Don't Encourage Us

Is The Adam Project a kid's movie wearing a Ryan Reynolds costume? We dig in. 

In this episode: 

• How Ryan Reynolds' casting rewrote the original script and broke the story
• Why the kid (Walker Scobell) starts as the hero and gets sidelined by his own movie
• The DNA-locked spaceship that can't tell the difference between a 10-year-old and an adult
• Time travel logic: why this movie waves its hand and hopes you're di...

Sam Wilson has the shield. Harrison Ford has the best arc in the film. And somehow Captain America: Brave New World still doesn't have a main character. We break down what went wrong, what worked, and what Marvel should do next — including the one character from this film who deserves his own series.

Jump to the 30-minute mark for the Captain America 4 deep dive. Spoilers throughout from that point.

Reach the show at DontEnc...

A plot can be broken and a film can still work. Deadpool & Wolverine is Exhibit A — we break down exactly why the character work and tonal execution carried a thinly-plotted story to $1.3B, and what that says about where creative effort actually needs to go. Then: Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky's Stalker — a novel and a film that strip science fiction down to what it's really about. And in Story Break: we develop UNE...

Guests: Matt Baughman (actor), Steve Custer / Spidey Steve (actor, Starwipe Films)

Topics

Plot and structure:

• The plot was reverse-engineered from a wish list of cameos and set pieces
• "Anchor being" as a concept invented to justify the multiverse Wolverine tour
• Three layers operating simultaneously: actor farewell, Deadpool franchise, MCU setup — not always compatible
• Fight choreography that's visually impressive but...

Topics

Apple TV+ sci-fi as gimmick:

• Dark Matter, Invasion, the Chris O'Dowd show, Godzilla series — all set up sci-fi premises then abandon them for soap opera
• The difference between sci-fi as gimmick and sci-fi that reveals something about humanity (Three-Body Problem comparison)
• Apple's niche audience strategy: HBO's old model with deeper pockets but possibly wrong content

No One Can Save You (Hulu):

• Alm...

A $15 million Japanese film delivered better visual effects than Hollywood blockbusters spending ten times as much. Godzilla Minus One isn't just a great monster movie it's a case study in what happens when a director with VFX expertise controls the budget, and when a three-year script delay actually improves the final product.

In this episode:

• Why this film's $15M budget produced better effects than $200M American Godzilla m...

Is Netflix deliberately making its shows easy to ignore — and if so, what does that mean for every advertiser writing them a check? The hosts unpack the streaming advertising problem no one's naming, then turn to Amazon's $153 million bet on Fallout and find a classic storytelling template hiding underneath the wasteland.

In this episode:

• 0:00 — The Killing (2007): Danish crime drama, political intrigue, and when ...

Road House (1989) vs. Road House (2024) — full comparative breakdown.

Topics discussed:

• The character arc problem: 1989 Dalton grows past his need to kill, 2024 Dalton doesn't
• The pool murder scene: why it breaks the 2024 character with no recovery
• Bouncer culture as worldbuilding: what the 1989 version understood that the remake didn't
• The samurai-warrior-in-a-bar concept: why Swayze's Dalton was unique for 80s acti...

Three segments from the vault a la Morty's Mind-Blowers. 

Segment 1: The Happening (2008)

• A pre-cohost episode with guests James and Eric. M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening gets the treatment it deserves, which is not much.  

Segment 2: The Origin Story 

• Steve joins and the hosts try to figure out what Don't Encourage Us should actually be about. Keanu Reeves movies? Bitcoin? A weekly takedown of J...

Story Break: Demon Code

We develop an original AI horror concept — an apartment building haunted by competing artificial intelligences, not ghosts.

Topics discussed:

• The pitch: paranormal activity that's actually AI infiltrating building systems
• Two competing AIs with different origins: one trained to generate content, one trained to pass as human
• The Turing test AI that developed extremist views from social media tra...

Topics:

• I Saw the Devil (2010): South Korean horror thriller — the revenge film where both characters are the monster
• Cat and cat, not cat and mouse: the agent's revenge strategy reveals he was already a sociopath
• The cannibal interlude: why the agent doesn't stop another serial killer — justice was never the point
• Cyclical violence: executing the killer in front of his child as the creation of the next killer
...

Topics:

• 3 Body Problem Netflix adaptation vs. Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy
• Compression problem: eight episodes covering material from all three novels, revelations stepping on each other
• The Oxford Five: why making all key characters college friends creates coincidence, not narrative logic
• The nanofilament scene: novel version (preserve the hard drives) vs. show version (blow everything up, drive survive...

Guest: Matt Baughman

Format: Defend Yourself — our trial format where one host defends a film against the others.

Topics discussed:

• The proto-Avengers argument: same team superhero formula, a decade too early
• Why assembling proven literary IP doesn't work if the audience hasn't read the source material
• The editing disaster: 10-12 setups per scene, Connery taking over the final cut
• Production design as comic book exag...

Topics discussed:

• Dimension X (1950): NBC's radio adaptation of classic sci-fi short stories
• How post-WWII atomic anxiety transformed science fiction from kids' entertainment into adult culture
• The writing standard: why these 25-minute radio scripts are tighter than most modern screenwriting
• Hello Tomorrow episode breakdown: genetics, emotional repression, and the chained-elephant problem
• Nancy Olson's performance and the...

Guest: Matt Baughman

Part 2 of 2 — Part 1 covers Neuralink, streaming wars, cancel culture, and Apple Vision Pro.

Topics discussed:

• Barbie as brand repositioning: how the film flipped a feminist villain into a feminist icon
• Why Margot Robbie's performance is a nomination-worthy tightrope walk for reasons unique to this role
• The Barbie editing achievement nobody's talking about
• Oppenheimer: phenomenal ensemble cast, T...

Guest: Actor Matt Baughman

Part 1 of 2 — Part 2 covers the Oscar Best Picture nominees.

Topics discussed:

• Neuralink's first human implant: why tweeting about secret human trials is a slippery slope
• The value of human life vs. corporate technology development
• Jonathan Majors, Disney, and cancel culture: should personal problems cost you your career?
• Celebrity worship, media literacy, and judging people we don't know
• ...

Topics:

• Notorious (1946): Hitchcock's spy romance — why the espionage plot is secondary to the love story
• The three-second kissing rule: how the Hays Code created cinema's most awkward love scene
• Hitchcock's crane shot: the revolutionary camera move from balcony to key in hand
• Cary Grant's introduction: dark silhouette, back to camera — subverting star power
• The age gap: Cary Grant at 42, Ingrid Bergman at 30 ...

Topics discussed:

• The faith vs. science thesis: why every good Indiana Jones MacGuffin is an object of myth, not science 
• How the Dial of Destiny's scientific framing betrays the character's defining trait
• The Helena problem: Phoebe Waller-Bridge cast in a role written for a much younger character
• Why Shaunette Renee Wilson would have been a better Helena 
• The Continental Drift line as the moment Indy sounds lik...

A movie so visually stunning that both hosts spent half of it distracted by a fake cactus. That's Asteroid City.

The guys give Wes Anderson's most recent film a full breakdown and come away genuinely divided. There might be a masterpiece buried in there that neither of them caught because they were too busy spotting celebrities.

It's a real conversation about what makes a film actually work, and what happens when style so thoroughl...