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Emma Stone’s Genius Twisted Sci-Fi Masterpiece Is Officially HBO Max’s Newest Hit

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A two-time Oscar winner with one of the finest filmographies of the 21st century, Emma Stone is one of a kind. After delighting in beloved big hits such as The Amazing Spider-Man, Birdman, and La La Land, Stone turned her attention to Greek writer and director Yorgos Lanthimos, a five-time Oscar nominee in his own right. The pair made magic on their first try, with the period comedy The Favourite earning 10 Academy Award nominations and a Best Actress win for Stone’s co-star, Olivia Colman​​​​​​.

Then came the utterly mesmerizing Poor Things, based on the eponymous 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, and the slightly underwhelming but certainly ambitious Kind of Kindness, an avant-garde anthology movie featuring Stone alongside another Lanthimos favorite, Jesse Plemons. The latest of the pair’s four collaborations to date arrived in 2025 and proved one of the year’s most exciting sci-fi projects. The science fiction satire Bugonia, a remake of Jang Joon-hwan‘s 2003 South Korean comedy Save the Green Planet!, starred both Stone and Plemons, with the latter kidnapping Stone’s high-powered CEO, convinced she is an alien sent to destroy Earth.

Exploring the power of truth, conspiracy, and class in the modern age, Bugonia takes plenty of big swings, no bigger than its final twist, which many consider to be one of the best in recent cinema. Collider’s Ross Bonaime awarded the movie a strong 8/10 rating in his review, writing, “With Bugonia, Lanthimos elevates an already fantastic concept, making an essential film about the world we live in and just how insane and hopeless it can feel at times.” A year on and Bugonia is still proving popular. At the time of writing, the film is one of the ten most-streamed movies on HBO Max in the world.

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Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz
Which Oscar Best Picture
Is Your Perfect Movie?

Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country

Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.

🪜Parasite

🌀Everything Everywhere

☢️Oppenheimer

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🐦Birdman

🪙No Country for Old Men

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01

What kind of film experience do you actually want?
The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.





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02

Which idea grabs you most in a film?
Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?





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03

How do you like your story told?
Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.





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04

What makes a truly great antagonist?
The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?





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05

What do you want from a film’s ending?
The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?





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06

Which setting pulls you in most?
Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.





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07

What cinematic craft impresses you most?
Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.





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08

What kind of main character do you root for?
The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.





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09

How do you feel about a film that takes its time?
Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.





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10

What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema?
The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?





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The Academy Has Decided
Your Perfect Film Is…

Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.

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Parasite

You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once

You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.

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Oppenheimer

You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.

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Birdman

You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.

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No Country for Old Men

You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.

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How Much Did ‘Bugonia’ Make at the Box Office?

Lanthimos is known for pushing the boundaries of cinema on a relatively low budget. However, with Bugonia​​​​​​, the master of the strange was given his biggest allowance yet, estimated to be between $45 million and $55 million. Sadly, this meant that the film was a box office flop, falling short of its reported budget with a global haul of just $43 million, split between $17 million in domestic revenue and a further $26 million from overseas markets.

Stay tuned to Collider for more streaming updates.


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Release Date

November 7, 2025

Runtime

119 minutes

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Director

Yorgos Lanthimos

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Writers

Will Tracy

Producers
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Andrew Lowe, Ari Aster, Ed Guiney, Emma Stone, Jerry Kyoungboum Ko, Lars Knudsen, Miky Lee, Yorgos Lanthimos, Kasia Malipan, Will Greenfield

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