With 'Dune: Part Two' delayed, a Hollywood without working writers and actors looks grim

Plus: 'Blue Beetle,' Adam Sandler's family project, and cringe-watching Carrie Bradshaw

View this email online by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when Barbie kept on rolling. It was the week when the strikes continued. And it was a bad week for a guy named Scooter. Let's get to it. Opening Argument The second chapter of Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Dune is not the first movie to be pushed to 2024 as a result of the labor disputes between Hollywood studios and the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, the unions representing writers and actors. But it feels like a big one. The first chapter won six Oscars and was nominated for best picture, making the original November 2023 date for Part Two a natural choice, since awards-y movies tend to come out late in the year (the first chapter came out in October 2021). Now it's been bumped to March 2024. March! Certainly not always a dead zone, but when it comes to ideal windows for important releases, conventional wisdom would hold it's certainly no November. This isn't about production. It's likely about promotion. Until the studios make a deal with the actors, stars like Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, and new addition Florence Pugh won't promote the movie. Putting out a huge project with an all-star cast when they're not going to participate in helping sell it has an awful lot of downside. And every time you do this, it has ripple effects. According to Variety, pushing Dune: Part Two to March means pushing Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire from March to April. (By the way: Did you know there was an upcoming movie called Godzilla x Kong? Not Godzilla vs. Kong, but essentially a movie purporting to be Godzilla multiplied by Kong? What a world.) When the WGA strike started on May 2, it wasn't clear how disruptive it would be in the short run. Shows and movies had been made already that could last for at least a while. When SAG-AFTRA also went on strike in mid-July, the effects got more acute. Scripts that existed couldn't be shot, and -- critically -- promotion from stars stopped. For a lot of projects, that's a very big problem. Chiabella James/Warner Bros. Pictures Granted, this is all conjecture, because everything can change day to day, and it's not as if studios are going to provide transparent explanations of their thinking. But counterintuitively, there may be cases where not doing press around a project could be perfectly okay with studios for reasons you might best describe as ... cynical. Rolling Stone critic (and my friend) Alan Sepinwall made the point to me that no interviews about the upcoming John Wick universe series The Continental on Peacock (set to premiere September 22) means no questions about (or to) Mel Gibson, one of its stars. Similarly, given the pending assault charges against Jonathan Majors, Disney+ may welcome the ability to launch the second season of Loki (set for October 6), in which he is featured, with no press at all. There may also be situations where external factors make it feel more plausible to go ahead and release something without traditional promotion. Apple TV+ still has the Brie Larson series Lessons in Chemistry scheduled for mid-October, but perhaps it helps that it's based on an extraordinarily successful 2022 novel that's been on the New York Times hardcover best seller list for 67 weeks. The Morning Show has its third season coming on September 13, but in addition to being a returning show, it has the benefit of star power in the form of Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon that sort of transcends any particular project. But whatever happens to these individual projects, the inevitable pain points for the content pipeline are obvious. Consider the long production shutdowns during the early parts of the COVID pandemic, which meant delays and interruptions that have had years of impact. Just one example: Succession went more than two years between season 2 and season 3, finally coming back in December 2021, almost a year after it was able to resume filming. Shows that have had great momentum in 2023 -- think of The Bear, for instance -- have no idea when they can come back with new seasons. They can't come back until they're filmed, they can't be filmed until they're written, and right now, nobody knows when that's going to be. Some shows, including Apple TV+'s Severance, were delayed by COVID and are now being delayed again. How many disruptions like that can one project sustain? It's not easy to get straight answers about the future. Some of the struck studios and streamers have pointed to short-term savings during the strikes, because obviously it saves money not to make anything. But ... well. As a kid, I used to listen to a comedy LP by Shelley Berman. In it, he did a whole routine about being a nervous flyer, and one joke was about the pilot boasting that the flight to Los Angeles would be landing 20 minutes ahead of schedule. "That scares the hell out of me, too," Berman says. "I mean, we can land an hour ahead of schedule if he puts it down in Grand Canyon." And what I learned from that joke is that the value of any given performance metric has to be considered in the context of the greater goal. And if the greater goal is to get the business moving again, seeing big movies vanish from the fall schedule is awfully deflating. Newsletter continues after sponsor message We Recommend I was quite charmed by You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah, a tween comedy on Netflix starring Adam Sandler's daughters and wife, as well as Idina Menzel -- and Adam Sandler himself. It's a pretty gentle, silly, only very lightly raunchy family movie that takes both the idea of a bat mitzvah and the idea of best friends pretty seriously. I'm currently reading and enjoying Once More With Feeling, a novel by Elissa Sussman, whose first book (Funny You Should Ask) I also very much liked. It's about a former pop star whose semi-scandalous past (in which she broke up with her boy-band boyfriend) resurfaces when she gets the chance to be in a new musical. Have I been watching Suits? I have been watching Suits. Do I understand why everybody is suddenly obsessed with Suits? Kind of! Are we going to talk about it on the show soon-ish? Yes. Listen to the Podcast Sponsor-Free Support your favorite pop culture junkies AND listen without sponsor interruptions with a subscription to Pop Culture Happy Hour+! Learn more and sign up at plus.npr.org/happy. Learn More What We Did This Week Craig Blankenhorn/Max Stephen and Aisha sat down to talk about the new raunchy talking-dog movie Strays. Aisha wrote about the new movie Bottoms, and she talked about it with Hazel Cills, Daisy Rosario and Christina Tucker. For you social readers out there, we shared some book club ideas. Glen talked to Cyrena Touros, Monica Castillo and Ronald Young, Jr. about Blue Beetle, and he also wrote a review laying out the film's "cure for superhero fatigue." I wrote a piece about HBO's very good new scammer documentaries Telemarketers and BS High. We have an episode upcoming about these as well, so catch up on both if you haven't yet. Aisha laid out the cringe-watch experience of season 2 of And Just Like That.... And, of course, look for Stephen on NPR Music's New Music Friday. What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: Christina Tucker: A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine Hazel Cills: How To with John Wilson on HBO Daisy Rosario: Kayaking lessons! Aisha Harris: Full Circle on Max Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: pchh@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Music, Books, Daily News and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Pop Culture Happy Hour emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy