This is the latest edition of the Movies Fantasy League newsletter. The drafting window for this season has closed, but you can still sign up to get the newsletter, which provides a weekly recap of box-office performance, awards nominations, and critical chatter on all the buzziest movies.
You can call the Movies Fantasy League a dinosaur’s story, because We’re Back! We have double the number of players as last year, all staring down an Oscar race that’s completely wide open and a fall calendar stacked with big, tentpole-y movies that could have the kind of box-office impact on scoring that we’ve seen only a handful of times over the past two years.
All of which is to say, to quote Tashi Duncan: LET’S GOOOO.
The Brutal List
It was fascinating to watch the rosters roll in and see which movies were getting the most attention. Here’s the top ten:
1. Anora: 5,121 rosters
2. The Brutalist: 4,228
3. Wicked: 4,029
4. Dune: Part 2: 3,370
5. Nosferatu: 3,014
6. Moana 2: 2,997
7. Saturday Night: 2,818
8. Conclave: 2,807
9. Joker: Folie a Deux: 2,738
10. The Wild Robot: 2,725
Anora, the winner at Cannes, appeared on more than one-third of all rosters. That’s a huge show of faith that the movie’s charms will translate upon its American debut. (I share that faith — I drafted Anora for my own roster.) I expected The Brutalist to be a hot item, what with its huge buzz at the fall festivals and its relatively thrifty $10 price tag.
MFL drafters did open their pocketbooks, shelling out for Dune 2 ($35), Moana 2 ($30), Wicked ($20), Conclave ($20), and Joker ($20), with all but Dune 2 eligible to earn box-office points. Then there are two wild cards in this top ten. Saturday Night was an $8 buy in part because it didn’t light the world on fire in its festival run, but SNL is a familiar brand, so I can see the draw. And Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is waiting for all you freaks who want to go watch a vampire movie on Christmas Day, and I hope it makes a billion dollars.
Points & Prizes
As a quick reminder of what’s at stake, this year’s prizes — which you can peruse here — include a Roku 4K TV, a Roku streambar, Bowers & Wilkins wireless earbuds, a LEGO Jaws set, and subscriptions to the Criterion Channel and MoviePass. But it’s a long road from here to you chilling in front of your brand new TV, and that road is paved with MFL points. How you earn those points is laid out here, but since we haven’t entered the awards portion of the year, all we have are box-office bonuses. Here’s what your movies will earn for various milestones:
Every $1 million earned: 1 point
Clears $25 million: 10-point bonus
Clears $50 million: 15-point bonus
Clears $75 million: 15-point bonus
Clears $100 million: 20-point bonus
Clears $125 million: 15-point bonus
Clears $150 million: 15-point bonus
Clears $175 million: 15-point bonus
Clears $200 million: 25-point bonus
Reaches No. 1 at the domestic box office: 20 points per week spent at No. 1
And speaking of box office …
Joker: Folie à Few
After the first weekend of live gameplay, we have just one movie earning box-office points — and it’s not earning nearly as many as anyone who drafted it (or anyone at Warner Bros.) may have hoped. Joker: Folie à Deux opened amid a flurry of terrible buzz, which started with critics following its premiere at the Venice Film Festival and now includes the general public, who gave the film a “D” Cinemascore. While, yes, it debuted as the No. 1 film of the weekend, Joker only pulled in $40 million. That’s less than half of the $96 million the first Joker made over the same weekend five years ago.
What exactly went wrong here? Was it the reviews that called the film everything from “boring” to “trolling its audience”? Did the Joker bros who lined up for the first movie’s nihilism and Scorsese allusions stay away because this one was (despite the protestations of everybody involved) a musical? Was it because Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga seemed thoroughly uninterested in the movie even as they were promoting it? Yes to perhaps all of these things!
None of this is great news for the folks who drafted Folie à Deux, except for the fact that as of right now, they’re the only ones with points. The other MFL-eligible movie that opened this weekend was The Outrun, Saoirse Ronan’s indie flick where she plays an alcoholic in windswept northern Britain. That movie played on barely over 500 screens and hasn’t passed the $1 million threshold yet.
So for now, Joker: Folie à Deux gets 40 points (1 point per million earned) + 20 points (for its No. 1 placement at the box office) + 10 points (for clearing the $25 million threshold). That’s 70 points in total. If you drafted the movie, congrats on ending the first weekend in a 2,738-way tie for first place. Here’s the full leaderboard: