Villeneuve, Denis

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    Can We Make Pop Culture Great Again?

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    When “Wicked” and “Gladiator II” debuted together late last month, there was a painful attempt to call their shared box office success “Glicked” — a reference to the portmanteau of “Barbenheimer” that described the joint cultural triumph of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” in the summer of 2023.It was painful because the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon was a genuine old-fashioned Hollywood success story: Two unusual and vivid and original stories (based, yes, on real history and a famous doll, but no less creative for all that) from directors working near the peak of their powers that managed to be culturally relevant and open for interpretive debate.Whereas “Wicked” and the “Gladiator” sequel are conventional examples of how Hollywood makes almost all its money nowadays — through safe-seeming bets on famous brands and franchises that can be packaged into just-OK-enough cinematic entertainments. Neither is as egregiously mediocre as “Moana 2,” the other blockbuster of the season: The musical numbers in “Wicked” and Denzel Washington’s Roman scenery-chewing lend energy that’s absent in the Disney empire nowadays. But neither are anything like the expression of mass-market creativity that we used to call The Movies.I’ve been writing lately about how American politics seem to have moved into a new dispensation — more unsettled and extreme, but also perhaps more energetic and dynamic. One benefit of unsettlement, famously adumbrated by Orson Welles’s villainous Harry Lime in “The Third Man,” is supposed to be cultural ferment: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”There are certainly signs of ferment out there, in technology, religion and intellectual life. But I’m worried about pop culture — worried that the relationship between art and commerce isn’t working as it should, worried that even if the rest of American society starts moving, our storytelling is still going to be stuck.Or maybe not stuck so much as completely fragmented, with forms of creativity that are all intensely niche, like the podcast-splintered marketplace of news consumption.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gotham Awards Go to ‘A Different Man’ and ‘Sing Sing’

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      The kickoff to awards season has a mixed record but can help lift small films like the two surprise winners.“A Different Man,” a dark indie comedy starring Sebastian Stan, was the surprise best-feature winner at the 34th annual Gotham Awards, which took place Monday night at Cipriani Wall Street in New York.Directed by Aaron Schimberg, the film stars Stan as an actor with neurofibromatosis who undergoes an experimental surgery to remove tumors from his face, giving him a more conventional appearance. That makeover puts him in danger of losing a leading role to a local bon vivant (Adam Pearson) who also has neurofibromatosis but owns his appearance without shame.Though “A Different Man” is distributed by the hot studio A24, it was considered the lowest-profile contender in its category. Most pundits expected the Palme d’Or winner “Anora” to cruise to victory here and even Schimberg was caught off-guard by the win. “I think I’m not the only person in the room who’s totally stunned by this,” the director said onstage, admitting he had not prepared a speech in advance, fearing it would be “hubris” to do so.In a very fluid Oscar season, the Gotham win could raise the chances of Stan, who also stars in the Donald Trump biopic “The Apprentice,” and Pearson, a dark-horse supporting-actor candidate. Though the Gothams’ effectiveness as an Oscar bellwether can fluctuate, three of the four most recent films to triumph there — “Past Lives,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Nomadland” — also went on to be nominated for best picture at the Oscars.The Gothams are most valuable when it comes to helping smaller films like “A Different Man” that rely on an awards-season run to stay in the conversation. Though the ceremony recently lifted its $35 million budget cap for eligible contenders, its nominating juries, which are mostly made up of a handful of film journalists, still tend to favor movies that were made on a shoestring.That includes “Sing Sing,” a prison drama that won the night’s lead and supporting-performance honors for Colman Domingo and Clarence Maclin. (The Gothams are gender-neutral.) “Let’s keep doing work that really matters, that makes a difference,” Domingo, who starred in “The Color Purple” and “Rustin” last year, told the audience. “That’s what we can do right now. That can be a light in the darkness.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Dune: Part Two’ Draws Biggest Opening Since ‘Barbie’ at the Box Office

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      The science-fiction sequel sold an estimated $81.5 million in tickets in the United States and Canada, the biggest opening for a Hollywood film since “Barbie.”“Dune: Part Two” and its A-list cast jump-started moviegoing in North America after a dismal start to the year.The science-fiction sequel sold an estimated $81.5 million in tickets in the United States and Canada from Thursday night to Sunday, the biggest opening for a Hollywood film since “Barbie” in July. (Taylor Swift’s concert documentary arrived to $93 million in October.) “Dune: Part Two,” directed by Denis Villeneuve, collected an additional $97 million overseas. IMAX screenings were especially strong.Legendary Entertainment and Warner Bros. spent $190 million to produce “Dune: Part Two,” not including a megawatt marketing campaign that found Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, Austin Butler, Anya-Taylor Joy, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and Florence Pugh trotting red carpets in Mexico City, London and New York.The movie had originally been scheduled for November, but Legendary pushed back the release date because of the actors’ strike: Without the buzzy young cast promoting the movie — Zendaya’s bottom-baring robot suit at the London premiere arrived on the internet as a sonic boom — Legendary feared that “Part Two” would not turn out audiences in big enough numbers to warrant the high budget. Sci-fi fans were likely to come one way or another. But Legendary also needed to sell the film’s more delicate story — a boy becoming a man, a guy falling in love — which would be more difficult without cast interviews.“It was a tough decision because I knew moving the movie out of the fall was going to cause a lot of pain for exhibition,” said Josh Grode, Legendary’s chief executive, using Hollywood jargon for theaters. “But when you have a cast like this one, you use it.”“We’re really, really happy,” Mr. Grode added.Ticket sales in North America had been down 20 percent this year compared with the same period last year. “Dune: Part Two” narrowed the decline to 13 percent. Theaters have struggled partly because studios have not released a steady flow of films; moviegoing begets moviegoing, analysts say, with trailers playing before titles on one weekend helping to fill seats the next. Marquees will be less sparse in March. “Kung Fu Panda 4,” “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” and Legendary’s “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” are all expected to be hits.Second place for the weekend went to “Bob Marley: One Love” (Paramount), with about $7.4 million in ticket sales, lifting its three-week domestic total to $82.8 million. The faith-based drama “Ordinary Angels” (Lionsgate) collected $3.9 million, for a two-week total of $12.6 million. More