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Friends With Kids debuted pretty decently this past weekend, pulling in a solid $2.1 million in a not quite wide, but not quite limited release of 374 theaters. Some of that is surely owing to the Bridesmaids halo effect, but now that you've had time to check out the Jennifer Westfeldt romantic comedy, how does it stand on its own two feet? Let's call to order another meeting of the Monday Morning Movie Club to discuss the relative dickishness of the movie's men and the casting of Megan Fox.
By now, we are accustomed to Johnny Depp's enthusiasm for the makeup chair. We know he loves a good wig, and we expect a heavy dose of eyeliner and some fantastical new rouge scheme with every new Depp performance. (It would not be surprising to see him vamping for Sephora.) But the first stills from the upcoming Lone Ranger, in which Depp plays Tonto to Armie Hammer's John Reid, suggest that all this face-painting and hat-wearing might be part of a larger homage on Depp's part: Most of his wackadoo characters bear more than a passing resemblance to a famous rocker. He made it clear that Keith Richards was his inspiration for Jack Sparrow, but Vulture couldn't help but notice that his Tonto looks a lot like he could be the fifth member of Kiss. And there are many more musical doppelgangers! Is Depp quietly working his way through the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll? Consider the evidence.
When Vulture entered a hotel room to interview Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill about their 21 Jump Street update, Hill immediately misidentified us as the New York Times’ gossip blog. We thought we corrected him … until he started chanting “gossip, gossip” to the tune of Kanye West’s “Monster.” Tatum, meanwhile, paced around the room eating chips and comically shadowboxed with his reflection in the window. Both of them were wearing cop uniforms. Did things get even odder as we discussed the link between 21 Jump Street and Skrillex, Peter Pan, and Drew Barrymore? You bet they did.
This weekend, eight months of indifferent and often confused chatter culminated in Disney's John Carter — which cost just shy of $250 million to make — grossing only $30.6 million domestically. (Insiders tell Vulture that for the film to break even, it would have had to have opened at nearly twice that amount.) The reviews were the very definition of middling, with a 53 rating on Metacritic.com, and yet critics rarely doom a family-targeting blockbuster this big: Just a week earlier The Lorax got a 47 Metacritic rating and grossed $70.2 million in its debut weekend, and another $39.1 million this weekend. No, this high-leaping hero was grounded from the moment the movie's first disastrously impotent, muddled, and largely action-and-effects-free teaser trailer debuted last July and left audiences saying, "What was that?" By the time its not-much-better Super Bowl ad played, the film had become a punch line — to those on whom it managed to make any impression at all. Even the star, Taylor Kitsch, seemed pained by the campaign, telling Metro last week that “there’s things, yeah, that I would love to have seen different.” While this kind of implosion usually ends in a director simmering in rage at the studio marketing department that doomed his or her movie, Vulture has learned that it was in fact John Carter director Andrew Stanton — powerful enough from his Pixar hits that he could demand creative control over trailers — who commandeered the early campaign, overriding the Disney marketing execs who begged him to go in a different direction. “This is one of the worst marketing campaigns in the history of movies,” a former studio marketing chief told Vulture before the film opened. “It’s almost as if they went out of their way to not make us care.” If that was the goal, it worked.
Though the new trailer for On the Road appeared in Clickables over the weekend, a movie with this many intriguing angles deserves a little more examination, wouldn't you say? Based on the classic Jack Kerouac novel, the movie stars Brit actor Sam Riley as Sal Paradise, Garret Hedlund as Dean Moriarty, and Kristen Stewart as Moriarty's teen bride Marylou. (There's also an extensive supporting cast that includes Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams, and Elizabeth Moss, though not all of them get their due in this teaser.) Walter Salles directed, and certainly, the result is something a little more naturalistic than the famously never-shot iteration of Road that was to be helmed by Joel Schumacher and star Brad Pitt and Billy Crudup (imagine!), but is this book impossible to do justice to? Is Hedlund hiding a Beat charisma he wasn't permitted to use in stolid studio films like Tron Legacy? And is that what Kristen Stewart looks like when she's actually enjoying herself onscreen? Discuss!
Does Woody Allen have some sort of grudge against Germany? The filmmaker had flirted with the idea of setting his next movie there as recently as August, but now, The Hollywood Reporter writes that Allen and his producers are in talks with Danish authorities to film the production in Copenhagen next year. Then again, THR also claims that Allen won't make the movie until 2013, which seems like an unusual amount of time off for the prolific, one-film-a-year director; does the source have its wires crossed, or have Allen's other commitments (he'll be acting in the film Fading Gigolo and scripting a stage transfer of Bullets Over Broadway) got him too busy?
This Weekend’s Winner: The Lorax spoke for the trees and audiences spoke for The Lorax, with the Seuss adaptation handily besting three newcomers and claiming No. 1 again with another $40 million on top of its remarkable $70 million opener. (One more victor is the overall box office, with the results in positive territory for the tenth week in a row — yay movies!)
This Weekend’s Losers: Taking second place with John Carter is decidedly cold comfort for Disney. Its $30.6 million opening was actually far more — some $5 million more, actually — than the studio was resigned to make, but still roughly half of what the film needed to open at if it were ever to see profit. Equally pathetic was the release of the Eddie Murphy comedy A Thousand Words; it had been malingering in the can for the last four years, and clearly, with its $6.4 million opening, Paramount would have been better served by keeping it there indefinitely.
Who will star opposite Beyoncé in A Star Is Born? Over the last year or so, that role has been difficult to lock down: Once upon a time, Russell Crowe was attached, then Clint Eastwood took over as director and approached Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Bale to no avail. Now, reports Deadline, the helmer is in talks with Tom Cruise for the male lead. That would definitely be something! Deadline also claims that Eminem (!) was once in the mix, as was Will Smith ... which, just give the role to Will Smith, you guys. Seriously!
Does Eddie Murphy actually have any range, or is it just an illusion created by a few early edgy roles and, later, a lot of CGI makeup and fat suits? In A Thousand Words, the comedian doesn’t do his usual thing of playing multiple parts (à la Dr. Doolittle or The Nutty Professor), but he does have to run the full gamut of shtick, as he is transformed from Über-con fident motormouth to hapless victim of karmic circumstance to earnest Changed Man™. But his performance feels so disingenuous, so forced, that an otherwise perfectly acceptable high-concept comedy comes crashing down around him.
Among the films premiering at South by Southwest this Saturday, none can boast a cast as fever-dream eclectic as the wild comedy Small Apartments. Directed by in-demand music video helmer Jonas Akerlund, it stars Brit comedian Matt Lucas as a Los Angeles man who kills his landlord (Peter Stormare) and comes into contact with the following people while trying to cover up his crime: his insane brother, played by James Marsden, who sends him toenail clippings and audio tapes narrated by Dolph Lundgren, as well as a fire investigator played by Billy Crystal, a pothead portrayed by Johnny Knoxville, a sexy mother-daughter duo played by Saffron Burrows and Juno Temple, and other assorted personalities who include Rosie Perez, Rebel Wilson, James Caan, Amanda Plummer, and Project Runway All-Stars hostess Angela Lindvall. Vulture's got the exclusive premiere of the poster, if you can still see straight after imagining a movie that could fit in all those people.
To get the obvious out of the way, John Carter isn’t the worst film ever made or even especially horrible, and anyone who says that it is needs to stop reviewing movies’ budgets and start paying attention to what’s onscreen. I paid attention. Except for one time, when I nodded off. I seem to have missed the introduction of the Martian pig-blob-pooch (I can’t recall the thing’s exact name [Editor's note: Woola!]) that would later come to the hero’s rescue, much as other loyal dogs have come to the rescue of the heroes in such affectionate tongue-in-cheek throwbacks as The Artist and The Adventures of Tin Tin. John Carter is certainly a throwback, but it isn’t tongue-in-cheek or even noticeably affectionate. If the director, Pixar wizard Andrew Stanton, has any feelings about the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs — on whose novel A Princess of Mars the film is based, and whose Tarzan series has inspired many white-people-go-native sagas over the ensuing century — then he doesn’t share them with the viewer. There’s no wonder or elation or even dopy sincerity here — just a high level of proficiency and, yes, a lot of expensive CGI. Hence the impulse to review the budget. And to snooze.
In 2006, a strapping, long-haired, slightly angry football player ambled onto our television screens and uttered two words that would change the way an entire nation (or, the thousands of people who watched Friday Night Lights) understood the American Southwest. “Texas Forever,” Taylor Kitsch commanded us as Tim Riggins, and there are many FNL viewers who wish that Kitsch — or Riggs — could have stayed in the Lone Star State, making season after season of emotionally draining television with Coach and Tami “Y’all” Taylor. But it was not to be: As Peyton Manning recently showed us, every great football run needs to come to an end. Instead, this weekend Taylor Kitsch begins the second skull-crushing phase of his career with John Carter, the confusingly marketed Civil War–Soldier-Goes-to-Mars movie that has so fascinated Vulture. In May, he will continue to shoot aliens in Battleship, Peter Berg’s $200 million based-on-a-board-game extravaganza. So on the eve of Kitsch’s transition from beloved TV star to blockbuster action star, Vulture spoke to industry insiders to answer the question: If Taylor Kitsch were a a stock, would you buy, sell, or hold?
For reasons we cannot explain, Lindsay Lohan opted to do last week's Today show, Saturday Night Live, "No, this time I am really ready to get back to work!" tour as a bottle blonde. But, now, finally, just a little under a week late, good sense has prevailed: Lindsay Lohan is, once again, a redhead, as God, man, and hair salons intended her to be. The odds of this particular comeback being a success just doubled.
In Vulture's most sustained bid yet for the Pulitzer Prize (they give that out for online entertainment journalism, right?), we have been tireless in our investigation of the most important character in Disney's sci-fi epic John Carter: Woola. Audiences will get their chance to experience Woola for themselves today, but what do film critics make of the CG creature, who becomes John Carter's best friend? In the most important edition of Woola Watch yet, we round up the greatest descriptions of the loyal Calot, and we've also got an important additional infographic for Woola obsessives. (Which is all of you, be honest.)
Judd Apatow, Kristen Wiig, Mandy Patinkin, and More at the Writers Guild Awards East
Party Lines Slideshow: Megan Hilty, Anjelica Huston, Katharine McPhee, and More at the Premiere of Smash
Party Lines Slideshow: Michael Fassbender, Viola Davis, George Clooney, and More at the National Board of Review Awards
Party Lines Slideshow: Jessica Chastain, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and More at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards
Party Lines Slideshow: Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, Jeremy Renner, and More at the Premiere of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
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