This Week in Gossip (April 6)

TV drama, juicy romance gossip, and a weird smear campaign over a bad movie.

Citadel, a Show You’ve Definitely Seen, Is Falling Apart

Hey, remember Citadel? You know, Citadel! The iconic Amazon original series starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden? The dazzling new original IP from visionary filmmakers the Russo Brothers? One of the most expensive TV shows ever made? Does it ring a bell? Well, if you hadn’t heard of it before then the chances are you’re not going to watch it any time soon. Amazon is struggling to get people invested in its overpriced and middling attempt at the Bond franchise (which they now own because media monopolies suck.) Things have only gotten messier recently.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the show's second season has been pushed back from a planned Autumn 2025 release to next Spring, and all of its spinoff series are on hold, "a least until the second season is released, if not indefinitely." This is reportedly because Amazon MGM executives are not happy with what they've seen of the second season and that ballooning costs have them questioning their investment. The first season underwent a lot of reshoots, crew defections, and its budget increasing to eye-watering heights. There are currently two spin-offs on the air but neither garnered much in the way of critical or commercial attention.

Citadel was positioned as an international first: a franchise with multiple shows across various countries with a central plot it would all tie into. There’s the anchor show but there is also Citadel: Diana, the Italian show, and Citadel: Honey Bunny, the Indian one (and the best of the three, but the bar is very low.) There were plans for spinoffs set in Spain and Mexico but they seem to have come to a halt.

Yeah, it’s hard to get people’s attention at a time when there’s so much new TV and there’s a ridiculous amount of pressure on audiences to keep up with, if not all of it then a decent portion of the most buzzed-about titles. We’ve seen what happens when the major streaming platforms try to fling money at the problem in the hopes that bigger equals better. Is anyone still talking about The Electric State, mere weeks after its release, with its $320m+ budget? (Christ, the Russo brothers are hacks.)

Amazon has latched onto the idea that they need a big IP they can milk akin to the Marvel Studios formula. That means a big budget, an expansive universe, and potential for tons of spin-offs. Citadel was designed explicitly to meet these demands. It was set up to be a launching pad for international versions that all tie into the same grand narrative. But as we’ve seen time and time again, every attempt to recreate Marvel has resulted in endless cases of failure-to-launch. Remember the Guy Ritchie King Arthur franchise we were supposed to get? Or the Taron Egerton Robin Hood one? The DC Universe has seen more reinventions than David Bowie! Trying to reverse engineer an entire multi-pronged cinematic universe simply won’t work. You can’t create a movie just to set up films’ worth of sequels and expect people to care.

With Citadel, which I’ve watched more of than most people on this planet (read my piece on The AV Club for more!), you could see how this expensive mess existed solely to set up all of these future installments. The plot is just not interesting. It’s generic and unimaginative but also convoluted in its execution. The actors don’t have much chemistry. The action is poorly shot in the American one (the Indian one fares better.) And these three shows are stylistically and tonally near-indistinguishable from one another. The Indian production has more flair and actors with some heat, and feels like it has more roots in its local film industry than Hollywood. Still, it’s not enough. It’s all interchangeable with generic spy crap that reeks of “we have Bond at home.”

This whole mess has also just confirmed to me that the Russo brothers are hacks who couldn’t direct their way out of a paper bag. Yeah, they made Marvel work but the moment they try to be “original” or play outside of the rigid boundaries of that carefully curated mega-franchise, they reveal how incurious they actually are (yes, I’m still mad about The Electric State.) Their greatest skill is wasting ridiculous amounts of money in the most generic way possible. All that cash and this is all you could make?

If Citadel is quietly cancelled once this second season is finally released, it will be the least surprising development of this entire experiment. They’ve got Bond now. They’ll run that into the ground next. Sigh.

Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell!

Rumours started swirling on a variety of sites that Sydney Sweeney had split from her fiancé of three years, Jonathan Davino. To make the story even juicier, Sweeney was then seen at the wedding of the sister of her Anyone But You co-star Glen Powell. While TMZ claims that she wasn't there as Glen's plus-one, the headlines certainly wrote themselves at this revelation. Are they really just "very good friends" or is the heat more than good buzz for that movie that did surprisingly well at the box office?