Fighting In The War Room: A Movies And Pop Culture Podcast · Katey, Matt, Da7e and David

522 – Taylor Swift The MCU, What is Vanity Fair Doing?, Weapons (Spoilers!)

August 13, 2025·1 hr 11 min·5 clips

The show opens with an elevator prompt in honor of Nobody Too and its elevator fight scene. Katie Rich says she is going to bring TV into it and immediately reaches for Pete Campbell and Tondra from The Elevator. She also lands on the Dying for Sex scene where Michelle Williams first meets Rob Delaney and his burrito drips onto the floor of the elevator. Gross, but memorable, and she insists it belongs among the all-time great scenes on screen. Matt Patches answers with The Totality of Devil, the M. Night Shyamalan produced elevator movie about going to hell. What if there was a devil in the elevator? Yeah. What if? Devil in the elevator? And we're going to... And I'm going to go with Terminator 2 Judgment Day. The crew keeps the joke alive by treating the prompt like a test with trap doors and escape hatches, which fits the show's habit of making a simple question feel like a scramble. The conversation then shifts to Vanity Fair and the layoffs there. The hosts talk about the magazine's age, saying it is in theory a hundred years old but really got revived in the late eighties. They bring up 92 and Tina Brown. Graydon Carter comes up as the person who wanted a very clear mission for the magazine. The discussion settles on the idea that every magazine needs to be something and needs to give readers a reason to subscribe. The show contrasts that with individual writers who can simply post things that entertain people. Vanity Fair and similar sites get described as vulnerable to the generic flattening of the SEO era. The recovery from that is tied to AI, which is framed as a likely beneficiary of the cleanup. The hosts also complain that a lot less garbage nonsense may be written, even if the labor consequences are ugly. The close moves into plugs, with Dave Gonzales, Katie Rich, Storm of Spoilers, Prestige Junkie, and Katie Rich's interview with Michelle Williams on Dying for Sex all getting airtime. It wraps with the F I T W R Blue Sky handle and the week's lightning-round question about favorite onscreen elevator moments.

As heard by us

Elevator jokes give way to Vanity Fair business talk, and the room stays lively throughout.

The episode opens on a brisk lightning round of on-screen elevator moments, moving from Nobody Too to Dying for Sex, The Elevator, The Totality of Devil, and Terminator 2 Judgment Day without losing tempo.

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Why you'd press play

You get elevator jokes, a Dying for Sex mention, and a playful debate about favorite on-screen elevator moments.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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