From where I sat on day two of CinemaCon, Warner Bros. Discovery has three big crowd-pleasers coming in 2023: Barbie, the musical remake of The Color Purple, and Dune Part Two. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling hit the stage at Caesars Palace’s massive Colosseum theater Tuesday afternoon, both wearing pink and big smiles as they yukked it up with costar America Ferrera and writer-director Greta Gerwig.
Gerwig spoke about how she and her partner, Noah Baumbach, cowrote the script by making each other laugh, until they found themselves crying. Baumbach, she said, might have been interested in directing the project too—but she stood firm when he suggested as much, telling him to step aside. (It was funny the way she said it, because Greta Gerwig is the best.)
Robbie gushed about the outstanding production design, and how Teamsters that didn’t really need to be on set and people working on Fast X kept visiting for a dopamine fix. Gosling made himself chuckle as he spoke about the process of finding his “Kenergy”—then, a little more seriously, said shooting on this set made him realize how Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz must have felt.
The extended sizzle reel we saw showed more of the Truman Show aspect of the story, with Barbie and Ken entering “the real world,” making for zany results. Aspects related to Robbie’s bare feet are actually an instigating plot point, as if Gerwig saw how Quentin Tarantino shot the 32-year-old Australian actor and said, “I can top this.”
Earlier, Oprah Winfrey and her otherworldly enthusiasm came out to present the trailer to The Color Purple with director Blitz Bazawule and performers Fantasia, Taraji P. Henson, and Danielle Brooks. She was charmingly familiar in the Oprah Winfrey Show–esque setting, which really did a number on the crowd’s engagement. The 1985 film directed by Steven Spielberg, she said, “was the most important thing that happened to me” at the time, and she vowed to the assembled theater owners that she would be mustering all the power of her social media to get people to theaters this Christmas. “The groups are coming. The sisters are coming,” she said.
The remake, based on the 2005 stage musical (itself based on Alice Walker’s 1982 novel), is very much a musical, or at least it seems that way based on the trailer we saw. It featured lots of choreography, elaborate costumes, and the promise that this was “not your mama’s Color Purple.” Winfrey, who is a producer on the film with Spielberg and Quincy Jones, later remarked that, while this is true, “your mama’s still gonna love it.”
Half a galaxy away from rural Georgia is the desert planet Arrakis featured in Dune. When we last left him, Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides was joining the nomadic warrior tribe the Fremen. Among the things we’ll see in Dune: Part Two is our young leader learning to ride a sandworm.
Chalamet, who wore both a leather vest and a grin, was positively giggly while talking about riding the worm. He said it was a practical effect too, but it’s hard to know exactly what he meant by this, as giant worms the size of the Chrysler building are not real. Anyway: He, Zendaya, and director Denis Villeneuve boasted that the second half of the tale is more action-packed than the first.
There’s “not one second of repetition from the first movie,” Villeneuve bragged, regarding the sets on the imaginary world. He also revealed that the entire picture was shot in the IMAX format, whereas Part One was only 40% IMAX.
The trailer indeed showed Chalamet’s Paul climbing atop a fearsome sandworm, and being coached by Javier Bardem. (“Nothing fancy,” he wisely says.) We also saw glimpses of Florence Pugh, new to the series, as Princess Irulan (the narrator of the book), and, in some black-and-white imagery, Austin Butler as Paul’s foe, Feyd-Rautha. Yes, yes, this is the character played by Sting in David Lynch’s version. And while Butler wore no metal truss, he did look bald and eerie. (Just beware of the purported photo of him in the film currently circulating on social media; it’s a fan-made image, not a legit still.)
