Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
Each week, the LA Times' Rebecca Keegan joins us for important news from the film business. Who's big at the box office, what name director turned down a movie, which superhero franchise is getting a reboot.
There's lots of that news this week. But the really, really important news concerns a character that, heretofore, has been ubiquitous on lunch boxes, but absent from the big screen.
Stand by for Hello Kitty, the movie. The 40-year-old feline phenom already has a Facebook page (Kitty lives in London, collects goldfish), so a movie seems the logical next step.
And this is not going to be an indy film, or a low-budget exploitation flick. The Japanese firm that's producing the film, scheduled for release in 2019, says it will have a budget somewhere around $200 million.
That's a lot of kitty litter.