Hollywood Press Tours Swap Interviews for Games and Gimmicks
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Christopher Nolan sat for a 60-second yes-or-no video interview with Back2FilmSchool, addressing retirement, superhero films, TV, phone viewing, Interstellar, and Star Wars — producing what the columnist calls "a feeling of profound emptiness."
- Nolan also appeared on a 13-minute 60 Minutes segment led by Bari Weiss, whom the author describes as "eminently unqualified."
- LADBible hosted a YouTube "Would You Rather" game featuring Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway to promote The Odyssey, despite the columnist noting the outlet doesn't typically score such high-profile interviews.
- Anne Hathaway has logged multiple promotional game appearances throughout a year in which she appears in five films, including an earlier LADBible round for The Devil Wears Prada 2.
- The Tonight Show deployed a rhythm-recap segment assembling Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, and Lupita Nyong'o into a "Fallon-approved cutesy semi-rap" promoting The Odyssey in roughly one-minute clips.
- The columnist, a working journalist, frames the trend as the "Fallon-ification of journalism" — a perverse victory lap for the same "pivot to video" that gutted legacy newsrooms.
Why it matters: The author surfaces a tension studios now openly concede: publicists claim these short-form videos build 'awareness,' not the desire to buy a ticket — meaning the promo-industrial complex has dropped even the pretense of driving sales. The result is celebrity capital spent on formats that the columnist argues produce no clear box-office lift, replacing the friction of real interviews with microdoses of forced rhymes from A-list talent.
