Edgar Wright's 'The Running Man'; Oscar-Bound Indies That Bombed; & Governors Awards Preview

0:01Ryan Lattanzio:I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the Bear. The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either going to be okay. Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned. We have each other. FX is the Bear. The final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+.

0:35Hey, everybody. Welcome to Screen Talk, IndieWire's weekly podcast bringing you up to speed on what's going on in Hollywood. I'm Anne Thompson in L.A.

0:43Ryan Lattanzio:And I'm Ryan Latonzio in New York. Very tired this week, but we're getting through it. On this week's episode, we're going to review The Running Man, Edgar Wright's adaptation of a Stephen King novel from 1982, but also a sort of remake of a bad Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from the 80s as well. We're also going to look at how the box office is shaping the Oscar race. And we're going to talk about some studio poll quotes that are getting ripped by film Twitter, such as Hamnet Marketing saying it's the best film ever made. Wow. Another one with Eli Roth calling Oz Perkins' Keeper like a surreal David Lynch film.

1:22Ryan Lattanzio:So we wonder if criticism is being devalued in favor of Rotten Tomatoes, like out of context capsules. Yes, that's sort of true, but it's more complicated than that. We will get into that. And this is a busy week in Hollywood. That's why we're kind of tired. It's everybody who's who's got a hopeful in the Oscar race is in town because the governor's awards are on Sunday. And they've been in New York also. You know, they've been running around, landing here for the Sunday Governor's Awards. So, I mean, a smattering of the people that we can be expecting to see at this thing. Netflix will have Jacob Elordi from Frankenstein with his director Guillermo del Toro.

2:05You can have Jay Kelly's Adam Sandler. You can have Sony Pictures Classics' Ethan Hawke for Blue Moon. Josh O 'Connor will be there. He has 50 million movies this year. Focus has Jesse Buckley for Hamnet and Emma Stone for Begonia. Searchlight has Brendan Fraser. Warners has Leonardo DiCaprio and Amy Madigan and Michael B. Jordan. They have the biggest table in the room. And Universal has Cynthia Erivo. And, you know, it's exciting. So I'll be working the room and I'll be writing it up on Sunday night, soaking up the vibes. You learn a lot at these things. You see what's going on. You talk to people.

2:49And it's one of the most fun events of the year. But it means that there's just a million things going on. It used to be that they gave these out on the actual awards proper. But they don't do that anymore. So this is a non-televised event. And it's just morphed into this concentrated moment when everybody comes together during the height of the campaign season. We'll see what happens. All right, so on the Oscar front, there are a number of movies that have not performed well at the box office, and they include the Springsteen movie. They include Smashing Machine earlier on. I mean, they include two sports movies where you have these sort of mainstream movie stars Dwayne The Rock Johnson and Sidney Sweeney this is the mistake.

3:48If you wear your Oscar hopes on your sleeve and you go out into the art house universe looking for reviews and you don't get them actually Smashing Machine did pretty well with the reviews. The audience didn't want to see it. It was a complete tweener. They weren't interested in Dwayne The Rock Johnson and they appear to not be interested in Sidney Sweeney either. She's a rising star, but she's not someone who necessarily pulls people in just because she's in a movie.

4:17Ryan Lattanzio:Well, Sydney Sweeney, she is better at courting internet headline generated controversy than maybe bringing in the box office. I would suggest that I'm not confident in Sydney Sweeney's skills as an actor. She's quite good in Euphoria, but we haven't seen a record of her being able to carry a movie. I think stacked against - She was very good in the movie with Glenn Powell, the romantic comedy. Oh, anyone but you. Yes. Thank you very much. That was very good. I remember being on airplanes when everyone on the plane was watching that film. It's one of the great plane films. And obviously later in the podcast, we will come back to talking about Glenn Powell.

4:59Ryan Lattanzio:I think that the sports biopic movies, which do wear their Oscar hopes inherently on their sleeve are not interesting to people. The Smashing Machine bombed horribly at the box office, obviously, but Variety just did a cover with Dwayne Johnson, Benny Safdie. It's very amusing, Ryan, because you can see that they're fumfering around trying to mend. They're calling him the underdog, right? They're trying to deal with the fact that the movie has crashed and burned and they're putting it on the cup they planned it a long time ago yeah right and so now they're retrofitting the piece to be like a comeback it's embarrassing yeah yeah because because these things are done so far in advance they've got they've got emily blunt and and dwayne johnson and everybody on the cover it's embarrassing i think it's a good movie I mean, he won.

5:57I mean, Benny Safdie, you know, he actually won Best Director in Venice. The critics liked it. It's not a bad movie. It's just a movie nobody wanted to see.

6:06Ryan Lattanzio:I gave it a fairly positive review out of Venice and I stand by it. There were some more recent quotes in that, or recent seeming anyway, quotes in the Variety story, specifically how Benny did not thank his brother Josh in the Venice acceptance speech. And his answer was, well, I just wasn't really thinking about him in that moment, which makes sense. I don't really see how that controversy is related to the performance of the movie, but - Not at all. It has nothing to do with it. It's way too inside baseball. No, but that said, his brother Josh's movie, which we'll talk about again, you know, in another episode, I think that movie is poised to do really well on a lot of fronts, including box office and awards, whereas the odds are pretty stacked against the Smashing Machine in those regards.

6:56Nothing's going to happen with it. It's not going to, it's not going to happen. And, and, and it's just interesting that the box office still has this impact. You know, I was expecting the Springsteen movie to do better than it did because it is a, it played well when I saw it in Telluride. But people are disappointed in it. It's, it's, it's a, it's a bit of a drag. It's a little bit sad. And I think it's, it's a good movie. It's not perfect. It has many flaws. Scott Cooper didn't always deliver the best script, the best, he made some mistakes, but it means that the movie won't, it will be a stretch even for the great Jeremy Strong to get in to supporting actor.

7:36And it won't. And I don't think Jeremy Allen White will get in at all. And I don't think Sidney Sweeney will get in. I don't think Dwayne The Rock Johnson and Emily Blunt will get in. Any kind of taint of failure is just a killer.

7:52Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, it's really hard to walk back from. A lot of people are going to watch Springsteen on PVOD. I don't know when it's landing on there, but that seems to be that's I imagine that the core audience of the movie, which are fans of the boss, as it were, even just me saying that I don't have a personal relationship to Bruce Springsteen or his music. So it feels anachronous for me. But I think that a lot of people will watch that movie at home, but it's not going to result in getting nominations. Right. Okay. So is there any other movie that didn't do well that we should be mentioning? Well, the most recent one.

8:29Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah. Well, I mean, we talked about Die My Love extensively last week, but that that didn't do that well. It was in the top 10, but it was a low performer. But we didn't expect anything other than that. Well, there's been some conversations about why these movies are opening so wide, right? In the old days, there was the platform release, and it really required the distributors to sort of grit their teeth and hang in there week after week after week and hope that good word of mouth was going to build for their for their movies that would require that there is good word of mouth if you have a movie like die my love that got a d plus cinema score then you're going to have to uh go wide because that's the only way you're going to make any money at all.

9:18If you go platform, you're dead.

9:20Ryan Lattanzio:Separate from our feelings about Die My Love, that movie was never poised to do well because we also know that just having a star attached to your movie doesn't mean it's going to open well, especially given literally all the movies that we just mentioned. So it was not set up for success necessarily. But as we've said before, the idea is to bring subscribers to the movie platform. I think probably more people will watch it there. Yeah, they will. They will. All right. So then the next topic is yours, Ryan. Run with it. What is going on with these critic blurbs? Well, obviously, film Twitter is a very insular world.

9:55Ryan Lattanzio:I don't know how much time you're on there anymore. I actually am not on Blue Sky. I'm on there. I'm on Twitter. No, you are on there, but you're also on, are you on Blue Sky? Yeah, I'm on both. Blue Sky is more political. There aren't that many people following me on Blue Sky, whereas on Twitter, I have a big following. I'm not on Blue Sky yet, and I'm trying to avoid it as I try to reduce my social media output. With regards to film Twitter, so this sort of pervasive phenomenon in the past week has been a lot of ire over a couple of studio poll quotes, one of which is from this neon movie, Keeper, directed by Oz Perkins, which again, is another movie to again rehash a topic we've discussed before that a lot of press have been kept out of likely in favor of influencers and people who are more likely and primed to give a positive review because the reviews for this one which I'm probably going to skip and just save for the plane have not been super positive but over the weekend there was a whole rollout of all these filmmakers giving their praise to Perkins's this is his third movie at neon in 16 months by the way The reviews are really bad.

11:08Ryan Lattanzio:And one of the poll quotes was, it's like a surreal David Lynch movie, courtesy of Eli Roth. And this term Lynchian has really become so eroded of meaning due to overuse, because it is a sort of handy catch all for a movie that feels sort of destabilized or surreal in some way. I also I'll say that surreal David Lynch movie is a that's totally redundant. And I don't think there's anything that's truly the Lynchian but a David Lynch movie, or maybe Bertrand Bonello's The Beast, which I talked about a lot. And to hear this from Roth himself suggests a tad bit of media illiteracy. And I don't know that it's doing it any favors, especially because all David Lynch movies are surreal, even the straight story, which doesn't necessarily seem to be The other one that's going around is a pull quote from a burgeoning film review podcast site called The Rolling Tape, which Focus excised their clip to call, I'm sorry, Focus took a quote from something they said out of context calling Hamnet the best movie ever made.

12:13Ryan Lattanzio:and as far as I could tell going through the rolling tapes editorial coverage of the movie I don't know that anyone ever said that they may have said it on a podcast or some kind of aside but I it's not doing the movie any favors and it's I think it's more on the studios to realize that they themselves are not doing themselves favors by setting up these very expectations um and it's also like is it like just also again saying that it's the best movie ever made again suggests a kind of media illiteracy or that you didn't watch that many films which i'm not saying that this site the rolling tape has not i've never heard of that site have you uh i did once this quote was getting passed around and i and i support them you know they should be able to do whatever they want to do but it's not helping anyone to take this stuff out of context and calling Hamnet the best movie ever made?

13:06Ryan Lattanzio:Like, come on. Well, I agree with you that setting it up like that is not a good idea. Actually, I think Focus has done a good job of trying to keep Hamnet away from being the best movie of the year, you know, or the front runner for the Oscar. You know, it could have come out of Telluride. They could have gone bam, bam, bam with a bunch of different festivals and they kept it relatively quiet. It did go to Middleburg. I think it went to London. but they're just bringing it out the big guns now. Now you're hitting the Jesse Buckley interviews and all that. They've been pretty good about not doing that.

13:43So are you saying that Focus itself sent that quote around?

13:48Ryan Lattanzio:Yes, they put it on a marketing campaign that they put on social media. It was that the rolling tape said Hamnet is not just the best movie of the year, but the best movie ever made. And I know that they they're that department, they took this out of context, but they really should have thought about it a bit more because it really has gotten a lot of backlash. And I don't think it's helping the movie, even as I'm going around town and I'm talking to more people that are taking issue with that film. Whereas at Telluride, it was like people burst out of the screening saying it's the film of the year and we're all in tears that are inconsolable.

14:23Ryan Lattanzio:But now that that also set the movie up for backlash. It's like festival hype also does the same job of hurting the movie in a way down the line. Well, you have to have some festival hype or you won't have any hype. Of course. I think they're doing a pretty good job of balancing it. The backlash is inevitable, even sentimental value, which is so obviously doing really well and people love it. And it's got a lot of I mean, I wrote a story about the house in sentimental value and it actually did well, you know, on my Twitter account. yeah it's sort of surprising to me but but but people love that movie but even though they do even though it has an enormous amount of support it's also getting um some backlash from people like justin chang you know and amy nicholson yeah both of them they both dinged the movie in their reviews respectively in new yorker and in la times so there's also it's interesting because there's a lot of uh compare and contrast with j kelly and sentimental values some people lean the sentimental value way.

15:27That would be me. I would argue that sentimental value is a better movie than Jay Kelly about the same subject that is a self-absorbed film person who neglects his family for the sake of his career. But others are saying the opposite. They're saying Jay Kelly's better than sentimental value. We'll see how it plays out. Both of those films are doing well, is the bottom line right now.

15:54Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, and J. Kelly just this weekend opens in theaters. That's right. And that'll be streaming in a few weeks. So that'll give it a little boost as it hits. But that's a Netflix movie, so it's going to be on the platform. Let's go back to the critics' quotes. They've been doing this forever. I mean, this is nothing new. There was a time when there were these sort of hack critics that the studios could count on to just give them puffy quotes. They would even solicit them, you know, or the critics would recognize what the studios wanted and wanted them to use their quotes and would write these, you know, laudatory things.

16:36Ryan Lattanzio:Last year, A24 did something that I thought was kind of clever, which was putting on its trailer or poster or whatever, the quote monumental, which was very apropos for this particular movie, And then listing under it the various outlets that had said that, which I don't know. Yeah, which unintentionally is kind of a dig at some of these people that use these kind of shopworn terms, especially with a movie that was about architecture. But then somebody also pointed out, I like this style of marketing, which was for Citizen Kane. There was just, it just says, it's terrific on the poster attributed to no one, which obviously came from RKO or, you know, someone in the studio.

17:17Ryan Lattanzio:which I kind of like that sort of bold proclamation. You could go back to that. Those were the days when there was absolutely no divide between the people who promoted the movies and the people who promoted the movies. You know, that was it. That was what they did. So, all right, well, let's talk about Running Man. Now, Ryan, were you skeptical of Running Man going in? Were you not looking forward to seeing it? Yeah, clearly, because I did not see the movie until last night, Thursday night, when I bought a ticket. I was actually already at the AMC Lincoln Square moderating a Q &A with Lee Byung-hun about No Other Choice.

17:57Ryan Lattanzio:Running Man happened to be playing then. So I was like, all right, fine, I'll finally go because I couldn't go to the earlier screening. So yeah, I was putting it off, especially because Edgar Wright's last movie, Last Night in Soho, was horrible and inspired No Confidence. He is a good director, though. and he's a good director of action. And this movie is perfect casting for him, I think. I think it uses his skills well. He has a little bit of a, we all know Edgar Wright. I mean, he's one of those people who is on Twitter, who does engage with people and does, you know, he likes to give an interview.

18:34He's fun. He's a fun guy. And there's an element of a smile at the edge of his movies always. Even this one, which is quite serious in many ways. It's a political screed, you know. It's an interesting movie because it's not, it works on both sides of the political spectrum. It doesn't necessarily, it works blue and red. It's just an angry guy.

19:00Ryan Lattanzio:Do you see it that way? uh i so this movie is based on a 1982 stephen king book which he wrote under his nom de plume of the time richard bachman which he was trying to use to separate himself from the fandom around that was attached to his name at the time and we are definitely in the year of prescient richard bachman movies with also the lion's gate adaptation of the long walk earlier this fall that's true the prescience of this movie is a little pushy and these films that keep coming up that make a comment on sort of quote unquote totalitarian America or the world aren't really telling us anything we don't know at this point.

19:40Ryan Lattanzio:And worse, they're not asking anything of us either. The book was set in 2025. So obviously it was high time to make this movie. And I would say without spoiling anything, the movie has a more decidedly hopeful revolutionary ending than the book. And another aspect is that the story has been retrofitted for the AI era. in which this guy played by Glenn Powell, who's on a game show where he is tasked with running undetected for 29 days. He keeps getting deep faked over broadcast to the rest of the world. And that content is used to turn the world against him. I actually I found Glenn Powell's performance in this to be really strident and honestly kind of annoying.

20:23Ryan Lattanzio:He is ever this angry every man and only ever operates in the one register of being pissed off all the time. Except when he's saintly dad, when he's in love with his wife and child. Well, that's the thing. His only identity is tied up in how much he loves his family. There are no characters in this movie. There are just, there is no character development other than the surface implications. That's what it is. I mean, that's the kind of movie it is, but it's kinetic and it's energetic and And it's vibrant and it moves and it's fun to see the universe. It's a dystopian universe. It is not pretty.

20:59That's what I like about the way that Wright created the world. And it doesn't look, you know, sanitized. Then there's Josh Brolin. Good old Josh Brolin is in everything right now, apparently. Phoning it in again. Yeah, he doesn't have to work very hard. No, I'm not arguing for any serious depth here. I'm arguing for kinetic cinema. I'm arguing for sit back in your seat with your popcorn and your and your soda or your water if you're healthy and and enjoy something that's just going to run right over you.

21:33Ryan Lattanzio:I actually don't think it's kinetic. And our colleague David Ehrlich put it really well, even though he gave it a somewhat positive review, that The Running Man lacks the musicality of earlier right movies like the Cornetto trilogy or Baby Driver or I love Baby Driver. Yeah. I don't know if you ever watched his early show Spaced, which is a really great show if you're in college and just want to sit on the couch getting stoned to it all day. There are some kind of gags that call back to that. And I did like some of the 80s inspired production design. And it reminded me actually of a better movie about a man constantly on the run, which is Minority Report.

22:12Ryan Lattanzio:that's a better movie that's Spielberg come on yeah and this movie he's reunited with the co-writer of Scott Pilgrim Michael Bacall who he gets Michael Bacall gets two screenwriting credits in the opening credits of the movie which I'm sure is some kind of WGA stipulation but that didn't inspire confidence either the other I think the most compelling argument to be made out of this movie is that it is a kind of urgent call to the fact that physical media is what's going to save us and not digitization. But there are pacing issues that get in the way of making the film feeling more anarchic than it should be, especially for a movie about anarchy.

22:53It does paint a picture of what the haves and have nots could look like if it continues to go the way it is right now. So that you have these billionaires and you have these wealthy people and you have people controlling the media and then you have everybody else is poor and and trying to scrabble for some kind of survival and i isn't this already going on like i just i don't know that it's what's going on but this is reality this is an exaggeration of it it's not there yet maybe it is maybe we're starving 42 million people who can't get their food stamps

23:30Ryan Lattanzio:yeah i mean i think it i think we are already there um so i will let's talk about how we think this movie is going to do it's actually i'll be successful the budget's over 100 million for paramount it's definitely an expensive release i don't think it's it's not going to make that back it's tracking at a 15 million to 25 million opening weekend which given the budget we just talked about i don't better be 25 well yeah yeah yeah well they keep doing this they keep making movies that are too expensive to to make their money back although i am getting annoyed with the with this constant criticism of one battle after another i i really a lot of people are going to see that movie what is it at now 200 million worldwide you know yeah and it's gonna do really well at home.

24:22Ryan Lattanzio:It's now on digital release. You can rent it at home. And I think a lot of people are going to watch it there. And that, you know, as we know, that's the way studios make like 80 % of the take off of that. Yeah, it's almost 200 million. It's at 196.8 right now. So that's an achievable goal, 200 million. That's respectable. I know it costs too much, but you're right. It's going to have a long tail and I think it's going to be okay. Interestingly, on the Paramount front, the whole question of whether the Ellisons are just going to scoop up Warner Brothers, there have been bids in the works now from Netflix and Comcast.

25:07So there is going to be some competition for Warner Brothers or at least pieces of Warner Brothers. That's the part, All these analysts have so much fun sitting down and say, oh, they're going to do this with the streaming and they're going to do this with the legacy studio and they're going to do this with with the cable assets. It's sort of fun to it's fun to watch it. It's not going to be fun to watch the destruction of one of the last major studios. That is not going to be fun. At least if Ellison takes it, he might keep it. He might keep the arrive, you know, two studios. Yeah.