitcom shot well in realistic set pieces and real environments. Lizzie McGuire was the same way, as were Kenan and Kel and Drake and Josh. All That was a sketch comedy show for kids — an adult concept adapted for a younger audience, but presented in a way that didn’t baby the viewer or treat their brain as lesser than. These shows challenged you to keep up, told real stories with multi-episode timelines, and entertained while teaching. The cinematography was exceptional at times. There was real effort put into these shows, the same kind of effort going into the major sitcoms on ABC, CBS, and NBC.

The animated shows felt the same way. Crazy visuals, genuinely insane plots — but no cuts every three seconds. No constant need to overstimulate. The jokes had a setup and a punchline, not just some brainrot meme that could be dropped into any situation for a cheap reaction. The show runners treated kids like they had a brain.

Think about some of those shows and their themes if you grew up in this era. The Rugrats Passover episode was a masterpiece. The SpongeBob Hash-Slinging Slasher episode was a major reason I grew up to love horror media. It was genuinely great television. This was real storytelling, and the people making these shows understood exactly what they were doing.

Blue’s Clues, which premiered in 1996, is probably the best example of how seriously the good ones took this responsibility. The pacing was completely deliberate, with pauses calibrated to be long enough for the youngest viewers to think, but short enough that older kids wouldn’t get bored. That style came from actual developmental research. Fred Rogers did the same thing, meeting regularly with his mentor, renowned child psychologist Margaret McFarland, to make sure every script authentically reflected the real concerns and feelings of children. These creators had researchers in the room. They cared about what was going into kids’ brains because they understood that television was powerful — and that worked both ways.

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As the 2000s rolled into the 2010s and social media and YouTube started to rewire how our brains consumed entertainment, the shows changed with them. They got faster. More cuts. Less storytelling. Less impact. Like everything else in that era, it started to feel like content instead of television. It was becoming disposable. Disney started casting influencers in their shows for clout. The attention economy ate the programming room alive. Don’t get me wrong — genuinely talented people came out of this period. Sabrina Carpenter, Zendaya, Keke Palmer, and Olivia Rodrigo are all superstars. But they were the good among a lot of bad changes in the industry.

The 2020s continued this trend and then floored the accelerator. YouTube became the dominant platform for children’s content and it was built on a completely different philosophy than anything that came before it — fast cuts, animations in your face, loud noises — it was about distraction and consumption instead of entertainment and story. The goal was not to tell a great story. The goal was to get kids to watch the next one. YouTube’s algorithm is engineered to maximize watch time, recommending content it predicts will hold a viewer’s attention — because longer watch times signal viewer satisfaction and push a video higher in the feed.

Kids no longer had three options for TV. They had thousands. One moment of boredom and they can find something else. Streaming platforms practically panic the second you hit pause, throwing five recommendations in your face and begging you to stay. And instead of creating programming that earns that attention through quality, the industry went the opposite direction, optimizing for thirty-second chaos followed by an immediate hook into more chaos.

Here’s the thing — and this is where I stop being the nostalgic dad and start citing actual science. Researchers at the University of Virginia found that just nine minutes of watching a fast-paced cartoon had immediate, measurable negative effects on four-year-olds’ executive function — including self-regulation, working memory, and the ability to delay gratification. Nine minutes. Not a four-hour tablet session. Nine minutes.

A 2024 systematic review in BMC Psychology backed this up, finding that children exposed to fast-paced programming switched activities more frequently and spent less time on tasks afterward — a pattern the researchers identified as a shortened attention span. And it gets worse: fast-paced editing and rapid scene changes reward fixed attention to a constantly changing stimulus, which means kids who watch a lot of this kind of television can become less tolerant of slower-paced activities — like reading, or learning, or just sitting still. They’re being conditioned to need the chaos.

This brings me directly to CoComelon, which I’ll say plainly is one of the worst things to happen to a toddler’s developing brain. I know that sounds dramatic. I don’t care. I would not let my kids within 100 feet of that show, but unfortunately I appear to be in the minority. The CoComelon YouTube channel has over 183 million subscribers and its videos have accumulated over 190 billion views. The company behind it, Moonbug Entertainment, tests content on young children using a device called the Distractatron — a system that monitors whether a child looks away from the main show, essentially the same feedback loop that social media platforms use to keep adults scrolling. They are literally optimizing for your toddler’s eyeballs.

The screen shifts every one or two seconds, there is almost never a quiet moment, and the constant high-contrast animation gives kids’ brains no time to rest or process what they’re seeing. The bright colors and relentless stimulation trigger dopamine responses that can lead to addictive patterns — over time, children may struggle to play creatively or tolerate any activity that doesn’t deliver the same level of constant input. Parents aren’t imagining it when their kids melt down after the tablet gets taken away. That’s documented.

It’s not to say that Rocko’s Modern Life or KaBlam! weren’t chaotic. They were. But it was controlled chaos, and the timing was different. The younger shows from this era actually built in space for kids to participate. Blue’s Clues paused for answers. Dora the Explorer waited for responses. Bear in the Big Blue House talked directly to the child watching. Kids were invited to be part of the show. Now the kids — mostly their eyeballs and developing brains — are just the product. Viewing hours and engagement metrics. No real interaction required.

Luckily, there are still people making children’s television the right way. Bluey is genuinely great, and my kids are proof of it. Unlike most modern children’s shows that lean on fast-paced editing and non-stop action, Bluey uses soft colors, natural dialogue, and moderate pacing to create a calming experience that fosters comprehension and emotional engagement. Researchers recently analyzed all 150 episodes from the first three seasons and found that nearly half included a clear resilience message — covering emotional communication, problem-solving, self-regulation, and empathy.

That’s a show made with intention by people who view kids as more than revenue streams. It also became the most-watched program in America in 2024 — not just among children’s shows, all shows, with 55.62 billion minutes watched on Disney+ and 143 consecutive weeks in Nielsen’s streaming ratings. So parents know the difference when they see it, and they will support these shows!

Trash Truck on Netflix is genuinely great. Lucas the Spider is wonderful. PBS Kids is still doing incredible work with animated programs like Carl the Collector, Secret Museum, Daniel Tiger, Wild Kratts, and even live action shows like The Odd Squad which gives me serious childhood flashbacks. Ms. Rachel was transformative for my son who had speech delays. And YouTube isn’t entirely without value — there’s a tremendous archive of older programming preserved there, and legitimately educational channels do exist if you look for them.

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My kids watch Bear in the Big Blue House, Dragon Tales, and The Magic School Bus. They love Bill Nye, Crocodile Hunter, and Little Bear. They’re already into the 1990s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and they’ll go through every era of Scooby-Doo before we’re done. And I see the difference in how they engage — their attention, their retention, what they bring up days later. These shows were built by teams who understood how to entertain and challenge a child’s developing brain at the same time. That’s not nostalgia. That’s just a higher standard that we’ve largely abandoned.

I’m not as familiar with what’s happening in the 8–13 demographic these days since my kids are younger, but I’d guess it’s much of the same. What I know for certain is that more teenagers watch YouTube than anything else, and Mr. Beast isn’t doing a single thing to further a kid’s education or inspire them with storytelling. He’s selling views and chocolate bars. And kids eat it up — literally.

So something has clearly shifted. It isn’t for the best, and I genuinely fear that too many parents are missing how much the media their children consume actually matters. A study examining what infants and toddlers were actually watching on YouTube found that less than 6% of videos in the sample contained any learning goals whatsoever. Less than six percent. And that’s the platform that now dominates children’s screen time.

Do I want regulations for children’s programming? No — free speech is free speech, and I tend toward the libertarian end of that argument. You should be able to do what you want and make your own choices. But consequences don’t disappear just because we don’t legislate them. It’s up to all of us as parents, as people working in the entertainment space, and as advocates for the generation that’s currently sitting in front of these screens to talk about this problem loudly and vote with our time and our wallets.

Support the programs that get it right. Support PBS Kids. Find the educational YouTube channels that are built on actual research. Go to the library and pick out a DVD. Go to the thrift store and find some movies and shows your kids have never seen. Sit with them and watch. Ask them questions about what’s on the screen. Research shows that when parents watch alongside their kids, those shows become active teaching tools — turning passive viewing into conversation.

Kids can watch TV. They can learn from it. Screen time is not the devil. What’s on the screen is either working for your child’s brain or against it, and right now the industry’s incentives are almost entirely pointed in the wrong direction. The golden era of children’s television proved that you could do both — entertain a child and respect the brain that was watching. We just have to demand that standard again as a society.

What are your kids watching? What shows from your childhood do you still put on? Drop it in the comments — I’d genuinely love to know.

This newsletter is always free. If you want to support the work and help me keep writing pieces like this, becoming a paid subscriber means the world.

Before we get into it, I have to get petty for a second. This is the New England in me coming out for you all to see. My grandmother would be proud.

For years, when you searched my name on Google, one of the first results is a Reddit thread about how people don’t like me. That’s what you get for being a public figure. But one comment from CletusVanDamnit — who is clearly a massive fan of me personally — was the one that bugged me the most because he was just dead wrong about something I first said years ago. But I had to wait for this all to play out.

Cletus, sometimes you gotta let things play out, my friend. They don’t happen overnight.

And I was correct. Here is a YouTube video I made about the news today. For those who prefer to read, carry on below!

Over two years ago, Disney moved all of their physical media production over to Sony. Sony was taking over which titles came out, the packaging, the remastering, the distribution, the manufacturing of the discs. You name it, Sony was doing it. So already, Disney had done away with physical media internally. They were basically licensing it out.

Fast forward to April 14th, 2026. Disney had mass layoffs — about a thousand people — and it included what was left of the home entertainment department. Everybody from the top on down. There is no home entertainment department left at Disney.

Disney’s sole focus is now Disney+. I’ve had industry people tell me that if Disney had the opportunity, they would probably pull all of their movies and TV shows off of every digital service — no Fandango, no Apple TV, no Prime Video for rental or purchase. They want it all streamlined into Disney+. So it’s natural that physical media would also go away.

But I don’t think this is the end for Disney physical media. It’s just the end at Disney.

And it truly is the end of an era. Disney Home Video was the juggernaut of the home video boom. Everybody had those clamshell VHS tapes. Everybody knew the coming-soon-to-video intros. The Lion King was the bestselling VHS tape of all time with over a billion dollars in sales. It was absolutely insane what they were putting out in the ‘90s and into the 2000s. And now they’ve stepped out because the money isn’t there anymore, and Disney follows the money.

But this is a trend you’re going to see across all the major studios. Consolidation is already happening. Studio Distribution Services — the joint venture between Universal and Warner Bros. — has been around for five or six years. They’ve picked up Shout! Factory and sell everything on GRUV.com. Sony has picked up remastering and distribution for other studios, with Disney being one of the main ones. And I trust Sony. Their CEO recently said the theatrical experience needs to be better, with longer theatrical windows and fewer ads. They really seem to get what the industry needs to thrive, and physical media is one of those things.

At the same time you’re seeing licensing explode. Arrow Video is picking up Warner Bros. titles, Kino Lorber is getting Paramount and MGM, and Vinegar Syndrome is continuing to expand. I wouldn’t be surprised if Disney and Fox catalog titles start getting licensed out too. This is exactly what happened with vinyl. The major labels walked away, boutique labels filled the void, and eventually everybody just licensed it out to the people who actually knew what they were doing.

That’s what’s happening here. Physical media will go back to the hands of Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow, Kino, Radiance, Criterion, Terror Vision, Severin, Synapse — the labels that actually love this stuff. This is nearly a billion dollar industry that is gaining ground in 2026. It is not going away.

I’m not worried. It’s another domino to fall, but all those dominoes are falling toward the same conclusion — the studios back out and the labels we love take over. This is now their industry.

Don’t be a Cletus. Keep things positive. Physical media is alive and well, even when the news makes it seem like it isn’t.

Roger Ebert said it best. In connection with his love for many genres, he talked about rating a movie according to its “generic expectations.” It translates like this: “The star ratings are relative, not absolute. If a director is clearly trying to make a particular kind of movie, and his audiences are looking for a particular kind of movie, part of my job is judging how close he came to achieving his purpose.”

I agree with that one hundred percent.

If you look at my Letterboxd, you will see a lot of high rankings. A 5-star slasher movie that I loved is not on the same level as The Godfather. I feel like that should be obvious for most film lovers. I rated Super Mario Bros. Galaxy a 3.5. My kids loved it, it was visually impressive, it kept their attention, and they had a ton of fun. So that is a great kids movie. It did its job. But if I also rate something like National Lampoon’s Vacation a 3.5 as a live action adult comedy from the 80s, those ratings are not equal. Everything has to be judged within the context of the genre, the era, and the intended impact.

Without context, what is art anyway? All art is created with context and none of it exists in a bubble. Cave paintings are fantastic pieces of art and history in the same way that Picasso and Monet are. You can’t hold a cave painting up against a Monet and call it trash. I am sure that there are cave paintings that are better than others — but you can never compare them to modern artistry. The context is everything.

So what makes a bad movie? In my eyes, it is a movie that fails on the simple goal of all movies: to entertain or expand my knowledge. This could be intentional, or unintentional based on audience reactions. If the movie fails to do any of that, it is a bad movie. But take a movie like The Room for example. Historically known as one of the worst movies ever made. But can it be a bad movie if it sells out screenings 20 years after its release? If it inspired a best selling book and then a movie based on that book, all about the making of this “bad” movie? It is one of the most well known and quoted movies in the world of film, so is it truly bad? It may have been unintentionally hilarious and become a bit of a meme, but in that context, it is hard to call the movie bad when it has become so popular.

On the other hand, I think about a movie like Solo: A Star Wars Story. That movie was about 80% complete when the studio stepped in, fired the creative team, and reshot and reworked a ton of the film. The end result was a sort of Star Wars slop — uninspired, honestly pretty boring, with its only redeemable quality being a small appearance from Darth Maul (who I think is still the coolest character in Star Wars). That movie failed because it didn’t entertain. It was boring. It was a classic case of studio interference causing a bad product. I have a feeling the original version was much better. The failure of that movie is no fault of the actors or the people who made it before they had their legs cut out from under them. But that is what makes a bad movie in my eyes. It didn’t do its basic job. It’s Star Wars! It should be fun and high energy and a great popcorn movie. And it wasn’t, in my opinion at least — but that is the important part. This is just me.

Movie reviews and ratings are completely subjective, and no film degree or decades of experience makes any opinion — including my own — any more valid than someone else’s. I think that is why platforms like Letterboxd are so valuable and why they are replacing traditional film criticism and sites like Rotten Tomatoes. It is a community aggregate score, not a score from a hundred top critics. To me, that is more valuable. Are my like-minded peers having a good time? Are the people who follow me and share my taste rating it highly? If you like my recommendations and trust my personal taste, then my Letterboxd ratings should hold more weight for you than a stranger’s — but take everything with a grain of salt and look at the entire picture.

I am not putting down critics who do the work. I am not putting down creators on social media. I am not putting down the person with three followers on Letterboxd who posts passionate reviews of their favorite films. I am putting down the idea that any of these people, in a bubble, as a singular individual, should impact your viewing habits.

What you should be mad about is anyone who puts Citizen Kane up against Friday the 13th and expects that comparison to mean something. Those films are doing entirely different things for different audiences in different time periods. To rank everything on the same scale as if it is all equal is a horrible way to write about film. Roger Ebert knew it best. I did not agree with all of his reviews, but I always knew his intention, I knew the way he judged movies, and I knew that he genuinely loved all sorts of different films. He graded with context and more than technical merit in mind. That is why he was the best to ever do it.

At the end of the day, you need to just watch movies and not worry about what other people think. Don’t get upset if you watch something that critics loved and you didn’t like. Don’t skip a movie because a critic said it wasn’t good. Be your own critic. Your brain is the most powerful algorithm in the world, and it is the only one that you can directly affect. Watch stuff that you think you will like. Sometimes you will love those movies, like others, hate others. But doing that is what builds your own personal context, based on your knowledge, experiences, and brain. Rely on that rather than critics.

And I say this as someone who recommends movies and talks about them every day — but I am only one source. People like me are a starting point, trying to point you in the right direction based on our own experiences. But the only way to truly know what you like, love, and despise is to watch more movies and take those risks. Try something new and different. Get uncomfortable and go outside your box. But never let someone else’s opinion discourage you from watching something. The only opinion that truly matters at the end of the day is your own.

I spoke with Ricky and Oscar about where the film came from, how they built two of the most compelling characters I’ve seen on screen in years, and why they were so deliberate about never telling you what to think.

The film was inspired by a real detail connected to the Uvalde shooting — a young woman in Germany who received an ominous message from the shooter and did nothing. That’s a haunting starting point. How did you go from that real-world moment to the story of Balthazar and Solomon, and how long did it take to get from that kernel of an idea to a finished script?

RICKY: That kernel took a while to pop. We talked about it for a while, the same way we do all our ideas and then one day when it feels ready you start writing. It wasn’t until Oscar added the fake crying that it felt like we could get going. All in all, the process from idea to draft was about a year and then another year to find the money which we kept writing through.

OSCAR: It’s also important to mention, that shooter messaged many, many people. There were a lot of people corresponding with him on various social media platforms. We’ve become so desensitized to “heinous thing someone is talking about on the internet that I can’t do anything about”; you obviously can’t blame a child in another country for not calling the cops in that situation. But the experience of receiving that message felt connected to what its like to grow up with these social media platforms so ingrained in your life. More recently in British Columbia, we know that the shooter was corresponding with Chat GPT and sharing their violent intentions, but the employees at Open AI did not alert authorities, because that would mean actually taking responsibility for something besides stock dividends. That is fatal negligence on Open AI’s part, symptomatic of the same problems, and even more haunting than where we were at when we started writing in 2022.

Were Asa and Jaeden part of your vision from the beginning, or did they come to the project later? Watching them, it’s hard to imagine anyone else in these roles — they disappear into the characters completely.

OSCAR: We try not to write for actors, though it can be hard because you want to have a mental picture of your character and to hear their voice. But, we tried to create an environment where Asa and Jaeden could take over their characters and make them their own, so if we WERE ever imagining anyone else, I can’t even remember who it would have been because those are Asa and Jaeden’s roles now.

The names Balthazar and Solomon both carry significant biblical and historical weight. Was that intentional, and what did those names mean to you as you built these two characters?

RICKY: The characters have no biblical significance other than in the case of Solomon, it’s possible his father or Mother heard the name spoken in a Christian context of some kind, but most likely never dug into symbolic meaning in the name. Like most Americans, Christian in name only.

OSCAR: I heard the name Balthy once because my former roommate had a friend with that name, and I liked the way it was shortened from balthazar. I never met that Balthy, but I knew that he had a boat that he could take people out in, in Manhattan, so in my head he was a wealthy guy.

Watching it, I kept feeling like the film could go anywhere at any moment — which is genuinely unsettling in the best way. Did you always know where Balthazar and Solomon were headed, or did the ending evolve as you wrote?

OSCAR: The ending always featured the final violent act, but who Solomon was and how we got there changed over time as we continued to discover the character.

RICKY: The fact that the film feels like it could go anywhere and is still entertaining is beautiful to hear. It’s very hard to craft a story that feels accessible and inevitable but not contrived or like you’re going through the beats all others movies do.

The promotional campaign has been really creative — Jaeden staying in character and bringing Balthazar into the real world in real time is a genuinely smart move. Was that always part of the plan, or did it develop organically? And do you think that kind of character-driven, social-native marketing is something more indie films should be doing?

OSCAR: It was always part of the plan, because Balthazar is so online and it felt like a no-brainer not to exploit that. I can’t control how well the movie performs at the box office, but I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself if we didn’t at least make a splash with our marketing. Especially after so many distributors told us they loved the movie but didn’t know how to market it…that activates the most competitive part of my brain where I’m like “okay I’ll show you.” I’m not sure it makes as much sense for like, a period film where the character doesn’t actually have social media. But for Balthy it allowed us to build intrigue in the character without giving up any of the actual movie, which is exactly what a good campaign should do.

RICKY: This is Oscars department. As an avid hater of social media I was a negative Nancy all the way up until the success of this campaign was obvious. Now I’ve jumped on board like it was my idea from the beginning.

More indie movies should be like our movie in many ways, but then our movie might not stand out of the pack as much - so scratch that.

You have mentioned in other interviews that there is no moral to this story, and you’ve been deliberate about that. But do you think the film has a warning? And if so, who is it directed at?

RICKY: We were deliberate about not being didactic or attempting to present a call to action/solution to gun control, masculinity or any of the other contemporary cancers plaguing modern American life that the movie presents. That said, within our story you’ll find a clear morality on the part of Oscar and I because there were rules set while we were writing such as; we cannot offend parents of victims of gun violence nor should we offend those kids that are truly, sincerely attempting to change the world via their committed and impassioned activism. We do not present ALL the kids as opportunistic activists, nor do we actually show footage, or mock anyone that could be a victim, in fact the movie presents family members of victims such as Supes as deeply wounded whether he’s a snake oil salesman or not and that was to say that everyone in America, no matter their cynicism or venality is touched by this issue. Because at the end of the day it is children being senselessly murdered solely because our policy makers care more about lobbyists and donations than they do our health and safety. There’s a message. Maybe the movie says it, maybe it doesn’t.

OSCAR: I think there is a morality in presenting our sicknesses without flinching, but the least entertaining thing you can ever do is tell people what to do about it or lecture them.

Oscar, this is your feature directorial debut, and it already feels like you have a defined sensibility — kinetic, chaotic, anxiety-inducing in the best way, which makes sense given your producing background on films like Uncut Gems and Good Time. Is that the filmmaking mode you feel most at home in, or is there a completely different genre or tone you’re eager to explore next?

OSCAR: Yeah, it feels true to the movies that I grew up on, which I think in a lot of cases were the same ones that Safdies did. Ricky and I have bunch of completed scripts, all very different. Mostly I’d just like to make another movie, but if I can be picky about it, it will be a completely different genre.

How do you personally categorize this film? I’ve been using the term “Doomscroll Thriller” for movies like this — films that are technically grounded in reality but weaponize social anxiety and human behavior in ways that feel genuinely terrifying. But I’m curious whether you see it that way, or whether genre labels matter to you at all as filmmakers.

RICKY: We knew there was an inherent tension in the “oh Jesus what’s going to happen? It can’t go well” set up of the story, but I don’t feel like I can define the genre of the film. Once we define it as horror or something else, I can’t write.

OSCAR: We tried calling it so many things while pitching it. It was like “if we call it a thriller, are you in?” Looking back, I think it’s a character drama with comedic elements. NOT satire. Satires always feel like they’re bragging about themselves while you’re watching and we tried very hard to not be that.

RICKY: Network, the greatest American movie of all time is excluded from that last sentence.

You’ve talked about wanting to subvert the typical tragedy narrative — where a community suffers and then triumphs. What made that framework feel wrong for this story, and what did you replace it with?

RICKY: I think that framework regarding school shootings in the US is wrong generally. When I watch a movie about how a community healed following a mass shooting I feel like I’m watching propaganda for school shootings. A kind of “these things happen, but don’t worry, you’ll get over it.”

OSCAR: We thought more of the Paul Schrader movies where you’re building to an act of violence or the Tommy Orange book “There, There” where a fabric of societal ills contribute to a powder keg that eventually explodes.

The score uses a one-of-a-kind instrument called the Pandemic Box alongside BABYMETAL as Solomon’s sonic signature. How did sound and music shape the identity of these two characters, and how early in the process did that come together?

OSCAR: Those were both post-production discoveries! Asa and I had a playlist of Solomon’s music, but it wasn’t until after the shoot and I’d had some time to think and dig and chat with one of our EPs, Adrian Simon (who also wrote the theme song for Solomon’s favorite animated series), that I discovered BabyMetal. And shout out to BabyMetal for licensing us the music instead of getting hung up on the movie’s logline, which is what happened with a number of other artists (that will remain nameless) I was interested in licensing. The Pandemic Box, which was designed and performed by Jeff Rosenman in the film, was something our composer James William Blades discovered and just, immediately had our attention. It was like seeing an audition or something and knowing, Mulholland Drive style, “this is the girl.”

You shot scenes all the way through as if they were theater pieces, prioritizing performance over traditional coverage. That’s a bold choice — what did it cost you in the edit, and was it worth it?

OSCAR: I met Matt Dillon a few months before we started shooting, and he was talking working with Lars Von Trier on “The House that Jack Built,” which I think is an incredible performance of his. He was like “I don’t know how they figure it out in the edit, but for us actors its the absolute best way to work” talking about shooting the scene all the way through and sampling from those long takes in the edit versus breaking it into pieces as you shoot. I’ve been working with editors Nate De Young and Erin DeWitt for over 10 years now, and known them even longer than that. We’ve done so many weird and crazy doc and archival projects together, I had no doubt they’d be able to figure it out and what we would gain in performance would be worth it.

Ricky, you come from a live media and interview background — HuffPost Live, Build — where authenticity and performance exist in constant tension. How much did that experience shape the themes of this film?

RICKY: I was working in a live newsroom when Sandy Hook happened and I remember the announcement over the newsroom there’d been a bad school shooting at an elementary school and one of the supervising producers said, “all right, here we go!” And I get it, it was their chance to work hard and prove themselves in the control room, but then you have anchors going on air and presenting this phony sympathetic/objective tone and it all just felt like the presentation of morality without the process of truly feeling it. That one experience always haunted me and I think, although there isn’t a news room in Balthazar that feeling lingers over the entire film.

The film deals with grief narratives, performative empathy, and the attention economy. Do you think audiences are ready to see themselves honestly reflected in Balthazar? Or is that discomfort part of the point?

RICKY: With a film like this, I don’t think Oscar and I can concern ourselves with an audience’s readiness for the subject matter. That would kill the creative process. We focused on the story we wanted to tell and whether we thought it was entertaining enough for an audience to enjoy it.

OSCAR: That’s the thing, people worry too much about what audiences are ready or not ready for. It all depends on how you present the ideas, stories and characters and I hope we presented them in a funny, accessible enough way that whether they were ready or not before, they’re ready now.

Horror movies and intense psychological thrillers are two of my favorite film genres. I love the way they give me an adrenaline rush like no other genre can. I also struggle with anxiety, and high-stress situations in my life can really throw me off. It seems like a contradiction, right? Wouldn’t these high stress movies make the anxiety worse? In reality, it’s one of the most calming things I can do after a tough day with a lot of anxious energy.

I have been medicated and diagnosed with generalized anxiety for about a decade now. Some days are better than others, but the medication has really helped me out quite a bit to avoid panic attacks and physical symptoms from the anxiety that I was having before. After stressful days, I can still get tightness in my chest, headaches, or just pure fatigue. And on those days, I tend to find a comfort movie — something like Hereditary, or Zodiac, or Sinister. Insane, right? But it works, and I have a theory why, as well as some real science to back it up.

I am not a doctor, so don’t take my advice as medical treatment, but something about the adrenaline rush I get from watching intense movies seems to negate the anxiety symptoms and calm my brain. This is somewhat true for any movie, where the distraction helps to get my mind off of the stress, but it works especially well with films that lock me into their dark storytelling. It’s almost like watching something horrible happening on the screen to someone else makes me feel better about my own situation, in a weird way. It puts things into perspective for me. Like, hey, at least I am not being hunted down by a serial killer, or haunted by generational demons passed down from my grandmother, right?

As it turns out, there might actually be a scientific explanation for what I’ve been experiencing. Researchers at Aarhus University’s Recreational Fear Lab have found that horror movies may provide a context in which people can practice emotional regulation — getting better at managing their own fear and anxiety through engaging with recreational fear. Even more interesting: a study of horror fans found that they reported less psychological distress than non-fans during the COVID-19 lockdowns — suggesting the genre builds a kind of emotional resilience over time.

Some people may refer to those studies as an example of how movies can desensitize people, and that is true to an extent. But if it desensitizes anxious people like myself who are stable enough to realize that this is all fiction, then where is the harm? In my eyes, these movies have given me a bit of a superpower over my brain.

Speaking of the brain, there’s also a neurological explanation for why it works. When watching a horror movie, the amygdala — known as the brain’s fear center — detects those emotions and prepares us for frightening events. Meanwhile, our conscious perception recognizes that the threat isn’t real. This means we can experience intense negative emotions in a controlled environment, which researchers suggest may be useful for managing anxiety. Essentially, your brain gets a workout it didn’t know it needed, and the movies are a great warm up.

Here’s the part that really resonated with me: researchers have noted that people prone to anxiety seem to be among the most likely to seek out movies with anxiety-inducing plots. That all sounds counterintuitive, but I totally get it! The thinking is that horror gives anxious people a rare, controllable way to engage with fear on their own terms. It is basically exposure therapy in film form. Horror movies offer a highly controllable, repeatable, and predictable way to amplify fear responses. For someone like me and many others whose anxiety often feels random and uncontrollable, that structure can feel grounding.

Outside of the science, I also think that there is something more immersive about these genres, at least for me as a fan of them. Maybe others who are more into comedy, or love a good drama or sci-fi film, experience the same thing. But when I get into a horror movie or a psychological thriller, I lock in. The outside world is gone, and I am in the story. My phone is away, the lights are off — it’s full immersion. And that part is also important. You have to put away the external stressors, turn off the lights, let yourself shut off for a bit, and just dive into a story. Too many people cannot do that at home, but it is truly so important to be able to destress and manage your anxiety.

So maybe it is the horror genre and all these thrillers that keep me on the edge of my seat instead of on the edge of a panic attack. Maybe there is something to watching horrific things happen to fictional characters that makes your brain realize how good you have it. Maybe I sound like a serial killer myself when I say things like that — but I cannot deny that something is happening. Something about these movies is making that shift in my head. And Science seems to agree.

These were the books that made me a reader, re-reading each one as I eagerly waited for the subsequent entry in the series. The first movie released on November 16, 2001, just six days after my 9th birthday. I had my party at the movie theater with my friends that weekend. I played the video games for hours on end. I had all of the merchandise. Hell, for a few years in elementary school I wore glasses and had my own Harry Potter look going. In high school, I was at the midnight premieres for the final films. I was all the way in, the way only a kid can be all the way in on something. That was over 25 years ago, and this world has never fully left me.

So I want to have an honest conversation about something a lot of people are struggling with right now — because I don’t think most of what people are seeing on the Internet within the vocal minority (on both sides) is a true representation of the general public.

Let me be clear about where I stand first: I am pro-trans. I have all the love in the world for the LGBTQ community. What JK Rowling is doing — using her platform and her wealth to actively lobby against the rights of trans people — is wrong. I’m not here to minimize that or explain it away. She has openly used money from the Harry Potter franchise to fund efforts aimed at restricting transgender rights in the workplace, in public life, and in protected spaces. That causes real harm to those communities and I’m not dismissing that for a second.

But I’m also not going to pretend that Harry Potter is one person.

You have to think about who actually built this thing. The original golden trio — Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint — have been among the most outspoken allies of the trans community throughout all of this. Despite backlash from the stars of the film adaptation, Rowling has continued to double down and trash the cast who blew this franchise up to massive proportions. That tells you everything you need to know about whose side those actors are on.

But you can’t forget about the makeup artists, the costume designers, the creature workshop artists, the visual effects teams, the writers, and the composers. There are the hardworking people who put Cursed Child on Broadway. The publishers at Scholastic who put these books in the hands of millions of kids like me. The cast members at Universal and crew who build Harry Potter attractions. And now, the cast and crew of the HBO series — including Nick Frost, who plays Hagrid and has said Rowling’s views don’t align with his “in any way, shape or form,” and Paapa Essiedu, who plays Snape and signed an open letter expressing solidarity with trans and non-binary people.

These are the artists and hard working people who are being supported by the movies, books, plays, shows, and theme parks. There is a whole economy behind this franchise, and although its extremely unfortunate what the creator spends her time on, I support everyone else.

Andrew Garfield said something recently that I keep coming back to. He admitted he’d only just watched the Harry Potter films for the first time while also acknowledging the controversy directly and agreeing that it was terrible. But then he said this about his friend Daniel Radcliffe and the films that made him famous":

“Daniel is so goddamn good…And honestly, I hadn’t watched [the Harry Potter films] until recently. He’s really good in those Harry Potter movies. Those Harry Potter movies are really good. I really liked them. I know we shouldn’t be putting money in the pocket of inhumane legislation right now through She Who Shall Remain Nameless, but the soul and spirit of those films … the kids are so good … and all the artisans — I’m working with a wonderful makeup artist right now, Clare [Le Vesconte] who was working in the creature workshop [on the films]. And I’m like, oh man, we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, there are so many beautiful artists who worked on those films.”

John Lithgow, who plays Dumbledore in the HBO series, said he nearly quit due to the backlash — but ultimately stayed because he felt the books themselves stood against the very intolerance Rowling now represents. I agree — the books gave me confidence, built a moral compass for a young 7 year old, taught me about courage and the dangers of evil in power, and stand for so much more than their creator’s current ideas.

So here’s my genuine question for anyone who says they won’t watch a frame of Harry Potter or spend a dime connected to it:

Are you bringing that same energy everywhere?

If you are, then you need to cancel HBO entirely. You need to call on the original cast to give back their (surely substantial) earnings from the films. You need to stop buying books from Scholastic. You can’t go see another Broadway production. Throw out your DVDs. Throw out the books you already own. If the argument is that any dollar touching this IP eventually benefits Rowling, then the circle of complicity is enormous. The only truly consistent position is to go scorched earth. And I want to be clear: I respect anyone who genuinely goes there.

But most people won’t. And I don’t think that makes them bad people or bad allies. I think it makes them human. The world is not black and white, and neither is this controversy and the decisions that people make.

Here’s the thing about boycotts that online “activists” don’t talk about: they’re blunt instruments. Some Potter fans have grown skeptical of how effective a boycott could even be, noting that there’s a question of how much more influence Rowling could possibly have at this point. She is, by any measure, one of the wealthiest people on earth. She has the money, the influence, and the platform already. A boycott doesn’t meaningfully move the needle on any of that — but it does hurt the grip department who worked 80-hour weeks on set for the HBO show, and the Broadway stagehands, and the costume designers, all the way down to the employees working the Butter Beer stands at Universal.

So what actually moves the needle? Voting. Donating directly to trans advocacy organizations. Show up for the people in your life who are affected by this. Support the politicians who will fight for human rights. JK Rowling is powerless if the government doesn’t support her efforts, or we have a Supreme Court that rules on the right side of history. That’s where your effort can change something real.

I’ll be honest with you about where I am personally. I want to watch the show, and I am still upset about what Rowling stands for. It is so exciting to see each book get adapted into a longer form season of television, where characters and storylines can fully develop in a way that a movie can not. I will read the books with my kids some day. We will watch the movies. It is a huge part of me and my life, and I am not going to let one awful woman take that away from me.

If you don’t agree and want to go scorched earth, then all the power to you. I respect what you are doing. And I would hope that you also respect others views on this the same. The creator is not equal to the creation they put into the world, and I am opting to find all the positive that a franchise of this level can bring instead of thinking about the one witch behind it all.

There has been a niche movement in the horror and psychological thriller world lately that focuses on modern Internet culture, social media, loneliness, and a deep descent into the most horrifying elements of our contemporary world. These aren’t mainstream blockbuster movies making millions at the box office, but an independent and artistic movement being led by millennial filmmakers who grew up with the Internet and have lived with its horrors. They are part horror, part thriller. and part social commentary. At times they lean into dark comedy/satire as well. They have become a true collage of themes and styles, subverting traditional genre norms to create their own niche.

So what do we call it? I’m going with “Doomscroll Thrillers”. I find them all fascinating and terrifying, and I sense this is a trend we will see more of in the coming years.

I am talking about movies like Lurker, CAM, Red Rooms, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Spree, Influencer, and most recently a new film called Our Hero, Balthazar — which inspired this article. Even TV shows are in on this trend, like the incredible miniseries Adolescence. They take the distraught and confused people dealing with these online epidemics and tell absolutely bone-chilling stories. The Internet is this vast, never-ending, ever-expanding part of our world. It is completely out of control and past the point of no return. And with that comes some deeply upsetting stuff. It happens in the real world, and these movies reflect the fears we all have about these types of people.

Now, there have always been movies about what crazy people will do when driven by society — American Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and Deliverance all come to mind. They tend to focus more on the victims, showing us the monster to scare us by putting audiences in the victim’s mindset. It is the common angle for most horror films. We could be the victim, we imagine how they must feel. But this new niche flips that on its head. This new wave of horror is not about watching a monster, its about watching someone become one from their own point of view. These films all get very introspective, almost first-person in a way. They are much closer to things like Taxi Driver, Nightcrawler, and Joker than traditional horror.

Red Rooms touches on deep true crime obsession, the dark web, and a world where humanity’s worst actions are broadcast online for all to see. Spree tackles streamers and the need for constant attention that is always creating a higher, and more unhinged, bar for people to reach. Lurker is all about the depths to which people will stoop for celebrity and notoriety in a digital world. Our Hero, Balthazar tackles an even deeper rabbit hole, touching on incel culture, mass murder in America, and the desperation for love in our increasingly isolated world. All of these films focus on the sickness spreading throughout culture — a world where more kids want to be influencers and streamers than athletes or movie stars. Internet fame is the new currency, one-upping others is the way ahead, and that is a scary place to be.

It makes total sense why this new wave is shaping up. Horror and thrillers focus on the fears we deal with every day. It’s why there was a rise in the torture-porn genre after 9/11 and during the “War on Terror”. There was a generation dealing with having seen some of the most horrific things imaginable play out on live TV. It traumatized people. It is the same reason we had films like The Deer Hunter, Rambo, and Taxi Driver after Vietnam, and films like Godzilla, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Manchurian Candidate in the post-WWII, Cold War era. Horror and psychological thrillers are a direct reflection of the fears of the current society, and they always will be. When society is in a good place, horror movies can take a back seat. But when we are going through something, there is always an explosion of these types of films.

I expect more movies from this new wave in the coming years. It is morbid, but there are people live streaming mass murder every year. Horrible wars are happening all over the world, and we are watching missiles hit civilians on social media apps every day. We have become desensitized to the sheer volume of violence and death we see on our phones in the 24/7/365 news cycle we live in.

The media needs clicks, and violence brings the attention. I am as guilty as the rest of us — I can’t avoid it even when I try, and it legitimately makes me upset on a daily basis. Luckily, I feel pretty stable and live a good life, but I can absolutely see what happens to people in less stable situations, or those carrying emotional trauma that this type of media will feed on. The current media ecosystem catches the eye of unstable people who want notoriety, want a community, and want to be seen — it’s a recipe for disaster.

Creative people are translating their fears to screen, and there is an entire generation of younger filmmakers who have grown up with this specific trauma. Our parents grew up worried about serial killers in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Their parents grew up worried about nuclear attacks in the ‘50s and ‘60s. We all grew up worrying about being killed in public spaces by maniacs who fell down the Internet and social media rabbit hole. It feels more real to me, being of that generation, and it is genuinely shaking me every time I see one of these films in a way that traditional horror dealing with the supernatural, the occult, or masked killers simply cannot. I love the traditional horror genre to death, but this new wave of films is what is really keeping me up at night.

Horror Won Big

Horror won big! Sinners took home 4 Oscars, including Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Score, and Best Original Screenplay. Amy Madigan took home Best Supporting Actress for playing a new horror movie icon in her role as Aunt Gladys in Weapons. Frankenstein won 3 Oscars for Costume Design, Makeup and Hair, and Production Design. Even K-Pop Demon Hunters — while not straight horror — has plenty of horror elements in a kid-friendly presentation. Demons are demons, no matter how they are portrayed, and it took home 2 Oscars including the big one for Best Animated Feature Film. Horror is here, on the main stage, and there is no denying that it is a major force driving Hollywood right now.

One Battle After Another Had a Great Night

I was surprised One Battle After Another won the Casting award early, and knocking off Sinners for that award cleared the way for the rest of the wins. Paul Thomas Anderson winning 3 Oscars after having none for all of his illustrious career was great to see. He deserved it, and even though One Battle may not be his best film — hard to beat There Will Be Blood — it was a timely one and definitely a bit of recognition for his amazing career. In any other year, Sinners likely would have come out on top in multiple areas where One Battle won, including Best Picture. But this was PTA’s year, and he deserved it.

Sinners Still Did Well

But Sinners did not get shutout by any means. Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan was awesome and so well deserved. I loved Chalamet in Marty Supreme, but the more I sat with that movie, the more it felt like he was playing a version of himself. Jordan had to carry three characters — Stack, Smoke, and (spoilers) Vampire Stack. It is so hard to act against a character who is not there, and not once during Sinners did I ever forget that he was not two distinct people. I was so happy for him.

I was also pumped for Autumn Durald Arkapaw from Sinners for her amazing cinematography win. The way that she shot that movie — so many different formats, aspect ratio shifts — it was just perfection and a huge reason why the movie was so successful. This was a movie that campaigned and marketed based on formats, bringing the conversation in the film world to a more technical space, and she deserved that award. After Michael Bauman (One Battle) won the award at the American Society of Cinematographers, I thought this might be tipping back to his side. Both were worthy contenders, but making history by giving the award to Autumn as the first female winner for cinematography was a big win for women in film, and it was so well deserved.

No Major Surprises

I was not really shocked by most of the results during the show. Most of the awards went exactly as I expected. Cinematography might have been the biggest “upset” based on past awards results. I also thought The Perfect Neighbor might win for Best Documentary, but Mr. Nobody Against Putin is certainly a great pick and an extremely relevant movie in the times we live in. I do wish they had given Best Supporting Actor to Delroy Lindo. Sean Penn was excellent in One Battle, but he hates awards shows and never shows up. It makes the whole win so anti-climactic. Delroy Lindo winning would have been an awesome shoutout to a veteran actor.

Warner Brothers and Netflix Owned the Night

The big winners of the night were Warner Brothers and Netflix, the two juggernauts who at one point almost got together to create a major power shift in Hollywood. Now it looks like Warner Brothers will be sold to Paramount, and Netflix will remain on their own. But it was their show, and almost nobody else had a presence. Disney won a single award for Avatar (Visual Effects), Apple took home one for Sound (F1), Focus Features and Universal took home Best Actress (Hamnet, Jessie Buckley), and NEON won Best Foreign Film (Sentimental Value). Nothing for Paramount or A24.

It was a shift from the last few years where indie studios like NEON and A24 dominated the awards circuit. This was a push back from the big studios, and it was all well deserved for Warner Brothers. They banked on original content from amazing voices and won big for their gamble. Other studios should learn from what they did here.

But This Might Be Warner Brothers’ Swan Song

Warner Brothers is set to be acquired by Paramount, and I have zero faith that Paramount ownership would greenlight films like One Battle After Another and Sinners. Paramount has so far focused on franchises and established IP. Don’t take my word for it — take a look at their slate for 2026 and beyond. It is almost entirely IP or franchise based. And honestly, I don’t see filmmakers like PTA, Ryan Coogler, or other prestige directors and producers working with the new Paramount ownership group in the future. The best case scenario is that the whole deal falls apart, David Zaslav steps down from his position, and Warner Brothers builds off of a great 2025 and continues to take chances and win big. We shall see…

The Ceremony Itself Was Underwhelming

Was it just me, or did the whole production seem off? Conan was fine as the host. I am a big Conan fan, but outside of the monologue he didn’t have much going on within the show. The audio was off, or delayed at times. The live music sounded terrible. Speeches were rudely cut short, sometimes allowed to continue, sometimes they were not. It all felt messy.

I do wonder if YouTube taking over in 2029 will bring some new life to the show and introduce it to a new audience. At the end of the day, I wanted more celebration of the movies and the filmmakers, and less theatrics. I want the original song performances back. I want more highlights on filmmakers and the people we lost — the Rob Reiner and Robert Redford tributes were on point. I want to learn more about the people behind these movies and let them speak. The awards show is for them!

So what did you think? Any surprises? Anything you wish they showed more of? How did your Oscar pool go? Let me know in the comments!

What strikes me about these films the most is that I do not think a man could have directed any of them. Several of these movies deal with experiences that I will never fully understand, and yet they communicated those experiences to me in ways I couldn’t shake. That’s what great horror does best - it makes you think and evaluate your own perspectives.

1. The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) · Directed by Amy Holden Jones · Written by Rita Mae Brown

This is a prime example of a film that is amazing precisely because of who made it. The Slumber Party Massacre was directed by Amy Holden Jones and written by Rita Mae Brown. Brown wrote the original screenplay as an explicit parody and satire of the slasher genre. The studio, doing studio things, had it shot as a straight slasher. And yet the original message of the script still bleeds through every frame.

The result is something genuinely strange and brilliant. This is a movie that functions perfectly well as a by-the-numbers 80s slasher. It has gratuitous nudity and gore, a drill-wielding maniac, and all the exploitation trappings you’d expect, while simultaneously operating as a feminist critique of all of it. The killer’s giant power drill is not subtle symbolism...

Whether you watch it as a fun, cheesy genre exercise or a knowing satire depends entirely on your mind set. Either way, it’s a blast, and its back story, two women at the helm of a Roger Corman production in 1982, makes it historically fascinating.

Where to watch: Shudder · Prime Video · Tubi (free) · Plex (free) · Pluto TV (free)

Find all streaming options at JustWatch

2. Near Dark (1987) · Written and Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn Bigelow made an incredible vampire movie that still scares people all these years later. She might be the most successful female director in Hollywood history - including becoming the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, for The Hurt Locker - and Near Dark is the film that announced her arrival. You can see the threads of everything she’d go on to do right here: the tension, the brutality, and the ability to make something deeply uncomfortable feel completely cinematic.

The film stars an incredible ensemble cast of 80s legends including Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, and Jenette Goldstein. It is basically the cast of Aliens relocated to the American Southwest (no complaints there) and the combination of western mythology and vampire horror is unlike anything else from the era. The cinematography is dark and gorgeous, the violence can be shocking, and the whole thing has a bit of a punk-rock, sun-scorched energy that feels completely fresh for the genre.

Near Dark is truly like a proof of concept for Bigelow’s entire career. She was always more interested in masculinity, violence, and moral ambiguity than she was in playing it safe, and this film, made in 1987, showed she could be tougher and more stylish than nearly anyone else working at the time. It is an unbelievable solo film debut that deserves far more attention.

Where to watch: Shudder

Find all streaming options at JustWatch

3. The Babadook (2014) · Directed by Jennifer Kent

This is one of the most chilling movies on this list, especially for the mothers out there. The grief, the trauma, the child who cannot get it together and is clearly disturbed by events in his life - its terrifying. All of the troubles are filtered through the lens of a paranormal entity that will absolutely give you nightmares. As an owner of one of the original Babadook pop-up books from the film (humble brag), this one holds a close place in my heart.

This is another debut feature film, and yet another masterpiece from director Jennifer Kent. The Babadook is one of the most precise and devastating portraits of grief and maternal exhaustion ever committed to film. Essie Davis gives a performance that is raw and hard to watch in the best possible way. Noah Wiseman plays her son, who many fans consider to be one of the most annoying characters in horror history. But that takes a special kind of performance to achieve as well. He was meant to be annoying and unbearable, and he nailed it. The horror is all terrifying on a surface level, but the real dread comes from watching a woman be slowly consumed by something she cannot name and cannot escape. I genuinely believe only a woman could have directed this film and made it work.

This was also one of the first films of what would become the “elevated horror” or “auteur horror” wave - the movement that gave us films like Hereditary, It Follows, The Witch, and a decade’s worth of horror that took the genre to new heights. Jennifer Kent helped kick all of that off.

Where to watch: Hulu · Shudder · AMC+ · Tubi (free) · Kanopy (free)

Find all streaming options at JustWatch

4. Jennifer’s Body (2009) · Directed by Karyn Kusama · Written by Diablo Cody

Karyn Kusama made a movie that was so far ahead of its time that it bombed at the box office and got dismissed as a dumb Megan Fox horror comedy. But slowly, over the next 15 years, it has gained the cult status it always deserved. This film is one of the most misunderstood studio horror movies of the 2000s, and I am always happy to see viewers re-assessing and re-discovering its genius.

It is a slasher movie, a dark romantic comedy, a high school party movie, and above all else a deeply gory horror film with a lot on its mind. The themes are heavier than the surface of the film lets on, about how women deal with exploitation, male attention, the predatory music industry, and beauty standards. These themes are all delivered through the language of a cheerleader-turned-demon, and somehow, it works. The cast alone is stacked, featuring Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Kyle Gallner, Adam Brody, J.K. Simmons, Amy Sedaris, Johnny Simmons, and Chris Pratt. And best of all, the storytelling is fast and funny in the way that Diablo Cody scripts always are.

It bombed because it was made for women, by women, and marketed by men to other men who didn’t get it. This is another one where the female authorship is essential. Kusama and Cody understood exactly what they were doing, even if studio execs did not, and you need a woman behind the camera to make it read correctly.

Where to watch: Starz · Philo

Find all streaming options at JustWatch

5. Censor (2021) · Written and Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond

This is one of my favorite hidden gem horror movies that I love to pull out as a recommendation. Censor follows a woman named Enid who works for the British Board of Film Classification in the 1980s, right in the middle of the “video nasties” craze. The “video nasties” came from the moral panic around gory VHS horror films (think Evil Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacfe) that led to mass bans and even arrest and prosecutions in Thatcher-era Britain. It is a genuinely fascinating piece of film and cultural history, and the way Prano Bailey-Bond works the censorship of horror movies and the making of these grimy b-movies into its own horror film is perfectly meta and appealing to hardcore genre fans like myself.

The visuals in this movie are completely mesmerizing. Bailey-Bond shot the film with 80s period texture, moving between the beige world of the censors’ office and the colorful grain of the exploitation films Enid reviews. As Enid begins to lose her grip on reality, those worlds bleed into each other in ways that are deeply unsettling. Niamh Algar is extraordinary in the lead role, going through a wide range of emotions and intense situations throughout the film.

The story takes twists and turns right up to the final scene, and the ending is one of those genuinely “what did I just watch” moments you’ll be thinking about for days. What’s real? What isn’t? We may never know. But I know that Censor kicks ass.

Where to watch: Shudder · fuboTV · Kanopy (free) · Hoopla (free)

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6. I Saw the TV Glow (2024) · Written and Directed by Jane Schoenbrun

Jane Schoenbrun made one of the most chilling movies I have ever seen with I Saw The TV Glow. I don’t know that I will ever fully understand the trans experience as a straight man, but this film felt like it explained it better than any other piece of media I’ve encountered. It communicates something about the terror of not being able to inhabit your own body in a way that goes straight past anything words can do and hits you right in the soul with pure feeling.

The scenes at the end with Justice Smith absolutely wrecked me. It’s heartbreaking and terrifying, but not in the way you would expect. The scares come from the reality and weight of the situation. It shakes you with an empathetic guilt from knowing there are many others who feel the same way as Smith’s character, and are stuck.

The way Schoenbrun weaves a Goosebumps/Are You Afraid of the Dark-era supernatural TV show into the story is a lot of fun for genre fans who grew up in the 90s. That aesthetic hits a very specific nostalgia, and watching it get slowly corrupted and distorted is deeply effective for viewers of the right age. The practical effects are awesome, the score is incredible, and the whole thing is visually unlike anything else.

This is a slow burn with a lot of metaphor and a lot of ambiguity, and I understand it’s not for everyone. But if it connects with you, it will feel like a gut punch you didn’t see coming. Schoenbrun is one of the most distinctive voices in American cinema right now and I am very excited for whatever she does next.

Where to watch: Prime Video · Max · Kanopy (free) · Hoopla (free) · Plex (free)

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7. Watcher (2022) · Directed by Chloe Okuno

Chloe Okuno made one of the best serial killer mysteries I’ve seen in some time with Watcher. Think Rear Window meets Silence of the Lambs - high praise, but it earns it. As a man, this film made me genuinely better understand the constant fear that women navigate in the world, and that alone makes it essential viewing.

The setup is straightforward and simple: Julia moves to Bucharest with her husband for his job, becomes isolated by a language barrier and new country, and begins to notice a man in the apartment across the street who seems to be watching her. Is he following her? Is he a creep? Is he a killer? Or is he just an odd guy who happens to live nearby? The film forces you to sit with that ambiguity - the same ambiguity that women live with every single day - and it is genuinely frightening in a way that’s hard to articulate. It’s something I thankfully do not have to think about in my day-to-day life, and Watcher made that gap in my experience very clear.

Maika Monroe is absolutely incredible here. She is a true horror legend at this point, between this film, It Follows, The Guest, and Longlegs. Do not sleep on this one - an you may not sleep after watching it either.

Where to watch: Netflix · Shudder · AMC+

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Women in horror are doing some of the best work in the genre right now. After being shut out for so many years in Hollywood, regardless of the genre, it does seem like the horror world has been more welcoming and open to these stories, and I am glad they are. Don’t miss any of the films on this list, and please add more recommendations in the comments! And to all my women readers - happy Women’s History Month! I hope we get many more additions to this list in the future.

Libraries are one of the most underrated resources for film fans. Beyond their massive collections of books, most carry an impressive selection of movies on DVD, Blu-ray, and occasionally even 4K Blu-ray. Many libraries also take special requests, so if you want to watch the new 4K remaster of as classic like Ben-Hur, or something more niche like The Exorcist III on 4K Blu-ray, your library can often track down a copy through their network or order it directly, just for you.

What’s Actually on the Shelves

But do they really have a good selection? Well, I went and looked for myself, searching the local library in my small New England town of about 25,000 people. Here’s a sample of what’s available through them right now: One Battle After Another, F1, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, The Black Phone 2, Freakier Friday, Caught Stealing, The Long Walk, indie films like Bone Lake, Sovereign, and The Last Showgirl, and even Warner Archive titles like The Hudsucker Proxy.

A quick search of their online catalog shows 27,742 DVDs and Blu-rays available through my library or the local shared system. And that is for a few small towns in New Hampshire. At the much larger Boston Public Library, I see in their catalog that they have over 34,000 DVDs and Blu-rays.

For context:

• The average Blockbuster carried around 8,000 titles

• Netflix currently has around 15,000 titles

• My small-town library system: ~30,000 titles

It won’t rival the legendary independent stores — Vidiots in LA has 60,000 titles, and Scarecrow Video in Seattle holds an astonishing 150,000. But most libraries absolutely blow away what the chain video stores ever stocked, and it isn’t close to what any streaming service can offer.

Free, Fast, and Better Than Streaming

It seems too good to be true, but all of this is free with a library card. Most libraries are part of shared networks, meaning your card also gives you access to the collections of multiple branches in your region. A new Blu-ray typically runs $25 at retail. It gets expensive fast - I would know as a passionate collector with credit card statements that are not always ideal. But your library can have it waiting for you on release day at no cost. If you love it, you can always buy it later.

Beyond physical media, libraries also provide free access to streaming services like Kanopy and Hoopla, which give cardholders a limited number of credits each month to watch films and TV shows at no cost. Similar services exist for eBooks, audiobooks, and even music.

The Value Is Almost Absurd

Take a second and think about what this is actually worth. Most libraries let you check out 5 to 10 movies at a time, with a one-week rental window. Renewals are often available if you need more time.

Remember what that would have cost you at Blockbuster? New release rentals ran around $5 each in the late ‘90s for a 3-5 day window with no renewals. If you wanted ten movies? That’s $50. In 1999 money. The library gives you the same new release titles, for a longer term, for no cost. They did back in the 90s too. I remember renting quite a few movies from different libraries. It is kind of amazing that Blockbuster ran a business model around a service that most towns offered for free.

And using it couldn’t be easier. Every library has an online catalog where you can search their entire collection and see exactly where a title is located and whether it’s available. If you can’t find something or need help navigating the selection, a librarian can help you in ways that many video store clerks (no offense to the great clerks out there who knew their stuff!) never could. These aren’t teenagers processing rental returns, they’re professionals who know their catalog inside and out and can often recommend titles or request options you wouldn’t have thought to ask about.

Why This Matters In The Streaming Age

So why are libraries an important archive for media now more than ever? Because streaming libraries have less archival depth than ever. Films and TV shows constantly move between services, disappear without warning, or never make the jump to digital at all. Physical media remains the most reliable way to watch films as they were intended, and it’s the format most likely to include all the goodies like director’s cuts, supplements, and restored transfers.

Libraries let you access all of that without the expense of buying everything at new release prices, and without the frustration of hunting down what’s available where.

I keep hearing from film fans who say libraries have re-ignited their love of physical media. People are using them to take risks with what they watch without the financial burden of buying a movie at retail price. If you haven’t checked what your local library has lately, it’s worth a look. You might be surprised.