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On this week’s bonus episode of Across the Movie Aisle, Peter, Alyssa, and I dove into Christopher Nolan’s surprising decision to offer tickets for 70mm IMAX screenings of The Odyssey a year in advance. Is this the most-anticipated movie of all time? MAYBE! Links below.
This is a subscriber-only episode, so if you aren’t a Bulwark+ member yet, sign up now. The first month is currently free!
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One thing I constantly harp on—the reason this newsletter exists, in a way—is that you can’t understand what is being made in the entertainment industry if you don’t understand why it’s being made.
This is why, for the first five or so minutes of this week’s Across the Movie Aisle, I laid out the economic case against Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. Yes, yes: I understand all the political implications of canceling The Late Show on the heels of the legal settlement between Viacom and Donald Trump meant to grease the skids for the company’s sale to David Ellison’s Skydance. As I said in that episode and elsewhere, it was a horrible decision and one that clouds the entire news operation at CBS. It hurt them badly because it cost them credibility.¹ But the simple fact of the matter is that The Late Show loses money, and lots of it, because the economics of linear TV in general and late-night TV in particular are in freefall, and also because the average age of his viewers is 68, well out of the coveted 18–49 demo.
On top of that, there is no extended value for the show or the host. Colbert’s YouTube numbers are much worse than either Jimmy Fallon’s or Jimmy Kimmel’s; he doesn’t do viral gimmicks, so his social media presence is limited. When ABC needs a host for something like the Oscars, either for the ceremony itself or an after-show on ABC, Kimmel is often the guy they call. CBS doesn’t call on Colbert in that way. And late-night programming doesn’t have much library value for streaming services. Old clips of Johnny Carson are of historical significance, but no one is signing on to Peacock in the hopes of killing time by watching a Jay Leno monologue from The Tonight Show that first aired in 1998. (Ironically, late-night shows were the original efforts by media companies to “win the war on sleep,” to paraphrase Netflix’s Reed Hastings’s description of his company’s mission. But people now spend that last hour in bed scrolling through Instagram before turning the nightstand lamp off and hitting the hay.)
South Park, on the other hand, is incredibly valuable to Paramount+ because South Park is a show that folks will sit around and binge when they need to watch something to kill time. As Matt Belloni noted in his breakdown of the negotiations, South Park has accumulated the 20th-most hours streamed in 2025, according to Nielsen, an impressive feat considering there hasn’t been a new season of the show since March of 2023 (though there have been a handful of one-off specials). I couldn’t say for certain that South Park is “worth” $1.5 billion over the next five years—the economics of streaming remain somewhat vague and mysterious to me—purely in terms of signups and retentions, but it’s clearly valuable in a way The Late Show simply is not. Some number of users will ditch HBO Max for Paramount+ for South Park. No one really cares if The Late Show is on streaming at all.
And that gives Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the mad geniuses behind South Park, leeway that Colbert simply doesn’t have.² They can do a whole episode about Donald Trump (allegedly) having a micropenis while treating him like they treated Saddam Hussein and Paramount can’t do a darn thing about it because Paramount needs South Park. It helps that Parker and Stone—who have long railed against efforts to police speech on the right and left alike over the show’s nearly thirty years of existence—have the cultural capital to criticize the nascent woke right’s urge to tamp down on speech critical of the president via both lawsuits and government regulation.
Either way, the FCC (finally) cleared Paramount’s merger with Ellison’s Skydance yesterday. But something tells me Parker and Stone aren’t about to take their foot off the gas.
For a little more on South Park vs. Trump, check out my conversation with Tim about the episode yesterday:
(Bulwark+ members can watch here without the ads! Membership has it’s privileges!)
The Fantastic Four: First Steps Review
THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS CALLS TO MIND the early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that first run of (largely) standalone films that introduced us to Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor. It’s competent and charming, well-acted with some fun set pieces, and relatively succinct at just under two hours. Like Superman, released two weekends ago, it’s not quite an origin story—just as with the caped Kryptonian, we’ve seen the FF origin on film