CINEMA ESSAY: Eddington, or: How We Mistreated a “Flop” and Perpetuated the Fall of the Movie Theatre

Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal face off in Ari Aster’s Eddington, a pandemic-era psychological Western now streaming on HBO Max.

“No one wants to see a movie about the pandemic.”

That’s the brand of focus-group revelations I'm sure ricocheted around Hollywood boardrooms, first murmured by underlings vying to be Nostradamus, then parroted by executives who dual-screened Eddington while Zillow-Porning.

Because here’s the thing: 

There is, in fact, a kind of polished amnesia at play. A public in quiet cahoots, collectively erasing the most globally shared experience of its lifetime. Pretending we didn’t shout at strangers. Pretending we didn’t disinfect our bananas. As if forgetting were the same thing as healing. 

And our coverage of movies is similarly damaging. To explain:

Cannes Film Festival photocall for Ari Aster’s Eddington—a star-studded red carpet moment celebrating the film with cast including Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, and Austin Butler.

Eddington, Ari Aster’s fevered, funny, quietly devastating psychological Western, offers an alternative to dissociation. And with its streaming release on HBO Max, the film is ripe for a second look. Not despite the pandemic or the label it received after opening weekend. But because of it.

Let’s go back to one. 

For a bright, electric moment, everyone agreed about Eddington. Cannes rose to its feet, as it is want to do. Telluride buzzed. Critics wrote about it like they were confessing.

Then the box office numbers came in.

And suddenly the story wasn’t about a film that held a mirror to our last decade, it was about a film that “failed.” The narrative narrowed its focus. It became an insufficient telling. 

I have notes.

Fear not, though. This is no lament. It’s a love letter. Albeit a bruised one. A letter written by someone who has spent enough time on sets, in edit bays, and tearing apart my scenes to build them back stronger, to know when a story matters beyond marketability and an executive retaining their job.

A masked teenager scrolls his phone while protesters rally behind him in Ari Aster’s Eddington—a striking pandemic-era image of modern culture wars, social media, and public unrest colliding in one frame.

There’s a scene early in Eddington, kids hanging in a field, dusk folding over them like a denim jacket. A lust-lorn kid cracks wise about being at a “super-spreader.” The laughter that follows is proud, relieved. It’s painfully familiar.

I didn’t laugh. I tensed. My chest did that thing it does when memory and instinct come to odds.

I remember watching my older kids pile into cars, maskless, on their way to "just hang out,” while I stood at the door rocking a newborn in one arm and a growing sense of fear in the other. I saw it as selfish, reckless. But now, with space, some breath, and watching Eddington from the safe confines of time, I can see how much they needed each other. How much the illusion of normalcy was its own kind of survival. 

Eddington somehow allows for everybody’s reality. Not without pain and consequence, but everyone gets their story told. You understand the weariness of the mayoral father (Pedro Pascal), the conflict of the white protesters supporting then drifting back to center stage, the cocksure cadence of the podcaster (Austin Butler) who read one article and decided he was the oracle. You watch them scrape up against each other, and you think, I’ve been him. I’ve lived with her. I’ve said that.

Aster opens on a homeless man, drifting toward town, bleating like a sheep, an omen nobody ordered. He’s the uninvited mania, the horror that arrives from nowhere and suddenly belongs to everyone. It’s a quiet thesis statement. Aster opens a world where madness shows up at the edge of town, and instead of treating it, we follow it. We imitate it. We let it lead.

Joaquin Phoenix in Ari Aster’s Eddington—a pandemic-era psychological Western that fuses small-town politics, surveillance-era anxiety, and cultural fracture into a simmering slow-burn.

Cut to Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), alone in the glow of his wife’s face on his laptop, watching a YouTube video about how to talk to your spouse into having a baby. In a few seconds, you know him: a man who needs a script. His version of empathy is a tactic. That’s the era in one image: we outsourced our communication to content and wondered why we couldn’t hear each other.

And then, before we’ve even entered our stage in any traditional dramatic sense, the reservation police arrive. They remind Joe he’s on their land. They tell him to put on his mask. He refuses. In one economical beat, Aster gives us land, history, entitlement, pandemic theater, and the “fuck your feelings” ethos distilled into a single moment. 

Craft-wise, the dude is not to be trifled with.

Which, frankly, is not something that can be said about every movie on the “New on HBO Max” carousel. There’s one recent release, I’ll be polite and let it remain nameless, that has all the ingredients of a movie but no idea how to find its shape. I watched these on consecutive nights, and I was reminded of a line from Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous: 

“‘The Letter’ by The Box Tops, it’s a minute and fifty-eight seconds, it means nothing. And yet it takes them less than two minutes to accomplish what it takes Jethro Tull… HOURS to NOT ACCOMPLISH!”

Emma Stone in Ari Aster’s Eddington—a pandemic-era psychological Western that turns small-town life into a slow-burn study of fear, power, and cultural fracture.

And so it is with story control. That is rare, inspiring, and worth acknowledging over weekend receipts. With Aster, he knows the rules of story structure well enough to snap them in half and still have the pieces land with punch, gravity, and a few truly rude surprises. The film builds like an argument that starts at breakfast and ruins dinner.

He is able to sustain a film that doesn’t accuse you. It includes you. And it does it from a safe enough distance that you don’t feel the need to defend yourself. But suddenly, you start to shift in your seat.

Because maybe you did sound like that. Maybe you did treat someone that way. It’s a film that leaves you in that strange middle ground, between “I was right” and “I wish I’d understood more.” The kitchen-table regrets, the driveway silences, and the “I just didn’t know how to say it” moments that piled up.

It’s cathartic without being precious. It clears out the fog. It shows us how we splintered, how loud we got, how fragile we were. It reminds you how hard it is to be right and kind at the same time.

Joaquin Phoenix in Ari Aster’s Eddington—a late-film escalation where the pandemic-era pressure cooker finally ruptures, turning small-town politics and cultural paranoia into full-blown psychological Western chaos.

This is the lineage Eddington belongs to. Dr. Strangelove turned nuclear terror into deadpan absurdity, letting us laugh just long enough to realize the joke was on us. Brazil wrapped bureaucratic cruelty in dream logic and ductwork, a fantasy that felt too specific to be entirely made up. And Get Out took liberal racism and turned it into body horror so on-the-nose it looped back around to genius. None of those films are “issue dramas.” They’re precise, specific, controlled as hell. And because of that, they last longer, they cut deeper.

Eddington shares some structural elements with Aster’s previous film, the criminally underrated and similarly treated Beau Is Afraid, sprawling, spiraling, deeply internal. But where Beau was a map of one man’s anxious mind, Eddington zooms out. It sketches the national psyche, a whole country’s fear, posturing, exhaustion, and grasping. It’s more grounded, more familiar, and maybe for that reason, more terrifying. Beau asks what happens when you live in fear. Eddington shows us what happens when everyone else does, too.

Pedro Pascal in Ari Aster’s Eddington—a modern psychological Western that turns small-town leadership into a study of power, image, and cultural fracture during the pandemic era.

I have a teenager in my home, seventeen now. Deep in the years when full sentences are rationed carefully. I’ve spent long stretches just waiting, like James Garner in The Notebook, hoping for the moment when the light flips, he remembers me, and I'm let in on what’s going on in his head.

And when he does open up, when he really starts talking, it’s almost always after a good movie.

Never the ones they think he wants. Not the movies with nine-figure budgets and six writers on punch-up duty. Those roll right off him. But he’ll watch Goodfellas six times, and now we’re talking about loyalty, compromise, power; how Henry Hill’s upbringing was so different from his. They change the shape of his questions. He was so proud of himself the first time he watched Magnolia, when bewilderment during the first forty minutes gave way to a fuller life understanding, and suddenly, we’re deep into coincidence, grief. It was the first time he ever talked to me about losing his grandparents. 

That’s the difference between a movie that entertains and a movie that lands. They become part of how we talk to one another. They make space. And there's this prevailing wisdom that we don’t want these things. They’re too sad. Too weird. Too long. 

And those movies, the ones nobody expected to pop, they’re the ones still generating revenue decades later. They’re the ones passed down. The ones still printed on sweatshirts, quoted with friends, and acquired consistently by streamers. They weren’t safe bets. They weren’t designed to open big and burn out. They were built to stay. And they’re the long-tail returns so conveniently excluded from a studio’s quarterly reporting.

A tense standoff in Ari Aster’s Eddington—a pandemic-era modern Western where small-town authority, public unrest, and escalating paranoia collide, pushing the community toward a breaking point.

Let’s say the hard thing out loud. And this is from someone who still gets religion every time the lights go down: the theater-going experience is forever altered. 

It’s not the death of cinema, and it’s not the end of in-person viewing. I’m not eulogizing the silver screen. But we’ve got to kill a darling or two here: the era of $200-million movies cashing in like clockwork is over, for now. The only people who can kill the theater experience are the ones running the numbers. Not audiences. Not streaming. The industry will kill itself through monumental losses. By playing from behind, pushing all the chips in on one holiday weekend, praying that a single spin of the roulette wheel pays for the whole year.

If Warner Bros.’ run with original films this year has shown us anything, it’s that the turn has already started. We could save the industry a lot faster by not swinging for the fences every time. 

As Crash Davis says in Bull Durham, “Relax, alright? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring. Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls, they’re more democratic.” 

A few more ground balls might be exactly what keeps the lights on and the seats filled.

Joaquin Phoenix in Ari Aster’s Eddington—a modern psychological Western that frames pandemic-era America as isolation plus pressure, where small-town power and cultural fracture turn everyday spaces into a battleground.

My seventeen-year-old is being trained in real time. The movies that actually move him, that floor him, rarely happen in a theater. So when he wants to feel something, when he wants to be rattled a little, he doesn’t check showtimes, he scrolls the back catalogue. We’re teaching generations that the multiplex is where you go to pass time, and the good stuff lives at home. That’s a passive way to look at going to the theatre, not a passionate one. And that’s not just a story problem. That’s a business problem.

The press perseverates on opening weekend receipts, negating all else, quality of the film being the biggest loser of all. We need to stop treating these movies: Eddington, One Battle After Another, like they failed, when film history repeatedly tells us otherwise. One Battle has racked up nearly $200 million worldwide and still has awards season ahead of it. My teenager found it last week and hasn’t shut up about it. That movie’s going to play in dorm rooms and late-night retrospectives for decades. That’s the long game.

Eddington (Joaquin Phoenix) and One Battle After Another (Leonardo DiCaprio) are exactly the kind of “didn’t-open-huge” films that age into culture—built for the long tail, rediscovery, dorm-room rewatches, and awards-season conversation, not just opening-weekend headlines.

Eddington isn’t first-date stuff; it invites us to remember, not with shame, but with a kind of permission. It lets us acknowledge what we became under pressure. How fragile we were. How loud. How desperate we were to be right. We don’t need more movies that help us forget. Escapism has had a decade-long residency in the multiplex, and if that worked, we wouldn’t still be so uninspired, still stuck in our corners, still arguing, aching for something real.

Aster’s raucous, intimate, satirical, bombastic, and heartbreaking film is streaming now, in an intimate environment it may thrive in. Its reputation will be written there.

And if we hadn’t let the “flop” coverage drown it out, more of us might have met it where it was built to be seen, with other people, in the dark. All the cultural weeping of the last decade, all the elegies and threats and blame and posture, none of it has landed as this movie does in a room where no one’s performing. That’s the ending we needed. Not a moral, not a lesson. A recognition. A movie that says: Yes, it was that bad. Yes, we all played a part. Yes, we’re still here. 

Also, be-fucking-ware. The way we act and the things we say have irreparable consequences. 

Character posters for Ari Aster’s Eddington starring Austin Butler, Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, and Emma Stone—an ensemble-driven psychological Western that captures pandemic-era tension, small-town politics, and culture-war paranoia.

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JR Mitchell is an Award-Winning Director, Writer, Editor, & Producer who began working professionally at 15. 

Mitchell has gone on, in his 30-year career, to produce everything from Feature Films to Live and Scripted Shows to over 2,000 Commercials & Brand Films.

Mitchell's most recent film is the multi-festival award-winning & Academy Award Short-Listed feature documentary "Satan & Adam." Mitchell produced and edited the film with legendary movie mogul Frank Marshall (Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park). The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was picked up by Netflix. It is presently in its second & third acquisitions, streaming on Peacock & Tubi.

Mitchell is the Owner of Osobarra Films, a partner at JoySauce Network, and director of JoySauce Late Night and the upcoming film Reconnected.

JR Mitchell, owner of Osobarra Films, on set during COVID.