Oasis, the Coen brothers, and the JoBros. Now, the Safdie brothers count themselves among the great sibling creative partnerships that eventually went their separate ways. In early 2024, Benny Safdie confirmed that he would no longer be directing films alongside his older brother, Josh Safdie, after over a decade of moviemaking and a lifetime of being related.
With The Smashing Machine out on October 3, Benny becomes the first to make to re-debut as a filmmaker independent of his brother after initially branching out into acting. While we haven’t gotten much of Josh’s perspective yet, Marty Supreme is out this Christmas, forgoing any major film festivals. Hopefully, like those siblings before them, the Safdies will eventually reunite to get Adam Sandler his Oscar but first, an awards season during which the brothers will be competing against each other instead of together.
March 10, 2008: Josh gets hired by the Spade family to make a short film including Kate Spade handbags. It later evolves into Josh’s directorial debut, The Pleasure of Being Robbed — Benny helped edit the project.
May 16, 2009: The first feature film that they co-directed together, Daddy Longlegs, premieres at the Directors’ Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival. Getting a little more intimate, their divorced father was a major inspiration for the movie.
February 26, 2011: The brothers win their first award together; Daddy Longlegs wins the John Cassavetes Award for films budgeted under $1 million at the Independent Spirit Awards.
April 18, 2013: Their next film, a sports documentary about one of the top high-school basketball players, Lenny Cooke, premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival.
April 23, 2014: Elara Pictures, their joint production company, is born through their next feature film, Heaven Knows What.
May 25, 2017: The duo starts getting a little bit more Hollywood with their next feature, Good Time, starring Robert Pattinson, which competes for the Palme d’Or at Cannes — and loses to Ruben Östlund’s The Square. This also becomes Benny’s second acting role after Person to Person earlier this year — and first role in one of the brothers’ films. He earns a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the Independent Spirit Awards but loses to Sam Rockwell in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
August 30, 2019: Anxiety-inducing Adam Sandler film Uncut Gems premieres at the Telluride Film Festival to critical acclaim.
February 8, 2020: The brothers win Best Director at the Independent Spirit Film Festival; they playfully talk over each other during their acceptance speech, before capping it off by saying “I love you” to each other.
February 22, 2020: Showtime orders The Curse pilot, executive produced by both brothers, but only Benny is writing the show; he leaves the directing to Nathan Fielder but co-stars alongside Fielder and Emma Stone. However, it is still an Elara Pictures production.
November 26, 2021: Benny scores one of his biggest roles as Joel Wachs in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, calling it a “liberating feeling” being understood as an actor by PTA.
April 22, 2022: Rumors swirl that the Safdie brothers and Adam Sandler are working on another feature film, per IndieWire.
April 25, 2023: Benny’s next role fills a more paternal role in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret in which he plays a part that hits close to home, a Jewish father. “There was something really cathartic about trying to put myself in a position of unconditional love with no understanding of what the other person was going through,” Benny tells NPR about playing a father to a tween girl.
July 18, 2023: Benny is the first to mention a creative split from Josh. “It just felt like, okay, there’s things that I want to explore that don’t necessarily align right now with Josh. So it’s a divide and conquer mentality,” he tells GQ. “He wants to tell this story, he can go and do that. I’m going to go and do a couple of other things. It seems like a natural progression for how things have happened.”
July 21, 2023: Oppenheimer premieres and Benny gets his second role based on a real person, Edward Teller, and even ventured into method acting with his eyebrows. “And I am proud to say that it’s all my eyebrows,” he told Vulture. “Teller had the best eyebrows. Every once in a while I have a straggler that I’ll just pluck out, ’cause it looks a little too crazy. But Chris said, ‘Don’t do that. Let’s just let it go crazy.’ I had the most insane eyebrows for months and months, and you just had to brush them out and then they shined in all their glory.”
August 13, 2023: The brothers return to their documentary filmmaking roots, producing the HBO docuseries Telemarketers.
October 13, 2023: The Curse premieres at the New York Film Festival; Josh is seemingly not in attendance.
November 13, 2023: Elara Pictures produces another docuseries for HBO, Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God, following the life and death of Amy Carlson, leader of a New Age religious movement. Both Josh and Benny are credited as executive producers.
January 4, 2024: Benny confirms that he and Josh are no longer directing movies together. “It’s a natural progression of what we each want to explore,” he says to Variety. “I will direct on my own, and I will explore things that I want to explore. I want that freedom right now in my life.” He also shares that he bowed out of the follow-up movie with Adam Sandler and Megan Thee Stallion as he “hasn’t been a meaningful part of the creative process.” The film is now paused and when asked if he would film another movie with his brother again, he says, “I don’t know.”
June 2, 2024: Ren Faire premieres on HBO, another doc executive produced by the Safdie brothers. They were nominated for Best New Non-Scripted or Documentary Series at the 40th Independent Spirit Awards but lost to Hollywood Black.
August 27, 2024: Josh reunites with Sandler to direct his comedy special, Love You.
December 13, 2024: Benny announces his first solo-directing project, The Smashing Machine, starring Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson through A24. It becomes Benny’s first project that is not produced by the brothers’ joint production company, Elara Pictures, since 2014.
January 30, 2025: Peacock orders a drama executive produced by the duo called Superfakes starring Lucy Liu, inadvertently debunking any feud rumors between the brothers.
March 28, 2025: Thank You Very Much, a documentary executive produced by the brothers, gets a limited release in theaters, however the brothers seemingly had limited involvement in the making of the doc.
May 23, 2025: Their most recent project executive produced together, Pee-wee As Himself, premieres.
July 15, 2025: It’s Josh’s turn now. He announces his second directorial feature (and first post-breakup), Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet. It’s produced by A24 and Central Group, a production company formed by Josh, Ronald Bronstein, and Eli Bush, instead of Elara Pictures. It will be A24’s most expensive film yet.
July 25, 2025: Benny’s the villain in Happy Gilmore 2, reuniting with Sandler — his brother, Josh, attended the premiere in New York. With his growing IMDb credits, Benny has no worries about multitasking from being both behind and in front of the camera. “I’m lucky enough that if there’s something I really want to do, I’ll figure out a way to make it happen,” Benny tells Time on working on Happy Gilmore 2 at the same time as The Smashing Machine.
August 28, 2025: Benny seems surprised that everyone else is surprised about the brothers going on different paths. “We had started out making movies separately, in college,” he told Empire. “And then we were always working towards something, and when we reached that place it was almost like, ‘Oh, well, what now?’” Separate paths, but not far off. They’re both still directing movies centered around an athlete of a specialized sport, just different ways of executing them.
September 6, 2025: With Marty Supreme skipping film-festival season, Benny becomes the first brother to get an award. At Venice Film Festival, he wins the Silver Lion for Best Director for The Smashing Machine, and he gives a special thank-you to “my friend, my brother, and partner,” the Rock. He does not mention his brother, Josh, but does thank his mother, stepfather, and his wife and kids. And with that, let the solo Safdie brothers awards sweep begin.
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Everything leading up to Benny’s and Josh’s solo endeavors, The Smashing Machine and Marty Supreme.
