It has been genuinely hilarious to watch Leonardo DiCaprio doing press for One Battle After Another. It’s partly his Gen X befuddlement. Like, I’m sure at least four of his pointedly Gen Z girlfriends have told him about TikTok, as did their millennial counterparts about Instagram. But he’s not a digital native and has, it seems, no interest in getting familiar with that world. (Teyana Taylor, on the other hand? Born for any screen, baby.)
Still, he remains committed to the press tour, as he always does. He threw all of his considerable movie star weight behind Lily Gladstone on the Killers of the Flower Moon awards circuit, which I’m quite sure legitimized her to the Academy1. He takes the business of movies very seriously, even if the TikTok of it all has made it seem very unserious.
And despite how incongruous he feels on social media, the TikTok generation does seem to love the guy. I wonder if Leo is to Gen Z as DeNiro is to millennials—a totemic figure, shorthand for “talent,” whose heartthrob status is more theoretical because it peaked so long ago. When Letterboxd went to the U.S. Open to ask players about their Four Favourite Films2, Leo did bananas numbers. A good half a dozen of his movies showed up! And Alcaraz having Shutter Island in his list was a better plot twist than the one in Shutter Island, frankly.
I’ve been watching (and honestly, contributing to) Letterboxd’s ascendancy with a lot of interest. Aaaand a fair amount of skepticism. On the one hand, I just really like the app. I like logging movies, I like making lists, I like creating idiosyncratic tags like “scream queen Justin Long” and “Hard to Watch, based on the novel Stone Cold Bummer by Manipulate.” I really enjoy their social media presence, and especially their Four Favourite Films question on the red carpet. There’s no way I’m the only Letterboxd member who has her four faves ready to go, just in case I bump into someone wielding a microphone with the iconic orange, green, and blue.
But their red carpet presence has proved so enjoyable that the Hollywood press machine has successfully co-opted them. They’re not just on the red carpet, but part of the press junkets, and participating in promotional events. More and more industry people rehearse their answers, hyperaware that there’s an audience judging them. and I were talking the other day about the unlikely frequency with which A Woman Under the Influence appears—clearly a movie with some feminist cinephile bonafides. One of my four favourite appearances was Ava DuVernay’s, because Black Knight is a legitimately bad choice and she legitimately did not care. But she still managed to hit the unspoken Letterboxd guidelines to ensuring a diverse, idiosyncratic, and impressive list.
Star-powered press tours have been part of the Hollywood ecosystem since the dawn of Hollywood itself, but the stops on said tours have shifted significantly towards outlets and individuals who come with specific audiences. If you want movie people—film snobs, cinephiles, whatever you want to call geeks like me—you want Letterboxd. If you want young people, you want TikTok. If you want middle American whites, you need the New Heights podcast; if you want coastal American whites, you go for Call Me Daddy or Good Hang. The variables have changed, but the math is basically the same.
I still remember Leo and Marty3 doing press for Gangs of New York4, and discussing the film sets. They filmed Gangs in Italy, but, as the title gives away, it’s set in New York. And Leo said something so corny that it has stuck with me for two decades: “people keep asking me, ‘how was Italy?’ and I always say, ‘Italy? I was in New York the whole time!’” Thats the kind of press he was trained to do—slightly over-the-top, sticky soundbites that can be remixed slightly for each interview. It’s the same kind of training Lady Gaga got for A Star is Born. Her repetition of the line about how “there can be a hundred people in a room, and all it takes is ONE believing in you” became meme-worthy because it’s the kind of line that was made for a pre-internet world. Neither she nor her team anticipated that people would catch on, let alone make montages “exposing” a movie star for recycling a line in what is essentially a campaign stump speech. It snagged for us because in 2018, we were shifting away from that deeply analog press machine.
The TikToks, Letterboxd lists, and podcast appearances all bear some markers of authenticity, being more casual, more about making incredibly rich and famous people seem relatable and down to earth. They want to seem like good hangs who enjoy the company of your parasocial faves, who display an unexpected depth of knowledge about something you care about, or who can lip sync to some funny audio. But that doesn’t make it any less scripted or calculated than what Lady Gaga was doing in 2018, or what Leo was doing in 2003. The ultimate goal of using star power to get butts in seats is the same.
All of this to say, I don’t consider it a harbinger of Hollywood’s doom that its most bankable franchise-less star is peddling his movie wares in these TikTok streets. Nor am I lamenting the death of Film Criticism™️. I’m more noting that the man who appears to understand Hollywood success—both critical and commercial—better than any of his peers is showing us where the power lies right now. And that there’s no way he’s Team Conrad.