2025 Summer Movies To Stream On Hulu
Palm Springs (2020)
Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti show us everything we need to know in case we ever get stuck in a time loop and have to live the same day over and over again.Watch it on Hulu.
Dirty Dancing (1987)
Baby and Johnny's dance sequence to "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" still lives rent-free in my head. Watch it on Hulu.
Call Me by Your Name (2017)
If you can't stop daydreaming about Italy or Timothée Chalamet, this is the perfect movie for you.Watch it on Hulu.
Summer of 69 (2025)
The classic tale of a girl trying to get the guy, except a stripper is thrown into the equation to ~spice~ things up.Watch it on Hulu.
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010)
Ready for a bloody good time? This movie is packed with laughs and seamlessly blends comedy with horror.Watch it on Hulu.
Dude, Where's My Car? (2000)
Take it back to the '00s with the antics of Ashton Kutcher and Sean William Scott as they try to locate where the F they left their car. Watch it on Hulu.
Fire Island (2022)
Inspired by Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, this rom-com brings a group of best friends to New York's Fire Island for one hell of a summertime adventure.Watch it on Hulu.
The Way Way Back (2013)
Summer can't possibly be complete without a coming-of-age story that takes place at a beach house. Watch it on Hulu.
Theater Camp (2023)
If you lived the camp life, this mockumentary will leave you rolling with laughter and busting out your best dance moves and tunes.Watch it on Hulu.
The Last Song (2010)
If you're a sucker for Nicholas Sparks, this movie is a must for your watchlist.Watch it on Hulu.
The Internship (2013)
If you're in the middle of a summer internship, this is just the movie you need to survive the work day.Watch it on Hulu.
Summer Camp (2024)
Who wouldn't want to relive their youth? This movie takes three best friends back to the camp where they grew up for a fun ride of summer nostalgia. Watch it on Hulu.
Just Go With It (2011)
We all need an Adam Sandler rom-com in our lives now and then.Watch it on Hulu.
What Happens in Vegas (2008)
Planning a summer trip to Sin City? It turns out what happens in Vegas doesn't always stay in Vegas...Watch it on Hulu.
Holes (2003)
If you've still got "Dig It" stuck in your head, you probably grew up with this Shia LaBeouf classic.Watch it on Hulu.
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Between the ensemble cast and family life lessons, the yellow VW bus is just the icing on the cake. Watch it on Hulu.
Crossroads (2002)
A movie that's all about a cross-country road trip with your girls? Say less.Watch it on Hulu.
(500) Days of Summer (2009)
Pretty much one of the best breakup movies of all time, in case you're newly single.Watch it on Hulu.
The Sandlot (1993)
This movie is "FOR-EV-VER" a classic no matter how old you are.Watch it on Hulu.
Vaction Friends (2021)
You know those people you meet when you're traveling — the ones you don't expect to see again? This movie hilariously unpacks that experience. Even better? There's a sequel!Watch it on Hulu.
What's your favorite summer movie? Share your thoughts in the comments!
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New York Times
7 hours ago
- New York Times
‘Washington Black,' Plus 7 Things to Watch on TV This Week
Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that are airing or streaming this week, July 21-27. Details and times are subject to change. A true-crime safari and life in an emergency room. In September 2016, Bianca and Larry Rudolph, who were both big game hunters, went to Zambia hoping to hunt a leopard. On the morning of Oct. 11, when the couple were supposed to leave their hunting camp, Bianca was shot in the chest with a gun. The new three-part documentary series 'Trophy Wife: Murder on Safari,' examines the events leading up to her death and the trial, which found Larry guilty of murder and mail fraud; he was sentenced to life in prison. The documentary features interviews from prison with Larry, who has maintained his innocence. Streaming Monday on Hulu. 'The Pitt,' the HBO drama following doctors in a Pittsburgh hospital emergency room, just received 13 Emmy nominations, but the new documentary series 'Critical: Between Life and Death' is a real look at one of London's emergency departments. The city's Major Trauma System treats 12,000 patients with the most critical of injuries each year, and the show follows doctors as they decide how best to treat their patients and the journeys of those receiving medical care. Streaming Wednesday on Netflix. Two novel adaptations, one modern, the other historical. A novel by May Cobb — 'The Hunting Wives' — is getting a screen adaptation. In the show, Sophie (Brittany Snow) leaves her big city life and job in Chicago to move to East Texas with her husband and son. While there, she meets Margo Banks (Malin Akerman), a member of the titular hunting wives who party hard and spend their nights doing target practice. When a body is discovered near where the clique hangs out, Sophie is suddenly part of a murder investigation. Streaming Monday on Netflix. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
‘Paradise' Boss on How Their End-of-the-World Research Sets Up Season 2
[This story contains spoilers from season one of .] By now, everyone should be caught up on Paradise. More from The Hollywood Reporter Emmys Nominations Snubs: 'Squid Game' Shut Out, 'Handmaid's Tale' Only Lands One Nod - Uzo Aduba Surprises Emmys: HBO and Max Score Most Nominations, Apple Takes a Big Bite 'The Last of Us' Season 2 Just Scored a Bunch of Emmy Nominations After becoming a runaway streaming hit when it launched on Hulu in early 2025, the Dan Fogelman-created post-apocalyptic drama then became a linear hit when ABC re-aired the season weekly in the spring. Now, for the trifecta, the Sterling K. Brown-starring saga just picked up four Emmy nominations this week, landing more nods in top categories than even awards experts predicted. Safe to say, Paradise is a hit and people are watching. The Hollywood Reporter previously spoke with executive producer John Hoberg, who wrote the groundbreaking seventh episode, 'The Day.' That penultimate episode of season one flashed back in time to reveal to viewers what exactly happened on the day of the extinction-level event that preceded the beginning of the series. Paradise viewers had been imagining how the show's world ended ever since the twisty premiere. But nothing prepared them for how current it would feel when it was revealed. Paradise opened in a post-apocalyptic world, where 25,000 people were saved from some sort of catastrophic climate event that nearly wiped out civilization. That event, we find out in episode seven, was from a super volcano erupting in the arctic, shattering the ice shelf, melting trillions of gallons of water and triggered a tsunami traveling 600 miles per hour with a wave as high as 300 feet. The coastal cities were wiped out first and global devastation followed. The president, played by James Marsden, and his hand-picked survivors were the only ones who escaped — to the underground bunker-society called Paradise. 'Imagine writing it, it destroyed me for a month,' Hoberg recalled to The Hollywood Reporter about his experience of penning the propulsive hour, which was directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. Read our chat below on all the research that went into 'The Day' and how it informs season two, which is now filming in Los Angeles. *** How did you get to be the lucky one to write this episode? Well, I'm an EP with Dan [Fogelman] so I'm in the room. I was either going to write the second-to-last or the last episode. I will tell you, it wasn't my experience writing on Galavant [the 2015 musical series created by Fogelman] that made them think I should do the end-of-the-world episode (laughs). But it had a lot to do with White House and the Air Force, and those are my obsessions. My wife [Kat Likkel] and I have always written together until this show; she wanted to write a novel and so I took this job with Dan. We have a place up in Solvang and she's like, 'I'm going to take 10 days and dive all the way in up there.' So basically, all I did for 10 straight days was just live in the feeling [of this episode]. It's such a minute-by-minute episode. I've never written this way where I just completely submersed myself in the experience. All season long, we had ideas about what happened, but it still didn't prepare me for what I saw. Good. Why did you place this episode as the penultimate one of the season? There are so many mysteries in Paradise, right? Always a new card turned over. We like to answer questions the whole time, because we don't want to frustrate an audience. So we hint at what happened, but don't say specifically. It's why Xavier [Brown] was so angry at Cal [Masden]. The show at its core is the mystery, and then tied around that mystery is, 'What happened out there? We know something cataclysmic happened, what is it?' We knew for Xavier's character that we wanted to hold that back, because you could tell he liked Cal. But something happened. If we had revealed much earlier [that Xavier blames Cal for his wife's death in the event], then we'd be giving up that mystery as well as the mystery what happened to the world. So it kept drifting. There was talk about it being the fifth episode at one point, but then it felt right that it would be the one before the end. So you finally have that mystery resolved, before getting into the murder-mystery resolve. you spoke to in order to research the end of the world, like the architect who designs cities who wrote you a 40-page dissertation, and experts on nuclear fallout and environmental catastrophe. He said you all were worried it might put you on government watch lists, because of what you were Googling. As far as we know, that didn't happen! Though I feel like my computer runs a little bit hotter than it needs to, so maybe they're in there now. (Laughs.) He did say that you are going to use a lot of that research in season two. How did you go about funneling all that into one hour of television, but also holding some of it back for season two? Stephen Markley, who's the novelist on the show, and Katie French, who was the story editor, were so helpful with the outline and helping to piece this whole thing together. It's a collaborative process when you break it out in the room. We have cards on the board and we're talking through everything. So by the time I was going to script, I felt very confident that I knew what the bigger pieces were. Then it was a matter of, 'What do you get rid of? What do you keep? How do you take something that might be a page of research and make it into a line, but sell it so that the audience feels it without having to be told what it is?' You prepare with a nice bunch of information and a plan before you even get in there. I understand you listened to recordings of similar tragic situations, like former President George W. Bush after 9/11 when he was on Air Force One, and after the Cuban Missile Crisis. How did all of that help inform the real-time reaction we saw in with President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) as the global tsunami was building? I have a grandfather who was an advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was there during the Cuban Missile Crisis. So as a kid, I was growing up around this Air Force colonel and a lot of his officer friends would come over for dinner parties. When they tell stories, you wouldn't hear national secrets, but you would hear about the tension and how personal issues that have nothing to do with the topics can get in the way of things. I tried to sprinkle some of that in, like when [in Paradise] the general is giving a briefing and the CIA guy keeps interrupting him; you can tell he's annoyed because clearly this guy does this all the time. Some of that was like a lifetime of research from being around an Air Force colonel that helped me feel the rhythms of what was going on, from hearing his stories about the Cuban Missile Crisis era. You filmed this episode with a propulsive pace, and without a lot of cuts. What were the longest scenes you filmed? John and Glenn, the directors, sat down and we talked about filming this almost as a play. Usually, you'll do a rehearsal and then people feel their blocking. If you think of the scene where Xavier's in the hallway and the secretary comes over to say, 'What do you know? What's going on?' Then suddenly, the vice president comes through and trips and stands up and you're in the room, and we go around the table. We shot that entire scene as a oner. We had it to keep that energy up — let's make these scenes so that we shoot them once without cutting, and then we'll do our coverage so we can pick stuff up. If you go back and watch that, there's 70 people involved! We actually let the studio know, 'You're going to see we're not rolling camera for a couple hours and that's because we're doing this process.' It was a ton of rehearsal and then shooting it was really fast, because everybody had it down. It was brilliant. It was their idea, and it was 100 percent right. Where was your White House set? We had the Oval office set, which I think was from 24. Sometimes you'll see evidence of where a set has been before. I worked on comedies a lot and every now and then there'd be an ancient room from I Love Lucy or Happy Days. So we had the Oval office and the area outside the Oval where the secretary sat. We built that next-door Oval office, the cabinet room, the hallway outside the cabinet room and the hallways that went the other way around the Oval. That was all on a sound stage. Then we went to a country club in Thousand Oaks that matched the feeling. It feels so grand, where Cal talks to the janitor in the big marble hallway. Then we shot the basement somewhere downtown. So it was all pieced together, which was a challenge of keeping up that same energy. The key is, you can't have the energy at a 10 in the first act. You have to have it build so when you're jumping all over the city to film, you can check in and keep up that intensity level. Xavier has this painful goodbye on the phone with his wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma), who he believes died in the event, and then he blows up at Cal over it in this flashback episode. Any notes or conversations with your main actors for those scenes? I was a mess writing that goodbye scene. You can't help but think about [your family]. The fact that my wife was up in Solvang and I'm down at home thinking, 'What if I got a call right now and this was it, and I knew it was it?' I remember adding that he could see the screen as the missile hit, and thinking, 'Fuck, he's going to have to watch his wife die while he's talking to her.' I was super emotional writing that. The other scene that was super emotional was Cal and Xavier fighting on the [airport] tarmac, where Cal is like, 'You know what to do' and Xavier is like, 'I don't know what to do.' Xavier, who always seems to know what to do, this is the only time he's ever said that, and you really get into his head. We shot that scene at Long Beach Airport; there's planes flying around and it's loud and chaotic, and there were so many extras. Everyone who wasn't on camera just stopped to watch, because it was that intense in person. The actors know they have it when they're looking over at me and John and Glenn at village and our eyes are glassy. It's like, 'Okay, they got it!' Let's talk about the nuclear football. How much of what Marsden explains was true… that there's a nuclear fail safe that can set the world's technology back 500 years? I don't know! I do know that my grandfather was at the Air Force when they were developing the football, and he had something to do with the football, and I will say that he would not divulge national secrets to me, but what he did say is the chilling thing that that thing can unilaterally launch a nuclear war. We did our research into what it is. And there's all this speculation, because really nobody knows — there are people who know, but it's not us. He was not awed by a lot. He fought in two wars and still had shrapnel that popped out of the top of his head every now and then. And he talked about that thing in a way that was like, 'There's something going on there that's bigger than I could possibly imagine.' While we were shooting this, there was a question about if some foreign government was testing an EMP [electromagnetic pulse] device in space. There's all this research that that was one of the early things they discovered and that there are EMP weapons, but the danger with an EMP is that if you light one off in Los Angeles, there are physical wires connecting things all around the world and you don't know where it's going. So it's a very dangerous thing and that got us to this idea of like, 'Well, if this is the last chance of survival, you wouldn't worry about what it might destroy.' But the answer is, I don't know. The flashback ends, and then we heard Sinatra's (Julianne Nicholson) version of what happened: That they avoided a nuclear holocaust, but their Paradise bunker still had the tech they needed. How much are we meant to ? Well, that's going to be a question for season two. Did it work? There seems to be some real evidence it worked, with this audio recording of Terry and other survivors. We've done a lot of research about what happens with an EMP, what it destroys. It basically can destroy most electronic things, but the most rudimentary things can be brought back. Like shortwave radio would probably be one of the first things that started to come back. Diesel engines are based on compression versus a spark. So people would know how to start to rebuild, and it seems there's evidence that people with know-how are starting to try to rebuild. If I had to guess based on what Sinatra said, not on any knowledge I have, she said it seems that it worked, at least partially. We witnessed a nuclear bomb go off and there seemed to be others that were hitting around the globe. But the question is: Did they all hit or was one of them averted, or was a handful of them averted? Well, this explains why there's no communication with the outside world, right? When they sent those four people out there, they didn't know anything. They didn't get their shortwave communications until they sent them out and put up their own shortwave to communicate with them. Then that's why Sinatra started hearing these radio signals. It seems like Cal should have been more suspicious of Sinatra earlier since he pushed that button on the nuclear football, which theoretically shut down every nuclear weapon in flight. Right. There's a power dynamic difference in episode seven when they're on the plane and he says to shoot Sinatra. Clearly between then and when we've met him [in present day], it shifted and he's lost that sense of power. So I think there were a lot of emotional things that went on between those people and everybody else in the time from when he pushed that button to when we meet up with him in Paradise world. Sinatra put Xavier in this ultimate blackmail situation, when she informed him that his wife is actually alive. How does this change him going into season two? On set, that was a scene where Sterling [as Xavier] had to put his weapon away, and he was wrestling with that. He was like, 'I would just fire the gun.' But John, our director, was like, 'You're Sterling K. Brown. Show us that on your face.' He told Sterling, 'Live in that, because that's what we've put you in. This impossible situation.' That to me was one of the most impressive moments of acting in the show, because you could feel him wrestle with that and then put his gun away. What happens when you've just tried to overthrow the government and you've succeeded, and now you have to back down? Dan told me about his three-season plan and that the end of season one would reveal enough to shift course so each season can be its own thing, but with the same characters. So, obviously the season one ending is setting up some . Would you say the finale raised a whole new set of questions to explore? One of the goals early on was that we wanted to make the viewing experience satisfying. That we're not just dangling things and then not answering them until the end of the season, or not answering at all. So you're going to get answers to what you want and then there are new questions raised. We were in a room breaking out [season two since before the official renewal] with this anticipation of, 'If goes well, you never know,' but we know where season two [ends]. Is there a reason you named the billionaire bunker project 'Versailles'? You always have a temporary name for something in the room. The librarian at one point, I made a joke that we should get Trent Reznor to play that, so that became a reference name. With Versailles, it sounded like a far away place where the rich would go, and there was a little bit of irony in that, so it sort of stuck. That it was a retreat for the billionaires, but also there's violence there, too. There were strange real-world parallels as the season was airing. Like how after President Donald Trump announced he wanted to declassify the JFK assassination files, had in an episode a line from James Marsden that the second he took office, he asked about the secrets: Bigfoot, JFK and aliens. It keeps happening on this show. When we first started talking about it, it was probably two and a half years ago. I remember feeling like, 'Are people going to buy that they're in a cave and there's a sky that looks real?' And then The Sphere [in Las Vegas] comes out and we talked to The Sphere people who said [Paradise] is based on 100 percent true science and you could do this. There were a bunch of things that keep mirroring reality. But for that particular one, I remember as a kid saying I want to run for president just so I can find out the secrets. That to me is the number one thing I would want day one as the president. Tell me everything. about how post-apocalyptic shows are usually in the far future, with zombies or something. But this show feels too close to tomorrow. Did it feel that way when filming? Yes. One of the things that was important for all of us is that the disaster wasn't one thing. It's a cascading series of events. This wave is going to kill all these people on the coasts, which is where a large percentage of the population is. But then it's going to black out the sky, and we did a lot of research into Krakatoa, which was a big explosive earthquake [in 1883]. That volcano actually had a sound wave that circled the globe eight times or something like that, a pressure wave. It was important for us that what happened in the show was real, but then also it's the human reaction and governmental reaction. So if the sky is blotted out, then one country would take a run for another country's resources to try to ensure their safety and before you know it, with all of our treaties, it would probably end in some kind of nuclear or regional war. That feels as real as it could possibly be, because the show is not just what happened. It's about how people react to what happened. That's where it gets messy. There are things that are going to happen naturally on the planet, but it's how we react to it that's so frightening. Amid global warming and climate change, this show tells us that the rich and the elite can survive. had a line about how the West Wing is stocked to feed those it could save for eternity. It who gets saved and who doesn't, which is interesting in this current moment in time. My grandfather had a tour in the Greenbrier Inn in West Virginia. You can now go tour it if you want, but it was the bunker to keep the government going in a nuclear war. The plan was that the government would all get on trains — all of Congress — but then you go in there and it's a bunker. They had a press room and hid the doors to close it off in plain sight. These bank vault doors. And my grandpa's job for a little was that he would be the person in charge of operations to get everybody in and out. But his job was then to close the door — and be on the other side of it. I visited that place and I've always thought about that. Who's in and who's out? He would have been like that guy who Xavier shoots on the side of the helicopter. Exactly! That realization of, 'Oh, you don't get to come in.' And he was fully aware of it. He said it was great during drills, because he wasn't in the bunker, he would get to stay at this fancy hotel. That part was nice. In reality, it wouldn't be nice. I grew up hearing this and my mom said when she was a teenager that he had the weight of the world on his shoulders because he was aware how real all this is. There are people who were doing everything to protect, and you can't protect everybody. The line has to go somewhere, and that's the crazy thing. Well, President Cal does the right thing in the end. He tells the truth. It creates chaos, but he tells the truth. We've been talking a lot lately about television capturing our current post-truth era. What do you hope people take away from President Bradford? I like that moment where he says that people are inherently decent. That's what he's seen, and he's speaking to all of us as like, 'Let's lean on our best version of ourselves.' You like to think that every president is going to wrestle with and tell the truth. Sometimes my guess is it's too dangerous to tell 100 percent of the truth. You have to hope that humanity comes through. Cal is playing someone who's got a big heart and really is trying to do the right thing, and even he got sucked into it. It took that interaction with that janitor to be like, 'This isn't right. I can't do this' to snap out of it. With any administration, it's like, when does the humanity of it make you make the decisions that are in the best interest of people? This is a fictional president. You don't even know what his party is, and we're trying to not make it about that. It's really about the people and the decisions being in power, what do you do? And the weight of power. But also, Xavier's wrestling with the same thing when he's lying to that secretary about being able to help her. It's healthy to explore that. It's easy to look at the people up above making selfish decisions. But then we put Xavier in that position, too. He's not telling 100 percent of the truth either. We wanted it to feel real and messy. What can you say about the murder-mystery reveal and how the season ended to set up season two? Having worked in comedies for so long, you don't have to worry about the mystery of it all. When I was first talking about this show with Dan, because this show has a little bit of This is Us in it, with its real heart, but also that apocalyptic thing like The Last of Us, my joke was that I started calling this show This Is the Last of Us. *** Paradise is now streaming on Hulu. Catch up on THR's season one coverage. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Studio': 30 Famous Faces Who Play (a Version of) Themselves in the Hollywood-Based Series 22 of the Most Shocking Character Deaths in Television History A 'Star Wars' Timeline: All the Movies and TV Shows in the Franchise Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
How Hollywood Is Feeding the Frenzy Around the Epstein Files
What did the president really know about a cushy remote getaway for the private-plane elite? No, not that president and not that conspiracy — I'm talking about Paradise, Dan Fogelman's crackling Hulu drama in which James Marsden plays a commander-in-chief with secret plans to ferry the privileged to a deep-in-the-mountain community when an apocalypse befalls Earth. More from The Hollywood Reporter Trump Files $10 Billion Lawsuit Against News Corp., Rupert Murdoch Over Story on Epstein Ties Epstein, Diddy Prosecutor Maurene Comey Speaks Out After Firing: "Fear Is The Tool of a Tyrant" Trump Reacts to 'Late Show' Ending: "I Absolutely Love That Colbert Got Fired" The show earned a surprise Emmy drama nomination this week, just as some figures on both the right and left were busy resurrecting their favorite real-world thriller: the tangled conspiracy theories surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. Paradise is fiction. The Epstein saga is not. But both feel cut from the same cloth of powerful people and the secrets they keep from us. Hollywood has actually spent decades on exactly this kind of story, chronicling conspiracies at the highest but darkest levels of government, crimes committed by the very people charged with protecting us. From the moment Warren Beatty started hunting around for a Senator-assassination coverup in The Parallax View back in the '70's, we've been subject to a steady parade of buried files, vanishing witnesses and covert programs — and inevitably the lone heroes who root them all out. Mulder and Scully solved those mysteries the FBI didn't want solved on The X-Files, Jason Bourne figured out what Conklin was actually up to at the CIA in The Bourne Identity, and most recently, The Night Agent and Paradise had some very plucky marginal types figure out what's really happening at the White House. So when a story pops up like Epstein, with all its mysterious millions and powerful people in the (sometimes literal) background, with all its legitimately open questions about a suspect with White House connections dying in federal custody, we're primed not just to see a news story — we're primed to see a movie. Without them or even us knowing it, the entertainment industry has been readying us for this story for fifty years. On their own, of course, most of these Hollywood government-coverup tales are harmless and even welcome entertainments, fertilizer for the human imagination. But pour on it the fuel of our polarized politics and algorithmic outrage and watch it explode. A story like Epstein is colliding with personal beliefs and prejudices (it's hard to avoid the anti-elite and at times, frankly, antisemitic undercurrents here), along with Trump's own history of Hollywood-derived conspiracy showmanship on QAnon and Obama birther theory, to detonate in, well, exactly the ways we're seeing now. Hollywood tells these stories by dramatic imperative — dangling that the truth is out there makes for much better storytelling than suggesting those mysterious lights were just illuminating the path of an airplane. So It feels too easy to implicate film and television in this factless frenzy. But it's also a cop-out to exempt them entirely. As the film critic Laura Venning wrote in the journal Curzon last year, while movies like Oliver Stone's JFK feel 'akin to a guilty pleasure' and 'you could certainly question whether there's any harm' to them, a 'decade ago the idea that a former President could instigate an insurrection over patently false claims that an election had been stolen from him would [also] have been unimaginable.' Sometimes Hollywood stories do involve real criminality, as with All the President's Men. More often though they have tilted toward JFK, cozying up just close enough to the truth to make us believe in non-existent cabals. And nothing suggests a cabal like the news story du jour. The Epstein Files is fast-becoming the JFK of our time, only it's playing out not in a lone Oliver Stone weekend movie-theater release but in our pockets and on our laptops, on airport cable-news broadcasts and bar-side phone-scrolling, the appeal of drama lapping the need for verification. A convicted sex offender killed himself in 2019 in federal prison awaiting trial after a whole set of fresh revelations of alleged sex trafficking. That left both a black hole where the alleged perpetrator's testimony would have gone and a juicy mystery left unsolved; if it wasn't a suicide, as the government was saying, who might have wanted Epstein dead? Numerous investigations followed, with many Rolodexes and other material published to sate the beast. All accompanied by tell of elusive 'files' that would supposedly implicate all kinds of powerful people on some mythical list. With so many Internet sources to listen to and publish on, the public had a chance to be the hero of the story, all these hints of Gilbert Joubert Three Days of the Condor supervillainy just begging us to summon our inner Robert Redford to find him out. Thus began the years of theories that Epstein was murdered as part of a conspiracy to conceal the sex crimes of powerful people, fed by noticeable but mostly unremarkable anomalies, like the modification of prison footage. With his opaque history and sources of wealth, his super-powerful friends and his immoral appetites, Epstein became the perfect avatar for our at-home Hollywood heroism. The story also uncommonly played to both sides of the political spectrum, the right's suspicion of government and the left's suspicion of the wealthy — a perfect horseshoe. As producers of The Fugitive and its Big Pharma bogeyman could tell you, a good conspiracy is made even better when it can be aimed at someone or some group already disliked. The Epstein Files became the ideal slate onto which both Democrats and Republicans could each project their supervillain fantasies. Trump himself led the charge. In his first term, he retweeted an outlandish theory that Bill Clinton was involved in Epstein's murder — his and his allies' go-to family secretly behind all kinds of killings (Seth Rich, Vince Foster). Trump at the time said that 'I want a full investigation, and that's what I absolutely am demanding.' J.D. Vance played along, during the campaign last year, saying that it was 'an important thing' to release the list, never mind if it actually existed. But once a MAGA-driven phenomenon, the script has flipped. Democrats are hammering the president on the issue now, trying to rally support in Congress to force Trump to reveal more findings, a push that resonates with an increasingly conspiracy-minded segment of the left and its distrust of legacy media. The story is playing to their favorite supervillain: Trump. (That narrative was fed this week when the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump in 2003 had sent Epstein a birthday card with a lewd drawing that implied the two had a 'secret.') Meanwhile, the president himself has uncharacteristically gone from Mulder to Scully, casting himself as the skeptic in the primetime conspiracy-drama he once created. 'Their [the left's] new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this 'bullshit,' hook, line, and sinker,' the president wrote on Truth Social Wednesday, after telling reporters on Tuesday night 'I don't understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody; it's pretty boring stuff' and after Attorney General Pam Bondi said a few days earlier the investigation was closed. The truth is not out there, and can we please go back to talking about Rosie O'Donnell? One way to view this two-party interest is expediency — each side, at one time or another, believed the other had more figures on whatever list probably doesn't exist. But the dual Democrat-Republican fascination with The Epstein Files also testifies to a truth Hollywood has forever known: a love of conspiracy stories tugs at us all. The Jason Bourne movies sold $800 million-worth of tickets in the U.S., and Democrats and Republicans each bought lots of them. The rise of conspiracy theories is a massively complex topic, with studies suggesting a whole slew of social and technological factors. No batch of fictional movies, no matter how exciting, would directly lead to the rise of any conspiracy theory. But it's easy to see how Hollywood has primed us to be ready to jump on one when it presents itself, especially if it comes at a moment already seeded with huge mistrust of elites and media and, yes, a growing culture of antisemitism. The anti-Jewish codings in all this are hard to avoid, with the longtime ridiculous and hateful caricature of Epstein as a Mossad agent running a blackmail ring for the Israeli government continuing to abide. Last weekend's Elmo hackers demanded an Epstein file release even as they were saying 'Kill All Jews,' among other antisemitic vileness and insanities, such as the idea Trump wasn't releasing the list because Netanyahu told him not to. Conspiracy theories are fun. The real world is monochromatic, straightforward, boring. Occam's Razor doesn't cut very deep. More complex hidden explanations are thrilling. (And, as with periodic events like Watergate or Iran-Contra, real just often enough.) True-crime podcasts and its unofficial streaming spinoff, Only Murders in the Building have long realized this fact and savvily played to it, as have earlier 21st-century TV hits like Search Party and Veronica Mars. Like the people 'seeking answers' on Epstein, these stories flatter their protagonists and the audience: Only the sharp few have the vision to spot what's really going on. And the real-world interest in conspiracy theories provides a feedback loop for Hollywood to make more of these stories see under: Ryan Coogler developing a new X-Files for these jittery 2020s times — which powers and makes these real-world theories even more fun. Of course, fun and true are two entirely different creatures. In recent years, the proliferation of digital content and those invidious algorithms have also personalized the phenomenon, turning us all into active amateur gumshoes, even if the truth we sleuth becomes nonsense like COVID-19 vaccines as government tracking devices and a Hillary Clinton-led sex ring run out of a pizza shop. Why watch Alan Pakula when we can be Alan Pakula? One of the rare recent TV exercises not to indulge conspiracy-theory tropes but deconstruct and criticize them was Netflix's winter limited series Zero Day, in which the British actor Dan Stevens played a villainous YouTuber peddling such theories. Asked how much tech platforms were responsible for these theories compared to politicians or the peddlers themselves, Stevens told THR, 'The system. The system is driving it. Those putting it out, those consuming it, everyone. It's a triangle.' What he left out is that Hollywood may be yet another point on that geometry, with its enjoyable but potentially incept-y ideas of an alternate truth the government doesn't want us to see. To be clear: Hollywood can and should tell conspiracy-theory stories. They're exciting entertainment, and that should always be the industry's first objective. But that doesn't mean they don't influence the culture. Venning, the Curzon critic, was writing her essay on Fly Me to the Moon, last year's Apple film, with another harmless but still potentially insidious idea that a moon landing was shot on a sound stage. Nearly half of all people under the age of 45 now are at least unsure of whether NASA actually landed on the moon, according to a recent University of New Hampshire study, and obviously, school didn't teach them that. In the film, Scarlett Johansson even has the cheeky meta line 'I think we should have gotten Kubrick.' As it happens, Kubrick himself sits at the center of Epstein conspiracy-mongering, with a running Internet theory that the sex-party scene in Eyes Wide Shut was an attempt by the late director to stealthily expose Epstein. You don't want to know. 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