10 - "The Flop Formula"

Do you remember the end of Field of Dreams… when Kevin Costner says "Hey Dad… you wanna have a catch?" Do you remember the entire theater screaming when Captain America picked up Mjolnir? When was the last time a movie did that to you? Take a second. Actually try to remember.

Been a while, hasn't it.

This week, Project Hail Mary opened to $141 million globally. No franchise. No sequel. No Marvel logo. Just a story — about a scientist who wakes up alone on a spaceship — and 5 million people bought tickets in one weekend. The biggest non-franchise opening in a decade.

In the same week, Pixar's Chief Creative Officer told the Wall Street Journal: "We're making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy."

And the internet lost its mind.

Conservative media celebrated. People said it felt like someone finally said the thing out loud. And they're not wrong — something real was admitted. But today we're asking the harder question: is the lesson actually being learned? Or are the people celebrating walking straight into the next room of the maze?

This episode is about what broke, why it broke, and what it would actually take to fix it. Not the product correction version. The real version.

We cover: 

→ How Pixar went from printing money to posting the worst opening weekend in their 40-year history — and what actually caused it 

→ Why a financial correction is not a values correction — and what the Disney Oscars commercial really was 

→ What story is actually for — and why Jesus told parables instead of making arguments 

→ Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary, and what one novelist knows that an entire industry forgot 

→ The pipeline problem — why the same room keeps making the same thing, and three concrete signals to watch 

→ What genuine creative recovery actually requires (hint: it starts in the same place every real recovery starts)

Lightyear lost $100M. Elio had the worst Pixar opening in history. The Bride! made $275,000 in its third weekend. The numbers have been saying something for years. Project Hail Mary is proof the audience was never the problem.

The Flop Formula was always optional. So is fixing it.

Transcript

Introduction

SPEAKER_03 0:25

Do you remember the first time you watched The Sixth Sense and you found out that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time? And you were like, what? Or do you remember when Thor was about to get the final blow by Thanos in Endgame and then Milneer hit him in the back, and then it went soaring back to none other than Captain America? The entire theater screamed. Or how about this? This might be a reach. Do you remember when all the ballplayers were walking into the cornfields at the end of Field of Dreams, but the catcher stays behind? And Kevin Costner says, Hey, Dad, wanna have a catch? None of these movies were out to make you feel guilty. They weren't there to browbeat you into some better than thou idea of environmentalism. They weren't cheap CGI to mask a poor plot without any story. I mean, those movies took you away from your living room. They made you care about a character so much that when something happened to them, it almost felt like it was happening to you. When was the last time the credits rolled and you just sat there for a second because you weren't ready to leave yet? Because whatever you'd just been through for the last two hours, you weren't ready to move on. When was that? Go ahead, take a second. Actually try to remember. It's been a while, huh? Yeah. Here's what I've noticed, and a lot of people I've talked to have noticed this too. The answer to that question takes a lot longer to find than it used to. You reach back and back, and you land somewhere further into the past than you thought you would. And you can tell yourself it's just nostalgia or hey, you're older now. Maybe you're just busier than you were back then. Sure, that stuff's true, but I don't think that's what it is. I think the machine broke. And I think we're only now starting to understand what broke and why, and whether the people fixing it actually know what they're fixing. Last weekend, something happened at the box office that the trades are calling a surprise. A two and a half hour sci-fi movie opened to $141 million globally in its first weekend. This movie isn't part of a failing cinematic universe. Don't wait for the post credit scene because there isn't one. You've never heard of the characters, no Marvel logo at the front, just a story based on a really great novel about a scientist who wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there. It got a 95 on Rotten Tomatoes, which honestly, we don't actually care that much anymore what Rotten Tomatoes says, but audiences gave it an A on Cinema Score. 83% of people who saw it say they would definitely recommend it to a friend. And I'm definitely one of them. Project Hail Mary sold five million tickets in North America in one weekend. That is the biggest non-franchise opening in a decade. Now in the same week that this all happened, the chief creative officer of Pixar sat down with the Wall Street Journal and told them this. Quote, we're making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy. And the internet kind of lost its mind, at least those who pay attention to Hollywood and movies. Conservative media ran with it everywhere. Even radio picked it up. People said it felt like someone was finally saying the quiet thing out loud, and I understand why it landed that way. I do. But today we're going to talk about what the quote actually means, and probably even more importantly what it doesn't mean. Because there's a viral swell happening right now about how Hollywood is finally waking up. And there's a much deeper story beneath that. A story about what went wrong in the first place and whether the right lessons have actually been learned or if we're just getting lip service. There's people out there celebrating Pixar's quote right now who are walking straight into the next room of the maze and they don't even see the walls. There are also people who've been frustrated with Hollywood for years. People who have watched movie after movie and felt like it was trying to manage them rather than move them. Those kinds of people who are probably most of us on some level, well, they deserve an answer to why that kept happening and what it would actually take to stop. Not a product correction dressed up as values transformation, a real answer. So that's what today is. You're listening to Trap Think? I'm Darren. Get your popcorn because today we're going to the movies.

The Golden Age Question

SPEAKER_03 4:28

There's a certain kind of person who gets uncomfortable when someone talks about a golden age of anything. And honestly, fair. I don't want to romanticize it unnecessarily, and sometimes it feels like nostalgia dressed up as criticism. So let me be specific instead of nostalgic. Let's go back to 1995. A toy cowboy is afraid of being replaced by a toy astronaut. That's the entire premise of Toy Story. No political subtext, no demographic mandate, no studio note about which communities are being underrepresented and what the script changes should be to address it. Just a cowboy and an astronaut. And one of the most fundamental human fears there is, the fear of being replaced by something newer and shinier than you. The fear of becoming irrelevant. The fear that the thing that made you special doesn't matter anymore because the world moved on to something better. Every person who has ever watched that movie understood it. Little kids understood it and grandparents understood it. People in Japan understood it. People in Brazil. Nobody had ever heard of Woody or Buzz before they sat down in that theater. But that didn't matter because the feeling at the center of the story didn't require that you knew anything about it. It only required one thing being human. Pixar wasn't reaching out to find an audience wherever they could be, they were meeting the audience exactly where they already were. Then think about what came after Toy Story. In 2003, a fish who has to cross an entire ocean because he promised to find a son, and love kept him going even when fear told him to stop. In 2004, a family of superheroes living in hiding because the world fears or hates them. And the movie's real question is, what does it cost you when you pretend to be less than what you really are? In 2007, a rat who loves food wants to cook in a kitchen where rats obviously don't belong. And the best line in that film doesn't come from the hero, it comes from the villain. During his final review, he realizes he's been wrong his whole career. Quote, not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. Every time Pixar released one of their movies, they had to rent a fleet of U-Hauls to go collect all the cash. I mean, if you didn't at least choke up at the end of Toy Story 3 when all the toys are holding hands about to be incinerated, you're a monster, and there's a special place in hell for you. That emotion was earned. Those movies didn't tell you what to feel. They built something real and let you respond to it. Now think about this. Not a single one of those movies started with a message. Every single one started with a character, a specific person or fish or brat or toy in a specific situation who wants something, who fears something, or needs something. And the story followed from that. The meaning emerged from the story. You don't feel instructed, you felt moved. And that's a completely different thing. When you feel instructed by a movie or a TV show, the story has told you what to think or feel. You can kind of feel the argument underneath the entertainment. You know what the filmmaker or the writers or more than likely the studio executives want you to think when you leave the theater. And whether you agree with the conclusion or not, whether it confirms your beliefs or challenges them, you've been acted upon by the story rather than invited into it. The story was aimed at you like you were a target. When you feel moved, something different happens. The story puts you somewhere real, and you respond to it the way you respond to real things, on your terms. Not because the filmmaker told you to respond, because the thing was true enough that your own humanity met it. The emotion didn't come from the screen. It came from somewhere in you that the story found and activated your lived experiences. Your story was reflected on the screen in these characters. The fight resonates with you because you've also fought. Now the distinction between being aimed at and being invited in is everything. It's the difference between propaganda and art. It's the difference between a lecture and a conversation. And it's the difference in very practical terms between a film that people talk about for twenty years and a film that people forget by the time they reach the parking lot. The Pixar films of the late nineties and early two thousands were, at their best, invitations. They put you somewhere so specific and so true that you couldn't help but bring your whole self to meet it. A cowboy afraid of being replaced, a fish terrified of losing his son, a rat who believes in beauty and a world that thinks he's a pest. These are not universal themes meant to give the audience the same feeling of reaction. They're universal in the reaction every person will have individually on their own terms. The general never moves anyone. The particular moves everyone. Now I need to be clear about something before I go further, because someone is going to hear me heading somewhere I'm not going. I'm not telling you Hollywood had some pristine golden era where everything was pure and free from pushing an agenda. That's not true and it's never been true. Hollywood has always had politics, always had an ideology. It's always had people trying to use the screen to move the audience in a particular direction. That goes back to like the 1930s. Some of the most celebrated films in history were made explicitly to influence public opinion. So I'm not romanticizing the past. What I'm saying is that at its best, and it was sometimes at its best, the discipline of storytelling enforced a constraint on everybody in the room. The director had to earn the emotion from the audience. The writers had to build the character. They had to respect us enough to take us on a journey rather than simply announcing the destination and then pointing at it. And somewhere in the last decade, a significant portion of the industry forgot how to do that, or stopped believing they had to. And we, the audience, noticed, not in a political way, most people don't think in those terms. They notice the way you notice when a magician shows you the trick while performing it. The magic stopped working, the mechanism became visible, and once you see the mechanism, you really can't unsee it.

SPEAKER_05 10:17

The controversy surrounding Elio sits squarely in the ongoing cultural and political debate over LGBTQ representación in family entertainment, particularly at Disney and its animation ARM Pixar. According to Pete Doctor, the studio removed elements suggesting the main character might be gay after the film tested poorly with audiences. He framed the decision as an attempt to keep the movie aligned with what families expect from a children's film. We're making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy. Doctor also said Pixar did not want to introduce topics with uh that young viewers, yeah, topics uh that young viewers may not be ready to process without conversations with their parents. Some critics and employees interrupted the change as a interpreted rather as a retreat from inclusive storytelling, especially because earlier versions of the film reportedly included scenes hinting that Elio had a male crush. The movie also came amid other controversy when Disney removed a transgender character from Pixar's series Win or Lose, intensifying criticisms from those who believe the studio is pulling back from LGBTQ representation under political pressure.

SPEAKER_03 11:30

Now, what they're talking about in that clip is the starting point for everything we're going to talk about today. Keep Pete Doctor's Wall Street Journal quote in mind because we're going to come back to what it does mean and what it doesn't mean.

The Captured Room

SPEAKER_03 11:42

So, how does an entire industry forget how to do their only job? Tell us stories. I mean, nobody sends a memo, nobody gives the speech where they say, starting Monday, we're abandoning the thing that made us great and replacing it with something that feels good to people who work here. But it doesn't happen that way. It happens the way Hemingway said bankruptcy happens, gradually, and then it all drops at once. The beginning steps each look reasonable from inside the building. Step one is that success creates insulation. When Pixar was putting out banger after banger in the late 90s and early 2000s, the studio built a reputation that gave it enormous creative latitude. Disney trusted them to bring it home in each story. Audiences trusted them, critics loved them, and that trust becomes a kind of bubble. When you're batting a thousand at the box office for over a decade, it becomes harder for anyone in the building to say, you know, I don't think that this is working. The culture of yes builds around the culture of craft, and once you're inside the bubble, the bubble feels like the real world. Step two is that the creative class becomes a self-selecting community. The people who work at a studio like Pixart tend to, over time, share a worldview. They come from similar schools, they live in the same neighborhoods, they go to the same dinner parties, they have the same conversations. It's basic sociology. It's the kind of thing that happens when an industry concentrates geographically and professionally over decades. The result is that the overturn window for what a story is designed to be narrows, quietly and gradually, without anyone actively deciding to narrow it, because everyone in the room already agrees about it. Groupthink doesn't feel like groupthink from the inside, it feels like normal consensus. Step three is where it breaks. This is the one we're at now. When stories start to underperform and when audiences stop showing up, there are only two possible explanations. Either the audience is wrong or the story just didn't work. If the institutional culture is healthy, then the latter gets the attention first and authentic correction comes. But if the culture's been captured, if everyone in the room shares the same foundational assumptions about what audiences want, then the former is always more comfortable to deal with. They say things like, the audience isn't ready for this, or the marketing failed. They think critics who didn't respond correctly are just missing the point. And when it's handled that way, the corrections never come. The stories get more insular. The gap between what filmmakers care about and what audiences want grows wider every year until the numbers become impossible to ignore. That's where we are, and that's why Pete Doctor told the Wall Street Journal that they aren't a form of therapy through movie making. I want to stay with what he actually said because there's a lot packed into it. He said he probably over-indexed on letting directors do whatever they wanted. He said Pixar found that parents didn't want entertainment that forced conversations they weren't ready to have with their kids. He described canceling productions that were too autobiographical from the directors' lived experiences. And he talked about having to completely overhaul the film Elio when it was already well into post-production. It had to be overhauled because test audiences said they wouldn't pay to see in a theater. When the original director was told he was leaving the project he'd built from his own life, people in the room cried. He's not saying that directors had bad intentions. Most of them probably didn't. These directors are people who genuinely love filmmaking, who came to this work from a real place. He's not even saying the ideas themselves were wrong. What he's describing is a process failure. He allowed the directors and writers to make movies for themselves. Movies rooted so deeply in their own personal experiences that the audience couldn't really find a way in. The film becomes the filmmaker's story and it doesn't relate to the audience's experience. And there's a place for that kind of personal expression. It's called a journal. Or an independent short film, or an MFA film festival where 80 other people who share the filmmaker's references come to watch. It is not a hundred and fifty million dollar wide release film aimed at everyone. But here's the thing Doctor didn't say the directors were making bad films. He said the films were disconnected from the audience. Those are kind of related, but really they're separate problems. A film can be technically accomplished, emotionally sincere, genuinely meaningful to the person who made it, and it will still fail to connect, because the specific life experiences of the director and writers that made it is too narrow for anyone outside those experiences to relate to. This is not a failure of the director's heart, it's a failure of the craft. The craft of storytelling requires translation, the ability to take your specific experience and render it in terms universal enough that a stranger sitting in a dark theater can recognize themselves in it. That's the hard part. It's the part of the work that's much harder than it looks, because the most powerful things in our own lives feel so real and so significant to us that we sometimes assume their significance will be self-evident to everyone else. Well, it isn't. The work of making it evident, the work of finding the specific detail, the specific moment, the specific character choice that unlocks the universal, that is the storytelling craft. And it can't be replaced by sincerity or ambition or a genuinely important subject. The films that failed weren't always failing because they were made by bad people with bad politics. In part they were failing because the people making them had stopped doing the hard translation work. They were assuming that life's significance to them was ubiquitous instead of demonstrating it through storytelling. A lot of that blame can be made at the feet of the studio executives as well. It isn't hard to find their interviews with Disney executives holding a hard line to promote their own ideological bent wherever possible. The audience sitting in a theater seat couldn't make the journey across that gap because the filmmakers hadn't narrowed it enough. Theatergoers on the whole don't care about a studio executive or animation director's not so secret gay agenda.

SPEAKER_10 17:43

It's like I love Disney's content. I grew up watching, you know, all of the classics. They have been a huge, like informative part of my life. But at the same time, like I worked at small studios most of my career, and I'd heard, you know, you hear whispers. Like I'd heard things like, oh, you know, they won't let you show this and a Disney show. And I'm like, okay. So I was a little like sus when I started. But then my experience was halfly the opposite of what I had heard. On my little pocket of like, you know, from the family Disney TVA. Um the showrunners were super welcoming, Meredith Roberts, and like the our leadership over there has been so welcoming to like my like not a little secret gauge and so like I feel like I felt like it was, I mean, like, maybe it was that way in the past, and I guess like something must have happened in the last, like, like they were turning into the realm, they're going hard, and then all that like momentum that I felt like that sense of I don't have to be afraid to like let's have these two characters kiss, let's in the background or something. Like that was just whatever I could, just basically adding queerness to like the if you see anything queer, the show problem. But like I just was like, no one would stop me and no one was trying to stop me.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

Now, this is elemental from Disney's Pixar. It did fall short of already lowered expectations. The film just grossed to adjusted $29.5 million, which is the lowest opening for a Pixar film when adjusted for an inflation, and it did come as a reported $200 million to make and got another $100 million to market. Now, this disappointing opening, despite the movie getting a 75% positive critic score and a 92% positive audience score on tomatoes, and critics are flagging that this is Pick Summer's third disappointment in the room. Now, it's not just Pick Summer under pressure. Another massive brand, Warner Brothers DC Comics. The movie, the Dumbles and Commissar reported roughly $300 million between production and marketing costs, grossed some $55 million in its opening weekend debut, despite DC Comics DC Studios co-chief James Gunn saying that it is one of the greatest superhero movies ever made.

SPEAKER_03 20:06

And the question of why it took so long to say it out loud is itself part of the story. It's a story about institutional culture and how organizations protect themselves from hard truths until they can't anymore. The correction that's now underway, the quote from Pete Doctor, the adjustments studios are saying are needed, the different kinds of films that are getting greenlit. This correction is happening at the product level. It's not yet happening as far as anyone can tell at the philosophical level. Those are two completely different things, and confusing them is the central trap of this moment.

The Celebration Snare

SPEAKER_03 20:40

When the Pixar quote hit, the internet did what it always does with a story that fits a clean narrative. It spread fast and with commentary locked in before anyone had time to think. Conservative commentators treated it like a victory lap. The framing was simple and satisfying. Audiences pushed back, studios listened, and the era of message movies is over. Sanity is returning to Hollywood. And parts of that are true. I'm not going to pretend that the market hasn't sent a pretty strong ticket message. It has, visibly. But here's the trap inside the celebration. A financial correction is not a values correction. When a company loses enough money, it changes its product. It recalibrates its offering to match what the market will accept. That's how markets work and it's genuinely useful. But changing the product doesn't mean changing the philosophy. The deep assumptions about what a story is for, about what the filmmaker's job is and what the audience needs and deserves, is a much slower thing to move, and it tends to survive product corrections fairly intact. Those product errors will sit quietly and wait for the moment when pressure eases and the space opens back up. Think about it this way if a restaurant owner keeps losing customers because the food is always too intense or too far from what people are expecting when they look at the sign on the front, the chef eventually agrees to adjust the menu. That is a business decision. It's not a change in cooking philosophy. The moment the pressure lets up, the moment a new crowd comes in that seems receptive to the original vision, the menu drifts back, because the chef still believes in the food. The adjustment was strategic, not fundamental. Now apply that to Hollywood. Pete Doctor is a smart man. His quote is real and significant. It was probably not easy to say in print. But listen to what it is. We're making a movie, not therapy. That is product language. That is a business correction stated in craft terms. What I don't hear in it, and I've read this full interview carefully, is a fundamental rethinking of what storytelling is for, or a genuine examination of why institutional culture produced what it produced for a decade. I hear a man who looked at the numbers long enough that he couldn't look away anymore. That matters. But it's different from transformation. And then there's the cruise commercial. Now this commercial takes place on the open ocean on a Disney cruise, I guess. Then this older man is looking out the porthole window of his room, reminiscing his youth as a father. Taking his son on a midnight walk all over the ship because he can't sleep.

SPEAKER_10 23:46

Is that okay?

SPEAKER_03 24:06

Ready for the midnight walk again. That is a beautiful piece of advertising. I'm serious. There's something emotionally true in it. I get a little choked up because I love father-son stories. This commercial captures the way love looks at different stages of life, but never stops being love. The handing of a tradition from one generation to the next, someone who was once a young father and is now the old man watching his son become the father. And it pulls from a piece of music that is one of the most emotionally effective compositions in recent film history. It works. Actually, it works so well that I'm booking an Alaskan cruise for next year for myself and my son. And conservative commentators who had spent years, collectively hundreds of streaming hours, attacking Disney for its creative direction, shared that commercial immediately, widely. They called it beautiful, said Disney was finally riding the ship, a little tongue in cheek. But that is their way. They said this is what they'd been asking for for years. From one 90-second advertisement. Now, I'm not mocking the people who felt moved by that commercial. I mean, damn, I'm one of them. The commercial is moving. And the human instinct to want that to be the signal that the rot in the industry must be over, to want to be able to say, it worked, we can stop fighting, things are changing. I completely understand that. Perpetual opposition is exhausting. When something shows up that looks pretty close to what you've been asking for, getting a peek at it feels right. But here's the mechanism that just ran. A corporation produces a well-crafted emotional product. The critics applying pressure receive it positively and share it broadly. The narrative shifts from Disney is broken to Disney is healing. The pressure eases a little. And the question that nobody usually asks in the moment is if a single commercial shifted the narrative, what incentive does Disney now have to go further? The pressure wasn't about commercials, it was about films, about creative direction, about hiring pipelines and development culture and what kinds of stories get green lit at what budget levels. None of that got addressed in this 90-second cruise set to the theme of the movie up. But the conversation moved as if it did. Watch the film slate over the next three years. Watch who gets hired, watch and see what scripts get greenlit. This is where the real answer lives. A commercial at the Oscars is not the answer. It's a very well-produced test of whether the pressure can be released with something that costs far less than actually changing. Because the trap for the people celebrating right now is the same trap that it closes on movements every time they accept a symbol as a substitute for the thing itself. You mistake the gesture for the transformation. You receive the signal as confirmation that the battle is over and you've won. And then three years later you're looking at a new slate of films wondering how it happened again. And there's no clean answer because the moment of apparent victory felt so real.

The Story Design

SPEAKER_03 27:17

Okay, now we've established the problem. We've looked at the institutional dynamics, we've talked about why the celebration might be premature and what real correction would actually need to involve. Now I want to go somewhere deeper because the political conversation, well, it's real and worth having, is sitting on top of a more fundamental question, one that almost nobody in the current coverage is even asking. And if we don't answer it correctly, we're going to rebuild the machine on the same broken foundation, just with different but equally terrible storylines in the movies it makes. So here's the question. What is story for? Not what should it contain, not which values should show up in it, not which communities need to be represented and how. I mean, what is the actual purpose of story as human technology? What does it do that nothing else does? Why have human beings been telling stories since before they could write anything down? Because I think if we get that wrong, the correction's not going to hold. We'll swap the ideology without fixing the craft. And the audience is going to feel it too, maybe less acutely, maybe a little more slowly, but they'll feel it. Because audiences aren't primarily responding to politics. We are the audience, and we're responding to whether the story is real or not for us. Here's what I believe. And I want to nail this down before we get back to Hollywood, because nailing this down is the whole argument. Story is the primary way human beings transmit meaning across time. Not argument, not data, not even theology, not in the first instance. Story. Before we had writing and before schools existed, and before anything we could recognize as a kind of formal knowledge system existed, human beings sat in circles and told stories. Not because they were primitive and didn't know any better, because it worked. The stories encoded everything a community needed to survive and cohere, how to read the environment, who to trust, what courage looked like under pressure, the cost of betrayal, what death meant and what happened after you died. The narrative was the container for the wisdom, and the wisdom only traveled from one generation to the next if the story was compelling enough to be remembered and retold. This is not the same as entertainment in the modern sense. Story inherently has infrastructure and is load bearing. And when you compromise the craft in service of some other goal, you compromise the load-bearing capacity. The meaning stops traveling, the wisdom doesn't land. The audience receives something that looks and sounds like a story, it has a story structure, but it doesn't do what stories are designed to do. When you read the oldest texts in human civilization, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Torah, they're not treatises, they're not arguments, they're stories. Characters who want things desperately, characters who fail and try again and who face impossible choices and live or don't live with the consequences. The truth is embedded in the character's experience of the situation. It's not attached to the outside of the situation like a label. And then we get to Jesus. And I want to hang out here for a second, because this is where the biblical thread for this story lives, and I want to be clear that I'm not making a stretch. I'm pointing at the sharpest illustration of the principal concept of story that exists in human history. Jesus was the most effective communicator in recorded history. Whatever your theology, whatever your relationship to Christianity as a system, the communication effectiveness of Jesus of Nazareth is not seriously contested. Two thousand years later, over two billion people organized their lives around what he said and taught. That doesn't happen through bad communication. And the method he chose consistently, deliberately across all four gospels was story, specifically the parable. Not systematic theology or philosophical argument, not the kind of formal discourse the religious scholars of his day were trained in and expected. He told stories about farmers and seeds, about a son who took his inheritance early, wasted every cent of it and came home broke, about a man who got robbed and beaten on a road while people who should have helped walked past on the other side. About a woman who lost just one coin and tore her whole house apart until she found it, and then threw a party that probably cost more than the coin was worth. Small, specific human situation, and inside each one something that cracked open into something eternal. His disciples asked him why he taught this way. Why wrap everything in a story when you could just say the thing directly? He gave an answer I keep coming back to. He said, He who has ears, let him hear. That is not a passive statement, that is a design statement. The parable is specifically designed to not deliver the same thing to everyone who hears it. It creates conditions, it opens up a space, and the listener who comes in with openness finds the truth waiting inside the story. They're not imposed on from the outside, but discovered from within. The listener who comes defended encounters the surface of the story and doesn't go any further. He who has ears means the capacity to receive this already exists in you. The parable doesn't create that capacity. It activates what's already there. That's why argument can't do what story does. Argument hits the defensive mind from the front. The mind has an immune response to proposition it doesn't already agree with. It generates counterarguments, it looks for logical gaps and protects its prior beliefs. Story gets in through a different door. You're inside it before you realize you're being invited somewhere. You are the prodigal son in the far country. And the text in that story says he came to himself. And then something moves in you when you read that. Because you've been there. Maybe not that far in those exact circumstances, but in some room of your own history, you made a decision that cost you more than you expected. And you know exactly what it feels like to finally come to yourself. The story didn't create it, it found it because it was already there. That's what story is for. Listen to Greg Owen break down the concept of theme or story even further.

SPEAKER_04 33:23

So, what is a theme? In short, it's a set of ideas or messages or concepts that the movie is trying to explore. When done well, this central idea permeates the entire movie without being overly obvious, and that is the key. Sometimes a movie's theme may as well be its title because it's beating you over the head with it. Other times, the theme turns into a message, or we sometimes call it the message. And it's not an exploration of a theme from different angles, it's a straight up op-ed yelling its viewpoint at you and demanding that you accept it. Often, this is so much the main focus of the creator that they forget to weave in, you know, story or character or anything. Honestly, it's just that bludgeon. Don't worry, Darling is a prime example of this. It was determined to be this feminist rallying cry, but it forgot to make the movie make sense. And the theme doesn't have to be one you agree with, it's all about the execution. Lots of conservative guys enjoy the boys, even though it is exploring the negative sides of nationalism, religion, and masculinity. What's important is that it's a well-done show. A quality theme is usually, but not necessarily always, some kind of universal human experience or ideal. An excellent example of this is Shrek. Now look, I know DreamWorks has had some duds, but when they hit, they hit hard. Shrek explores a few themes, mostly around appearances and judgments, both internal and external. Sometimes they came right out and said it. Onions have layers. Ugres have layers. Onions have layers? You get it. Other times, they showed it to you with characters not being what they seem, or having to learn to accept themselves despite what others thought of them. The movie was a fun comedy first, and the exploration of the themes added depth. That's why this movie is a freaking classic.

SPEAKER_03 35:25

So Hollywood at its best understood this design intuitively. The greatest films in history don't tell you what to think. They build something real and put you inside it. The filmmaker's job is not to produce a conclusion in the audience, it's to create conditions so that the audience produces a conclusion in themselves. Think about the films that actually changed people's minds and hearts on hard questions. Not the ones that were designed to, but the ones that actually did. Philadelphia didn't lecture anyone about AIDS or gay rights. It put you in a courtroom with a dying man trying to keep his dignity and let you watch Tom Hanks dance alone to opera music in his apartment. And by the end of it, something in you had shifted. That argument alone could never have moved. You didn't form an argument for or against gay rights. You watched a man that you cared about because you saw that he was complex, like you. Schindler's list doesn't argue that the Holocaust was evil. It puts you in Krakow. It shows you a little girl in a red coat moving through a black and white world. And the conclusion arrives inside you, not from the film, but through it. The film was the vessel. You did the work. That is the design. That is what the parable does. It doesn't tell you what to conclude. It puts you somewhere real and trusts the human being sitting in that seat to meet it there. And here's what I want you to understand about why the last decade of Hollywood storytelling fumbled the ball so hard and so consistently. It wasn't primarily political pressure from the outside. I mean, that existed. It wasn't primarily market failure, although that absolutely played a role too. It was a philosophical shift in how filmmakers understood their relationship to the audience. When a filmmaker thinks the audience needs to be improved, when they think that the job of the story is to produce better people who hold better beliefs, the story becomes a means to an end. The characters become representatives rather than people. The plot becomes a delivery mechanism and stops being an exploration. Every design in the making of that film, from casting to dialogue to what the ending means, gets filtered through the question, does this produce the outcome we want in the audience according to our worldview? That question poisons the well. Because the moment you are optimized for someone else's predetermined outcome, you've stopped serving the audience and started using them. And the audience, even when they can't articulate it, can feel the difference between being served and being used. This isn't a new problem. You can find it in propaganda films from the 1930s and 1940s. You can find it in heavy-handed social issue films of the 1970s. You can find it anywhere artists have decided that their first obligation is to the cause rather than to the truth of the story. The politics change across eras. The structural failure is identical, and the audience response is always the same. They just stop going. The breakdown of the last decade wasn't just ideological. It was a failure of craft rooted in the failure of philosophy. Filmmakers stopped believing that the story was enough. They started believing that the story needed to deliver a specific outcome rather than create an experience. That broke the design of story. The parable became a tract. The experience became a lecture. The audience, they felt the difference. They didn't always know how to name it, but they felt it in the way that you feel it when someone is trying to perform sincerity rather than actually being sincere. The mechanism of the feeling is similar and the tells are the same. You're not watching a story. You're sitting in a brow beating session. And therapy, as it turns out, is only useful when you choose it, not when it's forced on

The Weir Witness

SPEAKER_03 39:06

you. Now I want to talk to you about Andy Weir. If you don't know his name, you've probably heard of his book that was turned into a really awesome movie, The Martian. He wrote it initially as a serialized story on his blog, chapter by chapter, because he was genuinely interested in the problem of what would actually happen if an astronaut got left behind on Mars and then had to figure out how to survive. Not because he had a message to deliver, because the problem was interesting to him. He wanted to know if it was solvable, so he started running the math, real math, actual orbital mechanics and plant biology and caloric calculations. He built a character around the problem, and the character revealed himself through how he handled it. The book got picked up. The Ridley Scott film came out in 2015. 228 million domestically, and over 630 million globally. Then in 2021, Weir published Project Hail Mary. And last weekend, seven days ago as I'm recording this, the film adaptation opened to 80.5 million domestically and 141 million globally. The biggest opening of 2026, biggest opening that Amazon MGM Studios has ever had. 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. It got an A on cinema score. And here's the stat that should make every studio executive stop what they're doing and read it twice. It's the second biggest opening for a non-franchise film in the last decade. The only one that topped it was Oppenheimer, and I'm not sure how much that counts because Oppenheimer is a dramatization of real life events. So even it is rooted in something already. Project Hail Mary is a story nobody has seen before about a scientist who wakes up alone on a spaceship. The premise is almost aggressively simple. Ryland Grace wakes up alone, light years from Earth, with no memory of how he got there or what he's supposed to be doing. He doesn't even remember himself. Two crewmates are dead, and he's in a medical pod. He has to piece together from his physical environment, from the equipment around him, from the memories that slowly return, who he is, where he is, what the mission is, and whether there's any possible chance of completing it. That's it. That's the setup. And Weir does the thing that most writers and most filmmakers in the current environment have forgotten how to do. He trusts the problem. He doesn't inject artificial emotional stakes. He doesn't manufacture a villain so the audience knows who to root against. He doesn't reach for a political dimension to make the story feel urgent. He just follows the problem honestly. A scientist uses science to figure out his situation. Andy Weir lets the character emerge through how he handles it. Grace is funny. He's scared. He's brilliant in specific ways and completely unprepared in others. He makes mistakes, then he catches himself making mistakes. He is a specific human being in an impossible situation, and you're with him for every step because the specificity is what makes him real.

SPEAKER_06 42:08

So you've said in previous interviews that your family has a great influence on the roles you pick. Was that an influence on choosing this role since it's a little more lightweight, kind of comedic?

SPEAKER_09 42:18

Yeah, I think I wanted to make a film that, you know, I think we look for films that we can bring our family to, that we can go to the theater to see and kind of recreate some of those experiences that I had as a kid. And I felt like I had an opportunity with this one to do that, you know. And I also felt like the optimism in this film was something that I wanted to share with my kids, this sense that that maybe the future isn't something to be feared, but but just to be figured out. And I think Andy Weir has a special ability to sort of create these epics that don't in the end of the day, they're not just they're not escapists, they're actually about reminding us of what we're capable of. So it felt like the at the heart of it there was like a really strong like message.

SPEAKER_03 43:09

They remind us of what we're capable of. That's not a political statement, it's a description of the human experience. He said we look for films that we can bring our families to. He doesn't mean kids movies aimed at children, but films that work across the whole human range. He said he felt like there was an opportunity with this story to recreate something that he had as a kid, going to the movies and feeling like the story was for everyone in the room. That's it. That's what story is. It's a story that's for everyone in the room. Not for a demographic or for a community that needs representation, not for the critical establishment, not for the algorithm, not for the award cycle, for everyone. For the person sitting next to you who has completely different life experiences than you do, and who is sitting in the same dark room having the same feeling about the same character. That's what we, the audience, Have been waiting for. And when it showed up, five million of us bought tickets in one weekend. I want to take a minute to talk about the book itself because I think it matters that this story existed on the page before it existed on the screen, and that it found a massive audience there first. The book, Project Hail Mary, sold millions of copies. It was on bestseller lists for months. And people who read it, and I've talked to a lot of them and read a lot of what they wrote about it, describe the experience of reading it in terms that are almost identical to what people are now saying about the film. They say they couldn't put it down. They say that they read it all in one sitting, or close to it. They say they cried at a moment that they didn't see coming. They say they wanted to immediately tell someone else about it. That is word of mouth and it's the oldest marketing mechanism in human history. It is the one form of marketing that money cannot directly buy. You can buy awareness, you can buy opening weekend numbers, at least partially through marketing spend. You can put your film on every bus and every billboard and every streaming algorithm, but you cannot buy the moment when someone puts down their phone and says to the person next to them, you have to read this. That moment happens when a story does something to the person that they didn't expect, when it reaches somewhere that they didn't know they were open to being reached. Andy Weir earned that moment. Not through a marketing campaign, not through a platform. He earned it the old way. By building a character who was real enough that the reader forgot that they were reading, and by following the problem honestly enough that the reader couldn't look away. I myself read that book, and when I heard that there was a movie coming, I was excited before I saw any marketing for it. I knew the story could be good on screen, and it was. Let me tell you the specific thing about Project Hail Mary that I think is the most important lesson for Hollywood, and I'm gonna be intentionally vague about the details because some of you haven't seen it yet, and I don't want to take that experience from you. There is a relationship at the center of this story, a friendship that develops between Grace and something that he never expected to encounter, and it is one of the most unlikely friendships in the history of science fiction. On paper, the premise of it sounds like it shouldn't work. The logical mind looks at it and says, that's absurd. How could that possibly land emotionally? But it works. It works so completely that grown adults have been getting emotional in theaters for over a week. The reason it works is the same reason everything in Weir's writing works. He builds it scene by scene, discovery by discovery, miscommunication by miscommunication and setback by setback, until by the time the weight of it lands on you, you've been earning it for two hours. You feel it because you got to build it with the characters on screen. The story gave you materials and you assembled the meaning. That's the design of storytelling, working exactly the way it's supposed to, and it's worth noting that there is nothing in the central relationship of Project Hail Mary that could have been mandated by a studio note. No diversity metric generated it, no ideological framework required it. It existed because the story required it, because the problem required it, because Ryland Grace's situation, followed honestly, produced the relationship naturally. The story didn't serve the relationship, the relationship served the story. And because of that, the relationship is real. That is the whole lesson here. And if Hollywood takes it, genuinely takes it, and not just the surface version of it, the next decade could look very different from the last one.

The Numbers Never Lie

SPEAKER_03 47:26

Let me build the full picture because the data tells a story that the current media coverage has not fully assembled in one place. Probably on purpose. Lightyear came out in 2022. It's a Pixar film built on a very well-established Toy Story franchise. It included a same-sex relationship storyline. By deadline's calculation, it lost Pixar over $100 million. $100 million on a property with built-in global brand recognition. Elio in 2025. Director based the story on his own experiences growing up, including a character that's written to be gay. Lowest opening weekend in Pixar's 40-year history. The film made $150 million worldwide against a hundred and fifty million production budget before marketing costs. In film accounting, that means you have to double your production budget just to approach break-even. And they didn't even get close. Win or Lose, the Disney Plus animated series. An episode featuring a transgender character was cut before the series launched. Disney's statement at the time was when it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline. Ugh, the bride. From Warner Bros. just this year, Maggie Gyllenhall's feminist reimagining of Bride of Frankenstein, starring Christian Bale, Annette Benning, and Penelope Cruz. $85 million budget, nearly $100 million in marketing, grossed $13.4 million worldwide. On track to lose Warner Brothers 90 million. In its third weekend, it dropped 87% and grossed 275,000. Not 275 million, 275,000. That is not a struggling film. That is a film that no longer exists as a theatrical experience. Now the other side of the ledger. The second highest grossing film in Pixar history. Hoppers, Pixar's newest original, with reportedly scaled back environmental messaging from earlier versions of the film, 242 million globally through three weeks. The studio's first original hit since Coco in 2017. Now this movie still has a lot of problems, but it was course-corrected enough to make money back for Pixar. Now, Project Hail Mary, 141 million opening weekend, 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and A on Cinema Score, one of only three non-franchise films in a decade to open above 80 million domestically. Premium formats on IMAX and Dolby made up 56% of the weekend's total gross, which means people didn't just go to see it, they chose to spend more money to experience it on the biggest screen possible.

SPEAKER_09 50:51

I'm not an astronaut. If you don't go, you die.

SPEAKER_02 50:55

We're the rest of us. Film's success upends the prevailing theory that the multiplex has become the dominion of sequels, thels, and endless franchise installments. Case in point, Project Hail Mary joins Oppenheimer in becoming only the second non-sequel or non-franchise installment of the past decade to open to $80 million or more domestically. Gosling's top-grossing film of all time, of course, is Barbie, but Project Hail Mary is now his biggest domestic opening featuring the actor in a leading role not adjusted for inflation.

SPEAKER_09 51:25

So I met an alien.

SPEAKER_08 51:27

He's kind of growing on me. At least he's not growing in me, you know, which was a concern for a little while.

SPEAKER_02 51:31

Project Hail Mary was looking at a debut in the $50 to $60 million range heading into the weekend, but quickly went into hyperdrive when both critics and audiences embraced the warm-hearted action-adventure film.

SPEAKER_03 51:43

The market is not subtle and it's not partisan. The market is five million people deciding in one weekend that this specific story was worth leaving their houses for. Worth paying a premium to see it as large as possible. That is an audience that has been hungry, that has been waiting. Now here's the question the celebration is not asking. Is the lesson in the storytelling being learned correctly? Because there are two possible lessons you can glean from this data. Lesson one, message movies don't make money, so we should stop making message movies. Or lesson two, stories that respect the audience and trust the craft will always find an audience. The autobiographical insularity and the ideological delivery system dressed up as entertainment that we've been making is a violation of craft that the audience could feel. Does that make sense? Now, lesson one produces studios that make the same kinds of movies with different politics. Lesson two produces something that might actually last. Lesson one is a product adjustment, and lesson two is a philosophy. I'm not yet convinced that Hollywood knows the difference, and I'll be honest, even though lesson two is the path towards more authenticity in the movie theater, I would take either option over what we've had for the last decade.

The Pipeline Problem

SPEAKER_03 52:57

Let me tell you how a story gets made. By the time a film arrives in theaters, it has passed through somewhere between 50 and 200 people whose job it was to shape it. The writer, the development executives, the studio executives, the producers, the director, the notes process, the test screenings, the marketing team, the editing decisions. Each of those people brings a set of assumptions about what a story is for and what it should contain and what the audience needs. If those 50 to 200 people all share the same foundational worldview, which in the current structure of the major studios they largely do, the story they produce reflects that worldview whether they intend for it to or not. Not because anyone is running a coordinated agenda, because the worldview is invisible to itself. Don't get me wrong, they are in fact running a coordinated agenda, but it's a lot easier to run an agenda if you think most people see the world the same way you do. You make assumptions, and those assumptions shape everything downstream. This is why the box office signal by itself isn't enough to produce genuine creative change. The market tells studios what not to make. It doesn't tell them how to think differently about why they made it. The pipeline of the film schools, the development system, the intern to executive track, and the social world around the industry still produces the same kind of people with the same kinds of assumptions. And until the pipeline changes, the product will keep reverting to the same baseline in the moment the market pressure lets up. Think about where Andy Weir came from. He's a computer programmer. He wrote The Martian on his blog because he was genuinely curious about a problem. He wasn't coming out of a film school. He wasn't shaped by the development culture that produced Lightyear in Elio. He was a guy who loved science and loved problem solving and loved story, and he started writing because the problem was interesting to him. The story worked because he was following the problem, not a message, not a mandate, not a demographic target, not a committee's notes, a problem. Project Hail Mary came from the same place. Weir started with a scientific question. What if something were consuming the sun's energy? What would that actually mean? How would we know? And what will we do? Then he built a character who had to answer those questions. The character determined the story. The story determined the meaning, not the other way around. Now this is the opposite of how most studio films get developed right now. In the current system, you frequently start with the conclusion, a statement about the world that you want to make, and then you construct a story that delivers it. Characters get cast to embody the message. The plot gets designed to produce the intended emotional and ideological outcome. And the audience can feel it, even if they can't articulate why. The story doesn't breathe. The characters don't surprise you. Everything is moving towards a predetermined endpoint, and somewhere in the body, the audience knows they're being conducted rather than invited. Netflix's Damsel made it clear that the Knight in Shining Armor would not be saving the damsel in distress. Damsel is a mediocre movie that had options to be better, but opted to spell out its purpose for the audience, and that hurt its potential.

SPEAKER_04 56:09

A recent example of poor pace due to lack of theme is Netflix's Damsel. This one has been torn to ribbons online, and deservedly so. To shreds, you say. This is a great negative example of a movie that is pure plot and nothing else. Its number one goal was to be edgy and subvert tropes. Oh, what's that? Damsels usually get rescued? Ha! Not in this one!

SPEAKER_00 56:34

There are many stories of chivalry where the heroic knight saves the damsel in distress. This is not one of them.

SPEAKER_04 56:46

That is actually how the movie opens. I feel like you wouldn't believe me if I didn't play it for you. I mean, I wouldn't have believed it. Damsel attempts to be so clever, and we're left with an empty husk of a movie with nothing for us, the audience, to connect with. Little in the movie makes much sense. And at one point, the main character needs to know something to move the plot, so she just has a vision and gets the information. They tried to play it like she was putting together some pieces, but it was an info dump vision, okay? Which seems to be a trend right now. If I had a nickel for every plot device info dump vision I'd seen in a movie this year, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right? The biggest issue with that movie was the need for subverting tropes that have already been subverted so much that at this point a remake of Princess Bride would feel like a fresh original masterpiece. See the earlier example of Shrek if you want clever subversion.

SPEAKER_03 57:44

The great irony is that the films that have actually changed minds and moved people on genuinely hard questions were almost never the ones that were designed for that purpose. These kinds of films did what the message movies were trying to do almost on accident. They were films that started with a character in a real situation and let the truth emerge from it. You don't argue your way into someone's empathy. You put them inside an experience and let the empathy arrive on its own. That's the mechanism, and it's only available when the story is real enough to get in. Let's talk about what a genuine pipeline change would actually require, because the diagnosis phase is where the conversation usually stops and doesn't go all the way to the prescription. The film schools that feed the major studios are not going to change their curriculum because Project Hail Mary had a good opening weekend. The hiring culture that is built up over 30 years of geographic and ideological concentration is not going to diversify because Elio underperformed. The development system that rewards certain kinds of projects is not going to organize itself because Pete Doctor said something honest in a newspaper. These things change slowly. They change generationally. They change when the people coming through the bottom of the pipeline are different from the people who shaped the current culture, either in background or in perspective or in what they understand that craft requires. And right now, the pipeline is still producing the same people with the same assumptions. The institutional correction hasn't reached that level yet, and if it ever does, it won't be visible for five to ten years minimum. So what should you actually watch for as a person paying attention to this? Here are three concrete signals. One, original stories, not IP adaptations, not sequels, not franchise extensions. Original stories that didn't exist before someone decided to tell them, and ones that are made with a meaningful studio budget. The willingness to bet real money on a story that has no prior audience is the clearest signal of institutional confidence and craft over safety. Project Hail Mary cost $200 million to make. Amazon MGM bet $200 million on a story nobody had seen before based on the quality of the source material and the quality of the filmmakers. That is a signal. Watch for more of those bets or watch for the retreat back to sequel and franchise safety. The pattern of green lighting decisions will tell you more than any executive's quote. 2. The notes. The development process at major studios involves multiple rounds of notes, feedback from executives, producers, and test audiences that shape every film before it reaches the screen. Those notes are not public, you'll never see them. But you can read their footprints in the finished film. A film that has been through a healthy notes process feels cohesive. The characters' choices feel true to who they are, and the story follows internal logic. The emotional moments land where they should because they were built properly. A film that has been overnoted, one that has been shaped by too many competing mandates, feels like it's been stitched together. You can feel the seams. The character does something in Act Two that contradicts who they are in Act One, not because the story required it, but because a studio executive required it. Learn to read that. It tells you what the process is. Three, what happens to the filmmakers who succeed? When Project Hail Mary does its full theatrical run and when the final numbers come in, watch what happens to Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Watch what projects they get offered. Watch whether the industry treats their success as evidence that this approach to storytelling works and gives them the room to do it again, or whether it treats it as a lucky anomaly and pushes them back towards safer franchise territory. The industry's response to its own successes tells you as much as its response to its failures. What happens when a studio figures this out, if they ever figure this out, is the genuinely open question of the next five years. The correct answer is available. It was demonstrated last weekend at global scale. The question is whether the people in the rooms where decisions get made can take that lesson at the level it's actually operating, or whether they're going to take it at the surface and produce a new wave of films that have different politics but a same broken relationship to craft. That's the pipeline problem. And a box office loss doesn't fix it. A box office win points at what's possible, but the path between that win and a genuine creative recovery runs directly through the culture inside the building.

The Parable Standard

SPEAKER_03 1:02:08

I want to come back to Luke 15, because there's something in it for this specific moment. A father has two sons. The younger one asks for his inheritance early, takes everything, goes to a distant country, and then blows it all. He ends up broke and feeding pigs. He is so hungry that the pig food looks appealing, literally slop. And in that moment at the absolute bottom, the text says he came to himself. Not he was convicted of his wrongdoing, not he felt guilty, not he formulated a plan, he came to himself. He reconnected with who he actually was. He remembered his father's house. He remembered that even the servants there had enough to eat. And he got up and he started walking home. That moment he came to himself is the most human thing in the parable. And it almost never gets the spotlight in a sermon because it's sandwiched between the more dramatic moments of the fall and the return. But that line is the hinge, it's where the story turns, and it doesn't happen because someone gave him a good argument. It happens because he got quiet enough to hear himself. When the father in that story sees his son returning, he runs down the road to meet him. He doesn't wait for the apology. He doesn't make him complete the speech he'd rehearsed. He sees him while he's still a great way off, and he runs, throws a robe around him, calls for a feast. The father doesn't run down the road because he wants to make a theological statement about grace. He runs because his son is coming home and he loves him. The action reveals the truth. The truth doesn't interrupt the action to explain itself. That is the standard, and it is a high one. Every great film that has ever done what films are supposed to do has met some version of that standard. The character doesn't demonstrate the theme. The character lives, and the theme arrives through watching them live. The filmmaker serves the story. The story serves the character. The character serves the audience, and the audience, if the chain holds, receives something that was already true about their own life, made visible by the story in a way that they couldn't have accessed on their own. That's what Project Hail Mary does. Ryland Grace doesn't tell you who he is. He shows you by watching what he does when he's alone in space, with no one watching and with everything at stake. His character is not constructed to illustrate a point. His character is the point. And everything that makes you care about him, his style of humor, his personal fears, and his specific way of approaching an impossible problem, emerges from watching him handle the situation. The story trusts the situation and the situation reveals the person. The recovery Hollywood needs, the genuine version of it, not the product adjustment version, requires something that's harder to mandate than a box office target and harder to measure than a diversity metric. It requires humility. The filmmaker's job is to build something real enough, specific enough, true enough, that the audience discovers something in it that they didn't know that they were looking for. Love for baseball. Trusting in something you don't understand. Hollywood forgot what this scene does from Field of Dreams. It speaks to all the sons and dads out there that wish for another moment with their fathers. Another moment with their sons. It's important. It allows those people to dip into the emotion that they can't allow all the time. A second chance to have a catch with dad. Those things cannot be produced by notes. It cannot be required by a mandate. It's a posture. It's the difference between a filmmaker who respects the audience and a filmmaker who wants to improve them. And it's available right now in this market with this audience. Project Hail Mary is evidence that it's available. The audience has not become difficult or fragmented or unreachable. They never were. They were waiting. And they showed up the moment the story showed up for them. There's a line from Pete Doctor's full interview that I think about because it's the most honest thing in it, and it comes near the end. He's talking about what he hopes Pixar becomes, and he says, if we're just gonna crank out crap, let's shut the doors. I'd rather die trying to make something that we genuinely believe in. And I believe him. I think that that impulse, the desire to make something real, something worth making, is still in a lot of people inside that building. It's in a lot of people throughout the industry. It's the reason most of them got into this work in the first place. The question is whether that impulse can find its way back to craft, whether the genuine desire to make something meaningful can reconnect with the discipline that meaningful storytelling actually requires. The discipline of serving the story rather than using it, of building the character rather than announcing them, of trusting the audience rather than correcting them. That reconnection is not guaranteed. It doesn't happen automatically when the market sends a signal. It happens when the people in the building remember what their job is, when they remember that the parable doesn't explain itself, when they remember that the father runs down the road not to make a statement, but because his son is coming home. When they remember that the story is not the delivery mechanism for the meaning, the story is the meaning, and the craft is what makes it true enough to land.

SPEAKER_07 1:08:35

utterly excellent. Utterly excellent, emotional as hell, beautiful, touching, uh moving, um hopeful. Uh excellent direction from Lord Miller makes me question even more how Kathleen Kennedy or why Kathleen Kennedy moved him off so low. They just expertly direct this movie. It's two hours and thirty-six minutes, and it flies by. Ryan Gosling is just built to lead movies like this. He's just such a perfect lead for this. And yeah, you you'll definitely feel Shades of the Martian when you watch this movie, because obviously it's the same author. But the way they work his character of Grace with the character of Rocky, the alien there. I mean, you're just so emotionally caught up in their story, there's action, there's um really smart scientific stuff going on through Alpha. They make it easily consumable for those of us who are not big science people. Uh the cinematography, the score, the emotional beats, and the way they tell the story. I mean, just all of it was just utterly excellent. Like, really, I have no notes and no criticisms. Uh and I just found myself completely caught up in this. I've never read the book and uh I bought the book months ago, so I'm gonna read it now for the weekend. But this is one I highly, highly recommend. I understand what everyone's been saying. This is uh a film that uh will be nominated for Best Picture. It certainly feels like the best film of the year so far because we're in March, and uh I think it'll be there uh in those top ten selections there by the time the year is over. So highly recommended. Go see it. Let me know what you thought about it down in the comment section below. Thanks so much for watching this reaction video and bring some tissues. And I'll talk to you next time with another brand new reaction video here on the channel.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:22

That was John Roka, and he said he had to sit down to catch up with himself in order to give his thoughts on Project Hail Mary. He said it was expertly directed, beautiful, hopeful, emotional. John says he was caught up in it. That's the best marketing a film can get. John just laid out a human response to being respected, to being taken somewhere real, to being trusted with a story rather than aimed at with a message. People don't recommend things that they feel good about in a vague sense. They recommend things that matter and did something to them, something that they want the people they love to also experience. That is what a story is supposed to produce. The audience was never broken, the audience was never wrong. The audience was always ready to show up for something that showed up for them.

Closing: The Design Holds

SPEAKER_03 1:11:09

Proverbs 27-19 says as water reflects the face, so one's life reflects the heart. The story is a kind of water. It reflects what's in the heart of the person telling it. And for the past decade, what got reflected back at audiences from a significant portion of the entertainment industry was not love for the audience. It was this off-putting thought that the audience, you and me, we needed to be improved. They needed to correct us, to conduct us towards better conclusions that they had decided for us. And we, the audience, without reading a single piece of media criticism, without knowing anything about DEI mandates or studio development culture or the institutional dynamics we've been describing for the last hour, felt the difference. We can feel the difference between a story that loves us and a story that wants to fix us. And we've been voting with our absence, quietly, consistently, for years, in numbers the industry couldn't ignore forever. Now a movie opened about a scientist alone in space, and it opened to a hundred and forty-one million in a single weekend, and a Pixar executive admitted on the record in a major newspaper that his studio was making therapy instead of movies. Those two things happening in the same couple of weeks are not a coincidence. They're the market saying, in the only language markets speak, that the audience was never the problem. But the trap is still active. The trap right now is in the celebration. The trap is declaring victory because two data points moved in the correct direction. The trap is accepting a product correction as values transformation. The trap is missing the structural problem, the pipeline, the culture, the philosophy inside the building. Because the surface got addressed loudly enough to release the pressure. I'm asking you to stay skeptical in the moment when skepticism is least comfortable. At the moment when the news is good, uh when the quote landed and the commercial aired and the movie opened big and it feels like the thing that you've been arguing for is finally happening. I'm asking you to look at the structure underneath the signal before you let the signal replace the need for the structure to actually change. Don't be cynical, be skeptical. That's hard. It's much more satisfying to say, we won and move on. And maybe you're right. Maybe this is the moment that causes long-term change. Maybe the Pete Doctor quote represents a genuine reckoning inside Pixar's culture, and not just a public relations response to unavoidable financial reality. Maybe Project Hail Mary is the beginning of a sustained creative recovery and not just simply a great movie. Maybe the commercial at the Oscars is the first note of a different song and not a pressure release valve. And I genuinely hope so. I'm not rooting for Hollywood to fail. I'm rooting for good stories. I want theaters full of people forgetting where they are. I want my kids to have films that do to them what Toy Story did to me. I want the design to work the way it's supposed to. But wanting it doesn't make it true. And the only way to know whether it's true is to watch the structure, the pipeline, the green lighting decisions, the culture inside the buildings where stories get made. Watch those with clear eyes and without the pressure of wanting the story to be over. The deeper issue is less about politics. It's not even primarily about Hollywood. It's about what story is for and whether the people making stories understand their job. The job is not to improve the audience. The job is to serve them, to build something so specific and true and real that the audience finds themselves inside it. And in finding themselves inside it, finds something they didn't know they were looking for. Jesus told parables because truth embedded in story reaches places argument will never reach. Not because parables are a clever delivery mechanism, but because that is how human beings are designed to receive truth through experience, through recognition. Through the moment when you see yourself in a chapter and realize the story already knew something about you before you did. That's what Project Hail Mary did to five million people this last weekend. That's what the best of Pixar did in the decade that made them untouchable. Not ideology, not therapy, not a mandate or a metric or a studio note. A story, a real one, for everyone in the room. The audience never stopped wanting it. The question is whether Hollywood is willing to do the work of becoming worthy of it again. Not the product work, but the philosophical work, the humility work, the remembering what your job actually is work. That work is harder than adjusting a menu. And it starts in the same place that every real recovery starts. Coming to yourself.

SPEAKER_09 1:15:53

I can't even moonwalk.