Box office

Thursday

Peachy Keenan

The movie industry is broken

A massive sinkhole recently opened up on Sunset Boulevard at Holloway Drive, just down the street from the heart of Hollywood itself. It’s a fitting metaphor for the financial and creative sinkhole that’s busy hollowing out the entertainment industry. “There’s sheer panic in the ranks. And it’s only going to get worse,” a longtime representative at a major talent agency told me. “We talk about it on an internal Signal chat at work. We can’t even believe how bad things are.” A lot is going wrong all at once, and a huge transition is not-so-quietly under way “The meteor has hit and the dinosaurs don’t know it yet,” according to a director and producer who has spent two decades making movies in Hollywood.

hollywood

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Flight Risk proves Mel Gibson is still too toxic for mainstream audiences

Had the Mark Wahlberg vehicle Flight Risk, which topped the US box office last weekend with a modest but far from disastrous $12 million gross, been directed by most competent journeymen filmmakers, then it would have been a case of job done, box ticked and onto the next project. If you were told, however, that it was made by an Oscar-winning filmmaker whose previous movies have been large-scale dramatic epics — and who, frankly, would have done a far more interesting job with The Brutalist, although its overtly Jewish themes may have given him considerable difficulty — then the first question most people would ask is “Why?” And then when you’re told the director in question is Mel Gibson, the response is usually “Ah” and “Oh.