Yeah, the comment I saw on Twitter was that really, this was the year they decided to create a category that's basically separate but equal?

New Oscar category "Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film"

They already have this and it is called: The Boxoffice!

eep! trailer for The Meg

One of the local radio stations has Mario Lopez's syndicated show thing like Ryan Seacrest. He has a spot for it and it sounds like he's saying "The Mag". It annoys me every time I hear it.

This seemed relevant to the Buffistas.

I started listening to the Empire podcast interview with Christopher McQuarrie re. MI - Fallout, who is a terrific interviewee -- witty and fun and full of great anecdotes. It's over 2 hours long and only the first part (!), but within the first 30 mins, there have already been some super juicy bits: [link]

I long considered the plots to be secondary in this franchise, but I had no idea just how secondary. For example, the big climactic helicopter chase in Kashmir ? Totally started ass-backward. To wit, Tom Cruise long wanted to try a big stunt like that, and the thing he was trying to do was so crazy that the ONLY country that would let him do the stunt was New Zealand. So they decided to film it there, except New Zealand is not a site for a global conflict. So they reverse-searched for a likely place whose scenery resembled New Zealand and came up with Kashmir. Once they decided that was the location, they had to devise a plot to get everyone over there.

This seems a CRAZYPANTS way of making a $200 million+ budget film but apparently it all worked out? Also, McQuarrie said he lucked out when Tom Cruise broke his ankle and forced the production into a 6-week break, which gave him the chance to edit the footage they had and come up with a better way of moving the story forward and strengthening the team dynamic.

I mean, it seems like a pretty reasonable way to write a Mission Impossible film though, right?

Big stars do seem to have a habit of "I want to do X! How can we make that happen!"

It would ONLY work for something like MI films, honestly, since it's all big set pieces with only loose connective tissue forming the plot. They apparently didn't even have a proper script when they started shooting and there were all manners of improvisation every day. My goodness. I would have pulled out all my hair in stress.

I once heard that on the set of a big adventure film the stuntmen were wearing t-shirts that said something along the lines of "never mind the plot, let's blow something up".