There isn’t much going on that the box office except “Minecraft.”
Warner Bros. should be happy. They’re looking at a $40 million weekend for a movie based on a video game.
It’s “IP” baby! They could make one every 18 months.
Jason Momoa and Jack Black are the stars. Reviews are bad, just 48% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics, and only 82% on the audience meter.
But it’s probably mindless fun.
Look for a big Sunday as Jack Black is also hosting “Saturday Night Live.”
God bless.
Didn’t Elton John retire recently? The tabloids say he’s near death and completely blind.
Of course none of that is true. Sir Elton just turned 78 and dropped an exceptionally good album today with Brandi Carlile. “Who Believes in Angels?” is one of his best recordings ever.
For one thing, the album ends with a career-best song from Elton and Bernie Taupin called “When This Old World is Done with Me.” It’s sort of their “My Way,” but it’s eons more sublime and features powerful lyrics that Elton sings with the gusto of a 30 year old. Andrew Watt supplies a thrilling production with a unique throwback ending of just Elton, a piano wizard, on the most lovely instrumental ending.
“When This Old World” had better get a Grammy nomination next winter for Best Song.
Brandi Carlile makes for a sterling collaborator on “Angels.” I always forget how much I like her until I hear her voice again. She’s also kind of a unicorn in the way she’s sought out Joni Mitchell and Elton John as elder statesmen. She really loves and admires them for real, and you can feel it. Brandi has her own outstanding solo track on the album, called “You Without Me,” which might be her “Landslide.” It’s deceptively light as a feather. Her fans will be singing it aloud at concerts.
The rest of the tracks on “Who Believes in Angels?” are satisfying, catchy, and brilliantly constructed. My standouts right now are the title track, and everything else on side 2. The albu is sort of divided between a ‘disc one’ of rocky-ier numbers and ‘disc two’ — of more intimate numbers. “The River Man” is the highlight of the duets, matching the best of these two brilliant performers.
“Who Believes in Angels?” is also being marketed with real intelligence. Tomorrow on YouTube we’ll see the Q&A from tonight’s appearance at the 92nd St Y. Tomorrow night, the pair will be on “SNL.” The next morning they’re featured on “CBS Sunday Morning.” You can’t do better than this plan!
George Clooney really understood the meaning of “Go big or go home” last night.
Clooney’s $900 a ticket Broadway debut in “Good Night and Good Luck” really paid off. His star turn as crusading CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow is getting praise.
The opening night at Broadway’s massively big Winter Garden Theater brought out an A list crowd in formal attire that theater denizens will be talking about for years to come.
There was even an A list crowd that featured an “ER” reunion with Anthony Edwards, Juliana Margulies, and Noah Wyle.
The theater was so packed with stars that business partner Rande Gerber and his wife, Cindy Crawford, and their daughter Kaia Gerber had to sit in the first mezzanine.
(Not everyone dug the show, though: for some reason, Drew Barrymore, who was sitting two seats away from me, skipped out after 20 minutes. Go figure.)
Hugh Jackman was there, along with Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan, Uma Thurman, Richard Kind, legendary comedian Robert Klein, Kylie Minogue, Pierce Brosnan and Kelly Shaye Smith. and tons of media stars like Lesley Stahl, Chris Wallace, George Stephanopolous and Alexandra Wentworth, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, Stephanie Ruhle, Willie Geist, Graydon Carter, Gayle King, and of course, a jaw dropping Jennifer Lopez, who’s made overdressing for Broadway a new standard. (How do the people around her concentrate on the show?)
No sign, however, of Clooney’s wife, Amal. And Clooney pal Julia Roberts came on the night before with husband and son. They probably wanted to stay out of the star studded scrum. (It was a word I heard a lot last night.)
There was an overwhelmingly giltzy party that followed at the New York Public Library, the same place where Clooney apparently had a huge charity party last year. He knows to paint the town red!
Ironically, “red” was a theme last night politically, too, as “Good Night and Good Luck” — which Clooney wrote and produced with Grant Heslov — concerns the 1950s terrorizing of the press and the public by Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy’s counsel on the infamous House Unamerican Activities Committee was the nefarious Roy Cohn, mentor in later years to Donald Trump.
Is the picture getting clearer? The play — like the Clooney and Heslov movie it’s based on — is more timely than ever as Trump, using the Cohn and McCarthy playbook, threatens the very existence of press freedoms. Murrow and his team at CBS Radio, circa 1954, bravely confronted these evil men whose goal was to destroy everything around them.
Director David Cromer and production designer Scott Pask light up the stage with an enormous set inspired by CBS Radio’s studio above Grand Central Station a looming art deco backdrop, and the unique positioning of a 50s jazz singer and band stationed above the action to give the feel of the moment in time. (Georgia Heers, named Ella after Ella Fitzgerald, is a welcome counterpoint, with her buttery voice. She and “Maybe Happy Ending” singer Dez Duronn need their own category at the Tony Awards this year.) With Clooney and Heslov they use real black and white video clips from the era — especially of McCarthy– that punctuate the Senator’s sinister attacks.
Carter Hudson and Ilana Glazer are standouts as secretly married producer couple Joe and Shirley Wershba — who I was lucky enough to know 30 years later in the 1980s, Glenn Fleshler, of “Billions” is CBS’s Fred Friendly, Clark Gregg is Don Hollenbeck, a tragic figure, and Fran Kranz is Palmer Willliams. They are all top notch as Murrow’s Olympic team of journalists.
Clooney, with his dyed black hair and hang dog comportment, told me that he was scared of making his Broadway debut at 63. But when he steps on stage in character to a dais at a 1958 radio convention to deliver the first of several monologues, you can tell he has “it.” There’s no denying his star power, or his investment in the character of Murrow, whom David Straithairn played in the movie. This was a daring pivot for the movie and TV star, and the gamble paid off.
Clark Gregg gets the line of the night as on the ropes Hollenbeck, who’s been branded a “pinko” and is suffering the heat of being branded a Communist.(He eventually committed suicide.) In a line added to the play, Hollenbeck says to Murrow as the hateful McCarthy pursues him: “I wake up in the morning, and I don’t recognize anything. I feel like I went to sleep three years ago, and somebody hijacked … as if all reasonable people took a plane to Europe and left us behind.”
The audience bursts into applause, because that’s the way it feels now as Trump and Elon Musk take a chainsaw to the foundations of finance and culture. Cromer ends the play with a stunning montage of clips trying the past to the present. As Rachel Maddow said to me before the play even began — but after a long day of chaos in the real word — “we are in deep trouble.” We were then, too, in 1954, but we survived it. “Good Night and Good Luck” is assurance we’ll survive this, too.
One last thing: Michael J. Fox is nothing short of a miracle. So is Pollan. Michael was in his tuxedo, pushed in a wheelchair. We can’t imagine the effort that goes into the day to day living. He is a shining star for everyone dealing with Parkinson’s. Absolutely stunning, both of them!
Radhika Jones is out as editor of Vanity Fair.
Her reign has been marked by eight years of declining circulation and the ugliest covers in the history of magazines.
The current cover of Gwyneth Paltrow as an unwilling dominatrix is maybe the worst of the bunch so far.
Jones says she’s ready to take on new challenges. Yada yada yada.
Conde Nast lets Anna Wintour be the shadow editor of Vanity Fair. When she chooses the next person to run the show she’ll have to be careful. Vanity Fair has been reduced to an Oscar party. The online version still has strong stories, but the magazine’s influence has waned considerably.
What to do? Buy Air Mail and bring back Graydon Carter. That would at least get everyone’s attention.
Bruce Springsteen’s “Tracks 2” is coming on June 27th.
The boxed set will be pretty heavy. It contains 7 unreleased albums that include 83 songs. It takes up 9 discs.
Holy moly.
And not on it: “Electric Nebraska,” which we won’t get until the “Deliver Us from Nowhere” movie is released, and “Only the Strong Survive 2.” And who knows what else?
“Tracks 2” will take a month to absorb for even the best Springsteen fans. That’s a lot of music!
Here’s the first single, “Rain in the River,” from the album, “Perfect World”
Overnight, Kanye West posted a few times to Twitter.
He offered a tracklist for a new album that might be called “Bully,” which may or may not exist.
The new tracklist is adorned with swastikas. The songs are called “WW3,” “Cosby,” “Free Diddy,” “Dirty Magazines,” “BIanca,” “Virgil Let Me Down,” “Heil Hitler,” “Hitler Ye and Jesus,” “Jared,” “Money and Fame,” and “Nitrous..
“Bianca” would be about his wife, Bianca Censori, who he said in another post left him. There’s a rumor she’s trying to get a divorce after being paraded around naked for about a year.
“Jared” refers to Donald Trump’s nephew, who made billions during the first administration and is now missing from the White House.
The Virgil in “Virgil” would be Virgil Abloh, the designer who died in 2021 at the age of 41 from a rare cancer. Recently, West has been ranting on social media that before his death Abloh abandoned him over the rapper’s spewing of antisemitic comments.
The latter is part of West’s continued paranoia. He’s got feuds going on his head that no one cares about. Explaining them is pointless.
If there is a new album, West would have to release it on his own. If it does sing the praises of Hitler and contain Nazi images, I would hope streaming platforms would refuse to carry it.
Broadway openings are starting to look like Hollywood galas.
Tonight (Thursday) comes George Clooney opening in “Good Night and Good Luck.” You can only imagine who we’ll see there. Maybe his ER pal Anthony Edwards, who just hit the carpet for “Glengarry Glen Ross.” (He’s like the nicest guy in the world.)
At “Glengarry,” there were dozens of names see link here. I should have added Jesse Eisenberg, who is doing an Oscar victory lap, and NY actor Frederick Weller, who starred in a “Glengarry” revival years ago.
All of them were perfectly nice, hugged each other, and showed a real camaraderie. Everyone stopped and got their picture taken. Except one.
While we were waiting, a lovely young woman appeared from the 47th St side and indicated to the theater publicist that she had a star ready to walk in.
“Only he’s not taking photos,” said the woman, who then went out into 47th St. to find the black SUV which bore her mysterious client. A few heads craned as the assistant walked to and fro in the street, in light rain, peering in blackened windows.
So who bigger than Lorne Michaels, Tony Goldwyn, Sarah Snook, and so on that they didn’t want to be seen? Why, it was…drum roll…
Chris Pine! The “Star Trek” and “Wonder Woman” star managed to slip out of the limo, up the escalator to the newly renovated Palace Theater and into his seats without being spotted. Alas, during intermission he was “made,” so to speak. He did not come to party later at Tao downtown.
Wait: back to Sarah Snook who used her day off from “The Picture of Dorian Gray” to come support her “Succession” brother Kieran Culkin in his second Broadway outing ever. These two “Succession” grads are very likely to get Tony Awards this June in their respective shows, which is really amazing — and deserved.
Snook is on stage at her show, 8 perfs a week (two on Weds, Sat) playing TWENTY SIX parts in countless costumes and make up. She talks for two hours straight, often rapidly, and runs around like it’s a marathon.
“Why aren’t you asleep right now?” I asked her. “How are you even moving?”
She looked very subtly glamorous in black and white, by the way, fresh as a daisy. Her husband said, “I asked her that, too!” Sarah replied: “You just do the job.” Those Brits and their work ethic!
PS Here’s our Regina Weinreich’s portrait of the “Succession” siblings.
For some reason, Will Smith thought everyone wanted a new rap album from him.
It turns out, they did not.
Smith’s “Based on a True Story,” is dead on arrival, DOA.
Currently, number 11 on iTunes, “Based on a True Story” is number 2 of all rap albums. There’s no single on the charts and nothing on the radio. There’s no vinyl available.
Hitsdailydouble.com predicts “Based on a True Story” won’t make the top 20 albums of the week when the counting happens on Friday.
The album has terrible reviews, too. Critics have complained that all the fun of Smith’s “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” and his songs like “Summertime,” and “Get Jiggy Wit It” has been replaced by anger. In the opening number, Smith defends his famous Oscar slap of 2022 (see: Oscars, Chris Rock) which landed him a 10 year suspension from the Motion Picture Academy.
Apparently, “Parents Don’t Understand,” after all, and kids don’t care what a many times-over millionaire famous for public violence and being a cuck has to say about anything. Maybe if he’d taken the high road it would have helped.
There’s also a lot of foul language, which is okay for younger or at least full time rappers. But from the opening track, the “f” and “n” words are heard throughout the lyrics. Will Smith is 56 years old. His fans would have been looking for clever nostalgia, not being hit in the face.
“Based on a True Story” is also a vanity project, paid for by Smith and then distributed by small, indie label Slang Records. Luckily, he has enough money to underwrite the project, including videos. None of them for this album — the average number of views per video on YouTube for each one is about 50,000.
No show I can think of recently has had such a ratings rollercoaster as “The White Lotus.”
The HBO dramedy goes up and down like the ponies on the carousel (sorry Joni Mitchell).
Two weeks ago the big incest episode actually fell from the previous week.
This past Sunday, viewers probably thought the incest would be addressed. It wasn’t, but the numbers rose 28% nonetheless. Episode 7, in which not a lot happened, jumped to 956,000– the highest so far.
This coming Sunday will wrap up Season 3 with a 90 minute finale — the equivalent of one and a half episodes. We assume we’ll discover who is floating in the water, who did the deed, and how everything else is resolved.
My guess: somehow Timothy’s lawyer gets him off and the Ratliffs go home happy, wealthy, and white. Piper stays behind in Thailand. There’s some speculation that Timothy remains in Thailand, like Russell Simmons, but that wouldn’t protect Victoria from the law — or humiliation — at home.
Will the end be satisfying? Probably not, but good news — there will be no tariffs!
There’s been a lot of talk in the last 24 hours about the Michael Jackson biopic, “Michael.”
Both Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro and TheInsneider’s Jeff Sneider have been on the track of this movie since Lionsgate made no mention of the potential blockbuster at CinemaCon this week.
Now I can confirm exclusively that “Michael” will be split into 2 two hour films, and they will be released in 2026. There will not be a release in 2025.
My sources in the Michael Jackson world are very excited about these developments because the King of Pop, they say, deserves more attention than any other music star.
Given that the Beatles will get four movies in 2028, a Michael two-parter makes sense. I’m hearing this will be a la “Wicked,” although the two parts will occur in the same calendar year. That will make it easier in awards season.
This gives Sony Music enough time to organize soundtracks and tie-ins, and to get everyone ready for Michael’s nephew, Jafaar, who plays his uncle in the movie, up to speed in the public eye. Sources who’ve seen footage of Jafaar can’t stop raving about his performance.
Who’s not talking? The Michael Jackson Estate. They’re playing everything close to the vest considering they’re managing the “MJ” Broadway musical, a smash all over the world (and separate from the movie). After the live show and the movie, what can they do next? How about an opera? It would make sense!
PS Michael Jackson sales and airplay are already booming in the first quarter of 2025.