HBO has the canny knack of uncovering brilliant new show-runners and writer, or elevating established ones to new heights of popularity – and few have seen that more than Succession's creator Jesse Armstrong. A veteran of TV writing for decades, he's now a huge figure in the scene after nearly countless awards showered upon the brilliant media empire drama.
Now, it looks like Armstrong and HBO are back for another project with some very similar themes, in the form of the newly unveiled and trailed movie Mountainhead, which will hit Max (or Now here in the UK) on 31 May. It looks like a brutal satire of the billionaires who control so much of our information ecosystem, just like Succession was.
The movie will star Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef as four huge tech CEOs who gather for a week of isolation at one of their mountain lodges, to discuss their platforms and bond a little. Little do they know that while they're away the world will start to fall into major disruption and disorder, with some of the platforms that they own helping to spread disinformation about it all.
Lifting ideas from real life, given the changes Elon Musk has made to X (formerly Twitter) since he took it over, the four CEOs with hundreds of billions of net worth between them will hash things out in arguments and debates. It looks a lot like at least some of them will seek to dodge any and all responsibility for real-world situations, though.
The trailer is a brilliant little slice that gives a sense of the tension and hard-headedness that we're in for, and it's a safe bet that Armstrong will have come up with some diamond-sharp lines for these accomplished actors. The reaction in the YouTube comments demonstrates that the Succession factor isn't being ignored, either.
One person wrote: "Welcome back, Succession, we missed you." They've got hundreds of upvotes on that sentiment already, and I'd heartily echo it – Succession was so, so good and it's been sorely missed since concluding in dramatic style last year. Of course, Mountainhead is only a one-off movie, but it still looks like a great way to fill that void.
