The episode is about twelve hours late, mostly because I wanted to do a better job (in terms of editing) hitting that happy medium between succinctness and informal conversation. Jeremy Fuster (TheWrap) had to miss this one, but Ryan C. Scott (SlashFilm) and Lisa Laman (Collider and Looper) came to play.
Among the topics Bob Marley’s decent second-weekend hold and its place near the top of high-grossing musical biopics, how this four-part Beatles movie is going to work, whether the underperformance of Ordinary Angels bodes ill for aspirational Veggie Tales-style faith-based flicks (an actual debate between myself and Lisa… yay friendly conflict?), whether Oppenheimer can reach $1 billion worldwide (they think it’s half-way there, I think they’re merely living on a prayer), and the tragedy that the reissue of Universal’s Les Miserables did not score a $2,460.1 per-theater average.
We end with eye-rollingly specific opening weekend predictions for Dune Part Two, which means (now that they know it vexes me) I’d imagine this is going to be the status quo going forward for all such predictions. Speaking of which, Jeremy and I are seeing Kung Fu Panda 4 on Sunday, so the Dune Part Two episode will either be a little later or weirdly early.
SHOW NOTES -
I failed to correctly name the abortion-centric faith-based drama I referenced as earning around $20 million in 2019. It’s not October’s Baby (a different faith-based film that earned $5 million in 2011 but rather Unplanned.
The New York Times article, which Ryan Scott references when discussing Focus Features, can be found here.
The anime article Laman wrote for Collider can be found here, while Scott’s SlashFilm article on same can be found here. Scott’s retrospective on The Passion of the Christ can be found here. And while he couldn’t make it to this week’s recording, do still check out Fuster’s WrapPro piece on musical biopics as the hot new “trend.”
And when I noted in the episode that X-Men: Apocalypse was worse than Dark Phoenix, I didn’t even realize that Ms. Laman had just written a “why Apocalypse — not Dark Phoenix — killed the X-Men series” article. I called it a franchise-killing disaster in my initial 2016 review, which sadly turned out to be accurate.
It’s still among the few times that a major studio screened a major tentpole excessively early for critics (we all thought it meant the movie was going to be great) only to get blindsided by a slew of brutal pans. See also: Disney bringing Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny to Cannes. We’ll call this an extension of the Godzilla rule (don’t open your big movie on a Wednesday unless you’re sure you have a crowd-pleaser).
As always, if you like what you’re hearing, do the usual thing of liking, sharing, commenting and *smashing* (using a cartoon mallet) that subscribe button with every justified ounce of strength and passion. And do check out my guests’ work at their respective home bases. If you want to bother them on social media, well, that’s what Google is for.
Jeremy Fuster - https://www.thewrap.com/author/jeremy-fuster/
Lisa Laman - https://shorturl.at/hlqX8 and https://shorturl.at/mvzK8
Ryan C. Scott - https://www.slashfilm.com/author/ryanscott/
