With 'Mountainhead', It Looks Like 'Succession' Creator Jesse Armstrong Is Back in Eat-the-Rich Mode — and There's a Trailer
In this straight-to-streaming Max film, Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef play billionaires on holiday amid an international crisis.
The world is in chaos. Violent confrontations, atrocities, nations teetering both politically and economically: that's the situation. On a luxe snowy getaway, four presidents of tech watch on. What could the US President have to say when he calls, then? "That your platform's inflamed a volatile situation, circulating unfalsifiable deepfakes, massive fraud, market instability," is one prediction in the just-dropped first teaser trailer for Mountainhead.
The new movie is the latest project from Jesse Armstrong, who both writes and directs — and is making his return to the screen after Succession wrapped up in 2023. Based on the scenario seen in the sneak peek, aka a group of billionaires showing little care for the state of the globe while they live it up on holiday, Armstrong is still in eat-the-rich mode.
Steve Carell (Despicable Me 4), Jason Schwartzman (The Last Showgirl), Cory Michael Smith (Saturday Night) and Ramy Youssef (Poor Things) play cashed-up group, aka Randall, Souper, Venis and Jeff — and when Venis arrives, the fact that he's the richest guy in the world earns a callout. Cue ribbing and riffing between the four, including about platforms that are "racist and shitty", as well as poker and catering seeming to be more of a concern than an international crisis.
Mountainhead might be Armstrong's first feature as a director, but it's a straight-to-streaming flick, hitting Max in Australia on Sunday, 1 June, 2025.
Co-starring alongside Carell, Schwartzman, Smith and Youssef: Hadley Robinson (Anyone But You), Andy Daly (Night Court), Ali Kinkade (Lessons in Chemistry), Daniel Oreskes (A Real Pain), David Thompson (It's What's Inside), Ami MacKenzie (Pulse) and Ava Kostia (Love Across Time).
Although Armstrong is best-known for Succession — understandably so given that it has earned him seven Emmys — he's an Oscar-nominee for In the Loop's screenplay, also co-created Peep Show, was a writer on The Thick of It and Veep, co-penned Four Lions and wrote a season-one episode of Black Mirror, among other credits.
Check out the trailer for Mountainhead below:
Mountainhead streams via Max from Sunday, June 1, 2025.
Images: Macall Polay/HBO.
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