This is why mainstream pop culture journalism in 2025 sucks

When reading an article, I shouldn't have to answer my own goddamned questions

A few minutes ago, I was scrolling through my social media feed, and I happened upon a Variety article with this headline:

Anthony Mackie Says an Unreleased Film From the ‘Worst Director to Ever Direct’ Almost Cost Him His ‘Hurt Locker’ Role: ‘They Offered It To Somebody Else’

Immediately I thought, “Oh, I wonder what the unreleased film was!” So I pull up the article, and what I discovered was that the article never actually bothered to mention what the unreleased film was.

The article does, however, include a quote from Anthony Mackie where he says, “We shot that in 2007, and I remember I was doing a movie in North Carolina with quite possibly the worst director to ever direct. Ironically, because of that the movie never came out.”

So I go to IMDb Pro and pull up Mackie’s page, figuring that maybe I can figure it out from there, since you can check where projects were filmed, but I couldn’t find one with that approximate date that would’ve matched up. So I thought, “Well, surely it can’t be so easy as to just Google a combination of ‘Anthony Mackie,’ ‘2007,’ and ‘North Carolina.’”

But it was.

Oh, sure, you have to go through a page of links to outlets who’ve just copied the info from the Variety piece and posted in in their own articles, but by the second page, the answer is right there in your face: Bolden!

As you can find out if you click this link, Bolden! was “a big-budget independent feature about the life of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden, starring Anthony Mackie, Jackie Earle Haley and Omar Gooding,” with Wynton Marsalis serving as executive producer and composer and Dan Pritzker doing dual duty as writer/director.

A quick flip back to IMDb Pro found that Bolden - sans the exclamation point - did eventually come out in 2019, but here’s what happened in the interim:

• Pritzker thought that the material he filmed in 2007 didn’t work, so he shelved it.

• In 2009 and 2010, Pritzker took another stab at it, doing rewrites and reshoots, but he ended up shelving the project again.

• In 2014, Pritzker decided to have another go at it, but Mackie wasn’t available to work on the film by that point, so the role of Bolden was recast with Gary Carr instead.

• There were more reshoots in 2016, but the film was finally finished in 2018 and then released in 2019, with only just over 10% of the original 2007 shoot surviving to the final version.

Interesting side note: Mackie does still have a film credit as Bolden, but it’s in the 2010 film Louis, also directed and co-written by Pritzker, which stars Anthony Coleman as a young Louis Armstrong and definitely looks…interesting.

If the filming of Bolden! was anything like the filming of Louis, though, I can imagine that it probably did drive Mackie up the wall. Based on the trailer for the eventually-released version of Bolden, however, it looks like it went in a different stylistic direction, although who knows what the original vision for the film was in 2007?

Anyway, I have digressed away from my original point.

The Variety article talked up the unreleased film, which in fact wasn’t an unreleased film, it was just a film that suffered countless reshoots before finally making its way to release. And the writer could’ve figured that out if they’d just taken a cursory trip to Google to pose that question. But guess what? If you go to ChatGPT and ask it to name the unreleased film that Anthony Mackie did in North Carolina in 2007, it tells you that “the actual title of that unreleased movie hasn't been disclosed publicly.”

Pop culture journalism in 2025 sucks. I mean, it doesn’t have to. I just proved it doesn’t have to. But it does if we maintain a piss-poor standard like this in the mainstream outlets.