Warner Bros. “Justice League” is now officially in trouble. Friday’s opening including Thursday previews comes to $38.2 million. The projected weekend gross is around $93-$95 million.

This is far below the original grim estimates of $110 million. And even farther below “Batman vs. Superman” and “Suicide Squad,” its two predecessors. Forget about mega hit “Wonder Woman.”

At this rate, “Justice League” set a record for worst debut of a franchise comic book movie.

Think about it: “Wonder Woman” just on her own had an opening night of $38 million. This new chapter has Batman and Superman, plus Aqua Man, The Flash and so on.

Since comic book movies are all anyone at any studio cares about anymore, this is a problem.

Stay tuned…

I don’t know why, but for some reason there’s been almost no Oscar campaign for Noah Baumbach’s “The Meyerowitz Stories.” Gold Derby, a thing I deplore, lists it at number 46 of all the possible Best Picture choices. This is ludicrous. Baumbach’s textured screenplay featuring pitch perfect performances from Adam Sandler, Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller, Elizabeth Marvel, Emma Thompson, Grace van Patten and Judd Hirsch is being ignored. Is it because it’s a Netflix film? “Meyerowitz” played in theaters. It’s eligible for every award. And it’s a shonda. But it’s not too late.

Wait: Did I mention Candice Bergen’s literally show stopping scene as one of Harold Meyerowitz’s ex wives, the mother of Ben Stiller’s Matthew? Like all of the extended cameos– Adam Driver, Mickey Sumner et al– the characters are fully realized little gems. If Bergen had two more scenes, she’d be up for Best Supporting Actress.

So Harold Meyerowitz is a sculptor who almost made it in the 60s. Instead he taught at Bard College while his friend, LJ Shapiro, played by Hirsch, jumped ahead to fame. You can tell Harold is a victim of his own ego, his own worst enemy. He’s been married four times. The second wife bore him Danny (Sandler) and Jean (Marvel.) Then he married Bergen’s character. Or something like that. They had Matthew (Stiller) whom Harold clearly favors, idolizes. Danny and Jean, on the other hand, are kind of lovable losers.

Harold’s fourth and current wife, Maureen, drinks like a fish, makes bad meals. She is hippie-dippie but smarter than you think. The Meyerowitzes are a fully dysfunctional New York family, very much out of Woody Allen and JD Salinger and even Laurie Colwin. But they are also every family–black, white, Jewish, Catholic. They are so identifiably “your family” it’s insane.

Adam Sandler is the revelation as Danny. Finally reined in (although you can seem him straining) Sandler drops that horrible manchild voice of his and becomes a leading man. He has to be nominated for an Oscar. All the Oscar-noticators are breathing hard over Gary Oldman, hoping for Daniel Day Lewis or Tom Hanks, pushing for Jake Gyllenhaal or Timothee Chalamet. But Sandler is standing right there in front of them. I can’t believe I’m saying it, but it’s true. (Plus I love that his unseen wise friend is named Ptolemy.)

Hoffman– now he’s embroiled in one of these idiotic sex harassment things. Forget it. This is one of the great performances of an amazing career. Harold Meyerowitz is his own piece of art. (I think his art is supposed to be based on the actually very successful Joel Shapiro.) Harold is just barely aware of anything or anyone around. At one point he and Stiller–also working at highest level– are at a restaurant table literally talking over each other, ignoring what the other is saying– this is a clip for the Oscars.

There’s so much going on in this funny, sweet, and sad movie. It was released (somehow) right before this whole spate of women revealing horrible sexual things done to them by men. Marvel’s Jean is one of them. Her revelation, her story, which is presciently like a lot of the real women who’ve spoken in the last month, can bring you to tears. Marvel is a marvel. I’m surprised no one’s picked up on this.

Thompson is just a great fruit loop. I’ve rarely seen her so deeply embedded. It’s like she’s in a trance, that she’s been hypnotized into Maureen.

The screenplay is different, it’s not perfect or seamless. At least, it is for a while and then in its hospital section the segues disappear and it’s almost as if it’s a series of blackout sketches. This didn’t bother. The scenes have the same cumulative effect. The whole family goes on vigil at the hospital. And the net net is that Baumbach captures the scenario perfectly. There isn;t a person who watches “Meyerowitz” who doesn’t get the uncomfortable feeling Baumbach was following them around.

This is a long Oscar season. It’s also lackluster. We see “Dunkirk” as a de facto winner, “Lady Bird” (by, coincidentally, Baumbach’s other half, Greta Gerwig) as “charming” and “perfect.” And then what? “Shape of Water,” “Call Me By Your Name.”  “Mudbound” is the serious one. This is the least focused season I can recall in two decades. But it’s time to throw “Meyerowitz” back in the game. It’s just genius, and forgetting it is really a big mistake.

He said adding, “My wife – and it’s not clear if Oldman meant wife number four, Alex Endenborough, whom he divorced in 2015 or wife number five, Gisele Schmidt, who he married in September and was at the NY premiere – just said to me, ‘You know, c’mon, you’re going to stand here groaning, you’re going to speak this beautiful language and what’s the worse that could happen? You could be really terrible and suck but your life goes on,’ so that made sense to me. I’m not going to be marched in front of the firing squad. Just get some bad reviews and life goes on. So I jumped in.”

The fantastic prosthetic makeup and hair is by Kazuhiro Tsuji (Planet of the Apes, 2001), which is also sure to nab an Oscar nod. Oldman spent some 200 hours in the make up chair.

Did all this makeup make him more believable to himself as the character?

“What we do is we forget. You forget after a while,” said Oldman plaintively. “Occasionally I would walk down the hall and pass a mirror and then I looked in the mirror and thought, ‘okay,’ you get so used to it, you’re swept along as the character. That’s the great thing about it, it looks like a lot and it is, and it’s hot but you do forget. It’s not for a distraction. I would pinch myself sometimes, ‘Oh, it’s Winston Churchill!’”

Oldman was joined at the premiere by castmates Kristin Scott Thomas, who plays Clemmy Churchill, the PM’s wife) and Ben Mendelsohn, who takes on stuttering King George (who we all know so well from “The King’s Speech”). He is not related to the late great composer Felix Mendelssohn, we determined. “But I did like his father,” Ben said, referring to the 18th century philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, a person likely no one else in the room had ever heard of. Mendelsohn is the kind of actor you look forward to seeing in films, and he’s in a lot of them these days.  He’s like the new Alan Rickman, we said.

“I knew Alan,” Mendelsohn said, “and that’s a compliment.”

Photo c2017 Showbiz411 by Paula Schwartz

The critics and bloggers have spoken. All together, they’ve given “Justice League” a lowly 37 on Rotten Tomatoes.

It could be worse.

The first installment of what Warner Bros and DC Comics hoped would be a Marvel-like series, “Batman vs. Superman” — reviled by fans and critics– scored an even worse  27%. Nevertheless, it went on to have a $166 million opening weekend.

The second installment, “Suicide Squad,” had a 26% score and a $133 million open.

So who knows? Maybe the groundswell of new Wonder Woman fans will pull this one along.

This weekend will also see which of the second-level competitors “Daddy’s Home 2” and “Murder on the Orient Express” will survive. So far, “Orient Express” looks like it’s pulling ahead. And a new release, “Wonder,” with Julia Roberts– which sounds like a reboot of Peter Bogdanovich’s classic, “Mask” — may be a sleeper hit. We can only…wonder…

The premiere of Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” was held last night at the Motion Picture Academy in Beverly Hills. In all my years of going there, I’ve never seen a rapturous reaction to any film. ever. And I agree. This whimsical, magical fairy tale is at its core a love story, with Del Toro’s signature fanboy sci fi touch.

Poignant and poetic heartbreaking and clever, this film has been a life’s passion for Del Toro and as he told me recently, “this film I’m exhaling with.” Visually it’s masterful. The actors are equally as transcendent. Sally Hawkins plays Eliza, a mute cleaning lady at a government lab in the Cold War era. There they house a top secret monster, aquaman of sorts, which she falls in love with and he her. Del Toro called Hawkins luminous last night as he introduced her and he’s right. Her performance grabs you from her first scene and never lets up.

Octavia Spencer as Hawkins’ best cleaning lady friend and Richard Jenkins (Del Toro dubbed him mystifying and delightful) as her closeted best friend are just wonderful. Octavia has her Oscar, Jenkins, long overdue for his, deserves the golden trophy for this funny and heartbreaking performance. Michael Shannon is menacing as the bad guy government agent and the always wonderful Michael Stuhlbarg as the Russian spy round out this perfect ensemble.

Jenkins told me that he didn’t really know how the film would turn out until he saw it recently. Stulhbarg added that this was all Del Toro’s delicate work, every detail had to be his vision, down to the colors of the scales on the monster. And it all shows in a glorious cinematic experience. Guillermo summed it up perfectly as told the crowd last night that “We live in a time where ideology divides us. This is a movie that speaks too the great love of the ‘other.’ This film is profoundly in love with love and cinema.”

Amazon Studios could really use Cher right now to sing “If We Could Turn Back Time.”

In September things looked so good for the money spending new studio. They’d already had a huge hit with “Manchester by the Sea.” Casey Affleck won Best Actor at the Oscars, Kenneth Lonergan picked up a lot of awards for his screenplay.

Then came “The Big Sick,” which everyone loves and went on to make $42 million via Lions Gate. Again, lots of awards buzz.

The announcement came for the New York Film Festival: all of three of its galas would be Amazon films. Richard Linklater’s “Last Flag Flying” would open, Todd Haynes’ “Wonderstruck” would be the centerpiece, and Woody Allen’s “Wonder Wheel” would close the festival. It was a first, a hat trick, and really exciting.

And now: it’s all in cinders. Amazon president Roy Price is gone from the company after a sexual harassment charges. That’s the worst of it, kind of.

On the financial front, both “Last Flag Flying” and “Wonderstruck” are dead. The former has struggled to get $270,366 in 12 days of very limited release. Not even stars like Steve Carell and Bryan Cranston have been able to attract an audience. The latter film has made $826,697 in 24 days. Good films, decent reviews, but nothing.

(This doesn’t even count the failures of “Brad’s Status” or “The Only Living Boy in New York,” each DOA.)

And then there’s Woody Allen’s “Wonder Wheel.” On Tuesday, Amazon held a non-premiere at the Russian Tea Room with no red carpet and press banned completely. This followed the New York Film Festival opening last month that also had no red carpet. Still, without a carpet, someone got Woody on the fly to comment about Harvey Weinstein. And that went like a lead balloon.

“Wonder Wheel” has a middling 52 rating from critics. Kate Winslet has been talked about for a Best Actress nomination, but she can’t give interviews because everyone’s asking why she works with Woody Allen, whose controversies have become unfortunately linked to Weinstein’s and others. In a strong year for lead actresses, Winslet is not in good shape Oscar- wise. The box office future for “Wonder Wheel” isn’t great.

Amazon, feared in September, now has to count on “The Big Sick” to come through for them. Kumail Nanjiani’s lovely comedy should get a Golden Globe nod for Best Comedy/Musical. And Holly Hunter has a shot in Best Supporting Actress. But beyond that, “The Big Sick” may just remain a little gem with good box office and happy memories–and no sequel.

Will 2017 be Amazon’s last flag flying? Not at all. But it just shows, it was impossible to predict anything with certainty in this year’s Oscar race. We have all been in da Nile.