Natasha Lyonne had a long press line clamoring for her attention Thursday night at the second season premiere of Peacock’s Poker Face in Hollywood. The veteran actress, whose multi-hyphenate duties on the critically acclaimed comedy series include writing, directing, starring and executive producing, didn’t have time to stop for every outlet before she was needed on the American Legion Post 43 stage to introduce the screening alongside her partner-in-crime Rian Johnson.
So she did something rare (and appreciated among the journalists left waiting outside) by heading to the stage to deliver those comments only to return to the red carpet and give every reporter some of her undivided attention. After detailing the “magic” of the new season thanks to a killer line-up of high-profile guest stars, The Hollywood Reporter asked Lyonne about that other new project of hers on the horizon — an artificial intelligence-infused film Uncanny Valley.
News of the project broke two days before the Poker Face premiere and caused a stir. As reported by THR, Lyonne is set to make her feature directorial debut on the film from a script she wrote with Brit Marling and both are on board to star. Set in the world of immersive video games and said to blend live-action and game elements, Uncanny Valley centers on a teenage girl named Mila who becomes unmoored by a hugely popular AR video game in a parallel present. Partners on the project — designed to offer a “radical new cinematic experience,” per an Asteria representative — include technology innovator Jaron Lanier, the AI-based studio Asteria (founded by Lyonne with partner Bryn Mooser) and Moonvalley.
It was obvious that the buzz had reached Lyonne, who was quick to defend the project during her time with THR. “Of course the movie’s going to be shot like a real movie. Now I’m really threatening to just shoot it on 35 [mm] or something to prove the point because [we are using] real-life human cinematographers and production designers and all that, of course,” explained Lyonne. “I’m a Mr. Moviefone. There’s nothing I love more than movies. Cinema is my very celluloid blood that runs through these veins. I love nothing more than filmmaking, the filmmaking community, the collaboration of it, the tactile fine art of it. I love every aspect of it — it’s so incredible. I understand my own church, in a way, even when the rest of the world doesn’t make sense. In no way would I ever want to do anything other than really create some guardrails or a new language.”
The guardrails she referenced relate to how Moonvalley relies on an AI model called “Marey” that is built on data that has been copyright cleared, unlike other viral industry leaders.
“I have this new studio that I founded, Asteria, with Bryn Mooser, and we found these amazing engineers at Moonvalley, and they agreed off this idea of why is every model dirty, like Runway and OpenAI? And why are they building it off of stolen data? Why do cell phones just have stolen data? It’s a problem,” Lyonne said. “What’s so incredible about Marey is that it’s the first underlying foundational model that you build on top of that is actually on copyrighted license, and you can go in with your concept artist and your storyboard artist and start building out a world.”
Lyonne then praised her collaborators like Marling and Lanier, the latter of whom she called “a pretty heavy hitter in this space” and a “philosophical, ethical guy.” She added: “We’re getting to really find these sort of rules of play and start to understand that there might be a way to actually have some artist protection and carve out within all this that keeps us doing the thing that we love.”
Speaking of that affection, Lyonne then recalled how close she was with the iconic filmmaker Nora Ephron. “She was a real mentor of mine — I played a lot of poker — and she would say, ‘Whatever you do, don’t be a female filmmaker. You’re only allowed one mistake and they never let you work again.’ Of course she made so many hits that wasn’t exactly true, but it was an interesting lesson about the opportunities that are given or not. I really see this as a way to get a chance to make those sort of Avengers-style sequences or something that are essentially green screen and CGI. That’s mostly what [AI] is going to be used for, and that’s what the word ‘hybrid’ means here.”
Asteria, an artist-led generative AI film and animation studio, and Moonvalley, an imagination research company, launched the first clean AI video model, which was celebrated at a L.A. party in April hosted by Asteria’s co-founders Bryn Mooser and Natasha Lyonne.
Joelle Grace Taylor for Asteria
[This story contains spoilers for Thunderbolts*.]
Thunderbolts* co-writer Eric Pearson has been one of Marvel Studios’ most reliable collaborators the last 15 years.
In 2010, the New York City native enrolled in Marvel Studios’ Writers Program, before cutting his teeth on the majority of the Marvel One-Shots series, including Agent Carter (2013), which served as the catalyst for the 2015-16 ABC television series that housed three Pearson-penned episodes. He then performed uncredited writing on Ant-Man (2017) and Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), paving the way for Thor: Ragnarok (2017), his first co-writing credit on an MCU feature film. He proceeded to do some more script-doctoring on Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019) until Black Widow (2021) earned him sole writing credit. In between his Marvel work, Pearson also co-wrote Godzilla vs. Kong and Transformers One.
Coming out of Black Widow, Pearson laid the groundwork for Thunderbolts*, initiating the pitch that teamed up Widow’s Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour) and Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) with a few other MCU misfits against CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Eventually, he installed the multi-faceted villain of Sentry (Lewis Pullman), establishing the foundation of the now-critically acclaimed film’s much-discussed mental health allegory.
Pearson, in time, handed script responsibilities off to director Jake Schreier’s Beef collaborators, Lee Sung Jin and Joanna Calo, as he was called into co-writing duty on Matt Shakman’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Thus, when the dust settled, he was only caught off guard by one particular change involving Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and her headshot execution of Taskmaster. (In Black Widow, the child version of the character narrowly survived Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton’s attempt to assassinate her father, General Dreykov, and he subsequently turned his gravely injured daughter into a programmable killing machine until Natasha freed her eight years later.)
“When I saw the first cut, the biggest change was Taskmaster taking that shot, and I was shocked,” Pearson tells The Hollywood Reporter. “In my drafts, Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster lived out the movie, and she had a bit of a subplot with Ava/Ghost. They’d both been raised in labs, and Ava big-sistered her into how to break free and be her own person.”
Thunderbolts*’s unlikely union of MCU loners and rejects received the titular nickname when Alexei misinterprets John Walker’s (Wyatt Russell) sarcastic reference to Yelena’s youth soccer team. However, the name wouldn’t last long. Valentina, in a final act of self-preservation, holds a surprise press conference and presents the team as the “New Avengers,” revealing that the asterisk in the title was always meant to signify a placeholder name for something bigger and better. (As originally planned, the marketing for the film has now officially rebranded itself as The New Avengers.)
“That was a Kevin [Feige] thing. I pitched that Valentina is forced to introduce the Thunderbolts [to the public], and Kevin said, ‘I think that she should call them the Avengers.’ And I was like, ‘Whoa, okay!’” Pearson recalls. “And then there were many, many discussions: ‘Capital N? Lowercase n? Are they Avengers that are new? Are they the New Avengers?’ But that was Kevin’s idea, and it’s part of some four-dimensional chess plan that I don’t totally know yet.”
At one point during development, Yelena was going to further resolve a Clint Barton-related subplot that was set up in Black Widow’s post-credit scene and carried out in the Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld-led Disney+ series, Hawkeye. In the preceding stinger, Valentina tasked Yelena with a mission to do away with Clint, citing him as “the man responsible” for Natasha’s (Scarlett Johansson) death. But Clint later set the record straight so that Yelena understood that her adoptive sister sacrificed herself for the sake of bringing half the population back from Thanos’ blip, including Yelena.
“I loved [the confrontation scene] because it emphasized Valentina’s manipulation. Yelena entered the scene on fire, furious, accusing Valentina of setting her up to take out her sister’s killer, when, in reality, he was her best friend,” Pearson shares. “Then Valentina completely flipped the script on Yelena. I believe the line was: ‘Set you up? You mean paid you to do a job that, by the way, you didn’t even do? So I heard some bad gossip, pardon me for trying to motivate you. But this is your job, and asking questions isn’t a part of it.’”
Pearson is also revealing that, prior to Sentry’s involvement, John Walker was once the centerpiece of Valentina’s nefarious scheme.
“There were a lot of versions where Valentina had planted this kind of timebomb inside John Walker, and the goal was to make him the most unlikeable person on the team,” Pearson says. “He then becomes the monster, and [the Thunderbolts] have to talk him down. It didn’t ever totally work.”
Below, during a recent spoiler conversation with THR, Pearson also discusses the absence of Rachel Weisz’s Melina, as well as his ominous one-word tease of The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
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Thunderbolts* is your eight or ninth official Marvel credit. Do you currently have a deal with Disney or Marvel? Or do they have you on speed dial?
I’m more on speed dial right now. I’m supposed to go in and talk to them. It’s not about anything specific, but I think they’re doing the early furniture arranging of what’s next after Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. So I’m supposed to have a meeting to window-shop, I suppose, or to see if anything fits or is exciting. But I’m floating around on my own right now.
Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) in Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts*
Courtesy of Marvel Studios
Assuming that Thunderbolts* was always a Yelena-centered ensemble, you’re obviously the natural choice to kick-start it since you wrote Black Widow. Was that Marvel’s thinking as well?
That was actually my thinking. Marvel didn’t really have a plan for a Thunderbolts movie. I brought it to them, but I was thinking that, having had the pleasure to meet Florence on Black Widow and write the first Yelena Belova stuff and work with her to build that character, with her doing quite a bit of heavy lifting there. She’s incredible, and I knew that she was someone who could carry a movie like this. I didn’t want to go in saying, “Let’s hide a Yelena movie in a team-up movie.” I wanted it to be a team.
The Avengers had the centerpiece of Tony Stark and Captain America, and the duality of those guys at the lead. For the Thunderbolts and the way that I wanted to view these team members and the themes of the movie, it felt like Yelena was a natural leader. I’m not sure if this comparison is fully baked, but the idea is that she’s Michael Corleone and Bucky is Tom Hagen. That’s the way that I see it.
Was this story always meant to smuggle the “New Avengers” into the mix?
That was a Kevin [Feige] thing. I told him I wanted to do a Thunderbolts movie and the way in was going to be through Yelena bringing them together against Valentina. I tried one pitch that didn’t work, and the second pitch was very, very close to the movie that we have now. I ended the pitch with Yelena whispering in Valentina’s ear, “You work for us now,” essentially. So I pitched that Valentina is forced to introduce the Thunderbolts [to the public], and Kevin said, “I think that she should call them the Avengers.” And I was like, “Whoa, okay!”
That was his one big note from the pitch, and when you get one note from a Marvel pitch, you get out of there. So I was like, “Okay, cool. I don’t know what your plan is for the New Avengers.” And then there were many, many discussions: “Capital N? Lowercase n? Are they Avengers that are new? Are they the New Avengers?” But that was Kevin’s idea, and it’s part of some four-dimensional chess plan that I don’t totally know yet.
David Harbour’s Red Guardian, Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost, Sebastian Stan’s Bucky, Florence Pugh’s. Yelena and Wyatt Russell’s Walker in Thunderbolts*.
Courtesy of Marvel Studios
When the Thunderbolts are trapped in Oxe’s vault, they put their heads together to find a way out, and the solution was to put their butts together in order to climb up the silo. And the shape of their bodies is actually an asterisk. Did you notice that?
(Laughs.) As soon as you said “the shape of their bodies,” I was like, “Oh my God, it’s an asterisk!” I had not thought about that before, but it’s brilliant. The asterisk came later as well. In my drafts of the script, there was always the peewee Thunderbolts [soccer] team; that was where the name came from. We were obviously not doing Thunderbolt Ross [as inspiration from the Thunderbolts Red run]. But the asterisk was a thing that I saw later when they were in production, and I was just like, “That’s really cheeky, and I like it.”
Was there a soccer team photo in Black Widow’s photo album or the Ohio house where Yelena and Natasha grew up with Alexei and Melina?
I would love to go back and see, but I don’t think so. [Writer’s Note: After my own review, there was no soccer team photo in Black Widow.] It was probably two drafts into [Thunderbolts*] when we got the idea of Alexei calling out Yelena’s youth soccer league and having it be this great moment of both pride, connection and embarrassment for her.
Despite the deleted kiss at the end of Black Widow, there’s still an implication that Alexei (David Harbour) and Melina (Rachel Weisz) have rekindled their romance that began as an arranged marriage for their undercover operation in Ohio. However, she’s absent in Thunderbolts*, and David Harbour indicated to me that he’s been making the case for more of her/Rachel behind the scenes. Was she excluded because a happy Alexei-Melina would undercut the film’s selling point involving a band of loners and rejects?
It was kind of what you’re saying. Alexei is in a similar emotional crater as Yelena. He just masks it much better with a lot more facade and bravado. Happiness was the enemy of the beginning of this movie. You didn’t want these characters to feel like they had anywhere to go that was emotionally stable or safe or supportive. You wanted all of them right there at the edge of the void. Also, I felt like the connection was so strong between Alexei and Yelena [in Black Widow], and I always found that the [other] hard love connection was Melina and Natasha. There’s that inspiring moment of Melina just being impressed by Natasha. So Alexei and Yelena were the peanut butter and chocolate for me; they just go so well together.
Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) in Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts*
Chuck Zlotnick/MARVEL
Taskmaster’s already tragic life ended in quite a startling way. I can’t think of too many characters in the MCU, if any, who were executed like that via headshot.
That is the one biggest change. I didn’t get to go to set and finish out this one. I was actually back in Burbank working on Fantastic Four at that point. When I saw the first cut, the biggest change was Taskmaster taking that shot, and I was shocked. In my drafts, Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster lived out the movie, and she had a bit of a subplot with Ava/Ghost. They’d both been raised in labs, and Ava big-sistered her into how to break free and be her own person.
But I understand why they did it. It was probably just because of my audience reaction of being genuinely surprised. But everything else was exactly where I expected it to be, and Jake said, “We wanted to surprise the audience and raise the stakes and say, ‘Yeah, there’s danger here. No one’s safe.’ There’s a lot of saying that they’re bad people and seeing that they’re good people, so let’s make sure that we know that they’ve done bad things and have been living their lives doing harsh heartless things.”
Who knows how intentional it was, but there’s a cool moment where a window curtain strangles Bob (Lewis Pullman) and Yelena à la Natasha and Yelena’s fight in Black Widow.
Again, I wasn’t on set, but it seems so specific that I can’t imagine it not being [intentional]. If it’s not, it’s a hell of a coincidence. That was one of the most fun fights to think of [for Black Widow], and while I can’t say I designed it, I threw ideas into it. We didn’t want to end it in a draw, as in they decide they’re both the best. But whoever passes out first is going to be the first one to die, so let’s have them call a truce. So finding that moment in the fight was so great, and I hope that [the Thunderbolts* moment] was a cool little homage.
Were there any other Black Widow ties that didn’t ultimately make the final film?
No, not that I can think of. As much as we love that and where they came from, we didn’t want there to be too much looking in the past. We had to address the forever loss of Natasha and that effect on Yelena and Alexei. But we really wanted to push forward because Yelena is taking a big leadership role moving forward with this, and it’s a big journey for her. She is naturally anti-establishment, and if you look too much into the past, she couldn’t move that far forward.
Now that Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans have come back in unique capacities, do you think it’s only a matter of time before Scarlett Johansson is making her signature pose in the MCU again?
I will preface by saying that I have no idea, but I don’t think so. I feel like her end in Endgame and then her epilogue with our Black Widow prequel were so lovely. So I would be surprised, but I know nothing about that. I have very little knowledge of what’s going on with Doomsday right now.
Did you ever have a draft of Thunderbolts* in which Yelena does Natasha’s pose again?
Maybe very early on. I don’t think I would’ve done it to have just done the same joke again …
Without calling attention to it was what I had in mind.
Yeah, I can’t remember the different angle I would’ve had on it. But there’s some drafts from a while ago because we were stalled by the strike. There’s a lot of early drafts that dealt with the fact that Valentina had sent Yelena to go after Hawkeye, but as more time passed, I didn’t know if that was the right touchstone to call on people to remember when it happened four years ago [in Black Widow and Hawkeye]. So things shift all the time, but I can’t remember a specific poser joke. [Writer’s Note: After anothing viewing, Alexei launches Yelena à la Steve Rogers and Natasha in The Avengers. Yelena also does a pose en route to hugging Bob that is somewhat reminiscent of Natasha.]
Was Yelena going to confront Val about what Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) confirmed to be faulty intel in Hawkeye? Do you think Val purposefully misled Yelena?
Early drafts began with Yelena confronting Valentina about ordering the Clint Barton hit, which was one of my favorite scenes that eventually became not entirely relevant to the Thunderbolts* story. I loved it because it emphasized Valentina’s manipulation. Yelena entered the scene on fire, furious, accusing Valentina of setting her up to take out her sister’s killer, when, in reality, he was her best friend. Then Valentina completely flipped the script on Yelena. I believe the line was: “Set you up? You mean paid you to do a job that, by the way, you didn’t even do? So I heard some bad gossip, pardon me for trying to motivate you. But this is your job, and asking questions isn’t a part of it.” And then that led into the conversation about how Yelena is unhappy with her job/life and wants to make a change towards something more constructive.
Hannah John-Kamen (Ghost), Lewis Pullman (Bob), Wyatt Russell (John Walker), Red Guardian (David Harbour), Florence Pugh (Yelena), Sebastian Stan (Bucky) in Thunderbolts*
Chuck Zlotnick/MARVEL
Jake Schreier told me that Sentry wasn’t in your draft that he read before he committed, but that he was added to the very next one. Was the depression theme born out of Sentry? Or did you have some of those seeds planted already?
I think he might be wrong on that by one draft, but I’d have to check the timeline. I really, really wanted to end the third act with a hug, with an emotional moment, as opposed to a beating into submission. So there were a lot of versions where Valentina had planted this kind of timebomb inside John Walker, and the goal was to make him the most unlikeable person on the team. He then becomes the monster, and they have to talk him down. It didn’t ever totally work.
But thank God for my time in the Marvel Writers Program. I read the Sentry run back then, and in thinking about another villain that they can’t beat in a punching fight, I was like, “Wasn’t there a Superman who also had a dark side to him?” So I went back and read some of it, and it was very much like, “Yeah, The Sentry is the golden God of pure goodness, and the Void is pure evil. That can just as easily work for heroic ambition and self-esteem versus depression and self-loathing and loneliness and isolation.” So, yeah, it always was [planted]. Once we saw that and realized that all the character arcs were embodied in one person who could be the physical antagonist, that’s when the movie really locked together.
But I’m surprised. I thought that there was a draft with the Sentry before Jake came on. I remember him really locking into the Void Space. My idea of the Void Space was a lot more ethereal and dreamy. But his was more Being John Malkovich room mazes of very real, grounded stuff. So that helped incredibly in visualizing it and making it feel more unsettling.
I had someone call me earlier to say that her husband saw Thunderbolts* last night with his friends, and that they had a great time before speaking about mental health. The ultimate goal is for the audience to have a great time, and if there’s this added benefit of having meaningful conversations, how great is that?
You were all there at roughly the same time, but did you know Jake, Jon Watts or Chris Ford at NYU?
No, I met Jon Watts during the Spider-Man: Homecoming reshoots, and we ran down the list of teachers and all that. So we were right next to each other, and we probably rode in the same elevators a bunch of times or passed each other on the streets. But I didn’t know any of them until we got out here, and they’re a cool crew of people. When Jake came on, he showed me a bunch of the weird videos they’d shot in Brooklyn when they got out of college, and it seemed so fun. I didn’t have the same kind of creative ambition amongst my friend group. I guess we did do some videos, but theirs were just way better. (Laughs.)
Thunderbolts* ends with a Fantastic Four-branded ship headed straight for Earth-616 from their parallel Earth. I assumed this would be answered in The Fantastic Four: First Steps like the handoff of Fury’s pager from Avengers: Infinity War’s post-credit scene to Captain Marvel’s mid-credit scene. But it was shot by the Russos on the Avengers: Doomsday set, potentially as part of Doomsday.
I can’t speak to that part.
In any event, what do you make of this bridge between Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps?
I don’t think I can say anything, honestly. I can’t take credit for that tag scene either. I believe [co-writer] Joanna Calo wrote that, and I’m very jealous of it. It’s so funny and good. One of my favorite parts of the whole movie is John Walker saying, “I don’t know what any of these buttons do, nobody labeled them.” (Laughs.) That, for me, is one of the funniest things.
Have you seen The Fantastic Four: First Steps at this point?
I have seen one cut of Fantastic Four, but it was before additional photography.
Can you share an adjective or two?
I will share a proper noun: Galactus. That’s all I’m going to say.
Ryan Coogler’s 1932-set vampire movie Sinners has become a cultural phenomenon, and I’m sure that everybody at Marvel is elated for him. That said, has it made the Blade situation slightly more frustrating since there’s clearly an appetite for vampiric mayhem? (Costume designer Ruth E. Carter recently confirmed that, prior to Coogler hiring her for Sinners, she’d been prepping a now-defunct 1920s-set Blade. Pearson was a co-writer on the overall project.)
I cannot talk about The Blade situation. I’m so sorry. I wish I could, but I can’t. Sinners, though, that movie rules.
What else is on the horizon for you?
I’ve been working on this movie Fast and Loose for Netflix. It’s an action movie with a fun premise. [Writer’s Note: Will Smith and Michael Bay are attached.] I wanted this [other] deal to close so I could tell you guys, but there’s a franchise at a different studio that I’m hoping to reboot soon. They just couldn’t get the numbers straight, so I can’t say it. But hopefully we can talk about it during Fantastic Four.
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Thunderbolts* is now playing in movie theaters nationwide.
Mandy Moore, best known to screen audiences as one of the stars of NBC’s This Is Us, has joined comedian Nate Bargatze in The Breadwinner, a comedy feature that Eric Appel is directing for TriStar Pictures.
Additionally, up and comers Stella Grace Fitzgerald (Rebel Moon), Birdie Borria (The Fabelmans) and Charlotte Ann Tucker (Thunderbolts*) have joined the cast to play the onscreen couple’s daughters in the film.
Bargatze, one of the world’s top touring comedians, co-wrote the script and is producing the film with Dan Lagna. Former Marvel Studios exec Jeremy Latcham is also produce for Wonder Project.
The story sees the life of Bargatze’s character turned upside down when his supermom wife, played by Moore, lands a deal on Shark Tank. The lifelong breadwinner of the family becomes a stay-at-home dad, and quickly realizes he’s in way over his head.
Moore starred for six seasons as Rebecca Pearson in NBC’s award-winning drama This Is Us, earning multiple Emmy, Golden Globe and Critics Choice nominations. She recently portrayed investigative journalist Benita Alexander in Peacock’s Dr. Death alongside Édgar Ramírez.
She is also known for voicing Rapunzel in Disney’s Tangled movie, as well as the character’s many iterations across TV and video games. More recently, Moore lent her voice to Hulu’s top animated series Happy Family USA, created by Ramy Youssef and Pam Brady. She repped by Gersh, Untitled Entertainment and Johnson Shapiro.
Fitzgerald is repped by Gersh and Luber Roklin Entertainment. Borria is repped by DDO Artists Agency and Brave Artists, and Tucker is repped by The Osbrink Agency and New Beginnings Entertainment.
Tom Cruise has done some absolutely incredible stunts over the years. He’s climbed the tallest building in the world and he’s driven motorcycles off of cliffs. The way that Cruise presents himself, it’s as if it’s all in a day’s work. However, Simon Pegg says that the movie star does get nervous, at least sometimes, as he once did before the major set piece of Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.
Simon Pegg has been on hand for most of the Mission: Impossible movies and thus has had a front row seat to Tom Cruise’s wild stunts. Pegg tells People Cruise was smiling the entire time he was hanging off the Burj Khalifa for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. However, that wasn’t the case when Cruise had to hang off the outside of a cargo plane for Rogue Nation. Pegg said…
Hanging off a cargo jet as Cruise does in Rogue Nation is the sort of stunt where lots can do wrong. There’s, of course, there’s wind that’s pushing against him the entire time, but hanging off a plane also opens Cruise up to flying debris of all sorts. It’s the kind of thing that can’t really be controlled for in the moment, and could have led to serious injury had anything actually hit him. The stunt
Certainly, every precaution is taken to ensure safety on these stunts. Everybody is well aware of what the worst-case scenario is. But one can imagine that hanging off the side of an airplane in mid-air, there’s only so much that can be done. It feels like whatever harness is designed to keep somebody from falling off a building would feel safer than whatever harness was designed to keep somebody from falling off an airplane. The Cruise didn’t only make the actor nervous. Cruise admits it also terrified his mother.
Of course, one then has to wonder how one of the major stunts for Mission: Impossible -The Final Reckoning compares to the others, considering it was also a stunt that involved Cruise hanging from an airplane. Rather than being a massive cargo jet, Cruise is seen hanging off the wing of a small plane in the Final Reckoning trailers. Maybe the fact that the plane was smaller actually made it less scary.
Honestly, it’s nice to know that Tom Cruise even gets nervous pulling off some of these stunts. He’s always looking so confident so much of the time that it humanizes him to know that he is capable of fear.
Over the weekend, President Trump dropped a social media post decrying the state of the film industry in The United States. He said he’s instructed the Department Of Commerce to “begin the process” of placing tariffs on all movies shot outside the country. Immediately, social media exploded with fears about what this might mean for various movie studios and production houses, and several prominent media companies showed notable declines in their stock prices. With no timelines and few details, however, there’s a lot of uncertainty and several questions that still need to be answered before anyone knows what exactly this might mean.
Before we get into those questions though, let’s back up real quick and talk about the state of the film industry in The United States and more specifically, Los Angeles. In his social post, President Trump said movie-making has been “devastated” in Hollywood. The numbers back that up.
a recent report from FilmLA, the group that handles permits in Los Angeles, shooting is down more than twenty percent year over year. Television production is down almost fifty percent compared to an average of the last five years. Only 13 total pilots were shot in LA in the first quarter of this year, the lowest number in any quarter since FilmLA started keeping track. Sound stage usage is down. Permits being pulled are down. Anecdotally, there are a lot of people in the industry in Los Angeles talking about the struggle to find work. Something is clearly going on. The question is why.
In President Trump’s social post, he blames a “concerted effort” by other nations to offer incentives to filmmakers to shoot on location in their specific areas. You can read his message in its entirety below…
Now, it’s easy to verify that some of that is happening. Locations within The United States, Georgia most prominently, have started offering aggressive tax breaks and incentives for productions that film in the state. Officials literally produced brochures for movie studios and indie filmmakers that go over exactly how it works, and it has worked.
Georgia now has more movies and tv shows filmed on location than every State except California and New York. In fact, this has become such a problem the past few years that Governor Gavin Newsom has loudly and aggressively called for an expansion of California’s own tax incentive program to try and keep up. A bill is currently working its way through the state legislature.
To President Trump’s point, that same thing is happening with other countries too. Canada, the city of Vancouver in particular, has become a hotbed for filming and now attracts nearly 2 billion dollars a year in movie and tv production. That number was only expected to increase, as well, as local lawmakers recently passed even more generous incentive packages to try and entice more productions. Mexico has also become a hotbed for filming, as it offers cheaper costs and its own lucrative tax breaks. The UK and other countries in Europe have also started following suit and begun loudly courting the major studios with their own packages.
In short, producing movies and tv shows, regardless of budget sizes, now often involves incentive shopping. Whether they stay in The United States or not, most production companies are looking for the best deal, and even the actors have become jaded and are very open about how the process works. If a studio can shoot somewhere cheaper, they’re probably going to do that, and with the current pricing structure and cost of living issues in Los Angeles, Hollywood has become a lot less desirable.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the major Hollywood studios combined to release more than 110 theatrical movies per year on average. Over the last few years, that average has barely topped 80. The TV show numbers are just as scary. Back in 2018, there were more than 16,000 episodes of television produced. In 2024, that number barely topped 11,000 episodes.
When the streaming services first started coming into prominence, cable television was still operating at near max capacity. The major networks were all filling every available primetime slot, many cable networks were creating their own original programming and the premium channels like HBO were still in the midst of a creative renaissance.
Over the last few years, however, almost everyone other than Netflix has started pulling back. Many of the streaming services are still struggling to be profitable and have reduced production costs. Many cable networks have stopped producing their own programming, and the major TV networks have reduced their own spending, sometimes cancelling popular shows simply because they’re expensive to produce.
So, right now, the movie industry is in a position where a lot of companies are reducing the number of movies and TV shows they’re creating. Combine that with there being way more competition by other states and other countries to offer incentive programs and cheaper locations to film, and it’s been a perfect storm of problems for Hollywood.
The problem in predicting what might happen if tariffs were to go into effect is we don’t have any idea what they might actually look like. President Trump said he’s planning to roll out 100% tariffs, but we don’t know how those would be calculated.
Would half of any ticket sold for a movie produced outside The United States be paid to the government? That would likely create a system in which certain movies were more expensive to see in the theaters, which would likely be a catastrophe for the box office performance of those movies.
And what about if a movie went straight to streaming? Would the production be charged a fee based on its actual budget? If a movie cost $50M to shoot, would producers have to literally pay the The United States government a $50M penalty, sort of like how the luxury tax works in some professional sports if you spend over the salary cap?
None of this accounts for television or future rights payments or a wide variety of other issues either. Producing art is a lot more complicated than producing a manufactured good. That doesn’t mean these obstacles are insurmountable. It just means it’s a lot more complicated to forecast how any of this might work.
No one knows.
There has been a lot of talk about tariffs since President Trump took office. He’s vowed to make America’s trade agreements fairer, but there are wide disagreements amongst experts and political pundits about what fair actually means.
In the last hundred days, President Trump has advocated various positions. At one point, he seemed poised to drop moderate to massive tariffs on basically every country in the world, but after some negotiations, an overwhelming majority were paused so new agreements could be worked out. Those deals are still being negotiated, and no one is quite sure what they’ll look like or when they’ll go into effect. So, obviously, there’s going to be uncertainty around these proposed film tariffs for awhile.
Many experts in Hollywood are calling them the potential end of the film industry as we know it. They feel studios won’t be able to make the types of movies they’re making in Los Angeles for the budgets they’re making them at, which would mean cutting costs or reducing the number of films made. They also worry other countries will impose their own tariffs on movies shot in The United States, which would greatly reduce foreign grosses.
Others are cautious embracing the tariffs, as they feel the current tax incentive system isn’t good for anyone. They want to see a dramatic change in how business is done and feel only a massive jolt to the system will save Hollywood from losing more and more business to other countries. They also point to many animation and VFX jobs going to foreign countries and wonder if tariffs would help keep those in The United States.
Right now, all we can do is wait for more information and listen when the major studios start commenting publicly on how they feel this will affect business.
Denzel Washington is a music mogul on the move in the first teaser trailer for Spike Lee‘s Highest 2 Lowest.
The montage-heavy preview features quick scenes from the film interspersed with images of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Washington and co-star A$AP Rocky are shown on the move, with what looks like police in hot pursuit.
Over the visuals, Washington’s character in voiceover says, “There’s more to life than just making money. It’s integrity. There’s what you stand for. It’s what you actually believe in. Do you believe in yourself? Do you believe you’ll be successful? The hard times will come from the good times. The hard times will come from success. The hard times will come from the money. And the mayhem follows. So can you handle the mayhem? Can you handle the money? Can you handle the success? Can you handle the failure? Can you handle the lovers? Can you handle the memes? Can you handle everything that there is in between? That’s the question I have for you: Can you handle it? All money ain’t good money.”
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Lee dropped the preview on his Instagram account on Monday, writing in part, “I know u have been waiting ‘hella long’.”
The team-up marks Washington and Lee’s first film together in nearly 20 years and fifth collaboration overall.
Highest 2 Lowest, a New York City-set reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s crime thriller High and Low, stars Washington as a powerful music industry exec, known for having the “best ears in the business,” who’s targeted in a ransom plot that puts him in a life-or-death moral dilemma.
Highest 2 Lowest — the cast of which also includes Jeffrey Wright, Ice Spice and Ilfenesh Hadera — will have its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, May 19.
The film will get a theatrical release from A24 on Aug. 22 before arriving on Apple TV+ on Sept. 5.