BoxOfficeFangrl

With reserved seating, you don't have to show up super early to get a good seat, so they have to get eyeballs on those in-theater ads somehow, otherwise the advertisers won't pay as much. It is annoying, much like the mini-trailers before trailers that exist just to get around the skip button on YouTube.

I saw King Richard, I really liked it but hoped I'd love it. Could've been shorter, with a tighter last act. I just look at the UK box office and wonder if we'll ever get there again over here. - Now that you don't need to buy magazines to see photos of celebrities, Sexiest Man Alive is just a promotional tool. People Magazine's not going to pick someone who doesn't agree to go along with the campaign, and a celeb who doesn't have anything to promote in November/December is probably not going to bother, unless he wants the adulation that bad. Even if Blake Shelton laughed off the backlash, it had to hurt his ego a little when the general public reaction to him as Sexiest Man Alive was, "...did all the men die?" At least that made People be a bit more diverse in their picks for the next few years. But it's really not that serious.

Princess Diana, Vampire Hunter? An AU movie where Diana lives would probably get a lot of blowback but at least it would be something different than another, "Behind closed doors, she was mistreated and struggling with her mental health, did you know that?" depiction. I mean, I'll still watch it but Larrain being lauded for saying something new about Diana is a real eye roller. I mean, Diana herself gave interviews revealing this and she's been dead 24 years. Some critics come out of Spencer acting like the only Diana depictions out there are like this: Apparently, there were dueling network TV movies about the royal love affair, lol. * It's just so weird to see part of the box office back to "normal" yet other parts are majorly struggling still.

Will the Academy really vote for a movie called Licorice Pizza as Best Picture? Also, with the subject matter and general whiteness (I know Maya Rudolph is in it, but not a lead), frontrunner status will make for quite the Discourse. I don't know how much Film Twitter really matters to Oscar voters, but if a movie that racks up a lot of wins along the way "fails to live up to the hype" in some way that can cause a favorite to stumble and something else to cross the finish line.

As others have pointed out, the title was used less than a decade ago for busted Oscar bait. The audience likely to seek out a Princess Diana movie (people who watch The Crown and liked Downton Abbey and The Queen, for starters) would absolutely know what her maiden name was. It's just that that audience hasn't been coming back to theaters in big numbers, and aren't very likely to warm to Pablo Larrain's filmmaking. The Crown just had a Diana who went over very well, and the set photos of Elizabeth Debicki for next season don't help in the comparison department. Also, my experience online with The Crown fandom and royalty discussions in general is that there's still a strong rejection of the idea of Kristen Stewart as an acclaimed actress. I've seen this everywhere outside of Film Twitter for a while, but with the combination of this performer and the Diana role in particular... Point out that critics have been in her corner for years now or the awards she's won and they just refuse to accept it, and insist she's a bad actress and the good reviews are all from her PR. Even some who've seen her indie work are like, "She's fine in a narrow range but I really don't get why critics are so in love with her." I've never seen anything like it, Pattinson gets some hate about Twilight still but the attitude toward Stewart is on another level. Even without Covid, I think Spencer finding much more of an audience than Jackie was always a challenge.

To be fair, the only surprising thing about Red Notice is that it started off with a traditional movie studio before Netflix ponied up. It seems made for the algorithm even more than most of their movies. It seems impossible that any of the awards contenders will still be exclusively theatrical by the time the award ceremonies start. Maybe the late December releases, but that's it. Certainly a different business model than before...last year there were award shows and most titles were streaming and still it was a big no1curr.

He said he like didn't the movie at all while not even mentioning Gaga in the initial tweet: The replies to that are full of Little Monsters directing body-shaming, age bashing and homophobia Erik's way, while posting supposed proof of his agenda of...being a Madonna fan who also liked KStew in Spencer. It's vile of them and totally embarrassing. Erik totally raved LG in A Star Is Born, by the way, the tweets are still there. Everyone's not going to like everything, and award prognosticators/culture writers have zero power to keep a movie on the scale of House of Gucci from the Oscar nominations it's going to get. See Green Book, Joker, The King's Speech, etc. People just need to chill. The fringe element of the different actress/pop gurl fanbases are already doing the most this season and the Oscars aren't until late March. I'm sure there are media types operating in bad faith about HoG because they hate Gaga and/or for the Twitter engagement, and they'll keep doing it as long as the defensive fans keep responding to it. BTW, if Gaga wins Best Actrress it would be an early present for her with the ceremony being on March 27, the day before her birthday.

Eternals was "The first MCU movie with a sex scene!" Not exactly the best way to draw in the "family" audience... The movie's been a hot topic as an awards contender for a couple of months (since it premiered at Venice) and got a lot attention to begin with, for casting KStew as Diana. I don’t think lack of awareness is the problem here. The older audience has been slow to return to theaters and even pre-Covid, I doubt Spencer would have been a big word of mouth hit even among the prestige crowd. Not because the movie shows a flawed/imperfect Diana (so did The Crown and it had its most popular season yet), but because Pablo Larrain's sensibilities aren't the most mainstream. I'm thinking of the people at my screening of The Favourite who walked out midway through, they probably expected some Masterpiece Theatre sort of thing and got a Yorgos Lanthimos movie. The typical viewer of The Crown would totally hate two hours of Kristen Stewart whisper-yelling as Princess Di in a sort of horror movie. Neon probably knew this, obscured the unconventional aspects in the trailers and went for the "big" opening weekend. The Arclight's not around anymore to give arthouse fare the Star Wars treatment with 30 showings a day in limited release.

* The House of Gucci social media embargo lifts this week, I'm sure that'll be totally uneventful...

Those BIFA nominations are something else--how can you give something 11 nominations yet snub it for Picture, Director and Screenplay? Either they didn't really like it that much, or they can't deny the overall effect while still really, really hating its primary creative force. I know the politics be tricky with a British awards body, but come on... * The Nightmare Alley FYC is out, Rooney's lead, Cate's supporting, Bradley's also a producer...

Especially since Best Picture is back to the fixed 10 slots, and the "must have 5 percent #1 votes to make the lineup" rule is gone. The years when it had to be 10 nominees, you got stuff like Inception, District 9, The Blind Side, Pixar made it in both years...the lineups were pretty varied without needing a Popular Film category. Anyway, I think Dune will be in enough voters' Top 10s to make it, but nothing's guaranteed. The box office success, compared to most contenders, can't hurt.

Right, it's a filmed version of the original cast made widely available to the public and was a huge hit. Its success led to fans of other musicals wanting the same for their favorite shows, and lamenting that earlier iconic Broadway casts didn't get the "Hamiton" treatment in their prime. Remember how many Dear Evan Hansen fans justified the Ben Platt casting in the movie because he originated the role on stage, so he "deserved" to immortalized in the role? And a DEH movie might not have been a big hit regardless, but the broader public never stopped clowning on him as a teen on film. If there'd been a nice filmed version of Platt on stage, fans of the show would have been placated. A movie could have gone with a younger guy and been better for it (ignoring the part where Platt's dad is a big movie producer who can influence casting decisions). I just wonder if we're in a time where the fans of newish musicals will feel extremely ambivalent, at best, about proper movie adaptations. If the hard-core fans could choose between a movie-movie and their show getting a Hamilton sort of release, I think many would prefer the latter. Fans have always been picky and defensive, but social media has taken it to another level, and no movie will ever really be good enough in the eyes of certain purists. They'll probably watch a movie version, but will they truly love it? Especially now that they know a filmed version can be done (I mean, Great Performances has been around for years on PBS, but that's not streaming) with the original cast that they already like.

The last I heard about the CRA sequel was about the big pay disparity issue with the screenwriters: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/crazy-rich-asians-screenwriter-adele-lim-exits-sequel-pay-disparity-dispute-1236431/ Maybe it just soured Chu on the whole thing? He's busy with other projects. Also, when Constance Wu had her social media meltdown about her sitcom getting renewed, Gemma Chan inadvertently liked a tweet from a journalist saying Wu was notoriously rude/difficult to work with... * I liked In the Heights and in retrospect, maybe it didn't do that badly (especially considering HBO Max), though the budget was probably a little high. I'm not hugely attached to Wicked as a property, but it's fairly popular as modern musicals go. The the concept is easy to drill down to a couple of sentences, so easy to sell in trailers/ads. A fanbase of a Broadway show can only take a movie so far, the moviemakers should be respectful of the show while not feeling too beholden to it or the original cast. I wonder if the huge success of Hamilton on Disney+ has probably made fans of other musicals less accepting of movie adaptations in general.

I thought the Actress Wars last year were obnoxious, and that was really just Carey Mulligan stans going at Vanessa Kirby and Viola (they never really saw the Frances win coming). On top of all the big name ACTRESSES (and their fans) going at it this year, the last time Gaga was in the Best Actress race, you even had some Madonna stans trying to stir up negativity against her ("Madge said 'there can be 100 people in a room' first!", Jon Peters got MeToo'd!). And it's not like Madonna was going to get nominated instead, it was just pop gurl rivalry nonsense. This year will be wild, but watch Olivia Colman win again. The trailers have been fun but the editors didn't exactly tax themselves finding musical cues...

Every new revelation is worse than the last...

Oh yeah, I can easily see that happening, unless it's "too American" for the new AMPAS. In terms of King Richard's box office, it might draw a somewhat younger and more diverse audience than most of this year's HBO Max dramas, maybe that will help some. I'm not sure how much that matters, being a "crowdpleaser" in the awards world isn't strictly a matter of ticket sales-the voters just have to see the thing and remember how much they like it come ballot time. I guess we'll know for sure that King Richard is a threat when the "Richard Williams: a bad parent, actually" thinkpieces heat up.

Of course, movies don't have to be about important issues to win Best Picture. It's a combination of factors and depends on the competition in a year. Birdman was about show business, but it helped that they liked it more than Boyhood, a critical fave that the Honest Ballot types found overrated. On paper, Dunkirk made sense as the one to finally get Nolan Best Director and Picture: important subject, excellent reviews and box office success. But character development wasn't a strong suit (who will the voters relate to?), critics cooled on it by the end of the year, and more than one Anonymous Voter found the timeline confusing. It was never more than an also-ran. Get Out? Horror (an automatic uphill battle with the Academy) and a critique of white liberalism, which may have hit too close to home for some voters. Lady Bird? Female protagonist who isn't the most "likeable", both things Best Picture often doesn't reward (Nomadland winning is near miraculous but happened in a very unusual year). So Fish Sex it was, because overall, they either liked it more/disliked it less than the competition. But in a different year where an "important" movie has more emotional resonance, maybe another movie being "likeable" isn't enough for the win. So, Licorice Pizza is "Oscar friendly": so was Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which was about grown-ups in show business and starred movie stars and made a lot of money. It was what, no better than third for Best Picture by the end? Different year, different race, of course, and maybe a movie led by teen characters played by movie newcomers can nab the top prize. We'll have to see how much voters care for it, ultimately. We already know film festival crowds are liking Belfast, as it's won multiple audience awards. Not the same voters as AMPAS voters but not totally different, either. I really don't think awards voters are checking Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic before submitting their ballots.

Isn't Belfast set around The Troubles? It's apparently feel-good and through a child's eyes largely, but that seems more consequential than "the travails of 1970s Hollywood teens" or "shady carnival hucksters". With Nightmare Alley, if I turn my head and squint, I can see how there could be a plot point that maybe tangentially touches on a major social issue in the (US) news now, but that doesn't make the movie "important" in an awards bait way. And the main characters are all kind of villainous, too, unless Nightmare Alley v2.0 is innovative in some way or makes all the money, I don't see how it wins. Yeah, if everything is a flop, maybe nothing is? But if something baity does actually become a hit in this climate (however that is defined), wouldn't voters rush to reward it? In recent years they haven't really cared about box office in terms of winners, but in the before times, you still had "grown up" success stories like 1917 and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Little Women. At the moment it's looking pretty grim for adult dramas in movie theaters, maybe the first contender to $50 million has Best Picture wrapped up.

I know, it's practically typecasting, but I guess you don't hire Harry Styles for a superhero movie to play an awkward dweeb. It's not a huge spoiler, but usually the real press does try to be somewhat coy and cryptic about post-credit scenes ahead of the opening weekend. OTOH, it's a good point that this could have been left out of the premiere screening if the Marvel was really eager to keep it a secret...

I heard the Harry Styles rumor a while back, but with some parts of his fanbase, you never know if they are rolling with something totally made up that they just want to be true. The confirmation isn't earth shattering, but I am surprised by all the blue checks just blasting it on Twitter right away and throwing it into headlines. Bad form by them. I guess the lure of clicks/engagement is too strong, Harry's fanbase is massive and very active on social media. Million dollar fines are absurd but some of those reporters may find themselves off the list for the next MCU event. Lol that Mr Watermelon Sugar is playing Eros of all characters...

October had turned into a pretty strong month for moviegoing in recent years, yet so far in October 2021, we haven't had one weekend where the entire Top 10 has cleared a million dollars. There's a lack of box office depth, maybe it's entirely down to the product, maybe not. We do know that more than a quarter of Bond's domestic audience made the first trip back to theaters since the pandemic last week. If that's the level of event it takes for adults to show up, IMO that’s not the greatest thing for theaters and we're not back to "normal" yet.

Who do these pop culture critics think is watching Queen's Gambit, Mare of Eastown, White Lotus, The Crown, etc.? The adult drama fans have chosen to get their fix through TV dramas/limited series, and are just trickling back into theaters (Bond, a big event). The same thing will keep happening this year with the other awards bait movies (especially the ones that skew old and white), as long as the audience for them is too reluctant/afraid to go back to movie theaters.

I think a few more contenders than that will surpass $30 million, but agree the box office prospects of this year's awards bait aren't looking great overall. Can In the Heights make an Oscar comeback? I feel like the controversy it ran across wouldn't exactly bother the crowd that voted for Green Book..

I was so confused by the "no advertsing" talk, there's been plenty during live sports, stuff like this: In the last couple of weeks, they tried linking it to other "epic" bro movies: When the reviews improved, they leaned on those: People just weren't here for it. Most of the older audience that is returning to theaters probably went for the Bond movie. Given the scale and Covid delays, a $100m budget isn't surprising but a medieval drama about rape always had two strikes against it, even in the before times.

I just looked at RT now, the audience score is 75 percent. Maybe Peacock got the intern to take a snapshot of the moment the score went live, haha. The opening weekend of In the Heights looks less bad, every time another prestige awards hopeful opens to even less. And it was on HBO Max! All the big openers this year seem to have drawn a young/diverse audience. Bond is an exception but even that did less than expected, with the youth numbers being on the weak side. All the Oscar bait that only appeals to older white audiences is gonna be screwed...