The Studio Finale Still Believes Hollywood Can Right the Ship

I have no problem declaring that The Player, Robert Altman’s great Hollywood satire, is one of the greatest movies of all time. The 1992 comedy stars Tim Robbins as film studio executive Griffin Mill, who tries to sabotage a rival by convincing him that a terrible script for a legal drama with a depressing ending could win Best Picture. The Player features many inside-baseball Hollywood jokes, dozens of celebrities playing fictional versions of themselves, and a famous oner ushering viewers around the studio. Sound familiar?

If I had to take a guess, Seth Rogen surely took inspiration from The Player when he pitched Apple TV+ his own roast of Hollywood, The Studio. Hell, Bryan Cranston’s Continental Studios CEO even shares the same first and last name as The Player’s Griffin Mill. So, when The Studio began with a long oner, a Martin Scorsese cameo, and a Kool-Aid movie destined to fail upwards, I knew we were in for something special.

Thankfully, The Studio’s first season delivered the goods. In weekly installments, Rogen and co. took aim at the industry’s self-aggrandizing behavior and post-Barbie IP grabs. There are bits about Amazon threatening to buy the studio, shamefully outsourcing AI to cut costs, and even obsessing over filling call sheets to hit the perfect tableau of racial demographics. Best of all? It’s funny. Rogen’s film executive, Matt Remick, is a believable caricature of someone who is trying their best to make good films while also willfully carrying out Hollywood’s greatest flaws to save his own ass. But at the end of the day, how does Rogen expect the industry to change after he (smartly!) aired out their dirty laundry?

The first season comes to a head in The Studio’s two-part season finale—the final episode aired Tuesday night—when Remick and Continental Studios announce their film slate at the annual (and very real) CinemaCon in Las Vegas, Nevada. Everyone from Griffin Mill to Zoë Kravitz and Dave Franco are accidentally tripping on a “Hollywood Buffet” of mushrooms, resulting in hijinks (amidst a dream blunt rotation, may I add) that rival what we see in The Hangover and This Is the End. Yet somehow, the crew wrangles everyone together to finish the presentation and save Continental Studios from certain doom.

AppleAs The Studio ends its first season, it’s fair to wonder if Rogen’s takedown of Hollywood will change anything in the industry.

Continental’s slate? A Ron Howard crime drama starring Anthony Mackie called Alphabet City, Sarah Polley’s romance drama with Greta Lee called The Silver Lake, Kravitz’s definetely-not-Batman superhero flick titled Blackwing, and the star of the season: the Kool-Aid movie. All in all? Not too shabby. This is, arguably, something that Universal would have no problem carting out to CinemaCon.

But The Studio’s hijinks end on a surprisingly uplifting note. Much like a wrap party for The Studio itself, Remick thanks every member of the cast one by one for making his first year as a film executive possible. Then, he takes a cue from Weekend at Bernie’s and holds up a drunken Griffin Mill as he begins to slur his speech during the presentation. As Mill remains stuck on the word “movie,” Remick and co. improvise by convincing the crowd to join Mill’s chant for “Movies! Movies! Movies!”

As much as I love this parting moment from a stellar season of TV, I have to wonder: What is The Studio telling us here? Is The Studio hoping that we join in Remick’s relentless optimism, or are we supposed to see the folly of the guy telling everyone to buy tickets for the whole family to see the Kool-Aid movie this summer? Because after three Sonic the Hedgehog films and an upcoming live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon that looks identical to the animated film before it, there’s always something to be said about both what studios offer audiences and what audiences will pay for at the theater. At the end of the day, I found myself asking, Even with its greatest artists roasting their failures, will Hollywood ever change?

It’s a far cry from The Player’s final scene—which I won’t spoil for you here—that ends with a much-more cynical and biting look at Hollywood. The film deals with backstabbings, blackmail, and most-importantly, how easily someone will throw their good intentions aside to rise up in the business. But in The Studio, we end the first season with Remick feeling cautiously optimistic about the road ahead. He may have sold his soul to unleash Kool-Aid upon the world, but the adoration of the CinemaCon audience doesn’t seem to bother him all too much. Ultimately, Rogen leaves us in a gray area—The Studio ends with a tinge of hope, even after satirizing how little is left.

That said, the ending does feel inspired by Rogen’s own efforts to change the industry. In our cover story with Rogen, the actor spoke about his production company, Point Grey Pictures, which produces The Boys, Invincible, and Platonic, among others. Point Grey is a small operation built on collaboration from the ground up, and Rogen prides himself on the success they’ve achieved so far.

“We have a huge amount of output for the amount of people who work here,” he told Esquire. “There’s no sitting around doing nothing. We experimented with growth, and we thought, No, let’s keep a tight ship. I used to go to these production companies in airplane hangars in Santa Monica, and I thought, Oh my God, it’s like running a studio. That’s not what I want to spend my time doing.”

But now here he is, as Matt Remick of Continental Studios, running a studio and mimicking a slate of films that major studio CEOs like David Zaslav and Bob Iger would love have at their disposal. As The Studio wraps its finale, I don’t have much of a feeling that the satire will convince Hollywood to change its ways. Upcoming films like Hot Wheels and Polly Pocket still take priority over financing the next great Martin Scorsese drama. AI is likely still coming for all our jobs, and yeah, I would probably buy a ticket to see Ice Cube as the Kool-Aid Man.

It’s certainly a safer bet—especially now that The Studio is renewed for season 2—for Rogen to wrap everything in a nice little bow for now. Hopefully, he’ll now have the security of another season to twist the knife in even deeper into Hollywood’s gut when the show returns.