by Tony Rizzo
Time doesn’t go backward, it only goes forward. The movie industry will take a long time to recover from the effects of our pandemic, and it will never be the same again.
Movie studios and producers hate giving up half their profits to movie theaters to show their films. So when theaters closed, by government decree, it gave the studios a chance to test the waters. The first film made for theaters that premiered on-demand was “Trolls World Tour,” which brought in a big bounty. Then the new $65 million Chris Hemsworth film “Extraction,” which was to premiere in theaters April 24, instead made its debut on Netflix and was viewed by 90 million households in the first four weeks.
That’s not to say films made in 3D or IMAX can be streamed first, since their charm is big screens and special effects. Which is why the fourth G.I. Joe epic was instead pushed to Oct. 23 in theaters. This reboot is called “G.I. Joe: Snakes Eyes,” with “Crazy Rich Asians” star Henry Golding in the title role. You probably remember that Channing Tatum starred in the original (which grossed $302 million) and Dwayne Johnson in the sequel, “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” (which grossed $678 million). Naturally there’s already a fourth film being prepped, “G.I. Joe: Ever Vigilant,” though no star has been announced for this one.
Four-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan stars in director Wes Anderson’s new film “The French Dispatch.” She’ll again be paired with Timothee Chalamet (as in “Little Women,”), as well as four Oscar-winning actors: Benicio Del Toro, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton and Jeffrey Wright. Chalamet, meanwhile, has a date with “Dune,” the reboot of the classic Frank Herbert science-fiction novel, premiering Dec. 18.
Superstar Harrison Ford, now 77, recently had his third flying close call (that we know of). In 2015, he crash-landed a vintage World War II plane on a golf course in Los Angeles. He was lucky he was only “battered but OK.” Then in 2017, he landed on a taxi runway after he flew over a jet and again was unharmed. Most people were under the impression Ford was going to stop flying. Yet here we are today, hearing Harrison is “under investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration over an incident that happened at a Southern California airport.” He apparently was piloting his light plane and crossed a runway where another aircraft was landing. Ford acknowledged the mistake and apologized by saying, “I misheard an instruction from air traffic control.”
Ford is a true superstar, and in an era where we have so few, we need him healthy and in one piece so he can be beaten to a pulp in the new Indiana Jones epic!
(c) 2020 King Features Synd., Inc.
