Leaving behind a legacy of sexual abuse allegations and a handful of great movies that, well, people don’t feel enthusiastic about watching anymore, Woody Allen is retiring from filmmaking. Investors will have to find a new 80-year-old director who keeps making the same movies about old creeps seducing young women while insisting that their ingénues are “very mature for their age” because Allen’s next will be his 50th and final film. Per Variety, the four-time Oscar winner is currently at work on his last film in France. The movie, entitled Wasp 22, will be entirely shot in French and is akin to Match Point. He called the film “exciting, dramatic and also very sinister.” This must be the first time in decades that someone described Allen’s work as “exciting”—though the “very sinister” part is on brand.
Still, his announcement wasn’t very reassuring. “My idea, in principle, is not to make more movies and focus on writing,” Allen told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia. While it doesn’t sound that committed to putting the camera down, he did say to Alec Baldwin, in what Vulture calls a “terrifying Instagram live interview,” that the “thrill is gone” from making movies. But how could the thrill be gone with movies like Rifkin’s Festival and A Rainy Day In New York burning up the screen?
“When I used to do a film, it’d go into a movie house all across the country,” Allen said in the interview. “Now you do a movie, and you get a couple weeks in a movie house.” If only there were a reason why people wouldn’t be excited to see yet another Woody Allen movie about a “love affair” between a middle-aged academic and a college freshman. (Or maybe it’s because his ideal audience is still saying things like “movie house,” a particularly niche demographic.) Instead, Allen will retreat to his career as an author, presumably writing books about middle-aged academics and the college freshmen who can’t resist them.
One thing seems definite: Rosie O’Donnell is probably happy to see the man she called a “slimy bookworm lookin’ child molestin’ bastard” out of business. She didn’t want to “work with that fuck” anyway.