Exclusive: 'Obsession' Star Michael Johnston Joining Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz in New 'Mummy' Movie

Happy Monday, folks — unless you saw Nicolas Winding Refn’s new movie Her Private Hell over the weekend.

What. The Fuck. Was That?

I’m not even going to dignify this flaming turd by giving it space in my newsletter. You can find my review on Twitter, where no one brings the knives out like yours truly. And to the “If Jeff thinks it sucks, it must be great” crowd, aka my haters, I dare you to see this movie. It would delight me to have you waste two hours of your life, as I did.

Suffice to say, the film grossed $530,000 from 675 theaters — that’s $785 per theater. I don’t know if this film will be the nail in the coffin of Refn’s career, but hopefully it will prompt him to reflect, and maybe to seek out a screenwriter to collaborate with.

On the bright side, I thoroughly enjoyed my streaming comedy doubleheader of Jake Johnson’s pickleball movie The Dink on Apple TV, followed by Kevin Hart’s bachelor party romp 72 Hours on Netflix. Both were better than I expected, and I actually found The Dink kind of moving, driven by a great performance from Johnson (who’d make a good villain in something) and a game supporting cast. Kudos to director Josh Greenbaum and writer Sean Clements.

And because I found myself with some extra TV time this weekend, I also binged Season 4 of Reacher, which returns to Prime Video next month — when I’ll be able to write about it.

On the reading front — remember that — I just started reading John Wainwright’s novel A Ripple of Murders after finishing Cul-De-Sac this week.

The latter concerns a couple who go for a walk along a cliff, and the wife falls to her death. The husband says it was a tragic accident, but a meek witness claims otherwise — he saw the man push his wife to her death. Whose account do the police believe, and what does justice ultimately look like? A streaming service with a knack for mysteries could make a tight 90-minute thriller out of this one.

There’s potential in A Ripple of Murders as well. It’s one of those stories where a madman threatens to kill a random stranger unless a ransom is paid. The police believe the threat to be a hoax, but sure enough, the next day, a man is gunned down in broad daylight, and there aren’t any witnesses. Should the police have taken the threat more seriously, or was the shooting merely a coincidence? Hmmm…

Two months ago, I’d never heard of Wainwright. Now, I’ve read three of his crime novels. Could he be a rival streamer's answer to Netflix's wildly popular Harlan Coben machine? The material is there…

Elsewhere, there are now trailers for the Johnny Depp movie Ebenezer and the Prime Video series Blade Runner 2099 available online. Neither looks like appointment viewing to me, but we’ll see… You know what would be appointment viewing? Brad Bird’s 1906, which has been a passion project of his for years, and which he now thinks could make for a riveting eight-episode limited series. It would chronicle the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. For more, head over to World of Reel.

Tonight, I’m seeing Spider-Man: Brand New Day, so I’ll be back tomorrow with a full review, as well as my thoughts on Marvel’s Hall H panel.

But first, I’ve got a hot scoop about Obsession star Michael Johnston. These days, everyone online is obsessed with what Inde Navarette is doing next, but Johnston seems to have slipped under the radar. Not my radar, though! Aren’t you lucky?

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