BLOCKBUSTER CORONAVIRUS PROGRAMMING, AS SERIES PRODUCTION COMES TO A HALT
With many regularly scheduled TV series falling short of production in the wake of Coronavirus shut-downs all over the place, CBS is bringing back its Sunday Night At The Movies beginning this weekend, and all through May. You might say the network is looking to bring back the sort of time when everybody seemed to be watching The F.B.I. on ABC every Sunday night, as in Quentin Tarantino's latest, Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood. Bookended by two of Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones movies (Raiders Of The Lost Ark May 3rd, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade May 31st), Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible will air smack dab in the middle, on May 17th. The other two films are Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump (May 10th) and James Cameron's Titanic (May 24th).
""It's a five-week programming event with epic films, iconic stars, and brilliant stories that viewers love—and love to watch together," CBS programming exec Noriko Kelley states in the CBS press release. CBS also put together a retro-fashioned promo commercial that can be watched on its Facebook page.
"All hail the return of CBS ‘Sunday Night at the Movies’ in May," reads a San Francisco Chronicle headline from this past week. Forbes' Scott Mendelson expects that a new commercial for Paramount's upcoming Tom Cruise-starring Top Gun: Maverick will air during the Mission: Impossible slot May 17th. At The Stranger, Bobby Roberts writes:
It's so bizarre to see the CBS Sunday Night Movie come back to brodcast TV after being made more-or-less obsolete by cable back in the '90s. And then cable was made obsolete in the '00s by the internet, and now because the movie industry doesn't know what it's going to be in the near future, media companies like Viacom/CBS are looking at all these watch parties, looking at their network programming, noticing their large back catalogs, and boom: The Sunday Night Movie returns with a slightly different name at 8pm tonight, presenting a perfect excuse for everyone to get together at the same time, in the same place, and watch 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, maybe the most perfectly constructed film in cinema history. Maybe. I’m sure someone out there has an argument on deck, but I’m betting their champion of choice doesn’t include a giant pit of snakes; a fight inside, on top of, and hanging off the front of a truck at 50 mph; a holy box that melts Nazi faces like Totino’s Party Pizza; and—most importantly—the presence of peak Harrison Ford in all his sweaty, smirky, silly-yet-sexy glory.
Meanwhile, Rickey Fernandes Da Conceição at Goomba Stomp & Sordid Cinema posted his subjective list of the "40 Best Movies of 1996" today. De Palma's Mission: Impossible comes in at number 8. "One man has one chance to do the impossible," reads the quick-tag under the film's title. The description then reads, "An American agent, under false suspicion of disloyalty, must discover and expose the real spy without the help of his organization."
Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man gets the top spot on this list.
Posted by Geoff
at 12:01 AM CDT
Updated: Sunday, May 3, 2020 1:34 AM CDT
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Updated: Sunday, May 3, 2020 1:34 AM CDT
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