The Hot Blog Archive for May, 2005

Early Box Office Analysis

Early Friday Boxoffice Numbers
1. The Longest Yard – $15.7m
2. Star Wars III – $15.5
3. Madagascar – $14.4m
4. Monster-in-Law – $2.7m
5. Kicking & Screaming – $1.3m
6. Crash – $1.3m
The only real news about Friday

226 Comments »

The Island Shoes

pumablog.jpg
DreamWorks’ 40 minute preview of The Island came with a pair of shoes… really cool shoes. It turns out, they are $110 retail and the other three colors that Puma’s “Mostro Garment FS” shoes come in are virtually unwearable by men without extreme fashion daring. Yet, they are incredible comfortable.
I guess we’ll see how long it takes to make my white shoes gray.

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Weekend Warning

I’ve been expecting a lot from this weekend based on what seems like some sure bets coming into the multiplexes combined with Star Wars: Weekend Two – Return Of The Cash.
But word on the street is not only that the tracking is soft (by blockbuster standards) on both The Longest Yard and Madagascar… it is weak.
How weak? Well, even giving the animated film the benefit of the limits of tracking on kids, neither film is expected to crack $40 million in 4 days.
That would be the worst showing since the last Star Wars, in combination with Spider-Man, kept all but Insomnia, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and Enough out of the marketplace. Both Bruce Almighty and The Day After Tomorrow did more than $80 million on their own opening on Memorial Day.
$43 million would be Adam Sandler’s best opening ever… but still, this is his first time in a May film, much less in the Memorial Day Weekend slot.
Anything under $42 million would be DreamWorks’ worst CG animated opening since their very first film, 1998’s Antz. Scary punchline? If this film doesn’t do at least Shark Tale business, it could mean that someone from outside the company has to come in and buy out Paul Allen.
If both of these films are at around $40 million and Star Wars is around $75 million, we’re looking at a likely under-$200 million 4-day weekend. That would make it the weakest Memorial Day since 2001, the year of Pearl Harbor.

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This Just In…

I haven’t clicked on my bookmark for The Huntington Post all week…
Kind of sad, really.

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Just Why Is Joe Roth In Need Of A Fluffing?

Patrick Goldstein’s Tuesday LA Times column explaining that Joe Roth doesn’t really need all this hard core show biz stuff…
Why?
Why now?
Is this the first sign that negotiations in the Sony deal have taken a turn for the worse and Joe is ready to sell the failure of Revolution Studios as a good thing?
Ot perhaps he is setting himself up to be the next pope…
The only reason that this isn’t the first topic of most conversations in town is that everyone is too busy trying to figure out who forgot to feed Tom Cruise his pill before he went on Oprah.

16 Comments »

M.I.A.

Sorry I’ve been missing…
Seeing a lot of movies… but things will be quieter next week… in no small part because I will be out of town… but still working every day.
Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers is not mainstream, but it is wonderful.
I can’t comment on The Bat… but fans will be happy, happy, happy.
Lords of Dogtown is a strong indie-style drama.
Cinderella Man IS Seabisuit… but people seem to like it anyway.
Vince Vaughn is not what you’d expect in Wedding Crashers… which works wonders.
The first 40 minutes of The Island is strong… the car chase in the second act is one of the best “smash-em-up” car chases ever, with the best gimmick we’ve seen in a long time… way better than Bay’s Bad Boys II epic.

47 Comments »

Roger Friedman: Still The Biggest Jackass of Them All

How is it that Roger Friedman can take a story that everyone is already all over, Cruise & Holmes, and somehow add such a vain, idiotically conspiratorial twist that he makes you root for Tom and Katie to straighten out their love forever?
Roger now doubts the international box office, assumes that War of the Worlds is a repetition of Minority Report (a fine film, perhaps too dark and smart for its own box office good) and is sure that the Holmes/Cruise relationship is a sham because Katie Holmes didn’t confess it to him. I have news for El Moronico… you can fall in love in three weeks as easily as you can set up a publicity stunt.
Does his suspicion about world box office mean that he can’t comprehend that The Last Samurai grossed about $90 million less than Mission: Impossible II did worldwide and that it cost about $80 million less? Is he just too dumb to realize that there have been at least 6 films that cost more than War of The Worlds to make in the last three years?
And Roger shows his courage by blaming CAA for the allegedly fake hook up and not Scientology. Nice.
When a man is such a blatant ass that he has me defending big popcorn movies, CAA, and (dear God!) The Last Samurai, you know he has gone somewhere small, wet and dark… where rats belong.

63 Comments »

Two Surprisingly Gay Mainstream Commercials

In the last few days, I

11 Comments »

Badagascar or Maddisaster???

Which is the better title?

67 Comments »

Sunday Wars

MCN’s Len Klady estimates a $105.5 million 3-day weekend for Sith.
Fox offered up $108.5 million.
Why?
$108,037,878.00
That would be the 3-day for Shrek 2 last year on the same date.
I have always said there is about a 10% lean available to studio numbers before they start having other studios talk about the lie, as, a) everyone does it, and b) the finals aren’t really final when they are marked final.
And so, the $3 million lean – which is about what the other studios quietly had as the difference between Fox’s official $50 million Thursday and their numbers – will not cause any stir at all.
Of course, the whole thing is academic and only an issue of what non-industry types will say on air and in papers tonight and tomorrow.
The number is almost $25 million ahead of any other 4-day opening. And this is where the changing face of the box office is a story. The opening is the opening. But how long before one of these openings leads to a $500 million gross, much less Titanic

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Early Box Office Analysis

Aw, that rarified air…
Before anyone loses their mind and starts talking about the Friday dip for Star Wars: Episode III

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A Hot Blog Sneak Peak & Feedback Fest…

Next week, the filmmaker who brought us some really cool coverage from the NY Film Festival last October will be launching a new series of films on MCN… take a look at the teaser and let us know what you think…
http://crossoverfollowing.com/spec/mutinyteaser.mov
(it’s not a small load.)

10 Comments »

Star Wars Opens

50 million geeky dollars.
What do you think?

173 Comments »

One More Bush/Vader Perspective

Thank goodness For Alex Jones… he brilliantly puts the entire Bush/Vader thing in proper booby hatch perspective.
And as soon as he gets out of the booby hatch, he’s heading for The Alamo Drafthouse. Yahoo!!!

84 Comments »

Is Crash A Powerful Take On Race Or Patronizing Glop?

It’s generated a lot of e-mail at The Hot Button this week… I hated Crash.
And in this case, the anger expressed by readers is as based on race and politics as some of you guys can make… well, anything.
So have at it… and if you want to call someone a name, just think about a bigger target and make it less personal… please.

36 Comments »

The Hot Blog

Quote Unquotesee all »

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.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“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