I'll be real with you: the first trailer for Mainstream does not make it look good.
Directed by Gia Coppola, Mainstream follows a young woman (Maya Hawke) who teams up with a random guy (Andrew Garfield) to dive into the world of online influencers in an attempt to become famous. Their strategy for this is to loudly "do and say nothing" — a strategy that has worked well for numerous internet celebrities like Patrick Starr and Jake Paul, who appear in the film as themselves, being annoyed at Garfield's approach. The film also boasts Jason Schwartzman, Death Note and Paper Towns' Nat Wolff, proto-Paul-brother Johnny Knoxville, and Vine star Casey Frey.
Watching actual YouTubers in real life is already irritating and exhausting, so I can't imagine wanting to sit through an entire emoji-packed movie about deliberately insufferable fake YouTubers being deliberately insufferable and fake. But a lot of people still watch those Jackass-style "creators", so I guess some may watch this. It's their choice.
Mainstream is scheduled for release on May 7.
CORRECTION: April 8, 2021, 9:10 a.m. AEST Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this post mixed up the Wolff brothers. Nat Wolff, who appears in Mainstream, was not in Hereditary and the Jumanji reboots — that's his brother Alex. That detail's been updated and we regret the error.
