By Published Apr 27, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock. Summary Generate a summary of this story follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap
Warning! Spoilers ahead for The Drama and Euphoria season 3, episode 3.
is at the absolute tippy-top of the A-list right now. The traditional “star” is quickly becoming an antiquated concept, but , and 2026 is shaping up to be the biggest year of her career. She’s already carried , a decidedly uncommercial, hilariously uncomfortable pitch-black comedy, to $100 million blockbuster success at the box office, and she’s currently starring in the long-anticipated third season of HBO’s (and scoring the show’s only remaining positive notes from critics).
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg; this summer, she’s co-starring with her husband in Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and over the holiday season, she’s going head-to-head with the Avengers in Denis Villeneuve’s trilogy-capping epic Dune: Part Three. Even if she didn’t have those big-budget blockbusters on the horizon, The Drama and are already two of the most talked-about Hollywood releases of the year.
They’re very different projects; The Drama is an excruciating cringe comedy about the lead-up to a disastrous wedding, and Euphoria is a lavish teen soap opera that, after a five-year time jump, has become a lavish adult soap opera. But in both cases, Zendaya’s character touches on the same taboo subject: the gun issue. -turned-gun control activist, and in Euphoria, Rue has become a black-market gun runner selling firearms to criminals.
The Drama Dealt With The Gun Issue Much More Subtly Than Euphoria Season 3
The main attraction in Euphoria season 3, episode 3, “The Ballad of Paladin,” was the much-hyped wedding between Cassie Howard and Nate Jacobs. But it doesn’t get to the wedding until about a third of the way through the episode. In its first act, it plays like a bad Tarantino movie as we catch up with Rue’s improbable career as a gangster. These scenes have all the edgy dialogue, stylish visuals, and excessive violence of a Tarantino film, but none of the flair or ingenuity.
But there was one sequence that caught my eye with a fun, albeit unintentional parallel to The Drama. When Euphoria returns to the strip club, we learn that Rue has become an underground firearms dealer, selling 3D-printed machine guns to criminals. Just over three weeks ago, we saw Zendaya agonizing over the morality of gun ownership and . The titular drama in The Drama is the revelation that Zendaya’s Emma, the bride-to-be, once planned a school shooting in her youth, but ultimately abandoned the plan when another mass shooting took place in the area, her classmates came together to mourn, and she found a sense of community in a gun control advocate group, so she did a complete 180 on the gun issue.
Now, just over three weeks later, we’re seeing the same person (or, at least, the same actor) casually selling automatic weapons to cartel hitmen without batting an eye. While it’s an amusing coincidence that Euphoria is touching on , The Drama handled it in a much subtler, more delicate way. Euphoria makes a few glib, offhand remarks about American criminals sending guns across the border to Mexico, but The Drama looks at the issue from every possible angle, and explores the ethical implications of every little detail.
Once , the rest of the movie focuses on Pattinson’s Charlie as he struggles to wrap his head around it. He asks her all the wrong questions, because he wants to be able to make sense of it and wrap it up in a neat bow. But, as the film itself highlights, this is such a complex issue, with such far-reaching ramifications, that it can’t be wrapped up in a neat bow, or boiled down to the binary understanding of right and wrong — it’s a lot more complicated than that.
Euphoria has always been style over substance, but in the first two seasons, there was at least some substance. Season 3 has been all style, no substance. It’ll bring up an interesting taboo (no matter how far-fetched), like Rue selling guns on the black market, but it won’t do anything with it beyond some cool visuals. A couple of weeks after The Drama sparked such interesting discussions about the same theme, it’s really obvious just how empty Euphoria is.
The Drama's Marketing Ingeniously Hid What The Movie Was Really About
Along with 28 Years Later, . So many trailers these days spoil the entire movie and give away all the twists in a desperate attempt to entice ticket-buyers. But The Drama’s marketing campaign was a masterclass in restraint. It showed the infamous scene where Emma, her groom, and their best man and maid of honor all sit around a table after a long night of drinking and name the “worst thing they ever did,” and it showed everyone being horrified by Emma’s answer, but it hid exactly what Emma did to turn the whole table against her.
This sparked a lot of speculation about what it might be, and there were plenty of theories about the worst thing Emma did. The hook of that trailer is arguably just as integral to as Zendaya and Pattinson’s Gen Z star power. But it wasn’t just about hiding the twist; it also cleverly hid what the movie is really about. The Drama is a frank discussion of gun violence, gun legislation, and the alarming proliferation of mass shootings. But if it was advertised as that, then it would be labeled as a political movie, and it wouldn’t have been nearly as commercially successful.
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By burying the lede, A24 made The Drama a lot more accessible to a much wider audience. The trailers didn’t mislead audiences, or misrepresent the movie — they made it very clear that it’s a deeply disturbing, deeply uncomfortable inversion of a classic romcom — but they did prevent it from becoming an “issue” film in the public consciousness (at least until the cat was out of the bag on the opening weekend).
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