The Day They Confirmed the Entourage Movie

Deadline had the news: contracts signed, full cast returning, the Entourage film officially a real thing. Warner Bros. put up around thirty million dollars—modest by Hollywood standards, but if any property could do more with less it was always Entourage, a show that ran on charm and momentum and the specific pleasure of watching beautiful people be terrible to each other in Los Angeles.

The film was set to pick up roughly six months after the series ended, which meant everyone got to be exactly where we’d left them. That was the promise and the comfort of it. The show’s great joke was that nobody was ever going to change—Turtle would have a dumb idea, E would stress about it, Drama would catastrophize, Vince would coast—and somehow, against the odds, things would work out anyway. It was a fantasy of friendship and consequence-free hedonism, and I loved it without apology.

But Ari Gold was always the reason I watched. Jeremy Piven built that character into something that outgrew the show around it: the tantrums, the manipulation, the switchblade delivery at a volume most actors save for fight scenes. And underneath all of it, this stubborn love for his wife and kids that he could never quite say plainly. Every time Ari lost his mind in a hallway I was watching a man at war with himself, and it was magnificent. Filming started in 2014. I was there opening weekend. Ari came back. That was enough.