Hello to all my Wonderful World Outside Our Window Subscribers,
For a taste of Hollywood’s incredibly bleak future, look no further than Matchbox The Movie, which premieres Friday on Apple TV+. Produced by David Ellison’s Skydance Media (which, as of Monday, owns both Paramount and Warner Brothers), Matchbox The Movie1 is a perfect encapsulation of Ellison’s mission in life, and the broader rot infecting America at large.
Based on the Matchbox toy car brand (if that wasn’t obvious already), Matchbox stars John Cena as Sean Walker, an agent within an ultra-secret division of the CIA. Growing up, he loved to play with Matchbox cars. After a high-stakes weapons deal goes wrong, he returns to his old home to lay low and mourn the death of his childhood mentor. Kidnapped by the CIA, who blames him and his four childhood friends (The Matchbox Gang, as they refer to themselves, ad nauseam) for a missing nuclear warhead, Walker must clear his name whilst stopping the bomb from going off.
The movie is, predictably, very dumb. Frankly, it is violently stupid. It is hardly about Matchbox cars, considering Matchbox cars are simply small versions of real cars and not a narrative concept, but that is almost besides the point. This film is clearly the brainchild of a man who really loves his toys, and Ellison is that man. It is the exact type of film that Ellison has long said he likes making, and a grim blueprint for what we can expect from both Paramount and Warner Brothers going forward. After all, Ellison just poached Ynon Kreiz, the former CEO of Mattel and a producer on this film, to be the new Co-CEO of Skydance. He is not a very subtle man.
Shot like a particularly low-budget Hallmark movie, Matchbox The Movie starts with an interminable flashback to 1998 where Walker and his friends simply play with Matchbox cars for a bit. Barely a setup, the entire first ten minutes of this film seem to exist solely to remind the audience of how nice things were back when we were kids. We then, via a very goofy match cut, jump forward 28 years to Walker driving across the Sahara Desert while being shot at. The implication here is that his time playing with Matchbox cars prepared him for a life of danger. Have I mentioned the movie is based on the Mattel toy?
The film runs for two hours and never gets particularly interesting. Releasing directly on streaming, it will likely never be remembered, spoken about, or watched within a month, and no one involved cares. It’s hard to to even get mad at a movie like this because that would imply I expected something better. Instead, I’m just so exhausted. Obviously the Matchbox movie is bad, what else is new? Of course it was made by the man hand-picked by our would-be tyrant to run Hollywood into the ground, who else?
The fact is, Ellison’s invasion of Hollywood is part and parcel with Donald Trump’s complete destruction of America. A country of immigrants, Americans do not have a shared race, language, or history. We are bound together, primarily, by our culture. The century-long understanding of America as a global superpower was heavily influenced by studios such as Paramount and Warner Brothers, who in their cultural production defined the idea of the American everyman, the American solider, the American worker, and so on. Our nation’s identity is inextricably linked to these institutions, all of which are swiftly crumbling before our eyes.
We are handing the keys to a powerful kingdom to a petulant man-baby who just wants to strip it down to a playroom. What makes Ellison’s $110 billion mega-merger so annoying is that he is fundamentally such an uninspired, stunted guy. Ellison misses his father, who was never around growing up, and so he is using the combined might of Paramount and Warner Brothers to build himself a sandbox filled with the toys that populated his lonely childhood. His dad, of course, is picking up the check.
He slots perfectly into the broader, incredibly tedious decline of the American empire. Ellison and Trump are essentially running the exact same playbook, fueled by the exact same psychological rot. A decade ago Trump figured out that his base is terrified of the present and desperate to retreat into a fictionalized, uncomplicated past. He has since formed a government entirely devoted to addressing his random grievances with people who pissed him off in the late 1980s. Ellison is merely capitalizing on this, while forming his own empire entirely devoted to pretending his random childhood interests are still relevant.
Over the past 15 years, our entire culture has reoriented to exclusively serve adults who refuse to grow up. This is not just happening in politics or at the cinema — it is everywhere. Toy sales have skyrocketed, driven almost entirely by people over 30. It is men like Ellison, who are unable or unwilling to mature that will make up the target audience for this new media empire. And it is the same cultural rot that gave us Trump which rewards Ellison’s middlebrow taste. They are truly a match made in heaven.
Ellison has said that he wants to make movies and shows that appeal to the Americans left out by the snobby, liberal mainstream media. What he really means is that he wants to make things that don’t ask anything of him or the audience. He’s turning off the lights on two of America’s greatest institutions, not out of malice per se, but because he’d rather just play with his cars. Matchbox The Movie, in this way, is the perfect swan song for an infantilized empire — a piece of media so inherently brain-dead it quite literally has to clarify that it is a film in the title. It is hard not to feel like we all deserve this: a century of American humiliation following a century of pure, unadulterated American excess.
Signing off,
Max Bolen
Assuming Apple TV+’s press team will no longer respond to their emails.
The official press notes sent to me by Apple calls the film Matchbox The Movie, no colon. This is somewhat psychotic, but I will be going with the formal title.