BoxOfficeFangrl

Also thought that age appropriate bit was weird, Washington and Pattinson are 34 and 32 respectively, like, did they think we thought the female lead would be Mackenzie Foy or something? I mean, it would be different if this starred Denzel or Tom Hanks and they were saying, "Don't worry, the actress won't be young enough to be their daughter or anything."

LOL I had forgotten about this, but now I remember Harvey shifting release dates between this and Tulip Fever (talk about one that should have stayed in the vault!). But this is just dumb teen horror, surprised it wasn't released in January.

Even if Hotel Mumbai had been a contender, the subject matter was probably too limiting for an audience to really embrace it. The Upside had an appealing concept plus stars the US audience likes, so it did well here. What is the last Weinstein movie still in the vault, The Current War? It's not awards material but it might still work with a certain audience in a Monuments Men sort of way (admittedly that had more star power). WTG for Five Feet Apart, I like Cole Sprause and Haley Lu Richardson and I was always Team Rafael when I watched Jane the Virgin (FFA is directed by Justin Baldoni).

Would any time in the last 3-4 years have been a good time for a movie reenacting a real-life terror attack? The odds are that something similar might have happened again by the time it's released. Just going by the trailer, besides the Nazi element, the crowd for this has seen Knightley in superior WWII films already.

Likely too late for ASIB to close the gap unless WB suddenly releases a singalong version (but it's kind of heavy for that), or it gets an unexpected last minute wave of publicity because another song from the soundtrack somehow goes viral in the next week or two or IDK, Bradley splits from his girlfriend, then the media would be all over the role ASIB had in a breakup. So, oh well, congrats to BoRhap for winning the domestic and worldwide battles. I saw the trailer for The Aftermath and thought, didn't Keira already make this movie? And the arthouse crowd is probably not interested in what seems like a sympathetic portrayal of a Nazi right now.

Collider.com now saying the Production Weekly report is not true. Not sure if they mean the genre description, when filming starts, or both. http://collider.com/christopher-nolan-new-movie-romantic-thriller/ If there is a big romance element, he would be an excellent choice, even if it's not, he would make sense given his age and the studio connection. Aren't they kind of rivals now as THE next generation director of WB after Eastwood though? Kind of kidding, but Nolan and Cooper would be a super interesting dynamic.

.Loved the Encore version, not just for the extra songs but the really good bits of dialogue/interaction that added a little more character development. Too bad WB didn't play dirty and release the extended cut last month, even if it's not the screener version it could have given ASIB more life in the Oscars race. Oh well... And seeing Shallow again onscreen: somehow it was sung multiple times in the movie without anyone's personal space being violated! The Oscars rendition was straight fire but their *we were just performing the love in the song* excuses for it are utterly laughable, but go on and tell yourselves that, you crazy kids.

ASIB has been re-released with an extra 12 minutes of footage as an "encore" addition, they're calling it: there's a couple of songs that weren't originally shown at all, plus extensions of some performances/scenes. It's only supposed to be playing for a week. Saw it last night and feel like it was what would have been released initially if studios weren't so scared of "long" runtimes now.

"Go see the new version and btw Cooper and I totes aren't smashing, kthxbai"

Leave the man alone, his girlfriend blocked him from sitting next to his Lady (Gaga). No really, it's the easiest thing in the world to seat the costars next to each other, it makes the camera reaction shots that much easier to pull off. Very interesting that it's not happening here...

Kind of hoping Black Panther takes it, would cause the most pressage between the cinephiles and the salty fanboys still bothered by it. It's not actually what I would vote for as the winner, but what I want to win hardly ever does. Still, I thought it was very good and I like it better than The Shape of Water. Eagerly waiting to see how late the producers have scheduled Shallow to be performed, if they could save Best Original Song until the next to last category, they probably would. Also, what are Cooper and Gaga going to do with it. In the movie, the vibe was more "conquering your fears", when they sang together at her concert, it, ummm, leaned more into "love song" aspect of the lyrics.

If his family is smart, they will never agree to an authorized movie: besides the actual rape allegations against Bowie, some of his groupies in the glam rock days were very young and he was well aware, apparently. Totally convinced that Duncan Jones Netflix movie with the side character perving on underage girls (yet it wasn't a totally unsympathetic portrayal?) was him working out some feelings about his dad. It would all get dredged up if there is a big budget Bowie biopic. Even beyond all that, there will be the same issues Bohemian Rhapsody has with how his sexuality is portrayed but probably worse, I doubt Bowie's widow signs off on any portrayal of his bisexuality, which he himself tried to backtrack from later in his life. He and Mick Jagger insisted they were only ever friends, but others say they witnessed much more going on between the two of them. Whatever side the movie takes, someone will have a problem with it. Pretty much all biopics (musical or not) take liberties, often huge ones, with events and timelines, plus throwing in composite characters. Sometimes it becomes a controversy, sometimes it doesn't. If it has popular appeal, it will expose more people to this interesting person, than would have otherwise known about them. Ideally everyone would love the great warts-and-all biopic just as much, but that's not life.

I've been listening to a couple of podcasts that look back at past Oscar winners, one has hosts who watch the year's Best Picture winner vs. the top-grossing (worldwide) movie of the year and ranks which is better (if it's the same, they just talk about the one movie some more). The other hosts watch all the Best Picture nominees and picks winners from the bunch. Tastes change, tastes differ, but often times who/what won was based on outside stuff (politics, popularity, etc). that seems utterly incomprehensible for people who are just going by the movies and that's it. Some of these AMPAS members are playing themselves and don't even realize it. No one's going to care in 5-10 years that you pwned Film Twitter, or that this actress wasn't famous enough or that actor is too thirsty, people are just going to look at the winners compared to the nominees and say, WTF Academy. Art is subjective but some of the "logic" displayed by these anonymous voters is just pathetic. And here's a video demonstration of how the Best Picture preferential balloting works: SNL did a nominees sketch, not their best but some good in-jokes if you've been following this Oscar season: Especially loved the riff on Gaga's "99 people in a room" bit and how, erm, attached she and Bradley Cooper have become, plus the Green Book shade.

There's this, "A Star is Born Encore" that's been rated by the Classification & Rating Administration. Is this typical for DVD extras or could a director's cut be coming back to theaters? https://www.filmratings.com/Search?filmTitle=a+star+is+born&x=0&y=0 Also, it's nearly the one-week anniversary of Gaga and Bradley performing "Shallow" live! There are other versions with more views by far (the Gaga Daily channel is at 13 million, another is over 4.5m), but this one IMO has the most unobstructed close-ups:

Oh right, I always forget he was in that. Not live action, but a hit is a hit.

I love how DDL's win for Lincoln gets lumped in as biopic mimicry, what was he copying exactly, statues? It's not like he could just Youtube clips of Honest Abe for research. And McConaugheyheyhey wasn't playing a well known person, it was more about the weight loss transformation and playing someone who suffered. Speaking of Matthew, I guess we should have realized there was only so much to the McConaissance when he kept doing those Lincoln commercials. But hasn't really had a huge box office hit since Interstellar, so it makes sense to keep the money flowing some other way. I hope Deadline has the demo breakdown of the Serenity CinemaScore: sometimes their Sunday writeup will say what grade it got from young people vs. older people, women vs. men, with Mother I remember they said Darren Aronofsky fans gave it a C+ (though the overall score was still the dreaded F).

When the Sony leak happened, there were emails revealed about David O acting like a lunatic (even by his standards) on the set of American Hustle, that he treated Amy Adams so badly that Christian Bale apparently stepped in to confront him about it. Christian Bale, who has his own Infamous onset meltdown, which really shows you how bad David O. Russell must have been. I heard an interview once where Nolan was asked which actress he would cast to play his mother in a movie and his answer was Glenn Close (his mother's American). She's having a moment now, would love to see her in some sort of role in one of his movies. But the Gosling speculation makes a lot of sense, another blondish actor who can play a Nolan avatar of sorts.

"Bohemian Rhapsody was a great time at the movies, people love it so much, what are these critics going on about?" *presents some things the critics are going on about [while clearly not even personally agreeing with all these points]* "It's a global smash, suck it, haters!" A real scintillating conversation this is turning out to be... A movie can be popular and a minority of people can still have issues with it. It doesn't mean they're wrong, it doesn't mean they're right. A lot of things that were huge in one time, make everyone cringe 10-20 years later. Or sometimes stuff gets slammed in the present and years later, we wonder what was so controversial about it. Remember how La La Land was fascist and racist in the heat of the Oscar race?

Well, yeah, certainly knives are out because of Singer's involvement but many biopics rearrange/make up events for drama, some get slammed and some don't. Queen/Freddie are very well known, plus it's been reported for years, the prospect of a "harder" version, it set this movie up to disappoint with critics no matter what. But the way this portrayed his relationships didn't help. I wouldn't say it shows homosexuality as something to overcome, you do see him with a good guy BF in the end, but it seems to be portrayed a lot more reluctantly than his hetero relationship. It seems like like some see playing around with the timeline of his AIDS diagnosis as trivializing the disease. And onscreen Freddie's "wild" partying/trusting the wrong person aren't just because a biopic is gonna biopic (embellish reality and invent drama where there wasn't any)...but because the movie is clearly saying that all the band's problems were because gay Freddie just had to be so darn gay and lured in by a gay predator. (Fans don't look at the movie this way at all obviously). The singer who overdoes it casual sex and/or substances, the stars clashing over egos and jealousy, the sleazy music industry type in the lead's ear: these are all staples of musician dramas. Does a biopic have to avoid these themes with LGBT characters even if they are typical for the genre? Gay or straight, movies about singers can be very cliched so maybe they should try to do something different regardless.

It's like how a movie that takes place anywhere from, IDK, 1920s to the 1970s, but if the movie was made in the 21st century, it won't show that much smoking, compared to movies/TV shows that were actually made back then and at least half the population smoked. I mean, they used to even smoke on game shows. Except for maybe Mad Men, but that was a cable show for adults, but anything PG-13 or lower that is made these days tends to avoid showing the "good guys" smoking. Even if they are playing characters in a time where a lot of people smoked and big 1950s-1960s sitcom star would endorse cigarettes in character and on the TV show set. It's kind of the same with how this movie handles Freddie's sexuality, I wouldn't entirely say it portrayed homosexuality as an obstacle, but the way the Jim Hutton relationship played out does remind me of the 1990s movies where Hollywood wanted to be progressive, but couldn't show too much for fear of audiences shunning. Like in Philadelphia, when it was made in the early 90s and didn't show Tom Hanks actually kissing a love interest, even though the movie was about this gay man in a relationship who got discriminated against because he had AIDS. If it was made now (but still set 25-ish years ago) and portrayed the sexuality in that retro way, it would be reviewed a lot more harshly that it was at the time. Even under a PG-13 rating, there's a bit more freedom with how far directors can go with a male-male romantic scenes. You can think the movie was really tame and not necessarily believe it should have had an R rating.

I thought the pairing of the Overcomer teaser with Into the Spider-Verse was odd, it got some unintentional laughs along with the runaway dog one. I went back and watched the teaser for War Room and it was equally vague: it didn't specifically mention the troubled marriage plot and you saw images of everyone, but only heard the praying grandmother's dialogue. So it will probably be the same way with Overcomer, the trailer will say what this is actually about and will probably get attached to the one that's being released for Easter, where the kid falls through the ice and lives...Breakthrough.

Deadline has early figures for today's showings of They Shall Not Grow Old, $3.1+ million, making the grand total $5.4 million from the two dates so far (December 17 & 27). It opens in NY/LA/DC on January 11 and expands to the Top 25 markets on February 1 (Super Bowl weekend). https://deadline.com/2018/12/peter-jackson-they-shall-not-grow-old-box-office-record-1202526739/

So, apparently the movie is a little different than what's been sold in the trailers (spoilers in the link): https://www.thedailybeast.com/jennifer-lopezs-second-act-has-the-craziest-movie-twist-of-the-year

Wasn't it just a Fathom event? Don't think it's playing again until after Christmas.