Check Book: Mission Stitchpossible

The movies are BACK!!

Surprise! Blank Check has started a newsletter! Your favorite connoisseurs of context are gonna go on even more tangents, commit to even more bits, and share opinions on even more pieces of entertainment industry news because - hey, why not. Thanks for joining us!

IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

THE BARDI PARTY REPORT

Dare I say it - are the movies back? We just had a record-breaking $322 million Memorial Day Weekend at the Box Office thanks to Stitch and Tom Cruise. According to @DiscussingFilm, Regal Cinemas sold over 6 million pounds of popcorn over the last four days, probably due to Tom Cruise’s one man, two buckets popcorn campaigning. All said, financial forecasters are predicting a $4.2 BILLION summer at the movies.

Fun fact about Tom Cruise and Stitch - not only are they two short kings, and not only do both Lilo & Stitch (2025) and Final Reckoning feature supporting performances by Hannah Waddingham, but Minority Report’s somewhat lackluster opening weekend back in 2002 was due to the original Lilo & Stitch over-performing against it. Who gives a shit about Gabriel — Stitch is the real cartoon villain of Tom Cruise’s career.

Anyway, I’m a bit shocked by this bullish summer box office forecast. I’m not really looking forward to any of the major releases coming out over the next few months, but maybe this is just further evidence of my personal taste being out of touch with global audiences.

2025 Summer Tentpoles Ranked by How Likely it is that Marie Will See Them Opening Weekend -

1. 28 Weeks Later - not only am I hotly anticipating Danny Boyle’s return to this franchise, but I am contractually obligated to cover this movie on Blank Check

2. Superman - ditto, re covering on the podcast. But also - I’ve liked the trailers!

3. The Naked Gun - great teaser, great casting, Akiva Schaffer has never missed in my estimation

4. Weapons - ANOTHER GREAT TRAILER, and I’m fully on board with anything Zach Cregger does after Barbarian

5. F1 - Kosinski make things go fast in IMAX. Let’s go.

6. Fantastic Four: The First Steps - Idk, if people are into it, I will probably go see it. I am famously not a Marvel person, but I’m intrigued by the period piece of it all.

7. The Life of Chuck - Have never really been a Mike Flanagan person, but will this be the exception?? Seems like it might be corny…

8. M3GAN 2.0 - Loved M3GAN 1.0. Less enthusiastic about this one. Feel like they’re trying to make lightning strike twice in the same spot.

9. Predator: Killer of Killers - I heard Prey was good, but like - not my thing, not my franchise.

10. Jurassic World: Rebirth - No thank you.

If you want to convince me about any other summer titles, please make your case in the comments. Obviously I will be seeing Materialists, Eddington, etc - those just don’t qualify as “tentpoles” to me!

LET’S CRACK OPEN THE DOSSIER

• Following the release of her third film—1985’s National Lampoon’s European Vacation—director Amy Heckerling’s career was on life support—if not fully occupying a cell in director’s jail. She was unimpressed by the few projects coming her way—like the dim-witted Michael O'Keefe and Paul Rodriguez buddy comedy The Whoopee Boys—and producers seemed to think of her primarily as the director of “little high school movies,” but she was still defiant, as she told IndieWire in 2016: “The world’s always going to tell you no. You need that little voice inside you that goes, ‘Smack them off!’ It’s hard to think of grabbing a spear and going out there, but, fuck it. Do it. … You just go, ‘Here’s what I want to be doing. What are the ways that I can go do that?’ Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, it doesn’t. It ain’t over until the fat lady sings. It’s like, you just keep going.”¹ Out of this indefatigable spirit—and the short-lived Fast Times television show—came a realization: if she were going to dedicate her life’s energy to making it in Hollywood, she might as well write her own projects in addition to directing them. The first movie born out of this new approach—1989’s Look Who’s Talking—was a certified smash hit, and Heckerling’s career was finally off the ropes. In a Los Angeles Times piece published just under two weeks after the release of that film, Heckerling portrayed herself as the new toast of The Town: “I get on the treadmill, and I say to my husband that I really want to exercise for a half an hour. Can you take messages? I get off and he hands me a full page of messages. I have three phone lines in my house and they never stop ringing.”² You can safely assume that none of those calls were from the Whoopee Boys.

• Unfortunately, Heckerling would have to wait half a decade to usher the success of Look Who’s Talking into a passion project; first, she had to contend with the demands of her studio—and the American legal system. By February 1990, TriStar/Columbia had already gone public with their plans to exploit the success of Look Who’s Talking with a sequel film (Look Who’s Talking Too), a television series (Baby Talk), and an (unrealized) animated series. Along for the ride for at least two of those projects was Heckerling, though not enthusiastically: “So there I am doing this sequel, when I’ve already thought, ‘It’s over. It’s done. The baby said something.’”³ So how did Heckerling wind up helming a movie she didn’t want to make? (Beyond, you know, all of the obvious reasons people sign on for sequels.) Well, in January 1990, The Los Angeles Times reported that Jeanne Meyers and Rita Stern had filed a $20-million copyright lawsuit against Heckerling, her frequent star/business associate Twink Caplan, and TriStar, alleging that the trio had culled the baby-talking premise for Look Who’s Talking from their 1984 AFI short film “Special Delivery.”⁴ Though the lawsuit was settled amicably in early 1991—with Caplan stating, “We're happy girls, me and Amy. But we're not allowed to say one thing.”— Heckerling characterized the lawsuit much less rosily in a 2016 Ringer profile, saying, “I was very bummed out. When I should have finally had a moment of feeling good, it immediately turned to crap.”⁵ And while the exact mechanism is unclear, somehow Heckerling emerged from this mess with a mandate to reconnect with the Ubriacco family, per the director: “I had sort of been forced into doing a sequel to Look Who’s Talking for legal reasons, and it was just like, the story is over. That was not a fun experience, and I was going, ‘So, is that it? I did this teen thing a million years ago and that’s the highlight of my life? Is it all downhill from here—and why am I even existing?’ You know how you get.”⁶ But as we’ll see next week, it certainly wasn’t all downhill from there for Amy Heckerling—though there would, of course, be quite a few more trips downhill, too.

WHAT IS THE TEAM INTO THIS WEEK?

David Sims, Host: “I recommend X-Factor Issue 87, the one where the whole team goes into therapy and Quicksilver explains how boring it is to be him, which was written by Peter David and is one of a million great things he wrote in a storied career! He passed away over the weekend. I also recommend Andor, and I will have more on Andor later.”

Marie Bardi, Social Media: “I just finished reading Edward White’s Dianaworld, which is less of a biography of Princess Diana, but more of an attempt to understand the global obsession she sparked. I may or may not be prepping my own late-80s/early 90s UK royalty dossier for our live episode on King Ralph at Town Hall…”

AJ McKeon, Editor: “I’ve definitely heard Max Minghella’s real voice before but it stuck out a lot more in this week’s ep to me. And with that, I would like to recommend Max to play a villain in Night Eggs. Maybe he’s the voice of the virus the witch hackers install on the boxing gym computers.”

JJ Bersch, Researcher: “Over the weekend, news broke that Sacha Jenkins had passed away at the age of 53. In his brief but storied life, Jenkins parlayed a groundbreaking early run in rap journalism into a late career in documentary filmmaking. He is perhaps best known as the co-founder of the short lived but deeply influential hip hop magazine Ego Trip. Though its flagship project ran for just 13 issues between 1994 and 1998, Ego Trip lived a long and varied life, lending its name to a Rawkus Records compilation album, multiple VH1 TV shows, and two books, one of which is my recommendation for this week: 1999’s Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists, a cleverly organized and immaculately packaged roadmap through the first two decades of rap. Sure, come for the customary best singles and albums lists, but stay for the more esoteric stuff, like ‘10 Hip House Songs That Don’t Suck … & 10 More That Really, Really Do’ or ‘70s Baseball Players Who Get Shouted Out On ‘Two Brothers with Checks (San Francisco Harvey)’ by Ultramagnetic MCs’. It was a godsend to me when I first bought it 15-ish years ago, and I’ve since gifted it to more friends than I can count. Unfortunately, the physical book is currently out of print, but there’s a digital copy still for sale—and don’t sleep on your local library, though this is a book you’ll probably want around you for the rest of your life.”

Alan Smithee, Pseudonymous Editor: “I’m going to recommend this book:

Literally hours of fun.”

THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST

Long-promised guest Max Minghella finally makes his main feed debut as we discuss Look Who's Talking Too—a film that apparently inspired Max’s upcoming directorial effort, Shell.

And over on Patreon, we’re back with our Supermen series as we escape from the Phantom Zone and dive into Superman II.

COMING SOON:

1. IndieWire, May 12, 2016.

2. Los Angeles Times, October 26, 1989.

3. The Ringer, February 16, 2017.

4. Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1990.

5. New York Times, June 14, 1991/The Ringer, February 16, 2017.

6. Criterion, May 12, 2016.