Hollywood Winners & Losers: Why Sydney Sweeney Won and ‘Michael’ Critics Lost
WON: Sydney Sweeney: Sure, her cameo was cut from The Devil Wears Prada 2. Yes, she has many media and social media scolds in a tizzy over her racy scenes in Euphoria, which is hot garbage this season. Also, nobody can stop talking about her in the HBO show — even though she co-stars with Zendaya, arguably the hottest actress on the planet right now. And she’s back as the face of American Eagle, in a far more clearly non-racist jeans campaign this time, after boosting their sales last year. Oh, and Christy — her boxing biopic that was mocked by Sweeney’s detractors for bombing at the box office — just hit No. 1 on HBO Max.
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LOST: David Zaslav: How is this remotely fair? Warner Bros. shareholders approved the Paramount merger that Zaslav worked tirelessly to put together for so many months, yet 82 percent voted against rewarding the man most responsible with some modest compensation for his efforts. He was only expecting upward of $886 million, one of the largest golden parachutes in history. What more does Zaslav have to do to prove himself? Go to the office of every Warner shareholder and lay them off, too? Do you have any understanding of the costs, crew salaries, and maintenance of your average super yacht?
WON: Curry Barker: You may not have heard of him — yet. But Barker is a 25-year-old TikTok sketch comedy guy who has suddenly become a highly sought-after writer-director — even though his first theatrical release, Obsession, doesn’t come out until next month. Just in the last few days, he landed A24’s reimagining of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and another film he just wrapped for Jason Blum, Anything But Ghosts, sold to Focus Features (Barker also gets to star in that one). Sorry industry veterans reduced to lugging lumber at Home Depot: If AI doesn’t replace us, Gen Z surely will.
LOST: Michael Critics: Critics have been very tough on Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic about a singer who definitely did not molest young boys despite admitting to letting them sleep in his bed as a 40-year-old man. He was just a delicate and sensitive artist, OK? It’s your fault that you don’t understand a powerful pop star’s need to spoon other people’s 10-year-olds. With only 38 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, many reviewers claim that — aside from various omissions about Jackson’s legacy — the film is a boring, paint-by-numbers effort (a few critics, like ours, were much more positive).
Taj Jackson has pushed back online, writing, “Sorry media, u don’t get to control the narrative anymore of who Michael Jackson truly was. The public gets to watch this movie … they will decide for themselves.” If the Jackson family really wanted to let fans decide for themselves about the singer’s legacy, the estate wouldn’t have pushed HBO to de-platform its documentary about Jackson’s alleged sins, Leaving Neverland, on a legal technicality. Speaking to THR, the documentary’s director wearily claimed that fans going to see the feel-good Michael, “don’t care that he was a child molester.”
“Don’t care” indeed: Michael is tracking to earn at least $80 million for a potential record-opening weekend for a music biopic. Its CinemaScore is an A-. This fawning film is going to be huge and critics — and the parts of Jackson’s story that his fans don’t want to think about — can’t stop it.
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