It was a ho-hum weekend at the box office for new wide openers. But it was a busy frame for industry insiders who can’t stop talking about the impasse between Jimmy Kimmel and ABC after last week’s political firestorm.
Those are the topics tackled in today’s episode of “Daily Variety” podcast. Rebecca Rubin, Variety’s box office chief, details the lackluster openings for Universal’s sports drama “Him” and Sony Pictures’ “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.” Neither film seemed to have that key ingredient of offering something extra-special to get audiences out of the house and into a theater.
“Sony positioned [‘Big Bold] as a female event picture in the vein of ‘It Ends With Us,’ which was the Blake Lively Justin Baldoni movie that, despite all the controversy, was a huge box office success. And so they were very clearly saying, here we are going after this underserved female audience to call it a female event picture,” Rubin says. “It’s not really the type of movie that we see succeeding in in movie theaters anymore. We’ve seen movies from other genres succeed despite the odds, but typically when they are succeeding, despite the odds, they have behind them great reviews, the word of mouth. I think this movie just misfired on the execution.”
On a brighter note, Rubin says exhibitors are excited about the news dropped on Sept. 19 by Taylor Swift, namely that she plans to have an “Official Release Party” movie for her new platter, “The Life of a Showgirl.” The film bows Oct. 3, the same day the album is released. Swift’s “The Eras Tour” concert film was a juggernaut for AMC Theatres and others in 2023.
“She has been a big supporter of theatrical with her concert film,” Rubin says. “No matter what this movie does, it’s not going to do the business that the concert film did because it’s a very different project. But any money that this movie makes is just gravy that they were not expecting even a few weeks ago.”
As for Kimmel, the situation that led to the host being pulled off the air as of Sept. 17 is fraught with contemporary politics and the Trump administration’s zeal to use federal power to bully its critics. Steinberg unpacks the blow-by-blow that led Disney to bench Kimmel — and the swift backlash that is still building in the creative community. Protestors are expected to gather again Monday outside Kimmel’s stage in the El Capitan complex on Hollywood Boulevard.
Steinberg emphasizes that the turbulance for Kimmel, on the heels of CBS axing Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,’ is coming at a time when late-night TV has lost much of its audience pull. Kimmel’s fate was sealed when two big owners of ABC affiliate stations, Nexstar and Sinclair, said they would not run “Jimmy Kimmel Live” following conservative outrage at comments related to Charlie Kirk’s death in his Monday monologue.
“What’s happened in late night is the fragmentation has hurt it,” Steinberg says. “When David Letterman announced he’s going to retire in 2015, a lot of [networks] tried to throw spaghetti at the wall, see if they can get their own share of the late night audience. For a while MTV tried their hand at it. National geographic did a late night show,” Steinberg says. “Now you have a late night host now have to go for a base rather than for everybody. Johnny Carson had the whole whole nation watching him. And our current late night hosts are doing political humor. A lot of the success of their show these days depends on how many YouTube hits they get. So, the economics are weaker because the hosts now have niches rather than the whole world watching them.”
Listen to Daily Variety on iHeartPodcasts, Apple Podcasts, Variety’s YouTube Podcast channel, Amazon Music, Spotify and other podcast platforms.