Fictionalizing their famous friends to satirize Hollywood isn’t new for Rogen and Goldberg (see: the stupidly brilliant This is the End), but in The Studio, the writing pair trade manchild and weed jokes for something more adult and high stakes. Rogen is still playing a version of himself—an anxious goofball eager to please—but he just so happens to be a bigshot producer now, and so a bigshot producer he plays. The pair take it a step further by making Rogen’s Matt Remick the head of a billion-dollar studio, Continental Pictures. And so it’s the usual hijinks, but this time with deeper (and depressing) insight into the industry’s inner workings. Rogen employs a circus car’s worth of renowned actors and directors to play themselves, all delivering hilarious performances. Martin Scorsese and Sarah Polley are early standouts.
"Rather, in its warm embrace of an industry in decline, what The Studio actually resembles is a postcard from the end of an empire."
— Nicholas Quah
"Rogen is doing his usual high-pitched panicked comedy, which still works quite well after all these years, but Kathryn Hahn and Catherine O’Hara bring the house down."
— Ben Travers
Desperate for celebrity approval, the newly appointed head of a movie studio and his executive team at Continental Studios must juggle corporate demands with creative ambitions as they try to keep movies alive and relevant.
Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) is appointed as the head of Continental Pictures, a major film studio in Hollywood. But with his position comes a price: he must save it from losing any more money, primarily by sacrificing his love for artistic cinema.
The stars! Especially if they play jerk versions of themselves (more Actor Brain Paul Dano, please).
Basically crack for people with Letterboxd accounts.
