‘Everything Everywhere,’ All Through Awards Season?

South Indian Cinema Rules as Bollywood Battles Box Office Blues

“Almost half of all Asian roles serve as a punchline, study finds.”

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So welcome to Entertainment Exclusive, Crushing the Myth’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the latest Asian Entertainment news & newsmakers.

Explore new shows to binge, videos to keep you on the edge of your seat, and Asian celebs to stan. If that’s not enough, there are also job listings for the entertainment industry & open casting calls just a scroll down.

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🏆 The Headlines

‘Everything Everywhere,’ All Through Awards Season? — At a screening filled with Oscar voters, Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and the directors marveled at the way their quirky film has struck a chord.

• You make a movie because you hope people will respond to it, but no one involved with “Everything Everywhere All at Once” expected all of this, the cast and crew kept telling me in the reception area of a luxe Westwood theater on Tuesday night. The “this” in question was a tastemaker party with Oscar voters and industry veterans meant to reposition the indie hit as an awards contender. But the bigger “this,” the one that really boggled them, was the fact that they were embarking on a monthslong awards campaign to begin with.

• “We did press all through the summer, and then took a break and thought, ‘This will all die down. The feelings will die down, the excitement will die down,’” said Daniel Kwan, who co-directed the film with Daniel Scheinert. “And then we came back and somehow it’s gotten even stronger. At one of the screenings, someone came up to me and said, ‘This is my 14th time watching the movie!’”

• Passion counts for a lot during awards season, and “Everything Everywhere” has plenty of it: This sci-fi comedy about a Chinese immigrant and laundromat owner (Michelle Yeoh) who becomes the multiverse’s last hope earned stellar reviews in its March release, played for several months in theaters, and made more than $100 million worldwide on a $14.3 million budget. In doing so, it became A24’s highest-grossing title and reinvigorated a specialty-film market that has been ailing since the pandemic began.

• Though I expect the film will be nominated in several categories at the Oscars, including best picture, it hasn’t taken a traditional path toward that goal. Instead of debuting at a prestigious fall film festival, “Everything Everywhere” chose a raucous spring premiere at South by Southwest, and it was released in theaters on March 25, a time when awards attention was trained exclusively on the Oscar ceremony held that weekend.

• The film will also have to win over older voters, who may prove more resistant to its wacky charms, since “Everything Everywhere” is laden with sight gags and traffics heavily in down-market genres like sci-fi, action and gross-out comedy. Could it surmount all of those hurdles and become the first significant Oscar contender to feature a dildo fight scene? (If “Frost/Nixon” happened to have one, please write in to remind me.)

South Indian Cinema Rules as Bollywood Battles Box Office Blues —

• The Hindi-language Mumbai-based film industry known as Bollywood has been the most visible part of the Indian film industry over the decades but that hegemony appears to be waning.

• In recent years, the cinema of South India, comprising the Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam language industries, has stolen a march over its hitherto more glamorous Bollywood counterpart in both content and box office.

• In the 1990s, Mani Ratnam’s Tamil-language films “Roja” (1992) and “Bombay” (1995) were pan-India hits in their Hindi dubbed versions and the filmmaker made a few films in Hindi before returning to his native Tamil. The notion of a pan-India hit, i.e. films made in one of the South Indian languages becoming a hit across India and Indian diaspora markets in Hindi and other language dubbed versions, roared back to life with S.S. Rajamouli’s “Baahubali” films (2015 and 2017), made in Telugu and Tamil, which together grossed $379 million worldwide, with Hindi dubs accounting for a significant chunk ready thirsting over the thought of it on social media.

• It is during the pandemic years — when Indian audiences in lockdown were exposed to a plethora of non-Bollywood content — that South Indian films soared far beyond Bollywood, as the numbers prove. In 2021, the highest number of Indian films were released in Telugu (204) and Tamil (152) and only 84 films were released in Hindi, according to the annual EY media industry report. The Indian box office recovered post-pandemic to $472 million and South Indian films contributed $290 million of this, three times what Hindi films generated, with the myriad other Indian languages accounting for the rest.

• 2022 has been a trying year for Bollywood with fancied titles “Laal Singh Chaddha,” “Raksha Bandhan,” “Shamshera,” “Samrat Prithviraj” and “Vikram Vedha,” all featuring A-list talent, underperforming at the box office. Among the top 10 box office hits of 2022 so far, just three, “Brahmāstra: Part One – Shiva” at No. 4, “The Kashmir Files” at No. 6 and “Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2” at No. 7 are in Hindi. The rest of the top 10 are from South India with the Kannada-language “KGF: Chapter 2,” Telugu-language “RRR” and Tamil-language “Ponniyin Selvan: Part 1” occupying the top three positions.

🎬 Industry Insider

• ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Breakout Stephanie Hsu Joins Ryan Gosling in Universal’s ‘The Fall Guy’ (The Hollywood Reporter)

• ‘Deli Boys’: Poorna Jagannathan Joins Onyx Collective Comedy Pilot (Deadline)

• Onyx Collective Orders ‘Deli Boys’ Pilot From Abdullah Saeed; Asif Ali, Saagar Shaikh, And Alfie Fuller To Star (Deadline)

📢 Casting Calls

• Poping Auyeung Casting (Live action “Avatar, the Last Airbender,” “Shang Chi”) is searching for Korean Canadian actors for a union feature filming in Winnipeg, Canada in March – April 2023.Applicants can be based anywhere but must be CANADIAN CITIZENS or must have CANADIAN PERMANENT RESIDENT STATUS.

• CINDY TOLAN CASTING is searching for DANCERS with strong BALLET experience for a new UNTITLED BALLET SHOW by creators Amy Sherman-Palladino & Dan Palladino (THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL and GILMORE GIRLS)

🗄 Industry Job Board

• Employee Experience Project Manager | Blizzard Entertainment

• Producer | The Walt Disney Company

• Associate General Counsel, Product | Instagram

🍿 Watch List

👋, Lea @ Crushing the Myth