According to Variety, four new films are competing for the attention of adult moviegoers this weekend, with The Women attracting the +25 ladies and Righteous Kill, Burn After Reading and Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys attracting the men, I guess. The prediction is that Perry’s film will win the box office, because it will attract the black audience while Righteous and Burn are expected to split their (white?) demo. And, well, women don’t actually go to the movies. Right?
Universal and Focus have made a deal to invest in and co-produce the latest from Oldboy director Chan-wook Park. The new film, a risque vampire pic titled Thirst, is apparently the first Korean production financed and picked up for distribution by a U.S. studio prior to its being completed and released locally.
In case you want to know more about the Gore Verbinski-Johnny Depp motion capture film, Rango, Variety has a short follow-up, which spotlights the involvement of ILM. Though it doesn’t really add much to the original news, I’m a little more intrigued now about the future of animated features and whether or not mo-cap companies like ILM, Sony Pictures Imageworks and Animal Logic (none of which, it’s noted, develop their own projects) could soon give Pixar and DreamWorks a run for their money.
Nikki Finke made an interesting Freudian gaffe in this story on Midnight Meat Train’s dismal opening weekend. She quoted Lionsgate’s recent credit infusion as amounting to $340, about $339 million less than the actual number, but just $27 more than what Meat Train averaged on each of its 100 screens. As Finke notes, one of the reasons for the embarrassing take (besides, you know, a complete lack of advertising or reviews) is the fact that Lionsgate booked the film in dollar theaters and second-run houses. They also skirted major markets––in fact, the film opened nowhere near New York City. So not only was this film with a built-in audience (thanks to Clive Barker’s genre credibility) made nearly impossible for fans to find, but stuffing the deck with cut-rate houses Lionsgate made sure that even if the movie filled houses (which it didn’t). it would be a statistic impossibility for it to make any real money.
In her headline, FInke asks the question, “Why Did Lionsgate Dump Clive Barker Pic Into Dollar And Second Run Theaters?” She ultimately drops the vague suggestion that “the answer may well be studio politics,” but declines to offer new insight or information, beyond citing Joe Drake’s much-reported desire to migrate “away from this genre of films in favor of more mainstream fare like Tyler Perry.”
What’s implied in Finke’s write-up and others, but never spelled out, is that in order to complete Lionsgate’s transformation from a profitable house of ill-repute into a well-funded maker of wholly inoffensive middlebrow entertainments, the total failure of vestiges of the previous regime like Meat Train is so necessary that the studio couldn’t take chances on the whims of the ticket-buying public––this is a bombing that had to be engineered.
Spike Lee physically showed up to accept the Guggenheim Honor from the SilverDocs film festival tonight, but mentally, for much of the evening, he seemed to be elsewhere. Maybe his recent squabbles with Clint Eastwood have taken a toll, but when asked to talk about his non-fiction films by Denver Post film critic Lisa Kennedy, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker was virtually unresponsive. Only two subjects seemed to draw out Lee’s fierce, super-quotable Frankenstein.
One was Tyler Perry, who Lee didn’t quite slam, but definitely dissed by implication. “I’d love to see a great film about Martin Luther King,” Lee said. “But I can’t do everything.” He paused as a smile crept across his face. “I gotta leave something for Tyler Perry.” This got the desired affect from the audience––laughs, claps, a few stray “ooooh!”s––and then Lee offered cryptic clarification. “I made the movie Bamboozled,” he said, as if that’s facetious evidence enough that the master of the modern minstrel show would be the appropriate director for a serious film about Dr. King.
The only other subject that could jolt Lee out of his slumping stupor on stage was Barack Obama, to which all conversational roads seemed to lead. …Read more
This Hollywood Reporter story says Tyler Perry––whose most recent film, Meet the Browns, opened with $20 million but failed to hit number one as so many of Perry’s films have, and dropped off sharply in its second week in release––is looking to attract a crossover (white, suburban) audience without alienating his working-class Black base. And he’s got a foolproof plan: Perry’s next film, titled The Family That Preys, is set to star box office it girl Kathy Bates, who, of course, has proven time and time again to have a hypnotic lure on white audiences. I literally cannot hold on to a dollar bill if a Kathy Bates movie is playing in the vicinity.
In all honestly, this might be a smart move: if Perry’s broad comedy-spiked faith-and-family melodramas have a natural chance of crossing over to any white sub-demo, it’s older, middle-class women. But the makeup of the movies themselves is only half the battle. Even leaving race aside, if Lionsgate (for whom, as Carl DiOrio puts it in the THR story, “getting into the Tyler Perry business has been like acquiring a license to print money”) really wants to open up the appeal of these movies, they’ve got to make some changes in the way they’re marketed and released.
Tyler Perry’s Meet The Browns made $20 million this weekend, which wasn’t enough to beat Horton Hears a Who at the box office. Drillbit Taylor opened with just $10 million; Variety vaguely says it’s “the second lowest” opening for Owen Wilson after The Big Bounce, but that statistic must exclude every Wes Anderson film and anything else that’s opened in platform release. Speaking of platform releases, The Weinstein Company has finally has a successful one to speak of: Under the Same Moon broke the record for the biggest opening of a Spanish-language film in the U.S. this weekend with $2.6 million on 266 screens.
James Gandolfini will play the mayor of New York City in thatremake of The Taking of Pelham 123. The film hasn’t been shot yet, and it’ll still probably hit theaters before what was suppossed to Gandolfini’s first post-Sopranos project, Where the Wild Things Are.
Regal Cinemas is looking to double its number of IMAX screens over the next two years, via a deal where the theater chain and the giant screen guys share both the cost of the expansion, and the resulting profits.
The Underwire passes along the rumor that Lionsgate might be the next company to negotiate a Worldwide Pants-esque deal with the WGA. This of great interest, because in addition to distributing films like 3:10 to Yuma and the Saw franchise and the films of Tyler Perry, the small studio recently began producing original television series, which they essentially rent to networks for broadcast, including the much-beloved Mad Men (above). If this deal were to go through anytime soon, it might mean we could see new episodes in ‘08. Oh, and there’s the little matter of the next slice of fanboy bait from Frank Miller, which, like everything else, is on hold until the strike ends.
I haven’t seen anything about the rumor elsewhere, but if there’s anything to it, I’m sure Nikki will be on it by the end of the day.
Netflix will partner with LG to create a set-top box that will stream movies directly to a television without a disc or computer intermediary. Netflix has been rumored to be working on such a thing for a loooong time, but was it worth the wait? According to the Hollywood Reporter story, the first iteration will be aimed at HD-TV owners, and may be prohibitively expensive for the average consumer.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has yet to hammer out a deal with the Writers’ Guild to allow writers to work on the Golden Globes telecast, which is still tentatively scheduled for January 13. According to Dave McNary at Variety, the WGA looks so unlikely to budge that party planners and studio execs are proceding with plans on the assumption that the show will not be televised–and thus, the WGA won’t have reason to picket, and nominees and presenters will actually show up.
Sean Penn will chair the jury of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.
THR is confirming rumors, which first hit the web last week, that Tyler Perry has been cast as the head of the Starfleet Academy in J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie. Since there doesn’t seem to be any call for Perry’s usual makeup-aided, multi-role schtick, the casting seems like a clear ploy at broadening the remake/sequel/whatever’s built-in audience. Which makes me wonder: is this thing already so over-budget that Paramount is worried they won’t be able to manufacture a blockbuster on the shoulders of Trekkie love alone?
Almost three years ago, after Diary of a Mad Black Woman opened to big box office but largely negative reviews (16% on Rotten Tomatoes, in spite of fairly sympathetic reviews from EW and the New York Times) Lionsgate gave up even screening Tyler Perry films for critics. This is not an unprecedented move for Lionsgate–the studio’s bread and butter is the kind of disposable horror film that opens and closes on the whims of teenage boys, who are generally not dedicated readers of film reviews. But it does seem unusual in terms of demographics: Tyler Perry is the only filmmaker I can think of who is making films for and about middle-class adults–people who do read newspapers, even if they don’t necessarily use them as a guide for cultural consumption–whose movies are routinely denied entrance into critical discourse.
Sure, the NYT will send a critic to a Friday matinee and publish a review in Saturday’s paper, but the very fact that they have to exercise effort on this almost guarantees that the review will be dismissive. Compare second-chair critic Stephen Holden’s review of Diary to Anita Gates’ review, in the same paper, of Perry’s next film, Madea’s Family Reunion. Holden acknowledges that Perry has a built-in (black, middle-class, female) audience that doesn’t include (white, middlebrow, middle-aged, male) him, and then procedes to take Diary seriously enough to consider the film on its own terms. Gates, meanwhile, finds Madea’s very premise suspect. “What is it about fat-lady drag that appeals to so many young black male comedians?” she asks, but doesn’t attempt to answer.
But could the tide be turning? It seems significant that mainstream critics are now going out of their way to defend Perry’s latest film.
After explaining why Lionsgate declined to screen the film for critics, Armond White begins his review proper of Why Did I Get Married? on contrarian autopilot: “Most critics don’t ‘get’ Tyler Perry basically because most critics are whites who are not only clueless about Perry’s African-American culture, but unsympathetic to his particular expression.” Okay, probably. But isn’t that obvious? I started to wonder if old Armond wasn’t losing his touch.
Oh, but wait! Further down the page, he hits us Whiteys where it really hurts, by attacking sacred dude-com cow Judd Apatow. “Nothing in Knocked Up is as meaningful as Perry’s spectacle of men who must restrain their anger physically or his politically incorrect fashion show of women proudly, luxuriously wearing furs as signs of pleasure and achievement,” White sniffs. It gets better, when White insists that the derogatory terms most commonly used to describe Trapped in the Closet would be better applied to SuperBad. And I could go on. Just read it in full.
Note: Variety.com appears to be down as of this writing, so we’re introducing a new “trade” today: The Guardian.
George Lucas says he’s finally begun work on his long-rumored live-action Star Wars TV series. Lucas is adamant that the series will go beyond the tortured Skywalker clan to focus on peripheral characters from the film series, which doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem with the fans: at 6:30 on my local news this morning, this story was punctuated with a shot of the sun triumphantly rising over Manhattan set, to Darth Vader’s theme song. Production assistants at WNBC will apparently take whatever Star Wars extension they can get.
From the “Yes, The Hollywood Executive Actually Said That” File: Steven Zeitchik of The Hollywood Reporter says Tyler Perry’s box office victory last weekend (his third in three years, after 2005’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman and 2006’s Madea’s Family Reunion) has “heartened the growing number of studios looking to crack the market for black films.” He quotes Sony Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper:”There’s probably not one new story to tell that hasn’t been told about white people. But there are so many stories that haven’t been told yet about people with brown and black faces.”
Warner Brothers will tack a seven-minute Batman short in front of IMAX prints of the Will Smith vampire film I Am Legend. The short will cover the origin story of the Joker, to be played in Christopher Nolan’s next Batman flick by Heath Ledger.
Nikki Finke made an interesting Freudian gaffe in this story on Midnight Meat Train’s dismal opening weekend. She quoted Lionsgate’s recent credit infusion as amounting to $340, about $339 million less than the actual number, but just $27 more than what Meat Train averaged on each of its 100 screens. As Finke notes, one of the reasons for the embarrassing take (besides, you know, a complete lack of advertising or reviews) is the fact that Lionsgate booked the film in dollar theaters and second-run houses. They also skirted major markets––in fact, the film opened nowhere near New York City. So not only was this film with a built-in audience (thanks to Clive Barker’s genre credibility) made nearly impossible for fans to find, but stuffing the deck with cut-rate houses Lionsgate made sure that even if the movie filled houses (which it didn’t). it would be a statistic impossibility for it to make any real money.
This Hollywood Reporter story
Tyler Perry’s Meet The Browns
Almost three years ago, after Diary of a Mad Black Woman opened to big box office but largely negative reviews (
After explaining why Lionsgate declined to screen the film for critics, Armond White begins 
