Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 980

Steven Spielberg No Longer in the Sniper Game

Today in show business news: American Sniper needs a new director, Ryan Seacrest hosts a very strange new game show, and MTV gets into the cooking world.

Steven Spielberg, and by extension DreamWorks (or is it the other way around?), has pulled out of directing and producing American Sniper, the film based on the book by the late, decorated SEAL sniper Chris Kyle. No explicit reason was given for the decision, though the speculation is that something about the deal didn't work out. But I almost wonder if there's something more, some darker part of Kyle's story that eventually scared Spielberg off. Aspects of it are pretty dark, and there are those accusations about accuracy in Kyle's book. Though, I'd imagine that that ambiguity and uncertainty would draw Spielberg in. So maybe it was just money. Whatever the reason, he's off the picture, leaving the Warner Bros. production stranded and intended star Bradley Cooper without a big-name director. Will he stay on the project? Probably. It's a big macho part that could also potentially be awards material. Though, Cooper is a busy bee these days, so he might have to leave if the production can't find a director soon enough. What's Brett Ratner doing? Just get him. [Variety]

Cheery little seahorse Ryan Seacrest has been named the host of a new NBC game show called Million Second Quiz, which has a very strange description:

Taking place over 12 days and nights, Quiz will see contestants battling one another as they test the limits of their knowledge, endurance and will to win. Catering to Seacrest's strengths as a live broadcaster, NBC will broadcast the interactive show in primetime live from an hourglass-shaped structure in Manhattan -- which also will serve as the living quarters for the players -- instead of the typical studio setting. And unlike other competition shows, players have to play Million Second Quiz 24 hours a day for 1 million seconds -- which translates to 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds -- in order to avoid getting eliminated. As that time run out, champions will then duke it out, and an eventual winner will take home as much as $10 million.

So in all likelihood it's actually one of those secret psychological experiments to see who cracks under pressure, scrutiny, and claustrophobia. Ryan Seacrest is conducting some kind of Milgram experiment type of thing, or is at least complicit in it. And from the sound of it, this show will undoubtedly end in a terrible, terrible murder. Or murders. There's no way of telling how big this will backfire, but oh yes, it will backfire. Watch out, Ry-guy. Don't get any blood on your suit. [The Hollywood Reporter]

Josh Gad, the Book of Mormon actor who was on 1600 Penn this year, has been cast as Sam Kinison in a new biopic about the rage comic. The movie will be directed by Larry Charles, who had success with mockumentary (sort of) curios like Borat and Bruno. (Well, OK, he had success with Borat.) The script, based on a book by Kinison's brother, was written by the guy who wrote xXx. Y'know, the Vin Diesel action movie. This one. So this is a strange project! But is it so crazy it could work? Sure. Why not. Let's say it is. So long as Gad doesn't go surfing on a lunch tray at any point, it could be just fine. [Deadline]

MTV has ordered four new reality series, two of them food-related. One, called Snackdown, sounds like Chopped except the contestants are making junk food. What would Ted Allen say? ("I'm happy to have work. Sorry, Kyan," is probably what Ted Allen would say.) The other cooking show is called House of Food, which Deadline is careful to point out is a "(working title)," which is important, because House of Food is not a very good title for a show. Worse title for a restaurant, better a show called House of Food than a restaurant, but still pretty bad. Anyway, the show is about aspiring young chefs living together, so it's a little Hills-type drama, only about chefs instead of house cats fighting over patches of sunlight. The other two shows are less interesting — one is about virgins trying to stay or stop being virgins, the other is about confronting exes — but these cooking things, on MTV, could be something. Something terrible, probably, but something. Meanwhile, MTV has renewed its scripted series Awkward. for a fourth season. Who's she with now? Matty? Jake? Anyone know? She's got to be with one of them. Unless Matty and Jake are together? Nah, I feel like I would have heard something about that. But that should happen. The series has new showrunners, so maybe they can make that happen. Why not? [Deadline, Deadline]

       

When The Washington Post First Met Jeff Bezos

The announcement that Amazon's Jeff Bezos would buy The Washington Post completed a cycle begun in late 1996, when Bezos first appeared on the paper's radar screen. At that point, Amazon was a curiosity, just another one of these websites that made it into the paper's pages. Within a decade, the future paths of the two companies would be clear. Seventeen years later, Bezos' Amazon fortune was many times what he would need to pick up the Post for his portfolio.

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Below are snippets from the Post's first five years of coverage of Jeff Bezon, watching with curiosity as his Amazon.com became the norm in the online world. (Emphasis added below.)

The Post learns about online shopping October 19, 1996. "AT&T Adds On-Line Card Protection; Firm Joins AOL in Effort to Overcome User Fear of Credit Fraud"

"This is strictly a perception issue," said Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.Com, an Internet-based bookstore that handles thousands of sales a day.

"It's so much easier to go through a trash can or dumpster and get credit card numbers than it is to break the encryption schemes that are used on the Internet."

July 29, 1997. "A New Economy Is Still Subject to the Wrinkles of the Old One"

The biggest trend in the U.S. economy for the past 20 years has been the decline of manufacturing and a corresponding shift to high-technology, retailing, finance and entertainment. Transforming the primary source of wealth from the business of making things to the business of thinking up things has meant a drastic reduction in how long it takes to get rich. It took Andrew Carnegie three decades to become a centimillionaire by making steel. It took Jeff Bezos three years by starting Amazon.com.

August 7, 1997. "The Novelist Angle on Bookselling; Shoppers Compete Online to Add to Updike Story"

The point of a collaborative venture, said Jeff Bezos, president of Amazon, was to add an element of fun to online shopping. "People don't just go to bookstores to buy books," he said. "There are a lot of people who just like to spend a couple of hours browsing on a Sunday. The challenge for online shopping is to make it as fun as going to a bookstore."

The newspaper considers the business proposition July 10, 1998. "Booking the Future; Does Amazon.com Show That Publishing Clicks on the Internet?"

For the first time, nearly any book is only a mouse click and a few days away from any reader in the country. And that is changing the way publishers publish and readers read.

Only a few years ago, futurists were predicting that the digital age would be the death of conventional publishing. Text would be downloaded from a central source. Interactivity would give readers the power to customize their own plots. Anyone could be a publisher.

Instead, the hottest business on the burgeoning Internet is selling old-fashioned books -- and not just bestsellers but poetry and weighty academic tomes and forgotten treasures of years gone by.

Since Amazon is virtual, it doesn't have many of the fixed costs for real estate and employees that real-world bookstores do. It also takes advantage of its medium to allow its customers to post their own book reviews online -- which costs nothing, yet bonds its readers into a community.

But while Bezos makes all the expected noises about customers' privacy, buried away on the Web site is the "Amazon.com Bill of Rights," which notes: "We do not now sell or rent information about our customers. If you would like to make sure we never sell or rent information about you to third parties, just send a blank e-mail message to neveramazon.com."

You don't have to opt in; you have to opt out.

Amazon starts branching out November 8, 1998. "Looking Beyond Books; Amazon's Bezos Sees Personalization as Key to Cyber-Stores' Future"

In a wide-ranging interview with Washington Post reporters and editors last week, Bezos outlined his vision for the future of online shopping. The man who pioneered large-scale Internet shops sees bricks-and-mortar stores remaining strong for a long time, while virtual ones become smarter, more helpful and more fun.

He paints a rosy view of electronic retailing, likening it to the days before the Industrial Revolution ushered in mass production and mass merchandising, when all clothes were custom-made and small-town merchants knew what their customers liked. The Internet can bring the personal touch back to commerce, Bezos contends, only this time on a mass scale.

Amazon's home page already greets customers by name. Bezos says the page will steadily grow more personal. If you buy many bestsellers, for example, a bestseller list might appear at the top of your home page; if you never buy hardcovers, your personal recommendation list might only list paperbacks.

There will even be a "serendipity" knob you can adjust on a scale of 1 to 10 to control the amount of randomness injected into recommendations the computer makes for you. "Crank it all the way to the right, and we can show you books you are guaranteed to hate," Bezos says.

Bezos compares Amazon's efforts to collect and share personal information with the efforts of doctors who swap case histories -- all for what he calls "a common good."

March 30, 1999. "Amazon To Offer Auctions"

"We have a large community of online shoppers and they will all be cross-registered," said Amazon's chief executive, Jeff Bezos, in an interview. Bezos said Amazon's online auction has been in the works for several months. One of the first items up for bid will be a 1964 Corvette, he said.

September 30, 1999. "Amazon Opens Site to Merchants; For Monthly Fee, Retailers Can Join ZShops Online Mall"

"What's different about this service is the selection is all organized, and there is a uniform way of buying everything," Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said in a telephone interview. "We have asked our customers what they want, and one thing people said is they want one single place they can come to get the biggest selection on Earth."

Profitability questions arise September 24, 1999. "Amazon's Growing Pains; Web Retailing's Future Blurs as Industry Evolves"

Amazon's market capitalization -- the number of shares outstanding times the price per share -- is $ 21 billion. That's five times what it was a year ago, when a Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst wrote that Amazon would lose only $ 88 million in 1999 and be well on its way to profitability. Instead, it will likely lose three times that, with profitability nowhere in sight.

Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos wasn't available for comment, but he's said many times that "it would be a mistake to be profitable now."

October 10, 1999. "Buying Net Stocks In a Bundle"

At a recent meeting of Internet executives in California, Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos took the stage waving a thick printout of the names of hundreds of companies from the 1920s. Most had the word "motor" in their names, all were caught up in the car craze, and of the lot of them, only two or three exist today.

If you had invested a dollar in each one, Bezos calculated, you'd still be in the red. That's what's going to happen to the Internet economy, he predicted, only faster. Of the hundreds of Internet companies now, 10, 20 maybe, will survive.

November 22, 1999. "At Amazon.com, Service Workers Without a Smile"

While technology has helped eliminate the tedium in many fields, most of the jobs created in the New Economy are low paying, low skilled and monotonous. "The attention paid to 28-year-old tech tycoons has created the illusion that they're ubiquitous," said David Smith, the director of policy for the AFL-CIO. …

The top of the hourglass comprises the celebrated Internet magnates, splashed weekly on magazine covers, and typified by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns more than $ 4 billion in Amazon stock. The middle level, meanwhile, has thinned steadily in the last two decades. The lower level includes the group that a front-line Amazonian calls "us digital peons," the troubleshooters who answer e-mail from customers.

February 3, 2000. "Amazon's Losses Grew Last Quarter; But Customer Base, Sales Increased"

Amazon.com yesterday reported record losses for the last quarter of 1999 but said that both sales and the number of new customers soared. The company predicted it would move toward profitability this year.

"As we exit 1999, we believe we have reached a tipping point in this business," chief executive Jeff Bezos said.

February 6, 2000. "Venerable Amazon As a Model"

For a while, Wall Street thought Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, had a bit too much courage. The company's revenue growth was staggering. But so were its losses, thanks in part to thermoses. And profits were a distant shore.

So the stock stagnated for months until last week's Amazon results announcement, where Bezos's forced confession--that he really is aiming for a profit next year--was the highlight.

June 3, 2000. "At BookExpo, Reading Between The Onlines"

He added, "The physical world is still the best medium ever invented." In the next couple of decades, Bezos said, "The prospect for bookstores is good."

But with the coming of e-books--paperless books read in electronic fashion--what will happen to bookstores? Bezos took a breath. "I'm not sure what the prospects are," he said.

June 28, 2000. "Amazon's Hottest Product: Skepticism; Online Retailing Model Questioned"

By last December, less than five years after former Wall Street executive Jeff Bezos launched his Web site, he was Time magazine's "Person of the Year." Bezos was widely viewed as someone who would ultimately be recognized, as one analyst told Time, as the developer of "one of the smartest strategies in business history."

Six months later, that halo is gone. Amazon stock has fallen by more than two-thirds, and some observers even question whether it will survive without a shotgun marriage to a deep-pockets partner. It's not a profitable company, won't be one any time soon and has $ 72 in debt for every active customer.

Even Bezos concedes that this territory is unknown, and maybe even unknowable. "We were hoping to build a small, profitable company, and, of course, what we've done is build a large, unprofitable company," he said in a recent interview.

The view that Amazon is not getting it right the first time received a major boost last week, when Lehman Brothers bond analyst Ravi Suria issued a devastating report. Amazon, he said, has a "weak balance sheet, poor working capital management, and massive negative operating cash flow--the financial characteristics that have driven innumerable retailers to disaster throughout history."

June 29, 2000. "Amazon CEO Defends Strategy"

Amazon.com's chief executive fought back today against criticism that the Internet superstore's business was in trouble, saying the company can easily raise cash and some of its divisions would be profitable this year.

He declined to say when the company as a whole would make money.

Eighteen months later, it did. Today, that guy bought this paper.

       

Yes, People Still Love Sharks

In case you thought you were going to get rid of "sharks are hot" trend pieces following the reign of Sharknado, think again: Deadline's Lisa de Moraes reports that Discovery's (fake) Shark Week kick-off documentary Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives had nearly 5 million viewers, a record for the 26-year-old Shark Week programming event. 

Now, de Moraes notes that the success of the "documentary" was not without controversy, with viewers angry that, no, the prehistoric Megalodon shark is not in fact roaming the seas. One person commented on the Shark Week Facebook page: "When did Shark Week turn into a SyFy channel movie?" Well, that would be a good point, if it wasn't selling Discovery short when it comes to the ratings game. Only a little more than 1 million tuned into the first airing of Sharknado on SyFy, and even the great numbers for a repeat showing look tiny when compared to Shark Week's big draw. And while, no, Discovery is not pushing something on the scale Sharknado, Shark Week has often taken a sensational tone, even if some feel the Megalodon programming stretched the truth a little too far with an intentional deception. 

We'll have to see if there's a Shark Week revolt in the ratings, but for now Discovery is riding high. Or swimming high? Sharks!

 

       

You Are Your Net Worth: How Toxins Found in the Rich and Poor Differ

 

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“Tell me what kinds of toxins are in your body, and I’ll tell you how much you’re worth,” could be the new motto of doctors everywhere. In a finding that surprised even the researchers conducting the study, it turns out that both rich and poor Americans are walking toxic waste dumps for chemicals like mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium and bisphenol A, which could be a cause of infertility. And while a buildup of environmental toxins in the body afflicts rich and poor alike, the type of toxin varies by wealth.

America’s rich are harboring chemicals associated with what are normally considered healthy lifestyles

People who can afford sushi and other sources of aquatic lean protein appear to be paying the price with a buildup of heavy metals in their bodies, found Jessica Tyrrell and colleagues from the University of Exeter. Using data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, Tyrrell et al. found that compared to poorer people, the rich had higher levels of mercury, arsenic, caesium and thallium, all of which tend to accumulate in fish and shellfish.

The rich also had higher levels of benzophenone-3, aka oxybenzone, the active ingredient in most sunscreens, which is under investigation by the EU and, argue some experts, may actually encourage skin cancer.

America’s poor have toxins associated with exposure to plastics and cigarette smoke

Higher rates of cigarette smoking among those of lower means seem to be associated with higher levels of lead and cadmium. Poor people in America also had higher levels of Bisphenol-A, a substance used to line cans and other food containers, and which isbanned in the EU, Malaysia, South Africa, China and, in the US, in baby bottles.

Previous research has established that rich Americans are more likely to eat their fruits and vegetables and less likely to eat “energy-dense” fast food and snacks, but this work establishes that in some ways, in moving up the economic ladder Americans are simply trading one set of environmental toxins for another.

       

What Happened, America? You Used to Be Cool

The estimable Gallup, Inc., purveyor of fine survey instruments, decided to take advantage of the early August lull in political polling to drop two bombshells: first only 38 percent of Americans have ever tried marijuana and, second, wine has tied beer as America's favorite liquid intoxicant. Oh, America.

The important caveat, up front: Drinking and drug use are both bad, categorically. Neither is "cool" in the "you got a good degree and a good job and are living a wholesome life" sense, only in the "this is what stereotypically cool people do" sense. Don't drink or do drugs, ever, no matter what.

Let's start with the pot news. (For the 62 percent of Americans who may not know, "pot" is a slang term for "marijuana." We may also use the expression "weed," which means the same thing. We will not use the term "reefer.") The graph below takes the data from Gallup and breaks it down by demographic. As you can see, this includes the 38 percent figure. It also includes how many people said they regularly smoke (the light blue bar) — seven percent of Americans.

As Gallup notes, though, that's not much different than its surveys going back to 1985. The difference is only five percentage points.

The reason? Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign. Not really, but kind of. People who are between the ages of 18 to 29 are less likely than at any point since 1973 to say that they have tried pot. That would be people born between the years of 1984 and 1995. The people who smoked weed in their twenties during the 1970s are now older, so the number of people in the older age groups that admit having "ever happened to try" marijuana have also increased over time. Call it the Baby Boom of Bud.

What's interesting is that this isn't just a case of people who are older being the ones to continue to smoke weed. As the first graph shows, young people are still the most likely to smoke it; 14 percent of people under 30 do so actively, compared with only five percent of those between 50 and 64. Less pot being smoked by the group that's smoking the most seems to suggest that less pot is being smoked overall.

At the same time that kids ("kids" meaning anyone under 30, apparently) aren't smoking as much pot, they are also totally in love with drinking wine — the same alcoholic beverage that is literally given out at church on Sundays. Here's Gallup's data on how trends among alcohol drinkers have changed over the past 20 years. Negative numbers mean a decline in the alcohol's consumption; positive ones, an increase.

The popularity of beer has dropped thirty percentage points for people under 30 over the past two decades. Among nonwhites, the drop has been more significant.

The data on alcohol consumption is only for those who indicated that they actually drink. Guess what percentage of Americans that is. Go ahead. Guess.

Sixty percent. Forty percent of Americans don't drink at all — which is actually below the average of 63 percent since 1939. Among people under the age of thirty, that figure is only 41 percent — meaning that there is at least 23 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 30 who don't drink and have never tried marijuana.

And, you know, good for them. Luckily, there are no other drugs in the world which might be filling part of that gap.

Photo: A man stands near an unidentified leafy substance. (AP)

       

How Expanded Choices for Women May Have Hurt the Humanities

There's been a lot of hand-wringing this summer about the decline of the humanities. Students, it seems, just aren't studying literature the way they used to. But as The New Republic pointed out on Monday, that may simply be the result of women in the postwar era branching out into fields that had not been previously available to them.

According to a new study by Harvard fellow Benjamin Schmidt, “The entirety of the long term decline [of the humanities] from 1950 to the present has to do with the changing majors of women.” Before the 1970s, almost all women who went to college majored in education (40 percent) or the humanities (50 percent). Second-wave feminism encouraged women to pursue pre-professional tracks as well as majors in math and science. So, naturally, there was a decline in the number of people majoring in, say, comparative literature. 

Writes The New Republic's Nora Caplan-Bricker:

The number of women majoring in the humanities dropped by half between the mid-’60s and early-2000s. The flip side is that today, women make up about half of all pre-professional degrees. Meanwhile, the number of men in the humanities has dropped as well, but only by about one-sixth over the last half century. “You'd have to be pretty tone-deaf to point to [women’s] ability to make that choice as a sign of cultural malaise,” Schmidt observes.

In other words, the supposed decline of the humanities may be little more than an increase in choice for women, who may well want to become doctors instead of, say, English teachers. There seems to be very little troubling about that.

Photo by Lightpoet via Shutterstock.

       

U.S. Officials Are Worried About a New and Improved Liquid Explosive

U.S. officials are worried that Al Qaeda has a new liquid explosive technique that can't be detected by current security measures, according to the latest trickle of U.S. official-sourced stories in the wake of the unprecedented embassy closures across the Middle East this week. 

The story, up at ABC, adds some details to the general sense of why U.S. intelligence was so worried about the latest threat, and the significance of the threat's reported origin in Yemen: that's where Ibrahim al-Asiri is based, a.k.a. the guy behind the bombs constructed for the "underwear bomber" plot of 2009, along with an attempt on a Saudi intelligence chief's life using a bomb surgically implanted into the assassin. ABC explains that the newest idea, believed to be from al-Asiri, "allows terrorists to dip ordinary clothing into the liquid to make the clothes themselves into explosives once dry." Officials are also worried about a repeat attempt with a surgically-implanted bomb. 

Meanwhile, the press is learning more details on the previously-reported intercepted message that led U.S. officials to the plot, which is reportedly in its final stages. While we already knew that Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahri had threatened revenge on the U.S. for a series of drone strikes in the country, a New York Times piece today discloses that the messages intercepted by the U.S. were between al-Zawahri, along with Arabian Peninsula head Nasser al-Wuhayshi (now believed to be the number 2 of the whole organization). 

Even as more details emerge, the overall picture remains murky. In a press briefing today, White House spokesman Jay Carney sort of denied that the threat could reach domestically, while reiterating that U.S. intelligence doesn't really know at this point where the planned attack was targeting, only that it was "serious." From their embassy closures, one would have already guessed that officials narrowed down that threat to American government properties in the Middle East.  

       

Man Changes Racist Restaurant Name, Loses Customers

After 64 years, popular cheesesteak stop Chink's Steaks in Wissinoming, Philadelphia, was renamed Joe's Steaks + Soda Shop, for reasons that should be obvious to most people. Unfortunately, that subset doesn't include a large chunk of the restaurant's regulars — sales have not been good since the switch.

Over 10,000 people signing a petition to keep the offensive name, but owner Joe Groh still dropped the cheesesteak place's old title this April, and in the last couple of months he's seen a 10-15 percent dips in sales, reports Stu Bykofsky at the Philadelphia Daily News. Even the people who have hung around are mad with this display of political correctness. A quick look at Joe's Steaks social media and Yelp results show that most people either refer to the place as "Joe's (Formerly Chink's)," "Chink's (Now Joe's)" or:

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And of the patrons who haven't abandoned the shop, there's still a lot of resentment. Groh occasionally finds the word Chink's painted on the walls and sidewalks of the building and, as Bykofsky notes: 

Some want to have it both ways. A little old lady, maybe 75, comes in with her son and daughter. She says to Groh, "You make me sick," orders a cheesesteak, sits down, eats it, then walks out telling him, "You still make me sick."

There are a couple of reasons why the change, presumably the right thing to do, would receive this kind of backlash. It might just be a reflection of the shifting demographics in the area. Back in 1949, Wissinoming was predominantly a white, working class neighborhood. Now it's more diverse, and people aren't happy. In response to a tweet looking for recommendations of good cheesesteak places in Philadelphia, one person wrote:

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Tradition also plays a part. This isn't the first Philly cheesesteak place to offend people, and Groh, who spent most of his life working The Restaurant Presently Known as Joe's, didn't really want to rename in the first place. "In all honesty, no," Groh told Bykofsky when asked. "[But] I am Joe. It's 2013. It was time to do it."

"Some longtime customers who hated the name-change [call] it a surrender to political-correctness," Bykofsky wrote. "They have a point." If Asian-American groups hadn't demanded that he change the name, you might still be able to get your greasy cheesesteaks with a side of old timey prejudice. 

And some patrons argue that, no, actually, the old name wasn't racist at all. The man who first opened the restaurant back in 1949 was Samuel "Chink" Sherman, and his friends came up with the nickname because his eyes were almond shaped. And, as a black patron of the restaurant noted: If the shop had been named with a slur against blacks, "that would be offensive," he said. "But Chink was a nickname. It could have been a term of endearment." 

Only one thing is clear, then: Philadelphians of all persuasions love cheesesteaks, even if they aren't very good for you.

    

Can Jennifer Lopez Save 'American Idol'?

The producers at Fox are tapping into the long history of American Idol for the the judge's panel next season, but not in the way you might think. Despite rumors of a panel made up from the show's old contestants, a pair of old judges are returning and bringing along Will.i.am. 

Deadline's Nellie Andreeva reports Jennifer Lopez will return as a judge after a year away from the show. She'll sit alongside Keith Urban, whose return was announced this week, and potentially the former Black Eyed Pea. Andreeva says Will.i.am is close to signing a deal, too. The news is a little shocking considering Lopez wasn't really on the radar as a potential judge, but The New York Times' Brian Stelter points out Fox entertainment chairman Kevin Reilly said producers were throwing her name around during a press conference last week. 

There were plans for an all old contestants panel that didn't pan out. Jennifer Hudson, Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood were reportedly going to reverse rolls this year and help out fledging new singers. That idea was scrapped after Hudson was close to signing a deal but Clarkson and Underwood couldn't make the commitment. 

Lopez left the show in 2012 and Fox brought in Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey to judge with the only remaining original, Randy Jackson. They were hoping the drama created by the two divas would see an uptick in the already flagging ratings. But the Minaj-Carey experiment didn't work out as planned. Ratings nosedived, Minaj and Carey both left and calls for the show to maybe consider packing it up after 11 long, glorious years as the dominate musical audition show on television grew louder and louder. American Idol is at a vulnerable point in its history and needs a shot in the arm. Some fresh with interesting perspectives could rally the show and help it challenge NBC's The Voice, Idol's biggest competitor. Lopez is not that. She was popular enough as a judge, but no one was watching the show only to see her. She was balanced and fair with her criticism and, if we're being honest, that's not what makes people tune in. 

       

The 'Smurfs' Sequel Can't Compete with '2 Guns'

Welcome to the Box Office Report, where we're pretty impressed with Hollywood's ability to get away with completely mailing in movie titles now. This is all Cowboys vs. Aliens fault. 

1. 2 Guns (Universal): $27.4 million in 3,025 theaters

Director Baltasar Kormakur and Mark Whalberg already teamed up for 2012's surprisingly good Contraband, so it makes sense to throw Denzel Washington in the mix to make a decent mid-summer action movie. Sometimes movies aren't that complicated: if a studio puts two popular stars in a movie that works well at a certain time of year with an interesting director, then people will pay money to see it. 

2. The Wolverine (Fox): $21.7 million in 3,924 theaters [Week 2]

Some word of mouth and late critical love couldn't save The Wolverine from plummeting sixty percent this weekend. Hopefully Hugh Jackman is strong enough to hold back tears when studio executives tell him there probably won't be another solo Wolverine movie. 

3. The Smurfs 2 (Sony): $18.2 million in 3,866 theaters

The last Smurfs movie was a surprise success for Sony and went on to earn over $500 million worldwide, but the sequel is already struggling. Through its first five days in theaters, Smurfs 2 earned $27.3 million. The original made $35.6 million during its opening weekend. The Hollywood Reporter credits the Smurfs' flop to an overcrowded family box office: it's the third major family release in a little more than a month. The success of Despicable Me 2 and the release of Turbo immediately wore out parents. Three big kids movies in a month? With treats and tickets that would probably cost more than a mortgage payment.  

4. The Conjuring (Warner Bros.): $13.6 million in 3,115 theaters [Week 3]

It's not surprising to see The Conjuring holding its own three weeks later. Horror movies usually hold up well during the summer. They're easy excuses to turn your brain off, get out of the sun and into an air-conditioned theater.  

5. Despicable Me 2 (Universal): $10.4 million in 3,207 theaters [Week 5]

Those adorable little minions murdered the Smurfs. They don't seem so innocent and lovable now, do they?