Month: September 2020

The NBA coaching carousel is already in full swing, with the Brooklyn Nets making the somewhat surprising decision to hire Steve Nash into their head coaching role and teams like the Pacers, Pelicans, and Sixers all having coaching vacancies at the moment.

You can now add the Houston Rockets to that list, as Mike D’Antoni’s contract with the team has expired with their exit from the playoffs at the hands of the Lakers, and on Sunday he reportedly informed the team he would not be looking to come back, per ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.

D’Antoni would release a statement shortly after confirming the news.

All parties involved said the right things in recent days but this isn’t a major surprise. When the Pacers fired Nate McMillan, there were rumblings that D’Antoni was their top target. The former Suns, Knicks, Lakers, and Rockets coach will also reportedly be considered for the Sixers opening, per Woj, and given his pedigree he figures to have plenty of opportunity.

With Houston, D’Antoni built a perennial contender in the West, but one that always fell just short. He remains one of the league’s best offensive coaches and has adapted to the personnel given to him in a way few coaches ever have, with the Rockets small-ball experiment working in a way few imagined. The question is what kind of team he’s looking to go to next, as he may have his pick of the open jobs — personally, I’d love to see him go to Houston and play small-ball with Zion Williamson.

Houston also has a fascinating coaching decision to make, because they’ve made their bed with this small-ball group and have to find a coach that is willing to come in and work with that unit and try to make some tweaks to get them over the hump. Tyronn Lue, who has been named as a candidate for every job in the league thus far, is likewise considered among those who could end up in Houston.

The Rockets are a unique situation, but one with upside in the form of a perennial MVP candidate and a core of experienced veteran players. A coach like Lue might make sense if he’s willing to work with the personnel limitations the small-ball group creates.

The first full Sunday of the NFL season got off to a rollicking start with everything you love about pro football. You had ghastly turnovers courtesy of the Cleveland Browns, great plays by stars young and old, and even an absurd ejection in the first half of the Lions-Bears game.

Detroit linebacker Jamie Collins got sent to the locker room early after making the bizarre decision to demonstrate how he hit someone on a referee, very gently headbutting the ref in the chest — despite knowing that purposeful contact with an official, no matter how gentle, is grounds for ejection.

It’s simultaneously one of the dumbest and funniest things we’ll likely see on a football field all season. Collins clearly doesn’t mean any malice behind this, but we know the rules here and know that referees don’t take kindly to any player contact. The best part is the celebration of the Bears player realizing what happened, as while their may not be any fans in attendance, we haven’t lost any of the petty between divisional rivals.

The Lions will now have to go the remainder of the game without their star linebacker who has the next few hours to contemplate what the hell the plan was there that led to his ejection.

Friends, it’s that time of year again. The NFL is back, which means the Cleveland Browns are back, and no matter what you’ve been told or what you think has changed, the Cleveland Football Browns are still the same as they’ve ever been.

There may be no team better at killing early season optimism better than the Browns, who entered Sunday 0-14-1 in the last 15 years in Week 1. Against the Ravens, who were pretty heavily favored already, Cleveland managed to fall apart faster than even the most beleaguered and pessimistic of Browns fans could’ve imagined. It began on the first drive, where Baker Mayfield fired an interception at midfield that was dropped by one Raven, but caught by a second as Mayfield’s determination and drive to turn the football over cannot be stopped even by the clumsy hands of a dropping lineman.

The Browns would give up a touchdown drive to Lamar Jackson and company with haste to fall behind 7-0 and on the ensuing drive, new head coach Kevin Stefanski chose to roll the dice and have punter Jamie Gillian run a punter sweep on 4th down at their own 30. The result, as one would imagine, was extremely Browns.

Now, things turned around from there for Cleveland as the defense held Baltimore to a field goal and the offense marched for a touchdown (but would miss the extra point) on their next drive to make it 10-6. Have no fear though, the Browns are still the Browns, and in 2020 it’s nice to have something familiar you can count on.

Typically when I write Sunday’s weekly box-office report, I am able compose much of it on Saturday night with estimates provided by the studios on Saturday morning. I tweak the post on Sunday morning once final numbers are provided. Last weekend, however, there were no estimates provided for Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. In fact, while studios typically release box-office numbers to rival studios by the hour, Warner Bros. made the odd decision to withhold an entire week’s worth of box-office receipts and provide everyone with only one number last Sunday, which accounted for all of the box office for Tenet in the United States for the Monday – Sunday period, plus a full 11 days (and two weekends) of receipts from Canada. When we reported that the film had made $20.2 million, that was for 11 days in two countries. Warner Bros. still hasn’t provided a daily breakdown, but it appears that it made around $9.5 million over the three-day weekend.

Obviously, $9.5 million for a $200 million film would not be anything to brag about during normal times, and the reason that Warner Bros. has probably been so cagey with its numbers is that the studio doesn’t want those of us who write box-office reports to call it a box-office bomb. The studio is concerned that we might not provide the proper context, but I think that the proper context is apparent to everyone. There’s a pandemic going on; theaters are at 30 percent capacity; moviegoers are still very concerned about going into theaters; and theaters aren’t even open in some of the largest markets, including New York and Los Angeles.

The truth is, no one is anxious to call Tenet a bomb, because we want it to succeed. Its success means that more movies will be released, and from a purely selfish perspective, it also means we will continue to have box-office reports to write (as opposed to trying to suss out VOD sales and Netflix views). We also understand that, during the pandemic, movies like Tenet will collect box-office receipts over months, instead of weeks, and that Warner Bros. is playing the long game.

However, even though Warner Bros. has not been providing daily breakdowns, we can probably surmise that the studio is at least somewhat disappointed/concerned with the box-office numbers of Tenet because the same studio has pushed back the release of Wonder Woman 2 from October until Christmas. That means that either they don’t have faith in moviegoing right now, or that it at least wants to give Tenet some more time to itself in the marketplace (no other major movie is scheduled until Black Widow in November).

It’s hard to say what any of this means about the state of moviegoing for the near and far term. Anthony Fauci said that it might not be completely safe to return to theaters for another year; studios are starting to do yet another round of delays; and it remains unclear if theaters themselves can survive through these very lean times. Now that production has resumed on a lot of projects (with Covid restrictions), will studios continue to delay, or at some point, will they start moving their eggs into the streaming and/or PVOD basket? Then again, no one really knows how well Mulan has done in PVOD, either, so we don’t know yet if that is a viable option for huge blockbusters.

It’s all still very much up in the air, and until a vaccine is available, the uncertainly is likely to remain. With the fall and winter approaching and more and more blockbusters being pushed until 2021, it will be interesting to see how Oscar season plays out. A lot of the Oscar contenders with smaller budgets currently being screened at film festivals could do very well with VOD and streaming releases while America is hunkered down during flu season, so while we may not see a new Marvel film for awhile, our television sets and laptops may get quite a workout in the coming months.

Now, as for the actual numbers? They were not great, which is probably less a reflection of the movie itself, and more of a reflection of the state of moviegoing in America right now:

The domestic total for Tenet now stands at $29 million (including Canada). It is doing better overseas, although its second weekend drop was precipitous in China for a Nolan film, falling 66 percent to $10.8 million. The good news is, worldwide now, Tenet has put up a decent $200 million.

There’s still an audience out there internationally, but domestically, studios may need to rely on digital rentals and sales to supplement lower numbers, so far. Its not just Tenant, either. New Mutants only earned $2 million in its third weekend, and now has a worldwide cume of only $29 million, which is probably less than the marketing budget for the film. Broken Hearts Gallery with Selena Gomez opened wide this weekend, too, and only earned $1.1 million in 2200 theaters.

In fact, the only modest success in America, so far, has been Unhinged, which has earned $13 million since it opened. Unhinged, however, has earned most of its money in drive-in theaters.

Source: Exhibitor Relations, Deadline

Alex Trebek is the Jeopardy! GOAT, but that’s not the only acronym the show is officially associated with thanks to the power of the Internet. The world is still finding new ways to make Cardi B’s “WAP” viral, though many of them involve conservatives getting mad about the song’s vulgarity and celebration of female sexual satisfaction.

The latest example of this is much less about outrage than it is tonal satisfaction because, as it turns out, “WAP” fits perfectly over the Final Jeopardy! song. That’s how music works, of course, songs have the same rhythm and organization and that’s what makes mashups possible. But this is a unique pairing to say the least, and it’s satisfying how well it all works together.

On Sunday Claire McNear, who is writing a book about Jeopardy!, shared a video of an old Final Jeopardy! question that might be outdated in 2020. But it’s the audio that really matters, and that audio is a mashup of Cardi B’s “WAP” and the traditional Final Jeopardy! theme song.

It doesn’t necessarily slap, so to speak, but it’s the opposite of dissonant, musically speaking. The final beats of the Jeopardy! theme getting matched up with Cardi saying “wet” and “ass” and so on at the end really put it over the top. We’ve heard Trebek rap before, and hearing him say “bitchin” is something everyone should enjoy. But it’s another thing entirely to see Jeopardy! in the lens of one of the most culturally important songs of the year. All we now need is Trebek himself saying the lyrics. Hopefully in the form of a question.

Chris Evans was the star of the Internet on Saturday after he accidentally leaked, well, a very private photo on Instagram. It’s entirely unclear whose private photo it was, but it certainly was shared by the actor who played Captain America. That was enough to draw an incredible reaction from people on social media, with memes and a lot of very flattering jokes for Evans, all things considered.

Still, it’s not fun to reveal too much online even if everyone is being nice about it. Which is why Evans could have used a pick-me-up from another Marvel superhero who knows a thing or two about suddenly being considerably more exposed. Mark Ruffalo, who plays The Hulk, fired off a tweet on Saturday that gave Evans a “silver lining” to his indecent exposure.

“Bro, while Trump is in office there is NOTHING you could possibly do to embarrass yourself,” Ruffalo tweeted Saturday, tagging Evans directly in a tweet that quickly went viral in it’s own light. “See… silver lining.”

Ruffalo is trying to help, and it’s a funny way to make light of what’s certainly been an embarrassing episode for Evans. And it serves a dual purpose for Ruffalo, a climate advocate who has been active in criticizing the president before. The good news for Evans is that there is certainly a lot of other, more pressing things going on these days. So people will eventually move on to other, bigger news. Eventually.

Miley Cyrus was set to release her seventh album at the end of 2019, but vocal cord surgery forced the singer to delay its release as she recovered from the procedure. Almost a year removed from that surgery, Miley is back in action preparing to finally release the album, entitled She Is Miley Cyrus, to her fans. In a recent interview with French radio station NRJ, the singer revealed that her own musical interests served as the inspiration for the music on the album.

“In my sets, I cover Britney Spears to Metallica, so my record will be reflective of who I am,” she said in the interview. “Which is just kind of all different pieces of inspiration and influence.” The mention of Metallica falls in line with what Miley said about the album in a March interview with the Australian radio station Nova FM where she said it “is sounding super rock and roll.”

In the interview on the French radio station, Miley also spoke on her recent single, “Midnight Sky,” and how it fits perfectly with the kind of music she loves and the direction she wants to take on the upcoming album.

“I think the first single comes with a lot of pressure because it does kind of show everyone where you’re going,” she said. After its release in August, Miley performed the new single at the MTV VMAs where she replaced her wrecking ball for a mirror ball in her dance-heavy performance.

(via Consequence Of Sound)

For those who have been following The Walking Dead over the last decade, this week’s announcement that AMC would be pulling the plug on the series after 11 seasons came as a shock to most of us. We have been hearing for years that there was no end in sight for The Walking Dead, that it could run for 12 years, 15 years, or 20 years. Six months into the pandemic, however, AMC pulled the plug on its flagship series. It may have come as a surprise, but it shouldn’t have, and it probably didn’t have much to do with the pandemic.

So, why did AMC decide to end the series? There are a number of reasons that probably factored in.

1. Robert Kirkman’s Source Material Dried Up — After once suggesting that the comic series could likely outlast the television series, Robert Kirkman abruptly ended The Walking Dead last year, which had more ramifications for the television series than AMC was willing to let on in 2019. Kirkman’s source material, however, has provided 80 to 90 percent or more of the storylines in the series, so far, and without Kirkman’s arcs, The Walking Dead wasn’t going to be the same (see, e.g., Fear the Walking Dead). There’s one major story arc remaining in the series — The Commonwealth — and I expect the television show will end there, as well. It feels right.

2. Build Hype for the Grimes Movie — Right now, with The Walking Dead expected to air 30 more episodes, ending in late 2022; the spin-off, The World Beyond expected to run two more seasons; and the Rick Grimes movie likely coming afterward, it feels like everything is pointing toward the Rick Grimes movie putting a cap on The Walking Dead and this “phase” of the TWD universe. Announcing an end now allows the creatives to work toward that end goal, and it also builds hype toward the finish. Dramas will often announce an end date a few years in advance (see Lost) to get everyone back on board as they head toward the finish line.

3. Cast Members Keep Leaving — For most of The Walking Dead‘s run, it was the writers killing off characters and sending actors packing. The last few years, however, it’s been the actors who have been making those decisions. That’s to be expected for any long-running series, particularly one that shoots outside in the middle of the summer in Georgia. The writers killed off Carl, but Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira left on their own, and Lauren Cohan tried to leave but got pulled back in after her action-drama Whiskey Cavalier was cancelled. Don’t forget that Sonequa Martin-Green (Sasha) also left for Star Trek, and that Christian Serratos (Rosita) is expected to leave for Netflix’s Selena TV series. It’s probably not that easy to write and plan for a show where cast members are constantly leaving, and I expect that others who have been around five, six, seven years might have otherwise wanted to leave soon, as well.

4. It’s Mostly About Money — As most things are, it’s mostly about the money. I’m sure that AMC was happy to fund the necessary budget to pay for a popular and ever-expanding cast when the series was getting 15-20 million viewers a week. The ratings have fallen precipitously in recent years, however, while cast, producer, and licensing fees have increased, as happens as a show gets older. Moreover, as THR points out, the streaming rights were sold to Netflix years ago, and that’s where the real money is these days, especially as ad rates have fallen on The Walking Dead.

The untitled Carol and Daryl spin-off would allow AMC to continue following TWD’s two most popular characters while reducing the budget significantly, resetting the storylines, and reselling both domestic and international streaming rights. I’m sure that TWD Carol and Daryl is less a spin-off and more of a pared down continuation, but it allows AMC to essentially continue the same show (with the same showrunner) at a fraction of the cost while earning more profits from streaming rights.

There is a gamble, of course. If AMC ends the Rick Grimes’ phase of TWD with the movie, there’s no guarantee that viewers will want to continue watching a spin-off. How many more variations of the Carol and Daryl characters can we churn through? Maybe after 12 years, 11 seasons, two spinoffs and a movie, viewers will have had their fill of The Walking Dead universe. I am guessing, however, that most of us will at least sample the spin-off, so it will be up to Angela Kang to keep us hooked. Based on two seasons of The Walking Dead, I trust that she can pull it off.

One of the weirder moments of the NBA’s Orlando Bubble occurred on Saturday evening during Game 5 between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Houston Rockets. While the Lakers came out on top and sent the Rockets home en route to their first Western Conference Finals berth since 2010, the first person to leave the arena was there on behalf of the purple and gold.

Rajon Rondo’s brother, William, jawed with Rockets guard Russell Westbrook in the fourth quarter. Westbrook had to be held back by an official, while Rondo was escorted out by arena officials. After the game, the two players told the media what went down, with Westbrook saying that Rondo was chirping at him, which he believes led to Rondo’s brother getting in on the act.

Rondo, as you might be surprised to learn, had a different read on things. As he explained, both to the media and to Marc J. Spears of The Undefeated, William called Westbrook “trash,” then waved at him in a similar manner to how Damian Lillard waved after he bounced Westbrook and the Oklahoma City Thunder from the playoffs last year.

Additionally, Rondo went on to say that he wants security to ask those around his brother about what happened.

Players going back-and-forth with fans is, obviously, a pretty common thing, but this is a new one for the Bubble, which has been careful to make sure that tensions don’t boil over at a time when players are usually more on edge than usual due to the stakes of the postseason.

For the first time since 2010, the Los Angeles Lakers are headed to the Western Conference Finals. The team put forth one of its best two-way efforts that we’ve seen during its stints in the NBA’s Orlando Bubble, picking up a 119-96 win over the Houston Rockets to secure a 4-1 series win.

The Lakers will now have a few days off, waiting to figure out whether or not their opponent in the next round will be another team that calls the Staples Center home. But before then, let’s look back on what the Lakers did to win Game 5, and some of the questions that face the Rockets as they enter an offseason with more questions than answers.

1. The Lakers will win a title if they can shoot like this

The Lakers are not a particularly good shooting team. They’ve hung their hat all year on defense and being very good inside the three-point line, but during the regular season, L.A. was 23rd in threes made and attempted and 21st in three-point field goal percentage. In a league that is increasingly emphasizing hitting triples, the Lakers have decided to go in the other direction, and they’ve won a ton because of it.

Having said all of this, the Lakers ran the Rockets off the court in Game 5 because they got thermonuclear hot from behind the arc. The team hit 19 of their 37 attempts from deep, good for a 51.4 percent success rate. Markieff Morris went 4-for-4, Danny Green went 4-for-6, Kyle Kuzma went 3-for-6, and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope went 4-for-6. Even LeBron James hit three of his eight triples.

The big thing with hitting threes for L.A. is it frees up space for James, Anthony Davis, and whatever big men they have on the floor at a given time to go to work in the paint. As a result, Los Angeles went 20-for-34 (54.5 percent) on twos. James and Davis combined to go 10-for-19 on twos and shot 16 combined free throws.

While the Lakers aren’t going to connect on more than 50 percent of their threes on a given night, hitting a bunch of them is something that has worked out well for them. They were 5-0 during the regular season when connecting on more than 15 triples and are 7-1 this postseason when they make at least 10. Shooting is still a valuable commodity in basketball, even for a team like Los Angeles that didn’t build its team around that.

2. Balance helps, too

L.A.’s formula is basically that James and Davis will do so much on a given night that everyone around them will just need to do enough to get them over the hump. Saturday’s game saw part of that equation come true — James had 29 points, 11 rebounds, and seven assists — while Davis was relatively quiet, scoring 13 points, pulling down 11 boards, and dishing out four assists.

The good news for Davis was that a number of other players did exactly what we needed to do. The shooting that all of the previously mentioned dudes led to nice evenings for Kuzma (17 points, four rebounds), Morris (16 points, three rebounds, three assists), Green (14 points, four rebounds), and Caldwell-Pope (10 points). As is the case with their shooting, if those four dudes — or any of their additional role players — can combined to score 57 points, Los Angeles is going to win a bunch of games. And of course, they defended quite well as a team, holding Houston to 37.1 percent shooting from the field and 26.5 percent shooting from three.

3. Houston, woof

The Houston Rockets went all-in on a concept. Their bet: If we build a team that lets it fly from three, does not let you get anything easy on defense, and ramps up the pace of the game, we will have more good days than bad, and we will be able to make a run this postseason. It took seven games to barely beat the Oklahoma City Thunder in the first round, then in a fashion that has unfortunately become this team’s reputation, got waxed in the series-deciding game against the Lakers.

Now, Houston enters a bizarre offseason, one in which it is hard to see a clear-cut answer for whatever they need to do, in large part because they really can’t. Look at this.

Goodness gracious. The fact that these two are owed so much is a problem, but the fact that they are two guys on the wrong side of 30 is really concerning. Add in the fact that Houston basically gave up all its draft capital to acquire Westbrook, and they built a team in a very specific way that is oftentimes dependent on finding diamonds in the rough who fit their system, and it’s hard to find a path out. This is before we consider that their head coach, Mike D’Antoni, is a free agent, and while general manager Daryl Morey said he wants to bring him back, who knows how this series will impact that.

There’s a famous Draymond Green quote about how some guys are 82 game players, while others are 16 game players. It’s an interesting one, and it’s one I found myself thinking about a lot during this series. It is possible that the Rockets have a bunch of outstanding 82 game players, but when you need to win 16 games to get a ring, trusting them seems like a risky proposition. Maybe there’s a way out of this that does not involve blowing this experiment all the way up, but it does feel like something needs to change in Houston, even if there aren’t a whole lot of things they can really do that aren’t drastic.