He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.
At a time when comedies and — more precisely, mid-budget comedies — are viewed as no longer viable in theaters, a movie from 2025 quietly delivered a solid box-office performance. The movie’s profile was no doubt boosted by a trio of popular stars and positive reviews, factors that seem to be working in its favor during its home-video run too. The film has passed a major milestone on the streaming charts, after having tripled its reported budget in theaters. The film stars an MCU alum, the co-lead of 2022’s biggest movie, and an up-and-coming actor who has often been rumored to be in the running to play James Bond.
The film was directed by David Freyne, and premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It was given a theatrical release by A24 in the domestic market in November 2025, where it grossed $35 million against a reported budget of $12 million, before debuting on Apple TV earlier this year. The movie combines romance and fantasy for a will-they-won’t-they narrative brimming with philosophical insight and tender observations about true love. It stars Elizabeth Olsen as a recently deceased woman who is trapped in purgatory, where she must decide whom she wants to spend an eternity in the afterlife with — her husband or her first love, played by Miles Teller and Callum Turner, respectively.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
The movie in question is Eternity; it debuted in theaters at around the same time as another fantasy comedy, Good Fortune, starring Keanu Reeves, Aziz Ansari, and Seth Rogen. Both movies received positive reviews from critics and audiences. Eternity now holds a “Certified Fresh” 77% critics’ score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “Marrying a clever spin on the afterlife with an infectious sweet streak, Eternity is a spiritual successor to classic romantic screwball comedies that’s worthy of their company.” But it’s the film’s “Verified Hot” 90% audience score that seems to be propelling its streaming success. According to FlixPatrol, Eternity has spent more than 40 days on the domestic Apple TV charts so far, despite competition from major titles such as F1, The Gorge, and Greyhound. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
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David Freyne, Pat Cunnane
Tim White, Trevor White