“It was a contributor to the specialty box office, and I hope it will be again,” says Laemmle CEO Greg Laemmle of MoviePass, the subscription service that unsurprisingly went bankrupt in early 2020 after offering a movie a day for ten bucks a month.
A co-founder Stacy Spikes, who was pushed out amid strategic differences with new owners, including the $9.95 plan, acquired the assets out of bankruptcy in 2021. He relaunched MoviePass yesterday after months of beta testing. The movie-a-day-plan, which left the service subsidizing most tickets, “was never going to work,” Sikes tells Deadline. AMC had actually threatened to sue, saying the plan wasn’t sustainable and set consumers up “for ultimate disappointment down the road.” Its bankruptcy filing listed more than 12,000 subscribers it may have owned money to.
The new MoviePass has four tiers from $10 for 1-3 movies, to a limited availability $40 plan with 30 movies a month. Each plan also...
A co-founder Stacy Spikes, who was pushed out amid strategic differences with new owners, including the $9.95 plan, acquired the assets out of bankruptcy in 2021. He relaunched MoviePass yesterday after months of beta testing. The movie-a-day-plan, which left the service subsidizing most tickets, “was never going to work,” Sikes tells Deadline. AMC had actually threatened to sue, saying the plan wasn’t sustainable and set consumers up “for ultimate disappointment down the road.” Its bankruptcy filing listed more than 12,000 subscribers it may have owned money to.
The new MoviePass has four tiers from $10 for 1-3 movies, to a limited availability $40 plan with 30 movies a month. Each plan also...
- 5/26/2023
- by Jill Goldsmith
- Deadline Film + TV
"My little rascal, you gave your all!" Strand Releasing has unveiled an official US trailer for a very strange, one-of-a-kind film from Portugal titled Will-o'-the-Wisp, originally known as Fogo-Fátuo in Portuguese. This musical fantasy by João Pedro Rodrigues first premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival last year, stopping by tons of other festivals including Toronto and New York. On his deathbed, his royal highness Alfredo, king without a crown, is taken back to distant youth memories and the time he dreamt of becoming a fireman. The encounter with instructor Afonso from the fire brigade opens a new chapter in the life of the two young men immersed in love and desire, and the will to change the status quo. Starring Mauro Costa, André Cabral, and Joel Branco. This film will primarily appeal to anyone brave enough to wade into experimental cinema, but it looks like...
- 4/28/2023
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
A hopeful and bittersweet plea for a better future, Joao Pedro Rodrigues’ 67-minute oddity Will-o’-the-Wisp covers three periods in the life of Alfredo, a “Prince” of Portugal. If a little conceited and cutesy at times—perhaps “a musical comedy by” wasn’t literally needed to be specified in the opening credits—this a film that manages to remain likable throughout. Seemingly an accomplishment for something with so much on its mind.
Our first glimpse of Alfredo (Joel Branco) is on his deathbed in 2069 (we even see the shadow of a spaceship) and running through memories of his youth in what looks like a smaller room out of that similar scene near the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The memories of this “king without a crown” chart back to 2011 initially, as he falls in love with Portugal’s forests and trees as a young boy (depicted through what...
Our first glimpse of Alfredo (Joel Branco) is on his deathbed in 2069 (we even see the shadow of a spaceship) and running through memories of his youth in what looks like a smaller room out of that similar scene near the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The memories of this “king without a crown” chart back to 2011 initially, as he falls in love with Portugal’s forests and trees as a young boy (depicted through what...
- 9/17/2022
- by Ethan Vestby
- The Film Stage
The fogo-fátuo, or will-o'-the-wisp, is a chemical reaction that resembles small phantasmagoric flames. The phenomenonon generally happens in marshy areas or burial grounds, where phosphorus and methane are released from decaying organic matter. After a reaction with the environment, these substances combust in ghostly bursts of light that float on swampy surfaces.This is a deeply accurate title for the new João Pedro Rodrígues film, a spontaneous explosion in the midst of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Thirteen years after Rodrígues’s last appearance on the Croisette with his fatidic melodrama To Die Like a Man (2009), Will-o’-the-Wisp takes a different approach to tragicomedy, a deconstruction of the musical genre embellished with a potpourri of hilarious eccentricities. A 67-minute package of voracious cinematographic twists and turns, Will-o'-the-Wisp recounts the long life of King Alfredo (Joel Branco). On his deathbed in the year 2069, he remembers a fleeting encounter with love and desire,...
- 7/5/2022
- MUBI
While the police force faces a massive task of image rehabilitation on screen, these are unexpectedly rich times at the movies for anyone with a firefighter fetish. After an unsurprisingly long wait for one film featuring a team of strapping laddermen in sensual dance formations, two have come along at once. Taking the queer emergency service of “Titane” to a lighter, sweeter, more playful and more pornographic place, João Pedro Rodrigues’ delicious one-off “Will-o’-the-Wisp” lives up to the flighty, elusive promise of its title, teasing its viewers in more ways than one: with a titillating parade of bare male bodies in balletic motion, and with hints of thematic import beyond that leading erotic spectacle.
Climate-change anxiety, republican politics and colonialist history are all woven into this shoestring-budgeted lo-fi sci-fi musical romance, despite a scant 67-minute runtime that scarcely has room for half its fizzing, flung-about ideas. Still, Rodrigues...
Climate-change anxiety, republican politics and colonialist history are all woven into this shoestring-budgeted lo-fi sci-fi musical romance, despite a scant 67-minute runtime that scarcely has room for half its fizzing, flung-about ideas. Still, Rodrigues...
- 6/4/2022
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
Portuguese helmer João Pedro Rodrigues returned to Cannes this year with his new film “Will-o’-the-Wisp” (“Fogo Fátuo”), which screened in Directors’ Fortnight and is his first feature since the well-received 2016 madcap journey of self-discovery, “The Ornithologist.”
The film begins in 2069, with Prince Alfredo on his deathbed, who begins to reminisce about his childhood spent in the King’s Pine Grove in Leiria, near Lisbon, which was devastated in the 2017 forest fires. Behind him we see Jose Conrado Roza’s enigmatic 18th century painting “The Wedding Masquerade,” featuring exotic, dwarfish figures with black skin and a character suffering from a skin disease, at a wedding ceremony.
After the forest fire the young Alfredo decides to join the volunteer fire brigade where he falls in love with a Black fireman, Afonso.
Rodrigues calls the film a “musical fantasy.” The homoerotically charged film establishes metaphorical links between the tall erect pine trees and the male member,...
The film begins in 2069, with Prince Alfredo on his deathbed, who begins to reminisce about his childhood spent in the King’s Pine Grove in Leiria, near Lisbon, which was devastated in the 2017 forest fires. Behind him we see Jose Conrado Roza’s enigmatic 18th century painting “The Wedding Masquerade,” featuring exotic, dwarfish figures with black skin and a character suffering from a skin disease, at a wedding ceremony.
After the forest fire the young Alfredo decides to join the volunteer fire brigade where he falls in love with a Black fireman, Afonso.
Rodrigues calls the film a “musical fantasy.” The homoerotically charged film establishes metaphorical links between the tall erect pine trees and the male member,...
- 5/30/2022
- by Martin Dale
- Variety Film + TV
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