Topic: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016)

Sickness won’t keep Topher Mac down!  (But  it will make for a shorter episode than usual.). This week Shadows that Shine main host Topher Mac talks about Popstar all so he can highlight how he thinks you should go to the cinema and watch Jorma Toccone’s new movie Over Your Dead Body (2026). 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

You know, they did the uh they did the vote. The stockholder vote on whether or not Warner Brothers uh is gonna agree to sell to Paramount. So in other words, uh they voted to end Hollywood. I mean it's just it's an inevitability. I hate to be uh a pessimist, uh, but frankly, that's uh I mean that's just what I see. I see the end of the Hollywood system. So the question is, does cinema survive a post-Hollywood? But the answer isn't gonna come on this podcast. No, no, no. Um, hey, I'm Topher Mack. This is Shadows at Shine, a movie podcast. And instead of dooming and glooming it this week, I thought, hey, let's let's uh let's listen to each other. Each other, it's just me. Uh I wanted to watch comedy, and I wanted a comedy to be the movie that we focused on. Um I hope that you guys are going to enjoy this conversation about Pop Star, a movie that came out 10 years ago come June. We'll get into all that in just a little bit. But before we do, we got all kinds of of the regular stuff to get into, and we're gonna do that. Um I am under the weather. I was sick, so I put this off as far as I could to make sure that my voice could be as good as it can be. Um, you know, we'll see how this all goes. I'm Tophra Mack. I said that already, and let's get this Shindig started in just a moment. Alright, so it's time for some shadows that shine. Let's get into this. Uh starting with, well, the box office. Who won the domestic box office this weekend? Hey, no surprise at all. Just as I said last week, we were gonna be up. And that is because Michael premiered. That's the Michael Jackson movie. Um, it's I would say it's a biopic, but it's really a fluff piece. Did I see it? Not yet. I ended up I was supposed to watch it last week, and I switched my movie ticket from that to another movie I'm gonna talk about in just a minute. Uh, but we're talking box office right now. Michael brought in $97 million over the weekend uh domestically, $120.4 million internationally for a total of $217.4 million opening weekend on a budget of $200 million. The Super Mario Galaxy movie added another $21.2 million to its um uh Universal Pictures, you know, coffers. Uh so that brings your totals right now to $386.5 million domestically, $44. I'm sorry, $445 million internationally for a total of $831.5 million against their $110 million budget. Universal has to be feeling good about that. Uh Project El Mary, another $13.2 million for Amazon MGM. That brings their totals to $305.4 million, $308 million internationally for a total of $613.4 million against their $200 million budget. A very um uh, you know, these are very successful movies here that we have. But have you noticed the trend in all these movies that I've been saying? They're all massive budgets. The animated film $110 million, but the two other films $200 million budgets. It's like that's what we're getting all the time now, is these $200 million budget movies. And it's nice that they're working, but man, if if one of these movies don't work, and then another one doesn't work, and then another one doesn't work, oh man, that's a that's a huge margin of error to have there. On the other side of life, you have four and five smaller budgeted movies, Lee Cronin's the Mummy. It was a $22 million budget. This is, I believe, week two for it. And when it first came out, it looked like a total failure. Well, guess what? It added $5.6 million over the weekend, and a failure though, because domestically it's done $23.5 million. Again, $22 million budget, right? And you're like, well, that's still, I mean, that's basically a failure, right? Except internationally, it did $42 million for a total of $65.5 million. That means it is in the green for Warner Brothers, this mummy movie. And uh finally, speaking of another uh just you know, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can movie, the drama. That's Xandaya's movie. Uh Zandaya actress, not the director of the movie, she's the actress in the movie. $2.6 million. That's uh again A24. That's what they added to this. It was a $28 million budget, but guess what? That brings its total so far to $44.8 million domestically, $57 million internationally for a total of $101.8 million dollars. Hey, that is a big success, and it continues to show A24 doing their thing and doing a great job of it. Now, I just named the top five, and normally I stop there. But the movie that I went to watch this week, a movie that I thought was very good, I'm very disappointed to say it got uh seventh place, uh it might have been eighth place. Let me just double check those details. I gotta pull something up real quick. And yes, eighth place is what it got. The film is called Over Your Dead Body. It was released by IFC Films. Um, I don't know what the budget is, but it only made $1.4 million, and I'm very sad about it. We're just gonna jump straight into recently viewed here because I want to keep talking about this movie. This is what I went to see uh on Thursday night when I was supposed to watch Michael. I was like, you know what? I really I had heard the reviews from Michael that they don't address the uh important um the important things about the personal life, and it's basically this fluff piece that's like, hey, Michael sang and danced, and here's a big chunk of that early part of his life, but we're not gonna get into the the nitty-gritty. And I wanted nitty-gritty, I wanted something that was gonna challenge me. Well, that's why I switched over to Over Your Dead Body. Also, I did that because Yorma Tacoma is the director of that movie, and I like Yorma Tacoma. I think he's very talented, he's done a lot of great stuff with you. You might not know who he is just off of that name. He worked with uh this little group called The Lonely Island, you know, Dick in a Box, Jizz in your pants. He's the guy in the Jiz in Your Pants video. Um he was approached to do a remake of this uh film called I Onde Dodger. Yep, I butchered that by Tommy Workola, Nick Bowen and John Nevan. Uh those are all people that worked on the original movie. Uh I don't have the super duper details on it. I want to eventually cover this movie down the road. Um, it has actors that I like in it. It had um it was very good. I don't want to give any information about it. I'll just say that it was if you like the ultraviolence, cinema violence, if that's your thing, and you like comedy and you can handle dark comedy, then you need to go and see this movie. I prefer you see it in the movie theater because I'm a big cinema kind of guy, but eventually you need to watch this movie. If you're uh it is a great date night movie. I know it doesn't sound like it, but it is a great date night movie, in my opinion. So that brings your weekend totals to $150.8 million dollars, up 58.7% from the week before. So that is exciting. Hopefully, they can ride this wave into next week. At the end of the show today, of course, we'll be talking about what's coming up, uh, what's coming out tomorrow for this weekend. Um, so you know, assuming that you're listening to this as a new episode and not playing catch up. All right. Um, we're gonna take a little break so that uh I can blow my nose. I'm so sick. You have no idea. Um maybe you can hear it. Um have I armed enough for you yet? Alright, y'all. I'll be back in just a moment. Alright, here we are. Here we are, here we are, here we are, matey. Uh appreciate you giving me that break. It was moments for you. It was minutes for me. Alright, so recently viewed, as I mentioned, over your dead body was that. What I did not mention is that I watched The Evil Dead for the first time, the original The Evil Dead from the 80s. I'm not going to get into my thoughts and feelings about it because I plan on covering this very soon. Uh, John Paul Edmondson, uh stand-up comedian in North Carolina based one at that, uh asked me if I would want to cover that, and I said I never saw it. Then it happened to pop up in the movie theater, so I'm gonna have to hunt this man down, and I have to hear what he thinks about this movie. What I will say, it is a really over-the-top movie, and it does a lot of really interesting stuff directed by Sam Rainey. Um now, let's get in to today's A Deep A Dive. Today's Deep Dive, uh, the movie that we're covering is Popstar Never Stop, Neverstopping from 2016. It's rated R. It was one hour and 27 minutes long, and it was released on June 3rd, 2016. So that'd be almost 10 full years ago. Universal Pictures released it. Its estimated budget was $20 million. What did it make? $9.6 million domestically, $41,000 internationally for a total of well nine point six million dollars. Eek. Now that was back in the day of um that was back in the day of DVDs and Blu-ray cells, so maybe it made its money there. This kind of makes me sad though, because I was just talking about Yorma Tacoma movie that doesn't seem like it made its money back. And here we are again, because this was directed by Akiva Schaefer and Yorma Tacone, uh, both of the Lonely Island. They both make great movies, and yet they just can't seem to to pull off that box office. So I'm real uh I'm really bummed to to keep coming across that. Alright. Um so uh here's some other little details. It was written by The Lonely Island, Andy uh Sandberg is included in it this time, a Kiva Shea for Yorma Tacoma, and that's also the stars. It was wrapped around Andy Sandberg as a star vehicle. Uh, of course, that makes sense. They all uh on Saturday Live, Andy was kind of the charismatic standout. And yeah, so the movie is kind of partially making fun of some of the music documentaries of its time. Uh, funny enough, this is produced by Judd Apatau, who also did Walk Hard. And Walk Hard, uh, which I believe came out about 10 years before this, did a great job of lampooning those movies. Well, at this point, the form of the documentary uh music film had taken off. There was like a Justin Bieber movie, and then there were some other ones, and they were really just like this. It was, you know, I've heard Popstar called Formulaic, but of course it's Formulaic, it's a satire. It's a satire of those music documentaries, and let's have you know, let's show off and make this person relatable to you. Of course, the character that they built for Andy Sandberg to play, Connor for real, is a very non-relatable person. And so they have a lot of fun picking on celebrity in that sort of way. Um some interesting little facts that I found out in my research about it for me was you have uh a lot of uh interviews with and they're not scripted, they're just they did these like little fake interviews with people like 50 Cin and Usher and you know, yada yada yada, so on and so forth. I was I learned through the research that the way that they got them to say these things about the style boys was say, uh, say what you would say about the beastie boys. You know, treat them as if they were the beastie boys, and so they they just improvise their lines, thinking in their heads, what if the Loney Island was actually the Beastie Boys? How great would they have been? So, yeah, it's fun. Um, there's a meme reference involving uh DJ Colin. K Khalid Khalid K Kal Khalid? Look at me over here not being able to speak right just because I'm sick. Um yeah. I thought that this movie was very funny, but I'm not surprised that it bombed when it came out because I was a Lonely Island fan and it wasn't what I wanted from them. I wanted a movie about the Lonely Island. I think the same exact problem for me as a consumer was the Tenacious D movie that came out, uh, which I think was a few years before this. Pick a Destiny. Pick a Destiny wasn't the movie I wanted. Now, both of these movies have grown on me over time because they're good movies. Uh, Popstars, a very good comedy movie. It flows very quick, the jokes are rapid fire. Each of the satires of the types of people that are in it are very clear and distinct. Not only do you care about this dim-witted character, but you you know, they do a good job of you want to latch onto Yorma, which for me is always the care uh in in their early stuff when they did Awesome Town, uh, which was a pilot they did for Fox. Um, I've always gravitated to Yorma Tacoma. He just seems like someone that you want to feel sympathy for. They used him perfect in this. Uh and meanwhile, uh Andy Sandberg is a goofball who's over the top, and you just like him because he just is so charismatic that you don't care when he plays these idiot moron losers, which is not who he seems to be. Like when you listen to him on the podcast, he seems like a very intelligent person. Um he does seem to also be naturally charismatic, so it's almost typecasting in a way in that regard. And uh I thought that it was a smart move to give us uh uh Andy, Yorma, and Akiva. Uh sorry, I had to think about their names. Akiva putting him off to the side and just having him come in at key moments and using him to the best of his abilities, also so he could focus on directing, because I think he was the primary director with Yorma um adding in where he needs to. I thought, you know, uh all of it was great. Sarah Silverman is so freaking likable that even when she's playing kind of this scumbag uh suit from the label, which uh, you know, that's the way I'm seeing it, but she she's a PR person. And she she is scummy at the beginning of it, but you know, she's the kind of person that she can just in 20 seconds flip you from being like this is a a fucking joke of a person to oh she's a sweetheart. Oh, I'm really glad she's there. I care about it. Great job. Um great uh music performances. That whole thing right there was legitimately good music. Speaking of uh some of the cutaway stuff, I noticed this time around. Uh, one is the concert footage. I used to think that they just like hired a bunch of extras and packed it out, or like maybe they did what uh was done in the the most recent remake of oh, what's that movie with Lady Gaga? You know what I'm talking about, he says to the people that can't speak back. Go on, shout it at me. I know you know the answer. There was Lady Gaga and uh Rocket Raccoon, you know, the actor that plays him that was that was in the actor studio. This is what the weeks like today. I wish I had a co-host because someone would be like Bradley Cooper, and that's the answer. So yeah, they did uh a starsbourne. Ha ha, see, we got there together, we worked together. I heard you through the the radio or phone, whatever you're yelling at. Anyways, um I thought they did what was done in those movies, which was they piggybacked on real concerts, but come to find out, they just used B-roll and spliced it together. It was very creative, very creative to do it the way that they did it. Because you never for a moment doubt that that whole audience is in that arena, it was brilliantly shot. Is the directing is so good, which is visible again in this movie that just came out, Over Your Dead Body, which is the reason why I'm talking about this now. I was gonna do this topic like you know, in June, you know, because one of our release dates this year is the anniversary date for the 10-year release of this, and I rushed ahead because I really think that you guys should go see Over Your Dead Body. Um that's my thoughts and feelings on the matter. Uh another thing that they did, so they also did uh cutaway shots to celebrities, and they just took it from award shows. Which was clever because that's how you get, you know, Paul McCartney's in the movie, even though you know that they weren't gonna get Paul McCartney to come in and do a cameo for the friggin' movie. But there he is. It's very uh, you know, who else did a version of that is uh he's considered the worst film director of all time, Ed Wood. Which, you know, he's got real competitors these days. But uh Ed Wood used to get really creative about padding run times and having cutaway shots to things that were already shot, and he really did a lot of interview. In that regard, uh, even though his movies were just so painful to sit through and just not particularly good. As opposed to this, these are very good movies. I I feel so bad for the Lonely Island because they can't seem to get a hit when they're together in the film space, even though they're very good. Oh, that's what I was talking about before. The I wanted a Lonely Island movie about the Lonely Island. Like I wanted a fictional Yorma and Akiva and Andy, and I wanted like a fictional hears them together story. This was something very different than what I had wanted at that time. Come to find out, you know, you sit with the movie for a while because it's the movie you got, the only one you got, and it was so gone. Oh, it's exactly it was exactly the right choice. They did the right thing. It's just, you know, maybe sometimes it's just a big disconnect between what the audiences want and what they're given. And you know, yeah, that's that's what this was. I don't have a ton of things to say about this movie, so I'm not gonna, you know, circle the drain on this too much. It's a great movie. If you haven't seen it, you need to see it. I believe it's on uh Peacock streaming service. I have the physical copy of it. And the music's catchy. It's f- Oh, you know what I do need to mention? The Harry Harry Hunter Hunter the Hungry. Hunter the Hungry, which is apparently loosely a Tyler the Creator uh satire for those types of people that were getting really big around that time. The whole uh rebellious rapper, you know, the I'm not gonna conform rapper that was big of the time. I didn't like Tyler the Creator back then, but I love Tyler the Creator now because I never gave him a chance back then. Well, I did love this guy, the actor who was in uh um he did a great job. Oh, how about the fact that Tim Meadows is in this and in Walk Hard? Isn't that freaking awesome? I'm so stuffy from from this, and it's getting worse. The more that I talk, the worse the stuffiness is getting. Uh I'm gonna um wrap this up early. I'm so sorry, guys. Uh I'm gonna step away for a second. I'm gonna come back and we're gonna talk about what movies are coming out this week, and then I'm gonna I'm gonna get going, okay? So just a minute and I'll be right back. I'll be right back! Oh, it's a scream reference. Listen to the Scream 7 episode. Alright, so you're listening to Shadows that Shine, a movie podcast. I'm Tophrim Mac, handling it all by myself on this particular episode, and I'm here to tell you what's coming soon. And by coming soon, I mean if you're listening on Wednesdays, which is when we drop, then uh this week, these are the movies coming out. The Devil Wears Prada 2. I've never seen the first one. I heard really good things from the people that that's their thing. Uh, and they're giving us more. It's been, you know, 20, I think 20 years. So we'll see how that works. What I do know is that actress in Devil Wars Prada 2, uh Ann Hathaway, just bought the rights to a really interesting movie. It's supposed to be about um. Oh, I can't remember all of a sudden. I should have done a note on this. Anyway, she just bought the rights to this fascinating movie idea that I really hope comes to fruition. I shouldn't even say it. You know what? Whatever. Moving on. Uh, they're doing an animated version of Animal Farm. Yes, Animal Farm. If you're old like me, they made you read Animal Farm in school. They didn't make me, because I had terrible English teachers, but they made everyone around me read it. Uh what's weird is that it's this really subversive film being released by that Angel studio that we were talking about a few episodes ago, um, or have been sort of mentioning there's this Christian faith-based studio called Angel, and they're the ones releasing Animal Form. And I'm like, that's fascinating. Not what I would have expected to come from them. Seth Rogan's in this movie, wild. Um, additionally, another movie uh in the slasher genre, or not slasher genre, the horror genre, uh is called Hokum. I really hope this movie doesn't suck because I love the word hokeum. Uh so you know, three movies coming out this weekend. Probably gonna be a strong weekend for Devil's Wear Prada 2. I think they'll come in at second or third place. Um and then uh, you know, I also feel, you know, Animal Farm will probably be top three, and Michael will probably stay strong. The question is, is it if people really liked Michael, you know, it'll stay higher up, and if they didn't, it'll it'll go lower on that. I think Animal Farm stands a good chance of delivering. But I I don't know. It's so hard to read the market these days. Like I I thought I thought that Over Your Dead Body was gonna be top five, and I'm so wrong. Uh now that I've been in the rotation with this, because this is a course uh the 17th release, I believe we're like 13 weeks in, 12 or 13 weeks into the podcast now. And uh I'm starting to get my brain back into being able to predict markets. Uh and uh and I'm starting to as I pay closer and closer attention to how things are happening. So, what I'm gonna start doing is mentioning, hey, I think this movie's gonna do good, and we'll just have a little bit of fun with it. We'll see if I'm right, we'll see if I'm wrong. Uh maybe you guys can tell me what you think by going on to our Instagram uh or going on to our Facebook, Shadows That Shine, for both of those, and you know, write us. Let us know what you think. All right. Um, again, I'm not feeling well, so I am not gonna push this. Um luckily this week's topic is not something that you gotta get super in-depth with. And, you know, at the time when you do want to get super in-depth, the Lonely Island and Seth Meyer's podcast is gonna eventually cover it. So you know that there that'll be where you want to go for that. I mean, let's just face it. Get it right out of their mouth. It'll be more fun than listening to me ramble on about it with uh the stuffiest numbers ever. But I do hope that you guys are enjoying this podcast because I'm enjoying making it for you. You know, the numbers have been strong. We've seen a lot of uh a lot of growth. You know, it's a slow and steady growth, but it's growth, and I'm happy that y'all have joined us for this. My name is Topher Mack. This is Shadows That Shine, a movie podcast. Let's watch a movie in a movie theater this week. Please. I don't want this business to die. Even if Hollywood dies, I still want cinema to survive. Thank you for listening. Bye.