The Rundown: Every Major Movie Franchise Should Have A Christmas Special

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE – Everyone loves holiday cheer

Did you watch the Guardians of the Galaxy holiday special? It’s okay if you didn’t. It was fine and cute and I’m only mentioning it here to get to the point I want to make, which is that more big franchises should do holiday specials like this. All of them, if possible. They can be short little one-offs like this or big-budget versions set at the holidays or whatever. I’m not here to tell anyone how to do their jobs. Except for the thing where I’m telling them to do the holiday things. I am definitely telling them to do that. But the specifics of it are in their court. I am a reasonably benevolent king.

I think this all works for a few reasons. One is that, presumably, Christmas exists in all of these various universes and it would be fun to see how characters we’ve watched over multiple movies handle the holidays, which are a big stressful time for everyone and take up something like 10 percent of the year. Just using math alone, odds are that the action in one of the films would take place in December if you make enough of them. So that checks out.

Another reason: It would be fun. Action movies set at Christmas are usually fun. The Die Hards are fun. The Lethal Weapons are fun. Hell, Shane Black has made a whole career out of it, between those and Iron Man 3 and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Let him direct a Fast & Furious movie. Or a Mission: Impossible movie. Or a Magic Mike movie. Especially a Magic Mike movie. Give me a slew of male strippers in Santa hats and have them rob a casino for… actually, I don’t care why. We can say “to raise money to buy toys for orphans around the country” if it makes you feel good and fuzzy, but they could just do it to get rich. Let my greased-up boys thrive.

The John Wick franchise might be the one best suited for a holiday movie, actually, if only because of the loss he dealt with in the first one. The holidays can be hard, man. It makes you think about people you’ve loved that aren’t around anymore. People like, to choose an example at random, the wife who passed away and left you an adorable little puppy to keep you company that was then killed by freaking Theon from Game of Thrones because you wouldn’t sell him your car and then it all sends you on a globe-trotting revenge spree that eventually features Halle Berry. So… that could work.

Or just get weird with it. Have Santa’s sleigh break and force Ludacris and Tyrese into action in that NoS-powered Pontiac they took to outer space in F9. Have someone take Santa hostage and send Ethan Hunt to the North Pole to liberate him. Make an Indiana Jones movie where Harrison Ford has to find the scene of the actual Nativity. Make a Knives Out where a reindeer gets murdered and Daniel Craig has to figure out who did it. Maybe not that last one. Or maybe definitely that last one. Let’s see how this all plays out.

This brings us to the final reason we should do it, which is that I would like it. A lot. Even the stupid ones would be fun. Do them as cartoons and make them 30 minutes long and fling them on a streaming service tomorrow, if it makes it all easier. You can’t expect me to type “Tyrese and Ludacris playing Santa in a flying car” and not spend the next 6-8 months thinking about it.

Give it to me. As a Christmas present. Come on. I’ve been good. Kind of. I’ve been kind of good.

ITEM NUMBER TWO – CAKE RUINED

Okay, before we discuss the video up there, which I adore, we need to cover a little background information. This pains me, as context is for nerds and dweebs, but I have chosen this life and must face the consequences. Here we go.

Every year for like a decade now, Tom Cruise has been sending this one specific cake to almost everyone he knows. It’s a whole thing. It’s kind of taken on a life of its own now, with writers asking for and receiving cakes and lots of A-list types gushing on lots of red carpets about how great it is. Here’s the description of it from Goldbelly, where you can order it if you do not know Tom Cruise well enough to get a free one or if you do know him but he hates you so much that you worry the cake he sent you might be poisoned.

The White Chocolate Coconut Cake is Doan’s most famous creation and for good reason. They start with a ring of moist, luxurious coconut bundt cake, mix in chunks of sweet white chocolate, layer on rich cream cheese frosting, and then dust it all over with toasted coconut flakes. The result is a delicious, pillowy cake good enough to derail the strictest Hollywood diets.

Despite its worldwide renown (Doan’s Bakery is a favorite among Hollywood’s A-listers), this California bakery is still a family-owned and operated business, with a single location in Woodland Hills, California. Founded by Karen Doan in 1984, the bakery to the stars is now run by Karen and her son Eric, who bake all sorts of cakes together, including this beloved signature.

I do not super love white chocolate or coconut and would probably prefer a chocolate chip pecan pie — Tom, if you are reading, please consider — but good for everyone involved, especially the Doan family, which really hit the jackpot with this one.

This is all the context I am going to give. Feel free to Google or click here or here if you need to know more about cakes that Tom Cruise likes. I just said all of this so I could make three points:

• Imagine being the Doan family the first year Tom did this and you suddenly get an order for like 100 of the exact same cake that you are supposed to ship to like “Jimmy Fallon” and “Ellen Degeneres” and a bunch of other very famous people
• There would definitely be a little voice in your head that would think it’s for sure a prank and would tell you not to fill the order, which would turn out to be the worst financial decision you ever make
• It is funny in ways I cannot articulate that Michael Bay’s cake showed up all mangled inside the box and he chose to go online and complain about the FedEx of it all when he could have just placed his own order for replacement cake with a very small portion of the many millions of dollars he has

I love it. More than I would love the cake, I bet. Not as much as I would love the pie. Merry Christmas to me.

ITEM NUMBER THREE – This is now the second-best discussion about mind-altering drugs on Late Night With Seth Meyers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9cokuwK-4U

A few weeks back, White Lotus star Meghan Fahy went on Seth Meyers’ show and told a funny little story about the time she and her co-star Aubrey Plaza went hiking in Hawaii and got lost. It was a perfect talk show story in that it was entertaining in the moment and a little humanizing and absolutely no one remembered it as quickly as five minutes after it happened. Nobody except Aubrey Plaza, that is. Who went on the show this week. And revealed the reason they got lost. Which was that they were tripping balls on mushrooms.

There are a bunch of things we can take away from this story. The main one is that you should not tell Aubrey Plaza a secret because she will tell Seth Meyers and everyone else who will listen. Another one is that maybe you should not do mushrooms and then go on a hike on an unfamiliar island. Or maybe that you should do that. I don’t know. I guess that one is more up to you and whether you consider “getting lost in Hawaii while tripping on psychedelics” to be a good way to spend an afternoon. It doesn’t seem like fun to me. I would probably just stay at the resort and drink a mai tai or two. But again, your call. Not here to judge.

Anyway, the real reason I’m telling you all of this is that I wanted to post this video again…

… and it felt like a reasonably good excuse to do that. I’ve posted that video a million times since I first saw it seven years ago. I’ll probably post it a bunch more. The twist halfway through is a blast. Vanessa Bayer is the greatest. Get her in the next season of The White Lotus. Send her and Edi Patterson and maybe Sam Richardson to a fancy ski chalet in the Alps and let them solve or maybe commit murder.

Thank you.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR – … Okay

What we have here is a teaser for an upcoming show on TLC titled MILF Manor. This is important not because the show has any cultural value to speak of, but because it is the payoff of a joke 30 Rock made over a decade ago. It is really kind of funny, in a “laugh while you circle around in the toilet bowl” kind of way. We all really went ahead and made MILF Island and put it on a cable network whose initials once stood for The Learning Channel. Explain this to one of your grandparents over the holidays. Explain it to your most judgmental aunt. It’ll be fun. Be your own agent of chaos this year.

People broke down the trailer a little bit, which was nice because I can just blockquote them instead of transcribing this mess, so let’s do that…

The women include a competitive 47-year-old fitness studio owner from Mexico currently living in Miami, a spontaneous 50-year-old “disco mommy” from Orange County, a 44-year-old Jersey girl who’s relocated to Los Angeles, a 59-year-old fitness instructor and singer from L.A. and a 50-year-old event planner who used to be a B-Girl back in the day.

Hmm. This might almost be a better show without the dating aspect. Just put these people on an island and let them run amok. Worth considering.

“Life has given me some curveballs,” one hopeful says at the beginning of the teaser. Another declares, “It’s my time to find love.”

Good for you, lady.

One woman explains her reasons for going on the show: “I was married for 14 years. I want to get a chance to do me a little.”

On a show called MILF Manor.

Everyone is doing great!

Given their age range from 40 to 60 years old, the women have the advantage of years of relationship experience to leverage as they try to find a lasting connection with men who happen to be younger.

“Young men have much more energy,” one lady notes. “They think out of the box. I want that.”

Okay, a few things, also via bullet point, just for efficiency:

• A bunch of people have said this but my position here is that the twist should be that the young men are their own sons, matched up with other women on the island, which is so diabolical and wrong that it now has to happen on another show if it doesn’t happen on this one
• It is wild that this trailer dropped the same week the woman who was the first MILF — Jennifer Coolidge, way back in American Pie — went on a clumsy boat rampage in the season finale of The White Lotus
• It would be funny if the twist is that the island they’re on is Jurassic Park

We lost the FBoys but we gained some MILFs. Let’s call this a wash.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE – Please do this and record it and maybe invite me

Women Talking is a 2022 film from director Sarah Polley that stars people like Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley and Frances McDormand and Rooney Mara and is described as follows: “Women in an isolated religious colony struggle to reconcile with their faith after a series of sexual assaults.”

Jackass Forever is a 2022 film from director Jeff Tremaine that stars (among others) a man named “Poopies” and is described as follows: “Celebrate the joy of a perfectly executed shot to the groin as Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O and the rest of the gang return for another round of hilarious, wildly absurd and often dangerous displays of stunts and comedy.”

On paper and in practice the two films have very little in common. Or rather, they had very little in common. Until this week. When this happened.

I need to see this happen. I need them all to become friends. I need to see Frances McDormand on a jet-powered unicycle and I need to see Chris Pontius in the next Sarah Polley movie. These are my demands.

You have 12 months, Hollywood.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at brian.grubb@uproxx.com (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Aaron:

Here’s the situation.

We’re remaking A Muppet Christmas Carol in 2022. Everything else stays pretty much the same, but we need new human actors. The important one is Scrooge, but we also need new actors to play his nephew and his nephew’s wife. I know you won’t let me down on this one, buddy. What do you got?

Hmm. Pretty good question here. It’s tough to top Michael Caine as Scrooge, though. The man played a cranky old cheapskate perfectly and is still around today, a full 30 years later. Part of me says we should just let him do it again. But I will abide by the rules you provided. This time. Kind of.

Scrooge: Jason Statham or Hugh Grant, in old man makeup. We know Hugh can act with adorable talking fuzzballs because we all saw him In Paddington 2, so that’s a layup. Statham would be fun, though, both because we know he has range after watching Spy and because I like the idea of a take on this story where there’s a constant lingering threat in the air that Scrooge might roundhouse kick Gonzo right out of the frame.

Nephew/Niece: Let’s go with Nicholas Braun and Aubrey Plaza, mostly because I want to see Cousin Greg sing a massively depressing song while wearing a top hat and I want to see what Aubrey Plaza says about the Muppets on various talk shows while promoting it. Maybe she did peyote with Miss Piggy. I would want to know about that. These are reasonable requests.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To North Carolina!

An overturned tractor-trailer spilled “various meat products,” including hams, along Highway 74 in Monroe on Monday morning, city officials said in a statement.

MEAT SPILL

The truck was going eastbound on Highway 74 and ran a red light at the intersection of John Moore Road and the highway just before 7 a.m., according to the city. It “collided with a vehicle then left the roadway and overturned in a parking lot” just off the highway.

Imagine you’re sitting in an office at 7 a.m. just getting settled in at work and you hear a loud crash and you step outside and the parking lot is absolutely covered in ham. How would you get anything else done that day? I would be sitting at my desk all afternoon just thinking about the hams. Who is going without ham now? Will this make ham more expensive going forward because of a shortage? Are any of the hams still wrapped and in good condition? Can I have the ham? Is there a general legal principle of Finders Keepers when it comes to loose parking lot ham? Does anyone in the office have an omelette pan? Do we even have the other ingredients for an omelette? Do we need to cross our fingers that an egg truck crashes into the parking lot next? If an egg truck crashes, do you think three would survive to make the omelette? Do we have cheese? What if the egg truck slips on the ham and crashes into a cheese truck? And what about some potatoes?

It is a good thing I do not have a desk job.

The Charlotte Observer’s news partner WSOC reported Smithfield hams were among the meats that spilled over into highway in the wake of the collision. The wreck and resulting spill became number 45 on WSOC reporter Joe Bruno’s “Spill Tracker” list of various goods and liquids that have taken a tumble onto local roads in recent years.

Local news is the best news.