The Big Picture · Discussion · Interview
April 14, 2020/ 66 min/ Sean Fennessey · Amanda Dobbins
Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins on Universal dumping Trolls World Tour straight to $19.99 rental instead of theaters, then bring in Rob Harvilla to work out why a kids' movie is secretly a fight about rockism.
7 films across 2 segments.
AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.
The movie apocalypseSean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins on the first blockbuster to skip theaters
The first movie planned for a wide theatrical release that Universal sent straight to $19.99 home rental during the shutdown. Roughly $90M to make plus $30M in marketing, per Deadline. Universal told the trades it out-rented the digital opening day of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom tenfold; Sean and Amanda note the only source for that number is Universal, and doubt the release model survives past this one strange moment.
The 2016 original, which both hosts watched for the first time this week (a jukebox musical their colleague Jason Gallagher warned is a parent's nightmare by the 30th 6:30 a.m. rewatch). Its actual lesson, they decide, is that drugs are bad: the Bergens eat trolls to feel happy until they learn happiness comes from within.
Into the trollsRob Harvilla on a kids' movie about music criticism
Harvilla's No. 1 among movies explicitly about rock criticism, with Trolls World Tour landing a distant third behind it. Poppy's pop trolls versus Rachel Bloom's Queen Barb and her hard-rock crusade is, he argues, a straight dramatization of the rockism-vs-poptimism debate Kelefa Sanneh took mainstream in the mid-2000s.
His No. 2, which he admits he still relates to too closely: ahead of Trolls World Tour, it's the only movie he's watched that's theoretically about his own job, and one he hopes is the last.
The one about a Tibetan-monastery guard dog groomed to fight wolves who instead wants an AC/DC-type band, and eventually repels the wolves with rock. Harvilla's Exhibit A for the strange genre of kids' movies that weaponize music history at his children.
Where Adam Sandler's vampire clan defeats a sea monster by DJ-ing, settling on the Macarena: Harvilla's other chewing-ice-in-the-dark low point, and a warning about earworms getting implanted in kids for months.
A Christmas Eve karaoke-competition movie that sent his kids into a months-long Baby Got Back loop, his shorthand for how these films regurgitate pop music at children.
Also mentioned raised along the way
Release-strategy talk The HuntJurassic World: Fallen KingdomAvengers: EndgameSoulOnward
Quarantine watchlist TangledSpaceballsShort CircuitThe GooniesFrozen IIMoanaThe Lego Movie 2: The Second PartSonic the Hedgehog
The screenwriters' résumé Monsters vs. AliensDiary of a Wimpy KidA Dog's PurposeA Dog's JourneyThe French DispatchKung Fu Panda
In passing DolittleCentral IntelligenceSan AndreasCharlie's Angels
Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads
TV Stranger ThingsTrolls: The Beat Goes OnTop ChefJessica JonesWestworldSpongeBob SquarePantsThe Wire
Stage Hamilton
Video games MinecraftSuper Mario
Ads World Central KitchenSpotifyThe Wire: Way Down in the Hole (Ringer podcast)