The email was from: James Cameron.
Subject line just said: "Grant—"
"Grant,
Pure coincidence (and Kingfisher leaving scripts lying around), I watched Source Code the same way I stumbled across your Juno back in the day.
A few words to a junior colleague. Listen up.
First: your leads suck.
Meg Ryan can't carry a blockbuster. Her vibe is strictly rom-com.
Bradley Cooper is still too green for a commercial lead—hasn't been beaten up by the studio system yet.
Second: are you straight-up copying Spielberg?
Out of everybody, you pick the old man? You've clearly studied his tracking shots, push-ins, wides, and over-the-shoulders to a scary degree. That's exactly why I'm worried about your future. Those moves only work inside Spielberg's philosophy. Rip them out and they look like costume jewelry.
Third: this color palette—what the hell? Did Wes Anderson teach you how to give audiences color-blindness? Or that Japanese guy, Tetsuya Nakashima?
Drop the artsy-fartsy bullshit. Filmmakers who get obsessed with "style" usually crash and burn.
That said… somehow you took all that chaotic crap and made a movie I couldn't stop watching.
The last time a director shocked me this hard was Quentin Tarantino with Reservoir Dogs.
Don't get cocky—I'm not saying you're on his level. He's a freak, a once-in-a-generation monster.
You? You barely qualify as a genius.
—Cameron"
Classic tyrant Cameron, zero filter.
Joey wrote back a super polite, nervous, thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another reply. Crickets. No response.
Still, she walked around grinning like an idiot for two straight days. James freaking Cameron just called her (kind of) a genius. How many people on the planet get to feel that?
She kept it to herself. Some wins you just hug close and don't brag about.
Source Code officially locked its release date: November 28—this year.
Marketing was already in full swing.
Kingfisher only gave them a $5.5 million promo budget. For a $20 million movie that's actually decent; it meant they were taking it seriously.
They built a slick little website with a tie-in game that basically let you "defuse the White House bombing" and pick your faction. Nerds ate it up.
Hard-ad buys were heavy—trailers, bus shelters, the works—anything that screamed "sci-fi fans, come get it."
Since Joey had zero pull with the sci-fi crowd, the campaign leaned hard on Meg Ryan's name recognition and the high-concept hook.
Meg and Bradley hit every festival that would have them. Each appearance cost at least six figures in travel and glam. Kingfisher strong-armed Joey into letting them dock that money from her back-end points.
She gritted her teeth and signed. Capitalists gonna capitalist.
The press? Outside the official trades running the studio-approved copy, the tabloids and blogs were brutal.
"Meg Ryan + Joey Grant = ?????"
"$20 million hard sci-fi? Biggest gamble or biggest joke of the year?"
"Over-the-hill, cheating America's Sweetheart teams up with the one-hit-wonder Asian director—disaster loading."
Even some of the same critics who'd championed Juno were clutching pearls.
Bailey Jones, one of the top dogs at IMDb, basically wrote a eulogy: "She was never going to be more than a one-hit wonder. One taste of success and her ego ballooned past the stratosphere."
The gossip machine went into overdrive when Perez Hilton "broke" the news that the money behind the movie was Hughes Leiston—Joey's filthy-rich ex-fiancé.
The comments were a cesspool:
"So she crawled back to Daddy's money after all?"
"Explains how this trainwreck even got made."
"All that 'chasing my dream' talk after Juno was just PR bullshit."
Throw in Meg Ryan's old infidelity scandal and the public had already decided the movie was trash. Most of the attention it was getting was pure hate-watch energy.
Then emaScore—the company that famously nailed Juno's box-office prediction—became the center of attention again.
At a premiere, the second Mr. Mintz stepped out of his black stretch limo, reporters swarmed him.
"Mr. Mintz! Same director as Juno—what's your prediction for Source Code?"
Mintz stayed diplomatic: "The audience that loved Juno won't automatically show up for a hard sci-fi flick. Different demos. Honestly, I don't understand the pivot. Doesn't mean it'll flop—just means it's a gamble."
Of course the headlines the next morning screamed: EMA SCORE BOSS CALLS JOEY GRANT'S NEW MOVIE "A DUMB MOVE"
Talk-show host Briatore went full attack dog on his show: "When is this clownish Asian director gonna stop treating Hollywood like her personal playground? Meg Ryan, $20 million sci-fi, ex-fiancé funding—pick a gimmick and stick to it. Juno went to her head."
Asian-American groups and women's groups dragged him hard for the racist, sexist dog-whistle. He half-assed an apology but doubled down: "I just want certain directors to stop chasing hype and make a real movie for once."
Joey read every venomous word. Every day she doom-scrolled the coverage.
She was used to it by now. The hate didn't even sting anymore; it just felt like background noise.
She and Meg both knew the deal: they were the two most controversial pieces of this puzzle. Either they both get vindicated, or they both go down in flames together.
Meg had chosen to roll the dice with her. That meant something.
As for Briatore and his ilk—Joey fantasized about slapping that smug look off his face. Dude was straight-up prejudiced against female directors and minorities and too cowardly to admit it.
But she stayed quiet.
The finished film would do the talking.
She kept grinding through the press tour, smiling for cameras, ignoring the shade.
Deep down she still believed: if the movie's actually great, the noise dies eventually.
A lot of people were doubting her right now.
Including, she suspected, Tom Cruise.
She was pretty sure Tom thought she was in over her head—he was just too polite to say it to her face.
It hurt a little, but she got it. From the outside it looked insane.
So when her phone rang one afternoon and the caller ID actually said "Tom Cruise," she almost dropped it.
Tom Cruise still had her number saved.
And he was calling her.