September 19, 2026

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED:

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

BRYAN PRESTON: I saw the movie that Warner tried to delete: Coyote vs. Acme.

Warner Bros. had a movie it spent $70 million to create, finished in 2022. It brought some big names together – James Gunn as writer and producer, stars John Cena and Will Forte, and even bigger names in Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, and all the other classics from Looney Tunes. Warner didn’t just launch production on this film, it went through the entire process, and had a finished work that was ready for theaters. It was called “Coyote vs. Acme,” pitting the hapless Wile E. Coyote against the megacorp from which he’d bought so much failed gear over the decades.

But thanks to perverse tax incentives and a difficult climate for major movie releases, Warner decided to do the unthinkable: It was going to delete this finished movie. Not just shelve it. Destroy it.

Will Forte, who plays Coyote’s attorney in the film, appeared on Jay Mohr’s podcast, called it “a very frustrating story.”

“So we make this movie. The script is really fun. And then, we went through the process of making this movie, and we made an even better movie than this great script.”

Because half the film is animated with composited cartoon characters, anvils and other tropes, post-production was a long process. But it got through all that, Forte says, and they were called to a screening.

“After all the animation, they’re finally ready to show it to the cast. They called us up on a Tuesday night. Said, ‘OK we’re gonna show it to you next Tuesday. It’s testing really well, we’re very excited about it.’ The next day I get a call that Warner Bros. is going to shelve it. Just wants to take a tax loss.”

The cast still got to see the movie. Forte said he assumed that if Warner was shelving it, “It must be not as good as these guys said. But they saw it, and it’s ‘great.’

“Which made it even more frustrating… It was nuts.”

As Rob Long writes in this month’s issue of Commentary: Coyote Vs. Studio.

Given the position Warner Bros. was in at the time, the guys who shelved it weren’t wrong, and it is physically painful for me to write these words: The studio executives weren’t morons. In fact, they were doing the math correctly. The standard rule of thumb is that six out of 10 studio movies never earn back what was spent on them. An NYU Stern study found that the median studio-financed film delivers about 27 percent ROI. The median independently financed film returned negative 13 percent.

I didn’t know what those numbers meant—I’m a writer; I don’t know how money works—so I looked it up. Mature software companies post returns on investment capital in the 20–25 percent range. McDonald’s posts in the 22–26 percent zone.

So: A McDonald’s—a building that sells hamburgers to people who already know exactly what they’re going to order before they walk in—returns roughly 24 percent. A mature software company, selling code it had to write only once, returns 20–25 percent. But only four times out of 10 does a studio movie—which involves movie stars, visual effects, marketing campaigns, and a two-year production process that could be derailed at any point by a pandemic, a strike, or an actor who loves Hamas—return 27 percent. You can get the same return renting out a drive-thru window as you can financing a movie. But the drive-thru doesn’t require you to guess, 18 months in advance, whether the culture is going to want to watch a cartoon coyote and his lawyer. The smart move is to put down the camera and pick up the french-fry basket.

But the entire premise of the movie business—the only reason anyone has ever agreed to finance it—is that occasionally something as odd and small as a cartoon coyote suing a company that makes atomic-powered roller skates turns out to be a moneymaker. You don’t get into show business because it’s a good bet. You get into it because it’s fun. Warner Bros. wanted the predictability of a bank and the jackpot of a casino, and you cannot, in the end, have both.

Which is why Warner Brothers may well be absorbed into the Ellison empire, and if so, that’s possibly a wrap for the industry’s company town: Maybe Paramount-Warner SHOULD Leave L.A.

Posted at 8:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

IF YOU TELL A GENOCIDE LIE BIG ENOUGH AND KEEP REPEATING IT, PEOPLE WILL EVENTUALLY COME TO BELIEVE IT:

Related (From Ed): We’ve descended into some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Bill Maher is a voice of sanity:

That last tweet concludes, “‘How did that whole generation get there? My short answer: lack of education. We stopped teaching kids things. They don’t know anything… Ignorant is different than stupid… And it’s not their fault that the schools stopped teaching them things. History, economics, anything. They just pull anything out of their a$$… And the upshot is you have people… running for elected office now who want to get rid of the police and get rid of prisons and get rid of borders and make shoplifting legal.’ ‘You know kids, we tried this sh*t.’ David Foster: ‘Name a place where it works. I dare you.’ Bill Maher: ‘It doesn’t.’”

Posted at 7:55 pm by Stephen Green

THE PANOPTICON MAY NOT BE AS LEFT-LEANING AS I HAD THOUGHT:

Posted at 6:53 pm by Glenn Reynolds

I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN THE LEFT OPENLY DEMANDED HIGHER GAS PRICES:

Tweet concludes, “Do you see why they have to desperately obsess over the temporary increase in gas prices? It’s all they have.”

Obama and his cronies obsessed over creating a permanent increase in gas prices. As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

IT’S (D)IFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT:

Of course, sometimes the press even gave Biden — well, Biden’s handlers — the questions in advance.

UPDATE (From Ed):

Posted at 6:00 pm by Stephen Green

HISTORY: Impotent Russian spy gave away state secrets in exchange for treatment.

In 1981, as Iran’s new government hunted down political opponents, a KGB officer slipped into a bathroom in the British Embassy compound in Tehran. Vladimir Kuzichkin, 6-foot-4 and broad-shouldered, sat on a wicker laundry basket that creaked beneath him. Across from him, MI6 officer Ian McCredie sat on the toilet.

McCredie poured the Russian another vodka. He left the faucets running and turned on a radio to drown out their conversation. If the Revolutionary Guards overheard them, “they would both be arrested, interrogated, imprisoned, and possibly executed, once the torture was completed,” writes British journalist Ben Macintyre in his new book, “Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy” (Crown), out now.

Kuzichkin had come with Soviet secrets. He also had a very personal and bizarre question for McCredie, though he was in no hurry to ask it.

From there, things got weird.

Posted at 5:46 pm by Stephen Green

I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN “STATE-RUN MEDIA” WAS HYPERBOLE:

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

FASTER, PLEASE:

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

A CHOICE, NOT AN ECHO:

Related:

Posted at 5:19 pm by Ed Driscoll

NAILED IT:

Posted at 5:17 pm by Stephen Green

VOTE LIKE YOUR LIFE, LIBERTY, AND PROPERTY DEPEND UPON IT:

Posted at 4:12 pm by Stephen Green

HE’LL CUT OFF CALIFORNIA’S NOSE TO SPITE ITS FACE:

Posted at 3:12 pm by Stephen Green

SPACE: SpaceX to fly more NASA crews to space station under expanded $5.92 billion deal.

NASA said Friday that the agency had given SpaceX a $946 million contract to fly three more astronaut missions to the International Space Station, extending the company’s crewed flights to the station ‌through 2030.

The deal brings SpaceX’s total number of NASA astronaut flights under the contract to 17 and raises the contract’s total value to $5.92 billion. NASA is relying heavily on SpaceX to keep astronauts traveling to and from the station while it works to maintain a second U.S. ⁠option through Boeing.

The clock is ticking on Boeing getting Starliner certified for manned missions before SpaceX deorbits ISS in 2030.

Posted at 2:45 pm by Stephen Green

WHAT SOME ANALYSTS EXPECT AFTER THE RUSSIAN “ELECTION” IS A STEALTH MOBILIZATION, FOLLOWED BY… NOBODY REALLY KNOWS:

Posted at 2:19 pm by Stephen Green

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

GOV. STOMPY FOOT: California Gov. Newsom signs order demanding federal government regulate AI ‘before it’s too late. “”We’re not waiting to act – we’re going to speed up our work on substantial and responsible AI oversight before it’s too late. We’re going to do this thoughtfully but with urgent velocity; the stakes are too high to wait or delay action.”

Thoughtfully but with urgent velocity, eh?

Here’s how just one of Newsom’s urgent-velocity decisions played out:

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green

INGRID JACQUES OF USA TODAY: The real reason people are mad at Sydney Sweeney’s new ad.

After the first American Eagle ad, critics accused her of promoting “White supremacy.” She was outed as a registered Republican. Then President Donald Trump posted his support on social media.

That’s all it took for Sweeney to become blacklisted for her views among progressives, especially the Hollywood crowd.

Unlike most of Sweeney’s liberal acting colleagues, who can’t shut up about their obnoxious anti-Trump views, Sweeney is very private about her personal politics, demurring consistently when she’s asked about it. And she often is.

In an interview with Cosmopolitan in January, for instance, she was questioned about the “MAGA Barbie” nickname that some had given her online and how she “understood” the moniker.

“I’ve never been here to talk about politics,” Sweeney responded. “I’ve always been here to make art, so this is just not a conversation I want to be at the forefront of. And I think because of that, people want to take it even further and use me as their own pawn.”

That’s exactly what they want to do.

New Yorker writer Jennifer Wilson wrote an entire piece questioning whether conservatives have “taken sexy back” and the “political implications of cleavage,” devoting her opening to Sweeney and her SYRN lingerie campaign.

“While we were pretending not to be looking, breasts had somehow become Republican-coded,” Wilson opines.

Despite all the discourse and uproar over Sweeney and her bosom, she’s trying to live her best life and make the most of her 20s (which, trust me, go all too quickly).

Let’s not stand in her way.

Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on those “Cashing In on Sydney Sweeney’s Cash-In:”

I just gave a talk to some Fund for American Studies students. The assigned reading was the introduction to The Myth of Left and Right by Verlan and Hyrum Lewis. One of the very effective techniques the authors use is to show how the positions held by the left and right move back and forth over time. I don’t think they talk about porn in the book, but it fits. When I was in college, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were leading a crusade against porn as dehumanizing to women. It commodified women, turned them into objects, reinforced sexual stereotypes, etc. I think they sometimes overstated their case, but the case was pretty solid. There were definitely feminists who disagreed, but in the early 1990s, the anti-porn side of second-wave feminists had the whip hand, so to speak.

By the middle part of the decade, the pro-porn side grabbed the whip, sometimes kinda literally. Camille Paglia is a special case, but there was also Susie Bright, Wendy McElroy (author of XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography), and all the feminists who embraced sex work, sex “positivity”, etc. Suddenly, selling sex—literally and figuratively—was empowering and cool.

I think there were wrong and right opinions all along the continuum. But we don’t need to get into the weeds on all of that. My only point is that these arguments are often weaponized for essentially partisan purposes. I don’t necessarily mean Republican vs. Democrat—though that certainly happens. If Donald Trump had run as a Democrat—not at all improbable given that he was one for quite a long time—I’m sure his appearances in softcore porn Playboy movies would have offended a lot of Republicans who now couldn’t care less about his cameo in Playboy Video Centerfold: Playmate 2000 Bernaola Twins (sorry pervs, no links to the actual movie). Heck, they don’t care that he cheated on his (third) wife with Stormy Daniels, award-winning star of Sexbots: Programmed for Pleasure. Heck, given all the AI chatter these days, I’m surprised she hasn’t been interviewed on MS Now about that one. And, let us not forget that many of the people who don’t care about Stormy D now cared a great deal about Monica Lewinsky back then.

No, I simply mean partisan in terms of the culture wars more generally. I think it’s preposterous to claim that Sweeney dallied “with eugenics-inflected advertising” or “flirted” with the “aesthetics of white supremacy.” The same ads could have been made with Beyoncé, and the people who read “great jeans” as an offshoot of The Boys from Brazil would probably be shouting “you go, girl!” at Beyoncé’s ownership of patriarchal white male space or some such.

The obsession with Sweeney’s very familiar self-marketing strategy is a great example of how media bias isn’t just about left versus right. Sex sells. Ask any TV producer to choose between two hot controversies (well, at least one of them is hot). The first is about water safety and the other is about Sydney Sweeney using footballs to barely conceal her boobs. When the choice is between a story with B-roll of people in lab coats testing water samples and footage of Sweeney frolicking, guess which one they’ll pick? When the B in B-roll stands for boobs—very nice ones, at least—your notes from that seminar at the Columbia Journalism School achieve their highest utility as a coaster for your coffee. I don’t make the rules.

This morning, in response to The New Statesman piece, I tweeted that “People are just trying way, way, too hard on this topic.” My friend Kyle Smith replied, “When you’re writing about bazongas, you have to try extra hard to convince yourself you’re writing an intellectual think piece.”

Trump wants to Make America Great Again – that’s a tall order. Sweeney, simply wants to Make America 2012 Again, a much more fun era before “breasts had somehow become Republican-coded:”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

I ASSUME PEOPLE SAYING BLACKPILL STUFF LIKE THIS ARE AGENTS OF THE DEMOCRATS, OR THE CCP, TO THE EXTENT THAT THERE’S A DIFFERENCE NOWADAYS:

Posted at 12:56 pm by Glenn Reynolds