Articles by Casey Throwback Mills

Forty-four years and a day after E.T. opened, Steven Spielberg returns to first contact — this time with whistleblowers, congressional hearings, and the question of what they hid. A retrospective on the practical-effects wonder of Close Encounters and E.T., and what changes when the same director points the camera at suspicion instead of awe.

On May 19, 2006, Ron Howard and Tom Hanks released a $125 million prestige-tier adaptation of an airport thriller, watched the Vatican call for a boycott, and rode the controversy to $760 million worldwide. Twenty years later, the entire economic and cultural machine that made The Da Vinci Code possible has been dismantled — and we're looking at a fossil.

Twenty-two years ago this April, Tony Scott put a flask in Denzel Washington's hand, dropped him into Mexico City, and made every frame look like it was burning from the inside out. Man on Fire opened at $22.8 million, finished at roughly $130 million worldwide on a $60-70 million budget, and got a brutal 39% from critics. Audiences gave it 89% — and that gap is the entire reason Netflix is rebooting it on Thursday.

The Boys just premiered its final season to 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and the #1 streaming spot worldwide. Casey Throwback Mills looks back at how a blood-soaked Amazon show became the most important superhero series ever made.

Bryan Cranston and Frankie Muniz just reunited on Hulu for Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair. Twenty years later, the Wilkersons are back — older, messier, and surprisingly still relevant.

From Tobey Maguire's rain-soaked upside-down kiss to Tom Holland's record-breaking Brand New Day, Spider-Man has been reinvented more than any other superhero on screen — and somehow, every version found its audience.

In 1981, three college kids and a shoestring budget created one of the most enduring horror franchises in cinema. Forty-five years and six films later, Evil Dead Burn proves that you can't keep a good deadite down.

In 2015, Disney released a live-action Cinderella and quietly launched the most ambitious remake experiment in film history. Ten years and a dozen films later, we're still watching them do it — and the results are more complicated than you think.

In 1987, a dying studio spent $22 million making a He-Man movie nobody asked for. It became a cult classic. Now Amazon has spent $200 million on a reboot with Jared Leto under the skull mask. Here's what 39 years changed — and what it didn't.

The first five months of 2026 gave us blockbuster trailers and franchise hype — but the best movies of the year so far are the ones most people walked right past. Here are six films that deserved better.

Forty-four years after a shapeshifting alien terrified audiences with latex and foam rubber, Hollywood is quietly admitting what Casey Throwback Mills has been saying all along: pixels can't replace the real thing.

Twenty years ago, Martin Scorsese finally won his Oscar — and delivered a crime epic that rewired how Hollywood thinks about remakes, morality, and the long con. The Departed hasn't aged a day.

Twenty years ago, Alfonso Cuarón made a movie about a world falling apart — refugee camps, government crackdowns, a population too exhausted to hope. In 2026, it doesn't feel like science fiction anymore. It feels like a documentary from next year.

A 1957 film set entirely in one room with twelve men arguing. No explosions, no CGI, no twist ending. And it is still more gripping than 90% of what Hollywood makes today.