BoxOfficeFangrl

No, judging a Saoirse Ronan/Greta Gerwig movie for not making the same money as DiCaprio + Scorsese or Tarantino opening weekend is a totally reasonable response to LW's box office... j/k, it's massive goalpost shifting to somehow make a movie doing well so far into a failure.

I was talking more about the people who clearly weren't familiar with LW already, like when The movie sticks to the basics of LW, not entirely, the biggest deviation from the other versions is the way that the story is told. Anecdotally, I wonder if that aspect will work with younger people and/or the easily confused. The 1994 version definitely appealed to middle schoolers and as a book had many fans that age. I overheard a couple of preteens as I left my screening, they liked some things but were unsure about others. Oh well, makes it harder for kids to use the movie to get by on tests/book reports, lol.

This was just lovely! Brilliant cast all around, a real shame it didn't get the SAG nod but I'm glad the movie exists, whether it gets awards love or not. My only quibble is finding Florence Pugh too old to play the scenes where Amy is younger and still a child in the story, though it worked with the structure of the film. I never would have thought of telling Little Women that way and it makes me interested in what Gerwig will bring to the Barbie movie. Back to LW, it was fun to hear the audience reactions of people surprised by the different story developments.

Deleted from Universal's FYC site: https://www.nydailynews.com/snyde/ny-cats-pulls-oscar-consideration-push-20191226-og2apm43evg4pchpnx3bwpggna-story.html

He saw Cats as a kid and really liked it:

The critics on Breakfast All Day also noted the free alcohol offer at the Cats screening-if people who do the job professionally found it unusual, I'll take their word for it. I looked it up on Twitter, the booze to critics looks to be a film festival thing, at least at Cannes, a bit more highbrow than local screenings and might explain the "festival highs" that happen sometimes. Also saw a 2011 tweet from an attendee of an early Johnny English Reborn screening, they noted lots of free food/booze on offer and concluded the movie was bad with the studio trying to win over the critics. I wonder how much the "improved visual effects" added to the budget?

Never forget... No Wahlberg for Best Actor? Lol Major outlets confirming the Cats VFX patch, apparently it's at Tom Hooper's request. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/universal-notifies-theaters-cats-is-being-updated-improved-visual-effects-1264689 Will this help or hurt the Best Visual Effects campaign?

The critics all published their reviews at the same time. What makes a property work on stage does not necessarily translate for everyone to film. Even as a stage show, Cats developed a reputation. Obviously it has many fans, it won awards when it was new, but also has numerous detractors who derided it as kitsch, strictly for tourists and lacking in a plot or good/memorable music (apart from Memory). There's a reason this cartoon/meme used Cats and not other equally famous megamusicals like Phantom of the Opera or Les Mis:

Yeah, it doesn't appear Watson is filming anything else and obviously she has time to publicize hanging with her old HP friends. Promoting Little Women with three of the four March Sisters is awkward. I can't see how the absence of EW would be the studio's idea, unless she made some sort of exorbitant demands to do PR. It's generally part of the contract for a prestige studio movie like this. The reviews for the movie are excellent. I mean, no one in a press junket would ask Watson anything like, "So, does it bother you that Saoirse and Timothee and Florence are getting the standout notices from the younger cast?" This is a beloved story done well, the press tour would be maybe inane at times but kind to its stars. Even if she and Sersh did not get on, they could just arrange things so she mostly appears with Eliza or Florence, or however you needed to juggle the cast around. Maybe it will turn out EW's absence is down to some sort of health issue where she has to limit travel, or part of some "media tours are bad for the climate" stance she will reveal at a later date, but for now it is not the best look.

Entertainment media also finding Watson's absence a little odd...

Dan and Roth said that at the critics' screening they got a ticket for a free drink as they checked in, which is apparently not the norm for these things. Haha, the studio knew it would be very bad and thought bribing the critics with booze would help.

Pratt didn't even meet his current wife (Katherine Schwarzenegger, so the Star Lord has The Terminator as a father-in-law) until about a year after he and Faris announced their split. The tabloids really wanted him to be having an affair with JLaw as they made Passengers, but Jennifer, Anna and Chris were not having it and made a pointed effort not to give the gossips anything to work with. Anna even put in her book that JLaw was so apologetic to her about the speculation and could not have been more respectful. Kumail seems to have a sensible attitude about his glow up so far. John Krasinski went from being goofy faced Jim from The Office to buff action star/auteur and it hasn't wrecked his marriage yet.

LOL, perhaps this is not the forum for thirst posts about Ripped Kumail though social media more than has it covered. But for anyone wanting handy visuals...

There were even more digital effects than we realized: Should have left that in, it would have helped the box office!

That happened on the TV show The Crown, where the writing made JFK out to be jealous of Jackie's fame and implied domestic violence in the relationship. The few defenders were like, "dramatic license", or "no one really knows what happens between two people". But many viewers were very unhappy with the depiction, as a lot has been written about them and their marriage over decades and there is no hint of anything like that. The show could have worked with one of JFK's generally acknowledged flaws as a husband, which are numerous, but the writers seemed to be going for some sort of parallel with the current First Couple. Apparently, the AJC was the one outlet that didn't settle with Jewell and the courts ultimately ruled in their favor for the defamation suit he brought against them. So it's...interesting that the movie chooses to depict Kathy Scruggs the way it did, vs. going the composite character route, like with Jon Hamm's character. It's probably true the AJC is steering talk away from their coverage in 1996. Still, if the movie hadn't thrown in a baseless "she traded sex for scoops" angle, then the paper wouldn't have as much room to deflect and maybe everyone would be debating the nature of AJC's actual reporting. As it is, they are kinda skating on that just because the movie decided to add a bit of unnecessary drama.

Possibly, some of the worst openings ever were also put out of their misery after two weeks.

Wasn't Trouble with the Curve released right after he talked to the chair at the Democratic convention? It would be interesting to see if Clint's movies started taking a downward dive on Metacritic after that point. Yeah, I don't think WB is kicking Clint to the curb exactly, at worst a gentle nudge over to HBOMax going forward... Good point, though I don't think there's any star who could have gotten an anti-Apartheid rugby movie to $100M domestic. I always forget Hereafter even happened, or mix it up with that tsunami miniseries. I guess Matt Damon + Clinto made for box office poison. Angelina got nominated for Changeling, at least, Leo couldn't quite get there with J Edgar. Another thing that might have gone wrong for this Richard Jewell movie....maybe the typical Eastwood target audience feels like they are seeing enough of a guy getting "unfairly" attacked by the media and the authorities by watching the news, so why pay to see another case of it? And the politics were totally different, obviously, but I feel the same sort of sensibility hurt Fruitvale Station a few years back.

Oof. There's a simulation where this stars Jonah Hill and Leo and makes $100 million, but it probably needed a different director/screenwriter as well. After the reviews and the controversy, I wasn't expecting a total anywhere near that, more like a $10 million OW, but it managed only half of that. I saw on Twitter an observation that audiences are only coming out to see Clint movies either when he's in them, or there's another big star as the lead. Looking at his filmography over the past dozen years or so, that's basically the truth of it. Though The Trouble With The Curve, not sure what happened there...

- (14) PLAYMOBIL STX Enter… $170,000 -74% 1,458 -879 $117 $992,723 2 Is the theater drop a mistake by The Numbers or did STX waive the normal 2-week minimum booking as part of that discount ticket deal? Or were the theaters like, screw it, the penalty for dropping Playmobil will be less than what we'll lose by keeping it another weekend!

Bad misses so far for Little Women; the condensed awards calendar is not kind to movies that get off to a relatively late start. Also, I wonder if LW is being dismissed as covering some of the same themes as Lady Bird, and "young women chafing against society's restrictions" is not on the list of subjects a director can endlessly revisit yet still get nominated over and over.

The 2004 Phantom of the Opera is in the 30s on Rotten Tomatoes and got a Best Picture - Musical or Comedy nomination from the Globes. They love big budget musicals, so I would agree the relative lack of Cats love is concerning.

Right? The story doesn't need this at all to be interesting, and who couldn't have foreseen that in 2019, implying that a real-life female reporter f****d for scoops would be criticized? In a movie about the Richard Jewell case! It doesn't make law enforcement look great either. Given the movie's sympathies, you almost wonder if this was thrown in there on purpose. At least with in the Sully movie, the exaggerated NTSB figures accusing him of recklessness were given fake names.

Is this expanding again because of the Globe nods? Bong was on the Tonight Show yesterday.

I know it has fans all over, but Little Women has always seemed like a very American story to me-maybe it's the Civil War era setting. So I wasn't surprised the Globes were lukewarm, sometimes they are with movies that end up doing well with Oscar.