‘Whalefall’ is ambitious and ridiculous and beautiful. I love that it exists.

Hello hello, Popculturology fans. Welcome to the Friday newsletter.

I caught Whalefall last night, and I need you all to see it in a theater this weekend so that studios keep making wonderful and weird films like it.

Speaking of wonderful and weird films, do you remember when the first Dune movie was released in the aftermath of the pandemic and people just wanted it to make enough money to hopefully convince Warner Bros. to greenlight a sequel? Dune: Part Three lives in a very, very different world. The upcoming conclusion to Denis Villeneuve’s trilogy — which faces off against Avengers: Doomsday this December — gets the Empire cover treatment this week.

Anyone else impressed at how good Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya’s characters look knowing that Dune: Part Three takes place SEVENTEEN YEARS after Dune: Part Two? It must be the spice.

And after all, you’re my Whalefall

If you’ve been reading Popculturology since pretty much its inception as a newsletter, you know that I’ve been looking forward to Whalefall. I read the book when it came out in 2023, and I wasn’t surprised when movie rights were almost instantly snapped up.

Seeing Whalefall on its opening Thursday was never a question for me. I very much wanted to see how Brian Duffield and his team at 20th Century Fox turned Daniel Kraus’s novel about a guy who accidentally gets eaten by a sperm whale and has only an hour left on his air tank to survive could be turned into a film.

Would it be 127 Hours? Would it be The Martian?

Whalefall is unlike any film I’ve ever seen.

It’s claustrophobic. It’s not for the squeamish. It’s even goofy at times. But it’s beautiful. And I love that we live in a world where Whalefall exists.

There are sequences in Whalefall unlike anything I’ve seen in a movie. Kraus’s novel was already ambitious, and Duffield’s adaptation puts a ton of trust in the source material — and the audience — as it tells the story of Jay Gardiner on the big screen.

We should be talking about Austin Abrams as an Oscar contender for Best Acting. He is the heart of Whalefall. If Abrams doesn’t sell the experience of being pulled into the belly of a whale and desperately trying to escape, Whalefall doesn’t work.

Please go see this one in theaters this weekend. We need movies like Whalefall to show studios that they shouldn’t just focus on having Michael Bay make more Transformers sequels.

• 📖 Whalefall Director Brian Duffield Talks Book Changes, Test Screening Challenges and How Those Alien Rumors Started (Brian Davids, The Hollywood Reporter): “So we worked really hard to not kill Austin Abrams, and Zach would’ve also killed me if I killed Austin Abrams since Resident Evil was shooting with him right after we wrapped. Keeping him safe and healthy was good for all of us.”

‼️ THE BIG STORIES

Soderbergh steps in for Reeves on The Batman sequel

When news broke earlier this month that production on The Batman Part II had paused so that director Matt Reeves could step away for “a family matter,” it was unclear if that delay would push the film’s release date. (The Batman sequel has already been delayed so many times that Robert Pattinson will be older when it releases than Christian Bale was when The Dark Knight Rises hit theaters.)

It feels like a delay was incoming based on the news Thursday that Steven Soderbergh would complete principal photography on The Batman Part II while Reeves was away.

“As Matt Reeves continues to attend to an ongoing family matter, Steven Soderbergh, as an admirer of Matt’s work, approached Matt and will step in, with the full support of DC Studios, to help the writer-director complete the final weeks of principal photography on The Batman Part II,” DC Studios said in a statement. “Matt and Steven will work closely together with the actors and crew to fulfill Matt’s vision of the film.”

This is actually kind of sweet ...