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So they’re making another one.I saw the headline this morning—"Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill,... So they’re making another one.
I saw the headline this morning—"Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, Bette Midler to Star in 'Cut Off'"—and I swear I could feel a single, exhausted neuron in my brain just give up and die. It’s a new comedy from Warner Bros. about rich siblings who get cut off by their parents.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
No, seriously. Stop me. Because I feel like I’m in a time loop. We’ve seen this movie. Maybe not with these exact actors in this exact configuration, but we’ve seen it. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a TV dinner: predictable, processed, and vaguely comforting to people with no other options.
Let’s break down the assembly-line parts, shall we? You’ve got Kristen Wiig, who the world still rightly remembers from `Kristen Wiig SNL` characters and, of course, the lightning-in-a-bottle that was `Kristen Wiig Bridesmaids`. She’s comedy gold. You’ve got Jonah Hill, who co-wrote this thing and is also directing, a guy who has genuinely great performances under his belt. And you’ve got Bette Midler, a living legend.
On paper, it’s a powerhouse trio. In reality, it feels less like a creative collaboration and more like a calculated investment. It's like a hedge fund decided to make a movie. "The data suggests that audiences respond positively to these three performers in a high-concept, low-stakes comedy. Execute."
The plot is the real killer, though. Rich kids forced to live like us normals. What fresh, searing insights will we glean from this premise in the year of our lord 2026? Will they discover that you can’t pay rent with a trust fund? That avocados don’t just magically appear in the fridge? This is a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm creative snooze-fest. It’s a premise that was tired in the 90s, and now it’s just shambling around like a zombie looking for brains it will never find in a modern studio pitch meeting.
It's offcourse the same story we always get. A story about the 1% learning a valuable lesson for 90 minutes before, presumably, getting their money back in the end. Because god forbid a comedy actually have stakes.
The Inevitability Engine
And the machine is already humming. Production starts in the fall. They’ve already planted a flag on a release date: July 17, 2026. Two years from now. I can’t even commit to a lunch plan for next Tuesday, but Warner Bros. has already allocated a specific weekend for this thing to hoover up our money. It’s just so… sterile. Jesse Ehrman and Zach Hamby are overseeing it for the studio. I’m sure they’re nice people, but their job is to make sure the product is delivered on time and on budget. Art ain't really part of the equation.
This is the part of the modern movie business that drives me insane. The complete and utter lack of spontaneity. It’s all just schedules and press releases and strategic placements. It feels less like filmmaking and more like logistical supply-chain management.
And don’t even get me started on the title. "Cut Off." It’s so painfully literal. It’s the kind of title you come up with in the first five minutes of a brainstorming session before you get to the good ideas. It tells you everything and nothing. It’s a search engine keyword, not a movie title.
Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe millions of people are desperately clamoring for a movie about two wealthy adults learning how to use a washing machine. Maybe this is the catharsis the world needs. I mean, Kristen Wiig has a massive fanbase for a reason. From `Surprise Lady Kristen Wiig` bits on SNL to her voice work in things like `Despicable Me`, she can do anything. She's even in that `Gabby's Dollhouse` thing my niece is obsessed with. The woman has range. But you put talent like that into a box this generic and…
So, What's the Point?
I guess what I’m asking is, who is this for?
It’s not for people who want sharp, original comedy. It’s not for people who want to see these actors stretched in new and interesting ways. It seems to be for people who want to go to a theater, turn their brain off for two hours, and see famous people they recognize go through the motions of a story they already know.
And maybe that’s fine. Maybe that’s all movies are now. Content. Product. An acceptable way to kill a Friday night. But I look at the names involved—Wiig, Hill, Midler—and I just feel a sense of waste. These are genuinely funny, talented people. They could be doing something weird, something challenging, something memorable.
Instead, they’re making a movie that feels like it was generated by an algorithm fed a diet of 2000s-era rom-coms. The producers are from a company called Strong Baby. Jonah Hill is writing with Ezra Woods. These are all just names in a press release, gears in a machine designed to produce a perfectly predictable, market-tested piece of entertainment. They expect us to get excited about this, and honestly...
I just can't. I'm tired. This whole announcement has the energy of a corporate memo. There's no passion, no spark, just the cold, hard mechanics of intellectual property creation. The public reaction so far seems to be a collective shrug, because what else is there to say? It’s another movie. It will exist. Then it will be on a streaming service. The end.
Just What We Needed.
This isn't a movie announcement; it's a product rollout. It's a pre-packaged, shrink-wrapped slab of content designed for mass consumption. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a Pop-Tart. You know exactly what you’re going to get, and you’ll be hungry again in an hour. Congrats, Hollywood. You did it again.
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