Zendaya’s New Film ‘The Drama’ Appears to Have Been Inspired by This Photo Book

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Film fans believe that a key plot point in Zendaya’s and Robert Pattinson’s new movie The Drama was inspired by photographer Lindsay McCrum’s 2011 book Chicks with Guns.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for ‘The Drama’

Kristoffer Borgli’s 2026 film The Drama follows Charlie (played by Pattinson) who begins to question his relationship with his fiancée Emma (played by Zendaya) after she reveals, just days before their wedding that, as a teenager, she once planned — but did not carry out — a school shooting.

Emma’s confession leaves Charlie deeply unsettled. As he struggles to process what he has learned, he becomes fixated on a fictional photobook in the film titled “Brainrot.” The fictitious photo book in The Drama features images of young women posing with firearms. In the movie, Charlie begins to imagine Emma as one of the book’s subjects and becomes increasingly obsessed with the photographs.

The cover of Lindsay McCrum‘s 2011 book Chicks with Guns | Photo via Wikimedia Commons

According to a report by Art News, The Drama’s “Brainrot” appears to be loosely inspired by a real photography book, Lindsay McCrum’s Chicks with Guns, published in 2011. Salon has also noted similarities between the fictional book in the film and McCrum’s project.

At the time of the book’s release, NPR reported that McCrum developed the idea for Chicks with Guns after reading about the scale of the American gun industry in The Economist. More than 15 million women in the U.S. are gun owners.

“I was really struck by the extraordinary size and scope of the gun business,” the photographer told NPR.

McCrum then contacted women across the United States who owned firearms and photographed them in their homes. In total, McCrum photographed 280 women, ultimately selecting 81 images for the final book. The participants ranged widely in age, from eight to 85.

The book, which sold out on Amazon on the first day of its release, presents women from a variety of backgrounds in different settings. McCrum initially planned for the project to consist only of photographs, but later decided to include additional context to better convey the subjects’ stories.

McCrum said she did not create Chicks with Guns to make a political statement. McCrum, who has never owned a gun herself, says completing the book left her with a larger understanding of the role guns play in women’s lives.

“I would always make it very clear there was no political or ideological agenda attached to this body of work,” she said. “There’s a remarkable diversity of women and there’s an extraordinary range of reasons they own guns.”