Charles Pulliam-Moore

Charles Pulliam-Moore is a film and TV reporter at The Verge who covers genre entertainment, fan culture, and the ways technology and labor shape pop culture. His work stands out for treating movies, television, games, and comics as systems of power and discourse rather than just releases to be promoted. Across reviews, reported features, and industry analysis, he connects fandom-specific conversations to larger questions about streaming economics, AI, labor organizing, and representation. His background writing about comic books, race, and labor at outlets like io9, Gizmodo, and NPR’s Code Switch underpins that lens.

Netflix is pivoting away from prestige

Pulliam-Moore’s entertainment beat is anchored in the business of streaming and how platforms rewire audience expectations. In his recent piece on Netflix’s latest slate, he frames the company as pivoting away from prestige toward more reliable, attention-grabbing franchises, using production deals and show choices to illustrate that shift. Coverage of studio mergers, like his analysis of why Paramount will need to release far more movies for its merger strategy to work, extends that focus to traditional studios navigating a streaming-first economy.

Articles on Warner Bros. Discovery’s corporate renaming and broader restructuring similarly track how legacy media brands try to reposition themselves in the fight for viewers’ time.

He returns to this “war for our attention” framing across multiple dispatches from the entertainment business, treating corporate moves not as isolated news but as part of a larger re-creation of cable “from first principles.”

Within these stories, he mixes reported detail - deals ending, new leadership, release strategies - with sharp judgment about what they mean for creative workers and fans. He pays particular attention to where streaming logic undermines or supports labor, box office performance, and the viability of mid-budget projects, rather than only focusing on tentpoles. That combination of industry fluency and skepticism about corporate narratives distinguishes his coverage from straightforward announcement-driven reporting on the entertainment business.

Pokémon card resellers have turned collecting into an online blood sport

Another through-line in Pulliam-Moore’s work is a deep engagement with Pokémon and adjacent fandom economies across cards, games, and mobile experiences.

The recent feature on Pokémon card resellers portrays collecting as an “online blood sport,” unpacking how a hustle culture around scarcity, livestreams, and resale platforms reshapes a hobby into a speculative marketplace. He has covered anniversary card sets that condense “30 years of Pokémon cards in one futuristic set,” highlighting how commemorative releases are designed for both nostalgia and high-end collectors.

Articles on mobile titles like Pokémon Champions and the Pokopia Pokédex review extend that lens to gameplay, mechanics, and how new entries try to honor or reimagine classic experiences. His piece on Pokémon: Wild Card - teased at the Pokémon World Championships - connects trading card game lore, animation, and event culture to show how the franchise continually retools itself.

In his Pokémon Go coverage, he writes about the game finally making good on its original promise a decade on, treating the evolution of its mechanics and live events as a case study in how location-based games learn from long-term player behavior rather than initial hype. He uses these stories to show how fandoms live in tournaments, resale markets, and community spaces as much as in the games themselves, making his reporting relevant to anyone tracking the economic and cultural life of major franchises, not just game launches.

In Toy Story 5, the problem really is these damn phones

Pulliam-Moore’s criticism foregrounds how technology and corporate decisions shape the stories big studios tell. His Toy Story 5 review describes the film as a thoughtful return to form that directly confronts how phones and tablets hurt people, using that theme to examine how Disney and Pixar grapple with tech addiction in a family franchise. In superhero coverage like “Despite Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s success, the MCU is on shaky ground,” he reads box office wins against structural issues in Marvel’s shared universe, arguing that narrative and scheduling choices leave the larger project unstable.

Reviews and write-ups of projects like Kraven the Hunter, X-Men ’97, Coyote vs. Acme, and Harley Quinn frame each as evidence of how studios handle nostalgia, experimentation, and risk inside sprawling IP portfolios.

He frequently writes about series revivals and sequels - Barbie follow-ups, Malcom in the Middle returns, Wicked’s new subtitle - and uses them to question how much creative ambition is left once corporate strategy sets the terms. Interviews with filmmakers and showrunners, such as conversations with Kogonada about After Yang or the creators of Craig of the Creek, deepen that stance by asking how they build worlds that resist default dystopian or derivative tropes. Across these pieces, he treats genre fiction as cultural infrastructure, where decisions about casting, tone, and continuity reflect broader politics around race, queerness, and who gets to shape mainstream stories.

What Hollywood thinks about existential AI warnings

Pulliam-Moore is a leading voice on how AI intersects with Hollywood, creative labor, and audience trust. In “What Hollywood thinks about existential AI warnings,” he reports on major labor unions’ skepticism toward AI apocalypse narratives, emphasizing how workers see AI as a present-day bargaining and exploitation issue rather than an abstract future threat. His feature “Is paying artists enough to convince them to embrace AI?” analyzes an AI platform’s revenue-share scheme for visual artists, detailing per-image and per-second payouts and probing whether those numbers genuinely compensate for training models on human styles.

In “I looked inside an AI generated movie, and the best parts were all human,” he uses a Higgsfield-backed project to dissect where AI filmmaking still relies on human craft for coherence and emotional impact.

Pieces like “Hollywood is bending the knee to OpenAI,” “The future of Hollywood isn’t feeding prompts into vanilla gen AI models,” and coverage of Lionsgate’s AI-generated shorts all map a landscape where studios experiment with automation while creatives and unions push back. He connects AI debates to earlier reporting on labor, including coverage of Disney employee walkouts over Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and NLRB findings that reality TV contestants are employees, showing a consistent focus on labor rights inside entertainment. That sustained attention to contracts, royalties, and union strategy places his AI reporting firmly in the context of worker power, rather than technology pages removed from culture. For communications around tech-in-entertainment, his stories signal how announcements will be read by organized labor, artists, and engaged fan communities.

Across all of this, Pulliam-Moore writes in a clear, conversational style that assumes readers understand fandom and care about power dynamics. He moves easily between reported news, criticism, and interviews, but the through-line is consistent: how genre entertainment, streaming platforms, and new technologies reshape work, identity, and the stories that dominate the discourse.