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It only took 100 years but now Warner Bros has a new top grossing movie of all time.
Yesterday “Barbie” hit $537 million and passed Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight.”
The Greta Gerwig directed, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling starrer is now number 16 on the all time list of all studios, and is rapidly headed to replace number 15, “The Lion King.”
At WB this makes up for a lot after the disaster of “The Flash.” Toby Emmerich and his team should get a lot of praise for pushing the whole “Barbie” and Mattel idea through the studio. Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy came in and cheered it over the line. Nice work, all of them.
Will there be a “Barbie” sequel? Oh yes, and everyone will be paid handsomely. Will it be as good or as big of a hit? No! But it doesn’t matter. It’s out of everyone’s hands. It’s in the hands of the universe now!
PS Worldwide including the US “Barbie” is at almost $1.2 billion!!! That doesn’t include Japan, where it just opened this weekend.
Monday night, August 14th belonged to MSNBC with indictment coverage.
As the news broke through the evening that Donald Trump was getting the hook in Atlanta, MSNBC numbers blossomed like roses at the state fair.
Rachel Maddow came in with 3.9 million viewers, taking Sean Hannity by 1.5 million. He was left in the dust.
Hannity had to continue at 10pm because Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld is a joke. So Lawrence O’Donnell, with Maddow and other MSNBC stars helping, beat Hannity by 1 million pairs of eyes with 3.2 million. At 11pm, the MSNBC juggernaut continued, and pounded Fox to a pulp. By then whoever watches Fox was asleep or dead. MSNBC’s 3.5 million was about twice the Fox audience.
CNN, alas, had no game. None of their shows made it to 1 million viewers. Highest number of the night was Anderson Cooper at 8pm with 958,000.
Ari Melber and Chris Hayes each basically tied Fox News at their respective hours.
The lesson here is that when real news breaks, MSNBC has become the go-to organization. Fox News viewers even know they’re not going to get the truth or facts. CNN’s core fan base is strong, but if they were aggressive they could have their own following again.
This summer. “The Bachelorette” has been a bummer.
Maybe it’s because the people have been fairly normal, and not the usual jackals who compete in this crap fest.
Last night’s episode fell 11.6% from the prior Monday, and this was the one where all the guys come on and gossip about the previous episodes. This season’s ratings have averaged 2.3 million viewers, down about 1 million from the last season.
Next week is the finale, and it seems like anyone who’s interested already knows the ending. The Bachelorette, Charity Lawson, is smart and has a career as a child and family therapist. She’s not the show’s usual airheads. She’s also a college graduate whose primary focus isn’t on her nails or volleyball. So that may have turned off the TV audience.
Isn’t it time all of this ended? I know it’s cheaper to produce than real TV shows, and doesn’t need writers because no one would take credit for this junk. The ratings suggest the audience has lost interest. Time to cut bait.
This is not the way to win friends and influence people.
On social media, Donald Trump is calling Joe Biden the “Manchurian candidate.”
Trump is also reprinting his son’s post that cites indictments of Trump Sr. and Mark Meadows a “sham.”
Trump also reprints his son — Don Jr. — calling the Atlanta prosecutors “psychopaths.”
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Trump began the day shouting “Witch hunt!” He’s also attacked Fulton County DA Fani Willis. Trump has 10 days to turn himself in to Fulton County for arrest, arraignment, fingerprinting, and mug shot. These will not be 10 days of atonement, but just continued squealing like a pig.
Francis Ford Coppola has shown 30 minutes of his new film, “Megalopolis” to Spike Lee down in Atlanta.
Spike announced the meeting on Instagram just now. The movie, which should premiere in Cannes next May, stars a bunch of famous people including Aubrey Plaza, Jason Schwarzman, Dustin Hoffman, Shia LaBeouf, Adam Driver and many others.
The tour was scuttled when the singer fell ill last spring. She was hospitalized after being found “unresponsive.”
But since then she has responded, and the tour is back on. It starts in the UK on October 14th and winds it way through Europe.
On December 13th, Madonna finally appears in the US, at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, for three shows. She works right up til Christmas, takes a two week break, then resumes in Los Angeles at the Kia Forum on January 8th. She plays in Boston on the same date, so it’s clear that there are glitches still in the system! (There are a couple of other situations like this, too.) You know Madonna: she can do anything! Check her website for more info.
Ed Sheeran played a celebrity show last night in the Hamptons at the tiny Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett.
Lots of A listers turned up according to reports including Paul McCartney, who lives down the street, plus Angelica Huston, Stella McCartney, Billy Joel, Jerry Seinfeld, John Mayer, Howard Stern, Jon Bon Jovi, James Corden, Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav, Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Gwyneth Paltrow, Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan, Brooke Shields, and Christie Brinkley. That’s everyone although it seems hard to believe Jimmy Fallon was absent. Also didn’t Corden return to the UK?
I hope some of these people bought a copy of Sheeran’s “Minus” album or “Subtract.” Released in May, it’s Sheeran’s first album not to go gold. According to Luminate, “Minus” has sold the equivalent of around 320,000 albums. This follows the singer being exonerated in a plagiarism lawsuit over the song “Thinking Out Loud.” Sheeran played the song, but there was no word on whether he mentioned his triumph over the families of Marvin Gaye and Ed Townsend.
Ex-NFL player Michael Oher has made at least $22 million playing football. There are some estimates that he’s worth $34 million.
That’s swell, except Oher — now suing the Tuohy family, the ones who raised him and were featured in the movie “The Blind Side” — has not reciprocated with charity himself.
Oher runs The Oher Foundation, which is supposed to “provide individuals both in need and disadvantaged with empowering opportunities” according to its mission statement. He’s the president, and his wife, Tiffany, is the vice president.
The Ohers’ original foundation, called Beating the Odds, was formed in 2011 in Mississippi. But three years later it had never filed a tax return and its 501 c3 status was revoked by the IRS. It seems like this second iteration was formed in 2016 in Tennessee. The IRS didn’t catch that it was the same group starting up again in a different location.
So far, the Ohers haven’t done much to fulfill their mission. Three years of Form 990 tax statements from the Oher Foundation show little in the way of interest from the athlete in helping anyone. This is odd considering in his new book, “When Your Back’s Against the Wall,” Oher talks about his struggles as a young man including poverty, starvation, and homelessness. But from the Form 990s not filed and then filed under a different name, it would seem Oher is just about lip service and no action.
For example, in 2021, Oher showed $10,520 in revenue for the foundation. Grants to people who might have needed his help: zero (0). Nothing. Nada. And that’s down from $500 the previous year.
The foundation claimed net assets for 2021 of just $11,272.
I don’t know what the reality is of Oher’s issues with the Tuohy family, or the money that was made from “The Blind Side.” That will have to be dealt with in court. But when it comes to “paying it forward,” Oher hasn’t done much. The foundation has been in business since 2017. In those five years, he’s distributed less money than the average NFL player spends on dinner.
Bradley Cooper looks and sounds amazingly like composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein in the teaser trailer for “Maestro.”
Cooper is coming back for more Oscar attention after making the excellent “A Star is Born.” Carey Mulligan plays Felicia, Leonard’s long suffering wife. In this teaser, you just see their love story. But there will be dramatic fireworks when Felicia discovers the rest of Leonard’s life.
Netflix is sending “Maestro” to the Venice Film Festival, and we’ll see where else it turns up before its November release. It does look like a Best Picture nominee, making it the fourth perhaps in a group with “Oppenheimer,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and “AIR.”
This message was posted by Donald Trump around 10:20pm before the entire indictment document was read. He will surely have more to say later. He’s clueless.
