That's "happy." In this country we say "Happy New Year." Oh, ho, ho, thank you for correcting my English which stinks!
Hope everyone had a great New Years. From what I can remember, I had a good time. Me and Mr. Cuervo are going to have a trial separation though.
A few items...
The Backlash Has Begun! If you take a look at this top 10 at the box office for this past weekend you will find that, contrary to popular belief, not everything Judd Apatow touches turns to gold. In its second week of release Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story brought in just $3.7 million and fell to#13 (down from #8 last week). Walk Hard has grossed just over $12 million and is doing an abysmal $1,396 per theater average.
While these numbers may not be disastrous, they are nowhere near good. It’s still too early throw around the term “bomb” around (between domestic and foreign box office it will make its money back); but considering how they promoted the shit out of this movie you got to think the folks over at Sony are not thrilled. It appears that the over-hyping Walk Hard may have come back to bite them in their collective asses. You couldn’t turn on your television the past couple of months without seeing some sort of Walk Hard promotion, including a long spot on "Monday Night Football", tons and tons of appearances, and the trailer being played ad nauseum. Let’s not forget the extensive online viral marketing where you could go onto a site like Funny or Die and watch clips of the movie or the trailer again for the one billionth time. It’s possible that people either, a. figured they have seen every funny part of the movie already and don’t need to go pay to see the movie in theaters, or, b. are just sick as hell of this movie and don’t want to see it at all.
But this is Judd Apatow we are talking about; the man’s career has nine lives. He is the current reigning king of comedy in Hollywood. 2008 looks like it will be an even bigger year for Apatow; he has (at least) 3 or 4 big time comedies set to come out including Seth Rogen’s Pineapple Express and Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
There Will Be Buzz There is huge buzz for director Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film There Will Be Blood. The film, based on an Upton Sinclair novel, is the story of greed, power, family, religion and oil, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a Texas oil prospector at the turn of the century. I haven’t seen it yet, but from what I have heard it is excellent and needs to be included in any serious “best picture” conversations this year. The trailer makes the film look downright spooky and literally sent a shiver down my spine the first time I saw it.
It’s long since been my opinion that Daniel Day-Lewis is the greatest living actor around today and Anderson is more than capable of creating a fantastic film (see: Boogie Nights). I would not be surprised if Best Picture this year was between There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. Then again, after the Crash debacle of 2005 you never know.
Late Night Comeback Last Friday David Letterman’s production company Worldwide Pants completed a surprise hail-mary pass and finalized a deal with the WGA. When he and Craig Ferguson return to the air live tonight, they will do so with the aid of their writing staffs. Leno, Conan, & Kimmel also come back tonight, but will be flying solo. We will have to wait and see how this deal works out for Letterman in terms of his ratings compared to Leno before we know what kind of effect it may have on the strike. Surely there has to be some pretty pissed off writers right now who are out in the cold while Letterman’s guys get to go back to work. This may be the first true test of solidarity amongst the writers, which has been strong up to this point.
The important thing to remember is that "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" return on January 7th.
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