My first Hollywood junket in years

What’s up, everyone. Junket boy Brandon here. I'm back east for the holidays, writing this from a hotel near Newark's Liberty airport. It was a year truly unlike any other in my orbit at BroBible. I'm proud of the work I did this past year. So I want to use this space to talk about it a little bit.

Before I dive into my ramblings, let me ask you for a quick favor: go watch my interview with Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. on the BroBible YouTube channel (or below if you’re already here). I'm obviously biased, but I'm stoked on it. They were promoting Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, which hits theaters on January 9, 2025. Their energy was infectious.

OK, did you watch that? Cool. Now let’s talk about what it feels like to jump back into the junket seat after years away.

One of my major goals when I moved to Los Angeles in 2017 was to get BroBible back in the good graces of the entertainment-industrial complex. In the early days of the company, that ecosystem was crucial to our commercial viability with advertisers.

Between 2010 and 2014—the formative years of the blog era—studios poured marketing dollars into millennial-focused media outlets like BroBible, like prospectors staking claims during a gold rush. It was great business to have.

Movie and TV marketing campaigns have always been some of my favorite projects. I’ll never forget one of my first: brainstorming the best mullets and trashy haircuts in Major League Baseball to create buzz for Eastbound and Down back when Kenny Powers aired as appointment television on HBO Sunday nights. It blew my mind that we got paid to do projects like this. Looking back, it still does.

I fell in love with this very specific aspect of BroBible's unique business plan: We became a hub for creative campaigns where marketing dollars, big ideas, and audience reach collided.

There’s something intoxicating about connecting dots between moving parts—marketing, talent, narrative hooks—to tell stories that feel big, weird, and fun. It was about causing some buzz around the hive. Unlike other marketing categories, the KPI wasn’t about how many people bought XYZ trinkets to clutter their homes. It was about box office numbers or TV ratings. Yet the movies, TV, and music we consume—and that live rent-free in our brains, that we yap about at the water cooler to co-workers or over drinks with acquaintances—are still products born with commercial intent. As someone who loves culture and how it’s crafted—and occasionally engineered—I felt like there was a higher calling in that. I still feel that way.

Studios were ideal partners for BroBible. We could be irreverent, bold, and unapologetically ourselves. It felt like flexing a muscle we were built to use.

And then… it started to slip away. There’s plenty of blame to go around—between the business back end of BroBible and the stewardship of our former corporate owner before we went indie in 2018—but the truth is, the industry evolved faster than we did. Video content and social media became dominant forces. Marketing stunts needed to be more guerrilla, conversational, and instantly viral. It was no longer enough to have a clever idea; you needed to pitch it with precision, provide clear value, and navigate a fast-moving world where opportunities often came down to “who you know” more than the concept itself. The landscape shifted from slow-burning campaigns to a frenetic, always-on culture that rewarded speed and adaptability. In this wickedly fast world, you either adapted or got left behind.

Like a lot of lifestyle media brands, we veered more into gear and product marketing while studio marketing dollars went into programmatic and huge-scale purchases vs. bespoke custom content. So studio campaigns dried up, audiences shifted, and the landscape changed.

Every now and then, though, the opportunity to work with studios and entertainment brands bubbles up again. A few years ago, we started doing online watch parties, including one with the talent from Jackass Forever and Guy Ritchie’s The Gentleman. Back in September of this past year, we hosted a screening for The Killer's Game, an outrageously quriky action comedy with David Bautista. I'm super proud of those programs and the ones that followed in their wake because, in a roundabout way, justified my original intent for moving to Los Angeles in the first place.

I've been on this sort of creative journey lately to land more "gets" for BroBible and scale the Mostly Occasionally Show into something viable, which has had a certain DIY component to it. Recently, I found myself back in the junket seat, and it felt rad as hell—like coming home, if your home smells like hotel conference rooms and catered croissants.

Junketing 101: Understanding The Hollywood Hype Machine

For the uninitiated, junkets are finely tuned marketing apparatuses designed to generate interviews and soundbites that keep a movie or TV show top of mind. The result is a blitz of bite-sized clips and interviews flooding the information space to keep a movie or TV show top of mind. It’s when the stars of a project sit down with members of the press in quick 5-10 minute bursts, delivering soundbites that fuel earned media coverage. Traditionally, junkets happened in person at swanky hotels in Los Angeles or New York, but during the pandemic, they shifted to Zoom—a move that worked logistically but lost the magic of in-person interaction. Yet even during the remote years, these interviews continued to generate valuable insights, a space BroBible has thrived in, with our movie-obsessed Eric Italiano owning the beat through his Post-Cred Pod channels.

Now, they’re back in person because studios have realized something vital: the best chemistry and most authentic moments happen IRL. In today’s “everything is content” era, with endless entertainment options competing for attention, studios know that genuine connections resonate far more than overly rehearsed late-night talk show appearances.

As a person in a creative industry, I like junkets because they’re where you see the gears of Hollywood’s promotional engine whirring at full speed. If you’ve ever watched an actor try to be charismatic for the 35th time during a press tour, you get a glimpse of how a piece of IP can work like a jet engine.

Some of my favorite pieces have come out of junket experiences. Like the time I asked Todd Phillips about his Bittersweet Motel documentary about Phish during his War Dogs press tour. He politely told the publicist from Warner Brothers, listening in from the other room in the suite, to give us a little more time to discuss his early work as an auteur that thrives on chaos. Or when I talked to Miles Teller about post-Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and the very real trauma they went through coming back home to an apathetic American society that told them to take some pills and move on when he was promoting Thank You for Your Service.

There's great information that can be mined from the junket experience that contributes to a wider cultural conversation. The key is to find an original angle and lean in. It's both art and science.

My recent junket was for Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, a European diamond-heist action movie that’s as loud and flashy as it sounds. Think Porsche car chases, Gerard Butler’s chaotic energy as Big Nick O’Brien, and O’Shea Jackson Jr.’s everyman charm. It’s sexy, funny, and, as I explain to them in the interview, very "continental"—in the way affluent jetsetters with lots of frequent flyer miles refer to Europe as "the continent."

If you haven’t seen it, the first Den of Thieves (2018) channels the tension and vibe of the classic L.A. heist movie Heat. It follows a group of professional burglars attempting an audacious robbery of the Federal Reserve Bank in Los Angeles. Gerard Butler’s "Big Nick" O’Brien, a brash, hard-drinking detective with the LA Sheriff's Department, goes head-to-head with the crew of expert thieves in a chaotic clash of wits and firepower. I’m not going to spoil it for you, but there’s a good reason for the sequel.

I’ll admit, I had mixed feelings about getting back in the junket seat. My role isn’t exclusively writer and editor these days. Juggling multiple roles at BroBible—publisher, writer, editor, advertising strategist, ad tech person, ad operations problem solver, affiliate marketing dude, and occasional human shield between the advertising world and editorial world—can feel overwhelming. By 9 PM, staring at a to-do list that’ll keep me up until midnight, it’s hard not to wonder if the grind is worth it. But, like any good Eat, Pray, Love quest, I’ve realized that growth often looks like saying “screw it” and doing the thing anyway. So I sucked it up, booked the time, and just freakin’ went for it.

And honestly? I’m really glad I did.

Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. were the opposite of the checked-out, low-energy interviews you sometimes get in junket settings. They were rapidly engaged. In fact, you can even hear Gerard Butler say "here we go!" kinda under his breath when I fired off my first question, not really expecting yet what the energy in the room was like.

I wiggled in a question to Butler about his inspiration for playing morally ambiguous cops like Big Nick O’Brien. When I mentioned Denzel Washington in Training Day as perhaps the quintessential crooked cop, he paused, struck by the thought, and said, “Oh yeah!” That moment felt oddly validating. It’s nice to catch a pro in the act of rethinking their own process.

It all comes down to energy. They were hyped. Infectiously so. We talked about everything from the badass Porsche Taycan that’s basically a character in the movie to their favorite heist hype music. (O’Shea’s pick is a familiar Ice Cube anthem, which is endearing when you consider Ice Cube is his dad and it’s his dad’s master opus.)

There was even an unexpected debate about croissants. O’Shea, it turns out, has strong opinions on pronunciation: 'The best way to say croissant is to sound like you’re choking on a croissant.' Butler chimed in with a story about dating a French woman and dipping croissants in hot chocolate on the street. It was absurd and charming, like a buddy-cop subplot that didn’t make the final cut. O’Shea even waxed nostalgic about his love for the Burger King Croissan’wich.

This junket reminded me why I love writing about Hollywood. A week later, sharing a McCarthy Salad with longtime BroBible partners at the Beverly Hills Hotel Cabana Cafe, it clicked—this is what brought me to Los Angeles in the first place

I love the chaos, the energy, and the unexpected moments when something real slips through the cracks of a carefully managed PR day. It’s Gerard Butler pausing to reconsider his approach to playing crooked cops, O’Shea Jackson Jr. reminiscing about Croissan’wiches, and the two of them riffing on pastries like a buddy-cop flick waiting to happen. Those moments elevate what could have been just another press event into something genuinely memorable.

Junkets are like assembly lines for content: predictable and efficient, but every so often, something surprisingly special rolls off the belt. And for someone who’s spent years at the intersection of culture and commerce, it’s those sparks of authenticity that keep me coming back for more.

Look, things can feel a little stale when you're head down in the day-to-day. Deadlines. Deliverables. Spreadsheets. Emails. Zoom meetings. You know... the routine.

It’s moments like these that reignite my love for the chaos and creativity of this industry. I'm going to chase more of those sparks in 2025.

Thanks for reading—Junket boy out!