Movie · 2025 · Comedy, Drama, TV Movie · 1h 49m · R · English
Curator score: 1.1/10 (122.6K ratings)
Humanity is in their hands.
Overview
A group of billionaire friends get together against the backdrop of a rolling international crisis.
Ratings
Curator score: 1.1/10
IMDb: 5.4/10
Letterboxd: 2.54/5
Metacritic: 66
TMDB: 5.3/10
Director
Jesse Armstrong
Production
HBO Films, Hot Seat Productions, Project Zeus
Cast
Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, Ramy Youssef, Daniel Oreskes, Hadley Robinson, David Thompson, Ali Kinkade, Ava Kostia, Alex Peña, Amie MacKenzie, Larkin Bell, Capri Eaton, Emmi Eaton
Where to watch
Max
Curator Review
Verdict
A sharp premise and a few strong satirical instincts are undercut by a thin feature-length concept that many viewers found repetitive and too close to familiar billionaire-tech satire. If you like Jesse Armstrong’s dialogue-driven cruelty and can tolerate a more obvious, broader tone, there’s enough here to make it worth a look; if you want real escalation, depth, or a fresh target, it may feel like a retread.
Best for
Viewers who enjoy corporate satire and rich-people cannibalism
Fans of dialogue-heavy, pressure-cooker comedies
People curious about Jesse Armstrong’s post-Succession voice
Audiences who like bleak, timely media about tech power and crisis
Skip if
You want a genuinely new angle on billionaire satire
You dislike broad, smug, or repetitive comedy
You need emotional warmth or a strong character arc
You’re already fatigued by tech-bro/elite apocalypse stories
Overview
Mountainhead has the ingredients of a nasty, timely satire: a crisis outside the walls, a circle of insulated billionaires inside, and a writer-director who knows how to make privilege sound absurdly self-justifying. The problem is that the movie often feels like it is announcing its point rather than discovering it, and the joke can flatten into the same note over and over.
Worth noting
The cast is game, and the dialogue has flashes of the clipped, humiliating rhythm that made Armstrong’s best work sting. But as a feature, it can feel like a compressed spin-off of a richer ecosystem, with the satire aimed at a target that already feels overfamiliar. The result is less a revelation than a reminder of how quickly this kind of material can curdle into mannerism.
Bottom line
If you’re in the mood for a chilly, talky, contemporary power comedy, there’s enough craft here to keep it watchable. If you’re hoping for a sharper thesis or a bigger emotional or comic payoff, this one is likely to leave you feeling that the mountain was bigger than the head.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Preet (3★) · 2426 likes
whole lotta mountain not a lotta head
matt lynch (1.5★) · 2290 likes
Not remotely surprised that Jesse Armstrong decided to turn what was probably a Succession finale idea that got immediately shouted down in the writers' room into a movie Adam McKay would blame you for not liking. I'm as pissed as anyone that society somehow continues to reward these venal accelerationist tech pigs for deliberately dismantling civilization but it's somehow even worse to me that TV showrunners are endlessly allowed to get away with toothlessly "satirizing" the softest targets imaginable.
patrick (1★) · 2059 likes
kinda impressively bad. jesse armstrong's sell for mountainhead, his first project since succession, has been that he decided to "run at it fast rather than stew on it for five years.” he would have been wise to wait because this is a turgid, boring nothing of a film and it’s clear armstrong has little clue what he’s actually trying to say. he obviously got the itch to write some elon fanfiction and HBO were more than happy to accommodate. yes,… more kinda impressively bad. jesse armstrong's sell for mountainhead, his first project since succession, has been that he decided to "run at it fast rather than stew on it for five years.” he would have been wise to wait because this is a turgid, boring nothing of a film and it’s clear armstrong has little clue what he’s actually trying to say. he obviously got the itch to write some elon fanfiction and HBO were more than happy to accommodate. yes,… more
2013 · Crime, Drama, Comedy · 3h · R · Curator 7.9/10 (5.7M ratings) · Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video, Paramount Plus Premium, Paramount Plus Essential, AMC+, Philo, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
A manic portrait of greed and self-mythology with relentless comic momentum.