Late last year, as movie theaters were still struggling to get back to anything approaching pre-pandemic attendance levels, AMC Theatres debuted an unusual marketing strategy: They forked over $25 million for an ad in which Nicole Kidman welcomed people back to the multiplex. The earnest (and, frankly, pretty moving) spot quickly turned heads, and it’s been so popular that the chain kept running it before movies, and retained the Oscar winner’s services for another year as their spokesperson. Now, apropos for the age of deathless franchises, the ad is getting a sequel.
As per Vanity Fair, the writer of the first ad Billy Ray — a seasoned Hollywood scribe whose credits include The Hunger Games, Captain Phillips, and Richard Jewell, as well as directing the delightful plagiarism docudrama Shattered Glass — said he’d been tasked with writing part two of the Kidman AMC saga. In fact, he says, it’s already written.
Of course, how can one improve on perfect? The Nicole Kidman AMC ad has become a fixture of moviegoing, at least at the chain’s theaters. It’s not unusual for it to get hoots and hollers, even people reciting Kidman’s speech à la The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Who doesn’t get choked up at the newly ripped movie star saying that “somehow heartbreak feels good in a place like this”?
Kidman was kind of shocked when the ad turned heads, but she fully supports its message. In an interview with The Playlist, she got weepy about the power of movies in movie theaters, which were shuttered for so, so long. “I mean, talk about not feeling alone, sitting in a cinema with a broken heart, and then watching something that breaks your heart again, and you go, ‘I’m not alone,’” she said. “Please. This must not go away. We have to have cinema.”
Incidentally, you know who else loves going to the movies? Her ex-husband Tom Cruise.
(Via Vanity Fair)