Hello everyone,
Three BREAKING NEWS items!!!
The first breaking news is that “Barbie” is now #1 DOMESTIC MOVIE OF 2023 (so far). As of Wed Aug 23, the total domestic box office for “Barbie” $575.4 million and the #2 movie “The Super Mario Bros Movie” domestic box office is $574.2 million. “Barbie” may not get to the #1 international movie of 2023 (it’s approx. $65 million behind the #1 movie in other countries and last week it only made approx. $26 million and it goes down 35-40% each week). However, the “Barbie” WORLDWIDE box office should be #1 soon thanks to the added domestic total. I’m guessing sometime around the end of August.
“Barbie” will have a little help since IMAX announced that it will FINALLY be playing on IMAX screens domestically and internationally for 1 week starting Sept 22. It will be a SPECIAL IMAX VERSION formatted for IMAX screens and it will have some additional footage shown during the end credits.
The second breaking news is about the WGA strike negoitiations. It looks like previous reports were wrong. The WGA met with the studios several times last week but it looks like no progress was made. The two sides met again this week on Tues Aug 22 afternoon. This time some studio heads were involved in the meeting. According to reports from the WGA – the studios basically told the writers they should accept their ONLY offfer from back on Aug 11 (almost 2 weeks ago) so people can go back to work. NO NEGOITIATIONS AT ALL. Most of the meeting was about how good the offer was. The writers refused to accept the proposal, so after the meeting the studios RELEASED THE OFFER TO THE PRESS (which they supposedly threatened to do during the meeting) and basically told everyone that the WGA should accept their offer and how great their offer is.
The WGA response to the media was that the studios didn’t even consider the WGA counter offer (from last week) and anything else they discussed in the meetings last week. Their note said that the studios are just trying to force the WGA to take the deal or everyone will go broke because there’s no work right now. The WGA message also described a few of the loopholes in their offer as well as the WGA requests that the studio doesn’t even mention in their offer.
The third breaking news is that “Dune Part 2” is now officially postponed until 2024. Today it was announced it was moved from Nov 3, 2023 to Mar 15, 2024. The movie that was going to open on that date – “Godzilla Vs Kong:The New Empire” is pushed to April 12. That means that after “The Nun 2” (opening in a few weeks on Sept 8), Warner Bros won’t have another new release until December 2023 when they have 3 – “Wonka”, “Aquaman 2”, and “The Color Purple”. Some people thought that Warner Bros would postpone ALL of their 4th quarter 2023 movies (like Sony has done) but the announcement didn’t mention the December releases which is good news for movie theaters because right now the only wide releases scheduled for Dec 2023 are “Wonka”, “Aquaman 2”, “Migration” (animated movie from Universal), “The Color Purple”, and “The Boys in the Boat” (biographical drama directed by George Clooney).
Little bit of humor: People are trying to use “movie money”
In the US….. (note the “FOR MOTION PICTURE PURPOSES” in top right)
..and in the UK (“ITS USED FOR MOTION PROPS”)
LOS ANGELES FILM REVIEW 