Jennifer Lawrence left Adam McKay’s Elizabeth Holmes project after watching Amanda Seyfried in The Dropout
“I was like, ‘Yeah, we don’t need to redo that.’ She did it,” Lawrence says of Seyfried's performance
Aux News Elizabeth Holmes
Take note Hollywood: There are times when things are done so well the first time, there is no need to go back and rehash them for the exact same (or potentially worse) result. It’s a lesson Jennifer Lawrence took to heart this year when she saw Amanda Seyfried play Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s The Dropout, and decided to depart her ongoing Holmes project with Adam McKay.
“I thought she was terrific,” Lawrence tells New York Times journalist Kyle Buchanan in a new interview (per his follow-up tweet). “I was like, ‘Yeah, we don’t need to redo that.’ She did it.”
And that ladies and gentlemen, she did. She put on the black turtleneck, practiced that deep throaty voice, and went to work. Following The Dropout’s airing earlier this year, Seyfried took home the Emmy for Best Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series for her performance as the Stanford dropout and defrauder.
McKay’s adaptation of John Carreyrou’s 2018 book Bad Blood: Secrets And Lies In A Silicon Valley Startup, was picked up by Apple Studios back in December, with Lawrence set to star and produce the feature. There’s no question that Lawrence would have brought her own merits to the role, but when something’s been done to perfection once, why set yourself up for constant comparison?
Even in the interview with the NYT, Seyfried’s image of Holmes seems to haunt Lawrence, as she showed up to the interview in the classic black turtleneck.
“I tried on a hundred outfits for this and ended up just looking like Steve Jobs,” Lawrence says, “Or Amanda Seyfried.”
Lawrence stars in the forthcoming feature Causeway, with Atlanta’s Brian Tyree Henry, which arrives on Apple TV+ on November 4.
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“ended up just looking like Steve Jobs, or Amanda Seyfried.”helluva toss-up that.
Holmes apparently adopted the black turtleneck look deliberately to look like Steve Jobs (because that would make her similarly a great CEO by her magical thinking) and Seyfried was playing Holmes, so it isn’t quite so random.
got it, thanks.
Anyone else think Elizabeth Holmes isn’t that attractive? Even among tech CEOs, I think she’s no Marissa Mayer in the looks department.
God, I wish more people had the sense of mind to do the same. So much is endless copies.
Just ask Toby Jones.
Yup. Especially for something so recent. I can understand running a fresh take on a story for each new generation; that method is quite similar to how retellings of stories have been passed for eons, but to immediately spam multiple versions is excessive.
I will never understand the recent duplicate productions that run around the same exact time. What is the monetary value add here when you’re also competing with another show/movie? Sounds riskier to me.
It’s betting that the other one is bad that, even if yours is just mediocre, you look better by comparison.
I think it’s betting more that people are so fascinated by a subject that they’ll consume every project about it regardless of how good or bad.
Maybe the lesser of the two is hoping to benefit from confusion in that people likely won’t bother to get their money back after they’ve paid to sit in a theater and Ashton Kutcher shows up onscreen instead of Michael Fassbender.
I don’t remember which one came out first, but remember when both lead actresses from Black Swan went on to be in identical rom coms?
Yeah! Natalie Portman in No Strings Attached and Mila Kunis in (the far superior) Friends With Benefits. (NSA came out first.) Fun fact, NSA was based on a screenplay titled Friends With Benefits but they changed it when they found out about the other movie.
I love Friends With Benefits.Timberlake and Kunis are just so damn charming!
Yeah, it’s pretty much me and my wife’s favorite romcom. It just clicked really well with us for whatever reason, and we rewatch it periodically. (Sure, the flash mob stuff hasn’t aged well, but whatever, it’s quirky.)
Portman said in some interview this past year that she thinks FWB is the better of the two.
Were those the “I’m going to fuck my best friend” movies?
Recent?This has been a thing for decades. Armageddon and Deep Impact are the first two that come to mind. They came out within two months of one another.
The Prestige and The IllusionistAntz and Bug’s LifeThe two friends with benefits rom-comsThere was another volcano movie when Volcano came outTruman Show had another very similar movieThere were 2 Capote movies
Dantes Peak and Volcano! NGL, I’m a fan of both. How did I forget about Antz and Bug’s Life?!?!
because nobody remembers Antz, except that girl in the audience of Saving Private Ryan who asked her date after the trailer “Did you ever see Ant 1?”
Truman Show and Ed TV!
Back in the day, it was usually the case that the shittier of the two movies was sitting on the shelf until a similar movie was headed to market, at which point the producers of the shittier movie would rush it into theaters to capitalize on customer confusion. Now it’s just market glut. Less fun, IMO.
And when Roger Corman was active, there was the deliberate attempt at copying blockbusters (sometimes actually getting into theaters before the real thing). Some of them are actually fun movies despite the shoestring budgets.
Everything Everywhere All at Once vs Doctor Strange 2: The Multiverse of Madness.
Carnosaur beat Jurassic Park to the theater by 3 weeks
And had Laura Dern’s mom (Diane Ladd) as the star!
Also two movies about Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and company in 1993/1994 — the better (and better remembered) Tombstone in late 1993 and the lesser remembered Wyatt Earp in 1994.
Don’t forget all the underwater adventure movies around the time of The Abyss, many of which came out way before Cameron’s movie because the production time was so long.Edit: somebody did remember. I finally saw it deeper in the thread.
Dangerous Liaisons and Valmont
Twin Movies isn’t the same phenomenon as doing “ripped from the headlines” stories near each other.
You can get a real big list going if you’re willing to stretch out a bit. Were Romy & Michelle and Grosse Pointe Blank such rivals?
I can go further.1492 and Columbus: The Discovery.Cripes, can you even envision a time when studios were rushing to complete a biopic about Christopher fucking Columbus?https://www.slashfilm.com/552792/1992s-two-columbus-movies-head-to-head/
Yes. 1992. There was a fucking reason for it.
A fucking reason, you say?
The point is whatever you think of Columbus, his voyages in 1492 were probably some of the most important events in human history and so it made sense to make movies dealing with them on the 500th anniversary in 1992. It wasn’t a case of “They didn’t understand why Columbus was problematic in the 1990s, Lol” which seemed to be your take.
Even before that, 1989 was the year of six(!) underwater movies, all aimed to get in on some of that excitement that was there for Cameron’s The Abyss. Some of these movies were good enough to be memorable to this day (the monster in Leviathan was amazing even if the movie itself wasn’t), others like the low-budget Lords of the Deep, not so much.
Hell, I’m old enough to remember when for some damn reason there were two movies about the lambada released in the same year.
Lambada, as in, the dance? Lol, I had no idea there was a movie about that… let alone two movies.
Yes, the dance. One of them was from Cannon Films during the Golan-Globus era, when that was kind of their MO: ripping off a movie that was in the pipeline of a better studio, rushing out a shittier version, and hoping that being first would turn a profit.
Recent?
It’s a race. Whoever gets there first wins 99.9% of the time. And with all of these agencies snapping up rights to trending articles in the moment, you’re bound to see more and more overlap.
It’s 100% dick-measuring.
I think usually they’re both racing to be the first one out, so that the other one is seen as the knockoff
In 1992 there were no less than four movies based on Christopher Columbus – 1492, Conquest Of Paradise / Christopher Columbus: The Discovery / Carry on Columbus and The Magic Voyage, and yet I’ve not seen a single one of them.
That was a little different though. That wasn’t just studios copying each other as usual. 1992 was the 500th anniversary of 1492. It’s why there were so many WWII movies in 1995 (50th anniversary of the end of WWII).
Yes, why do we ned so many Pinocchios.
When something is popular, people will watch it, so even if you’re a duplicate you’re going to get a piece of the pie. It’s why you see dozens of vampire movies over a short period, or a a ton of Dahmer projects.
It’s hardly a “recent” trend. And the answer is no mystery; it’s like in every other competitive industry: sunk costs. These projects have been in development for well over a year before *you’ve* ever heard a peep about them, and have already been costing and spending invested money. Not every projects has “heard about” each other’s existence, and the ‘other guy’s project’ may fall apart at any moment or be markedly inferior to yours.
just came here to point out that noone has mentioned white house down and olympus has fallen
Wow.Does anyone ever do this?
Take note Hollywood —> Take note, Hollywood And that ladies and gentlemen, she did —> And that, ladies and gentlemen, she did (also, what is the “that” referring to?)The Dropout’s —> The Dropout’sMcKay’s adaptation of John Carreyrou’s 2018 book Bad Blood: Secrets And Lies In A Silicon Valley Startup, was picked up by Apple Studios —> McKay’s adaptation of John Carreyrou’s 2018 book Bad Blood: Secrets And Lies In A Silicon Valley Startup was picked up by Apple StudiosLawrence stars in the forthcoming feature Causeway, with Atlanta’s Brian Tyree Henry, which arrives on Apple TV+ on November 4 —> Lawrence stars in the forthcoming feature Causeway with Atlanta’s Brian Tyree Henry, which arrives on Apple TV+ on November 4 (really the whole sentence should be nuked from orbit)
They should have both been in “The Dropout”, alternating episodes.
By the sound of it, McKay doesn’t have some interesting alternate take. So, if he does this, it’s probably gonna be yet another not-good movie from him.
This would have been an excellent story to tell in McKay’s style, but the Elizabeth Holmes well has run dry.
I honestly thought The Dropout was based on Carreyrou’s book, so I was surprised to hear that McKay’s take was going to be based off of that book. I found out later that the miniseries was based on a podcast on Holmes called The Dropout. But honestly the content of the miniseries tracks pretty closely with the content and organization of Carreyrou’s book. I wouldn’t be surprised if McKay’s take wasn’t distinct enough from the miniseries.
Yeah, The Dropout tracks closely. I imagine they didn’t base it off Bad Blood because Carreyrou was still doing reporting for it this year (in the excellent follow-up podcast Bad Blood: The Final Chapter).I recommend giving it a listen, if only because it digs deep into the private conversations between Holmes and Sunny. At one point Carreyrou learns that when he came in to Theranos to get a test – actually a bunch of them because he wanted to be thorough – Holmes and Sunny were literally having a panic attack and trying to get their employees to stall him Bugs Bunny-style so they can have more time to pre-cook the test results.Carreyrou also takes to the records to point out how often Holmes just blatantly lies in the trials – she eventually tried to claim that Balwani forced her to do shit, only for texts to reveal that he was actually a moderating presence and Holmes coerced him to do dumb shit like lie to multiple people in the military all the time.
I can’t make heads or tails of this headline.