Category: Entertainment

David Ellison has emerged victorious. And he’s boldly — or arrogantly, if you prefer — decided to name the entertainment giant that he’s bolted together Skydance Corp., nodding to the original name of his film production firm that has swallowed up two Hollywood studios over the past 14 months.

Defying skeptics and beating back opponents, Ellison has harpooned his white whale in buying Warner Bros. Discovery. Now he has to prove that the $111 billion mega-merger can become a profitable entertainment powerhouse, and not just a vessel that will get sucked under by a massive whirlpool of debt.

As the closing of the deal — set to occur Tuesday, Oct. 6 — became a certainty, entertainment industry insiders started to come to grips with the reality that the enlarged company is a new and unpredictable force in town. The deal has been polarizing for the creative community, with many boldface names going public in their opposition to the merger. The new leadership team that Skydance is assembling under the direction of Ellison and Ynon Kreiz, just recruited from Mattel to serve as co-CEO, has to navigate that dynamic. And they must do it while walking a tightrope on Wall Street to pay down debt and grow profits across film, linear TV and streaming.

“They need to move as quickly as possible to get the leverage down,” says Jawad Hussain, managing director at S&P Global. “The biggest hurdle and the biggest thing we’re going to be keeping our eye on is integration and execution.” Two years ago, Hussain says, Skydance Meida was a small company that turned out a few films a year. “Now it’s managing one of the largest media companies. It’s not necessarily an easy task.”

It’s all been a whirlwind. On the morning of Sept. 30, Ellison still didn’t know if it was a done deal.

He had spent more than a year in his relentless pursuit of acquiring Warner Bros. and HBO. The WBD board rejected his takeover offers eight times. David Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery’s boss, ghosted Ellison in December 2025 after Netflix clinched a deal for WB’s streaming and studios business. But Ellison didn’t surrender; he finally outbid Netflix in February, with a $31/share offer that was nearly 2.5 times the stock price before the M&A frenzy kicked off. It was an offer WBD couldn’t refuse.

Ellison and his legal team, headed by former DOJ official Makan Delrahim, predicted the proposed Paramount-WB combo would easily clear regulatory approvals. In June, Trump’s Justice Department rubber-stamped the pact without attaching any conditions. All told, regulators in 68 jurisdictions worldwide cleared the merger with minimal pushback.

The last barricade in Ellison’s way? An antitrust lawsuit brought by 12 Democratic state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta. Ellison believed the litigation was politically motivated, stoked by fears he would try to turn CNN into a Trump-friendly mouthpiece. (He has repeatedly promised a hands-off approach to CNN’s news coverage.) But the AGs pressed their case and a federal judge agreed that their arguments — that Paramount-Warner Bros. would wield undue power in theatrical and basic cable markets — had merit. A trial was scheduled to begin in March 2027.

Frustrated and incredulous, Ellison let it be known through press leaks in August that he would pull Paramount out of California if the state AGs didn’t let him close the WB deal. Paramount insiders continue to insist the notion of Ellison’s Golden State exit wasn’t a bluff or a threat. Bonta, seeming to realize he would gain no political capital by derailing or delaying the merger, relented. Paramount and the AGs announced a settlement of the suit on Sept. 21 — with a list of concessions so lenient that it surprised not only industry watchers but also employees at both companies.

Now all that was left was the judge’s approval of the settlement. Worryingly for Ellison, U.S. District Court Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin at a Sept. 24 hearing had left the door open to a potential further third-party review of the settlement at the behest of Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). The groups behind the #BlockTheMerger coalition, which had amassed more than 5,700 signatories from actors, filmmakers and industry workers opposed to the deal, filed a brief with the court urging Martínez-Olguín to reject the settlement.

But on Sept. 30 at just after 12:30 p.m pacific time, the judge issued her ruling: She had approved the settlement.

The proposed consent decree, Martínez-Olguin wrote, reflects a “compromise that may leave some dissatisfaction for both sides and the public but a compromise that saves the risk, time and expense of litigating through trial.”

Boom! Teams at both companies swung into action to make the final preparations needed to close the deal. That evening, Paramount and WBD confirmed the merger’s expected closing date of Oct. 6, at which point Paramount’s common stock will move from Nasdaq to list on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock symbol will change from “PSKY” to “SKYD,” reflecting the Skydance corporate name.

Ellison is expected to lead a town hall meeting with employees next Tuesday, and Ellison and Kreiz are scheduled to host a virtual press briefing — along with the new Skydance’s executive leadership — at 7 p.m. ET on Oct. 6.

Coincidentally, on Sept. 30 Ellison had been sitting on his own bit of hot news: He was ready to announce that he recruited media vet Kreiz to be co-CEO at the combined Paramount-WBD. The merged entity’s businesses will jointly report to Ellison and Kreiz.

Word of Kreiz’s joining Paramount trickled out earlier in the day, but Ellison had already decided to wait until after market close to announce it. Paramount put the release on the wire at 1:06 p.m., a little over half an hour after the judge OK’d the antitrust settlement.

Ellison triumphantly sent Paramount employees a companywide email about Kreiz’s hiring, timestamped at 1:18 p.m., praising the exec as a “proven builder and operator.” Kreiz, during his eight years at Mattel, had helped cut costs through layoffs — and oversaw its first theatrical release, 2023 blockbuster “Barbie.” He swung the company to profitability, but revenue has stubbornly stayed flat the last four years.
Ellison wrote in his email: “Together we are well positioned to integrate, operationalize and run the businesses as we build one of the most ambitious next-generation media companies in the industry’s history. Kreiz, as part of his compensation package, will receive $31.5 million in fully vested stock as a signing bonus with the merger close.

Then on Friday, Oct. 2, Ellison shared on X that the new corporation would be … Skydance. His post included a sizzle reel of the combined company’s biggest hits, leading off with a clip from “Titanic” — an inauspicious choice, perhaps, given how that infamous voyage turned out.

“Paramount and Warner Bros. shaped over a century of culture,” Ellison wrote. “By combining them, we aren’t rewriting history — we’re equipping these iconic studios with a more powerful engine. Together, we are Skydance: a creative-first home for bold, quality storytelling.”

Three years ago, Ellison was primarily known as a rich kid — scion of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people — and a semi-successful movie producer, most notably with 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” which turned in a boffo $1.5 billion at the box office. Now, having bagged Warner Bros., he can lay claim to being a titan in the business and no mere nepo baby.

“Ellison stared down the attorneys general and won. He stared down the unions and won,” says Prof. Erik Gordon of University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “You can’t see David Ellison as daddy’s boy anymore. He’s a formidable force in the industry.”

The Paramount-WBD merger is the biggest M&A deal in Hollywood history. It brings together two of Hollywood’s biggest movie studios, HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming services dand TV brands including CBS, CNN, MTV, TBS, Comedy Central, Food Network and more. The new company’s entertainment franchises span Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and other HBO hits, the DC superhero universe, “Yellowstone,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Top Gun” and the Nickelodeon kids’ empire.

“We still have work to do before the deal closes, and nothing changes until it does,” Ellison told employees in his memo about Kreiz.

But even before the deal closed, the company’s new leadership was taking shape. Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, co-heads of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, will leave post-merger, sources told Variety. Paramount film heads Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein are in line to oversee both movie studios.

With the deal close, Zaslav is expected to depart — with a boatload of money. Zaslav stands to earn at least $550 million in stock and cash once the Paramount-WBD deal closes, including $34.2 million in cash severance payments, per the terms of his “golden parachute” package.

Skydance’s settlement-related obligations around theatrical film and the operation of its Paramount and Warner Bros. cable channels will undoubtedly have ripple effects in the marketplace that extend well beyond the U.S. Showbiz leaders in Europe have closely watched the transaction at a time when local-language production is at a peak thanks to the influence of Netflix, Amazon and Disney+. HBO has a growing international footprint that will be crucial to Skydance’s future growth.

Pierre-Antoine Capton, chairman of France’s Mediawan, says the broader film and TV business is in line for a bumpy few years amid the shakeout of what he calls “a period of intense consolidation” of media assets. Mediawan bought Peter Chernin’s North Road Company earlier this year. It’s also circling Lionsgate as a potential acquisition.

“Having spoken with David, I believe his vision is first and foremost an artistic, creative ambition,” Capton says of the Skydance merger. “He wants to build a more powerful group in order to invest in creation. It’s not only about making cuts. I believe in his commitment to cinema and to theatrical releases.” At the same time, “everywhere in the world we’re entering a much more difficult phase, where consolidation will be, in my view, one of the solutions to the economic problems we’re all going to face,” Capton says.

Ellison and Kreiz will also be under pressure to deliver a clear roadmap for generating bigger profits from its streaming pillars, HBO Max and Paramount+.

Casey Bloys, head of WBD’s HBO, is poised to assume oversight of the combined Paramount-Warner Bros. streaming business after Cindy Holland announced on Sept. 29 to staffers that she was stepping down from her role running Paramount+ and other direct-to-consumer businesses.

Holland’s resignation blindsided some senior managers at Paramount, who thought Ellison had hired her for the long haul. “We all thought we had the home-court advantage — that David was bringing all the new people at Paramount to have them be part of Warner Bros.,” a company insider says.

Paramount+ and HBO Max will together have more than 200 million subscribers. The newly merged Skydance can save money by consolidating its back-end streaming infrastructure. But “you don’t want to immediately combine the two streaming services because people won’t pay the sum of the two subscription prices,” says Prof. Sridhar Tayur of Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. For the foreseeable future, HBO Max and Paramount+ will continue as discrete brands.

Another area to watch: what Ellison does with CNN, which throws off operating cash that Skydance Corp. will need to bolster its finances. Ellison has held preliminary talks with CNN chief Mark Thompson about staying on after the merger, sources tell Variety. The prospect of Thompson continuing at the helm, at least for now, came as a relief to CNN personnel, who have been worried that Bari Weiss, the “anti-woke” media entrepreneur Ellison put in charge of CBS News, might extend her fiefdom to include the news cabler.

Under the settlement with the 12-state coalition, the merged Paramount-Warner Bros. will be subject to monitoring by a “news editorial independence board.” The board, which will include representatives from the states, will establish which will establish “guiding editorial and journalism principles” for CNN and CBS News. But critics have dismissed this as a toothless condition. One player displeased with this outcome was Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, who, although he signed off on the settlement, said afterward he had advocated for a full divestiture of CNN and CBS News.

Foes of ParaBros remain hopping mad. Actor Mark Ruffalo, one of the deal’s most strident critics, has vowed to continue the fight. “This merger will stifle creativity, weaken free speech and cost people their jobs — it is a bad deal for this country and should never have been approved,” he said in a social media post Sept. 30.

Ruffalo’s feud with Paramount got ugly. On Aug. 21, he posted a message warning about the dangers of the Paramount-WB merger and alleged Larry Ellison’s Oracle was complicit in “what we now have come to see as a genocide” by the Israeli government against Palestinians. Paramount responded forcefully. A company rep asserted the “antisemitic tropes” Ruffalo invoked “aren’t just wrong — they’re a bridge too far.” Ruffalo has been set to reprise his role as an FBI agent in a second season of HBO’s “Task” crime drama. It remains to be seen if Ellison will let bygones be bygones.

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Apart from the shouting, the biggest burning questions about the new entity are about its financial condition.

How is Paramount buying Warner Bros. Discovery, which has a market cap that’s six times larger? Paramount is issuing billions in debt securities and securing new loans to help foot the bill. Larry Ellison is bankrolling the WBD merger to the tune of $46.7 billion in equity financing. Paramount also lined up about $24 billion in commitments from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. In April, Paramount said the three Middle Eastern funds will own 38.5% of the combined entity, but that they will have no board seats or governance representation.

The new company will be controlled by the Ellison family alongside Gerry Cardinale, founder and managing partner of RedBird Capital Partners. Cardinale’s firm is also pitching in equity for the WBD deal, after funding Skydance’s Paramount Global takeover.

The new company’s net debt is estimated to be more than $80 billion. That staggering amount would translate into annual interest payments topping $6 billion. Add to that the fact that Paramount-WB, under the settlement with the AGs, is obligated to invest at least $300 million more on film production in the U.S. annually (above what the studios combined spent in 2025).

Paramount execs have told Wall Street they can achieve $6 billion in cost savings through the merger. But not everyone thinks there’s $6 billion in cost savings to be squeezed out without negative consequences. There are obvious areas of overlap in corporate functions like IT, marketing, procurement and legal. But a big risk in executing a media merger of this scale is cutting into bone — resulting in the loss of creative professionals who are essential to the enterprise, says Prof. Tammy Madsen, a professor of management at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business.

“Creativity matters,” Madsen says. “If you are too aggressive in eliminating redundancies in the creative parts of the company, you could kill the value.”

Ellison, after the final clearance for the merger came through, wasn’t exactly popping the Champagne just yet. But he did, apparently, pop open some breakfast burritos.

On Oct. 1 — out of nowhere — employees on the Paramount Studios lot in L.A. and at the company’s offices Burbank were welcomed with buffet breakfasts: French toast, pancakes, egg burritos, shakes, berry bowls, chia pudding and more. One insider says it was the first time they had ever seen the company put out that kind of spread.

Perhaps it was more like a peace offering, coming before the pain of a first wave of layoffs at the new Skydance expected before the end of the year. The merger could result in the loss of some 4,500 film and TV jobs over three years in L.A. alone, according to a report issued by Los Angeles County in August. Insiders believe layoffs will continue with further rounds into 2027.

There’s no way around the fact that thousands of employees across the former Paramount and WBD are about to get pink-slipped. But Ellison is betting that through the crucible of consolidation, a stronger company will emerge. “We have big goals for Skydance,” he wrote in his post on X about the new name, “and we intend to pursue them with passion, imagination and a willingness to take smart risks.”

Marc Malkin, Michael Schneider, Cynthia Littleton, Elsa Keslassy, Matt Donnelly, Angelique Jackson, Brian Steinberg and Gene Maddaus contributed to this story.

Philanthropist Olga Rabinovich will receive the inaugural Prêmio Encontros (Encounters Award) at this year’s Encontro de Ideias Audiovisuais, the industry platform of the São Paulo International Film Festival. The award honors her enduring commitment to advancing Brazilian cinema and elevating the international profile of Brazilian film and talent through her work with Projeto Paradiso.

The Encounters Award was created to spotlight the transformative role of private investment in culture, bringing together private funders and the creative professionals behind audiovisual productions. The inaugural honor will be bestowed upon Rabinovich during the event’s opening gala ceremony on Oct. 14 and ahead of an in-conversation event with Neon president Jeff Deutchman.

Born in São Paulo, Rabinovich spent years volunteering in hospitals, working closely with terminally ill patients. In 2018, she founded the Olga Rabinovich Institute, launching Projeto Paradiso soon after. The initiative is dedicated to the advancement of the Brazilian audiovisual sector and grew out of her belief that “stories can change the world,” as well as a decision to invest in the people who create them and want to share them with audiences worldwide.

“Olga Rabinovich is the first recipient of the newly created Prêmio Encontros, because she was the inspiration behind the award,” said Renata de Almeida, director of the São Paulo International Film Festival. I first heard Olga’s name in early 2018, when Josephine Bourgois came to see me about someone from the private sector who wanted to create an institute dedicated to cinema. The Olga Rabinovich Institute was announced during the 42nd Mostra, bringing a breath of hope at a time that promised to be particularly difficult for Brazilian film and culture.”

“Eight years later, Projeto Paradiso, an initiative of the Olga Rabinovich Institute, has already made a major contribution to discovering and championing a new generation of talent, strengthening Brazil’s audiovisual sector as a whole,” continued the director. “Projeto Paradiso has an outstanding professional team, as its results clearly demonstrate. But the image that stays with me is of a meeting with Olga, climbing the winding stairs of our little building for a somewhat chaotic coffee in the festival’s office. Because, in the end, almost everything really does begin with an encounter.”

Earlier this year, Variety sat down with the philanthropist ahead of the third Projeto Paradiso National Network Meeting in Brazil’s buzzy production hub of Recife. Rabinovich said she “loved the idea of supporting cinema because I feel it is a magical art form.” “You enter a screening room without knowing whether you’ll be elated or disturbed or moved. It’s a transformative experience. I think it’s incredible to have a communal artistic experience that moves you like this.”

Projeto Paradiso offers a wide range of support to Brazilian screen professionals to maximize their presence on the global stage, supporting the development of stories through fellowships, residencies, workshops, and other training and international reach initiatives. The Paradiso Talent Network now comprises 278 Brazilian professionals.

The organization also helps connect Brazilian talent and projects with the international industry through a network of more than 250 partner institutions in Brazil and abroad, including the Hubert Bals Fund, La Fabrique Cinéma de l’Institut français, TorinoFilmLab, Film Independent and the Sundance Institute.

The initiative was recently behind buzzy festival titles such as Allan Deberton’s Berlinale-winning “Gugu’s World” and Grace Passô’s “Our Secret,” and boasts a talent network of 264 professionals, including Anita Rocha da Silveira (“Medusa”), Juliana Rojas (“Good Manners”) and Dira Paes (“Manas”).

In 2025 Projeto Paradiso teamed with the Embratur Brazilian Tourism Board to launch Screen Brasil, offering four Brazilian films a year in two calls – the latest of which closed Oct. 2 supporting their international distribution campaigns, submissions being made by the international sales agent holding the film’s commercial rights. Announced at Cannes Marché du Film this May, films backed to date take in Gabriel Mascaro’s “The Blue Trail,” Rafaela Camelo’s “The Nature of Invisible Things” and animated feature “Papaya.”

Projeto Paradiso’s relationship with the São Paulo International Film Festival dates back to 2018, when the philanthropy initiatve was launched during the festival’s 42nd edition. Since then, Projeto Paradiso has steadily expanded its presence at the festival.

Since 2023, it has presented the annual Paradiso Distribution Support Award, providing a distribution grant for the theatrical release of a fiction feature. In 2024, Projeto Paradiso was also one of the driving forces behind a new partnership with the Hubert Bals Fund (HBF), which led to the creation of HBF+Brazil following initial discussions at Encontro de Ideias.

The 50th edition of the São Paulo International Film Festival runs Oct. 15-29.

A festival launching Oct. 11 at Manhattan’s SVA Theatre is positioning itself as an answer to the flattened, stereotyped picture of Muslims Western media often traffics in. The New York Muslim Film Festival (NYMFF), billed as the city’s first for Muslim filmmakers, wants them telling their own stories.

Hassan Babar, the festival’s artistic director, said such stories should not merely serve as counter-narratives. “They should be the establishing paradigm,” Babar said.

The one-day event will screen 12 shorts from seven countries, with documentaries, dramas, comedies, animation and experimental pieces in the mix. Women make up a majority of the program’s directors.

“This festival exists because those stories deserve a stage in this city, not on the margins of someone else’s,” said Nawal Mubin, the festival’s co-founder and director.

The day will open with a reception for filmmakers and industry guests. Two blocks of six films each, running roughly an hour apiece, will precede the awards and the jury announcement.

Emmy winner Aasif Mandvi, a longtime “The Daily Show” correspondent who also starred in Paramount+ series “Evil,” sits on the six-member jury. He is joined by Arab-American writer-director Darine Hotait, founder of Cinephilia Productions, whose shorts have aired on HBO, AMC, SundanceTV and the BBC; Munir Atalla, head of production and acquisitions at Watermelon Pictures and a former Netflix creative executive; and producer Abubakar Khan, whose resume includes “The Glassworker,” Pakistan’s entry for the 2024 Oscars, and SXSW 2023 audience award winner “Mustache.”

Rounding out the panel are Lebanese-American filmmaker Sarah Mokh, a Sundance Feature Film Fellow who recently wrapped her first feature, “The Alchemy of Being Okay,” which Khan is producing, and Egyptian-American actor Abubakr Ali. Ali has roles coming up in Bassam Tariq’s “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,” opposite Mahershala Ali, and Sean Durkin’s A24 film “Deep Cuts,” and recently appeared in Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite.”

Streamer Watermelon+ is behind the festival’s Watermelon+ Discovery Award. Its winner, whether filmmaker or rights holder, will give the platform an exclusive license to show the film for a limited period. The Islamic Scholarship Fund, New York production and post house Lost in Space, and Aneesa Talks, which filmmaker Aneesa Khan founded to support South Asian and Muslim creatives, have also signed on as partners.

The program ranges widely in tone and subject. Justin Mashouf’s documentary “$17.74” follows a former gang member, behind bars since the 1980s, whose gesture of support for Gaza from inside prison set off a viral wave of solidarity. In Karim Emara’s Qatar-U.S. dramedy “Baba Is Melting,” a son phones his father, who is waiting in the car before Friday prayer in Doha, to challenge him over a hidden second marriage.

Zaid Ahmed Hassan’s “Ghusl” centers on a son whose dying father asks him to learn Islamic burial rites, while Basma Khalifa’s U.K. experimental piece “Henna” follows the henna plant’s life cycle alongside women from 16 African and SWANA countries. Sima Naseem’s Canada-Pakistan animation “My Friend in the Jingle Truck” combines stop-motion and 2D to tell of a Karachi girl who meets a magical bird.

In Alex Aljouni’s “Bukra,” a young Syrian refugee whose sweepstakes prize is a soccer ball rushes to collect it in time for one last match with her best friend before he is gone for good. One daring move reopens old rifts among three generations of Afghan women in Negine Jasmine Sekandari and Ayda Rojhantalab’s comedy “Haram Salami,” as they weigh who they are against what custom demands and what they want.

Maram Taibah’s Saudi fantasy “Malika” explores a girl’s bond with her grandmother, and the pull between wildness and the obedience expected of girls, through a magical-realist world spun from a child’s imagination. In Bilal Shams Khan’s Pakistani drama “Sabr O Shukar,” 10-year-old Akram learns about patience and gratitude while chasing his dream of a bicycle.

Imran J. Khan’s “The Boy With Dinosaur Head” pits a troubled boy who believes he is a dinosaur against a teacher set on pulling him back to reality, and their short encounter stays with both of them. Ilhan Abdullahi and Sherry Rashidan’s Canadian comedy “Unqualified” follows Warsan, the lone Muslim at her workplace, who is handed the job of spiritually cleansing a lunchroom said to be haunted and must clear out the spirits, armed with her faith and a string of misunderstandings, before she loses her job.

Lyna Tadount and Sofian Chouaib’s French drama “Ya Hanouni” centers on two parents vying to be their baby’s first word, until their lighthearted contest is cut short by an event that upends their lives.

Babar, a Toronto-based actor and producer, co-heads programming with Aneesa Khan, who also leads communications. Mubin, a New York director-producer, co-founded the festival with filmmaker and post-production specialist Giuseppe de Matteis. Both work at Lost in Space.

It would be nice to say that Connor Storrie burns up the screen in “April X,” the star’s first film vehicle released since TV’s “Heated Rivalry” made him hot property, but it would be overstating the case. Appropriating Harrison Ford’s “Blade Runner” frown, among a few other things nicked from that sci-fi classic in this sci-fi filler, Storrie capably shoulders a grim, po-faced tale of human cloning and trafficking in a greige dystopian future, but there’s not much for him to work with here — and he mostly projects the aura of a working actor dutifully waiting for something better to come along. Which it did, so job done. But you can hardly blame “April X” for riding his sudden celebrity, securing a theatrical release and escaping the straight-to-VOD morass that would appear to be its natural habitat.

Surely only Storrie’s most ardently committed new fans will venture out to see this, though: It’s hardly an embarrassing blot on his résumé, but it’ll be forgotten long before the second-season premiere of the queer hockey phenomenon. For writer-director Michel K. Parandi, making his feature-length debut, “April X” will be a more critical calling card — and duly shows off some resourceful technical ability on a cramped budget. But his script, co-written with regular collaborator Jack Coulter, is less impressive, welding together story scraps from other, better films to rather turbid, uninvolving effect. It occupies a similar genre space to the recent release “Hot Spot,” Agnieszka Smoczynska’s comparably scrappy, patched-together vision of compromised human identity in the middle-distance future; that film was a misfire, but a measure of its imaginative eccentricity would still be welcome here.

The year is unspecified, but the fatigued brutalist housing blocks of outer Bucharest are still standing: Though it doesn’t specify a location either, “April X” uses the present-day wear and tear of the Romanian capital, where the film was shot on location, as shorthand for a world collapsing into concrete ruin. The odd hi-tech drone adds some futuristic pizzazz to the film’s exterior vistas, but the new technologies defining the narrative aren’t of the gleaming, brave-new-world variety: People are being cloned in grubby, shadowed fashion, while memories and dreams can be captured and downloaded onto surprisingly retro-looking data devices.

In this grimy waking nightmare, twins Baxter (Storrie) and April (German actor Lilly Krug) barely eke out a living doing a variety of sketchy jobs, some more criminal than others. He traffics organs on the black market, while she has a special gift for dreaming: At a time, apparently, when nobody has slumber visions anymore, hers are enviably lucid and vivid, to a marketable degree. April’s selling of her dreams to others wishing to experience her sensations isn’t a fresh idea — paging “Strange Days” — but it’s one of the more fertile ones here, and goes frustratingly unexploited as the film continues to probe a single glum reality.

We’re more concerned with Baxter, whose underworld dealings eventually see him run afoul of local gangster Klein (Serban Pavlu), and the twins’ combined savings aren’t enough to allay the severe consequences. Soon April disappears, and Baxter’s desperate search for her begins. It’s ongoing when the story suddenly lurches five years into the future: The world looks much the same, but his hair is briefly longer, while April has seemingly been cloned into a number of identikit sex workers. Whether her brother can locate her soul in any one of them, or somehow implant it via her recorded memories, is the film’s big existential question — but the characters themselves aren’t drawn with enough warmth or personality for us to really care either way.

Storrie soldiers through it all with a clenched jaw and a steely gaze, but the film’s world never comes fully to life. Nathan Haugaard’s sheeny widescreen lensing and Oana Novicov’s distressed production design ensure it looks pretty good, but “April X” is missing the granular particulars and textures that might make us believe it: The narrative, likewise, is just cohesive enough, but the details of Baxter’s life and livelihood are so muddy that he doesn’t have our full attention. Parandi’s film winds up outlining a dystopia more dull than devastating — though perhaps that’s the future we should really be fearing.

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains major spoilers for “Digger,” in theaters now via Warner Bros.

When does a bad movie become a fascinating watch?

So often the kiss of death for a feature is boredom; that feeling you’ve seen the same story many times before, the actors are checked out, there’s no visual panache. That’s not the case with “Digger.” While it’s shaping up to be a box office disaster, the movie is anything but dull. Tom Cruise leads the cast in acting to the rafters, DP Emmanuel Lubezki keeps the camera moving and director Alejandro G. Iñárritu injects plenty of swagger in the proceedings.

Unfortunately, the film’s opening — an extended introduction to Cruise’s ambitious oilman Digger Rockwell — is so in-your-face that it sags under the weight. Cruise is in grotesque prosthetics, eager to show us as quickly as possible how uncouth Digger is: He eats from the same can of sardines as his beloved cat, his butt crack is seen in plain view of his maid, his comb-over wisps wildly.

It’s a clichéd character surrounded by other bobbling caricatures that enter and exit the rooms of his mansion, flailing wildly as Digger learns that his oil company might have inadvertently caused a climate-based global disaster. It’s shrill and tired, and despite the best intentions of the filmmakers to cause provocation around environmentalism, it’s about as subtle as Cruise turning to the camera and screaming, “DO YOU GET IT?!?” Ultimately, the poster’s promise of “a comedy of catastrophic proportions” seems more like a threat than a guarantee of “Dr. Strangelove”-esque genius.

But then, an interesting twist happens. No, “Digger” isn’t a musical, but rather reveals that everything we’ve seen so far is a group of actors rehearsing an ambitious play about Digger called “Fossil Fools.” We’re witnessing the tech rehearsal hours before the show is set to debut in front of an audience, and Cruise drops his broad southern accent, revealing himself as Curtis Markson, the star of the show who has difficulty finding the satirical rhythm.

It’s an engagingly meta turn, and shows much more of Cruise’s psyche than audiences might expect. During a teflon press tour hyping “Digger,” journalists weren’t able to conjure anything personal or interesting from him. But during a scene where Cruise argues with “Fossil Fools” director Hannah (Sophie Wilde) about satire versus real-world events, the artifice of Cruise’s fat suit and cowboy boots melts away, and the fire in his eyes that made iconic performances in films like “Magnolia” and “Eyes Wide Shut” blaze returns in flashes.

It also helps to contextualize Iñárritu’s vision of satire itself. Some reviews of “Digger” have knocked the very idea of satirical films in 2026. After all, how can anything feel larger-than-life in the Trump era? But given the put-on-a-show staging, the film’s structure adds further firepower to standout scenes like Digger holding court in the United Nations, tap-dancing around a global community ready to feed him to the wolves after he doubles down on his wrongdoing.

The showcase scene is emphasized by the fact that everything is underwritten by Digger’s real-life nephew Kenny (Jesse Plemons), who bought the rights to “Fossil Fools” and used his vast wealth to fund the production. His motivations are many, as he implies that he’s doing it out of a mix of penance, flagellation and tribute to his family name. But ultimately he’s a benefactor of the arts. The themes make it impossible to ignore the real-life soap opera currently happening at “Digger” studio Warner Bros., where new owner David Ellison swears he bought the company for all the right reasons.

“Digger” ends on a somber note, with the audience methodically putting on gas masks and emptying the gorgeous theater, stepping into the dystopian world that remains after Digger’s environmental disaster. Flooded streets, discarded cars and military police are all around, until the camera tilts to the sky and the soundtrack becomes overwhelmed with the natural noises of wild animals. It’s a chilling wrap, as well as a dour end to what appears to be the last Warner Bros. film ever released.

Not all of the elements tied to the twist work — Curtis’ search for his daughter’s missing flight during the tech rehearsal is curiously underbaked — but at least it teases a flurry of ideas instead of drowning in clumsy dialogue. At its best, it recalls Charlie Kaufman’s far superior 2008 film “Synecdoche, New York,” in which Philip Seymour Hoffman is a theater director who, in the pursuit of truth, creates a full-scale recreation of New York City in a warehouse in order to accurately reflect life. It, too, looks at the idea of understanding larger truths through a stage production, but is more clever and sincere.

Ultimately, even the decision to add another layer, becoming a story about art just as much as one about the climate crisis, doesn’t escalate “Digger” into must-see territory. But the cross section of cinephiles who will be compelled to catch it in theaters — Cruise completists, flop aficionados, rubberneckers who want to see the world burn — will have more to chew on than the artifice presented at the beginning.