Month: July 2016

Categories
Television

I still miss Letterman, but Colbert is getting better.

Stephen Colbert can’t be ‘Stephen Colbert’

After CBS “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert told viewers that lawyers representing his old Comedy Central show said he couldn’t be “Stephen Colbert” anymore, he thumbed his nose at them with a transparent dodge.

Lawyers representing his old company complained to CBS after he revived the character he played under his own name on “The Colbert Report” — a clueless, full-of-himself cable news host. They said that the character “Stephen Colbert” was their intellectual property, “which is surprising, since I never considered that guy much of an intellect,” Colbert said on the “Late Show” on Wednesday.

The audience booed when Colbert, “with a heavy heart,” said it has been decreed that the character is kaput.

“I feel the same way, but what can I do?” Colbert said. “The lawyers have spoken. I cannot reasonably argue that I own my own face and name. And as much as I’d like to have that guy on again, I can’t.”

He then introduced “Stephen Colbert’s identical cousin,” an interview with himself displaying the same cocked eyebrow expression his old character had. Then the real Colbert did one of the old show’s most popular recurring segments, retitling “The Word” to “The Werd.”

Representatives from CBS and Comedy Central declined comment on Thursday. Until 2005, when CBS split from Viacom, the two networks were corporate cousins.

Since starting at the “Late Show” last fall, Colbert has struggled to establish himself with his own personality. So fans were delighted last week when he briefly brought the old character back.

The “Late Show” has been making an aggressive play for attention with two weeks of live shows coinciding with the Republican and Democratic conventions. Besides the reappearance of his character, old friend Jon Stewart appeared last week for his first extended comic riffs on TV since leaving Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”

The episode recalled a similar one when David Letterman left NBC’s “Late Night” to go to CBS in 1993. At the time, NBC’s president said Letterman could not take popular features like the Top 10 list and Stupid Pet Tricks with him because they were the “intellectual property” of NBC.

Letterman poked fun at that on his first CBS show. NBC’s “Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw walked onto the set and confiscated a couple of Letterman’s cue cards, saying, “these last two jokes are the intellectual property of NBC.”

“Did you ever think you’d hear the words ‘intellectual property’ and ‘NBC’ in the same sentence?” Letterman said.

The Top 10 list remained a staple of Letterman’s show until he retired last year.

Comedy Central does not repeat episodes of “The Colbert Report,” but fans can still access video highlights from the show’s website, which has paid advertisements.

During his interview on Wednesday’s show, Colbert’s “identical cousin” said, “Stephen, whenever you need me, wild horses ridden by corporate lawyers could not keep me away.”

“The Werd” segment was identical to what he used to do, except for the ‘e’ in the name. On a split screen, Colbert narrated a story while printed messages on the other side provided the punchlines.

For instance, Colbert said that during the coming campaign, Hillary Clinton will say things that will make Donald Trump appear to be a racist. On the side screen came the words: “And so will Donald Trump.”

He said there was another option for dissatisfied voters this fall: “Write in Michelle.”

Categories
Books

With all due respect, I didn’t think that she was done before, and I don’t think that she’s done now.

J.K. Rowling announces the end of Harry Potter: ‘I think we’re done’

Hold your new copy of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child close, people! After nearly 20 years, seven novels, eight feature films, and theme park attractions around the world, J.K. Rowling announced she is officially done expanding the trajectory of the boy wizard at the center of it all.

Speaking Saturday night at the London premiere of Cursed Child’s stage production, Rowling told press that Harry “goes on a very big journey during these two plays and then, yeah, I think we’re done.”

Rowling’s announcement comes as Cursed Child ends a little over a month of preview runs and officially opens to the public. Further elaborating on her decision to conclude Harry’s story with the play, the author added: “This is the next generation, you know. So, I’m thrilled to see it realized so beautifully but, no, Harry is done now.”

Parts I and II of Cursed Child’s printed script, which received glowing critical reviews and shattered preorder records, went on sale Sunday at midnight. The play, which is currently set to run through Dec. 2017, tells the story of Harry, Ron, and Hermione 19 years after the events of the franchise’s final novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and also focuses on Harry’s son, Albus.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is now playing at London’s Palace Theatre. Tickets are currently sold out, though 250,000 seats will be available for purchase beginning Aug. 4.

Categories
Movies

I saw Jason Bourne and while it isn’t great – and nowhere near as smart or clever as the others – I didn’t dislike it.

Box office report: Jason Bourne storms top spot with $60 million

A decade’s absence makes the hearts of America grow fonder. Nine years after their last franchise collaboration, Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass return to the top of the domestic box office as Jason Bourne grosses an estimated $60 million across its opening weekend.

Continuing the Bourne collective’s massive haul since 2002 (over $1 billion in total receipts), Universal’s fifth theatrical adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s book series averages $14,093 from 4,026 screens in North America, earning the second-highest opening haul for a Bourne title in history (unadjusted for inflation) and a positive A- grade on CinemaScore. The debut also marks the second best opening weekend of Damon’s career, trailing just behind The Bourne Ultimatum’s $69.3 million.

According to Universal, exit polling indicates men made up 55 percent of Bourne’s weekend audience, while 60 percent of ticket buyers were over the age of 35. Domestic numbers are up around 30 percent from the same frame last year, when Paramount’s Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation scored $55.5 million.

Bourne additionally amasses an estimated $50.1 million from 46 international markets, bringing its worldwide total to just over $110 million.

Topping $100 million in North America, Star Trek Beyond tumbles nearly 60 percent in its second weekend, adding an estimated $24 million to its total. The $185 million picture — the third in the rebooted lineage — is, adjusted for inflation, the second lowest-grossing title in franchise history, though its foreign numbers (currently at $54.8 million and counting) should push the film past its budget in the coming weeks. Whether the film pulls in enough to make a profit, however, remains to be seen.

Giving Star Trek a run for its money at No. 3 is STX’s female-driven comedy Bad Moms, which earns a healthy estimated $23.4 million in its opening weekend. Fronted by an ensemble cast that includes Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, Kathryn Hahn, Annie Mumolo, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Christina Applegate, the R-rated comedy’s total was fueled by an over-25, predominantly female audience as it averaged $7,278 on 3,215 screens.

On top of doing solid business, Bad Moms earned a rare A grade on CinemaScore, besting other summer comedies like Keanu (B), Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising (B), and Ghostbusters (B+) on its way to a healthy overall run as it wisely taps into a recently underserved demographic.

Rounding out the top five are The Secret Life of Pets and Lights Out, which pull in an estimated $18.2 and $10.8 million, respectively. In its fourth weekend of wide release, Pets’ domestic total sits just below $300 million. By mid-week, the film will become 2016’s sixth title overall (third animated) to cross that line. Lights Out’s 50 percent drop marks a relatively light decline for the horror genre, bringing the film’s U.S. and Canada total to an impressive $42.9 million on a $4.9 million budget.

Also debuting in wide release is the Emma Roberts/Dave Franco thriller Nerve, which earns an estimated $9 million this weekend after its $6.1 million head start on Wednesday and Thursday. The film’s five-day gross hovers above $15 million as it, too, receives an A- grade on CinemaScore.

Outside the top 10, Woody Allen’s Cafe Society expanded to 565 theaters on Friday, taking an estimated $2.3 million over the three-day frame, while Central Intelligence’s $910,000 gross adds to its worldwide total, which pushed past $200 million at the tail end of the week. Specialty titles like Equity and Indignation also impress in limited release, averaging a respective $20,182 and $22,268 from four theaters each.

Check out the box office estimates for the July 29-31 weekend below.

1. Jason Bourne – $60 million
2. Star Trek Beyond – $24 million
3. Bad Moms – $23.4 million
4. The Secret Life of Pets – $18.2 million
5. Lights Out – $10.8 million
6. Ice Age: Collision Course – $10.5 million
7. Ghostbusters – $9.8 million
8. Nerve – $9 million
9. Finding Dory – $4.2 million
10. The Legend of Tarzan – $2.4 million

Categories
Movies

I saw – and really enjoyed – STAR TREK BEYOND. It was a really great film, and it’s very funny too!!

Box office report: Star Trek Beyond numbers nearly triple Lights Out, Ice Age: Collision Course

Nearly tripling the grosses of its fellow new wide releases, Star Trek Beyond earned a solid estimated $59.6 million on 3,928 screens over its opening weekend. Still, Beyond’s numbers mark the lowest debut for the franchise since Star Trek: Nemesis flopped with $18.5 million back in 2002.

The Justin Lin-directed film looks ahead to a healthy run with critical (84 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) and audience (A- grade on CimemaScore) support driving it forward, as previous titles in the rebooted series dropped just under 50 percent from week one to week two with similar reception in tow.

Paramount also reports that 14 percent of the film’s opening weekend gross was earned from 387 IMAX locations for a global IMAX haul of $11.6 million — an overseas franchise record for the format. Overall foreign grosses for Star Trek Beyond stand at approximately $30 million.

Continuing to flex its muscles at the domestic box office, the Illuminations/Universal family animated title The Secret Life of Pets dips a slight 42 percent to $29.3 million at No. 2, bringing the film’s 17-day North American total to $260.7 million. Overseas, the film has earned roughly $63 million for a worldwide haul of $323.7 million, though it is set to open in an additional 52 territories (including France, Germany, and China) over the next few months.

Grossing an estimated $21.6 million, Ghostbusters is fighting for a third-place finish after its second weekend of wide release, as the decently reviewed New Line/Warner Bros. horror flick Lights Out and Fox animated sequel Ice Age: Collision Course go neck-and-neck with the rebooted action-comedy, bringing in roughly $21.6 and $21 million, respectively.

With a $4.9 million budget, Lights Out marks yet another James Wan-affiliated title that grossed exponentially more during its opening weekend than it cost to make. The inexpensive title also has strong critical reviews in its corner (77 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), but audiences weren’t as enthusiastic (its B grade on CinemaScore is in-line with the average genre picture). Though Wan didn’t direct the film (he’s credited as a producer), moviegoers have seemingly come to trust his brand as a filmmaker, as virtually every film he’s made since 2004 has made back its production budget (and then some).

Domestic audiences have finally grown weary of Fox’s Ice Age series, which rounds out the top five with a soft $21 million. This marks the first time in the franchise’s 14-year history that one of its titles has opened to less than $41 million, though the film’s international numbers are keeping the title afloat. Going against the recent trend of animated titles dominating the box office (this weekend marks the first time a live-action title has topped the domestic chart since mid-June), the $105 million picture has earned just under $135 million from foreign territories thus far, so its North American haul is likely of little concern to its parent studio.

Outside the top 10, the well-received cinematic continuation of the popular U.K. TV series Absolutely Fabulous earned a healthy estimated $1.9 million from 313 theaters, averaging approximately $6,006 per screen as it hit with its target niche audience. The Indian gangster drama Kabali also pulled in an impressive $2.2 million on 236 screens for an average take of $9,142 per theater.

Woody Allen’s Cafe Society grew to an estimated $875,000 to its total as it added 45 theaters on Friday, averaging around $17,500 per location for a domestic gross of $1.4 million thus far.

Also in limited release, The Film Arcade’s Mike Birbiglia-directed comedy Don’t Think Twice premiered to 2016’s highest per-screen average thus far, taking $90,126 from a single screen in New York. The film has also garnered some of the strongest reviews of any specialty title of the year, with a 100 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 45 reviews.

July 22-24 weekend box office estimates:

1. Star Trek Beyond – $59.6 million
2. The Secret Life of Pets – $29.3 million
3. Ghostbusters – $21.6 million
4. Lights Out – $21.6 million
5. Ice Age: Collision Course – $21 million
6. Finding Dory – $7.2 million
7. The Legend of Tarzan – $6.4 million
8. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates – $4.4 million
9. Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party – $3.7 million
10. The Infiltrator – $3.3 million

Categories
Movies

It’s been a horrible, horrible Summer Movie Season!!

Summer box office sinks, but don’t blame big blockbusters

Hollywood is having a soft summer — but don’t blame “Captain America.”

The May release from Disney’s Buena Vista studio and the season’s other tentpole releases are doing just fine, Wall Street analysts said — but the one-off smaller films are falling flat.

Among the losers this summer is “Money Monster,” the George Clooney and Julia Roberts film from Sony’s TriStar, which took in just $14.8 million during its opening weekend.

Weak efforts like that have the 2016 US summer box office at the halfway mark down 5.4 percent from the same period a year ago, according to figures compiled by BoxOfficeMojo.

These non-tentpoles, with more modest budgets that often appeal to more mature audiences, are not living up to studios’ expectations, according to Drexel Hamilton analyst Tony Wible.

Their historical role has been to smooth a studio’s financial performance in between blockbusters. But no more.

The smaller films are failing, in part, because cinema owners, like Cinemark and Regal Entertainment Group, are too obsessed with franchise films like “Finding Dory,” “Independence Day” and “The Conjuring,” Wible said in a note on Thursday.

“Money Monster,” budgeted at $27 million, serves as a sad reminder of this neglect. The Sony flick took had a US box office of $40.8 million as of last weekend.

“It had a great script, good reviews and Hollywood royalty [in Clooney and Roberts],” said a producer close to the project. “But none of that matters anymore.”

Wible blames underperforming non-tentpoles like “Money Monster” for the “entirety” of the 9.5 percent US box office decline in the second quarter.

For the summer season, which stretches this year from May 6 to Sept. 5, the US box office fell to $1.96 billion from $2.07 billion last year.

The summer’s also light on blockbusters. So far, only four qualify with a box office of at least $100 million — “Finding Dory,” “X-Men: Apocalypse,” “Captain America: Civil War” and “The Angry Birds Movie.”

Last year at the halfway mark there were six blockbusters.

The healthy tentpole competition isn’t just squeezing non-tentpoles out of cinemas, the producer told The Post. It’s also squeezing out the mature audience that watched them.

The result — for boomers, at least — is the tradition of dinner and a movie is being replaced by dinner out and over-the-top viewing at home.

“We can’t see a movie after sitting through a two-hour meal, because we’re too tired and too drunk,” says the producer, who calls himself a youngish boomer.

The movement toward just dinner, perhaps at a restaurant with a famous chef, and away from dinner-and-a-movie is something Hollywood is calling eatertainment.

“Food channels, cooking shows, celebrity chefs — it’s everywhere,” the producer says of the movie substitute.

“So many of us don’t read movie reviews anymore. We read restaurant reviews and talk about going to some new fusion place.”

Categories
Star Trek

I don’t think I was expecting that response.

George Takei Reacts to Gay Sulu News: “I Think It’s Really Unfortunate”

Speaking exclusively to THR, the actor and LGBT activist says the ‘Star Trek Beyond’ development for his character is out of step with what creator Gene Roddenberry would have wanted.
In the summer of 1968, George Takei attended a pool party at the Hollywood Hills home of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. The actor, then 31 and famous for his role as Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise, swam up to his boss and “had a conversation with him, a very private one. I was still closeted, so I did not want to come out to him.”

Nevertheless, Takei — who announced he was gay in 2005 — was fully attuned to the gay equality conversation gaining momentum at the time. He felt it was a topic worth exploring on the socially minded science-fiction series, which had previously tackled issues like the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War through keenly observed allegory.

But the show had recently seen its lowest ratings ever, with an episode featuring TV’s first interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura, which NBC affiliates in the South refused to air. While sympathetic to his star’s pitch, Roddenberry felt he was in no position to take those kinds of risks.

“He was a strong supporter of LGBT equality,” recalls Takei, now 79. “But he said he has been pushing the envelope and walking a very tight rope — and if he pushed too hard, the show would not be on the air.” Alas, the show was canceled the following season anyway.

But Star Trek has lived long and prospered for studio home Paramount, spawning six TV series and 13 feature films. True to its title, the latest big-screen outing, Star Trek Beyond, has gone where none have gone before: Star John Cho — who assumes the Sulu mantle for the third time in the reboots — has told Australia’s Herald Sun that the character is revealed to be gay.

The idea came from Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty in the new films and penned the Beyond screenplay, and director Justin Lin, both of whom wanted to pay homage to Takei’s legacy as both a sci-fi icon and beloved LGBT activist.

And so a scene was written into the new film, very matter-of-fact, in which Sulu is pictured with a male spouse raising their infant child. Pegg and Lin assumed, reasonably, that Takei would be overjoyed at the development — a manifestation of that conversation with Roddenberry in his swimming pool so many years ago.

Except Takei wasn’t overjoyed. He had never asked for Sulu to be gay. In fact, he’d much prefer that he stay straight. “I’m delighted that there’s a gay character,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Unfortunately, it’s a twisting of Gene’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate.”

Takei explains that Roddenberry was exhaustive in conceiving his Star Trek characters. (The name Sulu, for example, was based on the Sulu Sea off the coast of the Philippines, so as to render his Asian nationality indeterminate.) And Roddenberry had always envisioned Sulu as heterosexual.

Proving that is not so simple a matter, however. Sulu never had an onscreen love interest during Star Trek’s initial three-season run. He did mention a daughter, Demora, who appeared in 1994’s Star Trek Generations, the seventh film in the series (she was played by Jacqueline Kim).

But the only reference to how Demora was conceived appears in a secondary canonical source: the 1995 Star Trek novel The Captain’s Daughter. “It was, to put it crudely, a one-night stand with a glamazon,” Takei explains. “A very athletic, powerful and stunningly gorgeous woman. That’s Demora’s mother.”

Takei first learned of Sulu’s recent same-sex leanings last year, when Cho called him to reveal the big news. Takei tried to convince him to make a new character gay instead. “I told him, ‘Be imaginative and create a character who has a history of being gay, rather than Sulu, who had been straight all this time, suddenly being revealed as being closeted.'” (Takei had enough negative experiences inside the Hollywood closet, he says, and strongly feels a character who came of age in the 23rd century would never find his way inside one.)

His timeline logic, however, is enough to befuddle even the most diehard of Trek enthusiasts, as the rebooted trilogy takes place before the action of the original series. In other words, assuming canon orthodoxy, this storyline suggest Sulu would have had to have first been gay and married, only to then go into the closet years later.

Not long after Cho’s bombshell call came another, this one from Lin, again informing that Sulu was indeed to be gay in Star Trek Beyond. Takei remained steadfastly opposed to the decision.

“I said, ‘This movie is going to be coming out on the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, the 50th anniversary of paying tribute to Gene Roddenberry, the man whose vision it was carried us through half a century. Honor him and create a new character. I urged them. He left me feeling that that was going to happen,” Takei says.

After that, all was quiet from Beyond until a few months ago, when Takei received an email from Pegg “praising me for my advocacy for the LGBT movement and for my pride in Star Trek,” he says. “And I thought to myself, ‘How wonderful! It’s a fan letter from Simon Pegg. Justin had talked to him!'” Takei was certain the creative team had rethought their decision to make Sulu gay.

That is until one month ago, when he received an email from Cho informing him that the actor was about to embark on an international media tour for Beyond. Cho said it was bound to come out that his character was gay, and “what should he do?” A disappointed Takei told Cho to go about his promotional duties, but that he was “not going to change” his mind on the matter.

“I really tried to work with these people when at long last the issue of gay equality was going to be addressed,” Takei says. “I thought after that conversation with Justin that was going to happen. Months later, when I got that email from Simon Pegg, I was kind of confused. He thinks I’m a great guy? Wonderful. But what was the point of that letter? I interpreted that as my words having been heard.”

Takei for his part is hoping to take Sulu in new directions as well, potentially on CBS’ upcoming Star Trek series, slated to premiere in January and co-run by Alex Kurtzman and Bryan Fuller, who is openly gay.

“Leonard Nimoy made two cameo appearances [in Star Trek films]. There’s no reason why an ancient, wise Admiral Sulu can’t appear, or maybe an alien creature who sounds like me. That should be fun,” Takei says, then lets out his famous, basso profundo laugh.

Categories
Television

Possible Spoilers…if you aren’t up to date.

‘The Walking Dead’ Promotes 4 to Series Regular for Season 7

AMC’s The Walking Dead is putting four key members of its cast on lockdown.

The zombie drama has promoted Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Tom Payne, Austin Amelio and Xander Berkeley to series regular, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

The quartet boarded the drama based on Robert Kirkman’s comic series in season seven as recurring, with Morgan making his debut as famed villain Negan in the finale. All four play key characters from the comic books. Payne is hero Jesus, currently supporting Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and his band of survivors. Amelio is Dwight, a badly burned member of Negan’s dastardly Saviors who has a particular bone to pick with Daryl (Norman Reedus). And Berkeley is Gregory, the shady leader of the Hilltop Colony who is poised to clash with Maggie (Lauren Cohan) — provided the pregnant Alexandria Safe Zone resident survives the finale.

The promotions come as little surprise as most Walking Dead stars begin their time with the series as recurring with options to be promoted to regular. Katelyn Nacon (Carl’s love interest Enid), meanwhile, is still considered recurring.

The four additions to the full-time cast bring The Walking Dead’s roster to 20 series regulars — up two from season six — and an all-time high for the drama overseen by showrunner Scott M. Gimple. For its part, the series parted ways with (as in killed off) characters portrayed by series regulars Tovah Feldshuh (Deanna) and Alexandra Breckenridge (Jessie). The series also killed off recurring characters Denise (Merritt Wever) and Nicholas (Michael Traynor) last season.

Here’s the full list of series regulars for season seven: Lincoln, Reedus, Steven Yeun (Glenn), Cohan, Chandler Riggs (Carl), Danai Gurira (Michonne), Melissa McBride (Carol), Michael Cudlitz (Abraham), Lennie James (Morgan), Sonequa Martin-Green (Sasha), Alanna Masterson (Tara), Christian Serratos (Rosita), Josh McDermitt (Eugene), Seth Gilliam (Father Gabriel), Ross Marquand (Aaron), Austin Nichols (Spencer), Morgan, Payne, Amelio and Berkeley.

The cast ranks will likely lose at least one regular when the finale cliffhanger is resolved and Negan’s victim is revealed to be one of the 11 staples left kneeling before the ruthless killer. Meanwhile, the casting for comic book character Ezekiel is expected to be revealed soon as the series prepares to introduce yet another community, The Kingdom, and likely take on the source material’s “All Out War” arc in a battle against Negan and the Saviors.

Morgan (Watchmen, The Good Wife) is repped by UTA and Bloom Hergott; Payne (Luck) is with Paradigm, Untitled and Felker Toczek; Amelio (Everybody Wants Some) is with UTA and Brillstein; and Berkeley is with Paradigm, Affirmative and Stone Genow.

The Walking Dead returns in October. A premiere date and trailer will be announced this month at San Diego Comic-Con.

Categories
Weezer

I love the story behind it, but I wish it was a better song with less profanity.

Weezer celebrate NASA mission with new track, ‘I Love the U.S.A.’

Weezer released a new track titled “I Love the U.S.A.” honoring NASA’s Juno, a spacecraft set to reach Jupiter’s orbit July 4. The band follows in the footsteps of Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and composer Atticus Ross, who also commemorated the event with new music.

“I Love the U.S.A.” is the first new song Weezer’s debuted since dropping their self-titled tenth album this past April.

The opening verse, he writes, references his family, Manhattan (his birthplace), and a childhood habit of biting his fingernails. “I started biting my fingernails when I was 10 just because I was curious why the heck people would bite their fingernails,” he explained. “And then it became a habit.”

Explaining the inspiration behind the song, Cuomo wrote, “We were on tour abroad, and it got me thinking a lot about America, which lead to me write ‘I Love The U.S.A.’ When Apple and NASA asked us to be involved with Juno’s historic landing on July 4th, this song seemed like the perfect fit.”

Categories
Movies

This week I only had time to see Independence Day: Resurgence and I wish I’d skipped it.

Box office report: Three newcomers put up a fight as Finding Dory again takes Number 1

Though Finding Dory was expected to (and did) handily topple each of the week’s three new wide releases, Disney’s The BFG, Universal’s The Purge: Election Year, and especially Warner Bros.’ The Legend of Tarzan put up a respectable fight to the finish, pulling in between nearly $20 and $38 million each as the Pixar sequel ultimately took the No. 1 spot for its third straight weekend.

Continuing its ascent toward overtaking Captain America: Civil War ($405.4 million) as the year’s highest-grossing film so far, Disney/Pixar’s Finding Dory swims to the top of the North American box office for its third consecutive three-day window, adding an estimated $41.9 million to its $372.3 million haul after just 17 days in release. Its third weekend number will climb even higher once Fourth of July totals are announced Monday. If three-day estimates hold up, the July 1-3 weekend could be the fourth highest-grossing holiday frame in history, with totals approaching $190 million.

With a steady $166 million coming from foreign territories thus far, Dory now stands at $538 million globally, bringing the Ellen DeGeneres-starring animated film one step closer to becoming Disney’s fourth 2016 picture to cross the $900 million mark worldwide.

Defying expectations by a mile at No. 2, The Legend of Tarzan pulled in a solid estimated $38.1 million ($10,709 per-location average) over its first three days, a total that will push closer to $50 million at the close of the four-day frame. Tarzan pulled in $5.9 million from 454 IMAX screens, making the $180 million tentpole a surprise overperformer as audiences stuck it to critics who slapped the film with negative reviews on Friday, ultimately awarding a decent A- grade on CinemaScore to director David Yates’ first non-Harry Potter feature since 2011.

Studio tentpoles, especially sequels, have had issues generating much traction with domestic audiences this year. High-profile, mega-budgeted 2016 underperformers thus far include Disney’s Alice Through the Looking Glass ($75.7 million), Universal’s The Huntsman: Winter’s War ($48 million), and two Lionsgate/Summit pictures: Gods of Egypt ($31.1 million) and The Divergent Series: Allegiant ($66.2 million).

Prognosticators pegged Tarzan for a low-to-mid $20 million opening, though the picture will gross more than double that amount through the final run of its opening holiday stretch, while foreign grosses (especially from China, a market which has kept North American flops like Warcraft and Terminator: Genisys afloat with exceptional $100 million-plus grosses) should further elevate the film closer to recouping its sky-high budget in the weeks to come.

Rounding out the top three, The Purge: Election Year becomes the horror series’ second biggest opener yet, with an estimated $30.9 million across its first three days for a per-screen average of $11,040. The previous film in the franchise, The Purge: Anarchy, started with $29.8 million during summer 2014, which, adjusted for inflation, roughly matches the total Election Year pulled in this weekend. That number will balloon to around $35 million for the four-day period.

Carrying on Universal’s recent tradition of building an audience for a series, then consistently connecting with it on subsequent releases, The Purge joins the studio’s Fast and the Furious collection as a time-tested franchise continuing to produce successful sequels that match (or outpace) their forerunners. Election Year, yet another inexpensive horror title produced in collaboration with Blumhouse Productions and Platinum Dunes, also sees the highest CinemaScore rating yet for a Purge entry, with its B+ topping the C and B grades audiences gave the first and second films, respectively. With increasing audience affection and ongoing financial success (each of the Purge films have cost $10 million or under to produce), expect the series to go on for what is undoubtedly many sequels to come.

Coming in at No. 4 is Steven Spielberg’s animated epic The BFG, eating up around $19.6 million over its first three days of wide release. The $140 million film, based on Roald Dahl’s beloved novel of the same name, is the weekend’s best-reviewed new title (A- grade on CinemaScore, 71 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), though its three-day receipts total well under what a film of its budget should be pulling in. In releasing the film while Finding Dory is still in its empirical phase, Disney likely cannibalized itself as The BFG faced stiff competition, making it difficult to carve out an identity for itself amid an already-crowded market. Its four-day gross should wind up around $25 million.

Outside the top 10, A24’s Swiss Army Man grossed a solid estimated $1.4 million ($1.7 million four-day) as it expanded to 628 theaters this weekend, marking another specialty hit for the indie distributor after strong showings of their The Lobster ($7.6 million and counting) and The Witch ($25.1 million) in wide release earlier this year.

Check out the three-day box office estimates for the July 1-3 weekend below.

1. Finding Dory – $41.9 million
2. The Legend of Tarzan – $38.1 million
3. The Purge: Election Year – $30.9 million
4. The BFG – $19.6 million
5. Independence Day: Resurgence – $16.5 million
6. Central Intelligence – $12.3 million
7. The Shallows – $9 million
8. Free State of Jones – $4.1 million
9. The Conjuring 2 – $3.9 million
10. Now You See Me 2 – $3 million

Categories
People

May he rest in peace.

Michael Cimino, an appreciation: From Oscar triumph to Hollywood exile

Even in a town as fickle and faddish as Hollywood, the movie industry has never turned on one of its own as quickly and decisively as it once turned on Michael Cimino. In the span of two short years, the Oscar-winning director of The Deer Hunter, who died Saturday at age 77, went from boundless superstar to bruised and buried scapegoat — a tragic turnaround from which his career behind the camera would never quite recover. Some would say that Cimino only had himself to blame, that it was his ego that doomed his career so shortly after it took flight. But the sad truth is that it may only be now, with his passing, that we’re finally able to appreciate and fully reckon with all of the films he never got to make and that we never got to see.

Cimino came of age as a filmmaker in the 1970s, a decade when bold, rule-breaking, movie-drunk visionaries like Robert Altman, Francis Coppola, Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas were given unprecedented license to make the types of films they wanted to make, the way they wanted to make them. It was one of those seismic moments in movie history when the tectonic plates the industry was built upon seemed to be shifting. The major studios, which were still being run by clubby, old-school waxworks executives, had been caught flat-footed by the ‘60s counterculture. They’d lost the pulse of the times… and they knew it. It terrified them. The gut instincts that once told them what the public wanted before the public even realized it had been replaced by fear and insecurity. So they did the only thing they could do: They loosened their grips. They handed the keys (and their checkbooks) to a hip new generation in tune with the times. And for a while, this arrangement worked out beautifully, leading to a glorious string of timeless, often moody new classics like Nashville, The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, Jaws, and Star Wars. Until one day, the arrangement didn’t work out so beautifully anymore. And when that day came, it was Cimino who got the blame.

But let’s back up a bit…

Cimino entered the movie business through one of its more reputable side doors — as a director of TV commercials. But it was as a screenwriter that he found his earliest success. Although short and slight with the refined aesthetic tastes of a painter, Cimino proved to have a surprisingly intuitive knack for taut, muscular genre films like 1972’s sci-fi epic Silent Running and 1973’s Dirty Harry sequel, Magnum Force (on which he shared credit with the New Hollywood’s resident alpha male, John Milius). That film’s star, Clint Eastwood, saw something special in the young Long Island native — the kind of incandescent spark you want to gamble on — and Eastwood tapped him to write and make his directorial debut on his next film, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.
A classic example of “the kind of movies they don’t make anymore,” Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is part comic buddy movie, part twisty heist flick, part existential lost-America road movie, and every inch a product of the ‘70s. (That’s a compliment, by the way.) Eastwood gets to tap into a rare vein of lightness and play and sensitivity, Jeff Bridges earned his first Oscar nomination as his flaky, vulnerable young criminal sidekick, and the rest of the cast is a who’s who of the decade’s finest “that guy” character actors: George Kennedy, Vic Tayback, Geoffrey Lewis, etc. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot wasn’t the kind of movie that wound up on end-of-the-year critics’ lists, or that people remember very clearly 40 years later, but it did clean up at the box office. As calling cards go, it was an ace.

Even with the promise that Thunderbolt displayed, no one reasonably expected that Cimino would make such a quantum leap with his second film behind the camera. One of the earliest big-budget studio films to earnestly grapple with the war in Vietnam (this was before Apocalypse Now and Platoon), Cimino’s The Deer Hunter is an epic of ambition, execution, and statement. Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage costar as three steelworker best friends from blue-collar Pennsylvania who go off to Vietnam and are all indelibly scarred in their own ways. The film was nominated for nine Oscars and won five, including Best Director and Best Picture. The Deer Hunter went up against another searing movie about Vietnam, Hal Ashby’s Coming Home. But the right film won. While both dissect the excruciating and unappreciated toll the war took on soldiers after they came home, it was Cimino’s that opened that story up into something more sweeping — an indictment about how the American Dream had curdled into a nightmare we hadn’t really begun to talk about.

The one time I ever spoke with Cimino, it was for a story about Christopher Walken, the only actor to win an Oscar for The Deer Hunter (De Niro and Meryl Streep were both nominated as well). This was in early 2000. He hadn’t made a film in four years (and would never make another, it turns out). But the voice on the other end of the phone couldn’t have been more generous with his time — or his memories. Shot in Thailand, Deer Hunter climaxes with a famous and haunting Russian roulette scene. Walken’s character is so out of it from his wartime experiences and the drugs he’s taken to forget them that he never went home. Instead, he’s been sucked into an underground world of wagering and vice where he risks his life by pointing a gun to his head, pulling the trigger, and letting fate decide what should happen. He’s so ashen and sweaty and strung out he looks like a half-mad zombie. Walken, it turns out, had to go to some pretty dark places to play those scenes — and thanks to Cimino, he was allowed to.

Cimino said he suggested Walken improvise and spit into De Niro’s face during the scene to get a reaction. Walken didn’t want to do it. “Chris goes, ‘You want me to spit in Bob’s face?!’ But he did it,” Cimino recalled. “Well, Bob almost f—ing… he got so angry he almost got out of the scene. But he knew it was working.” That was just a warm-up. According to Cimino, De Niro wanted to ratchet up the intensity of the Russian roulette scene and asked if he could put a live round in the gun. “We had a whole conference about ‘Okay, we’re gonna do it, but we’re gonna check this thing 5,000 times.’ We went to a lot of extremes on that film.” As a result, The Deer Hunter feels like the kind of story that isn’t being faked or acted or told. It feels like it’s being lived. Cimino was swinging for the fences… and he connected. The next time, he wouldn’t be so lucky.

Over the past 35 years, Heaven’s Gate has become synonymous with ego run amok. It’s industry-wide shorthand for a fiscal sinkhole of cataclysmic proportions. It’s a cautionary tale of artistic hubris. And it’s also part of Cimino’s legacy. With all of the success of The Deer Hunter, the white-hot writer-director asked for and was given carte blanche on his follow-up — an epic western about homesteaders, ranchers, and U.S. marshals in 1890s Wyoming called Heaven’s Gate. It would become both his and his filmmaking generation’s undoing. As chronicled in Steven Bach’s inside account Final Cut, United Artists greenlit the two-and-a-half month shoot with a budget of $7.5 million. A year later, the budget would be $44 million — a large chunk of which no doubt went to the more than one million feet of film Cimino shot. Buffeted by his Deer Hunter success, the film became a self-destructive act of self-indulgence. Every detail was obsessed over. Each scene was too precious to cut. And by the time they knew what they had, the studio was in so deep they couldn’t turn the spigot off. So they had no choice but to sink or swim with Cimino’s folly. They sank. United Artists was finished.

When Heaven’s Gate was finally shown to critics, they’d had a year to sharpen their knives. Vincent Canby of The New York Times pulled out a hatchet dipped in schadenfreude and wrote that the film “fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect.” Clocking in at three-and-a-half hours, Heaven’s Gate was shaved down significantly before it was eventually released to the public. But it was still a mess. A gorgeously dreamy-looking one, thanks to Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography, but still a mess. It ended up making less than $4 million at the box office.

It wasn’t just United Artists that was finished after Heaven’s Gate came out: It also ended the brief reign of the New Hollywood generation. Cimino’s career was essentially over just as it was beginning. Afterwards, he retreated into a sort of spiritual exile from which he’d only occasionally emerge. But the sad truth was, he’d lost his swagger, his confidence. Who wouldn’t have? After all, maybe what we wanted from Cimino was something that was unfair to ask in the first place. Why shouldn’t it be enough that an artist give us one timeless masterpiece? Why do we need two or 10? Cimino would direct four more films during his life (1985’s Year of the Dragon, 1987’s The Sicilian, 1990’s Desperate Hours, and 1996’s Sunchaser). And while some have memorable scenes and performances, none of them are memorable films. Sunchaser, the last and probably least of his movies, made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival. It was as if the French cineastes, to whom idiosyncratic directors are revered as gods, wanted to singlehandedly rehabilitate Cimino’s reputation as an auteur. But there was too little of Cimino’s thunder and light left. Ironically, since then, Heaven’s Gate has undergone a bit of a reappraisal not just abroad, but here as well. I’m not one of the film’s champions, but who knows, with enough time, it may just end up becoming a classic instead of a cautionary tale. Cimino would have found that amusing. He would have agreed with it, too.