SXSW 2025 Review: THE STUDIO, So You Want to Make a Movie?

Hooray for Hollywood?

The Studio
The first two episodes enjoyed their world premiere at SXSW 2025. They will debut globally Wednesday, March 26, exclusively on Apple TV+. Subsequent episodes will debut every Wednesday, one per week, through May 21. I've seen all ten episodes.

Every movie about Hollywood lives under the shadow of a mountainous pile of movies about Hollywood, including Billy Wilder's soul-searching Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Robert Altman's pungent The Player (1992), to name just two.

Every filmmaker who has made a movie about Hollywood believes they have a unique perspective, based upon their own experiences and those of their friends and colleagues. News flash: they don't. But if they make something that's frank and funny, it can be distinctively entertaining, even for those who don't work in or around Hollywood.

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, in collaboration with their fellow creators Alex Gregory & Peter Huyck and Frida Perez, have made a distinctively entertaining show that is one part wish fulfillment -- what if I ran a Hollywood studio, with the power to decide what got made? -- and one part rueful reflection. The latter comes because the show is filled to overflowing with incidents that are riotously ridiculous and yet feel true to form.

Maybe none of these specific things ever happened in the way they are depicted, but nearly everything sounds authentic to the spirit of Hollywood. And here I'll insert a personal disclaimer: I am certainly not an 'insider' to the ways of major Hollywood studios. I was born near Hollywood, though, and am acquainted with a number of people who formerly or currently work in Hollywood, and all I can say is: yup, sounds true.

The show is also consistently hilarious. The first two episodes show how Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) became head of Continental Pictures, a modern Hollywood studio that is under financial pressures from its clueless owner (Bryan Cranston) because of a series of flops greenlighted by previous studio head Patty (Catherine O'Hara).

Matt and his team, including Matt's best friend and creative exec (Ike Barinholtz), marketing honcho (Kathryn Hahn), and former assistant turned creative (Chase Sui Wonders), must figure out the New New Hollywood, in a world in which movie studios are threatened by the changing tastes of modern audiences and the looming presence of streaming services.

Of course, it's no small irony that a show that touts the wondrous and preferable experience of watching movies in theaters over watching movies at home via streaming services is itself debuting worldwide on a streaming service. And it may only be a small comfort that the first two episodes are making their world premiere at SXSW in front of an appreciative audience.

The show itself makes a strong argument for its existence as a series, though. Each episode tackles a different aspect of the modern challenges that filmmakers face, especially those who work through the studio system. Each episode also reflects realities through the eyes and experiences of different members of the creative team. The series' creative team brings to bear their varying perspectives from making some of the funniest, most incisively mocking shows of the past 20 years.

Any movie or television show that is any good is guided by highly creative, original thinkers who can look at subjects from a fresh angle that no one else has considered before. That sums up The Studio, which covers subjects that I've seen a million times before, yet still mines unexpected laughs and causes bittersweet tears to flow.