In my book, the Berniebot attack on Beto O’Rourke a few days ago cancelled Bernie’s candidacy. I wore a Bernie sticker on my rumble-hog all through ’15 and ’16, but he’ll never get there in ’20. Nobody is going to get behind an 80 year-old who can’t seem to win over southern POCs. He’s just as dead as Hillary. I respect and admire everything he stands for, but…what am I saying? Of course he’s going to run. He can’t get there but he’ll give it hell anyway.

The Six-Million Dollar Man is an Austin Powers title. From Germany’s Turbine Medien, a 12-Bluray box set containing five seasons worth of episodes plus three extras. Those awful action sequences when slow-mo was used to convey Steve Austin moving at super speeds. Lee Majors, a slab of TV series beefcake in the ’70s and ’80s, is still with us at age 79. Look at the close-ups on the DVD Beaver review page — all 1.33:1, almost all close-ups, what TV series looked like in the bad old days of nascent cable and lingering coat-hanger antennas. Of all the things to blow 81 euros on…

Tom Hanks and Marielle Heller‘s Mr. Rogers movie has acquired a new title — A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

Did you know that before today’s announcement the Rogers biopic was called You Are My Friend? Did you know that? A lot of us did, I think. But not Variety‘s Matt Donnelly, to go by his report about the new title. Donnelly and his editors would prefer that readers forget the old title. In their view, the Hanks-Rogers-Heller project was a “previously untitled movie.”

Tristar will release A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood on 10.18.19. Award-season play for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Screenplay (Micah Fitzerman-Blue, Noah Harpster), etc.

Buckshot by one-third of the critics during last September’s Toronto Film Festival, Max Minghella‘s Teen Spirit will open on 4.5.19 via Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment. It costars stars Elle Fanning, Rebecca Hall and Zlatko Burić.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Leslie Felperin: “This making-of-a-star drama, set on the Isle of Wight, is old-fashioned and corny, and not in a good way. Flat and a bit pitchy.”

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “Elle Fanning plays a British teen who enters a TV singing competition in a pop film that tries to give us a sugar high but is too cookie-cutter to soar.

“If Teen Spirit, however, wants to be a movie of the moment, the genre of indie fairy tale it belongs to is older to the point of being rather creaky. Scrape away the pop frosting and what’s underneath is basically one of those cookie-cutter Miramax ‘crowd-pleasers’ from the ’90s: a movie that’s formulaic in every detail but that passes off its particular cute brand of British Isles whimsy as a vaguely high-toned signifier of ‘authenticity.'”

Felperin quibble #1: “Fanning, reported to have done all her own singing live and not had it auto-tuned in post, has a good set of pipes, but it’s hard to see her competent but derivative musical stylings breaking out in a crowded marketplace.”

“The exhibition business” — i.e., cheap sugar-fizz highs delivering mass soul suffocation by way of increasingly tedious genre flicks and running-out-of-steam franchises — “came roaring back in 2018″…yes! Joy and rapture!

So proclaims a 12.26 Variety trend story by Brent Lang and Rebecca Rubin, titled “Movie Theaters Bounce Back: What’s Behind the 2018 Rebound.” Lang and Rubin’s feigned exuberance is about $11.5 billion worth of tickets having been sold over the last twelve months — a fact.

“After being written off in 2017 as creaky anachronisms that were being rapidly surpassed by more agile streaming players such as Netflix and Amazon, studios and theater owners are closing out the year in a much more optimistic frame of mind,” L & R declare.

Question: Why did moviegoers return to theaters in such great numbers over the last 12 months? Answer: If the right kind of gleaming, smart-assy, familiar-but-diverse, CG-fortified crap comes along, moviegoers will lap it up like seals. The key terms are “right kind.”

Poison choke quote: “It’s all about content,” said Jeff Goldstein, head of domestic distribution at Warner Bros. “There were movies audiences wanted to see.”

Uh-oh factor #1: “There are reasons to worry that the film business remains overly reliant on a handful of genres and franchises. Six of the top 10 highest-grossing domestic releases in 2018 were superhero pics and nine of the 10 most successful North American movies were sequels or spinoffs, hardly a triumph for originality. The only movie in the top 10 that wasn’t part of a pre-existing series was The Grinch, a venerable piece of intellectual property that has already inspired a Jim Carrey movie and a beloved television film with the voice of Boris Karloff.”

Uh-oh factor #2: “Some of these franchises are growing longer in the tooth. Many are now entering their second, third, or, in the case of Star Wars, their fourth decades.