I have just spent a week at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. I saw no sunlight from Monday to around noon to Thursday, but I did see some movies — or at least part of them. It was, of course CinemaCon week, or as I like to call it, “the unofficial start to Oscar season.”
Many pundits might rather give the upcoming Cannes Film Festival that kind of distinction, but in recent times this smoke-filled exhibitors extravaganza looks to be the starting gun, if you go by what the studios are dropping footage of between all the popcorn-movie entertainment theater owners really care about.
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Last year CinemaCon ended up being the first stop for four of the 10 eventual Best Picture Oscar nominees. Warner Bros in their presentation made a big deal about Elvis, showing footage and trotting out director Baz Luhrmann and star Austin Butler for an extensive onstage interview that ran over 30 minutes. It also was where Paramount decided to debut Top Gun: Maverick to overwhelmingly positive response. Both those films then traveled to French Riviera for out-of-competition premieres at Cannes a month later. Between them they eventually got 14 nominations (but only one win, with Maverick taking Best Sound). At the Disney presentation, of course it gave a sneak peek at the loooooong-awaited Avatar: The Way of Water, which went to a Visual Effects Oscar win. As part of the Universal presentation, there was really nothing of Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (the studio saved that reveal for Toronto), but specialty division Focus Features gave us a tantalizing glimpse of Tár. It went on to six nominations (but no wins).
But the movie that would conquer them all, Everything Everywhere All at Once, already had premiered at SXSW (until then not known as a festival that could launch an Oscar winner) and was in release, but no one was predicting an eventual Oscar near-sweep and running the table at the guilds. Certainly, no one was betting it would take three of the four acting Oscars, tying Network and A Streetcar Named Desire for that distinction in Academy history.
So maybe CinemaCon didn’t give us the first glance at the big Oscar winners, but it was significant in terms of a soft launch for some real contenders. That is why I go every year in the hopes that we can start setting the table for Oscars, no matter how early it may be, or how universally unseen these actual films are at this point. So here, based on what we saw at CinemaCon, are some early predictions.
At itsMonday night presentation, Sony Pictures gave us the first extended look at Ridley Scott’s latest epic, Napoleon, which stars Joaquin Phoenix and is an Apple Original Films production. Because it is Scott, and clearly big in scope, this one has to have some sort of theatrical footprint, and thus Apple has teamed with Sony to give it a “robust” (as Tom Rothman calls it) wide release in theaters before eventually hitting Apple TV+. The extended scene shown was a major battle sequence with hundreds of extras (no CGI here) that looked truly spectacular and very Oscar-friendly. It had a Kubrickian feel to it, which is ironic since the Barry Lyndon director had an elaborate and famously unrealized plan to film a Napoleon epic himself. Scott — who is 85, folks — told me during an interview just before embarking on this project that he had six (count ’em, six!) battle scenes and that he was as excited as a kid to get it going. Rothman pointed out that Sir Ridley never has won an Oscar for directing, teeing up a narrative that could be irresistible come campaign season. Scott has been nominated for directing three times (Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Thelma and Louise), and Gladiator actually won Best Picture, but alas he was not a producer on it.
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On Tuesday, Warner Bros gave the first look anywhere at the new adaptation of Broadway musical The Color Purple, from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg. Of course, this title has a lot of Oscar history as Spielberg’s 1985 film version of the Alice Walker novel received 11 nominations but not a single win. He did get the DGA Award for it, even though his film went on to become one of the biggest shutouts in Oscar history. This version looks pretty delicious, and its ensemble cast starting with Fantasia (in her film debut), Danielle Brooks and Taraji P. Henson, is impressive. Warners might be getting a second chance with the Academy for this one, which got a huge boost from CinemaCon and a lengthy onstage interview with the cast and director Blitz Bazawule by none other than Oprah.
The studio also showed off Dune: Part Two and brought out director Denis Villenueve and stars Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya. The filmmaker described the 2021 first film, which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won six, as the “appetizer” and this as the “meal.” You can’t discount it, considering the AMPAS love for the first part.
Barbie, Wonka, and The Flash also dazzled but most likely will be relegated to crafts — though you never know. But that is usually the way Oscar treats commercial projects like those.
On Wednesday Disney did what Disney does by showing off generous chunks of its animation stockpile for 2023, meaning we saw the first 20 minutes of Pixar’s fire-and-ice comedy Elemental, which is going to close Cannes, and Wish, a musical confection with a holiday Frozen vibe. Those were just two of many films on display by the studios as animation clearly is a priority these days.
Two sure-to-be summer hits, the live-action Rob Marshall-directed The Little Mermaid , and Harrison Ford’s last go-round as Indiana Jones (also going to Cannes), are surefire crowd-pleasers, but Oscars? The original Indy adventure, 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, was a Best Pic nominee, but unlikely that could happen again. Mermaid probably could show in select crafts categories, though Melissa McCarthy clearly socks Ursula, the villain of Mermaid, home in style, at least in the “Poor Unfortunate Souls” number previewed. For me, the major wanna-see is Taika Waititi’s Searchlight pic Next Goal Wins, which looks to be the kind of movie you can fall in love with.
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Also on Wednesday, though all the studio presentations were great, Universal turned in the best produced and most dazzling as well as varied show, starting straight off with the studio’s big Oscar hopeful, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which based on past teasers and now the footage compiled for CinemaCon looks like it is firing on all cylinders. The director’s pleas for it to be seen in a laundry list of various formats he reeled off can’t hurt in demonstrating this is the kind of big and important, as well as entertaining kind of movie Oscar nominations are made of.
Riding the wave of the success of The Super Mario Bros Movie and the latest Puss ‘N Boots, an original from Illumination about a family of ducks, Migration, looked very promising to possibly land Chris Meledandri’s hit making company the Animated Feature Oscar nomination it deserves. Uni also showed off 2024’s Wicked, still only halfway through shooting, and you can bet on that one for the 97th Oscars from the looks of it.
Specialty division Focus Features also showed off their titles, and one of them – Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers which stars Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and more- feels like a movie that will make Oscar voters laugh and cry, a warm Christmas time film about those left behind at a school during the holidays. Considering recent Best Picture winners such as Green Book and Coda, this looks on the basis of the footage shown that it could grab the heart slot. Its filmmaking pedigree with two-time Oscar winner Payne, Oscar winning producer Mark Johnson, and others makes it one to watch for a group collectively responsible for Payne’s Sideways and The Descendants, and Rainman (which Johnson produced). I have a hunch about this November release. Focus also has Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City going to Cannes, and I am told perhaps his best yet. The footage certainly was unmistakably an Anderson film so we will see where it lands soon enough. Another Grand Budapest Hotel ?
Finally on Thursday Paramount had one surefire Oscar magnet with Apple Original Films’ production of Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon, which even at 3 1/2 hours (a colleague has actually seen it) looks from the footage I saw to be quintissential Scorsese, particularly with a cast including Leonardo Di Caprio in his sixth collaboration with the master and Robert De Niro with his 10th (!) I am hearing Lily Gladstone in the key female lead is a true breakout. As Scorsese’s first western (“there’s a lot of prairie out there on the location”, the New York filmmaker quipped at the great CinemaCon Legends Of Cinema luncheon where he was presented the lifetime award and interviewed by Di Caprio) it looks like a sure bet. We will find out when it premieres at Cannes on the 20th.
It looks to be another great year for Apple which remains the only streamer to have won Best Picture with CODA in 2022. Here again though, like Napoleon, they have teamed with a major studio in order to give it a major theatrical run in October , well before hitting streaming. This development along with Amazon’s now-proven willingness to give some of their films a more-than-token wide release in theatres, witness Air now at $43 million and counting, is a very heartening development that had the theatre owners applauding even as a streamer, in this case Apple, was thanked profusely by studio heads. Maybe the times they are a changing a bit. Just last night Amazon had its official opening of their new commercial movie house, The Culver Theatre in Culver City, which actually opened in December and is showing commercial non-streaming movies from all the studios. Of course Air is also being showcased there, but ironically it puts a major streamer in the same boat as all those exhibitors gathered in Vegas this week: hoping for commerical hits to keep the doors open and the people coming for the ultimate theatrical experience. Keep it up.
CinemaCon is very helpful in seeing what the studios in particular are willing to spend the campaign cash on. It is no mere accident of programming that Killers Of The Flower Moon was introduced by Paramount chief Brian Robbins, that Napoleon was introduced by Sony head Tom Rothman, that The Color Purple was introduced by Warner Bros/Discovery’s David Zaslav, and that Oppenheimer and Nolan were introduced by Universal’s Chair Donna Langley.
So here is an early stab. At least 5 of the 10 Best Picture Oscar nominees will be Oppenheimer, Killers Of The Flower Moon, Napoleon, The Color Purple, and The Holdovers. I wouldn’t be shocked, depending how things develop, to also see Dune 2 in that mix, This looks to be shaping up to be a year for BIG motion pictures. Thank you CinemaCon for letting me get the 96th Annual Academy Award game rolling.
Now all that’s left is to actually see these movies.
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