Charles Pulliam-Moore | The Verge

This AI startup says it can tell if a script will make a hit film

2026-06-05T10:26:50-04:00

When Quilty hit the industry trades earlier this year, the AI startup promised that its tool could accurately predict a film’s success just by reading the script. When people actually got a chance to experiment with Quilty’s product, though, they were left skeptical. Even with all the available data in the world, it predicted the script for Christy, which would go on to be a box office flop, would outperform the script for Sinners, which became an Oscar-winning blockbuster.

As many AI execs have pitched before, Quilty’s founders believe that can help “democratize” their industry by giving up-and-coming creatives access to assistive tools — a great Quilty score, perhaps, could be an in with a producer, and a low score might be a sign more revisions are needed. But right now, Quilty is little more than a jumbled mishmash of preexisting AI systems, and the company has yet to prove out that its technology has the taste or analytical abilities to identify a future hit (let alone a proven one).

Founded by film producers Simon Horsman and Daniel Wood, Quilty uses AI to analyze scripts and generate detailed reports about a project’s chances for success. After being fed an unproduced script, Quilty’s tech gives it a score ranging from 0 to 100 that reflects the quality of the would-be project’s narrative, its commercial viability, whether it will resonate with audiences, and how much the production would likely cost. The platform is selling the idea that it can give users a glimpse into the future as they try to get their films / movies greenlit. Horsman and Wood believe that Quilty is poised to become an integral part of how traditional production studios do business.

When I recently sat down with Horsman and Wood, they were adamant about wanting to “keep humans in the loop” rather than fully automating the pre-production process. While first establishing their company, Horsman and Wood solicited feedback from a number of other creatives who often voiced concerns about gen AI’s potential to negatively impact jobs and leave human workers deskilled.

“We agree with a lot of the negative sentiment towards AI, but what we’re trying to do is enable human creativity,” Horsman told me. “Quilty is really about development and giving the users — be they a writer, producer, buyer, financier, or studio execs — as much information as possible to make an informed green light decision.”

Instead of offering users access to a single, bespoke AI model that gives feedback on scripts, Quilty combines a number of widely available AI tools to bring different kinds of analyses to the process. All users have to do is upload their text scripts to the platform, and a few minutes later, it spits out a report that details things like an estimated budget, outlines of important story beats, and character analyses. The service costs $50 per individual analysis, but you can also purchase multiple analyses at a discounted rate.

The idea for this kind of piecemeal analytical workflow first came to Wood — who also serves as Quilty’s CTO — a few years back when he was being sued over a real estate matter. Rather than spending money on an attorney, Wood fired up ChatGPT, which promptly told him “I’m not a lawyer; go find someone else to help you.”

“Then I went to Gemini, which worked a lot better for a while, because I had a larger context window,” Wood recounted. “But then I was on X, and saw stupid Elon Musk talking about Grok getting the best lawyer score ever for an AI model, and I was like, ‘Let me check that out.’” (Wood did not detail how that legal dispute worked out.)

“When Claude Mythos comes out, all of a sudden, my whole software gets better”

The experience left Wood with a better understanding of how similar consumer-grade AI models can excel at different tasks. And Wood’s personal use of AI has informed Quilty’s approach to quantifying a script’s potential success. Because “Gemini is fantastic for structure and patterns,” Quilty uses that tool to help generate breakdowns — documents that distill all of a film or show’s production elements into comprehensive lists. For financial modeling, the company puts its faith in an instance of DeepSeek that’s hosted on servers located in the US. And for narrative / character analysis, Quilty uses a combination of Claude and ChatGPT.

Wood told me that the company relies on context prompting — a process in which you provide additional contextual data — in order to generate quality outputs that aren’t filled with hallucinations. Quilty doesn’t personally train any of the models it uses to create film reports / scores. But Wood insisted that it was a strength rather than a weakness because it makes it easier for Quilty to incorporate new and improved models into its workflow as they become available to the public.

“When Claude Mythos comes out and I can see that it’s a better LLM, all of a sudden, my whole software gets better,” Wood said, referring to the powerful new model that’s only available to a small group of organizations for cybersecurity purposes. “If some Chinese models suddenly become better than all these US frontier models, why wouldn’t I just use those instead?”

Though the modularity of Quilty’s tech stack might make it more agile in terms of overall updates, it also makes it somewhat harder to fully understand how the platform takes a script and comes up with a bevy of metrics that purportedly measure intangible things like how an audience might react to a movie that doesn’t actually exist yet. Prediction has been a key part of film development since the birth of Hollywood, but that labor has traditionally been performed by human workers who have a nuanced understanding of audiences.

No AI firm has been able to develop a model that can truly replicate human thought processes or the imprecise way we form opinions about art. But Quilty’s founders think that their “sentiment engine” is the next-best thing when it comes to assessing scripts because of the way it incorporates tools like VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) — open-source software that measures the degree to which text comes across as positive versus negative.

Quilty couldn’t possibly foresee every factor that might impact the way a film is received.

Horsman and Wood are also resolute in their belief that Quilty can accurately determine how a project “addresses the cultural moment” and give reliable box office projections. They pointed to Revenge of the Nerds as an example of a popular older film that would receive a lower Quilty score specifically because of the way it tries to depict sexual assault in a comedic light — something that modern viewers would see as being in poor taste.

When I asked Horsman and Wood about why Quilty gave Christy (which ultimately grossed around $2 million) a higher score than Sinners (which grossed $370 million), they insisted that the platform’s judgment “boiled down to the fact that Sydney Sweeney is really, really popular.” They said that on paper, Sweeney’s star power coupled with the fact that biographical dramas about boxing are cheaper to produce than fantasy / action features like Sinners made Christy a safer bet. But that situation highlights how Quilty’s logic isn’t all that reliable. Horsman and Wood admitted that there are some situations where Quilty couldn’t possibly foresee factors that might impact a film’s financial performance or the way audiences receive it.

Quilty could not, for example, have anticipated that Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams (which Horsman produced) would end up being derailed by actor Jonathan Majors’ high-profile fall from grace in 2023. Similarly, nothing about A Minecraft Movie’s script would have indicated to the platform that the Chicken Jockey phenomenon would become part of the film’s monster success. Horsman and Wood told me that, eventually, they want Quilty to be able to see these types of things coming, but it’s hard to imagine how that might come to fruition.

For all of its fanfare, what Quilty is selling is roundabout access to an assortment of large language models that are being asked to predict the future as it relates to unproduced pieces of art. It would truly be amazing if any of these AI tools worked like Quilty claims they can. But most of them are just sophisticated pattern recognition / mimicry machines that are a long way out from being able to understand what humans find entertaining.

The next big career move for young Hollywood? Reading audio smut

2026-06-04T10:04:10-04:00

Though Gen Z has developed a reputation for being so disinterested in sex that they don’t even want to see it on TV, the popularity of series like Heated Rivalry and The Summer I Turned Pretty has made it very clear that more than a few young people do, in fact, like their entertainment a little steamy. However prudish you might think today’s twentysomethings are, they’ve helped turn these sexually charged shows into breakout hits by participating in rabid fandoms. And women-focused audio erotica platform Quinn is trying to channel some of that intense fan energy into success for itself.

Founded back in 2019 by Caroline Spiegel (sister to Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel), Quinn offers its subscribers access to a vast library of aural porn that invites listeners to imagine themselves in all sorts of hot and heavy situations. Most of the platform’s stories — which cover a variety of genres and a wide range of sexual kinks — are written and produced by independent content creators who record the audio with their own voices. But for the past few years, the service has been partnering with celebrities like Jesse Williams, Andrew Scott, and Manny Jacinto for projects that are clearly designed to capitalize on established fame.

Earlier this year, Quinn pounced on the opportunity to cast Heated Rivalry’s Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams as star-crossed fae princes from feuding kingdoms who (spoiler) have been knocking boots in secret. And last week, Quinn announced that it was bringing Mika Abdalla and Stephen Kalyn — two stars from Amazon’s adaptation of Elle Kennedy’s Off Campus novel series — on board to voice a romantic drama about unlikely roommates who end up becoming more than friends.

While erotic audio content is nothing new, these high-profile celebrity collaborations have helped Quinn turn it into more of a mainstream commodity. Casting the stars of sex-forward TV dramas as the voices of spicy audio romances makes sense because there’s plenty of thematic overlap. But these projects also give Quinn a way to tap into these celebrities’ hyper-engaged fanbases.

In its first 12 days of streaming, Off Campus — which was already renewed for a second season before the first debuted — became one of Amazon’s most-watched shows. The internet is only just now recovering from the mass psychosis event that kicked off during Heated Rivalry’s inaugural season, which was a ratings hit for HBO Max. And it seems very much like Quinn has been able to parlay all that hype into its own upward momentum.

Some of Quinn’s success in this particular realm feels also rooted in the way that Hollywood dynamics have been shifting in the past few years. Audience attention is increasingly split between traditional entertainment and social / mobile content, with the latter often winning with Gen Z in popularity. You would have been hard-pressed to find leads from popular streaming series recording porn on the side a decade ago, but we’re now living in a moment where Oscar-winning A-listers are doing commercials for credit cards and travel booking sites.

As is the case with other sectors of the economy, production work is down in Hollywood and actors are looking for other reliable sources of income. That’s part of the reason so many established celebrities have begun flooding the podcast space and up-and-coming actors are booking gigs on low-budget vertical dramas. And now, Quinn is giving these artists yet another way to make some quick cash and stay connected with their audiences.

Backrooms is at the forefront of horror’s YouTube wave

2026-05-29T08:46:49-04:00

Though YouTube has always been a place where up-and-coming artists could be discovered and make it big, in recent years the platform has become a launching pad for some of Hollywood’s most exciting new horror directors. The filmmakers behind films like Talk to Me, Iron Lung, and Obsession all started off as content creators posting their independently created projects online. And if it weren’t for their fandom-fueled internet fame, studios might not have given them a chance to step up to the big leagues.

Going viral on YouTube with a series of videos inspired by 4chan memes is what put Kane Parsons on A24’s radar and led to him becoming the director of the studio’s latest movie, Backrooms. Everything about Backrooms — from its unsettling aesthetic to the way its script (written by Will Soodik) leaves you in the dark about what’s really going on — feels emblematic of this new generation of horror auteurs who grew up and found their creative voices on sites like YouTube.

During a recent conversation, Parsons told me that one of the most challenging things about bringing Backrooms to the big screen was embracing the fact that he needed to tell a story that could resonate with people who haven’t been following his work from day one. Though Parsons knew that longtime fans might show up expecting a deep dive into intricate Backrooms lore, his time on YouTube taught him that playing solely to that crowd can be a double-edged sword.

“With films like Backrooms that started off as YouTube projects, you have to really reflect on what worked in the first place in order to avoid making something that’s too contrived and dense for newcomers to enjoy,” Parsons explained. “That inaccessibility issue stems from the fact that so many of these projects are independently developed and largely controlled by individual people. You frequently see the ways in which creators can let online engagement affect them personally and affect the way they make things.”

Like Parsons’ shorts — there are 22 of them, and the first was uploaded in 2022 — Backrooms tells the disturbing story of what happens when people unknowingly stumble into an extradimensional space that looks like a sprawling maze of seemingly abandoned office building hallways. After a furniture salesman (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers a portal to the Backrooms beneath his failing store, he becomes obsessed with figuring out what the place is and why it’s filled with objects that appear to be human-made. But the more time the man spends in the place, the more his grasp on reality starts to slip.

“I wanted to make sure I was replicating what worked about that first short.”

Like a lot of other recent theatrical horrors, Backrooms could be fairly described as a vibe-forward sort of film that puts more emphasis on conjuring a discomfiting atmosphere as opposed to giving you a clear understanding of what’s happening to its characters. That mode of storytelling works especially well for short-form YouTube videos that viewers can pause, rewind, and pore over in excited anticipation of a creator’s next upload. But Parsons felt that it was important for the film to have a stronger and more concrete narrative center in order for it to work for theatergoers.

“Emotionally, I started from a place of wanting to capture what the Backrooms are while making sure that I wasn’t overwhelming the audience by showing them all of the various Backrooms biomes you see in my series,” Parsons said. “People who have watched all of my Backrooms videos are fine if I want to do a whole video where you don’t see any yellow wallpaper because they already have a larger understanding of the space. But for the film, I wanted to make sure I was returning to form and replicating what worked about that first short.”

The reasoning behind studios’ decisions to greenlight projects like Backrooms is simple enough to understand. Horror films tend to be cheap to produce, and if they wind up being hits, studios can easily recoup their production costs many times over (Backrooms reportedly cost $10 million to make and is on track to rake in $45 million in its first weekend.) When young filmmakers show up with sizable, built-in fan bases, executives see them as safer bets. A combination of those factors is what led to A24 bringing Parsons on board, and the studio is clearly hoping that Backrooms will become another testament to low-budget horror’s ability to dominate at the box office.

Before Backrooms, Danny and Michael Philippou’s first Talk to Me film (a sequel, Talk 2 Me, is currently in development) ultimately made just under $92 million against a $4.5 million micro-budget, while Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach’s independently produced Iron Lung — an adaptation of David Szymanski’s 2022 video game — netted an impressive $50 million while holding its own against more expensive features like Sam Raimi’s Send Help. These films are making a mark during a booming time for the genre, where the likes of Ti West’s X series, Longlegs, and Weapons have made it clear that audiences will flock to see low-budget horror.

“The YouTube algorithm is not your friend.”

Though Parsons knows that his YouTube fame is part of what helped him get his foot in the door, growing up in the age of content creators taught him how important it is to maintain a certain level of distance from online discourse about his work. Before Parsons was making videos of his own, he was a subscriber to channels like The Film Theorists, which gave him a deep understanding of how fans’ intensity can be a blessing and a curse for the creators they fixate on.

“My entire experience with the internet has been channels where people put so much energy into media analysis in a very decentralized, scattered way,” Parsons said. “And when you have tons of people who hang on the tiniest details in your story, it can end up creating and reinforcing an unhealthy feedback loop where a creator feels the need to disproportionately cater to their fans because that’s where the positive feedback is coming from.”

While the obsessive energy that defines so much of modern fandom often gives Parsons pause, he still feels YouTube is a place where aspiring artists can find their voices and hone their craft. Some of “the most talented artists” Parsons knows are “random people from Discord who are, like, 14-year-olds who are not working in the industry at all, but they’re fucking wizards.” Parsons believes that the entertainment industry would deeply benefit from capitalizing on more of that youthful wizardry, but he also told me that he refuses to “preach the blind optimism that I hear from a lot of other filmmakers who say, ‘You got a phone; everyone can be a filmmaker now.’” YouTube remains an important platform for being discovered, but it’s also becoming increasingly challenging to get noticed.

“About 50 percent of the internet traffic is now not even human, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re all still here and I don’t think people are fully dropping off the internet,” Parsons said. “But the YouTube algorithm is not your friend. These platforms are increasingly becoming more and more botted, atomized, and just not user-friendly, and I think it would be very dishonest to claim otherwise.”

Backrooms is in theaters now.

Sony’s sloppy Spider-Man universe gets even messier with Spider-Noir

2026-05-26T13:04:36-04:00

After years of it seeming like the Spider-Man film rights might be better off in Marvel’s hands alone, Into the Spider-Verse came along and proved that Sony was still capable of telling phenomenal stories featuring everyone’s favorite webhead. Into the Spider-Verse’s sumptuous visuals and focus on a different web-slinging New Yorker made it unlike any other Spider-Man adaptation. And it was genuinely shocking to see Sony follow the film up with a bigger, bolder, more imaginative sequel just a few years later.

Part of what made the first two Spider-Verse features so much fun to watch was the way they cleverly incorporated many of the lesser-known Spider-people Sony can legally use in its projects. Normies (read: people who don’t read comics) came to love Hailee Steinfeld’s Spider-Gwen, John Mulaney’s Spider-Ham, and Nicolas Cage’s Spider-Man Noir. And Sony took the films’ success as a sign that it could re-create a similar kind of magic with other characters who exist in Spider-Man’s orbit, like Venom and Madame Web, with varying levels of success.
Amazon’s live-action Spider-Noir series is Sony’s latest attempt at cashing in on the Spider-Man name independent of Marvel. In addition to being a comedy with very loose ties to the Spider-Verse films, the show is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the hard-boiled crime dramas that dominated Hollywood’s Golden Age. Aesthetically, Spider-Noir is a charming delight — particularly when you watch it in black and white (there’s also a colorized version). But the series is so lacking in narrative substance that it feels like Sony has lost sight of what made its most successful Spider-Man projects shine.

Rather than bringing Cage back to portray a flesh-and-blood version of his monochromatic Spider-Verse hero, Spider-Noir centers Ben Reilly — a brooding vigilante from yet another universe who the citizens of New York City know best as “The Spider.” Though fighting crime with his superpowers once gave Reilly a sense of purpose, the tragic death of his girlfriend drives him to leave the hero life behind in favor of becoming a private investigator.

After five years of working with Reilly, his secretary Janet (Karen Rodriguez) knows about his uncanny ability to sense danger and his knack for snapping photos, but he’s also been slacking when it comes to bringing in new clients and hasn’t paid her in months. Janet is almost ready to quit when Reilly lands a seemingly ordinary case that brings him face-to-face with femme fatale / nightclub singer Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li ). It doesn’t surprise Reilly to learn that the situation involves local mob boss Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson) and his gaggle of dim-witted goons. But Reilly is shocked when his investigation leads him to superpowered people like Flint Marko (Jack Huston).

Very little of Spider-Noir feels anything like Marvel’s 2009 Spider-Man: Noir comics series, and its commonalities with Cage’s Spider-Verse character are few and far between. That might work if the show had a unique story to tell or if it was fully committed to being a straight drama. But Reilly’s arc is marked by many classic Spider-Man beats — get ready to hear about great power and great responsibility again — that have already been adapted multiple times before. And Spider-Noir frequently leans into a cheesy kind of humor that keeps it from living up to its name.

Though Spider-Men from every universe tend to be wisecracking jokesters, there’s an intermittent cringiness to Cage’s outré performance here that highlights why this character (or at least a variant of him) works better as a cartoon character. From scene to scene, Cage plays Reilly as an aging quipster doing an iffy James Cagney impression, a smooth-talking Humphrey Bogart type, and a straight-up weirdo who lacks any sort of believable chemistry with romantic partners as they’re introduced. Cage’s Reilly is somewhat compelling when Spider-Noir calls for him to be a sullen, contemplative man pondering his place in the world. But those moments tend to be cut short as the show barrels through its too-predictable central story.

Cage’s Spider-Verse character worked because he brought an atonal energy to both films that complemented their focus on the multiverse. Things like Spider-Man Noir’s overwrought seriousness and inability to understand colors were funny because of the way they contrasted with the chaos and whimsy around him. But because Spider-Noir is so lacking in terms of emotional and thematic detail, Reilly comes across more like a messy pastiche of half-baked ideas as opposed to a fleshed-out character.

It’s a shame because the show is gorgeous and it’s clear that Cage is having fun with the role. But that’s not enough to make Spider-Noir a show that you need to see. Rather, the show feels like the result of Sony learning the wrong lessons from its previous wins. And it’s a reminder that we’re still a ways out from getting back to the good stuff.

Spider-Noir also stars Lamorne Morris, Abraham Popoola, Lukas Haas, Andrew Lewis Caldwell, and Jack Mikesell. All eight episodes premiere on MGM Plus on May 25th and on Amazon Prime beginning May 27th.

Boots Riley turns class struggle into comedy with I Love Boosters

2026-05-22T09:32:54-04:00

Before Boots Riley became the writer / director / musician behind Sorry to Bother You and I’m a Virgo, he was a young community organizer fighting for social justice as part of the Progressive Labor Party. Riley has channeled his anti-establishment, pro-worker politics into every piece of art that he’s made. But his belief that our society is long overdue for a revolution is most clearly articulated in his latest feature, I Love Boosters.

You can hear elements of I Love Boosters’ anti-capitalist message sprinkled throughout “I Love Boosters!” — a 2006 song Riley wrote and produced for his hip-hop group, The Coup. The movie also looks and feels like it could be set in the same worlds as Riley’s previous visual projects, but when I spoke with him recently, he explained that he isn’t trying to build a shared universe. Though “each of these stories is guided by the same rules,” Riley wanted to set I Love Boosters apart by making it a comedy that explores the nuances of class struggle.

“There have probably been 10,000 or more workplace comedies or just workplace movies where the manager is an asshole or somebody is doing something wrong,” Riley told me. “But few of them really center class struggle the way you see in Matewan, Norma Rae, and The Apartment. The script writers might not have been involved in class struggle, but it was happening in the world around them, and it takes a huge effort to edit that reality out.”

Set in a fantastical spin on the San Francisco Bay Area where skyscrapers lean at impossible angles and smooth-talking demons prowl the streets, I Love Boosters tells the story of a group of women who see shoplifting from luxury fashion retailers as a form of community service. If the monochromatic couture created by Christie Smith (Demi Moore) were more affordable, Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie), Mariah (Taylour Paige), and Jianhu (Poppy Liu) would have no reason to steal the clothes and sell them at drastically lower prices to their overworked, underpaid neighbors.

The group’s cartoonishly choreographed heists don’t even come close to putting a dent in Christie’s astronomical profits. But when she calls them out as a gang of “low-class urban bitches,” they take it very personally and set out to show her what determined boosters are really capable of.

Though comedic hijinks ensue as the Velvet Gang concocts plans to hit Christie where it hurts, I Love Boosters gets serious as it highlights the differences between spectacle-focused activism and political organization that uses collective action as a tool to dismantle exploitative systems. In the movie, the exploitative system in question is the global fashion industry. But Riley thinks that I Love Boosters speaks to the reality of what it will take for our society to be reoriented toward genuinely supporting working-class people.

“We are powerless until we can make a mass militant radical labor movement that can use the withholding of labor to shut down parts of industries, whole industries, or multiple industries in order to stop profit and demand policy changes,” Riley said. “We are living in a global system of capital right now. Power under capitalism comes from capital itself, and we need to figure out how to have collective control of that.”

Like Riley’s last film and series, there is an absurdity to I Love Boosters. Corvette lives in constant fear of being crushed by a massive Katamari ball made of overdue bills, and when the Velvet Gang has to flee the authorities, the ensuing chase is depicted with a blend of stop-motion animation and toy cars zooming through miniature physical sets. The movie’s bold aesthetics and whimsical action both feel like the kind of artistic feats that generative artificial intelligence fanatics insist the technology is capable of. But Riley is resolute in his belief that AI proponents and studio heads who say that gen AI is the future of filmmaking are simply lying.

“It was exposed that the AI-generated video of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise was basically made with video game technology that already existed 15 years ago,” Riley pointed out, referring to reports that ByteDance might have exaggerated the capabilities of its Seedance 2.0 video generator. “That company just shot footage of real fighters against a green screen. There’s a trillion dollars already invested in this technology, and a certain amount of the hype around it is just people scamming the same way we saw with NFTs.”

When I asked Riley about his thoughts on the way Hollywood has begun openly embracing gen AI, he stressed the importance of remembering how much money has already been poured into the technology based on the things it could potentially be able to do in the future. For his part, Riley has no desire to use the technology or to tell Disney-like stories set in “false socialist utopias where nobody’s worrying about housing, everybody’s got medical care, and people’s only concern about going to [college] is whether they want to move away or not.”

Instead, Riley’s much more interested in putting class struggle front and center because it “tells us that these challenges are widespread and endemic to the system, and that everything is not okay.”

I Love Boosters is in theaters now.

The Mandalorian and Grogu should have been a season of TV

2026-05-19T09:55:15-04:00

When The Mandalorian first debuted on Disney Plus, it was a refreshing reminder of how fascinating Star Wars stories can be when they aren’t focused on the same handful of well-established characters. Especially in its first season, the series felt like a sign that Disney was shifting gears after disappointing fans with its last trilogy of big budget features. But as The Mandalorian went on, it became overstuffed with supporting characters and haphazardly introduced lore that did little to make the show feel like must-see TV.

The relative weakness of The Mandalorian’s most recent season is part of what made it so surprising when Lucasfilm announced plans to bring the beskar-clad warrior and his infant ward to the big screen. It wasn’t clear whether The Mandalorian and Grogu was meant to be a straightforward extension of the series or a launchpad designed to elevate its titular characters to new levels of prominence within the franchise. And while there was little question about whether the film would make money at the box office, it seemed very possible that audiences might come away disappointed and unsure about Star Wars’ future.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is neither a knockout or a total disappointment. The movie is filled with excellent puppetry, and it cleverly inverts the show’s established Lone Wolf and Cub character dynamics. But between its by-the-numbers story and lackluster action sequences, The Mandalorian and Grogu feels like a phoned-in film that would have been better off as a new season of The Mandalorian instead of a standalone project.

Set shortly after the events of The Mandalorian’s third season, The Mandalorian and Grogu follows its titular duo as they settle into a new life of bounty hunting for the New Republic. Though the Galactic Empire has fallen, the galaxy is still crawling with Imperial outlaws who yearn for a return to power. They’re a constant threat to the fragile peace that the New Republic’s supporters have worked so hard to maintain. But as dangerous as these shadowy figures are, few of them are able to put up a fight whenever Din Djarin / The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu appear with their guns and training darts at the ready.

Because Mando and Grogu are so effective at dealing with Imperial war criminals, neither is all that concerned about their safety when New Republic commander Ward (Sigourney Weaver) asks them to look into the disappearance of Rotta the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White). Ward is convinced that finding Rotta — Jabba the Hutt’s son — will convince his crime lord cousins to give up information about one of the New Republic’s most-wanted targets. And while the Mandalorian isn’t exactly jazzed about having to deal with the Hutts, Ward’s promise of a hefty bounty is more than enough to convince him to take the assignment.

Though The Mandalorian and Grogu references a handful of plot points from the Disney Plus series, it’s clear that writer / director Jon Favreau and his cowriters Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor crafted the film to be a self-contained story that you can follow without having seen any of the show. It’s a welcome change of pace for Star Wars given how lore-dense most of the franchise’s other recent films and streaming series have been. But The Mandalorian and Grogu also leans into a kind of narrative simplicity that keeps it from really capturing one’s imagination.

The way that characters frequently reiterate key details of The Mandalorian and Grogu’s story, like the fact that Rotta is Jabba’s son, makes it feel like Favreau and company don’t fully trust the audience to keep up with everything that’s happening on screen. Some of that can be attributed to the fact that this is a movie that’s pointedly aimed at young theatergoers who just want to see the baby Yoda bopping around while his taciturn dad wrecks ne’er-do-wells. But it also feels like a reflection of the way that streamers have seemingly become fixated on putting out projects designed for people who are only half paying attention.

That aspect of the movie wouldn’t be so annoying if things weren’t so straightforward, or if the Mandalorian was thrust into a few more imaginative battles. But as the film progresses, its stakes and sense of urgency never really build in a way that keeps you fully invested. Especially in its first half, The Mandalorian and Grogu plays like a serviceable but uncompelling collection of The Mandalorian episodes that would actually benefit from a little more action and punchy dialogue from returning faces like Zeb Orrelios (Steve Blum) and Carson Teva (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee). And it isn’t until Mando and his infant charge are split up around the halfway mark that the film locks in on a properly engaging dramatic energy.

While Mando’s narrative arc here is nothing to write home about, the movie does a surprisingly good job of making Grogu feel like a tiny person with autonomy and complicated feelings. This movie is a testament to how delightful Star Wars’ animatronic / puppet characters can be when they’re presented as the story’s centerpiece. But as delightful as the baby is, its cuteness is nowhere near enough to keep The Mandalorian and Grogu from feeling undercooked.

With a little more depth and intrigue, The Mandalorian and Grogu probably could have made for a solid season of television. But after years of struggling to get Star Wars films in theaters, Disney seems to be using this as an experiment in figuring out what kinds of movies viewers actually want to see. Instead, The Mandalorian and Grogu is a reminder of how much stronger these side stories can be when given a little more room to breathe.

The Mandalorian and Grogu also stars Martin Scorsese and Matthew Willig. The movie hits theaters on May 22nd.

The funniest thing about the Trump arcade game is how good it is

2026-05-15T10:16:20-04:00

This week, a trio of video game cabinets emblazoned with pixel art of Donald Trump and a number of other government officials’ faces suddenly appeared at the DC War Memorial. Looking at the cabinets from a distance, it’s easy to get the sense that Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell (which you can also play on the web) is just another monumental joke erected by DC-based art collective, The Secret Handshake. But when I got up close and actually spent some time playing the new game, it became obvious that Operation Epic Furious is a scathing commentary that also happens to be a loving tribute to classic RPGs.

In Operation Epic Furious, you control president Trump as he wages war with Iran and attempts to reestablish the US’s access to the Strait of Hormuz. The game opens in the White House where you have to guide Trump through a collection of rooms filled with some of his most notable allies like secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, FBI director Kash Patel, and health and human services secretary RFK Jr. In its opening moments, Operation Epic Furious feels a lot like Nintendo’s early Zelda games where you were meant to explore the map looking for treasure and directions about what to do next. But instead of rupees of small keys to unlock doors, Operation Epic Furious tasks you with finding Kid Rock’s helicopter so that you can fly off and “ROCK Iran back to the stone ages.”

Artistically, there’s an earnestness to Operation Epic Furious that speaks to the fact that The Secret Handshake built this to feel like a genuine game rather than just a glorified joke about the Trump administration. The game has a surprisingly excellent soundtrack that seamlessly shifted from one piece to another as I wandered its pixelated Iran, stumbling upon enemies like schoolchildren and “weak on crime” Pope Leo XIV. It’s filled with NPCs whose dialog speaks to the administration’s real-world chaos. Even the battle system is robust enough to feel inspired by the Final Fantasy and Pokémon franchises.

After taking a few experimental hits, it became clear that no matter how I played, none of the enemies could knock Trump’s political power (visualized as a health bar) down low enough to take him down. For all of its gags, the game never lets you forget that each of its jokes are a snapshot of how much more unhinged the US government has become in recent years.

Epic Furious is absolutely poking fun at Trump and its allies, but its absurd humor is not trying to make light of the real world harms that this administration has caused. It’s funny when Trump learns new skills like Full Pardon after defeating enemies, but the game quickly follows those moments up with drone strikes that obliterate sections of the overworld map.

A fondness for the game’s dark sense of humor is what inspired Katherine, a nonprofit worker originally from Massachusetts, to grab a friend and come down to the Mall to check out Operation Epic Furious in person. Like many people, Katherine first heard about the game when photos of National Guard troops playing it began circulating on social media. She told me that she liked the game’s approach to making fun of the Trump administration, but what she really loved was that the game is a testament to protections afforded to US citizens by the First Amendment.

“This is a free country where we have freedom of expression and the ability to say what we want,” she explained. “That’s one of the reasons why we left England and became a country — to have the freedom to speak critically about religion and politics without having to worry that something would happen to us.”

“Suffering abroad never exists in a vacuum. It will always come back to you and show up in your society.”

The Secret Handshake’s last project, a statue depicting Trump and Jeffrey Epstein holding hands while frolicking, was briefly on display near the Capitol Building last fall. Alex, an IT specialist from Baltimore, remembered that project well, and it made him want to experience Operation Epic Furious for himself. When I asked Alex how he felt about the macabre energy baked into the game, he said he appreciated how it highlights the suffering that the US inflicts upon other countries while trying to keep its own citizens in the dark.

“The [violence in this game] is no different than the things the US has done all through history,” Alex said. “The more stories and facts about American history that you learn, it’s clear that everything we have here has always been built on the backs of other people’s suffering. But suffering abroad never exists in a vacuum. It will always come back to you and show up in your society if that’s what you’re built on.”

As the sun went down, I expected the number of people coming up to the War Memorial for Operation Epic Furious to dwindle, but that was far from the case. Would-be gamers kept showing up because they wanted to play before the cabinets were taken down, but it also felt like everyone was there because they wanted to experience something with other people.

For me, that something was getting lost in a ridiculous game that explicitly spells out how the sitting president has dragged our country into a new age of ghoulishness and derangement. Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell — which has since been removed from the Memorial and relocated to Busboys and Poets on 14th Street — might not inspire people to take to the streets and demand revolution. But it can absolutely help us chuckle through the horrors.

Fighting Trump will make or break Disney’s new CEO

2026-05-13T15:15:24-04:00

A week ago, newly appointed Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro was busy regaling investors with plans to turn Disney Plus into the company’s “digital centerpiece.” By last Friday, though, his attention had presumably shifted to a fight with the Trump administration over free speech.

Disney-owned ABC has now accused the administration of violating its First Amendment rights with an ongoing investigation into The View. D’Amaro — the former head of Disney’s parks division — might have wanted his legacy to be defined by corporate synergy and a souped-up version of Disney Plus. But this fight with Donald Trump and the Federal Communications Commission is likely to be the first thing that defines his tenure.

In its recent filing to the FCC, ABC claimed that the agency is threatening free speech with its ongoing investigation into whether The View violated the “equal time” rule, which requires radio and TV broadcasters to provide competing political candidates with equal access and time. Ahead of this year’s midterm elections, The View ran segments featuring James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett — two Texas Democratic candidates running for Senate seats — and the FCC seems to be taking issue with the fact that the show did not invite any Republican politicians to speak on camera.

ABC’s filing notes that The View was given an exemption from the equal time rule “more than twenty years ago” because it is a “bona fide news interview program.” The company also insisted that, by attacking The View, the FCC is taking action that will “chill core First Amendment-protected speech for years and potentially decades to come.”

“The danger is that the government will simply decide which perspectives to regulate and which to leave undisturbed,” ABC said. “In fact, while the Commission now questions The View’s decades-long exemption, it has not expressed any inclination to apply a similar interpretation of the equal opportunities rule to other broadcasters, including the many voices— conservative and liberal—on broadcast radio.”

This flavor of bullying from the FCC and Trump-appointed Chairman Brendan Carr began long before D’Amaro replaced Bob Iger. Relying on the FCC’s news distortion rule, Carr threatened to strip the broadcast licenses of any station airing Jimmy Kimmel Live! in response to the late-night show featuring a joke about Republican reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death. Those threats prompted ABC to pull the show for about a week before new episodes began airing again.

It was clear that Disney / ABC were trying to keep the Trump administration happy, but that has not stopped the president from calling for Kimmel’s firing again and creating new headaches for Disney. The FCC recently ordered Disney-owned ABC stations in eight different markets to renew their broadcast licenses by May 28th even though they weren’t originally scheduled to do so until 2028. And while the FCC is specifically targeting The View now, back in January, the organization signaled that it plans to more broadly revoke the equal time exemptions granted to other daytime and late-night talk shows.

No amount of prostration from Disney will keep Trump from going after the company

In contrast to Disney, capitulation to the Trump administration has served Paramount very well over the past year as it negotiated an $8 billion acquisition deal with David Ellison’s Skydance. It seemed very clear that Paramount was trying to curry favor with the Trump administration when the company announced last summer that it was canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Paramount said that the move was a cost-saving measure. That would have been much easier to believe if the president didn’t have a history of beefing with Colbert through the FCC and if Paramount and Skydance didn’t need the FCC’s regulatory approval to finalize their megamerger.

History has shown us that no amount of prostration from Disney will keep Trump from going after the company because he sees it as a political enemy. That might not have been readily apparent to D’Amaro’s predecessors, like Iger — who signed off on paying Trump $15 million to settle a defamation suit in 2024 — and Bob Chapek, who refused to condemn Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill even as Disney employees staged walkouts over concerns about how that legislation could harm them personally. But this reality is something that D’Amaro can’t ignore now because Trump and his allies are making it crystal clear through their actions.

In a recent letter addressed directly to D’Amaro, the FCC’s sole Democratic commissioner, Anna M. Gomez, said that by settling with Trump in 2024, Disney “told this Administration that pressure works.” Gomez laid out how all of this highlights the Trump administration’s pattern of hostile behavior, and she was frank about how the “the First Amendment does not belong to this Administration to grant or withhold.”

“It belongs to the public, to the press, and to every broadcaster willing to defend it,” Gomez wrote. “Your journalists do work that matters to millions of Americans across the country, and the viewers who rose up to defend Jimmy Kimmel are the same viewers who will stand up again if this FCC follows through with its threat.”

Gomez could not be more correct here. The Trump administration is trying to browbeat ABC and Disney into a humiliating submission under the pretense of fostering a healthy and fair media landscape. It’s obvious that the president is really only acting in his own self-interest, but that obviousness is all the more reason that Disney should feel empowered to call bullshit.

ABC’s assertion that the FCC is actively chilling free speech is reflective of a marked change for Disney, a company that spent years playing defense as conservatives attacked it for doing “woke” things like telling stories about marginalized groups of people. D’Amaro has seen that self-censorship and throwing money at the Trump administration will not stop the president from trying to harm Disney. And rather than following in his predecessors’ footsteps, it seems like D’Amaro understands that the only way forward now is to fight back against Trump with the understanding that these matters might end up being taken to the courts.

This situation could turn into an ugly, expensive, and exhausting legal battle that no CEO would want to deal with — especially during their first year on the job.. But if D’Amaro wants to be seen as a CEO who truly believes in his company and employees, he needs to put his boxing gloves on and get ready to fight no matter how long it takes.

The future of Disney Plus is a confused mess

2026-05-07T20:18:52-04:00

Newly minted CEO Josh D’Amaro says that he wants to turn Disney Plus into “the immersive, interactive digital centerpiece of the company.” It used to be that people went to the movies or theme parks to immerse themselves in Disney’s fictional worlds. But now, D’Amaro says that he sees Disney Plus becoming “the primary relationship between Disney and its fans.”

The general idea that D’Amaro put forth during his call with investors this week is that Disney Plus and Disney’s parks are both places that people visit to spend money while engaging with the company’s characters and worlds. D’Amaro framed the streaming service and the parks as complementary parts of Disney’s larger brand that, together, could create “a more connected fan experience” where Disney uses “technology as an accelerant.”

A lot of this makes sense on paper. Seeing a movie or show on Disney Plus could inspire a fan to plan a trip to Disney World, and a trip to Disney World might push a visitor to sign up for the streaming service if they don’t already have one. It also tracks that Disney would put more energy toward building Disney Plus’ profile given how much cheaper a subscription is compared to the costs attached with making a trip to one of Disney’s theme parks.

D’Amaro — who has been banging this kind of synergy drum ever since he became CEO — told investors that reducing Disney Plus’ churn by making the platform central to Disney’s brand “might be the single most significant opportunity that we have.” But what’s hard to understand is how putting Disney Plus “right at the middle” of Disney’s sports, games, and experiences (read: parks) might actually work in practice or if it’s something viewers would actually want.

Disney first began making overtures about supercharging Disney Plus a few years back when Bob Chapek was still in charge. In 2022, Chapek outlined a vision for Disney Plus in which the platform would eventually merge “the physical and the digital aspects of your Disney lifestyle.” Back then, the company was talking about building a system in which the details of a person’s visit to a Disney Park could influence the kinds of content that would be featured on their Disney Plus accounts. Under Chapek, there were also reports that Disney was considering an Amazon Prime–inspired subscription tier that would have given users access to discounts on physical merchandise and theme parks tickets. But by 2025, then-reinstated CEO Bob Iger appeared to be much more focused on fashioning the streamer into a metaverse filled with games and AI slop. None of these previous experiments to reinvent Disney Plus ever actually materialized.

We might soon see a Disney Plus that feels more like an overbusy, maze-like mall.

Now, the plan seems to be a unification of Disney’s various applications — like My Disney Experience and Disney Cruise Line Navigator — that would turn Disney Plus into a one-stop shop for all things Disney. But a souped-up Disney Plus that also functions as a hub for information about upcoming theme park trips and cruises does not exactly sound like something that would be very enjoyable to use.

What this does sound a lot like is Disney taking cues from other tech companies like Meta that have a history of juicing engagement on their various platforms by adding features that no one asked for. The idea of Disney Plus going this route calls to mind the way that Instagram became an overbloated, unintuitive platform as executives built Stories / Reels / Shopping features into it in order to keep people from jumping ship to other social media apps. Most of us can agree that this approach to boosting engagement led to a markedly worse user experience, but at the same time, it did keep users logging on.

Like all major streamers, one of Disney Plus’ biggest goals is to keep its subscribers from leaving the platform. One of the ways Disney can realistically do that is to keep releasing new projects that people want to watch, but D’Amaro’s recent comments make it sound like we might soon see a Disney Plus that feels more like an overbusy, maze-like mall that’s designed to get people to spend money on things they weren’t even thinking about in the first place.

That would be deeply at odds with the thing that draws people to streaming platforms: a desire to watch something with the understanding that they have already paid the price of entry up front. That sort of experience is fundamentally different from what motivates people to go on expensive vacations where they’ll encounter Disney characters while having no choice but to buy overpriced food. But that might not stop Disney from trying to make this work — especially because some of its other recent gambles haven’t paid off.

Christian content creators are outsourcing AI slop to gig workers on Fiverr

2026-05-01T15:23:22-04:00

In the beginning, platforms like Fiverr were places where people could hire freelancers to do specialized creative labor using skills that took years to develop. In the age of generative AI, though, many of these gig workers have embraced the technology in order to meet clients’ demands. These workers’ profiles emphasize that they can quickly (and cheaply) whip up images and videos of just about anything. But often, what their clients are looking for are dramatic animations inspired by the Christian Bible.

On TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook it is very easy to stumble across AI-generated clips that retell stories from the Bible. Like most AI slop, these videos tend to have an inconsistent aesthetic to them, and they’re narrated by mechanical-sounding voices. Rather than focusing on getting details from the Bible right, these videos cartoonishly emphasize emotions like fear and anger that are central to their simplified narratives.

Some of the videos — whose visuals appear to be borrowed from Pixar projects — are clearly aimed at children, while others — which are more photorealistic — feel like they’re meant for older viewers. You can tell from the view counts that people are actually watching these things. But the creators rarely mention the fact that they outsource the videos’ production labor instead of making the content themselves.

It’s the opposite on Fiverr, where gig-seekers are open about their history of working on projects for other people’s social accounts. The platform — which committed to becoming an “AI-first” company last fall when it laid off 250 employees — allows people to upload clips of their previous work, and clients can provide comments about their satisfaction. And each of the Fiverr workers that I spoke with for this story said that, as much as some people might abhor AI video slop, the gigs keep rolling in. When you scroll through Fiverr, there are people all over the world looking for these jobs, but some of the highest-rated freelancers are based in Africa and South Asia. To a certain extent, that pattern mirrors the way that AI firms have historically outsourced their model training and data labeling labor abroad to keep costs down. But the freelancers I talked to all said that they see this kind of work as far less extractive on a personal level.

Dave, a Nigerian freelancer with a background in web development and UI / UX design, told me that he first got into video production a few years back as AI tools became more widely available to the public. Dave said that he’s always had a deep love for visually driven narratives, and tools like ChatGPT, Grok, and Leonardo AI gave him an easy way to become a professional storyteller. Fiverr, Dave said, gave him a way to turn his newly acquired skills into cash.

“I saw an opportunity in [using AI tools] because learning traditional animation would have taken too long and the resources were not really there for me,” Dave explained. “With Al, the learning curve was not as steep, so I was able to play around and figure things out as I went, and eventually I came to Fiverr to start selling the skill.”

Though Dave gets hired for other kinds of AI video projects, he said that he takes on Bible-focused gigs because “the demand is quite high” and there are a lot of people who “are trying to build YouTube channels in this niche.” The niche is relatively new with solid traffic, and Dave feels like some of his clients hire him because they “do not want to be left behind” as AI takes off. I heard similar things from Sherry, a Pakistani video editor who has generated religious videos for YouTubers and TikTok accounts in a variety of different styles.

To my eye, Sherry’s AI videos did not seem all that distinct from what other Fiverr freelancers are offering because all of this content usually has That Look™ that’s become synonymous with slop. But when I asked Sherry why clients keep hiring them rather than just prompting up videos themselves, they insisted that doing this work requires a certain kind of expertise.

“I’ve developed strong prompt writing skills, along with an understanding of storytelling, timing, and visual composition, which helps me produce more polished and engaging videos,” Sherry told me. “I also handle the full process from concept to final edit, saving clients time and ensuring the content is professional, unique, and aligned with their goals. That combination of creativity, technical skill, and reliability is what sets my work apart.”

Workers like Sherry and Dave have given content brands like AI Bible a way of sourcing relatively cheap and fast labor that can be easily monetized online. Across different social media platforms, these pages have cultivated massive followings of people who engage with their content in earnest. You might think that more viewers would see this kind of treatment of the Bible as being somewhat sacrilegious. It definitely feels odd seeing biblical figures depicted as Instagram influencers recording videos of themselves with iPhones. But the comments sections are filled with people insisting that “Jesus would laugh at [these videos] too,” and praising the channels for spreading Christ’s message.

The overall visual similarity of these kinds of videos has a lot to do with the specific tools that people are using to make them. Ruaf, another Pakistani freelancer I spoke with via Zoom, walked me through his entire production workflow, which began with asking ChatGPT for ideas that could be turned into dialogue between characters from the Bible. He then used ChatGPT to turn that dialogue into a script broken into scenes. That script was sent over to ElevenLabs in order to generate an audio narration track and accompanying captions. And after asking ChatGPT to include things like camera directions and shot descriptions in the script, Ruaf fed each scene into Grok in order to generate visuals that could be edited together with the AI narration in CapCut.

Ruaf told me that there are many other freelancers using similar workflows for projects of their own. People in the AI community often share tips about how to deal with roadblocks like different platforms’ limits on how many generations users can make in a day. But when you look at the videos, you get the sense that their general uniformity is a byproduct of people taking the same general approach to making them.

The videos’ slop-y visuals don’t really seem to be an issue for the people commissioning them or the viewers — some of whom could very well be bots. And while this style of content comes across as at least a little bit blasphemous, the people cranking these things out aren’t concerned about that because there’s money to be made.