As a fan of the international features category, I really hope this helps some of the less-widely-distributed films get wider release.

I’ve not heard about a common reaction like that to estrogen, but I’m not a doctor. No clue about bicalutimide though.

Article text via 12ft.io:

The script for Sinners began circulating among studios in Hollywood in the winter of 2023 and resulted in a bidding war by January last year: a wild drama-thriller cum survival-horror flick set in Jim Crow–era Mississippi featuring blues-music set pieces, steamy sex scenes, Deep South occultism and dozens of Riverdancing vampires. More central to the project’s commercial potential, it had been written, and would be directed, by Ryan Coogler — the creative force behind Marvel’s $1.4 billion–grossing Black Panther — and star his frequent filmic muse Michael B. Jordan in a dual role as identical-twin gangsters turned juke-joint-owner brothers named Smoke and Stack. As one studio after another began clamoring to pay Sinners’s $90 million-ish asking price, the director’s agents at WME notified them of a few strings attached. Coogler would retain final cut (a creative dispensation reserved for the industry’s crème de la crème), command first-dollar gross (that is, a percentage of box-office revenue beginning from the movie’s theatrical opening rather than waiting for the studio to turn a profit), and, most contentiously, 25 years after its release, ownership of Sinners would revert to the director.

That last part was a dealbreaker for most studios — Quentin Tarantino is the most recent on a very short list of auteurs to demand such an exceedingly rare rights-reversion agreement. In 2017, the multiple-Oscar winner negotiated a complex pact with Sony under which copyright-control rights to his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood would revert from the studio to Tarantino 30 years after its theatrical release. And while Sony and Universal had been in hot pursuit of Sinners, Warner Bros. co-chairmen/CEOs Pam Abdy and Michael DeLuca were the only back-lot chieftains willing to acquiesce to Coogler’s unusual terms.

Directors owning their own movies is the opposite of business as usual — and to studios, cause for freaking out. According to senior executives at rival studios, the Sinners deal sets a “very dangerous” precedent. “It could be the end of the studio system,” says one exec.

Specifically, they say Coogler’s agreement is already recalibrating filmmakers’ expectations surrounding copyright ownership and distribution entitlements, restructuring a time-honored industry power balance and effectively imperiling the cinematic back catalog: the core asset behind all movie studio valuation. “Studios exist for one simple reason: to build a library,” this executive continues. “The lifetime, long-term value of our film properties is what makes a studio a studio. It’s why David Ellison wants to buy Paramount. It’s how MGM sold for $8 billion. Things like licensing and windowing these films throw off hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year globally. So the whole idea of building up your library — and you lose it in 25 years? Wait a second, you just gave up all your revenue down the line.”

Another executive at a different studio future-trips the consequences of Coogler’s deal in terms of making already fraught talent relationships even more difficult: by giving A-list directors unrealistic expectations. “If we, as a studio, give that to [Coogler], when somebody else we really want to be in business says, ‘Hey, I want this deal too’ — and you say, ‘No, I only gave it to him’ — how can we expect them to work with us?” he says. “It’s bad for the business. It’s bad for filmmaking relationships.”

In a recent interview, Coogler — whose short but impactful film resume includes the Sundance breakout biopic Fruitvale Station, Black Panther (nominated for a 2019 Best Picture Oscar), the Rocky franchise spinoff Creed and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever — described the symbolic importance of himself as a Black director owning a film about Black ownership. “That was the only motivation,” he said of pursuing the rights-reversion deal. (A publicist for Coogler declined to make him available for an interview with Vulture.)

By several insider accounts, Warner Bros. approached the deal calculus from a defensive crouch. In 2020 during the depths of the pandemic, the Burbank-based studio shocked and infuriated its top-tier stable of filmmakers by announcing it would release its entire 2021 slate of theatrical films on its streaming service (then known as HBO Max) at the same time as in theaters. In response, the acclaimed director of Warners’ $165 million sci-fi epic Dune Denis Villeneuve wrote that “Warner Bros. might have just killed the Dune franchise” in an op-ed essay for Variety. The studio’s longtime box-office rainmaker Christopher Nolan, meanwhile, decamped to Universal to make his next billion-dollar movie Oppenheimer. (Warner Bros. declined to comment for this story.)

Hollywood veterans as both producers and former co-chiefs of the film division at MGM, DeLuca and Abdy are renowned for their deep relationships with visionary moviemakers and long connection to prestige moviedom. Hired by Warner Bros. Discovery’s movie-killing, “Not artist friendly but artist aware and adjacent” CEO David Zaslav to revitalize Warner Bros. in 2022, the duo’s mandate included remedying the studio’s ugly reputation around town for sacrificing talent to the bottom line. Abdy and DeLuca quickly made their mark green-lighting big-budget projects for a stable of esteemed, if not consistently bankable auteurs: $130 million for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (a crime-thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio), $80 million for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! (reportedly a punk-rock art-house revision of The Bride of Frankenstein), $80 million for Saltburn writer-director Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights and, of course, Coogler’s Sinners.

“Warners is out-paying everyone for everything,” says our first executive. “The Wuthering Heights thing is a disaster; that’s crazy paying that for those rights! The attitude at Warners is, ‘Our studio is in trouble. We’ve got to get it going. Do whatever.’ But whoever is running the studio in 25 years is not going to be Zaslav or Pam and Mike. So [the Sinners deal] is a short-term decision to help the financial quarter out, to help the year out, to help them relaunch. It’s just that these short-term decisions have long-term effects. They don’t think, Well if you do this the studio system is going to be gone. Not thinking of the ramifications.”

To be sure, there are other members of the so-called Copyright Club, including Mel Gibson (who retained ownership rights to The Passion of the Christ by self-financing its production budget when no one else would touch the project), Richard Linklater (who negotiated partial copyright ownership for his coming-of-age drama Boyhood which was shot in fits and starts over 11 years) and Peter Jackson (who, as a producer, came to own the underlying rights to District 9 by bankrolling the sci-fi thriller from first-time feature director Neil Blomkamp). Two insiders with knowledge of Tarantino’s rights-reversion deal point out that it wasn’t new or unique to Sony but in effect a holdover from an agreement at his previous moviemaking home Miramax (then-headed by disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein) where the director had limited license terms on all his movies such as Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. “That was grandfathered in,” says a third source familiar with the copyright deal on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “Because the Weinstein business was made by Tarantino, they gave him whatever he wanted. And when Tarantino started to do stuff elsewhere, [Sony] was like, ‘Well, he had it. So if we want to be in business with him, we got to keep it going.’”

In the view of a high-level talent agent with a privileged understanding of negotiations surrounding Coogler’s deal, studio-executive fears that directors around Hollywood will start demanding copyright ownership en masse are overblown. “It’s not every director that can ask for this — it’s only the top AAA-level directors who control a piece of IP,” this agent points out. “They go out with it and everybody wants it.”

“Look, here’s the problem in Hollywood, OK?” he continues. “There’s no rationale or logic behind absolutely anything. So anytime there is a filmmaker who has a lot of heat and — I hate to say this — but when you have a diverse or a female filmmaker who has a lot of heat off a movie, then it’s all about, What can I get? Hollywood will pay for what they have to pay for. If you control it, and you have a lot of bidders, you can make a different kind of market.” (Coogler has characterized the deal as a one-off and says he won’t seek to own future movies.)

Currently sitting at 99 percent “fresh” on the Tomatometer, Sinners will have its work cut out at the box office. Until Black Panther’s record breaking $235 million opening, conventional industry wisdom held that films with predominantly Black casts typically underperform financially overseas. A recent report in the industry newsletter Puck posits that the vampire-thriller will have to gross in the neighborhood of $300 million before turning a profit — an especially daunting prospect for an R-rated, non-IP original film with disparate genre elements. For Abdy and DeLuca, the stakes seem even higher: on the heels of expensive flops made and released on their watch including Alto Knights, Mickey 17, Joker: Folie a Deux and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, reports have swirled that the pair’s days in the Warners C-suite are numbered unless they can start delivering hits. (The massive blockbusterdom of A Minecraft Movie earlier this month was a step in the right direction.)

But one could fairly argue that disruptions due to Coogler’s unusual degree of studio largesse is already being felt across the movie ecosystem. Even if not directly inspired by the Warner Bros. copyright reversion pact, a spate of new deals and recent negotiations represent a sudden tilt in the Hollywood power balance. In January, Netflix announced a highly unusual distrib

Cars made to be sold and driven in Japan (aka JDM vehicles, for Japanese Domestic Market) can not be imported into the US until they are over 25 years old. This is part of a series of import laws that American vehicle manufacturers lobbied for to keep foreign cars from dominating domestic marketplaces.

The US also has crash test safety standards that domestic cars must meet because a) safety is good, and b) people drive tanks like maniacs. Kei cars used to be pretty awful in crash tests, but have gotten a lot better in recent years.

Here is the map of CCTV camera locations. The ones we’re being told about, at least.

It also lists camera models. The one on 7th Ave S and S King Street is listed as an Axis Q6100-E/Q6135-LE. To give you an idea of what these things are capable of, have a look at this product spec video.

This is one of the main reasons that I started the trailers community. There absolutely are unique, original films being released all the time, they just rarely get noticed. I hope that surfacing their trailers right along side the big boys will help get them in front of curious audiences.

Biscoff bandoleer.

I wrote that as a former movie theater usher. I literally did that job. You regularly clean up giant messes. Kids matinees were always the messiest. That is the job. When you aren’t cleaning auditoriums, you’re cleaning toilets, the lobby, polishing the brass on the stanchions, etc. There’s literally no idle time being stolen by this work.

It’s fine.

This Minecraft business is fine. It’s no different than any afternoon kids movie matinee (ie: Paw Patrol; something that only kids are interested in). The mess that ends up on the floor is sold at a 99% profit margin and anyone who understands the finances of running a theater gives zero fucks about that product getting wasted. I can’t imagine any upset patron getting stiffed on a free screening to compensate for it, either.

At this stage, theater owners are hungry for literally anything that sells tickets and puts butts in seats. Fuck it; let the kids have fun at the movies.

I’m not sure “swap” is quite the right word for it. Effects can be used to drastically reduce the risks for performers, which already happens. Stunt performers wear harnesses and safety wires for high falls that get digitally painted out. Functioning guns with blanks can be replaced by non-functioning guns that have muzzle flash effects added later (though I still don’t know how to accurately depict recoil). I would like to see awards going towards innovations in these areas.

That said, I’m not sure how to properly honor stunt performers for the risks and sacrifices asked of them without encouraging more people to do it.

Idiots will hurt themselves doing stunts for cheap too without the prestige. The “Big” stunts are actually usually safer as they have more people knowing what they are doing.

Having a prize for stunts encourages more low budget unsafe stunt work too as people take risks to increase their prestige to get the bigger gigs.

I don’t deny that stunt work demands immense talent and effort and risk. Just like a performance artist who does five-finger filet really fast for money. But is it moral to give out accolades for it?

Would it be better to look at ourselves and say “Woah, this is fucked up. It’s fucked up that it’s happening and it’s fucked up that I’m entertained by it. What can I do to encourage less of this in the world?”

Oh dear.

The stunt arms race is officially on. That means bigger stunts, more danger, and more people getting hurt to chase the big shiny prize they just created.

The safe and humane way forward here was better digital effects. This change will literally mame and kill people who didn’t have to get hurt.

Strawberry Mansion

https://youtu.be/dpPsvOSc1Gk

Trust me; you’ll have a good time. 🩷

Reznor was (is?) the lead singer in Nine Inch Nails. He and Ross have collaborated on a bunch of film and TV scores over the last 20 years or so, mostly to excellent results.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are doing the score, so the music should at least be solid.

But the Jared Leto of it all…

I think it depends on the distribution agreement. For a big-budget, major studio release you might see one or two trailers like that (featuring this card), but exhibitors can put whatever else they want in there as well. AMC is the absolute worst about this.

0. Don’t make me pay to park a car.
1. No ads.
2. No excessive “welcome to our theater chain!!1!” preroll. A static card or 5-sec bump will do.
3. One movie trailer is ideal; Two is OK; Three if you must. Absolutely no more than that.
4. Comfy seating.

I also never quite got a grip on Summer Wars. I got this sense that the pacing and storytelling was not at all designed or intended for me (as an American viewer, watching subs). But I would never argue it was a “bad” movie, or even that it didn’t work. I just got the sense that I was not the right judge of it.

If there are cases to be made for it, I’m all ears.

Or “zany to the max” as one might say.

Column 5, after coming out: “I just want to be.”