Jonah Hill is trying to rehabilitate his image, but his new movie won’t help
In 2023, a woman named Sarah Brady shared a series of screenshots on her Instagram stories of texts from what appeared to be a possessive ex-boyfriend. Among other things, the texts berated her for spending time with friends he didn’t approve of, posting pictures of herself in a bathing suit (she is a surfer), surfing with men, and having friendships “with women from your wild recent past beyond getting a lunch or coffee or something respectful”.
These, he explained, were his “boundaries”, and if she wasn’t willing to follow them, he was not the right partner for her. The person who sent those texts, according to Brady, was the actor Jonah Hill.
No one has ever gotten cancelled for being a controlling asshole. In fact, controlling assholery is the key to many a man’s success. So, no matter how icky these texts were, they did not singlehandedly get Hill cancelled. Sure, the news cycle didn’t look good for him for a while. Therapists weighed in, pointing out that he was weaponising words like “boundaries”, “consideration”, and “respect” to legitimise his maniacal possessiveness. Mostly, though, the outcry stemmed from the blatant hypocrisy of a man who flaunted his supposed emotional availability the way Arnold Schwarzenegger flaunted his muscles in the ‘80s. Hill was the guy who made a documentary about his therapist. He even launched an apparel brand called “Meaningful Existence”. So yeah. Those texts didn’t look great.
Fast forward to 2026, and Hill is ready to forgive the public for seeing his true colours without his consent. His new movie, Outcome, is a star-studded comedy about a famous actor who is trying to find the person who is blackmailing him to avoid getting cancelled. Are you seeing any parallels? Keanu Reeves plays the star, named Reef Hawke, and Hill does his best to show us that Reef isn’t a saint. He had a hardcore heroin addiction and was mean to people. He’s a bit self-involved and lonely, but overall — great guy, just like the internet says.
The amount of talent in this movie comes across as extremely defensive. Hill may as well be crossing his arms and tapping his foot in couples therapy. Aside from Reeves, there’s Matt Bomer and Cameron Diaz playing his high school friends, David Spade and Kaia Gerber playing his neighbours, Laverne Cox playing part of his crisis PR team, and Martin effing Scorsese playing his former manager. Hill also appears, obnoxiously, as his lawyer.
Why is Scorsese in this movie, you ask? Possibly because he has a contract with Apple and therefore has no choice but to sell his soul to any Apple TV production that wants him. To be fair, though, he did an interview with Hill for Interview Magazine in which he seemed happy enough to talk about the project and the ills of gossip, so perhaps he’s just a true believer. He is also the best thing in the movie. His performance is strangely touching. He is the only part of the story that feels human. The rest is a self-indulgent, moralistic slog.
There is one scene in which Cox gives a lecture on the state of entertainment. “People got tired of having to work hard and actually be good at something,” her character says, launching into a timeline that begins with the laziness of the general population and ends with the dawn of the Kardashians and social media.
“The only way you can become rich and famous in this culture is to be a victim,” she says.
It would be too petty to accuse Hill of formulating that last line as a direct jab at Brady, but it also seems pretty on the nose. If nothing else, he might have stopped to consider how it might come across. Setting all that aside, though, the entire film has a brittle, cynical tone that casts Hollywood and the people who rely on it for entertainment as deeply shallow and uncultured. It is, in other words, both condescending and self-congratulatory, which is hard to stomach from a movie that is also bad. If you’re going to be patronising, you’d better make a good case for your own superiority. Two scenes with Martin Scorsese don’t cut it.
Movies about Hollywood are often out of touch (just look at Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly for a recent example), but a 2025 project from one of Hill’s once-frequent collaborators shows how it can be done. The Studio is Seth Rogen’s Apple TV series about a new studio head (Rogen) who balances his love of movies and desire to be loved by famous people with his responsibility to shareholders and general cluelessness. The series is significantly more star-studded than Outcome, but it makes sure that everyone has a chance to skewer their own persona (Ron Howard throwing a tantrum being the most enjoyable example). Most importantly, it never feels like the people involved have an us-against-them mentality about their audience.
Not every portrayal of Hollywood can be Sunset Boulevard or The Player or even The Studio, but Hill’s sour little comedy does him no favours, either as a director or as a star trying to convince us that he’s more than tabloid fodder.
