BoxOfficeFangrl

It must be deceptively difficult. His personal life is nice but dull, his family is boring (not even a secret criminal brother to avoid being asked about by nosy reporters), he doesn't have any substance/criminal issues, and lays low when he's not promoting something. The PR experts who stage manage "candid" photo ops, put a good spin on a star's messy love life/drug problems/resurfaced tweets or are in charge of promoting someone's "brand" on social media, will work with flashier stars. Damon just says dumb things in interviews sometimes, but they mostly blow over (though Twitter remembers). He has cultivated a nice liberal guy image, if I had a list of "Stars Over 50 Who Just Realized This Year That It's Bad To Use Homophobic Slurs", Matt Damon wouldn't have made my Top 20. So maybe his PR team is better than they get credit for? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At least the Matt Damon discourse has already moved on from how this movie shamelessly exploits Amanda Knox's story without her consent? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Right, many noir films from the classic era were based on pulpy stories/novels that went into detail about what the double crossed men and femme fatales were really getting up to. It's just that you have movie watchers who don't read, or think the past was actually as tame as the Hays Code, and it's people now who are making everything so vulgar and cheap. Nightmare Alley is not a well known property (relatively speaking), the average person who'd even be interested in a 1940s-set film noir probably imagines something like what you'd see on TCM. Though it's Guillermo del Toro, you should know what to expect at this point, and a lot of neo noir has gone in an R-rated direction. Still, some people really don't research what they're seeing ahead of time and end up scandalized.

I guess you can say this about any movie, but I just look at the Stillwater ads/traiiler and think, "Why?" Matt Damon coming off like American Sniper Lite, while playing (not) Amanda Knox's dad: was anyone really asking for this? Also, the real Knox is pretty pissed about yet another unauthorized take on her life, and it's not like it's particularly timely, at that...

The trailer on the MGM YouTube channel has 2.6 million views. OTOH, their Flag Day trailer from July 28 is at 2.4M, so maybe that's a baseline for their channel, or these are ad views. Anyway, the Jared Leto transformation and campiness of it all are getting lot of attention. It's not for everyone but there definitely is an audience.

Now that I've learned about Madam Slay, I will be a bit disappointed if Michaela doesn't end up playing her.

The trailer features Comer very prominently, so that's good. The poster is excellent. I still don't understand the Damon/Affleck hair decisions here.

LMAO, I guess that's better than lifting the embargo after the movie opens, but barely... That actually happened with Tulip Fever, BTW: https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/a-tribute-to-the-truly-bungled-release-of-tulip-fever.html

Trailer type thing... I need to know if there were meetings about how to depict Brenda Warner's hair during this era, and if Anna Paquin said no to even a wig version of it...

That matches what GDT was saying before, and the novel, but people are going in expecting a 1940s noir, LOL...

Yes, it was known in the aughts and Sam Raimi even talked about it with the media back in 2007: https://people.com/movies/spider-man-gets-romantic-3-times-the-web-slingers-hookups-have-swung-off-screen/?slide=5830418#5830418 I wonder if Zendaya and Tom have been a thing all this time or if it's been on and off, as it happens with people in their early-mid 20s. As long as it hasn't ruined the movies, it doesn't really matter.

DGA usually doesn't line up with the Best Director category 5-for-5, but this won't help:

I remember that, I think they had to ask earlier winners to volunteer their trophies to get through the end of the show. Didn't they know how many categories there were ahead of time? They seem to have upped the budget a little from those days. An article about the dust-up:

The drama never ends: Can you copyright a hotel ballroom? LMAO

Oooh, Robyn will be in this... Given that the Houston Estate is involved and the screenplay is by the Bohemian Rhapsody guy, it will probably be a timid, limited portrayal of the Whitney/Robyn relationship at best.

Hey, maybe Daniel Day-Lewis has won Best Actor three times but he had to be all Method and struggle for his art, while Vin has made millions saying, "I am Groot!" in a recording booth, and that's just a side gig compared to masterpiece properties like xXx and F&F, so who's the smart one, really? Seriously, though, the lack of self-awareness on Vin's part is staggering and hilarious.

Family...

Is In the Heights actually second at the UK box office? At least it hit somewhere.

La La Land cost $30m, it has fewer lavish sequences and a smaller cast though with bigger stars as leads. For some properties, I would understand $50m for the rights, even if it's a lot of money. For ITH, that's wild (here's how that happened-a bidding war on abandoned Weinstein Company properties). In hindsight it may seem like madness, but multiple studios were caught up in it. And paying so much for the rights helped set a floor for the budget-they weren't going to go lower than that.

WB definitely didn't budget or promote ITH like a niche property, and that played a part in building up the box office expectations.

So, Taylor Swift revealed that her new version of Red will have 30 songs, including one that's 10 minutes long, and now Jake Gyllenhaal is trending Top 5 in the US, haha.

More bad news for the HFPA: Another example of the HFPA's antics with stars:

Twitter was hilarious on Monday, between all the speculation on which superheroes would be into that, plus DJ Khaled started trending and people realized what "Watermelon Sugar" was about.

Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote several songs on the Moana soundtrack and that movie is incredibly popular on streaming, so that's something, but yeah. I mean, he wasn't the star of Mary Poppins Returns and it didn't flop, but the expectations were probably never realistic. Even if you can't tell what ITH is about from the ads, they do make it pretty clear LMM isn't the lead. People who liked him in Hamilton aren't going to flock to theaters now just because he has a minor role of a totally different project about an entirely different subject. Crazy Rich Asians wasn't a musical but it had its fair share of colorful spectacle, so I understand linking to another Jon Chu movie. But ultimately, CRA is a rom-com where the ordinary girl learns her boyfriend is rich and struggles to fit into his world/win over his mother. It's a much easier sell than a musical about rising property values and societal pressures faced by immigrants and the next generation. In the Heights has romantic plots, but it's not the primary focus of the story. So I get WB advertising the hell out of the "experience" and connections to other popular stuff, because the things it's about don't easily sway people to attend movies.