Wine snobs can be some of the most insufferable people out there. This is displayed perfectly in Alexander Payne’s 2004 dramedySideways, if not just through the movie’s most famous line. As delivered by depressed oenophile Miles (Paul Giamatti): “If anyone orders merlot, I’m leaving. I am not drinking any f*cking merlot!” And with that, sales of merlot dropped straight into the barrel.
That sounds like it could be a story tied to the film, sort of like the unfounded rumor that sales of undershirts plummeted because Clark Gable didn’t wear one in a movie. But this is absolutely true. In a new feature marking the 20th anniversary of Sideways, winemaker Doug Margerum remembered the ripple effect that line had, saying everybody started switching to pinot noir instead of merlot. “We were having a hard time selling pinot then, but after the film came out, everyone wanted to drink it and sales skyrocketed. We went from having one page of pinots on the wine list to three.” There was even a Sideways pinot noir released a few years ago.
And this kept building, with sales of merlot continuing to drop while pinot noir – the preferred wine of Giamatti’s Miles – took off. Production even slowed down, with one master sommelier being quoted as saying, “The film had a massive impact on merlot. In many ways, it was necessary. Merlot was planted in vineyards where it should not have been. This led to overplantings. After the film, growers planted less of it.”
One person who could have never figured on such an impact would be admitted merlot fan Alexander Payne, who directed Sideways and co-wrote it with Jim Taylor. “As we were making Sideways, I thought it was just a nice little comedy and had no idea that it would ever stand the test of time. And the merlot line that supposedly changed the wine industry? Well, it was just a joke, one single line in a movie. Who could have ever predicted that?”
Payne and Taylor would end up winning the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, with the film also snagging four other nominations, including Best Picture. It would also sweep the Independent Spirit Awards, taking home six.
When part one of Kevin Costner’s planned multi-film epic Horizon: An American Saga tanked at the box office – taking in under $30 million on a reported $50 million budget – you really felt bad for the guy. Here was someone who had put over 20 years and millions of his own dollars into his passion project, only to see it pulled from theaters after just a few weeks. But it wasn’t only Chapter 1 that saw an impact: the rest of the four-part saga is suffering as well, with Chapter 2 being lassoed away from the calendar. Yet, while the future seems uncertain for Horizon, Kevin Costner is remaining optimistic.
Appearing at Deadline Contenders Los Angeles, Kevin Costner said he still hopes that Horizon will be seen to its conclusion. “I’m hoping, I’m dreaming, I’m meeting all the billionaires that we all hear about — they’re all hiding in the shadows.” And after Chapter 2, he’s moving onward to the remaining films. “I’m don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to make it and then I’m going to make the fourth one. And if you want to say ’the end’ at that point, then that’s the end.”
As of now, it feels that, sadly, Chapter 1 might be the end. Shortly after that first part of Horizon was pulled from theaters, it went to Max, marking a rather tragic turn for Kevin Costner, who is one of the biggest champions of the cinemagoing experience. Whether you’re a Costner fan or not (maybe you still hold a grudge over the Yellowstone debacle?), this is awful to see, especially since Chapter 2 had a release date lined up for this past summer.
Our own Chris Bumbray gave Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1a 7/10, saying that had Chapter 2 also been showing that day, he would have caught it immediately after. But with no clear path for that follow-up, it’s hard to say if we’ll ever get a chance to watch all four films consecutively.
Did you see Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1? Do you want to see Kevin Costner complete his Horizon epic?
Is Dwayne Johnson still as big of a star as he seems to think he is? That’s the question that will be at the tip of everyone’s tongue this weekend, with his latest four-quadrant family film, Red One, opening to an underwhelming $34 million domestically. While that’s not a truly terrible number, what makes it sting more than it would otherwise is that the movie carries an astronomical budget of at least $200 million, meaning the movie may – rightly or wrongly – be viewed as something of a flop.
Consider this: Black Adam, which has a reputation for being a flop, still opened with about twice what Red One did. Unless word-of-mouth is terrific, Red One might have difficulty crawling to $100 million domestically.
Yet, it may not be as big of a flop as some think. The fact is, it was designed as a streaming movie for Prime Video, so one could view the theatrical release as an extended tease for its inevitable streaming launch. With the holiday theme, I’d expect it to premiere on Prime within weeks, which may hurt its long-term box office viability. Still, it opened with about $9 million more than I thought it would, and the A-minus CinemaScore rating isn’t half bad.
Venom: The Last Dance slid into second place, with a third weekend total of $7.35 million, adding up to a $127 million total, posting a 54% decline from last week. While that’s not an amazing domestic total for a superhero film, overseas, Venom 3 has been a blockbuster, with it on the cusp of breaking $500 million internationally before long.
Lionsgate’s The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is on track to become their highest-grossing film of the year, making $5.4 million for a total of just under $20 million. It should be able to pass Lionsgate’s biggest earner of the year so far, The Strangers: Chapter One, which made $35 million domestically. Ouch – $35 million is their best? It’s been a BAD year for this studio.
Meanwhile, A24’s Heretic fell 52% – which is a solid number for a horror movie – to a second-weekend gross of $5.3 million and a $20.4 million total, which ain’t bad for a movie that cost under $10 million. The Wild Robot rounded out the top five with $4.3 million and a $137 million total, while Smile 2 started to wrap up its run with $2.9 million in sixth place. The $65 million total is far below the $100 million plus made by the first film, but it still performed well for an R-rated horror film.
Another movie that’s proven to be a word-of-mouth hit is Focus Features’ Conclave. The film only fell 28% this weekend and made $2.85 million for a $26 million gross. It’s nice to see an adult drama having such staying power, which is also the case for Sean Baker’s Anora, which is further down the chart in 10th place with $1.8 million and a $10.5 million gross for Neon.
The Filipino romantic comedy sequel Hello, Love, Again came out of nowhere to make $2.3 million on only 250 screens. It had the highest per-screen average of the week, with $9.3K per screen. Finally, Searchlight’s Sundance breakout, A Real Pain, had a solid wide break with $2.3 million in ninth place. We loved this indie gem (read our review), and it deserves to be seenI
Next weekend should give the box office a huge boost, with Hollywood hoping the Glicked phenomenon (Gladiator/Wicked) becomes the next Barbenheimer. Only time will tell!
Have you ever wondered why, in the year 2024, we don’t have flying cars or instant teleportation the way some of our favorite movies and TV shows predicted we would? We look at entertainment from the 70’’s and 80’s and see fantastical inventions plastered on our screens of a future that never actually ever happened. Granted, who would want to live in the bleak futures of a Mad Max or Blade Runner but I’d gladly slide my small Pizza Hut pizza into a hydrator and have it come out a fully cooked delicious meal in seconds the way they did in Back To The Future Part II, which if you think about it: the future of Back To The Future Part II now takes place in our past!
For our newest series, we wanted to take a look at movies of the past and see how they predicted the future. What they got right, what they got wrong and even what may have been invented as a direct result of their inclusion in these movies. Writers have a fantastical mind, it is their job to create, of course they have the luxury of being able to come up with a concept without ever actually having to figure out if it is logical.
For someone like James Cameron, it would be a fever dream of a metallic torso holding kitchen knives dragging itself from an explosion that would plant the seed of an idea about a future destroyed by nuclear war and the rise of artificial intelligence, with a little time travel thrown in for good measure. The idea would lead to one of the most innovative low-budget films ever created (which has just gotten a controversial 4K re-release) where the vision of the future was not as rose-coloured as one may hope. As we approach the year in question, 2029 to be exact, in this video (embedded above) we take a look back at James Cameron’s seminal 1984 film The Terminator and figure out if Cameron himself was sent from the future to warn us of what was to come or simply just a darn good storyteller!
Here are some of the things we dig into:
Drones:
In today’s world, Drones are not just used for modern warfare, where a member of our armed forces can take out an enemy from six thousand miles away, but also for filming some of our favorite movies, creating amazing displays in our skies and even as a toy for our children. What began as a way to vanquish our enemies, is now something we buy our five-year-old for Christmas!
AI:
Consider the recent Hollywood guild strikes and the battle they had to ensure AI didn’t steal jobs. With the rise of ChatGPT, writers fear that in the future studios will simply use artificial intelligence to craft their films and television programs. Many say that no artificial intelligence can ever match the humanity of a human, and right now if you ask ChatGPT to write something, the result is very mechanical, but with the incredible advancements in technology over just the past few years, how long is it until something can mimic true human emotion? And what other jobs are at stake? How soon before AI technology replaces manual labour, coding, drivers and more?
Time Travel:
Technically speaking, travelling through time is possible. I am merely a writer of all things entertainment who is fairly good at research, the realities of time travel do not fall under my area of expertise, but if you want to understand the true complexities of time travel and wormholes, check out the writings of Kip Thorne. If you want to keep it movie-related, check out his excellent book “The Science of Interstellar” where he discusses how the film Interstellar, which he consulted on, is actually one of the most realistic looks at how time travel would and could actually work.
The question is: can time travel ever truly exist as depicted in something like The Terminator? For many, the idea seems to far fetched. If time travel were ever to be possible, wouldn’t we have been made aware of it by now? Wouldn’t some future person or machine have come back in time by now? Well, who is to say they haven’t?! Perhaps there are strict rules for traveling back in time such as you must blend in with your surroundings. Who is to say the person you walked by on the street an hour ago wasn’t someone from a distant future? You can’t, can you? But it would seem that as far as being able to strap into a device and travel through time, we aren’t quite there… yet!
For more on what The Terminator got right and wrong about the future watch the video above!
The bout between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul may have been a disappointment for viewers, but they helped make it a tremendous success for Netflix, seeing upwards of 65 million concurrent of the highly-anticipated fight…which means far more than that were ticked off by the constant streaming interruptions.
While the numbers won’t officially be known until later in the week, it was determined by Netflix over the weekend that 60 million households were tuned into the Tyson and Paul fight, a little under a quarter of their total subscribers. With 6,000 bars/restaurants also streaming the match, it was also found to be the most commercially distributed combat sports event ever.
But whether at home or at the watering hole, the Tyson and Paul fight was marred by seemingly constant lags — and we’re talking about the streaming itself. According to Downdetector, there were around 90,000 reports of streaming issues with Netflix even ahead of the main event. While there were fewer reports during the headline fight, there were still serious problems with buffering, pixelization, and crashing. Even still, trying to watch the Tyson / Paul match on Netflix was almost nothing but headaches, especially for those hosting watch parties or who placed bets.
With Netflix laying out their plans to get in on streaming live sporting events, they have their work cut out for them if the Mike Tyson / Jake Paul bout is anything to go off of. Not only did they snag streaming rights to WWE Raw for $5 billion but they also have two NFL games set for Christmas Day: the Baltimore Ravens vs. the Houston Texans and the Kansas City Chiefs vs. the Pittsburgh Steelers. With all of those teams holding winning records (as of publication) and the Chiefs themselves undefeated and defending Super Bowl champs, Netflix has a lot on the line here. If you thought people were irritated with Friday night’s service, wait until you get on the wrong side of a football fan! Raw will debut on Netflix on January 6th.
Mike Tyson and Jake Paul would end up going the full eight rounds, with Paul winning by unanimous decision. Also unanimous: how terrible the streaming quality was.
What are your thoughts on how Netflix presented the fight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul? Share your thoughts and frustrations with us below.
When it comes to the greatest years in film, 1999 is tough to beat. Personally, I remember it as the year which made me serious about the art of film, as I was just finishing high school at the time, and had begun to go see movies on my own more often. This was the year I got to see movies like Three Kings, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, The Insider, Magnolia, Any Given Sunday and so many more theatrically, and it’s a year I’ll always look back at fondly.
What’s interesting to me is which movies have had the most staying power. If you were around back then, you’ll remember that the most anticipated movie of the year was Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. While a hit, it was totally overshadowed by The Matrix, which came out on Easter Weekend that year, and ended up being the definitive sci-fi movie of that entire generation. Yet, even movies that flopped back in ’99, like Doug Liman’s Go, Galaxy Quest, and a whole slew of others have had massive cults spring up around them. As such, we wanted to find out which movie turning 25 this year (ouch) is the best. Take the poll below and let us know!
Recently it was announced that Mike Flanagan would be adapting Carrie for television. And I’m sure most of us are aware of the development hell that Crystal Lake (the Friday the 13th series) has been through, losing its showrunner amidst rumors of mismanagement. And we were very sad to see the Chucky series get canceled after three seasons. But it’s hard out there in the land of television and horror franchises haven’t exactly fared well there. Several years ago, Fox brought us The Exorcist TV series which had an incredible first season, fell off in the second, and was abruptly canceled.
The concept of a girl being possessed by a demon and saved by priests seems like a story that could theoretically work on television. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say that slashers do not tend to make for good television. Sure, we’ve seen shows like Scream and Slasher come along to somewhat success, but the subgenre based around murder just doesn’t lend itself to the format. It’s the same issue that slashers have when they get sequels. Most slashers take place in a very short period of time and have very similar structure. Taking place over one to three days to allow a killer to stalk some victims, kill them one by one, and a final girl to save the day in the end. There tends to be a mystery element, meaning there’s a lot to keep hidden to last a whole 8-10 episodes. Suspension of disbelief gets harder and harder the more time passes. The lack of police involvement becomes more noticeable. I’d point to Ryan Murphy shows that add such convoluted plotlines to stretch out a season.
It’s why every time we hear about the Friday the 13th series, it’s some strange backstory about Pamela or a one-shot gimmick episode. Making a show about a summer camp being ravaged by a hockey mask-wearing psycho in the woods would start to feel pretty samey after a while (as much as I would absolutely fucking love it). So instead they’re focusing on the background of Pamela and Jason and seeing how they can expand upon that. Does it mean we won’t get an episode that feels like a Friday the 13th? No, but I think it’d be silly to expect more than that. And it’s why I don’t have much interest in the series. Who cares about their backstories? I want Jason killing people! At least Chucky understood the assignment.
But the more I think about it, there is one “slasher” series that would translate well to television. One that relies on its creativity over all other elements. A Nightmare On Elm Street. It’s already so high concept compared to its contemporaries and the dream element would allow for such drastically different episodes. It can either be Anthology style like the 80’s show or even just an expanded Nightmare story being put into a season. Could you imagine the story of Elm Street from the original, to Dream Warriors, past Dream Master, and concluding with Dream Child? I’m not saying do a one-to-one, more pointing out that the bones are already there for an expanded, episodic story.
And the television landscape has changed a lot since Freddy was last on TV. The Walking Dead has blown the doors off of gore on cable TV, showing that you can get pretty crazy without much censoring. Then when you include streaming services and the possibilities for creative violence get even more tantalizing. It’s also no longer a place that big stars avoid, meaning some big stars may be open to getting killed by Krueger. We’ve already seen the crossover potential with the Chucky series. Would I want it to that degree? Probably not, but I’m just trying to show how financially viable it could be for a studio. Capitalism and all that.
There are so many ways to go about it that would be interesting: a continuation of the franchise a la Chucky where various members of the Elm Street franchise can potentially appear. Alice and Jesse are still hanging around and fans love them. Heck, throw in Lori from Freddy vs Jason. Or they can even make Freddy into a woman because that would be progressive and fresh (note: this is a joke. Please don’t change Freddy’s gender. We don’t need Francesca Krueger). I don’t even think the concept of recasting Krueger will be controversial so long as they get it right. Jackie Earl Haley may not have pulled it off in the remake, but people were genuinely excited at his casting. The Elm Street fanbase is more pliable than they’re given credit for. So there are so many things you can do that would still be in line with the series at its core. And I’ll always vote for a return to the anthology format.
Really this whole article is just a plea to bring back Freddy’s Nightmares and do it right. It’s such an interesting concept that could solve the problem of putting Robert Englund behind the makeup once more. Just bring him back as an episode as some kind of Alpha Freddy. Or hell, have Englund narrate and cast someone else as Krueger (an inevitability at this point). Episodes can be drastically different as the dream/nightmares would reflect the victim. Some victims can die, and some can vanquish Krueger. It doesn’t matter because, just like the Elm Street film, we always know that Freddy will return at the start of the next one. Now just imagine it happening in 10 one-hour episodes that we can binge. That’s a dream I want to live.
What do you think? Should the Nightmare on Elm Street series be brought to television? Is the Friday the 13th series doomed? Let us know in the comments!
What Do We Know About the upcoming series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy? More thank you may think. The Paramount+ original series will be the latest edition of the Star Trek universe and the first sequel series of Star Trek Discovery. With casting announcements, rumors, and more, we know a lot of what is to come. So, let’s jump in!
The series is set in the 32nd Century.
The twelfth Star Trek series since Gene Roddenberry’s original CBS show debuted in 1966, Starfleet Academy is the sixth small screen entry in the franchise since the debut of Discovery in 2017. Overseen by franchise-runner Alex Kurtzman, the new series was co-created with Noga Landau, who created the four-season-long Nancy Drew series for The CW. In development since Kurtzman’s original deal with CBS back in 2018, the series has gone through many iterations and timelines before settling on the future setting used since Discovery’s third season. Writers on the series include Gaia Volo and Lower Decks star Tawny Newsome. Newsome is the first Star Trek actor hired for a staff writing position in franchise history.
New stars and Trek veterans will lead the cast.
While the series is set a thousand years after the familiar eras of James Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard, Starfleet Academy is bringing back familiar faces from beyond just Star Trek: Discovery. While Discovery veterans like Mary Wiseman, Tig Notaro, and Oded Fehr will appear in their respective roles as Sylvia Tilly, Jett Reno, and Admiral Charles Vance, the new series is bringing back The Doctor, the holographic creation from Star Trek: Voyager, who Robert Picardo will once again play. The series will also feature Gina Yashere as an instructor with the young cadets played by Kerrice Brooks, Bella Shepard, George Hawkins, Karim Diané, and Zoë Steiner. Discovery star Doug Jones has voiced his desire to appear in the series and may guest star at some point.
Paul Giamatti playsthe villain, with Tatiana Maslany and Holly Hunter in key roles.
The big names attached to the series include Holly Hunter, who will portray the Chancellor of Starfleet Academy, and She-Hulk: Attorney At Law star Tatiana Maslany in an unidentified guest role. The big name attached to the series is Oscar-nominated actor Paul Giamatti, who plays the first season’s main antagonist. Alex Kurtzman initially approached Giamatti during the actor’s promotional rounds for 2023’s The Holdovers, during which he proclaimed his love for all things Star Trek and his desire to play a Klingon. Kurtzman gave Giamatti his roles in the new series, but details remain under wraps.
The series will not be about space exploration.
If the title does not give it away, Starfleet Academy will focus on the recruits to the new school to train cadets for the United Federation of Planets branches. Following the cadets from new recruits through graduation, the series will be set after the cataclysmic event forced Starfleet to regroup and start over from scratch. Early in 2024, production designer Matthew Davies oversaw the building of the set for Starfleet Academy’s atrium, the largest set ever built for a Star Trek series. Filling 45,900 square feet of the biggest soundstage in Canada, the atrium set is two stories tall and boasts a mess hall, amphitheater, multiple classrooms, catwalks, trees, and a view of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
Season two is already greenlit.
Despite being slowed by the 2023 Writer’s Guild and Actor’s Guild strikes, Starfleet Academy began production in August 2024 with Alex Kurtzman helming the first two episodes and Discovery director Olatunde Osunsanmi. Jonathan Frakes was offered the chance to helm an episode but could not do so due to a personal conflict. Frakes did express a desire to direct a season two episode, which may happen as Paramount has already greenlit a second season of the series. The first season is set to include ten episodes, keeping the content focused on a main narrative, which Tawny Newsome said will be about the younger generation, a tone and approach vastly different to any Trek project to date outside of the animated series Prodigy.
Starfleet Academy will premiere no earlier than the end of 2025.
Production on the first season of Starfleet Academy is underway, with Kurtzman stating he expected to helm his entries in October. Because the series is in front of cameras right now, it seems highly unlikely to be done with visual effects and post-production until well into the new year. Paramount still has the already filmed third season of Strange New Worlds and the Michelle Yeoh-led film Section 31 ready to premiere in 2025, so it is possible they may save Starfleet Academy until early 2026. Still, we likely will not know more until September 2025 during the annual Star Trek Day celebration.
Stay tuned to JoBlo.com as we learn more about Star Trek: Starfleet Academy and your other favorite shows. What do you expect to see in the upcoming season of Starfleet Academy? Let us know in the comments, click like, and subscribe to follow all our latest original videos.
Plot: Based on Charles Yu’s award-winning book of the same name, the show follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural called Black & White. Relegated to the background, Willis goes through the motions of his on-screen job, waiting tables, dreaming about a world beyond Chinatown and aspiring to be the lead of his own story. When Willis inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, he begins to unravel a criminal web in Chinatown, while discovering his own family’s buried history and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.
Review: Interior Chinatown is an interesting approach to telling a meta-fictional story. Rather than breaking the fourth wall or setting a story within a story, this series takes the approach of interconnecting characters often relegated to the background and showing how they can break free of their stereotypical and cliche constraints to become fully realized protagonists in their own stories. Based on the novel by Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown is awash in the tropes of television cop shows, past and present, and uses them to explore the idea of identity within a blend of comedy and mystery. With Taika Waititi aboard as executive producer and director, Interior Chinatown is a unique series with standout turns from the ensemble cast by Jimmy O. Yang and Chloe Bennet.
Set across ten episodes, each titled after a generic background character often seen in police procedurals, Interior Chinatown centers on Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang), a hapless waiter working in his uncle’s restaurant. Willis lives in a one-bedroom apartment near his mother, Lily (Diana Lin), an aspiring realtor, and his father, Sifu (Tzi Ma), a martial arts instructor. Willis’ older brother (Chris Pang) disappeared years earlier, and his absence still serves as a rift for the family. When Willis spots a woman getting kidnapped by masked men, his life is drawn into the police investigation led by Detective Sarah Green (Lisa Gilroy) and her partner Miles Turner (Sullivan Jones). Green and Turner have been assigned to work with a Chinatown expert, Detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet), who seeks out Willis to help her investigate. Willis encounters challenges in trying to break out of the mundane and banal life he leads in more ways than one.
Having seen the first five episodes, I was unsure what to expect from Interior Chinatown. Adapting the National Book Award-winning novel, which has its own way of illustrating the complex world these characters inhabit, seems like it would have been a challenge. Still, Charles Yu and Taika Waititi opened this series by setting up some of the rules of this world. While there are some parallels with the world of Free Guy in which the non-playable characters take center stage, the twists show how the world of Interior Chinatown functions are all built on lighting, camera styles, visual tone, and creative set design. Anyone who has seen an episode of Law & Order will recognize the visual cues of that series and similar cop shows, but the transition from that world to the world of Willis Wu is done seamlessly without overtly telling audiences what is going on. As each episode progresses, we follow Willis as he evolves from a waiter to a delivery guy, then a tech guy, and beyond as his ownership of his life expands. At the same time, the reason for his brother’s disappearance and why Lana Lee has entered Willis’ story become more apparent.
Jimmy O. Yang, who has had memorable turns in Silicon Valley and Space Force and success as a stand-up comedian, brings a layered performance to Willis Wu. Having to balance the surreal nature of this story along with some comedy, drama, and martial arts never phases the unexpected lead. Yang’s success is also due to a solid ensemble cast, including veteran actors Tzi Ma and Diana Lin as Willis’ parents, reuniting after playing a couple in The Farewell. Lisa Gilroy and Sullivan Jones are perfect as the procedural cops slowly realize something is off in their routine. Chloe Bennet plays Lana Lee with a hidden agenda that comes into focus as the series progresses. Bennet is initially seen through the male gaze, but her character becomes more integral to Willis’ journey in each episode. Archie Kao, Lauren Tom, and Chris Pang are great is supporting roles, but the standout is Ronny Chieng as Willis’ best friend, Fatty Choi. While Fatty’s journey is far different than Willis’ at the start of the series, The Daily Show correspondent gets to be incredibly funny as the best on-screen waiter I have seen in a long time.
Taika Waititi directed the first episode of the eight-episode series. Stephanie Liang and John Lee each directed two entries, and Ben Sinclair, Jaffar Mahmood, Alice Wu, Anu Valia, and Pete Chatmon each helmed an episode. Charles Yu led the adaptation of his own novel, which was a massive undertaking as this story was already complex as a book. Yu scripted the first and final episode of Interior Chinatown, enlisting Eva Anderson, Matt Okumura, Tiffany So, Saba Saghafi, Naiem Bouier, Keiko Green, Lauren Otero, Alex Russell, and Greg Cabrera to faithfully adapt the less-than-three-hundred page novel by adding new characters and exploring the mystery at the center of the series in a way that works on screen. The visual tricks used to transition between the worlds are mostly technical in nature. They may not have been as readily apparent during filming as they are in the finished product, but across the five episodes that I have seen, it is handled in a manner that I have not seen done in any other series or film before.
Interior Chinatown takes the idea of stereotypes and flips them on its head, offering a story about more than Asian-American identity. It also pays deep heed to the journey of immigrants from abroad to the United States. Jimmy O. Yang is a great choice to play the unassuming lead in a story he would usually have been a supporting player in. Without seeing the second half of the season, I anticipate that Interior Chinatown will become one of the better stories of identity and culture clashes, finding a place alongside Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Farewell, and The Sympathizer. Interior Chinatown is a truly unique approach to storytelling that brings comedy, mystery, drama, and surreal fantasy together to tell a great story as well as a story about storytelling.
Interior Chinatown premieres on November 19th on Hulu.
Just as we predicted earlier this week, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s mega-budget Christmas action-comedy, Red One, is set for one of the star’s lowest debuts. While the $30 million Deadline is predicting isn’t quite as bad as the $25 million we called earlier this week, given the movie’s $250 million price tag, this has to be seen as an embarrassing failure for The Rock. When all is said and done, he hasn’t had a legitimate box office smash since Jumanji: The Next Level back in 2019.
The one glimmer of hope for Red One is the fact that the movie has a surprisingly excellent CinemaScore, with the A-minus rating suggesting those who are going to see the movie are actually enjoying it. While I slammed it in my review, even if the movie fails theatrically, it will likely be a solid hit once it hits streaming, with it set to debut at some unspecified date on Prime Video (it was originally designed as a streaming exclusive). Given the holiday theme and the poor box office showing, I’d expect it to drop on Prime Video sooner rather than later.
Ironically, Red One may not actually be all that big of a flop for Amazon-MGM when all is said and done, as Christmas movies typically have a long shelf life. Movies like Jingle All the Way and The Polar Express were branded as failures when they came out, only to eventually become perennial favourites. If anything, the only one who really suffers is The Rock, with the poor opening likely seen as another ding against his waning star power. However, his Moana 2 will likely be a smash hit when it comes out in a few weeks, and his A24 drama, The Smashing Machine, may give him a boost of credibility. It might just be that audiences are sick of this kind of fare coming from him, as Red One has little going for it to distinguish it from Red Notice, Jungle Cruise or Jumanji.
Did any of you reading this see Red One this weekend? Let us know what you thought in the comments!
