There’s a new Safdie brothers film coming out this year. The project hails from A24 and is primed for an awards season push. It’s got serious star power in front of the camera. It focuses on a sport that’s rarely gotten its due on the big screen. The budget reportedly comes out to $50 million–plus, making it one of the most expensive productions in A24’s history. If everything goes to plan, it’s the kind of movie that could define the next stage of a filmmaker’s career. Somehow, all of this applies—separately—to Josh and Benny Safdie.
While the Safdie brothers have been darlings on the New York indie scene since the late aughts, it was their recent collaborations with A24 that landed them on the radar of cinephiles. With the one-two punch of Good Time and Uncut Gems, the Safdies delivered urban crime thrillers possessing a uniquely manic energy in which a down on his luck protagonist (Robert Pattinson and Adam Sandler, respectively) repeatedly digs himself into an even bigger hole. These are movies that keep you glued to the screen, even as you're squirming uncomfortably in your seat—anxiety bottled into high art. I still hyperventilate when I think about Howie Ratner hitting up the auction house with his father-in-law’s money before throwing it all away.
With critical acclaim comes opportunity, especially when Uncut Gems became one of the highest-grossing films in A24’s tastemaking catalog. The Safdie brothers were tapped to direct a reboot of 48 Hrs. in addition to another collaboration with Sandler set in the world of baseball and sports memorabilia. Then, however, cracks began to form in the Safdie partnership. Josh was slated to direct the Sandler project by himself—the first time that a Safdie would have gone solo since the 2008 drama The Pleasure of Being Robbed (also directed by Josh). “It just felt like, OK, there’s things that I want to explore that don’t necessarily align right now with Josh,” Benny explained to GQ in July 2023. “So it’s a divide and conquer mentality. He wants to tell this story, he can go and do that. I’m going to go and do a couple of other things. It seems like a natural progression for how things have happened.”
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True to his word, Benny’s kept busy, cocreating and starring in the Showtime series The Curse with Nathan Fielder and appearing in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Oppenheimer, and Happy Gilmore 2. (Benny will reunite with Christopher Nolan on The Odyssey; role TBD.) As for Josh, while he did direct Sandler’s latest comedy special, Adam Sander: Love You, the baseball movie is currently on pause. But the fact that all these different projects are being juggled by the Safdies confirms what we feared: The brothers have, creatively, chosen to part ways. “It’s a natural progression of what we each want to explore,” Benny told Variety last year. “I will direct on my own, and I will explore things that I want to explore. I want that freedom right now in my life.” Here’s how I’m taking the news:
Anyway, freedom for Benny comes in the form of The Smashing Machine. Based on the documentary of the same name, The Smashing Machine follows MMA pioneer Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) during a three-year stretch in which he competes in Japan’s Pride Fighting Championships. Reviews have been mostly positive, with Johnson’s transformative role earmarked as a potential Oscar contender, while the film is tracking to earn $8 million to $12 million in its opening weekend. If that holds, The Smashing Machine will need strong word of mouth—and the Rock’s star power—to get out of the red.
Josh, meanwhile, is also sticking to sports. On Christmas Day, A24 will release Marty Supreme, a biopic loosely based on the life of Marty Reisman as he aspired to reach the pinnacle of ping-pong in the 1950s. A $70 million ping-pong movie competing with an Avatar sequel over the holidays is incredible in and of itself—and that’s before we get into Timothée Chalamet rocking the same mustache I had my freshman year of college:
As a result, we’ve officially entered Safdie Season: A festive time for cinephiles that, based on the brothers' track record, will operate on a chaotic wavelength. But while getting two Safdie movies to savor in the span of a few months is cause for celebration, it’s hard not to dwell on what could have been. What if the Safdies had rebooted 48 Hrs.? What if they’d codirected another crime thriller to round out an unofficial, anxiety-inducing trilogy about loathsome New Yorkers? What if a shared love of Sandler had the power to keep the brothers together?
That the Safdies’ split seemed to happen just as quickly as their ascension has also raised some eyebrows, leading to unsubstantiated rumors that the professional relationship between the brothers had soured. It’s probably nothing more than speculation, but when Benny curiously omitted his brother during an acceptance speech at the Venice Film Festival, you can’t help but fixate on it. Anyone who’s worked with a loved one—be it a family member, romantic partner, or close friend—knows that mixing the personal and the professional can be treacherous territory.
In any event, one has to hope that the creative split will embolden the Safdies as artists, rather than hamper them, and that there’s no bad blood bubbling beneath the surface. Besides, just because the Safdie brothers are off doing their own thing right now doesn’t mean they can’t work together down the line (see also: Oasis). For now, let’s just appreciate the fact that both brothers are being given every opportunity to impress, with A24 doling out big budgets and release dates with the Oscars in mind. If everything falls into place, we could have an awards season featuring two brothers with competing sports biopics from the same studio. That’s history right there, you understand?
