Early in 2023, you couldn’t tell folks that Magazine Dreams wasn’t going to become the talked about movie of the year.
It had just had a splashy premiere at the Sundance Film Festival that January. It stars Jonathan Majors, an actor who had then been positioned as “a young Marlon Brando,” an heir of Sidney Poitier’s legacy. He plays a socially awkward, aspiring celebrity bodybuilder often seen doing pull-ups or some other exercise in his makeshift garage gym while staring at footage of his favorite muscleman for inspiration.
Written and directed by Elijah Bynum, Magazine Dreams was swiftly acquired by Searchlight Pictures. Its trailer teases subjects and themes that one could easily see becoming the basis for incessant social media discourse: body dysmorphia, Black masculinity, media, and celebrity obsession.
Never mind that it is not, actually, a very good movie, despite a flurry of glowing reviews out of Sundance from outlets like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. Majors’ performance is, reliably, superb, but, in this writer’s opinion, some of the intriguingly complex plot details—involving sexual assault, other forms of violence and romantic connections—don’t come together by the end of the film. Still, coming out of the festival, the feeling was that this is precisely the type of movie that so many love to hail as “important” or “Oscar bait.”
But none of that is particularly relevant to what Magazine Dreams is today.
The month after the film was acquired, Majors was arrested on allegations that he choked, assaulted, and harassed ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari. In June 2023, Rolling Stone reported an alarming pattern of domestic abuse allegations that extend beyond Jabbari’s, as well as controlling behavior stemming as far back as his days as a student at Yale University that followed him on film sets.
While all of that was happening, Hollywood was distancing itself from the actor. Majors was dropped by both his talent manager and his publicity firm, fired by Marvel, for whom he starred in both Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Loki, and taken out of consideration for various other projects. By January 2024, Searchlight returned the film rights of Magazine Dreams to the filmmakers, allowing them to shop it to other distributors.
In April 2024, Majors was convicted of one count of misdemeanor third-degree assault and one count of second-degree harassment of Jabbari.
Majors has denied all allegations and has never publicly apologized. Still, just this week, an audio of him allegedly admitting to having “aggressed” Jabbari was released.
That’s now the prism through which swaths of Hollywood and audiences see him as an actor—and through which they will approach Magazine Dreams, which heads to theaters Friday through Briarcliff Entertainment. (Well, save for some Tinseltown elite like Whoopi Goldberg, Michael B. Jordan and Matthew McConnaughey, who are all quoted in support of a redemptive arc for Majors’ career in The Hollywood Reporter’s cover story on the actor that ran last week.)
“I am not here for a J Majors resurgence this is crazy,” posted one X user the day the THR cover dropped. On Threads, cultural critic Rebecca Bodenheimer lamented Majors’ allies in the profile: “Of f---ing course. MBJ is a bit disappointing but TBH the number of men in Hollywood who ever break rank to support female victims is vanishingly small. And Whoopi…well, not surprising given some of her other statements.”
Meanwhile, on BlueSky a user posted, “The industry is ushering him back in…This honestly was quicker than I expected.”
But the answer to whether audiences will embrace Majors again depends on whom you ask. Briarcliff, for instance, seems to be living in its own bubble. In the THR article, the distributor’s CEO Tom Ortenberg seems confident that fans of independent film and bodybuilding will come out for the film, as will Black audiences.
“Anecdotally, we know that Black audiences—both men and women—are extremely enthused about the film,” Ortenberg told the publication. He added: “Based on what I’m seeing, people are rooting for Jonathan.”
Actually, Black audiences are a bit more nuanced when it comes to Majors and Magazine Dreams.
Racquel Gates, an associate professor of film and media studies at Columbia University, initially noticed that a lot of Black people were backing Majors following the allegations. “I actually saw widespread support among Black folks,” she told me on a video call. “So much of it seemed to be framed within this like, Oh, look at the system trying to take another Black man down.”
There’s truth to how Hollywood issues penalties to Black transgressors that seem to outweigh what they give their white counterparts and for lesser offenses (Will Smith comes to mind as does Isaiah Washington, who Gates mentioned)—and how white public opinion is then shaped. But systemic racism shouldn’t overshadow the transgression.
Regardless, the allegations against Majors, Gates noted, took a bit of a backseat in The Discourse, which drifted toward dissecting every move the actor made in the press. That included him telling Good Morning America that he aspired to be like Martin Luther King and President Barack Obama, attending the NAACP Image Awards with then-new girlfriend Megan Good on his arm and his statements in the new THR interview.
That all became ripe for frivolous social media discourse and the lens through which many would evaluate him and, by extension, his once buzzy indie film.
For many, Majors’ off-screen persona and the character he plays in the film, Killian Maddox, had begun to merge. It doesn’t help that audiences that choose to watch Magazine Dreams will see the actor as Killian descend into violence and attempt to woo a young white woman (Haley Bennett). (Jabbari is also white).
Gates, who has not seen Magazine Dreams, recognized even from the trailer that audiences would think that it “feels like it’s a little too close.”
No one should feel compelled to watch a film, particularly not one that centers an actor whose alleged off-screen behavior could be triggering or outright offensive. As Gates put it, “I think that there are enough talented people in the world that no industry has to tolerate people with bad and harmful behaviors.”
But their reasons may also point to a rising concern today about their relationship with art and performance. Their decision is often not based on the film itself but rather the conversation around the film and its star.
In many ways, Gates said, social media culture is “supplanting the primary engagement with his films such that he can become known to a certain group of folks primarily through social media—and not at all through his actual day job as an actor.”
The audio that emerged this week further complicated that.
“Allow me to warn you that it will be a triggering sit for more reasons than one,” critic Tomris Laffly posted on X about Magazine Dreams the same day the audio was released. “Among them is the fact that Jonathan Majors plays a Travis Bickle-like character. He is admittedly great in the movie. But MAN…”
Killian is indeed a troubled, increasingly disturbed character. So many of the film’s most difficult scenes to watch are when he’s responding to harm that has been done to him or reacting to his own dangerous actions. Unlike Travis Bickle, though, Killian is also Black.
Audiences were always going to have something to say about watching a Black man in a role that doesn’t fit within the confines of accepted Black masculinity. And others would raise eyebrows at the fact that the character becomes violent—not only because of the allegations against Majors but also because of the historical stereotypes of Black men. But that can feel more like a reflection of the viewer than the performance itself.
“I really do think we’re in this very strange moment where people have over-personalized the media that they engage with,” Gates said.
That’s true. And the consistent wave of social media posts from people claiming that a movie or image made them “feel seen” further proves that. But even Majors seems to understand that as part of his objective. “One of my jobs as an actor is to let people see themselves, to give them an opportunity to examine themselves through me,” he told THR. “It’s a service job in a way.”
The professor noted that that relationship between a viewer and on-screen image is shaped by the fact that so many audiences watch images through their personal devices.
“There’s this way where what you watch is now being understood as a referendum on your personal values,” she said. “When you have this very strange collapse along parasocial lines, I’m not surprised that people see this film as an endorsement of abuse and therefore avoid it.”
Or, see it as an extension of who Majors already is and not a performance, which harkens back to a historically racist perspective of Black actors like Lincoln Perry (professionally known as Stepin Fetchit), who was billed as “The Laziest Man in the World” and not simply performing.
There’s another issue that might be at play here that Gates mentioned. At a time when audiences are hypercritical of the type of Black images we see on screen, with good reason, there often comes a rather reductive question of: Do we need this movie right now?
“I think that had Jonathan Majors done a biopic about a nice political figure or something like that, we’d be having a very different conversation,” Gates said. “But he’s tackling this complicated thing and immersing himself, sacrificing his body for this part. But that doesn’t always line up with politics, respectability stuff.”
And had he played, say, a Martin Luther King type of character here, folks would likely feel a kind of way about an actor with his off-screen persona embodying a venerable figure. So, that wouldn’t exactly escape criticism either.
But criticism itself isn’t the issue here. Some of it has been useful and necessary, while other parts of it feel performative and have little to do with Majors or Magazine Dreams—and everything to do with the purveyor themselves. Because so much of the discourse takes place on social media, where people’s desire for likes and perceived virtue is prioritized above all else, complexity is not valued and neither is self-assessment.
Without that, it rings very hollow.
