the most exciting moment at the end of the year. My favorite first watches of 2025. But first, honorable mentions:
ARMY OF DARKNESS
28 DAYS LATER
NANNY
THERE WILL BE BLOOD
Little Toni’s in North Hollywood CA if anyone was curious! They were so great to us for the day we filmed there. Fun fact: it was the last day of filming!
‘OBSESSION’ is now eyeing a $300–330M worldwide finish.
That would be more than 400x its reported $750K production budget – one of the biggest box office multipliers in film history.
Art directors risk nothing for their work. They get paid and they can move on to the next project. If the movie blows up they can leverage that massively or complain and make themselves a byword for industry insiders.
But the producers are the ones holding the massive bag if the movie bombs.
Is the art director going to surrender her salary if that happens? No.
Is the cast and crew willing to defer their fee in hope the movie does well? If so, let's have that conversation, but most wouldn't.
So why should they get an upside if the film does well? They don't deserve it, unless they negotiated for it and it is in their contract.
You can agree to the offered salary or not. But if you take it, and then the film makes a ton of money and then you complain about being exploited, you've shown your hand, and no one will want to play poker with you because they see how you operate.
Pay is a proxy for effort, but also risk. The risk you take as BTL crew is zero. The effort is compensated fairly (consent to the contract is agreement to fair, equitable trade).
But you don't deserve upside while also offloading all the downside to the producers.
Re: Angry Art Director: As a #newbie, a writer asked me to write a few scenes of an episode. I wrote HALF. He got $6K & I got $300. He didn't rewrite me. Unfair. I asked for $750 as a compromise. He agreed. Pay models need to change, but public outing? Biting hand that fed you?
The studios are not stealing millions from the cast and crew. That money does not "belong" to the people who worked on the film - they were paid for their work. It belongs to the studios that took a chance on Obsession and marketed it and got it into thousands of theaters
How your art director looks at you when she decides that the fair rate she consented to is retroactively unfair because the film turned out to be a massive hit.
You're not cool and quirky for not allowing phones at your concert. What if notorious serial killer The Butcher was at your concert and he could go to the show without being noticed.
The Obsession art director post. Man, what a choice.
One year total experience. Only credit pre-Obsession is a single short film. Sign on to a low budget indie. Agree to rate. Movie explodes. You're suddenly the Art Director fo the most talked about film of the year.
If this ever happens to you, let me give one piece of advice. Embrace it. Use the credit to fight off offers, get a BTL agent, turn those difficult three weeks into an incredible career.
Do NOT cut every connection you have to the filmmakers, put out tweets about how you wish you'd shut down their production, and complain about the rate you agreed to (which isn't even like $100 or some student film sketchiness).
Do you know how many indies I have done as an actor for $240/day? A fucking lot. Every single time I know what I'm getting into and I hope to god it turns out well and leads to another opportunity. I cannot even imagine getting cast in Obsession and then putting out a career ruining post about it instead of trying to leverage it into more work.
"Love Island USA" Season 8 has achieved the most-watched debut for an original season of television ever on Peacock.
23% of viewership has come from phones and tablets, the largest mobile usage any Peacock original series has seen during its launch window.
https://t.co/ZcNiZUgYsk