BoxOfficeFangrl

So this starts out live action... And apparently very No wonder the ads were like, hey, this is so wacky and colorful and Harry Potter is a spy!

So I looked this up and it's not really a sequel to I Can Only Imagine, it's just taking a similar concept of making a biographical movie based on a Contemporary Christian song. The story behind I Still Believe, I know it really happened but So it's baffling that they picked Britt Robertson, she looks nothing like Melissa Camp and I guess there's no late teens/early 20s role that Hollywood won't cast with someone pushing 30. Also, Shania Twain is in this because apparently you can't have a Christian movie without a country singer in the cast.

It's also the Metacritic score not being "good enough" for an award-winning film. The comparisons are lazy and ignore that Joker is divisive critically with some reviewers utterly hating it, but it also got many 100 scores and the Golden Lion. Meanwhile, the divide on BoRhap was about its popularity with audiences/guild voters despite critics, at best, finding it pleasant/mediocre with a good lead performance. But I guess both sorts of reception can inspire passion during awards season, in one way or another. Joker has enough detractors not to show up with all the critics' circles and the predictors don't feel totally secure in how it will fare with Oscar, which also happened to BoRhap, even if the particular details for each are largely different.

Welp...

LOL, Playmobil. It came out months ago in the UK and I figured it would be one of those things that play well enough in Great Britain but don't get a theatrical release here, like the Peppa Pig or Horrible Histories movies. STX posted the trailer in July and it's still under 1 million views: This could not seem like more of a Lego Movie knockoff if it tried. Also, Adam Lambert?! I loved American Idol back in the day, I guess the Queen concerts with him are doing well enough, but that's so random.

It did, though to a lesser degree, also the usual suspects chiming in about her talent level in general. Whenever there's a JLo movie, you get endless back and forth about her musical relevance. With ASIB, on top of the pop gurl wars, you had blind item sites stoking the flames with fake rumors to bait rival stans: supposedly, the studio was so worried it would flop and the leads had no chemistry (lol). I guess Cats is so weird on its own, there's no need to make up fake news about what a mess it could be. So it's just fans and haters throwing out album/streaming/follower stats, like that will have any impact on the movie's reviews or box office. Some people just can't help themselves I guess.

I noticed that Harlan wasn't acting like someone ODing and wondered if he'd somehow switched the bottles himself beforehand, along with hiring an investigator ahead of time for an added bit of theatrics. Midway through, I was thinking Chris Evans hadn't had much screentime given how famous he is right now and how much he'd been featured in the PR tour, plus his character was just too entitled and smarmy, of course he would be the killer (of someone). For me, this is the kind of movie where the journey matters more than the destination and I found it entertaining throughout. Liked the running gag of all the different countries of origin the Thrombeys gave for Marta's mother, despite going on about how much Marta was like family to them. The last shot of Marta looking down on them, drinking out of the "My House" mug was great.

Is it really the year of Renee? The critics' circles have barely started weighing in and the guilds might go a different way. True, Judy is a biopic of someone recognizable, succeeding in this genre is apparently the height of acting, according to the Academy . OTOH, Judy's done fine for the sort of movie it is in 2019, yet Little Women will not only make far more money (which doesn't matter as much to award voters) but is also likely to rack up many more nominations. If you are a voter playing catch-up, you're probably going to watch a screener for something with 9-10 nods (for example) before a movie with a lone acting nomination. That's what did in Close last year, a lot more voters got around to watching The Favourite compared to The Wife. As for Luminosity winning, IDK, the reviews for her are strong so far, yet some are calling others besides Sersh as best in show. It's another young woman coming of age role: will voters want to reward her for Little Women if they feel she was better in Brooklyn or Lady Bird? As you say, she is only 25, that's on the young side for a Best Actress winner, they might not feel a need to reward her just yet. But it really depends on how the competition falls, I think that if ScarJo gets in, she will have more of an "it's her time" narrative to win, even if she's never been nominated before and Saoirse has.

Welp... But if this nabs Best Ensemble at the SAG Awards, Emma would get a trophy, too. Being involved in LW is still a big win for her.

She is also high on the lead in Best Actor. Who knows how these pundits will feel in six weeks but this is an interesting development...

What a ridiculous headline (middlebrow and mid-budget don't mean the same thing, NYT). In this scenario, if Frozen 2 is playing on 5-6 screens, that leaves 10 playing something else. I just looked at 13-plex closest to my job, besides Frozen 2, today they're playing 21 Bridges, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, The Good Liar, Last Christmas, Harriet and even one screening of Black and Blue. I didn't even count Ford v Ferrari or Midway given that their budgets might push them into "blockbuster" territory. The weekly counts show non-blockbusters routinely being released in thousands of theaters. Do they play as much as comic book adaptations or franchise movies, maybe not, but it's not nothing and theaters will keep playing what people show up to see.

Ugh, I knew it! Though there's a clarification that nothing formal is in place for a remake right now. As I watched, I tried to push out of my mind that this was sure to get an English language remake set in California, probably Silicon Valley.

On SJU, they theorized the exec's assistant read the script and raved about it, but the exec didn't read it themselves and had no idea who Harriet Tubman is (who knows, maybe they weren't American). They were maybe going off a summary of it being an action adventure story starring a woman, like a Sleeping with the Enemy but set in "olden times". Also the person who objected that Julia Roberts couldn't play the part may not have been explicit about why (because it's so obvious), so the dim bulb exec might have just thought they meant, oh, Julia is too young, wrong hair color, some superficial thing. I mean, just this week, Brenda Song said she wasn't allowed to audition for Crazy Rich Asians because she was told she wasn't Asian enough. The producers of that project have said other studios were like, "Can't Rachel be white?" So I can believe there are some powerful showbiz people who are massively oblivious idiots when it comes to race, even moreso 25 years ago.

Yeah, the critics were super high on Dunkirk when it opened, then cooled on it later in the year. If 1917 gives voters an "emotional arc" along with being technically dazzling, it could go very far in the Oscar race. IMO, that's what tripped up Dunkirk with awards, Nolan made the movie he wanted to make but voters felt like they didn't care about the characters.

I saw Parasite today and on the way to my theater, saw three girls dressed like Elsa, an Anna and a little boy carrying a stuffed Olaf-so cute! The thread is reminding me of Catching Fire's "disappointing" OW.

Olivia is not playing a composite character in Richard Jewell, but a real person (now deceased) who cannot defend a media portrayal of herself...ironic. There's dramatic license but the story was interesting without this development, so it's an easily avoided controversy. However, I feel we are in a post-controversy era in the awards world, viewers and voters are burnt out from all the outrage and don't like being told what to do. I'm not sure Film Twitter realizes this yet, but it can be an echo chamber, and they still need their clicks either way. I can see this resonating a lot with people who dislike trials by media and the rush to condemn without facts. When the movie inevitably appeals to conservatives, non-fans of Eastwood will resent it at this moment in time and try to peg this as right-wing propaganda or something. Yet the idea of the media/law enforcement scapegoating an innocent person is also familiar to people who are more liberal, so a mini breakout for RJ wouldn't be a total shock.

I lnow for sure that there are posters with that take on ActressWars, I mean AwardsWatch. That's pretty much what they are doing. "Spirit" from the new version of Lion King also sounds a bit like "The Circle of Life" in parts. Predictable but I get the strategy, and sometimes a song being a pale Imitation of a better one in the past is enough for an Oscar anyway. "Writing's on the Wall" is widely viewed as similar yet inferior to "Skyfall" and it still won. It just depends on the competition for the year.

But then it will be so much easier for writers/directors of new movies to lift complete plots from the classics without audiences realizing! By sheer luck, I saw Mission: Impossible 2 about a week before watching Hitchcock's Notorious for the first time. The story of the latter was seeming so familiar to me, even though I knew I'd never seen Notorious before, when it clicked halfway through (the two movies share very similar plots) and then I got even more irritated with M:I:2.

This one was my favorite. I spent Terminator: Salvation waiting for "the scene", probably the only reason I saw it. Casey Affleck was earlier in 2017, before #MeToo later that fall. Just a year after his win, he skipped the Oscar ceremony because it was made clear he would not be welcome there in the immediate wake of #TimesUp. If that movement happens a year earlier, maybe Denzel does win for Fences. And I don't believe this personally, but there are conspiracy theories that the Academy somehow swapped in Denzel for James Franco in Best Actor that year to avoid having a guy with multiple accusers being nominated. OTOH, Gary Oldman steamrolled to the win despite his ex-wife's accusations, but people could say, divorces can be contentious, he got custody, she also lost custody of her other kid with Fincher, another ex-wife (Lesley Manville) is also a nominee and isn't trashing him at every turn, so maybe he's not the bad guy here, etc. On one hand, Green Book won Best Picture despite all its controversies, though it missed a directing nomination. OTOH, you have to wonder, without #MeToo, maybe Bryan Singer never goes AWOL from the set, he never gets fired and isn't disgraced. Do Singer and the movie end up winning Oscars instead? I mean, they really, really responded to BoRhap...

Great comparison! The latest Shaft did have stars from earlier versions, but still had the "Why is this being made? Who is this for?" problem plus an extra 20 years away from the IPs original impact. We really should have thought of this when predicting box office for Charlie's Angels now, but I guess Shaft v3.0 flopped so hard, people forgot it even happened, lol. The Golden Globes really go for musicals, so I think Taron Egerton might win, though the HFPA really likes Leo, too. OTOH, Paramount will probably throw together some Rocketman event with the HPFA where Taron and Elton charm the room before putting on a mini-concert, the voters will swoon and put Egerton at the top of their ballots.