Hayden Panettiere Died at 36: Hollywood Looked Away

By Dua Mifsud

There is a version of this column where I write about *Spider-Man: Brand New Day* holding the box office for a fourth consecutive weekend, or about the *Call My Agent!* movie trailer landing on Netflix with the kind of French-cinema energy that makes you immediately want to cancel all your plans for September 10th. I will get to those things. But I cannot start there.

Hayden Panettiere died at thirty-six. She started working in Hollywood as a child — *One Life to Live*, *Remember the Titans* — and the industry consumed her in the way it consumes child performers with a particular efficiency that everyone witnesses and nobody stops. Anna Paquin and Melissa Gilbert are now asking where the collective outrage is, and the honest answer is that the outrage arrives after, always after, and the system that produced the tragedy remains completely intact for the next one. I don't have a neat cultural observation about this. Sometimes the story is just the story.

The rest of the week is considerably lighter. *Lanterns* Episode 2 on HBO is being called a better version of what Marvel catastrophically attempted with *Secret Invasion* — which is a low bar, admittedly, but the early word suggests the DC series is actually clearing it with room to spare. The *Foundation* adaptation on Apple TV+ gets an interesting footnote: Isaac Asimov's daughter Robyn has spoken about what her father would have made of it, and her answer is the kind of thing that makes you reconsider the whole adaptation-as-tribute conversation. Asimov never got to see it. That matters.

A24's *Tony* — the Anthony Bourdain biopic — is doing five million dollars at the indie box office and proving once again that A24 understands something about cultural appetite that the major studios keep failing to locate. Bourdain as subject makes complete sense for them. He was a person who treated aesthetics as survival. So do they.

And then there is the Diane Warren news, which I refuse to let pass without comment: the woman who has lost the Oscar more times than anyone else in Academy history has adopted a viral runaway pig named Wilbur who briefly became Los Angeles's most beloved fugitive. She said, and I am quoting directly, "I lose Oscars but I won a pig." That is the single most emotionally evolved sentence anyone in the entertainment industry has produced all year.

The box office will keep spinning. The pig has a home. The child actor conversation will happen again, too late, for someone else.