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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Friday Estimates by Is This Still A Franchise? Klady

Screen Shot 2016-03-19 at 12.38.44 PM

A pretty basic box office weekend.

Disney’s Zootopia is driving the train with strong holds for a movie that’s playing well to all ages: smart, funny, and with legitimate emotion and insight.

Summitsgate has to be in agony over the third Divergent film, Insurgent, opening to just better than half of the first two films… meaning that the committed audience is abandoning the series. Scary stuff with one more on the way. This is 10 million reasons for someone to be fired… but who? (Who’s left?)

Blah opening for religious parable Miracles From Heaven. We are seeing this year that you just can’t throw this stuff at the wall and see what sticks… unless you budgets are low enough. (Who’s your Kirk Cameron noooooooowwwwww?)

The only really happy story on the indie scene is Midnight Special, which will be over $30k per on five screens. But what is WB spending and will they be able to build an indie? History tells us no, but they don’t have much to do over there – heh heh – so I’m sure it’s a high priority.

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4 Responses to “Friday Estimates by Is This Still A Franchise? Klady”

  1. movieman says:

    “The Bronze” is totally living down to expectations.
    A $111 per-screen average on opening day?
    Even “The Brothers Grimsby”–on 1,000 more screens!–posted a better PSA yesterday.

    Since SPC apparently loves throwing away money on lost causes, they should consider donating to the RNC’s “Stop Trump” movement,

  2. Tracker Backer says:

    Typo on “Krishna.” It should be Krisha.

  3. Big G says:

    Someone should have seen the writing on the wall (TM Sam Smith)and made Insurgent into one movie and been done with it.

  4. pat says:

    Do they HAVE to film another Divergent movie? Why throw good money after bad? They abandoned the Percy Jackson YA series when it was clear movie audiences weren’t interested enough to justify the expense.
    Or Lionsgate could give the next one a radically reduced budget and sell it to Netflix?

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
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“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon