Zak Penn on 'Free Guy,' Writing Villains, and the Fate of 'PCU'

Aug 19, 2021, 04:00 PM

Very excited to have on Zak Penn this week, who, in addition to being one of the writers of Free Guy, is also a credited writer on a series of HBO classics from my younger days: Last Action Hero, PCU, and Behind Enemy Lines, among others. On this episode we talked a lot about Free Guy and the state of Hollywood’s internal struggle between IP-branded ventures and original films, but we also dove into some of his other work: What happened with the writing of Last Action Hero, the first script Penn sold; the gratifying legacy of PCU as a cult classic and the oddity of its unavailability now; and why X-Men: The Last Stand gets a bad rap. It’s a super-sized episode because we had a ton of ground to cover; if you enjoy what you hear, please share it with a friend! If this episode does well maybe we can convince the studio swells to put out that 4K Blu-ray collector’s set of PCU we’ve all been clamoring for.


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Very excited to have on Zak Penn this week, who, in addition to being one of the writers of Free Guy, is also a credited writer on a series of HBO classics from my younger days: Last Action Hero, PCU, and Behind Enemy Lines, among others. On this episode we talked a lot about Free Guy and the state of Hollywood’s internal struggle between IP-branded ventures and original films, but we also dove into some of his other work: What happened with the writing of Last Action Hero, the first script Penn sold; the gratifying legacy of PCU as a cult classic and the oddity of its unavailability now; and why X-Men: The Last Stand gets a bad rap. It’s a super-sized episode because we had a ton of ground to cover; if you enjoy what you hear, please share it with a friend! If this episode does well maybe we can convince the studio swells to put out that 4K Blu-ray collector’s set of PCU we’ve all been clamoring for.

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