Spiegel Stuff: The Early Buzz on Blade Runner 2049

Vanity Fair

ESSENTIAL INDUSTRY and AWARD NEWS FROM HOLLYWOOD, compiled by REBECCA KEEGAN

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

It's Wednesday, and I'm looking for fashion-forward, hard-soled, closed-toe shoes to wear to the Academy Museum construction site. More on that story tomorrow.

Hello from Los Angeles, where we're whispering about Blade Runner, preparing for the return of Empire, and overbooking Leonardo DiCaprio.

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF GOOD REVIEWS?

Warner Bros. has begun screening Blade Runner 2049 for journalists; a passel of us piled into the Dolby screening room in Burbank Tuesday, and many others saw the more than two-and-a-half-hour film in New York. The review embargo for Denis Villeneuve's anticipated sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 science-fiction neo-noir doesn't lift until Monday, ahead of its opening October 6—but the studio is obviously confident about the film's quality, and is already allowing the press to blurt out review-adjacent reactions on social media. Let's just say the "M" words ("masterpiece" and "mind-blowing") are coming up a lot, as are calls for its 13-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer, Roger Deakins, to finally collect a little gold statue. Deakins was most recently nominated for his previous two collaborations with Villeneuve, Prisoners and Sicario, as well as his work on Unbroken. As The Wall Street Journal's Ben Fritz points out in a comprehensive piece about the making of the movie, "Perhaps more than any big budget movie this year . . . the success or failure of Blade Runner 2049 will depend on what critics and early viewers think. Given the incredibly high regard in which fans hold the original, word-of-mouth could be vicious if the follow-up falls short." Like the rest of the Hollywood press corps, I have sworn to surrender my firstborn, a charming lab-Doberman mix, rather than say anything that could be construed as a review; V.F.'s Richard Lawson will deliver that for us next week. Instead I'll just point out that in an era where studios are grappling with how to peel audiences away from their Netflix queues and entice them to see movies on the biggest screen possible, Blade Runner 2049 does the most. If I hear any Academy members say they're waiting for a screener for this one, I'll introduce them to my charming lab-Doberman mix.

STAR SEARCH

V.F.'s Katey Rich writes:

Lee Daniels has made a career of pushing boundaries, from matching Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr. as love interests in his debut feature, Shadowboxer, to filming sex scenes on his Fox hit Empire that just barely squeak past network standards. So why shouldn't the Oscar-nominated director do what everyone else is doing, and flee for premium cable or streaming—where he can really do whatever he wants? "What's the point?" he responded when I asked him that very question. "[Network TV] keeps me on point. You have to be PG, but you have to be provocative." Daniels will be doing just that when Empire and his other series, Star, return tonight with two crossover episodes that allow—at last!—Queen Latifah's Carlotta and Taraji P. Henson's Cookie to share the screen. Eagle-eyed viewers may also spot Daniels himself, in the opening moments of Star, doing his best Cecil B. DeMille as the director of the music video that opens the show. "I only have one word, and that's action," Daniels said. "So I couldn't screw it up."

39, GOING ON 13

V.F.'s Hillary Busis writes:

How real are the most cringe-inducing moments in Big Mouth, Netflix's graphic new puberty cartoon? This real: "We had a friend who used to fuck his pillow, and so that became [a part of the show]," co-creator Nick Kroll tells V.F.'s Josh Duboff. But don't think that the raunchy new show is nothing but crude jokes about sexually insatiable animated seventh-graders; there's also a distinct sweetness to the series, perhaps because Kroll and his co-creator Andrew Goldberg based the show on their actual adolescence. (Kroll also stars in the series as a younger version of himself; the younger version of Goldberg is voiced by Kroll's frequent collaborator John Mulaney.) He describes the series as a sort of "perverted Wonder Years," one he hopes can start a vital conversation: "My hope is that we made a funny show that I would want to watch, but also that kids want to watch and that parents could watch with their kids and talk about this huge stuff that is really hard to talk about."

LEONARDO DIVELOPMENT

V.F.'s Yohana Desta writes:

Leonardo DiCaprio is starting to give me whiplash. The Oscar winner has been on a relentless development streak lately, signing to star in and produce a number of high-profile potential projects, many of which might never see the light of day. The latest item added to his lengthy to-do list is one that hopefully will come to fruition: a Teddy Roosevelt biopic directed by frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese. Paramount is negotiating the film, according to Variety, which will star Leo as the rough-and-ready president. He's also set to produce it under his Appian Way banner. For V.F., I took a quick look at all the other projects DiCaprio has reportedly been developing, including two more Scorsese collaborations, a potential Captain Planet movie, and a Leonardo da Vinci biopic, which is clearly the most important of them all.

WILL AND GRACE AND 2017

V.F.'s Laura Bradley writes:

Will & Grace is back—almost! The sitcom's revival premieres on NBC Thursday night. The series was a trailblazer back when it first premiered in 1998, perhaps the single series that best helped gay culture make its way into the mainstream—but will the revival, which largely stays true to the original, still resonate in the more accepting world it ushered in? It's a fair question—but the show's cast and creators are not afraid. As Eric McCormack tells Vanity Fair, "I think, first and foremost, we're going back to basics; if it's not funny, then the show doesn't work. So funny is everything right now. We're not trying to—we don't have an agenda beyond that. Because if we had an agenda and we weren't funny, no one would care. So that's the agenda: funny. And everyone can see where the chips fall after that." For what it's worth, we found the first three episodes—and all of the cast and writers with whom we spoke—to be very, very funny.

That's the news for this sunny Wednesday in L.A. What are you seeing out there? Send tips, comments, and a replicant who transcribes to Rebecca_Keegan@condenast.com. Follow me on Twitter @thatrebecca.