Richard Jewell | December 13 2019 | Clint Eastwood's highly anticipated follow-up to The Mule | Now a WB movie | Premiering at AFI Festival

[filmlover]

I'm seeing this over the weekend (along with Jumanji) but tbh I'm not really excited for it or anything. Hopefully it's better than Eastwood's last two movies (although watching paint dry would be more entertaining than The 15:17 to Paris).

[JB33]

Just now, filmlover said:

I'm seeing this over the weekend (along with Jumanji) but tbh I'm not really excited for it or anything. Hopefully it's better than Eastwood's last two movies (although watching paint dry would be more entertaining than The 15:17 to Paris).

What did you think of The Mule?

[filmlover]

Just now, JB33 said:

What did you think of The Mule?

It was mediocre. Clint was good but tonally the movie was a mess (drug smuggling thriller one minute, grumpy grandpa comedy the next, family drama the minute after that).

[JB33]

16 hours ago, filmlover said:

It was mediocre. Clint was good but tonally the movie was a mess (drug smuggling thriller one minute, grumpy grandpa comedy the next, family drama the minute after that).

Yeah. It did very well last Christmas but I think the big selling point was Clint acting again.

[JB33]

77% on RT after 116 reviews so far. Not too bad, all things considered.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/richard_jewell

[JB33]

Well....this will end up beating Black Christmas. It's got that going for it.

[BoxOfficeFangrl]

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...

[Porthos]

11 minutes ago, BoxOfficeFangrl said:

Though The Trouble With The Curve, not sure what happened there...

It alienated a good chunk of the potential baseball audience with it's OTT/strident anti-sabermetric stance.  Made it easy for people to say "pass".  Not to mention it looked like a bad copy of much better baseball films.  Coming off the heels of Moneyball just made both factors worse there.

[Jonwo]

15 minutes ago, BoxOfficeFangrl said:

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...

At this point, Clint has made WB so much money that he gets a free pass when one of his film doesn't do well. 

 

I don't think it's necessarily true that big names help Clint's films otherwise J.Edgar, Invictus and Hereafter would have done better. 

[Porthos]

6 minutes ago, Porthos said:

It alienated a good chunk of the potential baseball audience with it's OTT/strident anti-sabermetric stance.  Made it easy for people to say "pass".  Not to mention it looked like a bad copy of much better baseball films.  Coming off the heels of Moneyball just made both factors worse there.

*double checks something*

 

Yeah, that's what I thought.  Trouble With the Curve was also released in the immediate aftermath of Eastwood's infamous "Empty Chair" speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention that year.  That plus the subject matter of the film made it all too easy to paint Clint Eastwood as "Old Man Yells at Clouds".

 

He's rebounded since then to a large degree, but I think those were many of the factors in play at the time.

 

...

 

Being released in Sep didn't help, either. 

[CoolioD1]

i saw trouble with the curve but i'm also pretty sure it doesn't actually exist.

[filmlover]

Clint is gonna be turning 90 next year so we're definitely at the point where every new movie runs the risk of being his last. Who knows, maybe after the articles highlighting this being his worst opening in decades he'll just retire.

[BoxOfficeFangrl]

43 minutes ago, Porthos said:

It alienated a good chunk of the potential baseball audience with it's OTT/strident anti-sabermetric stance.  Made it easy for people to say "pass".  Not to mention it looked like a bad copy of much better baseball films.  Coming off the heels of Moneyball just made both factors worse there.

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.

 

42 minutes ago, Jonwo said:

At this point, Clint has made WB so much money that he gets a free pass when one of his film doesn't do well. 

 

I don't think it's necessarily true that big names help Clint's films otherwise J.Edgar, Invictus and Hereafter would have done better. 

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.

Edited December 16, 2019 by BoxOfficeFangrl

[WittyUsername]

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2019/12/15/jumanji-2-is-1-with-60m-richard-jewell-underperforms/

 

The comments section for this article sure is pretty fascinating, to say the least...

[filmlover]

Breitbart is death.

[Jonwo]

 

34 minutes ago, filmlover said:

Clint is gonna be turning 90 next year so we're definitely at the point where every new movie runs the risk of being his last. Who knows, maybe after the articles highlighting this being his worst opening in decades he'll just retire.

I can't imagine Clint retiring unless his health seriously declines in the next few years. I think WB accepts that not every one of his films will do well but when he does hit, he hits big as we saw with American Sniper and Sully. 

 

[WittyUsername]

I noticed a funny little edit on Wikipedia regarding the Scruggs controversy. 

 

Quote

They also noted that the purpose of the film was to expose and condemn the character assassination of Jewell; however, in the process, the film commits the same character assassination to Scruggs. However, it is not character assassination if it is true.

 

[DeeCee]

“Both Brenner and Billy Ray, though, say the focus on Scruggs is a diversionary tactic. “This movie is about a hero whose life was completely destroyed by myths created by the FBI and the media, specifically the AJC,” Ray told Deadline. “The AJC hung Richard Jewell, in public.... They editorialized wildly and printed assumptions as facts. They compared him to noted mass murderer Wayne Williams. And this was after he had saved hundreds of lives. Now a movie comes along 23 years later, a perfect chance for the AJC to atone for what they did to Richard and to admit to their misdeeds. And what do they decide to do? They launch a distraction campaign. They deflect and distort...opting to challenge one assertion in the movie rather than accepting their own role in destroying the life of a good man. The movie isn’t about Kathy Scruggs; it’s about the heroism and hounding of Richard Jewell, and what rushed reporting can do to an innocent man. And by the way, I will stand by every word and assertion in the script.””

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/12/richard-jewell-movie-kathy-scruggs

[WittyUsername]

25 minutes ago, DeeCee said:

“Both Brenner and Billy Ray, though, say the focus on Scruggs is a diversionary tactic. “This movie is about a hero whose life was completely destroyed by myths created by the FBI and the media, specifically the AJC,” Ray told Deadline. “The AJC hung Richard Jewell, in public.... They editorialized wildly and printed assumptions as facts. They compared him to noted mass murderer Wayne Williams. And this was after he had saved hundreds of lives. Now a movie comes along 23 years later, a perfect chance for the AJC to atone for what they did to Richard and to admit to their misdeeds. And what do they decide to do? They launch a distraction campaign. They deflect and distort...opting to challenge one assertion in the movie rather than accepting their own role in destroying the life of a good man. The movie isn’t about Kathy Scruggs; it’s about the heroism and hounding of Richard Jewell, and what rushed reporting can do to an innocent man. And by the way, I will stand by every word and assertion in the script.””

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/12/richard-jewell-movie-kathy-scruggs

In fairness, while I’m sure that Scruggs was a shady journalist, I don’t think the film needed to lie about her just to make her look extra bad, especially when she’s not even alive to defend herself. Her real-life actions should speak for itself, unless you’re going for satire in the style of South Park. It’s like if Vice had Dick Cheney beating his wife, even though there’s no indication of him ever having done that in real life.

Edited December 16, 2019 by WittyUsername

[filmlover]