At last, Hollywood mocks cancel culture

Dream Scenario is a film about modern celebrity culture and the terror of losing yourself to the internet’s virtual mob. It’s the story of evolutionary biology professor Paul Matthews, a balding, befuddled, bespectacled everyman who is the walking embodiment of anonymity – played by Nicholas Cage, the face that launched a thousand memes. At the start of the film, he gives a lecture on how zebras have adapted to avoid the mortal danger of standing out from the herd. Suddenly, in a supernatural, psychopathological epidemic, anorak-clad Paul finds himself appearing in everyone’s dreams. At first, he is just a benign bystander; in one dream, he stands there admiring a mushroom while his student is stabbed by a serial killer.

Paul, like so many of us, uses his smartphone stardom to prove he is not tragically ordinary

Paul wholeheartedly welcomes the newfound attention and adoration that comes with being an overnight sensation and there are some agonising scenes where he meets with millennial marketers who want him to do deals with Sprite and Obama.