Nathan Rabin's Bad Ideas: A Look Ahead

2025 is going be CRAZY, y'all!

Giving someone you love with impeccable taste and boundless curiosity a gift subscription to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas represents a double gift. I consider every paid subscription to this newsletter an obscenely valued gift, one I appreciate to an almost unseemly extent.

It means the world to me that folks are willing to support me and my Quixotic literary career with their money as well as their enthusiasm.

This has been a tough year for all of us, but it’s been a good year for Nathan Rabins Bad Ideas. I had around 185 paid subscribers to the newsletter at the beginning of the year, whereas I now have 278.

Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas came into its own in 2024. I finally figured out what I wanted to do with it and how to execute that vision without going insane from overwork. I cranked out Joy of Positivity recommendations at a rapid clip. If you become a paid subscriber, you instantly have access to hundreds of Joy of Positivity picks dating back to the founding of this newsletter. And I dutifully went to the movie theaters every weekend, often with my ten-year-old son in tow, to watch the new movies you choose through a weekly poll.

I’m excited, if a little anxious, about the newsletter’s growth and would love to keep it going strong in the new year.

To that end, I have super-sized Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas. I love Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, my pre-Bad Ideas online home, but I’ve been frustrated by its non-existent growth, so I’m moving some core features to a place where they might receive the attention they deserve.

Here’s what I have in store for 2025.

Stephen King Mania! The paid subscribers for this newsletter voted for me to do the deepest of deep dives into the films of arguably our most commercially successful novelist rather than the James Bond franchise or the MCU.

So, I will post a new piece on a Stephen King movie every Tuesday. That could be a movie he wrote or one adapted from his novels and short stories.

There are a whole bunch! It’ll take me years to finish this project, but that’s okay! I’m already building a backlog so I can be less stressed when the ball drops and 2024 becomes 2025.

I’m going to try to go chronologically because my dumb brain likes to self-sabotage by having me write about stupid bullshit nobody cares about rather than popular, much-discussed fare. So, while everything inside my neurodivergent brain screams that I should introduce the column with a piece on Graveyard Shift and The Mangler, it would be wiser from a business standpoint to begin with Carrie and The Shining.

The Fractured Mirror comes to Bad Ideas-to celebrate the imminent release of The Fractured Mirror, my epic exploration of American films about moviemaking, I will be running excerpts from the book every Tuesday and Thursday for paid subscribers. So, if you are a paid subscriber, you get exclusive content every weekday: The Joy of Positivity on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and a shard from the Fractured Mirror on Tuesday and Thursday. PLUS, you can choose what I see in theaters every weekend through polls. I want to give you as much value as possible for five bucks a month, which is less than the cost of one of those fancy Starbucks drinks the kids love so damn much!

Autism in Entertainment is now a Bad Ideas column: I was diagnosed with AUDHD (that’s when you have Autism PLUS ADHD) in December of last year. I also have bipolar 2, another fun condition that makes life super-easy and super-fun, but that’s neither here nor there.

I make sense of the world by writing about it and immersing myself in my special interests/areas of hyper-fixation. So, I decided to embark on a column where I write about depictions of autism in pop culture.

I should have begun with Rain Man, which is the Birth of a Nation/Jazz Singer of autism-themed entertainment, but instead, I began with my trademark obscure bullshit that nobody cares about.

I will correct my mistake by launching Autism in Entertainment 2.0 in January with Rain Man.

Oh crap, Silly Show-Biz Book Club will be here as well—I love reading and writing about terrible books about celebrities, often of the self-published and impossibly terrible variety. I haven’t written a new entry in a long time because I read 26 graphic novel compilations of 1950s pre-code EC Comics consecutively. Seriously. I’m autistic. I’m obsessive.

I recently wrote my first new Silly Show-Biz Book Club entry in about a year on Matthew Perry’s Friends, Lovers and the Big, Terrible Thing, where I am quoted extensively. It’s a big, meaty, 2000+ word piece about an objectively important and huge-selling book.

I’ll be posting a new Silly Show Book Club article every month here

A monthly column on Manic Pixie Dream Girls—When I die, my legacy will probably be coining the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” I’ve made peace with that, and would like to take advantage of it by running a monthly column where I definitively decide whether a fictional character is or is not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl

I promise to not write about whoever this is!

No politics! I’m going to do everything in my power to make this a politics-free zone where I never write about the big, terrible thing that divides us all. Hopefully, that’ll make the newsletter a welcome escape from all of the ugliness.

So please do consider becoming a paid subscriber or gifting a subscription. I’ve looked at this as my backup site and Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place as my main site, but going forward, I’d like them to be more equal.

So hop on board the Bad Ideas train! Subscribing to this newsletter is paradoxically a very good idea.