Dear Evan Hansen | Sep 24 2021 | Universal | Supposedly about "High School Students" | Premiering at TIFF!

[Lucas]

Not me finally reading what this shit is actually about 

[JWR]

I'm curious to see if this can at least avoid losing to Shang-Chi in week 4.

[WrathOfHan]

8 hours ago, JWR said:

I'm curious to see if this can at least avoid losing to Shang-Chi in week 4.

I think it'll be close. Based on the tracking thread my current guess is 11-13M; if it hits the higher end, it'll be neck and neck with SC.

[CJohn]

7 hours ago, WrathOfHan said:

I think it'll be close. Based on the tracking thread my current guess is 11-13M; if it hits the higher end, it'll be neck and neck with SC.

Fucking hell if this shit gets a 13M OW. I would laugh until the end of times as it would serve as another evidence that ITH is not a real movie.

[CoolioD1]

On 9/18/2021 at 11:53 PM, grim22 said:

Genuinely wondering, how did so many people, including me, end up thinking this was a gay love story

 

 

 

 

ETA: I guess this makes sense

 

 

The transfer of ott praise to "wait what the fuck?" when the wider public discovers it happens with so much broadway shit. theater nerds are just different.

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

23 minutes ago, CoolioD1 said:

The transfer of ott praise to "wait what the fuck?" when the wider public discovers it happens with so much broadway shit. theater nerds are just different.

 

It's an incredibly strange phenomenon. Especially given how many genuinely good shows there are, versus the ones that become significant and successful. Seems like an arbitrary toss of a coin as to which shows get deemed 'good'.  

 

Theatre culture however is very slow moving and operates as an insular bubble because it kind of has to given the size of the demographic matched against how much money the big shows cost. Once the pieces move in on a show the culture kind of feels it has to go all in in order to get the mainstream to then buy in to enough of a degree. As such you get shows that feel/promote something niche/radical/special but are actually incredibly bland and surprisingly generically populist. 

 

This dynamic happens with books and other properties too though, it's just the slow pace of the theatre culture enhances the dynamic more. I think even a little aspect of this can be seen recently with The Suicide Squad - what was awesome to one large, but still limited, demographic was just rejected by large segments of the general public who didn't align with it at all. Scott Pilgrim another example.  

[filmlover]

Broadway and movies are, at the end of the day, two completely different art forms that come with completely different audience expectations. People are more willing to overlook things like plot flaws and suspend disbelief at the notion of a grown person playing a teenager when you have the energy of a live performance to get all caught up in, all of which you're naturally gonna lose in the transition to a format that requires a more naturalistic approach. Some of the reasons why so many musical adaptations fail moving from stage to celluloid and goes to show how it takes a lot of work for success to cross mediums and why it doesn't just happen.

[AJG]

The taste makers for Broadway musicals are usually incredibly wealthy, incredibly white, and incredibly old New York liberals who not only fund these shows but are normally the only people that can afford tickets for the first few years.

When general audiences can finally get a hold of these shows then that's when the consensus starts to change. "Rent" is the most common example. It went from a groundbreaking production shining a spotlight on the AIDS crisis, to a silly and digestible show that ignored the government and church sponsored war against the LGBT community and treated AIDS closer to a fun badge of youthful rebellion.

 

Dear Evan Hansen came out in 2016. When it hit old people praised it for tackling teen suicide head on. It wasn't something they were used to seeing in High School set media. It was a beefy subject, especially for a musical. Unfortunately for Evan the "13 Reasons Why" controversy and Logic's horrid Suicide Hotline song both dropped in 2017 and younger people changed the way the way they look at teen suicide in the media ever since. 

Evan has only been on the broadway stage for about 3 years (it would've been closer to 5 if not for COVID). That wasn't enough time for word to spread on what the show was to general audiences and that's a factor leading some of the conversation we are seeing about it now.

 

Edited September 20, 2021 by AJG

[Ipickthiswhiterose]

The previous two comments are excellent and I wish I'd written them.

 

To slightly address filmlover's point though: I don't think that it's so much film's propensity for naturalism that's the issue, rather how contemporary filmmakers simply don't strategise around the change from that live environment to screen, regardless of how than manifests. And even when they do strategise - such as Rocket Man - the audience only goes with it for as far as they're inherently bought into the material.

 

Indeed two recent-ish transitions from Stage to screen that didn't work are History Boys and God of Carnage both of which are themselves fairly naturalistic scripts. In that case it was the verisimilitude of the script that was the problem - both those films are static beyond belief.

 

Looking to history there are plenty of examples of films leaning into non-naturalism unashamedly that work perfectly from Animal Crackers to West Side Story and Little Shop. But in a individualised, hyper participatory world it's hard to see how that can be done for a mass audience without appropriating material that's already uber popular such as Disney Remakes or the Mamma Mia/Bohemian Rhapsody gig. The only example that broke all that was Les Mis but then that's an ultra rare case where a) You have a genuinely world-known property and b) Hoodwinking the audience into thinking they're watching something naturalistic was already woven into the stage show.

 

I think Cats was actually a great opportunity ironically. It just needed a deliberately self-aware balls to the wall piece of bonkers-ness rather than grabbing the world's most mundane point-a-camera-at-the-literal-thing director. It could have really showcased the versatility and creativity of musical theatre, rather than confirm every stereotype that exists of it.

[JWR]

I think Cats would have gone down better with audiences if it was a fully animated film (2D or CG). Wouldn't have guaranteed it being good, but it likely would have been cheaper and less of a money loss.

 

Conversely, I don't think a Dear Evan Hansen movie was ever going to be able to transcend its problematic premise.

[AJG]

I might be completely wrong but this movie might have leaked online three days ago and nobody noticed.

 

EDIT: yeah so... this thing leaked (and Card Counter). Family film night is back on.

Edited September 20, 2021 by AJG

[Cmasterclay]

Can confirm: I 100 percent thought Dear Evan Hansen was a gay love story, and I did theater for ten years and used to go to festivals and be a district rep and shit. Total mind blower when I found out.

[lorddemaxus]

I so want to watch this opening day but I don't want to pay for it. Couldn't Universal execs have put this shit on Peacock instead of Halloween Kills?

[vale900]

anyway days ago on imdb it was at 3.8/10 (i think more because of a kind of hating vote storm than people who really saw it). After it leaked is at 5.6/10. So maybe the audience of this stuff is not hating it that much and it's getting a good amount of 7 and 8?

Edited September 21, 2021 by vale900

[JWR]

https://www.thewrap.com/dear-evan-hansen-backlash-universal-reviews-tracking-ben-platt-age/

[AJG]

So I watched it.

 

 A lot has already been said about “the big lie” that kicks things off. The producers throw whatever they can at us to make the first scene between Amy Addams and Evan less sinister than it is but it’s still very flimsy. Essentially Evan has anxiety and implied autism (which gets conveniently discarded after the first meeting) and Amy and her husband start unknowingly pressuring Evan into confessing he had a real relationship with their son. Frankly you do not need to experience a teen suicide to know that absolutely no school administration on the planet would allow a such meeting, where an autistic student is locked in a room with two random distressed parents, to take place. The scene following the meeting where Evan creates a whole fake online relationship with the dead boy is what kills the idea that there are good intentions here completely. To mask the dick-ishness of the act they turn the whole thing into an LOL musical number. It’s funny but it’s not enough.

We also have Ben Platt who often comes across like Martin Short in Clifford. Dude looks old but keeps the mannerisms and fashion sense of a 12 year old. The Lie would’ve been a much easier sell to the audience if it were being told by someone that actually looks 17, that can look as if they have some innocence left. You can’t help but think that this grown man, sitting in front of this dead boys parents, could navigate the situation better. A lot of what I feel the producers thought Ben could bring to the role is lost by how distracting his face is in the high school setting. The Hair and Costume doesn’t help either. There’s one musical number where he wanders though a high school pining over a school girl and it’s like watching a creepy SNL parody.

 

At the end of the day what truly kills this movie is simple. It’s boring. It’s so fucking boring. There’s no imagination with these musical numbers at all. Every last musical number is someone wandering a high school, or their kitchen, or their bedroom. They’re filmed as if they're just regular boring old dialogue scenes. Apart from one scene there’s no dancing. There’s no choreography. There’s no fantasy. Look below, the set design of the stage show is GORGEOUS, but here they’ve replaced it with an actual sterile bedroom. For a musical it has all the razzmatazz of an episode of Law and Order. The second half of this movie devolves into a slow countdown where we wait and wait for the lie to finally unravel. When it finally does we’re greeted by an equally unending prologue of sorts.

 

 

I understand people want to hate-watch this. I understand the curiosity. But this thing here is a dull time. Its like a musical by someone embarrassed to be making a musical.

 

It’s a LOW RENTAL (I liked the first song).

 

 

[Orestes]

2 hours ago, AJG said:

A lot of what I feel the producers thought Ben could bring to the role is lost by how distracting his face is in the high school setting. The Hair and Costume doesn’t help either.

 

I think the thing the producers most wanted him to bring to the role was his dad's money.

[JWR]

Low tracking? How low we talking here? 🤔

[JWR]

https://variety.com/2021/film/box-office/dear-evan-hansen-box-office-debut-shang-chi-1235071311/

[lorddemaxus]

On 9/20/2021 at 8:00 PM, lorddemaxus said:

I so want to watch this opening day but I don't want to pay for it. Couldn't Universal execs have put this shit on Peacock instead of Halloween Kills?

Thank the movie gods. I don't have to pay to watch this piece of shit. And now I finally understand why non-critics I follow were able to watch it last week.

 

Edit: Lol, I didn't see @AJG's comment. I wish I watched it earlier.

Edited September 25, 2021 by lorddemaxus