Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about 21 July 2023 being a date for the history books. There were two financial Goliaths released that very day — Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which, by 25 July, had grossed $472.6 million worldwide against its $145 million budget, and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, having grossed $231.1 million worldwide against its $100 million (though, by producers’ standards, it will have to break $400 million in order to be considered profitable), as well as the plebeian David that is Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb (no data offered, as Lionsgate gave it a limited release). Pitra remarks that, on a 100° day as the meteorologists have forecasted, Schulz should come through the studio door wearing a long-sleeved black shirt. Hey, it’s paper-delivery day, Schulz retorts, and it’s a long-standing practice of his to wear that shirt on those days. Those factors and Schulz’s shirt aside, it’s incredible that Barbie and Oppenheimer did as well as they did, both being live-action films with its idiosyncrasies (Barbie‘s freewheeling, inventive fantasy-comedy; Oppenheimer‘s intellectually- and emotionally-ambitious horror-drama), whose first five-day estimates beat out The Super Mario Bros Movie ($204.6 million). Is this a once-in-a-cherry-moon experience? Or does it give proof that moviegoers are as psyched to see flesh and blood up on the screen as they are animation? Will either film (though probably Barbie) surpass Mario Bros‘s $1.355-billion gross? Perhaps not — but the amount of talk both films generated amongst our radio hosts (and their friends, not present) make such a concern seem utterly beside the point. As for the “trashy little horror film” Cobweb, it has qualities to recommend it (Lizzy Caplan being paramount), and you may be streaming it before too long, enough time for these historical reverberations to recede somewhat and for viewers to determine its merits afresh. As for forthcoming films, Justin Simien’s Haunted Mansion, freighted as it is with stars (LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Dan Levy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Wynona Ryder, and Jared Leto), may make us forget (if only we could remember it) the 2003 Rob Minkoff The Haunted Mansion, starring Eddie Murphy, Terence Stamp, Wallace Shawn, Marsha Thomason, and Jennifer Tilly, which, twenty years ago (!), was released around the same time as the first Pirates of the Carribean film. (Were we ever so young? Were you ever so old?) Also forthcoming is Talk to Me, an Australian supernatural horror film directed by Danny and Michael Philippou and starring Sophie Wilde, Alexandra Jensen, Joe Bird, Otis Dhanji, Miranda Otto, Zoe Terakes, Chris Alosio, Marcus Johnson, and Alexandria Steffensen — Aussies all. The plot is basically, “Crikey, we were just goofing around with the magic and now we’ve conjured up all these homicidal spirits! What the bleedin’ heck are we gonna do?!” Schulz wonders why the film wasn’t called Talk to the Hand, given the main totem is a severed, embalmed hand, and that observation brings Dave and Darren to a screeching halt. Also among those movies we’ll be getting is The Baker, a vigilante action film directed by Jonathan Sobol and starring Ron Perlman, Elias Koteas, Emma Ho, and Harvey Keitel, which has an interesting premise (Perlman, a career baker, turns amateur butcher when his family is threatened by gangsters). And let’s not forget the looming Liam Neeson action thriller Retribution, whose trailer has everyone convinced that it will be so bad that you won’t want to miss it — as with cherry moons, how often do you get to witness a perfect disaster unfold right in front of you?. . .
