Oct 6, 2026 · 1h 39m
Hollywood’s merger era tests ambition against safer bets
‘Verity’ Is Trash. But Is It Good Trash? Plus: ‘Digger’ Flopped and Warner Bros. Is No More.
The episode connects a studio leadership upheaval and a box-office failure to a larger fight over what mainstream filmmaking should be.
- 1Digger’s weak opening underscores the commercial risks facing ambitious theatrical films during Hollywood’s corporate reshuffling.
- 2Skydance’s Paramount strategy could favor recognizable franchises and Americana over the riskier filmmaker-driven identity associated with Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca.
- 3Verity has lurid ingredients for good trash, but its muddled tone and implausible exposition drain the fun from its premise.
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The hosts compare Verity’s actual climax with an alternate ending that would have made Lowen the manipulator and preserved the film’s camp potential.
The brief
Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins begin with Digger’s weak opening, then use its failure to examine the commercial pressures reshaping Warner Bros. and Paramount.
David Ellison’s Skydance era brings new leadership and a slate built around recognizable properties, raising a central question: can a safer strategy preserve creative ambition?
The hosts revisit the previous regime’s wins, misses, and abandoned projects before considering what Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca represented in an increasingly consolidated industry.
Verity supplies the episode’s sharpest disagreement with itself: its erotic melodrama, violent twists, and camp potential are obvious, but the film never chooses a coherent tone.
Sean and Amanda argue that an alternate ending, with Lowen as the manipulator and Verity alive, would have better matched the movie’s self-aware trashiness.
Their verdict is less that Verity is too outrageous than that it is insufficiently committed, leaving good-trash potential stranded between sincerity and camp.