Oasis Documentary Lands on Disney+
Disney+ marked the home-entertainment debut of Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger with a fan event at Abbey Road this week, adding bonus footage shot from Cardiff to South Korea along with the songs "Half the World Away" and "Do You Know What I Mean?" Brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher did not attend, but directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace appeared alongside writer Steven Knight. The film, which chronicles the band's 2025 reunion tour, opened to £2.66 million at the UK and Irish box office and has grossed more than £4 million since its premiere less than a month ago, making it the top-performing documentary currently in release. "The whole point of doing the thing was to explore why this music, these words, and the poetry of these words have this effect on so many different people around the world, to the point where it makes them emotional, where they feel as if the songs are about their lives," Knight said. "You see that unfailingly happen every single time, no matter what you do, no matter how you put it together — somehow those songs have that effect on people. So, [the film] is about the power of the music, but also about the fact that they are bulletproof, somehow, as a band."
Pete Townshend's Telluride Premiere
The documentary Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes held its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, examining The Who's songwriter, who thrashed chords and smashed guitars while Roger Daltrey sang lead. The film is directed by Frank Marshall, known for The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, and Nigel Sinclair, producer of Billy Preston: That's the Way God Planned It. It arrives despite The Who's towering legacy, including the rock operas Tommy and Quadrophenia and songs like "Won't Get Fooled Again," "My Generation" and "Love Reign O'er Me."
Andrew Scott's Elsinore
Elsewhere, Elsinore revisits the story of Ian Charleson, the Chariots of Fire actor who took over the role of Hamlet from Daniel Day Lewis in Richard Eyre's 1989 National Theatre production at the Olivier Theatre while secretly dying of AIDS. Andrew Scott portrays Charleson in the film, capturing his determination to keep performing as his health declined. As Beresford describes it, Charleson would "rather die from performing Hamlet than AIDS."
Digger's Box Office Collapse
Tom Cruise's Digger, reported at a $160 million net price, opened to just $8 million domestically and $20 million globally with a C+ CinemaScore — the star's lowest opening in 19 years. Sources say the film could lose around $150 million and may only reach $50 million worldwide if it's fortunate. It joins a run of pricey post-pandemic fall disappointments, including last year's Dwayne Johnson vehicle The Smashing Machine, which finaled at $21.1 million globally on a $50 million budget, and 2022's Amsterdam, starring Margot Robbie, Christian Bale and John David Washington, which closed at $31.2 million globally on an $80 million budget.
Artificial Finds a Home at Neon
Luca Guadagnino's Artificial, about the origins of OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman and key creative Ilya Sutskever, had its world premiere Monday at the New York Film Festival after a turbulent path to release. Produced under Amazon MGM Studios, the film was shopped to distributors last spring after Amazon reportedly decided a tech company wasn't the right outlet for it, with speculation pointing to Jeff Bezos's reported $150 billion stake in OpenAI. Every distributor who screened it in late spring passed before Neon, the two-time Best Picture-winning indie, stepped in and set a Christmas Day release. Plans to skip the festival circuit changed, delivering NYFF a high-profile premiere in what has already been a strong year for the festival landing world premieres.
Photo: TKA201, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
