About a year ago, you guys did a truly unfathomable thing. Something that completely blew my mind… You gave The Life of a Showgirl the biggest first week for an album in history. I took a trip to Sweden to celebrate with Max and Shellback, my two collaborators on this album. Really we just wanted to reflect and take in how grateful we were for the moment we were in, but there was a studio there and we did what we do when we feel anything at all: We wrote more songs. I hope you love them, because they were born out of pure gratitude for your exuberance for and celebration of the album we made. The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore including four new songs is out on Friday and available to pre-order and save now at ❤️‍🔥 📸: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott

On a Hollywood economic vibe shift: The first two decades of the 20th century were dominated by what you could sort of simplify as the Iger hit formula. (1) Buy familiar IP; (2) Establish franchise; (3) Extend franchise; (4) Repeat. This was so reliable that for years, practically every film in the top 10 had a sequel-number in the title. Iger was brilliant, but the Iger formula is faltering. Remakes and sequels of Moana, Star Wars, Minions, and Supergirl have all disappointed recently. But every Nolan movie these days is a billion-dollar event, Sinners was a monster, and Villeneue makes almost all bangers. That this is coinciding with the Obsession/Backrooms phenomenon is interesting, too. @MattBelloni: "I'd rather have the next commercial movie from the five biggest directors (Nolan, Cameron, Coogler, Gerwig, Villeneuve) than the next installment of almost any piece of well-worn I.P. Wouldn’t you?" The optimistic gloss on this would be that I, a person who never read comic books and don't like Marvel very much, am much more interested in seeing movies that were greenlit on behalf of the ingenuity of the director or the script, rather than the mathematical inevitability that "we did Ant-Man 2, so we're doing Ant-Man 3." It's also cool that this shift is happening during a relatively buoyant year for ticket sales. The risk for Hollywood, I think, is that the bar for success is getting higher; or, put differently, I think maybe the floor is lower. If you owned the Marvel or Minions franchise in the 2010s, you had a relatively high floor for the next Marvel or Minions movie, bc you knew a certain number of people would turn up even if the Rotten Tomatoes number was 60. But what happens when you're sort of starting from scratch every time? If you're a studio, it's really hard to do 10 Obsessions in 10 straight years! That was a weird fucking movie. Bottom line, the Iger-Nolan vibe shift in Hollywood is great for people who like original big swings and blockbusters that also try to win Academy Awards. But, despite an awesome 2026 for the Return of Movie Theaters narrative, it's sobering to remember that sui generis hits are rare, Nolan is rare. If the bar for hits is "it better be genius," that's an interesting business problem, bc genius is rare ... maybe even rarer than familiar IP.

Been thinking a lot about the amount of hate around AI lately, and especially how dramatically more polarized everything has become over the last six months. I started exploring this space about five years ago and, back then, people mostly seemed curious or indifferent. You could disagree, debate what the technology meant, argue about where it might go, and then move on with your life. Somehow that feels increasingly impossible now. A lot of people compare what’s happening to the arrival of CGI, but I’m not convinced the comparison really works at this scale. Traditional artists were obviously worried about CGI, jobs changed, entire workflows disappeared or evolved, and there was plenty of resistance. But CGI artists weren’t being insulted daily by everyone from industry veterans to some random 17-year-old or your neighbor who happens to be a landscaper and has absolutely no stake in filmmaking whatsoever. Today it’s “AI slop” here, “fuck AI” there, and people will genuinely go out of their way to find work they dislike simply to tell the person who made it that they hate what they’re doing. The magnitude of the reaction is fascinating in itself. Social media obviously changes the equation enormously. We didn’t have millions of people algorithmically rewarded for having the hottest possible take when CGI was becoming mainstream, and outrage now travels at roughly the speed of culture having three espressos. But I think there’s more to it than that. AI touches several anxieties at once. Copyright, employment, authenticity, inequality, identity, even the very personal question of what makes someone’s skills valuable when a machine suddenly becomes capable of doing pieces of what took them years to learn. And unlike CGI, this technology landed directly in everybody’s hands almost immediately. You don’t need a workstation, a studio job, or years of technical training to encounter it. It’s on your phone, in your search engine, in your workplace, in your kid’s homework. So the debate stopped being primarily about technology and became cultural remarkably fast. There are legitimate reasons to question how these systems are built, how people are compensated, where consent belongs, and what happens to creative jobs. I don’t think dismissing those concerns helps anyone. But there’s also something deeply unhealthy about turning every person who experiments with the technology into a proxy for all of those problems. Someone making a film with AI isn’t personally responsible for solving copyright law, labor economics, OpenAI’s business model, the future of Hollywood and your existential crisis before they’re allowed to post a 30-second animation. You can dislike the technology. You can refuse to use it. You can fight for better rules around it. All of those positions are legitimate. But five years into this journey, the part I find increasingly difficult isn’t disagreement. It’s how quickly curiosity has been replaced by tribalism. And historically, tribalism has rarely been where humanity does its best thinking.

Amazon Studios is hiring a Gen AI / VFX Coordinator in Culver City. The job req names seven tools. Six are closed APIs. @ComfyUI is the only one you run yourself. Listed under required qualifications, and again under preferred, where they ask for direct experience creating visual content with it. That's not a studio testing whether this works. That's a studio building the compliance layer you only build once you've decided it's permanent.