BoxOfficeFangrl

I don't know, "Meet the Grahams" dropped late Friday and Drake fans were like, it's low energy and no one will be playing it in the club (as if that was the point). And on Saturday, here comes the uptempo "Not Like Us"—I've already seen videos from people dancing to it at clubs. The lyrics for Kendrick's newest songs also reference/respond to things from "Family Matters" which Drake just dropped on Friday. Kendrick has said there's a mole in Drake's camp, so maybe there's been some lead time in putting his responses together. One of the more elaborate conspiracies is that the mole is actually a double agent and deliberately fed false info about the 11 year old daughter, as to discredit all of Kendrick's allegations. Notice Drake denied having (another) secret kid right sway but didn't immediately address Kendrick likening him to Harvey Weinstein. There's also the theory that Eleven is a reference to Millie Bobby Brown's Stranger Things character. It's well known that Drake was texting "advice about boys" and that he missed her so much, when he was 32 and she was 14. And she's not the only underage girl he was known to be "friendly" with...

Drake accused Kendrick of beating his woman, and Kendrick has essentially labeled Drake a sexual predator over multiple tracks in two days, while saying he should die. Showbiz is unpredictable, but right now it's hard to picture them doing a reunion tour together in their 50s. J Cole is the true winner in all this for bowing out early.

Even the BBC wants in on that web traffic lol: Kendrick Lamar’s beef with Drake and J Cole explained

It's hard to say some hit movies have still advertised during the Super Bowl but someone will argue they would have been hits anyway. Can a Super Bowl ad still put something that's not already a big franchise or well known property on the map?

They used to put upcoming summer movies on the map but the time has probably passed. A Super Bowl ad only makes sense now for movies coming out within a month, or it's like that surprise Cloverfield thing that dropped on Netflix right after the game. A pregame ad gets nearly the same reach/coverage while costing less. And film festival highs/bubbles are pretty notorious. At festivals like Cannes or Venice, the media reports on how long the standing ovations are, and five minutes means the movie's reception is actually kind of mid. SXSW skews younger, less "formal", more action/geek friendly. They premiered the Road House remake there. The Fall Guy probably benefited from the comparison. Dan was just nominated for a Tony and is being predicted to win his category. So thrilled he's found success in other projects.

The Fall Guy is still Certified Fresh at 83 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and got an A- CinemaScore, which is far better than those metrics for The Flash. Universal moved the release date from the first weekend in March to the summer box office kick off slot: they really thought they had something. The Super Bowl ad and leaning into Barbenheimer makes more sense with a March 1 release date—that was before this year's Oscars ceremony (March 10). Ryan and Emily were both nominated, so if they had been heavily promoting The Fall Guy in late February, of course talk about the movies they wete nominated for would naturally come up. But they moved it to May, so a Super Bowl ad can seem like a waste in a fast-moving world, and Barbenheimer was old news.

All the hip hop heads were pulled away by Kendrick Lamar vs Drake escalating throughout the day. Three diss tracks on Friday alone! Kidding, but both full Fall Guy trailers had 80s rock blaring throughout, and the Super Bowl ad had a Taylor Swift song. Obviously, people can listen to all kinds music regardless of their background, but those tracks are more broadly appealing to some groups and ages more than others.

Don't forget, "You loved Barbenheimer, right—right?" at the Oscars (okay, fine, it was brief awards banter) and during Ryan's SNL monologue. Even this Universal promo fashioned as a "marketing meeting" for The Fall Guy has a Barbenheimer reference: This promo kinda sorta leans into the notion that Universal was having trouble marketing it...

The original TV series was about a stunt man by day moonlighting as a bounty hunter. Simple premise, though maybe not the most romantic comedy friendly. The ethics of bounty hunting are widely challenged, but Hollywood makes movies about hit men all the time so it can't be that. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood did well but that was Leo + Tarantino + Brad Pitt + 2019, a much more favorable combo for box office success. An all-time classic "movie about movies" is Singin' in the Rain but what get lost to time is that it’s also a jukebox musical—it was designed as a vehicle to showcase a songwriting duo's back catalog of old hits, and they just came up with a story surrounding it. The contemporary equivalent would be a musical set in 1999 Hollywood full of songs produced by Max Martin and the movie's title was something like Baby One More Time or I Want It That Way.

Maybe there should have been one trailer featuring mostly action and other that showcases the comedy/romance. Instead, both 3 minute trailers are a hodge podge of genres, so instead of appealing to multiple audiences it struck some people as unfocused? Movies can balance more than one tone, of course, but in these challenging times for theatrical, "original" movies might be better served by keeping the pitch to audiences extremely simple. The premise of the original TV series is a stuntman moonlighting as a bounty hunter.

The prequel trilogy has a big fanbase now, a lot of people too young to have had crushed expectations back in 1999. Movies with much less going for then than The Phantom Menace have been reclaimed. The most recent trilogy leaving a lot of unsatisfied fans maybe makes earlier movies more appealing. I saw Challengers in IMAX and the tennis scenes looked good but IMO it's not essential to see it in a large format.

That was always obvious. In 2009, The Hangover and The Proposal were huge summer hits. That Labor Day weekend, a Sandra Bullock/Bradley Cooper romcom was released and it still flopped. To be fair, All About Steve got dreadful reviews, so that's a case where leaning on other movies to sell it made sense—it had few merits of its own. Pushed too extensively, the "You liked Barbenheimer, right? Right???" angle just makes it seem like The Fall Guy can't stand on its own strengths. The good reviews haven't translated to good ticket sales unfortunately. It's like people made up their minds in either direction after seeing the (long) trailers.

The title still makes me think of "Just Dance"...

Some amazing tap dancing going on in that copy, but you gotta play nice to get that access.

IMO Challengers could only be considered a "comedy" in the Golden Globes sense, where the definitions are notoriously loose. But the movie isn't selling itself that way (for now), and IMDb lists the genres as "Drama/Romance/Sport", which seems right to me. There are extended match sequences and it got an IMAX poster. It's not 100 percent tennis onscreen but even tennis documentaries don't meet that standard. If I told family/friends that "Challengers is a romcom in the tennis world," they'd probably go in expecting something like Wimbledon and feel extremely misled. If I were telling someone what it's actually like, I'd say "Cruel Intentions with sports and a pinch of The Dreamers thrown in".

Basically, though I would say Challengers has quite a bit of tennis filmed in visually interesting ways. Maybe that explains the higher scores with men? Though as a female tennis fan of course I know women can like sports and sports movies, too. Ads hyping Challengers as "one of the sexiest movies ever made" gives the idea it's 50 Shades of Tennis (or more) and it's not. So people who wanted more "action" might be disappointed, though I think the Zendaya fangirls might have had a different issue with the movie than that. The movie has a ton of product placement, that probably helps offset the $55 million budget somewhat.

If Amazon was expecting a blockbuster out of a tennis movie they didn't do their homework, because tennis has a long history of meager box office performances. Like, the "record" for Challengers to beat is seemingly Match Point—a Woody Allen movie pretty light on sports content. The Challengers ad campaign is leaning into sexiness, which is great for internet attention, but it's not the 1990s anymore. Being steamy is just as likely to repel modern moviegoers as draw them in. They'll watch that, just not in theaters.

Oh, there were definitely bloggers/media personalities pushing the "OJ is innocent!" narrative after the news of his death and people who genuinely believe it. Some never stopped feeling that the cops set him up and OJ wasn't the killer, plus now there's a whole new generation of adults born after the trial, who will just latch onto theories pushed by new true crime docs or TikTok. "The Juice" doesn't exactly sound like it's going to be released by a major studio or part of the Oscar conversation, so that will limit The Discourse a great deal. Maybe it'll find a home on Tubi with this forgotten masterpiece:

I never used to feel this way but the NBA playoffs are so long! So for now I just see the results on social media. Also Jokic's pregame movie promo:

I can't say I'm that surprised there's a potential movie purporting to exonerate OJ and somebody Black Famous agreed to star in it. When the trial was happening the surveys showed a huge racial divide in beliefs about his innocence and in my experience, that feeling hasn't entirely gone away. Add in how conspiracy theories and the manosphere have flourished in recent years, and a movie sympathetic to OJ will have its defenders online. Will they actually watch? That's another story. The Juice was famous for decades and had a bunch of celebrity/insider friends before the murders and for some, the fandom never stops no matter what. So they look for "the real killers", harder than OJ ever did... No, what surprises me in all this is how much money was allegedly offered to land Owen Wilson in a leading role. What did they think he was going to offer to this cinematic masterpiece, and why did they think he'd ever agree to it? Honestly, the best a production of this caliber (with Charlotte Kirk! as Nicole Brown) could have hoped for is Johnny Depp, but even he might have turned this down, so they'd have to settle for someone on the geezer teaser circuit.

I don't primarily think of Match Point that way either, but the sources that do include: Rotten Tomatoes Wikipedia The Hollywood Reporter (the photo for Match Point is Jonathan Rhys Meyers playing tennis, lol) Esquire Town & Country (not a movie mag but pretty plugged into the country club set) Hey, I don't make the rules... Maybe they're stretching the definition because it's not an extensive list. I think Challengers was wise to lead the advertising with the sexiness, because people going into it expecting the typical American "sports movie" wouldn't be able to handle this.

I watched it last night and it's going to inspire so much fanfic. Who knows how Film TikTok will handle the sensuality... Match Point (2005) has a worldwide gross of $85.6 million. That looks to be the one to beat, unless there's some big IP thing with tennis scenes that technically lets it count as a "tennis movie" (the way Wonder Woman makes the lists of World War 1 films).

Oh wow, but they looked sweet together at the Golden Globes. Social media will be absolutely chaotic if this news proves true (though such rumors were denied by Kris Jenner TMZ earlier this month). As it is...

Bob Marley: One Love is on Paramount+ already. My local AMC only had one showing for it yesterday (at 4:20 pm) and tickets were priced at $4.20. Expecting National Theater Day levels of attendance here would have been pretty foolish. I'm not sure hitting $100m, $200m, etc milestones matters for studios like it used to. Cable TV rights can't be worth much these days and streaming rights seem to be sold before the movie's even out. Maybe they are still trying to push things over the line but the efforts just don't work in this era? They seen to come too late in the game to make a difference.

I wonder if Paramount will report the numbers... One of the local AMCs is playing it all day today, but the other only has one showtime starting at 4:20 (of course). It's already on Paramount+ so I doubt it will do much.