There is a movie Hollywood wanted you to see this weekend.
There is a movie Netflix tried to convince you you wanted to see this weekend.
And there is the movie you actually should’ve seen this weekend.
We’re going to talk about all three today.
We’ll start with shocking box office news. The second weekend of the dinosaur sequel, Jurassic World Dominion, beat out the premiere weekend of Pixar’s, Buzz Lightyear. Jurassic World took in 58 million and Buzz Lightyear took in 51 million.
For reference, the last Toy Story film took in 120 million on the exact same weekend three years ago.
I know some of you don’t care about box office. But I do. I think every box office success and failure tells us something about the stories the general moviegoing audience wants to see.
What was it about this story that kept people away? Some analysts point to it being a confusing concept. The origin story of a fake toy. I don’t know about that. I thought that was quite clever. In a movie landscape where prequels and sequels and spinoffs and sidequels have become commonplace, this is one of the more original spinoff ideas I’ve come across.
I honestly think one of the big reasons the movie opened low was the music choice in the trailer. Starman by David Bowie??? A song recorded in 1972. And your audience is 9 year olds? I’m sorry but that doesn’t track. It didn’t feel right and I honestly think it painted the film with a confusing brush.
The more common belief is that Buzz doesn’t have his ensemble of toys to accompany him this time around. It’s just him and that’s not enough to get people to show up. I guess that makes sense. You’ve grown up getting all the toys, now you only get one of them. But I don’t know. The Marvel movies that focus on one character seem to do just fine at the box office.
There’s also the matter of the gay kiss in the movie, which may have scared off more conservative families than Disney had anticipated. And Chris Evans, who can be, let’s just say, aggressively political at times, called anyone who didn’t agree with his opinion on the matter, “idiots.” Regardless of which political side you find yourself on, that’s bad form. You shouldn’t call anyone an idiot. But, in the end, who knows how much of an effect that had on the box office. It’s impossible to tell.
I think what it comes down to with every project – and this is something that Hollywood, despite the billions of dollars it’s shoved into R&D over the years, has never figured out – is that some movies have that x-factor that gets people excited and some don’t. Buzz Lightyear never had that x-factor.
Cause I was originally going to see it. But the closer I got to the movie, the more I started to weigh the three hours it was going to take out of my day against what else I could do with that time. In the end, alternative use of that time won out.
I’m still going to watch Lightyear when it hits Disney Plus. I’m a sci-fi geek so I root for any big-budget sci-fi story. I also love Toy Story. But this movie never got up into that exclusive “must-see” territory, which is why it lost out to Jurassic World.
By the way, what a huge win for Jurassic World, right? This movie was murdered last week by critics and most movie-goers. There wasn’t a single positive storyline around the film. But this surprise win makes the movie relevant, at least for the next seven days!
For those who stayed home, they had a big Netflix release awaiting them in Spiderhead. Spiderhead was a movie that wasn’t on anybody’s radar. Netflix knew they had a dud but when director Joesph Kosinski and Miles Teller debuted the most talked about movie of the year in Top Gun, Netflix went all-in on Spiderhead’s promotion.
There’s nothing worse than “clumsy and silly” masquerading as “high-minded.” And Spiderhead is the epitome of this. It wants so badly to make a statement about… I don’t know, the world or something. But it’s such a weak script combined with such a haphazard execution that virtually nothing works.
For starters, it throws us into the movie midway through the main character’s journey. That was a terrible decision. We show up watching our characters freak out after drugs have been injected into their system and we never catch up to what’s going on or why. Which I think was the point but it was a really bad point because it didn’t work at all.
The first draft of Groundhog Day famously dropped us into Bill Murray’s nightmare hundreds of days into the loop. The producers loved the concept but immediately identified how confusing it was to already start in the loop and ordered the writer to begin the story before the loop.
Reese and Wernick or Kosinski or whoever made this choice would’ve done well to approach Spiderhead in the same way. The movie never recovers from starting at such a strange point in the process.
And then there are just basic bad storytelling choices. There are two “suits” conducting the experiments and no protocols for if someone dies or commits suicide in the trial rooms??? They have to deal with it themselves??? That’s a straight up lack of effort on the writers’ part. They needed to figure out their mythology and understand what happens in those circumstances and create the proper staff support to deal with them because even if something basic goes wrong, there clearly should’ve been staff to deal with it.
And then the patients can come up and hang out with the suits whenever they want? They have full access to them? Can even sneak up on them? This when you have mentally unstable prisoners with violent tendencies??? I mean come on. How much sense does that make? Every creative choice in this screenplay seems designed to destroy the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. It’s baffling how lazy and stupid it all is.
And by the way, one of the easiest ways to know if a movie is bad is when the trailer doesn’t even know what the movie is. It shows you a bunch of random shots. Nothing is cohesive. There’s no clear narrative to latch onto. Whenever that happens in a trailer, as it did Spiderhead, that’s exactly how the movie ends up.
Which is why I’m worried about “Nope.” Its trailer has the same problems that Spiderhead had in its trailer. But back to Spiderhead. Stay as far away from this movie as you can. I would even suggest hiring a local programmer to come to your home and reprogram your Netflix app to eliminate all references to Spiderhead just so you don’t accidentally click on it and are forced to watch the first several seconds.
Spiderhead is the embodiment of a “What The Hell Did I Just Watch?”
But do not fear, my friends. This does not mean you are without something to view this week. There is a good movie out there. The only catch is it’s on Apple TV. It’s called “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” and it’s one of the big success stories to come out of Sundance earlier this year.
The movie was written and directed by (and stars) 23 year old Cooper Raiff. It follows 22 year old recent college graduate, Andrew, who finds himself really good at being a hype man at bar mitzvahs, to the point where he starts getting paid for it.
During one of these parties, he meets Domino, the mother of an autistic teen girl, and Domino instantly falls for him when he does the impossible, getting her daughter to have fun at the party.
Of course, she’s in her 30s and he’s 22 and, oh yeah, she’s also getting married soon. So it’s far from smooth sailing. That’s really what the movie is about. They’re navigating this impossible situation and all of it is done in classic Sundance indie fashion that’s at times frustrating but most of the time, satisfying.
For starters, 23 years old?? And this is your first movie? That’s amazing. Visually, the director, Cooper Raiff, is nothing special. But where he shines is he gets amazing performances out of everyone, especially Dakota Johnson, who’s irresistible in this. He also gets a good performance from Leslie Mann, Vanessa Burghardt (the actress who plays the autistic daughter), as well as himself!
And the writing is surprisingly strong for a 23 year old. When you’re writing character based storylines, you need to create character-centric plot pieces that make us care. And one of the ways to do this is to make the character goals impossible.
There was something I loved about Raiff’s choice to have Domino months out from her wedding. Being already married is kind of cliche. More importantly, it seems easier to overcome if you’re Andrew. If they’ve been married for a long time and they’re both numb to marriage and don’t really care about one another, that’s a shield that can be penetrated by Andrew.
But the fact that they’re GETTING MARRIED and therefore still in the happy phase of a relationship made it seem a lot tougher to penetrate. That’s what you’re trying to do as a writer. You want to make things as hard as possible for your hero. And the further into the story we got, the harder Andrew prying Domino away from her fiancé felt.
Let me explain why this choice is such a good one. If it becomes clear that Andrew is going to win Domino over, that it’s only a matter of time, we have less need to read. Because we already know what’s going to happen. But if you go the opposite direction, and after every ten pages, Andrew feels further away from his goal of getting Domino, then we have no choice but to keep reading. Because we’re thinking, “Well it’s a movie so he has to get her. But it looks like he’s not going to.” That conflict is what powers our curiosity and makes us want to charge through the rest of the screenplay to see what happens.
I don’t think this is a perfect movie. It’s not as good as its big brother, Coda. But it’s sort of like the perfect Sundance indie movie. It hits all those beats that make you feel like you’ve discovered a cool little movie that nobody else knows about.
I suggest you check it out.
Also, feel free to leave your reviews of both Buzz Lightyear and Spiderhead! I’m curious what you guys thought!
