• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, March 5, 2024

Apparently, I’m very late to the Nicole Kidman cult-zombie-goddess party.

For the last three years, the “Big Little Lies” actress has been starring in a 60-second promo for AMC Theaters. 

Her head is dramatically backlit as she sits alone in a dark movie house sharing heightened language about the wonders of cinema-going.

Something about the insistent campiness of it has resulted in the spot being worshiped.

I only learned about its worldwide popularity  this week when AMC had the temerity to release a new 30-second version of the original, with two more to come.

The redo is already spurring outrage online. But the weird thing is that we’ve seen this movie before, because AMC already tried cutting the original message to previous sputtering.

Whichever, it seems people don’t want AMC to mess with one word of NK’s by-now-beloved monologue, containing words as silvery as her costumey jumpsuit.

Like the Pledge of Allegiance, the  impassioned words have been printed out, memorized, and saluted in theaters and backyard parties all over America.

Indeed, her “We Make Movies Better” speech has also birthed a thousand memes, which are now printed on T-shirts, hats and backpacks.  

The most meme-ably melodramatic line?  “Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.” 

And oddly, that’s exactly the high-camp line that AMC has cut in the update.

But let’s go back to 2021, those hazy days when people started timidly venturing out after a year of COVID isolation. I do remember seeing the original in a theater then.

I thought it was a strange, overwrought, almost paranormal message, but palpably smart.

In its stilted weirdness it conveyed a visceral sense of what we’d collectively been through and lost during the lowest points of the pandemic. So, the message -- that movie theaters were still palaces where we’d be welcomed to feel the transformative power of the big screen together, if still six feet apart -- resonated.

As a certifiable movie star with her red hair in a messy bun, using her native Aussie accent to speak from a blacked-out Mount Olympus, Kidman was offering some kind of mystical nurture that spoke to the moment.

The 2021 version begins with her pressing her stiletto heel into a puddle outside the theater, drawing her raincoat up around her. (Message: outside is cold, wet, and unpleasant -- all the better to step inside to an accommodating dream world.)  

Once she’s climbing up the stairs of a dark, empty theater, she touts the “indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim and we go somewhere we’ve never been before. …not just entertained, but somehow reborn.”

Seated on high, her face is treated as a film goddess/cult leader’s mask.  The noisy, old-timey film projector adds to the old Hollywood feeling, and casts a halo of red and orange light from behind her head.

As she speaks, she looks at clips of movies including  “Jurassic World” and “Wonder Woman." (The newer versions update the films.)

Some of what the megastar says is in voiceover, but she also looks intimately into the camera  as she tells us,  “Our heroes feel like the best part of us…because they are.”

The commercial was directed by brothers Jeff Cronenweth  (“Fight Club”) and Tim Cronenweth, whom Kidman had worked with previously. She also recruited screenwriter Billy Ray (“Captain Phillips,” “The Hunger Games”) to write the copy.

Ray, deep in the hope that he could revive the business, told Variety that the first draft took him 15 minutes to compose, with only a few more minutes for revisions. And yet, Ray says it is without question the most widely viewed material he has ever written.

Imagine that: a movie writer whose best and most prominent work came out in an ad.

And ironically, in whatever form, perhaps Nicole Kidman’s mini-mini-micro movie is bringing people into theaters.

Maybe audience participation rituals are the new (fade-to) black.