Excelsior Links

• /Film Michelle Yeoh may be headlining a Star Trek spin-off series
• Towleroad Greg Berlanti (Love Simon) plans to direct a Rock Hudson biopic
• Variety This is so cool. The animation studio Aardman (Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit, etcetera) is transferring its ownership to its employees. Peter Lord will stay on as creative director

 

• MNPP Raúl Castillo joins the already amazing cast of Rian Johnson's Knives Out
• Awards Daily Adam McKay promoting Vice says something he might regret about the difference between Cheney and Trump
• Playbill Did you hear they're releasing another album for The Greatest Showman? This one is all covers. Kelly Clarkson is doing "Never Enough"
• Kinja great deal if you're a Potter person. All 8 Harry Potter films on bluray for just $40
• Cinema Eye Honors, which honors documentary films (we guess it's the week for that?), release their nominations for the year with Bing Liu's Minding the Gap leading with 7 nominations and Bisbee '17, Hale County This Morning This Evening and Shirkers each receiving 5. All are eligible for the Oscars this year, too.
• Boy Culture what Matt said about this odd quote from Michael C Hall on his sexuality
• The Guardian Controversy! German Playboy has published an interview with Ennio Morricone in which he trashes Quentin Tarantino. Now Morricone says he never gave that interview and will take legal action.

R.I.P.
• Variety Stan Lee, Marvel's figurehead and comic book legend, has died at 95. One assumes we have four final Stan Lee cameos coming up, though. He gets a bit in Into the Spider-Verse (yes, I've seen it but we're not allowed to talk about it yet). And surely he'll be in Captain Marvel, Infinity War Part 2, and Spider-Man: Far From Home , since they're all in post production already.
• The Guardian Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL in 2001 has died at 90.

Exit Video
Here's another cover from The Greatest Showman Reimagined from P!nk and her daughter Willow Sage Hart

P.S. Alarming!
Grammy winner Beck tweeted out that he was recording a score for Roma. Naturally this is upsetting because the movie has screened for months and actually has no score. The soundscape is so unique and immersive and tons of critics have praised the movie for this craftsmanship exactly. Why would they change it now after all the praise? I'm currently having nightmares of what happened to A Star is Born (1954) and The New World (2005) when the studio kept meddling after screenings with something that was already brilliant and perfect to the point where some people never could see the original version and in the case of A Star is Born it was lost for all time. 

Sir Ian prepares for "Cats"

Sir Ian McKellen was just on Graham Norton discussing his preparation for his role in Cats. As usual just when you think you couldn't love this man any more than you already do, he proves you wrong yet again.

P.S. Tom Hooper is still casting his adaptation of the phenomenally successful 80s stage musical. The household name stars have been announced for some times but they've been adding new-to-the-big-screen talents including two principal dancers from the Royal Ballet.

Beauty vs Beast: And Then There Was Fassbender

Jason Adams from MNPP here for a new week's round of our "Beauty vs Beast" poll, wherein we ask you to choose between a "good" guy and a "bad" guy and roll and around and muck up the in between what that means. One of our modern masters in mucking up that in between has a new movie out this weekend - Steve McQueen returns with Widows, out on Friday. If you'd like my long-form thoughts on it here's my review from last week, but if you just want short-form, here: it's great! Go see it!

I will say there's one thing I was disappointed by with Widows though, and that's the absence of McQueen's lucky charm Michael Fassbender, who'd starred in every one of his movies before now. And that's where we turn for this week's contest. (I'm worried about Fassbender in general, who's all but disappeared from acting since The Snowman soiled our cinemas last year - come back, Fassy!)

survey software

PREVIOUSLY Although we should be celebrating Parker Posey every day we really celebrated the heck out of her last week for her 50th birthday - for our poll it was her incest-minded Bouvier twist who took top honors, swallowing up 64% of the vote along with all that scenery. Said James From Ames:

"Jackie O left me awestruck. It’s such a star-making role and performance that it’s almost painful to think on, given that Hollywood never capitalized on this huge talent. My cousin, 10 years younger than me, was obsessed with the real Jackie O and wore that pink suit for Halloween. She didn’t like my suggestion to add brains to the look, and I found out she had never heard of this great film!"

Can You Ever Forgive the Box Office?

by Nathaniel R

Dear readers, we don't know why we relay the box office charts each week because they can be depressing. Films that should be giant hits are not and vice versa. With great regularity. We've learned to adjust our expectations so that now films that seem like giant hits made for adults are actually just modest hits if you compare them to year's past and so on. But for what it's worth here are this week's charts... 

Weekend Box Office Estimates (Nov 9-11)
W I D E 800+ screens	PLATFORM / LIMITED excluding prev. wide
1  Dr Seuss the Grinch $66 on 4141 screens *NEW* Posterized	1 🔺 Can You Ever... $1.4 on 391 screens (cum. $3.6) Review, Podcast

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