For the average moviegoer, the holidays are one of the best times to make a trip to the theater. There was a bit of everything on the slate at the end of 2024: prestige dramas (The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown), family friendly fare (Mufasa: The Lion King, Sonic the Hedgehog 3), and heartwarming romances for the sickos (Babygirl, Nosferatu). But the enlightened few (read: me) know that the December offerings are merely an amuse-bouche before the real cinematic feast to follow: Dumpuary.
Traditionally, January is viewed as a dumping ground for studios to release projects they have little faith in—look no further than 2024’s Night Swim, a horror movie about a sinister swimming pool. (It’s as bad as it sounds.) But Dumpuary has also been home to films that were hailed as instant masterpieces (Paddington 2; Nic Cage knows what’s up) or went on to become cult classics (negative reviews be damned, Michael Mann’s Blackhat was always a banger; they didn’t understand it). Then there’s the actors who’ve turned Dumpuary into their cinematic stomping grounds; Gerard Butler (Den of Thieves, Plane) and Liam Neeson (Taken, The Grey) chief among them. My point being: Whether you’re seeking out knowingly schlocky trash, an underappreciated gem, or a wholesome bear eating his body weight in marmalade, this is a sneaky fun month at the movies. Like NBA fans grinding tape during summer league, someone plugged into Dumpuary has earned their stripes as a hard-core cinephile. Anybody can watch The Brutalist; real ones pre-ordered their tickets for Bald Mark Wahlberg Presents: Mel Gibson’s Flight Risk weeks ago.
As a longtime Dumpuary enthusiast, however, I noticed something strange in the 2025 lineup. Allow me to present the evidence:
Wait for it.
[Francis Dolarhyde voice] Do you see?
Much has been made about the distressing state of men in the real world: They’re becoming lonelier, more conservative, and they’re exhibiting traits of toxic masculinity. Now, we’ve also got something going on with dudes on the big screen: They are, quite literally, becoming animals. There’s Wolf Man, writer-director Leigh Whannell’s remake of the classic Universal monster movie, featuring Christopher Abbott transforming into the titular creature. There’s Better Man, the musical biopic about British pop star Robbie Williams, who’s been reimagined as a chimpanzee. (To quote the film’s tagline: Fame makes monkeys of us all.) Finally, there’s Dog Man, the feature film adaptation of Dav Pilkey’s graphic novel series of the same name about, you guessed it, a hybrid dog-man who’s a police officer. (Not to be mistaken with Luc Besson’s Dogman, which is about a dude who loves dogs.)
I think I speak on behalf of the entire moviegoing public when I say: What the fuck? What is happening to men? What has led to our cinematic counterparts devolving into their most primal, animalistic selves? Is this just a bizarre aberration of Dumpuary, or the beginning of a trend? If it’s the latter, were the men of Hollywood inspired by Amy Adams’s work in Nightbitch? Am I wildly overthinking this? Maybe. Is brain fluid leaking from my ears? Definitely.
To help make sense of everything, we might as well examine these films and their animal men on a case-by-case basis. After abandoning its plan to launch a Marvel-style “Dark Universe” of monster movies because of the commercial failure of 2017’s The Mummy—we’ll always have the bungled IMAX trailer with a downright Lynchian audio mix—Universal has opted for stand-alone projects, the best of which has been Whannell’s remake of The Invisible Man. Starring Oliver Jackson-Cohen as Adrian Griffin, an optics scientist who fakes his death before tormenting his ex-girlfriend Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss), The Invisible Man is a legitimately unnerving thriller that explores modern-day misogyny and gaslighting. (Also, further evidence that men are not OK.) Now, Whannell returns to the Universal monster well with Wolf Man, which follows unemployed writer Blake Lovell (Abbott) as he takes his wife and daughter to his childhood home in rural Oregon to escape city life and, more importantly, repair a fractured marriage.
Obviously, there’s something lurking in the woods once they get there; one thing leads to another, and Blake is bitten by a violent, humanoid creature. Blake’s transformation in Wolf Man is gnarly as hell, akin to succumbing to a fast-acting virus. But like The Invisible Man, the real meat of the story (pun unintended) is what the animalistic transformation represents. Blake had an estranged relationship with his late father, a paranoid survivalist who had a temper. As Blake’s marriage falters, he worries he’s becoming a very familiar monster: his dad. It’s intriguing thematic ground, and one that many dudes can relate to: What’s scarier than the sins of the father being visited upon their sons? (Oh, right: Transforming into an actual werewolf.) For this Dumpuary Animal Man Movie, I’ll reward Wolf Man one paw up. (One paw down for the questionable lighting that made some of the nighttime scenes impossible to see.)
We can all agree that someone becoming a Wolf Man was essential to a movie called Wolf Man, but the same can’t be said for Better Man. If you aren’t familiar with the career of Robbie Williams, I’ll let you in on a secret: He’s not a talking chimpanzee, he’s a human man from Stoke-on-Trent. But Williams has likened his pop star heyday to being a performing monkey; besides, when musical biopics are a dime a dozen, what better way to stand out from the pack than making the protagonist a dead ringer for Caesar from Planet of the Apes? But here’s the wildest thing of all: When you watch Better Man—and I say this as one of the few people in America who actually did—it doesn’t take long to get accustomed to the sight of Monkey Robbie Williams. The movie is Doing the Absolute Most at all times, so much so that you’ll buy into a CGI chimp being the frontman for a pop band, getting jerked off by a fan, and shooting heroin. I’m honestly not kidding. I also wholeheartedly believe the “Rock DJ” dance number is when cinema peaked as an art form.
Williams being a monkey isn’t just a curious gimmick, either. It embodies the pop star’s issues with self-doubt and addiction; the monkey(s) on his back he can’t shake off no matter how successful he becomes. In fact, having his on-screen incarnation take the form of a chimp might’ve helped soften the blow for Williams, who reflects on the low points of his life with raw, painful honesty, including missing out on visiting his grandmother when she was on her deathbed. Traditionalists might turn up their noses to something as bonkers as Better Man, but the film wasn’t (sorry) monkeying around: Director Michael Gracey justified the approach with real ingenuity and chutzpah. We see Robbie Williams how he sees himself. In that spirit, this Dumpuary Animal Man Movie gets one hairy opposable thumb up from me.
But while Wolf Man and Better Man use the guise of animals to explore the pain and insecurities within ourselves, Dog Man is downright unhinged. As in Pilkey’s graphic novel, the eponymous Dog Man is a combination of a human cop, Knight, and his police dog, Greg, who are both gravely injured on the job. Turns out, the only way to save man and his best friend is by surgically combining them, attaching Greg’s head to Knight’s body. Thus, Dog Man is born.
This is an abomination on multiple fronts. For one, the film is Cronenbergian body-horror aimed at children that invites questions like Whose consciousness has taken over the Dog Man? and Was the operation a human rights violation? We also don’t need our country’s youth consuming more copaganda; we’ve suffered enough with Paw Patrol. And as a cat owner, I feel compelled to speak up against Dog Man’s Petey (voice by Pete Davidson), an orange tabby deemed the “world’s most evilest cat.” Rebuttal: Cats aren’t evil, they just can’t be bothered sometimes—and I have the science to prove it. Lastly, Dog Man is meant to take place in the same cinematic universe as Captain Underpants, which isn’t a complaint, but fascinating all the same. Dog Man may be honoring its source material, but we’d be better off if this franchise was put down. Two paws way down.
So there you have it. The Dumpuary Animal Man Movies have their own (sometimes questionable) reasons for existing, which leads me to believe this is a strange coincidence rather than everyone in Hollywood suddenly deciding that every man—or Amy Adams—must turn into an animal. With my investigation complete, I continued with my regular Dumpuary viewing. Next on the agenda was a screening for the 2026 Best Picture front-runner, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. As someone who considers Gerard Butler’s dad cinema one of our nation’s finest treasures, I couldn’t have been more thrilled to dive into the latest adventures of Nick “Big Nick” O’Brien, a man who understands you come to Benihana for the ass. I didn’t want anything spoiled before my viewing, but as an intrepid journalist, I looked up the definition of pantera. Reader, I hope you’re sitting down for this:
The Hollywood we knew is no more—it’s a zoo.
