Issue 002 — March 2026
Screen Share Week of 17 March 2026
This Issue

Power.

Who has it. Who loses it. What it costs.

Lead Film: Network (1976, Sidney Lumet)
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A note from the editor

The week I started putting this issue together, a billionaire’s son finalised his takeover of a major American studio. Separately, an AI company that promised it wouldn’t train on your likeness quietly changed its terms. And Sidney Lumet’s Network — made fifty years ago — described both events more precisely than any piece of current journalism I read. That’s either a great argument for cinema, or a terrifying one about how little changes. Maybe both.

Power is this issue’s subject. Not power as spectacle — the throne rooms, the monologues, the slow-motion falls from grace. The mechanics of it. Who holds it quietly. Who loses it without noticing. What the camera sees when it decides to look directly.

Network is in the archive. The Zone of Interest is in Flashpoint. The Godfather is in the Argument — and so is Gomorrah, which is a better film about power than most people realise. The television list this week is almost entirely about institutions: what they protect, what they cost, who they were built to serve.

As always — stay if it resonates.

Niall Editor, Screen Share
▶ The Rewind | A film from the archive that speaks to right now
Each issue we reach back into cinema history for a film that earns its place in the conversation right now. Not a classic for a classic’s sake — something that speaks to the week’s theme in a way that might surprise you.
Network (1976)
1976 · Sidney Lumet · Written by Paddy Chayefsky

Network

Network is the Rewind pick for Issue 002 because it describes precisely what is happening this week, not just generally. The Paramount-Skydance merger — where a billionaire’s son explicitly negotiated favourable media coverage in exchange for regulatory approval — is the film’s boardroom scene rendered in real time. Paddy Chayefsky’s central insight — that corporations owning the microphone will amplify any outrage that serves profit, and silence any truth that threatens it — has become the operating manual of 2026’s information landscape.

Howard Beale’s famous speech: “When the 12th-largest company in the world controls the most awesome propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?” In 2026, it’s not the 12th-largest company. It’s the first.

Fifty years on, the film has not aged into a historical curiosity. It has aged into a documentary.

💬 The Argument | One question. No verdict.
Every issue we pick one interpretive question and lay out two honest readings — no winner, no consensus. The point isn’t to settle the debate. It’s to make the debate worth having.
“The best films about power make us root for the wrong person. Is that manipulation — or the whole point?”

There’s a flattering story we tell about cinema’s relationship to power: that the best films expose it, interrogate it, hold it up to the light. The more honest version is that the best films about power make us want to belong to it. The Godfather doesn’t just depict a crime empire. It makes the crime empire look like home. Which leaves a question about what the camera is actually doing — and whether that matters.

Reading A — “The Camera Is Lying to You”

Every time Vito Corleone speaks softly and the score swells, you’re being worked on — and the film knows it. The Godfather doesn’t just depict a crime empire; it makes you want to belong to one, because Coppola lights it like a Renaissance painting and scores it like a lullaby. Succession’s Logan Roy is a bully, a narcissist, and an emotional abuser — but the show frames his contempt as vigour, and half the audience called him the only real person in the room. That’s not neutral storytelling. It’s the camera taking sides, and we should at least notice when it does.

Reading B — “You Were Supposed to Feel That”

The discomfort of rooting for Tony Soprano isn’t a bug — it’s the entire engine of the show. Gomorrah goes further: Ciro Di Marzio has no redemptive arc, no Hollywood gloss, no likeable quirks to soften what he is — and you’re still watching at 1am, genuinely invested. The show isn’t asking you to find him charming. You just do. That’s not manipulation; that’s the mirror working. If you’d sat back unmoved, nodding sagely that crime is bad, you’d have learned nothing about why people follow charismatic monsters, or why power is so difficult to resist from the inside. Tragedy isn’t a warning label. It’s a mirror, and it only works if you’ve already leaned in.

Which reading lands for you?
The Camera Is Lying 0%
The Mirror Is the Point 0%
Your vote:
🎭 Discover | Not genre. Emotion.
Algorithms sort by genre. We sort by feeling. Pick the mood you’re in and we’ll find something worth watching.
Which would you watch tonight?
⚡ Flashpoint | The moment something ignited
Cinema has always been political. Flashpoint looks back at the moment a film said something it wasn’t supposed to — and what happened when it did. History as context for the present.
The Zone of Interest (2023)
2023 · Jonathan Glazer

The Zone of Interest

The Zone of Interest shows the mundane domestic comfort of the Höss family — the commandant of Auschwitz, his wife, their children — while the camp operates just over the garden wall. You hear everything. You see nothing. Power through omission: the most radical choice Glazer could have made, and the most unsettling. The Höss family tends its garden, hosts dinner parties, sends children to school — while exercising total power over human life metres away. The banality of that power is the horror.

At the 2024 Academy Awards, Glazer used his Best International Film acceptance speech to draw a direct line between the Holocaust and the conflict in Gaza — in a room full of Hollywood’s most powerful people. Half the industry stood and applauded. The other half was furious. The argument has never fully resolved. A filmmaker using his own moment of institutional power to say something the institution didn’t want said: that’s the Flashpoint.

📡 The Signal | AI in film and television — the deal, the resistance, the tool
The Signal tracks AI’s intersection with the film and television industry. Three items each issue: a deal, a resistance, a tool. No hype, no panic — just what happened and what it means.
The Deal

On March 5, 2026, Netflix announced the acquisition of InterPositive, a stealth AI startup founded by Ben Affleck in 2022. The system builds AI models from a production’s own dailies, then applies them in post to assist with colour, relighting, and visual effects. Netflix is offering the tools to its creative partners rather than selling them commercially; Affleck joins as a senior adviser.

The Resistance

ByteDance’s AI video model Seedance 2.0 launched on February 12, 2026, and within days users had generated unauthorised clips featuring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and copyrighted IP. The Motion Picture Association sent a cease-and-desist, SAG-AFTRA condemned the “blatant infringement,” and ByteDance indefinitely halted its global API rollout.

The Tool

In March 2026, AI firm Asteria — co-founded by filmmaker Bryn Mooser and Natasha Lyonne, with backing from CAA and Comcast Ventures — launched Continuum Suite, an AI-enabled cloud operating system for film and TV production. Unlike generative video tools, it functions as a unified workflow layer covering creative development, production coordination, and post.

📡 The Weekly Pulse | What the conversation looked like this week
Three film cards every week: the most talked-about, the most divisive, and the one most people missed. Signal versus noise — what’s actually worth paying attention to right now.
Most Talked About
Scream 7
Kevin Williamson / Paramount, 2026
The franchise’s biggest opening weekend on record — $63.6M domestic — arrived shadowed by years of behind-the-scenes power struggles: Neve Campbell locked out over a pay dispute she called a question of “value,” Melissa Barrera fired, directors cycling in and out before original Scream scribe Kevin Williamson took the helm himself. The boycott didn’t stop the crowds; if anything, the controversy was the marketing. What Scream 7 really documents isn’t Ghostface — it’s who controls a franchise, who gets paid for building it, and what it costs a woman to say her labour is worth more.
Most Divisive
The Bride!
Maggie Gyllenhaal / Warner Bros., 2026
Gyllenhaal’s gothic monster romance — Jessie Buckley as the Bride of Frankenstein, Christian Bale as the creature, set against 1930s Chicago — has split audiences cleanly down the middle. The division isn’t really about quality; it’s about what you think women in stories are for. Buckley’s Bride refuses the role written for her — companion, reward, mirror — and the hostile half of the audience finds that unforgivable.
Audiences split — no consensus
Most Overlooked
Shelter
Ric Roman Waugh / Amazon Prime Video, 2026
Dismissed as another Statham vehicle — and it is a Statham vehicle — but its engine runs on something sharper: a MI6 director hauled before a political inquiry to answer for a surveillance programme run outside government approval. Bill Nighy’s bureaucrat-in-the-dock scenes carry more menace than any set-piece. At a moment when questions of institutional power and unaccountable intelligence are anything but fictional, Shelter deserves a second look.
Streaming now
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Scream 7
The Bride!
Shelter
📺 On Screen | Television worth your time
Screen Share covers film and television. This section tracks what’s worth watching on TV right now — curated picks currently airing, coming soon, or waiting to be found.
Airing Now
Hulu/ABC · Season 2 · Weekly from Feb 23
Paradise
A president murdered inside a utopia built for the powerful. Season 2 weekly from Feb 23.
HBO/Max · Season 4 · All 8 episodes streaming
Industry
The best drama on TV about what capitalism does to the people who serve it. All 8 episodes streaming now.
Apple TV+ · Season 3 · Just wrapped
Tehran
Mossad agent Tamar plus Hugh Laurie as a UN nuclear weapons inspector. Geopolitical power at its most tightly wound. Just wrapped.
HBO / Max · 2024 · Complete
The Penguin
Oswald Cobblepot clawing his way from under Carmine Falcone's shadow. Power seized from the ground up. The best origin story of the streaming era — and the most honest one about class.
On the Horizon — Worth Tracking
Disney+ · Season 2 · March 24
Daredevil: Born Again
Wilson Fisk as mayor — criminal power laundered through legitimate office. March 24.
Apple TV+ · Final Season · March 27
For All Mankind
Final season. Geopolitical power replicating itself in space. March 27.
Hulu · April 8
The Testaments
Atwood’s Booker-winning Handmaid’s Tale sequel. Three women, Gilead, one act of resistance. April 8.
HBO / Max · 4 Seasons · Complete
Succession
The definitive study of inherited power. The Roys fight for the throne while dismantling everything it stands for. Ties directly into this issue's Argument — rooting for the wrong person was always the whole point.
Under the Radar
Sky/HBO Europe · Complete series
Gomorrah
Camorra as alternative state. Ties directly into the Argument section. No glamour, no loyalty, still draws you in.
FX/Hulu · 2024 · Complete
Shōgun
Feudal power forensics. Strong new viewer entry point.
HBO · 2024 Miniseries
The Regime
Kate Winslet autocracy portrait. Criminally underseen.
Netflix · 4 Seasons
Borgen
The definitive TV study of political power. More honest than Succession, more human than The Crown. S4 subtitled “Power and Glory.”
The Continent | Subtitles Required
The best television being made right now is frequently not in English. This section exists because subtitle aversion is costing you some of the sharpest writing, directing, and performance in the medium. No excuses.
France — Canal+ — 3 Seasons
Baron Noir
French
A fictional French president forged in betrayal and backroom deals. Baron Noir is the political drama the English-speaking world keeps reinventing without getting right. The best study of how power is actually accumulated — not through vision, but through patience and ruthlessness.
France — Canal+ — 5 Seasons
Le Bureau des Légendes
French
Deep-cover intelligence done properly. Consistently rated among the best television ever made, and still underseen outside France. Institutional power, fractured identity, and the cost of living inside a fiction. Start it this week.
Italy — Netflix — 3 Seasons
Suburra: Blood on Rome
Italian
Crime, church, and government locked in a three-way power struggle for Rome’s coastline. Brutal, gorgeous, and more honest about Italian politics than anything you’ll read in a newspaper. The power theme of this issue runs through every frame.
Germany — Sky / Netflix — 4 Seasons
Babylon Berlin
German
Weimar Republic, 1929. Political power rotting from the inside as the centre fails to hold. The most expensive German television production ever made — and worth every frame. If you watch one European series this year, let it be this one.
Behind the Curtain | The Industry Story You Weren’t Meant to See Clearly
Labour, money, censorship, consolidation — what’s actually happening behind the films and shows you watch. Not entertainment news. Not gossip. The structural shifts.
The Consolidation

Ellison’s Paramount: The First Year

David Ellison’s Skydance completed its acquisition of Paramount Global in late 2024, ending Shari Redstone’s 30-year family control of the studio. Within months, Paramount+ lost its standalone identity in several markets, key creative executives were replaced, and the company signalled a pivot toward franchise consolidation over auteur-driven projects. The studio that made The Godfather, Chinatown, and Network is now run by a tech heir with a mandate to cut costs and chase IP.

Why this matters: Ellison’s Paramount is the clearest case study in what happens when power in Hollywood shifts from film families to tech money — and what gets lost in that transfer.

More info here →
The Machine

Amazon Embeds AI Into the MGM Pipeline

Amazon has been quietly deploying AI tools across its MGM acquisition — automated script coverage, AI-assisted casting analysis, and AI-generated marketing materials for international distribution. Much of this has happened without public announcement, surfacing mainly through trade reporting on workflow changes inside the studio. Writers and directors working with MGM have reported AI-generated notes appearing in development feedback without disclosure of their source.

Why this matters: The absence of transparency about where AI is entering the creative pipeline is the 2024 version of studios not disclosing test screenings — except the stakes are higher.

More info here →
The Labour Front

WGA’s AI Monitoring: One Year In

A year after the WGA secured AI protections in its 2023 contract — including the right to know when AI is used on a project and a prohibition on AI-generated material counting as source material for writer credit — enforcement has been uneven. The guild’s AI monitoring committee has documented dozens of complaints, but studios have challenged several cases on definitional grounds, arguing that AI “assistance” doesn’t constitute AI “generation.” The semantic battle is where the real power struggle is happening.

Why this matters: The WGA won the argument in 2023. Whether they win the enforcement is the question that will define the next decade of writers’ rooms.

More info here →
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