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The Devil Wears Prada Predicted 20 Years of Cultural Stagnation | Episode 548

Release Date: 05/18/2026

Inside the VFX of Disclosure Day with Matthew Butler | Episode 560

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Steven Spielberg doesn't want you to know his aliens aren't real. That's the standard Matthew Butler had to hit on Disclosure Day: total photographic believability, zero tolerance for anything that reads as fantasy, even when the story is about a supposed decades-long government cover-up of extraterrestrial contact. Butler has been Spielberg's go-to VFX supervisor for grounded, "make it real" work since Ready Player One, and before that, he was Chris's first VFX supervisor ever, on The Day After Tomorrow. Back in Episode 557, Chris and Daniel broke down Disclosure Day as fans, tracing its DNA...

Nolan's Odyssey Is Really a Movie About Waiting | Episode 559

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Is it a good movie if you have to watch it ten times? That's the question Chris and Daniel keep circling back to as they take on Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, skipping the marketing noise and the wireframe-cyclops conspiracy theories to actually ask whether the thing works as a film. They dig into what Nolan is doing as a filmmaker, structurally and emotionally, in his adaptation of the oldest story in Western literature, and why a three hour runtime built around a decade-long wait might be the whole point rather than a flaw. The real conversation is about adaptation itself: what happens...

Split Diopters, Indie Film Private Equity, and the Rock and Roll of Making Movies | Episode 558

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Something is shifting in independent film right now, and Ron Cohen, one of the producers on June July and a veteran of physical production, is exactly the person to make sense of it. Chris and Daniel bring him in for a wide-ranging conversation that touches on everything from The Odyssey's marketing to the A24 backlash of the moment, but the real news is that the team just wrapped a shoot on June July, and Ron walks through how it actually went. The conversation moves into the details of that shoot, where fully ray traced and relightable Gaussian splats, an unplanned split diopter, and a crew...

Disclosure Day and The Secret Weirdness of Steven Spielberg | Episode 557

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Steven Spielberg is the most famous filmmaker alive, which is exactly why almost nobody actually understands him. Chris and Daniel use Disclosure Day, Spielberg's new alien chase thriller with Emily Blunt, to argue that the "safe, mainstream" reputation is a decades-long misdirection: underneath the crowd-pleasing surface is a genuinely weird, deeply personal artist who has been smuggling strange, uncomfortable ideas inside blockbuster packaging since at least Close Encounters. They trace it through Fabelman's casting David Lynch as John Ford, the theory that Kubrick handed Spielberg AI...

A24, DeepMind, and the "No CGI" Marketing Lie Everyone's Tired Of | Episode 556

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A24 announced a $75 million research partnership with Google DeepMind and framed it as R&D for production tools, not a content deal. Nobody cared about the distinction. Chris, Daniel, and James Blevins spend the first half of this Rough Cut on why that announcement landed like a betrayal anyway, then pull the same thread through the Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery merger, Mark Ruffalo's New York Times op-ed on quiet industry retaliation, and what it means that four studios now control what used to take six. From there the panel turns to Christopher Nolan's press tour for...

He Cold-Called Kubrick's Secret Number | Doug Trumbull | Episode 555

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Doug Trumbull spent fifty years trying to convince Hollywood that the way movies are projected is fundamentally broken, and most of the industry never listened. The visual effects supervisor behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and the director of Silent Running and Brainstorm, Trumbull passed away in 2022. This conversation originally aired in July 2020, before a lot of you were listening, and it's one of the fullest records of him explaining his life's obsession in his own words. We're pulling it back out of the...

What If Orson Welles Had a Steadicam? | Hnedel Maximore | Episode 554

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Hnedel Maximore did not come up through the traditional VFX pipeline. He started drafting floor plans in Liberia, studied architecture in Michigan, got laid off during the housing crash, and worked his way across industries before landing at Speed Shape in Detroit doing automotive commercials. That's also where he and Chris first crossed paths, years before either of them could have predicted where things would end up. What Hnedel built along the way was not just a technical skillset but a spatial intelligence that became the secret weapon behind one of the most visually distinctive streaming...

Obsession, Backrooms, and the 1970s Moment Hollywood Needs Right Now | Episode 553

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For years Chris and Daniel have been saying the corner was going to turn, that history would repeat itself the way it did in the 1970s. It turned. Jason Blum said the same thing last week. Two horror films made by twenty-something YouTubers just proved everything the studio system has been getting wrong, and the box office numbers are not being polite about it. Obsession cost under a million dollars. Backrooms cost ten million. Both are outperforming movies that cost a hundred times more. Chris and Daniel break down both films as filmmakers. They get into what Obsession borrows from Takashi...

Why Hollywood Keeps Getting Its Audience Wrong | Trina Renee & Julianna Politsky | Episode 552

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Hollywood is having a Marie Antoinette moment. The people running studios and making AI announcements have no idea how their decisions are landing with the audience that actually buys tickets, and the backlash to Jorge R. Gutierrez announcing Punky Duck as an AI project is just the most recent and visible proof. Chris and Daniel are joined by Trina Renee, a studio-side post producer whose client credits run through Warner Brothers and Fox, and Julianna Medina-Politsky, who spent a decade as an executive at Legendary Entertainment and now runs Station X Ventures, for a conversation that is more...

Mocking AI With AI: Sergio Cilli on Why the Joke Only Works If You Actually Use It | Episode 551

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Sergio Cilli is going to get hate from both sides. The pro-AI crowd thinks he's mocking their tools. The anti-AI crowd thinks he's a hypocrite for using them. He's fine with that. Cilli is a director and writer who came up through sketch comedy and the writers' room of a David Spade Comedy Central show, went on to the Late Late Show as a segment producer, built a commercial directing career through Funny or Die, and has been making people laugh on the internet for twenty years. His Instagram series Will AI Replace Us? has become one of the sharpest, funniest pieces of AI criticism online...

More Episodes

A movie from 2006 looks like it could have come out last year. The cars are the same. The computers are the same. The fashion, the cinematography, the music -- all of it effectively unchanged. Chris and Daniel use The Devil Wears Prada as a lens to ask a question that goes well beyond film: has Western pop culture simply... stopped moving?

The conversation covers the film's craft -- Meryl Streep's uncommonly restrained performance, why the movie works better than it has any right to, and why Daniel reads Miranda Priestly not as a villain but as a Whiplash-style manifestation of what the main character actually wants. But the real thesis is bigger: the iPhone, social media, the collapse of risk-taking across studios and streaming, and why neither audiences nor executives are really to blame -- the incentive structure is. Chris and Daniel also get into the sin-eater problem, why indie film has lost its live-wire energy, and what it actually takes to stop doom-scrolling and just make the thing.

Links and References

What The Devil Wears Prada and Your iPhone Have in Common: Nothing Has Changed in Twenty Years >

The Devil Wears Prada (2006, dir. David Frankel)

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026, dir. David Frankel)

Justin Denton, The Curse of the Sin Eater

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

The Last Detail (1973)

Whiplash (2014)

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Swiss Army Man (2016)

Sinners (2025)

Suits (TV series)