Was ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ Helped by Offscreen Scandals? Of Course! They Made the Movie Sound Like a Tabloid Soap Opera

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic We live in an age when all kinds of behavior that was once not thought of as scandalous is now scandalous.

Yet the mentality of “calling people out” can extend to less serious and sometimes even trivial things. That’s been the drama of “Don’t Worry Darling” — and by drama, I don’t mean the story of a Stepford housewife, played by Florence Pugh, who wakes up to discover that the candy-colored ’50s dreamworld she’s been living in is a carefully constructed nightmare.

That drama, as I wrote in my review, is just okay; it starts enticingly and then loses steam. But the offscreen drama? That’s been a gift of gossip that keeps on giving. (If you want to know what Neil Postman meant by the title of his 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” look no further than Spitgate.) Part of the addictive fun of “Don’t Worry Darling: The Offscreen Diaries” is that it’s been a juicy backbiting tabloid celebrity saga in which nobody actually did anything too wrong. (You can have your facile Twitter moralism and eat it too.) The pieces of the saga, if you take them one by one, aren’t complicated or even very outrageous.

In the midst of making her second feature, Olivia Wilde, a high-powered film director, entered into a romantic relationship with her leading man, Harry Styles, who happens to be the most coveted pop star on the planet. (Important fact to take note of: A film director carrying on a relationship with his or her lead actor has never before happened in the history of motion pictures.) There’s also the matter of who the lead actor was originally set to be.