'Megalopolis' tanked, but at least we have 'Nosferatu.'

A box office update, a new trailer, an actor said something dumb, and Donald Trump is worried that our actors have no muscles anymore.

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Noseferatu has a trailer.

Years back I interviewed Robert Eggers about trying to resurrect a dead vernacular for his debut feature, The Witch, and even at the time he struck me as the rare director who on occasion might actually be too faithful to his story. To have a tendency to maybe treat the audience as smarter than we actually are. That’s such a rare quality in a filmmaker these days that I’ve been thrilled to see his name on anything since.

He’s only gone on to make better and better movies — The Lighthouse, The Northman — all living in some middle ground between reality and nightmare/fever dream that are, if anything, at times too transporting, in ways that make me sweaty and claustrophobic whenever I’m not laughing (The Lighthouse was somehow both nightmarish and hilarious).

Now Eggers is back with Nosferatu, whose trailer just dropped, his take on F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, which was itself inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Willem Dafoe (who did his own take on Nosferatu in Shadow of the Vampire) is in there as Professor Von Franz, with Bill Skarsgard as the vampire and Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, presumably the character who the vampire wants for his devil bride. Emma Corrin is in there somewhere too, meaning that this film is sure to break records for the number of weird, bug-eyed actors crammed into the same movie. The Visine budget must’ve been incredible.

As for the first trailer… it looks pretty good. I mean, the parts of it I was actually able to see look pretty good, anyway. I may have to take my computer into the shop to get the screen re-enbrightened before they release another. I keep turning up the brightness, but it does nothing! This man saw Game of Thrones S1 and said “hold my beer.”

Opens this Christmas.

/Dumb guy voice: I make picture dark ‘cause vampire hate sunlight. I think self, “what vampire do?” Prolly turn off lights. So, no lights this movie ‘cause vampires.

Megalopolis is a big ol’ flop (for now).

I urged everyone to see Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed boondoggle, because, as I wrote in my review, “an unreleasable debacle released nonetheless is by definition a triumph of the human spirit.”

There was sort of a cognitive dissonance with Megalopolis, a movie that was intriguing enough that multiple friends asked me about it and planned to see (“which drugs should I take beforehand?” being the most common question), but that when I actually did see, the theater was mostly empty. That seemed to be a consistent occurrence with friends that saw it too. It was a movie that lots of people I know saw, and all agreed that no one was seeing. Just goes to prove the limits of anecdotal information, I suppose.

The numbers are now in and they are not good. Megalopolis, whose budget Vulture puts at $136 million, earned just $4 million for the weekend, good enough for sixth place, behind Speak No Evil in its third weekend and the debut of Devara Part 1, a three-hour Telegu-language epic I only heard of just now.

…such an underperformance fell wildly short of pre-release “tracking” estimates which had Ford’s two-hour and 18-minute ensemble opus... earning between $7 million and $10 million. Or, to put it another way, Megalopolis would have to continue selling tickets at the same rate for another 24 weeks, with no drop off, to break even (not including its prints and advertising spend: another $30 million to $50 million). [Vulture]

Critics didn’t like it much (myself included) and even the self-selecting audience of debacle enthusiasts like myself rated it a D+, according to Cinemascore (a solid D+?). Kind of disappointing that an old master can’t succeed despite himself, but I guess what do you really expect from a movie about Megalon, a particle never explained, starring Adam Driver as a man who can control time, but never does so for any good purpose? Oh well, I guess we’ll always have Wow Platinum. For another few weeks, at least.

The Wild Robot, which I haven’t seen yet but plan to, took the top spot, earning $35 million in domestic box office with a 98% RottenTomatoes score and an A Cinemascore. I don’t put much stock in either of those metrics, but a broadly popular movie that wasn’t a remake, reboot, or sequel succeeding on the basis of people thinking it was good seems like positive news.

Zachary Levi comes out as Trump supporter.

In a surprise to no one who has paid any attention to Zachary Levi, the star of Kurt Warner: American Underdog endorsed Donald Trump for president over the weekend. (For anyone normal who hasn’t been paying attention to Zachary Levi, would you believe a Hollywood actor named “Zach Levi” actually isn’t Jewish? Crazy, right? I know!).

Levi endorsed Donald Trump before moderating an event with RFK Jr. and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard on Saturday in Michigan, before claiming his move would likely constitute “career suicide.”

Appearing at the “Team Trump’s Reclaim America Tour,” Levi said that “of the two choices that we have, Donald Trump, President Trump, is the man that can get us there.”

Just moments earlier, he told the crowd “we’re here for unity...whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican... every one of us is a child of God.” [DailyBeast]

I loved Levi in the first Shazam!, one of my favorite superhero movie ever, and luckily I will still be able to because who really cares what actors think anyway? Mel Gibson seems to hold abhorrent views on just about everything, but I’ll be damned if the man doesn’t understand story structure. Braveheart still rips.

Levi is probably medium-correct on balance that this won’t be a great career move for him, but it wasn’t like Hollywood’s up-and-coming directors were beating down his door anyway. He had already partly pivoted to culture war stuff. Also, it’s almost hack to point out at this point, but it’s always funny when evangelicals invoke God when they talk about Trump. Just say you like him because he hates the same people that you do! God doesn’t have anything to do with it.

Do not ask me to pretend that a guy who holds a Bible like this is a religious figure. No one who holds a Bible like that has ever read it, or possibly any other book.

Speaking of…

What movie is Donald Trump talking about here?

This might be my new favorite Trump clip (I don’t think Substack will let me embed Twitter video, but you should watch it).

https://x.com/bostonbrian23/status/1840465386573111750?s=46

Here’s the actual transcript, as transcribed by me:

“If you wanted to do a movie on some of these people that you're gonna be looking at in two minutes, there's no actor in hollywood that could play a role... there's nobody that could do it… you know these actors they're a little bit shaky.. they bring in a big actor and you look, and you say ‘look, he's got no muscle content.’ He's got no muscle! We need a little muscle! Then they bring in another one -- but he's got a weak face. He looks weak. Now these guys have the whole package. Unfortunately for our country I watched one of them shouting at a judge, ‘I kill you!’ I kill you when I get out, I kill you!

“And you know the judge is like, hmmph. He's never heard this stuff. And even the guards, you know, they want to look for a new job themselves. ‘I kill you.’”

He seems to have gone full Grandpa Simpson, the depth of his harangues are always something to witness. Meanwhile, the sidebar next to the footage from the rally is showing an ad for the “Trump Arc Lighter” from a website called “PatriotAddictDeals” which is perfection. (Are they addicted to patriotism or cigarettes? Discuss.)

Despite being a professional film and television critic, for the life of me I cannot figure out what show or movie he is talking about here. It took Miles Klee a good six months to figure out that Trump’s running, “late great Hannibal Lecter” bit was probably based on him confusing Anthony Hopkins, the still-living British actor who played Hannibal Lecter, with Jon Voight, the also-still-living American actor who is a Trump supporter and sort of looks like Anthnoy Hopkins (the political connection being that Lecter came from an insane asylum, which Trump seems to think is related to immigrants applying for asylum). That was incredible work, but I really hope it doesn’t take six months to parse this one.

I really want to know which shows and television Trump has been watching, as his media consumption is by far the most entertaining thing about him. And so, I’m putting the question to you here: do you know which movie or show has someone shouting “I kill you” at a judge? It smells like a network cop show to me, though I don’t watch many of those these days.

I’m considering voting for him if he pledges to improve the muscle content of our actors. He’s not right about everything, but he’s onto something here. Actors are too scrawny these days! And with weak faces! We can’t have Australians playing all of our heroes, it’s a national embarrassment. Make actors bigger again, I say. Kumail Nanjiani for Secretary of Gains.