People close to Hayden Panettiere told Page Six that the actress was suffering with severe back problems and anxiety in the months leading up to her untimely death at age 36.
Panettiere, known best for her roles in &#8220;Nashville,&#8221; &#8220;Heroes,&#8221; and &#8220;Remember the Titans,&#8221; was found unresponsive Sunday afternoon at a residence in Greenville, South Carolina, where she had been temporarily staying. An investigation into the death is ongoing, but authorities say there are currently no signs of trauma.
Erick Orellana, Panettiere&#8217;s close friend and hairdresser, told Page Six that the actress was dealing with severe back problems earlier this year, which left her using crutches.
“I know she suffered earlier this year with her back,” Orellana said, describing the pain as “really severe.”
“At one point, it was even hard for her to move her legs,” the hairdresser added.
Back in March, Panettiere was photographed using crutches while traveling through the LAX airport with her boyfriend Brian Hickerson.
Orellana said she thought Panettiere appeared to be &#8220;on the mend&#8221; from the back issues before she died.
Another source said Panettiere, who was a &#8220;night owl,&#8221; seemed extremely tired at times and suffered from anxiety. The 36-year-old would take medicine for her anxiety that could “every so often&#8221; impact her speech, the source added.
The Greenville County Coroner’s Office said an autopsy was completed and found no signs of trauma that would have contributed to her death.
“The decedent has been identified as Hayden [Lesley] Panettiere, 36, of California. Panettiere was found unresponsive inside the residence, where she had been temporarily staying. An autopsy was completed today,&#8221; the office said in a statement. &#8220;At autopsy, no signs of trauma were discovered that would have contributed to the death. This investigation remains active and ongoing.&#8221;
First responders were dispatched to the apartment where Panettiere had been staying with Hickerson on Sunday afternoon. A 911 call indicated that there was an unresponsive woman who may have suffered cardiac arrest. Hickerson was reportedly at the apartment at the time.
TMZ has reported that Narcan, a medication commonly used to rapidly reverse an opioid overdose, was found at the scene.
On Tuesday, former heavyweight boxing champion Wladimir Klitschko, who was in a relationship with Panettiere for nine years, shared an emotional statement following her death. The former couple have one child together, an 11-year-old daughter named Kaya.
<div id="attachment_1159821" style="width: 777px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1159821" class="wp-image-1159821 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/GettyImages-168286242-767x576.jpg" alt="" width="767" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/GettyImages-168286242-767x576.jpg 767w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/GettyImages-168286242-300x225.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/GettyImages-168286242-768x577.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/08/GettyImages-168286242.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 767px) 100vw, 767px" />Jemal Countess/Getty Images</div>
“Our family is going through a time of profound shock and grief,” Klitschko posted to social media. “The announcement of Hayden’s tragic death saddens me deeply. She left this world far too soon. Hayden was, although no longer my partner, an important part of my life and the mother of our daughter, Kaya.”
&#8220;She built an incredible career through immense talent, while also facing the darker sides of a very demanding industry. Nothing will erase the times we shared or the place she had in our lives,&#8221; Klitschko wrote. &#8220;To our daughter Kaya, I will always speak of her mother with respect and make sure she remembers the person she was.&#8221;
&#8220;I extend my deepest condolences to Hayden’s parents, her friends, and her fans, who are also grieving today,&#8221; he continued. &#8220;Young and talented people like Hayden should not leave this world so soon. I ask everyone to please respect our family’s feelings and privacy during this incredibly difficult time. For now, this is all I wish to say.&#8221;
&#8220;Thank you to everyone who is supporting my family and expressing their sincere condolences,&#8221; Klitschko added. &#8220;Rest easy, Hayden. May you find eternal peace.&#8221; 
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Our family is going through a time of profound shock and grief.
The announcement of Hayden’s tragic death saddens me deeply. She left this world far too soon. Hayden was, although no longer my partner, an important part of my life and the mother of our daughter, Kaya.
She built… <a href="https://t.co/etL169NOmB">pic.twitter.com/etL169NOmB</a>
— Klitschko (@Klitschko) <a href="https://x.com/Klitschko/status/2089609887076503934?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 18, 2026</a></blockquote>
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/actress-hayden-panetierre-dead-at-36">Actress Hayden Panettiere Dead At 36</a>

Hayden Panettiere Portrait Session

Troubling Details Emerge About Hayden Panettiere’s Life Before Her Death

Revealed: Hayden Penettiere’s Mounting Health Problems Before Her Death 

Death

Hollywood

Movies

The autopsy for actress Hayden Panettiere has revealed more information about her shocking death at the age of 36.
The Greenville County Coroner’s Office delivered an initial statement on the &#8220;Nashville&#8221; actress&#8217;s post-mortem, saying that her body had not shown visible &#8220;signs of trauma&#8221; at the time of her death.
&#8220;The decedent has been identified as Hayden [Lesley] Panettiere, 36, of California. Panettiere was found unresponsive inside the residence, where she had been temporarily staying. An autopsy was completed today. At autopsy, no signs of trauma were discovered that would have contributed to the death,&#8221; the statement read.
&#8220;This investigation remains active and ongoing. No further details are available for release at this time,&#8221; the coroner&#8217;s statement concluded, but the office stipulated that additional testing was ongoing and that additional information would be released as it was made available.
First responders were dispatched to an apartment in Greenville, South Carolina, where Panettierre was reportedly staying with on-again boyfriend Brian Hickerson, on Sunday. Their arrival came following a 911 call indicating that there was an unresponsive woman who may have suffered a cardiac arrest. Two ambulances arrived on the scene, according to entertainment site TMZ, and both unloaded stretchers, but it is unclear why they thought a second stretcher might be needed. Hickerson was reportedly at the apartment at the time, but both ambulances ultimately left the scene without patients onboard.
Additional reports from TMZ suggested that first responders used both Narcan and epinephrine — used to treat opioid overdoses and cardiac arrest, respectively — but did not confirm whether they were used exclusively to treat Panettierre or someone else who may have been in the apartment.
Earlier reports included information from the 911 call from the apartment, and indicated that Panettierre was being treated for a suspected overdose.
The &#8220;Heroes&#8221; actress has had a long and well-documented history of struggling with addiction, dating back to her teenage years when she said adults had offered her &#8220;happy pills&#8221; ahead of red carpet appearances: &#8220;They were to make me peppy during interviews.&#8221;
As her battle escalated, she eventually compromised her liver function to the point that she developed jaundice.
&#8220;I was being told how to be and how to live by so many people in my life. I wanted certain decisions to be my own, and nobody could stop me. What I put in my body was like an act of defiance,&#8221; she said — and she added that her addiction had gotten much worse while she battled postpartum depression following the birth of the daughter she shares with ex Wladimir Klitschko.
&#8220;I never heard any stories about it at all,&#8221; she said of <a href="https://people.com/parents/hayden-panettiere-wishes-someone-told-me-its-ok-postpartum-depression/">postpartum depression</a> in 2023. “I just thought there was something seriously wrong with me, so I thought, ‘[Alcohol] will fix this. Duh!’ And it didn’t. It does for a moment, but then it made everything worse.&#8221;
By the time she sought treatment, her eyes were yellow from the jaundice and her hair had thinned and begun to fall out.
&#8220;Doctors told me my liver was going to give out,&#8221; Panettierre admitted during a 2022 interview — and in her recently released memoir, she added, &#8220;A doctor told me that if I didn’t stop drinking, I’d be dead within five years.&#8221;
Panettierre spent months in rehab, and went into great detail in her memoir describing her experiences going through withdrawal: &#8220;Once during withdrawal, I heard voices that were so terrifying I got on all fours and crawled to my bathroom, where I lay on the cool, clean tiles and waited for the panic to pass. I couldn’t sleep, and my head pounded like it was pressing against my skull.&#8221;
Panettierre was pronounced dead at 2:32 p.m. on Sunday, just five days before what would have been her 37th birthday.

Build Presents Charles Esten & Hayden Panettiere Discussing “Nashville”

Hayden Panettiere Autopsy Reveals New Details About Her Death

Celebrities

John Hinckley Jr., the man who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981, is offering new insight into the factors that drove him to carry out the attack, pointing to his own estrangement from his family.
In an interview with filmmaker and producer Mark Joseph obtained exclusively by The Daily Wire, Hinckley once again said the 1976 Martin Scorsese film &#8220;Taxi Driver&#8221; had a profound influence on him as he spiraled into the delusions that ultimately led him to shoot Reagan. “&#8217;Taxi Driver&#8217; influenced me very much,” Hinckley said when asked how responsible he believed the movie was for his actions. “I wouldn’t use the term ‘hold them responsible,’ but yeah, &#8216;Taxi Driver&#8217; influenced me greatly.”
But he also said his isolation from his family was a contributing factor, and offered a word of caution to young people struggling with loneliness.
“Do not get estranged from your family,” Hinckley said. “Keep the family ties, because that’s what happened to me: I got estranged from my family, and that led to isolation and depression and delusions.”
“So do everything you can to keep your family ties,” he continued. “And, you know, if you have some faith, try to have a faith in God. With me, that’s what saw me through.” The comments come as Hinckley has received renewed attention following his first major interviews in decades. In another <a href="https://ew.com/john-hinckley-jr-shares-a-message-for-jodie-foster-in-rare-interview-12053383">portion of the interview</a>, he discussed his obsession with Jodie Foster and said he once believed the actress would ultimately join him after the assassination attempt.
The attack wounded Reagan, White House Press Secretary James Brady, Washington police officer Thomas Delahanty, and Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy. Reagan survived after suffering a punctured lung and internal bleeding. Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1982 and spent more than three decades in psychiatric care before being released from court supervision in 2022.
Joseph produced the 2024 film “Reagan,” starring Dennis Quaid as the 40th president. A director&#8217;s cut of the film is scheduled to return to theaters in September as part of the nation&#8217;s 250th anniversary celebrations.

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EXCLUSIVE: Ronald Reagan Shooter Speaks To ‘Reagan’ Producer Ahead Of Director’s Cut Release

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It’s increasingly common to see films slated for big-screen releases get <a href="https://variety.com/2026/film/news/madden-movie-prime-video-streaming-release-nicolas-cage-david-o-russell-1236829167/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://variety.com/2026/film/news/madden-movie-prime-video-streaming-release-nicolas-cage-david-o-russell-1236829167/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1786461952363000&amp;usg=AOvVaw38zmQ9HEUOkXFBBo3Or6o6">relegated</a> to streaming service premieres. Rarely, if ever, do we see things go in the opposite direction, which makes “The Amazing Digital Circus” all the more notable.
The final two episodes of Glitch Productions’ popular YouTube series got a theatrical release after two years of streaming on the video-streaming platform. The show takes place in the titular Digital Circus, a realm controlled by a godlike artificial intelligence bot named Caine.
That the heroes are teenagers is enough to explain why the show became popular with my generation. But not everything popular among teenagers is destined to blow up like this. What explains the show’s success?
The episodes released in theaters offer a clue. In the finale, we learn that the show’s protagonists are merely the social media avatars of real people. We see those people living happy lives, outside the Digital Circus where the main character, Pomni, and her friends face challenges at the hands of Caine and his world. The characters we’ve come to know are shown to be different from the people controlling them.
This fact — the dissonance between how someone is in real life and how they appear online — speaks to teenagers today. In fact, throughout its run, “The Amazing Digital Circus” deals with issues that young people face as they attempt to strike a balance between the real and digital worlds and struggle with what happens when humans lose humanity.
A kid may be a straight A+ student in school but a wannabe criminal online, or an F student in real life and a nerd online. Maintaining both identities can be hard to manage, something we see in the film. By the end of the movie, the characters have discovered and accepted that they are merely digital, and they choose to move forward with their lives in the Circus. Watching these digital characters accept their artificiality reminds those of us watching the importance of accepting our humanity.
But the protagonists don’t always have an easy time. When a character is overwhelmed with emotion, they experience “abstraction.” Their brain stops functioning and they become a black mass of rainbow eyes, acting like a feral animal in terror.
The fear comes from the idea of being seen as less of a person or being socially dehumanized. In the Circus, this fear is rooted in the fact that the characters are cartoon avatars. But this is, of course, a fear real people have. Do my parents, teachers, or friends see me as less of a person and more of a problem? Something fragile to be avoided? So often we worry about expressing emotions or being vulnerable around our friends out of fear that we too could be reduced to our issues, nothing more than an abstraction.
“Digital Circus” also deals with the lack of control young people often feel. The show begins with Pomni awakening in the Circus, with no idea how she got there and no ability to change her course. This is certainly a common feeling among teens, one I’ve felt myself.
With its theatrical release, “Digital Circus” did more than just give voice to the alienation young Americans feel. It also gave them an opportunity to break free from the digital world and connect with each other in person. I felt quite underdressed in a flannel and sweatpants, surrounded by screaming fans in full cosplay and “Digital Circus” merch.
The staff repeatedly warned the crowd to be quiet. No one listened. There was singing, screaming, crying, and cheering — and that was just my friends.
For any other film, this would have made for a terrible viewing experience. But here it made sense. We weren’t there for the cinematic experience, but the camaraderie. We were there to mingle with other fans, break the anonymity of the internet, and have a social life off-screen.
For two years, “The Amazing Digital Circus” has helped its fans grapple with, and even escape from, the abstraction and oppression of digital life. By premiering its final two episodes in theaters, it provided a real-world opportunity for fans to come together as a community. That’s why it’s breaking the industry and why so many teens, and maybe even some adults, love it.
***
Charles Marcus is a high school student in West Virginia who writes about the unique challenges his generation faces.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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Gen Z’s Biggest Digital Obsession Comes With One Giant Irony

Gen Z

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Upstream

YouTube

“One Night Only” has an audacious premise, one designed to get people talking long before it arrived in theaters. In an alternative universe, Congress has passed a law dictating that singles may not have sex until marriage — except for, in a political compromise, one night a year.
A lot of things about this conceit don’t make sense, of course. Why is this movie a rom-com and not a dystopia? Why has every unmarried member of Congress not already been tossed in the clink? And why does this one night of legal free shagging not devolve into utter mayhem, orgies, and a windfall for STD clinics? But none of these questions, as you’ll see, really matter.
It seems an odd time for such a film, too. Gen Z is relatively sexless, so such a law isn&#8217;t even necessary for most kids these days. And yet we&#8217;re nowhere near a law like this being realistic, despite the dreams of the Trad Cons. But the film’s ridiculous premise has little to do with the actual plot; take it away, and you’re left with the misadventures and serendipitous story of young people looking for love.
This isn’t a sex comedy à la “Animal House” or “Easy A.” It’s a true rom-com, with all the trappings of the genre: a woman who’s a hopeless romantic, a heartbroken and hunky man, and the plot device that brings them together. 
Director Will Gluck previously helmed the much more sex-forward films “Anyone But You” (starring Sydney Sweeney and rated R for nudity) and “Easy A” (about a girl who becomes a modern-day Hester Prynne without actually having sex). This time, he said he listened to viewers who didn’t want random nudity.
“As we started to show it to audiences, we felt it takes you out of the movie,” he <a href="https://variety.com/2026/film/features/one-night-only-director-removed-nudity-1236827870/">told</a> Variety. “You’re engaged in the characters and what’s going on, and then you pan over and there’s two naked people having sex, and you watch the audience … it’s a physical thing. They turn to who they’re with and … the benefits do not nearly outweigh the negatives of it.”
“One Night Only” is still rated R, but what brief sex scenes exist are less “Bridgerton” and more of the 2000s rom-com variety. And if the movie has a message, it is, ironically, that random hookups end pretty badly. 
At the beginning of the most libidinous night of the year, singer and hopeless romantic Allie (Monica Barbaro) meets up with her friend at a surprisingly un-packed bar so they can both find a “prince,” someone to hook up with for the night who won’t ghost them the next day. They both know the odds are slim. “The chance of having great sex on a one night-stand is like 2.8%,” Allie sighs. 
When her friend manages to find a literal prince in line for the bathroom, Allie is on her own, roaming the streets of New York in search of love “on the least romantic night of the year.”
Meanwhile, pizza shop owner Owen (Callum Turner) is on a date with his girlfriend who breaks the news that she’d like to sleep with someone else tonight just to try it out. She encourages him to do the same, and he walks home, dejected, with an unrevealed engagement ring in his hand. 
Allie and Owen’s meet-cute is thrown off when he starts puking up the sushi he didn’t want to waste on his expensive date, yet they keep running into each other throughout the night as they look for other available singles. Of course, the plot keeps them from closing the deal with anyone else. In practice, this means that following your, well, not your heart, leads to comical misfortune. 
For the main characters, being unscrupulously horny leads to almost hooking up with an art thief, almost hooking up with a dopey singer who plays guitar in his underwear, and almost hooking up in your mother’s apartment (where your mother still resides).
Marriage, of course, is still on the table. When Owen’s mother suggests that he find some of his buddies to pick up women with, he responds that, due to the mandate, they’re already all married. (We never meet any of these friends as they are either enjoying the night or enjoying that they don’t have to take advantage of it.)
And Allie and Owen get trash-talked by the youth who are surprised to find these 30-somethings out and about. When two end up at a bodega fighting over the one available condom, a younger couple behind them balks, “Aren’t you kind of a little old?”
Even singer and popular “Repeal” campaigner Ezra has mixed views of the mandate, saying that it makes the night’s choice more significant. “Just maybe the fascists were right about this one,” he muses. 
Spoiler: At the end of the night, Allie and Owen don’t even have sex. After they finally reconnect with just a few minutes to spare before the mandate is back in effect, they decide to wait and give their relationship a real shot.
The concept of a no-sex mandate raises a lot of questions that are self-consciously answered by the film. It does explain some of the logistics; everyone has a tracker in their arm that checks hormone levels and flags the authorities if two nearby singles’ oxytocin levels spike at the same time. A politician on the news claims that teen pregnancies are “near zero,” STIs are down, and, comically, now “it’s a badge of honor to be an incel.”
But the film isn’t really about the mandate, and as such, doesn’t need to spend more time explaining it. Our attempts to understand this sci-fi world are as fruitless as the characters’ efforts to oppose it. “Repeal” is to the film’s characters what “resist” has become to today’s coastal dwellers, a futile but ubiquitous expression of one’s de rigueur politics. 
So, obviously, critics are complaining about the film’s lack of sex and anti-fascist campaigning. 
“‘One Night Only’ isn’t bawdy or trenchant enough for its concept,” <a href="https://apnews.com/article/one-night-only-movie-review-ec617723f2dd36722ba2267f66fa9be0">complained</a> the Associated Press. 
“‘One Night Only’ makes fun of purity culture, yet perpetuates it,” declares a Mashable <a href="https://mashable.com/entertainment/one-night-only-makes-fun-of-purity-culture-yet-perpetuates-it">headline</a>, followed by the improbable subhead, “The rom-com imagines a fascistic U.S. that&#8217;s not too different from the one we&#8217;re living in.”
“One Night Only Might Actually Be the Darkest Movie of the Year,” declared a Vulture <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/one-night-only-might-be-the-darkest-film-of-the-year.html">review</a> that called the film “thrillingly cynical.”
Never mind that the Left would have preferred an NC-17 commentary on #resisting Trump’s America. “One Night Only” isn’t interested in politics or dystopia or any “1984”-esque anti-sex themes it conjures. At its core, it’s about looking for romance when everyone around you is looking for sex, and it suggests that for the two to go together, the latter is going to have to wait.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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‘One Night Only’ Turns Hookup Culture Into The Real Villain

Culture

Entertainment

Movie Review

Superhero blockbusters have been hit or miss for years now. But “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is proof that the problem is not lack of an interested audience.
The latest Marvel Studios release was the fastest film to cross a half-billion at the domestic box office in just a week. This record was previously set by “Avengers: Endgame” in 2019, but it took that movie eight days to cross the $500 million threshold. 
“Brand New Day,” released on July 31, is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and stars Tom Holland and Zendaya. It’s the 23rd movie ever to make more than half a billion at the North American box office, and industry insiders are especially impressed by how well it’s performing on weekdays. Per <a href="https://deadline.com/2026/08/box-office-spider-man-brand-new-day-fastest-half-billion-record-1237028214/">Deadline</a>, it pulled in over $32 million this past Wednesday, which was the second best Wednesday ever for a non-opening title. 
Sony Pictures chief Tom Rothman credited the popularity of the film’s stars as being a huge draw for audiences, and speculated that the trend will continue. 
“They’re not popular because they’re popular,” he <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/spider-man-the-beatles-jumanji-sony-tom-rothman-interview-1236663221/">told</a> The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published earlier this week. “They’re popular because they’re talented, and they deserve their popularity. They’re lovely, decent, grounded, good-valued people, and they work really hard. So they’ve earned every ounce of their success.”
“All the geniuses who said that theatrical movies were dead, they’re not necessarily right. Actually, the theatrical marketplace is booming right now, and I’m excited about it. So I’m very optimistic,” Rothman told the outlet at another point.
Some reviewers have also pointed out that the movie marks a return to old-fashioned superhero storytelling. 
The official description states, “Fighting crime full-time as Spider-Man in a world that doesn’t remember him — and the pressure of seeing his old friends move on without him — sparks a change in Peter he may not have the power to control. But that transformation might also be the only thing that can stop a shocking new threat to the city and those he loves — a powerful villain no one can even see. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker, but he hasn’t forgotten them.”
It <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/spider_man_brand_new_day">currently has</a> a 90% critical rating and 98% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Spider Man

Spider-Man’s Massive Win Proves Audiences Were Never The Problem

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Anticipation is growing for The Daily Wire’s newest project, “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” as the full-length trailer for the film dropped on Thursday.
The subject matter couldn’t be more timely. A follow up to the hit 2020 action film “Run Hide Fight” — which dealt with a school shooting — takes place on a college campus that has been taken over by violent terrorists in a situation that’s chillingly true to life.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="YouTube video player" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sF4OZoLcCD0?si=QgNUsTl-S80SnK2S" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe> 
“When radical Islamic terrorists hijack a liberal college’s pro-Palestine encampment to enforce barbaric Sharia law on students and execute infidels in a makeshift caliphate, a ragtag band of red-blooded students, a security guard tired of ‘Uncle Tom’ smears and a Delta Force vet must arm up to save their clueless peers and keep America from surrendering to the enemy on its own soil,” the logline of “Infidels” says.
The full length trailer provides more details about the storyline. In it, Jonathan Majors appears as Captain Clay Saunders, a retired Delta Force soldier who visits a college campus to promote his new book. But the radical Islamic terrorists on campus stage a violent attack &#8211; coopting a hapless group of campus protesters &#8211; to try to stop Saunders from spreading his warning against the rise of Islam in America.
“There are three ways Islam will conquer the West,” Majors says during his campus speech in the trailer clip. “Through immigration, through the wombs of our women, and by using our nation’s freedom against us.”
“What makes them so dangerous? Their goals are not in this life, but the next,” he goes on.
His speech is interspersed with shots of radicals carrying out an attack on the venue. The attendees and Majors are seen fighting back against the terrorists. “Fight back or fall,” the trailer caption says as the heart-pounding drama unfolds.
There’s a shot of an injured pregnant woman, college girls being held hostage by the terrorist ringleader, and bombs being thrown.
But the good guys don’t take any of it lying down. Majors takes charge of the situation, echoing the words of his speech. “We cannot run or hide from what is coming,” he says from the stage. “We have to fight.”
“That’s the American way,” he deadpans while leading the charge against the terrorists.
The film marks a comeback to the industry for Majors. It’s reported to be a return to traditional action-packed storytelling that’s been missing from Hollywood for some time.
Producer Dallas Sonnier revealed a little bit about the inspiration, telling Page Six, “We all worship at the altar of [director] John Milius and Red Dawn. And Eastwood, and all the other wonderful action stars of the ’80s — Stallone and Schwarzenegger. Nobody’s making these types of movies anymore.”
As for the film’s star, Sonnier said, “Majors loved the script, loved shooting the movie, is so great in the film, and he is totally 1,000% behind it.”
“Run Hide Fight: Infidels” debuts on September 16 — only on DailyWire+.

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WATCH: ‘Run Hide Fight: Infidels’ Full Trailer Just Dropped

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Not since “Avengers: Endgame” have theatergoers been this happy. “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” just had the biggest opening weekend in box office history, beating out the Avengers finale with $360 million in sales. Audiences <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/spider_man_brand_new_day">love it</a>, and it’s proving that the age of superhero movies isn’t over; just the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hollywood-made-another-modern-woman-hero-heres-how-it-went">stupid ones</a>. 
It’s not hard to see why the movie has been so successful. Despite becoming the third Spider-Man actor in the span of just 15 years, Tom Holland stands on his own, exuding a boyish charm and an innocence without naivete that his predecessors never mastered (all due respect to Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield).
“Spider-Man” also manages a few cameos (Black Widow, Hulk) that make the story more dynamic rather than feeling like Marvel product placement. And if you haven’t yet seen Holland’s previous appearances in “Captain America: Civil War,” “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” you can watch this one anyway without getting lost.
Audiences will reward good storytelling, and “Brand New Day” hits Spider-Man’s sweet spot: sometimes light and funny, sometimes exploring deeper themes of isolation and belonging.
After the death of his aunt, Peter Parker has spent four years crime-fighting alone. In “No Way Home,” his secret identity was revealed, so in order to protect the ones he loves — his girlfriend, MJ, and his best friend, Ned — he asked for Doctor Strange to wipe the entire world’s memory of Peter. Now his only personal connection is to an NYPD detective who chastises him for not even knowing the names of her children. These days, he’s all business. 
But when government facilities start being attacked by a telepath who can jump into people’s minds to control them, danger finds Peter’s friends anyway, and he realizes that his secluded life is hurting more than just himself. 
Every good superhero film needs a compelling villain, and Jean Grey (played by Sadie Sink) delivers. She’s no Green Goblin or Doc Ock, but her powers are terrifying, and her anxieties existential. Producer Amy Pascal suggested that Jean Grey’s character represents much of Gen Z. 
“We picked Jean [Grey] because [director] Destin [Daniel Cretton] came in and said, ‘If you guys want to do a movie that is about the way people feel isolated, even more today than ever, because of our technology and everything else — and not just young people, but everybody, but it has afflicted young people so much — if we can do a movie that is about how reaching out and making a connection to someone is the most important thing that you can do, then I understand how to do this movie,’” she <a href="https://deadline.com/2026/08/spider-man-brand-new-day-amy-pascal-interview-1237016593/">told</a> Deadline.
Peter’s own struggle with hermit-hood ends when MJ (Zendaya) reprimands him for wiping her memory and staying aloof, not giving her the choice to decide for herself whether she wants to be a part of his life. Peter may have good intentions for his solitude, and even though he can boast that he’s fighting crime bosses and mechanical scorpions, he finds that the results of his isolation are the same as they would be for any of us: He loses sight of who he is and what he can offer the world. To quote the Good Book, “It is not good for the man to be alone.”
Near the end of the film, Peter delivers a key line that came from Holland’s ad-libbing. Speaking of a day spent shooting scenes at Aunt May’s grave, director Destin Daniel Cretton <a href="https://deadline.com/2026/08/spider-man-brand-new-day-director-explains-ending-sadie-sink-1237016256/">said</a> Holland “came up to me and said, ‘I’m just going to try some dialogue.’ I said, ‘Great.’ So we mic’d him up, and he squatted down, gave the flowers to Aunt May, and said the lines that ended up in the movie.”
“At the time, I didn’t think much of it,” Cretton continued. “I was just letting him improvise. But as soon as he said, ‘You’d be happy to know that I’ve decided I’m not going to do this alone anymore,’ that statement became the north star of the entire movie. Now it feels obvious that’s where the movie was always headed, but at the time we shot it, we didn’t really have that simple core idea yet. We worked backward from that point and realized, ‘That’s where we’re going.’ To me, that’s the entire movie right there.”
Tom Holland&#8217;s Spider-Man has the peculiar winsomeness needed to experience great personal tragedy and still believe in the goodness and sanctity of life. No more jaded superheroes, please. Our heroes should inspire us, and that&#8217;s exactly what this Spider-Man does.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

spiderman

Why ‘Spider-Man’ Is Succeeding Where So Many Superhero Movies Failed

Film

Spiderman

Superheroes

Tom Holland

The 1980s were a tamer time for movies. Films rated “R” for extreme content, &#8220;Die Hard&#8221; or &#8220;Flashdance,&#8221; for example, now seem benign when placed alongside the gorefests or sexually gratuitous scenes that are standard fare on today’s large and small screens. However, the Dustin Hoffman movie &#8220;Tootsie,&#8221; given a modest “PG” rating on its release in 1982, now feels shockingly boundary-pushing and transgressive when viewed through today’s culturally charged lens. 
The plot centers on brilliant but struggling New York actor Michael Dorsey, who is too much of a perfectionist to be offered work anymore. As his long-suffering agent, played by the film’s director, Sydney Pollack, warns him: “No one will hire you.” Providing moral support to a friend and fellow actor, Sandy, at her audition for the role of an administrator in a daytime TV hospital soap opera, Dorsey realizes he can simultaneously circumvent his difficult reputation and experience, as he puts it: “one of the great acting challenges an actor could have,” by pretending to be a woman and auditioning for the role. Michael duly becomes “Dorothy Michaels,” wins the part of hospital administrator, Emily Kimberly, and proves an instant hit with the viewers, production crew, and cast members alike. So convincing is he as a woman, the showrunner congratulates him as “the first female character who is her own person.” 
Despite his newfound wealth and professional success, Michael soon comes to realize how stressful being a woman can be. As Dorothy Michaels, he gains a terrifying insight into how women are routinely patronized by their male co-workers or simply ignored. The very title of the movie, &#8220;Tootsie,&#8221; comes from the demeaning term the show’s director uses to address women when he cannot be bothered to remember their names. Casual and sometimes threatening objectifications of women are brought home to Dorsey on numerous occasions. In one particularly fraught evening, the father of an actress he has fallen in love with proposes marriage to him, and upon returning home he is pursued to the point of assault by a male co-star who has stalked him back to his apartment. “This is a nightmare,” he mutters to himself as he tries to get rid of his amorous suitor without blowing his cover. 
Dorsey becomes desperate to leave the soap opera — partly because he cannot handle the exhausting attention “Dorothy” is receiving, and partly because he is falling in love with his beautiful co-star, Julie, who plays a nurse on the show. But his agent tells him he cannot break his contract and confess what he has done. Admitting that all along he was a man pretending to be a woman would be treated by the studio executives as “major fraud.” This declaration alone feels genuinely scandalous to a modern sensibility trained to internalize the mantra “trans women are women” as an unquestionable orthodoxy. The way Dorsey figures out a solution to his predicament — ad-libbing live on camera after a pre-recorded scene has accidentally been wiped — is one of the funniest <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBBPFkMG1hY">moments</a> in the whole movie.
And it is as a screwball comedy rather than social commentary that &#8220;Tootsie&#8221; works best. Not only does the film contain humorous insights into what New York was like in the early 1980s — as, for instance, one character saying it would be cheaper to get mugged than to get a taxi — but the real hero of the film is Dustin Hoffman. The brilliant but impossible Michael Dorsey we see at the beginning of the movie is clearly based on Hoffman himself. By playing off his real-life reputation as a notorious control freak, Hoffman displays remarkable generosity and humility as an actor, disarming the audience from the outset. 
Drawing on what psychologists might laud as the healthy ability to acknowledge one&#8217;s own absurdities, Hoffman plays Michael Dorsey absolutely “straight.” There is no knowing wink to the camera that this is really Dustin Hoffman under the wig, and none of the camp a less confident actor might have reached for in his depiction of Dorothy. That earnestness, paired with his evident willingness to mock his own reputation, establishes a safe, playful tone that allows the movie&#8217;s satire to grow organically without feeling mean-spirited. It is from this foundation that the film&#8217;s comedy of gender errors can flourish. 
None of this is to say the film asks us to excuse the men who patronize or endanger women. The director who can’t be bothered to learn a woman’s name is condescending, not confused. The co-star who follows Dorsey home and won’t leave is not a hapless victim of crossed signals; he is, by any reasonable measure, committing sexual assault. That Michael is genuinely rattled by it, entirely unprovoked as it is, tells you how little he understood before he had to live it, and it&#8217;s one of the film’s sharpest jokes at male expense.
Yet the film&#8217;s brilliance lies in its recognition that men and women are bound to disappoint each other and that a healthy society must learn to accommodate that awkward reality. While Michael Dorsey witnesses the ugly side of male chauvinism, he also discovers the impossible, romanticized ideals women harbor about the opposite sex. In a brilliantly comedic reality check, Dorsey, back to being a man, uses his inside knowledge to feed Julie, the actress he has fallen in love with, the exact chat-up line that she had earlier confided in him — while thinking he was Dorothy — was her dream for how a man would approach her. Far from sweeping her off her feet, the line freaks her out, and she throws a drink in his face.
It is a hilarious reminder that human beings rarely match the fantasies we project onto them. A mature culture doesn&#8217;t respond to this inevitable gap between expectation and reality with outrage. It accepts that romantic and social interactions are a messy business where we must learn to forgive each other’s inevitable shortcomings.
This is a skill a healthy society still needs alongside its capacity to name real wrongdoing because most of daily life isn&#8217;t made up of &#8220;Tootsie&#8221;-grade sexism but of much smaller frictions: the clumsy joke, the misread cue, the tactlessly phrased opinion. For those types of interactions, a functioning, pluralistic society relies on an unwritten social contract: the presumption of good faith, sometimes called the benefit of the doubt. Civil society flourishes not because people stop making mistakes, but because a healthy culture defaults to reading most missteps as foolishness rather than malice.
This presumption of charity is the bedrock of social trust. It acts as a buffer against paranoia and lets people speak, collaborate, and navigate their differences without constant fear of social excommunication. Naturally, bad characters exist; some people are genuinely manipulative or worse. But a society that structures its everyday norms around the worst of its members, rather than its ordinary ones who are all too capable of daily disappointments and calumnies, ends up asking everyone to live in a permanent defensive crouch.
There is a reason everyone who meets Dorothy Michaels falls in love with “her.” Dorothy is patient, unflappable, endlessly wise about other women’s problems and without appetites or wounds of her own, the ideal of a woman precisely because she is a performance, not a person. Michael is talented but insufferably arrogant, capable of friendship and ruthless exploitation in the same afternoon. Julie is warm and funny but dragging the wreckage of a messy love life and a habit of choosing men who treat her badly. Neither of them is anyone&#8217;s fantasy. What &#8220;Tootsie&#8221; understands, and what a culture chasing moral perfection keeps forgetting, is that real intimacy is only available to people who can tolerate the whole, flawed picture of somebody else, essentially the version of them that lets you down and misjudges the moment. Dorothy can be loved by everyone precisely because she is unreal. Loving an actual person is a harder and far more interesting kind of work.
The film&#8217;s real gift, then, is not naivety about human nature but proportion in how we respond to it. By letting us laugh at how men and women clumsily relate to each other, the film treats indignity as something survivable, even comic, rather than a mortal wound. It reminds us that a mature response to the disappointments of the opposite sex is neither to pretend them away nor to let them become the only thing that ever happened to you, but to meet them with the resilience to make sure they don’t get the last word. In a world obsessed with phantom standards of perfection, the messy, frustrating reality of genuine human relationships offers a more satisfying reward.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

GettyImages-529338939

What A 1982 Comedy Teaches Us About Men And Women

Dating

Gender

Relationships

Women

Academy Award-winning Russell Crowe revealed a lot about his own values, giving a thoughtful answer when he was asked about which movies should be required viewing for young men, specifically Gen Z.
Crowe, who won the coveted Best Actor award for his role in &#8220;Gladiator,&#8221; was asked to look back at his filmography and explain which movies he thought every young man should watch. He based his answer on what values and lessons the younger generation could take away from the movies he&#8217;d chosen to make.
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&#8220;That&#8217;s kind of a very serious question,&#8221; Crowe began with a smile, adding, &#8220;It would probably take me a month to write a dissertation.&#8221;
Crowe then selected three of his movies — 2000&#8217;s &#8220;Gladiator,&#8221; 2003&#8217;s &#8220;Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,&#8221; and 2005&#8217;s &#8220;Cinderella Man&#8221; — and explained what he believed young men might learn from each of them.
<h4>&#8220;Gladiator&#8221;</h4>
&#8220;Gladiator&#8221; was first on his list because he said it would teach young men about &#8220;honor and the importance of la familia.&#8221;
Crowe has often talked about the fact that family, and one man&#8217;s mission to avenge his loss, is the heart of that film. He felt so strongly about that particular point that he pushed back — hard — when producers and even director Ridley Scott wanted to add a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/russell-crowe-reveals-why-he-refused-to-do-a-sex-scene-for-gladiator">sex scene</a> into the movie.
&#8220;When we were shooting that film, there was a lot of pressure. The studio, the producers [thought] there should be sex between Maximus and the female characters. I just kept pushing back,” he said in a previous interview.
&#8220;This is the story of a man avenging the death of his wife and his child,” Crowe explained. “There cannot be a moment in that journey where he stops and has sex with somebody. It doesn’t make any sense because then that destroys the journey.&#8221;
The end results spoke for themselves: Scott ultimately sided with Crowe, agreeing that a sex scene would take away from the film&#8217;s &#8220;moral core.&#8221; The finished product netted them not only Crowe&#8217;s Best Actor statue, but also the Best Picture Oscar. (Crowe has <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/russell-crowe-blasts-gladiator-2-for-lacking-moral-core-that-made-the-first-one-great">also said</a> that the reason &#8220;Gladiator 2&#8221; failed to capture the audience in the same way was that it strayed from that &#8220;moral core.&#8221;)
<h4>&#8220;Master and Commander&#8221;</h4>
The second film Crowe listed was &#8220;Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,&#8221; a period piece set in 1805 and loosely based on the &#8220;real-life naval exploits of British Captain Lord Thomas Cochrane.&#8221;
The actor said that film, which did not garner anywhere near the commercial or critical success he saw with &#8220;Gladiator,&#8221; would nonetheless teach young men &#8220;about loyalty and fealty.&#8221;
&#8220;There are a few movies in the things that I&#8217;ve done which can have a profound connection to a young man,&#8221; Crowe continued before offering up his third and final selection. &#8220;Those two are very important, but there&#8217;s also a film called &#8216;Cinderella Man,&#8217; which is about somebody who&#8217;s facing the worst kind of situation, but he still goes forward. And because they go forward, they end up achieving what they set out to achieve.&#8221;
<h4>&#8220;Cinderella Man&#8221;</h4>
&#8220;Cinderella Man,&#8221; as Crowe noted, follows the career of the boxing champion who almost wasn&#8217;t: Jim Braddock. After a hand injury and the onset of the Great Depression stalled what had looked to be a promising boxing career, Braddock was forced to work manual labor jobs on the New Jersey docks — and rely on government assistance at times — to support his family.
In 1934, he got a chance to step back into the ring, but he wasn&#8217;t fighting for the title so much as for his own name. He won in a knockout — and kept winning. But as the prize money rolled in, Braddock didn&#8217;t spend it or even put it into savings. Instead, he tracked down every government agency through which his family had gotten aid, paying every cent back.
Dubbed &#8220;the Cinderella Man&#8221; due to his rags-to-riches story, Braddock went into the 1935 championship match at Madison Square Garden against World Heavyweight Champion Max Baer with 10-1 odds that he would lose. But years of working on the docks had given him the stamina to wear Baer down, and after 12 rounds, Braddock was named the new world champion.
With more than 80 acting credits to his name, Crowe could have answered that question dozens of different ways. The way he chose to answer, what he chose to pass on to the next generation, revealed that values he holds dear: family, loyalty, honor, and determination. And, as Crowe himself showed when the &#8220;moral core&#8221; was threatened during the filming of &#8220;Gladiator,&#8221; he is willing to fight for them when necessary.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Russell Crowe

Russell Crowe’s Three Movies Every Young Man Should Watch

family

Kennedy Centert

Parenting

For the last few weeks, Christopher Nolan’s &#8220;Odyssey&#8221; movie has been a more divisive topic for conservatives than the war with Iran. Is it woke or secretly based? Is it <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/what-christopher-nolan-couldnt-bring-himself-to-do">unfaithful to the original</a> (and if so, is that good or bad)? Is anyone who <a href="https://x.com/IMPERATORAUS/status/2078594683832541671">sees it</a> “an enemy of Western Civilization”?
As always, trillionaire entrepreneur and anti-woke crusader Elon Musk is an <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/movies/articles/elon-musk-gets-dragged-saying-173742252.html">eager participant</a> in these debates. This time, though, Musk isn’t just complaining. He’s proposed two ways to make a more conservative-friendly &#8220;Odyssey&#8221; and offered to put real effort behind making them happen.
 The first is a nonstarter. “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer,” Elon <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2079758604656316619">posted</a> to X last week.
I’m sure that’ll be technically possible, but it’s certainly not desirable. Replacing a creative process that involves real actors in real places where real light strikes real lenses with a guy at a keyboard entering prompts would not be a victory for conservative art. It would be the abolition of art itself. If anyone can, with a few keystrokes, make the exact movie he wants to see, then cinema ceases to play its role as a cultural artifact. It no longer emerges from and shapes the zeitgeist. 
The proliferation of AI-generated &#8220;Odyssey&#8221; adaptations Elon proposes might be aesthetically impressive, but these movies would not bring people together the way Nolan’s has — not even to hate them. They would be pieces of worthless slop that took no effort to create and leave audiences more isolated and demoralized than ever. AI can supplement filmmakers’ efforts, as Ben Affleck’s half-billion-dollar start-up <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/19/netflix-paid-587m-for-ben-afflecks-ai-filmmaking-startup/">InterPositive</a> promises to do. It cannot replace them.
Elon’s other <a href="https://x.com/martianwyrdlord/status/2079640327170728085?s=20">idea</a>, which he <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2079756091232227665?s=20">got</a> from pseudonymous Substack blogger <a href="https://americanreformer.org/2025/06/we-can-fight-the-left-without-repaganizing/">John Carter</a>, is more interesting: “give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek.”
Gibson is a political conservative and an able director who has proven his ability to handle epic material (&#8220;Braveheart&#8221;), make blockbusters that appeal to the religious right (&#8220;The Passion of the Christ&#8221;), and successfully immerse audiences in a wholly alien culture (&#8220;Apocalypto&#8221;). But if Elon wants to fund a mega-budget project for him, the Odyssey is the wrong choice.
Making Gibson’s &#8220;Odyssey&#8221; as a direct response to Nolan’s would seem reactive, derivative, and petty. Audiences would perceive a rushed-out remake funded by Elon’s money and motivated by his resentments as a political stunt and would understandably avoid it. Too many conservative artists seem content to make “conservative art” that appeals solely to committed conservatives. Instead of winning back the culture, they preach to the choir. Gibson is living proof that it doesn’t have to be this way, and saddling him with a project doomed to languish in the conservative ghetto would be a tremendous waste of his talents.
Fortunately, there’s a far better candidate for an Elon-funded, Mel-directed, swords-and-sandals epic poem adaptation: Virgil’s &#8220;Aeneid.&#8221; This masterpiece, written soon after Rome transitioned from republic to empire, follows a band of Trojans who escape the fall of their city, wander the Mediterranean for years, fight to win a new homeland in Italy, and fulfill their destiny by becoming the forefathers of Rome.
Virgil borrows settings, plot elements, and even his protagonist — the Trojan prince Aeneas — from the &#8220;Iliad&#8221; and &#8220;Odyssey,&#8221; but his poem has a different “vibe” than either of Homer’s epics.
In Homer, time is a flat circle. Odysseus failing to make it home would be bad news for Telemachus and Penelope, but it would have no world-historic consequences. Neither would Troy’s defenders driving the Argives into the sea. No matter what happens, things will go on as they always have. Men strive to win glory in battle, the gods engage in their petty squabbles, and Fate hands down its mysterious, arbitrary decrees.
Everything in the &#8220;Aeneid&#8221; bears the weight of history, and history itself has an end toward which it is progressing. For Virgil, this telos is Roman dominion. Rome’s divine calling is to “rule with all [its] power / the peoples of the earth.” Aeneas’ journeys and wars are sowing the seeds of universal empire, and Virgil constantly reminds us of the growth they’ll one day produce. 
Aeneas himself struggles under the burden of this lofty destiny. In some ways, his sense of duty makes him more human. C.S. Lewis <a href="https://dl.icdst.org/pdfs/files4/2cf71f4fa9ccbe4bbcd655eea8c822e6.pdf">describes</a> him as a “grown-up” compared to whom Achilles seems like a “passionate boy.” In other ways, it has the opposite effect. Edith Hamilton argues that, by the end of the poem, Aeneas “is not a man,” but “something strange and portentous.”
In the hands of most Hollywood directors, an &#8220;Aeneid&#8221; adaptation would probably lean toward the latter. Aeneas would have much in common with Paul Atreides in Denis Villeneuve&#8217;s &#8220;Dune&#8221; trilogy: an initially relatable hero swept up in prophecy until he becomes indifferent to the suffering he inflicts while trying to fulfill it.
But with Mel Gibson behind the camera, we could expect a very different &#8220;Aeneid.&#8221; For 2,000 years, Westerners have viewed the &#8220;Aeneid&#8221; as, in some sense, their own origin story. If Aeneas hadn’t succeeded, then our civilization — so profoundly shaped by Rome — wouldn’t exist.
The stakes are even higher for Christians. If God willed for his son to be born under Caesar Augustus, for the gospel to spread initially within the Roman Empire, and (in Catholic teaching) for the Church to be governed from the Eternal City, then Rome’s founding and rise must have been providentially ordained. 
Gibson is the perfect director to emphasize this angle, not only because he’s a conservative and a Catholic, but also because he’s done it before. For most of its runtime, &#8220;Apocalypto&#8221; is a thrilling chase film set in a society so alien that, as far as the typical viewer is concerned, it might as well take place on another planet. That all changes in the film’s final minutes, in which the chase is interrupted by the arrival of Spanish ships with cross-emblazoned sails. Their arrival signals the end of human sacrifice and the eventual conversion of the Americas.
This ending, in which world-historic forces impinge upon human drama in a way that foreshadows the providential triumph of the viewer’s own civilization, is positively Virgilian. 
Gibson could do something similar with the &#8220;Aeneid.&#8221; Begin with the unfamiliar: foreign language dialogue, Bronze Age brutality, strange gods, and mysterious portents. Maybe even show the Carthaginians engaging in human sacrifice — a practice not mentioned in the poem but well attested historically. Then, amid all that unfamiliarity, drop hints that Aeneas’ predicament is our predicament, that his virtues are those to which we should aspire, that the hearth-fire he carried out of Troy still burns for us — until finally, an &#8220;Apocalypto&#8221;-style climax reveals him as a founding father of Western Civilization and Christendom. All that he suffered, he suffered on our behalf.
An &#8220;Aeneid&#8221; like this would be unmistakably conservative without sacrificing mainstream appeal. It would be original rather than derivative. And for Elon Musk, it would be $100 million well spent.
***
Grayson Quay is the author of “The Transhumanist Temptation” and a former editor at the Daily Caller.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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The Epic Movie Elon Musk Should Be Making Instead

Elon Musk

Mel Gibson

Roman Empire

The Odyssey

After criticizing Christopher Nolan&#8217;s &#8220;The Odyssey&#8221; over its casting choices, billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk said he would be willing to bankroll an alternative adaptation of Homer&#8217;s epic. 
Musk, who previously <a href="https://deadline.com/2026/05/elon-musk-the-odyssey-christopher-nolan-cast-lupita-nyongo-helen-1236901704/">blasted</a> Nolan for &#8220;race-swapping&#8221; characters and suggested he was chasing awards with casting decisions, said he would be willing to pony up $100 million to produce an alternative adaptation directed by Mel Gibson.
It&#8217;s unclear whether Musk was serious, but the idea quickly gained traction after an X user suggested he bankroll Gibson&#8217;s version of Homer&#8217;s classic.
“I want Elon Musk to give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek,” the user <a href="https://x.com/martianwyrdlord/status/2079640327170728085">wrote</a> on Tuesday. 
“I’m down,” Musk replied.
The original poster was blown away by the response, and even if nothing comes of it, there are already alternative “Odyssey” projects in the works. 
Later Tuesday, Musk posted that his artificial intelligence (AI) platform, Grok, would take a stab at it.
“Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer,” Musk wrote, sharing a clip of a dialogue scene posted by another X user.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
I want Elon Musk to give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek.
— John Carter (@martianwyrdlord) <a href="https://x.com/martianwyrdlord/status/2079640327170728085?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 21, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The idea of competing adaptations has already begun taking shape. Days before Nolan’s blockbuster debuted, content generator Ash Koosha announced plans to release an AI-generated version of &#8220;The Odyssey&#8221; later this year.
Koosha is best known for debuting another AI-generated feature, “Dreams of Violets,” at this year&#8217;s Tribeca Film Festival.
“We very much hope that Christopher Nolan’s film, The Odyssey, is a raging success at the box office, and in some way that our version of the journey of Odysseus might further that success by bringing to theaters those who might not otherwise come out to see the film, simply because they are curious to see the ultimate in human creation and compare it to one man’s collaboration with AI,” Koosha <a href="https://www.euronews.com/culture/2026/07/15/ai-slop-version-of-the-odyssey-announced-prior-to-release-of-christopher-nolans-epic-block">said</a> of his version.
Meanwhile, “The Odyssey” has become the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/conservatives-had-concerns-about-the-odyssey-now-theyre-praising-it">biggest box-office opening of Nolan’s career</a>. 
While some conservatives initially criticized aspects of the casting before the film&#8217;s release, many have praised it despite those reservations. Others, however, continue to object to several casting choices, including the decision to cast Elliot Page, a transgender-identifying woman, as a male soldier.

Elon Musk Says He’s ‘Down’ To Fund A Rival ‘Odyssey’

Artificial Intelligence

Christopher Nolan

Elliot Page

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