Chris is a Senior News Writer for Collider. He can be found in an IMAX screen, with his eyes watering and his ears bleeding for his own pleasure. He joined the news team in 2022 and accidentally fell upwards into a senior position despite his best efforts.
For reasons unknown, he enjoys analyzing box office receipts, giant sharks, and has become known as the go-to man for all things Bosch, Mission: Impossible and Christopher Nolan in Collider’s news division. Recently, he found himself yeehawing along to the Dutton saga on the Yellowstone Ranch.
He is proficient in sarcasm, wit, Photoshop and working unfeasibly long hours. Amongst his passions sit the likes of the history of the Walt Disney Company, the construction of theme parks, steam trains and binge-watching Gilmore Girls with a coffee that is just hot enough to scald him.
His obsession with the Apple TV+ series Silo is the subject of mockery within the Senior News channel, where his feelings about Taylor Sheridan’s work are enough to make his fellow writers roll their eyes.
Sign in to your Collider account
La La Land was probably the most definitive movie that Hollywood could make to prove how much it loves itself, and we mean that as a compliment — audiences, critics, and creatives all responded in kind when it came out ten years ago. The film won six Oscars; it was a huge box office smash, and everyone loved it. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before somebody decided it was time to bring it back with the original gang.
Lionsgate has officially confirmed that the original creative team behind La La Land has been headhunted for the new stage production of the film, with Emmy-winning choreographer Mandy Moore and Oscar-nominated costume designer Mary Zophres returning ten years later. Lionsgate is developing the musical alongside Emmy- and Tony Award-winning producer Marc Platt, and Tony-winning director Bartlett Sher (South Pacific).
Mia is an aspiring actress working in a coffee shop on the Warner Bros. studio lot while struggling to land her big break in Hollywood, while Sebastian is a passionate jazz pianist who dreams of opening his own club and preserving the music he loves. When their paths cross in Los Angeles, the pair fall in love while encouraging each other to pursue their ambitions. But success is a double-edged sword, and it can cause as much heartache as it can happiness.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Moore and Zophres were instrumental in creating the distinctive look and feel of Damien Chazelle’s original film, which starred Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as two aspiring artists trying to make their dreams come true in Los Angeles. Moore was in charge of the striking choreography, including that incredible opening number on the packed Los Angeles freeway, while Zophres designed all the colorful costumes that were such a big part of the movie’s visual identity.
The stage adaptation will feature music by the movie’s original composer, Justin Hurwitz, with lyrics from **Benj Pasek **and Justin Paul, who also worked on the film. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar and Matthew Decker are writing the book, while 59 Studio, whose credits include Stranger Things: The First Shadow, will handle production design alongside design collaborator Edward Pierce.
La La Land was a gigantic pop culture smash when it came out a decade ago, and it earned $472 million worldwide against a production budget of around $30 million. The movie received 14 Academy Award nominations and won six, including Best Director for Chazelle, Best Actress for Stone, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song.
Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
](/tag/romance/)
Damien Chazelle
Damien Chazelle
Marc Platt, Fred Berger, Gary Gilbert, Jordan Horowitz
