Analyzing Recent Trailer Backlash

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To learn more, check out accccenture d. com slash sppotify It is Thursday, june eighteenth By now, most people in Hollywood are familiar with the tactics of digital marketers unseen hands and help movie trailers go viral, or TV shows build buzz, or a celebrity rehabilitate his own image by trashing his ex wife online But even savvy insiders probably aren't aware of the extent to which this so called culture of clipping has taken over the dominant social platform And how much of a business this manipulation of online sentiment has become If you're not familiar with clipping, that's when someone hires a company to turn a trailer or a song or an interview into attention grabbing clips which are then posted over and over by normal looking accounts designed specifically to make it look like real people are talking about this stuff One of these companies had sixty five thousand dummy accounts posting about fifty thousand videos a day across TikTok X YouTube, Instagram, all the others If the clips are good enough or the text accompanying them, interesting enough The algorithms then go to work and push this stuff to more and more users. and all of a sudden, a trend is born. It's called trend simulation, one professional clipper told New York Magazine,Qote, everything on the internet is fake. quote I'll admit, clipping worked on me last year with the rock band Geese, which all of a sudden was everywhere in my feeds and got me to check out the band And it turns out that was thanks to a company called Chaotic Good Projects, which was hired to do exactly that And I know from my own reporting that clipping has become a powerful tool for the Hollywood stududios. But how powerful And how can regular people spot this stuff That's what we're going to talk about today with Lane Brown He's a features writer at New York Magazine, who just wrote that big story on Cipping called The Feed is Fake. Today it's the business of clipping what's real and fake online and how Hollywood benefits from the quiet manipulation of the public discourse. From the Rar and Puck, I'm Matt Belleny, and this is the Town All right, we are here with Lane Brown, who is a features writer at New York Magazine and the author of a recent article that I very much enjoy called The Fed is fake. Welcome, Lane Thank you very much for having Mat All right, this is a fascinating topic and you went into the entire culture of clipping and the culture of Internet, social media, opinion manipulation, but I want to focus on the Hollywood aspect of this because we are a Hollywood business podcast And you wrote This is your words. On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once. every signal the platforms produce, a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that, quote, everybody is suddenly talking about the same thing can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas How exactly is Hollywood benefiting from this trend. Right now, if you're a studio and you're wondering why other movie trailers are going viral, but yours aren't Probably the answer. Studios are Really like everybody. Basically this is happening pretty much across every category. I spent a few weeks in Discord serervice where this is happening. I you know, music, video games, sports to, of course, movies and TV. And Yeah, it' more or less almost any trailer you can imagine is sort of being run through this through this sort of digestive system and posted like this. It's like it works.s This is the way now to get your content in front of big audiences. So give us some examples. likeike in the story you cited stuff you came across for the Michael Jackson movie, Michael and for all mankind, on Apple TV pllus. The Netflix show night agent. likeike how Do I Joe blow consumer on social media identify fake or kind of Studio hyped ing content Or the whole point is I think that you can't. I know, but that's my point. I want to be savvy about this and I feel like I'm being gamed I think probably everybody should try to join these clipping servers and take a look at what's, you know, what these campaigns are so they can, you know, know what, you know, why this stuff is sort of junking up their feeds right now It's really tricky to tell what is fake and what's real. And you mentioned the Michael Jackson movie, which is a really interesting case So it's not just clips of the trailer from the Michael Jackson movie that are being clipped and posted. What was really sort of interesting about that one was it's it's handheld videos like the whoever was paying for this campaign was asking people to post this handheld video of somebody shooting the billboard for for the Michael Jackson movie. And so they want it to look like you know, just basically some random nut is out on a walk and sees this billboard and gets so excited by it that he needs to shoot it with his phone and then post it to TikTok. And so that sort of looks real. The production values are as terrible as anything else on your TikTok feed. And so reallyally, you know, they've gotten very savvy and they know how to make something look like it's just you know normal regular everyday garden variety enthusiasm from regular people. And that's Lionsgate paying one of these agencies to do the campaign for them. What is the ecosystem of these agencies. Like how many of them are there? What is you know, what are the money involved? Like give us the economic breakdown. Well the first it's tricky because it's the studios marketing departments that usually hire like outside marketing departments and then these other outside marketing departments then hire the clipping shops And so then the Clipin shops go into the disiscord service and hire you know, freelance regular people that actually do the work. And so know, between the clips in the studio, you have you know, four layers of plausible deniability. rightight? We don't know. It just went viral. We have no idea how Barbenheimer happened. Yeah. Eactly, exactly. And so yeah, when I went around asking about these campaigns, the studios either didn't write me back or they had to take a week to sort of investigate this. and then they came back sheepishly and said, you know, okay, yes, that was us you know, this is really still pretty new. And so it's only been around for a couple of years. And so the companies that are doing this, the actual clipping shops You know, they seem like they they seem tiny, but they're growing. I talked to a few of them. There's there's going to be spade clipping There is or at least was floodify that was wor until recently. There is floodify. I love that name It literally says what it does. It literally it floods you with garbage. Yep. And yeah, that's what they do. Yeah, no, and I have heard and I can't mention any names, but a couple of people that I talked to in the story, they told me that talent agencies are now basically bringing this in house. And so They may not necessarily be contracting out to people to do it on Discord they might actually have know a broom closet someplace with a thousand phones where they're, you, posting their own trailers. So it's Oh God, they're probably getting the mailroom people to do it. Exactly, exactly Now, but that's interesting though, because you know the talent agencies often complain when the studio marketing campaign is either not as robust as they want or doesn't focus on their client, focuses on someone else. So you can essentially take matters into your own hand and if you are the third lead in a movie that's coming out. you could hire one of these agencies to flood the zone about Your client and make sure that the focus is on your client, even if the studio has determined that your client shouldn't be the focus of the campaign Right So the entry of Riceborough strategy just got a lot more interesting Exactly. Andrew Risborough could have done this. Now it's very different in the Oscar context because you're marketing to ten thousand members of the accademy. and she did that brilliantly with her campaign a couple years ago. But this is sort of a glorified version of this. It's highly specialized And I think pretty effective viral marketing Give us some of the costs involved. Like you go into it in the story of like what a, you know campaign to boost awareness for a band or for a TV show might cost of one of the things that is most interesting about this is this is basically the cheapest form of advertising that has ever existed. So on a cost per mill basis, which is what it costs to get one thousand views, it costs a dollar to get a thousand views on running one of those campaign. And so if you buy a real ad on TikTok or Instagram, that can cost dollars per thousand views. so this is you know a fraction of that. And then the bonus you get with this is nobody knows that it's advertising. It looks like a real thing. And so therefore people will trust it more than they will, a thing that is sponsored on it. Well, and if it's good then you get it into the algorithm that then feeds it out to everybody and they start sharing it on their own And most people don't share ads on their own. but If it's a woman doing a funny dance in front of the Michael Jackson movie during a screening That's something that you might share with your friends. And if it's studio marketing, that's the home run Budgets for a lot of these campaigns are it's, you know they'll say we're going to pay five thousand dollars and then stop. And then, you know, even if these clips are still circulating and trking more, you know, getting more and more views, that's free, you know, free views for them. And so yes, if one of these goes super viral get a really pretty spectacular deal on it. And it's supposed to be illegal Right? I mean, there is an FTC rule that you have to identify advertising on these platforms.et When you called the platforms, they didn't seem to be enforcing it that much. It's Yeah, the platforms you know, they all sent me these statements about, you know, protecting the integrity of their, you know, platforms and you know, we do our best and whenever we see any of this stuff,'ll, you know, we'll take it down. And then, you know, got this statement from YouTube. and then hours later, this cliip and cameampa in for the Google IO confonference is posted in one of these discord servers. And so it's, Google is obviously YouTube's parent company And platforms themselves are basically doing this U doing themselves And so they don't seem to be super incentivized to shut it down. And the government, I mean, God knows the government's not going to do this. The Government's not to do this because I mean, Trump's FDC presumably is not going to you know get on this because I think Trump himself is probably benefiting from this strategy as well. And so yeah, this is it's illegal in the way that like jaywalking is illegal, which Not very illegal. right Let's talk a little bit about the difference between a narrative campaign and a clipping campaign because Clipping, obviously is getting the clips out there, making sure people are seeing the videos on TikTok and elsewhere. But narrative campaigns are more interesting to me because There's an editorial component of there. There are evil geniuses out there who can craft a tweet that looks like it would be coming from a real twelve year old suburban kid that is like, oh, this is interesting or Can't wait to see this or something some version of that that can craft the narrative. And we saw this win you know the whole Baldoni versus Blake Lively where that group was trying to craft an image of her as being, you know, the villain in that fight and we saw it during the Johnny Depp Amber heard situation where there were bots out there. I'm less interested in the bots. I'm more interested in how you craft a narrative. through a narrative campaign on social media and how the studios can do this to better sell their products I got into this kind of in music, which is, know, the people I talked to, they were able to speak better to that. But somebody gave the example of when a band of theirs appears on Saturday night Lve, they most might post you know a thousand times in ten minutes after they've been performing. This is the best performance of the year on Saturdayight Live Oh And I think you know for movies and TV, I think you know they basically they can just send people the comment sections to post, you know, this trailer looks fantastic or you know, I can't wait to see this. It's yeah, it's really interesting. There is an extra editorial component to it that is sort of a little bit scary. But the comments are one thing. I'm talking about that goes viral on fors like Twitter X and TikTok and YouTube, where it's literally people are like Holy shit, and it's like a clip where it feels real You know, and sometimes The narrative campaigns will push Both sides of something controversial just in order to stoke the conversation and get people interested in the topic. And that's kind of interesting as well Yeahes so I spoke to a couple of companies that claimed to be able to detect this kind of thing and they found that you know in a couple of big recent controversies, Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl where there was this fight over a you know, Spanish speaking artist performing at the Super Bowl and the Syney Sweeney American Eagle Jeans thing, they found that it was pretty much the exact same accounts that were amplifying both both sides of the argument in some cases. and so it looks like you know, somebody just basically wanted to make these things the loudest argument in America for a week just get attention for whatever the product was So if you're American Eagle, And all of a sudden the media is reaching out to you for comment on your controversial Sidney Sweeney Jeans campaign. You have created that controversy via your clipping and narrative services Allegedly Right. So yeah, some You know, one part of this is they want to fool regular people on social media. And so that's that's one part of it. Another part of it is they want to fool people like us, journalists who you know, look at our social media feeds when we're trying to figure out what to what to write about. and we think, okay, this is something that everyone is talking about right now. And so I better weigh in And so we kind of basically amplify this fake sort of astroturfed conversation and you know, turn it into something thats that's almost real. They got me. they got me last year on geese. Like I was like, what is geese? and why is everybody talking about geese? So I listened. I want to clarify, Lane that these posts, these like viral posts, the quote retweets on Twitter with a funny caption on it. These are being created by human beings or are these being created by like some algorithm, some AI bought, some kind of computer program? orr is it like they hire human beings to come up with shit to post across all these platforms. So some of it I think primarily the stuff that works the best right now, I think is human made. And so like use the night agent as an example. And so there are one of the videos that that I think went semiviral was it was like a caption where it was like when the when the girl you're hooking up with says she wants to have a talk and then the night agent is like driving his car off a bridge, I think is the clip from the show. And sos like that And so that seems to be, you know, human made. But I think more and more they could do better They could do better than that. But now there are all kinds of ways to clip and post via AI too. And so that feels like that's, you know, I think. This is this is a brand new thing that's changing all the time and people are finding new and more efficient ways to do it. And so it feels like AI is now of going to be a big part of this It's also, I think that the demise of the monoculture really feeds this. I mean, you get into this in your story when nobody knows what is popular anymore and the media landscape is so fractured. We all have our own little bubbles. We are constantly looking for what is popular And into that void comes these manipulators who can provide the appearance popularity. And That matters. It arguably matters more than popularity itself now. Yeah, it's like you can give people FOMO if you can create this illusion that everybody is watching a particular show or listening to a particular band. And so the you know the appearance of popularity is, you know, basically your best Uh your best marketer and so you can sometimes turn that into actual popularity or at least something looks like actual popularity.'s yeah it's tricky, but yeah, nobody has any idea what it's popular. The metrics, you know, every streaming service Everybody used to sort of use the same scoreboard and pay attention to the same stats. Now everybody has their own scoreboard and only shows the stats that flatter them the most. And so in that yeah, it's really hard to get a sense of what other people are actually watching And this basically giv studios the a way to sort of manufacture the illusion that something is popular. And so that That's pretty valuable This podcast is brought to you by Landman As oil rises from the Earth, so do the secrets. Billy Bob Thornton, Demi Moore, and Sam Elliott star in the explosive secondcond season of Landman. One of the best TV shows of the year Raves the rarap This season is better than ever, says Esquire. From Taylor Sheridan, Landman continues its run as a cultural phenomenon for your Emmy consideration in all categories. now streaming on Paramount plus. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn ads Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling They optimize for the numbers that look great, imppressions, reach and reacts But when they don't show revenue, well That's a not so great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that Blls span Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO Linked in ads generates the highest ROAaz of all major ad networks Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. You can target by company, industry, job title, and more Bulls span Advertise on LinkedIn The network that works for you Spend two hundred and fifty dollars on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a two hundred and fifty dollars credit for the next one Just go to LinkedIn d. com slash the town That's LinkedIn dot com slash the town. Terms and conditions apply It's interesting though because we're making it sound like it's kind of easy to do this. and I have talked with studio marketers about how it's actually pretty difficult to have something go viral and feel organic And it gets to the question of Why we haven't had a Barbenheimer momoment Since then It's been a few years now and there hasn't, you know, there's been successful viral campaigns and there's been a lot of movies that have hit because of the social promotion and reaction But nothing that has reached that level yet. And so first of all, do you believe that Barbenheimer was manufactured by the studios. And if you do believe that Why hasn't it happened since? Its Tough to tough to tell. I would say, you know Yeah Probably the reason it hasn't beenince is because this stuff doesn't always translate necessarily into real world you know engagement. in music rightight now, there are all these bands who are having to cancel tours because nobody's buying tickets. And you know, they thought based on their online reaction that they were a lot more popular than they actually were. And it turns out Post Malone or the Pussy Katells not that popular And so You know, it may just be that this will help you sort of cut through on social media, but that does not necessarily mean that people are going to buy movie tickets So you can generate all the reaction you want, but it's not a butts and seeds moment necessarily. Yeah, exactly. And then there's something like the clavicular phenomenon where this dude has all of a sudden broken through and is everywhere and is getting a New York Times profile based essentially on effective clipping Yeah, it's a strange world we live in. It's, you know, exposure is different than popularity. And I think the clavicular phenomenon is sort of a perfect example of just, you know, he' showing up in people's feeds. They didn't ask for this. R And then you get the Yeah, it's like you get the media who' sees this weird person doing this stupid thing and we've got to get on this and and then it becomes smashing his face. lookooks maxing Looks masing with a hammer. Yeahah. So ye yeah, this is this is how it screwed up our Media ecosystem is now I know Craig tried it for a while. It just led to a bunch of bruising No, but, you know, it's it's a it's it gives legitimacy when Journalists like myself are looking at this and then deciding to cover it. And if the New York Timesites a profile, all of a sudden Clavicular is a thing. and he's got a very aggressive publicist who's Pushing that stuff out One of the people in your story quoted, said, I don't know if we've found a true viral trend in a while All of them are going to have some sort of inauthentic behavior behind them That is just like depressing Everything is advertising. The scary thing to me is o, Justin Bieber at Coachella, Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl, the NBA finals.' like these things should be popular online, but basically everybody is doing this. so it has sort of raised the bar. And so even actually popular things have to use these strategies to, you know cut through all of that noise. Yeah, why does Bieber need that? Bieber is a headliner at Coachella. that is byy definition, a viral moment Especially when he gets up there and starts playing YouTube videos of himself on stage You would you would think so, but you really had to pour some gasoline on it to make that make that go as viral as it did. So it's it's not a guarantee. If it's organic, it's not a, you know, even if it seems like it's a high visibility thing that presumably you know, generate its own attention, that's not guaranteed anymore It's so odd. I mean, it's almost like you There might be a market for people to say like we don't do this. you know Authentic authentic content, not to you via paid clipping. It's going to have to be on a different app because the algorithms are not going to promote any of that stuff probably. It's going to get buried. I kind of feel it's the economics of it are so good. It works so well that I sort of feel like even the holdouts are going to get basasically pulled in by competitive pressure. It's pretty terrifying Lane, how prevalent do you think this is? Like how ubiquitous is this stuff? Is this every once in a while you will see a post for the movie obsession and think, o, maybe this is a engineered marketing campaign, or is this, you know hal half or more of what we're seeing on the internet is fake I have gone crazy and now I'm seeing it everywhere, every place I look. There's I opened the Reddit app the other day and it's got like the you know posts in the Reddits that you follow, whatever. And I think there was a somebody asked I'm just getting into Elliot Smith. and I want more artists that sound like Elliott Smith. Th then you open the post and the whole comment section is this one the personost and this one artist who sounds like Elliot Smith who just released an album last week, it turns out. And so it's clear seemingly that that was sort of posted this is, you know, a stealth And And so just I find myself seeing that kind of thing everywhere. now. it does feel pretty prevalent. If you sort of recalibrate your Your skepticism, I think you will see this in more places than you might expect even. And you listen in the artle, Joe Lim, the former CEO of Flatify, he said he thinks ninety percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise ninety ninety percent. That sounds high for sure. You know. he would he would probably know Also, I was surprised that all these guys were talking. wasas it at South by Southwest? They were just on stage you know, disclosing their secrets to the world of what they're doing under the hood? Craig, everyone wants to brag. Everyone wants to be giving credit. But there's been a pullback now where they're much harder to reach now itound Yeah. When New York magazine calls you're like, oh shit, what did I say? They were doing it on stage. I mean, what did they expect My story sort of went you know a tiny bit viral and I do kind of I get suspicious of even that. It's like I did mention the names of some of these clipping services in the story, of course. And so I wonder if I might have had a little artificial help myself inadvertently. Well no Did New York magazine pay for a clipping service to clip your piece I am told that we don't do that. Sure, sure. Craig, where's my clipping service? Craig, does the ringer do that? I don't believe so We gott to get on that. But I I guess I could look into it. I guess if everybody, if you're not doing it, you're fing behind, it sounds like You won't believe what Matt said today. Every time I open my YouTube page, I see Matt's face or Chris Ryan. So you know, you the algorithm. thank you. We appreciate you clicking on our faces. But but it gets to an interesting business point because You know, when an actor has a project coming up, especially if they are an up and coming actor talent team gets together and said, okay, how are we going to capitalize on this and try to raise the profile of the actor? And you hire a publicist and you try to get earned media and you try to get into the marketing campaign But should a clipping service be part of the campaign for individual actors, filmmakers, etceter trying to get attention for their work. person who cares about the integrity of our information I would say no, but if you're a young actor who wants to, you know, wants to get out there, it seems like a no brainer at this point Let's use an example. like this woman in Disclosure Day. I forget her name, this actress who plays the newscaster at the end. I think it's Courtney Grace. Courtney Grace. That is a breakout role. when when you see the movie, you're like, wow, who is this person? She's great in the movie I wonder now if all the clips I'm seeing of her and all the attention she's getting is because her team is doing a campaign, a clipping campaign I can't prove it but yeah, very good chance. basically, if something is getting through at all There's a very good chance that that's where it came from these days The only other thing we didn't talk about was whether you could point to a specific movie where or show where the narrative was significantly gamed. Well, that's I mean, that's that's hard to do. I didn't find Like the narrative campaigns aren't advertised in like these these discord servers. I think that's smaller. You don't need thousands of people to do that. Those are subter. need Do't people It doesn't, you know, Netflix interns or something to to attack the comment section. So that's scarier because it's easier to do, and it's almost untraceable Well, you almost need like it's almost like hiring late night joke writers to flood the space. L it's really because those are the things that that go viral where when I talk to my friends the next day about something, they will literally mention a tweet that I've also seen in my algorithm because it's funny it went semi viral. And it's like you kind of need people who are clever to be putting out these twits. All of these out of work comedy writers should start working for clipping services to create the narrative around the content Yes, there used to be a website, I forget the name where you could basically log in and everybody would be competing to make the best joke about like a weekend update story and then the winner would get up voted to the top. And it's essentially that on a larger scale just on social media now, where it's basically just a competition for the best joke to go viral. and these companies should hire comedians who are out of work. A lot of them these days. Yeah Final question here, how the AI question Is AI going to make this problem better or worse I mean, I assume so much worse. I assume works. The end of every story, you've got the ending where it's like, yeah, and AI will make all of this terrible thing worse. But yeah, so like you right now yes, right now, a lot of these clips are by humans, AI means that you can click them much faster and much more efficient in posted greater volumes which is going to raise the bar, which will make it even harder for organic things to sort of get back attention for those results. But then also eventually people are just going to stop trusting social media because this has become, you know, professional wrestling or like reality TV. And so pretty much this all of this strategy is going to go toward feeding are basically fooling the training material of AI. And so when you, you know, you ask Chat GPT, what should I, you know, what TV show should I watch t theonight? it might come back to you and say, o definitely the night agent becausecause people are talking about it on social media. or it appears that way. Yes. appears that way. Exactly. I know, it just seems like there's a market opportunity here for social platform that doesn't have this or the recommendation system that isn't AI or bot or clipping infused. Well, the spin zone here is that this is actually going to ultimately be a good thing because this is just Moving this towards the dead Internet theory, which is the theory that the internet is basically just bots talking to bots and humans are going to be stuck on the outside looking in. and that maybe ultimately this will lead to whatever the next era is of online activity, but it won't involve everybody looking at Instagram and Twitter every single day anymore It'll be glasses. It'll be Evan Spiegel and his glasses snap. that we'll all be interacting via our giant Milton Burl glasses from the nineteen fifties. All right, Lan, thanks very much. appppreciate. This is a scary topic Thank you, Matt. Great to be here We are back with the call sheet Craig, are you one of those people that goes into the comments of a new movie trailer and expresses your opinion on the trailer itself Yeah, I have my own clipping company that I fled the zone with Craig's opinions. Craig go Yeah. No, I don't do that. I've probably I can count on one hand the amount of times I've commented on something on social media. Sometimes I'll express an opinion on Twitter ex, but most of the time I do not Lately, there's been some pretty active commenters on some of the recent trailers, the Shrek five teaser that just came out. peoplee very upset that Illumination has changed the look and feel of the Shrek character a little bit, modernized him a little bit. and then Social reckoning, the social network follow up. L lot of backlash to Mikey Madison's comments or voice in the trailer. She kind of mumbles. It's just the one line where she says, I have a hunch, you're not a fan of Facebook and she kind of mangles the line a little bit and people were like, why did you use this take? She doesn't even pronounce the line clearly Yeah, it's an interesting question because Obviously, the studios are monitoring this stuff very closely. And then it becomes a question of what is just social media noise and people being angry online? and what is something that should be actionable? Very apropo to be in this episode, yes. Exactly. And what we should and the A classic example is the Sonic the Hedgehog movie, which had a trailer come out and the fans were so irate at the look and feel of Sonic and the fact that he had human teeth and kind of looked like a real like more humanoid that they actually went back, delayed the release and fixed the character And it ended up becoming a huge franchise. And my prediction today is twofold. I do not think they're going to do anything to shhrek I think that is just noise. Illumination is so far along on that project. It takes so long to do this stuff that they are not going to do anything to Shrek I think that Sorkan is going to go back in and re record that dialogue to make it a little bit more understandable and people will notice a difference. You're saying in the actual cut of the movie, that line will be either eighty yard or they'll use a different take. Yes. That is that is fixable at this point. And it's an easy fix to make. And if it really did take people out of the movie, then worth fixing. Well remind me the Sonic controversy if we can call it that is that wasn't for the first Sonic movie. It was like the second or third one, right that people were upset about? No, no, it was the first. It was It was the first one. Yes, it was the first of the current Sonic movies and it was the first time that people fans of the video game saw the Sonic character and they went Right And they said, that's not my Sonic completely apes shit crazy. like Sonic can't have human teeth. He's a hedgehog. like insane stuff. but It was real. It was real enough where and I've talked to people who are involved in this, they like had a big meeting at Paramount. They said, what do we do? And they ultimately decided that it was worth it to the movie, release itate and fix it. Yeah. I don't think and obviously Shrek is a big bet by universal and illumination And if the fans don't like the new Shrek then maybe they take a little bit of a hit But ultimately, I don't think people care if If the movie's good, the movie's good and they will show up Yeah, and looking at Shrek, somebody who grew up with Srek, I do think he looks a little different. I don't think it I mean I guess it looks worse, but maybe it's just because it's not what I'm used to. But he does look a little bit more animated in a way that I think also people's relationship to AI animation now and all the crap that they see online, they kind of relate New animation to perhaps being AI, even though it wasn't, and so they hate anything that's new? Well, it's not. It's an illumination movie. I mean, they just have a particular style of animation that they use and they have updated it. It looks more clears and there's just kind of it's like more vivid and I think that kind of upsets people based on what they remember. Yeah. And this is a dreamwork slash illumination project a Dreamworks property, bothoth are owned or co owned by Universal So this is not just an illumination problem here. But again, I don't think it's a real problem. just it's so difficult for studios nowadays to discern what noise online is real And what is just noise? Well, they get bullied. It's like the Odyssey. peopleople, you know, the whole Elon Musk clash likeike to me, that's just noise You know, you got at some point it becomes real. I don't think that one became real, But at some point these controversies become real. No, I mean, the Odyssey set pre sale records. Clearly, it's not a huge problem You know, I don't know. it's it's a tough spot to be in. But I do think that social reckoning, there's still time, Sor and you can fix this and it's an easy fix. All right, that's the show for today. I wantanna thank my guests, Lane Brown, prodrouca Craig Horbeck, arrters, Jesse Lopez and Matt Pevick. And I wantanna thank you we will see you next week