Weinsteins step down as Miramax CEOs

right? Queen is ridiculously popular and young people see Freddie Mercury as a musical genius. also the general public's music taste is hella basic and people would have gone to see it regardless of who the director was. (this is also why the Mamma Mia! movies were huge hits, even though half the cast couldn't carry a tune).

i'm a millennial (i think?) and ii literally have no recollection of Queen being an american pop culture touchstone other than the bit in wayne's world. i work at a small liberal arts college and have never seen anything to clue me in to Queen being popular amongst the youth. i've seen Joy Division, Black Sabbath, Big Star, Led Zeppelin etc. on tees but never Queen. i just don't understand what makes them more appealing subject matter for an imaginary movie than any other band from the last 40 years.

having said that, i fully acknowledge that I'm no authority on this subject matter. it just seems odd that no one I know likes Queen at all.

not so much that he works cheap, but rather that his films make lots and lots and lots of money for the studios. agree that he's a mediocre filmmaker, but he does know how to draw in moviegoers.

i was probably being overly generous, i think Singer is genuinely a very bad filmmaker. No imagination, no real style, brings nothing to the table except apparently a manila envelope with compromising photos idk. when I saw Usual Suspects it felt like a real con job of a movie, like a decent calling card for a screenwriter but certainly no classic. and fuck i mean for example Superman Returns was about five hours long, each hour longer than the previous, and no one has ever wanted to see it again and everyone has forgotten its existence.

Ha, when I saw Superman Returns mentioned in the article I was thinking, "Did that actually get released?"

how the fuck has BoHo made 800 mil

I know Queen are still super popular & basic (hence huge numbers) but still. STILL

That 800 Mil is worldwide gross, no?

Yup, $200 Mil domestic: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?view2=worldwide&yr=2018&p=.htm

Ohh

.....still?

Looked up Titanic, $2.1 billion worldwide.

Avatar $2.7B but maybe that's not a "drama."

Queen is great, you herbs

NB he was the band’s first choice to direct the Queen pic, not the studio’s.

not their first, since he didn’t come on until about seven years into active development, and was replaced mid-production by the director who’d been signed four years earlier but walked bcz he thought the “band”’s approach to the script was dumb and bad, a year or two after the star had walked bcz he thought the band’s approach to the script was dumb and bad

^ not a major nitpick in this thread’s specific context, but it took a while to find a team who was really keen to tell a bland story that glossed over the sexual attitudes of the protagonist, and...

he was very hot coming off Usual Suspects but x-men/x2 and bohemian rhapsody were can’t-miss and the rest is box office disappointment if not out and out flops. Superman Returns? Jack the Giant-Killer?

Superman Returns is his second-highest grossing film in adjusted dollars!

Rank	Title (click to view)	Studio	Adjusted Gross	Unadjusted Gross	Release
1	X2: X-Men United	Fox	$321,889,800	$214,949,694	5/2/03
2	Superman Returns	WB	$275,837,100	$200,081,192	6/28/06
3	X-Men	Fox	$263,528,100	$157,299,717	7/14/00
4	X-Men: Days of Future Past	Fox	$254,041,000	$233,921,534	5/23/14
5	Bohemian Rhapsody	Fox	$203,079,400	$203,079,367	11/2/18
6	X-Men: Apocalypse	Fox	$160,860,200	$155,442,489	5/27/16
7	Valkyrie	UA	$100,963,000	$83,077,833	12/25/08
8	Jack the Giant Slayer	WB (NL)	$73,849,500	$65,187,603	3/1/13
9	The Usual Suspects	Gram.	$48,453,900	$23,341,568	8/18/95
10	Apt Pupil	Sony	$17,065,000	$8,863,193	10/23/98

gross has to be compared against budget and expectations. point of all of this being, how does a guy with Singer’s track record and known baggage keep getting major gigs?

i think Singer is genuinely a very bad filmmaker. No imagination, no real style, brings nothing to the table except apparently a manila envelope with compromising photos idk.

Disagree, with X2 as evidence. I didn't mind him in the early '00s when he treated the genre seriously and added queer subtexts.

who the fuck is paying money to see bohemian rhapsody? does anyone under 40 listen to Queen? is there a hot youtube star playing brian may that i don't know about? does bowie make a beyond the grave cameo? is there a scene where they're writing "we are the champions" everything about it seems so so bad. i know baby boomers still get to decide what gets nominated for awards but those box office numbers are more than just old white dudes turning out right? why does anyone care? freddy mecury was certainly a charismatic figure but the story of "Queen" isn't what i would have considered interesting enough to be a box office smash.

― dynamicinterface, Thursday, January 24, 2019 9

I don't blame you for not hanging around teenagers, but the movie was a big deal to them, at least the ones I talked to over the holiday break: Mom and Dad listening to Queen with the kids, with Mom and Dad themselves converted in 1992.

^^ check out. 'Queen Greatest Hits II' (that blue one) was released in 1991 and I remember that cd begin *everywhere* at the time.

*checks

Good Omens injoke about every car containing a cassette of Queen’s Greatest Hits is troooooooo

added queer subtexts.

I mean, I can’t read more than three panels of Claremont before my eyes dry up, but I’m given to understand he baked the subtext into the source pretty richly

i agree Singer took the genre seriously and X2 is fine, but he's very uninspired. the subtext alone isn't much to write home about imo bc it's not done very interestingly. I won't draw a line in the sand there because i have no real issue w/anyone thinking he's solid, since that's all separate from the larger issues at play at present. I guess the main question is, why is Bryan Singer of all filmmakers too valuable as a talent to exile? He is a replacement level talent, at best. This is not a new thing, these allegations have gone back for twenty years and unlike other rumors the stories ring true.

he's not talented enough for me to protest a blacklist, so throw'em in the thorns

Singer kinda takes me back to the days of late-'90s AOL movie message boards when people would list their "best filmmakers of all time" and the lists would be like Hitchcock, Scorsese, Kubrick, Tarantino, Darabont, Singer, Kevin Smith.

have not seen any Singer films except Usual Suspects, which was a decent stunt-noir I suppose. I think you can tell he loves 16-year-olds from his subsequent filmography.

why is Bryan Singer of all filmmakers too valuable as a talent to exile?

or, is bryan singer even the low bar? how far down could you go? is the guy who directed deuce bigalow too big to throw under the bus?

Hollywood is an industry run by cargo-cultists; nobody who has ever delivered the cargo is too foul to run off the island.

people are maybe overlooking the general entertainment industry omertà and the fact that bryan singer knows where the bodies are buried wrt lots of other powerful influential men in hollywood

is the guy who directed deuce bigalow too big to throw under the bus?

Lego Movie 2 isn’t out for two weeks, you’d better hurry up if you want to cancel him

people are maybe overlooking the general entertainment industry omertà and the fact that bryan singer knows where the bodies are buried wrt lots of other powerful influential men in hollywood

― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Friday, January 25, 2019 12:12 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

BINGO

Wonder if it was the same for R Kelly.

I don't think it's as complicated as any of these theories.

I think it's more like this: If Singer loses work based on rumours and articles, (or the three lawsuits that I can recall have been dismissed-- Apt Pupil, Michael Egan, John Doe), it leaves the studios that are terminating his employment open to wrongful dismissal suits.

Should a studio fire Singer over these rumours and articles, It may also leave his allegers open to graver suits of defamation-- if any allegations against Singer cause him to lose work, he can cite the lost work as damages incurred in defamation suits against his allegers.

I think it’s pretty easy to not give him more work, Bohemian Rhapsody’s production sounds like it was a debacle and if they can’t point to these allegations they can point to his recent work history.

Meantime...

On a 10-min break halfway through Sundance’s 4-hour Michael Jackson child sex abuse documentary. Whatever you thought you knew or were aware of, the content of this is more disturbing than you could imagine. And again, we’re only halfway through.

— Kevin Fallon (@kpfallon) January 25, 2019

people are maybe overlooking the general entertainment industry omertà and the fact that bryan singer knows where the bodies are buried wrt lots of other powerful influential men in hollywood

There's a lot of discussion of whether artistically or financially Singer merits the protection he's been given

idk, speaking for myself it’s not whether he merits protection or whatever. as also noted above, unwinding existing agreements is thorny. the question I’m asking is why a replacement-value director with heavy baggage keeps getting hired for new projects when there are plenty of replacement-value directors without baggage.

still a lotta MJ defenders I see

xps

don't know what ind of traction #mutemj would get now; curious about how people feel about erasure for bad dead people vs bad living people. Obviously the idea of supporting someone still capable of doing shitty things hits harder logically but are we gonna start backward looking with artistic boycott.

people are maybe overlooking the general entertainment industry omertà and the fact that bryan singer knows where the bodies are buried wrt lots of other powerful influential men in hollywood

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/arts/music/ryan-adams-women-sex.html

Going to read more but saw that part: Mandy Moore was married to Adams for nearly six years. What she called his psychologically abusive behavior stalled her music career: “He would always tell me, ‘You’re not a real musician, because you don’t play an instrument.’ and yikes.

lots and lots of yikes in there. one of my best friends is a superfan and she is having a hard time with this. :(

http://www.tcj.com/hubris-and-chutzpah-how-lil-abner-kayod-joe-palooka-and-both-their-creators-came-to-grief-part-8/

thanks for posting that -- i've been reading every installment of that al capp/ham fisher story since it started running several weeks ago, it's a fascinating piece of deep reporting with some pretty shocking moments. i recommend starting from the beginning and reading the whole thing if you have some time. i knew capp was an appalling guy but he seems almost evil after reading that stuff.

I've been skipping it bcz I can't tell if it's newly written &/or expanded, or the same version Harvey published in TCJ in the '90s, but I'll dip into this chapter

i don't THINK this is old? i knew most of this story but some of the details are truly fucked up

read this one: seems to be much the same as the old version, except this time treating sexual assault as serious, and not inserting comedy asides about how amusing we all should find the idea of a man with one leg, chasing a teenager around a desk, in the office of people with a duty of care to her

Emma Thompson writes to the producers of "Luck" re their hiring of John Lasseter, who recently left Disney/Pixar following multiple allegations of sexual misconduct. https://t.co/Bfxcn2bgNB pic.twitter.com/6ouWBkClpv

— Letters of Note (@LettersOfNote) February 26, 2019

Warner Bros. CEO:

For 15 months, @kimmasters & have been working on this story. Today, we finally hit publish. https://t.co/yfw1ClSB3S via @thr

— Tatiana Siegel (@TatianaSiegel27) March 6, 2019