Few have soared as high and crashed as hard as Jonathan Majors. There was a point where it seemed like he was going to be the biggest star of all time, then came the whole beating up his girlfriend thing and it all went away. Is he ready for a comeback? Looks like it’s coming whether the world is ready for it or not.
Right before everything fell apart for him, Majors was going to be the villain in a whole phase of Marvel movies (before they pivoted to Dr. Doom) and there was Oscar talk about a bodybuilding movie called Magazine Dreams.
When Majors was found guilty of assaulting and harassing his former girlfriend Grace Jabbari, Searchlight dropped the film. He was also dropped from starring in Lionsgate’s 48 Hours in Vegas, about Dennis Rodman. He hasn’t done any studio films since his conviction, but he did get a role in an upcoming indie film called Merciless, courtesy of director Martin Villeneuve, the younger brother of Dune director Denis Villeneuve.
Magazine Dreams will now come out through Briarcliff Entertainment and hit theaters on March 21, 2025, almost two years after it drew mountainous acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival.
The movie was written and directed by Elijah Bynum, and Majors stars in it as an amateur bodybuilder named Killian Maddox. The cast includes Haley Bennett, Mike O’Hearn, Harrison Page, Taylour Paige, and Harriet Sansom Harris.
Briarcliff is no stranger to courting controversy. In October, the company premiered the Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice, which made about $17 million worldwide. There’s always the possibility that Magazine Dreams will reignite Majors’ career, but who knows.
In a review of the movie, critic David Rooney called Majors’ work in the movie an “all-in performance for the ages, layered with as much vulnerability as anger, and it’s to Majors’ credit that our hearts ache for Killian even — or perhaps especially — when he’s out of control.”
Part of Majors’ appeal was his ability to channel an almost primal rage that would seethe underneath his eyes. It made him simultaneously vulnerable and terrifying, and it was hard for audiences to look away. That dynamic is apparently on full display in the film, as at one point Killian apparently gets so mad at a painting contractor that he struggles not to lose his temper.
“I control my emotions, my emotions don’t control me,” he says in the film. Before his assault charges, his anger and rage were seen as superhuman acting abilities. Looking at it through the lens of his conviction, it might be more of a case of art imitating life.
“Its flaws notwithstanding, Magazine Dreams is a profoundly unsettling experience from which it’s impossible to look away,” Rooney said.
Earlier this year, Majors appeared on ABC News Live, and told Linsey Davis that the whole ordeal of his arrest and conviction was “very, very, very hard, and very difficult, and confusing in many ways.”
He bemoaned that “everything has kinda gone away.” Time will tell if everything starts to come back after his supposedly incredible performance in the upcoming film.