Wisconsin's Weekend Morning News
A Husband and Wife Battle at the Box Office
It's time to check in with Matt Miller. You know him, of course, as the pop culture editor and movie critic from Unmowlucky.com, and there are some new movies out this week, and it looks like maybe there's going to be a husband and wife duel. A little bit and excitingly so at the top of the box office, so Blake Lively, famously Ryan Reynolds slash Deadpool's wife and a movie star of her own, obviously she's got a new movie this weekend. It ends with us based on a Colleen Hoover book, very popular, and it's what turned into a quiet late summer smash this weekend. I think it's opening around $50 million, which I think pretty much double what was originally kind of expected of it, and it's really nice to see, you know, for all the hand ringing earlier this summer about the box office, it seems like things have really recovered. And you like seeing stuff like this where, you know, a drama, a straightforward romantic drama that, you know, isn't an original movie, but isn't, you know, obviously a remake or a reboot, or, you know, based on a product or something like that, per se, a name brand in a way. You know, a movie like that is about to make a ton of money this weekend, and it's great. It's great to see. What's the plot of the film? It's a relationship drama about a woman who's like in a bad relationship, and she's trying to figure out the next steps in her life, and it's about female friendship, and it's about, you know, the Blake Lively's character kind of self actualizing and stuff like that. Again, not the kind of stuff that Hollywood typically is like, oh, we got a greenlitness. It doesn't really have that big hook, but it's got the book behind it. It's got, you know, it's fans, obviously, and I do think a big thing here is it is a movie made for women. It's been made primarily for female audiences, and Hollywood, for some odd reason, refuses to make these movies. For some odd reason, you know, two, three years ago, where the crawdad thing made its money back and then some. It was a really big summer hit. It almost made $100 million on a budget one fourth of that. And for some odd reason, Hollywood didn't see that and think, oh, we should do more of this. Hollywood thought, oh, that's interesting. Let's never talk about this ever again. And, you know, this happens every time a female kind of centric movie does. Well, it happened when Magic Mike opened really big. It happened when the Sex and the City movie came out and became a massive blockbuster for some odd reason. Hollywood doesn't get it that women like seeing movies too. Blake Lively up to this point. Yeah, certainly I know the name, but I knew her most as being Ryan Reynolds's wife. Is this going to put her on a different plateau? If this movie is such a hit? I think it'll definitely help kind of catapult. She was always a star. I mean, from, you know, gossip girl and then she was in the traveling sister to the traveling pants movies and she had a few kind of action movies and a few kind of dramas along the way too. But I think, you know, this is going to really, you know, this is one of those things where people are going to be able to point to this and say, look, she opened this movie. This is a Blake Lively movie. And it's about to have one of the bigger openings of the summer. And again, you like to see it and hopefully Hollywood doesn't memory vault this, you know, shove it in the memory bank and forget it happened and instead be like, okay, let's make more movies for this audience. It's like the five nights with Freddy's thing that happened last Halloween. You know, younger audiences want movies directed towards them. Women want movies directed towards them, you know, black audiences, Latino audiences. People want movies that are made for them on some level. And Hollywood has kind of stopped doing that. Or at least they don't do it for anyone besides, you know, 18 year old white dudes. Well, he's back. And he doesn't make that many movies. And that's what, M. Shyamalan? M. Night Shyamalan. He makes a movie a year these days. You don't hear about them as much because they're not as catastrophically awful as some of those kind of movies from a decade ago where, and they're not as good as the Sixth Sense, but he's got this new one trap with Josh Hartnett as a dad taking his daughter to kind of a Taylor Swift looking concert. And it turns out the concert is a trap designed to catch a serial killer. And lo and behold, Josh Hartnett is that serial killer. It is really, it's a very silly movie. It is a movie. Well, now I'm intrigued. Yeah, I'll say, if I had a lot of fun with this movie, if you are like a cinema sense person, if you're like a nit picker, you will find plenty of logic gaps in this movie to say, Oh, well, that's silly. But if you kind of just go along for the ride, if you go along for this kind of modern day Hitchcock thriller situation, I think you're going to have a lot of fun with this very wild, very fun movie. And also Josh Hartnett is legitimately good in it. Like for a guy who people tossed off back in the Pearl Harbor days is kind of just a heartthrob. He's genuinely really good in this. And between trap and Oppenheimer last year, he was a big part of Oppenheimer. The Josh Hartnett a sense might be a punter. Sure. I, again, the plot is interesting. It's something I haven't seen before, so I might make it a point to go and see that one. Finally then, now, here's one. If you're a video game fan, you might like it, but it's kind of getting panned. Yeah, it's not good. It's called Borderlands. It's based on a video game. It's very much trying to be a Guardians of the Galaxy situation. And right now, I think it has like a 4% on Rotten Tomatoes. And I know people are going to hear that and be like, wow, that sounds really terrible. I've got to see how awful this thing is. You don't. It's not like the room-style thing where you watch it and you're like, oh, wow, this is catastrophic. You're just going to watch it and be really bored. Like it's not bad per se in like a, oh, my gosh, how did this get made way? It's bad in a functionally boring way where you're just watching it and you're waiting for something interesting or exciting or even unintentionally, you know, noteworthy to happen. And it never does. You are going to forget you watch Borderlands by the time the end credits start. It is that unmemorable. So yeah, not a great way to end the summer there on that one. Well, we're ending the Olympics. And what's your overall impression of what we saw on TV? I had a really good time watching this year's Olympics. I think NBC did a pretty good job of adapting to the kind of time hop and the kind of different ways people watch the Olympics. Now in this modern era, you know, I think having all the sports on live on Peacock during the day was really nice because you could kind of watch the events and like the meaningful gold metal stuff as they happened in the afternoon. And then at night, you kind of got the highlights. So I think that's kind of the way forward, especially for when the Olympics are in places where there's a significant time jump and you're not able to watch everything. I also think a lot of these streaming services, they kind of hop on some of these sports, you know, I got really into archery this Olympics. It's a great background noise sport and it's very easy to understand. And I think, you know, if these streaming services are looking for programming and looking for things to keep people's eyeballs glued to them, find like a random archery league, find like some random gymnastics league or diving league or something like that because I think we're all into these sports for this two weeks and, you know, why not capitalize on that? No, I kind of want to find the guy from Turkey, who's the gunman? Yeah, there should be a movie about him. Yeah, it's called John Wick. But no, that guy is great. That's always the fun thing about the Olympics, the kind of unexpected characters that come out of it all. And I'm going to end this on a little bit of a grump because this weekend was the debut of the breaking competitions at the Olympics for the first time. You mean like break dance, break dance? Yeah. And I was excited about it and then I watched it this weekend and I got it doesn't sit. And it's not a problem with the athletes. They are genuine athletes. These are genuine skills and talents they have. It's very impressive what they're doing, but it's a little bit like skateboarding at the Olympics where the Olympics are just too formal. They're too skate. They're too rigid. For sports like this, you know, it's weird watching people do break dancing moves at the Olympics and you hear the announcer being like, "Ooh, they're doing that traditional freezes." And it's just like, "That's not how it is supposed to work." No, they had the wrong person doing the commentary. It should have been Snoop. It should have been Snoop. It should have been Snoop. It should have been Snoop. He should have wrapped while they were breaking and that would have been an event. Snoop took the new official mascot of the Olympic Games. They should send him to every Olympic Games because no one has more fun. And no one does a better job of conveying the excitement of some of these sports than Snoop Dogg. He just has kind of an everyday person's enthusiasm for these remarkable things. And nobody can pull off a dressage outfit like Snoop Dogg. And I'll leave it at that. Matt Miller, it's always great to have here. to have here well thanks for having me