Jake The Great

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While Jake's been off in France being all fancy-pants (and also getting into a screaming match with some random lady in a restaurant - hey random lady, you leave my boy alone) that movie Nocturnal Animals he's set to make with Tom Ford that we told you about back in March just got its rights picked up by Universal for a hefty chunk of change - the studio paid 20 million dollars to distribute the flick. 

I was going to say this seemed weird given the fact that Ford's first (and last) film A Single Man only made around nine million bucks, but Nocturnal, as a Noir thriller co-starring Amy Adams, seems to have a slightly more commercial plot than "college professor gets suicidal after his boyfriend dies." So maybe this is money well spent! Have any of you read the book on which it's based?

I was already thinking about Jake as a "movie star" already before reading this news; when I saw Mad Max Fury Road this weekend they showed the trailer for Southpaw and before the trailer played there was one of those brief video introductions to said trailer and it was Jake - you know, where he goes, "Hi I'm Jake Gyllenhaal, I hope you enjoy this trailer for my new movie, Southpaw," or whatever. And I was surprised by this, in a weird way. Jake's obviously been making big movies for a good decade now but he actually felt like a brand, suddenly. Know what I mean?

He really has spent the last couple of years re-branding himself anyway, with hard work and excellent choices, and I think the next couple of years if things click into place he's really going to be one of the big Movie Stars; you know, somebody whose name our mothers and grandmothers would even know. He's apparently got Harvey Weintstein in his corner for Southpaw anyway, and we've all seen that man's pull writ historic by now.

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