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Even with the dinosaurs chewing all the scenery this weekend, the flyboys still came in winners.
“Top Gun Maverick” made another $50 million this weekend, ending up around $394 million. (Paramount lowballs their estimates, so could be a bit higher.)
The result is that “Maverick” will cross $400 million on Monday, which is quite a coup for director Joseph Kosinski. He has another movie coming to Netflix on Friday called “Spiderhead,” which will be lucky, I’m told, not to face box office scrutiny.
At the bottom of the box office barrel, Neon’s David Cronenberg outing, “Crimes of the Future” took in just $375K in its second week. Total now is $2 million. The party is over. Surgery is not the new sex.
It don’t come easy: Ringo Starr has had to postpone the balance of his summer shows because two of his band members have tested positive for COVID. They still had 12 shows to go in June. The tour will pick up in October.
Ringo’s band members are all stars but they are also all “older,” so there has to be concern. Ringo himself is almost 82. The band members are Steve Lukather, Colin Hay, Warren Ham, Gregg Bissonette, Hamish Stuart and Edgar Winter. The word is Winter and Lukather tested positive. Ringo, who looks like he’s 62 because he’s a vegetarian, is just fine. But he must be less than thrilled that COVID has crept into his crew.
#well we tried things happen I send you all peace and love and thank you to all the people Who came to the shows peace and love everybody😎 ✌️🌟❤️🎶🎼🥦🌈🍒☮️ pic.twitter.com/FgjPdoBcZ6
I’ve never really understood who Post Malone is or what he’s all about. But he’s had three hit albums and a bunch of hit singles.
A few weeks ago he was on “Saturday Night Live.” I thought his performances were really odd. Again, I don’t get it. I also can’t stand facial tattoos.
Well, his new album, “Twelve Carat Toothache,” arrived last Friday. And the news is not good. Sales for the first week were down a whopping 118% from his last release in 2019, called “Hollywood’s Bleeding.”
That album sold 489,000 copies in its first week, including streaming. The new one sold 125,000 copies and finished in second place according to hitsdailydouble.com. The painful part of that news is that the number 1 album for the week, by Bad Bunny, is in its second week. So Post Malone couldn’t knock off a release that had already been out.
Pop fame is fleeting. With these acts, it’s important that every new release be methodically marketed because these are not lasting talents. They exist on celebrity and the ability to make a handful to top 40 songs keep bringing fans back. “Twelve Carat Toothache” may be full of cavities.
Justin Bieber has a condition called Ramsey Hunt in which his face is paralyzed. Earlier this year, his wife, Hailey Baldwin Bieber, had a mini stroke. They’ve each had COVID and are anti-vaxxers. Could that be the reason they’re getting illnesses unusual for people are under 60? Just sayin’…
Justin is supposed to resume his tour on Monday night in New York for two gigs in a row at Madison Square Garden. Let’s hope he’s on his way back to good health…
The dino’s are chomping on everything around them.
Box office previews last night for “Jurassic Park Dominion” exceeded $18 million. That’s $3 million more than the last episode, “Fallen Kingdom.” It’s also the third highest preview night in the last three years.
“Dominion” is now set for at least a $150 million or more opening weekend, maybe higher. And this is despite terrible reviews. No one cares. Everyone wants to see how this thing ends after 29 years.
At the same time, “Crimes of the Future” from Neon Pictures made just $98,317 last night, total of $1.6 mil since last Thursday, it’s deader than the dinosaurs’ victims.
EXCLUSIVE Sales of former Trump and White House spokesperon Kellyanne Conway’s book, “Here’s the Deal,” dropped 93% in the second week of availability.
Sales for week 2 were 9,200 copies compared to 25,000 for the first week.
The book has also dropped off Amazon.com’s top 200 list. It’s at number 241 down from 201 yesterday at this time.
Numbers are from NPD Book Scan.
The failure of the book to sell shows that people who can read reject Conway’s endorsement of Donald Trump and indeed her own failure to criticize Trump for anything. Setting aside Conway’s constant lying and fabrications, this may be a referendum on Trump as well.
It’s also unique timing. Last night the January 6th Committee presented on television a horrifying look at Trump’s violent efforts to overturn the US government after his election defeat in 2021. Even today he continues to defendthe horrors of what happened on that day on his social media platform. Conway stood fast by him even after she stepped down from her White House job. She deserves to have to return her advance to her publisher and pulp whatever books aren’t sold.
PS When I first reported the book’s sales on June 2nd, every outlet, including the Daily Beast, lifted the story out of this column without credit. Don’t do it again.
This is big news. The great Lena Horne, legendary movie and stage star and singer of “Stormy Weather,” is getting a Broadway theater named for her.
The Nederlander Organization is renaming the Brooks Atkinson Theater in her honor. Brooks Atkinson was a revered theater reviewer who’s had his name on the marquee for decades. Even he would agree this is a spectacular idea.
James (Jimmy) L. Nederlander’s father, James M. Nederlander, was instrumental as one of the lead producers of “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music” which played at the Nederlander Theatre in 1981. The show was an instant success and was extended to a full year run, garnering Horne a special Tony Award and two Grammy Awards for the cast recording of her show.
On a personal note, I had the pleasure of seeing that show a couple of times, once even taking my grandmother, who was a huge fan. Horne was then 64 years old, and everyone marveled hw a woman “that age” could do 8 shows a week!
Times have changed! But she was trailblazer.
“We are proud to take this moment to rename one of our theaters in honor of the great civil rights activist, actress, and entertainer Lena Horne,” said James L. Nederlander of The Nederlander Organization. “I am so honored to have known Lena. She became a part of our family over the years. It means so much to me that my father was the producer of Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, and it is my privilege, honor, and duty to memorialize Lena for generations to come.”
Horne’s granddaughter, Jenny Lumet. is a respected screenwriter. Jenny’s dad was the esteemed director Sidney Lumet. Jenny’s mom is Gail Lumet Buckley, who says: “On February 13, 1939, Brooks Atkinson wrote a review of the musical Blackbirds of 1939 for The New York Times. His review was generally unfavorable except for the mention of ‘a radiantly beautiful girl, Lena Horne, who will be a winner once she has proper direction.’ The proper direction came from within Lena herself. She sought an artistic education, and a political education. She sought her own voice, found it, and then fought for the right that was always denied her – the right to tell her own story. In 1981, James M. Nederlander offered her their stage and Lena’s one-woman show, The Lady and Her Music ran for more than a year. 366 performances, in three countries. It was her fullest expression as an artist and storyteller. We’re grateful to the Nederlander Organization for rechristening this space to the Lena Horne Theatre. We hope artists and audiences alike will tell their own stories here.”
Today, the ever prolific Elvis Costello is issuing a six track EP under the name Rusty. It’s called “The Resurrection of Rust.” If you want to see where Elvis began, when he was still Declan McManus and five years before “My Aim is True,” I direct you to this little gem.
Costello was a mere 17 when he and Allen Mayes set out as an act. Now, 50 years later, they’ve re-recorded their best stuff with Costello’s very simpatico producer, Sebastian Krys. The result is disarmingly good, swinging, soulful, and catchy.
Elvis sent me an email describing the whole endeavor, which follows below. But the upshot is that this little collection comes from an era that also launched Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, Brinsley Swartz and Bob Andrews, who became The Rumour, which played famously with Garland Jeffreys and of, course, Graham Parker. Except for Edmunds’s hit cover of “I Hear You Knocking,” we didn’t know about these people in ’72. We weren’t ready for them.
All the tracks on “Resurrection” can be found on YouTube in other older forms from that era. But these new versions are far superior, I think. They’ve become top of the pops in my car over the last week. I can’t get enough of an early Elvis song, “Warm House (And an Hour of Joy)” and a Nick Lowe confection called “Don’t Lose Your Grip On Love.”
PS Let’s not forget Elvis’s “The Boy Named If,” one of the very best records of 2022, which followed his earlier masterpiece “Look Now.” Costello is still pumping away at 67, a lovely rebuke to the lightweights of the current generation.
from Elvis:
This is Rusty making their recording debut 50 years AFTER I joined the band on New Year’s Day, 1972 – then a four-piece.
We played everywhere they’d let us but never made any money and only made one much-rejected demo tape – which sounds like it was recorded in a bucket down a well. Allan Mayes and I pressed on until early ’73, when I went back to London (and all that) and Allan stayed in Liverpool, mostly playing other people’s songs before relocating to Texas after getting a contract to play a covers circuit in Texas, Louisiana and Florida, then on cruise ships and oil-worker bars in Alaska before returning to Austin, where he lives and works today. He wrote to suggest that we might play a few tunes to celebrate this big number but I thought we should make the record we dreamed of making when we were teenagers. I was 17 and still at school when I wrote “Warm House”. Allan and I worked on the early musical draft of “Maureen & Sam” which I later re-wrote as “Ghost Train” with an entirely different melody and a lot of changes to my original lyric, turning “Sam” into “Stan”. And that is why we are singing Nick Lowe, Jim Ford and Neil Young songs from 1972.
Much like, “The Boy Named If”, Pete Thomas and Davey Faragher are the rhythm section, Bob Andrews reprised his “Surrender To The Rhythm” organ and piano in New Mexico, while Steve Nieve played on “I’m Ahead” and “Don’t Lose Your Grip On Love”. I play all the electric guitars and piano, bass and drums on “Maureen & Sam”, the mandolin on “Warm House” and the mandolin and electric violin on “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere/Dance Dance Dance”. Allan recorded his vocals and acoustic guitar in Austin.
PS This is a bootleg version of “Don’t Lose Your Grip” with Elvis and Nick. I’ll have the new one on Friday.
Here’s the deal: the first week rush of curiosity seekers is over for Liar Extraordinaire Kellyanne Conway.
Her book, called “I Did it for the Money,” has fallen to number 201 on amazon.com. On the New York Times bestseller list, the tome, otherwise known as “Alternative Fax,” dropped in its second week from number 1 to 5. How it got that high on the Times list is bizarre.
But the second week sales collapse is happening. Paperback rights have been sold to that man in the park who plays the kazoo and sells poems he wrote on the back of Bill DeBlasio posters. They’re 20 for a buck.
Movie rights are available. There’s been talk of setting the film entirely at Bowling Green subway station.
The first week sales were 25,000. We’ll have the second week numbers shortly and will update again.
