Innholdsfortegnelse for January 5, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

In the days before the U.S. premiere of The Matrix Resurrections in San Francisco on Dec. 18, rumors began swirling that the movie was part of a new trilogy. There were whispers that back-to-back shoots could happen and that a spinoff series based on a character named Bugs, a breakout in the movie played by Jessica Henwick, was in the works for HBO Max. However, HBO Max insiders insist no series is in development. And movie sequels to the Warner Bros. reboot may prove glitchy as well. Sources tell THR that star Keanu Reeves does not have sequel options, and it’s unclear if director Lana Wachowski wants to make more. It’s no surprise that Warner Bros. and sister company HBO Max may be downplaying such speculation: Matrix Resurrections, which reportedly…

In the mid-’70s, Bob Dylan holed up at the circa-1949 Malibu Riviera Hotel to write Blood on the Tracks. The Point Dume hideaway is also where Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield were rumored to have gotten away from the glare of Hollywood. Now, the property — which was turned into the Native Malibu hotel in 2017 only to suffer extensive damage in a 2018 fire — has been reborn as Hotel June Malibu (rooms from $425 a night, 28920 Pacific Coast Highway, thehoteljune.com). This new chapter is a partnership between Proper Hospitality and the creative team behind its previous incarnation. The pandemic became an opportunity to build additional amenities, giving guests more excuses to stay put and unplug — those include a sunken swimming pool with scores of sun loungers…

Many events may have been scrapped amid the latest COVID-19 surge, but there was no stopping the turning of the calendar page as a handful of New Year’s Eve celebrations ushered in 2022. Although a number of performers — including LL Cool J, Chlöe Bailey and Karol G — dropped out, ABC’s Dick Clark Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest persevered with Ashanti and Ja Rule joining as last-minute headliners alongside Journey. Miley Cyrus and Pete Davidson hosted a NYE party for NBC, with performers Brandi Carlile, Jack Harlow and Saweetie, and on CNN, Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen returned for their annual countdown. Got tips? Email rambling@thr.com…

They shared their fears about showing vulnerability, their sense of responsibility when wielding guns on sets — and an improbable connection over a moody horse named Rain Man. In December, Nicolas Cage (Pig), Peter Dinklage (Cyrano), Andrew Garfield (Tick, Tick… Boom! and The Eyes of Tammy Faye), Jonathan Majors (The Harder They Fall) and Simon Rex (Red Rocket) gathered and bonded at THR’s annual Actor Roundtable. If you were teaching an acting class, what would be your first lesson? ANDREW GARFIELD It would be something to do with freedom, something to do with humiliation, in the sense of allowing oneself to fail in front of a bunch of people that you don’t want to fail in front of. I say that maybe because that feels like it’s been my journey…

I dina Menzel is no stranger to the Academy Awards, having performed two Oscar-winning songs — Frozen’s “Let It Go” and Frozen 2’s “Into the Unknown” — at the ceremony. But this year, she may have the chance to showcase her own song writing during the live broadcast as her song “Dream Girl,” from Amazon’s Cinderella, has landed on the shortlist for best original song. “Dream Girl,” co-written with Nashville based two-time Grammy nominee Laura Veltz, is the standout number for Menzel’s Vivian, the stepmother to Camila Cabello’s Cinderella. In writer-director Kay Cannon’s version of the fairy tale, Vivian isn’t just the canonical wicked stepmother — she is a product of her time, a woman who was forced to give up her dreams in order to marry and find security…

Pitching his would-be Western for the better part of the 2010s, Jeymes Samuel had been in a lot of tough rooms. One of the most nerve-wracking was in customs and immigration at LAX. At the time, Samuel had been flying back and forth between Los Angeles and his native U.K. so much that, he says, he was flagged by immigration. “I said, ‘Listen, I am trying to work here but I am not being paid. I am trying to make a movie.’ They said, ‘What’s the movie?’” So, as he did on studio lots and to indie financiers many, many times before, Samuel pitched The Harder They Fall, a Western that brings together an all-Black cast for a fictionalized epic about how real-life Old West legend Nat Love (Jonathan Majors)…

Hollywood studio executives breathed a sigh of relief in October and November when overall moviegoing comfort levels hit an average 76 percent, the best of the COVID-19 era. While consumers ages 35 and older still were more nervous than their younger counterparts, progress was being made. Yet those comfort levels plummeted 10 points to 66 percent by Christmas — the lowest since August, during the delta wave — as COVID-19 cases spiked again due to the omicron variant, according to National Research Group, which polls moviegoers on a weekly basis. The box office recovery was again in peril. Sure, December superhero blockbuster Spider-Man: No Way Home did huge business — the box office now belongs to males ages 18-34 — and families turned up for Sing 2. But adult-skewing fare…

BEST PICTURE Spider-Man: No Way Home On the heels of its opening (second best of all time), this critically acclaimed superhero flick (94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) became 2021’s top-grossing film domestically and passed $1 billion worldwide. Now, as THR first reported, it will get a best picture Oscar push. Don’t Look Up Adam McKay’s star-studded dark comedy bowed on Netflix on Christmas Eve and was slammed by critics (55 percent on RT) but is huge on the service (Netflix says it’s No. 1 in 88 of the 89 countries in which it’s available). Licorice Pizza After debuting to huge per-theater numbers in limited release, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest opened wide but grossed just $2.3 million and was slammed for a recurring bit mocking a character’s accent (with one Asian-American…

In Focus If 2020 and 2021 were the years Hollywood stars proved their mettle in podcasting, 2022 could be the year top influencers find their stride in audio. A survey of U.S. listeners by Acast and Nielsen finds that nearly 40 percent of respondents say they want podcasts from YouTubers and influencers, outranking interest in shows from music and TV personalities. Already TikTok stars like Addison Rae and the D’Amelio sisters have released their own shows, with the former signing an exclusive deal with Spotify in 2020 for a show hosted with her mom, Sheri Nicole. YouTuber turned boxer Logan Paul has a comedy podcast that has garnered 3.5 million subscribers for its YouTube companion page. Emma Chamberlain, who has 11.2 million YouTube subscribers and hosts the show Anything Goes,…

Hot in Cleveland was such a happy set — Betty said it was the happiest she’d ever been on, and that meant the world to me. Betty, Valerie [Bertinelli], Jane [Leeves] and Wendie [Malick] loved and respected one another so much. When we did the pilot, Betty’s entrance received a three-and-a-half-minute standing ovation, and in the writers room we called her “The Hammer” — because she nailed every joke. One day I showed up to the set and she was kissing an actual tiger on the mouth. I asked if he was a good kisser and she said, “Breath like an angel.” When Robert Wagner guest-starred, he surprised her with an unscripted kiss at the end of a scene. When asked how that was, Betty deadpanned, “In this business, you…

To make his first musical, 20th Century Studios’ adaptation of the classic West Side Story, Steven Spielberg assembled a sound team that included some trusted and long-time collaborators. Among them were supervising sound editor/rerecording mixer Gary Rydstrom of Skywalker Sound — a seven-time Oscar winner for films like Spielberg’s Jurassic Park and Saving Private Ryan — and rerecording mixer Andy Nelson, a 21-time Oscar nominee who won statuettes for Saving Private Ryan and Les Misérables. Spielberg also enlisted four-time Oscar-nominated production sound mixer Tod Maitland, who brought a background in musicals but still describes working on West Side Story as “the most complicated, difficult but rewarding” film he’d ever done. “About 80 percent of it was [shot] on location, and it was a brutally hot summer,” says Maitland of making…

It’s been a particularly busy year for Jonny Greenwood. The Radiohead guitarist is the mind behind the scores for three major awards-season contenders: MGM/United Artists’ Licorice Pizza, Netflix’s The Power of the Dog and Neon’s Spencer, the latter two landing on the Oscar shortlist for best original score. Greenwood’s first composition for a narrative feature came with 2007’s There Will Be Blood. (His first time composing for film happened years earlier with the documentary Bodysong). There Will Be Blood kicked off a longtime collaboration with director Paul Thomas Anderson that has gone on to include The Master, Inherent Vice and Phantom Thread, which earned Greenwood an Oscar nomination for best original score. He reteamed with the director this year on Licorice Pizza, a romantic comedy set in 1973. This year…

In the first episode of HBO Max’s Peacemaker, a character offers a snap judgment of Christopher Smith, aka Peacemaker, aka the title character played by John Cena. “Sexist. Probably racist,” she says. “But there’s something else about him that’s… sad.” That “something sad” proves to be the bruised heart of Peacemaker, beating from underneath thick layers of juvenile humor and self-aware snark. Like so much of creator James Gunn’s work in the super-something realm, the series is equally interested in provoking giggles at exploding heads or dick jokes as it is in wringing tears for its poor tragic weirdos. And while it more or less succeeds on both counts, it struggles to stand out in a sea of other superhero content doing much the same thing — often at the…

Source: Comscore, Jan. 1, 2021-Jan. 2, 2022. *Still in release Thanksgiving provided the starving specialty box office with a needed feast when Licorice Pizza posted a stellar per-location average of $86,289 from four theaters in New York City and Los Angeles. For decades, art house distributors have relied on what’s known as a “platform” release to grow their films slowly before expanding nationwide. The pandemic eradicated this practice — until now. United Artists Releasing and MGM decided to take a chance on just New York and L.A. for Licorice Pizza. The plan worked, and the film entered the top 10 when expanding weeks later into 786 theaters over Christmas. “It was definitely a risk,” says UAR distribution chief Erik Lomis. In late October, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch opened in…

Deal of the Week On the first business day of 2022, AMC Theatres CEO Adam Aron shared his New Year’s resolution with his Twitter followers. “If we can, in 2022 I’d like to refinance some of our debt to reduce our interest expense, push out some debt maturities by several years and loosen covenants,” he wrote. The fact that AMC has an improving financial position after nearly two years of a global pandemic is something of a miracle in and of itself. A year ago this month, the movie theater company was reeling from the pandemic, facing potential bankruptcy, and its stock was trading at $2 a share. And then it became a meme. Online traders gathering on platforms like Reddit and TikTok embraced the company’s stock, and propelled its…

The night before Renate Reinsve received the call from director Joachim Trier, she had decided to give up acting after years of frustration with the roles being offered her in Norwegian film and TV. “Two-dimensional female characters just there to serve the plot,” she recalls. Then she got the call. “It was literally the next day. Joachim called and said, ‘I’m writing a movie and I want you to play the lead. I’m writing it with you in mind,’” she says. Trier remembered Reinsve from her one-line role — “Let’s go to the party!” — in his 2011 film, Oslo, August 31st, when the actress was still in theater school. After seeing her onstage in works by Chekhov and Ibsen, he knew her talent was being wasted on bad Norwegian…

Fred Savage had no intention of revisiting his past. In fact, he said as much, multiple times, when asked about a potential Wonder Years revival. “And I stand by it,” he says now. While the coming-of-age comedy that premiered this fall bears the Wonder Years name, the former star insists Saladin K. Patterson’s version is an entirely new show, built around a Black family from the same era. Savage no longer is the face of the series, as he was some 30 years ago, but rather the ABC series’ Atlanta-based director and executive producer. The experience, he says, has been nothing short of surreal. “I remember so vividly being a kid on that set and looking to the directors and the producers, and they terrified me and inspired me and…

The uniqueness of the Oscar-winning visual effects in 1999’s The Matrix, particularly its signature “bullet time” effect, has become iconic, and so it’s not a surprise that two decades later, The Matrix Resurrections VFX supervisor Dan Glass experienced plenty of “fear and apprehension” over the planned fourth edition to the Wachowski siblings’ sci-fi classic. “It’s clearly a continuation of the story and has a very high qualitative and aesthetic bar to hold up to,” he says of the new film, this time helmed solely by Lana Wachowski and again following Keanu Reeves as Neo. “The story is an evolution in the sense that it’s a newer version of the Matrix.… The need to upgrade was even present in the story. That said, Lana’s vision was that it should feel more…

The Jan. 28 release of Joe Wright’s Cyrano, in which Peter Dinklage plays the lovelorn lead, is the latest example of Hollywood’s enduring infatuation with the 1897 Edmond Rostand play Cyrano de Bergerac. Among those to play Cyrano on the silver screen were José Ferrer (1950), Christopher Plummer (1962), Gérard Depardieu (1990) and Kevin Kline (2008). And that doesn’t include modernizations — the most memorable of which is 1987’s Roxanne. In that version, written by and starring a 41-year-old Steve Martin (Australia’s Fred Schepisi directed), the lead is not a French Army cadet but a small-town fireman named Charlie “C.D.” Bales who is self-conscious about his abnormally long nose. Daryl Hannah, then 26, was offered the part of Roxanne Kowalski, a beautiful astronomer who comes to town in search of…