The Hot Blog Archive for June, 2011

Cool Cruise or Cruisin’ For A Bruisin’?

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As tweeted by Alec Baldwin… what do we make of this?

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Friday Estimates by Green Klady

The Green Lantern problem is not a revenue problem, it’s a spending problem.

Yeah… that’s the Republican talking point on the insanity of not raising taxes on the rich. But this has never been more true in Hollywood. Green Lantern is a dinosaur of sorts, not heavily hedged by outside money, and way too expensive. WB is admitting $200 million and $150m marketing… but that is said to be about $50m short by insiders who like to gossip.

The opening is likely to land in third place amongst the three big comic book movies to date, with an outside shot at being bigger than X-Men: First Class. It’s not catching Thor‘s opening. But it’s certainly a decent opening for a 2nd tier comic book character with a lot of (overly) nasty buzz that’s been around for months.

With 13 wide-release summer movies so far, it will be #4 or #5 in opening, perhaps behind only the two big sequels and the summer opener. Give WB Marketing credit for that.

But then realize that the film needs to “pull a Thor” to get to breakeven, which is to say, even if it ends up in the range of $150m domestic, it needs to double that internationally to… well, still be on the cusp on red/black ink.

Mr. Popper’s Penguins will likely open somewhere between Jumping The Broom and Bridesmaids… not a thrill for a Jim Carrey movie with animals. The opening will probably improve slightly on Yes Man, which is not thrill either.

Super 8‘s hold is fine… not especially strong or weak. It’s actually the same hold as Grown-Ups last year, which ended up doing 4x opening weekend. So that would be nice. For Super 8, that would be a $142m domestic gross. Seems about right, unless it gets swamped by Trannies 3.

And as I noted last week, the very successful Midnight in Paris is now in its downward trajectory, as happens over and over with films that expand carefully. There is a place – which the distributor fully knows, which is why this is Woody’s widest release – and after that, the cost of expansion does not match the returns. Once you expand and your box office gross drops, expansion is over and it’s time to manage for a leggy run in the places you’re playing strong. Based on previous weekends, MiP should be at $22.2m by the end of this weekend. And even with screens dropping, $40m domestic is not out of the question.

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BYOB 61711

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Gren Lantern Spoiler Space

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DP/30: Buck, director Cindy Meehl and subject Buck Brannaman

Pile On du Jour: David Carr

Here’s how I see much of the profoundly insightful criticism of David Carr in Page One and resulting media exposure…


Who Wore It Best?

Smacking David Carr for being the Will Rogers/Steven Tyler/Ron Jeremy/Tallulah Bankhead of media journalism is like hating comic book movies for being comic book movies… waste of time… and often, missing the fun of a really great show.

No one has been more snidely about David’s rosey glasses regarding his home team, The New York Times. But if media types could get past the pain that it’s not them who is emerging as a (bigger) star in a documentary – a.k.a. knowing they have a job for the next decade, short a revelation involving penis tweets or proof that he never inhaled – they would appreciate that the film is about them as much as it’s about Carr & Co.

In my view, it’s about the idea of journalism… layers of thinking… not just vomiting up whatever enters your earhole and may amuse a wide audience… challenging yourself so you have asked the key questions about what you are covering. This is what’s now missing from most journalism and what the NYT aspires to continue to represent.

Of course, you’ll still screw up. And if there is a missing act of Page One, it’s the idea of this machine dealing with a major f-up.

But expecting a documentary to be a comprehensive look at an organization as expansive as NYT, short of a 30-hour Ken Burns piece, is silly. Add in Bill Cunningham: New York and another dozen not-yet-made docs, including one on Judith Miller and in a few years, one on the pay wall, and you will have a complete-ish picture. But whining about the limited narrative of this film is a little like getting laid on a first date and complaining about being asked to wear a condom to do it.

So, David is now a target for some, a victim of being a compelling personality and not being too modest to let it fly.

Of course, most of the press response has been good. And being as turf-aware as David is, he saw this coming and has been acknowledging trouble might be brewing since my first conversation with him about the movie. He is a homer, but he genuinely wants to share it all with his colleagues at The Times (and elsewhere). He does not want to be The Brand. He always seems pleased and honored to have his place of work be a “higher power” that he can love and respect and remain in some awe of, even when it stumbles. NYT is bigger than Carr and Carr doesn’t doubt this. He explicitly keeps himself aware of any moment in which he might think himself equal to or greater than the institution, as that way lies bad things.

I admit… I am a Carr fan. We disagree on some of the things I consider most important. But I never doubt that he is an honest broker. And the list of those about whom I can say that about in this game is short. Very short. So I am that much more of a fan of those who are.

Shouldn’t we all be?

Review: Green Lantern (spoiler-free)

This is when Rotten Tomatoes does a disservice to movies.

Green Lantern is not the best comic book movie of the summer. But it’s nothing like the as-of-this-writing 19% on Rotten Tomatoes bad. Not even close.

In fact, I would say that the quality of the first half of the film could make it a surprise box office hit. It’s not the comic book movie we have come to expect lately. It actually looks like a comic book… much more so than Thor, for instance, which also spends a fair amount of time in other worlds. Thor looks like sets and some cool CG around them. Green Lantern is immersive. And it’s a certain kind of comic book… not Burton, not Nolan, not Singer. Director Martin Campbell is not shy about making reference back to Donner’s Superman, with a bit of Lester in there.

The problem really starts when the film gets way too complicated.

When I see reviews and read that people thought it was too busy or that they couldn’t understand it or that it was a mess, I throw up my hands. Bull. If you are a professional critic and you can’t keep up with Green Lantern, you aren’t trying. You probably went in with your mind made up.

However… the film gets too big for its britches. It’s not the Lantern Corps taking itself too seriously. It’s not the idea of the power of will vs the power of fear. It is, for me, having a really great performance by Peter Sarsgaard – really, the performance he probably signed up to give – obfuscated by, as some call it, The Doody Monster. It’s like they just refused to trust what they had… an angry human portrayed by a great actor turned into an empowered monster by the power of fear. Yeah, you need more that two guys punching it out. But you don’t need the brown cloud endlessly working its way to earth and then on earth. It’s supposed to be the most powerful evil in the film but it’s not even interesting. (There is one interesting angle, which I would consider a spoiler… one of the few in the film… but not interesting enough.)

Another, less significant problem, is that the idea that our new Green Lantern progresses and that we can see that in the creativity or intelligence of how he uses his ring… not really there. It’s not a very complex piece of character writing. But it isn’t really there. The audience, like the 10-year-old Green Lantern comic book reader I once was, should get a kick out of what he comes up with. And he gets smarter about his choices. But there really isn’t a moment when he creates something with his ring that makes the audience want to shout or applaud.

There were two CG sequences that I really didn’t like. One involves a race track out of a giant Hot Wheels box… which speaks to the last paragraph. And the other is the close, which is a great idea, but which just doesn’t play as it is clearly intended to play. but some of it is really quite wonderful. And the 3D is about as well done as any movie ever, maybe better. Looking at the first half of this film, I see what Jim Cameron is thinking when he says 3D could be a standard. They shot this film with visual layers and never did anything for 3D’s sake. No swords coming at the audience. But when Ryan Reynolds walks down an alley, the abandoned building behind him has holes in the wall and gives the shot unusual depth. This may be the very rare film that is actually better in 3D.

Ryan Reynolds is fine. He’s not doing smirky joke-telling guy. He is a smart-ass, but his tone fits the story and his character.

Blake Lively has a bit of a Sarah Jessica Parker thing going on with her face and body. In some shots, she is stunning. In others, she looks like she could cut her way out of a vault with her face. And as an actor… she’s a solid TV actor. But she’s not special. You don’t really believe she is as hard-charging as her character is supposed to be.

Mark Strong is very good and pretty close to unrecognizable as Sinestro.

Tim Robbins, Angela Bassett, and Jay O. Sanders are sadly wasted in paycheck roles that have nothing to work with, aside from Bassett’s wig.

And the voice over/fish head… well, I kinda liked guessing through the film… well, through the first 4 minutes or so. I didn’t see his name in the credits, so maybe that is part of the fun. I’ll leave it there. But I liked him a lot.

Speaking of Fish Head, I love the 2011 version of the Mos Eisley Cantina. It doesn’t feel like the CG guys are trying to win awards. It feels right… in a comic book way.

I didn’t love this movie. But for the first half-hour, it had me, hungry for it to win me over completely. And like I said, it got too complicated. Ryan Reynolds, yes. Sarsgaard, really great. Loved the elders. Sinestro, solid. Many, many things work and work on a level that I thought for a while that this might be a game changer for what is embraced in this genre.

Less would probably be more in this case. But I would be really happy to see a sequel… a simpler, tighter sequel. I like Hal Jordan and the Lantern Corps. And there is a sequel set-up a couple of minutes into the credits. I bet that could be a very good summer comic book movie.

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The 65%+ International Club

With word that Disney’s Pirates 4: The Search For Where The Fun Went has passed the $900 million mark worldwide and is now the highest non-domestic/international grosser of all time at Disney, I decided to look into the phenomenon of films that seemed to be underperforming at home, yet slayed them overseas,

34 movies in modern box office history (international box office record keeping before the mid-70s is a bit iffy) have grossed over $450 million worldwide AND done at least 65% of that business overseas. Half of them are sequels. Of the 17 “originals,” 5 are animated, 2 each are from Jim Cameron and Roland Emmerich, 2 are remakes, and 2 are franchise starters that were made with the intention of spawning sequels. That leaves Mamma Mia!, Troy, and Inception.

The only title in the group before 2001 is Titanic.

The #2 international performer by percentage is Ice Age 3, whose domestic is very slightly ahead of #2, but whose domestic is $230m above any other film in the series.

Pirates 4 (currently #3, 76.7% and growing) will have the worst domestic performance of any Pirates film.

Angel & Demons (#7, 72.6%) did $85 million less domestically and $272m less worldwide.

The last two Bond films grew slightly here, but each grew international by more than 50% over the best previous grossers, putting Bond in the $400m international club after never having done better than $275m before.

No Potter film has done as much as the first one did domestically… but every one since the first has had a higher percentage of its total gross come from international tickets sold. (Though to be completely fair, the numbers are pretty consistent on Potter, both ways.)

It does seem to me that the international market is a bit slower to both catch onto franchises and to tire of franchises than the domestic market.

There certainly is also the fact that the international marketplace has expanded, in terms of screens and treaties (like China’s), while the US theatrical market has been pretty static for the last 7 or 8 years. But I’m just looking t the outliers here.

And if anyone cares, 8 of these 34 titles were released in 3D.

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BYOB 61511

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The New 5% Rule At The Academy

Of course there is media that refuses to see anything at The Academy as well-intended. Everything is about ratings. Everything is cynical. Change is bad.

But in the case of the new rule that requires films to get 5% of the nomination vote to get a Best Picture nomination, there is ZERO benefit for the ratings. If anything, it hurts, because some pictures will get left out… and we have no idea whether those will be big pictures or small pictures. And of course, they Academy is not doing a nominations TV show, they are doing a show announcing the winners.

That said, this is a smart choice to legitimize the idea of more than 5 nominees… which remains a smart choice that is – as I keep saying – much more important to the indies than to the big studio movies. Let’s see a show of hands of people who think last year’s Oscars would have been better off without a Winter’s Bone nomination…. Anyone? Anyone?

Anyone who thinks we’ll be better off without Midnight in Paris or The Tree of Life getting nominated this year?

That said, they have made one mistake in this choice… and that’s limiting the nominations list to 10.

The rule should be as simple as they want to make it… 5% of the vote and you get a nomination. That could lead to 20 nominations. But as the board learned, history (and logic) tells us this won’t happen. But if one year, you get 8 nominees and the next, there are 12, I say, “God bless.”

If, say, the Top 9 films eat 85% of the votes and there are two films with over 5% after that, why should one be left off?

This is not a sport. This is a celebration of the movies people loved the prior year.

Odds are, there will never be more than 10 nominees. But if there are, what are we afraid of… too many films being embraced?

By 2013, The Academy should move voting to computers (with a print option that has a shorter voting window, for those who don’t want to go there), deliver ALL the eligible films that any studio/producer submits available to Academy voters by encrypted HD stream including docs and foreign language, and move the whole thing to the weekend before or after the Super Bowl.

It’s not about how the Golden Globes or BFCA will react… it’s about doing the best thing for the Academy Awards show and the idea behind it. We just don’t live in a culture anymore that waits 3 months for an answer. Use technology to move the process of voting and viewing into the 21st century while simplifying the experience of the show so that it’s fun again.

This year’s Tonys kicked the crap out of most Oscar shows. And very few people know who the people winning awards are. But the show entertained. And the feelings of the winners were infectious. Add movie stars and stir.

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Nikki, Part Deux

It never occurs to me how low some people can stoop.

I can always count on Nikki Finke to slither to the lowest place in the cesspool she is so proud of creating.

So we have Nikki trying to shred Lynne Segall on her way out the door to go to The Hollywood Reporter 2.0, as Deadline seems to be struggling a bit to keep up.

I am not a friend of Lynne Segall. I have questioned her integrity along the way myself. I know her a little.

I was pretty much sticking to the business side of this story.

But what kind of person tries to kick someone as they leave a job? A piece of shit. The same kind of piece of shit who writes nary a negative word about a failed Paramount executive as she is in bed (figuratively) with his boss.. until he is dumped… at which point she shits all over the guy in print, never, of course, mentioning the man who hired him in a fit of brain damage in the first place. The same kind of person who roots for a network exec to fail, never taking into account the many, many people whose livelihoods depend on his success.

Writing based on a Friends List and an Enemies List – especially from the list of someone else who is on your Friends List – is not journalistic integrity. It’s water carrying.

You know, journalists cover Nikki liked bemused zoo patrons watching monkeys throw shit at each other. Ha ha. Isn’t it funny? I know it’s a scam, but it makes me laugh. Who is she really hurting? Everyone gets the joke, right?

Is there no shame left in this town?

Isn’t there a point where the most powerful people in this business say, “Okay… check… tired of being The Nikki Whisper” and letting her shit all over my staff and tired of being in business – no checks are signed, but Nikki is paid in ego strokes – with someone who doesn’t make me any actual money but makes the community an uglier and uglier place to live?”

And by the way… has anyone actually read the lower-than-trade-special-edition-suck-ups Primetime Emmy Awards print editions that Nikki now boastfully claims are her doing? If there was a single piece of reporting (aside from the ability to do a 300 word interview) crawling around in there, it died of loneliness before it got past the multi-page glossy ads.

Is she so delusional that she actually thinks ANYONE buying her ads thinks there is any editorial integrity in any of the print editions that have come out from Deadline? Sell fluff if you want to, but don’t try to turn yourself into a martyr to journalism for printing a list of Emmy or Oscar contenders next to high-gloss photos.

Tell us, oh Queen of Transparency, why you haven’t written a single harsh word about any upper management at 3 of the majors in years? Tell us, Nikki, who feeds you your take on the two major indies out there right now and why nothing you ever write goes against their personal positions? Tell us, Nikki, who at Fox TV pulls your little strings? Tell us, Nikki, how much it costs in information to get you not to write a story?

Trans-fucking-parency? You won’t let anyone see your face!!!! Are you kidding?

You are a smart, smart woman, Nikki. You are a shit journalist, but you are a master manipulator.

I know that when you show yourself to be the disgusting human being that you are, it amuses the hell out of some people. Everyone in this business has their share of enemies… including Lynne. So you will milk this flaw of human nature and continue to ride the Bile Train for as long as you live. You were there long before you ever found your home on the web.

You’re smart to stay hidden away… or you might get slapped in the face a dozen times a day, walking down the street in Brentwood, by decent people who just want to express how they feel about you.

And the ability to bring that out in others… that’s the only power you really have… the only power you’ll ever have… because you aren’t good enough – not confident enough – to do it any other way. So enjoy that power. And stay an example of what could happen to the rest of us if we lost touch with our humanity.

But that’s just how I see it… so sue me…

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Lynne Segall Returns To Sanity

(Almost) Everyone she knew told her not to take the job with MMC, which is dominated by Nikki Finke and Deadline Hollywood. But they were willing to pay her a lot… others didn’t have it to pay…. there was heat around the brand… and it was a chance for Lynne, who had virtually zero experience with selling a web-only product, to learn the new medium.

It took her less than a month to realize that what everyone had said about Nikki was true. (I believe she is on good terms – at least until her exit – with Jay Penske.)

It took her just under 15 months to get out.

Lynne did crack the seal on the studios spending on Nikki. There were some buys in years past, but last year, most of the players turned up on Deadline at some point or another. Lynne created the print product that will be repeated again by Deadline this year, even though it didn’t turn out to be a home run for anyone. Lynne dragged in Pete Hammond to give her something (anything!) to sell as Oscar content.

But the question at Deadline/MMC is whether any of this offset the cost of the many expensive hires – including Lynne – that have been made and are now in ongoing doubt. The core of Finke/Fleming/Andreeva is not under threat from being fired… though some might be dreaming of exit strategies. But Penske has a bit of a problem on his hands. While Deadline remains a media darling of sorts, the Finke brand continues to be watered down by the domination of the site by her top two employees and her own inability to remain exciting/horrifying on a regular basis.

In other words, they wanted to be a trade. They are a trade now. And fewer and fewer people care. Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter has pushed a higher-class version of the button that made Nikki famous. Some trade news, sure… but there’s plenty of TMZ and Smoking Gun and high-gloss at The Hollywood Reporter.

And at Deadline… there a HOT trailer from YouTube… someone changed agencies… someone else was cast as the second lead of some show at Fox EXCLUSIVELY! And every once in a while, Nikki calls someone an asshole for crossing one of the studio heads that feed her information that she dutifully prints with exclamation points.

There is another problem for MMC. They have shown that two trade reporters and one obsessive screamer is all you really need to be “a trade” in this town. So others have come. And more will come. It ain’t brain surgery… it’s a Rolodex of familiar names and a willingness to write their stories up as the trades have done for years. Transcription more than reporting.

Nikki never has to go away. She is scalable, as an individual. Her blog can run for under $20k a year. But the overhead – meaning writers and other staff – not so scalable.

And this is the story of the internet and journalism. The scale is the high and the low. There is the potential for virtually anything. But there is also the reality that no matter how well a niche is served by content, it’s still a niche and as long as advertisers can pay for imdb or MSN or others to get EVERYONE, the niche is still just a niche. Except during awards season… which is why there is such a frenzy for those dollars.

But even having some success bringing in those Oscar and Emmy dollars, a ton of uniques and a ton of traffic to one page is not scalable. No one who reads Deadline reads Deadline only. No one ever will. The expansion has been an attempt to sell a buffet in an a la carte world. The Hollywood Reporter is serving a la carte… but with more dishes on the menu and those dishes are cooked to be attractive to a much wider potential audience.

Anyway…

Lynne Segall is back in her wheelhouse. Good for her. There will be more real pressure in the new job than in the last job because the stakes are much higher. She had her hands tied by the product at MMC. She has all the weapons she could ask for at THR… and now needs to grow the business by a significant margin this year and next.

And we’ll see how Nikki and Penske deal with the corner they have painted themselves into. Fleming and Andreeva should realize that they are now in a power position. The site, as it has been grown, joins a long list of also-rans instantly if either of them leaves. And make no mistake, there are a lot of people who will be happy to feed on Nikki’s venomous carcass the second she seems vulnerable (or as soon as they can convince their bosses she is not worthy of first-placement status).

Penske would probably have a healthier business model spinning FlemDreeva off, with some support, to a trade business and putting Nikki back into the daily screeching business. The duo is dynamic and professional. They could actually do better without Nikki floating above, even though not having the 800 lb gorilla ready to vomit out the verbal version of an Anthony Weiner phototweet might be scary at first. That way, he could sell both, though I think anyone who gets it knows that the ads on the FlemDreeva site would sell better than on a Nikki site.

Or Penske could double down and buy Variety. Of course, Nikki couldn’t begin to run an operation that size. So that’s dangerous too. She might scream him to death and demand that he sue himself.

Anyway again…

Congratulations, Lynne. Can’t wait to hear the screams all over town as you take on your former staff at the LA Times with a loaded weapon.

Wait? Did everyone not get that? Hollywood Reporter is not competing with Deadline or The Wrap or even Variety. LAT is the real target.

And here we go…

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DP/30: The Art of Getting By, actor Freddie Highmore

(shot in April 2011)

Freddie w/ Emma Roberts and writer/director Gavin Wiesen at Sundance (back when it was called “Homework”

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The Hot Blog

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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.”
~ 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