Author: Sam Allcock

The huge, color-coded number is located at the top of the page. A percentage next to a cartoon tomato, green for fresh and red for rotten, has somehow grown to be one of the more significant single figures in the entertainment industry. It was featured in trailers by studios. It can be seen on posters. Chains of theaters make reference to it in their marketing materials. Distributors regard a movie with a 95% fresh rating differently than one with a 60% rating, even if the underlying reviews reveal a more nuanced picture than either figure indicates. For a very long…

The magazine had been published consistently since before World War I. Back issues, bound volumes dating back to the days when the publication was manually set in lead type, occupied a storage room on the third floor of its premises. The editorial voice has changed throughout the years, adapted to various times, and withstood the introduction of television, cable, and the early internet. The combination of dwindling print advertising revenue and a digital content strategy designed for a search environment that had silently stopped functioning as anyone remembered was what it had not survived, at least not comfortably. Over the…

Many individuals are familiar with a particular type of Tuesday night without particularly relating it to anything systemic. Before you’ve had a chance to determine whether you were truly hungry, you open a food delivery app, select something, and the order is placed. No wallet was found. No money was counted. No friction that could cause someone to reconsider. The food shows up. Three days later, the price shows up on your statement, somewhat more than you recall due to a delivery cost, a service charge, and a pre-selected eighteen percent tip. Making a sandwich would have taken more time…

The Northern Territory begins to seem to function on a different scale than the rest of the country if you drive north from Alice Springs for a sufficient amount of time. The horizon is flat, the ground is red, and the distances make it impossible to gauge how far you have really come. One of Australia’s most strategically important mineral reserves in a generation is located somewhere in that region, beneath ground that appears to be thousands of square kilometers in all directions. The Project Nolans. A decade ago, neodymium and praseodymium were hardly mentioned in public discourse; today, they…

A blurry, somewhat overexposed shot from the 1973 Met Gala depicts a room full of people who appear genuinely unsure about what the evening would bring. There was genuine tension throughout those early incidents. Fashion experts debating whether clothing qualifies as art at a museum, not knowing how the public would react. Whatever the initial doubt was, it resulted in something. At least a dialogue. There was occasionally a real change in the industry’s self-perception. In more recent iterations of the event, that quality is hard to come by. Instead, what you see when you browse the carpet coverage or…

An editor is sitting by themselves in front of a timeline full of takes in a room somewhere in Burbank, Soho, or wherever post-production work actually takes place. One scene could have forty different variants. An performer tries the line one way, then another, and the director requests something completely different. The video lasts for several hours. Ninety seconds will be displayed on the screen. While the director is already discussing the movie in press interviews, the editor discreetly works for months to decide which ninety seconds to use, in what order, and how much time to leave between cuts.…

A few people are working from a communal table next to a window overlooking the water on a Tuesday morning in Wynyard Quarter, the waterfront precinct located along Auckland’s inner harbor. Open laptops, coffee from the downstairs cart, and a Teams call that is muted while someone types. In many respects, it resembles any contemporary co-working space. The light streaming through the glass and the fact that, for at least some of the people seated there, they were doing this eighteen months ago in San Francisco are the differences. Auckland hasn’t started a formal campaign aimed at the remote workers…

A seven-year-old is being requested to perform the take once more somewhere in a suburb outside of a mid-sized American city. The living room’s lighting is already installed. The carpet reflects the ring light. A parent watches the frame while holding a phone. The youngster seemed worn out. The child repeats it after the parent says it again, this time with emotion. This afternoon, the video will be posted. By dawn, it will receive several hundred thousand views. None of the money will be seen by the child. Most individuals outside of the kidfluencer industry are unaware of how big…

The guest list has evolved in ways that would have looked unthinkable ten years ago if you were to walk inside the backstage area of a mid-tier fashion week presentation today. The well-known names—the bookers, the agents, and the editorial contacts from old print titles—remain. However, among them are individuals whose professional presence is gauged by engagement rates and follower counts rather than campaign credits; some of these individuals developed their fan bases by sharing outfit photos from their apartments in places that aren’t on the conventional fashion calendar. Although the change has been developing for some time, the numbers…

When a movie is doing well in test screenings yet viewers consistently characterize it as “nice” in the written remarks at the bottom of answer cards, a particular type of discussion takes place in studio marketing departments. Not unexpected. Good. When the term appears quietly in a focus group summary, it might start a heated discussion about whether the film has a perception issue and whether there is anything that can be done to address it before the film’s release date. Although the effort to get an R-rating for a movie that hasn’t quite earned one in any natural way…