Why the Oscars Should Be Turned Into a Telethon for Charity and Firefighters Should Give Out Best Picture

It’s Monday, and though the wind has relaxed a bit here in Los Angeles, fires continue to rage throughout the county, forcing countless evacuations.

My heart goes out to so many industry denizens, from Heart Eyes director Josh Ruben and Mank cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt to THR writer Mikey O’Connell and Sundance alum Michelle Satter and her family, who lost their home just over a year after losing their wonderful son, Michael Latt, due to a tragic home invasion. They’ve already experienced unimaginable pain, and I’m keeping them in my thoughts.

I also want to highlight the GoFundMe campaign for my friend Jairo Alvarado and his family, including his three kids. Everyone is safe, thank god, but they lost their home in Altadena, and my heart breaks for them. Jairo is one of the best guys I’ve met in this crazy business, and he has spent his career believing in people.

I have no doubt that our community will help his family get back on their feet, and many other families in the same position.

Of course, our entire industry continues to grieve unfathomable losses, which will be felt for quite some time, though we will heal together, eventually.

The mood remains somber in Santa Monica, where Lionsgate execs would otherwise be celebrating the opening of Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, which opened to $15.5 million at the domestic box office — and that’s with more than 80 theaters closed across the country for various reasons, including roughly a dozen in Los Angeles due to the fires, per Deadline.

I saw the Den of Thieves sequel on Thursday night on my own dime — though I’ve since signed up for AMC A-List — and it delivered pretty much exactly what I wanted from the sequel, which is a guilty pleasure, just like its predecessor.

With a running time of 2 hours and 24 minutes, it’s about 15 minutes too long, and there’s a sequence with Gerard Butler on drugs that is just plain goofy and should’ve been cut. One of my #1 rules about movies is that watching someone on drugs is never as fun as being on them yourself, and filmmakers should avoid such scenes unless they’re absolutely necessary.

You need to see Ethan Hawke’s POV on PCP in Training Day, and Seth Rogen’s POV on a cocktail of drugs in The Night Before. But you don’t need to see Gerard Butler do drugs to “prove himself” to the so-called “Panthers” in Den of Thieves 2, though I suppose that excess is part of the appeal of this franchise.

In any case, I found the scene to be the rare error in judgment from writer-director Christian Gudegast, who otherwise delivers a pretty slick crime sequel — one where you don’t seem to mind that the action is limited to the final half-hour.

Butler can, of course, do this role in his sleep, but he’s a madman and I relish the character of Big Dick Nick, while O’Shea Jackson Jr. delivers his one big monologue quite effectively. He’s still an awkward fit as the co-lead of this series, having lost the element of surprise he had in the first film, but I can’t complain about Jackson’s performance here, and his face when Butler says “Fuck the police!” is absolutely priceless.

Before we get started today, Puck confirmed that Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey will be the most expensive of his career, with a budget of $250 million. That would technically put it in a tie with The Dark Knight Rises, but as we all know, any number that a studio cops to is lower than the actual number, as studios have no incentive to provide the real number.

That was a Day 1 lesson for me as a film reporter — “don’t trust the studios on budgets… or on anything related to money… ever.”

No offense to my studio friends out there

I’m sure that a Day 1 lesson for publicists on the first day of Publicist School is, “Don’t ever cop to the real number… on anything… ever.”

And that’s the beauty of the love-hate relationship between journalists and publicists.

Personally, I don’t understand the public’s fascination with budgets, as it’s not like the budget of a film affects its ticket price — a revolutionary concept first introduced by Mr. David Spade in his 1998 HBO special Take the Hit. But for some reason, everyone seems to care what a movie costs.

With that little preamble about budgets out of the way, tonight’s newsletter includes an idea on how the Academy can save its own awards show and help countless people in the process — a telethon benefiting the victims of LA’s wildfires.

Plus, there are items about Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ sequel, Wicked’s first-week haul on PVOD, Timothee Chalamet’s return to SNL, and the delay of Cillian Murphy’s return to Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later trilogy.

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