Three cheers to Pixar employees for their forceful righteous letter to Disney

by Nathaniel R

Thank you to the always informative Cartoon Brew for sharing this letter from Pixar employees. The original  source was the subscription newsletter Popular Information. The letter addresses Disney's disgusting support of anti-gay legislators in Florida (which we discussed a couple of days ago) and the company's lame attempts at pretending they haven't given that support without actually removing it. The letter was written by 'LGBTQ+ employees and their allies' at Pixar. It's forceful and necessary. Of notable interest is the admission that Pixar films have tried for greater diversity in their storytelling years before the current wave of movies but has always been shut down by their parent company. We're sharing it in full because it's 100% worth reading...

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Pushing Linksies

• The Reveal "The Gotham City liveability index" through Batman projects. Hee
• Vulture interviews Lee Pace about Pushing Daisies for its 15th anniversary. Of all the shows being rebooted, shows that didn't get long runs should be at the top of the lists
• AV Club gets righteously snarky about theater chains upping their prices for The Batman. Cosign
• Letterboxd curating a fat girl cinematic canon
• Dread Central "a timeline of women monsters in film"

More after the jump including Austin Stowell, Paul Dano, M Night Shyamalan casting news, and Disney's disgusting anti-gay politics...

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The long reach of 'Nosferatu,' now 100 years old

by Brent Calderwood

A century after its March 4th, 1922, premiere in Berlin, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu remains a truly chilling classic. It’s widely acknowledged that Nosferatu and other German Expressionist masterpieces were influential not only to the development of Hollywood horror, but also to film noir and other genres. Nothing demonstrates the shadowy reach of Expressionism quite so strikingly, though, as its prevalence in the first wave of Walt Disney’s full-length features, which quoted heavily from Murnau and his contemporaries...

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What's Encanto's best song?

by Cláudio Alves

Just as they did with their last animated musical, Disney has decided to focus their campaigning on a single song from Encanto. In total, Lin-Manuel Miranda composed eight tunes for the feature, but only "Dos Oruguitas" will get a chance to compete for Oscar gold. Considering the risk of hypothetical vote-splitting, it's an understandable move though Disney hasn't always been the best judge of their songs' quality. So who's to say they know which song would make the best contender? With 2019's Frozen II, not everyone agreed with the spotlighting of "Into the Unknown" to the detriment of "Show Yourself." Does history repeat itself with Encanto? As with Frozen II, let's settle the matter through some list-making fun. In other words, a ranking… 

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Box Office: 007 Money and 2021's Highest Grossers

All you need to know about this very strange ecosystem shift in moviegoing is that an Icelandic language film (Lamb) made the overall top 10 despite having a per screen average of just $1,715. These are odd times we're living in when only blockbusters are making bank and even those aren't operating at close to full strength. There used to be 25-30 movies in wide release at any given time but there were literally only 8 in release this weekend here in the US. One wonders how the economics will all play in the future decade since streaming isn't as profitable as the traditional theatrical market and films have always been budgeted for pre-COVID realities. Will we see production values decrease in the next decade as Hollywood starts trying to make things on the cheap or just much higher subscription prices for streaming services?  What did you see this past week/weekend? More notes are after the jump.

Weekend Box Office October 8th-10th 🔺 = new or expanding / ★ = recommended
WIDE RELEASE	PLATFORM TITLES
No Time To Die	Lamb
1 NO TIME TO DIE 🔺  $56 Deborah's Review	1 LAMB 🔺 $1.0 in 583 theaters Cannes Capsule
2  VENOM LET THERE BE CARNAGE  $32 (cum. $141.6)	2 THE JESUS MUSIC [DOC] $150K in 270 theaters (cum. $857k)...

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