Latest in The Front Runner

In a wide-ranging interview for my Deadline video series The Actor’s Side, Hugh Jackman visits our studios and talks of encounters with Kirk Douglas (he just received the Santa Barbara Film Festival award named for the legend), hosting the Oscars and why he may do it again, and the impetus for his role as P.T. Barnum…

Does the giant box office business but poor reviews of films like Bohemian Rhapsody suggest film critics are underrating fare that offer pure entertainment values? We discuss that question and other issues in our latest edition Deadline’s The Bart & Fleming Podcast. Also on the docket: Is the public ready to embrace…

A column chronicling conversations and events on the awards circuit. The fact that the town basically has shut down for the four-day Thanksgiving holiday doesn’t mean the Oscar race is slowing. In fact, campaigners discovered a few years ago that Thanksgiving Day itself is a good time to tout their movies and hold…

The challenge of taking on the saga of former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart was front and center at Deadline’s The Contenders Los Angeles event held earlier this month at the DGA Theater in front of a SRO audience of Academy and key guild voters. The Front Runner co-writer and director Jason Reitman was joined onstage by Hugh…

Since hanging up his claws as Wolverine in spectacular fashion with Logan, Hugh Jackman has been exploring. He returned to his first love, musical theatre, last year for the blockbusting The Greatest Showman, and now tackles perhaps the meatiest role of his career to date as 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Gary…

Awards season is in swing, and we are back in podcast mode. Today, we weigh in on a plethora of fact-based films, and the question of how authentic they really are. The main topics: Green Book, a road trip through the Jim Crow-era deep South that unites two unlikely partners in a brilliant black classical pianist…

There's a certain perversity in the decision to open “fact-based” movies at the close of an election season. After months of political noise, facts have become something like black holes in our public conversation – rhetoric in search of truth. Still, having been trained as a newsman, I habitually welcome films like Gr…

In an original effort to launch a movie about disgraced 1988 presidential candidate Gary Hart on Election Day, Bron Studios/Sony’s The Front Runner didn’t win many votes at the box office, fizzling with a combined $6,8K from two theaters in New York (AMC Lincoln Square and Regal Union Square) and two in Los Angeles…

Even though it deals with a presidential race that took place 30 years ago, and a candidate whose campaign lasted only three weeks, new film The Front Runner could not be more pertinent or important in terms of today’s politics. Perhaps that is why Sony Pictures is taking the unprecedented step of beginning its…

Sony Pictures brought two awards-worthy gems to Deadline’s The Contenders LA on Saturday: political biopic The Front Runner and the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. A retelling of the 1988 scandal that saw Democratic Sen. Gary Hart and presidential hopeful caught in an extramarital affair, The Front…

Jason Reitman has called The Front Runner, his film about embattled U.S. Presidential candidate Gary Hart, a mirror to how people view politics. The director, speaking at Deadline’s recent The Contenders London event, said the movie asks people what information they think is relevant in terms of how they view…

“It’s not a biopic, it’s not a movie about a person, it’s a movie about a moment,” says filmmaker Jason Reitman about his latest film The Front Runner which opens on Election Day. In the film, Hugh Jackman plays embattled U.S. Presidential Democratic candidate Gary Hart. Though the Hart scandal occurred when Reitman…