Great googly-moogly! Another week of things happening has happened! Onward!
In this week’s” Big numbers game” story, New Line’s IT opened to an enormous $ 13.5 million for a Thursday night.
The North American preview number for IT is the third-largest for 2017, trailing only Disney’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, at $17 million, and Beauty and the Beast, with $16.3 million. It’s also the largest gross for a horror movie, for an R-rated title, for a September release, and for a film based on a Stephen King book.
Also in the numbers game is Despicable Me 3, which has now grossed over one billion dollars, despite the general uninspiring box office receipts this past summer.
The latest installment of Illumination’s marquee animated franchise on Thursday joined Beauty and the Beast and The Fate of the Furious as the third film of 2017 to gross $1 billion worldwide, giving Universal two billion-dollar hits this year.
In this week’s “Spin-off X” story, Drew Goddard, Oscar nominated writer for The Martian, and creator of the Daredevil Netflix show, will be writing and directing the X-man spin-off, X-Force, which will star both Deadpool and Cable Marvel characters.
Simon Kinberg, who shepherds the X-Men franchise for the studio, Lauren Shulder Donner and Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds will produce the feature.
In this week’s “Box Office Fail” story, This past summer’s theater attendance is down – WAY down. In fact, it’s showing the lowest numbers of attendance in 25 years.
Yep. If you don’t make any really good summer movies, it turns out no one bothers to go to the theater to see them. Funny how people don’t want to spend money to see shitty movies. Go figure. *shrug*
In this week’s “another one bites the dust” story, we have yet ANOTHER director parting ways with a Star Wars film.
Yes, it turns out that director Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed, Jurassic World) and Lucasfilm have parted ways even before Star Wars: Episode IX has began shooting.
This is, of course, better than waiting until they’re almost done with shooting, like in the case of the Han Solo movie, but still, it’s certainly officially a trend.
According to the Star Wars website: “Lucasfilm and Colin Trevorrow have mutually chosen to part ways on Star Wars: Episode IX,” the note read. “Colin has been a wonderful collaborator throughout the development process but we have all come to the conclusion that our visions for the project differ. We wish Colin the best and will be sharing more information about the film soon.”
Trevorrow’s departure from the film follows an August shake-up, during which screenwriter Jack Thorne was tapped to take over the script from Trevorrow and his writing partner, Derek Conolly. Per sources, a new set of eyes was needed to finish the final installment of the franchise reboot.
Lucasfilm and its parent company Disney did not say whether the directorial change will effect the timeframe for the as-yet untitled Episode IX. Production is scheduled to begin next January and the movie is expected to open May 24th, 2019.
Ok, clearly they just want a director that will take orders form Kathleen Kennedy in order to make a film that maintains the same look and feel of all the previous Star Wars films. If you, as a director, have a unique voice, keep it to yourself. Lucasfilm doesn’t want it. They want someone that can take orders.
In this week’s “Lady in a loin cloth movie” story, with the success of Wonder Woman, Millenium Films is looking for the next Gal Gadot.
Why? Because they plan to bring back Sheena: Queen of the Jungle. Yes, they want to dust off the American comic book jungle girl after 33 years.
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle was actually the first female comic book character with her own title in 1938 and was the first comic book to title-star a female character preceding Wonder Woman in 1941. She was predated in literature by Rima, the Jungle Girl, introduced in the 1904 William Henry Hudson novel Green Mansions.
The story of Sheena is that she was orphaned and then grew up with wild animals and learned to survive fighting with makeshift weapons and later knives, spears and bows and arrows; she would then fight evil out of the jungle.
Model Irish McCalla portrayed Sheena in a 26-episode TV series aired in first-run syndication from 1955 to 1956. Tanya Roberts starred in the feature version from Columbia Pictures in 1984.
In this week’s “Teen Titans…without the Teen” story, here comes another comic book show! You may be familiar with the animated show, Teen Titans, which is rather fun and irreverent, but this live-action DC show will simply be called Titans.
Friday Night Lights alumna Minka Kelly has been tapped to play Dove opposite Alan Ritchson’s Hawk in the new live-action series Titans, from Greg Berlanti, Akiva Goldsman, Geoff Johns, Sarah Schechter and Warner Bros TV, which is slated to premiere in 2018 as part of the inaugural slate of a new DC-branded direct-to-consumer digital service.
Kelly’s Dove, aka Dawn Granger, is one half of the crime-fighting, vigilante duo and romantic couple Dove and Hawk. Dove is strategic, defensive and lithe — the opposite of Hawk, an aggressive, offensive bruiser. Both Kelly and Ritchson will be recurring, with an option to become regulars in Season 2. I hear the producers also are exploring a potential Hawk and Dove spinoff series down the road, which would be headlined by the duo.
Written by Goldsman, DC Entertainment’s Johns and Berlanti, Titans follows a group of young soon-to-be superheroes recruited from every corner of the DC Universe. In the action-adventure series, Dick Grayson (Brenton Thwaites) emerges from the shadows to become the leader of a fearless band of new heroes that includes Starfire (Anna Diop), Raven (Teagan Croft) and others.
Everything’s coming up superheroes.
In this week’s “Speaking of comic book stuff…” story, Suicide Squad 2 has found a writer and director in Gavin O’Connor, the helmer of The Accountant.
O’Connor has been recruited to write the script for the upcoming superhero sequel and is also in talks to direct. The next DC film on the shooting schedule is David F. Sandberg’s live-action Shazam! and Suicide Squad 2 isn’t expected to head into production until fall 2018 at the earliest, but per Variety, the studio was keen to get someone working on the script Asap.
In a sort of related story, it seems the studio will also work with O’Connor on a sequel to The Accountant. That seems like a bad idea, but Hollywood never has a shortage of those.
In this week’s “You think YOU’RE confused? story, if all the news about the upcoming Joker films is hard to unravel, try being Jared Leto. He’s got questions.
Speaking to On Demand Entertainment at the launch for the new video game Destiny 2, Leto admitted that he didn’t know what was going on with Joker’s cinematic future since Warner Bros. announced plans for not one but two films focused on Batman’s greatest foe. “I’m a little confused too,” Leto told an interviewer who said she wasn’t sure what was going on with all of these Joker movies. “Yeah, there are a couple of things happening in the DC world.”
Leto first played the character in Suicide Squad, where he allegedly took his immersion in the role to lengths that his costars occasionally found objectionable – including Viola Davis claiming she wanted to pepper spray him. (Leto has since walked back his own claims that he sent his co-stars anal beads and used condoms.) In the same interview, he diplomatically observed that the role is perhaps too iconic for just one actor to play. “I love the Joker. He’s a great character and really fun character to play. But it’s a big universe and when you play the Joker, there’s no ownership there.”
Weirdo. Which is what it likely takes to play a role like the Joker.
In this week’s “Behind The Man in the Moon” story, apparently there are some interesting stories about how actor/comedian Jim Carrey transformed himself to play legendary genius comedian Andy Kaufman.
A new documentary about this film is on it’s way very soon.
We hear about method acting from actors occasionally, with talents like Daniel Day-Lewis investing themselves so deeply into a character that they maintain the illusion of that performance between takes on set, sometimes even when they’re completely away from the production, all in an effort to give the most authentic portrayal possible. That’s exactly what Jim Carrey did while working on Man on the Moon, and a new documentary that premiered at the Venice Film Festival explores the “psychotic” lengths to which the actor went to stay in character.
The Man on the Moon documentary is called Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – The Story of Jim Carrey & Andy Kaufman Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton, and this sounds like a movie that I really want to see.
The documentary comes from roughly 20 hours of candid footage of Jim Carrey on the set of Man on the Moon. It was originally intended to be part of an electronic press kit, but ended up sitting in a Universal Pictures vault for the past couple decades because the studio didn’t want anyone to come away from watching it thinking that Jim Carrey was “an asshole.” Initially, the studio even put the kibosh on this project coming together, but thankfully, American Movie director Chris Smith was able to get it off the ground.
Apparently through the footage and interviews in the documentary (including Carrey himself), we see that Jim Carrey indeed would not respond to any name other than Andy Kaufman or Tony Clifton (the comedian’s rude, crude, lounge singer alter ego; one of his biggest showbiz pranks) while working on set. Even Jim Carrey’s driver during production indicated that he would stay in character on the drive home. The Hollywood Reporter recalls one moment in the documentary which I think we’ll have to see to fully UNDERSTAND, but here’s how they described it:
“At one point in the documentary, Carrey as Clifton was tormenting director Milos Forman so much that ‘Andy’ hinted that ‘Jim”’could go back to simply doing impersonations, which Forman declined.”
Ok, this stuff is weird and fascinating. I’m looking forward to it.
In this week’s “Not second best anymore” story, Gal Gadot was thinking about quitting acting just before she got Wonder Woman.
Gadot was tired of always being second in line for big roles. “I had so many almosts for big, great things, but I was never a big enough name … It was always me and the big name,” Gadot said. One movie she missed out on: Mad Max: Fury Road. “I was runner-up for Mad Max with Charlize,” Gadot said.
So does she resent the woman who went on to become the post-apocalyptic desert’s most iconic badass? Apparently not: “Charlize, I love. We have Patty Jenkins in common,” she said, referencing Theron’s Oscar-winning turn in the Wonder Woman director’s 2003 film Monster.
And let’s face it, now Gadot is an A-lister. Good for her, I say.
In this week’s “Young Nurse Ratched” story, writer/producer Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story), is planning a series for Netflix that will explore the early days of Nurse Ratched in a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest prequel series.
According to a report published Wednesday on Deadline, Murphy is set to direct the pilot of Ratched and shepherd newcomer Evan Romansky through two seasons of “her murderous progression through the mental health care system. Murphy cast his American Horror Story and American Crime Story leading lady Sarah Paulson in the title role, and allegedly spent a year securing the rights to the character, and the permission of the Saul Zaentz estate, vis a vis executive producer Michael Douglas. A compassionless rule-follower and all-around unhappy person, smugly presiding over her helpless wards? Sure, that sounds like Nurse Ratched. But we’re supposed to buy into a “murderous progression” that audiences didn’t see in Cuckoo’s Nest? I don’t know. Might be pushing this one.
In this week’s “Poisoning the well before you even drink from it” story, we know there will be a sequel film to this weekend’s IT, but it could go beyond that – maybe even into franchise territory.
However, according to an individual with inside knowledge of the movie, there has been no talk of extending the current IT beyond a single sequel. But there should be, says Jeff Bock, senior analyst at Exhibitor Relations.
“They are going to want to explore the possibilities as soon as the movie opens to double its budget,” Bock told TheWrap. “The fact that the first cost $35 million and is going to double that just on opening weekend… it proves that horror is still the best genre in the business.”
Horror films are notorious for returning to the well again and again via origin stories, returns from the dead, and spinoffs. And Pennywise literally springs from a well.
“If you think of the way that universes work, certainly it has enough going for it in terms of the main characters and then of course tangential and prequel style storylines, or the Pennywise origin story,” Paul Dergarabedian, senior analyst at comScore, told TheWrap.
“There is enough confidence in this movie itself, and that’s why the idea of a franchise strategy or spinoff strategy going forward, is natural for them to look at,” Dergarabedian said. “The Pennywise character is so compelling that when he’s not on screen, you are always wondering where he is and when he is going to show up. … Bill Skarsgard is incredible and eerily charismatic, scary and repulsive at the same time. People love that.”
So, yeah…IT better be awesome, because you never know how much of it you’re going to see in the coming years.
In this week’s “That last meter will get ya” story, if you remember that shark movie that came out earlier this year -no, not the The Shallows, the other one, with Mandy Moore in it, called 47 Meters Down – you may not know that it made a ton of money. It cost only $ 5 million to make, and it made a whopping $ 50 million at the box office.
Well, we all know what that means. Yep, writer and director Johannes Roberts will return for the inevitable sequel, and will astoundingly called, 48 Meters Down. Because that one extra meter is a doozy.
Surely will do some version of the exact same thing as the first one, except in waters off the coast of Brazil instead of Mexico. While the first movie revolved around a pair of sisters on a bonding trip, 48 Meters Down will feature a group of girls who want to avoid tourist traps, choosing instead to set out for a more authentic adventure experience.
The The Hollywood Reporter report does not say anything about Mandy Moore returning for the sequel, but if the money is better, you can bet she’ll find the time.
In this week’s “Dude looks like a lady” story, actor Brian Austin Green, who is back together with his wife MEGAN FOX, has something to say to those that would complain about his son Noah wearing dresses: “I don’t care.”
The Beverly Hills, 90210 alum spoke out in a series of candid interviews with Hollywood Pipeline’s Straight from the Source in August, opening up about the way his eldest son’s chooses to express himself.
Noah — one of four of Green’s sons, three of whom he shares with wife MEGAN FOX — has often been seen out and about with his parents wearing a dress.
“Does it affect you guys if you see people talking crap on it?” host Dax Holt wondered in a video posted Thursday.
Green didn’t skip a beat. “My son, he’s 4,” he explained. “I’ve heard from some people that they don’t agree with him wearing dresses. To them I say, I don’t care. He’s 4 and if he wants to wear it then he wears it.”
“And it’s dresses or goggles or slippers or whatever,” Green continued. “It’s his life, they’re not my clothes. … I feel like at 4 at 5, that’s a time when he should be having fun. He’s not harming anyone wearing a dress. So if he wants to wear a dress, good on him.”
Brian Austin Green gets props for that attitude. Let kids express themselves how they want. They’ll only be kids once.
Did I mention that Austin Green is still married to MEGAN FOX? Ok, just checking.
~Thanks for stopping by this week! Cheers!