Word: muniz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When he turned 16, 16 months ago, Frankie Muniz gave himself a birthday present: he bought the VW Jetta that Vin Diesel drove in The Fast and the Furious. But the Muggsy Bogues-size star of Fox's Malcolm in the Middle has bigger toys in mind. He would like to own the Los Angeles Clippers. Somebody should tell Muniz that's a TV actor's ambition. If he thought himself a true movie star--and he should, having headlined last year's hit Big Fat Liar and the current Agent Cody Banks--he would dream bigger: take over...
...Muniz may be thought of as just another cute, cunning face, smiling from inside your living-room furniture. Duff and Bynes may be familiar to everyone under 14 and nobody over. (Bynes' appeal was so dense and narrow that MTV bookers thought she was a little kid when her publicists approached them last month.) But these teens don't see TV as the apogee of their career arc. They want to be movie stars. And now Hollywood wants that...
...studios, finally acknowledging the power of the tween audience, are packaging 10- to 15-year-olds for their own TV shows, then rewrapping them for the big screen. Muniz, even as he girds for his fifth season as Malcolm, is so much a fixture in theatrical films that a Cody Banks sequel is already in the works. Bynes and Duff, the twin Tweens' Queens of kid TV, aim to become Hollywood movie princesses...
...tickets," says Stan Rogow, who produced the Lizzie McGuire show and movie. "And they can't travel alone, so they bring a parent. The tween audience has developed from barely a concept three years ago to a group that delivers in ratings and box office." Muniz's Big Fat Liar last year grossed nearly $50 million (on a $15 million budget), and Cody Banks pulled in a robust $36 million in its first three weeks...
Malcolm skews a bit older, with more roughhouse and cynicism, but Muniz's feature films are traditional anxiety fantasies for kids: Big Fat Liar put some brisk wit into its boy-who-cried-wolf plot; Cody Banks is a wan recycling of Spy Kids with a 007 fixation. The Bynes and Duff movie vehicles are more nakedly retro. What a Girl Wants is based on the '50s Sandra Dee bauble The Reluctant Debutante, while The Lizzie McGuire Movie could be Gidget Goes to Rome with an updated pop score. Both put their budding stars in glamorous foreign capitals (London...