THB #161: Around The May Pall

Sometimes, you just don’t really want to write… but to get started writing, you just need to start writing… so… here we go…

Top Gun Maverick kinda shot its wad a couple weeks ago. There was a Doctor Strange movie sometime in the past… like before Ambhnny Trial… after… who knows?

Streaming is in this weird place… some great shows just finished… the last Emmy wave hitting the beach.

Netflix continues to be a punching bag for everyone who hailed it as the one true God just a few months ago. Crappy. Hard enough falling from heaven without the birds pissing on you in the way down to earth.

The entire Sunday night legacy schedule mostly cleared the way (double 60 Minutes, no John Oliver, NBC in repeats) for the American Idol closer last night… like it was 2010… Deadline’s chart for the night shows the scary results…

5.6 million people? And that is with a nationwide live feed and a replay in the west.

Yikes.

Friends in Cannes seem to be liking an unusual number of movies… but I have to wonder how many of them will get serious theatrical releases in America. Happy that Neon is birthing Crimes of the Future here in the U.S.A. It’s coming at you fast (June 3).

I don’t know what to make of the Thor: Love & Thunder trailer. It doesn’t seem to quite know what it wants to be when it grows up…

I do know what to make of the trailer for George Miller’s 3000 Years of Longing, which looks like a romp… and really, George’s full-on first romp for adults.

The new season of Only Murders In The Building is a frickin’ delight… but I can’t say anything about it... another month+ before it launches….

Amazon is having a strong moment, with The New Kids in the Hall relaunch of the guys in their 60s… the extremely odd combo of Night Sky and Outer Range… and the “is this what teens want” duo of Chloe and The Lake. And the new season of Fairfax is coming soon… and like Mrs. Maisel, wanders a bit before closing strong in the last few episodes.

I’d love to clue you in on what is coming to Netflix, but they make it too hard to see everything… so…

Top Gun Maverick opens this weekend. No one should expect $187m, like Strange, for the 3 day OR the 4-day. That is not what Memorial Weekend does. Here is a chart of the Top 10 Memorial Day Weekend openings ever…

Funny (not really) how Disney and 20th Century, which are now one, dominate this list, 6 of 10 entries.

20ish years ago, Memorial Day Weekend was the opening of the summer. The last time a Memorial Day Weekend opener won the summer was actually 2000… Mission: Impossible 2. Not even on this Top 10 list. $58 million. Gladiator, which opened in the First Weekend of May slot, came in a close second for the summer and How The Grinch Stole Christmas, opening Thanksgiving, was #1 for the year.

That may sound like a soft year to you, but it was the biggest domestic year in history at the time, topping the previous champ, 1999, by less than 2%.

The next year was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and the year after that, Spider-Man. We were off into the CG future of cinema. Box office kept going up every year… but the New York Times decided that it had to crap all over that and when 2005 landed without the massive anomaly of The Passion of the Christ to add an unexpected $370m domestic from moviegoers who really weren’t moviegoers, they squirmed and manipulated numbers and made it fashionable to count seats (irrelevant stat) and exhibition has been defending itself from the media every since.

The box office went from $8.8 billion domestic that year (2005) to $11.3 billion in 2019. Not good enough for some people.

International more than doubled from $14.7 billion in 2005 to $31 billion in 2019… but most outlets, especially the New York Times, conveniently forgot this in story after story about the end of theatrical.

Oy…

Have I mentioned that I am kinda loving Ziwe this season? Last season was a bit too aggressive for me… there was a lack of playfulness. Ziwe is not really easing up this season, but she isn’t suffocating the humanity of those who participate. The show is provocative in a really interesting way.

We Own This City is very strong, though I don’t really see it as an Emmy player in a big way. Jon Bernthal and Josh Charles are dead on at playing pricks here. But the standout for me is Wunmi Mosaku, who plays it so close to the vest, but who allows us to feel everything she is feeling and cannot say.

Atlanta has killed me this season. There are 2 or 3 episodes in there that really belong in the all-time episodes time capsule. And I am still mourning the end of Better Things, which I will write about in depth soon.

I went to go see Men in a theater this last weekend… still chewing on it. But I think I think it’s a lot better than most of the reviews I have read from critics I respect. I kinda feel like they were trying so hard to figure it out that they lost the ability to figure it out… which is a lot simpler than I think they think it is.

I am still recommending Single Drunk Female to everyone. It finds it way in and out of what seem like obvious answers with great skill. The star is a find (even if you have actually seen her in a half-dozen other places before). And you will never know how much you missed Ally Sheedy until you spend time with her on a screen again.

Angelyne missed in concept… too many hours… too clever… wastes a lot of really good work.

And The Offer continues to make me insane because everyone is the wrong height… and other stuff. But the amazing imitation of Bob Evans by Matthew Goode is just always off for me because of the 4” or 5” difference in height between the real thing and the glorious fugazi… which combined with a short Coppola (Dan Folger is doing fine… but he’s short, not 6’ 1”)… yeesh. But I would sure give Burn Gorman a hard look as a Supporting Actor nominee for his turn as Charlie Bluhdorn.

Okay… enough… it’s late…

Until tomorrow…