Alexander Larman

Well, it had to happen. Taylor Swift has been the most talked-about person in the world for some time now. After 2023 saw her conquer both stadiums and the world’s cinemas with her Eras Tour film — which, with a current gross of $249 million, is now the highest-earning concert movie ever made — her remarkable year has been capped off both with the enormous success of her re-recorded album 1989 (Taylor’s Version) and now, the news that TIME magazine has awarded the thirty-three-year-old musician the accolade of Person of the Year. She follows in the footsteps of everyone from Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. There are several noteworthy features of the accolade.

Netflix’s royal saga The Crown has been one of its biggest hits of the past few years. Sacrificing subtlety for big, dramatic arcs, with award-winning performances by a cast that has, in a stroke of genius on the part of its creator Peter Morgan, changed every two seasons, it’s been the most gripping and rich account of the post-war British royal family ever put on screen. It has been helped both by an enormous budget and the useful way in which the present-day battles between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and the rest of the Firm have come to mirror The Crown’s increasingly eventful power struggles among the various branches of the family.

Did you see Wish last weekend? Chances are, according to the box office receipts, you didn’t. The latest big-budget Disney extravaganza, with the voices of Ariana DeBose and Chris Pine, was expected to be a hit, grossing a decent $50 million on its opening weekend. Instead, to the studio’s chagrin, it came in third with a comparatively measly gross of $31.7 million, bested not only by the second weekend of the Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, but, considerably more surprisingly, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, which soared past early estimates to come in with an impressive $32.5 million. Not bad for a film without any bankable movie stars (sorry, Joaquin), mixed reviews, a B- CinemaScore rating and a subject with which American audiences are not intimately familiar.

Most men approaching the age of eighty-six would be forgiven for taking it easy. Not so Sir Ridley Scott: legendary filmmaker, director of the eagerly anticipated epic Napoleon and, it appears from the recent interviews he has given, someone who does not give a single solitary cuss about how he, or his film, are received. He is fresh from telling historians who have criticized his film’s factual accuracy that they should “get a life” and that “when I have issues with [them], I ask: ‘Excuse me, mate were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then.

The trailer for David Fincher’s latest movie, the hitman thriller The Killer, promises that admirers of one of cinema’s most talented directors will be getting their money’s worth, whether they see it during its theater release or wait for it to premiere on Netflix (which paid for it), just as they did Fincher’s previous film, Mank, and his serial-killer series Mindhunter. There will be a lead performance by Michael Fassbender — returning from several years away from the big screen racing cars — that will, as usual, combine icy charisma with brute physicality. There will be impressively gloomy cinematography, courtesy of Erik Messerschmidt.

When David Fincher’s latest picture The Killer premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, it was to a more muted reception than might have been anticipated. Part of this may have been because, with the actors’ strike very much in force, its stars Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton were nowhere to be seen, with Fincher himself the only A-lister on the red carpet. But it was also undoubtedly because the finished film was not remotely what many had anticipated. Early hype suggested that The Killer would follow the exploits of Fassbender’s anonymous assassin as he (inconveniently) develops a conscience, presumably setting up an existential quandary.

After a paralyzing 118 days, the actors’ strike is now, finally, looking like it’s over, following hard in the footsteps of the similarly resolved WGA strike a couple of weeks ago. The SAG are claiming victory over the studios, who took an exceptionally long time to ratify demands that included everything from increased fees for work appearing on streaming services, to protections regarding the use of AI, to reproduce actors’ images on screen. There were many times during the strike when it looked as if both sides were simply too far apart to achieve a resolution. In the end, money talks: the major Hollywood studios and streaming services realized that without the swift agreement they needed, there would be a drought of product in the marketplace next year, and beyond.

In the Sixties, the rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones  — even if it was more of a hype battle dreamt up by their respective publicity departments — meant that whenever one band released an album or single, the other was never too far behind. Sometimes, they even explicitly referenced their competitor’s work; the Stones’s 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request was “inspired” by the Beatles’s LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released earlier that year. Yet after the Beatles split up in 1970, the rivalry seemed to be at an end, and the deaths of John Lennon in 1980 and George Harrison in 2001 apparently put paid to any possibility of the Liverpudlian band continuing in any form. Oh, how wrong we were.