BoxOfficeFangrl

Big "I Wanna Dance With Somebody - The Whitney Houston Movie" energy...

Joe Russo says he's on the board of some AI companies, presumably the companies for the "good" AI, so it's fine... Here's the whole interview: https://collider.com/joe-russo-donald-mustard-gaming-storytelling-fortnight-interview/

So many of those "X unfollowed Y on Instagram" articles end up being fake news: as it turns out, X was never following Y to begin with. Easiest clickbait ever, it spreads fast and wide and barely ever gets fact-checked. Don't know the particulars here, maybe there is smoke. If it's a stunt, it seems way too early to deploy the showmance speculation. You don't want an Affleck/de Armas where the romance is over months before the movie is even out and they barely promote it.

Someone tell the Russos that no one's going to watch The Gray Man 2 if they're all preoccupied with deepfake porn (and leave Marilyn Monroe alone)... Were their opinions on the movie industry and filmmaking always this trash or is this strictly a post-MCU development?

Before all this cable news news dropped today, I was catching up on the Pras trial (Leo testified?). The spy movies have been missing a big angle... https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/24/politics/pras-michel-fugees-trial-recap/index.html

The scene that got the biggest laughs at my screening has extremely R-rated language. There could have been a PG-13 version of the story, but since it was made to be a streaming movie, Affleck probably wasn't that concerned about the MPA rating. Amazon surely has people who can do math and knew there was virtually no path to Air breaking even theatrically. So from their perspective, why bother with reshoots that may not improve the quality of the movie and may not add much to the box office?

Tennis as a sport has been around for eons but in film hardly ever performs well. From this list of tennis movies (a whopping 36, which includes documentaries, made-for-TV movies, short films, even a lost one from 1929), the box office champ seems to Match Point ($23m domestic, $85m worldwide, but in 2005-6 currency). Adjusted for inflation, probably Strangers on a Train, which isn't really a "world of tennis" movie. Maybe King Richard would have done better without day-and-date, but given how it's gone with most tennis movies, still probably not a hit. Challengers could be fine because it's not going for the mainstream "sports movie" audience at all, but Film Twitter enthusiasm has had a way of not translating to broader success.

Didn't even know about that, yikes.

Aur got budgeted like a streaming movie and Amazon was willing to throw big money at the project. Plus, the music rights, it has like every big hit from 1984. If it had been planned as a theatrical release all along, it probably costs $50? million (Covid costs have bumped up studio budgets). Maybe $40 million they film outside of LA, go a bit less famous in a couple of the roles and skip the superstar needle drops. Side note, Air and Don't Look Up ($75m) costing what they did with the casts they have, just shows how wild Nancy Meyers was for wanting $150m for a Netflix romcom.

Can't decide if it's more pathetic that Mr Twitter Owner admitted he's paying for some stars who rejected Twitter Blue to have it anyway, or how the people who forked over for it are mad about the mockery and claiming that the $8 was the price for "free speech".

Air is somewhat comparable to The Big Short and Moneyball in being process movies, and it's true both ended up in the $70-75 million domestic range (though with inflation, their ticket sales would get them closer to the century mark). So maybe it's true that it wouldn't have been huge, before. IMO, Air is more of a comedy than a drama, or at least equal parts. It competing in the Musical/Comedy category at the Golden Globes would be justifiable. More $100+ million pre-pandemic dramas (domestic totals): The Upside, $108m Hustlers, $104m The Mule, $103m Wonder, $132m Sully, $125m Hidden Figures, $169m

That really sucks. It's nice that the manager emailed you. Canceling screenings was a huge thing during No Way Home's opening weekend. Nightmare Alley opened, too, and there were a lot of anecdotal social media reports from people with tickets who had their showtimes yanked, so theaters could show more Spider-Man. I get the business decision, but it's disrespectful to the fans who'd traveled to the theater. Nightmare Alley did ride the "unjustly screwed over" narrative to a surprise Best Picture nomination, at least...

I enjoyed it, though all the snarky quips were on edge of annoying me sometimes. The essential story wasn't hard to follow, though you can tell there's a lot of lore/Easter eggs for the fans and I felt somewhat out of the loop at times. After seeing it, the box office makes sense to me, especially considering the stigma the franchise has in some corners. I was entertained, but maybe people with even a passing familiarity with D&D are getting more out of it. Can't believe Justce Smith turns 28 this year, I thought he was 19 or something. What an interesting cameo...

Yup: A very R-rated tennis movie: hoping for the best but the box office is going to be so bad...

Well, she's already experienced at ghost directing, so screenwriting should be a piece of cake. /s Hollywood TV/movies and screenwriting practices have changed so much since 2007 or even 2017, a strike wouldn't surprise me at all. In the short term, I fear we're going to get a lot of unofficial ChapGPT scripts cleaned up under the table by producer/executive assistants.

So, the merger means that the NBA playoff telecasts so far (at least from TNT) are flooded with ads for Dr Pimple Popper. I actually do like both (I remember when she only had a YouTube channel), but based on the tweets, it seems these fanbases don't really overlap. So, I see why the execs changed the name, not to MAX (very generic) but away from HBO [Whatever]. In the glory days of cable, HBO got away with having all the Emmy winning series/movies on the same channel with "documentaries" like Taxicab Confessions and The Cathouse. But now, the same conglomerate is offering Succession and Dr Pimple Popper... In an ideal world, maybe Warner and Discovery never merge, or they keep their services separate. It's happened, though, so maybe it's not the worst thing if 90 Day Fiance (and the like) aren't in any way "HBO" shows. And for now at least, the HBO brand/ethos still exists under the MAX umbrella.

That CGI Live Aid crowd is gonna look so awesome in 4DX! Seriously, it's smart of Regal to try appealing to different sorts of crowds with this promotion. I also remember hearing that Disney was being stingy about theaters screening old Fox titles (besides Avatar), so BoRhap's inclusion here is nice to see on that level.

This is the first weekend in a long time where I've thought there were maybe too many new releases? None of them truly broke out and the space they took up crowded out the non-Mario holdovers. The Pope's Exorcist did the best and might have performed slightly better without Renfield as direct competition. They aren't the same but have overlapping appeal.

I saw Hidden Figures and Air in theaters, both on Saturday afternoons, Hidden Figures had a much younger and more diverse audience. Last weekend Mario was a juggernaut and still seems to be, maybe it's pulling a lot of 20s-30s moviegoers. OTOH, Air is the biopic of a shoe starring Gen Xers, maybe that limits the audience, though pre-Covid that still could have meant $100 million.

LOL, quite the promo for "Brother From Another Mother", I have to say... Wild, and that's before learning why Woody Harrelson's dad has his own Wikipedia page...

I agree, Daniel, Rupert and Emma made bank from the movies/residuals, it's not like they were on some Saturday morning teen show and were broke/washed up at 25. AFAIK, they haven't lost all their fortunes through bad drug problems/investments/expensive divorces, like a lot of actors who grudgingly revisted their most iconic roles. Daniel has carved out a career on stage and pops up often enough in movies, Rupert seems to be a muse for M Night Shyamalan, and Emma is practically retired from acting. Maybe when they're 40s-50s and if their other options have dried up, they'd come back to playing the Trio but IMO we're not there yet. That's not even getting into the JK Rowling of it all... Other actors from the series would probably be a bit more amenable to Potter 9 right now, but maybe WB doesn't have the same faith in Harry Potter Presents: Neville vs Draco...

I've always thought they should go the animated route in adaptating the books; it would sidestep a lot of the issues of filming with growing children, and the characters can look like their book descriptions. Of course, they probably want to have more racial diversity with the top characters than the books provided, and have some out gay characters to show it's NBD in the Wizarding World. Will Polyjuice still work across gender in the TV series, or are they going to skip those parts... It's funny seeing all the fans now considering the movies perfection-that sure was not what they had to say back when they were being released. Like, the internet was around back then, we can still see the bitter screeds from the aughts about "Emmione" and Ron the sidelined goofball and "Dumbledore said calmly". Never got the sense Daniel, Rupert and Emma were just waiting around to reprise their Potter roles. They secured the bag pretty young and hopefully invested wisely. Emma barely acts anymore, while Dan and Rupert clearly want to prove themselves as performers outside of the franchise and aren't so old/washed that they have no other options. They're still a decade too young for Cursed Child. I never thought they'd come back to the roles this soon, even if JKR had stayed off Twitter and out of gender politics. But her heel turn probably makes the decision easier for them.

School attendance stats from Deadline:

It totally works here, too bad Mattel hates the song.

The tweet headline is misleading, as Lowery didn't actually say anything about Mario in his interview. Also, how kids process entertainment may not match what adults think. I remember when I was a teenager and music videos were big on TV, my parents lamented how my generation wouldn't be able to attach memories to songs like they had. They felt the existence of music videos meant that's all we would ever remember of a song once we heard it. Obviously, that wasn't true for Gen X/millennials: even when MTV played videos all day, you still heard music on the radio, at the store, parties, concerts, etc., and formed personal memories of those times attached to the songs playing. The music video was just a bonus memory. However, my parents made some boomer assumptions that the youths were experiencing art in a lesser way, because our experience with it was a bit different than theirs. It seems to me that 8 year olds being delighted by a movie could lead to a habit of moviegoing by them. Will their tastes evolve as they get older? Probably. Would it be nice if a children's movie with a 95 on Metacritic could make $600M? The critics seem to think they would love that (but then how would they get rage clicks?). The shows/movies I watched and enjoyed as a kid weren't always great, whether they were based on IP or not. Every era has its schlock and gems that slip through the cracks.