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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE IP MACHINE LAUGHS AT ITSELF  
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Eileen Jones
June 3, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg mock Hollywood’s creative collapse
in The Studio — while continuing to churn out sequels, reboots, and
branded spin-offs. _

Still from The Studio. , (Apple TV+)

 

Alot has been written about the IP problem besetting mainstream
filmmaking today. IP, or intellectual property, refers to all the
preexisting material adapted to film by studios and producers. It’s
a way of minimizing financial risk by relying on familiar sources that
have already found favor with consumers. These include best-selling
novels, popular comic books, hit video games, and remakes of beloved
older films and television shows but also, increasingly, successful
brand-name commercial products such as Barbie, Air Jordan, and
BlackBerry.

In short, IP refers to all of those plus any sequels, spin-offs,
remakes, or reboots that follow from the ones that make big money. The
blockbuster hit _A Minecraft Movie_, based on the beloved video game,
will inevitably beget _Another Minecraft Movie_. Stockholders and
investors may be reassured by a full slate of IP projects, but in the
meantime the theatrical exhibition side of the movie business is in
free fall as bored viewers skip new releases or wait for mundane
content to show up on streaming services.

IP it is argued, is killing cinema as we know it. Or knew it. But
then, at the same time, it’s the IP movies that so often make
billions of dollars while original films tank at the box office. A lot
has been written about that phenomenon, too, in long think pieces that
wind up blaming audiences for their dreadful taste in films.

It’s become such a familiar topic that it’s featured as the main
comedic target in the premiere episode of the new hit Apple TV+
series _The Studio_, a satire of the contemporary American film
industry in creative decline. The show is about a new studio head
named Matt Remick, played by Seth Rogen, who yearns to save Hollywood
by making great, original, auteur-driven pictures again. But he can
only nail down the top job in the first place if he promises to do
“the Kool-Aid movie.”

In order to do that, he winds up having to torpedo his own dream
project, which is making what has been announced as Martin
Scorsese’s last film. It happens to be based on an original script
dealing with the horribly grim subject of the Jonestown massacre. For
a brief, desperate interlude before he inevitably shafts Scorsese (who
plays himself), Remick hopes to make Scorsese’s movie a nightmarish
combo of daring originality and cynical IP sellout. He thinks he can
angle the film toward the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid,” which
emerged from the horrors of the Jonestown tragedy. That way he could
still claim to be making “the Kool-Aid movie.”

Rogen and Evan Goldberg are the writing-directing-producing team
behind this series. And that might explain why _The Studio_ seems a
bit soft and overly affectionate toward the industry it’s supposed
to be brutally mocking — the two have long been very comfortable in
Hollywood. The incredibly prolific duo run Point Grey Pictures, and
they’re just as accommodating when it comes to cynical showbiz
willingness to monetize everything, regardless of issues like quality,
creative ambition, and human dignity.

In interviews, Rogen downplays any “end of the industry” woes by
saying that the way Hollywood works naturally changes over time, so in
order to succeed, you simply adapt to the change. He seems to be the
opposite of the character he’s playing in _The Studio,_ which
ridicules Remick’s overly romantic notions of great studio
filmmaking of the past every bit as much as it mocks the crass
Hollywood executives raving about how fantastic the Kool-Aid movie
will be.

In their early years as a writing team, Rogen and Goldberg had no
trouble churning out a critically despised but moneymaking adaptation
of _The Green Hornet_ (2011) as a follow-up to the popular,
critically praised original comedies that put them on the map —
2007’s _Superbad_ and 2008’s _Pineapple Express_. Their initial
promise as idiosyncratic comedy talent has faded considerably since
then. When directing films over the years, they’ve tended to opt for
predictably rowdy satirical comedies with outrageous premises, plenty
of slapstick, and crude sexual jokes, like _This Is the
End_ (2013), _The Interview_ (2014), and _Sausage Party _(2016).

 

Their most recent feature film as writers and producers is an animated
reboot of the _Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle_ series — itself an
extension of a vast media franchise encompassing comics, television,
merchandising, and video games — called _Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles: Mutant Mayhem_ (2023). They’re very active film producers
and are involved in various capacities in television, too, with a
particular highlight being the 2022 Hulu miniseries _Pam & Tommy_, a
comedy-drama that’s also a sympathetic study of the marriage of
Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee.

A lot of their TV work draws on IP sources, such as adaptations of
comic book series like _Preacher_ and _The Boys_ (which led
to _The Boys Presents: Diabolical_ in 2022). And Rogen and Goldberg
are inclined to embrace media crossover sequel and franchise
possibilities as well. The 2016 animated movie _Sausage Party_, which
they cowrote and coproduced, was followed by the 2024 Amazon Prime
Video television series _Sausage Party: Foodtopia_. Their follow-up
to the film _Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem_ is the new
animated Paramount+ TV series _Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles_. And on top of all that hyperactive productivity, it’s
important to note that Rogen is often performing in these films and
television series as well.

In short, by the current standards of the entertainment industry,
Rogen and Goldberg are ideal high-functioning, wide-ranging talents.
Many successful filmmakers might have cringed at the prospect of
writing and producing 2016’s _Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising_, a
sequel to the 2014 comedy _Neighbors_. Empowered by the accumulation
of so much industry success and influence, they might have fought to
distance themselves from cranking out IP content in order to
concentrate on more ambitious projects and develop a coherent creative
vision. But not Rogen and Goldberg. They seem to have no Matt
Remick–like delusions of grandeur or love of film art for art’s
sake. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine them following up their
successful series _The Studio_ with a film spin-off called _The
Kool-Aid Movie_.

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Contributors

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

 

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