Hollywood Q&A

Q: Is there any reason why “CSI: NY” is not showing any reruns? I see all the other CSIs but not New York.

A: There’s no easy answer to this one, and there almost never will be because there are so many different factors for why a show is rerun.

On the seller’s side, for example, there’s who owns the rights, what they paid to get them, what they charge for licensing fees, and more. On the buyer’s (broadcaster) side, there’s the same license-fee question, but also who they think their audience is and what they think they want. Multiply those factors by the number of different channels that play reruns and by the everincreasing number of shows available for syndication, and you get to the point where a show’s chances of being run are close to random, mathematically speaking. Your point about the other spinoffs is interesting, though. If the game is random, why do the other CSIs keep winning? There are some things going against “CSI: NY,” the main one being it was less popular than the original version and “CSI: Miami.” It also produced fewer episodes — it ran for nine seasons, compared to 10 for “Miami,” and a whopping 15 plus a movie for the original show. More episodes is generally better for a show going into repeats because it gets less, well, repetitive.

Q: Between his role as SpiderMan and his epic “Lip Sync Battle” performance, Tom Holland seems to be pretty gifted with his acrobatics. Was he a dancer or something beforehand?

A: Not “or” — he was a dancer and more.

You’re right to grab on to the dancing aspect first, though. Vox did the same thing in a fawning article explaining why Tom Holland is a better Spider-Man than predecessors Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield.

Prior to becoming part of the highest-grossing film franchise of all time, Holland was a stage actor who also did gymnastics and parkour running. His stage work required him to study classical dance as well, particularly for his role in the London stage adaptation of “Billy Elliot,” about a miner’s son who becomes a ballet dancer. “Gymnastics and parkour are valuable skills for any action performer to have, but actors must be able to emote through that movement if they’re going to headline an entire franchise,” the Vox critic Oliver Sava said. “That’s where dance comes in.”

Q: What’s Guy Ritchie doing next? I loved “The Gentlemen” and am glad he’s gone back to proper action movies again.

A: If you saw Guy Ritchie’s latest movie, 2019’s “The Gentlemen,” as a return to form, then you’ll be happy with what I’m about to tell you.

Ritchie is following up his comic caper film “The Gentlemen” with another crime flick, “Cash Truck,” due out next year. Indeed, this is extra-great news for old school Ritchie fans, as it reunites him with his early-era muse, Jason Statham.

Ritchie came to prominence as a lowbrow film auteur, directing and writing “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” (1998) and “Snatch” (2000). Those two twisty, comic caper movies both featured Statham and turned him and Ritchie both into huge Hollywood names.

Unfortunately, Ritchie seems to get bored with the crime genre every so often. He followed “Snatch” with the dismal 2002 romcom “Swept Away”, then seemed to apologize to his fans with a couple more crime films (2005’s “Revolver” and 2008’s “RocknRolla”). Having won their sympathy back, he got adventurous again, with mixed results. The “Sherlock Holmes” movies (2009 and 2011) starring Robert Downey Jr. were critical and commercial hits, but he followed them up with “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” (2015) and “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” (2017), weird pseudohistorical flops that played fast and loose with some very popular source material.

Then came his weirdest choice yet, the 2019 live-action adaptation of “Aladdin.” Critics didn’t love it, but it made more than $1 billion, so he probably didn’t care much.

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