Writing villains is supposed to be hard. No grand, world-dominating plan ever really makes sense in a story. Soon after "The Dark Knight" came out, David Goyer, its writer, told me the Joker had been a real relief. "Blessedly, because of who the Joker is, we just said, 'fuck the plan. We don't have to do it. He's the Joker. He's the anti-plan,'" Goyer said. "Trying to take over the world is such an impossible, stupid idea — as if anyone could do it with a single act, you know?"

Yet now very real people seem to try just that, on the regular. Except if you believe Hollywood, they're not insane clowns. They're billionaire tech bros. It's starting to seem like every movie and TV bad guy is a douchebag who got rich making stuff that works on your phone. Mark Zuckerberg in "The Social Reckoning," Elon Musk in "Musk," Elizabeth Holmes in "You Can See Everything," Sam Altman in the upcoming "Artificial," Sam Bankman-Fried in "The Altruists." In these stories, at varying levels of fictionality, the evil villains' megalomaniacal plans mostly make sense. Some of them even got away with it. America is eagerly consuming stories about them. "You Can See Everything" grossed $15 million on opening in just 855 theaters, twice what its producers expected.

The more interesting question is why these founders are our demons, all of a sudden. Chalk it up to the reality of the "techlash," the society-wide revulsion to Big Tech's ubiquity and power. But if you really want to understand the extent to which everyone thinks Silicon Valley is so uncanny these days, you should be watching a CBS legal procedural called "Cupertino." It's a sharp look at tech and its discontents — but more than that, it clarifies how widely the techlash is spreading.

"Cupertino" comes from the TV-making couple Michelle and Robert King, best known for the "The Good Wife" and "The Good Fight." In their new show, a slick lawyer played by Mike Colter gets iced out of the tech company he cofounded at the same time as a more junior attorney also gets ousted. The two join their wrongful-termination lawsuits against the company, eke out a big settlement, and start a firm to represent "little guys" against Silicon Valley giants. In one plotline, a drone maker tries to blame a mid-level coder for one of its bots falling out of formation during a show and killing a man — it turns out the company had changed batteries to accommodate a prospective military contract. In another, a mysterious whistleblower client asks for help to force an Anthropic-like company to put guardrails around its most powerful AI. Then the whistleblower claims to in fact be the AI.

It's all in good fun. The actors are beautiful. They banter well. Colter wears the hell out of a suit. Busy Philipps plays a Mackenzie Scott-like benefactor of the new law firm — if Scott used her incredible wealth to become a hardcore partier.

A CBS show like "Cupertino" picks bad guys that millions of people can easily recognize as deserving of comeuppance. It picked the overlords of Silicon Valley.

But thematically, there's depth. That Colter is the only Black person for miles does not go unremarked. His new partner Olivia Siffre (pronounced "cypher"), played by Rachel Keller, is a devout, cross-wearing conservative from the Midwest, an alumna of Liberty University. Their closest allies don't come from the ranks of coders, marketing, or venture capital but are instead service workers, tradespeople, and the waitstaff from a nearby TGI Fridays. (Alas, a fiction — there are no TGI Fridayses in the Valley.)

So see that class rage for what it is. The fantasy here is that the middle-American proletariat gets to stick it to bespoke-suited, arrogant C-level types and unkempt, geniuser-than-thou sex pests. Because for the last few years, those people have had all the power. "They always have a friendly audience, an accommodating interviewer who won't ask them anything controversial. And then they get into territory where the price is much higher," Robert King said in a recent interview. "They reveal who they really are: robotic, inhuman nerds who never got laid in high school and are now kind of crazy with power, self-importance, and a sense of entitlement."

The point is, the "little guys" fighting this good fight seem like they're supposed to be proxies for the viewer. "Cupertino" is a CBS procedural, the genre of shows like "NCIS" and its offspring — things that no one watches, except for 10 million people every week. That's a lot. CBS typically has the largest primetime viewership of any network, and the oldest — like, people in their 70s. It's all well and good for young coastal sophisticates to post about Elizabeth Holmes' inability to grasp the Who's-on-First routine, but "Cupertino" is aimed at America's parents and grandparents. And apparently they are excited to see the people who make their phones portrayed as the wealthy engines of every inconvenience — sources of half a billion dollars to Republicans only, builders of data centers, creators of chatbots that drive kids to death by suicide, purveyors of screens that watch you back. "Cupertino" debuted to rapturous reviews and more than 3 million viewers, beating "Grey's Anatomy" in its time slot.

A show like "Cupertino" is meant to have a low barrier to entry; it picks bad guys that millions of people can easily recognize as deserving of comeuppance. It picked the overlords of Silicon Valley.

Not so long ago it would've seemed preposterous to give a scrawny, socially awkward, brainy little guy the job of Big Bad. They're the assistant, or the butt of a particular kind of joke, like the spectrum-y heroes of the wildly popular "Big Bang Theory" — Klingon-speaking, physics-doing, Green Lantern oath-knowing clods. Still, I can think of examples of "bad guy, subtype: tech nerd" going back to the early days of science fiction. Mad scientists like Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll, or various HP Lovecraft antiheroes, probably count. So too might the arrogant cyberneticist in Robert Heinlein's "Waldo."

A rough analog in the mid 20^th century might be the rogue industrialist. After all, James Bond villains have often been tech-bro adjacent. Karl Stromberg in "The Spy Who Loved Me" wants to build independent ocean settlements; he's basically a seasteader. Hugo Drax in "Moonraker" is a eugenics-obsessed CEO who wants to build space stations, which sounds familiar. Max Zorin, played by Christopher Walken in "A View to a Kill," is an "industrialist" and the product of Nazi genetic experiments. But his megalomaniacal plan is to use a California natural disaster to gain a monopoly on silicon computer chips. That's just Jensen Huang on any given Tuesday.

The weirdest new phenomenon here is how personal it all is. Evil technology oligopolies have been representatives of oppressive capitalism in Hollywood for decades — but they were faceless. The anonymity was part of the terror. Think of the company that orders Bruce Dern to destroy the last forest in his spaceship biodome in "Silent Running," the Umbrella Corporation in "Resident Evil," or Cyberdyne Systems, creator of Skynet in the Terminator movies.

More recently, film and television have started identifying not just faceless corporations but specific tech-coded people as their worst-of-the-worst. And not just any people, but people geofenced into Silicon Valley: "Glass Onion," "Don't Look Up," "Ex Machina," "Devs," "Super Pumped" (fictionalized Uber), "WeCrashed" (fictionalized WeWork), "The Playlist" (fictionalized Spotify), and "The Dropout" (fictionalized Theranos), "Mythic Quest" — the list goes on.

Actually, Cyberdyne's a good example of one important way these depictions have changed; in 1984's "The Terminator," Cyberdyne is a Los Angeles-area heavy-industry firm. In 2015, "Terminator Genisys" moved Cyberdyne to a gleaming tech campus explicitly modeled on the headquarters of Oracle. It's an inside joke, though not the ha-ha kind. The movie's producers included Megan and David Ellison, children of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. David now owns the merged studios of Warner Bros. and Paramount, and he just got a billion-dollar investment from Elon Musk. The new company, Skydance, includes in its holdings … CBS.

Christopher Walken's Bond villain has a megalomaniacal plan is to use a California natural disaster to gain a monopoly on silicon computer chips. That's just Jensen Huang on any given Tuesday.

"A sequence of Hollywood contemporary science-fiction movies identifies Silicon Valley capitalists as a new type of villain," write Northumbria University film studies scholars Joe Street and Russ Hunter in a 2024 paper. These new movies critique tech, they say, using an approach "in the grand tradition of cinematic science fiction touchstones such as the Cold War alien invasion films that allegorized fears of Communism in 1950s America."

In other words, movies about time-travelling killer robots and dead-eyed billionaires aren't so different, after all. Horror is about shared anxieties. Old-school mad scientists posed a threat because they dared to do experiments that contravened the laws of nature; they were evil for love of the game. The Silicon Valley bad guys are worse, because they do it for profit. "When presented with an innovation," Street and Hunter write, "the prime movers in these corporations think not of moral or ethical concerns and crucially not of the material impact of what they are doing — but only of the innovation's potential for financial gain."

Is Hollywood's techlash actually on the rise? The schlemiels of "Silicon Valley" premiered in 2014. I have tech-bro-villain articles in my files going back to 2022 at least. And the business world has always been fodder for stories filtered through the anxieties of the time—what was Ebenezer Scrooge if not a capitalist oppressor?

Mapping the full arc of technology-associated villains would be, in the words of Ted Underwood, "hard to code." Underwood's an English and information science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, researching ways to identify literary trends across time, in big canons. "In addition to tracing the history of villains, you'd have to think how often these social types appear as heroes," he says. For every Max Zorin there's a Tony Stark. Ethan Hunt's nobody without tech aces Luther and Benji. "Star Trek" doesn't trek without Scotty, or Chief O'Brien. Every movie heist is basically a hack. And let me just say unto you: "MacGyver." "One hypothesis would be that what we're feeling right now with evil tech bro villains is just that the counterbalancing examples have dropped out," Underwood says.

Clearly, though, tech billionaires and their hangers on have actively tried to make themselves into main characters. Some of them seem to think they're the only real consciousnesses in a simulation, a virtual world populated with non-player characters like you and me. At minimum they evince a belief that they possess a greater depth of perception and knowledge. As the architect and tech historian Fred Scharmen once wrote, "for this particular kind of person, wealthy and powerful or not, intelligence comes paired with a certain kind of malignance. The Evil Nerd is sharp, and also mean, their big brains are oriented towards anger and destructiveness." The Thiels, Altmans, Musks, and Karps of the world turn what had been nerdy weakness into nerdy strength. They go on friendly podcasts and show up in pictures taken with presidents. We don't have to imagine them delivering what the screenwriter John Rogers, creator of the anticapitalist TV show "Leverage," calls the Evil Speech of Evil. They monologue at tech conferences! These guys embody their ideologies; l'enterprise, c'est moi.

And what happens if that kind of behavior gets depicted, week in and week out, on a popular legal procedural TV show? Even if that show airs on a network owned by one of those "evil nerds"? Hard to say. Maybe it'll be enough to turn some people into the Joker.

• Some of the most hyped films of 2026 are based on blockbuster novels.
• You still have a few weeks to read "Dune Messiah" before "Dune: Part Three."
• There are a couple of holiday books getting adapted, too.

Any booklover knows that news of an adaptation can be complicated: Can we trust the directors, screenwriters, and actors to bring our favorite stories to life?

This year's movie slate is filled with books that are near and dear to thousands of readers, including classics that are decades (or centuries) old, like "Pride and Prejudice, "A Christmas Carol," and "Dune Messiah."

There are also some new classics set to be adapted this year, including "Klara and the Sun" and "Sunrise on the Reaping."

We've compiled a list of 13 must-read books that you should crack open before they're adapted this year.

'Whalefall'

Release date: October 16 in theaters

Daniel Kraus published "Whalefall" in 2023. It's a pretty self-contained, if wild, story: What would happen if you got swallowed by a whale? And not in a biblical, Jonah sense — in a literal, swallowed-while-scuba-diving sense.

The film stars Austin Abrams as Jay (get it? J as in Jonah?) and Josh Brolin as Mitt, Jay's deceased father, from whom he was estranged. That's the whole reason he dives in the first place; he's diving to find his father's remains.

'Wildwood'

Release date: October 23 in theaters

Stop-motion studio LAIKA's latest film, "Wildwood," is based on the 2011 novel of the same name, written by Colin Meloy and illustrated by Carson Ellis.

Both the film and the book follow Prue, a teenager, whose baby brother, Mac, is stolen by a pack of birds and taken into a mystical forest. She, along with her classmate Curtis, ventures into the woods to rescue Mac and perhaps save this magical land.

Prue is voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee and Curtis is voiced by Jacob Tremblay. Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Awkwafina, Jake Johnson, Angela Bassett, Charlie Day, and Amandla Stenberg also star.

'Klara and the Sun'

Release date: October 23 in theaters

Kazuo Ishiguro's 2021 novel "Klara and the Sun" was longlisted for the Booker Prize upon its publication.

The book takes place in a not-too-distant dystopian future where rich children can be gifted "Artificial Friends" to help them socialize, since now all schooling is done at home, online. Klara, the narrator, is purchased for a sick girl named Josie.

In the film, which was cowritten and directed by Taika Waititi, Klara will be played by Jenna Ortega, Josie will be played by Mia Tharia, and Josie's mom, Chrissie, will be played by Amy Adams.

'The Good Daughter'

Release date: November 12 on Peacock

Karin Slaughter's "The Good Daughter" is a bestselling thriller that was published in 2017.

It follows two sisters, Charlotte and Samantha, whose lives were shattered as kids when their mother was murdered and their father was traumatized. Now, as adults, Charlotte has followed in her dad's footsteps and tried to be the perfect daughter. Samantha chose to deal with her grief in a, shall we say, different way.

In the Peacock series, Rose Byrne plays Samantha and Meghann Fahy plays Charlotte.

'Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist'

Release date: November 13 on Apple TV+

Director Siân Heder's follow-up to best picture winner "CODA" is "Being Heumann," a biopic about Judith Heumann, who is known as the "Mother of the Disability Rights Movement." It's based on her 2020 memoir of the same name.

The film stars Ruth Madeley as Judith, Mark Ruffalo as United States Health and Human Services Secretary Joseph A. Califano Jr., and Dylan O'Brien as a reporter who covers Judith's protests.

'Victorian Psycho'

Release date: November 13 in theaters

"Victorian Psycho" was written by Virginia Feito and published in 2025.

The story follows Winifred Notty, a governess sent to Ensor House (a gothic dream), who seems more like Patrick Bateman than Maria von Trapp.

Maika Monroe will play Winifred.

'A Christmas Carol'

Release date: November 13 in theaters

Yet another adaptation of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," originally published in 1843, is hitting theaters this year.

This time it's called "Ebenezer" and stars Johnny Depp as Scrooge. He'll be joined by Rupert Grint as Bob Cratchit, Scrooge's long-suffering employee, Andrea Riseborough as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Tramell Tillman as the Ghost of Christmas Present, Ian McKellen as Scrooge's dead business partner Marley, Sam Claflin as Scrooge's nephew Fred, and Daisy Ridley as Fred's wife Clara.

This version of the story will be helmed by director Ti West, so it might be a more horror-forward version of the classic.

'The Bodyguard'

Release date: November 18 on Netflix

Netflix first announced that Katherine Center's novel "The Bodyguard," published in 2022, will be adapted for the streamer in September 2025.

The story follows Jack Stapleton, a famous actor with a stalker, who hires bodyguard Hannah Brooks to protect him. But since he doesn't want to worry his sick mother, the two instead pretend to date.

The catch with this adaptation? Since there's already a quite famous film called "The Bodyguard," Netflix, along with stars Leighton Meester (Hannah) and Jared Padalecki (Jack), asked fans to come up with a new name for the film, and they landed on "Guarding Stars."

'Sunrise on the Reaping'

Release date: November 20 in theaters

For years, fans begged "Hunger Games" author Suzanne Collins to tell the story of Haymitch Abernathy's games. In March 2025, she obliged, publishing "Sunrise on the Reaping," a "Hunger Games" prequel that takes place 24 years before the first novel.

It tells the story of the 25th Hunger Games, which Haymitch, the future tribute mentor for District 12, won. As with all "Hunger Games" books, it's devastating.

"The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping" boasts an all-star cast of Mckenna Grace, Jesse Plemons, Ralph Fiennes, Glenn Close, Kieran Culkin, Elle Fanning, Billy Porter, Maya Hawke, Lili Taylor, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Whitney Peak, and newcomer Joseph Zada as Haymitch.

'The Titan's Curse'

Release date: November 20 on Disney+

Season three of "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" is set to premiere on November 20. This season consists of eight episodes and concludes on December 11.

This season is based on the third installment in Rick Riordan's books: "The Titan's Curse." It sees Percy (Walker Scobell) go on a mission to rescue his friend, Annabeth (Leah Sava Jeffries), and the goddess Artemis (Dafne Keen) after they're kidnapped by mysterious forces.

'In a Holidaze'

Release date: December 2 on Netflix

Romance powerhouse duo Christina Lauren published their first holiday romance in 2020, called "In a Holidaze."

This is a classic time-loop story that follows Mae (Maddie Ziegler) as she returns home for Christmas, determined to tell her longtime crush Andrew (Graham Phillips) how she really feels. But when everything goes wrong, instead of dealing with the fallout, she relives the same day over and over.

'Pride and Prejudice'

Release date: December 3 on Netflix

"Sense and Sensibility" wasn't the only Jane Austen novel getting adapted this year — over 20 years after Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen played Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, there's a new duo in town that's ready to play these iconic yearners.

In this Netflix miniseries, adapted by Dolly Alderton, Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden will play the two. They'll be joined by Olivia Colman, Rufus Sewell, Daryl McCormack, Louis Patridge, Jamie Demetriou, Fiona Shaw (who was also in "Sense and Sensibility" this year), and Freya Mavor.

'Dune Messiah'

Release date: December 18 in theaters

After the two-part adaptation of "Dune," the third film in the series is set to adapt Frank Herbert's second novel, "Dune Messiah," published in 1969.

Picking up after the events of "Dune: Part Two," "Dune: Part Three" will follow Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) as he struggles to control the galaxy, prevent the death of millions, avenge his father, and juggle relationships with Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) and his love Chani (Zendaya).

Editor's Note: This story was first published in December 2025 and was last updated in October 2026.

Fjord is a movie about having your children taken by the state. The tone is calm, clinical, measured, and by the books. No violence is depicted on screen. People rarely even raise their voices. Everything unfolds in the distant and impersonal style of bureaucratic procedure. 

But the movie, which won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, is utterly enraging, a fierce, ferocious, gut-punch of a film. It's a haunting portrait of the consequences of unchecked state power, especially the kind that purports to be for one's own good.

Much of the film's power comes from the fact that it simply depicts what happens when a person, or a family, comes under suspicion by the state. There's no commentary, no lecturing, no big speech at the end. Instead, writer-director Cristian Mungiu, a Romanian filmmaker whose sympathies are clearly with the family, simply shows us, unblinking, what it's like to lose one's rights and freedoms at the hands of a bureaucracy that respects no power and no authority but its own. 

When the film begins, the Gheorghiu family—a mother (Renate Reinsve), father (Sebastian Stan), and their five children—moves from Romania to a small town in Norway. Soon, school authorities notice the children have bruises. We in the audience know the bruises weren't caused by the parents, but the children, who don't speak Norwegian, give conflicting statements. After being brought in for questioning by the police, the father admits to sometimes spanking or lightly slapping his children on the behind, for correction. In order to go free, he's required to sign a statement that contorts his words, making his admission of spanking sound like something more sinister and violent. 

He's also a conservative Christian, which has caused some social tension: He's played Christian music, without singing the lyrics, on a piano at school, a no-no in a state that strictly curbs proselytizing. School officials are concerned that he requires his children to pray and study the Bible; the children aren't allowed to play video games or watch YouTube. One of his children spoke out against homosexuality in school during a session on gender. There's suspicion among the teachers and administrators that he might be indoctrinating his kids.

So the school authorities alert Child Protection, Norway's powerful family bureaucracy. They remove the kids, including a breastfeeding baby, from their parents' custody and place them in three separate foster homes. At first the parents are allowed no visitation, and they are not told where the children are located.

Then they go to court, initially for a civil trial, but with a criminal trial for child abuse looming in the background. As the legal process proceeds, they are told repeatedly that essentially anything they do to fight for their children will make the outcome worse. The state wants compliance and admission that they wrongly abused their kids. But if they admit to abusing their kids, doesn't that give the state evidence they are unfit to parent? Doesn't that make the criminal trial more likely to go against them? As their own, mostly sympathetic lawyer, informs the two parents, "Frankly unless you convince them that you understand and regret it, the risk of you going to prison is considerable." 

Later, at the trial, a representative from Child Protection calmly says there's no reason to believe children might be better off with their biological parents, noting the family's restrictions on video games, internet, and YouTube. In their view, the state knows what's best for the kids; the culturally backward, religious conservative parents do not. It's not for nothing that one character, a conservative political figure from Romania who has come to help publicize the situation, analogizes the power of Child Protection to the power of the Soviet state. 

Part of what makes Fjord so effective is its lack of sermonizing. You don't have to be a trad, a conservative, a family values evangelical, to see that what's happening to the Gheorghiu family is simply wrong. They are railroaded by an imperious bureaucratic state that distorts reality to turn them into villains, with the goal of separating children from their parents and each other. Who are the real child abusers here? 

The story is fictionalized, but not hypothetical. Fjord is based on the true story of the Bodnariu family, conservative Romanian immigrants whose five children were taken from them by the Norwegian state in the 2010s on similarly flimsy justifications. The family eventually left Norway. After watching Fjord, it isn't hard to see why. 

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After their mission in Afghanistan goes tragically wrong, enter the heart of Tehran to earn redemption by pulling off a daring rescue. Director: Guy Moshe; Starring: Zachary Levi, Liam Neeson,

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Abandoned by his team and with nothing left, Matt seeks out a cutting edge treatment that miraculously returns him to his former self… but also unexpectedly affects his grip on

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Tom Cruise's new climate film Digger is turning into the "biggest flop of his career" and could lose $150m in a "historic disaster", leading Warner Bros to try a bold new marketing strategy: implying Americans are dumb.

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Kevin Dupzyk’s profile of Sam Rockwell, a “legendary scene-stealer” now in his fourth decade of work, is a crisp and entertaining one-act, with journalist and actor holed up in a spare Manhattan greenroom. Dupzyk studies Rockwell while Rockwell studies the room, testing the durability of his own idiosyncratic observations—about Red Bull and loss and rain—to see what they might yield in a conversation with a stranger. Dupzyk had wanted to “gin up some action for this story,” but it’s strangely compelling to watch Rockwell’s gaze prowl the room, to see what lodges in the filter of his creative process.

Rockwell is a good tennis player. And like any good athlete, he trains. For as much as he appears to get by on natural charm and charisma, he is an actor’s actor, a true believer, in his words, an “acting nerd.” Research. Running lines. Exerci—

“Do you know what a gibbon is?” Rockwell asks.

“Like, a monkey?” I say, confused.

Pat Caldwell is 69 years old and, as Chris Stanton gushes in this uproarious Q&A, “a legend to IMAX nerds.” Caldwell loves Vision3 film stock, hates Joker: Folie à Deux, and has discovered more than one dead body in a movie theater. His decades-long career as a projectionist includes a stint at a Tennessee porn theater with “very good equipment,” and he once spent half a year screening Lawrence of Arabia four times daily. When Stanton reached out to Caldwell on the occasion of The Odyssey, he may have landed the year’s most entertaining interview.

So Sam taught me how to run the projectors, and he got drunk, passed out on the couch. And after the concession stand in the box office closed, I would go up and run the rest of the movies for him. This went very nicely until one night there’s a knock at the door. I opened the door and here’s this old man standing there. And I said, “Well, who are you?” He says, “I could ask the same question. Who are you? I’m the business agent of the local projectionists’ union.” I explained what was going on. He woke up Sam, chewed him out. And the next day they made me an apprentice. I trained for a year with no pay at all the local theaters in Nashville.

Ahead of the 40th anniversary of Stand By Me, Alec Joyner takes up Rob Reiner’s classic film and considers it from a few dozen angles. It’s a canny piece of critical writing on time, memory, masculinity, and tenderness, forces that often work against each other. (Joyner doesn’t raise the subject of Reiner’s violent death last year, though he pauses briefly on Chris, a character “freakishly knifed to death . . . trying to break up a fight.”) Stand By Me‘s two days of summer are a “vital pause” in the life of its characters, a “portal . . . into the expanse of time.” Here, Joyner illuminates that pause, and captures some of its elusive grace.

Stand by Me was slapped with an R rating, for the boys’ profanity, as well as the prominence of child abuse and death. This may have hampered ticket sales, but it also made it the first R-rated movie that many ’80s and ’90s kids saw. It made it a fitting rite of passage.

Still, there’s something lamentable in the verdict, the MPAA telling a faulty story much like the fictional adults of Castle Rock. How many blockbusters have promoted horrendous violence, only to make the PG-13 grade because they feel safely unreal? Stand by Me was received as dangerous because its horrors and its dirt live at home.

First off: This isn’t a Rick Moranis profile. I know you want it to be—we all want it to be—but it’s not. Maybe one day we’ll get the deep, rich look at a man who’s beloved by millions of comedy fans but who also stepped out of the public eye more than 30 years ago. Until then, there’s the fact that Moranis will be part of next year’s Spaceballs sequel, and as such was game enough to show up at San Diego Comic-Con over the weekend (where, predictably, Hall H chaos ensued). Anthony Breznican was there, shadowing the proceedings. Read it at ludicrous speed, obviously.

Even in this holding area, Moranis is already getting a sense of the excitement building around him. Among the first people to have their socks knocked off is Clerks and Mallrats filmmaker Kevin Smith, the moderator of the presentation and a Comic-Con stalwart for decades. “I came for the panel because of Rick Moranis,” he tells me, invoking the name of the actor’s beer-swilling duo with Dave Thomas from their SCTV days. “Jay and Silent Bob doesn’t exist without Bob and Doug McKenzie. Having him at Comic-Con is like having geek royalty here. You’re talking about a dude who, for most of us, was there as we grew up. He was part of the fabric of the culture since we were kids.”