Charles Pulliam-Moore | The Verge

Neill Blomkamp’s new zombie AI ‘film’ is just slop warmed over

2026-07-21T18:06:43-04:00

On Monday, District 9 and Gran Turismo director Neill Blomkamp unveiled his latest project: a 13-minute sci-fi short titled Nightborne that’s loosely based on Peter Watts’ 2014 novel Echopraxia. The short comes from Blomkamp’s new AI startup / production company, Barley Studios, and features characters whose voices and faces are modeled after human actors. But every single one of Nightborne’s shots was made with ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 text-to-video generator.

In an X post about the short, Blomkamp described it as a “test start” meant to demonstrate what generative AI is capable of, and he said that he wants “to tackle a full feature in this format” at some point in the future. Blomkamp seems to think that Nightborne is a strong proof of concept that might get people intrigued to see what he prompts next. But as polished as the “film” might be compared to most of the AI-generated videos floating around the internet today, it still bears many of the hallmarks we associate with slop. And even though a team of real people was involved in the project’s production, Nightborne is such a terrible watch that one would be hard-pressed to call it the future of moviemaking.

Set against the backdrop of a military conflict between the US and Syria, Nightborne tells the story of an American pilot who sustains life-threatening injuries when her helicopter is shot down. Though most of the pilot’s body is badly injured, she’s still technically alive and her head is intact. Those things make her the ideal candidate for Project Nightborne — a governmental program that turns brain-dead soldiers into remote controlled, weaponized zombies. And because the military has an endless supply of bodies at its disposal, the pilot is one of many uniformed ghouls being trained for war in secret.

Like basically every other AI-generated film that has come before it, Nightborne is really a collection of very short video clips that have been edited together to tell a simple story. Nightborne frequently cuts from shots of its zombified main character to documentary-style interviews with people involved in Project Nightborne. These cuts give the film — which was edited by Austyn Daines — a way to obfuscate the fact that Seedance 2.0 is only capable of generating a few seconds of video footage at a time. And the way the film’s dialogue is mixed almost (but not quite) makes it seem like you’re listening to real people speaking.

Blomkamp’s creative voice feels almost nonexistent

When you really take a good look at Nightborne’s visuals and listen closely to its audio, it’s easy to pick up on how much gen AI is in the mix. Signs in the background are often written in complete gibberish, and characters deliver their lines with unusual emphases that make them come across like people who don’t actually know what they’re saying. According to Blomkamp, “real concept artists” contributed work to the project, and 32 human actors agreed to have their likenesses used on-screen. But that human input doesn’t seem like it’s anywhere near enough to keep Nightborne from feeling more like machine-made content than a piece of art.

Aside from it coming from the same director who dreamt up Alive in Joburg — an imaginative exercise in using VFX to explore ideas about apartheid-era bigotry — there’s nothing remarkable about Nightborne. Blomkamp’s creative voice feels almost nonexistent as the short’s story unfolds, and if Seedance 2.0 wasn’t part of the equation, people probably wouldn’t be talking about it.

Though Seedance 2.0 can clearly churn out videos of people emoting, Nightborne highlights how the model still doesn’t have any sort of real understanding of the minute details that make human performances feel organic and truly alive. Whatever emotive nuance you might see in the short is really just a reflection of the videos Seedance 2.0 has been trained on, and not exactly something that it can take credit for.

Aside from zombies, Nightborne doesn’t have all that much in common with its source material. But it’s a lot like Jia Zhangke’s Jia Zhangke’s Dance short and Ruairí Robinson’s viral AI video depicting Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting — both of which were created with Seedance 2.0. Each of these projects has demonstrated that traditional filmmakers tend to know how to downplay gen AI’s technical limitations, but their skills can only do so much to offset the technology’s innate weaknesses.

Though text-to-video models may be getting more sophisticated, they haven’t advanced enough to produce finished works that audiences are excited to see. Nightborne’s announcement was almost immediately met with a wave of backlash from people who saw the film as a sign of Blomkamp being washed. And while Blomkamp might have thought that Nightborne would generate some positive buzz for himself, it seems much more like he’s wandered into an unfortunate situation similar to the one Darren Aronofsky created with his terrible AI series about the Revolutionary War.

The most interesting thing about Nightborne is the way its story can be interpreted as commentary on the technology that was used to make it. Project Nightborne is all about individuals in positions of power repurposing dead people’s bodies without their consent in order to generate labor on the cheap. Generative AI isn’t as (immediately or obviously) destructive as killer zombie soldiers, but those pushing for the technology’s use are driven by a desire that’s similar to the one motivating Nightborne’s villains.

The Odyssey turned me into an IMAX believer

2026-07-20T17:47:37-04:00

After seeing Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey for the first time early last week, I came away impressed, but somewhat conflicted about two of the film’s more fantastical set pieces. While those scenes were beautifully crafted and tremendously acted, there was something a little bit off about the way they hit my eye. I spent days wondering what, exactly, wasn’t quite working for me during that first theatrical viewing, and I thought that might have just been splitting hairs. But it wasn’t until I saw the movie again over the weekend — this time in IMAX — that the issue became crystal clear.

Though I’d heard all of the buzz about The Odyssey being the first feature shot entirely with 70mm film IMAX cameras, I thought a lot of it was clever marketing hype meant to activate Nolan’s cinephile fan base. I hadn’t considered how watching the film in larger format would make for a markedly different viewing experience. But The Odyssey really is a movie that needs to be seen in IMAX if you want to get a true sense of the story Nolan is telling.

Spoiler warning: This story contains spoilers for The Odyssey (which, to be fair, is an adaptation of Homer’s almost 3,000-year-old epic poem).

There are many scenes throughout The Odyssey that look perfectly fine when the film is displayed in the 35mm format. Majestic, wide shots of Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men at sea make you appreciate the Mediterranean’s expansiveness, and you can feel the soldiers’ claustrophobic tension as they hide within the Trojan horse. Even though you can see that the film is cropped, Odysseus’ disastrous encounter with the Laestrygonians gives you a sense of how gigantic they are compared to the wandering Ithacans. But The Odyssey’s scenes involving some of the story’s more gargantuan monsters take on a different gravity when they’re displayed in IMAX because of how much more visual information there is to take in.

When I saw The Odyssey in 35mm — which is projected in a widescreen, 2.39:1 aspect ratio — I knew that the Cyclops Polyphemus (Bill Irwin) towered over the humans who marched into his cave searching for food. But when I saw a standard IMAX screening of the film — whose 1.90:1 aspect ratio is smaller than the 70mm’s 1.43:1 ratio — I had a much clearer understanding of the creature’s stature and the subtle nuances baked into Irwin’s physical performance. Because the IMAX screening projected a taller image, I was able to spend more time taking in details that were easy to miss the first time around, like the way Polyphemus has to hunch in order to keep his head from hitting the cave’s ceiling.

The substantive difference between the two screenings became exceedingly obvious once I saw the Cyclops chasing Odysseus and his men down a mountain for a second time. In 70mm, you can see more of the monster’s upper body as it lumbers through trees in a fitful rage, which brings an added sense of danger and urgency to the chase scene. I had a similar experience seeing the soldiers rowing past a whirlpool not knowing that they were drifting directly into the sea monster Scylla’s reach. The 35mm screening shows you that Scylla’s humongous, but the IMAX screening’s added real estate makes it easier to understand how she’s able to snatch her victims up before any of them realize that she’s lurking in the cliffs above them.

By shooting The Odyssey completely in 70mm, Nolan crafted a film whose size and visual detail could make it feel immersive in ways that most modern features aren’t. But he also chose a format that makes it difficult for most theatergoers to see the movie in its most impressive form. Because there are only about 40 theaters globally (25 in the US) that are able to screen 70mm IMAX films, the vast majority of people will probably never get a chance to take The Odyssey in as Nolan intended. This and the fact that standard IMAX screenings are more expensive than standard movies have prompted some to accuse the director of being anti-art and contributing to the culture of obsessive format purism.

One could also argue that Nolan is using The Odyssey to show IMAX and theater owners that there is a genuine public demand for films shot in 70mm. The current shortage of 70mm screenings of The Odyssey is due to the fact that IMAX hasn’t been able to produce new projectors. Speaking to Variety, IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond explained that the company has largely been focused on retrofitting old projectors, but there aren’t many movie exhibitors willing to take on the construction costs it would take to build the 1.43:1 screens necessary to display 70mm films. If IMAX and various theater chains were willing to pony up the cash for projector part development and venue expansion, 70mm screenings could become more common. But for the time being, the industry seems comfortable using the format’s scarcity as an effective marketing tool.

That marketing strategy has worked for The Odyssey — a highly anticipated project from one of the world’s most revered filmmakers. But Nolan’s star power clearly has a lot to do with the movie’s box office success. There aren’t that many other directors who could get people journeying across the country just to see one of their features. It also helps that the movie is actually worth seeing, especially in IMAX.

Avengers: Doomsday’s first trailer puts everyone on high alert

2026-07-20T10:36:05-04:00

After months of teasing us with reminders about how large Avengers: Doomsday’s cast is going to be, Marvel has finally released a proper trailer for the film.

Though Robert. Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom definitely appears to be causing a lot of the chaos in Doomsday’s first trailer, the movie seems like it’s going to feature more than a few moments where different teams of heroes fight one another. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) seems to be the only person who understands that the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and the (New) Avengers need to be more focused on dealing with their new Latverian enemy. And while Thor might not be able to rally the troops on his own, Steve Rogers’ (Chris Evans) presence will probably bring them all together.

The trailer makes Doomsday seem like it’s going to be another humongous spectacle that puts a lot of emphasis on our nostalgia for Marvel’s old X-Men movies. Marvel probably has a few more Doomsday details we won’t hear about until the studio comes to San Diego Comic-Con later this week, which should get people even more hyped to see the film before it hits theaters on December 18th — the same day that Dune: Part Three hits theaters.

AI slop movies are the new direct-to-video cash grabs

2026-07-15T15:55:15-04:00

This weekend, cinephiles across the world will march to their local theaters to feast their eyes on Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of The Odyssey. It’s on track to rake in anywhere between $80–$100 million in just a few days. People are clearly excited to see how Nolan uses cutting-edge filmmaking tech to make the Homeric classic feel fresh. But another director is trying to capitalize on the buzz around Nolan’s project to drum up interest in an Odysseus-focused movie of his own.

On Tuesday, film studio Fountain 0 announced that it is working on an AI-generated reimagining of The Odyssey titled Odysseus: The Fall, which will be available to rent or buy from the company digitally sometime later this summer. The movie comes from director Ash Koosha, who previously collaborated with the startup to make Dreams of Violets — an AI-generated docudrama about the civil unrest and state violence that have rocked Iran between late 2025 and early 2026. Like Dreams of Violets — which reportedly cost only $2,000 to make — Odysseus: The Fall’s production budget is said to be a fraction of a traditionally produced movie’s. Koosha was able to write / direct / edit the movie with a budget in the “mid-five figures,” which is nothing compared to the $250 million Nolan needed to shoot The Odyssey.

Odysseus: The Fall’s trailer makes it pretty obvious what kind of “film” Koosha has cooked up using Kling’s AI video generator and Google’s Nano Banana. Every shot seems short, and they all have that over-glossy aesthetic we associate with AI slop. The characters are modeled after real humans — this Odysseus was modeled after Koosha’s own likeness, and the director voices the entire cast — but there’s still an uncanny stiffness to the way they move and speak that makes them feel wholly AI.

What’s also clear is that Fountain 0 is trying to ride Nolan’s coattails in order to market its AI services while selling what’s essentially a direct-to-video knockoff of a film that people actually want to see. Speaking to Variety, Fountain 0’s executive chairman, Tom Rogers, said that their project is aimed at people who might not “like going to the movie theaters, but have a real interest in AI and what’s going on.” This makes Odysseus: The Fall sound less like a filmmaker’s earnest interpretation of The Odyssey and more like an elaborate advertisement for Fountain 0’s AI-forward production workflow.

“[W]e actually think, when our film is released, that it will be a catalyst for a lot of people who might not otherwise have seen the Odyssey to hopefully go see it, so they can compare the state of the highest state of human filmmaking achievement, which I truly expect the reviews to suggest Nolan’s film is, with what the top state of the art is in AI filmmaking today,” Rogers said.

Rogers wasn’t exactly suggesting Odysseus: The Fall will be able to hold a candle to The Odyssey, but he was saying that Fountain 0’s projects represent the best kind of “films” that AI firms are capable of making. Rogers might genuinely believe that his company’s features are good, but when you watch Dreams of Violets — which plays like a collection of prompted clips — it’s hard to imagine theatergoers would agree with him.

Seeing the visual grandeur and studied artistry of Nolan’s The Odyssey makes you appreciate how it is the product of hundreds of humans tirelessly working together to make a truly epic piece of art. Fountain 0 has made a big deal out of the fact that Koosha and his brother Pooya did most of the work on Odysseus: The Fall themselves, but that isn’t really the sort of thing that convinces people to buy movie tickets.

Though there was a (dubious) argument to be made that Dreams of Violets was trying to raise public awareness about Iran’s history of human rights violations, it’s hard not to see Odysseus: The Fall as yet another AI-hyping stunt that has little to do with the celebration of art. This was similarly true of ElevenLabs’ recently released The Odyssey audiobook narrated by an AI-generated facsimile of Michael Caine. It’s also the entire ethos behind studio / startup Particle6’s repeated attempts to convince everyone that “AI actress” Tilly Norwood is a thing that we should all spend time thinking about.

Like Fountain 0, Particle6 recently announced its own plans to put out a feature-length movie starring an avatar. Both of these companies seem to think that they can troll their way into relevance before becoming widely accepted parts of the entertainment industry. But what they don’t seem to realize is that the thing that gets people eager to see a film like Nolan’s The Odyssey is the way it embodies the deeply collaborative human elements of traditional filmmaking.

The effusive praise and hateful backlash that The Odyssey has drawn both speak to Nolan’s ability to craft works of art that elicit genuine emotion from audiences. Those powerful feelings are what drive film discourse and get people buying movie tickets, which keeps major studios like Universal in business. For all the promises that gen AI is going to fundamentally reshape the entertainment industry, the technology’s boosters have yet to release a film or series that comes anywhere close to drumming up the excitement Nolan’s fans have for The Odyssey. And they never will if stunts like the one Fountain 0 is trying to pull are all they have to offer.

A decade later, Pokémon Go finally made good on its original promise

2026-07-11T15:31:05-04:00

When Niantic dropped the first Pokémon Go trailer in 2015, it was hard to grasp how a bunch of players could work together to catch a pokémon like Mewtwo. But this week at the game’s 10th anniversary event in New York City, Pokémon Go showed the world how it’s done. Almost 2,000 players (some of them Pokémon Go influencers) packed into Times Square on Thursday evening to participate in a special battle. It was cool to see Times Square briefly go dark before the billboards began lighting up, revealing an escaped Mewtwo Mega Evolving, and it was even wilder to see people living the fantasy depicted in the game’s first trailer.

Even though most people had never played a mobile game like Pokémon Go when the game debuted in 2016, the trailer made the general idea easy enough to understand. Players were meant to go out into the world, and the game would tell them where they might be able to find wild, catchable monsters if they could get to a specific area fast enough. The trailer made gameplay seem like it could be a chill, solitary experience, but it also featured wild shots of crowds teaming up to take down powerful pokémon. Raids hadn’t been introduced to the game at that point, but it was clear that Niantic had plans to make things like catching legendaries feel special.

In a press release, Scopely — which acquired Niantic’s games business last year — VP of product Michael Steranka explained that the recent anniversary event was the company’s way of living up to that first trailer. “When we first dreamt what Pokémon GO might become a decade ago, hosting more than a thousand people in a single, local raid battle was just a pipe dream,” Steranka wrote. “Seeing that vision become a reality in Times Square was the perfect way to celebrate 10 years of playing together with our community.”

This latest in-person event was a far cry from the game’s first in 2017, when thousands of players descended upon Chicago only to find their poké-plans scuttled by network overloads and software issues that Niantic took ultimately credit for. Steranka joined Niantic that same year to help coordinate the disastrous Chicago event, and during a press briefing this week, he said that — at the time — he thought that he “should have been fired” for how things played out.

“I also quickly discovered from this experience that the Pokémon Go team does not point fingers,” Steranka said. “Instead of trying to find someone to blame, everybody came together, and we spun up an offsite in Seattle to learn what went wrong and how to fix things.”

Doubling down on and expanding the scope of its in-person, community-focused events has been key to Pokémon Go’s exponential growth over the years. According to Scopely, over 800 million people have downloaded Pokémon Go since the game first launched, and the company raked in $1 billion from Go in 2025 alone. For years, Niantic struggled to replicate that kind of success with its other IP-focused augmented reality games, like Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and Catan: World Explorers. Pokémon Go’s continued popularity is somewhat surprising considering how the core gameplay hasn’t really changed all that much. But Scopely’s games president, Ed Wu, attributes Pokémon Go’s staying power to the way the company has put much more emphasis on cultivating player communities.

“What started as an invitation to explore the world around you has become something that brings players together across cities, countries, and cultures, from neighborhood meetups to celebrations that draw hundreds of thousands of people together,” Wu said in a press statement. “As we look ahead, our commitment remains unchanged: to keep evolving the game in ways that turn everyday places into opportunities for discovery and connection.”

Scopely sees Pokémon Go as a forever game both because of the franchise’s ever-expanding roster of monsters and the fact that there are always going to be people — especially younger ones — who have never played before. With each new mainline Pokémon game launch, a new generation of players arrives. When I asked Wu how his team plans to evolve Pokémon Go in the future, he didn’t go into specifics. But he said that Scopely is looking into capitalizing on the ways that people of different ages (e.g., children and their parents) get one another into Pokémon and how gyms can be used to foster communities.

This Saturday and Sunday, millions of people are probably going to be out and about participating in 2026’s global Pokémon Go Fest that will see the map light up with even more Mewtwo encounters and challenges that require players to work together. It’ll be the game’s most ambitious event yet, but with a set of new mainline Pokémon titles dropping next year, Pokémon Go will still have room to grow.

Character.AI wants a piece of the microdrama pie

2026-07-10T05:08:15-04:00

Character.AI’s plan to become more than just an LLM-powered chatbot platform is going beyond interactive books, comics, and audio dramas. Today, the company announced the debut of c.ai Series — short-form, episodic videos designed to be watched and interacted with on your phone.

Unlike traditional microdrama services that feature cheaply produced, live-action shows starring human performers, c.ai Series are animated and almost entirely made with generative AI. The company’s interest in getting into the microdrama space isn’t surprising considering that it’s projected to become a $26 billion industry in the next few years. And even though some young people have begun to take a stance against gen AI, that might not be an issue for the folks already using Character.AI.

Each of Character.AI’s microdramas revolves around a different set of characters being thrust into adventures that map neatly onto popular genres like romance, horror, and sci-fi. You can already find plenty of that kind of stuff on other microdrama apps like ReelShort and DramaBox. But what sets c.ai Series apart is the way that viewers will be able to chat with characters after they’ve finished watching an episode.

Character.AI is kicking off this new initiative with three projects. Last Summer tells a story about secret admirers while leaning into an anime aesthetic, The Nighttime Game — which resembles Netflix’s Entergalactic — focuses on friends playing a deadly card game, and Eden Fall follows a group of elite MMO players into a Ready Player One-style virtual reality that looks a bit like Genshin Impact. The three Series will all debut with 10 episodes that clock in at under two minutes each. The first eight episodes of each Series will be free to watch for all Character.AI users, but the final two will be behind paywalls.

Character.AI says that this first batch of Series were all developed by a human-led, in-house studio team “using AI as part of the production workflow.” But in the future, it plans to let creators produce original microdramas of their own using the company’s AI tools.

At a glance, Character.AI’s foray into microdramas seems very much like the company following in the footsteps of TV networks like Fox, Bravo, and BET that have already hopped onto the vertical video bandwagon. But when I recently spoke with Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand, he insisted that microdramas are an organic next step for the platform.

“Microdramas are a continuation of that broader arc of becoming a broader storytelling and entertainment platform that we’ve been on,” Anand told me. “This isn’t just a one-off thing we’re doing because microdramas are the next cool thing; it’s a very natural extension of what our users are already doing and it opens up another massive gateway into our community.”

Though Character.AI could have launched Series “six months ago by hitting three buttons,” Anand said that he did not want to rush the feature’s release because he isn’t interested in putting out video slop. Rather than leading with shows that were wholly made with gen AI, the company enlisted a “fantastic team of Hollywood screenwriters” to develop scripts with a small group of creators who penned extensive bibles detailing each story’s lore. Those scripts were then fed into Character.AI’s proprietary, agentic pipeline to generate visuals and audio that were edited together with traditional post-production software.

Development on these first three Series took a few weeks, which puts their production timelines on par with other microdrama platforms’ live-action offerings. The process might have been faster if Character.AI utilized third- party video generation models, but Anand wanted to keep things in-house in order to maintain visual consistency.

“The amount of innovation that has happened with text-focused LLMs has been exceptional, but there haven’t been equivalent advancements in the multimodal image and models,” Andand explained. “Our models make it easier for us to ensure visual and tonal consistency for characters across different scenes.”

Watching Character.AI’s microdramas, you can definitely see that they’re more polished than most of the AI animations floating around the internet today. Scenes flow with a clear sense of direction that makes them feel like they were crafted by a person with a basic sense of visual storytelling. The occasional bit of leaden dialogue and stiff facial expressions make it clear that these characters aren’t being voiced by actual actors. But when you compare these shows to the low-budget absurdity of most live-action microdramas, it’s easy to imagine Character.AI’s user base giving them a shot — if only to play around with the interactive features.

Similar to Character.AI’s regular chatbots, people will be able to roleplay or simply talk to characters from their favorite Series. One of the major differences, though, is that each episode is powered by a unique LLM that’s designed to only provide information that has been previously established on screen. This, Anand explained, is meant to prevent the chatbots from spoiling users with details about things they haven’t seen yet. These bots are supposed to be fun, which is also part of the reason why Character.AI is barring its underage users from interacting with them.

When I brought up Character.AI’s history of getting caught up in scandals regarding children being encouraged to self-harm by its chatbots, Anand was adamant that the company has taken the necessary steps like implementing hard age verification to make itself a safer place. At launch, Series will only be available to users over 18, and while younger viewers will eventually be able to watch the shows, they won’t be allowed to chat with Series-focused bots.

Character.AI made a name for itself by creating a space where fandom-obsessed people could insert themselves into fictional worlds, and Stories really do seem like the sort of thing that could resonate with this audience if the company can get them hooked.

Of course viewers are giving up on Netflix shows

2026-07-07T17:58:39-04:00

Even though Netflix is the world’s most popular paid streaming service, the company has been struggling to keep viewers watching its series after their first seasons. Beef — the streamer’s anthology about people locked in feuds — lost 70 percent of its viewership when it returned earlier this year. There seems to be some confusion as to why people aren’t champing at the bit to dive back into once-popular projects like the live-action adaptations of Avatar: The Last Airbender and One Piece. Netflix is reportedly hard at work trying to figure out what, exactly, is prompting subscribers to jump ship in droves. But if you’ve spent any time paying attention to the broader media landscape, the answers — there are a few — are fairly obvious.

Some of Netflix’s problems are rooted in its internal practices, like the way it tends to cancel shows right as they start becoming more expensive to produce. It also doesn’t help that, on the whole, the wait between seasons of series has been gradually getting longer, which makes it easier for people to lose interest. But Netflix also has to deal with the reality that competitors like TikTok and YouTube are capturing people’s attention in ways that it simply can’t.

It only took a few years for adults in the US to begin spending just about the same amount of time scrolling through TikTok as they do watching things on Netflix. This is undoubtedly part of the reason why the streamer has been so aggressive about getting into games, live sports, and video podcasts. Netflix also has plans to experiment with short-form content that sounds like it’s meant to be consumed in the moments when people have time to kill. But the simple fact that TikTok and YouTube are free makes them significantly more accessible than Netflix, and it seems very unlikely that short videos will be enough to get people signing up for the paid service.

In addition to viewers spending more time on other platforms, Netflix also has to contend with the way the streaming wars have fundamentally altered people’s relationships with episodic television. When the platform first launched, appointment watching was still a thing and people made an effort to keep up with programs from week to week. But Netflix’s binge model trained audiences to cluster around shows for brief windows before moving on to the Next Big Thing that folks are yapping about on social media. The binge model made it difficult for Netflix’s shows to maintain long-term engagement or generate the word-of-mouth buzz that turns people on the fence into paying customers. And while the company has had some success releasing projects on a weekly basis, it’s a bit too late in the game for that strategy to solve its fall-off problem.

Something else that Netflix has to take into consideration is that, sometimes, people just stop watching shows when they aren’t particularly enjoyable. As much as we all loved Stranger Things in its early days, the show became an unwieldy mess by its final season. Stranger Things was a big enough phenomenon that its diminishing quality didn’t exactly hurt its overall viewership. But the same can’t be said for some of Netflix’s newer would-be flagship shows like Avatar, which came out of the gate limping and quickly drew ire from fans of the original animated series.

What Netflix needs to really turn this ship around is to focus on producing the kind of programming that gets people locked in, and then actually sticking with it once shows manage to build dedicated audiences. This will take time, patience, and money on the company’s part, which isn’t exactly the kind of strategy that gets stockholders salivating. But it’s really the only way that Netflix can hope to climb its way out of this hole and keep other platforms from eating its lunch.

Influencer screenings aren’t going away

2026-07-02T11:50:26-04:00

For a few days, it seemed like Universal decided that there would be no advanced screenings of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey for influencers. But on Monday, influencers sat alongside traditional critics and journalists at special showings of The Odyssey specifically for the associated press junket. Despite what it may have looked like, Universal was not going back on its word. The studio was simply embracing an undeniable reality of the modern entertainment press.

Much as it may pain some to admit, influencers and content creators have become a significant part of our media ecosystem — one that offers film studios an invaluable way to reach larger, more diverse, and younger audiences. Whether it’s a YouTuber’s video essay, a TikToker’s reaction video, or a glowing review on Instagram, influencers’ content can go viral if it resonates with (or enrages) a rabid fan base. And the way that some influencers build massive followings of their own highly engaged fans makes them useful for studios hoping to engineer the next Barbenheimer moment.

People’s reactions to the idea of Universal snubbing creators ahead of The Odyssey’s theatrical premiere highlights another important facet of our media landscape. Influencers have become a big part of how studios promote their films. Speaking to Yahoo Entertainment, digital marketing strategist Gigi Robinson explained that influencer screenings are “one of the smartest moves in entertainment marketing right now” because of how they “create a full content arc.”

“It’s not just about showing up and watching a movie,” Robinson said. “Every creator makes it their own. These screenings make people feel like they’re part of something exclusive. And that anticipation? That’s what gets people into theaters.”

But some people have grown weary of the (often overly enthusiastic or cartoonishly negative) energy that they bring to the table. It’s clear that studios are aware of this on some level, otherwise trades wouldn’t be running stories about who’s getting invited to screenings.

What Universal probably meant when the no-influencers-allowed news broke was that there won’t be any screenings of The Odyssey that are put on solely for content creators. Those types of screenings aren’t unheard of, but it’s far more common for studios to screen their unreleased projects for small audiences that consist of critics, journalists, regular theatergoers (who have usually won a contest of some sort), and a handful of people best known for their social media presences. Having that mix of people from different walks of life makes for a viewing experience that feels much more like what it might be like to see the movie opening night. And that feeling can — but doesn’t always — inform a reviewer/writer/video essayist’s thoughts as they work on pieces about what they’ve just seen.

One of the more frustrating things about these screenings is the way their scheduling tends to leave members of the press with very little to finish their work before embargos (agreements barring journalists from publishing until a certain time) are up. It can be difficult to put a piece of insightful film criticism together in just a few hours before you have to post it and hope that Google Zero won’t make your work almost impossible to find (it will.) This is particularly challenging for writers who try to hit deadlines in order maximize their chances of catching readers when they’re intentionally looking for news about a movie. And while some studios probably see reviewers having less time to sit with their thoughts about a movie — some of which can be negative — as a good thing, it also creates an environment that discourages people from producing quality criticism.

These hurdles aren’t always an issue for influencers whose contributions to the discourse can be as simple as a hyperbolic X post telling their followers that [insert movie] is the best or worst thing they’ve ever seen. The relative speed with which creators are able to broadcast their thoughts to their audiences is part of what makes them so useful to studios. And because there are quite a few movie influencers who have built brands around hyping up movies rather than discussing them thoughtfully, studios have relied on them to generate positive buzz.

Though there are plenty of creators whose work is much more than that, the algorithmically driven social media platforms we use every day often reward content that’s attention-grabbing and short enough to be consumed quickly. This is why you still see a sea of soyface thumbnails whenever you search through YouTube for basically anything, and it’s why so many online movie influencers only seem capable of speaking in extremes. These tactics have helped influencers build dedicated followings of people who see them as entertainers and news sources that are more trustworthy than traditional media outlets.

Influencers have given people an easy way to access content about art in a moment when newsrooms across the board are shrinking. Social media personalities might not be as well-equipped to go deep with a director about their process or influences, but that doesn’t necessarily matter to a subscriber who sees them as a friend who conveniently lives in their phones. Parasocial relationships are also a key part of the creator economy that studios are now trying to capitalize on through things like influencer screenings. It takes more energy and focused attention to get through a written movie review than it does to half-watch a reactionary TikTok that pops up on a curated For You page. But making the effort to engage with nuanced, studied criticism is really the only way we can encourage studios to help foster it.

This doesn’t mean that everyone should just unfollow every creator who pops up in their feeds or that studios should only work with press from legacy media outlets. But it does mean that we should be willing to work a little harder to find and share substantive criticism that isn’t just a bit of promotion meant to get us into theaters.

After a great start, DC’s new cinematic universe is already slowing down

2026-06-29T17:00:35-04:00

While Kara Zor-El’s appearance at the end of James Gunn’s Superman was a very pleasant surprise, Warner Bros. Discovery’s plan to fast-track a standalone Supergirl feature always felt a little dubious. It seemed odd that, after Superman, the studio wanted to flesh out its new cinematic universe with films about another Kryptonian and one of Batman’s less notable villains. But Gunn implored fans to have faith in his vision and trust that the DCU would become a world of interconnected stories that put WBD’s last batch of comic book movies to shame.

Though hopes were high for Supergirl, the movie has turned out to be a bit of a dud. Critics have been rather down on the project, and its lackluster box office performance has it on track to lose WBD somewhere between $100–120 million. Films flop all the time, and Supergirl not resonating with audiences probably wouldn’t be a huge deal if we knew that DC Studios had more exciting things coming down the pike. But Supergirl feels like it could be an early sign that Gunn’s grand plan for the DCU is falling apart before it even really gets off the ground.

Loosely based on Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow comic miniseries, the new Supergirl film follows Superman’s cousin Kara (Milly Alcock) as she embarks on an interstellar bender that culminates in her dog being poisoned by crew of sex-trafficking pirates. Unlike Superman (David Corenswet), Supergirl doesn’t really have a problem with killing her enemies — especially when they’re trying to stop her from saving Krypto. But with an orphaned girl (Eve Ridley) tagging along for the adventure, Kara tries to set a good (read: no murdering) example.

Supergirl struggles to make its titular heroine feel distinct from Superman

Though Supergirl comes from director Craig Gillespie and writer Ana Nogueira, everything about this movie — from its focus on animals in distress to its needle drops — makes it feel a lot like some of Gunn’s previous work. Supergirl’s drunken brawls in alien bars and scenes of her schlepping around space in a junky starship look like they could have been ripped from any one of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy features. You can hear Nogueira channeling Gunn’s spiky sense of humor as the movie introduces new faces like unhinged bounty hunter Lobo (a distracting Jason Momoa in comics-accurate garb). Momoa’s presence is a constant reminder of how the DCEU fell apart, but Lobo isn’t really what drags Supergirl down.

As refreshing as it was to see Superman gloss over Clark Kent’s oft-repeated tragic backstory, Supergirl spends much of its runtime rehashing the details of Krypton’s destruction. Flashbacks to Kara’s past are meant to help us understand the grief she’s been living with, and to see why her sense of morality is very different from her cousin’s. But rather than unpacking Kara’s emotions in any meaningful way, the movie makes light of her substance abuse while sending her on a by-the-numbers adventure that’s generally lacking when it comes to intrigue or visual spectacle.

One of Supergirl’s more glaring issues is the way it struggles to find organic ways to make its titular heroine feel distinct from Superman. Aside from her relative brutality and moody outlook, she’s just another indestructible alien who periodically needs to recharge her powers by basking in yellow sunlight. The movie tries to give itself some stakes by constantly putting Kara in situations where she’s left without her abilities. But by the second sequence in which Kara’s getting punched out by a bunch of dudes, you get the sense that DC Studios never really locked in on a plan to make this story pop.

That’s somewhat surprising given the way Gunn has previously insisted that DC Studios would “never put a half-assed script in production” simply because the project had already been announced. Half-assed is the perfect description of Supergirl’s entire vibe, and it being the studio’s second major feature doesn’t exactly bode well for the DCU’s future. Supergirl needed to demonstrate that Gunn had a solid plan to build a new universe on the backs of some of DC’s lower profile characters. Though we’ve already seen some of how that could work in HBO’s Peacemaker series, it was less clear whether the studio could pull it off on the big screen. The entire point of rebooting WBD’s superhero movies was to put DC Studios in a better position to compete with Marvel — which is on the verge of its own major reset. But whereas Marvel has a few reliable aces like the X-Men and a new Spider-Man movie up its sleeve, DC is essentially starting from scratch.

Some of Supergirl’s problems might not be so readily apparent if there had been more time before it and Superman’s theatrical debuts. The two movies coming out so close to one another emphasizes their characters’ general similarities, and makes it seem like DC might be a little too comfortable putting out iterative projects. This calls into question Gunn’s decision to prioritize a series about the Green Lanterns and a Clayface film before introducing new versions of more well-known heroes like Batman and Wonder Woman. WBD still plans to put out a sequel to Matt Reeves’ The Batman that won’t technically be part of the DCU, but the Gotham of it all may get audiences primed to see a new Bane / Deathstroke movie that the studio is reportedly prioritizing in the wake of Supergirl’s underperformance.

All of these B-tier projects and alternate realities give the nascent DCU a whiff of the same messiness that has plagued Sony’s universe of Spider-Man spinoffs since its inception. And when you factor in WBD’s impending merger with Paramount Skydance, it seems very possible that the DCU might not come together the way Gunn originally intended. Though it’s possible that next year’s Man of Tomorrow could steer things in a stronger direction, what feels more likely right now is DC putting out another Super-movie that feels a little too similar to what we’ve seen before. It wouldn’t be the first time that WB found itself on the ropes with a comics-related crisis, but it might be the last chance the studio has to get this stuff right.

Instagram wants to monopolize your attention

2026-06-26T07:28:31-04:00

This week, Instagram launched a series of new features for its smart TV app that are all designed to get people to spend more time on the platform through the biggest screens in their homes. In addition to vertical Reels, Instagram for TV — which is currently available for Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, and Samsung Smart TVs — users can now watch disappearing Stories and horizontal videos with aspect ratios similar to what you typically see on YouTube. And soon, Instagram will make a big push for longform, episodic content and TV-focused “live creator experiences.”

This foray into the TV space feels very different from the Meta-owned company’s previous attempts to capture more of our attention by adding functionalities borrowed from competitors like TikTok, Snapchat, and Periscope (RIP.) It’s all contingent on the idea that people want to sit on their couches to watch Instagram content that they would typically consume on their phones.

The fact that we take our phones with us basically everywhere means that Instagram is always just a few taps away. The inherent portability of phone-based Instagram is arguably the biggest reason why the platform has managed to hit 3 billion monthly users. Scrolling through Instagram’s discovery page is something to do while you’re bored and already swiping through your phone. It’s easy to fire the app up and send videos to friends while you’re commuting, waiting for an elevator, or using the bathroom. But Instagram’s latest pivot is geared toward a more stationary experience that’s meant to be shared with people in the same room. This is a big bet.

Instagram says that community feedback is what inspired it to roll out the TV app’s new features. Some of them — like being able to cast Reels from your phone to your TV — make a certain amount of sense. If someone wants to share a funny video with a group, it’d be easier to throw it up onto a larger screen instead of having everyone cluster around a phone. What feels a little more dubious are Instagram for TV’s new dedicated channels that are supposed to “make it easier to find videos everyone in the room can enjoy together” even though the feeds are tailored to individual users’ interests.

It’s also hard to imagine people wanting to watch a carousel of Stories — which are essentially vertically oriented multimedia slideshows — on their televisions. Stories look awkward on widescreen displays, and interacting with them using a remote is much less intuitive than swiping through them on a phone’s touchscreen. This is probably why Instagram is also testing a dedicated section for widescreen content. The company’s plan to develop longform content and episodic series with creators is a sign that Instagram knows its TV app can’t just be a place where people scroll through videos that only last a few seconds.

It’s obvious that Instagram is trying to capture some of the attention away from YouTube and newer upstarts like the many microdrama platforms that have begun popping up.

Microdramas are already a booming business. The sector’s revenue is estimated to hit $14 billion by the end of the year. On mobile, Instagram is in a very good position to get into the microdrama game given the app’s built-in, massive user base. Most microdrama apps require you to sign up and then either pay per episode or subscribe to monthly or yearly plans to access their content. If Instagram can convince creators to start producing more of these kinds of videos on their own, the company could very well turn itself into a new microdrama hub.

Instagram may be leading with the vertical content for the moment, but with the understanding that longform, horizontal videos need to become central to the TV app for it to succeed. Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Instagram’s VP of product Tessa Lyons said that the company sees shortform content as “a very accessible way” for creators “to get into telling longer and more episodic stories.” Lyons also explained that part of what prompted the Instagram for TV’s new emphasis on longer videos was seeing creators using Instagram to promote their projects that live on other platforms.

But even if more Instagram creators embrace longform, landscape video, the TV app is going to have a tough time becoming something akin to YouTube. Like Instagram, YouTube has copied some of its competitors’ features, but YouTube has always been a destination for a wide variety of content that lends itself to viewing on a larger screen. You might start watching a YouTuber’s skit or video essay, but it’s easy to wind up putting on a playlist of music videos or a feature-length studio film. The breadth of YouTube’s content library is why it continues to be the most-watched streamer in the US, and while there’s plenty to see on Instagram, the two platforms aren’t exactly comparable in terms of what they offer viewers.

There’s a level of commitment that comes with watching something on TV that Instagram content has never really had to worry about before. You don’t exactly have to lock all the way in to appreciate a short clip on your phone. But a video on the TV should be something that can sustain your attention for more than a few minutes.

This TV pivot might work if Instagram can actually get creators to start churning out polished series instead of flooding the space with more phone-native content. But without a sharp influx of compelling projects that are crafted specifically for TV viewing, this could end up being another instance of Instagram losing the plot while chasing its competitors.