Some might say that the era of the big budget romance died when Pearl Harbor took a critical drubbing in 2001. And yet James Camerons Avatar proved beyond doubt seven years ago that audiences will still sign up for a good old-fashioned love story, provided theres plenty of spectacle among the lingering glances. By somehow managing to bring together the kind of filmgoer who will pay to see an alien movie with those who would rather spend their last dollar on a late-night screening of The Notebook (as well as looping in some brilliantly synapse-boggling 3D), Cameron briefly appeared to have single-handedly rescued Hollywood from certain doom.
But while Pearl Harbor would never have existed without the success of Camerons Titanic four years previously, Avatars imitators have largely chosen to focus on the movies groundbreaking stereoscopic effects rather than copy its preposterous blend of sci-fi and romance. And who can blame them, given that Hollywood and space have a troubled history stretching all the way back to studios clunky attempts to mimic the extraordinary success of Star Wars in 1977? The fact that Disney came a cropper far more recently with the similarly pitched John Carter will not have inspired confidence.
Passengers: trailer for Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt sci-fi drama
This is exactly why Passengers, the $120m (some estimates suggest $150m) mega-budget Sony space romance that has just released its debut trailer, is such a surprising arrival on the 2016 scene. It could well be another Avatar waiting to happen. But given Hollywoods history with outlandishly expensive sci-fi, it could just as easily find itself languishing in DVD store bargain bins in a few years along with faded copies of Mars Needs Moms and The Adventures of Pluto Nash. The fact is, nobody knows how this one will pan out.
The initial signs, however, are promising. Passengers, from the excellent Norwegian director of The Imitation Game, Morten Tyldum, has the look of a glossy 21st-century update of classic 70s space movies such as Dark Star, Silent Running and Solaris, all from that era in which sci-fi film-makers loved to riff on the endless boredom of travel between the stars and imagine madness taking root in the cosmos like cholera in dirty water.
Hollywood hot properties Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt are the two star travellers who have woken early from hibernation to discover their ship and the lives of all 5,259 on board are in deep doo-doo. Will they find love in the cosmos, or will they end up tearing each other apart? And is there more to their once-in-a-lifetime coming together than we might initially have been led to believe?
The major difference between Passengers and its 70s forebears is that the Starship Avalon appears to boast all the mod cons of 22nd-century living, including a robot barman (an ingeniously cast Michael Sheen) to serve our hero and heroine on their first space date. But will all that luxury help keep the happy couple sane when they are the only two conscious souls for millions of light years? And has Sheen been reading from the Cameron-Scott guide to evil robots?
Space romance it may be, but Tyldums movie is also ploughing a rather different furrow to Avatar. Camerons film succeeded despite the absence of any major A-list names it was all about the film-makers back catalogue and those spine-tingling visuals while Passengers appears to be the very definition of a star-driven blockbuster, almost a throwback to an era where studios would line up their romantic two-hander Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in the 1940s, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the 90s and worry about what movie they were making later.
Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in Passengers. Photograph: Allstar/SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT
Sony is reportedly paying Lawrence a barely-heard-of $20m fee, famously $8m more than Pratt will receive as the male lead. Yet none of Tyldums previous films have exactly driven all before them at the box office, and Passengers cannot even count on a pre-existing fanbase to help it on opening weekend as its based on an entirely original script that made the 2007 blacklist of the best unfilmed screenplays in Hollywood. The studio really is banking on the Norwegian mining gold from Pratt and Lawrences star power and abundant chemistry, a brave move when its rivals are all obsessed with cinematic universes and endless remakes, adaptations and sequels.
One major roadblock for the movie may be that early industry reports appeared to give away its central twist heavily hinted at in the new trailer though its possible Tyldum has since rejigged Jon Spaihts screenplay. Another is that Passengers is due to debut in cinemas just a couple of weeks after Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Will audiences turn up for two giant space movies in a matter of weeks?
If Sony does pull off a surprise smash, it could be a game-changer. Tyldums film appears to offer a tentative pathway for the industry to shift back towards original big-budget film-making and away from the incessant hum of superhero movies that have overtaken the slates of at least half the major studios and to begin trusting to the talent of its finest actors, screenwriters and directors once again, rather than being forced to rely so heavily on pre-existing fanbases.
Much has been made of Hollywoods creative redundancy at a time when TV is experiencing a golden age, but studios cannot just steal all the small screens best ideas and put them in the multiplexes, for the two mediums work on vastly different dynamics. As Cameron so smartly spotted in the 1980s, blockbuster cinema requires genuine spectacle to make its mark in the modern era, for no other reason than that audiences might as well stay at home if they are only paying their hard-earned bucks to see the same content on a larger screen. But that does not mean that extravagant tentpole film-making, with the kind of synapse-searing effects that only cinemas are capable of showing off in their full glory, cannot be delivered with verve and originality.
Just as Starship Avalon is not the only damaged vessel floundering in increasingly uncertain territory, Sony bigwigs will not be the only studio executives hoping that Passengers proves to be a major hit. One imagines the whole of Hollywood would very much like to ride the success of Tyldums film all the way to its own new golden age.
Shawty Lo Dies in Hit & Run Car Accident in Atlanta
Shawty Lo died this morning from injuries sustained in asingle-car accidentin Georgia. Driving home on I-285 in Fulton County shortly after 2 AM, he jumped a guardrail and was ejected from his vehicle and pronounced dead at the scene.
News of his death quickly spread across social media and soon reached the ears of his artistic peers, many of whom reside in Atlanta. Upon hearing the ill tidings, Gucci Mane, Young Scooter, Future, 50 Cent, Lil Yachty, Freekey Zekey, Jermaine Dupri, and a host of others posted on social media to share condolences to Shawty Lo"s family. Lo is survived by his 11 children.
d**n! Lo #rip
A photo posted by Jermaine Dupri (@jermainedupri) on Sep 21, 2016 at 4:10am PDT
Emily Ratajkowski Says Jimmy Kimmel"s Mom Makes A Bad PB&J (TMZ TV) 9/20/2016 6:25 PM PDT BY TMZ STAFF
EXCLUSIVE
Oscar winning director and writer Curtis Hanson died at a home in the Hollywood Hills Tuesday afternoon ... TMZ has learned.
Law enforcement sources tell us paramedics went to the home, responding to a call of an unconscious man. We"re told Hanson was pronounced dead at the scene, and it appears to have been a heart attack.
Hanson won an Oscar in 1998 for his "L.A. Confidential" screenplay, which he also directed. He famously directedEminem"s Hollywood debut in"8 Mile" ... as well as "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," "The River Wild" and "In Her Shoes."
Angelina Jolie files for divorce from Brad Pitt Photo Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in 2013. Credit Leon Neal/Agence France-Presse Getty Images
It was a grand Hollywood romance that made its presence felt far and wide, from the red carpet to refugee camps in the worlds trouble spots.
It was chronicled in lavish photo spreads in high-end fashion magazines and in paparazzi shots that appeared in the tabloids and on the gossip sites, as if to undercut the couples mythic status.
Now, with a lawyers blandly worded press statement on Tuesday morning, the love story of Angelina Jolie Pitt and Brad Pitt, who were married in 2014, has come to an unhappy end.
This decision was made for the health of the family, Robert Offer, a lawyer for Ms. Jolie Pitt, said in the statement. She will not be commenting, and asks that the family be given its privacy at this time.
The announcement came a little over two years after the couple married in a ceremony before roughly 20 friends and family members in a Romanesque chapel on the grounds of Chteau Miraval, their estate in the South of France. The couples six children, three of them adopted, attended the bride and groom. The master tailor Luigi Massi of Atelier Versace made Ms. Jolie Pitts wedding dress, incorporating designs from her childrens drawings.
In keeping with the public nature of their relationship, Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie Pitt sold the photographs of their wedding day to People and Hello! magazines for a reported $5 million. In keeping with their habit of giving to charity, the couple contributed the payment to the Jolie-Pitt Foundation.
When their romance became public, the tabloids were quick to dub them Brangelina. At the time, she was a divorced mother of an adopted son, Maddox, having ended her marriage to the actor Billy Bob Thornton in 2003. Mr. Pitt was still married to the Friends star Jennifer Aniston.
Slide Show The End of Brangelina
CreditChris Pizzello/Associated Press
Ms. Aniston filed for divorce from the actor in March 2005. That summer a spread appeared in the large-format glossy magazine W. Shot by Steven Klein and headlined Domestic Bliss: Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt at Home, it comprised 60 pages of photographs of Mr. Pitt, Ms. Jolie and five boys (all of them models) who somewhat resembled Mr. Pitt, in a chic, early 1960s setting.
Their most recent project as a couple, the 2015 film By the Sea, directed by Ms. Jolie Pitt, told a different story. Meta with a vengeance, By the Sea stars Angelina Jolie Pitt and Brad Pitt as itinerant married artists who are suffering, beautifully, through a rough patch, wrote Manohla Dargis in her review for The New York Times.
Asked about the process of directing her husband, Ms. Jolie Pitt told Vanity Fair, A few friends asked if we were crazy. The moody film was a box-office flop, grossing $3.3 million.
During the course of their relationship, the Jolie Pitt clan expanded. In addition to Maddox, 15, whom she adopted in Cambodia in 2002, the couple are parents to Zahara, 11, from Ethiopia; Shiloh, to whom she gave birth in Namibia in 2006; Pax, 12, adopted in Vietnam; and the twins Vivienne and Knox, 8, to whom Ms. Jolie Pitt gave birth in 2008.
Ms. Jolie Pitt and Mr. Pitt have separately discussed struggling with self-destructive behavior in their younger years. Both seemed to have overcome the dark periods, with a slew of high grossing, critically acclaimed films to their names and a well-documented commitment to philanthropy.
She began working for the United Nations in 2000 as a good-will ambassador, and became the special envoy for the United Nations high commissioner for refugees in 2012.
She has gone on dozens of missions to countries around the world, including Iraq, Jordan and Myanmar. Last year she addressed the United Nations Security Council, arguing that the United Nations was failing the people of Syria. Earlier this month, Ms. Jolie Pitt spent three days at the Azraq camp in Jordan, which is home to more than 37,000 Syrian refugees, according to the United Nations.
During her years with Mr. Pitt, she had box office hits with the action movie Wanted and the Disney fantasy Maleficent while also making a name for herself as a director of serious fare like In the Land of Blood and Honey, a love story set against the backdrop of the Bosnian War, and Unbroken.
He has won an Oscar for producing the critically acclaimed 12 Years a Slave and has been nominated for several other Oscars, including for best actor for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and for Moneyball. He was also nominated for a best supporting actor Golden Globe for his role in Babel.
In 2013 Ms. Jolie Pitt wrote a candid and widely praised Op-Ed page essay for The New York Times about choosing to have a preventative double mastectomy. She followed it up in 2015 with an essay on her next preventative surgery, during which her ovaries and fallopian tubes were removed.
While he wears his political commitments more lightly than Ms. Jolie Pitt, Mr. Pitt is a co-founder of Not on Our Watch, a nongovernmental organization devoted to preventing genocide, and the founder of Make It Right, which builds homes and other structures for people in need.
Photo From left, People magazine covers featuring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt from Jan. 20, 2006; June 9, 2006; and March 9, 2007. Credit People Magazine, via U.S. Newswire; People Magazine, via Reuters; People Magazine, via PRNewsFoto
Over the course of their time together, the couple demonstrated an unusual ability to negotiate with the media. After Shiloh was born in 2006, the couple sold photos of the mother and newborn to People magazine for an estimated $4.1 million, all of which they donated to charity. That same year they negotiated with People on another deal, giving the magazine exclusive photos of Ms. Jolie and Maddox for an estimated $750,000 and the promise to cover Ms. Jolie Pitts charity work.
Later, they received an estimated $14 million from People and Hello! magazines for shots of their twins and again donated the funds to charity.
On Tuesday, with the announcement of the split, the hashtag #Brangelina quickly became the top trending item on Twitter, with fans reacting to the news with a range of emotions, including laments over the death of love; complaints that the news was superseding President Obamas speech at the United Nations; and theories that the news was a welcome distraction from the presidential campaign.
Ms. Jolie Pitt was silent on the matter but Mr. Pitt gave a statement to People magazine: I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids. I kindly ask the press to give them the space they deserve during this challenging time.
Correction: September 20, 2016
An earlier version of this article misstated the award Brad Pitt was nominated for after his role in Babel. It was a Golden Globe for best supporting actor, not an Oscar.
"NCIS," the No. 1 drama on television, will return for its 14th season on Sept. 20 on CBS. Longtime cast members Mark Harmon, Pauley Perrette, Sean Murray and David McCallum will be joined by newcomers Wilmer Valderrama, Duane Henry and Jennifer Esposito, as the show moves off following the departure of Michael Weatherly (Tony DiNozzo).
But before the new season begins, check out these 11 fun facts that FOX411 sleuthed out about the crime drama:
Five students score perfect ACT scores Tim Boyle, Getty Images
Laramie County School District #1 officials are pleased with the scores students in the district achieved in the most recent round of ACT testing.
Steve Newton, LCSD#1 Director of Instruction, says the average test scores for the district went up by a full half point. He says that while that may not sound like a lot, the national and state average ACT scores dont usually change much at all, so a half point increase is actually quite good.
He says that when LCSD#1 is taken out of the state numbers, the local numbers are actually about a point above the average score in the rest of Wyoming. the test is given to all high school juniors in Wyoming, including roughly 1,000 students in LCSD#1.
Among local high school students, every single score went up among Cheyenne East and Cheyenne South students taking the test.
Among Cheyenne Central students math reading and composite scores were up, while English and science scores were the same as last year.
