Abate the Hate,Increase the Peace

With the aid of Galley Brother B.J. I had a rant all worked up and ready for when Kobe Bryant won the MVP award. You'll just have to trust me when I tell you it was hot.

The gist was that while Kobe--the locus of all evil in professional sports--obviously deserved the MVP this year, it was travesty, because by this standard, Iverson should have won three or four MVPs in the late '90s and early '00s.

But instead, Steve Nash has won, for the second year in a row. If I had a vote, I would have cast it for Kobe. But Nash would have been my second choice. He's fabulous and a great MVP.

There's a lesson in all of this. But I'm from Philadelphia, so I refuse to learn it. I'll just hold on to my grudge until next year. Or the year after that. Sooner or later, the universe really will be conspiring against us.

And when it does, I'll be ready with that defense of Answer. Oh yes I will.

Worst Re-Brand Ever?

The Nintendo Revolution is now the Nintendo "Wii" (pronounced "wee"). The Big Brains at Nintendo Corp. explain:

While the code-name "Revolution" expressed our direction, Wii represents the answer. Wii will break down that wall that separates game players from everybody else. Wii will put people more in touch with their games...and each other. . . .

So that's Wii. But now Nintendo needs you. Because, it's really not about you or me. It's about Wii. And together, Wii will change everything.

So, dumbest re-brand ever? Post competing nominees below, please.

On Teri H.:

Man, if there's anything sexier than bloodless mummies, it's bloodless mummies who look like an ad for rum. Put a parrot on her shoulder and I may just fall in love.

Fugging Impossible III

Galley Friend and Hollywood Superstar E.H. sends us a new site to crush on with this picture and captions set from M:I3. Just go, you'll laugh about it all day long.

If you need further proof of the Fud genius, see this Dunst-hating post (Jenny, that's just for you, peaches) and this Tom Cruise-Phil Hoffman triptych, which ends with:

Philip Seymour Hoffman: It's true, America. He's batshit crazy. What can I say?

Tom: HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH HOFFMAN YOU JOKER. GOD, isn't this FUN?

Philip Seymour Hoffman: I'm not kidding.

Run Tom Run

Jenny sends us to BWE which links to this very fabulous Tom Cruise/Nike mash-up. Very, very well done.

Update: Here's the original Nike ad.

The Greatness of Tom Hanks

This morning I remarked on Tom Hanks's impressive streak of 12 of 14 movies going over the $100M mark from 1993 to 2002. It turns out that his streak is even more impressive when you adjust for inflation. How much of a difference does it make? Toy Story's 1995 gross of $190M is actually $280M in 2005 terms.

Anyway, when you adjust the numbers, Hanks has actually by 14 of 17 movies over the $100M mark from 1992 until today. Has any other actor put together a streak that comes even close?

Clint Eastwood is a giant, durable movie star, but look at his adjusted numbers and you see that even during his high point, he only put together 6 or 9 movies that went over $100M. Heck, he only has 14 movies over the $100M mark in his entire career, and he's been around since 1967.

Tom Cruise is a super-gigantic movie star with great numbers. Since 1986, he's put 16 of 20 over the $100M (adjusted). That's a rate equivalent to Hanks. But for my money, Hanks's streak is more impressive because of the movies he did. A lot of Cruise movie's are hits no matter who stars in them. (Also, Hanks's next three projects all look like they have a good chance to join the $100M club.)

Sylvestor Stallone was the biggest star on the planet once. At his height he put 6 of 11 movies over $100M (adjusted). Ditto Robert Redford who also put 6 of 11 movies over the adjusted $100M mark.

Watching Bossom Buddies, who would have thought that we were seeing the birth of our generation's biggest star?

Update: A commenter suggests Harrison Ford, the star who's my personal favorite. I accosted him at a party once, but that's a story for another time. Suffice it to say that he's more gracious than anyone could possibly expect. And that voice isn't made in the mixing room.

But what about his inflation adjusted run? Beginning in 1980 with Empire and going through 1994's Clear and Present Danger, Ford put 11 of 15 movies over the $100M mark.

Musical Chairs

Drew McWeeny has a nice review of MI:3, but the best part is this little recap of how the making of Superman shaped the entire slate of movies for this summer:

So when Paramount announced Abrams as director of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 3, after a long development process that included Frank Darabont, Joe Carnahan, and David Fincher, I was cautiously optimistic.
That development squaredance led to several other people re-aligning in terms of what projects they ended up doing. Because the Abrams script was picked over the Andy Kevin Walker script, Walker was free to go write this summer’s ZODIAC, which was directed by David Fincher, who abandoned the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE job that Abrams took later. Brett Ratner was attached to direct that SUPERMAN, but when he was booted, that cleared the way for Bryan Singer to take over SUPERMAN (after McG flirted with it before his own fear of flying grounded him), which left the director’s chair open on X3, giving Brett Ratner a place to rebound. Wolfgang Petersen, who did not end up making his SUPERMAN VS BATMAN, stayed with Warner Bros. to make POSEIDON.

It's worse than the NCAA Div. I basketball coaching carousel.

McWeeny's final verdict:

M:I3 is, for all intents and purposes, a really big-budget retelling of the ALIAS pilot with Tom Cruise playing Jennifer Garner in a film that could be subtitled RUN, TOM CRUISE, RUN!!

That's enough to sell me.

Who Gives a Rat's Ass?

Apparently scientists in Venezuela. Using rats and their deposits, researchers at Simon Bolivar University in Caracas were able to learn which type of bacteria-infused beans can reduce flatulence among consumers. According to Reuters, the scientists "identified two bacteria ... which can be added to beans so they cause minimal distress to those who eat them, and to those around the bean-lovers...." The researchers also point out that "In spite of being part of the staple diets of these [poor] populations, their consumption is limited by the flatulence they produce."

So will this latest discovery help bring an end to world hunger? It's too soon to tell, and the testing was not entirely accurate. Apparently the rats had also consumed light beer and sauerkraut.

Besides that, not everyone was happy to hear of this latest breakthrough. When GlaxoSmithKline, makers of Beano, got wind of the results, they were reportedly fuming.

Stalker Central

Jenny points us to this mean-spirited post which suggests that Hayden Christensen might be gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

The reason I link is that--gay or not--the picture of Christensen with this other fellow is kind of creepy because the other guy is wearing a "Sith Happens" t-shirt.

Makes it look more like Christensen has his own personal stalker.

United 93 Box Office (cont.)

Continuing our earlier discussion of the box office potential of United 93, we now have another data point: BoxOfficeMojo is reporting that United 93 will debut on roughly 1,700 screens.

That seems like a pretty modest number. If it holds when the screen count numbers come out later this week, it probably means that New Line is hedging its bets and willing to push wider if the response is good. But what does that mean for United 93's opening weekend?

For starters, it means that you can throw out any hope that it does Passion-like numbers. The Passion opened to $83.8M in 3,043 theaters. Even if United 93 did Passion's very formidable per theater average ($27,554), it would just crack $40M.

And even that would be asking a lot. A list of the top 200 per-theater averages on opening weekend has only two movies with averages over $28,000 per theater and opened on more than 100 screens.

So, as we keep sifting this data, it seems more likely that United 93 opens in the $17M to $25M range, with a shot at doing near $40M if it's a real phenomenon. The good news (for New Line) is that the weekend's big release RV shouldn't overlap with its audience at all.

Update: Is there a reason United 93 couldn't do Fahrenheit 9/11-type business? (It opened to $23.9M on 868 screens.) Nope. But that would be a real accomplishment.

Update 2: In comments, arrScott makes the smart point that the appeal of United 93 is exactly opposite that of The Passion and Fahrenheit 9/11--it seems to be a well-made, explicitly non-political movie. Very true. arrScott speculates that it may play similarly to Saving Private Ryan.

I'd considered Saving Private Ryan as a model, but ultimately I don't think it's the best one for two reasons: Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Spielberg is the only director alive today who serves as a significant box office inducement all by himself (Woody Allen is an inducement for a certain audience, but on a much smaller scale). And you could make the case that Tom Hanks is the most durable movie star of his generation. Look at the awe-inspiring numbers for Hanks and you'll see 12 of 14 movies topping the $100M mark between 1993 and 2002--that's Hollywood's version of the DiMaggio hitting streak. And what makes the numbers even more impressive is that not all of these movies were sure-fire hits. A League of Their Own? Forrest Gump? Toy Story? These are risky propositions. This streak wasn't built with flicks like Mission: Impossible 2 or Independence Day. Anyway, I'd argue that the presence of two gigantic stars makes Saving Private Ryan substantially different from United 93 in terms of how it will play on opening weekend.

(There are other differences, too: Remember that DreamWorks did an amazing roll-out for Saving Private Ryan, with packages on the covers of newsweeklies and tons of TV tie-ins leading up to the release. The roll-out of United 93 has been demure by comparison. Also, don't forget the budgets: Saving Private Ryan had a $70M budget, while United 93 was made for $15M. That doesn't mean much except that it's a "smaller" movie, and smaller movies tend to open, well, smaller.)

All of that said, arrScott may very well be right that the cultural mood surrounding United 93 will be similar to what surrounded Saving Private Ryan, and the long-term graph of how they play over the summer may chart pretty closely. But for that to happen, United 93 needs to have a solid first weekend. The way the summer season works, it'll get moved out of theaters quickly if the audience doesn't show up the first two weeks.

Giving Notes

Screenwriter John August has an interesting post on what to do if you've written a movie and the final cut of it stinks. But what's really interesting is that in the post, August has links to PDF versions of the notes he gave Doug Liman after the first cut of Go came out.

If you're interested in how the sausage gets made, August's notes are great reading.

Gilmore Girls Backstory

I know how sad you all were hearing the news about Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband leaving Gilmore Girls the other day. You probably locked yourself in your bathroom and took a long bath while watching Golden Girls blocks on Lifetime.

But now Galley Friend M.R. sends along this truly awesome link discussing the fellow who's now running Gilmore, Dave Rosenthal.

Just a word of caution: If you think Gilmore is for girls, that's fine. You'll want to read this thing anyway. It's like a Chris Buckley version of how Hollywood works. (Except that Hollywood is the Chris Buckley version of itself.)

Sample:

Hoping to learn more about this guy, I tracked down a rather infamous Los Angeles Times Magazine article on Rosenthal, written by Janet Reitman, from 2002, entitled "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Ranter." Informative reading to say the least. According to Reitman, Rosenthal's success in Hollywood was meteoric by anyone's standards. A 1989 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the son of a rabbi, Rosenthal moved to Los Angeles shortly after graduation to pursue his dream of writing sitcoms.

Within a year, Rosenthal swiftly jumped from being a production assistant on Anything but Love (a sitcom which starred Richard Lewis and Jamie Lee Curtis) to staff writer on the same show; then two years later, another jump, this time to a head writer position on Ellen (yes, that Ellen; Rosenthal stayed for three years and then was reportedly fired). After a year-long stint developing sitcoms for Jeffrey Katzenberg, he was hired as a writer on Michael J. Fox's sitcom Spin City... and was quickly promoted to showrunner. Rosenthal married a fellow Spin City writer, bought a house and a Porsche, and landed a lucrative $2.5 million contract with Fox Television. By all accounts, Rosenthal seemed to have the perfect life.

I know, who cares? Stay with me:

Going through my rolodex of Hollywood contacts, I stumbled upon someone who had actually worked with Dave Rosenthal in the past. I asked if I could ask her a few questions about Rosenthal and she agreed, as long as I maintained her anonymity. . . .

I asked "Julia" how she would describe Rosenthal, based on the time they worked together. . . .

"The guy quit Spin City in order to concentrate on writing a play about his desire to have sex with Heidi Klum," Julia told me. "Dropped out of TV completely to do this. He pretty much had a breakdown, dropped out of society, and became the madman writing a misogynist play. He lived like this until his dad read the play and actually had him committed."

No, really. It gets better:

After speaking to Julia, I did some more digging. Rosenthal had in fact written a play called "Love" about his quest to get supermodel Heidi Klum to have sex with him. Reviews of the play, which apparently contained so many profanities that it rated an NC-17, were not kind. The New York Times called Rosenthal's play "not only offensive but incompetent" and said that the way that Rosenthal talked about Klum--whom he had met during a guest stint on Rosenthal's show Spin City--was "as cruel and disgusting as actual stalking."

The New York Times reviewer wasn't the only one perturbed by Rosenthal's play. Rosenthal had sent copies to his then agents at Endeavor--Ari Emanuel and Richard Weitz--who promptly dropped him as a client. His rabbi father, after reading the play, had Rosenthal briefly committed at UCLA Medical Center.

You can pretend otherwise if you want, but you and I both know you're going to read the rest.

my.traffic.com?

Am I missing something, or is this the the greatest site in the history of the interweb? Choose your city and check out the traffic jam meters . . .

Transformers News

IGN is reporting casting for the Michael Bay Transformers movie. Most notable is that Jon "A Man Can Stand Up" Voight is onboard. What's sad is that he isn't voicing Starscream. He's actually acting. I know: Who cares?

AICN has a visit with Bay, including the movie's tagline: "Their War. Our World." Really, how dumb can studio executives be? The property already has a dynamite tagline with built-in recognition. Perhaps you've heard it? More than meets the eye?

I know you're not going to read the entire AICN post, so let me give you the good stuff, the description of Bay's meeting room:

The meeting room had a long table in the middle of the room, a flat panel widescreen TV on the far wall, giant horizontal posters for BAD BOYS 2 and PEARL HARBOR on the adjacent wall, Leatherface's mask in a displace case underneath, a TRANSFORMERS toy above it (it was a shiny black toy with a customized Michael Bay head on it, a gift from Hasbro, Bay told me), People's Choice award surf boards (for 2004 and 2005) resting in 2 of the 4 corners of the room and the bomb from PEARL HARBOR in another corner.

Displaying his People's Choice awards and a Transformer with a Michael Bay head on it. Admit it, even if you were writing that scene, you wouldn't have come up with that.

Star Trek Prequel Is On

Brendon shouts out to the new J.J. Abrams-helmed Star Trek prequel which we first heard word of a few weeks ago.

United 93 Box Office?

The early word on United 93 is almost universally positive. So how much money is it going to make? It's not unreasonable to speculate that United 93's box office performance will be analyzed as a cultural indicator of one sort or another.

Let's start, as always, with the marketplace. HSX has United 93 pegged at $48, which translates to a $16.5M opening weekend.

Our next stop is the performance of the April 28 weekend over the last few years:

* In 2005 The Interpreter opened to $22.8M.

* In 2004 Man on Fire opened to $22.7M and 13 Going on 30 opened to $21M.

* In 2003, Identity opened to $16.2M.

* In 2002, Jason X opened to $6.6M and Life, or Something Like It, opened to $6.2M.

* In 2001, Driven opened to $12.1M.

* In 2000, The Flintstones Viva Rock Vegas, Frequency, and Where the Heart Is opened to $10.5M, $9M, and $8.2M, respectively.

What we see here (excepting 2000, when this weekend followed the strong release of The Scorpian King) is a trend of increasingly large openings for the fourth weekend in April.

Because of this, it looks as though the floor for United 93 is probably $22M. None of the other April openers are in the same genre as United 93--really, nothing is, except maybe Passion of the Christ. Passion opened to $83M. Could United 93 wind up in that neighborhood? I think it's possible. But I'd be surprised.

Only two movies have ever opened above $40M in April. It's more likely that United 93 will fall somewhere between that $22M floor and $42M. If it's within that range then I'm not sure the audience reaction will really symbolize anything--that's basically business as usual for the month of April.

But if it's significantly outside that range, then it could really say something about American attitudes.

It's a Good News/Bad News Situation

Game maker Aspyr reports:

Development has also continued progressing with Call of Duty® 2 and Sid Meier's Civilization® IV. Look for both of those great titles to be released for Mac in the next few weeks.

Oh well, there goes my summer.

HD DVD vs. Blu-Ray (cont.)

Let the battle commence! IMDB has this unsettling report:

Consumer electronics writers have begun to weigh in on the new HD DVD players distributed by Toshiba this week, and most are unimpressed. Several cite an intolerably long boot-up period, a confusing menu system, and incompatible sound. But nearly all express disappointment in the picture. . . . Writing in the Los Angeles Times David Colker remarked that on larger screens he could detect a subtle difference. He added: "I tested my perceptions by switching between the two formats. I asked a colleague to close his eyes while I chose a version, then had him open them and guess: DVD or HD DVD? He got it right only about 75% of the time.

That's bad news for HD-DVD but I think it might be worse news for Sony. A lackluster $500 hi-def DVD player is better than a lackluster $1,800 player.

Up until now, though, I hadn't considered this possibility: What if both standards fail?

In historical terms, the change from VHS to DVD took much longer than the switch from DVD to HD DVD (or Blu-Ray). The first mass-market DVD players didn't hit until about 9 years ago; the DVD revolution only really completed itself about four years ago. What if it's too soon for a new format that only offers marginal improvements at a very high price point?

Here's the rest of the Colker article.

So Long, Stars Hollow

Hercules points us to this TV Guide story reporting that Amy Sherman-Palladino is leaving Gilmore Girls.

Sad news. Let's hope she gets a chance to do another good show.

I Should Have Included . . .

this link in yesterday's Sentinel post. I was already planning it while I was sitting in the theater at the screening. That's how much I care about this blog. And you.

And since I feel bad about forgetting, here's some bonus Brendon that I found while hunting for that link:

Eva Longoria claims to be so sure that boyfriend Tony Parker is "the one," she's already planning a family with him. Gabrielle Solis, Longorias character on Desperate Housewives, is pregnant, and now Eva is frustrated that she lives in California while Parker, who is the point guard for the San Antonio Spurs, lives in Texas.

"I want a lot of children, so I told Tony to hurry up because Gabrielle is already two months pregnant, and we're two months behind. Tony and I live in separate states, so that would be difficult at the moment. But he's very family oriented and we both want to have kids."

Yeah. It's cool. I don’t care either. What I do care about is these pictures and what kind of story she's telling that requires her to slap her own ass. Probably about a bee sting or detention or something. What? A sex story? But . . . wait, sex stories involve girls lying perfectly still and crying, don’t they? Oh. They don’t? Well, heres a tip, they do when you're a pretend social worker and you host sexual addiction trust building workshops.

Merry Christmas.