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When James Gunn was named a co-head of DC Studios in 2022, along with his producing partner Peter Safran, he was essentially being tasked with building a plane in midair. His remit from Warner Bros. (which owns DC Comics and its entertainment rights) was to clear away the dregs of its most recent efforts to create a cinematic superhero universe, quickly reboot things with a slate of new comic-book movies, and direct the first big entry himself, which turned out to be 2025’s Superman. The studio had spent years trying to play catch-up with Disney’s hugely successful Marvel movies, pumping out films either directed by Zack Snyder or made to suit his darker tone, and although some had hit, the overall project never seemed to find cultural ubiquity.

So with Gunn (who made the hit Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy for Marvel) aboard, DC is trying again. But it’s happening as the state of genre cinema seems to be shifting away from the “cinematic universe” approach. Yes, Marvel’s still making movies, at a slightly more relaxed pace, but the many other imitators have wound down (think of Sony’s flimsy villain-focused attempts at a wider Spider-Man world, Fox’s now-collapsed X-Men universe, or failed efforts such as Universal’s “Dark Universe”). Audiences have grown savvy to the treadmill these series put them on, with each ending teasing future editions rather than providing satisfying conclusions, characters never getting happy endings, and fun cameos by past and future members of the universe substituting for actually interesting writing.

Gunn and Safran, to their credit, seem somewhat self-aware about the problems that can sprout from the cinematic universe. In addition to narrative stagnation, these movies have a sort of necessary homogeneity. Part of what makes the Marvel brand “work” is that super-producer and honcho Kevin Feige has overarching creative control, so there’s a consistent tone—but also a bit of sameness to the visuals, the action, even the humor. Every movie starts filming with reshoots built in and scripts sometimes unfinished, more like the creation of a television show. So Gunn said things at DC would work differently: Movies could be green-lighted only with finished scripts, directors could put their imprimatur on whatever project they were in charge of, and entries in a given series could vary wildly in terms of genre and content.

That’s why Clayface is such an interesting test case for the entire DC endeavor. The leadoff film in this universe, Gunn’s Superman, was a genuine delight, but it was very much a comic-book movie, aimed at the widest audience possible with a pretty sunny, bouncy PG-13 tone. The second effort was this summer’s Supergirl, inarguably a misfire from Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) that aimed for darkly cynical but felt anonymous. Clayface is at least offering the hope of something fresh. It’s a gory, R-rated horror movie about a Batman villain who seems connected to the wider DC universe in only the slimmest of ways.

The film is about an up-and-coming actor named Matt Hagen (played by Tom Rhys Harries) whose face is disfigured after a brutal attack from a gangster. He seeks experimental nanotechnology treatment to rebuild it and soon finds himself with weird “powers”—sometimes he can shape-shift into another person entirely; other times his features look like they’re melting off his skull. Clayface is essentially a visual-effects-driven body-horror movie with some impressive, gory flourishes; its only real connection to the DC Universe is that it’s set in Gotham City. I enjoyed it, while finding it rather silly, but was a little baffled by its existence in the first place.

That’s because Clayface is, indeed, a member of Batman’s rogues’ gallery in comic books, a big gooey monster that the Caped Crusader occasionally does battle with. But Gunn’s new version of this world has yet to establish who will play Batman (the recent Robert Pattinson movie is not included in it), and there’s no immediate plan to do so. In a way, that’s wise (Hollywood is saturated with Batmen already), but Clayface is a minor-key work that struggles to justify itself.

What worries me the most about the ongoing DC plan is that, ultimately, there may be no way to create a cinematic universe that doesn’t require a level of Marvel-like rigor. Gunn is green-lighting interesting things, and he’s had some decent success on the TV side too: The relatively gripping Lanterns is getting good ratings on HBO Max; the hilarious-sounding mockumentary The People vs. Gorilla Grodd is coming in 2027. But he’s moving at a much slower pace, which makes an oddity such as Clayface feel inessential—yes, it’s a tiny piece of a bigger landscape, but when we see only one or two works a year, that landscape is filling in too slowly for us to get invested. Marvel’s approach of total saturation was overwhelming for many, but there may be no other way to make the grander project feel worthwhile.

An Essay I Enjoyed

50 Unforgettable Love Stories

By The Atlantic Culture Desk

Centuries before bookstores had shelves labeled ROMANCE and fictional hockey players locked eyes across the ice, the love story, with all of its attendant joys and sorrows, was an organizing principle of life—and of literature. The sentiment that another person might “complete” us enchanted both Plato and Jerry Maguire, and the search for that someone, along with the desire to understand why it can hurt so bad, has animated fiction from the beginning. The list below is an effort to name those love stories: novels, of course, but also poetry, plays, and short stories—that we consider to be the most enduring. We asked a jury of scholars, librarians, critics, and authors across genres, as well as many colleagues, to name their favorite titles that were originally written in English. We thought of our own personal touchstones, deliberated over the choices, and emerged with a group of standouts: 50 titles you won’t soon forget.

Read the full article.

Coming Attractions

Last week I wrote about the industry turmoil going on at Warner Bros. as it merged with Paramount under the Skydance umbrella, with the storied executives Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy suddenly finding themselves out of a job after a string of misses in 2026. Well, their next opportunity might be arriving very quickly, because Netflix is the next movie studio to see turnover up top. First, “chief content officer” Bela Bajaria was axed on October 15; then her subordinate Dan Lin (who ran its film division) was informed he was out a day later. Lin had been hired in 2024 to rein in spending; a somewhat confusing New York Times profile of him this year said the studio was “done coddling Hollywood,” an oddly aggressive bit of press for a company that’s already struggling to attract top talent because of its hostility to cinema releases.

Now Netflix is seemingly looking to pivot back to prestige, abandoning the belt-tightening that went on under Lin. De Luca and Abdy, who are reportedly in talks to take over, would provide an instant shot of it, given their existing relationships with big auteurs including Ryan Coogler and Paul Thomas Anderson, and they are reportedly discussing guaranteed theatrical releases, something Netflix has only just begun to tiptoe toward. It’s already happening with movies such as Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, David Fincher’s The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, and now the KPop Demon Hunters sequel. But could Netflix actually abandon one of its biggest tenets in search of Hollywood luster? To fill the gap being left by Warner Bros. and the merger, maybe.

What Else I’m Watching

• The wide release most worth checking out in theaters this week is Wildwood, the epic stop-motion animated adventure directed by Travis Knight (the company’s CEO, who also directed Kubo and the Two Strings). Wildwood, based on the first entry in Colin Meloy’s Wildwood Chronicles novels, has been in development for 15 years and in production for five, and really feels like a true labor of love. That can be said about every movie from Laika, a stop-motion studio based out of Oregon that made its name with Coraline. The films are all huge undertakings made more for artistic enjoyment than for profit, but Wildwood is especially ambitious, featuring PG-13 action and a two-plus-hour running time. Take your older kids to see and enjoy—it’s a fun modern fantasy as well as an affectionate portrait of Portland, where Knight grew up.

• There’s also Wicker, a sweet folk comedy that I heartily enjoyed, starring Olivia Colman as a reclusive fisherwoman who contracts a local weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her a husband out of wicker. And indeed he does, creating a creature (Alexander Skarsgard) that looks like a handsome scarecrow and rustles romantically with every step. It has the potential to be a horror movie, but it’s actually a wry satire of patriarchal relations in medieval times (and how, in some ways, things have never changed). Colman is, as always, a true comic delight.

When he was in charge of Apple, Steve Jobs was notorious for projecting a “reality distortion field.” That was the jokey way his employees described Jobs’s mix of charisma and bravado and his demanding management style—which would lead people to accept seemingly impossible deadlines, or to promise that they could fix unfixable problems. A malfunctioning version of the same phenomenon once surrounded Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the failed medical start-up Theranos. She worshipped Jobs, imitating his style and unnerving confidence, even while presiding over an imploding enterprise. Her promises of a device that could affordably perform rapid medical tests with only a drop of blood were, at best, fantastical; once valued at $9 billion, Theranos collapsed into nothing. In 2022, Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding her investors.

In the new documentary You Can See Everything, the comedian and television auteur Nathan Fielder steps into Holmes’s reality-distortion field. Fielder, accompanied by his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, and a small camera crew, essentially moved into Holmes’s abode for the 34 days before she reported to federal prison. The team received fairly unfettered access to her, her two small children, and her partner, the entrepreneur Billy Evans, who professes obsessional devotion to Holmes. What Fielder was expecting to find while staying at the family’s Del Mar, California, rental is unclear, but he ends up in an odd and unsettling game of cat and mouse: He’s trying to suss out whether Holmes is a master manipulator or someone so deeply convinced of her own genius that she can’t distinguish fiction from fact.

The film capturing that experience is an odyssey of human perception. Fielder knows that no matter how intimate his time with Holmes is, the minute the camera is trained on her, both he and the audience will be consumed by the question of whether she’s giving yet another performance. The movie unfolds and evolves over nearly three hours, spanning both the month ahead of Holmes’s May 2023 incarceration and the years following; throughout, Fielder pores over his interactions with not just Holmes but also the people around her, sifting for kernels of authenticity. What emerges is a transfixing portrait of a phenomenon most viewers will understand—a deep desire to empathize, even as we are horrified by what’s occurring or suspect we’re being lied to.

[Read: Manipulator vs. manipulator]

Holmes would disagree about that last part. Early on, she plainly states to Fielder that she has never told a lie, a statement so bewildering that it cracks his reliably deadpan expression. Watching him work to make sense of what she could mean by that, I thought of Jobs’s strange force of personality. Holmes has saucer-shaped, striking blue eyes, and she repeatedly meets Fielder’s squinty gaze with an unblinking stare and gauzy smile. Holmes may indeed be flatly misleading her interviewer, but she comes off as unnervingly sure that she’s being honest; she’s perhaps deceiving herself alongside the people in her orbit.

Evans is a vital part of her new facade, which has morphed from the elite-businesswoman persona of her CEO days to that of a loving mother and partner. Holmes often has a child draped over her, and she seems profoundly attached to her worshipful partner. Yet at other times, Evans gives off a controlling air. He plucks a bowl from her because she’s not stirring eggs quickly enough. When Fielder’s questions probe too close to an uncomfortable topic, Evans will show up, put his hands on Holmes’s shoulders, and softly try to shut down the conversation. The claustrophobic proximity between Fielder and his subjects comes across visually: Oppenheim shoots them all with zoom lenses, holding on their faces for a discomfitingly long time as they wince, frown, and grin. Like his co-director, he’s searching for the truth by getting as physically close as he can. Given Holmes’s past, however, the task of uncovering anything feels impossible.

Fielder is obviously uninterested in relitigating the details of Holmes’s case; she appears firmly assured that she did nothing wrong, and he knows there’s nothing he can do to tell her otherwise. Instead, he pokes at how she takes in the world, and how Evans is helping to feed her surreal self-image. It also becomes apparent that the pair are working on a new version of Theranos, chatting to investors and patent lawyers on the phone with abandon. When the harsh reality facing her—that she’ll soon have to leave her children behind—peeks through, her devastation seems genuine. But those moments then flit by as Holmes and Evans try to ponder a brighter future.

[Read: The comic who’s his own worst enemy]

The first half of the movie consists of captivating fly-on-the-wall footage. The second half, which Fielder and Oppenheim have begged critics not to spoil (and I do think it’s fun to experience it cold), establishes You Can See Everything as one of the best films of the year. That portion finds Fielder fixating on his brief time with Holmes and the untoward influence Evans had over it: He brings in other perspectives to consult, re-creates scenes to better understand them (something he’s wont to do, especially on his fascinating HBO show, The Rehearsal), and, most important, reckons with his role in telling this chapter of Holmes’s life story.

Fielder is smart enough to know that his celebrity presence further pierces the bubble around how we perceive ourselves and one another. But he quickly developed a sort of emotional intimacy with Holmes, even as he sought to remain objective. You Can See Everything is a bold title, an invitation from Holmes that she is unlikely to follow through on. Can Fielder see everything that’s going on in her head? Beyond that, can he be an effective audience surrogate so viewers can see what he sees? The true question of this documentary isn’t just whether Holmes—who has been a figure of societal fascination for more than a decade—is putting on another performance, but also whether that’s all we, the viewers, crave from Holmes anyway.

Sign up for Video Village, a new weekly newsletter in which David Sims unearths cinematic gems and brings readers into his movie obsession.

To kick off this newsletter, I sent out a message declaring that movies were “undeniably back.” Within days, it seemed that the sky was falling again. Two venerable studios, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, officially merged on October 6, further consolidating power in Hollywood into just a few conglomerates. The new entity has been dubbed Skydance, the name of the original production company that CEO David Ellison founded in 2006. Not much has outwardly changed thus far, new moniker aside. But internally, Ellison has already made at least one concerning decision. Once the deal closed, two key leaders at Warner Bros., the bolder and more risk-taking of the two studios, were immediately shown the door: Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, the co-chairs of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group. Their departure suggested what many industry analysts had feared: that their new boss was no longer a fan of taking big, bold risks.

After all, the news that De Luca and Abdy were exiting the company—to be replaced by Paramount’s current team, which will oversee what has been referred to as the “Paramount Warner Bros. Motion Picture unit” (try saying that three times fast)—arrived right before a historically bad weekend for the studio. The Tom Cruise project Digger opened on October 2 to only $8 million domestically, on a budget that reportedly climbed as high as $180 million; that’s an especially anemic number given Cruise’s involvement as both star and co-producer. Digger now stands as Warner Bros.’ final release before it joined Skydance, and the movie’s catastrophic box-office performance is the latest in a series of tough beats for the company this year. Given the film’s wild ambition, its failure will also be a fitting coda for an era that was very up-and-down financially—but often creatively thrilling.

De Luca and Abdy took over Warner Bros. Pictures in 2022, bringing with them a strategic reset. They were both well-regarded names in the world of awards-friendly indie cinema, shaking up a studio that was bouncing back from a theatrical strategy unpopular with the industry: putting blockbusters on HBO Max the day they were released. De Luca was a storied executive whose career included green-lighting boundary-pushing projects by Paul Thomas Anderson and David Fincher and earning Best Picture Oscar nominations for such movies as The Social Network and Moneyball. Abdy started out her career at Danny Devito’s hyper-cool Jersey Films and worked on The Revenant and The Big Short, among other awards-season hits, as president of the production outfit New Regency.

Together, they presided over a splashy period at Warner Bros. in which they focused on recruiting big stars and major auteurs while they also shed the remains of the prior leadership’s flailing, expensive approach to the DC Comics franchise. But their results were inconsistent: In 2023, the giant success of Barbie in the summer and Wonka at Christmastime buoyed the studio. The following year, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Joker: Folie à Deux were such expensive flops that industry experts began predicting De Luca and Abdy would soon lose their jobs.

Instead, last year, the duo spearheaded a cinematic slate that will likely be spoken about in hushed tones in Hollywood C-suites for generations. A Minecraft Movie took advantage of its kid-friendly IP to make nearly $1 billion worldwide, despite being barely coherent. The relaunch of the DC cinematic universe went splendidly with Superman, directed by the new DC Studios co-chair, James Gunn. The silly sequels Final Destination Bloodlines and The Conjuring: Last Rites punched above their weight commercially. Zach Cregger’s Weapons was not just a horror hit but also a critical favorite that won major awards. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, whose high budget met prerelease skepticism from box-office analysts, was a cultural sensation and a financial boon. And Anderson’s blockbuster, One Battle After Another, earned just enough money to justify its scale before taking the Oscar for Best Picture.

In basically each of these cases, De Luca and Abdy’s calculation of betting on creators who had an established track record and pairing them with reliable stars worked. Meanwhile, safe comic-book and video-game adaptations helped shore up any business concerns. This year, however, the same approach has resulted in a lot of swings and misses. Collaborations between acclaimed directors and performers, such as Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jessie Buckley’s The Bride!, failed to make back their budget; Supergirl and Practical Magic 2 were box-office disappointments, in part because of poor reviews. Warner Bros. couldn’t even claim the surprise success of Coyote vs. Acme, a Looney Tunes movie that it sold to the indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment after deciding in 2023 not to release it; it became a sleeper family hit this summer.

Maybe Digger flopping was the final straw for Ellison. Or maybe the Skydance CEO was always intent on keeping his own team in charge. Paramount has adopted a more populist, risk-averse strategy since Ellison took over that studio in 2025. This year’s schedule included crowd-pleasing horror films and a Jackass clip-show-style sequel, although none was particularly successful with theatergoers; a new live-action Street Fighter and the latest edition in the Angry Birds franchise are on the way. Indeed, it even has a Tom Cruise movie on the slate for 2028—but rather than being an auteurist effort like Digger, it’s a sequel to the 1990 NASCAR drama Days of Thunder that I’d argue nobody was really asking for.

Skydance seems to be planning to keep Paramount and Warner Bros. separate, the industry reporter Matthew Belloni suggested in a Puck column last week. Ellison has also promised that Skydance will keep up a furious pace of releases, perhaps in recognition of Hollywood’s agita when Netflix almost got its hands on Warner Bros. during the merger drama; the concern was that films released as part of “Netflix Warner Bros.” would not be shown in cinemas at all. But the departure of De Luca and Abdy certainly suggests that any weirder Hail Mary passes will be few and far between. Sure, they haven’t all worked—but a hit like Sinners doesn’t happen without a couple of other tough throws that fail to connect.

Meanwhile, some viewers are seemingly already reclaiming Digger as a cult classic; maybe that’s just quick-turn nostalgia for a moment in Hollywood that appears to be further slipping away. Or perhaps it’s a sign that some portion of the audience will always be clamoring for audacious work—the kind that is and will still be made by studios of all sizes. Just maybe not by Warner Bros., going forward.

An Essay I Enjoyed

The Most Cursed Team in American Sports

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

The mythical story of the Buffalo Bills could be told like this: Their fans are crazy and live in the snow. They shovel this snow out of their stadium to help their godforsaken football team, which, until recently, was most famous for losing the Super Bowl four times in a row in the early 1990s. According to one theory, those failures fed into Timothy McVeigh’s derangement before he planned and executed the Oklahoma City bombing. The franchise was an utter disaster, for the most part, until the 2018 arrival of an otherworldly quarterback named Josh Allen, who has exhibited many heroics. But he has yet to bring his team to the Super Bowl.

Read the full article.

Coming Attractions

A gorgeous new release this week is William and David Greaves’s Once Upon a Time in Harlem. The project restores old, unreleased footage shot by William, which his son, David, helped assemble and spruce up for a new generation to understand. William Greaves, who died in 2014, was a former actor who, dispirited by the opportunities afforded him in postwar Hollywood, became a challenging, acclaimed filmmaker. His body of work is well worth a deep dive, particularly the avant-garde documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, which is itself about the reality-warping process of making documentaries. Once Upon a Time in Harlem, however, was left unfinished for decades.

The documentary captures a party the elder Greaves threw in August 1972, bringing together every living member of the Harlem Renaissance he could find to Duke Ellington’s townhouse. He let the cameras roll as the group chatted, caroused, and unfurled memories of that flourishing era for Black art. David, then age 26, helped his father with the filming; more than 50 years later, he went through 60,000 feet of footage to pick out the best moments. The result is a rather stunning look back at an event filled with people who were already looking back; it’s a beautiful echo of an echo. Once Upon a Time in Harlem is debuting in select cinemas, but it’s a must-see—and will hopefully expand soon.

What Else I’m Watching

• Chris Rock’s Misty Green received a mixed reception at this fall’s festivals, but it’s somewhat redeemed by Rosalind Eleazar’s lead performance. She plays a fading actress striving for a role while her personal life disintegrates around her, and her masterful on-screen sloppiness helps explain away some of the dodgier plot twists. I’ve always found Rock’s directorial career frustrating; although he has good taste and influences (this film has major Safdie-brothers energy), he always falls a little short of what he’s imitating.
• Criterion’s humongous Stanley Kubrick box set will finally be on shelves Tuesday, and it’s an unsurprisingly impressive package from those doyens of physical media. All 13 of his features have received sparkly restorations, and the collection also includes his daughter Vivian’s documentary Making The Shining, which offers a glimpse into the much-mythologized auteur’s process. The rare international version of The Shining, which is far shorter than the U.S. theatrical cut, is one of the best Easter eggs on offer.
• Another movie that had long been thought lost is the director’s cut of Ken Russell’s intense psychological horror The Devils, which was censored and outright banned in many countries on its 1971 release. The original version was officially unavailable for years, but a 4K restoration of it is now touring theaters. A 17th-century-set dramatization of witch-hunting within the French Catholic church, The Devils is genuinely shocking—especially given the era of its release—but should be required viewing for genre completionists.