goodness gracious, great links of fire

• Variety Susanne Bier to direct Nicole Kidman in the miniseries The Undoing about a therapist whose husband goes missing
• Paste Kyle Turner on the "literary drag" of Can You Ever Forgive Me?
• Decider Julia Roberts 'queen of comebacks she never had to make'
• Pajiba an ode to Missy on Big Mouth (also my favorite character on the show)
• AV Club Emma Thompson wore sneakers to her damehood ceremony
• IndieWire it's foolish to bet against James Cameron even if you think the idea of four more Avatars is insane

• Remezcla why was the Cuban submission Sergio & Sergei left off the Oscar Foreign Film list?
• THR will Netflix caving on an exclusive theatrical window for Roma mean more films will get that treatment?
• Vulture on the extreme closeups in this season's awards contenders
• i09 interesting piece on why we need more utopian fiction (it's all dystopias out there currently)
• Vulture unexpectedly good article "in defense of the medicore music biopic" on Bohemian Rhapsody, Great Balls of Fire, The Doors, and more...
• People Idris Elba named "sexiest man alive" for 2018
• Gizmodo MoviePass didn't kill the dream of subscription-based moviegoing. A new competitor Sinemia has lots of tiered pricing options and a $24 monthly charge if you want unlimited one non 3D movie a day.
• /Film Nothing ever stays dead onscreen. Breaking Bad will now get a film version with Aaron Paul expected to return (as a sequel to the series)
• Broadway World Angela Bassett and Cicely Tyson named honorary chairs of the 60th anniversary gala of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

Post Election Blueishness
• Slate offers a practical optimistic way to look at the election results yesterday
• New Yorker "Putin Loses Control of the House" - funny piece!

Showbiz History: "The Story of Us" Hits Theaters, "You Light Up My Life" Tops the Charts

10 random things that happened on this day, October 15th, in showbiz history

1888 A letter written "From Hell" was postmarked on this day for the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. Was it actually from Jack the Ripper? The letter is now lost and the murders were forever unsolved. The story has fascinated Hollywood forever. Anyone remember the movie From Hell (2001) with Johnny Depp and Heather Graham?

1917 Exotic dancer Mata Hari is executed in France for espionage. Many films have been made about her.

More after the jump including Joan Crawford, Penny Marshall, Michelle Pfeiffer, a missing hunk, and "You Light Up My Life"...

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What did you see this weekend?

by Nathaniel R

Weekend Box Office Estimates (September 7-9)  🔺 = New or Expanded Theater Count
W I D E 800+ screens	PLATFORM / LIMITED excluding prev. wide
The Nun	The Wife
1. 🔺THE NUN  $53.5*NEW* Nun movies	1. YA VEREMOS $770K on 369 screens (cum. $3.3) Review
2. CRAZY RICH ASIANS $13.6 (cum. $136.2)  Review, Yeoh, Podcast	2. 🔺THE WIFE $712k on 153 screens (cum. $2)  Review, Poster Blurb, Glenn's Oscar
3. 🔺 PEPPERMINT $13.1 *NEW*	3. 🔺JULIET, NAKED $670k on 467 screens (cum. $2.4)
4. THE MEG $6 (cum. $131.5) Review	4. THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS $155k on 132  screens (cum. $11.9)  Review
5.🔺SEARCHING $4.5 (cum. $14.3) Review	5.  PUZZLE $121k on 131 screens (cum. $1.8)

What did you see this weekend? I'm in Toronto cramming movies into my eyeballs (just screened: First Man and If Beale Street Could Talk). Reviews soon... thankfully Chris at least is keeping up with the reviews immediately after his screenings. I'm slower - apologies!

In box office news this week: The Nun had the biggest opening weekend of its Conjuring franchise; Fallout became the #1 in the Mission: Impossible franchise globally; BlacKkKlansman is now Spike Lee's third biggest narrative feature (behind Inside Man and Malcolm X... though if you dont adjust for inflation its also behind Jungle Fever and Do the Right Thing); Crazy Rich Asians finally showed a bit of a slowdown after a month in release but hasn't started to lose theaters yet and is already well on its way to being very profitable ( $160+ million globally thus far on a $30 million budget); And The Wife is expanding well with a still healthy per screen average and now crossing $2 million which bodes well for Close's Oscar campaign if it's a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race kind of year. We'll see. 

Summer Box Office Top Ten. Are These "Popular Achievements"?

by Nathaniel R

It's probably foolish to continue to poke fun at The Academy for their desperation in wanting to honor "Popular Achievements" but we can't help ourselves. It's so redundant. Box office success is its own reward and has nothing to do with "best" really, just with "success of brand awareness" and "delivering what people are expecting". The charts prove that it's getting more and more rare for an original picture to make it into the year end top ten. Even in the summer, with a much smaller field of contenders, it's still really hard for any movie that isn't a sequel to be one of "the most popular." Summer movie season kicked off on April 27th with The Avengers and ends right about now on Labor day weekend.

Herewith the TEN biggest hits of Summer 2018... How many of them did you see and if you controlled all box office, how much would they have earned?

SUMMER TOP TEN (Figures as of 9/2/2018)

1. AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR (April 27th) $678+ It was always going to be huge but the phenomenon of Black Panther helped push it way way over the gross of the preceding Avengers picture which made $459 domestic. (Global Gross to Date: $2 billion... the first Marvel movie to ever do that... Black Panther grossed $1.3 billion globally though it's a bigger hit than Infinity War in the US)

2. INCREDIBLES 2 (June 15th) $601+ Proving that audiences were really impatient for a sequel to the 2004 smash, they turned out in droves 14 years later, the rose still in full bloom (Global Gross to date: $1.1 billion)

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Posterized: Glenn Close

by Nathaniel R

Glenn at the UK premiere of The Wife earlier this monthWith The Wife expanding to 78 movie theaters today, more of you will now have the chance to see the performance that's won Glenn Close so many raves. So let's consider this weekend the kick-off to what we hope will be a competitive but satisfying Best Actress race since Lady Gaga (A Star is Born) and Emma Stone (The Favourite) are in the process of making big splashes at Venice as we type this. To celebrate the Oscar campaign for Glenn Close, let's look back on her filmography, shall we? Balder & Dash beat us to a very fine essay about her whole career and we're glad they did because plans to do a whole Glenn Close Week here failed; weirdly  I discovered that a lot of members of Team Experience are agnostic about her! I have had an up and down relationship with this Connecticut-born Oscar favorite, myself, but I am most definitely not agnostic about her performance in The Wife. I think it's the best she's been in 20 years and I'm thrilled (and surprised) to be quoted on the poster for the movie.

Here is her entire feature film career via movie posters. We've mixed in a few key TV projects so that this will feel more comprehensive, since Close has spent major time there, as well. How many of these 51 Glenn Close performances have you seen?

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