Can ‘Magazine Dreams’ Turn the Page for Jonathan Majors?

Magazine Dreams’s hopeful journey to the big screen began where it does for many independent movies: the Sundance Film Festival. The dark drama about an amateur bodybuilder landed at the fest in January 2023, where its writer-director, Elijah Bynum, attended the premiere with stars Jonathan Majors and Haley Bennett.

The film quickly captured the attention of critics, especially for Majors’s haunting performance as the bodybuilder whose desperate desire for recognition sends him down a dark path. Vanity Fair’s review described him as a “terrifying wonder.” At the time, Majors was on the cusp of a movie star–making breakthrough, with both Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Michael B. Jordan’s Creed III set to release in the next two months. The film also solidified Bynum, who made his directorial debut with the 2017 film Hot Summer Night starring a young Timothée Chalamet, as an exciting new filmmaker to watch.

So it’s no wonder that Searchlight Pictures—the distributor behind Oscar darlings like Nomadland and Poor Things—scooped up the film in early February, with plans for a December 2023 release and an awards campaign for Majors. “I felt like Cinderella. It was a really magical time,” remembers Bynum now. “I was probably a little too stressed out to fully enjoy it, but looking back, the memories are all warm and fuzzy.”

Warm and fuzzy quickly became cold and complicated after Majors was charged with domestic abuse. For a while, it seemed like Magazine Dreams’s hopes for release would be dashed forever. “I was rather certain it would never come out, and I made peace with that,” Bynum tells Vanity Fair. “In fact, I began to tell myself there was something vaguely cool about the movie becoming one of those films lost to history that only a handful of people would ever see.”

Two years later, though, Magazine Dreams is finally opening in theaters on March 21, thanks to a new distributor: Briarcliff Entertainment. It may seem risky to release a film whose star is so closely tied to scandal—but founder Tom Ortenberg is happy to shoulder that risk. “Magazine Dreams deserves to be allowed to be seen,” he tells Vanity Fair. “In my view, there’s two choices when it comes to the distribution of the picture: The movie is either allowed to be seen, or if you disagree with that, you’re saying we should burn the negative. And in current times in particular, dare I say now more than ever—when people are talking about banning books left and right and other forms of censorship—I don’t think we should be burning the negative.”

Just one month after Magazine Dreams was bought by Searchlight, Majors was arrested after a domestic dispute with his then girlfriend in New York. The accusations against Majors became headline news for months as he awaited trial, and led to his management and publicity team dropping him as a client. Several months later, as the writers and actors strikes threw the industry into chaos, the Disney-owned Searchlight shifted dates for several of its films—and pulled Magazine Dreams from the schedule.

Majors’s trial began at the end of November 2023. He was eventually found guilty of reckless assault in the third degree and harassment, and was sentenced to one year of domestic assault counseling. Soon after, Marvel announced that Majors would not continue to play the role of Kang in its superhero movies, and Majors’s future in Hollywood seemed precarious.

In January 2024, Searchlight quietly dropped Magazine Dreams and returned the rights to the filmmakers. Ortenberg had seen Magazine Dreams at Sundance, but had been quickly outbid by bigger distributors for the rights. “I thought it was an amazing achievement, both by Elijah as a filmmaker and Jonathan as an emerging movie star,” he says. Nine months after Searchlight dumped the movie, Briarcliff Entertainment acquired it and set the film’s release for March 2025. “I understand it affected the original acquisition of the picture, but the process played itself out,” says Ortenberg. “Jonathan has paid his dues and process was served. Elijah deserves to have his movie released. The hundreds of people that gave significant portions of their lives deserve to have their movie seen.”

Briarcliff, which launched in 2018, isn’t as well known as indie distributors like A24 and Neon. But the studio made a name for itself last year, when it acquired The Apprentice. Centered on Donald Trump’s rise in power and his mentorship by attorney Roy Cohn, the film—written by Vanity Fair special correspondent Gabe Sherman—faced an uphill road to release with the 2024 presidential election (and a potential lawsuit brought by Trump) looming. No studio bought the film after its Cannes debut; afterward, writer Sherman says “Every studio and streamer passed.” Eventually, Briarcliff stepped in. The Apprentice ended up earning $17 million at the box office, along with Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for actors Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong.

With that film, Briarcliff proved itself adept at navigating a tricky awards campaign, and could very well do the same for Magazine Dreams. Ortenberg, a veteran of the industry who previously ran Open Road—the firm distributor behind Nightcrawler, Spotlight, and Snowden—says they’ve got time to decide if the film might take that path. “One of the nice things about releasing the picture when we are is there’s no pressure of awards consideration at the moment,” he says. “When the picture comes out, it’ll be self-evident whether it looks like we’ll be an awards contender next year. And if we are, that’s terrific—we will pursue awards with gusto. The important thing to me was giving the film its chance to be seen. Everything else on top of that is gravy.”

Meanwhile, Majors has been slowly climbing his way back into Hollywood’s good graces. He has been cast in his first film since the court case, slated to star in Merciless, a supernatural thriller that will be directed by Denis Villeneuve’s brother Martin Villeneuve. He’s also been busy promoting Magazine Dreams, participating in interviews and Q&As before screenings. In a cover story for The Hollywood Reporter, many of his previous collaborators including Jordan, Whoopi Goldberg, and Matthew McConaughey speak out in support of him. “Do I hope to make more movies? Absolutely. That is my intention,” he told the publication. “But that’s not my call. I don’t have a studio. And I’ve given up control.”

As of now, Magazine Dream’s awards chances still seem murky; running an awards campaign with even a hint of scandal can swiftly send a movie off the rails. (Just ask Emilia Pérez.) But other men with past domestic violence issues have gone on to find acceptance and awards in Hollywood—including Mel Gibson, who pleaded no contest to misdemeanor battery in 2011 and later earned an Oscar nom for directing Hacksaw Ridge, and Josh Brolin, who was arrested in 2004 for a domestic abuse incident with his then wife Diane Lane. (The charges were later dropped.) Brolin went on to a 2009 Oscar nomination.

No matter what happens next for Magazine Dreams, at least Bynum’s long purgatory is finally over. “It’s exciting, of course, and to be honest also a little nerve-racking,” he says of the film’s long-awaited release. “For better or worse, the audience at Sundance approached the movie differently than the audiences of today will. It will be interesting to see how they respond to it.”