BoxOfficeFangrl

Except for Home Alone, it played really well after Christmas, but this movie is not getting anywhere near $285 million let alone $610M domestic. Over/under Love Actually? Last Christmas won't have the same built-in audience of Crazy Rich Asians and it will be competing with all the TV/streaming options for Christmas movies (Hallmark really does the 24/7 Christmas programming by Halloween now, there's Lifetime and even Netflix got into the game a couple years ago).

Only one December release among the Top 20 Christmas movies about Christmas: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=christmas.htm Five out of 20 December releases for the Top 20 "Christmas-Setting Only" movies, but some would be considered a reach as "Christmas movies" (maybe there are huge groups of people who get into the holiday spirit by watching Catch Me If You Can, IDK): https://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=christmassetting.htm November releases seem pretty standard for the Holiday genre and lucrative as well.

Good trailer but very weird that they are showing the first footage less than two months before the release date.

I don't like that picture of him in the story, I saw a different one before, and out of the choices he made the most sense to me given his age/appearance/baggage (or lack thereof) with the audience. I don't know what Harry Styles was even doing in consideration for this when he looks much more like Mick Jagger. Good luck to everybody involved trying to dodge the questions about Elvis and 14-year-old Priscilla!

Set when silents were being taken over by talkies...another old Hollywood "homage" from Chazelle, this time Singin' in the Rain (sans music apparently)?

https://junkee.com/gay-roles-straight-actors/143890 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/call-me-by-your-name-why-luca-guadagnino-left-gay-actors-explicit-sex-scenes-q-a-973256 https://www.advocate.com/film/2017/11/29/call-me-your-names-straight-casting-stirs-controversy http://digg.com/2018/call-me-by-your-name-controversy-gay https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/11/call-me-by-your-name-is-not-a-gay-movie.html Just did a quick search of "Call Me By Your Name straight actors" and these were on the first page of results, there were many more. I definitely remember the "how gay is it really" topic being a discussion during that Oscar season. Perhaps Scarlett's comments are getting the amount of attention they have because she is way more famous than anybody in CMBYN? In other news lolol Goop, you would think after the whole thing with her not realizing she was in Spider-Man Homecoming, that she would try to keep up a little more for future promotional appearances.

Priscilla said in her book that they didn't do it until they were married (though she hinted that other stuff happened before) and points to Lisa Marie being born exactly 9 months after the wedding as proof. Even if anyone believes that, by modern standards many would view Elvis's behavior towards Priscilla as grooming of a minor, or at best, wildly inappropriate. It was a different time but the media knew about her even back then, they weren't judging him for it (the newsreel gets her age wrong she was 15, not 16, in 1960): Though back then, if unmarried people were dating, the idea that they weren't having sex yet was kind of plausible? So maybe that made it okay in people's minds (unlike Jerry Lee Lewis, whose career was destroyed when it was discovered that he had married a 13 year old, that she was his cousin compounded the ickiness). The drugs, you can say a lot of people took many substances whose dangers were not fully understood in the 1960s. But IDK how the makers of this film plan to address the dicier elements of Elvis's life, if they bother. I picture Baz focusing on the professional side of things with Elvis and Colonel Parker and just sidestepping Priscilla as a major figure until the point in the story where it becomes slightly less R Kelly-esque...

This is out in UK cinemas in two weeks?! One of the actors was interviewed on a British movie podcast yesterday and I was confused, because usually the show gets stars on the promo tour when the film is about to come out, and it's being released in October here in the US. I guess we'll see if the new cut goes over better with critics soon enough. https://www.radiotimes.com/news/film/2019-07-08/the-current-war-cinema-release-date-cast-plot-trailer-benedict-cumberbatch/

Just saw the full Judy trailer with Renee Zellweger, unless the movie is terrible, she should be good for the nomination. Cynthia Erivo is playing Harriet Tubman in a biopic, it's a meaty role and she will EGOT if she wins, so she will campaign like crazy.

Finally finished reading Nightmare Alley...the hardboiled crime novel is really not my thing (the bleakness, the casual racism, the gratuitous descriptions of "dames"...part and parcel of the genre, but still, meh) though it did fill in some of the blanks left by the 1947 version. All those moments from the movie where I wondered if I missed something, or why a character acted in a certain way, made more sense after getting the story that was left unsaid due to the production code of the day. The book covers a much longer period of time than the 1947 movie seems to. I am skeptical that this movie is really going to play out over the novel's extended time frame. And some of the subject matter, studios are still reluctant to deal with, even now. The novel covers some very thorny areas that could potentially attract separate mainstream and thinkpiece outrage during an awards cycle due to the (book spoilers) : The characters supposed to be amoral/sleazy so that might help mitigate any controversy. GdT's last movie featured a woman hooking up with a fish man and it won Best Picture, but it's not an overwhelming issue that resonates in the real world, so people weren't going to get bothered over it in the same way. TSoW didn't have a big-name star bringing in a mainstream audience with more basic expectations, either. Also, the novelist was not the greatest guy IRL but doesn't have such a legacy that people will be rushing out to defend him. Going to be interesting to follow this one...

I've seen The Guardian use that rule but I've never understood the comparison, the UK + Ireland vs US + Canada populations are more like 5 times apart in size. Maybe the difference in movie-going patterns or theater availability is factored in too, IDK.

There was a TV sitcom not long after the movie, My Big Fat Greek Life, though the characters had different names and John Corbett wasn't in it: The complete series, lol, all 7 episodes of it! Ironic how a movie that was derided as a glorified, extended sitcom was so terrible as an actual one. The 1997 Titanic doesn't leave a lot of room for a sequel where Rose was concerned, though I've seen some people say they look at The Great Gatsby as an AU take on what would have happened if Rose had stayed on the lifeboat and Jack had survived. Different characters, obviously, but the same sort of dynamic. In sticking with the 1910s oceanliner disasters, a Lusitania movie could be interesting.

IDK, after they got married I was looking at the list of other celebrities who eloped in Vegas and there were some couples that made it (Paul Newman/Joanne Woodward, Kelly Ripa/Mark Consuelos, Bon Jovi and his wife), but a lot that didn't last. The track record with celebrity couples overall isn't the best, but Las Vegas seems to add a train wreck factor in some cases. If neither person is French, the couple has to jump through a lot of hoops to have a legally valid wedding in France. What many people do is get married here and go over there for a big fancy ceremony. You can do the legal part of it very quietly, but you get way more headlines for eloping in Vegas with Elvis impersonator. Now a second set of headlines for the big formal ceremony and celebrity guest list... Go Rocketman!

JDW still has the facial hair for the movie, I was wondering about that. Difficult to make much out of their outfits, except RPatz's could have been pulled out of Nolan's closet.

This is the second ceremony; they eloped in Vegas in May after some awards show, Diplo livestreamed it on his Instagram. It got huge publicity then, maybe it boosted the Jonas Brothers song some more (though Sucker had already gone number one) and gave Sophie Turner a bigger name as a celebrity, because Game of Thrones was at peak publicity regardless. Certainly didn't help Dark Phoenix...or maybe it did, and it would have done worse without Sophie being more famous than ever. The wedding now is just for show and sentimental reasons, though Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra had like 12 celebrations and got a lot of attention for each one.

About Endgame's frontloadedness this weekend, there will be a fan rush, but MCU movies tend to have more of a Saturday bump than other CBMs, so maybe it will even out? A Star Is Born had an extended cut plopped into theaters during its run, here's how how it played that weekend (March 1–3) : Fri: $481,844 (+852.4%) Sat: $821,830 (+70.6%) Sun: $550,533 (-33%) Total: $1,854,207 Very different genres and situations, Endgame doesn't have that much new content vs. 12 minutes extra for ASIB, but Endgame hasn't (legally) hit digital yet weeks before this release. There was more notice about the "new" Endgame hitting theaters vs. the official announcement of the encore ASIB happening two days ahead of that Friday (March 1). Lady Gaga went onto Jimmy Kimmel's show to promote the re-release, though 99% of the headlines after were about how she addressed the Oscars performance/speculation that she and Bradley Cooper were in love, rather than hey, there's a new version in theaters this weekend! So it was as situation where ASIB was in the news a lot as it was re-released (probably more than Endgame right now), but the buzz around it could have just driven people to digital/DVD instead. Whereas, if you want to see any version of Endgame right now, you have fewer (legal) options. A long-winded way to say comparisons are difficult. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's silly because it's Dora the Explorer, but the movie probably will be a little "edgier" (if that's the right word) than the actual cartoon, which is strictly for preschoolers and under.

IDK, A Star Is Born got an "Encore" version with 12 more minutes and BOM doesn't separate it out as a different release. The original cut was still in theaters and the weekend after the Oscars, the new version replaced it as far as I could tell (every movie theater site I remember looking up suddenly seemed to have the longer runtime for it). If you didn't know and just looked up ASIB's run on the box office charts, you would see the 200 percent jump that weekend and think it was only due to the Oscars performance and win. Those things *helped*, but not that much. If you do release a proper new cut of a movie in theaters, it has to get re-rated by the MPAA, even if the rating doesn't change. I don't know if that had to happen with Endgame, since it seems like stuff is tacked on more than being integrated into the film. Plus, Endgame is already 3 hours long. Maybe there will be some Extended Cut someday that is 4 hours or something but that would probably be more for home viewing than theaters.

Youtube: Already looks more interesting than the first trailer. It has five new scenes but is apparently 10 minutes shorter than the cut that played Toronto in 2017. Way more focus on Tesla in this trailer than the other one, I wonder if that was always the plan or if this new cut emphasizes him more.

This won't affect the production schedule (unless all the women working on the movie stage a walk out over working conditions or something) but more bad PR:

Little Women has a 150-year legacy, a story girls and women have admired/idolized for generations. If audiences and Oscar hate this version, it's not going to be because stans bugged critics on Twitter about Chalabae or Emma Watson, that's going to be such a small percentage of how this movie ends up being received. The Vanity Fair interview with Greta Gerwig was really interesting, especially her take on Jo and Laurie's relationship, maybe he will come off like less of a fuckboi in this version...

A prequel? They are an iffy concept even when they focus on characters that fans might be inclined to care about (the younger days of older characters we already know, or the ancestors of our faves). With The Hunger Games, it's a prequel set after an ultimately failed rebellion and we know where are the world ends up. The general audience bailed on Mockingjay and that had characters people knew and cared about, so what is the appeal of this as a movie, again? Though I guess if the prequel is a big hit first as a book, it might build anticipation for a movie...

GdT's last two feature films had period settings. Now his last movie won Best Picture, he's lining up an A-list lead, the studio will probably be a little more generous with the budget. The mentalist angle would fit into any time, I think, but the carnival aspect works best as an element of years gone by. Plus, the fashions of the 1940s are great for this genre, neo-noir just doesn't have the same style. I looked up how old the actresses from the original film were in 1947: Joan Blondell (Zeena) was 41, Coleen Gray (the girlfriend) was 25, Helen Walker (the psychologist) was 27! The girlfriend probably has to stay youngish, and it would make sense if the carnival veteran seems older than the male lead. I think there is flexibility with the age range for the psychologist. People now would look askance at today's 27-year-old actresses as such a character (not that this always stops Hollywood), but someone mid-30s or older should work.

I just watched the movie today, very enjoyable but I can see how a remake isn't the worst idea. From the way Stanton was dressed and how characters spoke to/about him at the beginning, I figured that he was supposed to be "young", but he always looked at least 30 to me. Tyrone Power just had one of those builds/faces that didn't allow him to pull off "callow youth" for very long. Even at the start, people are dressed like they're in the present day of the times, the 1940s. Maybe the book gives the sense of 15-20 years passing but I didn't get that from the movie, you can easily write a new version so that it takes place over 4-5 years. But after seeing the story, I do get why someone who's closer to 30 than 40 might make more sense as the lead. It's different to see characters fleshed out, compared to reading about their actions in a plot summary, so I take back that everyone is a terrible person in the story, some do show flashes of conscience here and there. I think the women in this are kind of all supporting, given their screen time or the kind of roles that have? If there is an awards campaign (and I'm not sure it's really that kind of movie), the psychologist is the Best Actress push. It's Guillermo del Toro, he might just call up Jessica Chastain for it. Lady Gaga would be on the upper end of the age range for Molly but isn't so young that she wouldn't be plausible as Lilith. Whatever is going on with she and Cooper personally, if they do get her for this movie, too, the set will be absolutely hounded by paparazzi!