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Ariana Grande news: Epic battle awaiting Wicked and Gladiator II stars as Hollywood balances box office with ballot box

Three weeks after the United States presidential election in November, Ridley Scott will present his latest big-screen opus. Gladiator II returns the prodigious filmmaker to ancient Rome for a story about a power, the survival of Rome and the fate of democracy.

“Hopefully,” Scott says, “it will be a good omen.”

Over the next few months, Hollywood will be trying – with everything from swaggering historical epics like Gladiator II to the high-seas adventure of Moana 2 – to capture the nation’s attention at a time when much of it will be directed at the polls.

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Gladiator II is one of the many blockbusters hitting the box office in the next few months. (AP)

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Already, Hollywood has played a co-starring role in the election. The Democratic Convention in August was packed with stars like Oprah Winfrey. Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, was first introduced to many by the 2020 big-screen adaptation of his Hillbilly Elegy. And it was George Clooney, who this month stars in the Apple Studios film Wolfs alongside Brad Pitt, who was one of the most prominent voices to urge President Joe Biden to step down from the race.

Hollywood, famously progressive, has always had to strike a balance between the liberal leanings of the majority of its creatives with the big-tent demands of pop culture. In recent years, that’s grown increasingly tricky.

At the same time, the movie industry, after several years hobbled by pandemic and strikes, is striving to recapture its all-audiences populism – and all the billions that can come with it. Disney chief Robert A. Iger last year signaled the need “to entertain first,” adding “it’s not about messages.”

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This past (American) summer, Disney led Hollywood out of a box-office slump with a pair of billion-earners in Inside Out 2 and Deadpool vs. Wolverine. Ticket sales for the season rose to $US3.7 billion (approx. $5.5 billion), according to Comscore – less than the traditional $US4 billion (approx. $5.9 billion) benchmark but significantly better than initially feared after a painfully slow start.

One of the (American) autumn’s likeliest candidates to continue the trend is Moana 2. Dwayne Johnson, who returns as the voice of Maui, earlier this year said he wouldn’t endorse a candidate in the election out of concern for the division it would cause.

Like many of the films opening during this period, Moana 2, as as a story about a strong female protagonist and a celebration of Pacific Islander culture, could resonate very differently, depending on the outcome of the election.

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“If it resonates for people in a different way, I can’t control that,” says Dana Ledoux Miller, who directed Moana 2 with David Derrick Jr. and Jason Hand.

“I’m so excited about what this story is and what it means to be a person in a community who wants something more for the world they live in and for the future. We’ll see what happens, but the movie is what it is.”

Movies this year have largely only approached political themes from a distance. Civil War, by Alex Garland, imagined the United States in all-out warfare. War Game, directed by Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss, gathered real political figures for an insurrection simulation.

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But The Apprentice will offer the movie version of an October surprise. The film, the release of which was announced just last week, stars Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump under the tutelage of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). The Trump campaign has called it “election interference by Hollywood elites.”

Its director, Ali Abbasi, argues filmmakers have a responsibility to face current politics head-on.

“I’ve been hearing a lot: Let’s make a movie about the Second World War or the Civil War – just go back in time,” says Abbasi. “They say a Civil War movie is a good metaphor for the way our society is now. I’m like: Our society is extremely exciting, complex, complicated, has huge problems and opportunities. Why not address them? We have a [expletive] responsibility.”

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The Apprentice
The Apprentice, which sees Sebastian Stan star as Donald Trump, is becoming divisive. (AP)

As usual in these next few months, studios will trot out a new wave of awards contenders. Unlike last year, when Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer came into the season the clear favourite, no such frontrunner has yet emerged.

At the Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals, notable premieres include Todd Phillips’ anticipated sequel Joker: Folie à Deux, Edward Berger’s Conclave, Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson, Steve McQueen’s Blitz and LaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys.

Standouts from earlier festivals will also mix in, like Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning Anora and Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez. But, at least for now, the Oscar race appears wide open.

Gladiator Cast

Everything to know about the cast of Gladiator I and II

Emilia Pérez, about a Mexican drug lord who transitions into a woman, is just one of the many musicals landing in theatres. Some studios have recently run from the label of “musical”; last December’s Wonka wasn’t advertised as such. But this American autumn, no matter what’s happening on the news, it won’t be hard to find song and dance on the big screen.

That includes Joker: Folie à Deux, Moana 2 and the two-part adaptation of the Broadway show Wicked! – not to mention biopics on Robbie Williams (Better Man) and Bob Dylan (A Complete Unknown, with Timothée Chalamet).

Wicked director Jon M. Chu and producer Marc Platt were confident enough in their film, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, that they opted to split it into two. (Part two will release in November 2025.) Wicked will open against Gladiator II in the most ‘Barbeheimer’-like weekend matchup of the year.

Wicked
Ariana Grande’s Wicked is opening the same week as Gladiator II. (AP)

“I love at this time, at this moment, we can root for all movies, all the time,” says Chu. “It’s getting to tell people: Come to the movies. Everyone come.”

In Wicked, which imagines the story behind the opposing witches of The Wizard of Oz, Platt sees a story with plenty of relevance to the current political climate.

“It’s a significant election for both of us,” says Platt. “But our story aspires to be about the distance people travel to connect with each other, about seeing the other as not the other, about living in a world where sometimes the truth is not real.”

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Some films are taking some novel approaches to storytelling. Morgan Neville’s Piece by Piece tells Pharrell Williams’ story with Lego bricks. Robert Zemeckis’ Here, starring Tom Hanks, has the appearance of a film shot in one take. In Better Man, Williams is portrayed by computer-generated monkey.

In festival screenings of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, midway through the movie a man has walked on stage and addressed a question to the screen.

Coppola, who financed the film himself, spent years steadily building Megalopolis, a future-set epic about a visionary (Adam Driver). In cynical times, it’s brashly optimistic, even utopian.

Joker: Folie à Deux
Joker: Folie à Deux is embracing the renaissance of the movie-musical. (AP)

“You never turn on CNN or open the newspaper to: ‘Human Being Is an Unbelievable Genius.’ But it’s true. How can you deny it?” Coppola said after the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

“Think of what we can do. A hundred years ago they said man will never fly. Now we’re zooming around. So I ask myself: Why is it that no one dare say how great we are? There’s no problem that we’re facing that we’re not ingenious enough to solve.”

While Coppola was making his conception of a modern-day Roman epic, Scott was a making the genuine article.

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During the making of Gladiator II, Scott – a self-professed news junkie – continually felt that his film was far from ancient history. Russia’s war in Ukraine unspooled during the film’s making, the director noted.

“You are living during what I call democracy against tyrants, tyranny,” says Scott.

“We’re looking in this film as about tyrannical leadership against people who try to rectify that. When is history not about that?”

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