If the estimates for the weekend box office hold, the movie will also be the fourth biggest US opener of the year (Behind Transformers, Harry Potter and, oddly enough, Fast and Furious - Didn't see that one coming, did you?), with a $65million weekend in the US alone (The disaster porn scored an additional $160million from overseas audiences). Not bad for a movie that started as a spec script (and from a director whose last movie, 10,000 BC was considered by many a poorly-received mess). Guess we can say that that 2013 TV show will definitely be happening, then...

'2012' destroys worldwide box office [Variety]

It seems that once Roland Emmerich was done assembling all the CG components for destroying the world and gathering a full complement of "Hey, it's that guy!" actors, he realized 2012 had no script, and decided to cull characters and situations from every other disaster movie ever made. Despite its massive scale of destruction, 2012 will be familiar to anyone whose seen any movie about an earthquake, volcano, aquatic disaster, or celestial body striking the Earth.

2012 follows the parallel stories of several characters at the end of the world. John Cusack plays the sort of fellow John Cusack always plays, though this time he's also a struggling writer whose only novel sold roughly 400 copies. And Amanda Peet plays his Amanda Peet-esque ex-wife, who is dating a plastic surgeon named Gordon. Gordon is all kinds of perfect, adores Amanda, and is great with her kids, but of course she's only with him because she can't be with John Cusack. Oh, and John and Amanda (or Jackson and Kate Curtis as they've been named for the sake of the film) have perfectly generic children. There's the requisite daughter with a quirk (she's overly fond of hats) and the son who's mad at his father (and insists on calling him by his first name).

As it turns out, years earlier, an Indian scientist discovered that solar flares are causing mutant neutrinos to microwave the Earth's core, which will cause the tectonic plates to shift and the Earth's waters to boil (but somehow doesn't cause us humans to explode). He warns his friend and fellow scientist Adrian Helmsley (a blandly earnest Chiwetel Ejiofor), who in turn warns a Washington bureaucrat that the world is ending. World leaders are informed, contingency plans are made, precious art is stowed away, and important people mysteriously die. But the hoi polloi are left in the dark, and people in California gradually get used to the regular miniquakes and surface cracks that plague their streets.

After a chance encounter with a crackpot conspiracy nut (Woody Harrelson), and hearing rumblings of the aforementioned contingency plan, Jackson realizes just in the nick of time that the world is, in fact, ending. And through a mixture of superhuman feats and incredibly unlikely bouts of luck, puts his family on the path to safety.

Although 2012's main concern is Jackson and his family, the film shifts perspectives and introduces us to a range of characters, all straight from central casting: a stocky Russian billionaire, a trophy wife who loves her purse dog above all, a pair of horrid children who look like they should be touring Willy Wonka's factory, a world-weary and noble President, the beautiful and intelligent First Daughter, a young Tibetan monk, an interracial jazz duo. It's too few characters and too Western-centric to convey an epic scale, but too many for us to particularly care who lives and who dies. Caring is irrelevant anyway; following classic disaster movie tropes will give you a pretty accurate picture of who makes it to the end of the movie.

All in all, it's a very Hollywood view of how the world ends. With the exception of a few token minorities, it's American and European characters we're tracking, American and European high culture people are trying to save, and American and European monuments we're seeing destroyed. Yes, Emmerich didn't get a shot at the Kaaba, but surely there were other non-natural monuments he could have thought to break apart. There's a lot of menfolk making decisions while the women hang out with the children, and a lot of nice speeches about respecting all humanity while Western leaders are calling all the shots. Perhaps Emmerich is being cynical about the end of the world — suggesting that even then, Westerners and Western culture will get all the breaks — but if the non-Western characters fight as hard for their lives, we don't see it on screen.

But, if you can shut down the centers of your brain that demand logic, storytelling, or characters who aren't secretly Superman, 2012 can be an enjoyable experience. We were promised beautiful footage of the world falling apart, and on that point, 2012 delivers. Whole cities break apart, monuments crumple, volcanos shoot up from the Earth, and waves pull supercarriers from their watery homes and crash them into buildings. Save for a few odd seams, the computer-generated effects look incredible and there's something strangely satisfying about watching things break down so completely. And Emmerich recognizes that the apocalypse doesn't just demand disaster porn; it needs moments of absurdity as well. He manages to make room for some offbeat sight gags, some of which are genuinely funny and surprising. 2012 might actually be enjoyed most thoroughly on mute.

Emmerich has announced his plans to follow 2012 with a television series, 2013, which would pick up after the end of the movie. Perhaps now that Emmerich has finished blowing the world to smithereens, we can get back to characters and drama, and the year 2013 can prove more interesting than the year 2012.

Emmerich told MTV that he's planning a two-film arc following the events of Independence Day. He doesn't have a script yet, but the idea is to continue the story of the original. He wouldn't elaborate on exactly what sort of foe humanity would face this time around, but it sounds like we'll be seeing an invasion of some kind:

It's always about earth and that earth gets invaded.

He also reiterated that the idea involves Will Smith and that the sequels would, like the original, focus on a "king who leads his troops into battle against an evil force, and that stays like that." So what title has Emmerich suggested for this opus?

'ID4-ever,' Part I and II maybe?

We'll have to wait and see if he's joking.

'Independence Day' Sequel To Be Two Movies, Possibly Called 'ID4-Ever' [MTV]

Make It Impossible

The first rule to come from the director was, make it impossible....

The rules are — what I always say but people forget — the pictures have to be super impossible. I'm only interested in doing the impossible image. That's really hard to explain. But one of the first things I saw in my mind, was the ground opening up. And I realized what that means, when the bottom falls out under your feet.

So far that sounds exactly right as just about every single scientist and critc has said that the general ideas behind these disaster movies are, literally, impossible. But come on — who doesn't want to see people running from frost?

Stick To What You Know: You Can Always Blow Up The White House Again

[If you are going to destroy something] It has to be very original, otherwise you don't do it. I remember at one point [during 2012 production] we were discussing what will happen with the White House [in 2012]. I said, "What should happen? I cannot destroy the White House again." And Harald [Kloser, screenwriter] said, "Well you have to, if you don't destroy it people will have the same question. Just come up with something new." ... I thought I could have this object crashing into the White House, because we knew that in one of the first waves we'd have to put objects in it so you could see how big it was and thought maybe tankers or war ships. Then we came up with image of [the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy crashing into the White House, which is like] JFK returns to the White House. I was reading about the Kennedy family a lot at the time and thought that was sort of ironic and interesting in a way.

You gotta respect a man who made a career of blowing up the White House, so much that if he doesn't do it we wonder why not? But honestly, we're running out of cities for this guy to destroy, and yet he still manages to crush them differently each time. One has to wonder if he'll be able to come up with more after this last disaster.

The More Characters The Better

Multi characters help you a lot because you can constantly keep the story moving. And people from all walks of life. Every audience member has different people they like in the movie and will follow them. These movies are so expensive that they have to work for pretty much everybody. For young people, for men and women. old people probably like Danny Glover, and Harry and Tony, the Jazz musicians. Kids get wrapped up in our two kids. Create characters so everyone in the audience has an identification figure.

I guess that means my character in 2012 is Woody Harrelson the conspiracy blogger, cause I like cartoons and pickles too. Look at me, I'm bonding with the story! Still I'd like to meet the people that relate to beautiful Vivca Fox, the heart-of-gold stripper who loves dolphins and has a Fighter Pilot for a boyfriend.

Superheroes Aren't Half As Cool As Earthquakes, Tornadoes And Waves

Who wants character-driven movies about confused anti-heroes in a near futuristic world fighting Oscar-winning villains? Not me. Give me Will Smith punching aliens and Bill Pullman's president speech any day.

Look at it like this. I'm a person who doesn't like superhero movies, just personally. I like some of them but I cannot really relate to a superhero. I have trouble with fantasy stories. And famous books — I write my own stuff, a famous book is really not an option for me. There's very little left in big movie genres. It's science fiction or it's disaster movies. And what is the most successful movie of all time? Titanic. And the best part of a disaster movie is: No sequel.

Cut Other Would-Be Disaster Porn Directors Off At The Knees

You have to be a tyrant about getting your end of the world movies made. This is why Emmerich is the King of the B grade blow em up movies, because he'll make it before you. Who wants to wait until 2012 to make 2012? Not this guy.

"First when we had the idea, I said, I'm not going to do it. I don't want to repeat myself. Then we heard inklings that other people were working on something like this, also with the title 2012. Then Harald [the screenwriter] said, "Someone else is going to do it. Don't you want to be the person to do it? Look at your movies: you are perfect for this. Make it your crowning achievement."

Be G-Rated Political *Winky Wink, Nudge Nudge*

If you've seen the five-minute clip from 2012, you know there is a Arnold-esque Governor in the film reassuring the people of California that everything is a-okay, after a mess of earthquakes rocked the town, to which John Cusack yells he's "just an actor, he's reading a script." Suddenly fake Arnold gets creamed with a few lights. Subtle, no? We asked the director if this was on purpose as in The Day After Tomorrow, when actor Kenneth Welsh was cast to be a Cheney look-alike. If you remember Welsh was a bit of a dick about the whole, "we're all gonna die," situation. Which Emmerich later confirmed was a dig at the Bush administration's environmental policies. Emmerich shrugged off our political questions:

"We kind of felt that not every politician should be on the ark. I don't know where these ideas come from. We have terrible fun with what we do."

Which I'm translating as: We lob softball politics at the audience, just so everyone feels good about themselves, for being in on the obvious political joke. I wonder what Emmerich would say his reasoning behind casting Glover as the president before we knew the results of this election. Or was it simply just another near-future "Neato, a black president!" moment?

For Every Wrinkled-Shirted Scientist, You Need At Least One Crazy Prophet

Dennis Quaid, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Jeffrey Goldblum may have messy hair, messy clothes, big ideas, and know all the facts. But they pale in comparison to their crazy counterparts: the homeless guy with the dog, spouting words of humanity, Woody Harrelson's crazy tree-hugger and the drunken pilot from Independence Day who knew there were aliens all along.

[Woody] came out of the fact that there are a lot of crazy people on the internet that believe a lot of crazy things about 2012, so we thought that we have to have a character like that. And then on the other hand we have to explain what the theories are like Earth Crust Displacement. How do you describe them in scientific terms. And we thought, we can have Woody tell the audience how this all works, with a little you tube.

But Make The Destruction Glamorously Terrible

Say what you will about the exceedingly cheesy work of Roland — you can't deny, when he slaughters millions of tiny CG specks that are supposed to be people, he does it with panache and style. It may be ridiculous, but it's beautiful. Which is why, no matter how cliche or repetitive these movies get, it will make millions opening week, because people want to see the great big wave number two come careening into New York City yet again, but on a big fat splodey screen. When it comes to disaster porn, we're all addicts.

After Independence Day brought us Bill Pullman as the inspirational President Whitmore, Emmerich didn't feel the spirit of the film was compatible with the times of the Bush administration:

"In Independence Day, it was about a king who leads his country into a fight against an outside invader. I didn't want to make that movie during the Bush years. It was not thought that George W. Bush would have made a great king. Now with Obama, it's another story."

The sequel would, in fact, focus on the US President, but it's still plagued by funding woes and disagreements between Emmerich and Fox as to whether to bring back Will Smith. But Emmerich seems determined to return to the universe of what he calls his "defining film."

Roland Emmerich Wants To Make Independence Day 2 Because Of Obama [Cinema Blend]

At the end of 2012 the cast members who have survived the massive floods and volcanic destruction on Earth head over to Africa, the new center of the world. What happens next has just been picked up by ABC as a television series that Emmerich is helping out with. We got the chance to find out more about his post-post-apocalypse series at the 2012 press day.

io9: You may dislike sequels but I hear you are interested in making a TV series sequel to the this film called 2013?

Roland Emmerich: But that's something different. It's something like Lost, which has a totally different feel to it. It's more than a little bit like District 9. These ships show up in Africa and [in] Cape Town there are survivors, and they are not happy people. Because they were left behind. And how do you start a new society? It has no visual effects, it's all about characters. What will the future bring? Hope for us?

Will 2013 have to happen pretty quickly after this movie is released? Do you have any actors or additional writers in mind?

They just made a deal with ABC. And we're very happy about that. I'm already discussing with the people that write and try to help them with what this could be. The original idea is from [2012 co-writer] Harold [Kloser], me and Mark Gordon. Mark is big in TV so Harold and I had an idea. Because there were a lot of things we couldn't incorporate in 2012. And we thought it was interesting what happened after all this. When we were writing the script we had to end it at one point and we left it very vague. They discovered that Africa is still existing. It has just risen a couple thousand feet. But that's it. And we ended on a really really small note about a little girl who overcame her fear. It was a very small way [to end]. Which was also kind of for us something very personal and poignant. [In the sequel] people would expect visual effects but it will be only what happened between people. We can do that on a TV show week after week after week.

It's just the fact that they come off their shiny arcs to a destroyed Cape Town. And it's not the bright and happy future everybody was envisioning. It's same old problems.

According to the wire 2012 is getting ready to D-box your brains out, because this end of the world joy ride is going to include some action seats.

Audience members viewing 2012 in theaters equipped with the D-BOX motion technology will not
only see the movie, but experience it in a unique way as their surroundings respond and react to the events on screen....D-BOX's motion designers spend hundreds of hours creating realistic motion effects (referred to as "MFX") frame by frame in perfect sync with the onscreen action for each individual movie, providing an experience unlike any other on the market. Each D-BOX MFX seat comes equipped with individual intensity settings that can be adjusted to heighten or decrease the motion experience. While moviegoers feel motion effects during many of the action sequences, the seats will remain still during the more dialogue-driven scenes.

Which means, more action for your action, stuffed with action. If this is the wave of the future, count me out. The last thing I need to do is feel the car slamming into my passenger door while John Cusack screams "we're all gonna die!" Unless there's a nice "Cusack caressing the side of my face" scene — if the D-box can make that happen believably, then they can have all my money. Otherwise, you'd better make sure your popcorn bucket can double as a barf bag.

(A spokesperson for Sony Pictures denies that the movie's marketing is ramping up our hysteria about the real-life end of the world, of course.)

So Morrison and other prominent scientists are standing up to debunk the 2012 rumors — in particular, anthropologists say that the fact the Mayan calendar ends in 2012 just means it rolls over, like an odometer. (Or like your computer's clock prior to Jan. 1, 2000. So maybe this is the Mayan version of the Y2K problem?)

The most hilarious part of the Los Angeles Times article on the subject is the list of crazy theories about how the world will end, all of which would make better movies than Emmerich's:

[There's] the persistent Internet rumor that a planet called Nibiru or Planet X is going to crash into the Earth... Besides fearing a rampaging planet, the worriers think the sun might lash out at the Earth with some calamitous electromagnetic force. They also fear that some sort of alignment between the Earth and the center of our galaxy could unleash catastrophe.

I want a movie about Planet X and Nibiru teaming up to crush us. Oh, and the other best part? There's a fancy new term for fear of the world ending in 2012: "Cosmophobia." [Los Angeles Times]

What was the movie John Cusack was watching? Why, it's this...

Also here's some more information 2012 collected about the inevitable end of the world and the roots of the problem...

B Roll: The Cardboard Crazies Were Right:

In an interview with Collider, Emmerich explained how his Foundation adaptation would grapple with the hundreds of years worth of events in galactic history that Asimov's books portray. For those fans wondering how Emmerich plans to balance the stories of mathematician Gaal Dornick, mayor Salvor Hardin, trader Limmar Ponyets, and merchant prince Hober Mallow...well, it might be time to get used to the idea of Gaalvor Ponlow, mathematically and politically inclined trader extraordinaire.

According to Emmerich:

Well I was interested in Asimov before and I think with "I, Robot" they changed everything and fans kind of hated the movie so I didn't want to do that. On the other end, The Foundation is a similar problem in that you have all these short stories and then they were combined into a book and so in a way there is not one character and I spoke with the Rob [Rodat, writer of "Saving Private Ryan"] and he said we have to consolidate the characters and that's what we did and it worked really, really well in the context and I think if Asimov would have conceived this as a science fiction trilogy or series from the very beginning, he would have done that too but he didn't so I think in spirit it's totally "Foundation" but has consolidated characters that go through the three movies.

Emmerich also mentioned that writer Rob Rodat is yet to send him the screenplay for Foundation, but he's optimistic it will be finished before his disaster epic 2012 comes out. The timeline for Foundation is still somewhat unclear, but it's at least one movie down the road for Emmerich; his next movie will be Anonymous, a political thriller about the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays.

[Collider]

After a two-minute clip from 2012 appeared on almost every broadcast and cable network in the United States last night, this five-minute demolition derby clip went online at Fancast and at Comcast On Demand. Is it terribly wrong that as soon as I start thinking of 2012 as a demented comedy, I get vastly more excited for it? [Fancast]

At the 2012 panel, Roland Emmerich said that after the wide-scale destruction in his earlier films like Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, 2012 would have to be special among disaster flicks:

I always said, "I don't want to make a disaster movie anymore." And I found a story so interesting, but then also I said to myself, "Okay, so this will be my last one, so I will make the mother of all disaster movies."

And no stone goes undemolished in the clip he showed. It starts with John Cusack as Jackson Curtis, sitting in the driver's seat of a limousine. Jackson is fiddling with the radio, listening to assurances from Schwarzenegger that the recent spate of natural disasters is over and there's nothing to worry about. He hears a crackling noise that doesn't seem to be coming from the radio. He opens the limo door and sees the pavement crumbling beneath him. As he frantically drives off, he calls his ex-wife Kate, played by Amanda Peet.

He tells her to put the kids in the car and leave right away. She turns to a small TV in the kitchen that shows Arnold (played by a look-alike, not the Governator himself) holding a press conference. She notes that Arnold says everything is fine, but Jackson is frantic and exasperated. "He's an actor!" he screams. "He's reading from a script!" Kate, sure he's overreacting, hangs up the phone. The television announces in an Austrian accent that the worst is over and, on cue, an enormous quake shakes the house, knocking the television to the ground.

The shaking continues, throwing dust and debris around the house. Kate and her boyfriend Gordon grab the kids and make a mad dash for the front door. As soon as they make it outside, Jackson appears in his limo. They pile in, but before they can get the rear door closed, another car rolls by and rips the door off. Jackson drives and the road simply erupts behind him, like someone is pulling a carpet into waves. They dodge debris, and a sewage pipe opens in front of them, coating the windshield in a thick coat of brown sludge. The adults decide they have to make it to the airport. "Take the Santa Monica Freeway," Gordon says. "It'll get you there in half the time."

"Yeah, right," Jackson replies as the freeway comes into view. The structure is simply crumbling and the gridlocked vehicles become a cascade of deadly projectiles. Jackson's years as a limo driver come in handy, and he masterfully avoids the flying sedans.

Destruction is all around them now. Buildings are collapsing, giant promotional donuts roll through the streets, the street undulates dizzily. A tanker truck whizzes overhead and erupts in fire. Finally, the limo crew runs into an object too large to avoid: a skyscraper that is simply sinking into the ground. Without any other option, they drive through the building, smashing through windows and strobe-lit cubicles until they come out the other side.

We cut to an airport runway, where the family has made it into a small airplane. Gordon is at the controls, trying to figure out how to take off by reading the manual. Jackson yells at him to hurry up — while there's still runway to take off from — and Kate snaps at Jackson to lay off. Finally, Gordon gets the plane moving, but his inexperience combined with the shaky ground are making it difficult. The plane skips a bit but doesn't stay aloft, and the ground is quickly disappearing from beneath it. As the last bit of runway slips into a widening chasm, the plane manages to stay in the air.

But of course, their trials aren't over, just because they're airborne. As they fly, two skyscrapers are collapsing into one another, and the plane must fly through the ever-shrinking triangle between them in order to escape the city.

If watching natural and man-made structures crumble is your particular flavor of eye candy, then 2012 won't disappoint. Even though Emmerich claims the effects were only 70 percent complete, the CG was impressive, creating a visually believable scenario for total urban destruction, down to each scrap of pavement. And the destruction is on a genuinely wider scale than anything I've seen before. But non-aficionados of disaster porn looking for suspense might be disappointed. The clip was strangely free of any sense the Curtis family might not escape the city, and instead played like a series of visually interesting anecdotes about their survival. So, unless Emmerich's claims of a compelling plot prove true, I suspect 2012 might be little more than a very pretty, accident-prone face.

We asked 2012's Roland Emmerich's about his next scifi project, adapting Isaac Asimov's Foundation and found out that big time writer, Robert Rodat, is hard at work translating it:

Can you update us on the status of Foundation?

Foundation is a book series I was very fortunate to get. I just started developing the first of the planned three movies. The first one is called Foundation and then the second one is probably Second Foundation. I've hired the writer for Saving Private Ryan, Bob Rodat, to write it.

Is that going to be your Lord Of The Rings?

I don't know.

Is it tricky adapting Asimov, do you have to have a lighter touch?

It's a different kind of movie all together. The interesting and difficult thing about Asimov's Foundation is that he actually wrote it as short stories. Then, out of the short stories, he took the first book out called Foundation, which was like several stories. Then he wrote two big novellas, which became the second part. Then he wrote a novel called Second Foundation. So it was never really meant to be one narrative. And when you make a movie you need one narrative, you need one story. That was the tricky thing to figure that one out.

How long is the script right now?

Bob is writing it and he's already announced that it's a very long script. It's Bob Rodat... I don't know. I haven't read it. He says, well, when I wrote The Patriot, it was at first 240 pages. I said, is it longer than that? But it's ok - we can cut it down. We have to. He's a writer that just writes it out, you know? He just has to spit it out on paper. He says there's a lot of nonsense, but it's like pearls and you have to pick it out in rewrites and keep picking, and picking, until you have something that really works well. He loves to write, write, write, write. He uses you as the editor.

2012, which comes out in November, is the story of John Cusack's everyday dad trying to escape from some kind of massive world-ending calamity — which only a few elite people are able to find refuge from. I can't actually tell from this trailer if this movie will be better than The Day After Tomorrow or the one about the scary primitive people. At least Emmerich is on comfortable ground here, and if nothing else we'll get to see an RV running away from fireballs. Here's the equally porntastic new German trailer:

Watch the U.S. trailer in shiny high-def at the link. [Yahoo Movies]

The character Charlie Frost looks like a lunatic hippie, mixed with a bit of shock jock. I know I was against Woody being involved in this ridiculous picture, about the world ending according to the Mayan calendar, but I take it all back - all of it. This was the role he was born to play or he's just not acting. Seriously, take away the hair and I this exactly what I would imagine Woody Harrelson is like in real life. Wearing ponchos, driving around in a camper, talking about government conspiracy theories - and then we'd all go get high from the remnants of his now defunct "oxygen bar." I'm for Charlie Frost and his over the top, crazy-eyes viral videos, especially when he hits on caller Linda in the "Super Volcanoes" clip. They're cute and remind me a little of Independence Day.

As for the rest of 2012, well I still don't have the highest of hopes for the struggling limo driver/writer Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) who has to win back the respect of his family and keep them save from the apocalypse. Seems like a lot of juggling - but it is Cusack, so fingers crossed.

Charlie Frost's Animation

Doomsday Seed Bank:

Nanotechnology:

Super Volcanoes

The Institute for Human Continuity (IHC) Lottery

Check out Charlie's website, This Is The End.

Emmerich's 2012 — a disaster movie about the end of the world, with the privileged few trying to survive on Noah's Ark-like spaceships — was originally going to open on July 10th and be Sony's contender for the big summer blockbuster movie crown this year, taking on Transformers 2 and Star Trek at the box office... until Sony blinked, and moved the movie's release to November 13th.

Officially, the reason for the move is that Sony's summer is already too crowded with awesome, according to the studio; Variety reports Rory Bruer, the studio's president of distribution as saying that Sony's summer is so strong with the remake of The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3 and DaVinci Code sequel Angels And Demons that 2012 would do better at Thanksgiving... where it'll be head-to-head with the next Twilight movie. Now there's a good enough reason to hope for apocalypse.

Sony pushes back '2012' [Variety]

An auction on Thursday evening ended with Columbia Studios owning the rights to Asimov's Foundation trilogy (Foundation, Foundation And Empire and Second Foundation), with the intention of the books being adapted into a movie franchise to be produced and directed by Roland Emmerich.

While I've enjoyed certain movies from Mr. Emmerich in the past (especially Godzilla, which I had the benefit of seeing in Germany, dubbed and without any idea what anyone was actually saying, thereby increasing my enjoyment considerably), I remain unconvinced that he's necessarily the man to bring Asimov's epic series to the masses... Or, at least, to do so without dumbing it down considerably and increasing the number of scenes requiring large explosions and/or people screaming. Here's hoping that I'm happily surprised.

Roland Emmerich finds 'Foundation' [Variety]