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Did Streaming Subscription Prices Just Hit the Wall?

There are (finally) signs that the streaming prices have hit the wall. The public simply can’t afford paying hundreds of dollars per year for each platform. So I’m not surprised that a new survey shows that 55% of consumers want to cancel subscriptions right now.

This isn’t just an idle threat. According to Deloitte, 40% of consumers have already cut back on subscriptions during the previous three months. Even more revealing: 61% say they would cancel their favorite service if the price went up by just five dollars.

Let me repeat that—they would cancel their favorite service, not just any platform.

People now complain of subscription fatigue—and for good reason. If things don’t change, it will soon reach the point of subscription exhaustion. Tech companies have created this mess, and now must live with the consequences.

They did it with three exploitative strategies.

(1) Everything got turned into a subscription. [...]

(2) You’re now punished with intrusive and endless advertising if you don’t subscribe. [...]

(3) Instead of competing on quality and service, companies focus on “audience capture”—and then exploit the captives.

That’s you, by the way—you are the captive. At least that’s how you’re treated by the big tech platforms.

Years ago, these same companies started by offering stuff for free, or at a small price. They only forced through huge price increases after they had captured a huge user base. You see that strategy at Netflix, Spotify, Instagram, etc.

These companies make little effort now to improve their offerings or user interface. In many instances, quality has declined, even as they raise prices. But consumers aren’t stupid—they can see that they’re getting a shaft that won’t cop out...

But even I can’t believe how greedily they have now implemented that strategy. Spotify has raised its price three times in less than three years. It’s now asking $12.99 per month. And if you want a family subscription—which is essential in a household like mine—the price jumps to $21.99 per month.

Those are US prices, but Spotify is doing the same thing everywhere. Last summer, the company forced through price increases in 150 countries.

YouTube is even more avaricious. The company is now raising its premium subscription to $15.99 per month. And the family rate is a whopping $26.99—that adds up to $329 per year.

Video streaming companies are playing the same game. Not long ago, Netflix charged me $9.99 per month. I recently got a notice that my new price has been “updated” to $19.99. Yes that’s more than a doubling over the course of just a few years.

But Netflix may have gone too far. The company’s stock dropped 12% last week after its latest quarterly results. Investors expected the company to raise its guidance for future earnings—because of this subscription price boost. But the company refused to do so, and took a more cautious stance.

According to Morningstar analyst Matt Dolgin:

“The market likely hoped for increased full-year guidance, given that the March price hikes came as a surprise…Growth acceleration in 2027 now seems less likely.”

The more you dig into the latest earnings report, the more ominous things look. Netflix only met expectations because of the breakup fee after it walked away from the Warner’s acquisition. Without that one-time benefit, earnings per share would have dropped year-on-year.

If you try to find some good news here for the company, it comes from Netflix’s shift to advertising. This may be its growth engine in the future—because price increases are now stirring up consumer resistance.

I’d like to be able to provide specific numbers here, but Netflix now refuses to tell us the number of total subscribers. That’s revealing in itself. Not long ago, the company bragged endlessly about subscriber growth. Their silence now tells you everything you really need to know.

Three Ways to Defeat Subscription Fatigue

You aren’t helpless here. You do have options for battling subscription fatigue. Here are three of them.

For a start, customers have learned that canceling a subscription might make sense even if they are just bluffing. It’s amazing how different the rate looks if you’re willing to walk away. I recently canceled a subscription, and was offered an 80% price cut if I would reconsider.

I’m now thinking I should cancel every streaming subscription once per year—just to see what special offer I’m missing. Even if I sign up again at the old rate, I haven’t lost anything by trying this tactic.

Another way of combating costs is a rotation strategy. Under this scenario, consumers only pay for one video streaming subscription at a time. When they want to watch something on another platform, they simply cancel the current subscription and move to the new provider. This lets them watch anything they want for just one monthly payment.

Sure, it’s a hassle. But when annual subscriptions can cost $300 per year or more, consumers are increasingly willing to go to the trouble of ‘rotating’ from service to service.

Of course, you always have the final option of just walking away. Judging by the mood of the consumer, that will start happening more and more.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: uncredited/Netflix

[ed. One more option: Earlier this year I got tired of Amazon Prime's video service - more ads and almost every movie I wanted to see was either a rental or purchase. So I quit Prime altogether (or suspended my account, as Amazon put it). Then one day I saw they had exclusive rights to some movie or other that I wanted to see; they'd increased their speed of delivery in my zip code; and I really did miss free shipping and returns. So I unsuspended my account and started paying a monthly membership fee again. But... just by turning off my service for a few months I got back to my initial lower subscription rate simply by cost averaging over the year (albeit with a few less months of service). So you don't have to quit completely, just for a few months. (Might also note this blog has always been ad and subscription free!)]

The Linguistic Foundations of Project Hail Mary

The film adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary hits general release today, March 20, and it’s great—go see it! Though a little light on the science, the movie goes hard on the relationship between schoolteacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and an extraterrestrial named Rocky, and it’s a ride well worth taking.

But as good as it is, the movie shares a small flaw with the book: Despite having very few things in common, Grace and Rocky learn to communicate with each other extremely quickly. In fact, Grace and Rocky begin conversing in abstracts (concepts like “I like this” and “friendship”) in even less time than it takes in the book. Obviously, there are practical narrative reasons for this choice—you can’t have a good buddy movie if your buddies can’t talk to each other. It’s therefore critical to the flow of the story to get that talking happening as soon as possible, but it can still be a little jarring for the technically minded viewer who was hoping for the acquisition of language to be treated with a little more complexity.

And because this is Ars Technica, we’re doing the same thing we did when the book came out: talking with Dr. Betty Birner, a former professor of linguistics at NIU (now retired), to pick her brain about cognition, pragmatics, cooperation, and what it would actually take for two divergently evolved sapient beings not just to gesture and pantomime but to truly communicate. And this time, we’ll hear from Andy Weir, too. So buckle up, dear readers—things are gonna get nerdy.

A word about spoilers

This article assumes you’ve read Weir’s novel and that you’ve seen the movie. However, for folks who haven’t yet seen the film, I don’t think there’s much to be spoiled in terms of the language acquisition portions that we’re going to discuss—the film covers rather the same ground as the book but in a much more abbreviated way.

Still, if you want to avoid literally all spoilers, skip this article for now—at least until you’ve been to the theater!

The yawning chasm of “meaning”

Dr. Birner’s specific field of study is the science of pragmatics. “Pragmatics has to do with what I intend by what I say and what I mean in a particular context,” she explained to Ars on a Zoom call earlier this week. She elaborated by bringing up her (nonexistent) cat—the phrase “my cat” can have a multitude of meanings attached, all of which are inferred by context.

If you know Dr. Birner has a cat, her saying “my cat” could refer to that cat; if you know that she doesn’t have a cat but used to, “my cat” could refer to that cat instead, even though the semantics of the phrase “my cat” haven’t changed. That’s pragmatics, baby!

Pragmatics are particularly relevant to the Grace/Rocky language-acquisition problem because the discipline involves the creation of inferences by the listener about the speaker’s mental state and about what specific meanings the speaker implies.

But “meaning” is a fraught word here, too, because ultimately we cannot know for certain the exact meaning being implied by another person because we cannot ever truly peek inside someone else’s mind. “We are always making guesses about what our shared context is and what our shared cultural beliefs are, and, indeed, what our shared knowledge as members of the species are,” Dr. Birner continued. “And I think of this because of thumbs-up/thumbs-down.”

“The cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson put out a book, boy, back in the ’80s,” she said. “They talked about all of language as metaphorically built up from embodiment, our embodied experience, and our senses. So we sense up and down, and then we have this whole metaphorical notion of happy is up, so we have a thumbs up, ‘I’m feeling up today. I’m just feeling high. My spirits are lifting.’”

“Or, I can be down in the dumps,” she said. “I can be feeling low, my mood is dropping, thumbs down,’ and there’s this whole metaphorical conception. And I loved the way Project Hail Mary played with that in that Rocky didn’t share that. Rocky did not have a metaphor of ‘happy is up,’ the way Lakoff and Johnson would say we all just do.”

I asked Dr. Birner if our “up is good, down is bad” association has a biological basis in our cognition or if it’s something that has simply been shaped into a broadly shared metaphor over thousands of years of language use, and she took a moment to answer.

“That’s a really good question, and I don’t remember whether they deal with that,” she said. “But I could imagine it being biological because we start as little helpless things that can’t even stand up. And soon we stand up, we get taller, we get smarter, we get better and better the taller we get. I can actually very well imagine a biological basis for it.”

The first leap—not math, but truth

Let’s focus in on some of the specific linguistic mountains Grace and Rocky would have had to climb. The one that struck me as perhaps the most basic would be starting from pantomime and figuring out the most important thing: the twin concepts of yes and no, and the companion dualities of true/false and equal/not-equal. To me, this feels like the most mandatory of basics.

And here, perhaps, we can fall back on some good ol’ Sagan—or at least the movie version of Sagan. Dr. Birner and I (along with my colleague Jennifer Ouellette, who also hung around on the Zoom call) went back and forth for some time, but in the end, no one could really figure out a more straightforward way to demonstrate these concepts than the “primer” scene in 1997’s Contact, where the unknown alien signal is shown to contain a small grouping of symbols that appeared to represent addition, along with “equals” and “not equals” sign equivalents.

“That’s a good way to go about it, with equivalent and not-equivalent,” said Dr. Birner. “So at least you get negation, and now you can work on perceptual oppositions—up and down, black and white, loud and soft. I think that would probably be the jumping-off place for yes and no.”

Though there are linguistic biases in English and other human languages that might peek through even here—the inherent tie between “positive” (as in agreement) and “positive” (as in “this thing is good and I like it”). Careful aliens would likely want to spend a fair amount of time interrogating this bias—if it’s even visible at this point. And it likely wouldn’t be, as we haven’t built any of those syntactic bridges yet.

Pidgin? Not so fast

Getting those bridges built—going past “yes” and “no” and into some of the other basics that must be established to communicate—is not straightforward. Grace and Rocky benefit from being in a tightly constrained environment with a set of mutual problems to solve; two humans in a similar situation would likely develop a “pidgin”—an ad-hoc working language cobbled together out of components of both speakers’ languages.

But as Dr. Birner points out, true pidgin here is impossible because neither Grace nor Rocky is capable of actually producing the sounds required to speak the other’s language in the first place. “They don’t actually develop a pidgin,” she said. “They each have to learn the other’s language receptively, not productively.”

“Which is great,” she went on, “because when kids acquire language, it’s sort of a truism that reception precedes production. Every kid is going to understand more than they’re producing. Necessarily! You can’t produce what you don’t understand yet. So it makes the problem a little easier for Grace and Rocky—they don’t have to produce each other’s language, just understand it.”

Who is even there?

Grace and Rocky are lucky in that both humans and Eridians are ultimately extremely similar in their cognition and linguistics, even if their vocalizations aren’t alike. This means a lot of the mandatory requirements for conversation as we understand them are already present.

“If I encounter Rocky, I need to know, does he have a mind?” she posited. “Does he have what we call a theory of mind? Does he have a mind like mine? And does he understand that I have a mind like his, but separate? Does he understand that I can believe different things from what he believes? Can I have false beliefs? That’s all a prerequisite for communicating at all. If your mind and my mind had all the exact same stuff in it, there’d be no need to communicate.

“H.P. Grice said that communication doesn’t happen without the assumption that both parties are being cooperative,” she said. The word “cooperative” here doesn’t necessarily mean that both parties are copacetic—Dr. Birner pointed out that even when people are fighting, they tend to still be cooperatively communicating. There are rules to the interaction that must be followed if one party intends to impart meaning to the other.

Beyond adherence to the cooperative principle, another bedrock of communication is the notion of symbols, the understanding that a word can represent not just an abstract concept but can actually stand in for a thing. “I can use the word mug,” explained Dr. Birner, holding up a mug, “and mean this. And you understand what I mean, and I don’t have to show you the mug every single time.”

Also on the “mandatory” list is an understanding of the concept of displacement, which Dr. Birner attributes to the researcher Charles F. Hockett. “Displacement has long been said to be solely human, though not everyone agrees with that. It’s the ability to refer to something that is distant in time or space. I can tell you that I had a bagel this morning, even though I’m not having it right now and it’s not present right here. I had it elsewhere and I had it earlier,” she said.

She continued: “There’s this wonderful article, 1979 by Michael Reddy, called ‘The Conduit Metaphor,’ where he says that we think in metaphors. And the metaphor he’s talking about is that language is a conduit, and we really just pass ideas from my brain to yours. And he says it’s a false metaphor. It’s clearly not true that that’s what happens, but we talk about it as though it does. ‘I didn’t catch your meaning,’ or ‘Give that to me again.’ We talk as though this is a thing we literally convey, and of course we don’t convey meanings. Reddy argues that the vast majority of human communication is actually miscommunication, but so trivially that we never notice.”

By way of example, she referenced her nonexistent cat again. “If I mentioned my cat, Sammy, well, you’ll have some mental image of a cat,” she said. “It almost certainly isn’t remotely like Sammy, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to explain everything about Sammy. If I did, the conversation would grind to a halt and you’d never interview me again. Also, I’d be violating the cooperative principle because I would be saying too much for the current context.”

Math, the universal language?

It is a common trope in science fiction—and one brought up more than once in the comments on our last article on this subject—that “math is the only universal language.” It’s a fun, pithy saying that perhaps makes mathematicians feel good about their dusty chalkboards, but at least from my knothole, it’s a false generalization because the language in which one does one’s mathematics must be settled before any mathing can happen.

“I’m not sure that even is true on Earth,” said Dr. Birner about the notion of math as universal grammar. “The concept of zero hasn’t always been around, and how much math can you do without zero? There are languages that count, “One, two, three, many,” and that’s it. And those are human languages. So to say, ‘Math is a universal language,’ I’m already not totally on board there.”

“I think math would help, but I don’t think it would get them terribly far because they need the notion of objects. They need the notion of the semiotic function, that things stand for other things.” She paused pensively, then went on. “And once they’ve got that, that there are discrete objects and we both think of the same things as discrete objects, then we can talk about counting those objects and now we’re off and running.”

Whole-object notion is another oft-overlooked component here—often referred to as the “gavagai problem.”

“You’re pointing to a rabbit, and you say, ‘gavagai!’” said Dr. Birner. “Well, does that mean ‘rabbit?’ Does that mean ‘fur?’ Does that mean ‘ears?’ Does that mean, ‘hey look?’”

“Quine’s notion is that we default to a whole object. Well, does what counts as a whole object for me count as a whole object for you? Does every conceivable culture have discrete borders on objects?”

The author speaks on human-Eridian similarities

Fortunately for Grace and Rocky, humans and Eridians do have all these things in common because in the universe of Project Hail Mary, the species share a common ancestor. [...]

Weir notes that he worked through a number of the same linguistic issues that Dr. Birner and I raised as part of the story-generation process.

“Let’s say you have intelligent life on the planet,” he said. “What do you need? What does that species need to have to reach the point where they’re able to make spacecraft and fly around in space? Well, first off, you have to be a tribal thing. You can’t be loners. You can’t be like bears and tigers that don’t communicate with each other. You have to have the sense of a community or a tribe or a group or a gathering so that you can collaborate because you can specialize and do all these things. You need that.”

“Number two, you need language. One way or another, stuff from my brain has to get into your brain,” he said, echoing Dr. Birner’s note about Reddy’s conduit metaphor paper.

“Number three is you need empathy and compassion. A collection of beings altogether doesn’t work unless they actually are willing to take care of each other. And that’s not just found in humans—it’s found in primates. It’s found in wolf packs. It’s found in ants. It’s like any collectivized species has to have that trait.”

“You need to have compassion, empathy, which means putting yourself in somebody else’s situation. Compassion, empathy, language, a decent amount of intelligence, a tribal instinct, a group instinct, a society kind of building instinct,” he said. “You must, I believe, have all of those things in order to be able to make a spaceship. Any species that’s lacking any one of those won’t be able to do it. So any alien you meet in space is going to have all of those traits. The Friendly Great Filter is that any aliens you meet, I believe, have to have this concept of society, cooperation, empathy, compassion, collaboration, and so on.”

I’m here for Weir’s explanation—it works within the context of the science fiction universe we’re being presented, and Rocky and Grace need to be able to talk to each other or we don’t have a book (or a film!). But does it ring true under scrutiny? After all, even here on Earth, there is a wealth of problem-solving, tool-using creatures much more closely related than humans and Eridians with vastly different cognitive toolkits. Cephalopods (with distributed nervous systems and pseudo-autonomous arms), corvids, and cetaceans all have their own evolutionary approaches to communication. [...]

Here, Ars’ Jennifer Ouellette made an important point. “Rocky is basically a rock,” she said. “He’s not a human form, and that’s going to affect how a language, if there is one, evolves in that species—and it’s really going to impact how they communicate.”

“Yes, embodiment is a big deal in communications,” replied Dr. Birner, returning to the subject she’d brought up earlier, that the nature of our flesh-prisons inherently shapes not just how we experience the world but how we communicate. Our physical forms are the product of evolutionary pressures—they are the results of the inevitable, inscrutable dialogue between environment and organism. And the evolutionary pressures faced by Homo sapiens on Earth are vastly different from the evolutionary pressures faced by Eridians on Erid, and that same dialog on Erid led to vastly different outcomes. [...]

Friendly aliens

The most dangerous thing about communicating with aliens this way isn’t mistaking a word or two—it’s the more fundamental problem of what happens to third- and fourth-order assumptions when the foundations those assumptions are built on aren’t quite right. Sure, Grace and Rocky can agree that they are “friends,” but how do you explain “friend”?

“To be someone’s friend can mean a million things,” said Dr. Birner. “I have my best friend since high school. I consider you a friend,” she said, pointing at me through the screen, “and we’ve talked three times. My daughter, who’s now 35, has turned into my friend. What does that mean?”

Indeed, the notion of “friend” is a rough one—it’s fundamental to human interaction, and as such, it carries with it a huge number of (sometimes contradictory) behavioral expectations. When you’re explaining “friends” to an alien, how do you paint it? That you and the alien have shared interests and should therefore work together? That you are genuinely interested in the alien’s well-being? That you’d make sacrifices for them? That you’d expect them to help you haul furniture when you move?

And what assumptions might you make about the alien’s behavior once you’d declared each other “friends”? That they would make sacrifices for you? What if for the alien, the concept they’ve settled on for “friendship” means they’ll pull your limbs off when the adventure is over because that’s what friends do in their culture?

“You need societal grouping,” I supplied, “but you don’t necessarily need friends.”

“Absolutely,” she said. “And now I’m going to another work from 1982, Maltz and Borker, who looked at kids on the playground, and at that time—I think it’s changed a lot, it’s been 40-some years!—but at that time, they saw that little girls had a horizontal set of relationships. It was all friendship-based and secrets-based, and you have your best friend and then your next best friends. And little boys had a hierarchy, and your whole goal was to get higher in the hierarchy by insulting the kids above you and whacking them and try to be king of the hill.”

“Get the conch,” I joked unhelpfully.

“Yeah, exactly—get the conch. Again, cultural knowledge.”

by Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Images: Project Hail Mary/Amazon MGM studios

[ed. I've always had a vague appreciation for linguistics (their effects on perceived reality and lately their nuances in bridging disagreements - for example, this is the second time in three days that I've heard the term gavagai). My grandson came over today and he went right to some YT videos explaining the basics of PHM's plot and science, especially how Ryland and Rocky communicated. Then we watched Ghostbusters. : )]

The AI Doc

 

(This will be a fully spoilorific overview. If you haven’t seen The AI Doc, I recommend seeing it, it is about as good as it could realistically have been, in most ways.)

Like many things, it only works because it is centrally real. The creator of the documentary clearly did get married and have a child, freak out about AI, ask questions of the right people out of worry about his son’s future, freak out even more now with actual existential risk for (simplified versions of) the right reasons, go on a quest to stop freaking out and get optimistic instead, find many of the right people for that and ask good non-technical questions, get somewhat fooled, listen to mundane safety complaints, seek out and get interviews with the top CEOs, try to tell himself he could ignore all of it, then decide not to end on a bunch of hopeful babies and instead have a call for action to help shape the future.

The title is correct. This is about ‘how I became an Apolcaloptimist,’ and why he wanted to be that, as opposed to an argument for apocaloptimism being accurate. The larger Straussian message, contra Tyler Cowen, is not ‘the interventions are fake’ but that ‘so many choose to believe false things about AI, in order to feel that things will be okay.’

A lot of the editing choices, and the selections of what to intercut and clip, clearly come from an outsider without technical knowledge, trying to deal with their anxiety. Many of them would not have been my choices, especially the emphasis on weapons and physical destruction, but I think they work exactly because together they make it clear the whole thing is genuine.

Now there’s a story. It even won praise online as fair and good, from both those worried about existential risk and several of the accelerationist optimists, because it gave both sides what they most wanted. [...]

Yes, you can do that for both at once, because they want different things and also agree on quite a lot of true things. That is much more impactful than a diatribe.

We live in a world of spin. Daniel Roher is trying to navigate a world of spin, but his own earnestness shines through, and he makes excellent choices on who to interview. The being swayed by whoever is in front of him is a feature, not a bug, because he’s not trying to hide it. There are places where people are clearly trying to spin, or are making dumb points, and I appreciated him not trying to tell us which was which.

MIRI offers us a Twitter FAQ thread and a full website FAQ explaining their full position in the context of the movie, which is that no this is not hype and yes it is going to kill everyone if we keep building it and no our current safety techniques will not help with that, and they call for an international treaty.

Are there those who think this was propaganda or one sided? Yes, of course, although they cannot agree on which angle it was trying to support.

Babies Are Awesome

The overarching personal journey is about Daniel having a son. The movie takes one very clear position, that we need to see taken more often, which is that getting married and having a family and babies and kids are all super awesome.

This turns into the first question he asks those he interviews. Would you have a child today, given the current state of AI? [...]

People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

The first set of interviews outlines the danger.

This is not a technical film. We get explanations that resonate with an ordinary dude.

We get Jeffrey Ladish explaining the basics of instrumental convergence, the idea that if you have a goal then power helps you achieve that goal and you cannot fetch the coffee if you’re dead. That it’s not that the AI will hate us, it’s that it will see us like we see ants, and if you want to put a highway where the anthill is that’s the ant’s problem.

We get Connor Leahy talking about how creating smarter and more capable things than us is not a safe thing to be doing, and emphasizing that you do not need further justification for that. We get Eliezer Yudkowsky saying that if you share a planet with much smarter beings that don’t care about you and want other things, you should not like your chances. We get Ajeya Cotra explaining additional things, and so on.

Aside from that, we don’t get any talk of the ‘alignment problem’ and I don’t think the word alignment even appears in the film that I can remember.

It is hard for me to know how much the arguments resonate. I am very much not the target audience. Overall I felt they were treated fairly, and the arguments were both strong and highly sufficient to carry the day. Yes, obviously we are in a lot of trouble here.

Freak Out

Daniel’s response is, quite understandably and correctly, to freak out.

Then he asks, very explicitly, is there a way to be an optimist about this? Could he convince himself it will all work out?

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAtV |  Read more:

‘Project Hail Mary’ Adds to a Winning Streak for Originality at the Movies

Franchise movies have been the dominant currency in Hollywood for years, but, lately, the upside of originality has been hard to miss.

A week after “One Battle After Another,” “Sinners” and “KPop Demon Hunters” all triumphed at the Academy Awards, Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s “Project Hail Mary” notched the biggest nonfranchise opening weekend since “Oppenheimer.” In the first three months of 2026, the two biggest hits in theaters are it and the Pixar original “Hoppers.”

All of these successes came at considerable expense. “Project Hail Mary,” based on the Andy Weir bestseller, cost close to $200 million to make. But its $80.5 million debut vindicated Amazon MGM’s big bet, and gave the studio its largest box-office hit yet.

“They made a tremendous investment, and it’s going to pay off,” Lord said in an interview alongside Miller last week. “How exciting to reward the people that took a shot.”

“Project Hail Mary,” despite its title, isn’t anyone’s idea of a long shot. It stars one of the most widely liked actors in Ryan Gosling. Its source material, Weir’s novel, is beloved. And it trades on much of the same science-first sci-fi appeal of 2015’s best picture-nominated “The Martian,” from an earlier book by Weir. Lord and Miller, the filmmakers of the “Spider-Verse” movies and “The Lego Movie,” have a long track record of success with both audiences and critics.

But the recent run for originality — at the Oscars and the multiplex — suggests audiences may be more eager for something different from the same old. At the least, the potentially cascading rewards of an original hit are freshly apparent at a time when a lot of big bets — like the $130 million-plus that Paul Thomas Anderson’s best picture winner “One Battle After Another” cost Warner Bros. to make — have paid off so massively.

“People go to the movies to see a new experience,” Miller said. “They don’t go to see a thing they’ve already seen. Originality has value, especially as AI gets into the picture. The value that we can bring as filmmakers is to bring something that can’t be AI because it hasn’t been thought of before.

“So it’s good business.”

Franchise domination

Franchises have hardly been displaced. They will, no doubt, largely control the box office for the rest of year, beginning with Universal’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” next month, followed by anticipated releases like “Toy Story 5,” “Avengers: Doomsday” and “Dune: Part Three.” Last week, the 11th “Spider-Man” movie this century, Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” set a new trailer record with 718.6 million views in its first 24 hours.

So, yes, franchises still very much rule the day. But waves upon waves of sequels, reboots and remakes have made the few big-budget originals that manage to get made all the more singular.

“If we don’t continue to do originals, we’re going to run out of stuff,” Pete Docter, Pixar chief creative officer, earlier told The Los Angeles Times.

Since its founding, Pixar has clung to a belief that original movies are part of its mission, though that quest has grown more arduous in recent years. During the pandemic, “Soul,” “Luca” and “Turning Red” were diverted to Disney+. “Elemental” seemed like a disappointment at first but it just needed time to catch hold, eventually collecting $496 million.

“Hoppers,” directed by Daniel Chong, is hoping to follow that trajectory. So far, in three weeks of release, it’s grossed $242.6 million worldwide for The Walt Disney Co. — good business, to be sure, but a far cry from the pace of the 2024 blockbuster sequel “Inside Out 2.” It grossed $1.7 billion.

Such economics are tough for original movies to compete with, plus nonfranchise films take more effort, and money, to market. For a $200 million movie, marketing costs can come to nearly rival production budgets. [...]

An ambitious marketing campaign also accompanied “Project Hail Mary.” Gosling was everywhere from hosting “Saturday Night Live” to doing the “La La Land” dance with his alien co-star, Rocky. But the movie always rested on the appeal of the comic sensibilities of its filmmakers, Weir’s book and Gosling.

“We’re all united by the fact that we’ve spent the last two decades having people ask us: What genre is this?” says Drew Goddard, who scripted both “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary.” “We’re constantly hard to classify because we love existing in those strange places. We like drama, we like comedy. We like heartbreak, we like terror. We like silliness.”

Streaming economics change the calculus

In matching broad-appeal material with the right filmmakers and stars, “Project Hail Mary” relied on not just old-school studio moviemaking but the sometimes overlooked lessons of “Barbenheimer.” Both Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” showed what can happen when the right filmmakers are given free rein on a big canvas. There is a definite downside, though. Warner Bros.’ “The Bride!” by Maggie Gyllenhaal seemed like a compelling, filmmaker-driven concept, but its losses might approach $100 million.

Aside from having Gosling in common, “Project Hail Mary” also shared the producer of “Barbie” in Amy Pascal. Before the studio’s acquisition by Amazon, it was greenlit by then-MGM chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy. They later moved on to Warner Bros., where they made both “One Battle After Another” and Ryan Coogler’s much-celebrated “Sinners” ($370 million in ticket sales against a budget of $90 million).

As much as Amazon’s $8.5 billion purchase of MGM was motivated by capturing some of the richest IP in movies, James Bond, it’s also true that studios can establish themselves with homegrown hits. The opening for “Project Hail Mary” was Amazon MGM’s biggest ever.

In fact, three of the biggest original hits of the past year have come from streaming companies: Apple with “F1,” Netflix with “KPop Demon Hunters” and Amazon with “Project Hail Mary.” For these studios, box-office performance is only part of the win; Netflix didn’t even publicly record the chart-topping theatrical weekend of “KPop Demon Hunters.”

These companies are sometimes willing to take greater risks because breaking even in theatrical isn’t the end-all, be-all goal. Driving attention to their streaming platforms is just as vital. “KPop” was developed and produced by Sony Pictures, but, sensing the potentially perilous road to opening it theatrically, the company sold it to Netflix. There, it became the streamer’s most-watched movie ever.

“It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that three of the biggest original hits over the past year have come from the biggest streamers: Netflix, Amazon and Apple,” says Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends for Comscore. “What the streamers are finding is that they can parlay their small-screen successes into the big screen, and vice versa.”

As much as franchises will soon take back the multiplex, several high-profile movies will try to continue the winning streak for original films, among them Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day,” Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger,” J.J. Abrams’ “The Great Beyond” and, if you count one of world’s oldest stories, “The Odyssey,” by Nolan.

by Jake Coyle, AP/ST |  Read more:

Image: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
[ed. It's not rocket science. But in this case it is... and it sells. See also: Seattle teacher inspired ‘Project Hail Mary’ director Christopher Miller (ST); and Beyond the Science: Why Rocky is the Beating Heart of the Project Hail Mary Movie (NCC).]

The Last Useful Man

About halfway through Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise goes for a run on a treadmill. The treadmill is on the USS Ohio, a submarine manned exclusively by implausibly attractive people. One of those people is not who they seem: a cultist, radicalized by the Entity, the film’s AI antagonist. The cultist sneaks up behind Cruise and lunges with a knife. Things look dicey for a moment — until Cruise gains some distance and kicks him repeatedly in the head. While doing so, he imparts a few words of wisdom: “You spend too much time on the internet.”

What divides the heroes and villains in Final Reckoning is simple: the villains have to Google things, and the heroes do not. There are three bad guys, more or less. First, the Entity, a rogue AI halfway through its plan for global domination. Second, Gabriel, the Entity’s meat puppet. Third, a gang of surprisingly likable Russians who take Cruise’s team hostage in a house in Alaska. What unites the villains isn’t malice so much as it is uselessness. I mean that precisely. They are often effective, even successful. But never useful. [...]

This division between characters with embodied knowledge and those without runs through all of Cruise’s recent work. His own impossible mission is to teach the value of physical competence: not just knowing things, but knowing how to do them. In Final Reckoning, this idea finds its clearest form. [...]

Like Forster, Cruise and his long-time collaborator Christopher McQuarrie invent machines to dramatize the age they live in. Forster gave us the Machine; McQuarrie, the Entity. But unlike Forster, their imagination of technology is not apocalyptic but diagnostic — they aren’t warning us of the machine age so much as asking what it demands of us, and what it reveals.

This brings us to what looks, at first glance, like a paradox: How does a franchise so lovingly built on disguises, gadgets, and inventions of all kinds — from the eye-tracking projector that gets Cruise into the Kremlin to the single suction glove that lets him cling to the Burj Khalifa — end with a villain made of pure technology?

If you asked Cruise, his answer would be simple: technology is good when it roots you in your body and bad when it lets you forget you have one. That’s why Final Reckoning, for all its AI villainy and suspicion of the terminally-online, still treats technology with a near-Romantic sensibility. Hand-soldered pen drives, aging aircraft carriers, and vintage biplanes carry Cruise and his team on their mission to save the world. At times subtlety disappears altogether; the film’s most inviting location is a candle-lit Arctic hideout filled with analogue comforts: old books and gramophones, telescopes and soldering tools.

The same ideas return — turned up to eleven — in Cruise and McQuarrie’s two other collaborations this decade outside the Mission: Impossible franchise. The first, Edge of Tomorrow, in which Cruise relives the same day on repeat until he generates enough embodied knowledge to defeat an autonomous alien race, is, even for the purposes of this essay, too on the nose, so I’ll focus instead on Top Gun: Maverick.

The film opens with Cruise test-piloting an experimental stealth aircraft in a last-ditch attempt to save the program from cancellation by the “drone ranger,” an admiral who wants the budget for his autonomous fleet. For the program to survive, Cruise needs to hit Mach 10: a speed no vehicle has ever reached. As the team watches on, he delivers the impossible. Gauzy wisps of supersonic air stream across the cockpit windows as Maverick stares out into the black of space. He whispers softly to his dead best friend, “Talk to me, Goose.”

Soon afterwards, Maverick is sent back to Top Gun to train a new generation of pilots. He begins his first lesson holding up the flight manual for the F-18, which makes the Riverside Chaucer look like a novella, before throwing it in the bin. “I assume you know this book inside and out. So does your enemy.” What matters instead is the knowledge that can’t be written down: the things his students already know by instinct, but cannot yet express  “Today we’ll start with only what you think you know.”

The quest to ‘“know more than we can tell,”’ as Michael Polanyi put it, drives the rest of the film. The pilots even have their own version of the phrase, a near-religious catechism recited at almost every decisive moment: “Don’t think. Just do.”

Beyond the screen, the same principle applies. In the Mission: Impossible franchise, filming begins with no plot or script, only a commitment to figuring it out in the process. It’s most evident in each film’s tentpole action sequences, where the line between Cruise the actor and Cruise the stuntman blurs beyond recognition.

The art critic Robert Hughes once wrote of his love for “the spectacle of skill” — the thrill of watching an expert at work, whatever the discipline. Nowhere is this more evident than in Cruise’s increasingly daring plane sequences. In Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Cruise clings to a real Airbus A400M as it lifts off from an airfield in Lincolnshire. He sprints across the field, in that inimitable Tom Cruise style, mounts the wing with practiced ease, and seats himself by the cargo door. The plane taxis. So far, so cool. Then it lifts off. The perfect hair vanishes, blown back and forwards, alternating second by second between old skeleton and boy with bowl cut. His clothes are shapeless and billowing, pulled off him by the force of the air.

This is no country for sprezzatura, nor the embodiment preached by the wellness industry with its vocabulary of “balance” and “equilibrium.” Here, we are meant to feel the effort. To know yourself is to know your limits, and so push your body to the edge of failure. When they are about to perform stunts, Cruise often briefs his team with an unusual mantra: ‘Don’t be safe, be competent.”

At the end of Final Reckoning, Cruise plummets through the sky as his parachute burns to cinders above him. To film it, the stunt team soaked a parachute in flammable liquid, flew him to altitude in a helicopter, and pushed him out as it ignited. He did this 19 times. When he asked to go again, the stunt coordinator told him there were no parachutes left. This was a lie. McQuarrie was more direct: “You’re done. Do not anger the gods.”

It’s interesting to see this return to embodiment and strange to find myself drawn to it. Like many default clever people, I’d long paid lip service to Merleau-Ponty and his ilk while living as a dualist; my brain was the moneymaker, my body just along for the ride. It was only after having children that I began to understand what it meant to inhabit a body rather than simply use one.

In an essay for Granta earlier this year, the writer Saba Sams contrasted her son’s love of leaping from benches and walls with her own unease: “For them, the body is not a constraint, is not a ticking clock, is not something to be moulded or hidden. The body is the window to movement, and movement is a window to joy.”

Sams captures something larger. This renewed fascination with embodiment isn’t spontaneous, it’s a reaction to technologies so powerful and frictionless they’re impossible to ignore. Even the most grounded among us now move through the world not through our bodies but through screens, which is why so many make the negative case for technology, urging us, thankfully without a Cruise-style kick to the head, to spend less time on the internet.

What Cruise gives us is the positive case: not just resistance to disembodiment but a reminder of what is beautiful about being physical in the first place. The skilled things bodies can do are inherently satisfying. They can be thrilling, reassuring, even a little terrifying. But, as David Foster Wallace put it in his essay on Roger Federer:

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

That’s the mission, if we choose to accept it. The target is not the recent bugbear of AI, but instead the more gentle conditions of modernity. When we use Google Maps instead of a printed atlas, or when CGI is used to sell a stunt instead of the performers doing it themselves, something is lost. It’s why the focus on AI can sometimes be misguided. It’s not so much a revolution, it’s simply the next step on the ladder of disembodiment: another in a long line of technologies to make humans a little less self-reliant. Why learn, if you can ask?

In the final biplane sequence, we watch Cruise commandeer a plane, fly it to another, board that plane midair, and take control of it — a feat so exhausting it beggars belief. Gabriel, the villain, in order to survive his defeat, needs only do something a hundredth as difficult: jump from the plane and deploy a parachute. He laughs. This is easy. But he doesn’t know the complexities of leaving a biplane with a parachute — the correct moment to release, the parts to steer clear from. He’s never bothered to learn. He frees himself, clips the rudder, cracks his skull open, and dies.

Here we see the real villain: not intelligence, but convenience. The mission so often feels impossible because we keep trying to do things without effort. Cruise’s answer is simple: Stop. Remember your body. Sometimes, it’s better to take the hard way.

Final Reckoning’s closing scene presents us with two intelligences and two bodies. One is Cruise, a 62-year-old body who we’ve seen, for the last two hours, run fast, dive deep, and hang from planes. The other is the Entity, trapped in a glorified USB stick: a golden nugget incapable of anything other than being flushed down a toilet.

One still moves. The other never could.

by Aled Maclean-Jones, The Metropolictan Review | Read more:
Image: Getty

Verdict: Yes, You Should Go See Project Hail Mary As Soon As Possible

First, in the plainest language, before we get to anything else, Project Hail Mary is a fantastic film. It does right by its source material, and it also easily stands on its own for folks who haven’t read the book. It comes out on March 20, and if you’re a regular Ars Technica reader, you will almost certainly enjoy the crap out of it. Go see it as soon as you can, and see it in a theater where the big visuals will have the most impact.

Next, a word about what “spoiler-free” means here: In this short review, I’ll talk about stuff that happens in the movie’s many, many trailers. If you’re an ultra-purist who is both interested in this film and who has also somehow avoided reading the book and also seeing any of the trailers, bail out now.

Otherwise, read on!

It’s a buddy movie

PHM is, first and foremost, a movie about a schoolteacher who becomes friends with an alien and the joy of that relationship. And because the film is based on an Andy Weir novel, there’s also some problem-solving with science.

What problems? A pretty major one dominates: As we learned back in the first trailer, the Earth’s sun is mysteriously dying, and no one knows why. An assay of our nearby stellar neighbors reveals that those stars all appear to be dying as well—all except for one, Tau Ceti, located just under a dozen light-years away. Why is Tau Ceti seemingly being spared by whatever force is causing the other stars to dim? In what quickly becomes a common refrain, no one knows.

The solution, as presented to us by a mysterious government representative named Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), is to build an interstellar craft, accelerate it to near the speed of light, and visit Tau Ceti to find out what’s going on. It’s a long-shot mission—a “Hail Mary,” as she puts it.

But why do they send Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle-school teacher with no immediately apparent qualifications? Why not send a crew of trained astronauts, or top scientists, or both? These questions are eventually addressed—but before they are, poor Grace finds himself stuck at Tau Ceti and plunging headlong into something no one was prepared for: first contact.

Hey, yo, Rocky

Since the trailers go there, we can go there: Grace quickly discovers he’s not Tau Ceti’s only visitor. Another ship, much larger and obviously alien, is already present—seemingly for the same reason. And aboard that ship is Rocky, an extraterrestrial whose design breaks hard from traditional Trek-style humanoids with bumpy foreheads.

Brilliantly realized almost entirely through practical puppetry, Rocky is everything one could ask for in a space-going science friend: he’s inquisitive, he’s funny, and most important of all, he’s friendly. Grace and Rocky quickly work out a shared vocabulary and get down to the business at hand of saving both species’ stars from destruction.

It’s important at this point to say that although Project Hail Mary shares a considerable amount of heritage with 2015’s The Martian—both are based on novels by Andy Weir, both celebrate engineering as a discipline, and both were adapted for the screen by Drew Goddard—this film is very much not The Martian II, in tone or content. This is, above all else, a buddy movie.

It’s also a relatively long buddy movie, coming in at two hours and 46 minutes—but it doesn’t feel nearly that long. The film has a lot of establishing work to do, and it gets that work out of the way quickly; we run into Rocky about 40 minutes in, and from that point on, the Grace and Rocky show is in full effect.

by Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Amazon MGM Studios

[ed. Oh man, can't wait. I may have to read the book again just to get ready.]

Family Deepfakes Help With Grieving

When the lights dimmed at Jaideep Sharma’s wedding reception in the north Indian city of Ajmer, guests expected to see a cheesy montage of the young couple in various attractive locations. Instead, they saw Sharma’s father — dead for more than a year — on the screen, smiling and blessing the newlyweds.

The video was created using artificial intelligence by a local creator Sharma found on Instagram. Using pictures of Sharma’s father, the creator produced a minute-long video in about a week, and charged about 50,000 rupees ($600), Sharma told Rest of World. It was worth it, he said.

“It was like a bombardment of emotions for everyone,” said the 33-year-old garment trader, who felt his father’s absence keenly at his wedding. “He was like a central force in the entire family. So when the video played, everyone was very happy and emotional at the same time.”

Sharma is among a growing number of Indians discovering the power of AI deepfakes to resurrect dead family members, create voice clones of the departed, and add absent guests to family celebrations. AI tools such as OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Nano Banana, and Midjourney have made it easier to create images and videos that can fool even experts. Cashing in are entrepreneurs in small towns and cities, who have learned how to use these tools from YouTube tutorials and online forums.

Like Akhil Vinayak, a film buff, who posts deepfake videos of popular dead actors on Instagram for fun. A client in the south Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram approached him with an unusual request: Could he create a deepfake video of her dead mother-in-law blessing her baby?

“She wanted to surprise her husband,” the 29-year-old told Rest of World. “Her mother-in-law had passed away before the baby was born.”

Vinayak created a video showing the dead woman stepping down from heaven and visiting her son, then holding the baby she hadn’t met. The client was thrilled, and sent Vinayak a recording of the family’s stunned reaction. That video has more than 1 million likes on Instagram.

Such uses — and reactions — stand in sharp contrast to the growing pushback to AI-generated videos and voice clones, which are most commonly used for harassment, extortion, financial scams, political misinformation, and election manipulation.

For Vinayak’s clients, though, the deepfakes are not just practical but also deeply emotional, he said. Vinayak uses open-source models like Stable Diffusion and editing systems such as Adobe Premiere Pro to create them, charging about 18,000 rupees ($200) on average for minute-long videos. 

by Hanan Zaffar and Jyoti Thakur, Rest of World | Read more:
Images: Ishan Tankha for Rest of World/Akhil Vinayak

Richard Linklater, Before Sunrise. Starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy
via:

Everyone is Stealing TV

Walk the rows of the farmers market in a small, nondescript Texas town about an hour away from Austin, and you might stumble across something unexpected: In between booths selling fresh, local pickles and pies, there’s a table piled high with generic-looking streaming boxes, promising free access to NFL games, UFC fights, and any cable TV network you can think of.

It’s called the SuperBox, and it’s being demoed by Jason, who also has homemade banana bread, okra, and canned goods for sale. “People are sick and tired of giving Dish Network $200 a month for trash service,” Jason says. His pitch to rural would-be cord-cutters: Buy a SuperBox for $300 to $400 instead, and you’ll never have to shell out money for cable or streaming subscriptions again.

I met Jason through one of the many Facebook groups used as support forums for rogue streaming devices like the SuperBox. To allow him and other users and sellers of these devices to speak freely, we’re only identifying them by their first names or pseudonyms.

SuperBox and its main competitor, vSeeBox, are gaining in popularity as consumers get fed up with what TV has become: Pay TV bundles are incredibly expensive, streaming services are costlier every year, and you need to sign up for multiple services just to catch your favorite sports team every time they play. The hardware itself is generic and legal, but you won’t find these devices at mainstream stores like Walmart and Best Buy because everyone knows the point is accessing illegal streaming services that offer every single channel, show, and movie you can think of. But there are hundreds of resellers like Jason all across the United States who aren’t bothered by the legal technicalities of these devices. They’re all part of a massive, informal economy that connects hard-to-pin-down Chinese device makers and rogue streaming service operators with American consumers looking to take cord-cutting to the next level.

This economy paints a full picture of America, and characters abound. There’s a retired former cop in upstate New York selling the vSeeBox at the fall festival of his local church. A Christian conservative from Utah who pitches rogue streaming boxes as a way of “defunding the swamp and refunding the kingdom.” An Idaho-based smart home vendor sells vSeeBoxes alongside security cameras and automated window shades. Midwestern church ladies in Illinois and Indian uncles in New Jersey all know someone who can hook you up: real estate agents, MMA fighters, wedding DJs, and special ed teachers are all among the sellers who form what amounts to a modern-day bootlegging scheme, car trunks full of streaming boxes just waiting for your call.

These folks are a permanent thorn in the side of cable companies and streaming services, who have been filing lawsuits against resellers of these devices for years, only to see others take their place practically overnight.

Jason, for his part, doesn’t beat around the bush about where he stands in this conflict. “I hope it puts DirecTV and Dish out of business,” he tells me.

Jason isn’t alone in his disdain for big TV providers. “My DirecTV bill was just too high,” says Eva, a social worker and grandmother from California. Eva bought her first vSeeBox two years ago when she realized she was paying nearly $300 a month for TV, including premium channels. Now, she’s watching those channels for free, saving thousands of dollars. “It turned out to be a no-brainer,” Eva says.

Natalie, a California-based software consultant, paid about $120 a month for cable. Then, TV transitioned to streaming, and everything became a subscription. All those subscriptions add up — especially if you’re a sports fan. “You need 30 subscriptions just to watch every game,” she complains. “It’s gotten out of control. It’s not sustainable,” she says.

Natalie, a California-based software consultant, paid about $120 a month for cable. Then, TV transitioned to streaming, and everything became a subscription. All those subscriptions add up — especially if you’re a sports fan. “You need 30 subscriptions just to watch every game,” she complains. “It’s gotten out of control. It’s not sustainable,” she says.

Natalie bought her first SuperBox five years ago. At the time, she was occasionally splurging on pay-per-view fights, which would cost her anywhere from $70 to $100 a pop. SuperBox’s $200 price tag seemed like a steal. “You’re getting the deal of the century,” she says.

“I’ve been on a crusade to try to convert everyone.”

James, a gas station repairman from Alabama, estimates that he used to pay around $125 for streaming subscriptions every month. “The general public is being nickeled and dimed into the poor house,” he says.

James says that he was hesitant about forking over a lot of money upfront for a device that could turn out to be a scam. “I was nervous, but I figured: If it lasts four months, it pays for itself,” he tells me. James has occasionally encountered some glitches with his vSeeBox, but not enough to make him regret his purchase. “I’m actually in the process of canceling all the streaming services,” he says...

The boxes don’t ship with the apps preinstalled — but they make it really easy to do so. vSeeBox, for instance, ships with an Android TV launcher that has a row of recommended apps, displaying download links to install apps for the Heat streaming service with one click. New SuperBox owners won’t have trouble accessing the apps, either. “Once you open your packaging, there are instructions,” Jason says. “Follow them to a T.”

Once downloaded, these apps mimic the look and feel of traditional TV and streaming services. vSeeBox’s Heat, for instance, has a dedicated “Heat Live” app that resembles Sling TV, Fubo, or any other live TV subscription service, complete with a program guide and the ability to flip through channels with your remote control. SuperBox’s Blue TV app does the same thing, while a separate “Blue Playback” app even offers some time-shifting functionality, similar to Hulu’s live TV service. Natalie estimates that she can access between 6,000 and 8,000 channels on her SuperBox, including premium sports networks and movie channels, and hundreds of local Fox, ABC, and CBS affiliates from across the United States.

How exactly these apps are able to offer all those channels is one of the streaming boxes’ many mysteries. “All the SuperBox channels are streaming out of China,” Jason suggests, in what seems like a bit of folk wisdom. In a 2025 lawsuit against a SuperBox reseller, Dish Network alleged that at least some of the live TV channels available on the device are being ripped directly from Dish’s own Sling TV service. “An MLB channel transmitted on the service [showed] Sling’s distinguishing logo in the bottom right corner,” the lawsuit claims. The operators of those live TV services use dedicated software to crack Sling’s DRM, and then retransmit the unprotected video feeds on their services, according to the lawsuit.

Heat and Blue TV also each have dedicated apps for Netflix-style on-demand viewing, and the services often aren’t shy about the source of their programming. Heat’s “VOD Ultra” app helpfully lists movies and TV shows categorized by provider, including HBO Max, Disney Plus, Starz, and Hulu...

Most vSeeBox and SuperBox users don’t seem to care where exactly the content is coming from, as long as they can access the titles they’re looking for.

“I haven’t found anything missing yet,” James says. “I’ve actually been able to watch shows from streaming services I didn’t have before.”

by Janko Roettgers, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Cath Virginia/The Verge, Getty Images

[ed. Not surprising with streaming services looking more and more like cable companies, ripping consumers off left and right. A friend of mine has one of these (or something similar) and swears by it.]

Why the Future of Movies Lives on Letterboxd

Karl von Randow and Matthew Buchanan created Letterboxd in 2011, but its popularity ballooned during the pandemic. It has grown exponentially ever since: Between 2020 and 2026, it grew to 26 million users from 1.7 million, adding more than nine million users since January 2025 alone. It’s not the only movie-rating platform out there: Rotten Tomatoes has become a fixture of movie advertising, with “100% Fresh” ratings emblazoned on movie posters and TV ads. But if Rotten Tomatoes has become a tool of Hollywood’s homogenizing marketing machinery, Letterboxd is something else: a cinephilic hive buzzing with authentic enthusiasm and heterogeneous tastes.

The platform highlights audiences with appetites more varied than the industry has previously imagined, and helps them find their way to movies that are substantial. Black-and-white classics, foreign masterpieces and forgotten gems are popular darlings, while major studio releases often fail to find their footing. In an online ecosystem dominated by the short, simple and obvious, Letterboxd encourages people to engage with demanding art. Amid grim pronouncements of film-industry doom and the collapse of professional criticism, the rise of Letterboxd suggests that the industry’s crisis may be distinct from the fate of film itself. Even as Hollywood continues to circle the drain, film culture is experiencing a broad resurgence.

Letterboxd’s success rests on its simplicity. It feels like the internet of the late ’90s and early 2000s, with message boards and blogs, simple interfaces and banner ads, web-famous writers whose readership was built on the back of wit and regularity — people you might read daily and still never know what they look like. A user’s “Top 4 Films” appears at the top of their profile pages, resembling the lo-fi personalization of MySpace. The website does not allow users to send direct messages to one another, and the interactivity is limited to following another user, liking their reviews and in some cases commenting on specific posts. There is no “dislike” button. In this way, good vibes are allowed to proliferate, while bad ones mostly dissipate over time.

The result — at a time when legacy publications have reduced serious coverage of the arts — is a new, democratic form of film criticism: a mélange of jokes, close readings and earnest nerding out. Users write reviews that range from ultrashort, off-the-cuff takes to gonzo film-theory-inflected texts that combine wide-ranging historical context with in-depth analysis. As other social media platforms devolve into bogs of A.I. slop, bots and advertising, Letterboxd is one of the rare places where discourse is not driving us apart or dumbing us down.

“There’s no right way to use it, which I think is super appealing,” Slim Kolowski, once an avid Letterboxd user and now its head of community, told me. “I know plenty of people that never write a review. They don’t care about reviews. They just want to, you know, give a rating or whatever. And I think that’s a big part of it, because there’s no right way to use it, and I think we work really hard to keep it about film discovery.”

But in the end, passionate enthusiasm for movies is simply a win for cinema at large. Richard Brody, the New Yorker film critic whose greatest professional worry is that a good film will fall through the cracks without getting its due from critics or audiences, sees the rise of Letterboxd as a bulwark against this fear, as well as part of a larger trend toward the democratization of criticism. “I think that film criticism is in better shape now than it has ever been,” he tells me, “not because there’s any one critic or any small group of critics writing who are necessarily the equals of the classical greats in the field, but because there are far more people writing with far more knowledge, and I might even add far more passion, about a far wider range of films than ever.”

Many users are watching greater amounts of cinema by volume. “Letterboxd gives you these stats, and you can see how many movies you’ve watched,” Wesley Sharer, a top reviewer, told me. “And I think that, for me definitely and maybe for other people as well, contributes to this sense of, like, I’m not watching enough movies, you know, I need to bump my numbers up.” But the platform also encourages users to expand their tastes by putting independent or foreign offerings right in front of them. While Sharer built his following on reviews of buzzy new releases, he now does deep dives into specific, often niche directors like Hong Sang-soo or Tsui Hark (luminaries of Korean and Hong Kong cinema, respectively) to introduce his followers to new movies they could watch...

All this is to say that an active, evolving culture around movies exists that can be grown, if studios can let go of some of their old ideas about what will motivate audiences to show up. Letterboxd is doing the work of cultivating a younger generation of moviegoers, pushing them to define the taste and values that fuel their consumption; a cinephile renaissance means more people might be willing, for example, to see an important movie in multiple formats — IMAX, VistaVision, 70 millimeter — generating greater profit from the same audience. Engaging with these platforms, where users are actively seeking out new films to fall in love with, updates a marketing playbook that hasn’t changed significantly since the 2000s, when studios first embraced the digital landscape.

by Alexandra Kleeman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via:

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Reflections on the 'Manosphere'

Andrew Tate Is the Loneliest Bastard on Earth

Every five years or so, there’s a changing of the guard in digital media. Platform empires rise and fall, subcultures come and go, trends ebb and flow.

In my estimation, we’re entering year two of the latest shift.

The decline of punditry and traditional political commentary is continuing apace from its boom during Covid lockdowns. Commentators who might have once staked out clear, binary positions—conservative or liberal—are drifting away from political debate altogether, moving toward a more parasocial model: building audiences around personality and the feeling of relationship, rather than argument.

It’s increasingly clear that writing is niche. We’re moving away from the age of bloggers and Twitter, and into the age of streaming and clip farming—short video segments, often ripped from longer content, optimized for sharing. (I’ve made this point many times now, but this is why in the world of right-wing digital media, characters like Nick Fuentes are emerging as dominant, whereas no-video podcasters, bloggers, and Twitter personalities receive less attention.)

Labels like “right” and “left” are better thought of as “right-coded” and “left-coded”: ways of signaling who you are and who you’re with, rather than actual positions on what government should do. The people still doing, or more accurately “playing,” politics are themselves experiencing a realignment, scrambling to figure out new alliances as the old divisions stop making sense. I’ve written previously about New Old Leftists and the “post-right,” a motley group of former right-wing commentators who are not “progressives” in the traditional sense, but take up progressive points of view specifically in dialogue with their disgust with reactionary elements of the right.

Anyway, in this rise of coded communities—where affiliation is about vibe and identity more than ideology—we’re seeing the Manosphere go mainstream again. Second time? Third?

The Manosphere—if you’re a reader of this blog who somehow doesn’t know—refers to a loose network of communities organized around men, masculinity, dating advice, and self-improvement, sometimes tipping into outright hostility toward women. These communities have been around on the fringes of the internet for years, though depending on your vantage point, their underlying ideas are either hundreds of years old or at least sixty.

Either way, they keep surfacing into broader culture.

***

The Manosphere as we know it today has at least two distinct antecedents. The first is the mid-twentieth-century convergence of pick-up artistry and men’s rights discourse: one responding to the Sexual Revolution and changing dating norms, the other developing in explicit opposition to second wave feminism. These strands framed gender relations as adversarial, strategic, and zero-sum.

The second antecedent is the part that I hear people talk about less often. The Manosphere in so many ways is a Black phenomenon. I do not mean this as a racial claim about ownership or blame, nor am I referring narrowly to what is sometimes called the “Black Manosphere.” I mean something more specific: many of the aesthetic forms, masculine philosophies, and anxieties that the Manosphere treats as “newly” discovered were articulated in Black American communities decades earlier. These were responses to economic exclusion, social displacement, and the erosion of traditional routes to masculine status.

Someone on X made the good point that the viral clips of Clavicular’s Big Night Out—Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Sneako, and company—felt like a child’s idea of not only masculinity, but wealth. The cigars, the suits, the VIP table, the ham-fisted advice about how you don’t take women out to dinner.

If you’ve read Iceberg Slim, or watched 1970s blaxploitation films like The Mack or Super Fly, the visual language is immediately recognizable. You’ve seen this figure before: the fur coat, the Cadillac Eldorado, the exaggerated display of wealth and control. The question is why that aesthetic originally looked the way it did.

In mid-century America, Black men were systematically excluded from the institutions through which wealth and status quietly accumulate: country clubs, elite universities, corporate ladders, inherited property. The GI Bill’s housing provisions were administered in ways that shut out Black veterans. Union jobs in the building trades stayed segregated. The FHA explicitly refused to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods. Under those conditions, conspicuous display wasn’t vulgarity (at least, not primarily or exclusively)—it was one of the few available ways to signal success in a society that denied access to the kinds of prestige that don’t need to announce themselves. When wealth can’t whisper—as TikTok’s “old money aesthetic” crowd loves to remind us it should—it has to shout.

The modern Manosphere inherits this aesthetic, adopting the symbols as though they were universal markers of arrival rather than compensatory performances forged under exclusion. What began as a response to being locked out of legitimate power gets recycled, abstracted, and repackaged, this time as timeless masculine truth. As so, to modern audiences, it reads as immature.

The aesthetic was codified in the late ‘60s. (...)

By the 1970s, blaxploitation films had transformed the pimp into an outlaw folk hero, emphasizing style over the moral complexity of the source material. What survived was the cool, the walk, the talk, the clothes, the attitude. Hip-hop — which I admittedly know very little about, so please feel free to correct me here —- picked up the thread: Ice-T named himself in tribute to Iceberg Slim; Snoop Dogg built an entire persona around pimp iconography; the rest is history. The pimp was no longer a figure of the Black underclass navigating impossible circumstances but was quickly becoming embraced as an inadvertent, unironic symbol of male success, available for adoption by anyone — race agnostic.

The “high-value man” who dominates contemporary Manosphere discourse is this same archetype, put through a respectability filter, or maybe just re-fit for modern tastes. The fur coat becomes a tailored suit. The Cadillac becomes a Bugatti. The stable of sex workers becomes a rotating roster of Instagram models (I guess, in Andrew Tate’s case, still sex [trafficked] workers). The underlying logic — and material conditions — are identical: women are resources to be managed, emotional detachment is strength, and a man’s worth is measured by his material display and his control over female attention. (...)

The Manosphere’s grievances are not manufactured—just as the pimp’s weren’t. The anxieties it addresses are real. The conditions that produced the pimp archetype in Black America, the sense that legitimate paths to respect and provision have been foreclosed, are now conditions we all experience.

The Manosphere exists because millions of young men — of every race — are asking the same question Black men were asking in 1965: what does masculinity mean when its economic foundations have been removed?

by Katherine Dee, Default Blog |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. Pathetic bunch of losers. Includes some truly cringe videos I've never seen before.]

The Day NY Publishing Lost Its Soul; Fifty People Control the Culture

Everybody can see there’s a crisis in New York publishing. Even the hot new books feel lukewarm. Writers win the Pulitzer Prize and sell just few hundred copies. The big publishers rely on 50 or 100 proven authors—everything else is just window dressing or the back catalog.

You can tell how stagnant things have become from the lookalike covers. I walk into a bookstore and every title I see is like this.

They must have fired the design team and replaced it with a lazy bot. You get big fonts, random shapes, and garish colors—again and again and again. Every cover looks like it was made with a circus clown’s makeup kit.

My wife is in a book club. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they read the same book every month. It’s those same goofy colors and shapes on every one.

Of course, you can’t judge a book by its cover. But if you read enough new releases, you get the same sense of familiarity from the stories. The publishers keep returning to proven formulas—which they keep flogging long after they’ve stopped working.

And that was a long time ago.

It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.

It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk—but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.

How did we end up here?

It’s hard to pick a day when the publishing industry made its deal with the devil. But an anecdote recently shared by Steve Wasserman is as good a place to begin as any.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I'll never buy a book that looks like this, no matter what the reviews say. I'd be embarrassed to be seen in public with it, let alone display it on my bookshelf. See also: Fifty People Control the Culture (HB).]