He had simply become better at learning from it.… In October 2026, twenty-eight-year-old Arjun Mehta stood outside a neighborhood movie theater in Queens, New York, wearing a wooden sandwich board that advertised two films nobody on the street appeared particularly interested in watching. He had been born and raised in Pune, India, where his father ran a small stationery shop and his mother taught mathematics at a local school. As a teenager, Arjun had developed an almost embarrassing fascination with American cinema. He loved everything about it: the enormous production budgets, the elaborate promotional campaigns, the psychology behind movie trailers, and the mysterious process by which a relatively unknown actor could become a global celebrity overnight. He didn’t simply want to make films. He wanted to understand how films found their audiences. After completing his undergraduate studies in India, Arjun moved to the United States to...