Matt Remick’s (Seth Rogen) career is in the toilet. No, really. Episode 1 of The Studio introduced the new head of (the fictional) Continental Studios as a true-blue cinephile who just wanted to make meaningful art, the next Rosemary’s Baby (1968) or Annie Hall (1977). Five episodes later, his latest project is about zombies who infect people with their diarrhea.
Johnny Knoxville might call Duhpocalypse a “dark satire about medical disinformation,” but no such lofty aspirations are apparent from its trailer, in which a dishevelled zombie turns around, drops his pants and drenches Josh Hutcherson in projectile explosive diarrhea.
He’s now been “dooked”—a line the actor delivers with much more panic-laden gravitas than it deserves—and must be killed before he infects anyone else. Somehow, this isn’t a straight-to-bargain-bin DVD release. This is the new Spike Jonze film, and it’s hitting theatres. And therein lies the problem.
For much of Episode 6, Matt and his studio colleagues debate the nuances of just how much poop the trailer should contain. Theater owners in the American heartland are unhappy with just how graphic it all is. “This is a hill I will die on,” Matt promises solemnly at one point. “We will get that s–tsplosion.”
Despite the deadly seriousness with which he approaches his job, the episode drives home how shallow his career really is, especially compared to the life-and-death stakes his new girlfriend, pediatric oncologist Sarah (Rebecca Hall), routinely confronts.
In one of the episode’s funniest moments, Sarah and Matt walk into a charity gala together, engaged in parallel conversations over the phone. She’s tempering the expectations of a critically ill child’s parent, laying out the tough possibility of the clinical trial failing. He has opinions on the sound design of the trailer’s fart. He wants it “wet-sounding”, in case you were wondering.
Matt might position himself as a creative, but the reality is that his work hinges on borrowed talent. “You directed this?” asks Sarah earlier in the episode, when he spots action franchise instalment MK Ultra 4 on television and calls it “his movie.” “Sort of,” he concedes. “I championed it.”
For all his artsy pretensions, most of the in-universe films his studio has produced so far have been mere imitations of the classics. In Episode 3, Ron Howard’s Alphabet City is a blatant Collateral (2004) ripoff. In Episode 4, Olivia Wilde’s Rolling Blackout is an obvious Chinatown (1974)-style neo noir. Continental Studios is so creatively bankrupt by Episode 5, it considers rehashing even the recent horror movie Smile (2022), calling it ’Wink’…and hiring its original director Parker Finn for the job. Even the ridiculous Duhpocalpyse is a nod to Jonze and Knoxville’s Jackass franchise, and all its poop jokes.
Matt’s one big swing at movie-making history misses spectacularly when he, through a series of bumbling contrivances, kills Martin Scorsese’s last-ever film. A plaque at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, where the Episode 6 gala is held, lists Oppenheimer (2023) and Gigli (2003) as the films that have been shot there—a fitting nod to the gulf in quality between the kinds of movies Matt sets out wanting to make and the ones he actually does.
His insistence that his job is just as hard as Sarah’s is undercut by him taking a call in which his marketing head Maya (Kathryn Hahn) describes the depiction of poop in the latest version of the trailer as “so quick, it’s almost subliminal.” “Buttliminal”, Knoxville helpfully interjects.
The narrative inclusion of Duhpocalypse provides insight into just how much Matt’s changed over just six episodes of The Studio. The same man who was so dejected by having to meet with Jenga and Rubik’s Cube reps so as to build franchises around these games in Episode 1 now vehemently argues that even the dumbest popcorn movies are art, a “pure expression of human emotion.” It turns out that the films he’s backed include the entire seven-installment MK Ultra Franchise, about men with exploding heads, The Lighthouse Keeper and Dumb Guys 1 and 2. Real Oscar contenders there.
It’s in this episode, however, that he can well and truly say that what he’s produced is a steaming pile of s–t.
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