Then, seemingly, out of the blue, Brad Pitt wins the Venice Film Festival's Best Actor award for Jesse James. Without question, this helps Assassination, but I still don't think that it's a movie I would own in my Fantasy Moguls league. In the past eight years, only two Venice Best Actor winners have gone on to Oscar nominations — Javier Bardem in Before Night Falls and David Strathairn for Good Night, and Good Luck — and there have been some real head-scratchers over the years. Wesley Snipes in One Night Stand? Or how about last year's recognition for Ben Affleck in Hollywoodland?

At any rate, don't be seduced by Pitt and his Venice recognition. He has missed commercially before with long, aimless duds like Seven Years in Tibet ($10 million opening weekend, $37 million cume), and Assassination is 2 hours and 20 minutes long.  Jesse James has been a red-headed stepchild at Warner Bros for awhile, and the reviews out of Venice clarify why. Honeycutt is particularly critical of the accents used in the movie:

Whether they accurately reflect the country rube-cracker speech of 19th-century Missouri or not, they frequently land on 21st-century ears as unintelligible sounds. Couldn't this have been cleaned up in ADR?

Here's a link to the trailer, and to the full Hollywood Reporter review. If you own this movie on your Fantasy Moguls slate, I would drop it. On Sept. 21, Warner Bros. will likely roll it out on fewer than 1,500 screens, and possibly far fewer. After a soft opening, it may never get wider as the studio refuses to throw good money after bad. I'll be shocked if it tops $25 milllion domestic.

Do you know Juno?
My friend Peter Sciretta from /Film is raving about a little movie called Juno that he saw at the Toronto International Film Festival. This is Jason Reitman's follow-up to the terrific Thank You For Smoking ($24.7 million cume), and it’ll be rolled out by Fox Searchlight starting Dec. 15. Ellen Page, amazing in Hard Candy, stars as Juno MacGuff, a teenager who gets pregnant from her first sexual experience. The boyfriend is played by Michael Cera from Superbad, and Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman play the suburban couple that wants to adopt the baby. No trailer or poster yet, but the film will be available in the upcoming October-December Fantasy Moguls flight. It could be the next Little Miss Sunshine.

Whether it's Bob Dylan or Queen Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett is a major fall force.
I'm a huge Cate Blanchett fan. From the moment I saw her in 1998's Elizabeth, I was smitten. It stands, for me, as one of the great performances of the past 20 years. She lost the Oscar that year to Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, but I've often thought Gwyneth should send the little golden guy to Cate and concede that there must've been some mistake. It didn’t stop there for Blanchett (it did pretty much stop for Paltrow). She followed with amazing turns in The Talented Mr. Ripley, An Ideal Husband, The Aviator, Babel and Notes On a Scandal. She won her first Oscar for her portrayal of Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator.

Now, she's got two major films on the way, including the sequel Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Universal), which will open wide on Oct. 12. Despite the return of director Shekhar Kapur, screenwriter Michael Hirst and Academy Award winners Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush, the first review out of the Toronto Film Festival is a negative one. Todd McCarthy from Variety says:

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is a follow-up less golden than its 1998 predecessor. Without the pleasure of watching Cate Blanchett continue the role that launched her to stardom, there would be little to recommend this latest of many cinematic and television accounts of the celebrated monarch's life, which is melodramatic, narrowly concerned with portraying her human vulnerabilities, and, thanks to a constantly pounding musical score, bombastic. Commercial prospects look OK but less promising than what a first-rate film of this nature would command.

Here's a link to McCarthy's full review, and to the trailer for the movie. Based on the downbeat critique, I'm lowering my projections for this film just a bit. Still, I think the IMDb User review score should be at least 7.1 and $30 million domestic is likely. I expect 3 Top 5 points and 3 PTA points.

Blanchett's other role this fall is very daring. She is one of six actors who play Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes's quirky pseudo-biopic I'm Not There (MGM/Weinstein). Originally reviewed by Todd McCarthy at Telluride, it definitely sounds like an odd, but fascinating film. I'm Not There got a boost this weekend as Blanchett won Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for her Dylan turn. How does Cate manage to pull this role off? Here's what McCarthy writes:

Scrawny, her eyes often concealed by large shades and topped by a curly mop identical to Dylan's at the time of "Don't Look Back," Blanchett is, appropriately enough, truly electrifying at first; she's uncannily got down the skittish movements, wary eyes, curt mumble and occasional flashes of brilliance, and comes far closer than anyone else to approximating the Dylan the public knows. As the performance goes on — it's by a fair distance the dominant turn in the picture, both in impact and duration — and the character becomes increasingly wigged out by drugs and paranoia, the reliance on mannerisms over psychological depth becomes more apparent. Still, Blanchett's casting and performance rep a daring coup, and she can now rightly claim to be the only thesp on Earth ever to have been asked to channel both Bob Dylan and Katharine Hepburn, and to have done so successfully.

The Weinsteins intend to platform I'm Not There starting on Nov. 21, and the Blanchett performance has a chance to drive a fantastic PTA run. I'm looking for an IMDb User review score of 7 with $6 million or so in box office and as many as 7 or 8 PTA points.

Atonement is officially an Oscar favorite.
In the next Fantasy Moguls flight (October-December), you'll have a shot at Atonement (Focus Features), set for a limited release on Dec. 7. If you're playing Ultimate Movie Moguls, where IMDb score and PTA points count, this is a must-have film. Director Joe Wright was successful with Pride & Prejudice, and now he's reteamed with star Keira Knightley on a film based on Ian McEwen's novel of the same name. At the moment, critics are unabashed in their praise. I first read Derek Elley's Variety review after he saw the movie in Venice, and thought it seemed a bit over the top. He glowingly writes:

Rarely has a book sprung so vividly to life, but also worked so enthrallingly in pure movie terms, as with Atonement, Brit helmer Joe Wright’s smart, dazzlingly upholstered adaptation of Ian McEwan’s celebrated 2001 novel. Period yarn, largely set in 1930s and '40s England, about an adolescent outburst of spite that destroys two lives and crumples a third, preserves much of the tome's metaphysical depth and all of its emotional power. And, as in Wright's Pride & Prejudice, Keira Knightley — echoed by co-thesp James McAvoy — proves every bit as magnetic as the divas of those classic mellers pic consciously references.

Now Jeffrey Wells from Hollywood Elsewhere has chimed in. After initially expressing some doubt about Elley's "cartwheels and somersaults" after seeing Atonement, Wells now agrees.

You can absolutely confirm and take to the bank all serious notions of Joe Wright's Atonement (Focus Features) being a top-ranked Best Picture contender. It's a shatteringly well-made, deeply felt, rich-aroma romance that will go all the way with (almost all) critics, Academy voters and public alike. Wright has totally pole-vaulted himself past the level of Pride & Prejudice (a well-made Jane Austen-er that I was only okay with) and taken costars Keira Knightley, James McAvoy and especially Vanessa Redgrave (a locked Best Supporting Actress contender) right along with him.”

Wow. This is heady stuff, so pass on Atonement at your own risk. Focus is the company that rolled out Brokeback Mountain in December 2005, so they are incredibly good at handling a platform release. At the moment, Atonement seems headed for at least an 8.5 IMDb User review score, as much as $35 million-$40 million domestic, possibly 2-3 Top 5 points and 10-12 PTA points.