Things are still heavily weighted by COVID, still in flux, and--although the evidence keeps coming in that theatrical and streaming being commingled as so many seem to desperately want is financial malfeasance--still loaded with production and distribution companies running new strategies on a seemingly haphazard basis, not allowing stability toward any clear future.

My ambition is not to predict the future, but to figure out when it will be safe again to pick up the crystal b…

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Ans here is my obnoxious, but accurate, answer.

Nothing went wrong.

Everyone did their part. The Emmys have kept expanding to, now, 117 awarded categories so that records can be set on the regular. The talent showed up in their best borrowed outfits. Netflix filled the void in a season without ongoing series and will likely dominate next year's Emmys, like Succession, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Barry, and Euphoria, as well as shows (including their own) that ended, like Ozark, VEEP, and Schitt's Creek.

In the six Lead Acting categories, there were twelve Black nominees. In Supporting, 11. (I am avoiding "People of Color," since the only color other than White that is well represented at Emmys is Black... Hispanic/Latino/Latinx and Asians are still getting table scraps, from the industry and thus, from the Emmys.)

CBS pi…

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Well...

Here are the films that survived the weekend, between the two festivals. Not frontrunners. Not a one of them. But well-liked and in the game... in order...

1. King Richard
2. The Power of the Dog (both festivals)
3. Belfast
4. Spencer (both festivals)
5. Dune
6. Cyrano

Half of these might get a real theatrical-first release.

The French Dispatch is sneaking in Telluride, but it's a ringer, given Wes Anderson's history, so count that likely nominee. The Card Counter also turned up as a TBA... but it seems to be an actor-only proposition, (opening this month) based on reactions.

The list of the dead... which doesn't mean they are hated or even disliked, but failed to get the kind of reaction that could propel these titles into the season with bravado enough to get to the Best Picture nomination finish line (in alphabetical order).

C'mon, C'mon, The Duke, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, The Hand of God, The Last Duel, Last Night in Soho…

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It’s about a failure to understand the brand that has been going on for years and years now.

If this Matt Belloni report is true, it is profoundly idiotic.

“I’m told several award categories—almost certainly the short films and likely several below-the-line crafts—will be jettisoned to the pre-show or commercial breaks, with an “acknowledgement” on the main telecast.”

Another part of Belloni’s report: “other changes are coming to try to make the Oscars more of a celebration of movies and less about the specific films in contention”

Again… Sheer bullshit. The show has increasingly failed to celebrate movies & it’s not because of lack of hits.

Dawn Hudson has never understood or accepted what The Academy is, whether you consider her choices to be self-serving or not. And she has held great sway, albeit at times by the skin of her teeth.

There is no such thing as “reb…

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A cottage industry has quickly grown, including legacy companies like Nielsen, around trying to quantify what is happening in the streaming content world. Every streamer knows exactly what is happening in their world. And it is the most highly protected information in the business.

As we continue to reach for Peak Spending On TV, the cost of production across all platforms may well crack the $80 billion mark for original content. At an insane (but not unrealistic) average of $8 million an hour for this content, that's 10,000 hours or original TV content being created in a year... More than one hour of new TV created for each of the 8,760 hours that exist in a year.

Madness.

If you spent twelve hours a day,…

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I have never heard as many people as confused about where the filming television industry is headed. Of course, you have media out front, full of piss and ignorance as ever, endlessly explaining the most simplistic perspectives possible, shifting in the wind as each exec or agent makes a pronouncement between their salad and portioned gluten-free entree.

Truth be told, my head is spinning. And it's not so easy to spin my head.

There have always been moments of WTF in the early moments of paradigm shifts, which is what we are in right now. But there were also some guard rails... mostly about making money.

So let's get right into the meat of it... Making a ni…

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But Disney has triggered me.

I'm not even clear in my own head about what it is that so worries me about their behavior around Black Widow and Jungle Cruise. Even when they announced the day-n-date Premium Video On Demand (PVOD) for these two titles, it didn't bother me much, no matter how much I believe in theatrical as a financial necessity by distributors. I saw two films, still in the window of COVID, taking advantage of alternative revenue opportunity while still pushing out wide theatrical releases. Would this cannibalize the theatrical? Yes. But not to a huge degree, I thought.

And indeed... I don't think the option cannibalized the theatrical release a whole lot. Even if you assume two people for every PVOD purchase buying theatrical tickets, it was just three million units, translating to $60 million in theatrical revenue that didn't happen. This would no…

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Front-and-center in the column was a list of The Untouchables... films that seemed, at that point, too significant throw to the whims of exclusive streaming or a theatrical release destabilized by the pandemic. There were 18 titles on the list.

In the year since, two were sold to streamers (Coming 2 America, Connected), two got sucked into Kilar's Folly - aka the Warner Media dump of all 2021 Warner Bros. theatrical (we'll see) to HBO Max - (Wonder Woman 1984, The Conjuring 3), 2 were pushed to Disney+ (Mulan PVOD, Soul free), and one was pushed out by Universal with a short theatrical window before PVOD and then, VOD, but with a much longer theatrical life than expected (The Croods 2).

For those counting at home, that would be seven total "untouchable" movies pushing to new platforms in the year, four of which had no…

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There are a lot of ways to look at this.

Of course, the expected "they said it, it must be true" writers are positioning it as some sort of "come to Jesus" moment for exhibition. Wrong. For the millionth time... Wrong!

I was kinda hoping they would be right, though I would come at it from the other side. I believe that Netflix will look to theatrical as a revenue stream before the half-decade is up. And I was hoping, from the headline, that this might be a start in that direction. But it isn't that either.

It's a one-week booking between Those Who Wish Me Dead/Spiral and Cruella/A Quiet Place II. (Speaking of which, when is Paramount going to start spending into this release? Or are they hoping it will fail at the box office and be better Par+ bait? Don't get it.)

All that really …

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"Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out."

Steven Soderbergh is an iconoclast. Has been one from the start.

The ideas that drove the Incredibly Bad Oscar Show™ are not new to Soderbergh. He clearly believes in turning the Oscars back into an industry cocktail party (last seen 50 years or so ago). And I, for one, don't disagree.

But there are issues that need to be accounted for. Like The Independent Spirit Awards have been doing this schtick for 20 years and can't find an audience as big as a M*A*S*H rerun. Like The Golden Globes - a made-up organization of people…

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My first reaction was to roll my eyes. I think the series is masterful and perhaps the most significant fictional work on the experience of race in America that I have seen in a decade, in that it doesn't patronize its victims/heroes nor offer safe harbor for its villains. To my eye, it produces so much empathy that it never becomes safe or comfortable. It does use the tools of supernatural and horror films. I don't downgrade it for that.

I have been railing on for years about how critics tend to attack any film or tv show that makes them feel deeply uncomfortable... or really, just deeply. I find that critics are comforted by an intellectual distance, lest they not be, somehow, tricked into an emotion. Many of my favorite films have that distance (See: Kubrick and The Coens). But many do not. All art is a manipulation and…

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And still, outside of the nominees, their companies, their parents, their agents, and the possibility that Steven Soderbergh will do something really interesting... it's such a "so what?" at this point.

It's been a pretty nice season. The Holy Complainers basically sat this one out. No talk about category theft, even though two of the 98%-sure acting winners are in the wrong categories. No one really bit on claims about Chloé Zhao being a closet billionaire. The Father and Mank didn't get electroshocked for being about the pain of wealthy white men as no one really thought they could win.

The Retro Whiners showed up in the persona of Bill Maher on Friday and The Holy Complainers threw shit at the walls, fast and furious. This year's nominees are too precious and fragile to be called boring and depressing. The horror. The horror.

The Retro Whiners haven't gone away this season. They just aren't talking loudly. It feel…

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It's not COVID anymore. I am feeling pretty good about that, even as we have months to go before any real normalcy returns, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

It's this industry. Film and television. And how media covers it. And how many deals are being made. And how people are seeing the future, which always concerns me more than it should because 50 years later, we are surrounded by the real life manifestations of Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In improv, it's called playing to the height of your intelligence... which human beings tend not to do. Even the smartest people.

Right now, we are in a time of massive transition. Some of it is moral. Some of it is financial. Some of it is social. Some of it is personal. Some of it is determinin…

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But then Disney did its reset for the coming summer. And it makes perfect sense, really.

There are two clear, opposing ideas in play. First, for the bigger movies to make the money they hope to make, theaters need to be open and at least 75% operational. On weekdays, 33% occupancy is plenty. But on weekends, theaters need near-sell-outs and sell-outs to make the machine work, both for theater owners and distributors.

Second, though we can start to get a real sense of when that 75% seat availability will be realistic, no one knows when audiences will be ready to have that experience again.

The often one-note industry media comes to the issue ass-backwards, obsessed with shortened windows and streaming. But even after a year of almost completely closed movie theaters, the math hasn't changed. Distributors know that theatrical is an important financial piece of their economic structure and want to have a full and thriving…

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It's been more than 24 hours since The Jonases, beautiful, talented, and from media other than film, adorably announced the *Oscar nominations. And for that day+, I have been - and it seems others have been, too - looking for something worth discussing about the nominations.

And really... nothing. The same group of a dozen films considered in play for months went into the hopper and came out a little differently than other "precursors," but nothing surprising. The only real "snubs" (a stupid word used stupidly way too often) this season were imaginary nominees in the first place, spurred on by an encouraging media happy to suck in added marketing dollars from the overly hopefuls.

The truth is, the eight Best Picture nominees (it will be 10 from next year's 10-month season on) were the best- or most-marketed and films that delivered what they claimed (for the most part). Just like every season.

Netflix …

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What most every writer has gotten wrong all year is seeing every major release as a standalone event. Almost none of them have been that. They are all experiments. And while some are repeating (Universal and WarnerMedia), a total of zero have truly been successful.

Just under 200 new movies were released domestically after the shutdown last March. Twelve grossed as much as $10 million. (Onward opened on March 6 and got a good weekend in, topping the list with $62 million. Tenet at $57 million. Croods: A New Age is at $54 million and is still in release.) About 150 of the releases grossed under $500,000. Sixteen m…

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When it makes you feel like you have a personal stake in the story.

Autobiography and Industry Insight books written by William Goldman, Steven Soderbergh, Julia Phillips, Linda Obst and John Gregory Dunne have done that for me and stand with the most important books in my movie library.

There are a bunch of books with more detail or equally powerful insights, books by Lumet and Mamet and Sondheim that are must-reads. There are biographies that are ultimately about paradigm shifts, like Tony Hendra's remembrance of the Lampoon group (that dominated comedy for decades) or Goldman's "The Season" or David Puttnam's "Movies & Money," which is as relevant today as when it was when published in 2000 as it would also have been in 1970 or 1940.

The Life Observed biographies rarely ring my bell in this way. They are overly controlled by the focus of the bio or too interested in eye-catching side stories, never capturing the work of the artist that made anyone willing to…

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People will watch more of the nominees. Not Academy viewers, 80% of whom will be 80% of the way to completion (aside from docs, international, and shorts) when the nominations are announced, but real life people.

That's really it.

If real people are paying attention to the movies that get nominated, they might watch the show wreck to come, which is important to The Academy, which will, for what it's worth, run an Oscar show for a 10-month year in 2022.

Of course, as illogical as that is (as was expanding the window through February this year for what turned out to be zero reasons), the natural progression of Oscar tends to block out any movie that opens before March anyway. So... maybe no harm, no foul there. (And if you are feeling your defense of the handful of movies that qualified late this year... they would have pushed back to a December window if the rules hadn't been changed, so please release your pearls.)

I would be truly thrilled by…

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Let's see what conversations we can spark.

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