‘The Fabelmans’: Steven Spielberg Eventually Told Gabriel LaBelle To “Figure It Out” [Interview]

UPDATED, 8:16 AM: Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans will receive the Vanguard Award at the 2023 Palm Springs Film Festival’s gala in January.

EXCLUSIVE: A slew have just boarded Paramount’s upcoming Transformers: Rise of the Beasts including Peter Dinklage (as the voice of Scourge), Liza Koshy (as the voice of Arcee), John DiMaggio (as the voice of Stratosphere), David Sobolov (as Rhinox/Battletrap), Michaela Jaé Rodriguez (as Nightbird), Cristo Fernández (as Wheeljack), and Tobe Nwigwe (as Reek).

EXCLUSIVE: WME has signed The Fabelmans breakout Chloe East, in a competitive situation.

Steven Spielberg has Covid. Given that, the 75-year-old director missed his planned introduction of the Michelle Williams tribute at the Gotham Awards tonight in Manhattan.

Sideshow/Janus Films EO held well in week two, grossing $23,217 for the five-day holiday frame ($11,609 per screen) and $16,900 for the three-day weekend ($8,450 per screen). The new cume is $50.7k in a crowded arthouse market, a strong showing for the film starring a melancholic gray donkey. It expands to LA next week opening at Laemmle Royal, Alamo Drafthouse DTLA, Los Feliz 3, and Santa Barbara’s Riviera Theater at SBIFF. Director Jerzy Skolimowski will be on hand for Q&As all weekend.

The Oregon house made famous by the 1985 cult classic film The Goonies is on the market and may have already been sold.

Few directors have reached the upper echelon in which names like Steven Spielberg reside, and “The Fabelmans” gives viewers insight into how the great movie-making mind came to be. Spielberg’s origin story springs off the page from a script co-written by the director and Tony Kushner, the “Angels in America” playwright and a frequent collaborator of Spielberg’s.

Steven Spielberg will be feted with a special homage at the 73rd edition of the Berlin International Film Festival next February.

There was something particularly nerve-racking about playing a young Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans, the director’s semi-autobiographical movie base on his own family and upbringing. For starters, star Gabriel LaBelle said during an appearance at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles awards-season event that he never actually sat down with the director to get the 411 on what Spielberg was like as a young kid.

Three rite-of-passage movies are vying for attention this week at a moment when the rewards of maturity seem to be offering more gratification than the agonies of youth.

Bradley Cooper is set to star in a previously announced Steven Spielberg “Bullitt” project, which is in development, according to an individual with knowledge of the project.Josh Singer will write the screenplay. The film will not be a remake but a new story with the Bullitt character at the center.Spielberg will direct.McQueen originally starred as Frank Bullitt in the the 1968 classic “Bullitt,” which followed a cop who is on the hunt for a mob kingpin that killed a witness.

Projects come and go, some get announced and never happen, and sometimes filmmakers lose interest. But Steven Spielberg’s remake of Steve McQueen’s action car chase classic “Bullitt” (1968) looks like it is not only moving forward, but his next film as Bradley Cooper has been cast in the lead role.

EXCLUSIVE: Steven Spielberg looks to have found his Frank Bullitt as sources tell Deadline Bradley Cooper has closed a deal to play the no-nonsense San Francisco cop in the new original Bullitt story centered on the classic character famously played by Steven McQueen in the 1968 thriller, which is set up at Warner Bros. Cooper will also produce the pic along with Spielberg and his producing partner Kristie Macosko Krieger (marking their second collaboration after Maestro), with Josh Singer on board to pen the script. Steve McQueen’s son, Chad ,and granddaughter Molly McQueen will exec produce the new movie.

The Fabelmans grossed an estimated $160k this weekend at four theaters in NY and LA. That’s a $40K per screen average, on par with recent strong (for post-Covid) specialty openings like The Banshees Of Inisherin (at $45k PSA) and Tár (also $40k), both on four screens too, reflecting a definite pickup in the specialty space. Spielberg’s written, directed and produced semi-autobiographical tale debuted into one of the biggest openings of the year with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

That figure is just a few hundred dollars above the $39,655 platform release average of Focus Features’ “Tár” and below the $46,113 of Searchlight’s “The Banshees of Inisherin.” Though it isn’t the best platform launch among the early Oscar contenders this awards season, Universal said that it had projected a $40,000 average for “The Fabelmans” prior to release and were pleased by the film’s Friday-to-Saturday drop of just 3%, signaling that the film is gaining the kind of word-of-mouth it will need in the weeks ahead. “With ‘The Fabelmans,’ Steven Spielberg has crafted one of his most personal stories yet, an incredible universal coming of age story that clearly resonated with audiences this weekend earning an A CinemaScore, 96% audience and 95% critical scores on Rotten Tomatoes and we have no doubt the film will captivate audiences throughout the holiday season,” Universal’s domestic distribution president Jim Orr said in a statement.

Merhan Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian man who lived for 18 years in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and inspired the Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks film The Terminal, died Saturday at the airport, officials said. He was believed to be 80 years old.