And just like that, Season 36 is in the books. Here's The Roundup....
THE CHAIN
The Chain is a very solid biopic. Is it revolutionary? No. Does it reinvent the music-biopic formula? Not even a little. But sometimes there is absolutely nothing wrong with taking the “greatest hits” approach when the greatest hits are this good. Fleetwood Mac already comes preloaded with everything a movie needs: relationships imploding, substance abuse, creative rivalries, enormous egos, and some of the best music ever recorded. The film wisely understands that it doesn’t need to manufacture much drama—it just needs to organize what was already there into a compelling two-hour story. Charlotte Wells gives it enough personality to keep it from feeling completely mechanical, while Diane Esposito’s screenplay checks all the expected boxes without making them feel like chores. Sometimes formula works. The Chain is proof.
I think we can stop calling Joe Keery an emerging leading man. He’s a leading man. Period. His rise through LRF has been interesting to watch because it never felt forced. He started with supporting parts, gradually earned larger opportunities, proved he could carry Starman, and now he’s standing at the center of a prestige Fleetwood Mac biopic playing Lindsey Buckingham. That’s a pretty substantial climb. More importantly, he feels comfortable there. Keery has enough charisma to carry lighter material, but The Chain also lets him show some rougher edges and dramatic weight. This is the kind of role that changes how an actor gets cast going forward. The training wheels are officially off.
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JESSIE BUCKLEY
Jessie Buckley has had one of the more interesting LRF careers because she’s never really been treated like a conventional movie star. For a while, she bounced between supporting roles in larger productions and her recurring Jean Grey appearances in the X-Men franchise. That gave her visibility, but it didn’t necessarily give her many opportunities to truly own a movie. The Midnight Library finally does. And even though I have plenty of problems with the film itself, Buckley isn’t one of them. She takes a potentially exhausting character and gives the material far more emotional credibility than I thought the screenplay deserved. If nothing else, this movie proves she can absolutely carry a leading role outside the comfort of an ensemble or franchise.
THE MIDNIGHT LIBARY
Jessie Buckley is good. There. That’s the compliment. Everything else about The Midnight Library frustrated me. The story felt emotionally manipulative in a way that constantly reminded me I was being told how to feel. The supporting characters were difficult to like, and the movie kept stacking misery on top of misery as though sadness automatically equals profundity.
And can we talk about the genre classification? Fantasy? Really? Yes, technically there’s a fantastical device at the center of the story. But if you walked into this expecting an actual fantasy movie, you probably spent two hours wondering where it went. This was a depressing character drama with a supernatural framing device. Call it what it is.
TALES FROM THE CRYPT
There are things I like here. Individual segments work. Some performances work. A couple of the horror concepts are genuinely fun. But taken as an entire movie? This reminded me why horror anthologies are so difficult to pull off theatrically. You’re essentially asking the audience to repeatedly reset its investment. Just as one story starts building momentum, it ends and you’re suddenly meeting another cast, another villain, another set of rules. That can work beautifully on television. In a two-hour movie, it often feels like channel surfing. Midnight Tales struggled with the exact same problem years ago, and Tales from the Crypt never really solves it either.
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SEASON PROFITS
No billion-dollar profit season. Not even quite. The studio had some enormous successes this year—Boba Fett, Donkey Kong Country, The Hulk 3, Assassin’s Creed: Eternal—but there simply weren’t enough of them. More importantly, the misses were expensive. Stretch Armstrong was a crater. The Bounty Hunter hurt. Several smaller movies lost enough money that the cumulative damage became impossible to overcome. That’s ultimately the financial story of Season 36. The studio produced hits, but it never developed the depth necessary to turn those hits into a truly dominant season.
So no Scrooge McDuck vault diving this year. Nobody’s swimming through gold coins. Maybe next season.
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