The last year in which Nicole Kidman‘s AMC Theatres turned a profit was 2018 — $110M in the black. They lost $4.56B in 2020, $1.27B in ’21…pandemic. They lost nearly a billion in ’22 ($974M), a mere $397M in ’23 and $352M in ’24…closer and closer to breaking even! AMC’s total 2024 revenue was $4.6B.

Every time I go into an AMC theatre, it’s between 15% to 20% filled….if that. Then again I avoid idiot-level movies.

I posted my jubilant “Kathy Kennedy is stepping down piece” yesterday aftenoon…..whoo!. The Critical Drinker and Echo Chamberlain weighed in several hours later.

Sasha Stone has been working on this Hollywood-has-succumbed-to-a-woke-apocalypse Tablet story for a few weeks now. It finally surfaced last night (2.25). It’s called “Awards Daily, was all but assassinated by Rebecca Keegan and The Hollywood Reporter last summer. That aside, Sasha’s article is accurate, well written, honest, straight-shooting. I wanted something meaner and more scathing, but that’s me.

Excerpt: “The woke code is like the Hays Code. The rules weren’t written down, but everyone knew what they were. After Trump’s win, the fear of racism morphed into Salem-like episodes of mass hysteria that would find its way to the Oscars, too. Suddenly, it wasn’t just most people who were racists. Most movies were racist, too. La La Land was racist, so Moonlight had to win. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was racist so The Shape of Water had to win. By the time Green Book came along, everyone in Hollywood had lost their minds.

“After the Green Book [foolery], the Academy began adding new members and purging their older members, with the objective of adding more women and people of color. The only requirement would be that they were somehow involved in film and that they weren’t white and male. Women in Hollywood saw this new rule as a perk for going along with the new system, which targeted white men but not white women.

“Over a period of just a few years, the Academy added approximately 3,000 new members, bringing the total membership of the Academy to around 10,000. Of necessity, most of the new instant Academy members were from foreign countries—the same way most “students of color” at prestige American universities these days are the children of wealthy foreign elites, not the products of our collapsing inner cities.

“The sea change in the Academy’s membership was first felt in 2019 when the South Korean art house film Parasite beat some of the most critically acclaimed and profitable films from American film studios, including Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Joker and 1917. Parasite killed two birds with one stone. Had it not won, all of the winners that night from the major categories would have been white. Parasite ensured that the Oscars made history and had glowing headlines the next day.

“But they also proved something else: that the Oscars were no longer as invested in their traditional job of fortifying the American studio system. Most of the members worked in the industry and cared about its continued success. International voters, whose own film industries are often heavily subsidized by their governments, have no such investment.

“As Hollywood began to rebuild after COVID, there was a shift away from reporting on the domestic box office and more on the global box office, which paints a more optimistic picture of the industry. This is the second year in a row that there are two films double dipping in the Best Picture and International Feature categories.

I’ve been a Brutalist hater for several weeks now, and am certainly as dug into this viewpoint as Matt Walsh is….”a long monotonous journey into the void,” you bet.

That said, Walsh’s statement that “there is no valid excuse for a film to be three and a half hours long” is ignorant and (no offense) forehead-slap embarassing. A few Vulture staffers spelled this out on 1.12.25. No excellent movie is too long, and no awful, punishing, “give me some heroin so I can get through this” movie is too short.

A majority of Gatecrashers voters are still predicting an Adrien Brody win….please God…please let Timothee Chalamet win…please…no Brody, no Brody…no, no…I’m already bummed enough by the likely prospect of Demi Moore taking Best Actress…in my mind everyone and everything connected to The Brutalist must not only be stopped but ground into the pavement. I don’t mean to sound hard or cruel but I don’t care if Brady Corbet is living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Yes, another Blue Velvet of sorts, right?…another take on the dark underbelly of an idyllic American picket-fence domesticity?…a midwestern Diary of a Mad Housewife? Obviously something in that realm. Older white male = perverse-to-the-max bad guy…shocker!

The folks at Amazon MGM are presenting. Nicole Kidman, Gael García Bernal, Matthew Macfadyen (whose Succession performance landed him this role), Jude Hill, Rachel Sennott.

Debuting before the South by Southwest whores in 3.9.25 (Austin cineastes will heartily shriek over anything), followed by some kind of release on 3.27.25.

I’m trying to wangle a couple of tickets to a 3.6 MOMA screening (7 pm) of Errol Morris‘s “CHAOS: The Manson Murders“, mainly because Morris will be doing a q & a directly after. The 96-minute doc begins streaming on Netlix the following day (3.7).

An excerpt from Nicolas Niarchos‘ reaction (i.e., not really a “review”) to Michael Wolff‘s just-published “ALL OR NOTHING: How Trump Recaptured America“:

I’ve said repeatedly that Disney’s seemingly woked-up Snow White (3.21) is almost certainly going to be an instructive (read: punishing) militant feminist fantasy by way of a manifesto…not my cup but fine, whatever.

But rightwing notions that star Rachel Zegler (of Columbian-Polish descent) is somehow an inappropriate choice for the titular role…these slags are ridiculous. Zegler is a beautiful, fair-skinned, dark-haired actress with an excellent singing voice…where’s the problem in that?

Nonetheless The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield has apparently been persuaded that conservative gripes about Zegler not being “white” enough…Rushfield thinks this is some kind of major narrative out there. Well, not to my fucking knowledge…

The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield, posted on 2.25.25: “A studio calling out criticisms of Rachel Zegler’s ethnicity as the disgusting filth it is, is not a studio ‘going woke,’ but rather making a basic stand for decency and refusing to be dragged into the dark places where much of the world seems determined to go.”

Posted on 12.3.24:

“And following in the path of Glenn Powell‘s character in Twister, relegated to the sidelines during the action-packed climax, there ain’t no savior prince in the new Snow White (Disney, 3.21) — this is apparently a militant, storm-the-barricades show aimed at progressive women of all ages. (The script is by Greta Gerwig and Erin Cressida Wilson.) Okay, there’s the kind-hearted, mild-mannered Jonathan character (Andrew Burnap) as well as the Huntsman (Ansu Kabia)), but, like Powell, these are second-banana characters.”

That snarling, hyperventilating army of HE readers who constantly put me down when I mention the word “peaked” in one of my HE obits…these same people need to start circulating an online petition that calls for the immediate termination of Variety‘s Chris Morris.

Morris needs to be slapped down but good for using the “p” word in a 2.24 report about the passing of the once-great Roberta Flack.

Paragraph #5 in Morris’s story reads as follows: “[Flack] reached her peak with the 1974 pop and R&B smash ‘Where Is the Love’, which claimed the apex of both charts.” If the HE firebrands want this shit to stop, they have to nip it in the bud…seriously.

HE sincerely mourns Flack‘s passing. She had a glorious three-year run in the early ’70s (’72 through ’74). Clint Eastwood put her on the map when he used “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” in Play Misty For Me (’71).

Kathleen Kennedy, the long-embattled Lucasfilm exec and mediocre anti-visionary who decimated the Star Wars brand and the intense loyalty of the worldwide community by trying to woke-icze and feminize the nearly 50-year-old galactic franchise…Kennedy, destroyer of worlds, is finally taking a hike!

Kennedy’s just-announced departure is many years overdue, of course…the faith is pretty much gone and the franchise with it. Kennedy turned it into a 21st Century political-cultural anti-machismo, up-with-DEI thing…a progressive/feminist Star Wars crusade dedicated to diminishing and in some cases the outright de-balling of a once-proud mythology…a once-devotional theology gone south.

The only good things that came out of the Kennedy regime were Tony Gilroy‘s Andor and Gareth Edwards‘ Rogue One.. Otherwise, forget it…implosion, dilution, a woke-product-in-the-pipeline mentality.

My favorite Kennedy bonehead move was the ghastly miscasting of the beady-eyed, reedy-voiced, small-shouldered Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo…that in itself was a firehouse alarm. Other Kennedy wrongos include The Acolyte, the chubby Kelly Marie Tran fan revolt, Moses Ingram‘s Baltimore accent in Obi Wan kenobi, multiple director firings (Lord & Miller, Josh Trank, Colin Trevorrow), the Boba Fett movie, the stalled Rian Johnson trilogy…all of it.

Back in ’21 or thereabouts Tatiana and I were about to begin one of our Sulllivan Canyon hikes, and there was Kennedy walking toward us on the same horse trail. I nodded at her but said nothing.