Between seminal works like Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, FLCL, Gurren Lagaan, and of course, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gainax was an institution. They pumped out some all time classics and were defined by their absolute love of the weirdness that was anime. And yet, their closure wasn’t a surprise in the slightest to me. In an era where more and more anime titles were being pumped out each season, Gainax became a relic of a bygone era.

While it may be somewhat easy to just point at one thing and say that was the sole reason why Gainax collapsed, the truth is a lot more complicated. I do think most of their problems stem from one singular event, but even then, there wasn’t a singular moment it all went downhill for the company. Then again, as someone who has followed anime for most of my life, it’s not too hard to see how Gainax slowly died. Here’s the story of a company that started off as a passion project between a group of devout animators, only to eventually lose that drive and become a walking corpse.

Make no mistake, when Gainax began, it was full of nothing but drive. The original founders of Gainax, before forming the company, all cut their teeth making shorts that violated all kinds of copyright laws but they made them because they just wanted to create anime. Their most famous short from this time was probably the short they made for DAICON IV, which illegally sampled Electric Light Orchestra and featured an anime girl fighting Darth Vader and more or less forced their way into the market. But that’s just the kind of company they were. They didn’t care about measly copyright laws because they had a passion to just make solid anime.

Because of the quality of their animation for these shorts, they were able to establish Gainax in 1985 as their own company. For the better part of a decade though, they were in flux. Sometimes they would create profitable works, like Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and Gunbuster, but other times they would produce commercial failures like Wings of Honneamise, despite how nearly all of their titles were critically acclaimed.

By the mid 90s, Gainax was on the verge of shutting down. The studio needed money to stay afloat and needed a big hit. Then Neon Genesis Evangelion happened and you better believe that Gainax made bank off of it. Hideaki Anno, the studio’s founder, apparently didn’t want to make the series at Gainax give how strained the company’s coffers were (something that could easily be seen in the last few episodes of the series). But with Eva’s success, Gainax was ready for a whole new era of production to begin from the ludicrous amount of money they now had.

But with that came a double edged sword. Sure, the company was able to put out a lot of great anime and hire new talent like Hiroyuki Imaishi, a lot of shady corporate dealings were taking place. Thanks to the massive influx of money from Evangelion, the head of the company, Takeshi Sawamura, was arrested for tax fraud due to the money earned from Evangelion. Basically, because Gainax was financially unstable in the early 90s and there was no telling how long Evangelion would be profitable, Sawamura saw this as an opportunity to secretly stash some of that money away for a rainy day so to speak in case the company needed it. That’s the charitable reading of the situation, mind you, since the uncharitable one is because Gainax finally had a hit, Sawamure wanted to cash out before the company went belly up when the Eva horse was beaten to death.

Throughout the 2000s, while Gainax was producing critical hits, none of them ever reached the same heights as Evangelion. Titles like Gurren Lagaan and Mahoromatic were successful, but they weren’t Evangelion. In a somewhat lucky stroke of fortune around this time, Anno wanted to remake Evangelion, only this time as a film series. Given how the original series faced production issues, some from budgetary constraints and others from Anno facing several bouts of depression, Anno wanted to create a new version of the series, not dissimilar from what remakes like Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood or Hunter X Hunter did. But, in a move that began to spell the end of Gainax, Anno opted to do the remakes at a new company that he would create, a studio called Khara.

Anno opened up a few years ago about why he did this. First of all, he thought that if he did the series at Gainax then all of the artists would just be yes-men to him and not challenge him whatsoever. More importantly, due to the heads of the studio’s previously shady behavior, as well as the fact that most of the animators working at Gainax were hardly getting a salary, he wanted to ensure that the staff working on the film would receive fair compensation for their work.

And with that, Anno was gone. Gainax would still profit from some of the merchandise produced in relation to Evangelion, but Khara would get the royalties. Combine that with a string of failures like *checks notes* The Mystical Archives of Dantalian and talent like Imaishi leaving to create companies like Studio Trigger, Gainax was in a pinch. They were back to being unprofitable and producing fewer titles than ever before. By the early 2010s, anime streaming became more prevalent around the global and Gainax simply didn’t have the manpower, talent, or money to keep up.

And so came the begging. Gainax begged Khara/Anno for money in order to keep the company afloat, which Khara did, only for Gainax to then sell off the rights to many of the series like FLCL to other companies, as well as selling original concept art, storyboards, and production materials of their earlier series for profit. This resulted in Khara suing Gainax for not paying back the initial loan, which Anno was originally going to ignore until he learned about the the production materials being sold off. Plus, the negative publicity that Gainax was receiving from everything happening at the time was damaging the Eva brand, which only reaffirmed Anno’s actions to make it clear that Khara was now the home of Evangelion, not Gainax. Khara won that lawsuit, plunging Gainax even further into debt.

By this point, Gainax was hardly producing anime. The last series they ever made was in 2015 and it was an anime collaboration with Suburu of all companies. Shock of all shocks, it was a financial failure and Gainax struggled to find funding ever since. They made a second company called Fukushima Gainax and sold it off to another company for quick profit, but without a steady stream of money coming in from anime productions and merchandise, the money dried up. The death blow came in 2019 when a member of the board of directors had “indecent acts” against an aspiring voice actress, permanently blackening the name of the company in any investor’s eyes. And from there, it was only a matter of time until they declared bankruptcy.

Obviously, there’s a lot of things that I didn’t really get into here, but understanding Gainax’s collapse isn’t simple. This was a company that struggled to survive even in its early days, hit it big, then slowly began to make a lot of shortsighted and greedy decisions that ruined the goodwill that it had earned in the anime community. Of course, not making an anime in nearly a decade definitely didn’t help matters, but that was only systemic of the larger instability the company eventually developed. However, if you were to ask me what the really caused the death of Gainax, it all comes back to Evangelion.

It’s hard to not look at everything that happened to Gainax and not trace everything back to Eva. I don’t begrudge or hate Evangelion – it was the hit that Gainax needed to survive – but it’s success led to the numerous poor decisions to try to replicate its success. It’s what made Anno leave Gainax. It’s what led to Gainax selling off production materials and cutting off the financial support they needed from Khara. It’s what led to the tax fraud. All of their problems, in one way or another, all come back to Anno’s magnum opus.

Gainax certainly has a place in anime history, but its relevancy was almost nonexistent even a decade ago. The passion that made Gainax the hub of animation that it was still lives on in studios like Khara and Trigger as they become more and more preoccupied with financial gain. When the quality titles dried up, that was it. Their last notable hit was Panty & Stocking With Garterbelt in 2010, but even then it was a polarizing title that not everyone loved. Gainax has a place in anime history, but that time passed decades ago. It’s not shocking at all to me that Gainax died. It’s been a walking corpse for a while.

Unfortunately, that earned momentum doesn’t last long. After the intriguing opening, you’re forced into a glacially-paced flashback/tutorial. Here, you flip back and forth between awkwardly climbing cliff faces and *checks notes* dragging a big vacuum around and getting your ass handed to you by the game’s complex combat system. It’s here the game’s biggest sin first appears: during exploration or combat, you are constantly interrupted by text tutorials, forced camera movement, and the chatter of your companions—often happening all at once!

The flashback/tutorial ends with Cloud limping through a burning village, and I cannot emphasize how slow and boring this sequence is. The chaos of the fire and the bombastic music—not to mention the liberal use of slow motion—try so hard to hammer how important and epic this moment is, but what’s actually happening is completely drama-less. It’s the Zack Snyder-fication of video game storytelling: big moments, no feeling.

Finally released from the tutorial’s clutches, we catch up with our party in the present day, on the run but free of Midgar. But wait, didn’t we see them all incapacitated and captured by Shinra? I’m currently 12 hours into the game, and this alternate universe/timeline/whatever has not been explained.

After another hour of forced tutorials and a stealth sequence, the party escapes into the wilderness, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth actually starts in earnest. The wide world of the planet is ahead of you, villainous hotboy Sephiroth is somewhere out there, and the evil forces of Shinra are in pursuit. What kind of new adventure does the immortal Final Fantasy have in store for us?

It’s a goddamned open-world game. There are little clusters of monsters to fight, and sidequests to complete, and crafting materials to gather. They even have towers. Towers! That reveal more icons on the map! It’s 2024!

Needless to say—which is part of the problem—dumping you into an open world sequence completely kills the game’s momentum. Despite narrowly evading Shinra forces in the town of Kalm, you can just… go back there to play a useless card game, take on a photo mode challenge, or accept a sidequest where you repair a pipeline. Didn’t we spend the entirety of the last game trying to blow those up? Who cares! Numbers go up!

This is Rebirth‘s biggest problem: it wants to be the only video game. Not just the only game you are playing, the only game, period. Members of the development team have said a few times that Rebirth is a great starting point for the series. Which is ridiculous! This is a sequel to a remake of a portion of a game that came out in 1997! 

The characters and environments are lovingly recreated based on our memories of the original Final Fantasy 7. The story assumes familiarity with both the original and Remake, and the combat system basically requires some affinity with other action games, but all the tutorials and handholding treat the player like it’s the first time they’ve ever picked up a controller. Who is the audience for Rebirth other than “PS5 owners?”

Let’s get real basic for a second: What are the motivations of this story? Why is Cloud pursuing Sephiroth? Vengeance, I guess—we see in the first scene that Sephiroth killed Cloud’s mom—except, because of the weird glitchy video thing, maybe he didn’t. Why is Aerith following Cloud? Because she has a crush on him? What about Red XIII? He seems to want revenge for what Shinra did to him, but he’s also pretty chill about it. In fact, everyone is pretty chill about everything, because any sort of driving force might distract the player from visiting all the little icons on the map.

Do you ever notice how, in a book series like Harry Potter, the books get longer as the series continues? As writers become more successful, the role of the editor falls away so that “the fans”—that nebulous, angry, wallet-burning glob of Twitter usernames—don’t feel robbed of the divine genius of their current favorite creative. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is in desperate need of an editor, someone who can evaluate the project as a whole and say, hey, maybe we don’t need a crappy Mario Kart ripoff in the middle of our 100-hour-long melodrama. It’s like the entire development process of this game was just that webcomic of that guy getting chucked out a window over and over again for 6 years. 

It’s an interesting time to release something as bloated and directionless as Rebirth. Entertainment is in a weird place: the gaming industry has seen a brutal wave of mass layoffs and streaming services keep upping their prices while pumping out more and more mediocre content, and both have impossibly high standards of profitability that are only getting higher. 

On the other hand, the movie industry is thriving: 2023 was one of the best years for movies ever, with big movies by big directors that lived up to the hype critically and made a ton of money. 2024 has already seen the release of Dune Part Two, a thoughtful and intelligent blockbuster that also happens to totally kick ass. Hopefully, video games take the right lessons from this era of high-budget films with art house souls—before we’re all buried in the content sludge.

Storycraft is a column by Colin Munch that dives into storytelling in video games and other media. You can read his other work here.

I had originally said back in my Winter 2024 Anime guide that Solo Leveling‘s interesting fusion of Isekai tropes, video game sensibilities, and modern-day setting made it an interesting dark fantasy series that deserved a three-episode watch at the very minimum. And after watching those three episodes, the series gets off on a very strong foot. It violently breaks down any and all expectations you may have had going into it, chews them up, and spits them back out, asserting that it’s not playing by your traditional rules. But that’s the funny thing about recommending you watch the first three episodes of a show – they can be excellent episodes in nearly every sense, but an anime series isn’t just three episodes long. It’s more than that, and from the fourth episode on, my thoughts and opinions on the series dropped considerably.

Why is that? Well, Solo Leveling, much like any other anime series within the past several years, played a game with viewer expectations that has become all too common. In the past few years, you may have heard of something called the “Three Episode Rule.” That production philosophy has become omnipresent in anime culture, and it’s one that virtually every show has to grapple with. Some shows fail that rule, some break it, and then you have shows like Solo Leveling that exploit it. Like it or not, it’s a rule that anime fans live by, and while many critics within the anime community may groan that it has outlived its purpose or that it never served a role at all, I would argue otherwise. The Three Episode Rule is very real and is usually a good indicator of whether a show, like Solo Leveling, is worth your time.

The Three Episode Rule, at its core, is a very simple idea. The main gist of it is that if you want to get into a new anime that is currently streaming or even a classic show, a newcomer should give the series three episodes to sell you on its potential. We all can agree that a first impression is very important, whether it be personal relationships, jobs, video games, and so on and so forth. During those first few moments, we can learn a lot about a person or a situation and make a general assessment of whether we like the person or situation we are in. Plenty of television studios know this, too, so they try to make sure the first episode of a show has something to sell you on it and get you invested. In anime, that usually comes down to some high production values, a killer opening, or a plot hook to really get viewers invested.

But what comes after that first episode? The production values will begin to decline, the momentum established by that intro will slow, and the things that viewers loved about the premiere will be a distant memory. Anime production companies are aware of this, so they try their hardest to make the two episodes after the intro just as important and engaging as the premiere. Not every company does, though, so the anime community has created the Three Episode Rule to try and determine if a series is worth watching. It’s a philosophy that basically admits that you can’t truly judge a series by its first episode alone, and once the bombast and luster of the premiere has worn off, you should watch more of the show before fully committing to it. Once you’re three episodes in, and you’ve seen the routine a show has developed and given the show enough time to convey to the audience what it’s about, then you’ll know if it’s a show worth committing to or not.

Related: All English Dub Voice Actors & Cast List for Solo Leveling

It’s a sound philosophy and one that makes sense. I can only speak from my personal experience, but I find that watching three episodes of a show is probably the best way to determine if you’re going to like it or not. Dozens of shows are coming out each season, and it’s virtually impossible to watch all of them. Having a small system that allots a show one hour to convince you is effective. Each season, I have around a dozen shows that I find interesting, so I watch the first three episodes once they’re done, then make a judgment call if they’re worth continuing or not. Sometimes, this system pays off, like when you have shows like Madoka Magica that keep viewers invested and completely hook them by the end of the third episode. Other times, this system fails, like with a show back in 2021 called Wonder Egg Priority that was bursting with potential and promise after those first three episodes, only to completely collapse in on itself by the end. Still, that’s not necessarily a fault of the show but rather the lofty ambitions of an inexperienced production team, but that’s a discussion for another time.

This brings us to Solo Leveling, a series that ropes you into its world and the situation our hero, Jinwoo, finds himself in at the end of the first episode. He’s locked in a dungeon with an enemy who is unimaginably more powerful than him and already effortlessly killed two of his party members. The next two episodes go on to flesh out the terrible situation, as well as set up the show’s premise where due to a dark ritual caused by this towering titan of nightmare fuel, Jinwoo has been granted the power of a “Player.” What that means to him is somewhat unclear, same with how it applies to this world with its own power system that seems virtually incompatible with his status as a Player. But we learn very quickly that the punishments for failing to complete certain tasks are harsh and severe to the point where you almost want to see him fail just to see what gets thrown at him next.

So, based on those three episodes, Solo Leveling does a stand-up job setting up the rest of the season. The production values were high, and I was roped in. But from the fourth episode on, it’s become evident that the production team at A-1 Pictures has already become a bit too comfortable with the positive reputation that the series has developed in such a short time. They knew, like most anime production studios, that the Three Episode Rule is a very real phenomenon, so now that audiences are already invested, they don’t have to try as hard to keep them coming back week after week. The animation has become a bit sloppier. The uniqueness of the concept has become stale. The hope that those first three episodes had to deliver a dark fantasy epic petered out. Of course, the narrative problems that the show is facing now may also be present in the original source material, but regardless, they’re here, and they’re… dull.

That’s my overall mood after watching Episode 7, the most recent episode at the time of this piece. Jinwoo has become a boring protagonist who no longer has a lighthearted personality and good common sense. In those first three episodes, despite his complete and utter lack of strength, his observation skills and sense of self-preservation made him stand out from other anime protagonists. Now, Jinwoo is physically and mentally a different person and a less interesting one at that. He’s gained exponential strength due to his status as a Player, but with it, he lost the skills that made him so compelling despite being pathetically weak. He’s essentially become just like every other Isekai main character like Rimura from Reincarnated As A Slime or Hajime from Arifureta – characters who are so overpowered that they’re boring to watch now. Solo Leveling tried to remediate this in Episode 7 by having Jinwoo fight against a monster that was leagues above him in terms of strength, but when compared to every other named human character, I can’t help but feel that these potential foes are just going to be weaklings that are deflating to watch Jinwoo fight against, not dissimilar from how I can’t get invested in any side character’s fight in One Punch Man since I know Saitama can one-shot all of them.

Is the series beyond redemption? Of course not, but the longer a show like Solo Leveling goes on, the easier it will be for me to drop it if I don’t see any signs of improvement. I was hooked based on those first three episodes, and I definitely gave the show its fair shake. I saw potential there, and I still see potential now, but I also see a show that is very comfortable to fall into familiar trappings now that it has its audience. This is one of the ever-increasing amount of modern shows that are aware of how important its first three episodes are and will pull out all of the stops to impress in that short amount of space, then start coasting the second it reaches episode four.

I know that the Three Episode Rule is a very polarizing topic within the anime community. I’ve heard arguments stating that it has and always will be relevant when it comes to determining which shows to watch, just as I’ve heard arguments saying that it’s a relic of a bygone era when anime wasn’t as pervasive as it is today. I think that both sides are valid, but the Three Episode Rule does still have value today. First impressions do matter a lot, and this rule is a great determining factor to help a person see if a show is for them. Just be careful of shows like Solo Leveling that will exploit this rule and pull out all of the stops in its beginning, only to consistently take the easy way out time and time again the second those three episodes are over.

The man is considered to be one of the founding fathers of the modern-day anime industry, mostly thanks to his works in Studio Ghibli and his dedication to keeping 2D hand-drawn animation alive in an industry that is becoming more and more reliant on digital techniques, sometimes to a frightening degree. With 12 films under his belt over six decades and a production studio known throughout the world, Hayao Miyazaki is a legend in nearly every sense of the word. He’s not perfect by any means, but there’s no one else like him in the industry.

Why is that, though? What makes Hayao Miyazaki… Hayao Miyazaki?

That was one of the questions I was asking myself recently when I sat through his most recent film, The Boy and the Heron. I have seen it twice over the course of a week, once with subtitles and once with the English dub, and I kept asking myself why I was finding it so compelling. It’s a good movie, but it’s one that I think has some pretty obvious flaws that you’ll need to contend with. Yet I was able to overlook them much easier than I would if it was a Mamoru Hosoda film or a Masaaki Yuasa piece. Plus, whenever anyone watches a film by Miyazaki, it’s clear that something is going on there that’s hard to pin down – some tone, some perspective, some element that can’t be captured by any other director. So, I wanted to examine what that special ingredient may be and how only an artist like Miyazaki can effectively use it.

If I were to use a single word to describe all of Miyazaki’s library, which is not an easy feat, mind you, I would probably describe it as pure. Now, that word can mean a lot of different things, depending on the movie. In some films, it means a lack of cynicism as the world is presented to us from a child’s point of view. In other cases, it’s examining broad concepts in simple terms and just letting the feelings of the piece evoke imagery and emotions in a viewer. And then there are times when the film’s message is ultimately about the desire to maintain purity in the world and to prevent its corruption, if only for a little bit. Miyazaki, for all of the themes and ideas he may constantly pull from, loves to showcase the purity in the world.

This is usually pretty relevant whenever aviation, or flying in any capacity, is involved. In most of his movies, his characters either gain the ability to fly or participate in a sequence where they soar through the skies, marveling at the calmness of it all. From Nausicaa to Kiki’s Delivery Service and Howl’s Moving Castle to The Wind Rises, the clear skies are usually the place his characters go to in order to achieve peace. There’s a stillness and quietness to the skies, which embodies a concept that Miyazaki loves to throw into his film: Ma. Ma, in simple terms, means stillness, and Miyazaki likes to include these beats in his films, pure little moments where the world and environment can just exist as is. No tension, no chaos, no rushed pacing, just a breather for audiences to take in the film and engage with it on a deeper level.

You can almost reach a zen-like state when you watch a Hayao Miyazaki movie. Yes, there are scenes where a lot can happen both in the context of the narrative and on-screen, but all of his films eventually return to that state of inner peace. When I was watching The Boy and the Heron, that film was almost all introspective contemplation, something that is very befitting of a man who is approaching the end of his life and can be seen at times to be therapeutic not only for the audience but for Miyazaki himself.

It’s no secret that Miyazaki puts a lot of his beliefs and personal history into his films. As a child, Miyazaki grew up in the remains of post-war Japan and directly saw the affect effects that World War II had on his country. Combining that with his complex relationship with his father, who helped manufacture fighter planes in the war, it’s easy to see how Miyazaki developed his strong anti-war messages that can be seen in Nausicaa, Porco Rosso, and Howl’s Moving Castle. But as Miyazaki grew older, he became more and more interested in examining his own life and his relationship with the world. The Wind Rises, despite being a film about a real-life airplane designer, Jiro Horikoshi, is basically about Miyazaki trying to reconcile his past with his family’s legacy and how his family inadvertently corrupted the purity of the skies that Miyazaki loves so much. Granted, that may be a lofty reading of it, but the elements are present. Miyazaki is a storyteller, and the stories he wants to tell are deeply personal to him.

But it’s that audience that may also be the key in trying to determine what makes Miyazaki so singular of a director. If you were to ask Miyazaki who the target demographic for his films is, then he would almost certainly say children. In nearly all of his films, children are seen as the driving force of the plot and the audience’s surrogate character. No one child is the same in his films, offering different perspectives for different ages and genders. The children of My Neighbor Totoro, with their wide-eyed innocence, contrast nicely with a character like Kiki, who is learning to grow up on her own and live the life that she wants to live. Each of his films can also easily be understood by children, allowing anyone to become engaged with his filmography. When I was growing up, outside of watching Kiki’s Delivery Service on a nearly monthly basis, I watched most of his films when I was 12 on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block, finding myself easily enamored by what I was watching.

Was it different from what I was used to? Undeniably. The only anime I had seen up until that point were either action shows like Yu Yu Hakusho that aired on Toonami or series co-opted by Saturday morning cartoon blocks like Digimon, Monster Rancher, and Fighting Foodons (sidebar, does anyone remember that show because I can’t be the only one who remembers it). But I felt like watching a Miyazaki movie was like finding an oasis. In an industry that was interested in pumping out more and more titles and selling merchandise, Hayao Miyazaki’s films never came across that way. Yes, Studio Ghibli made bank off of merchandising films like My Neighbor Totoro, but that felt more like an unintentional result than a clear goal. His films were meant to always be artistic statements that could be understood by children and allow those feelings to resonate with them.

It seems like the anime industry forgets that animation typically skews to a younger audience. Obviously, there are numerous examples of anime series that are targeted toward adults and those with mature sensibilities, but as time goes on, it feels like those examples are becoming the majority. Anime aimed at children seems like they are becoming more and more fringe. I mean, take Astro Boy, one of the most defining anime series ever made, and compare it to its modern-day reinvention, Pluto. Now, Pluto is a great show in too many ways to count, but I would never dream of showing Pluto to a child in my life. As more and more anime targets older audiences, it’ll become harder and harder for children to get into anime. Miyazaki’s films at least offer an easy and accessible entryway into the medium.

And it’s unclear how long that’s going to last. Miyazaki announced that he was going to retire at numerous times in his career, only for him to come out of retirement time and time again for another film. That seems to be the case once more, but there is concern that, without Hayao Miyazaki’s guiding philosophy and artistic vision, what does the future of Studio Ghibli even look like? In the decade between The Wind Rises and The Boy and the Heron, Studio Ghibli’s production schedule decreased significantly, with the quality of those films also being a lot lower than what is expected of Ghibli. Two of those films were directed by Miyazaki’s son, Goro Miyazaki, and for as much as Goro may try to replicate his father’s style, it comes across exactly as that – an imitation of something genuine and sincere.

As sad as it is to acknowledge, Hayao Miyazaki will eventually die and the anime industry will never be the same. There will be mourning and musings about how Miyazaki was unlike any other director in the industry. That’s true. No one will ever be like Miyazaki. No one can ever have the same experiences or pour themselves into their work as much as him. No one can try to find the magic and beauty in innocence and convey that through the eyes of a child. No one can convey stillness and silence like Miyazaki. Miyazaki gives you time to think about his movies as you watch them. And if I had to hazard a guess about why no one else will be like him, that’s my go-to answer.

Frame Jump is a column from Jesse Lab that focuses on anime, such as Happy Sugar Life, Attack on Titan, and One Piece. You can read the full archive of what he’s written so far here.

Oh sure, there is a lot to say about the franchise as a whole and how it holds a special place in many an anime fan’s hearts. I’m just not one of them. It’s not that I think I have some higher moral authority on the matter or think that it’s overrated. In the modern-day anime industry, where almost everything has a toxic fandom that will attack anyone and everyone who criticizes their beloved franchise, I’m not even criticizing the show as a bad series. I’ve heard nothing but wonderful things about the series from fans who have followed it for all of those ten years. I gave it a shot years ago when it first came out, dropped it, and never felt the need to look back on it.

I guess you could consider this piece as me coming to terms with why I never cared about Attack on Titan. As someone who watches an unhealthy amount of anime on a weekly and monthly basis, why did a show like Attack on Titan never click with me, but weirder and probably more objectively poorer series like Happy Sugar Life did? I think the overarching reason has to do not only with the show itself but also with the state of the industry and the studios that would be involved with the production of it.

Make no mistake, I respect the hell out of what Attack on Titan did for the anime industry. From my own personal experience growing up, anime was always seen as being a niche interest. To an extent, that’s still true, but within the past decade, anime has become more and more mainstream and gained wider recognition outside of Japan. One of those reasons was primarily because of Attack on Titan and its release. The series began streaming on Crunchyroll five years after the streaming service launched in 2008, and while it wasn’t the series that catapulted it into the anime juggernaut it is today, that honor would probably go to Sword Art Online, it still pushed a ton of people to get Crunchyroll subscriptions back in the day. Even then, it made Netflix and Hulu dive headfirst into anime to capture some of that delicious Attack on Titan cake, which resulted in them having their own slew of anime productions.

I also have to commend the series for launching the studio that first began producing it, Wit Studio. The studio, established by former Production I.G. employees, put their heart and soul into Attack on Titan, which was the first production under their new studio. In that way, Attack on Titan could serve as a mission statement of sorts for Wit Studio and what they wanted to accomplish. They wanted to storm onto the anime scene and redefine what an anime was capable of. In retrospect, there’s no denying that the first episode of Attack on Titan did all of that and more. It’s an absolutely fantastic first episode of any show – anime or otherwise – sends a clear message about the premise of the show and the world its characters live in and almost demands viewers to stick around for more.

RELATED: Jujutsu Kaisen Manga Chapter Release Date Schedule

It was around October of 2013 that I got my Crunchyroll subscription, not for Attack on Titan, which was almost done with its first season, but for a series called Kill la Kill. I had heard about Attack on Titan all throughout the summer from friends and co-workers at the summer camp I worked at, saw the Survey Corps logo on plenty of jackets, and heard the amazing OP “Guren No Yumiya” on loop. So I gave the series a spin alongside the other Fall 2013 series and enjoyed the first episode a lot to the point where I began to slowly catch up to the first season. But as I got through more and more of the show, my focus shifted to those other Fall shows like Kill la Kill and Beyond the Boundary. It wasn’t because Attack on Titan was bad or conventional, but rather because I was bored by the characters.

Yes, I know that nowadays, many of the core cast members of Attack on Titan are beloved and go through wonderful arcs and have several layers of nuance to them, but back then, I found myself bored. I found Eren and Mikasa to be uninteresting, and the side characters were underutilized. I guess I had developed the perception that if this was going to be a series that killed its cast, I should give a damn about them, yet I wasn’t developing any emotional connections. Again, knowing what I know now, the show definitely does go into some out-there and somewhat subversive directions with its cast, but I’m someone who loves a good character drama, and Attack on Titan, at the time, just wasn’t doing anything for me, despite the universal praise and wonderful animation. 

So the series kept trucking along, and I found myself becoming more invested in other shows, yet I was still aware of the success that Attack on Titan had earned. Even when fans were criticizing the show, which was somewhere around the third season, I think, I was still hearing plenty of recommendations for it. But by that point, the show was already fairly well established, with dozens of episodes to its name. It got to the point where it was on my backlog, but the show had become so large of a watch that I just kept becoming disinclined to watch it. Much like how I don’t really want to go back to Persona 5 because I know I will be spending over 100 years playing it, I also didn’t feel the need to spend precious hours of my day watching something that I knew I wasn’t a big fan of initially. Why would I invest my time into something I was originally mixed on?

So I stayed away from the series for a while, but then I started to hear about the series for a completely different reason. In 2019, Wit Studio, after three seasons, decided not to produce the show’s last season. To many, this was a shocking development as Wit Studio built their entire reputation thanks to Attack on Titan, and for the longest time, no one knew exactly why they did this. Recently, however, the founder of Wit Studio opened up about why they dropped the show, and the answer was that it became too demanding for them to produce. Not necessarily because the sequences were difficult to animate, even though they were, but actually making the series was too taxing. 

The behind-the-scenes production of the first season of Attack on Titan was a nightmare. Yes, we hear all about how anime studios are essentially workhouses and staff are mistreated often (I’m looking at you, MAPPA), but Attack on Titan was especially chaotic. Wit essentially begged for animators as the show went on to help create the same kind of spectacle that was present in that first episode, and things were so down to the wire that episodes were turned in mere hours before they were set to air. There were year-long breaks between seasons to help the staff get some breathing room from the Titan-sized expectations of the series, but grueling work is still grueling work no matter how far apart they were. Plus, by this point, Wit had already grown to a point where they could take on other projects with less demanding production cycles that were less mentally draining than Attack on Titan. So they said farewell to the series that made them.

It was interesting to me to hear about this as an outsider because I interpreted that there were some problems with the series moving forward and that Wit knew something that we didn’t know at the time. Ultimately, it was for a better work-life balance for their staff, or at as good of a work-life balance that you can get in the anime industry, but I was curious to see who could fill those lofty shoes established by Wit. The answer, it turns out, would be… MAPPA. A studio that has no problem openly exploiting its workforce to diminishing effects.

I admit that when it comes to MAPPA and the seemingly endless negative stories about their working conditions, that just sealed the deal on why I wouldn’t bother with the series. We all have to choose our battles on what we support and don’t support, but this one is my personal line. Knowing what I know now, I feel weird watching their shows. And I admit, that is a bit of a hypocritical stance to take, especially given my enjoyment of some of their shows like Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen. However, these feelings towards MAPPA are relatively recent and have tainted my opinions on the company as a brand. I can’t look at MAPPA animation anymore without thinking of how inhumane their practices are, much in the same way I can’t watch any Woody Allen movie without thinking of the allegations against him.

What made it even easier for me was the almost comical levels that this “final season” was split into multiple parts, then subdivided even further into smaller parts. I appreciate that MAPPA didn’t just try to fart out a conclusion and gave the animators time to create a worthy conclusion to the series, but I can’t enjoy the series, or at least the ending of the series, knowing that the people behind it were responsible for some of the worst conditions in the anime industry. I know it’s unfair to associate Attack on Titan with such an unfortunate company, but it’s still an association that can’t be overlooked. At least fans seemed to have been satisfied with the show’s finale, despite how it’s been drawn out to the point where calling it “the final season” has all but become a joke.

But the me of today is different from the me of 10 years ago. I’m no longer looking for the next big franchise to dive into and immerse myself in. At least, right now, I’m more interested in smaller and more interesting anime projects. Has anyone here seen Pluto? That show is just plain stellar. Plus, with other smaller titles disappearing into the cracks, I’m much more interested in watching anime that doesn’t have the massive and lofty expectations. That series isn’t going anywhere and has cemented itself as a bastion of the anime community for time immemorial. But I view it more as a symbol now than an actual show. Like how I don’t see myself ever rewatching Dragon Ball Z simply due to how long it is and how much it transcends the anime industry, Attack on Titan now occupies the same space. It’s a legend, but it’s something I can respect and appreciate for what it did rather than what it actually is. 

Frame Jump is a monthly column on all things anime from Jesse Lab. If you want to read more Frame Jump, you can find all the articles published so far here.

Last week’s bombshell Variety report looking at the chaos behind the scenes at Marvel Studios has generated a lot of discussion. The company is facing some very real problems, many of which are tied to larger market forces and so can’t really be solved by a few shrewd decisions. However, there is one lingering issue that the company is seemingly refusing to address: Jonathan Majors.

Majors has been cast as Kang the Conqueror, the multi-dimensional threat who will serve as the backbone holding together the next few years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU). He is essentially replacing Josh Brolin as Thanos, the villain who loomed large over “the Infinity Saga.” Marvel is betting big on Kang and, by extension, Majors. The next ensemble Avengers film has been announced with the subtitle of The Kang Dynasty, referencing a Kurt Busiek story arc.

When he was cast, Majors was regarded as one of the most promising actors of his generation. He had broken out in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, to the point that critic Kyle Buchanan advocated for a Best Supporting Actor nomination and even Richard Brody’s negative review singled out the performer as “reflectively and sensitively persuasive.” Majors followed that up with a starring role in Lovecraft Country and appeared as the youngest member of the ensemble in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods.

When Majors was announced as Kang in September 2020, his casting was a coup for Marvel. As the company had done by casting performers like Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt during the previous decade, and arguably as they’d done in reinventing more established-but-adrift leads like Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans, Marvel Studios was making a big bet on an emerging talent with an incredible amount of potential. Ant-Man director Peyton Reed called him “the most exciting actor of his generation.”

Of course, things have changed dramatically since then. In March 2023, Majors was arrested and charged with assault in New York City. Very quickly, allegations of domestic abuse began to surface, along with reports suggesting a larger pattern of behavior. These allegations do not exist separate from his work with Marvel. Prosecutors are investigating “a Molineaux incident” that occurred while he was in London filming his role in Loki.

These reports are incredibly serious. To the credit of the major studios, it appears that the reports are being taken seriously in Hollywood. The actor was dropped by his management firm, Entertainment 360. There are unconfirmed reports that the talent agency CAA has also dropped him because of his “brutal conduct” towards staff.) He was removed from the upcoming adaptation of The Man in My Basement. Even Disney removed his awards contender, Magazine Dreams, from the release slate.

However, Marvel Studios has yet to make a decision about whether Jonathan Majors will remain as Kang the Conqueror. More than that, the company has done little to downplay or marginalize Majors within their shared universe. The performer was a significant part of the advertising for the second season of Loki, appearing as a big reveal in the trailer for the season, even though he is just a recurring guest star in the six-episode season.

According to Variety, the company is adopting a wait-and-see approach, considering the possibility of replacing Kang the Conqueror with Doctor Doom. This arguably makes sense anyway, given that Doom was a key figure in both Secret Wars comic book storylines. However, it’s unclear what exactly Marvel is waiting for. Court cases can take a long time, and it’s clear that the company needs to make some quick decisions to help fight the rising tide.

It’s important to be clear. Majors’ guilt or innocence will be determined by a court of law, adhering to a burden of proof. That standard does not apply to an actor starring in a gigantic multimedia franchise. Actors can be replaced and fired without a criminal conviction. No performer is entitled to stand at the center of the largest movie franchise in the world. Even beyond the standards of a basic “morality clause,” Marvel Studios’ decision to part ways with Majors is independent of criminality.

After all, Marvel Studios has recast roles before, under a variety of circumstances. The studio replaced Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle because Howard asked for too much money. They swapped out Edward Norton with Mark Ruffalo because Norton wanted to make a movie to his own standards. Harrison Ford will step into the role of Thunderbolt Ross vacated by the passing of William Hurt. None of these examples imply any criminal guilt for any of the actors replaced.

There are obviously examples where recasting might be a bad or tasteless idea. Chadwick Boseman was so iconic and definitive as T’Challa that it would be an insult to his memory to replace him in the role. Hopefully, it is not a controversial statement to suggest that Jonathan Majors is no Chadwick Boseman. Indeed, the possible emergency switch to Doctor Doom seems unnecessary. The character of Kang the Conqueror comes with a fairly handy internal justification for any possible recasting.

As established in Loki and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Kang the Conqueror is a supervillain with countless variants across the multiverse. Indeed, several of his variants have already been killed off on-screen: He Who Remains and Victor Timely in Loki, and the version who appeared in Quantumania. While the MCU has established that some variants, notably most of those featured in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, are identical, it has also revealed that many aren’t.

There is no hard-and-fast rule that every variant of a multiversal character needs to be played by the same actor. Spider-Man: No Way Home features three versions of the title character played by Tom Holland, Tobey Maguire, and Andrew Garfield. Loki has featured a diverse array of variants of the trickster god played by actors like Tom Hiddleston, Sophia Di Martino, Richard E. Grant, Deobia Oparei, Jack Veal and more. There is no reason that every version of Kang needs to look like Majors.

Majors is a growing problem for the studio. Reviews of the second season of Loki tend to mention the actor’s controversies, creating a narrative that ties them to the studio. ScreenRant noted that the controversy “hangs over what is otherwise a solid run of episodes.” SlashFilm opined that Majors’ grandstanding “made for an unpleasant viewing experience.” Even an agnostic Hollywood Reporter review conceded that Majors’ presence “either will or won’t prove to be a point of distraction.”

Part of the issue is the nature of the role itself. It is perhaps possible for an actor mired in controversy to give a compelling and engaging performance. The morality of employing such a performer is a larger debate, but there are cases where the work speaks for itself. Oppenheimer, for example, makes excellent use of Casey Affleck, an actor who comes with no shortage of off-screen baggage, by casting him in a role that relies on his ability to make the audience feel ill-at-ease.

In contrast, Kang is a role that can often feel like an acting exercise. Over the next few years, the audience is going to see countless variations on Kang, and the actor playing the role will have to come up with a way of differentiating them from each other. It’s an interesting concept — one that feels quite academic. Can an actor play what is essentially the same role in an infinitely diverse number of ways? It’s the kind of challenge that attracts a showy performer.

Majors has talked about “the potential” that Kang has and how he “didn’t recognize” himself as Kang in the Quantumania trailer. According to Majors, the role of Kang “is an actor’s dream or an actor’s nightmare.” It’s a fun idea to play with, and one that taps into the improvisational roots of the shared cinematic universe. Producer Jeremy Latcham has talked about Marvel Studios as a place where people “want to come play,” and that is certainly the vibe with Majors’ approach to Kang.

To put it simply, Majors is doing a lot. Watching Majors in Loki and Quantumania, this is an actor who is putting a lot of mayonnaise on the sandwich. Particularly on Loki, Majors distinguishes the different versions of Kang by giving them mannerisms and tics. Victor Timely even has a pronounced stutter. Majors is constantly making big choices in the role, which makes sense. He needs to be able to sell these characters as fundamentally the same, but superficially different.

However, this performance relies on the audience’s goodwill. It’s playful and fun, but it requires an actor with whom the audience wants to play and have fun. There’s a minimum threshold of goodwill required to sell and sustain this sort of performance, and Majors has lost that. As IndieWire mused in their review of Loki’s second season, “it’s hard to kick back and enjoy his frenzied energy or stilted intonations when you know the monstrous accusations levied against the man in real life.”

Loki executive producer Kevin Wright has explained that the show’s second season didn’t recast Majors because it was “maybe – not maybe – this is the first Marvel series to never have any additional photography.” In a world where Quantumania was seemingly reshooting its ending just weeks before release and Multiverse of Madness was shooting up to the last minute, recasting Majors might be a more valid excuse for the studio to employ its trademark postproduction reshoots.

Still, with Loki wrapping up its second season, there’s no excuse for Marvel to wait any longer. The past few years have been surprisingly tough for the company, and those in charge will undoubtedly face tough decisions in the months and years to come. Right now, they face an incredibly easy problem with a very simple solution: just recast Kang the Conqueror.

Invincible is back this week, premiering on Amazon Prime. The show is a glorious and gleeful celebration of comic tropes, but it is also layered with compelling human drama.

In some ways, Invincible is a reminder of just how thoroughly the conventions of superhero storytelling have permeated the mainstream. The show takes place in a world that feels fully formed, in which superheroism is just a fact of life. As such, the series has to do remarkably little handholding to guide the audience through this universe populated by incredibly powerful aliens, clones confused about the nature of their identity, hidden empires of fish people, and societies of lizard supervillains.

Of course, in many cases it’s possible to identify an obvious influence on a given Invincible character or concept. Cecil Stedman (Walton Goggins), the head of the Global Defense Initiative, is clearly evoking characters like Amanda Waller or Nick Fury. The Guardians of the Globe suggest the Justice League or the Avengers. Dimension-hopping supervillain Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown) recalls Kang the Conqueror.

In many cases, these parallels help to orient the viewer within the world of the show. Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons) is recognizable as a Superman stand-in. By that logic, Darkwing (Lennie James) is Batman, War Woman (Lauren Cohan) is Wonder Woman, Red Rush (Michael Cudlitz) is the Flash, Aquarus (Ross Marquand) is Aquaman, and Martian Man (Chad L. Coleman) is the Martian Manhunter. Aquarus’ kingdom is obviously Aquaman’s Atlantis. The Lizard League recalls the Serpent Society.

It is a clever approach to building a superhero world, as it allows Invincible to just throw the audience into an existing framework and have them figure it out as they go along. It’s a refreshing approach in a landscape dominated by superhero movies that are still fixated on origin stories. Even recent superhero movies that aren’t explicitly origin stories, like Spider-Man: No Way Home or The Batman, are often stories about the start of their protagonists’ career.

This approach is understandable. Origin stories are appealing because they provide a clear structure and arc. In a genre defined by “the illusion of change,” it’s reasonable that most superhero multimedia would be drawn to stories about that narrow window in a hero’s career where they can change. It makes for gripping drama. It’s very hard to sell a movie or television show where the character doesn’t change, but instead remains static in the way that comic book superheroes tend to.

However, this comes at a cost. Many of the best Marvel and DC comic book stories could only be told in a universe that has the baggage of decades of continuity on which they might build. These stories tend to take for granted elements that have been set up over years and decades. To pick a straightforward example, A Death in the Family is a story built around the emotional crux of the death of the second character to carry the mantle of Robin, which requires a lot of groundwork.

It is hard to build to those sorts of emotional or dramatic payoffs when stories keep starting over, even in shared continuity. The Marvels film is going to have to introduce both Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) for moviegoers who didn’t watch the streaming series Ms. Marvel or WandaVision. Despite the ground covered in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Captain America: Brave New World is going to have to reintroduce Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) as the new Captain America.

There are exceptions to this general trend. In particular, writer and director James Gunn is very good at capturing this sense of a lived-in superhero world in projects like his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy or The Suicide Squad. Those are movies that take superhero concepts at face value, rather than trying to over-explain or justify them. The same is true of the recent Spider-Verse movies, which speedrun their origins as a joke. However, these are the exception rather than the rule.

For its part, Invincible uses shorthand to bypass a lot of the nitty-gritty setup. It is built on the assumption that, by this point, the average audience member has been exposed to literally decades of superhero media. They are media literate and know how these stories work. As such, they can jump on board with concepts like the Mauler Twins (Kevin Michael Richardson), a mad scientist who has cloned himself so often that there are always two of him and neither knows which is the original.

On one level, this just frees Invincible to deliver the kind of good old-fashioned superhero fun that other more conventional superhero shared universes like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU) or the DC Extended Universe (the DCEU) should embrace. The show can just casually introduce vast interstellar empires or cool underwater kingdoms because that’s how the logic of superhero stories should work. The assumption is that the audience knows that this is how these stories work.

It helps that Invincible is animated rather than live action. Even ignoring the budgetary concerns of trying to render this level of spectacle for a weekly live action television show, there is a greater suspension of disbelief in animation than in film. It’s one reason why Disney’s photorealistic remakes of their animated classics wander into the uncanny valley. It also helps that animation is, by its nature, closer to the visual language of comic books than live action film or television.

Of course, this raises the question of why there aren’t more animated superhero films and shows. After all, with shows like Invincible and Harley Quinn or movies like the Spider-Verse franchise, the genre arguably has a more consistent track record in animation than live action. It seems likely that the existing stigma against western animation as a medium aimed at children plays a key role here. Live action adaptations are seen as more prestigious and more respectable.

Invincible is not a show aimed at children. This is true in both form and content. It is graphically violent and explicitly sexual. However, it is also structured as a collection of hour-long episodes, a format that distinguishes it from the tradition of animated superhero shows intended for children like Batman: The Animated Series or X-Men: The Animated Series. The individual episodes of Invincible have runtimes comparable to prestige shows like Better Call Saul or Mad Men.

This is Invincible’s most impressive trick. It lovingly riffs on the conventions and narrative logic of classic Silver and Bronze Age comics, where cities can be randomly cursed to “perpetual midnight, permanent darkness, summer on the dark side of the moon” and where Omni-Man’s son, Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun), can find himself tasked with marrying Aquarus’ widow Aquaria (Tatiana Maslany), but it is also engaged with the inner emotional lives of its characters. Superheroism takes a toll.

Invincible might embrace the inherent ridiculousness of superhero storytelling, but it takes its characters seriously. The show explores what it might be like to live through the bizarro narrative logic that guides stories like these. For example, Omni-Man murdered Cecil’s personal aide, Donald Ferguson (Chris Diamantopoulos), at the end of the first season. However, in the second season, Donald is alive again. Comic book resurrections are business-as-usual, but Donald is clearly unsettled.

Much of the second season is given over to Omni-Man’s wife and Mark’s mother, Debbie (Sandra Oh). Debbie is dealing with the emotional fallout of Omni-Man’s betrayal, his mass murder of both superheroes and civilians, and the realization that after decades of marriage he only loved her “like a pet.” Debbie struggles to process those emotions, eventually ending up at a support group for superhero spouses, populated by characters working through similar issues.

There are plenty of other examples. Mark pushes himself to the limits in an effort to both atone for his father’s sins and prove that he is a completely different person. Atom Eve (Gillian Jacobs) deals with her own father’s (Fred Tatasciore) feelings of inadequacy when confronted with his daughter’s superpowers. When superhero Robot (Zachary Quinto and Ross Marquand) clones a child body for himself so he can be flesh and blood again, he struggles with human emotions like fear.

There is an emotional complexity and nuance here that is missing from so much modern superhero media. In Avengers: Endgame, half of the world’s population just vanished for five years. That should have had profound consequences, leading to something similar to The Leftovers. However, “the Blip” was treated as a joke in Spider-Man: Far From Home and while it has come up as a plot point in some recent productions there has been no real attempt to explore the emotional fallout from it.

Of course, Invincible is far from the first superhero story to try to engage with the emotional reality of these heightened concepts. Comic book writer Grant Morrison has been exploring this idea for decades, through genre-defining works like Animal Man or All-Star Superman. Morrison’s comics are often about characters reacting emotionally to the absurd logic of comic book plotting. However, Invincible feels like the first superhero adaptation to attempt something similar in film or television.

It might sound reasonable to ask why these stories should try to convey recognizable emotional responses to fundamentally absurd plot points. If these stories are about events that could never really happen, perhaps it’s pointless to try to engage with them emotionally. This is a myopic understanding of how stories work. Put simply, characters are easier to engage with and empathize with when they are allowed to express emotion, even in the face of something unreal.

More to the point, these sorts of stories are heightened expressions of recognizable human drama. Most children struggle to escape the shadow of their parents, as Mark does with Omni-Man. Many people have felt betrayed by a loved one, like Debbie does with Omni-Man. Sometimes things happen that people just don’t have a framework to process, as Donald experiences. After all, the past few years have felt somewhat apocalyptic, so it is not as if these stories are entirely unrelatable.

Invincible is titled in reference to Mark’s superhero persona, a reminder that the young man is as physically invulnerable as Silver Age Superman. However, the show’s real trick is understanding that the deepest scars aren’t always physical, and that even a fantastical world of aliens, robots, and fish empires can still be deeply traumatic.

For those tracking the streaming wars, the news is grim for both studios and consumers. Last month, Netflix raised the monthly price of its basic and premium plans in the United States, with the premium offering crossing $20 per month for the first time. Disney+ announced its second price hike this year. Peacock had its first price hike since its launch. Apple TV+ jumped from $6.99 to $9.99. Paramount promises a hike within the next two years. Even Shudder is raising its price by a buck a month.

The reasons for these hikes are obvious. The companies are floundering. Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing has grown its user base, but its quarterly revenue growth and forecast still lag estimates. Disney+ lost 11.7 million subscribers and $512 million in the second quarter of 2023, bringing total losses on the service to more than $11 billion. In that same period, Max lost 1.8 million subscribers. Apple TV+ has reportedly seen its market share diluted in the past year.

Even those streaming services that have seen an increase in subscriptions are struggling to balance the books. Peacock gained 2 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2023, but lost $651 million. Paramount’s direct-to-consumer businesses lost $424 million in that same window, which is actually down from the $511 million losses in the previous quarter. That appears to be the thing about the streaming wars. Even the winners end up losing.

Of course, the streaming bubble was always an illusion. Part of the appeal of Netflix was that it was really the only service of its kind, and that a single subscription could grant a user access to a huge library of titles. That appeal couldn’t be replicated by studios who created rival services, as those platforms fragmented the market and siloed the content. There was never going to be a way for all the major studios to compete with Netflix.

The problem was compounded by the fact that Netflix, Apple, and Amazon operated in an entirely different ecosystem. They were valued as tech companies, combined with Facebook and Google as the “FAANG” stocks. This suggested a different mode of valuation than traditional media companies, to the point that when they did release movies in theaters they often refused to publish box office results. The emphasis was placed on growth and potential, allowing them to generate huge debt.

To put it simply, these streaming services were playing a different game than the traditional studios. They were just built differently. As a result, studios struggled to compete. The past few months have suggested that the studios have no real idea how to make this model work, as demonstrated by Disney’s recent dispute with Charter Communications, its attempt to blend intellectual property with live sports for “Toy Story Funday” football, and even Max’s decision to fold in live sports.

Studios are desperately looking for anything that might work as the bottom falls out of the market. In hindsight, the cracks were present from the outset. The streaming wars really kicked into high gear with the launch of Disney+ in November 2019. The following year, a global pandemic would effectively create a captive audience for these services with more disposable income. For parents locked in a house with a couple of kids for an extended period, Disney+ was an essential service.

This created an illusion of sustainability, even if the cracks were obvious to anybody paying attention. However, with the end of the pandemic, those cracks have developed into full-blown fissures. There is an inflation crisis and a looming global recession. Surveys suggest that customers are curbing their spending on entertainment. Streaming is particularly affected, with studies suggesting that households are spending about 25% less on streaming services than they were two years ago.

This may explain why it feels like studios have been trying to push back the clock. Along with price hikes, streaming services have announced ad-supported tiers, effectively reintroducing television advertising. Indeed, Netflix had disavowed advertising as recently as three years ago. Services are no longer dropping shows like The Rings of Power and Ahsoka at midnight, but instead scheduling them to line up with American prime-time broadcast slots. Streaming now looks a lot like television.

Much of the streaming wars was built around the idea of “disruption” — the destruction of established models and the creation of something more porous. The boundaries between film and television blurred, with companies like Marvel treating television as a new world to conquer and services like Disney reducing intellectual property to “content soup.” The past few weeks have seen Marvel concede that this model isn’t working for them. Maybe television should be made like television.

It’s very bloody out there. Streaming services are becoming a lot more frugal, with even deep-pocketed giants like Amazon and Netflix working harder to justify their spending on film and television. Companies like Warner Bros. have completely scrapped almost-finished movies rather than sending them to streaming and even removed existing titles from their libraries. There has been a spate of high-profile cancellations, including shows being “unrenewed.”

Looking at the state of the current media landscape, it can feel like the major studios got swept up in the tech company mindset of “move fast and break things.” However, these companies moved so fast that they never put any effort into figuring out what workable model was going to replace the one that they had just broken. The assumption seemed to be that everything would work itself out, and that these companies could improvise their way to success.

Of course, of the major studios, the big exception is Sony. Sony does not have its own streaming service. Instead, the company figured out that the safest way to get rich during a gold rush is to sell the shovels, adhering to the traditional model of licensing its content out to the highest bidder. Sony effectively survived the streaming wars by becoming “the biggest arms dealer on the battlefield.” This is also good for the services, as theatrically released movies tend to do better on streaming.

Indeed, there is some small sense that nature is healing. At the height of the pandemic, Warner Bros. announced that they would be sending all of their biggest movies to their streaming service, then called HBO Max, as part of what came to be known as “Project Popcorn.” As a result of this decision, films like The Suicide Squad, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, Reminiscence, and Dune all landed on the service on the same day that they were released in theatres.

The grand plan was that these massive releases would drive subscribers to the service. In doing so, it would solidify corporate owners AT&T’s plans for complete vertical integration. AT&T would sell customers movies they made on a streaming service they owned over an internet infrastructure that they provided. Suffice to say, the plan did not go as expected. The underperformance of these movies led to AT&T’s retreat from the market and the merging of Warners with Discovery.

Warner-Discovery CEO David Zaslav has made cash flow a top priority, hoping for quick returns on bold decisions. Zaslav had driven Warner Bros. to start licensing out its content again, meaning that its shows and films are no longer siloed on Max. Netflix has apparently been a major buyer for international markets. Indeed, many of those movies that were used to bolster the subscriber base of HBO Max can now be watched on Netflix. Zaslav got his cash and Netflix got their content.

It seems to be working for both parties. Over the past few weeks, Netflix’s top ten list in countries like the United Kingdom has included a number of the “Project Popcorn” films, including bigger titles like Space Jam: A New Legacy but also giving space to smaller titles like Those Who Wish Me Dead and The Little Things. It seems entirely possible that more people have seen The Little Things on Netflix than watched it on HBO Max.

This is the way that this model used to work. As demonstrated by shows like Breaking Bad or Cobra Kai, Netflix used to be very good at taking an underseen show from another developer and turning it into a zeitgeist hit. Indeed, Netflix can still do that. Suits, an episodic show that aired in the USA between 2011 and 2019, is currently one of the biggest shows in the world because it is streaming on Netflix. In this sense, Netflix is filling a function that used to be held by home media — somewhat ironically.

Of course, even allowing for this shift back towards a model that is at least more stable and sustainable, there are lingering questions. The recently resolved writers’ strike came to be known as “the Netflix strike,” because many of its issues hinged on the sustainability of the streaming model. Many of those concerns have bled over into the ongoing actors’ strike. There are questions around royalties and profit-sharing, not to mention transparency and accountability.

After an intense few years of heated combat, it feels like the streaming wars are finally simmering down and that most of the heavy ordinance has been discharged. The trenches have been dug and the boundaries clearly defined. Much infrastructure has been razed and much earth has been salted. As the survivors stumble dazed through the wreckage of what remains, it’s hard not to wonder if the struggle has irreparably damaged what they claimed to be fighting over.

That love has taken any number of forms. Scorsese has been the subject of profile pieces in which the aging director grapples with his mortality. There have been loving and thoughtful retrospectives covering some of the director’s more overlooked films. His daughter Francesca has shared a collection of hilarious and endearing TikToks featuring her father, allowing audiences to see a delightful and playful side to the octogenarian filmmaker that is rare for an artist of his stature.

Part of this is simply a matter of timing. Killers of the Flower Moon stars Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Lily Gladstone, who would normally front a lot of the publicity. However, the ongoing actors’ strike has meant that much of the press coverage of Killers of the Flower Moon has had to be built around Scorsese himself. The result is a publicity campaign that has foregrounded a director in a way that is relatively rare in modern Hollywood, reminding audiences just how wonderful “Marty” is.

It helps that Killers of the Flower Moon is a vibrant and urgent piece of work. The movie has been embraced by critics and gave Scorsese the third best opening of his career. Of course, the film’s gigantic budget is a concern, but Apple are footing that bill and have never been too concerned about box office. Killers of the Flower Moon seems assured major awards contention, and seems likely to earn Scorsese his tenth nomination for the Best Director Oscar.

Scorsese also gives no impression of slowing down. He has already signaled interest in a number of other projects, including a second movie about the life of Jesus Christ. He is already reteaming with Killers of the Flower Moon author David Grann and his “muse” Leonardo DiCaprio for The Wager, a story about an 18^th century shipwreck. Scorsese is prolific and productive, his energy putting filmmakers half his age to shame. His career has been – and will continue to be – incredible.

It’s interesting to contrast Martin Scorsese with another beloved and iconic American filmmaker — Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino is currently working on his new movie, The Movie Critic. However, despite the fact that Tarantino is twenty years younger than Scorsese, he has made a big deal of the fact that The Movie Critic will be his last movie.  Tarantino has long signaled that his career as a movie maker came with a time limit, planning to retire at 60 or after a total of ten films.

Tarantino is kinda cheating here. He turned 60 earlier this year, crossing the first of his red lines. There is also some creative accounting required to line up The Movie Critic as his tenth film; it disregards his first film, My Best Friend’s Birthday, and requires either ignoring Death Proof or counting Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and Kill Bill, Vol. 2 as a single film. Still, Tarantino is operating by his own rules. It seems reasonable to allow the director some leeway.

Still, even if the filmmaker sticks to the letter of his promise, he is unlikely to retire into obscurity. Tarantino has a long history directing television shows like E.R. and CSI, and has already announced plans to make his own television show, likely Bounty Law. The director has long expressed interest in becoming a television auteur. He has already written a couple of books. Tarantino has even argued that potential studio gigs like a hypothetical Star Trek film wouldn’t “count against [his] ten.”

That said, Tarantino is one of the most successful and beloved directors in modern Hollywood. He is one of the last filmmakers to become an honest-to-goodness celebrity, as popular on talk shows as he is behind the camera. As such, it is disheartening to think that he might simply step aside and retire from filmmaking. After all, plenty of directors have had long and celebrated careers beyond their sixth or seventh decade. Clint Eastwood is still making movies at the age of 93.

For Tarantino, this is the point. When Bill Maher argued that Tarantino was still at the top of his game and was too young to quit, Tarantino countered, “I know film history, and from here on in directors do not get better.” He told CNN, “I don’t want to work to diminishing returns. I don’t want to be… one, I don’t want to become this old man who’s out of touch when already I’m feeling a bit like an old man out of touch when it comes to the current movies that are out right now.”

There is a vanity in this. Tarantino is concerned with his own legacy as a filmmaker. “Directors don’t get better as they get older,” he told Playboy in 2012. “Usually the worst films in their filmography are those last four at the end. I am all about my filmography, and one bad film fucks up three good ones.” This isn’t an academic argument for Tarantino. He specifically cites “William Wyler and The Liberation of L.B. Jones or Billy Wilder with Fedora and then Buddy Buddy or whatever the hell.”

There is an obvious counterargument to this. Nobody except hardcore cinephiles care that Billy Wilder directed Buddy Buddy. Nobody but completionists will even watch it. Instead, they associate Wilder with the best films in his career. If Wilder had stopped after only ten films, the world would have been denied Some Like It Hot or The Apartment. If Clint Eastwood stopped at 60, audiences would have never seen Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, Letters from Iwo Jima, or Gran Torino.

Naturally, Tarantino’s argument came up on the press tour for Killers of the Flower Moon, with Scorsese agreeing with an interviewer that he was simply “built differently” than Tarantino. However, there is a more fundamental juxtaposition to be made here. The issue isn’t simply that Scorsese has continued to be a defining influence on American cinema, like his good friend Steven Spielberg. It’s that Scorsese has arguably only truly found his niche in the later years of his career.

Scorsese was always an important American director. He emerged alongside the other “Movie Brats” of the 1970s, but never quite enjoyed the same success as his contemporaries Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Frances Ford Coppola. Scorsese had his champions, and enjoyed a certain degree of critical and commercial success, but never truly broke through. He has talked about feeling “like an outsider” and profiles as recent as the late 1990s described him as “a career Hollywood outsider.”

Scorsese’s first ten feature films include all-timers like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull. However, Scorsese himself would acknowledge that those were difficult films and that their reception left him somewhat adrift. He has talked about his “kamikaze” approach to making Raging Bull, convinced that he wouldn’t have an American career left afterwards. For Scorsese, most of the 1980s was a lost decade, a collection of work-for-hire gigs including television and music videos.

Had Scorsese’s career ended there, it seems unlikely that he would be as beloved and as iconic as he is today. Even in the 1990s, when Scorsese was directing movies like Goodfellas or Casino, he still felt quite apart from the larger movie culture. His then-girlfriend Illeana Douglas recalls his reaction to losing the 1991 Best Director Oscar to Kevin Costner, “They don’t like me. They really, really don’t like me.” Even a film like Casino took years to burnish its reputation.

Scorsese has talked about how he almost gave up filmmaking during the 2000s. The production of Gangs of New York was so troubled that he briefly “decided it was over.” The editing process on The Aviator was so stressful that he briefly “left the business.” Reportedly tensions got so high with Warner Bros. during post production on The Departed that Scorsese told the studio, “Fire me, shoot me, kill me — we’re gonna wrestle this thing to the ground.”

Scorsese only really hit the “beloved filmmaker trifecta” of critical acclaim, box office success, and awards recognition after he turned 60. The Aviator was Scorsese’s first film to gross over $200 million worldwide. This was followed by massive commercial success for The Departed, by far the highest-grossing Best Picture nominee of its year. Next came Shutter Island, Scorsese’s biggest earner at the American box office — at least until The Wolf of Wall Street three years later.

This box office success came with the acknowledgement that Scorsese was finally an insider. He won Best Picture and Best Director for The Departed, with his victory such a sure thing that it was handed to him by Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola. Scorsese finally earned the recognition that he had long sought. The transformation from the 1970s cocaine goblin who cameoed in Taxi Driver to the lovable movie grandpa of A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies was complete.

Of course, tastes differ and mileage varies. There’s an open-ended debate to be had about whether Scorsese’s 21^st century run is as good as his 1970s classics. However, it is a debate. Both Scorsese’ filmography and wider culture are undoubtedly richer for including movies like The Wolf of Wall Street or The Irishman. Even relative underperformers like Hugo or Silence seem likely to be rediscovered as hidden gems in the years ahead, as many of Scorsese’s other films have been.

After all, for decades, the mainstream didn’t truly appreciate the work that Scorsese was doing. The director is still understandably bitter at the critical drubbing that King of Comedy received when it was released in 1982, and that movie is now considered a classic. The box office disappointment of After Hours led to the “lowest ebb” of Scorsese’s career, but has since become beloved. Would those reappraisals of older movies have happened if Scorsese had retired or stepped away?

Of course, Tarantino’s career is his own. He can and should make his own choices, and decide what works best for him. He certainly doesn’t owe pop culture anything more than he has already given it. Still, looking at the success and the popularity that Scorsese has enjoyed in recent years, along with both the consistency of his output and the continuous reminders of his past successes, it’s hard not to think that Tarantino’s legacy would be better served by just letting himself make movies.

There is a moment over an hour into Five Nights at Freddy’s in which Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson), the new nightwatchman supervising the abandoned and dilapidated family restaurant Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, wakes up to discover that his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio) has left the office. He hears screams coming from the dining area. He rushes out to save his sibling, and finds her surrounded by the restaurant’s animatronic animal characters, who have seemingly come to life.

Now, this should be terrifying. It is a combination of images and ideas that at once riffs on the familiar horror trope of childish imagery turned monstrous and which is unsettlingly absurd. Certainly, nothing in Mike’s life has prepared him for the possibility that he might one day be charged with acting as a security guard at an old pizzeria populated by killer robots, let alone the revelation that those killer robots are controlled by the ghosts of murdered children.

However, Mike reacts to all this with what might be charitably described as “dull surprise.” To be fair, at least some of this is performance. Whatever strengths Hutcherson possesses as an actor, he has never been especially expressive. His breakout role was in the Hunger Games franchise, where he served as a romantic foil to Liam Hemsworth. The most unbelievable scene in Five Nights at Freddy’s is when Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), a local police officer, notes that Mike’s pulse is racing.

That said, there is a sense in which the movie is aware of this and actively plays into it. Mike spends a not-insignificant portion of Five Nights at Freddy’s taking sleeping pills, which feels like a commentary on the movie’s lethargic pacing. The movie treats these killer animatronics in a very matter-of-fact way. It’s revealed quite early on that Vanessa has known about them for a while. Over breakfast the following morning, Mike asks, “Are they ghosts?” Abby replies, nonchalantly, “Of course.”

Horror movies are typically about suspense and build-up. The title of Five Nights at Freddy’s suggests a countdown. What happens on the first four nights? How does the tension mount? What does Mike experience and how does he rationalize it as events escalate? However, Five Nights at Freddy’s doesn’t work like that. Mike doesn’t really have any near misses with the animatronics. He walks into the dining area, and they are all standing in the open, looking at him. It’s like any other day, really.

This is a very strange approach to adapting Five Nights at Freddy’s. After all, horror is meant to be scary. Indeed, this particular kind of horror is meant to be unsettling and uncomfortable. Five Nights at Freddy’s is about taking something recognizable and familiar – classic chain restaurants and animatronic animals – and rendering it alien and monstrous. Indeed, the source video game is “famous for its jumpscares,” which makes this dull familiarity particularly weird. There’s no awe here, no wonder, no horror.

There are moments when Five Nights at Freddy’s seems to understand the power of the uncanny and the irrational. Throughout the movie, Mike is constantly slipping into a dream world disconnected from reality. While awake, he struggles to connect with Abby, who seems to communicate primarily through drawings. Doctor Lillian (Tadasay Young) explains to Mike that these images are abstractions, ways of communicating ideas in a non-verbal manner. That’s what the film should be.

It’s worth situating Five Nights at Freddy’s in a larger context. While the film is based on a video game that was itself created in reaction to the response to developer Scott Cawthon’s previous game, Chipper and Sons, it can also be situated in a wider trend of contemporary horror built around the perversion of childhood markers. The most obvious recent examples might be Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey or The Banana Splits Movie, but it’s a rich contemporary genre.

In particular, writers like Christopher Barkman have situated the original video game in terms of contemporary internet horror, particularly the idea of the “creepypasta.” Indeed, this idea of seemingly innocuous children’s entertainment pushed into the realm of the uncanny evokes classic creepypasta stories like Candle Cove or 1999. It’s not too difficult to imagine a version of Five Nights at Freddy’s that might have emerged from that same internet subculture.

Although creepypastas are arguably just a modern twist on the classic urban legend or ghost story, the genre reflects the internet age. It’s possible for creepypastas to expand to entire shared universes of stories, but most of them are tied to a fairly simple idea that can be easily shared and expanded or elaborated upon in any number of directions. In many cases, it’s the lack of context that makes these stories so unsettling, like a staircase standing randomly in the middle of a forest.

Of course, the fact that this vagueness is part of the appeal serves to attract fans who are specifically drawn to explain the uncanniness. There is a large online fandom that is dedicated to obsessively and thoroughly explaining Five Nights at Freddy’s, constructing elaborate theories that cobble together a cohesive internal mythology. Although controversial within the fandom, this sort of activity can be fun and involving so long as it doesn’t take things too far.

However, this sort of obsessive theorizing is exciting to hardcore fans precisely because of the lacunas in the original work. It is a process that exists separate from the work itself; as a reaction to it. It is an argument in favor of that negative narrative space, not a justification for filling it. One of the big problems with the film adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s is that it folds this perspective into the narrative itself, even including a cameo from prominent theorizer MatPat.

Hollywood studios have traditionally struggled to adapt internet horror. There is an obvious desire to chase that trend, given that horror audiences skew younger, but it often leads to uninspired results like Friend Request or Slenderman. There are great movies that tap into that rich vein of internet horror – that electronic folklore feeling – but they usually come from outside the studio system: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Skinamarink, The Empty Man, and even Talk to Me.

One of the central issues with the film adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s is that it is packed to the brim with lore. The movie is constantly explaining itself. It is full of backstory and exposition, all of which neatly fits together in the end. There are none of those gaps that were so enticing to fans. When the movie begins, Mike is dealing with the lingering trauma around the mysterious disappearance of his younger brother Garrett (Lucas Grant). As a result, Mike is struggling to hold down a steady job.

Through his career counselor, Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard), Mike is offered the position at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. That restaurant was the site of multiple disappearances, and only remains standing because of the owner’s lingering sentimentality. While there, Mike begins dreaming more vividly of the day that his brother disappeared. He is also haunted by visions of the children who disappeared from the restaurant, as Vanessa helps him delve into the restaurant’s history.

Inevitably, everything is connected. It turns out that Steve Raglan is really William Afton, the owner of the restaurant. Afton murdered the five children at the restaurant and also abducted and murdered Garrett. “I killed your brother and now I’m going to kill you,” he boasts to Mike at the climax. “Symmetry, my friend.” Also, the reason that Vanessa knows about the child-possessed-animatronics is because she is really Afton’s daughter.

These plot decisions manage the impressive feat of being both absurdly neat and horrendously contrived. It imposes a clear structure on the movie, allowing Mike closure over his brother’s death and it ties all of the characters and events of the movie together in a bow, even if none of it makes any sense. Why is William Afton working as a career counselor under another alias? If he was a prominent businessman in the local community, surely people would recognize him as William Afton? If he can afford not to sell or demolish the restaurant, why does he need a fairly generic office job?

All of this just serves to make Five Nights at Freddy’s knowable, to beat a set of uncanny imagery and iconography into a recognizable shape. It applies a depressingly predictable narrative template to the movie, a checklist of beats that Mike needs to hit on his hero’s journey. There is nothing even remotely unfamiliar about Five Nights at Freddy’s. Indeed, the movie even goes out of its way to humanize and empathize with its monsters, turning them into cute mascots.

Five Nights at Freddy’s opens with the animatronics murdering the last nightwatchman (Ryan Reinike), implying that this has been a regular occurrence. However, most of their onscreen violence is directed at characters who can be seen to deserve it, such as Carl (Joseph Poliquin) and his gang, who trash the restaurant in an effort to get Mike fired, or Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson), who is trying to take Abby away from Mike. These monsters aren’t allowed to be monstrous.

Any violence undertaken by the killer mascots is explained as Afton’s perverse influence over them. Abby wants to befriend the animatronic animals. The film’s closing moments suggest that Mike isn’t inherently against taking Abby to visit them at some point in the future. It’s a bizarre approach to the concept. The key appeal of the concept of Five Nights at Freddy’s is the perversion of innocent childhood imagery, but the film circles back around to making that imagery cute and cuddly again.

Then again, this is perhaps the result of living in the age of intellectual property, where these movies are built around the very concept of familiarity. These films are pre-packaged. Everybody going to Five Nights at Freddy’s knows exactly what they are getting. They know each of the animatronics by name and by backstory. The naming of Lillard’s character as Afton in early press was something of a spoiler that later publicity tried to walk back. The goal with these sorts of projects isn’t to surprise or unsettle audiences, but to present them with things that they already recognize and enjoy. This limits the effectiveness of Five Nights at Freddy’s as a horror movie. Then again, it is at least true to the experience of those creepy old family eateries.

If nothing else, Five Nights at Freddy’s captures the dull familiarity of reheated chain restaurant pizza.

We all have that one show or movie that we have that reaction to. It may be because of the quality of the experience, the feelings that it evoked in a person, or the memories associated with watching it, but there are some pieces of media we just never want to experience again. Films like Requiem For A Dream or Mother!, or games like Hatred and Manhunt 2 are my go-to examples of this phenomenon, but oftentimes it isn’t because of their quality. They may be beautiful, artistic, and fully realized experiences, but so uncomfortable to engage with that you swear off ever experiencing them again. There’s an anime that fits this definition to a T for being so disturbing and unsettling that I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again: Happy Sugar Life. 

Don’t let the lighthearted and fun title fool you. Happy Sugar Life is anything but pleasant and cute. In an industry that seems almost averse to actually exploring horror in any meaningful way other than to pepper pre-established Shonen tropes and action series, Happy Sugar Life decides to tackle themes on a weekly basis that are beyond taboo. Normally when a show broaches one of these themes it’ll be enough to raise alarm bells for a series being “problematic,” but Happy Sugar Life goes way, WAY beyond that. There aren’t any monsters in the show (that aren’t human), or even a lot of gore. But it still scared me in such a way that I don’t ever want to think about it again. I mean, I’m doing that now, but only because I want to spread that suffering to other people. 

The series, an adaptation of Tomiyaki Kagisora’s manga, debuted in 2018 on Amazon’s failed attempt to create an anime-centric channel on Prime called Anime Strike. This experiment lasted for all of a year and had titles like Made in Abyss, Land of the Lustrous, and Re;Creators as exclusives, which is also probably why those series don’t have too much of a following in the West — sadly. Happy Sugar Life was the same, fading into relative obscurity and to this day still being exclusive to Amazon Prime. Given how anime has consolidated around Crunchyroll, HIDIVE, Hulu, and Netflix, there’s very little reason you would ever search Amazon Prime for Happy Sugar Life unless someone told you about it. In that way, it’s kind of like a Creepypasta about this one forgotten anime on an abandoned Amazon streaming channel that was so vulgar that it was quickly buried and lost to time.

Before we get into what this series is and why it’s perfect for a depressing Halloween spectacular, I do want to give a content warning because… there’s a lot to be aware of here. Trigger warnings for pedophilia, rape, molestation, mental illness, suicide, sexual assault, child abuse, and alcoholism.

The series follows two girls, Satō and Shio. Satō is a high school girl who is fairly popular and is trying to hold down a job working at a cosplay restaurant as she lives on her own due to her family not being in the picture. One day, she finds a lost girl named Shio, whom Satō takes in and begins to take care of. Shio is barely in elementary school, but that doesn’t stop Satō from developing intimate and most certainly romantic feelings for her, going so far as to discuss marriage and killing anyone and everyone who gets in the way of her happy life. But of course, that idyllic dream will be difficult to maintain, especially when Shio’s brother appears putting up missing posters all over the town and other parties want to take Shio for themselves. 

The main idea that permeates through most of Happy Sugar Life is the idea of purity vs impurity. Within our lives, there are some relationships that are theoretically meant to be pure and wholesome, like the love between family members or the sacred bond between married partners. To characters like Satō, these concepts are sweet and pure, something that is to be desired and savored. She loves Shio with all of her heart and often does what she can to maintain the purity of their relationship. She tries with all of her might to keep Shio uncorrupted from the outside world and from Satō’s own actions, going so far as to forbid Shio from leaving the apartment and barring her from entering a room in the apartment with a conspicuous amount of bloody bags in them. Shio doesn’t mind this as, again, she’s a pure and innocent child who only assumes the best in Satō. She doesn’t know about the horrors that Satō enacts upon anyone who may make her happy sugar life “bitter.”

And it’s that bitterness that truly does give the show its edge. While other horror properties may give you physical and visceral thrills to terrify and shock, all of Happy Sugar Life’s scares are psychological and leave a dull numbness in the viewer. Nearly all of its cast are deeply troubled people who are reprehensible in their actions. The method in which Satō embraces her yuri tendencies may be bad — and believe me they are yandere levels bad — but they’re nothing compared to the horrors that her unnamed aunt may or may not have done to her. It’s an all-encompassing chill as the trauma of the characters piles up slowly but surely, painting a picture that abuse breeds abuse.

Nearly all of our young cast members suffer abuse from an adult, whether it be biological parents or people put into positions of power. In the most tragic case, there’s a teenage boy who works with Satō named Taiyō, who starts off the series like your average side character. He’s pleasant, a little bit quirky, but generally a nice guy. Within the premiere, he’s molested and raped by his boss and develops a fear and disgust of older women, frequently going into a panic at the mere thought of being close to one. His solace though is Shio, whom he meets and sees as an angel capable of cleansing him of his sins, often leading him to be manipulated by Satō for the chance at interacting with her. By the end of the series, he’s regressed to the point he’s a reclusive shut-in who has lost everything and can’t even function as a member of society. 

I have to give Happy Sugar Life credit for not trying to hide its horror from the audience, going so far as to basically reveal its hand in the first episode, then spending the rest of the series as a game of cat and mouse between Satō and the various people attempting to find Shio or cause harm to Satō for her actions. There are several mysteries that the show establishes, like why Shio was lost, how Satō got the apartment they live in, and what happened to Satō’s aunt, all of which keeps viewers engaged with its reprehensible cast. As the series progresses and the stakes become higher, each of our cast members begins to crack and becomes more desperate to reach their goals.

We see the slow degradation of several characters’ mental health as trauma upon trauma is put on them. This trauma isn’t meant to make us sympathetic to them, however. In fact, you shouldn’t find any of its cast sympathetic in any way except for Shio and her role as a victim. Rather, that trauma serves as an important rationale for why these characters are doing what they’re doing. Satō does what she does because her aunt imbued in her a twisted sense of love and validation that could only come from someone with a broken definition of the concept. Taiyō uses Shio as a therapeutic symbol of sorts as a way for him to overcome his past. Even Shio’s brother Asahi only looks for Shio with such determination because he wants to prove to her, as well as himself, that healthy and loving relationships are possible. The series never once asks us to relate to its cast of broken young adults or even pity them. They are who they are because of their trauma.

That being said, it uses trauma in a way not unlike how a high schooler may implement trauma in a story they’re writing. They’ll throw in a mature concept because it will lend gravitas to a character’s backstory, but not really bother with actually learning or understanding the implications of that concept. Happy Sugar Life is very well aware of the implications and often just piles them on to see its characters crack because that makes good drama and horror. At times, it does border on tragedy porn where it seems like every single person in this world either is a monster or becomes one through frequent and nonstop abuse. I understand that trauma is powerful in altering how a person operates, but seeing a character like Taiyō shift so rapidly into a broken mental state strains credibility and just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. 

Believe me, at times, I wanted nothing more than to stop watching Happy Sugar Life. The horror this show exudes isn’t grand and glamorous and in your face. It’s insidious and gets under your skin because of how relatable it is. It’s a kind of horror we see in the news. A horror where actual monsters commit unspeakable acts against innocent people solely for their own benefit. A horror that the nightly news plays on repeat to inform the populace that there are monsters like this out there. This is a series that depicts selfish monsters sickeningly trying to find a way to exploit a young girl’s naivete for their own benefit. But I kept watching the show. Why? Because I had to see how it ended. Would there be a happy ending? And would that ending give enough sweetness to repel the bitterness of everything leading up to it?

And as the final scene began to play out and we see the perpetuation of abuse and the cycle slowly beginning again, all I just felt was dead inside. I got my ending, and it was nothing but bitter. I didn’t need a monster devouring the souls of innocents to be afraid. I didn’t need a group of paranoid researchers arguing about which one of them was an alien. All I needed to be afraid was a little girl saying that despite everything that happened, she still loved Satō. That was enough for me. I never want to experience that feeling again. If you’re brave enough to go down this rabbit hole and see the all-too-real horrors of Happy Sugar Life, then go for it.

I just won’t be joining you and I don’t think I ever will.

Situated in the middle of Carpenter’s phenomenal run that stretches from Assault on Precinct 13 to They Live, Christine is frequently overlooked in favor of movies like Halloween or The Thing. It says a lot about the quality and consistency of Carpenter’s output that movies like Christine and Prince of Darkness tend to be ignored because they are simply “very good” rather than genre-redefining masterpieces. Still, Christine is a movie that feels ripe for reappraisal.

Carpenter arrived on Christine by accident. His adaptation of Stephen King’s Firestarter was derailed by the commercial failure of The Thing, making King’s Christine a second choice. In hindsight, he concedes Christine “turned out better than it had any right to.” Discussing Bryan Fuller’s planned re-adaptation of King’s novel, Carpenter simply offered, “Well, good luck to him. It will probably be better.” (It remains to be seen if Fuller’s version will make it to screen, given the allegations of harassment against him.)

Still, Christine has developed something of a devoted cult following over the decades. Notably, it was a key influence on David Gordon Green’s Halloween Ends, to the point that Green asked Carpenter to let him know if the script was “too Christine.” Halloween Ends’ Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) shares a surname with Christine’s Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon), and both characters find work in junkyards fixing up cars. Both young men also undergo similar transformations.

Stephen King’s Christine is obviously the story of a killer car, a concept that is ripe for mockery. To a certain extent, Carpenter just plays this straight. The movie’s opening sequence has the soundtrack play “Bad to the Bone” as the car rolls through the Detroit assembly line. Seemingly operating from pure malice, the car breaks the hand of one auto worker (Joe Unger) and murders another (Art Evans). Carpenter never explains why the car is evil. It just is.

However, like a lot of Kings’ novels, Christine is rich with subtext about masculine anxieties. Indeed, Carpenter and King make for a good pairing, sharing a lot of similar influences and interests. Jumping forward in time by two decades, the car finds its way into the possession of Arnie Cunningham. Arnie is a nerd and a loser. He’s bullied at school by Buddy (William Ostrander) and at home by his mother Regina (Christine Belford). Arnie is a young man stewing in resentment.

Much of that resentment is explicitly sexual in nature, even before the car gets involved. In his very first scene, he chats with his best friend Dennis Guilder (John Stockwell) about wanting to lose his virginity. He also complains about the game of Scrabble that he played with his mother the previous evening, which he lost because she disqualified his use of the word “fellatio.” He recalls, “She said obscenity’s not allowed in scrabble. I looked it up. It’s in the dictionary.”

Christine is not always subtle in communicating its theme of frustrated masculine anxieties. At one point, Regina sends her son to school with a packed lunch that includes a yogurt. Buddy steals the brown paper bag and penetrates it with his switchblade. The white goop splatters all over the floor of their shop class. There is a sense that something is simmering below the surface, that Arnie’s masculine and sexual anxieties are being sublimated.

They seem to be sublimated into the car. As the name implies, Christine itself is frequently gendered and sexualized. Even before he buys the car, Arnie refers to it as “her” and “she.” The previous owner, George Lebay (Roberts Blossom), recalls that Christine “had the smell of a brand new car. That’s just about the finest smell in the world, except maybe for pussy.” Later in the movie, Arnie opines that “there is nothing finer than being behind the wheel of your own car, except maybe for pussy.”

However, Christine is presented as an alternative to feminine sexuality. The car’s violence is often framed in explicitly sexual terms and often in masculine sexual terms. Christine is very forceful. It rams and crushes. It asphyxiates. The car squeezes itself down an impossibly narrow loading bay to cut Buddy’s friend Moochie (Malcolm Danare) “in half,” recalling a Family Guy joke. It later rams Buddy’s car repeatedly, smashing into a garage. That garage then explodes dramatically.

Arnie is fixated on sex, but from a place of insecurity. When he invites Leigh (Alexandra Paul) on a date to a drive-in, he feels impotent as Christine tries to choke her. He watches powerlessly as another patron performs the Heimlich maneuver on his date. Shot from a low angle, with rain falling as the pair thrust and grunt, ending with both collapsing in satisfaction, this is an explicitly sexual scene. Arnie is watching Leigh and another man. “Get your goddamn hands off her!” he screams.

However, Christine is not really interested in the relationship between Arnie and Leigh. Leigh is introduced as a potential love interest for both Arnie and Dennis, but then just drifts through the movie. The film is much more fascinated by the dynamic between its two male leads. In particular, the idea that the car itself comes between the relationship that these two young men share. “I know you’re jealous,” Arnie tells Dennis when his friend voices concern about the car.

Dennis is a fascinating contrast to Arnie. In many ways, Dennis is more conventionally masculine. He plays football, he drives a car, he is popular with the girls at school. If Arnie is a stereotypical nerd, then Dennis initially appears to be a stereotypical jock. However, as Christine unfolds, Dennis comes to embody a much more complicated and nuanced sort of masculinity. Indeed, it often seems like Arnie himself misunderstands what makes Dennis so much more popular and so much happier than he is.

Dennis is not hyper-aggressive. When he catches Buddy bullying Arnie, he doesn’t solve the situation by resorting to violence; he summons their teacher, Mr. Casey (David Spielberg), and reports Buddy’s switchblade. Dennis is portrayed as genuinely caring. He is constantly looking out for Arnie. There’s a compelling vulnerability to Stockwell’s performance, who plays the second half of the film as if Dennis is constantly on the verge of breaking into tears. Dennis understands his own feelings.

There’s a definite subtext to Arnie and Dennis’ relationship. When Arnie confesses he is drawn to the car because “for the first time in [his] life, [he] found something uglier than [him],” Dennis replies, “You’re not ugly, Arnie.” When Arnie rejects this, Dennis adds, “Queer, maybe, but not ugly.” On the page, this moment could be read as casually homophobic in the way that many movies of the era are. However, as played by Stockwell, it’s strangely tender. As he drives away, Dennis listens to Bonnie Raitt’s “Runaway”: “As I walk along I wonder what went wrong with our love, a love that was so strong.”

Arnie lacks Dennis’ comfort in his own skin. Befitting a movie released in the middle of Reagan’s first term, wealth plays into this. Arnie lives in the suburbs and is going to college. His mother dislikes that he is taking shop class, as if “it embarrasses her or something.” Class informs Arnie’s relationship with Darnell (Robert Prosky), who runs the auto shop. Darnell insists the shop is for “working stiffs gotta keep their cars running so they can put bread on the table,” not wealthy dilettantes slumming.

Over the course of Christine, Arnie transforms himself from a seemingly sweet and timid nerd into a complete monster. Christine predated Revenge of the Nerds by a whole year, but there was undoubtedly something stirring in the popular consciousness. Christine has aged remarkably well; the study of a young man who channels his own insecurities and frustrations about his inability to embody a stereotypical masculine ideal into something poisonous and monstrous.

That said, Christine hits on many of Carpenter’s recurring themes and fixations. After all, it directly followed The Thing, which is also about a set of unarticulated masculine anxieties. However, there are other points of overlap within Carpenter’s filmography. Christine feels like a strange companion piece to Halloween. Like King’s source novel, the bulk of Christine is even set in 1978, the same year as Halloween. Both are also stories about suburban repression.

In some ways, Christine is a gender-flipped take on Halloween. Carpenter has argued that Halloween is best understood as the story of Laurie Strode’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) sexual frustration. “The one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife,” he explained. “She’s the most sexually frustrated. She’s the one that’s killed him. Not because she’s a virgin but because all that sexually repressed energy starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy. She doesn’t have a boyfriend … and she finds someone — him.”

By this logic, Laurie seems to almost conjure Michael Myers (Nick Castle) back to Haddonfield. During their very first encounter, as she drops the key off at the old Myers house, she sings idly to herself, “I wish I had you all alone.” Myers steps obligingly into shot. In her conversations with her friends Lynda (P J Soles) and Annie (Nancy Loomis), it becomes clear that Laurie does have desires, even if she refuses to act on them. As Carpenter puts it, Laurie “is more like the killer, because she’s repressed.”

The Halloween series repeatedly uses “Mr. Sandman” as a music cue, as if Michael is Laurie’s dream manifested. The use of that song, much like the use of so much 1950s rock-and-roll in Christine, suggests the repression that informed that decade. In Christine, Arnie’s own repression seems to attract and empower the 1958 Plymouth Fury in the same way that Laurie’s repression seemed to draw Michael. All those unarticulated feelings have to go somewhere, and the results are horrific.

Of course, allowing for the opening scene of Halloween Resurrection, Laurie always vanquishes Michael. Arnie is not so lucky. At the climax of Christine, he stumbles out of the car and grasps Leigh. He gasps and collapses, a sequence just as sexual as the Heimlich maneuver earlier in the film. Ultimately, it’s revealed that Arnie has achieved penetration: a shard of glass sticks through his abdomen. Arnie has been impaled by Christine. Repression kills.