The InSneider’s TIFF Awards, Grades for 24 Movies, Hot Sales Rumors, and Why A24 Was the Fest’s Big Winner

Happy Friday, folks!

How about that Presidential Debate earlier this week? 67 million people tuned in to watch Kamala Harris verbally twist Donald Trump into an orange pretzel (much tastier than a cat or a dog), but politics aside… did you notice that Lionsgate bought a spot for Megalopolis during the debate? Disney couldn’t have been the only company happy with the ratings, as Lionsgate’s marketing campaign also surely got a boost.

I wrote a little bit about Megalopolis on Tuesday, and regardless of what you think about the movie itself, you have to admire what writer-director Francis Ford Coppola is doing here, and how Lionsgate has supported him.

Speaking of Megalopolis, Coppola filed a $15 million lawsuit against Variety that personally named Film Editor Brent Lang (as well as one of the trade’s respected reporters). Variety, in a nice change, announced that it would stand by its reporters, and I’m sure that Jay Penske has told Lang and his co-worker not to worry.

To me, it felt like karma, as Brent used to be one of the smartest, funniest, sweetest guys I know when we worked together back at TheWrap, but he changed when he joined Variety. He’s still very smart and I’m sure he’s still very funny… and that’s where I think I’ll leave it for now, other than to say, I wish everyone involved in Variety’s Megalopolis reporting the best of luck in dealing with the guy behind The Godfather. Let’s all hope he doesn’t crush the trade like a grape from one of his vineyards...

But hey, no one’s perfect, and neither am I. Before leaving Toronto, I made sure to apologize to Spider-Verse producer Chris Miller and composer Daniel Pemberton — not for the reporting you read in this newsletter, mind you, but for how I defended that reporting on social media, and crossed the line in doing so by making it personal and taking cheap shots.

Going forward, I’ll do my best to let my reporting speak for itself and respond in this newsletter rather than on Twitter, where I tend to engage with trolls who don't know what they’re talking about but sure do know how to get under my skin. I apologize to them and to all of you for not meeting the standards I’ve set for myself.

The thing is, I do spend all day writing this newsletter using very specific language, and that hard work is destroyed within minutes by aggregators who read this newsletter in 5 minutes and have their own stories up 10 minutes later, full of inaccuracies and other fanciful leaps to conclusions.

Even Jordan Ruimy, whose site World of Reel is one of the first things I reach each morning, ran a headline declaring that Sony had “scrapped Beyond the Spider-Verse,” which is not what I said at all, and I’m not surprised the internet melted down based on some of these reports, which have become one big game of telephone.

There is an art to aggregation — trust me, I’m one of the best to ever do it — and that art has been lost due to a lack of reading comprehension, though I will take responsibility for not writing the initial piece as clearly as I perhaps could have and should have.

Just as Miller and Pemberton had every right to defend themselves, so did I, and believe me, there was a lot to defend myself from — rampant antisemitism, gross homophobia, and death threats. This is what it’s like for a reporter when a filmmaker refutes one of your stories online — a story that I’m willing to bet neither of them actually read, mind you.

But I digress.

We’re moving onward and upward here at The InSneider, and I’m going to enjoy the weekend hanging out with old friends, watching a ton of football after missing Week 1 of the NFL while I was in Toronto, and catching up with new releases like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Speak No Evil, which I still haven’t seen.

In tonight’s newsletter, you’ll read Hollywood’s most complete TIFF round-up featuring letter grades and star ratings for 24 movies, plus hot sales gossip, the winners and losers of the festival, and my first annual TIFF Awards.

There’s also a review of HBO’s new series The Penguin, which features a dynamite performance from Colin Farrell, and news of Judd Apatow teaming up with Steven Spielberg, plus my thoughts on the trailer for Salem’s Lot.

I’ll be working on a ton of TIFF reviews next week, so keep your eyes peeled as I weigh in on the rest of the fest and offer up a brand new, very different batch of Oscar predictions.

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