‘Cosy competency porn’: why The Post is my feelgood movie
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- Steven Spielberg read Liz Hannah's spec script in February 2017 after another project collapsed and had the film in cinemas by December, entering John Williams's score recording sessions "having not heard a note" in advance on a $50 million production.
- The Post stars Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham alongside Tom Hanks, with Spielberg describing it as "a chase film with journalists" rather than a slow-burn investigative drama; its final scene leads directly into the events of Alan J Pakula's All the President's Men.
- New York Times staffers reacted with fury over the film's minimization of their paper's role in breaking the Pentagon Papers — one said "I've been so pissed off," while another called it "[a] stupid project."
- Producer Amy Pascal originally picked up Graham's story in 2016 to coincide with Hillary Clinton's "looming election victory," but the completed film instead captured a different national mood after the 2016 outcome.
- The film's optimistic take on journalism "seemed to die shortly after its release" — five years later, Deadline declared "Journalists aren't as interesting as they think they are" while dissecting She Said's box office.
- The ensemble leans heavily on character actors (Jesse Plemons, Matthew Rhys, Bradley Whitford) rather than movie stars beyond Hanks, with Richard Nixon voiced through archive tapes as the film's "shadowy villain."
Why it matters: The Post's ten-month script-to-screen cycle and $50 million greenlight on a Spielberg whim now reads as a relic of a pre-streaming era when legacy studios still bet on adult-oriented journalism dramas — and its accidental transformation from a Clinton-campaign companion piece into a Trump-era press-freedom rallying cry illustrates how fast a film's political meaning can flip under it.
