Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s 189-minute carnival of cocaine, elephant dung, and jazz trumpets, arrived in 2022 like a glitter-flecked hangover: loud, expensive, and somehow both shameless and ashamed of itself. The film’s $80-million fever dream about 1920s Hollywood excess was marketed as “international event cinema.” In truth, it is a perfect allegory for the global film…
The question “What channel is the Champions League on?” sounds innocent enough—like asking where one might find a decent cup of coffee in a new city. Yet behind that query lies the entire architecture of 21st-century soft power, geopolitical sausage-making, and the quiet surrender of human attention to whichever media conglomerate has shoveled the most…
Shawn Levy: The Canadian Export Who Conquered Hollywood While the World Burned By our correspondent, filing from a hotel bar where the mini-bar charges more than most people’s monthly rent It is, perhaps, the most Canadian invasion in history: quiet, polite, and carried out under the polite fiction that it’s merely “cross-border collaboration.” Yet the…
Danny Ramirez and the Strange Global Afterlife of a Sidekick By Our Man in the Multiplex, filing from somewhere between the popcorn fumes of Los Angeles and the tear-gas haze of a streaming boardroom In the grand geopolitical arena—where microchips are national security, water rights trigger trade wars, and a misplaced emoji can sink a…
The Summer I Turned Pretty Ends, the World Keeps Spinning (Barely) By the time the final beach sunset faded to black on Prime Video last Friday, three things were already certain: Conrad had chosen his girl, the fish-market economy of fictional Cousins Beach would survive another season of hormonal chaos, and somewhere in Sri Lanka…
Gen V Season 2 Release Time: A Global Countdown for the Morally Flexible By Dave’s International Desk, filed at 03:17 GMT from somewhere with suspiciously fast Wi-Fi The planet’s collective id has once again synchronized its watch. In twelve time zones, from the frost-bitten sanity of Oslo to the humidity-soaked delirium of Jakarta, humans are…
Chicago Fire, Global Alarm: How a Midwestern Script Became the World’s Favorite Disaster Comfort Blanket Somewhere between the Baltic Sea and the Bay of Bengal, a commuter in a Seoul subway car is wiping away tears over the death of a fictional firefighter who never drew breath outside a soundstage in Illinois. The scene is…
The Mouse That Roared in 4K: How Disney+ Conquered the World One Toddler at a Time SÃO PAULO—At 2:17 a.m., while most of this city’s favelas slept under flickering streetlights, nine-year-old Júlia was wide awake, clutching a cracked Android and humming “Let It Go” in Portuguese with the fervor of a Cold-War radio operator. Somewhere…
The Mouse That Streamed the World By a Correspondent who has seen too many “Skip Intro” buttons die of neglect Disney+ launched in November 2019 with the fanfare of a small nation-state acquiring nuclear weapons. Three years later, the service has colonized more territories than the East India Company—minus the opium, plus the Baby Yoda…
CAPE, CAMERA, ACTION: HOW HBO MAX’S SUPERMAN STREAMING DEAL TURNED THE PLANET INTO ONE BIG GOTHAM By the time the sun rose over Reykjavík last Tuesday, half of Iceland had already binged the first three episodes of HBO Max’s new Superman series. By sunset in Seoul, South Korean subway ads for the show were promising…
Amazon Prime Video: The World’s Longest Layover Lounge By our correspondent in a windowless room, somewhere between Schengen and daylight saving time Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, a Scandinavian flight attendant is apologizing for turbulence while 200 passengers scroll past the same thumbnail of “The Boys.” Three continents, one algorithm, zero surprises—welcome to Amazon Prime Video,…
TNT Sports: The Cable Behemoth That Conquered Football, Boxing, and Your Sunday Hangover By the time the sun rises in Singapore and sets in São Paulo, TNT Sports has already broadcast roughly 73 live events, 214 slow-motion replays, and one very confused cricket commentator wondering why his feed just cut to the NBA Finals. Such…
