Karina on SpoutBlog

Jeff Wells notes that Juno, which came in at the third spot at the box office over the weekend, is now besting both I Am Legend and the National Treasure sequel to sell more tickets than any other film during the week. At the rate it’s going, it looks certain to cross the $100 million mark by the end of awards season. To put it mildly, this strikes Wells as something of a surprise:

That’s a mindblower. I never would have called that in a million years. This is just a sweet and sharp little film. I wasn’t levitating after I first saw it in Toronto. I knew that I liked it because it was well-written and well-acted. I still know that. But for me, this makes two head-scratchers in a single night.

Really, Jeff? A teen sex comedy hipped up enough to attract 20-somethings, feminized just enough to attract tween girls, but not so girly that it turns off the Apatow crowd. Advertised EVERYWHERE. Plus, it’s probably the most crowd-pleasing movie to have played a festival in 2007. And you’re surprised that it’s making a lot of money? Seriously?

You would have had to have been stupid to have seen Juno with an audience at Telluride or Toronto and NOT imagined it performing at least as well as Superbad. Jeff Wells is not stupid. Is actively selling the fiction that this is a “surprise”/”crossover” hit a condition of accepting Juno skyscrapers on your site?

I swear to god, I want to stop talking about this, but they keep pulling me back in …

United Hollywood passes along the news that, mere hours after making a side deal with the WGA that will allow them to legally employ writers, United Artists has made a tentative deal with Paul Haggis to adapt a children’s fantasy book series called Ranger’s Apprentice. United Artists was the first studio to make such a deal (although Lionsgate and the Weinsteins reportedly have similar pacts in the works), so I guess this makes Paul Haggis the first screenwriter to legally get a job in the midst of the strike.

It’s legal, but is it kosher? An interesting fight has broken out in the comments on the United Hollywood post. On the one hand, this looks like a victory for these WGA side deals: the first studio to put a pact together nabs a name brand screenwriter and puts him to work on a franchise film within a matter of hours. But the very quickness of the deal has some wondering: was Haggis doing more than picketing over the past ten weeks?

(more…)

• Specialty divisions are expecting this Sunday’s stripped-down Golden Globes to deliver a serious hit in the usual visibility for their Oscar-hopeful product. But one exec quoted in this piece says some of his colleagues are “secretly thrilled” that they don’t have to take their minds off the strike and the election in order to attend one more black-tie schmoozefest. Here’s the kicker: “I had heard that stars weren’t even planning to dress up should the telecast have happened,” he said.??
• Although film studios have thus far managed to remain fairly active over the course of the strike, Warner Brothers laid off more than 1,000 employees yesterday, citing an impending “decline in production activity.” At other studios, crew members from struck TV shows have been repurposed?? to work on films, but the stock pile of shootable scripts can only last so long.
• Nicole Kidman is pregnant, so Kate Winslet will take the part she was scheduled to play in Stephen Dalry’s The Reader. Winslet was Daldry’s first choice for the role but had been initially unavailable.