I Love Boosters, Riley’s new crime comedy, follows a crew of shoplifters who steal high-end fashion and resell it cheaper, until a ruthless fashion mogul steals their designs and gives them a bigger reason to strike back. The film stars Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Don Cheadle, and Demi Moore, with Neon releasing it theatrically in the U.S. on May 22, 2026.

The movie sounds like a joke until you realize Riley is dead serious. That has always been his trick. Sorry to Bother You took corporate America, race, labor, and desperation and turned them into a carnival ride with the brakes cut. I Love Boosters appears to be playing in that same register: absurd, loud, messy, funny, political, and allergic to being normal.

Just how Boots like it. I mean, just how Boots loves it. 

The idea of “boosting” has always lived in that gray area America loves to pretend it does not understand. When rich people steal ideas, labor, land, culture, designs, slang, and style, they call it business. When poor people steal the finished product back, suddenly everybody finds a moral compass. That is where this movie seems to plant its flag. Not in the question of whether stealing is “right,” but in the bigger question: what do you call a system that robs people so cleanly it gets to write the law afterward?

The fashion angle is what makes the movie hit a little harder. Clothes are never just clothes. They are class, access, taste, aspiration, costume, armor, and sometimes a receipt of who got left outside. A luxury brand can take from the street, mark it up, put it behind glass, and call it “inspired.” But when the same people who created the sauce find a way to get paid off it, now it is theft. That hypocrisy is the movie’s real villain.

From early reviews, I Love Boosters seems to be divisive in the way a Boots Riley project should be. Some critics praise the film’s originality, visual ambition, and anti-capitalist bite, while others call it overstuffed or chaotic. That does not scare me. Some movies are clean because they do not have much to say. Riley’s work is messy because he is trying to stuff the whole broken machine into the frame.

That does not mean the movie is above criticism. A story this packed can lose emotional weight if every character becomes a symbol. Satire can also get so busy proving its point that it forgets to let a scene breathe. But even when Riley misses, he misses swinging at something real. I will always respect that more than a polished movie with nothing on its mind.

I Love Boosters looks like a movie about shoplifting, but it is really about ownership. Who owns style? Who owns labor? Who owns rebellion once rebellion becomes marketable? And who gets punished for taking back a little piece of what the world already took from them?

That is the fun of it. That is also the sting.

Because under all the jokes, fits, scams, surrealism, and chaos, I Love Boosters seems to be asking one very simple question:

If the whole system is built on stealing, why is the booster the only one being chased?

The funny thing about luxury is that people swear they hate gatekeeping until the gate opens a little bit.

That is what makes this Audemars Piguet x Swatch collab so interesting. Not because it is the cleanest watch ever made. Not because it is going to make watch snobs throw away their Royal Oaks and start shopping like regular people. But because it exposes the whole game in real time.

Audemars Piguet and Swatch officially unveiled the Royal Pop, an eight-piece collection inspired by AP’s Royal Oak and Swatch’s old POP line. The twist is that it is not a wristwatch. It is a pocket watch you can wear around your neck, clip to a bag, keep in your pocket, or style however you want. AP says the collection pulls from Royal Oak codes — the octagonal bezel, eight screws, and “Petite Tapisserie” pattern — while Swatch brings the bioceramic, color, and playful accessibility. (Audemars Piguet)

And that right there is why people are mad.

They wanted the AP shape, the AP feeling, the AP status, but without the AP invoice. They wanted to walk into Swatch, spend a few hundred dollars, and walk out with the same emotional high as somebody who just got “the call” from a boutique after pretending to be patient for three years. That was never going to happen cleanly. Luxury does not survive by letting everybody touch the same thing at the same level.

So instead of giving people a plastic Royal Oak wristwatch, AP and Swatch gave them something weirder: a pocket watch.

And honestly? That might be the smartest part.

A regular wristwatch would have been too obvious. It would have felt like the MoonSwatch formula with richer friends. The Omega x Swatch thing already taught us what happens when Swiss prestige gets dropped into mall culture. Lines form. Resellers appear. Everybody suddenly becomes a watch historian with a StockX tab open. This one had to do something different. The Royal Pop starts at $400 for the Lépine models and $420 for the Savonnette versions, with in-store-only availability at selected Swatch locations and a one-watch-per-person-per-store-per-day limit. (GQ)

That is not an accident. That is controlled chaos.

That is “everybody can participate” with a velvet rope still standing somewhere in the room.

The pocket watch part is what makes it cultural instead of just commercial. A watch on the wrist is expected. A watch around the neck is a decision. A watch clipped to a bag is styling. A watch worn wrong on purpose is fashion. And once something moves from product into styling, the conversation changes. Now it is not just “Can I afford this?” It becomes “Do I know what to do with this?”

That is where the real separation happens.

Because money can buy the item, but taste has to carry it.

Somebody is going to wear this thing and make it look incredible. Somebody else is going to wear it and look like they got finessed by a museum gift shop. Same watch. Different life.

That is fashion.

The funniest part is watching people act like this damages AP. Please. Audemars Piguet is not going to collapse because Swatch made a colorful pocket watch with an octagon on it. The people who were buying real Royal Oaks were not waiting to see if the Swatch version came with a lanyard. AP is still AP. The rich are still rich. The waitlist is still the waitlist. The boutique still knows who buys jewelry for their wife before asking about allocation.

What this does is make AP louder.

It puts the name in front of kids who know the Royal Oak from rap lyrics, Instagram wrists, tunnel fits, athletes, and finance bros who wear quarter-zips like uniforms. It takes a brand that can feel locked behind glass and throws it into the street for a weekend. Not forever. Not fully. Just enough to make people feel close to it.

That is the part people do not like admitting.

We are not just buying watches anymore. We are buying nearness.

Near luxury. Near access. Near the room. Near the table. Near the lifestyle. Near the person we think we would be if the money, timing, and credit limit all lined up at once.

The Royal Pop is a strange object, but it understands the moment. Hype does not need perfection anymore. Sometimes hype just needs a logo, a story, scarcity, and enough confusion to make everybody argue for free. And this collab has all of that.

It is playful. It is annoying. It is smart. It is unnecessary. It is going to sell.

That is usually how you know something hit the culture.

The watch itself might not be for everybody. I get that. A pocket watch in 2026 sounds like something your uncle would pull out before telling you the government took prayer out of schools. But Swatch and AP did not make this for the safest person in the room. They made it for the person willing to treat time like an accessory instead of just a function.

That is the flex hiding underneath all the noise.

Not “I got an AP.”

More like: “I got the joke.”

And sometimes, in fashion, getting the joke is the whole outfit.

Ted Turner understood that before a lot of people did.

He looked at Atlanta and saw a broadcast tower. A city with enough nerve to talk to everybody at once. He took a place that was still fighting to be taken seriously and turned it into a place the world had to watch. Not because Atlanta begged for respect. Because Ted put Atlanta on the screen until respect had no choice but to find the address..

This man took a local television station and stretched it across the country through the “superstation” idea. Then he bought the Braves in 1976 and made them more than a baseball team. He made them programming. He made them company. He made them something a kid in Georgia, Montana, Ohio, or some small town with two gas stations could fall asleep watching on TBS. Then in 1980, he launched CNN out of Atlanta and created the first 24-hour cable news network. That changed television, politics, sports, war coverage, airports, waiting rooms, hotel lobbies, and the way America understood urgency.

That is the part people miss when they reduce Ted Turner to “CNN founder.” That is too clean. Too easy. Ted Turner helped build the modern Atlanta imagination.

Before Atlanta became the city of rap videos, Tyler Perry studios, luxury apartments with fake industrial lighting. Turner had already made the city national. He gave Atlanta a broadcast identity. He made the city feel less regional. Less tucked away. Less like a Southern city waiting to be validated by New York.

CNN was not just a company in Atlanta. It was Atlanta telling the world, “We can be the center too.”

That matters.

Because cities are built twice. Once with concrete, zoning, highways, hotels, arenas, office towers. Then again in the mind. The second build might be more important. A city can have buildings and still feel invisible. Ted Turner helped Atlanta stop feeling invisible.

The Braves part is even more Atlanta than people understand. The Braves were not always this gold-standard organization with division banners and postseason expectations. There was a time when the product on the field was bad enough to make a grown man question how much he loved baseball. But Ted understood something deeper than wins. He understood repetition. Put the Braves in people’s homes every night. Make the logo familiar. Make the voices familiar. Make the city familiar. Let people grow up with Atlanta before they ever step foot in Georgia.

That is branding before everybody started calling themselves a brand.

He turned sports into a city commercial. Every night, whether the Braves won or lost, Atlanta was on. The skyline was on. The stadium was on. The idea was on. TBS helped make the Braves “America’s Team” because the games traveled farther than the team did.

And that is Atlanta. Take what they think is local and make it global.

This is where the conversation gets interesting. Because Atlanta today is not just a city. Atlanta is a signal.

Music signal. Fashion signal. Sports signal. Black business signal. Film signal. Food signal. Strip club signal. Church signal. Airport signal. Hustle signal. “I know somebody who can do it cheaper” signal. “We open late” signal. “Meet me on the Eastside” signal. “Traffic crazy, I’m still coming” signal.

Ted Turner helped build one of the first modern versions of that signal.

He made Atlanta feel like a headquarters.

Not an outpost. Not a branch. Not a market. A headquarters.

He understood distribution.

That is the word. Distribution.

A lot of people have ideas. Fewer people know how to move the idea. Turner knew how to move the idea. He knew a signal sitting still was just noise in one room. But a signal with reach? That becomes culture.

And Atlanta is a city obsessed with reach. That is why the airport matters. That is why the music matters. That is why the highways matter even when we hate them. That is why people come here to become more themselves. Atlanta is not always polished, but it moves. It distributes. It spreads. It catches. It mutates. It gets copied badly by people who do not understand the original recipe.

Ted Turner was on that before the language caught up.

Now, was he perfect? No. No serious person needs their city builders to be saints. Saints do not usually build cable networks. Saints do not buy baseball teams for content. Saints do not bet the house on 24-hour news when people are telling them nobody wants news all day. Ted was a lot. Atlanta is a lot. Maybe that is why it worked.

The city has always had a strange relationship with big personalities. We complain about them until they win. Then we name streets after them. Turner got that treatment because the bet was too large to ignore. CNN changed news. TBS changed cable. The Braves changed how a local team could become a national habit. Turner’s money and mouth moved through the city like weather.

And Atlanta became more Atlanta because of it.

When people talk about what shaped modern Atlanta, they usually go straight to the Civil Rights movement, the Olympics, hip-hop, Hartsfield-Jackson, Freaknik, Tyler Perry, OutKast, the Braves, the Falcons almost breaking our hearts permanently, and the migration of Black professionals who turned the city into a capital of possibility.

Ted Turner belongs in that conversation.

Not above it. Not instead of it. In it.

Because he helped give the city a screen.

And once Atlanta got on screen, it never really got off.

Ted Turner died at 87, but the city is still living inside some of his bets. Every time Atlanta acts like the center of the world, a little bit of Ted is in that. Every time somebody builds something here with a Southern accent and global plans, a little bit of Ted is in that. Every time somebody says, “Why not Atlanta?” and means it as a challenge, not a question, a little bit of Ted is in that.

That might be his real legacy.

He did not just put Atlanta on television.

He helped Atlanta believe it belonged there.