Oscar Boyson spent years making other filmmakers’ visions possible. With Our Hero, Balthazar, his feature debut, he has built one of his own — a pitch-dark satire about school shootings, performative grief, and the gap between online posturing and real-world consequence, now heading into nationwide release.
The film centers on Balthazar “Balthy” Malone, a ridiculously wealthy New York City teenager played by Jaeden Martell, who fakes emotional breakdowns on social media to impress a gun-control-activist classmate. When an anonymous online troll from Texas begins mocking his videos and claims to be a potential mass shooter, Balthy impulsively travels south to stop him, setting off a collision between two young men from vastly different Americas.
The film premiered at the Tribeca Festival in June 2025 and was released by Picturehouse and WG Pictures, opening in New York on March 27, 2026, before expanding to Los Angeles and additional cities. It carries a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. The nationwide rollout launched this week.
Boyson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ricky Camilleri, traces the film’s origins to a specific, unsettling piece of recent history. The pair were struck by reports that Uvalde gunman Salvador Ramos texted a teenage girl in Germany moments before the 2022 attack — and the social media pile-on she faced afterward. “People dragged her as if she could have done something,” Boyson said. “It felt like a microcosm for what it means to be a kid. On social media, you’re exposed to and burdened with all the terrible things in the world, as if you are the one who should be doing something about them.”
Boyson arrived at filmmaking through an unlikely path — answering a Craigslist ad that led him to work with YouTube pioneers Casey and Van Neistat at their SoHo studio, a creative hub that also launched Greta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, and the Safdie brothers. He went on to produce the Safdies’ Heaven Knows What, Good Time, and Uncut Gems, and co-produced Frances Ha. “I saw how well that movie did and how it resonated with audiences, and nobody was talking at all about how small the budget was,” he said of Frances Ha. “That was the most empowering experience of my professional life.”
The film’s marketing leans into its themes: an Instagram account run by Martell in character has attracted over 85,000 followers, making it the third-most followed social media account for an independent film. Boyson sees that traction as validation of a generation Hollywood consistently ignores. “Young people know when it’s AI. They know when they’re getting sold something,” he said. “We’re expecting them all to show up to these movies, but we’re not thinking about their perspective at all.”
