Hollywood Playbook: Friday's Top 5 Stories

Hollywood Playbook: Friday's Top 5 Stories

Box Office: “Noah” Slowing Fast
 
Though its budget was much larger than “Noah’s”, Russell Crowe’s “Robin Hood” is considered a flop after grossing only $105 million in North America. Currently “Noah” is pacing a little ahead of where “Robin Hood” was after the same number of days, but “Noah” is now losing ground everyday. On its 10th day of release “Robin Hood” made $1.5 million, compared to “Noah’s” $1.1 million. In fact, “Noah” has lagged behind and lost all week.
 
There’s a chance “Noah” might fall short of the $100 million mark in North America, which would be a major disappointment.
 
Bait-and-switch only gets you through the first weekend.

 

Left-Wing Muppets are Box Office Toast 

The box office chickens have really come home to roost for Disney’s The Muppets. The divisive political partisanship that stunk up their re-launch a couple of years ago has caught up to them in a fierce way with “Muppets Most Wanted.” After 20 days in release, the sequel has grossed only $41 million. The budget was $50 million, not including a probable $25 to $40 million promotion budget.

 One big mistake Disney made with the sequel was in the casting of Tina Fey and Ricky Gervais — two actors that carry an enormous amount of divisive political baggage.

 

Kyle Smith: Colbert Is Not Funny 

I had to laugh as some of the commenters on yesterday’s Top 5 actually freaked out after I pointed out how low Colbert’s ratings are and that “The Colbert Report” is regularly beat by Adult Swim.

Why does math and science upset leftists so?

Al Sharpton even ripped me on his MSNBC show.

Why so bitterly defensive?

Sorry, but Colbert is the “Girls” of Late Night: low-rated but made to seem bigger than he really is because elites love leftism and confirmation of their own biases. Colbert is not America’s comedian, he is a Jester to the State and the elites that protect and feed off of The State.

Oh, and as Kyle Smith reminds us, Colbert also isn’t funny — which might explain his losses to Adult Swim:

Except Colbert essentially does the same joke over and over (conservatives are morons) and he’s only funny if you accept the premise (conservatives are morons) while you snort Mountain Dew out your nose thinking about what an awesome point he just made. (Conservatives are morons.)
 
Colbert’s audience is young, but his act gets old after about five minutes, and his legendary ability to “stay in character” is a myth.
 
What he does is split himself into two personalities. One issues standard liberal boilerplate gleaned from whatever fanciful view of reality is being peddled on Daily Kos or the Huffington Post. No conservative would ever say these things in the first place.

Les Moonves made the correct choice if he wants to get backslapped and high-fived for a few weeks of cocktail parties held in velvet bubbles. Out here in the real world, though, Moonves has already alienated half his audience and picked a Late Night guy who is already in Late Night and not doing very well.

Sure, Colbert is loved because he lives to please the Elite Left. He’s an Establishment toadie who will never rock the boat.

But he’s not popular.

He might change. Fallon so far has surprised us and as a result his ratings are better than NBC could have ever dreamt. But Colbert has only ever showed himself as a far-left ideologue much more interested in the approval of the insufferable “Morning Joe” crowd than mainstream America.

 

NY Post: ‘Mad Men’ Back with Sizzling Final-Season Opener

Robert Rorke’s review of Sunday’s premiere of “Mad Men’s” seventh season opener confirms that this is a show that has always known where it’s going and will fade-to-black forever at the end of this season on a creative high note:

Megan [Don Draper’s estranged second wife], meanwhile, is not waiting for Don to get his act together. More independent than she is generally given credit for, she is living in LA when the premiere opens, seeing her acting career blossom after quitting her job on a TV soap. In the episode’s best scene, she picks Don up at the airport in a green Austin-Healey convertible, dressed in a smashing, diaphanous, Pucci-era minidress, while the Spencer Davis Group’s classic “I’m a Man” pulses on the soundtrack. To underscore that Don doesn’t know where he’s going in Megan’s world, he gets into the passenger seat.

 
It’s no accident that this scene makes the episode feel like it’s taking off. The rise of California in the late 1960s — and the decline of New York City — is something creator Matthew Weiner has stressed in interviews about the new season.
 

As is always the case, I won’t be watching in real-time. The DVR will fill up with the season and I’ll catch up to the rest of the world during the finale.

Bingers gotta binge.

For some reason I’ve always imagined the show ending with a final scene set in 1987. A graying, overweight, alcoholic Don Draper is living alone in a part of Los Angeles that is rapidly decaying into gang violence. After a strained goodbye with his estranged kids and grandchildren, they drive away; Don takes off his shirt revealing a pot belly under a filthy wifebeater, lights a cigarette and has a fatal heart attack trying to pull-start a lawnmower.

 

Model Heidi Klum Accused of “Cultural Appropriation”

Super model Heidi Klum dressed up in a feather head dress and put some war paint on her face. She is now being accused of some new politically correct thoughtcrime called “cultural appropriation.” It has to be a thoughtcrime because we all know that her intentions were totally unlike Kevin Costner’s in “Dances With Wolves” — a whitey who “honored” Indians with feathers and war paint.

The left doesn’t care about the sensitivity of Indians. It’s all about feeling superior, because that’s how you feel when accusing another of racism.

The other tactic is to make sure the rules never make sense or remain consistent – Kafka 101 in the art of cultural terrorism.

 

QUICK HITS:

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SAG Foundation Releases Two Hours of ‘Conversations With Mickey Rooney’

‘The Simpsons’ Spoofs ‘Mad Men’ in Vague New Promo

First ‘Hercules’ Clip: Dwayne Johnson Gets Ambushed

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2014 Induction Ceremony

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